proofreading team _series two:_ _essays on poetry and language_ no. samuel cobb's discourse on criticism and of poetry from poems on several occasions ( ) with an introduction by louis i. bredvold the augustan reprint society july, membership in the augustan reprint society entitles the subscriber to six publications issued each year. the annual membership fee is $ . . address subscriptions and communications to the augustan reprint society in care of the general editors: richard c. boys, university of michigan, ann arbor, michigan; or edward n. hooker or h.t. swedenberg, jr., university of california, los angeles , california. editorial advisors: louis i. bredvold, university of michigan, ann arbor, michigan, and james l. clifford, columbia university, new york. introduction what little is known of the life of samuel cobb ( - ) may be found in the brief article in the _dictionary of national biography_ by w.p. courtney. he was born in london, and educated at christ's hospital and at trinity college, cambridge, where he obtained the degrees of b.a., , and m.a., . he was appointed "under grammar master" at christ's hospital in and continued his connection with this school until his early death. he had a reputation for wit and learning, and also for imbibing somewhat too freely. in his poetry he especially cultivated the style of the free pindaric ode, a predilection which won him a mention without honor in johnson's life of pope (_lives of the poets_, ed. birkbeck hill, iii, ). even the heroic couplets of his poem on "poetry" aim rather at pseudo-pindaric diffuseness than at epigrammatic concentration of statement. as a critic cobb deserves attention in spite of his mediocrity, or even because of it. he helps to fill out the picture of the literary london of his time, and his opinions and tastes provide valuable side-lights on such greater men as dennis, addison, and pope. "of poetry" belongs to the prolific literary type of "progress poems," in which the modern student finds illuminating statements as to how the eighteenth century surveyed and evaluated past literary traditions. the list of cobb's publications in the _cambridge bibliography_ suggests that he enjoyed some degree of popularity. his volume, _poems on several occasions_, was published in , and reprinted in enlarged form in and . the reproduction herewith of the preface "on criticism" and the versified discourse "of poetry" is from a copy of the edition in the newberry library, in chicago. louis i. bredvold university of michigan a discourse on criticism and the liberty of writing. in a letter to _richard carter_ esq; late of the _middle-temple_, now living in _barbadoes_. sir, _the_ muses _are said to be the daughters of memory: a poet therefore must lay down his title to their favour, who can be forgetful of a friend, like you, whose polite knowledge, instructive conversation, and particulur generosity to my self, have left such strong impressions upon my mind, as defy the power of absence to remove them. i scarce believe death it self can blot out an_ idea _so firmly imprinted. the soul, when it leaves this earthly habitation, and has no more use for those vertues, which were serviceable in the conduct of human life, such as_ temperance, fortitude _and the like, will certainly carry_ love _and_ gratitude _along with it to heaven. this may suffice to let the world know what obligations you have laid upon me. by this letter (the room of which, for your sake i could willingly have supply'd) you will plainly see, that no place, however remote, is able to secure you from the zeal of a_ friend, _and the vanity of a_ poet. for tho' retiring to the _western isles_, at the long distance of five thousand miles, you've chang'd _dear london_ for your native seat, and think _barbadoes_ is a safe retreat; you highly err: nor is the _wat'ry fence_ sufficient guard against impertinence. the _muse_, which smiles on jingling bards, like me, has always winds to waft her o'er the sea. blow on, ye winds, and o'er th' _atlantick main_, bear to my gen'rous friend this thankful strain. _you see, sir, i have not left off that rhyming trick of youth; but knowing you to be a gentleman who loves variety in every thing, i thought it would not be ungrateful if i checquer'd my prose with a little verse._ _after this preamble, it is presum'd, that one who lives on the other side of the globe, will expect by every pacquet-boat to know what is done on this. since your departure, affairs have had a surprizing turn every where, and particularly in_ italy; _which success of our armies and allies abroad, have given a manifest proof of our wise counsels at home.--parties still run between_ high _and_ low. _i shall make no remarks on either; thinking it always more prudent, as well as more safe, to live peaceably under the government in which i was born, rather than peevishly to quarrel with it._ _but you will cry,_ who expects any thing from the politicks of a poet? how goes the state of _parnassus_? what has the battle of _ramillies_ produc'd? _what battles generally do; bad poets, and worse criticks. i could not perswade my self to attempt any thing above six lines, which had not been made, were it not at the request of a musical gentleman. you will look upon them with the same countenance you us'd to do on things of a larger size._ born to surprize the world, and teach the great the slippery danger of exalted state, victorious _marlbrô_ to _ramilly_ flies; arm'd with new lightning from bright _anna's_ eyes. wonders like these, no former age has seen; subjects are _heroes_, where a saint's the _queen_. _mr._ congreve _has given the world an ode, and prefix'd to it a discourse on the_ pindaric verse, _of which more, when i come to speak on the same argument: there are several others on that subject, and some which will bear the test; one particularly, written in imitation of the style of_ spencer; _and goes under the name of mr._ prior; _i have not read it through, but_ ex pede herculem. _he is a gentleman who cannot write ill. yet some of our_ criticks _have fell upon it, as the viper did on the file, to the detriment of their teeth. so that criticism, which was formerly the art of judging well, is now become the pure effect of spleen, passion and self-conceit. nothing is perfect in every part. he that expects to see any thing so, must have patience till_ dooms-day. _the worship we pay to our own opinion, generally leads its to the contempt of another's. this blind idolatry of_ self _is the mother of errour; and this begets a secret vanity in our_ modern censurers, _who, when they please to_ think a meaning _for an author, would thereby insinuate how much his judgment is inferiour to their inlighten'd sagacity. when, perhaps, the failings they expose are a plain evidence of their own blindness._ for to display our candour and our sence, is to discover some deep _excellence_. the critick's faulty, while the poet's free; they raise the _mole hill, who want eyes to see_. _excrescences are easily perceiv'd by an ordinary eye; but it requires the penetration of a_ lynceus _to discern the depth of a good poem; the secret artfulness and contrivance of it being conceal'd from a vulgar apprehension._ _i remember somewhere an observation of st._ evremont _(an author whom you us'd to praise, and whom therefore i admire) that some persons, who would be poets, which they cannot be, become criticks which they can be. the censorious grin, and the loud laugh, are common and easy things, according to_ juvenal; _and according to_ scripture, _the marks of a_ fool. _these men are certainly in a deplorable condition, who cannot be witty, but at another's expence, and who take an unnatural kind of pleasure in being uneasy at their own._ rules they can write, but, like the _college tribe_, take not that physick which their rules prescribe. i scorn to praise a plodding, formal fool, _insipidly_ correct, and _dull_ by rule: _homer_, with all his _nodding_, i would chuse, before the more exact _sicilian_ muse. who'd not be _dryden_; tho' his faults are great, sooner than our laborious _laureat_? not but a decent neatness, i confess, in _writing_ is requir'd, as well as _dress_. yet still in both the _unaffected air_ will always please the _witty_ and the _fair_. _i would not here be thought to be a patron of slovenly negligence; for there is nothing which breeds a greater aversion in men of a_ delicate taste. _yet you know, sir, that, after all our care and caution, the weakness of our nature will eternally mix it self in every thing we write; and an over curious study of being correct, enervates the vigour of the mind, slackens the spirits, and cramps the genius of a_ free writer. _he who creeps by the shore, may shelter himself from a storm, but likely to make very few discoveries: and the cautious writer, who is timorous of disobliging the captious reader, may produce you true grammar, and unexceptionable_ prosodia, _but most stupid poetry._ in vitium culpæ ducit fuga, si caret arte. _a slavish fear of committing an oversight, betrays a man to more inextricable errours, than the boldness of an enterprizing author, whose artful carelesness is more instructive and delightful than all the pains and sweat of the poring and bookish critick._ _some failings, like moles in a beautiful countenance, take nothing from the charms of a happy composure, but rather heighten and improve their value. were our modern reflecters masters of more humanity than learning, and of more discernment than both, the authors of the past and present ages, would have no reason to complain of injustice; nor would that reflection be cast upon the_ best-natur'd nation _in the world, that, when rude and ignorant, we were unhospitable to strangers, and now, being civiliz'd, we expend our barbarity on one another_. homer _would not be so much the ridicule of our_ beaux esprits; _when, with all his sleepiness, he is propos'd as the most exquisite pattern of heroic writing, by the greatest of philosophers, and the best of judges. nor is_ longinus _behind hand with_ aristotle _in his character of the same author, when he tells us that the greatness of_ homer's _soul look'd above little trifles (which are faults in meaner capacities) and hurry'd on to his subject with a freedom of spirit peculiar to himself. a racer at_ new-market _or the_ downs, _which has been fed and drest, and with the nicest caution prepared for the course, will stumble perhaps at a little hillock; while the wings of_ pegasus _bear him o'er hills and mountains,_ sub pedibusq; videt nubes & sydera-- _such was the soul of_ homer: _who is more justly admir'd by those who understand him, than he is derided by the ignorant: whose writings partake as much of that spirit, as he attributes to the actions of his_ heroes; _and whose blindness is more truly chargeable on his_ criticks, _than on_ himself: _who, as he wrote without a rule, was himself a rule to succeeding ages. who as much deserves that commendation which_ alcibiades _gave to_ socrates, _when he compar'd him to the statues of the_ sileni, _which to look upon, had nothing beautiful and ornamental; but open them, and there you might discover the images of all the gods and goddesses._ _who knows the secret springs of the soul, and those sudden emotions, which excite illustrious men, to act and speak out of the_ common road? _they seem irregular to us by reason of the fondness and bigottry we pay to_ custom, _which is no standard to the brave and the wise. the rules we receive in our first education, are laid down with this purpose, to restrain the_ mind; _which by reason of the tenderness of our age and the ungovernable disposition of young nature, is apt to start out into excess and extravagance. but when time has ripen'd us, and observation has fortify'd the soul, we ought to lay aside those common rules with our leading strings; and exercise our reason with a free, generous and manly spirit. thus a_ good poet _should make use of a discretionary command; like a_ good general, _who may rightly wave the vulgar precepts of the military school (which may confine an ordinary capacity, and curb the rash and daring) if by a new and surprizing method of conduct, he find out an uncommon way to glory and success._ bocalin, _the_ italian _wit, among his other odd advertisements, has this remarkable one, which is parallel to the present discourse. when_ tasso _(says he) had presented_ apollo _with his_ poem, _call'd_ giurasalemme liberata; _the_ reformer _of the_ delphic library, _to whose perusal it was committed, found fault with it, because it was not written according to the rules of_ aristotle; _which affront being complain'd of,_ apollo _was highly incens'd, and chid_ aristotle _for his presumption in daring to prescribe laws and rules to the high conceptions of the_ virtuosi, _whose liberty of writing and inventing, enrich'd the schools and libraries with gallant composures; and to enslave the wits of learned men, was to rob the world of those alluring charms which daily flow'd from the productions of poets, who follow the dint of their own unbounded imagination. you will find the rest in the th advertisement._ _the moral is instructive; because to judge well and candidly, we must wean our selves from a slavish bigotry to the ancients. for, tho'_ homer _and_ virgil, pindar _and_ horace _be laid before us as examples of exquisite writing in the heroic and lyric kind, yet, either thro' the distance of time, or diversity of customs, we can no more expect to find like capacities, than like complexions. let a man follow the talent that nature has furnish'd him with, and his own observation has improv'd, we may hope to see inventions in all arts, which may dispute superiority with the best of the_ athenian _and_ roman _excellencies_. nec minimum meruêre decus vestigia græca ausi deserere.---- _it is another rule of the same gentleman, that we should attempt nothing beyond our strength: there are some modern_ milo's _who have been wedg'd in that timber which they strove to rend. some have fail'd in the lyric way who have been excellent in the dramatic. and, sir, would you not think a physician would gain more profit and reputation by_ hippocrates _and_ galen _well-studied, than by_ homer _and_ virgil _ill-copied?_ horace, _who was as great a master of judgment, as he was an instance of wit, would have laid the errours of an establish'd writer on a pardonable want of care, or excus'd them by the infirmity of human nature; he would have wondred at the corrupt palates now a-days, who quarrel with their meat, when the fault is in their taste. to reform which, if our moderns would lay aside the malicious grin and drolling sneer, the passions and prejudices to persons and circumstances, we should have better poems, and juster criticisms. nothing casts a greater cloud on the judgment than the inclination (or rather resolution) to praise or condemn, before we see the object. the rich and the great lay a trap for fame, and have always a numerous crowd of servile dependants, to clap their play, or admire their poem._ for noble scriblers are with flattery fed, and none dare tell their fault who eat their bread. _dryden's pers.._ juvenal _shews his aversion to this prepossession, when his old disgusted friend gives this among the rest of his reasons why he left the town,_ --mentiri nescio: librum si malus est, nequeo laudare & poscere. _to conquer prejudice is the part of a philosopher; and to discern a beauty is an argument of good sense and sagacity; and to find a fault with allowances for human frailty, is the property of a gentleman._ _who then is this critick? you will find him in_ quintilius varus, _of_ cremona, _who when any author shew'd him his composure, laid aside the_ fastus _common to our supercilious readers; and when he happen'd on any mistake_, corrige sodes hoc aiebat & hoc. _such is the critick i would find, and such would i prove my self to others. i am sorry i must go into my enemies country to find out another like him. our_ english _criticks having taken away a great deal from the value of their judgment, by dashing it with some splenetick reflections. like a certain nobleman mention'd by my lord_ verulam, _who when he invited any friends to dinner, always gave a disrelish to the entertaiment by some cutting malicious jest._ _the_ french _then seem to me to have a truer taste of the ancient authors than ever_ scaliger _or_ heinsius _could pretend to_. rapin, _and above all_, bossu, _have done more justice to_ homer _and to_ virgil, _to_ livy _and_ thucydides, _to_ demosthenes _and to_ cicero, _&c. and have bin more beneficial to the republick of learning, by their nice comparisons and observations, than all the honest labours of those well-meaning men, who rummage_ musty manuscripts _for_ various lections. _they did not_ insistere in ipso cortice, verbisq; interpretandis intenti nihil ultra petere, (_as_ dacier _has it_) _but search'd the inmost recesses, open'd their mysteries, and (as it were) call'd the spirit of the author from the dead. it is for this_ le clerc _(in his_ bibliotheque choisie, _tom._ . _p._ .) _commends st._ evremont's _discourses on_ salust _and_ tacitus, _as also his judgment on the ancients, and blames the grammarians, because they give us not a taste of antiquity after his method, which would invite our polite gentlemen to study it with a greater appetite. whereas their manner of writing, which takes notice only of words, customs, and chiefly chronology, with a blind admiration of all they read, is unpleasant to a fine genius, and deters it from the pursuit of the_ belles lettres. _i shall say no more at present on this head, but proceed to give you an account of the following sheets. what i have attempted in them is mostly of the pindaric and the lyric way. i have not follow'd the_ strophe _and_ antistrophe; _neither do i think it necessary; besides i had rather err with mr._ cowley, _who shew'd us the way, than be flat and in the right with others._ _mr._ congreve, _an ingenious gentleman, has affirm'd, i think too hastily, that in each particular ode the stanza's are alike, whereas the last olympic has two_ monostrophicks _of different measure, and number of lines._ _the pacquet-boat is just going off, i am afraid of missing tide. you may expect the rest on the_ pindaric style. _in the mean time i beg leave to subscribe myself,_ _sir, your ever obedient and obliged servant,_ samuel cobb. _of poetry._ . its antiquity. . its progress. . its improvement. a poem. _antiquity of poetry_ sure when the maker in his heav'nly breast design'd a creature to command the rest, of all th' _erected progeny of clay_ his noblest labour was his _first essay_. there shone th' eternal brightness, and a mind proportion'd for the father of mankind. the vigor of omnipotence was seen in his high actions, and imperial mien. inrich'd with arts, unstudy'd and untaught, with loftiness of soul, and dignity of thought to rule the world, and what he rul'd to sing, and be at once the poet and the king. whether his knowledge with his breath he drew, and saw the depth of nature at a view; or, new descending from th' angelick race, retain'd some tincture of his native place. fine was the matter of the curious frame, which lodg'd his _fiery guest_[ ], and like the same nor was a less resemblance in his sense, his thoughts were lofty, just his eloquence. whene're he spoke, from his _seraphick_ tongue ten thousand comely graces, ever young, with new _calliopes_ and _clio's_ sprung. no shackling rhyme chain'd the free poet's mind, majestick was his style, and unconfin'd. vast was each sentence, and each wondrous strain sprung forth, unlabour'd, from his fruitful brain. [ ] the soul according to the platonists. so _virgil_: _aurai simplicis ig, nem._ but when he yielded to deluding charms, th'harmonious goddess shun'd his empty arms. the muse no more his sacred breast inspir'd, but to the skies, her ancient seat, retir'd. yet here and there _celestial seeds_ she threw, and rain'd _melodious blessings_ as she flew. which some receiv'd, whom gracious heav'n design'd for high employments, and their clay resin'd. who, of a _species_ more sublime, can tame the rushing god, and stem the rapid flame. when in their breasts th'impetuous _numen_ rowls, and with uncommon heaves swells their diviner souls. thus the companion of the godhead [moses] sung, and wrote upon those reeds from whence he sprung. he, first of poets, told how infant light, unknown before, dawn'd from the womb of night. how sin and shame th' _unhappy couple_ knew, and thro' affrighted _eden_, more affrighted, flew. how god advanc'd his darling _abram's_ fame, in the sure promise of his lengthen'd name. on _horeb's_ top, or _sinah's_ flaming hill familiar heav'n reveal'd his sacred will. unshaken then _seth's_ stony column stood, surviving the destruction of the flood. his father's fall was letter'd on the stone, thence arts, inventions, sciences were known. thence divine _moses_, with exalted thought, in _hebrew_ lines the _worlds beginning_ wrote. [_the progress of poetry._] the gift of verse descended to the jews, inspir'd with something nobler than a muse. here _deborah_ in fiery rapture sings, the rout of armies, and the fall of kings. thy torrent, _kison_, shall for ever flow, which trampled o'er the dead, and swept away the foe. with songs of triumph, and the maker's praise, with sounding numbers, and united lays, the seed of _judah_ to the battle flew, and orders of destroying angels drew to their victorious side: who marching round their foes, touch'd myriads at the signal sound, by harmony they fell, and dy'd without a wound. so strong is verse divine, when we proclaim thy power, eternal light, and sing thy name! [_orpheus._] nor does it here alone it's magick show, but works in hell, and binds the fiends below. so powerful is the muse! when _david_ plaid, the frantick _dæmon_ heard him, and obey'd. no noise, no hiss: the dumb apostate lay sunk in soft silence, and dissolv'd away. nor was this miracle of verse confin'd to _jews_ alone: for in a heathen mind some strokes appear: thus _orpheus_ was inspir'd, inchanting _syrens_ at his song retir'd. to rocks and seas he the curst maids pursu'd, and their strong charms, by stronger charms subdu'd. [_homer._] but _greece_ was honour'd with a greater name, _homer_ is _greece's_ glory and her shame. how could learn'd _athens_ with contempt refuse, th' immortal labours of so vast a muse? thee, _colophon_, his angry ghost upbraids, while his loud numbers charm th' infernal shades. ungrateful cities! which could vainly strive for the dead _homer_, whom they scorn'd alive. so strangely wretched is the poet's doom! to wither here, and flourish in the tomb. tho' _virgil_ rising under happier stars, saw _rome_ succeed in learning as in wars. when _pollio_, like a smiling planet, shone, and _cæsar_ darted on him, like the sun. nor did _mecænas_, gain a less repute, when tuneful _flaccus_ touch'd the _roman_ lute. but when, _mecænas_, will thy star appear in our low orb, and gild the _british_ sphere? say, art thou come, and, to deceive our eyes dissembled under _dorset's_ fair disguise? if so; go on, great _sackvile_, to regard the poet, and th'imploring muse reward. so to thy fame a _pyramid_ shall rise, nor shall the poet fix thee in the skies. for if a verse eternity can claim, thy own are able to preserve thy name. this province all is thine, o'er which in vain _octavius_ hover'd long, and sought to reign. this sun prevail'd upon his eagle's sight, glar'd in their royal eyes, and stop'd their flight. let him his title to such glory bring, you give as freely, and more nobly sing. reason will judge, when both their claims produce, he shall his empire boast, and thou the muse. _horace_ and he are in thy nature joyn'd, the patron's bounty with the poet's mind. o light of _england_, and her highest grace! thou best and greatest of thy ancient race! descend, when i invoke thy name, to shine (for 'tis thy praise) on each unworthy line, while to the world, unprejudic'd, i tell the noblest poets, and who most excel. thee with the foremost thro' the globe i send, far as the british arms or memory extend. but 'twould be vain, and tedious, to reherse the meaner croud, undignify'd for verse on barren ground who drag th'unwilling plough, and feel the sweat of brain as well as brow. a crew so vile, which, soon as read, displease, may slumber in forgetfulness and ease, till fresher dulness wakes their sleeping memories. some stuff'd in garrets dream for wicked rhyme where nothing but their lodging is sublime. observe their twenty faces, how they strain to void forth nonsense from their costive brain. who (when they've murder'd so much costly time, beat the vext anvil with continual chime, and labour'd hard to hammer statutable rhyme) create a _british prince_; as hard a task, as would a _cowley_ or a _milton_ ask, to build a poem of the vastest price, a _davideis_, or _lost paradise_. so tho' a beauty of _imperial mien_ may labour with a heroe, or a queen, the dowdie's offspring, of the freckled strain, shall cause like travail, and as great a pain. such to the rabble may appear inspir'd, by coxcombs envy'd, and by fools admir'd. i pity madmen who attempt to fly, and raise their _airy babel_ to the sky. who, arm'd with gabble, to create a name, design a beauty, and a monster frame, not so the seat of _phoebus_ role, which lay in ruins buried, and a long decay. to _britany_ the temple was convey'd, by natures utmost force, and more than human aid. built from the _basis_ by a noble few, the stately fabrick in perfection view. while nature gazes on the polish'd piece, the work of many rowling centuries. for joyn'd with art she labour'd long to raise an _english_ poet, meriting the bays. how vain a toil! since authors first were known for _greek_ and _latin_ tongues, but scorn'd their own. as _moors_ of old, near _guinea's_ precious shore, for glittering brass exchang'd their shining oar. involving darkness did our language shrowd, nor could we view the goddess thro' the cloud. [_chaucer_ and _spencer_] sunk in a sea of ignorance we lay, till _chaucer_ rose, and pointed out the day. a joking bard, whose antiquated muse in mouldy words could solid sense produce. our _english ennius_ he, who claim'd his part in wealthy nature, tho' unskil'd in art. the sparkling diamond on his dunghil shines, and golden fragments glitter in his lines. which _spencer_ gather'd, for his learning known, and by successful gleanings made his own. so careful bees, on a fair summer's day, hum o'er the flowers, and suck the sweets away. o had thy poet, _britany_, rely'd on native strength, and foreign aid deny'd! had not wild fairies blasted his design, _mæanides_ and _virgil_ had been thine! their finish'd poems he exactly view'd, but _chaucer's_ steps _religiously_ pursu'd. [_ben. johnson_.] he cull'd, and pick'd, and thought it greater praise t'adore his master, than improve his phrase; 'twas counted sin to deviate from his page; so secred was th' authority of age! the coyn must sure for _currant sterling_ pass, stamp'd with old _chaucer's venerable face_. but _johnson_ found it of a gross _alloy_, melted it down, and slung the dross away he dug pure silver from a _roman mine_, and prest his sacred image on the coyn. we all rejoyc'd to see the pillag'd oar, our tongue inrich'd, which was so poor before. fear not, learn'd poet, our impartial blame, such thefts as these add lustre to thy name. whether thy labour'd comedies betray the sweat of _terence_, in thy glorious way, or _catliine_ plots better in thy play. whether his crimes more excellently shine, whether we hear the consul's voice divine, and doubt which merits most, _rome's cicero_, or thine. all yield, consenting to sustain the yoke, and learn the language which the victor spoke. so _macedon's imperial hero_ threw his wings abroad, and conquer'd as he flew. great _johnson's_ deeds stand parallel with his, were _noble thefts, successful pyracies_. souls of a heroe's, or a poet's frame are fill'd with larger particles of flame. scorning confinement, for more land they groan, and stretch beyond the limits of their own. [_fletcher_ and _beaument_] _fletcher_, whose wit, like some luxuriant vine, profusely wanton'd in each golden line. who, prodigal of sense, by _beaumont's_ care, was prun'd so wisely, and became so fair. could from his copious brain new humours bring, a _bragging bessus_, or _inconstant king_. could laughter thence, here melting pity raise in his _amyntors_, and _aspasia's_. but _rome_ and _athens_ must the plots produce with _france_, the handmaid of the _english_ muse [_shakespear_.] ev'n _shakespear_ sweated in his narrow isle, and subject _italy_ obey'd his stile. _boccace_ and _cinthio_ must a tribute pay, t'inrich his scenes, and furnish out a play. tho' art ne're taught him how to write by rules, or borrow learning from _athenian_ schools: yet he, with _plautus_, could instruct and please, and what requir'd long toil, perform with ease. by inborn strength so _theseus_ bent the pine, which cost _the robber_ many years design[ ]. [ ] _see plutarch's life of theseus_. tho' sometimes rude, unpolish'd and undrest his sentence flows, more careless than the rest. yet, when his muse, complying with his will, deigns with informing heat his breast to fill, then hear him thunder in the pompous strain of _Æschylus_, or sooth in _ovid's_ vein. i feel a pity working in my eyes, when _desdemona_ by _othello_ dyes. when i view _brutus_ in his dress appear; i know not how to call him too severe. his _rigid vertue_ there attories for all, and makes a sacrifice of _cæsar's_ fall. [_cowley_.] nature work'd wonders then; when _shakespear_ dy'd her _cowley_ rose, drest in her gaudy pride. so from great ruins a new life she calls, and builds an _ovid[ ]_ when a _tully_ falls. [ ] _ovid_ was born the same year in which _cicero_ dy'd. with what delight he tunes his silver-strings, and _david's_ toils in _david's_ numbers sings? hark! how he murmurs to the fields and groves, his rural pleasures, and his various loves, yet every line so innocent and clear, _hermits_ may read them to a virgin's ear. unstoln _promethean_ fire informs his song, rich is his fancy, his invention strong. his wit, unfathom'd, has a fresh supply, is always flowing-out, but never dry. sure the profuseness of a boundless thought, unjustly is imputed for a fault. a spirit, that is unconfin'd and free, should hurry forward, like the wind or sea. which laughs at laws and shackles, when a vain presuming _xerxes_ shall pretend to reign, and on the flitting air impose his pond'rous chain. hail _english_ swan? for you alone could dare with well-pois'd pinions tempt th' unbounded air: and to your lute _pindaric_ numbers call, nor fear the danger of a _threatned fall_. o had you liv'd to _waller's_ reverend age, better'd your measures, and reform'd your page! then _britain's_ isle might raise her trophies high, and _solid rome_, or _witty greece_ outvy. the _rhine_, the _tyber_, and _parisian sein_, when e're they pay their tribute to the main, should no sweet song more willingly rehearse, than gentle _cowley's_ never-dying verse. the _thames_ should sweep his briny way before, and with his name salute each distant shore. [_milton._] then you, like glorious _milton_ had been known to lands which conquest has insur'd our own. _milton_! whose muse kisses th' embroider'd skies, while earth below grows little, as she flies. thro' trackless air she bends her winding flight, far as the confines of retreating light. tells the _sindg'd moor_, how scepter'd death began his lengthning empire o'er offending man. unteaches conquer'd nations to rebel, by singing how their stubborn parents fell. now _seraphs_ crown'd with _helmets_ i behold, _helmets_ of substance more refin'd than gold: the skies with an united lustre shine, and face to face th' immortal armies joyn. god's _plated son, majestically gay_, urges his chariot thro' the chrystal-way breaks down their ranks, and thunders, as he flies, arms in his hands, and terrour in his eyes. o'er heav'ns wide arch the routed squadrons rore, and transfix d angels groan upon the _diamond-floor_. then, wheeling from _olympus_ snowy top, thro' the scorch'd air the giddy leaders drop down to th' abyss of their allotted hell, and gaze on the lost skies from whence they fell. i see the fiend, who tumbled from his sphere once by the _victor god_, begins to fear new lightning, and a second thunderer. i hear him yell, and argue with the skies, _was't not enough, relentless power_! he cries, _despair of better state, and loss of light irreparable? was not loathsom night and ever-during dark sufficient pain, but man must triumph, by our fall to reign, and register the fate which we sustain? hence hell is doubly ours: almighty name hence, after thine, we feel the_ poet's _flame and in immortal song renew reviving shame_. o soul _seraphick_, teach us how we may thy praise adapted to thy worth display, for who can merit more? or who enough can pay? earth was unworthy your aspiring view, sublimer objects were reserv'd for you. thence nothing mean obtrudes on your design, your style is equal to your theme divine, all heavenly great, and more than masculine. tho' neither vernal bloom, nor summer's rose their op'ning beauties could to thee disclose. tho' nature's curious characters, which we exactly view, were all eras'd to thee. yet heav'n stood witness to thy piercing sight, below was darkness, but above was light: thy soul was brightness all; nor would it stay in nether night, and such a want of day. but wing'd aloft from sordid earth retires to upper glory, and its kindred-fires: like an unhooded _hawk_, who, loose to prey, with open eyes pursues th' ethereal way. there, happy soul, assume thy destin'd place, and in yon sphere begin thy glorious race: or, if amongst the laurel'd heads there be a mansion in the skies reserv'd for thee, there ruler of thy orb aloft appear, and rowl with _homer_ in the brightest sphere; to whom _calliope_ has joyn'd thy name, and recompens'd thy fortunes with his fame. [_waller_.] tho' she (forgive our freedom) sometimes flows in lines too rugged, and akin to prose. verse with a lively smoothness should be wrote, when room is granted to the speech and thought. like some fair planet, the majestick song should gently move, and sparkle as it rowls along. like _waller's_ muse, who tho' inchain'd by rhime, taught wondring poets to keep even chime. his praise inflames my breast, and should be shown in numbers sweet and _courtly_ as his own. who no unmanly _turns_ of thought pursues, rash errours of an injudicious muse. such wit, like lightning, for a while looks gay, just gilds the place, and vanishes away. in one continu'd blaze he upwards sprung, like those _seraphick_ flames of which he sung. if, _cromwel_, he laments thy mighty fall nature attending weeps at the _great funeral_. or if his muse with joyful triumph brings the monarch to his ancient throne, or sings _batavians_ worsted on the conquer'd main, fleets flying, and advent'rous _opdam_ slain, then _rome_ and _athens_ to his song repair with _british_ graces smiling on his care, divinely charming in a dress so fair. as squadrons in well-marshal'd order fill the _flandrian plains_, and speak no vulgar skill; so rank'd is every line, each sentence such, no word is wanting, and no word's too much. as pearls in gold with their own lustre shine, the substance precious, and the work divine: so did his words his beauteous thoughts inchase, both shone and sparkled with unborrow'd grace, a mighty value in a little space. so the _venusian clio_ sung of old, when lofty acts in well-chose phrase he told. but _rome's_ aspiring _lyrick_ pleas'd us less, sung not so moving, tho' with more success. o _sacharissa_, what could steel thy breast, to rob _harmonious waller_ of his rest? to send him murm'ring thro' the _cypress_-grove, in strains lamenting his neglected love. th' attentive forest did his grief partake, and sympathizing oaks their knotted branches shake. each nymph, tho' coy, to pity would incline; and every stubborn heart was mov'd, but thine. henceforth be thou to future ages known; like _niobe_, a monument of stone. here could i dwell, like bees on flowry dew, and _waller's_ praise eternally pursue, could i, like him, in harmony excel, so sweetly strike the lute, and sing so well. but now the forward muse converts her eye to see where _denham_, and _roscommon_ fly, cautiously daring, and correctly high. both chief in honour, and in learning's grace, of ancient spirit, and of ancient race. who, when withdrawn from business, and affairs, their minds unloaded of tormenting cares, with soothing verse deceiv'd the sliding time, and, unrewarded, sung in noble rhyme. not like those venal bards, who write for pence, above the vulgar were their names and sense, the _critick_ judges what the _muse_ indites, and rules for _dryden_, like a _dryden_, writes. 'tis true their lamps were of the smallest size, but like the _stoicks_[ ], of prodigious price. _roscommon's_ rules shall o'er our isle be read, nor dye, till poetry itself be dead. fam'd _cooper's hill_ shall, like _parnassus_, stand, and _denham_ reign, the _phæbus_ of the land. [ ] _epictetus._ among these sacred and immortal names, [_oldham_.] a youth glares out, and his just honour claims; see circling flames, in stead of laurel, play around his head, and sun the brighten'd way. but misty clouds of unexpected night, cast their black mantle o'er th' immoderate light. here, pious muse, lament a while; 'tis just we pay some tribute to his sacred dust. o'er his fresh marble strow the fading rose and lilly, for his youth resembled those. the brooding sun took care to dress him gay, in all the trappings of the flowry _may_. he set him out unsufferably bright, and sow'd in every part his beamy light. th' unfinish'd poet budded forth too soon, for what the morning warm'd; was scorch'd at noon. his careless lines plain nature's rules obey, like _satyrs_ rough, but not deform'd as they. his sense undrest, like _adam_, free from blame, without his cloathing, and without his shame, true wit requires no ornaments of skill, a beauty naked, is a beauty still. warm'd with just rage he lash'd the _romish_ crimes, in rugged _satyr_ and ill-sounding rhymes. all _italy_ felt his imbitter'd tongue, and trembled less when sharp _lucilius_ stung. here let us pass in silence, nor accuse th' extravagance of his unhallow'd muse. in _jordan's_ stream she wash'd the tainted sore, and rose more beauteous than she was before. [_lee._] then fancy curb'd began to cool her rage, and sparks of judgment glimmer'd in his page, when the wild fury did his breast inspire, she rav'd, and set the little world on fire. thus _lee_ by reason strove not to controul that powerful heat which o'er-inform'd his soul. he took his swing, and nature's bounds surpast, stretch'd her, and bent her, till she broke at last. i scorn to flatter, or the dead defame; but who will call a blaze a lambent flame? [_otway._ and _dryden._] terrour and pity are allow'd to be, the moving parts of tragic poetry. if pity sooths us, _otway_ claims our praise; if terrour strikes, then _lee_ deserves the bays. we grant a genius shines in _jaffeir's_ part, and _roman brutus_ speaks a master's art. but still we often mourn to see their phrase an earthly vapour, or at mounting blaze. a rising meteor never was design'd, t'amaze the sober part of human kind. were i to write for fame, i would not chuse a prostitute and mercenary muse. which for poor gains must in rich trappings go, emptily gay, magnificently low, like ancient _rome's_ religion, sacrifice and show. things fashion'd for amusement and surprize, ne'er move the head, tho' they divert the eyes. the mouthing actors well-dissembled rage, may please the young _sir foplings_ on the stage. but, disingag'd, the swelling phrase i find like _spencer's_ giant sunk away in wind. it grates judicious readers when they meet nothing but jingling verse, and even feet. such false, such counterfeited wings as these, forsake th' unguided boy, and plunge him in the seas. _lee_ aim'd to rise above great _dryden's_ height, but lofty _dryden_ keeps a steddy flight. like dædalus, he times with prudent care his well-wax'd wings, and waves in middle air. the native spark, which first advanc'd his name, by industry he kindled to a flame. the proper phrase of our exalted tongue to such perfection from his numbers sprung. his tropes continu'd, and his figures fine, _all of a piece throughout, and all divine._ his _images_ so strong and lively be, i hear not words alone, but substance see; adapted speech, and just expressions move our various passions, pity, rage and love. i weep to hear fond _anthony_ complain in _shakespear's_ fancy, but in _virgil's_ strain. tho' for the comick, others we prefer, himself[ ] the judge; nor do's his judgment err. but comedy, 'tis thought, can never claim the sounding title of a poem's name. for raillery, and what creates a smile betrays no lofty genius, nor a style. that _heav'nly heat_ refuses to be seen in a town-character and comick mien. [ ] see preface to _aurengzebe_. if we would do him right, we must produce the _sophoclean buskin_; when his muse with her loud accents fills the list'ning ear, and _peals_ applauding shake the theater. they fondly seek, great name, to blast thy praise, who think that foreign thanks produc'd thy bays. is he oblig'd to _france_, who draws from thence by _english_ energy, their captive sense? tho' _edward_ and fam'd _henry_ warr'd in vain, subduing what they could not long retain: yet now beyond our arms the muse prevails, and poets conquer where the hero fails. this does superiour excellence betray; o could i write in thy immortal way! if art be nature's scholar, and can make such vast improvements, nature must forsake her ancient style; and in some grand design she must her own originals decline, and for the noblest copies follow thine. pardon this just transition to thy praise, which young _thalia_ sung in rural lays. as sleep to weary drovers on the plain as a sweet river to a thirsty swain, such _tityrus's_ charming number show, please like the river, like the river flow. when his first years in mighty order ran, and cradled infancy bespoke the man, around his lips the _waxen artists_ hung, and drop'd ambrosial dew upon his tongue. then from his mouth harmonious numbers broke, more sweet than honey from a hollow oke. pleasant as streams which from a mountain glide, yet lofty as the top from whence they slide. long he possest th' hereditary plains, admir'd by all the herdsmen and the swains. till he resign'd his flock, opprest with cares, weaken'd by num'rous woes, and grey with years. yet still, like _Ætna's_ _mount_, he kept his fire, and look'd like beauteous roses on a brier. he smil'd, like _phoebus_ in a stormy morn, and sung, like _philomel_ against a thorn. here _syren of sweet poesy_, receive that little praise my unknown muse can give. thou shalt immortal be, no censure fear tho' angry _b----more_ in heroicks jeer. a bard, who seems to challenge _virgil's_ flame, and would be next in majesty and name. with lofty _maro_ he at first may please; the righteous _briton_ rises by degrees. but once on wing, thro' secret paths he rows, and leaves his guide, or follows him too close, the _mantuan_ swan keeps a soft gentle flight, is always tow'ring, but still plays in sight. calm and serene his verse; his active song runs smooth as _thames's_ river, and as strong. like his own _neptune_ he the waves confines, while _bl----re_ rumbles, like the king of winds. his flat descriptions, void of manly strength, jade out our patience with excessive length. while readers, yawning o'er his _arthurs_ see whole pages spun on one poor _simile_. we grant he labours with no want of brains, or fire, or spirit; but he spares the pains, one happy thought, or two, may at a heat be struck, but time and study must compleat a verse, sublimely good, and justly great. it call'd for an omnipotence to raise the _world's_ _imperial poem_ in six days. but man, that offspring of corrupting clay, subject to err, and subject to decay: in hopes, desires, will, power, a numerous train, uncertain, fickle, impotent and vain: must tire the heav'nly muse with endless prayer, and call the smiling angels to his care. must sleep less nights, _vulcanian_ labours prove, like _cyclops_, forging thunder for a _jove_. with flame begin thy glorious thoughts and style, then cool, and bring them to the smoothing file. if you design to make your prince appear as perfect as humanity can bear. whom vertues at th' expence of danger please, deaf to the _syrens_ of alluring ease. no terrours thee, _achilles_, could invade, nor thee, _ulysses_, any charms persuade. this must be done, if poets would be read, who seek to emulate the sacred dead. thus in bright numbers and well polish'd strains _virgilian addison_ describes _campaigns_. whose verse, like a proportion'd man, we find, not of the _gyant_, nor the _pygmy_ kind. such symmetry appears o'er all the song, lofty with justness, and with caution strong. this _congreve_ follows in his deathless line, and the _tenth hand_ is put to the design. the happy boldness of his finish'd toil claims more than _shakespear's_ wit, or _johnson's_ oil. sing on, _harmonious swan_, in weeping strains, and tell _pastora's_ death to mournful swains. or with more pleasing charms, with softer airs sweeten our passions, and delude our cares. or let thy _satyr_ grin with half a smile, and jeer in _easy etherege's_ style. let _manly wycherly_ chalk out the way, and art direct, where nature goes astray. 'tis not for thee to write of conqu'ring kings, the noise of arms will break thy am'rous strings. the _teian muse_ invites thee from above to lay thy trumpet down, and sing of love. let _montague_ describe _boyn's_ swelling flood and purple streams fatned with hostile blood. o heavenly patron of the needy muse! whose powerful name can nobler heat infuse. when you _nassau's_ bright actions dar'd to see, _you_ was the _eagle_, and _apollo he_. but when he read you, and your value knew, _he_ was the _eagle_, and _apollo you_. both spoke the bird in her _Æthereal_ height, the _majesty_ was _his_, and _thine_ the _flight_. both did _apollo_ in his glory shew, the silver _harp_ was _thine_, and _his_ the _bow_, so may _pierian clio_ cease to fear, when _honour_ deigns to sing, and _majesty_ to hear! so may she favour'd live, and always please our _dorset's_, and judicious _normanby's_! nor does the _coronet_ alone defend the muses cause: the _miter_ is her friend. can we forget how _damon's_ lofty tongue shook the glad mountains? how the valleys rung when _rochester's seraphick shepherd_ sung. how _mars_ and _pallas_ wept to see the day when _athens_ by a plague dispeopled lay. what learning perish'd, and what lives it cost! sung with more spirit than all _athens_ lost. nor can the _miter_ now conceal the bays, for still we view the _sacred poet's_ praise. so tho' _eridanus_ becomes a star exalted to the skies, and shines afar, below he loses nothing but his name, still faithful to his banks, his stream's the same. but smile, my muse, once more upon my song, let _creech_ be numbred with the sacred throng. whose daring muse could with _manilius_ fly, and, like an _atlas_, shoulder up the sky. he's mounted, where no vulgar eye can trace his wondrous footsteps and mysterious race. see, how he walks above in mighty strains, and wanders o'er the wide ethereal plains! he sings what harmony the spheres obey, in verse more tuneful, and more sweet than they. 'tis cause of triumph, when _rome's_ genius shines in nervous _english_, and well-worded lines. two famous _latins_[ ] our bright tongue adorn, and a new _virgil_[ ] is in _england_ born. an _Æneid_ to translate, and make a new, are tasks of equal labour to pursue. [ ] _lucretius_ and _manilius_. [ ] mr. _dryden's_ _virgil_. for tho' th' invention of a godlike mind excels the works of nature, and mankind; yet a well-languag'd version will require an equal _genius_, and as strong a fire. these claim at once our study and our praise, fam'd for the dignity of sense and phrase. these gainful to the stationer, shall stand at _paul's_ or _cornhill_, _fleetstreet_ or the _strand_. shall wander far and near, and cross the seas, an ornament to _foreign libraries_. hail, glorious titles! who have been my _theme_! o could i write so well as i esteem! from her low nest my humble soul shou'd rise as a young _phoenix_ out of ashes flies above what _france_ or _italy_ can shew, the celebrated _tasso_, or _boileau_. come you, where'er you be, who seek to find something to pleasure, and instruct your mind: if, when retir'd from bus'ness, or from men, you love the _labour'd travels_ of the pen; imploy the minutes of your vacant time on _cowley_, or on _dryden's_ useful rhyme: or whom besides of all the tribe you chuse, the _tragick, lyrick_, or _heroick_ muse: for they, if well observ'd, will strictly shew in _charming numbers_, what is false, what true, and teach more good than _hobbs_ or _lock_ can do. hail, ye _poetick dead_, who wander now in fields of light! at your fair shrines we bow. freed from the malice of injurious fate, ye blest partakers of a happier state! whether intomb'd with _english kings_ you sleep, or common urns your sacred ashes keep: there, on each dawning of the tender day, may tuneful birds their pious off'rings pay! there may sweet myrrh with balmy tears perfume the hallow'd ground, and roses deck the tomb. while you, who live, no frowning tempest fear, sing on; let _montague_ and _dorset_ hear. in stately verse let _william's_ praise be told, william rewards with honour and with gold. no more of _richelieu's_ worth: forget not, fame, to change _augustus_ for great _william's_ name. who, tho' like _homer's_ _jupiter_, he sate, musing on something eminently great and ballanc'd in his mind the world's important fate; lays by the vast concern, and gladly hears the loud-sung triumphs of his warlike years. whether this praise to _stepny's_ muse belong, or _prior_ claim it for _pindarick song_. the sleeping dooms of empire were delay'd, and fate stood silent while the poet play'd. the double vertue of _nassovian fire_ at once the soldier and the bard inspire. the hero listen'd when the canons rung a fatal peal, or when the harp was strung, when _mars_ has acted, or when _phoebus_ sung. o cou'd my muse reach _milton's_ tow'ring flight, or stretch her wings to the _mæonian_ height! thro' air, and earth, and seas, i wou'd disperse his fame, and sing it in the loudest verse. the rowling waves to hear me shou'd grow tame, and winds should calm a tempest with his name but we must all decline: the muse grows dumb, not weary'd with his praise, but overcome. who shall describe him? or what eye can trace the matchless glories of his princely race? what prince can equal what no muse can praise? no land but _britain_, must pretend to shine with gods and heroes of an equal line. so may this island a new _delos_ prove, joyn[ ] young _apollo_ to the _cretan jove_! what bloom! what youth! what hopes of future fame! how his eyes sparkle with a heav'nly flame! how swiftly _gloster_ in his bud began! how the _green hero_ blossoms into man! smit with the thirst of fame, and honour's charms, to tread his uncle's steps, and shine in arms: see, how he spurs, and rushes to the war! pale legions view, and tremble from afar, what blood! what ruin! thrice unhappy they who shall attempt him on that fatal day. _edwards_ and _harry's_ to his eyes appear in warlike form, and shake the glitt'ring spear. at _agincourt_ so terrible they stood, so when _pictavian_ fields were dy'd with blood. the royal youth with emulation glows, and pours thick vengeance on his ghastly foes. troops of commission'd angels from the sky, unseen, above him, and about him, fly. o'er _england's_ hopes their flaming swords they hold, and wave them, as o'er paradise of old. nor shall they cease a nightly watch to keep, but, ever waking, bless him in his sleep. their golden wings for his pavilion spread, their softest mantles for his downy bed, defend the sacred youth's imperial head. [ ] _the duke of_ glouceiter. _here the author laments he prov'd so bad a prophet_. after whose conquests, and the work of fate, the arts and muses on his triumph wait. the streams of _thamisis_, exulting, ring, when fair _augusta's_ lofty _clio's_ sing _granta_ and _rhedycina's_ tuneful throng fill the resounding vales with learned song. live, heav'nly youth, beyond invidious time, adorning annals, and immortal rhyme. thy glories, which no malice can obscure, bright as the sun, shall as the sun endure. but on thy fame no envious spots shall prey, till _english_ sense and valour shall decay. till learning and the muses mortal grow, or _cam_ or _isis_ shall forget to flow. proofreading team aspects of literature j. middleton murry new york: alfred a. knopf mcmxx copyright, _printed in great britain_ to bruce richmond to whose generous encouragement i owe so much _preface_ two of these essays, 'the function of criticism' and 'the religion of rousseau,' were contributed to the _times literary supplement_; that on 'the poetry of edward thomas' in the _nation_; all the rest save one have appeared in the _athenæum_. the essays are arranged in the order in which they were written, with two exceptions. the second part of the essay on tchehov has been placed with the first for convenience, although in order of thought it should follow the essay, 'the cry in the wilderness.' more important, i have placed 'the function of criticism' first although it was written last, because it treats of the broad problem of literary criticism, suggests a standard of values implicit elsewhere in the book, and thus to some degree affords an introduction to the remaining essays. but the degree is not great, as the critical reader will quickly discover for himself. i ask him not to indulge the temptation of convicting me out of my own mouth. i am aware that my practice is often inconsistent with my professions; and i ask the reader to remember that the professions were made after the practice and to a considerable extent as the result of it. the practice came first, and if i could reasonably expect so much of the reader i would ask him to read 'the function of criticism' once more when he has reached the end of the book. i make no apology for not having rewritten the essays. as a critic i enjoy nothing more than to trace the development of a writer's attitude through its various phases; i could do no less than afford my readers the opportunity of a similar enjoyment in my own case. they may be assured that none of the essays have suffered any substantial alteration, even where, for instance in the case of the incidental and (i am now persuaded) quite inadequate estimate of chaucer in 'the nostalgia of mr masefield,' my view has since completely changed. here and there i have recast expressions which, though not sufficiently conveying my meaning, had been passed in the haste of journalistic production. but i have nowhere tried to adjust earlier to later points of view. i am aware that these points of view are often difficult to reconcile; that, for instance, 'æsthetic' in the essay on tchehov has a much narrower meaning than it bears in 'the function of criticism'; that the essay on 'the religion of rousseau' is criticism of a kind which i deprecate as insufficient in the essay, 'the cry in the wilderness,' because it lacks that reference to life as a whole which i have come to regard as essential to criticism; and that in this latter essay i use the word 'moral' (for instance in the phrase 'the values of literature are in the last resort moral') in a sense which is never exactly defined. the key to most of these discrepancies will, i hope, be found in the introductory essay on 'the function of criticism.' _may_, . _contents_ the function of criticism the religion of rousseau the poetry of edward thomas mr yeats's swan song the wisdom of anatole france gerard manley hopkins the problem of keats thoughts on tchehov american poetry ronsard samuel butler the poetry of thomas hardy the present condition of english poetry the nostalgia of mr masefield the lost legions the cry in the wilderness poetry and criticism coleridge's criticism shakespeare criticism _the function of criticism_ it is curious and interesting to find our younger men of letters actively concerned with the present condition of literary criticism. this is a novel preoccupation for them and one which is, we believe, symptomatic of a general hesitancy and expectation. in the world of letters everything is a little up in the air, volatile and uncrystallised. it is a world of rejections and velleities; in spite of outward similarities, a strangely different world from that of half a dozen years ago. then one had a tolerable certainty that the new star, if the new star was to appear, would burst upon our vision in the shape of a novel. to-day we feel it might be anything. the cloud no bigger than a man's hand might even be, like trigorin's in 'the sea-gull,' like a piano; it has no predetermined form. this sense of incalculability, which has been aroused by the prodigious literary efflorescence of late years, reacts upon its cause; and the reaction tends by many different paths to express itself finally in the ventilation of problems that hinge about criticism. there is a general feeling that the growth of the young plant has been too luxuriant; a desire to have it vigorously pruned by a capable gardener, in order that its strength may be gathered together to produce a more perfect fruit. there is also a sense that if the _lusus naturæ_, the writer of genius, were to appear, there ought to be a person or an organisation capable of recognising him, however unexpected his scent or the shape of his leaves. both these tasks fall upon criticism. the younger generation looks round a little apprehensively to see if there is a gardener whom it can trust, and decides, perhaps a little prematurely, that there is none. there is reviewing but no criticism, says one icy voice that we have learned to respect. there are pontiffs and potential pontiffs, but no critics, says another disrespectful young man. oh, for some more scotch reviewers to settle the hash of our english bards, sighs a third. and the _london mercury_, after whetting our appetite by announcing that it proposed to restore the standards of authoritative criticism, still leaves us a little in the dark as to what these standards are. mr t.s. eliot deals more kindly, if more frigidly, with us in the _monthly chapbook_. there are, he says, three kinds of criticism--the historical, the philosophic, and the purely literary. 'every form of genuine criticism is directed towards creation. the historical or philosophic critic of poetry is criticising poetry in order to create a history or a philosophy; the poetic critic is criticising poetry in order to create poetry.' these separate and distinct kinds, he considers, are but rarely found to-day, even in a fragmentary form; where they do exist, they are almost invariably mingled in an inextricable confusion. whether we agree or not with the general condemnation of reviewing implicit in this survey of the situation, or with the division of criticism itself, we have every reason to be grateful to mr eliot for disentangling the problem for us. the question of criticism has become rather like glaucus the sea-god, encrusted with shells and hung with weed till his lineaments are hardly discernible. we have at least clear sight of him now, and we are able to decide whether we will accept mr eliot's description of him. let us see. we have no difficulty in agreeing that historical criticism of literature is a kind apart. the historical critic approaches literature as the manifestation of an evolutionary process in which all the phases are of equal value. essentially, he has no concern with the greater or less literary excellence of the objects whose history he traces--their existence is alone sufficient for him; a bad book is as important as a good one, and much more important than a good one if it exercised, as bad books have a way of doing, a real influence on the course of literature. in practice, it is true, the historical critic generally fails of this ideal of unimpassioned objectivity. he either begins by making judgments of value for himself, or accepts those judgments which have been endorsed by tradition. he fastens upon a number of outstanding figures and more or less deliberately represents the process as from culmination to culmination; but in spite of this arbitrary foreshortening he is primarily concerned, in each one of the phases which he distinguishes, with that which is common to every member of the group of writers which it includes. the individuality, the quintessence, of a writer lies completely outside his view. we may accept the isolation of the historical critic then, at least in theory, and conceive of him as a fragment of a social historian, as the author of a chapter in the history of the human spirit. but can we isolate the philosophic critic in the same way? and what exactly _is_ a philosophic critic? is he a critic with a philosophical scheme in which art and literature have their places, a critic who therefore approaches literature with a definite conception of it as one among many parallel manifestations of the human spirit, and with a system of values derived from his metaphysical scheme? hegel and croce are philosophical critics in this sense, and aristotle is not, as far as we can judge from the poetics, wherein he considers the literary work of greece as an isolated phenomenon, and examines it in and for itself. but for the moment, and with the uneasy sense that we have not thoroughly laid the ghost of philosophic criticism, we will assume that we have isolated him, and pass to the consideration of the pure literary critic, if indeed we can find him. what does he do? how shall we recognise him? mr eliot puts before us coleridge and aristotle and dryden as literary critics _par excellence_ arranged in an ascending scale of purity. the concatenation is curious, for these were men possessed of very different interests and faculties of mind; and it would occur to few to place dryden, as a critic, at their head. the living centre of aristotle's criticism is a conception of art as a means to a good life. as an activity, poetry 'is more philosophic than history,' a nearer approach to the universal truth in appearances; and as a more active influence, drama refines our spiritual being by a purgation of pity and terror. indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the very pith and marrow of aristotle's literary criticism is a system of moral values derived from his contemplation of life. it was necessary that this relation should exist, because for aristotle literature was, essentially, an imitation of life though we must remember to understand imitation according to our final sense of the theme which is the golden, persistent thread throughout the poetics. the imitation of life in literature was for aristotle, the creative revelation of the ideal actively at work in human life. the tragic hero failed because his composition was less than ideal; but he could only be a tragic hero if the ideal was implicit in him and he visibly approximated to it. it is this constant reference to the ideal which makes of 'imitation' a truly creative principle and the one which, properly understood, is the most permanently valid and pregnant of all; it is also one which has been constantly misunderstood. its importance is, nevertheless, so central that adequate recognition of it might conceivably be taken as the distinguishing mark of all fruitful criticism. to his sympathetic understanding of this principle coleridge owed a great debt. it is true that his efforts to refine upon it were not only unsuccessful, but a trifle ludicrous; his effort to graft the vague transcendentalism of germany on to the rigour and clarity of aristotle was, from the outset, unfortunately conceived. but the root of the matter was there, and in coleridge's fertile mind the aristotelian theory of imitation flowered into a magnificent conception of the validity and process of the poetic imagination. and partly because the foundation was truly aristotelian, partly because coleridge had known what it was to be a great poet, the reference to life pervades the whole of what is permanently valuable in coleridge's criticism. in him, too, there is a strict and mutually fertilising relation between the moral and the æsthetic values. this is the firm ground beneath his feet when he--too seldom--proceeds to the free exercise of his exquisite æsthetic discrimination. in dryden, however, there was no such organic interpenetration. dryden, too, had a fine sensibility, though less exquisite, by far, than that of coleridge; but his theoretical system was not merely alien to him--it was in itself false and mistaken. _corruptio optimi pessima_. he took over from france the sterilised and lifeless aristotelianism which has been the plague of criticism for centuries; he used it no worse than his french exemplars, but he used it very little better than they. it was in his hands, as in theirs, a dead mechanical framework of rules about the unities. dryden, we can see in his critical writing, was constantly chafed by it. he behaves like a fine horse with a bearing rein: he is continually tossing his head after a minute or two of 'good manners and action,' and saying, 'shakespeare was the best of them, anyhow'; 'chaucer beats ovid to a standstill.' it is a gesture with which all decent people sympathise and when it is made in language so supple as dryden's prose it has a lasting charm. dryden's heart was in the right place, and he was not afraid of showing it; but that does not make him a critic, much less a critic to be set as a superior in the company of aristotle and coleridge. our search for the pure literary critic is likely to be arduous. we have seen that there is a sense in which dryden is a purer literary critic than either coleridge or aristotle; but we have also seen that it is precisely by reason of the 'pureness' in him that he is to be relegated into a rank inferior to theirs. it looks as though we might have to pronounce that the true literary critic is the philosophic critic. yet the pronouncement must not be prematurely made; for there is a real and vital difference between those for whom we have accepted the designation of philosophic critics, hegel or croce, and aristotle or coleridge. yet three of these (and it might be wise to include coleridge as a fourth) were professional philosophers. it is evidently not the philosophy as such that makes the difference. the difference depends, we believe, upon the nature of the philosophy. the secret lies in aristotle. the true literary critic must have a humanistic philosophy. his inquiries must be modulated, subject to an intimate, organic governance, by an ideal of the good life. he is not the mere investigator of facts; existence is never for him synonymous with value, and it is of the utmost importance that he should never be deluded into believing that it is. he will not accept from hegel the thesis that all the events of human history, all man's spiritual activities, are equally authentic manifestations of spirit; he will not even recognise the existence of spirit. he may accept from croce the thesis that art is the expression of intuitions, but he will not be extravagantly grateful, because his duty as a critic is to distinguish between intuitions and to decide that one is more significant than another. a philosophy of art that lends him no aid in this and affords no indication why the expression of one intuition should be preferred to the expression of another is of little value to him. he will incline to say that hegel and croce are the scientists of art rather than its philosophers. here, then, is the opposition: between the philosophy that borrows its values from science and the philosophy which shares its values with art. we may put it with more cogency and truth: the opposition lies between a philosophy without values and a philosophy based upon them. for values are human, anthropocentric. shut them out once and you shut them out for ever. you do not get them back, as some believe, by declaring that such and such a thing is true. nothing is precious because it is true save to a mind which has, consciously or unconsciously, decided that it is good to know the truth. and the making of that single decision is a most momentous judgment of value. if the scientist appeals to it, as indeed he invariably does, he too is at bottom, though he may deny it, a humanist. he would do better to confess it, and to confess that he too is in search of the good life. then he might become aware that to search for the good life is in fact impossible, unless he has an ideal of it before his mind's eye. an ideal of the good life, if it is to have the internal coherence and the organic force of a true ideal, _must inevitably be æsthetic_. there is no other power than our æsthetic intuition by which we can imagine or conceive it; we can express it only in æsthetic terms. we say, for instance, the good life is that in which man has achieved a harmony of the diverse elements in his soul. for the good life, we know instinctively, is one of our human absolutes. it is not good with reference to any end outside itself. a man does not live the good life because he is a good citizen; but he is a good citizen because he lives the good life. and here we touch the secret of the most magnificently human of all books that has ever been written--plato's _republic_. in the _republic_ the good life and the life of the good citizen are identified; but the citizenship is not of an earthly but of an ideal city, whose proportions, like the duties of its citizens, are determined by the æsthetic intuition. plato's philosophy is æsthetic through and through, and because it is æsthetic it is the most human, the most permanently pregnant of all philosophies. much labour has been spent on the examination of the identity which plato established between the good and the beautiful. it is labour lost, for that identity is axiomatic, absolute, irreducible. the greeks knew by instinct that it is so, and in their common speech the word for a gentleman was the _kalos kagathos_, the beautiful-good. this is why we have to go back to the greeks for the principles of art and criticism, and why only those critics who have returned to bathe themselves in the life-giving source have made enduring contributions to criticism. they alone are--let us not say philosophic critics but--critics indeed. their approach to life and their approach to art are the same; to them, and to them alone, life and art are one. the interpenetration is complete; the standards by which life and art are judged the same. if we may use a metaphor, in the greek view art is the consciousness of life. poetry is more philosophic and more highly serious than history, just as the mind of a man is more significant than his outward gestures. to make those gestures significant the art of the actor must be called into play. so to make the outward event of history significant the poet's art is needed. therefore a criticism which is based on the greek view is impelled to assign to art a place, the place of sovereignty in its scheme of values. that plato himself did not do this was due to his having misunderstood the nature of that process of 'imitation' in which art consists; but only the superficial readers of plato--and a good many readers deserve no better name--will conclude from the fact that he rejected art that his attitude was not fundamentally æsthetic. not only is the _republic_ itself one of the greatest 'imitations,' one of the most subtle and profound works of art ever created, but it would also be true to say that plato cleared the way for a true conception of art. in reality he rejected not art, but false art; and it only remained for aristotle to discern the nature of the relation between artistic 'imitation' and the ideal for the platonic system to be complete and four-square, a perpetual inspiration and an everlasting foundation for art and the criticism of art. art, then, is the revelation of the ideal in human life. as the ideal is active and organic so must art itself be. the ideal is never achieved, therefore the process of revealing it is creative in the truest sense of the word. more than that, only by virtue of the artist in him can man appreciate or imagine the ideal at all. to discern it is essentially the work of divination or intuition. the artist divines the end at which human life is aiming; he makes men who are his characters completely expressive of themselves, which no actual man ever has been. if he works on a smaller canvas he aims to make himself completely expressive of himself. that, also, is the aim of the greater artist who expresses himself through the medium of a world of characters of his own creation. he needs that machinery, if a coarse and non-organic metaphor may be tolerated, for the explication of his own intuitions of the ideal, which are so various that the attempt to express them through the _persona_ of himself would inevitably end in confusion. that is why the great poetic genius is never purely lyrical, and why the greatest lyrics are as often as not the work of poets who are only seldom lyrical. moreover, every act of intuition or divination of the ideal in act in the world of men must be set, implicitly or explicitly, in relation to the absolute ideal. in subordinating its particular intuitions to the absolute ideal art is, therefore, merely asserting its own sovereign autonomy. true criticism is itself an organic part of the whole activity of art; it is the exercise of sovereignty by art upon itself, and not the imposition of an alien. to use our previous metaphor, as art is the consciousness of life, criticism is the consciousness of art. the essential activity of true criticism is the harmonious control of art by art. this is at the root of a confusion in the thought of mr. eliot, who, in his just anxiety to assert the full autonomy of art, pronounces that the true critic of poetry is the poet and has to smuggle the anomalous aristotle in on the hardly convincing ground that 'he wrote well about everything,' and has, moreover, to elevate dryden to a purple which he is quite unfitted to wear. no, what distinguishes the true critic of poetry is a truly æsthetic philosophy. in the present state of society it is extremely probable that only the poet or the artist will possess this, for art and poetry were never more profoundly divorced from the ordinary life of society than they are at the present day. but the poet who would be a critic has to make his æsthetic philosophy conscious to himself; to him as a poet it may be unconscious. this necessary change from unconsciousness to consciousness is by no means easy, and we should do well to insist upon its difficulty, for quite as much nonsense is talked about poetry by poets and by artists about art as by the profane about either. moreover, it is important to remember that in proportion as society approaches the ideal--there is no continual progress towards the ideal; at present society is as far removed from it as it has ever been--the chance of the philosopher, of the scientist even, becoming a true critic of art grows greater. when the æsthetic basis of all humane activity is familiarly recognised, the values of the philosopher, the scientist, and the artist become consciously the same, and therefore interchangeable. still, the ideal society is sufficiently remote for us to disregard it, and we shall say that the principle of art for art's sake contains an element of truth when it is opposed to those who would inflict upon art the values of science, of metaphysics, or of a morality of mere convention. we shall also say that the principle of art for art's sake needs to be understood and interpreted very differently. its implications are tremendous. art is autonomous, and to be pursued for its own sake, precisely because it comprehends the whole of human life; because it has reference to a more perfectly human morality than other activity of man; because, in so far as it is truly art, it is indicative of a more comprehensive and unchallengeable harmony in the spirit of man. it does not demand impossibilities, that man should be at one with the universe or in tune with the infinite; but it does envisage the highest of all attainable ideals, that man should be at one with himself, obedient to his own most musical law. thus art reveals to us the principle of its own governance. the function of criticism is to apply it. obviously it can be applied only by him who has achieved, if not the actual æsthetic ideal in life, at least a vision and a sense of it. he alone will know that the principle he has to elucidate and apply is living, organic. it is indeed the very principle of artistic creation itself. therefore he will approach what claims to be a work of art first as a thing in itself, and seek with it the most intimate and immediate contact in order that he may decide whether it too is organic and living. he will be untiring in his effort to refine his power of discrimination by the frequentation of the finest work of the past, so that he may be sure of himself when he decides, as he must, whether the object before him is the expression of an æsthetic intuition at all. at the best he is likely to find that it is mixed and various; that fragments of æsthetic vision jostle with unsubordinated intellectual judgments. but, in regarding the work of art as a thing in itself, he will never forget the hierarchy of comprehension, that the active ideal of art is indeed to see life steadily and see it whole, and that only he has a claim to the title of a great artist whose work manifests an incessant growth from a merely personal immediacy to a coherent and all-comprehending attitude to life. the great artist's work is in all its parts a revelation of the ideal as a principle of activity in human life. as the apprehension of the ideal is more or less perfect, the artist's comprehension will be greater or less. the critic has not merely the right, but the duty, to judge between homer and shakespeare, between dante and milton, between cezanne and michelangelo, beethoven and mozart. if the foundations of his criticism are truly æsthetic, he is compelled to believe and to show that among would-be artists some are true artists and some are not, and that among true artists some are greater than others. that what has generally passed under the name of æsthetic criticism assumes as an axiom that every true work of art is unique and incomparable is merely the paradox which betrays the unworthiness of such criticism to bear the name it has arrogated to itself. the function of true criticism is to establish a definite hierarchy among the great artists of the past, as well as to test the production of the present; by the combination of these activities it asserts the organic unity of all art. it cannot honestly be said that our present criticism is adequate to either task. [april, . _the religion of rousseau_ these are times when men have need of the great solitaries; for each man now in his moment is a prey to the conviction that the world and his deepest aspirations are incommensurable. he is shaken by a presentiment that the lovely bodies of men are being spent and flaming human minds put out in a conflict for something which never can be won in the clash of material arms, and he is distraught by a vision of humanity as a child pitifully wandering in a dark wood where the wind faintly echoes the strange word 'peace.' therefore he too wanders pitifully like that child, seeking peace, and men are become the symbols of mankind. the tragic paradox of human life which slumbers in the soul in years of peace is awakened again. when we would be solitary and cannot, we are made sensible of the depth and validity of the impulse which moved the solitaries of the past. the paradox is apparent now on every hand. it appears in the death of the author of _la formation réligieuse de j.j. rousseau_.[ ] one of the most distinguished of the younger generation of french scholar-critics, m. masson met a soldier's death before the book to which he had devoted ten years of his life was published. he had prepared it for the press in the leisure hours of the trenches. there he had communed with the unquiet spirit of the man who once thrilled the heart of europe by stammering forgotten secrets, and whispered to an age flushed and confident with material triumphs that the battle had been won in vain. rousseau, rightly understood is no consoling companion for a soldier. what if after all, the true end of man be those hours of plenary beatitude he spent lying at the bottom of the boat on the lake of bienne? what if the old truth is valid still, that man is born free but is everywhere in chains? let us hope that the dead author was not too keenly conscious of the paradox which claimed him for sacrifice. his death would have been bitter. [footnote : _la formation réligieuse de jean-jacques rousseau_. par pierre maurice masson. (paris: hachette. three volumes.)] from his book we can hardly hazard a judgment. his method would speak against it. jean-jacques, as he himself knew only too well, is one of the last great men to be catechised historically, for he was inadequate to the life which is composed of the facts of which histories are made. he had no historical sense; and of a man who has no historical sense no real history can be written. chronology was meaningless to him because he could recognise no sovereignty of time over himself. with him ends were beginnings. in the third _dialogue_ he tell us--and it is nothing less than the sober truth told by a man who knew himself well--that his works must be read backwards, beginning with the last, by those who would understand him. indeed, his function was, in a deeper sense than is imagined by those who take the parable called the _contrat social_ for a solemn treatise of political philosophy, to give the lie to history. in himself he pitted the eternal against the temporal and grew younger with years. he might be known as the man of the second childhood _par excellence_. to the eye of history the effort of his soul was an effort backwards, because the vision of history is focused only for a perspective of progress. on his after-dinner journey to diderot at vincennes, jean-jacques saw, with the suddenness of intuition, that that progress, amongst whose convinced and cogent prophets he had lived so long was for him an unsubstantial word. he beheld the soul of man _sub specie æternitatis_. in his vision history and institutions dissolved away. his second childhood had begun. on such a man the historical method can have no grip. there is, as the french say, no _engrenage_. it points to a certain lack of the subtler kind of understanding to attempt to apply the method; more truly, perhaps, to an unessential interest, which has of late years been imported into french criticism from germany. the sorbonne has not, we know, gone unscathed by the disease of documentation for documentation's sake. m. masson's three volumes leave us with the sense that their author had learnt a method and in his zeal to apply it had lost sight of the momentous question whether jean-jacques was a person to whom it might be applied with a prospect of discovery. no one who read rousseau with a mind free of ulterior motives could have any doubt on the matter. jean-jacques is categorical on the point. the savoyard vicar was speaking for jean-jacques to posterity when he began his profession of faith with the words:-- 'je ne veux argumenter avec vous, ni même de tenter vous convaincre; il me suffit de vous exposer ce que je pense dans la simplicité de mon coeur. consultez le vôtre pendant mon discours; c'est tout ce que je vous demande.' to the extent, therefore, that m. masson did not respond to this appeal and filled his volumes with information concerning the books jean-jacques might have read and a hundred other interesting but only partly relevant things, he did the citizen of geneva a wrong. the ulterior motive is there, and the faint taste of a thesis in the most modern manner. but the method is saved by the perception which, though it sometimes lacks the perfect keenness of complete understanding, is exquisite enough to suggest the answer to the questions it does not satisfy. though the environment is lavish the man is not lost. it is but common piety to seek to understand jean-jacques in the way in which he pleaded so hard to be understood. yet it is now over forty years since a voice of authority told england how it was to regard him. lord morley was magisterial and severe, and england obeyed. one feels almost that jean-jacques himself would have obeyed if he had been alive. he would have trembled at the stern sentence that his deism was 'a rag of metaphysics floating in a sunshine of sentimentalism,' and he would have whispered that he would try to be good; but, when he heard his _dialogues_ described as the outpourings of a man with persecution mania, he might have rebelled and muttered silently an _eppur si muove_. we see now that it was a mistake to stand him in the social dock, and that precisely those _dialogues_ which the then mr morley so powerfully dismissed contain his plea that the tribunal has no jurisdiction. to his contention that he wrote his books to ease his own soul it might be replied that their publication was a social act which had vast social consequences. but jean-jacques might well retort that the fact that his contemporaries and the generation which followed read and judged him in the letter and not in the spirit is no reason why we, at nearly two centuries remove, should do the same. a great man may justly claim our deference, if jean-jacques asks that his last work shall be read first we are bound, even if we consider it only a quixotic humour, to indulge it. but to those who read the neglected _dialogues_ it will appear a humour no longer. here is a man who at the end of his days is filled to overflowing with bitterness at the thought that he has been misread and misunderstood. he says to himself: either he is at bottom of the same nature as other men or he is different. if he is of the same nature, then there must be a malignant plot at work. he has revealed his heart with labour and good faith; not to hear him his fellow-men must have stopped their ears. if he is of another kind than his fellows, then--but he cannot bear the thought. indeed it is a thought that no man can bear. they are blind because they will not see. he has not asked them to believe that what he says is true; he asks only that they shall believe that he is sincere, sincere in what he says, sincere, above all, when he implores that they should listen to the undertone. he has been 'the painter of nature and the historian of the human heart.' his critics might have paused to consider why jean-jacques, certainly not niggard of self-praise in the _dialogues_, should have claimed no more for himself than this. he might have claimed, with what in their eyes at least must be good right, to have been pre-eminent in his century as a political philosopher, a novelist, and a theorist of education. yet to himself he is no more than 'the painter of nature and the historian of the human heart.' those who would make him more make him less, because they make him other than he declares himself to be. his whole life has been an attempt to be himself and nothing else besides; and all his works have been nothing more and nothing less than his attempt to make his own nature plain to men. now at the end of his life he has to swallow the bitterness of failure. he has been acclaimed the genius of his age; kings have delighted to honour him, but they have honoured another man. they have not known the true jean-jacques. they have taken his parables for literal truth, and he knows why. 'des êtres si singulièrement constitués doivent nécessairement s'exprimer autrement que les hommes ordinaires. il est impossible qu'avec des âmes si différemment modifiés ils ne portent pas dans l'expression de leurs sentiments et de leurs idées l'empreinte de ces modifications. si cette empreinte échappe à ceux qui n'ont aucune notion de cette manière d'être, elle ne peut échapper à ceux qui la connoissent, et qui en sont affectés eux-mêmes. c'est une signe caracteristique auquel les initiés se reconnoissent entre eux; et ce qui donne un grand prix à ce signe, c'est qu'il ne peut se contrefaire, que jamais il n'agit qu'au niveau de sa source, et que, quand il ne part pas du coeur de ceux qui l'imitent, il n'arrive pas non plus aux coeurs faits pour le distinguer; mais sitôt qu'il y parvient, on ne sauroit s'y méprendre; il est vrai dès qu'il est senti.' at the end of his days he felt that the great labour of his life which had been to express an intuitive certainty in words which would carry intellectual conviction, had been in vain, and his last words are: 'it is true so soon as it is felt.' three pages would tell as much of the essential truth of his 'religious formation' as three volumes. at les charmettes with mme de warens, as a boy and as a young man, he had known peace of soul. in paris, amid the intellectual exaltation and enthusiasms of the encyclopædists, the memory of his lost peace haunted him like an uneasy conscience. his boyish unquestioning faith disappeared beneath the destructive criticism of the great pioneers of enlightenment and progress. yet when all had been destroyed the hunger in his heart was still unsatisfied. underneath his passionate admiration for diderot smouldered a spark of resentment that he was not understood. they had torn down the fabric of expression into which he had poured the emotion of his immediate certainty as a boy; sometimes with an uplifted, sometimes with a sinking heart he surveyed the ruins. but the certainty that he had once been certain, the memory and the desire of the past peace--this they could not destroy. they could hardly even weaken this element within him, for they did not know that it existed, they were unable to conceive that it could exist. jean-jacques himself could give them no clue to its existence; he had no words, and he was still under the spell of the intellectual dogma of his age that words must express definite things. in common with his age he had lost the secret of the infinite persuasion of poetry. so the consciousness that he was different from those who surrounded him, and from those he admired as his masters, took hold of him. he was afraid of his own otherness, as all men are afraid when the first knowledge of their own essential loneliness begins to trouble their depths. the pathos of his struggle to kill the seed of this devastating knowledge is apparent in his declared desire to become 'a polished gentleman.' in the note which he added to his memoir for m. dupin in he confesses to this ideal. if only he could become 'one of them,' indistinguishable without and within, he might be delivered from that disquieting sense of tongue-tied queerness in a normal world. if he cheated himself at all, the deception was brief. the poignant memory of les charmettes whispered to him that there was a state of grace in which the hard things were made clear. but he had not yet the courage of his destiny. his consciousness of his separation from his fellows had still to harden into a consciousness of superiority before that courage would come. on the road to vincennes on an october evening in --m. masson has fixed the date for us--he read in a news-sheet the question of the dijon academy: 'si le rétablissement des arts et des sciences a contribué à épurer les moeurs?' the scales dropped from his eyes and the weight was removed from his tongue. there is no mystery about this 'revelation.' for the first time the question had been put in terms which struck him squarely in the heart. jean-jacques made his reply with the stammering honesty of a man of genius wandering in age of talent. the first discourse seems to many rhetorical and extravagant. in after days it appeared so to rousseau himself, and he claimed no more for it than that he had tried to tell the truth. before he learned that he had won the dijon prize and that his work had taken paris by storm, he was surely a prey to terrors lest his vincennes vision of the non-existence of progress should have been mere madness. the success reassured him. 'cette faveur du public, nullement brigué, et pour un auteur inconnu, me donna la première assurance véritable de mon talent.' he was, in fact, not 'queer,' but right; and he had seemed to be queer precisely because he was right. now he had the courage. 'je suis grossier,' he wrote in the preface to _narcisse_, 'maussade, impoli par principes; je me fous de tous vous autres gens de cour; je suis un barbare.' there is a touch of exaggeration and bravado in it all. he was still something of the child hallooing in the dark to give himself heart. he clutched hold of material symbols of the freedom he had won, round wig, black stockings, and a living gained by copying music at so much a line. but he did not break with his friends; the 'bear' suffered himself to be made a lion. he had still a foot in either camp, for though he had the conviction that he was right, he was still fumbling for his words. the memoirs of madame d'epinay tell us how in , at dinner at mlle quinault's, impotent to reply to the polite atheistical persiflage of the company, he broke out: 'et moi, messieurs, je crois en dieu. je sors si vous dites un mot de plus.' that was not what he meant; neither was the first discourse what he meant. he had still to find his language, and to find his language he had to find his peace. he was like a twig whirled about in an eddy of a stream. suddenly the stream bore him to geneva, where he returned to the church which he had left at confignon. that, too, was not what he meant. when he returned from geneva, madame d'epinay had built him the ermitage. in the _rêveries_, which are mellow with the golden calm of his discovered peace, he tells how, having reached the climacteric which he had set at forty years, he went apart into the solitude of the ermitage to inquire into the configuration of his own soul, and to fix once for all his opinions and his principles. in the exquisite third _rêverie_ two phrases occur continually. his purpose was 'to find firm ground'--'prendre une assiette,'--and his means to this discovery was 'spiritual honesty'--'bonne foi.' rousseau's deep concern was to elucidate the anatomy of his own soul, but, since he was sincere, he regarded it as a type of the soul of man. looking into himself, he saw that, in spite of all his follies, his weaknesses, his faintings by the way, his blasphemies against the spirit, he was good. therefore he declared: man is born good. looking into himself he saw that he was free to work out his own salvation, and to find that solid foundation of peace which he so fervently desired. therefore he declared: man is born free. to the whisper of les charmettes that there was a condition of grace had been added the sterner voice of remorse for his abandoned children, telling him that he had fallen from his high estate. 'j'ai fui en vain; partout j'ai retrouvé la loi. il faut céder enfin! ô porte, il faut admettre l'hôte; coeur frémissant, il faut subir le maître, quelqu'un qui soit en moi plus moi-même que moi.' the noble verse of m. claudel contains the final secret of jean-jacques. he found in himself something more him than himself. therefore he declared: there is a god. but he sought to work out a logical foundation for these pinnacles of truth. he must translate these luminous convictions of his soul into arguments and conclusions. he could not, even to himself, admit that they were only intuitions; and in the _contrat social_ he turned the reason to the service of a certainty not her own. this unremitting endeavour to express an intuitive certainty in intellectual terms lies at the root of the many superficial contradictions in his work, and of the deeper contradiction which forms, as it were, the inward rhythm of his three great books. he seems to surge upwards on a passionate wave of revolutionary ideas, only to sink back into the calm of conservative or quietist conclusions. m. masson has certainly observed it well. 'le premier _discours_ anathématise les sciences et les arts, et ne voit le salut que dans les académies; le _discours sur l'inégalité_ paraît détruire tout autorité, et recommande pourtant "l'obéissance scrupuleuse aux lois et aux hommes qui en sont les auteurs": la _nouvelle héloïse_ prêche d'abord l'émancipation sentimentale, et proclame la suprématie des droits de la passion, mais elle aboutit à exalter la fidelité conjugale, à consolider les grands devoirs familiaux et sociaux. le vicaire savoyard nous reserve la même surprise.' to the revolutionaries of his age he was a renegade and a reactionary; to the conservatives, a subversive charlatan. yet he was in truth only a man stricken by the demon of 'la bonne foi,' and, like many men devoured by the passion of spiritual honesty, in his secret heart he believed in his similitude to christ. 'je ne puis pas souffrir les tièdes,' he wrote to madame latour in , 'quiconque ne se passionne pas pour moi n'est pas digne de moi.' there is no mistaking the accent, and it sounds more plainly still in the _dialogues_. he, too, was persecuted for righteousness' sake, because he, too, proclaimed that the kingdom of heaven was within men. and what, indeed, have material things to do with the purification and the peace of the soul? world-shattering arguments and world-preserving conclusions--this is the inevitable paradox which attends the attempt to record truth seen by the eye of the soul in the language of the market-place. the eloquence and the inspiration may descend upon the man so that he writes believing that all men will understand. he wakes in the morning and he is afraid, not of his own words whose deeper truth he does not doubt, but of the incapacity of mankind to understand him. they will read in the letter what was written in the spirit; their eyes will see the words, but their ears will be stopped to the music. the _mystique_ as péguy would have said, will be degraded into _politique_. to guard himself against this unhallowed destiny, at the last rousseau turns with decision and in the language of his day rewrites the hard saying, that the things which are cæsar's shall be rendered unto cæsar. in the light of this necessary truth all the contradictions which have been discovered in rousseau's work fade away. that famous confusion concerning 'the natural man,' whom he presents to us now as a historic fact, now as an ideal, took its rise, not in the mind of jean-jacques, but in the minds of his critics. the _contrat social_ is a parable of the soul of man, like the _republic_ of plato. the truth of the human soul is its implicit perfection; to that reality material history is irrelevant, because the anatomy of the soul is eternal. and as for the nature of this truth, 'it is true so soon as it is felt.' when the savoyard vicar, after accepting all the destructive criticism of religious dogma, turned to the gospel story with the immortal 'ce n'est pas ainsi qu'on invente,' he was only anticipating what jean-jacques was to say of himself before his death, that there was a sign in his work which could not be imitated, and which acted only at the level of its source. we may call jean-jacques religious because we have no other word; but the word would be more truly applied to the reverence felt towards such a man than to his own emotion. he was driven to speak of god by the habit of his childhood and the deficiency of a language shaped by the intellect and not by the soul. but his deity was one whom neither the catholic nor the reformed church could accept, for he was truly a god who does not dwell in temples made with hands. the respect he owed to god, said the vicar, was such that he could affirm nothing of him. and, again, still more profoundly, he said, 'he is to our souls what our soul is to our body.' that is the mystical utterance of a man who was no mystic, but of one who found his full communion in the beatific _dolce far niente_ of the lake of bienne. jean-jacques was set apart from his generation, because, like malvolio, he thought highly of the soul and in nowise approved the conclusions of his fellows; and he was fortunate to the last, in spite of what some are pleased to call his madness (which was indeed only his flaming and uncomprehending indignation at the persecution inevitably meted out by those who have only a half truth to one who has the whole), because he enjoyed the certainty that his high appraisement of the soul was justified. [march, . _the poetry of edward thomas_ we believe that when we are old and we turn back to look among the ruins with which our memory will be strewn for the evidence of life which disaster could not kill, we shall find it in the poems of edward thomas.[ ] they will appear like the faint, indelible writing of a palimpsest over which in our hours of exaltation and bitterness more resonant, yet less enduring, words were inscribed; or they will be like a phial discovered in the ashes of what was once a mighty city. there will be the triumphal arch standing proudly; the very tombs of the dead will seem to share its monumental magnificence. yet we will turn from them all, from the victory and sorrow alike, to this faintly gleaming bubble of glass that will hold captive the phantasm of a fragrance of the soul. by it some dumb and doubtful knowledge will be evoked to tremble on the edge of our minds. we shall reach back, under its spell, beyond the larger impulses of a resolution and a resignation which will have become a part of history, to something less solid and more permanent over which they passed and which they could not disturb. [footnote : _last poems_. by edward thomas. (selwyn & blount.)] our consciousness will have its record. the tradition of england in battle has its testimony; our less traditional despairs will be compassed about by a crowd of witnesses. but it might so nearly have been in vain that we should seek an echo of that which smiled at the conclusions of our consciousness. the subtler faiths might so easily have fled through our harsh fingers. when the sound of the bugles died, having crowned reveillé with the equal challenge of the last post, how easily we might have been persuaded that there was a silence, if there had not been one whose voice rose only so little above that of the winds and trees and the life of undertone we share with them as to make us first doubt the silence and then lend an ear to the incessant pulses of which it is composed. the infinite and infinitesimal vague happinesses and immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the sound of speech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itself crumbles into dust--this very texture of the life of the soul might have been a gray background over which tumultuous existence passed unheeding had not edward thomas so painfully sought the angle from which it appears, to the eye of eternity, as the enduring warp of the more gorgeous woof. the emphasis sinks; the stresses droop away. to exacter knowledge less charted and less conquerable certainties succeed; truths that somehow we cannot make into truths, and that have therefore some strange mastery over us; laws of our common substance which we cannot make human but only humanise; loyalties we do not recognise and dare not disregard; beauties which deny communion with our beautiful, and yet compel our souls. so the sedge-warbler's 'song that lacks all words, all melody, all sweetness almost, was dearer then to me than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.' not that the unheard melodies were sweeter than the heard to this dead poet. we should be less confident of his quality if he had not been, both in his knowledge and his hesitations, the child of his age. because he was this, the melodies were heard; but they were not sweet. they made the soul sensible of attachments deeper than the conscious mind's ideals, whether of beauty or goodness. not to something above but to something beyond are we chained, for all that we forget our fetters, or by some queer trick of self-hallucination turn them into golden crowns. but perhaps the finer task of our humanity is to turn our eyes calmly into 'the dark backward and abysm' not of time, but of the eternal present on whose pinnacle we stand. 'i have mislaid the key. i sniff the spray and think of nothing; i see and hear nothing; yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait for what i should, yet never can, remember. no garden appears, no path, no child beside, neither father nor mother, nor any playmate; only an avenue, dark, nameless without end.' so, it seems, a hundred years have found us out. we come no longer trailing clouds of glory. we are that which we are, less and more than our strong ancestors; less, in that our heritage does not descend from on high, more, in that we know ourselves for less. yet our chosen spirit is not wholly secure in his courage. he longs not merely to know in what undifferentiated oneness his roots are fixed, but to discover it beautiful. not even yet is it sufficient to have a premonition of the truth; the truth must wear a familiar colour. 'this heart, some fraction of me, happily floats through the window even now to a tree down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale, not like a peewit that returns to wail for something it has lost, but like a dove that slants unswerving to its home and love. there i find my rest, and through the dark air flies what yet lives in me. beauty is there.' beauty, yes, perhaps; but beautiful by virtue of its coincidence with the truth, as there is beauty in those lines securer and stronger far than the melody of their cadence, because they tell of a loyalty of man's being which, being once made sensible of it, he cannot gainsay. whence we all come, whither we must all make our journey, there is home indeed. but necessity, not remembered delights, draws us thither. that which we must obey is our father if we will; but let us not delude ourselves into the expectation of kindness and the fatted calf, any more than we dare believe that the love which moves the sun and the other stars has in it any charity. we may be, we are, the children of the universe; but we have 'neither father nor mother nor any playmate.' and edward thomas knew this. the knowledge should be the common property of the poetry of our time, marking it off from what went before and from what will come after. we believe that it will be found to be so; and that the presence of this knowledge, and the quality which this knowledge imparts, makes edward thomas more than one among his contemporaries. he is their chief. he challenges other regions in the hinterland of our souls. yet how shall we describe the narrowness of the line which divides his province from theirs, or the only half-conscious subtlety of the gesture with which he beckons us aside from trodden and familiar paths? the difference, the sense of departure, is perhaps most apparent in this, that he knows his beauty is not beautiful, and his home no home at all. 'this is my grief. that land, my home, i have never seen. no traveller tells of it, however far he has been. 'and could i discover it i fear my happiness there, or my pain, might be dreams of return to the things that were.' great poetry stands in this, that it expresses man's allegiance to his destiny. in every age the great poet triumphs in all that he knows of necessity; thus he is the world made vocal. other generations of men may know more, but their increased knowledge will not diminish from the magnificence of the music which he has made for the spheres. the known truth alters from age to age; but the thrill of the recognition of the truth stands fast for all our human eternity. year by year the universe grows vaster, and man, by virtue of the growing brightness of his little lamp, sees himself more and more as a child born in the midst of a dark forest, and finds himself less able to claim the obeisance of the all. yet if he would be a poet, and not a harper of threadbare tunes, he must at each step in the downward passing from his sovereignty, recognise what is and celebrate it as what must be. thus he regains, by another path, the supremacy which he has forsaken. edward thomas's poetry has the virtue of this recognition. it may be said that his universe was not vaster but smaller than the universe of the past, for its bounds were largely those of his own self. it is, even in material fact, but half true. none more closely than he regarded the living things of earth in all their quarters. 'after rain' is, for instance, a very catalogue of the texture of nature's visible garment, freshly put on, down to the little ash-leaves '... thinly spread in the road, like little black fish, inlaid as if they played.' but it is true that these objects of vision were but the occasion of the more profound discoveries within the region of his own soul. there he discovered vastness and illimitable vistas; found himself to be an eddy in the universal flux, driven whence and whither he knew not, conscious of perpetual instability, the meeting place of mighty impacts of which only the farthest ripple agitates the steady moonbeam of the waking mind. in a sense he did no more than to state what he found, sometimes in the more familiar language of beauties lost, mourned for lost, and irrecoverable. 'the simple lack of her is more to me than other's presence, whether life splendid be or utter black. 'i have not seen, i have no news of her; i can tell only she is not here, but there she might have been. 'she is to be kissed only perhaps by me; she may be seeking me and no other; she may not exist.' that search lies nearer to the norm of poetry. we might register its wistfulness, praise the appealing nakedness of its diction and pass on. if that were indeed the culmination of edward thomas's poetical quest, he would stand securely enough with others of his time. but he reaches further. in the verses on his 'home,' which we have already quoted, he passes beyond these limits. he has still more to tell of the experience of the soul fronting its own infinity:-- 'so memory made parting to-day a double pain: first because it was parting; next because the ill it ended vexed and mocked me from the past again. not as what had been remedied had i gone on,--not that, ah no! but as itself no longer woe.' there speaks a deep desire born only of deep knowledge. only those who have been struck to the heart by a sudden awareness of the incessant not-being which is all we hold of being, know the longing to arrest the movement even at the price of the perpetuation of their pain. so it was that the moments which seemed to come to him free from the infirmity of becoming haunted and held him most. 'often i had gone this way before, but now it seemed i never could be and never had been anywhere else.' to cheat the course of time, which is only the name with which we strive to cheat the flux of things, and to anchor the soul to something that was not instantly engulfed-- 'in the undefined abyss of what can never be again.' sometimes he looked within himself for the monition which men have felt as the voice of the eternal memory; sometimes, like keats, but with none of the intoxication of keats's sense of a sharing in victory, he grasped at the recurrence of natural things, 'the pure thrush word,' repeated every spring, the law of wheeling rooks, or to the wind 'that was old when the gods were young,' as in this profoundly typical sensing of 'a new house.' 'all was foretold me; naught could i foresee; but i learned how the wind would sound after these things should be.' but he could not rest even there. there was, indeed, no anchorage in the enduring to be found by one so keenly aware of the flux within the soul itself. the most powerful, the most austerely imagined poem in this book is that entitled 'the other,' which, apart from its intrinsic appeal, shows that edward thomas had something at least of the power to create the myth which is the poet's essential means of triangulating the unknown of his emotion. had he lived to perfect himself in the use of this instrument, he might have been a great poet indeed. 'the other' tells of his pursuit of himself, and how he overtook his soul. 'and now i dare not follow after too close. i try to keep in sight, dreading his frown and worse his laughter, i steal out of the wood to light; i see the swift shoot from the rafter by the window: ere i alight i wait and hear the starlings wheeze and nibble like ducks: i wait his flight. he goes: i follow: no release until he ceases. then i also shall cease.' no; not a great poet, will be the final sentence, when the palimpsest is read with the calm and undivided attention that is its due, but one who had many (and among them the chief) of the qualities of a great poet. edward thomas was like a musician who noted down themes that summon up forgotten expectations. whether the genius to work them out to the limits of their scope and implication was in him we do not know. the life of literature was a hard master to him; and perhaps the opportunity he would eagerly have grasped was denied him by circumstance. but, if his compositions do not, his themes will never fail--of so much we are sure--to awaken unsuspected echoes even in unsuspecting minds. [january . _mr yeats's swan song_ in the preface to _the wild swans at coole_,[ ] mr w.b. yeats speaks of 'the phantasmagoria through which alone i can express my convictions about the world.' the challenge could hardly be more direct. at the threshold we are confronted with a legend upon the door-post which gives us the essential plan of all that we shall find in the house if we enter in. there are, it is true, a few things capable of common use, verses written in the seeming-strong vernacular of literary dublin, as it were a hospitable bench placed outside the door. they are indeed inside the house, but by accident or for temporary shelter. they do not, as the phrase goes, belong to the scheme, for they are direct transcriptions of the common reality, whether found in the sensible world or the emotion of the mind. they are, from mr yeats's angle of vision (as indeed from our own), essentially _vers d'occasion._ [footnote : _the wild swans at coole_. by w.b. yeats.(macmillan.)] the poet's high and passionate argument must be sought elsewhere, and precisely in his expression of his convictions about the world. and here, on the poet's word and the evidence of our search, we shall find phantasmagoria, ghostly symbols of a truth which cannot be otherwise conveyed, at least by mr yeats. to this, in itself, we make no demur. the poet, if he is a true poet, is driven to approach the highest reality he can apprehend. he cannot transcribe it simply because he does not possess the necessary apparatus of knowledge, and because if he did possess it his passion would flag. it is not often that spinoza can disengage himself to write as he does at the beginning of the third book of the ethics, nor could lucretius often kindle so great a fire in his soul as that which made his material incandescent in _Æneadum genetrix_. therefore the poet turns to myth as a foundation upon which he can explicate his imagination. he may take his myth from legend or familiar history, or he may create one for himself anew, but the function it fulfils is always the same. it supplies the elements with which he can build the structure of his parable, upon which he can make it elaborate enough to convey the multitudinous reactions of his soul to the world. but between myths and phantasmagoria there is a great gulf. the structural possibilities of the myth depend upon its intelligibility. the child knows upon what drama, played in what world, the curtain will rise when he hears the trumpet-note: 'of man's first disobedience....' and, even when the poet turns from legend and history to create his own myth, he must make one whose validity is visible, if he is not to be condemned to the sterility of a coterie. the lawless and fantastic shapes of his own imagination need, even for their own perfect embodiment, the discipline of the common perception. the phantoms of the individual brain, left to their own waywardness, lose all solidity and become like primary forms of life, instead of the penultimate forms they should be. for the poet himself must move securely among his visions; they must be not less certain and steadfast than men are. to anchor them he needs intelligible myth. nothing less than a supremely great genius can save him if he ventures into the vast without a landmark visible to other eyes than his own. blake had a supremely great genius and was saved in part. the masculine vigour of his passion gave stability to the figures of his imagination. they are heroes because they are made to speak like heroes. even in blake's most recondite work there is always the moment when the clouds are parted and we recognise the austere and awful countenances of gods. the phantasmagoria of the dreamer have been mastered by the sheer creative will of the poet. like jacob, he wrestled until the going down of the sun with his angel and would not let him go. the effort which such momentary victories demand is almost superhuman; yet to possess the power to exert it is the sole condition upon which a poet may plunge into the world of phantasms. mr yeats has too little of the power to vindicate himself from the charge of idle dreaming. he knows the problem; perhaps he has also known the struggle. but the very terms in which he suggests it to us subtly convey a sense of impotence:-- hands, do what you're bid; bring the balloon of the mind that bellies and drags in the wind into its narrow shed. the languor and ineffectuality of the image tell us clearly how the poet has failed in his larger task; its exactness, its precise expression of an ineffectuality made conscious and condoned, bears equal witness to the poet's minor probity. he remains an artist by determination, even though he returns downcast and defeated from the great quest of poetry. we were inclined at first, seeing those four lines enthroned in majestic isolation on a page, to find in them evidence of an untoward conceit. subsequently they have seemed to reveal a splendid honesty. although it has little mysterious and haunting beauty, _the wild swans at coole_ is indeed a swan song. it is eloquent of final defeat; the following of a lonely path has ended in the poet's sinking exhausted in a wilderness of gray. not even the regret is passionate; it is pitiful. 'i am worn out with dreams, a weather-worn, marble triton among the streams; and all day long i look upon this lady's beauty as though i had found in book a pictured beauty, pleased to have filled the eyes or the discerning ears, delighted to be but wise, for men improve with the years; and yet, and yet is this my dream, or the truth? o would that we had met when i had my burning youth; but i grow old among dreams, a weather-worn, marble triton among the streams.' it is pitiful because, even now in spite of all his honesty the poet mistakes the cause of his sorrow. he is worn out not with dreams, but with the vain effort to master them and submit them to his own creative energy. he has not subdued them nor built a new world from them; he has merely followed them like will-o'-the-wisps away from the world he knew. now, possessing neither world, he sits by the edge of a barren road that vanishes into a no-man's land, where is no future, and whence there is no way back to the past. 'my country is kiltartan cross, my countrymen kiltartan's poor; no likely end could bring them loss or leave them happier than before.' it may be that mr yeats has succumbed to the malady of a nation. we do not know whether such things are possible; we must consider him only in and for himself. from this angle we can regard him only as a poet whose creative vigour has failed him when he had to make the highest demands upon it. his sojourn in the world of the imagination, far from enriching his vision, has made it infinitely tenuous. of this impoverishment, as of all else that has overtaken him, he is agonisedly aware. 'i would find by the edge of that water the collar-bone of a hare, worn thin by the lapping of the water, and pierce it through with a gimlet, and stare at the old bitter world where they marry in churches, and laugh over the untroubled water at all who marry in churches, through the white thin bone of a hare.' nothing there remains of the old bitter world which for all its bitterness is a full world also; but nothing remains of the sweet world of imagination. mr yeats has made the tragic mistake of thinking that to contemplate it was sufficient. had he been a great poet he would have made it his own, by forcing it into the fetters of speech. by re-creating it, he would have made it permanent; he would have built landmarks to guide him always back to where the effort of his last discovery had ended. but now there remains nothing but a handful of the symbols with which he was content:-- 'a sphinx with woman breast and lion paw, a buddha, hand at rest, hand lifted up that blest; and right between these two a girl at play.' these are no more than the dry bones in the valley of ezekiel, and, alas! there is no prophetic fervour to make them live. whether mr yeats, by some grim fatality, mistook his phantasmagoria for the product of the creative imagination, or whether (as we prefer to believe) he made an effort to discipline them to his poetic purpose and failed, we cannot certainly say. of this, however, we are certain, that somehow, somewhere, there has been disaster. he is empty, now. he has the apparatus of enchantment, but no potency in his soul. he is forced to fall back upon the artistic honesty which has never forsaken him. that it is an insufficient reserve let this passage show:-- 'for those that love the world serve it in action, grow rich, popular, and full of influence, and should they paint or write still it is action: the struggle of the fly in marmalade. the rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, the sentimentalist himself; while art is but a vision of reality....' mr yeats is neither rhetorician nor sentimentalist. he is by structure and impulse an artist. but structure and impulse are not enough. passionate apprehension must be added to them. because this is lacking in mr yeats those lines, concerned though they are with things he holds most dear, are prose and not poetry. [april, . _the wisdom of anatole france_ how few are the wise writers who remain to us? they are so few that it seems, at moments, that wisdom, like justice of old, is withdrawing from the world, and that when their fullness of years is accomplished, as, alas! it soon must be, the wise men who will leave us will have been the last of their kind. it is true that something akin to wisdom, or rather a quality whose outward resemblance to wisdom can deceive all but the elect, will emerge from the ruins of war; but true wisdom is not created out of the catastrophic shock of disillusionment. an unexpected disaster is always held to be in some sort undeserved. yet the impulse to rail at destiny, be it never so human, is not wise. wisdom is not bitter; at worst it is bitter-sweet, and bitter-sweet is the most subtle and lingering savour of all. let us not say in our haste, that without wisdom we are lost. wisdom is, after all, but one attitude to life among many. it happens to be the one which will stand the hardest wear, because it is prepared for all ill-usage. but hard wear is not the only purpose which an attitude may serve. we may demand of an attitude that it should enable us to exact the utmost from ourselves. to refuse to accommodate oneself to the angularities of life or to make provision beforehand for its catastrophes is, indeed, folly; but it may be a divine folly. it is, at all events, a folly to which poets incline. but poets are not wise; indeed, the poetry of true wisdom is a creation which can, at the best, be but dimly imagined. perhaps, of them all, lucretius had the largest inkling of what such poetry might be; but he disqualified himself by an aptitude for ecstasy, which made his poetry superb and his wisdom of no account. to acquiesce is wise; to be ecstatic in acquiescence is not to have acquiesced at all. it is to have identified oneself with an imagined power against whose manifestations, in those moments when no ecstasy remains, one rebels. it is a megalomania, a sublime self-deception, a heroic attempt to project the soul on to the side of destiny, and to believe ourselves the masters of those very powers which have overwhelmed us. whether the present generation will produce great poetry, we do not know. we are tolerably certain that it will not produce wise men. it is too conscious of defeat and too embittered to be wise. some may seek that ecstasy of seeming acquiescence of which we have spoken; others, who do not endeavour to escape the pain by plunging the barb deeper, may try to shake the dust of life from off their feet. neither will be wise. but precisely because they are not wise, they will seek the company of wise men. their own attitude will not wear. the ecstasy will fail, the will to renunciation falter; the gray reality which permits no one to escape it altogether will filter like a mist into the vision and the cell. then they will turn to the wise men. they will find comfort in the smile to which they could not frame their own lips, and discover in it more sympathy than they could hope for. among the wise men whom they will surely most frequent will be anatole france. his company is constant; his attitude durable. there is no undertone of anguish in his work like that which gives such poignant and haunting beauty to tchehov. he has never suffered himself to be so involved in life as to be maimed by it. but the price he has paid for his safety has been a renunciation of experience. only by being involved in life, perhaps only by being maimed by it, could he have gained that bitterness of knowledge which is the enemy of wisdom. not that anatole france made a deliberate renunciation: no man of his humanity would of his own will turn aside. it was instinct which guided him into a sequestered path, which ran equably by the side of the road of alternate exaltation and catastrophe which other men of equal genius must travel. therefore he has seen men as it were in profile against the sky, but never face to face. their runnings, their stumblings and their gesticulations are a tumultuous portion of the landscape rather than symbols of an intimate and personal possibility. they lend a baroque enchantment to the scene. so it is that in all the characters of anatole france's work which are not closely modelled upon his own idiosyncrasy there is something of the marionette. they are not the less charming for that; nor do they lack a certain logic, but it is not the logic of personality. they are embodied comments upon life, but they do not live. and there is for anatole france, while he creates them, and for us, while we read about them, no reason why they should live. for living, in the accepted sense, is an activity impossible without indulging many illusions; and fervently to sympathise with characters engaged in the activity demands that their author should participate in the illusions. he, too, must be surprised at the disaster which he himself has proved inevitable. it is not enough that he should pity them; he must share in their effort, and be discomfited at their discomfiture. such exercises of the soul are impossible to a real acquiescence, which cannot even permit itself the inspiration of the final illusion that the wreck of human hopes, being ordained, is beautiful. the man who acquiesces is condemned to stand apart and contemplate a puppet-show with which he can never really sympathise. 'de toutes les définitions de l'homme la plus mauvaise me paraît celle qui en fait un animal raisonnable. je ne me vante pas excessivement en me donnant pour doué de plus de raison que la plupart de ceux de mes semblables que j'ai vus de près ou dont j'ai connu l'histoire. la raison habite rarement les âmes communes, et bien plus rarement encore les grands esprits.... j'appelle raisonnable celui qui accorde sa raison particulière avec la raison universelle, de manière à n'être jamais trop surpris de ce qui arrive et à s'y accommoder tant bien que mal; j'appelle raisonnable celui qui, observant le désordre de la nature et la folie humaine, ne s'obstine point à y voir de l'ordre et de la sagesse; j'appelle raisonnable enfin celui qui ne s'efforce pas de l'être.' the chasm between living and being wise (which is to be _raisonnable_) is manifest. the condition of living is to be perpetually surprised, incessantly indignant or exultant, at what happens. to bridge the chasm there is for the wise man only one way. he must cast back in his memory to the time when he, too, was surprised and indignant. no man is, after all, born wise, though he may be born with an instinct for wisdom. thus anatole france touches us most nearly when he describes his childhood. the innocent, wayward, positive, romantic little pierre nozière[ ] is a human being to a degree to which no other figures in the master's comedy of unreason are. and it is evident that anatole france himself finds him by far the most attractive of them all. he can almost persuade himself, at moments, that he still is the child he was, as in the exquisite story of how, when he had been to a truly royal chocolate shop, he attempted to reproduce its splendours in play. at one point his invention and his memory failed him, and he turned to his mother to ask: 'est-ce celui qui vend ou celui qui achète qui donne de l'argent?' 'je ne devais jamais connaître le prix de l'argent. tel j'étais à trois ans ou trois ans et demi dans le cabinet tapissé de boutons de roses, tel je restai jusqu'à la vieillesse, qui m'est légère, comme elle l'est à toutes les âmes exemptes d'avarice et d'orgueil. non, maman, je n'ai jamais connu le prix de l'argent. je ne le connais pas encore, ou plutôt je le connais trop bien.' [footnote : _le petit pierre_. par anatole france. (paris: calmann-lévy.)] to know a thing too well is by worlds removed from not to know it at all, and anatole france does not elsewhere similarly attempt to indulge the illusion of unbroken innocence. he who refused to put a mark of interrogation after 'what is god,' in defiance of his mother, because he knew, now has to restrain himself from putting one after everything he writes or thinks. 'ma pauvre mère, si elle vivait, me dirait peut-être que maintenant j'en mets trop.' yes, anatole france is wise, and far removed from childish follies. and, perhaps, it is precisely because of his wisdom that he can so exactly discern the enchantment of his childhood. so few men grow up. the majority remain hobbledehoys throughout life; all the disabilities and none of the unique capacities of childhood remain. there are a few who, in spite of all experience, retain both; they are the poets and the _grands esprits_. there are fewer still who learn utterly to renounce childish things; and they are the wise men. 'je suis une autre personne que l'enfant dont je parle. nous n'avons plus en commun, lui et moi, un atome de substance ni de pensée. maintenant qu'il m'est devenu tout à fait étranger, je puis en sa compagnie me distraire de la mienne. je l'aime, moi qui ne m'aime ni ne me haïs. il m'est doux de vivre en pensée les jours qu'il vivait et je souffre de respirer l'air du temps où nous sommes.' not otherwise is it with us and anatole france. we may have little in common with his thought--the community we often imagine comes of self-deception--but it is sweet for us to inhabit his mind for a while. his touch is potent to soothe our fitful fevers. [april, . _gerard manley hopkins_ modern poetry, like the modern consciousness of which it is the epitome, seems to stand irresolute at a crossways with no signpost. it is hardly conscious of its own indecision, which it manages to conceal from itself by insisting that it is lyrical, whereas it is merely impressionist. the value of impressions depends upon the quality of the mind which receives and renders them, and to be lyrical demands at least as firm a temper of the mind, as definite and unfaltering a general direction, as to be epic. roughly speaking, the present poetical fashion may, with a few conspicuous exceptions, be described as poetry without tears. the poet may assume a hundred personalities in as many poems, or manifest a hundred influences, or he may work a single sham personality threadbare or render piecemeal an undigested influence. what he may not do, or do only at the risk of being unfashionable, is to attempt what we may call, for the lack of a better word, the logical progression of an _oeuvre_. one has no sense of the rhythm of an achievement. there is an output of scraps, which are scraps, not because they are small, but because one scrap stands in no organic relation to another in the poet's work. instead of lending each other strength, they betray each other's weakness. yet the organic progression for which we look, generally in vain, is not peculiar to poetic genius of the highest rank. if it were, we might be accused of mere querulousness. the rhythm of personality is hard, indeed, to achieve. the simple mind and the single outlook are now too rare to be considered as near possibilities, while the task of tempering a mind to a comprehensive adequacy to modern experience is not an easy one. the desire to escape and the desire to be lost in life were probably never so intimately associated as they are now; and it is a little preposterous to ask a moth fluttering round a candle-flame to see life steadily and see it whole. we happen to have been born into an age without perspective; hence our idolatry for the one living poet and prose writer who has it and comes, or appears to come, from another age. but another rhythm is possible. no doubt it would be mistaken to consider this rhythm as in fact wholly divorced from the rhythm of personality; it probably demands at least a minimum of personal coherence in its possessor. for critical purposes, however, they are distinct. this second and subsidiary rhythm is that of technical progression. the single pursuit of even the most subordinate artistic intention gives unity, significance, mass to a poet's work. when verlaine declares 'de la musique avant toute chose,' we know where we are. and we know this not in the obvious sense of expecting his verse to be predominantly musical; but in the more important sense of desiring to take a man seriously who declares for anything 'avant toute chose.' it is the 'avant toute chose' that matters, not as a profession of faith--we do not greatly like professions of faith--but as the guarantee of the universal in the particular, of the _dianoia_ in the episode. it is the 'avant toute chose' that we chiefly miss in modern poetry and modern society and in their quaint concatenations. it is the 'avant toute chose' that leads us to respect both mr hardy and mr bridges, though we give all our affection to one of them. it is the 'avant toute chose' that compels us to admire the poems of gerard manley hopkins[ ]; it is the 'avant toute chose' in his work, which, as we believe, would have condemned him to obscurity to-day, if he had not (after many years) had mr bridges, who was his friend, to stand sponsor and the oxford university press to stand the racket. apparently mr bridges himself is something of our opinion, for his introductory sonnet ends on a disdainful note:-- 'go forth: amidst our chaffinch flock display thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight!' [footnote : _poems of gerard manley hopkins_. edited with notes by robert bridges. (oxford: university press.)] it is from a sonnet written by hopkins to mr bridges that we take the most concise expression of his artistic intention, for the poet's explanatory preface is not merely technical, but is written in a technical language peculiar to himself. moreover, its scope is small; the sonnet tells us more in two lines than the preface in four pages. 'o then if in my lagging lines you miss the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation....' there is his 'avant toute chose.' perhaps it seems very like 'de la musique.' but it tells us more about hopkins's music than verlaine's line told us about his. this music is of a particular kind, not the 'sanglots du violon,' but pre-eminently the music of song, the music most proper to lyrical verse. if one were to seek in english the lyrical poem to which hopkins's definition could be most fittingly applied, one would find shelley's 'skylark.' a technical progression onwards from the 'skylark' is accordingly the main line of hopkins's poetical evolution. there are other, stranger threads interwoven; but this is the chief. swinburne, rightly enough if the intention of true song is considered, appears hardly to have existed for hopkins, though he was his contemporary. there is an element of keats in his epithets, a half-echo in 'whorled ear' and 'lark-charmèd'; there is an aspiration after milton's architectonic in the construction of the later sonnets and the most lucid of the fragments,'epithalamion.' but the central point of departure is the 'skylark.' the 'may magnificat' is evidence of hopkins's achievement in the direct line:-- 'ask of her, the mighty mother: her reply puts this other question: what is spring?-- growth in everything-- flesh and fleece, fur and feather, grass and greenworld all together; star-eyed strawberry-breasted throstle above her nested cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin forms and warms the life within.... ... when drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple bloom lights the orchard-apple, and thicket and thorp are merry with silver-surfèd cherry, and azuring-over graybell makes wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes, and magic cuckoo-call caps, clears, and clinches all....' that is the primary element manifested in one of its simplest, most recognisable, and some may feel most beautiful forms. but a melody so simple, though it is perhaps the swiftest of which the english language is capable without the obscurity which comes of the drowning of sense in sound, did not satisfy hopkins. he aimed at complex internal harmonies, at a counterpoint of rhythm; for this more complex element he coined an expressive word of his own:-- 'but as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what i am in the habit of calling _inscape_ is what i above all aim at in poetry.' here, then, in so many words, is hopkins's 'avant toute chose' at a higher level of elaboration. 'inscape' is still, in spite of the apparent differentiation, musical; but a quality of formalism seems to have entered with the specific designation. with formalism comes rigidity; and in this case the rigidity is bound to overwhelm the sense. for the relative constant in the composition of poetry is the law of language which admits only a certain amount of adaptation. musical design must be subordinate to it, and the poet should be aware that even in speaking of musical design he is indulging a metaphor. hopkins admitted this, if we may judge by his practice, only towards the end of his life. there is no escape by sound from the meaning of the posthumous sonnets, though we may hesitate to pronounce whether this directness was due to a modification of his poetical principles or to the urgency of the content of the sonnets, which, concerned with a matter of life and death, would permit no obscuring of their sense for musical reasons. 'i wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. what hours, o what black hours we have spent this night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! and more must in yet longer light's delay. with witness i speak this. but where i say hours i mean years, mean life. and my lament is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent to dearest him that lives, alas! away.' there is compression, but not beyond immediate comprehension; music, but a music of overtones; rhythm, but a rhythm which explicates meaning and makes it more intense. between the 'may magnificat' and these sonnets is the bulk of hopkins's poetical work and his peculiar achievement. perhaps it could be regarded as a phase in his evolution towards the 'more balanced and miltonic style' which he hoped for, and of which the posthumous sonnets are precursors; but the attempt to see him from this angle would be perverse. hopkins was not the man to feel, save on exceptional occasions, that urgency of content of which we have spoken. the communication of thought was seldom the dominant impulse of his creative moment, and it is curious how simple his thought often proves to be when the obscurity of his language has been penetrated. musical elaboration is the chief characteristic of his work, and for this reason what seem to be the strangest of his experiments are his most essential achievement so, for instance, 'the golden echo':-- 'spare! there is one, yes, i have one (hush there!); only not within seeing of sun, not within the singeing of the strong sun, tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air, somewhere else where there is, ah, well, where! one, one. yes, i can tell such a key, i do know such a place, where, whatever's prized and passes of us, everything that's fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone, undone, done with, soon done with, and yet clearly and dangerously sweet of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face, the flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet, never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth to its own best being and its loveliness of youth....' than this, hopkins truly wrote, 'i never did anything more musical.' by his own verdict and his own standards it is therefore the finest thing that hopkins did. yet even here, where the general beauty is undoubted, is not the music too obvious? is it not always on the point of degenerating into a jingle--as much an exhibition of the limitations of a poetical theory as of its capabilities? the tyranny of the 'avant toute chose' upon a mind in which the other things were not stubborn and self-assertive is apparent. hopkins's mind was irresolute concerning the quality of his own poetical ideal. a coarse and clumsy assonance seldom spread its snare in vain. exquisite openings are involved in disaster:-- 'when will you ever, peace, wild wood dove, shy wings shut, your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs? when, when, peace, will you, peace? i'll not play hypocrite to own my heart: i yield you do come sometimes; but that piecemeal peace is poor peace. what pure peace....' and the more wonderful opening of 'windhover' likewise sinks, far less disastrously, but still perceptibly:-- 'i caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn falcon, in his riding of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding high there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing in his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, as a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and the gliding rebuffed the big wind. my heart in hiding stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!' we have no doubt that 'stirred for a bird' was an added excellence to the poet's ear; to our sense it is a serious blemish on lines which have 'the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.' there is no good reason why we should give characteristic specimens of the poet's obscurity, since our aim is to induce people to read him. the obscurities will slowly vanish and something of the intention appear; and they will find in him many of the strange beauties won by men who push on to the borderlands of their science; they will speculate whether the failure of his whole achievement was due to the starvation of experience which his vocation imposed upon him, or to a fundamental vice in his poetical endeavour. for ourselves we believe that the former was the true cause. his 'avant toute chose' whirling dizzily in a spiritual vacuum, met with no salutary resistance to modify, inform, and strengthen it. hopkins told the truth of himself--the reason why he must remain a poets' poet:-- i want the one rapture of an inspiration. o then if in my lagging lines you miss the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation, my winter world, that scarcely yields that bliss now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.' [june, . _the problem of keats_ it is a subject for congratulation that a second edition of sir sidney colvin's life of keats[ ] has been called for by the public: first, because it is a good, a very good book, and secondly, because all evidence of a general curiosity concerning a poet so great and so greatly to be loved must be counted for righteousness. the impassioned and intimate sympathy which is felt--as we may at least conclude--by a portion of the present generation for keats is a motion of the consciousness which stands in a right and natural order. keats is with us; and it argues much for a generous elasticity in sir sidney colvin's mind, which we have neither the right nor the custom to expect in an older generation, that he should have had more than a sidelong vision of at least one aspect of the community between his poet-hero and a younger race which has had the destiny to produce far more heroes than poets. commenting upon the inability of the late mr courthope to appreciate keats, sir sidney writes:-- 'he supposed that keats was indifferent to history or politics. but of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the secret of his indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a disillusion,--that the saving of the world from the grip of one great overshadowing tyranny had but ended in reinstating a number of ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less tyrannical. to that which lies behind and above politics and history to the general destinies, aspirations, and tribulations of the race, he was, as we have seen, not indifferent but only tragically and acutely sensitive.' [footnote : _john keats: his life and poetry, his friends, critics, and after-fame_. by sidney colvin. second edition. (macmillan.)] we believe that both the positive and the negative of that vindication might be exemplified among chosen spirits to-day, living or untimely dead; but we desire, not to enlist sir sidney in a cause, but only to make apparent the reason why, in spite of minor dissents and inevitable differences of estimation, our sympathy with him is enduring. it may be that we have chosen to identify ourselves so closely with keats that we feel to sir sidney the attachment that is reserved for the staunch friend of a friend who is dead; but we do not believe that this is so. we are rather attached by the sense of a loyalty that exists in and for itself; more intimate repercussions may follow, but they can follow only when the critical honesty, the determination to let keats be valid as keats, whatever it might cost (and we can see that it sometimes costs sir sidney not a little), has impressed itself upon us. it is rather by this than by sir sidney's particular contributions to our knowledge of the poet that we judge his book. this assured, we accept his patient exposition of the theme of 'endymion' with a friendly interest that would certainly not be given to one with a lesser claim upon us; and in this spirit we can also find a welcome for the minute investigation of the pictorial and plastic material of keats's imagination. under auspices less benign we might have found the former mistaken and the latter irrelevant; but it so happens that when sir sidney shows us over the garden every goose is a swan. like travellers who at the end of a long day's journey among an inhospitable peasantry are, against their expectation received in a kindly farm, and find themselves talking glibly to their host of matters which are unimportant and unknown to them--the price of land, and the points of a pedigree bull--so we follow with an intense and intelligent absorption a subtle argument in 'endymion' in which at no moment we really believe. on the contrary, we are convinced (when we are free from our author's friendly spell) that keats wrote 'endymion' at all adventure. the words of the cancelled preface: 'before i began i had no inward feel of being able to finish; and as i proceeded my steps were all uncertain,' were, we are sure, quite literally true, and if anything an under-statement of his lack of argument and plan. not that we believe that keats was incapable of or averse to 'fundamental brain-work'--he had an understanding more robust, firmer in its hold of reality, more closely cast upon experience, than any one of his great contemporaries, wordsworth not excepted--but at that phase in his evolution he was simply not concerned with understanding. 'endymion' is not a record or sublimation of experience; it is itself an experience. it was the liberation of a verbal inhibition, and the magic word of freedom was beauty. the story of endymion was to keats a road to the unknown, in her course along which his imagination might 'paw up against the sky.' a refusal to admit that keats built 'endymion' upon any structure of argument, however obscure--even sir sidney would acknowledge that the argument he discovers is _very_ obscure--is so far from being a derogation from his genius that it is in our opinion necessary to a full appreciation of his idiosyncrasy. it is customary to regard the odes as the pinnacle of his achievement and to trace a poetical progression to that point and a subsequent decline: we are shown the evidence of this decline in the revised induction to 'hyperion.' as far as an absolute poetical perfection is concerned there can be no serious objection to the view. but the case of keats is eminently one to be considered in itself as well as objectively. there is no danger that keats's poetry will not be appreciated; the danger is that keats may not be understood. and precisely this moment is opportune for understanding him. as mr t.s. eliot has lately pointed out, the development of english poetry since the early nineteenth century was largely based on the achievement of two poets of genius, keats and shelley, who never reached maturity. they were made gods; and rightly, had not poets themselves bowed down to them. that was ridiculous; there is something even pitiful in the spectacle of rossetti and morris finding the culmination of poetry, the one in 'the eve of st agnes,' the other in 'la belle dame sans merci.' and this undiscriminating submission of a century to the influence of hypostatised phases in the development of a poet of sanity and genius is perhaps the chief of the causes of the half-conscious, and for the most part far less discriminating, spirit of revolt which is at work in modern poetry. a sense is abroad that the tradition has somehow been snapped, that what has been accepted as the tradition unquestioningly for a hundred years is only a _cul de sac_. somewhere there has been a substitution. in the resulting chaos the twittering of bats is taken for poetry, and the critically minded have the grim amusement of watching verse-writers gain eminence by imitating coventry patmore! the bolder spirits declare that there never was such a thing as a tradition, that it is no use learning, because there is nothing to learn. but they are a little nervous for all their boldness, and they prefer to hunt in packs, of which the only condition of membership is that no one should ask what it is. at such a juncture, if indeed not at all times, it is of no less importance to understand keats than to appreciate his poetry. the culmination of the achievement of the keats to be understood is not the odes, perfect as they are, nor the tales--a heresy even for objective criticism--nor 'hyperion'; but precisely that revised induction to 'hyperion' which on the other argument is held to indicate how the poet's powers had been ravaged by disease and the pangs of unsatisfied love. on the technical side alone the induction is of extraordinary interest. keats's natural and proper revulsion from the miltonic style, the deliberate art of which he had handled like an almost master, is evident but incomplete; he is hampered by the knowledge that the virus is in his blood. the creative effort of the induction was infinitely greater than is immediately apparent. keats is engaged in a war on two fronts: he is struggling against the miltonic manner, and struggling also to deal with an unfamiliar content. the whole direction of his poetic purpose had shifted since he wrote 'hyperion.' 'hyperion,' though far finer as art, had been produced by an impulse substantially the same as 'endymion'; it was an exercise in a manner. keats desired to prove to himself, and perhaps a little at that moment to prove to the world, that he was capable of miltonic discipline and grandeur. it was, most strictly, necessary for him to be inwardly certain of this. he had drunk, as deeply as any of his contemporaries, of the tradition; he needed to know that he had assimilated what he had drunk, that he could employ a conscious art as naturally as the most deliberate artist of the past, and, most of all, that he would begin, when he did begin, at the point where his forerunners left off, and not at a point behind them. these necessities were not present in this form to keats's mind when he began 'hyperion'; most probably he began merely with the idea of holding his own with milton, and with a delight in an apt and congenial theme. keats was not a poet of definite and deliberate plans, which indeed are incident to a certain tenuity of soul; his decisions were taken not by the intellect, but by the being. he dropped 'hyperion' because it was inadequate to the whole of him. he was weary of its deliberate art because it interposed a veil between him and that which he needed to express; it was an imposition upon himself. 'i have given up "hyperion"--there were too many miltonic inversions in it--miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather artist's, humour. i wish to give myself up to other sensations. english ought to be kept up. it may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from "hyperion" and a mark + to the false beauty proceeding from art and one || to the true voice of feeling....'--(letter to j.h. reynolds, sept. , .) that outwardly negative reaction is packed with positive implications. 'english ought to be kept up' meant, on keats's lips, a very great deal. but there is other and more definite authority for the positive direction in which he was turning. to his brother george he wrote, at the same time:-- 'i have but lately stood on my guard against milton. life to him would be death to me. miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the verse of art. i wish to devote myself to another verse alone.' more definite still is the letter of november , , to his friend and publisher, john taylor:-- 'i have come to a determination not to publish anything i have now ready written; but for all that to publish a poem before long and that i hope to make a fine one. as the marvellous is the most enticing and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers i have been endeavouring to persuade myself to untether fancy and to let her manage for herself. i and myself cannot agree about this at all. wonders are no wonders to me. i am more at home amongst men and women. i would rather read chaucer than ariosto. the little dramatic skill i may as yet have, however badly it might show in a drama, would, i think, be sufficient for a poem. i wish to diffuse the colouring of st agnes eve throughout a poem in which character and sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. two or three such poems if god should spare me, written in the course of the next six years would be a famous gradus ad parnassum altissimum. i mean they would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine plays--my greatest ambition--when i do feel ambitious....' no letter could be saner, nor more indicative of calm resolve. yet the precise determination is that nothing that went to make the volume should be published, neither odes, nor tales, nor 'hyperion.' this is that mood of keats which sir sidney colvin, in his comment upon a passage in the revised induction, calls one of 'fierce injustice to his own achievements and their value.' but a poet, if he is a real one, judges his own achievements not by those of his contemporaries, but by the standard of his own intention. the evidence that keats's mind had passed beyond the stage at which it could be satisfied by the poems of the volume is overwhelming. his letters to george of april, , show that he was naturally evolving towards an attitude, a philosophy, more profound and comprehensive than could be expressed adequately in such records of momentary aspiration and emotion as the odes; though the keen and sudden poignancy that had invaded them belongs to the new keats. they mark the transition to the new poetry which he vaguely discerned. the problem was to find the method. the letters we have quoted to show his reaction from the miltonic influence display the more narrowly 'artistic' aspect of the same evolution. a technique more responsive to the felt reality of experience must be found--'english ought to be kept up'--the apparatus of romantic story must be abandoned--'wonders are no wonders to me'--yet the romantic colour must be kept to restore to a realistic psychology the vividness and richly various quality that are too often lost by analysis we do not believe that we have in any respect forced the interpretation of the letters; the terminology of that age needs to be translated to be understood 'men and women ... characters and sentiments' are called, for better or worse, 'psychology' nowadays. and our translation has this merit, that some of our ultra-moderns will listen to the word 'psychology,' where they would be bat-blind to 'characters' and stone-deaf to 'sentiments.' modern poetry is still faced with the same problem; but very few of its adepts have reached so far as to be able to formulate it even with the precision of keats's scattered allusions. keats himself was struck down at the moment when he was striving (against disease and against a devouring, hopeless love-passion) to face it squarely. the revised induction reveals him in the effort to shape the traditional (and perhaps still necessary) apparatus of myth to an instrument of his attitude. the meaning of the induction is not difficult to discover; but current criticism has the habit of regarding it dubiously. therefore we may be forgiven for attempting, with the brevity imposed upon us, to make its elements clear. the first eighteen lines, which sir sidney colvin on objective grounds regrets are, we think, vital. 'fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect; the savage, too, from forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep guesses at heaven; pity these have not trac'd upon vellum or wild indian leaf the shadows of melodious utterance, but bare of laurel they live, dream, and die; for poesy alone can tell her dreams,-- with the fine spell of words alone can save imagination from the sable chain and dumb enchantment. who alive can say, 'thou art no poet--mays't not tell thy dreams'? since every man whose soul is not a clod hath visions and would speak, if he had loved, and been well-nurtured in his mother-tongue. whether the dream now purposed to rehearse be poet's or fanatic's will be known when this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave.' we may admit that the form of these lines is unfortunate; but we cannot wish them away. they bear most closely upon the innermost argument of the poem as keats endeavoured to reshape it. all men, says keats, have their visions of reality; but the poet alone can express his, and the poet himself may at the last prove to have been a fanatic, one who has imagined 'a paradise for a sect' instead of a heaven for all humanity. this discovery marks the point of crisis in keats's development. he is no longer content to be the singer; his poetry must be adequate to all experience. no wonder then that the whole of the new induction centres about this thought. he describes his effort to fight against an invading death and to reach the altar in the mighty dream palace. as his foot touches the altar-step life returns, and the prophetic voice of the veiled goddess reveals to him that he has been saved by his power 'to die and live again before thy fated hour.' '"none can usurp this height," return'd that shade. "but those to whom the miseries of the world are misery and will not let them rest. all else who find a haven in the world where they may thoughtless sleep away their days, if by a chance into this fane they come, rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half."' because he has been mindful of the pain in the world, the poet has been saved. but the true lovers of humanity,-- 'who love their fellows even to the death, who feel the giant agony of the world,' are greater than the poets; 'they are no dreamers weak.' 'they come not here, they have no thought to come, and thou art here for thou are less than they.' it is a higher thing to mitigate the pain of the world than to brood upon the problem of it. and not only the lover of mankind, but man the animal is pre-eminent above the poet-dreamer. his joy is joy; his pain, pain. 'only the dreamer venoms _all_ his days.' yet the poet has his reward; it is given to him to partake of the vision of the veiled goddess--memory, moneta, mnemosyne, the spirit of the eternal reality made visible. 'then saw i a wan face not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd by an immortal sickness which kills not; it works a constant change, which happy death can put no end to; deathwards progressing to no death was that visage; it had past the lily and the snow; and beyond these i must not think now, though i saw that face. but for her eyes i should have fled away; they held me back with a benignant light soft, mitigated by divinest lids half-closed, and visionless entire they seemed of all external things; they saw me not, but in blank splendour beam'd like the mild moon who comforts those she sees not, who knows not what eyes are upward cast....' this vision of moneta is the culminating point of keats's evolution. it stands at the summit, not of his poetry, but of his achievement regarded as obedient to its own inward law. moneta was to him the discovered spirit of reality; her vision was the vision of necessity itself. in her, joy and pain, life and death compassion and indifference, vision and blindness are one; she is the eternal abode of contraries, the idea if you will, not hypostatised but immanent. before this reality the poet is impotent as his fellows; he is above them by his knowledge of it, but below them by the weakness which that knowledge brings. he, too, is the prey of contraries, the mirror of his deity, struck to the heart of his victory, enduring the intolerable pain of triumph. here, not unfittingly, in his struggle with a conception too big to express, came the end of keats the poet. none have passed beyond him; few have been so far. of the poetry that might have been constructed on the basis of an apprehension so profound we can form only a conjecture, each after his own image: we do not know the method of the 'other verse' of which keats had a glimpse; we only know the quality with which it would have been saturated, the calm and various light of united contraries. we fear that sir sidney colvin will not agree with our view. the angles of observation are different. the angle at which we have placed ourselves is not wholly advantageous--from it sir sidney's book could not have been written--but it has this advantage, that from it we can read his book with a heightened interest. as we look out from it, some things are increased and some diminished with the change of perspective; and among those which are increased is our gratitude to sir sidney. in the clear mirror of his sympathy and sanity nothing is obscured. we are shown the keats who wrote the perfect poems that will last with the english language, and in the few places where sir sidney falls short of the spirit of complete acceptance, we discern behind the words of rebuke and regret only the idealisation of a love which we are proud to share. [july, . _thoughts on tchehov_ we do not know if the stories collected in this volume[ ] stand together in the russian edition of tchehov's works, or if the selection is due to mrs constance garnett. it is also possible that the juxtaposition is fortuitous. but the stories are united by a similarity of material. whereas in the former volumes of this admirable series tchehov is shown as preoccupied chiefly with the life of the _intelligentsia_, here he finds his subjects in priests and peasants, or (in the story _uprooted_) in the half-educated. [footnote : _the bishop; and other stories_. by anton tchehov. translated by constance garnett. (chatto & windus.)] such a distinction is, indeed, irrelevant. as tchehov presents them to our minds, the life of the country and the life of the town produce the same final impression, arouse in us an awareness of an identical quality; and thus, the distinction, by its very irrelevance, points us the more quickly to what is essential in tchehov. it is that his attitude, to which he persuades us, is complete, not partial. his comprehension radiates from a steady centre, and is not capriciously kindled by a thousand accidental contacts. in other words, tchehov is not what he is so often assumed to be, an impressionist. consciously or unconsciously he had taken the step--the veritable _salto mortale_--by which the great literary artist moves out of the ranks of the minor writers. he had slowly shifted his angle of vision until he could discern a unity in multiplicity. unity of this rare kind cannot be imposed as, for instance, zola attempted to impose it. it is an emanation from life which can be distinguished only by the most sensitive contemplation. the problem is to define this unity in the case of each great writer in whom it appears. to apprehend it is not so difficult. the mere sense of unity is so singular and compelling that it leaves room for few hesitations. the majority of writers, however excellent in their peculiar virtues, are not concerned with it: at one moment they represent, at another they may philosophise, but the two activities have no organic connection, and their work, if it displays any evolution at all, displays it only in the minor accidents of the craft, such as style in the narrower and technical sense, or the obvious economy of construction. there is no danger of mistaking these for great writers. nor, in the more peculiar case of writers who attempt to impose the illusion of unity, is the danger serious. the apparatus is always visible; they cannot afford to do without the paraphernalia of argument which supplies the place of what is lacking in their presentation. the obvious instance of this legerdemain is zola; a less obvious, and therefore more interesting example is balzac. to attempt the more difficult problem. what is most peculiar to tchehov's unity is that it is far more nakedly æsthetic than that of most of the great writers before him. other writers of a rank equal to his--and there are not so very many--have felt the need to shift their angle of vision until they could perceive an all-embracing unity; but they were not satisfied with this. they felt, and obeyed, the further need of taking an attitude towards the unity they saw they approved or disapproved, accepted or rejected it. it would be perhaps more accurate to say that they gave or refused their endorsement. they appealed to some other element than their own sense of beauty for the final verdict on their discovery; they asked whether it was just or good. the distinguishing mark of tchehov is that he is satisfied with the unity he discovers. its uniqueness is sufficient for him. it does not occur to him to demand that it should be otherwise or better. the act of comprehension is accompanied by an instantaneous act of acceptance. he is like a man who contemplates a perfect work of art; but the work of creation has been his, and has consisted in the gradual adjustment of his vision until he could see the frustration of human destinies and the arbitrary infliction of pain as processes no less inevitable, natural, and beautiful than the flowering of a plant. not that tchehov is a greater artist than any of his great predecessors; he is merely more wholly an artist, which is a very different thing. there is in him less admixture of preoccupations that are not purely æsthetic, and probably for this reason he has less creative vigour than any other artist of equal rank. it seems as though artists, like cattle and fruit trees, need a good deal of crossing with substantial foreign elements, in order to be very vigorous and very fruitful. tchehov has the virtues and the shortcomings of the pure case. i do not wish to be understood as saying that tchehov is a manifestation of _l'art pour l'art_, because in any commonly accepted sense of that phrase, he is not. still, he might be considered as an exemplification of what the phrase might be made to mean. but instead of being diverted into a barren dispute over terminologies, one may endeavour to bring into prominence an aspect of tchehov which has an immediate interest--his modernity. again, the word is awkward. it suggests that he is fashionable, or up to date. tchehov is, in fact, a good many phases in advance of all that is habitually described as modern in the art of literature. the artistic problem which he faced and solved is one that is, at most, partially present to the consciousness of the modern writer--to reconcile the greatest possible diversity of content with the greatest possible unity of æsthetic impression. diversity of content we are beginning to find in profusion--miss may sinclair's latest experiment shows how this need is beginning to trouble a writer with a settled manner and a fixed reputation--but how rarely do we see even a glimmering recognition of the necessity of a unified æsthetic impression! the modern method is to assume that all that is, or has been, present to consciousness is _ipso facto_ unified æsthetically. the result of such an assumption is an obvious disintegration both of language and artistic effort, a mere retrogression from the classical method. the classical method consisted, essentially, in achieving æsthetic unity by a process of rigorous exclusion of all that was not germane to an arbitrary (because non-æsthetic) argument. this argument was let down like a string into the saturated solution of the consciousness until a unified crystalline structure congregated about it. of all great artists of the past shakespeare is the richest in his departures from this method. how much deliberate artistic purpose there was in his employment of songs and madmen and fools (an employment fundamentally different from that made by his contemporaries) is a subject far too big for a parenthesis. but he, too, is at bottom a classic artist. the modern problem--it has not yet been sufficiently solved for us to speak of a modern method--arises from a sense that the classical method produces over-simplification. it does not permit of a sufficient sense of multiplicity. one can think of a dozen semi-treatments of the problem from balzac to dostoevsky, but they were all on the old lines. they might be called shakespearean modifications of the classical method. tchehov, we believe, attempted a treatment radically new. to make use again of our former image in his maturer writing, he chose a different string to let down into the saturated solution of consciousness. in a sense he began at the other end. he had decided on the quality of æsthetic impression he wished to produce, not by an arbitrary decision, but by one which followed naturally from the contemplative unity of life which he had achieved. the essential quality he discerned and desired to represent was his argument, his string. everything that heightened and completed this quality accumulated about it, quite independently of whether it would have been repelled by the old criterion of plot and argument. there is a magnificent example of his method in the longest story in this volume, 'the steppe.' the quality is dominant throughout, and by some strange compulsion it makes heterogeneous things one; it is reinforced by the incident. tiny events--the peasant who eats minnows alive, the jewish inn-keeper's brother who burned his six thousand roubles--take on a character of portent, except that the word is too harsh for so delicate a distortion of normal vision; rather it is a sense of incalculability that haunts us. the emphases have all been slightly shifted, but shifted according to a valid scheme. it is not while we are reading, but afterwards that we wonder how so much significance could attach to a little boy's questions in a remote village shop:-- '"how much are these cakes?' '"two for a farthing.' 'yegorushka took out of his pocket the cake given him the day before by the jewess and asked him:-- '"and how much do you charge for cakes like this?' 'the shopman took the cake in his hands, looked at it from all sides, and raised one eyebrow. '"like that?' he asked. 'then he raised the other eyebrow, thought a minute, and answered:-- '"two for three farthings...."' it is foolish to quote it. it is like a golden pebble from the bed of a stream. the stream that flows over tchehov's innumerable pebbles, infinitely diverse and heterogeneous, is the stream of a deliberately sublimated quality. the figure is inexact, as figures are. not every pebble could be thus transmuted. but how they are chosen, what is the real nature of the relation which unites them, as we feel it does, is a secret which modern english writers need to explore. till they have explored and mastered it tchehov will remain a master in advance of them. [august, . * * * * * the case of tchehov is one to be investigated again and again because he is the only great modern artist in prose. tolstoy was living throughout tchehov's life, as hardy has lived throughout our own, and these are great among the greatest. but they are not modern. it is an essential part of their greatness that they could not be; they have a simplicity and scope that manifestly belongs to all time rather than to this. tchehov looked towards tolstoy as we to hardy. he saw in him a colossus, one whose achievement was of another and a greater kind than his own. 'i am afraid of tolstoy's death. if he were to die there would be a big empty place in my life. to begin with, because i have never loved any man as much as him.... secondly, while tolstoy is in literature it is easy and pleasant to be a literary man; even recognising that one has done nothing and never will do anything is not so dreadful, since tolstoy will do enough for all. his work is the justification of the enthusiasms and expectations built upon literature. thirdly, tolstoy takes a firm stand; he has an immense authority, and so long as he is alive, bad tastes in literature, vulgarity of every kind, insolent and lachrymose, all the bristling, exasperated vanities will be in the far background, in the shade....'--(january, .) tchehov was aware of the gulf that separated him from the great men before him, and he knew that it yawned so deep that it could not be crossed. he belonged to a new generation, and he alone perhaps was fully conscious of it. 'we are lemonade,' he wrote in . 'tell me honestly who of my contemporaries--that is, men between thirty and forty-five--have given the world one single drop of alcohol?... science and technical knowledge are passing through a great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, dull time.... the causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity, our lack of talent, or our insolence, but in a disease which for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. we lack "something," that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void. let me remind you that the writers who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic: they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel, not with your mind but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of hamlet's father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing.... and we? we! we paint life as it is, but beyond that--nothing at all.... flog us and we can do more! we have neither immediate nor remote aims, and in our soul there is a great empty space. we have no politics, we do not believe in revolution, we have no god, we are not afraid of ghosts, and i personally am not afraid even of death and blindness. one who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears nothing cannot be an artist.... '... you think i am clever. yes, i am at least so far clever as not to conceal from myself my disease and not to deceive myself, and not to cover up my own emptiness with other people's rags, such as the ideas of the 'sixties and so on.' that was written in . when we remember all the strange literary effort gathered round about that year in the west--symbolism, the _yellow book_, art for art's sake--and the limbo into which it has been thrust by now, we may realise how great a precursor and, in his own despite, a leader, anton tchehov was. when western literature was plunging with enthusiasm into one _cul de sac_ after another, incapable of diagnosing its own disease, tchehov in russia, unknown to the west, had achieved a clear vision and a sense of perspective. to-day we begin to feel how intimately tchehov belongs to us; to-morrow we may feel how infinitely he is still in advance of us. a genius will always be in advance of a talent, and in so far as we are concerned with the genius of tchehov we must accept the inevitable. we must analyse and seek to understand it; we must, above all, make up our minds that since tchehov has written and his writings have been made accessible to us, a vast amount of our modern literary production is simply unpardonable. writers who would be modern and ignore tchehov's achievement are, however much they may persuade themselves that they are devoted artists, merely engaged in satisfying their vanity or in the exercise of a profession like any other; for tchehov is a standard by which modern literary effort must be measured, and the writer of prose or poetry who is not sufficiently single-minded to apply the standard to himself is of no particular account. though tchehov's genius is, strictly speaking, inimitable, it deserves a much exacter study than it has yet received. the publication of this volume of his letters[ ] hardly affords the occasion for that; but it does afford an opportunity for the examination of some of the chief constituents of his perfect art. these touch us nearly because--we insist again--the supreme interest of tchehov is that he is the only great modern artist in prose. he belongs, as we have said, to us. if he is great, then he is great not least in virtue of qualities which we may aspire to possess; if he is an ideal, he is an ideal to which we can refer ourselves, he had been saturated in all the disillusions which we regard as peculiarly our own, and every quality which is distinctive of the epoch of consciousness in which we are living now is reflected in him--and yet, miracle of miracles, he was a great artist. he did not rub his cheeks to produce a spurious colour of health; he did not profess beliefs which he could not maintain; he did not seek a reputation for universal wisdom, nor indulge himself in self-gratifying dreams of a millennium which he alone had the ability to control. he was and wanted to be nothing in particular, and yet, as we read these letters of his, we feel gradually form within ourselves the conviction that he was a hero--more than that, _the_ hero of our time. [footnote : _letters of anton tchehov_. translated by constance garnett (chatto & windus).] it is significant that, in reading tchehov's letters, we do not consider him under the aspect of an artist. we are inevitably fascinated by his character as a man, one who, by efforts which we have most frequently to divine for ourselves from his reticences, worked on the infinitely complex material of the modern mind and soul, and made it in himself a definite, positive, and most lovable thing. he did not throw in his hand in face of his manifold bewilderments; he did not fly for refuge to institutions in which he did not believe; he risked everything, in russia, by having no particular faith in revolution and saying so. in every conjuncture of his life that we can trace in his letters he behaved squarely by himself and, since he is our great exemplar, by us. he refused to march under any political banner--a thing, let it be remembered, of almost inconceivable courage in his country; he submitted to savagely hostile attacks for his political indifference; yet he spent more of his life and energy in doing active good to his neighbour than all the high-souled professors of liberalism and social reform. he undertook an almost superhuman journey to sahalin in to investigate the condition of the prisoners there; in he spent the best part of a year as a doctor devising preventive measures against the cholera in the country district where he lived, and, although he had no time for the writing on which his living depended, he refused the government pay in order to preserve his own independence of action; in another year he was the leading spirit in organising practical measures of famine relief about nizhni-novgorod. from his childhood to his death, moreover, he was the sole support of his family. measured by the standards of christian morality, tchehov was wholly a saint. his self-devotion was boundless. yet we know he was speaking nothing less than the truth of himself when he wrote: 'it is essential to be indifferent.' tchehov was indifferent; but his indifference, as a mere catalogue of his secret philanthropies will show, was of a curious kind. he made of it, as it were, an axiomatic basis of his own self-discipline. since life is what it is and men are what they are, he seems to have argued, everything depends upon the individual. the stars are hostile, but love is kind, and love is within the compass of any man if he will work to attain it. in one of his earliest letters he defines true culture for the benefit of his brother nikolay, who lacked it. cultivated persons, he said, respect human personality; they have sympathy not for beggars and cats only; they respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts; they are sincere and dread lying like fire; they do not disparage themselves to arouse compassion; they have no shallow vanity; if they have a talent they respect it; they develop the æsthetic feeling in themselves ... they seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct. the letter from which these chief points are taken is tremulous with sympathy and wit. tchehov was twenty-six when he wrote it. he concludes with the words: 'what is needed is constant work day and night, constant reading, study, will. every hour is precious for it.' in that letter are given all the elements of tchehov the man. he set himself to achieve a new humanity, and he achieved it. the indifference upon which tchehov's humanity was built was not therefore a moral indifference; it was, in the main, the recognition and acceptance of the fact that life itself is indifferent. to that he held fast to the end. but the conclusion which he drew from it was not that it made no particular difference what any one did, but that the attitude and character of the individual were all-important. there was, indeed, no panacea, political or religious, for the ills of humanity; but there could be a mitigation in men's souls. but the new asceticism must not be negative. it must not cast away the goods of civilisation because civilisation is largely a sham. 'alas! i shall never be a tolstoyan. in women i love beauty above all things, and in the history of mankind, culture expressed in carpets, carriages with springs, and keenness of wit. ach! to make haste and become an old man and sit at a big table!' not that there is a trace of the hedonist in tchehov, who voluntarily endured every imaginable hardship if he thought he could be of service to his fellow-men, but, as he wrote elsewhere, 'we are concerned with pluses alone.' since life is what it is, its amenities are doubly precious. only they must be amenities without humbug. 'pharisaism, stupidity, and despotism reign not in bourgeois houses and prisons alone. i see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation.... that is why i have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation. i regard trade marks and labels as a superstition. my holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom--freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they make take. this is the programme i would follow if i were a great artist.' what 'the most absolute freedom' meant to tchehov his whole life is witness. it was a liberty of a purely moral kind, a liberty, that is, achieved at the cost of a great effort in self-discipline and self-refinement. in one letter he says he is going to write a story about the son of a serf--tchehov was the son of a serf--who 'squeezed the slave out of himself.' whether the story was ever written we do not know, but the process is one to which tchehov applied himself all his life long. he waged a war of extermination against the lie in the soul in himself, and by necessary implication in others also. he was, thus, in all things a humanist. he faced the universe, but he did not deny his own soul. there could be for him no antagonism between science and literature, or science and humanity. they were all pluses; it was men who quarrelled among themselves. if men would only develop a little more loving-kindness, things would be better. the first duty of the artist was to be a decent man. 'solidarity among young writers is impossible and unnecessary.... we cannot feel and think in the same way, our aims are different, or we have no aims whatever, we know each other little or not at all, and so there is nothing on to which this solidarity could be securely hooked.... and is there any need for it? no, in order to help a colleague, to respect his personality and work, to refrain from gossiping about him, envying him, telling him lies and being hypocritical, one does not need so much to be a young writer as simply a man.... let us be ordinary people, let us treat everybody alike, and then we shall not need any artificially worked-up solidarity.' it seems a simple discipline, this moral and intellectual honesty of tchehov's, yet in these days of conceit and coterie his letters strike us as more than strange. one predominant impression remains: it is that of tchehov's candour of soul. somehow he has achieved with open eyes the mystery of pureness of heart; and in that, though we dare not analyse it further, lies the secret of his greatness as a writer and of his present importance to ourselves. [march, . _american poetry_ we are not yet immune from the weakness of looking into the back pages to see what the other men have said; and on this occasion we received a salutary shock from the critic of the _detroit news_, who informs us that mr aiken, 'despite the fact that he is one of the youngest and the newest, having made his debut less than four years ago, ... demonstrates ... that he is eminently capable of taking a solo part with edgar lee masters, amy lowell, james oppenheim, vachel lindsay, and edwin arlington robinson.' the shock is two-fold. in a single sentence we are in danger of being convicted of ignorance, and, where we can claim a little knowledge, we plead guilty; we know nothing of either mr oppenheim or mr robinson. this very ignorance makes us cautious where we have a little knowledge we know something of mr lindsay, something of mr masters, and a good deal of miss lowell, who has long been a familiar figure in our anthologies of revolt; and we cannot understand on what principle they are assembled together. miss lowell is, we are persuaded, a negligible poet, with a tenuous and commonplace impulse to write which she teases out into stupid 'originalities.' of the other two gentlemen we have seen nothing which convinces us that they are poets, but also nothing which convinces us that they may not be. moreover, we can understand how mr aiken might be classed with them. all three have in common what we may call creative energy. they are all facile, all obviously eager to say something, though it is not at all obvious what they desire to say, all with an instinctive conviction that whatever it is it cannot be said in the old ways. not one of them produces the certainty that this conviction is really justified or that he has tested it; not one has written lines which have the doom 'thus and not otherwise' engraved upon their substance; not one has proved that he is capable of addressing himself to the central problem of poetry, no matter what technique be employed--how to achieve a concentrated unity of æsthetic impression. they are all diffuse; they seem to be content to lead a hundred indecisive attacks upon reality at once rather than to persevere and carry a single one to a final issue; they are all multiple, careless, and slipshod--and they are all interesting. they are extremely interesting. for one thing, they have all achieved what is, from whatever angle one looks at it, a very remarkable success. very few people, initiate or profane, can have opened mr lindsay's 'congo' or mr masters's 'spoon river anthology' or mr aiken's 'jig of forslin' without being impelled to read on to the end. that does not very often happen with readers of a book which professes to be poetry save in the case of the thronging admirers of miss ella wheeler wilcox, and their similars. there is, however, another case more exactly in point, namely, that of mr kipling. with mr kipling our three american poets have much in common, though the community must not be unduly pressed. their most obvious similarity is the prominence into which they throw the novel interest in their verse. they are, or at moments they seem to be, primarily tellers of stories. we will not dogmatise and say that the attempt is illegitimate; we prefer to insist that to tell a story in poetry and keep it poetry is a herculean task. it would indeed be doubly rash to dogmatise, for our three poets desire to tell very different stories, and we are by no means sure that the emotional subtleties which mr aiken in particular aims at capturing are capable of being exactly expressed in prose. since mr aiken is the _corpus vile_ before us we will henceforward confine ourselves to him, though we premise that in spite of his very sufficient originality he is characteristic of what is most worth attention in modern american poetry. proceeding then, we find another point of contact between him and mr kipling, more important perhaps than the former, and certainly more dangerous. both find it apparently impossible to stem the uprush of rhetoric. perhaps they do not try to; but we will be charitable--after all, there is enough good in either of them to justify charity--and assume that the willingness of the spirit gives way to the weakness of the flesh. of course we all know about mr kipling's rhetoric; it is a kind of emanation of the spatial immensities with which he deals--empires, the seven seas, from dublin to diarbekir. mr aiken has taken quite another province for his own; he is an introspective psychologist. but like mr kipling he prefers big business. his inward eye roves over immensities at least as vast as mr kipling's outward. in 'the charnel rose and other poems' this appetite for the illimitable inane of introspection seems to have gained upon him. there is much writing of this kind:-- 'dusk, withdrawing to a single lamplight at the end of an infinite street-- he saw his ghost walk down that street for ever, and heard the eternal rhythm of his feet. and if he should reach at last that final gutter, to-day, or to-morrow, or, maybe, after the death of himself and time; and stand at the ultimate curbstone by the stars, above dead matches, and smears of paper, and slime; would the secret of his desire blossom out of the dark with a burst of fire? or would he hear the eternal arc-lamps sputter, only that; and see old shadows crawl; and find the stars were street lamps after all? music, quivering to a point of silence, drew his heart down over the edge of the world....' it is dangerous for a poet to conjure up infinities unless he has made adequate preparation for keeping them in control when they appear. we are afraid that mr aiken is almost a slave of the spirits he has evoked. dostoevsky's devil wore a shabby frock-coat, and was probably managing-clerk to a solicitor at twenty-five shillings a week. mr aiken's incubus is, unfortunately, devoid of definition; he is protean and unsatisfactory. 'i am confused in webs and knots of scarlet spun from the darkness; or shuttled from the mouths of thirsty spiders. madness for red! i devour the leaves of autumn. i tire of the green of the world. i am myself a mouth for blood....' perhaps we do wrong to ask ourselves whether this and similar things mean, exactly, anything? mr aiken warns us that his intention has been to use the idea--'the impulse which sends us from one dream or ideal to another, always disillusioned, always creating for adoration some new and subtler fiction'--'as a theme upon which one might wilfully build a kind of absolute music.' but having given us so much instruction, he should have given more; he should have told us in what province of music he has been working. are we to look for a music of verbal melody, or for a musical elaboration of an intellectual theme? we infer, partly from the assurance that 'the analogy to a musical symphony is close,' more from the absence of verbal melody, that we are to expect the elaboration of a theme. in that case the fact that we have a more definite grasp of the theme in the programme-introduction than anywhere in the poem itself points to failure. in the poem 'stars rush up and whirl and set,' 'skeletons whizz before and whistle behind,' 'sands bubble and roses shoot soft fire,' and we wonder what all the commotion is about. when there is a lull in the pandemonium we have a glimpse, not of eternity, but precisely of :-- 'and he saw red roses drop apart, each to disclose a charnel heart.... we are far from saying that mr aiken's poetry is merely a chemical compound of the 'nineties, freud and introspective imperialism; but we do think it is liable to resolve at the most inopportune moments into those elements, and that such moments occur with distressing frequency in the poem called 'the charnel rose.' 'senlin' resists disruption longer. but the same elements are there. they are better but not sufficiently fused. the rhetoric forbids, for there is no cohesion in rhetoric. we have the sense that mr aiken felt himself inadequate to his own idea, and that he tried to drown the voice of his own doubt by a violent clashing of the cymbals where a quiet recitative was what the theme demanded and his art could not ensure. 'death himself in the rain ... death himself ... death in the savage sunlight ... skeletal death ... i hear the clack of his feet, clearly on stones, softly in dust, speeding among the trees with whistling breath, whirling the leaves, tossing his hands from waves ... listen! the immortal footsteps beat and beat!...' we are persuaded that mr aiken did not mean to say that; he wanted to say something much subtler. but to find exactly what he wanted might have taken him many months. he could not wait. up rushed the rhetoric; bang went the cymbals: another page, another book. and we, who have seen great promise in his gifts, are left to collect some inadequate fragments where his original design is not wholly lost amid the poor expedients of the moment. for mr aiken never pauses to discriminate. he feels that he needs rhyme; but any rhyme will do:-- 'has no one, in a great autumnal forest, when the wind bares the trees with mournful tone, heard the sad horn of senlin slowly blown?' so he descends to a poetaster's padding. he does not stop to consider whether his rhyme interferes with the necessary rhythm of his verse; or, if he does, he is in too much of a hurry to care, for the interference occurs again and again. and these disturbances and deviations, rhetoric and the sacrifice of rhythm to shoddy rhyme, appear more often than the thematic outline itself emerges. in short, mr aiken is, at present, a poet whom we have to take on trust. we never feel that he meant exactly what he puts before us, and, on the whole, the evidence that he meant something better, finer, more irrevocably itself, is pretty strong. we catch in his hurried verses at the swiftly passing premonition of a _frisson_ hitherto unknown to us in poetry, and as we recognise it, we recognise also the great distance he has to travel along the road of art, and the great labour that he must perform before he becomes something more than a brilliant feuilletonist in verse. it is hardly for us to prophesy whether he will devote the labour. his fluency tells us of his energy, but tells us nothing of its quality. we can only express our hope that he will, and our conviction that if he were to do so his great pains, and our lesser ones would be well requited. [september, . _ronsard_ ronsard is _rangé_ now; but he has not been in that position for so very long, a considerably shorter time for instance, than any one of the elizabethans (excepting shakespeare) with us. sainte-beuve was very tentative about him until the sixties, when his dubious, half-patronising air made way for a safe enthusiasm. and, even now, it can hardly be said that french critical opinion about him has crystallised; the late george wyndham's essay shows a more convinced and better documented appreciation than any that we have read in french, based as it is on the instinctive sympathy which one landed gentleman who dabbles in the arts feels towards another who devotes himself to them--an admiration which does not exclude familiarity. indeed, it is precisely because ronsard lends himself so superbly as an amateur to treatment by the amateur, that any attempt to approach him more closely seems to be tinged with rancour or ingratitude. there is something churlish in the determination to be most on one's guard against the engaging graces of the amateur, a sense that one is behaving like the hero of a gissing novel; but the choice is not large. one must regard ronsard either as a charming country gentleman, or as a great historical figure in the development of french poetry, or as a poet; and the third aspect has a chance of being the most important. ronsard is pre-eminently the poet of a simple mind. there is nothing mysterious about him or his poetry; there is not even a perceptible thread of development in either. they are equable, constant imperturbable, like the bag of a much invited gun, or the innings of a safe batsman. the accomplishment is akin to an animal endowment. the nerves, instead of being, if only for a moment, tense and agitated, are steady to a degree that can produce an exasperation in a less well-appointed spectator. he will never let himself down, or give himself away, one feels, until the admiration of an apparent sure restraint passes into the conviction that there is nothing to restrain. all ronsard the poet is in his poetry, and indeed on the surface of it. poetry was not therefore, as one is tempted to think sometimes, for ronsard a game. there was plenty of game in it; _l'art de bien pétrarquiser_ was all he claimed for himself. but the game would have wearied any one who was not aware that he could be completely satisfied and expressed by it. ronsard was never weary. however much one may tire of him, the fatigue never is infected by the nausea which is produced by some of the mechanical sonnet sequences of his contemporaries. no one reading ronsard ever felt the tedium of mere nullity. it would be hard to find in the whole of m. van bever's exhaustive edition of 'les amours'[ ] a single piece which has not its sufficient charge of gusto. when you are tired, it is because you have had enough of that particular kind of man and mind; you know him too well, and can reckon too closely the chances of a shock of surprise. [footnote : _les amours_. par pierre de ronsard. texte établi par ad. van bever. two volumes. (paris: crès.)] with the more obvious, and in their way delightful, surprises ronsard is generous. he can hold the attention longer than any poet of an equal tenuity of matter. chiefly for two reasons, of which one is hardly capable of further analysis. it is the obvious reality of his own delight in 'petrarchising.' he is perpetually in love with making; he disports himself with a childlike enthusiasm in his art. there are moments when he seems hardly to have passed beyond the stage of naive wonder that words exist and are manipulable. 'dous fut le trait, qu'amour hors de sa trousse pour me tuer, me tira doucement, quand je fus pris au dous commencement d'une douceur si doucettement douce....' ronsard is here a boy playing knucklebones with language; and some of his characteristic excellences are little more than a development of this aptitude, with its more striking incongruities abated. a modern ear can be intoxicated by the charming jingle of 'petite nimfe folastre, nimfette que j'idolastre....' one does not pause to think how incredibly naive it is compared with villon, who had not a fraction of ronsard's scholarship, or even with clement marot; naive both in thought and art. as for the stature of the artist, we are back with charles of orleans. it would be idle to speculate what exactly villon would have made of the atomic theory had he read lucretius; but we are certain that he would have done something very different from ronsard's 'les petits cors, culbutant de travers, parmi leur cheute en biais vagabonde, heurtés ensemble ont composé le monde, s'entr'acrochant d'acrochemens divers....' for this is not grown-up; the cut to simplicity has been too short. so many of ronsard's verses flow over the mind, without disturbing it; fall charmingly on the ear, and leave no echoes. but for the moment we share his enjoyment. the second cause of his continued power of attraction is doubtless allied to the first; it is a _naïveté_ of a particular kind, which differs from the profound ingenuousness of which we have spoken by the fact that it is employed deliberately. conscious simplicity is art, and if it is successful art of no mean order, ronsard's method of admitting us, as it were, to his conversation with himself is definitely his own. his interruptions of a verse with 'hà' or 'hé'; his 'mon dieu, que j'aime!' or 'hé, que ne suis-je puce?' (the difference between ronsard's flea and donne's would be worth examination) have in them an element of irresistible _bonhomie_. we feel that he is making us his confidant. he does not have to tear agonies out of himself, so that what he confides has no chance of making explicit any secrets of our own. there is nothing dangerous about him; we know that he is as safe as we are. we are in conversation, not communion. but how effective and engaging it is! 'vous ne le voulez pas? eh bien, je suis contant ...' 'hé, dieu du ciel, je n'eusse pas pensé qu'un seul départ eust causé tant de peine!...' or the still more casual 'un joïeus deplaisir qui douteus l'épointelle, quoi l'épointelle! ainçois le genne et le martelle ...' of this device of style our own elizabethans were to make more profitable use than ronsard. at their best they packed an intensity of dramatic significance into conversational language, of which ronsard had no inkling; and even a strict contemporary of his, like wyatt, could touch cords more intimate by the same means. but, on the other hand, ronsard never fails of his own effect, which is not to convince us emotionally, but to compel us to listen. his unexpected address to himself or to us is a new ornament for us to admire, not a new method for him to express a new thing; and the suggestion of new rhythms that might thus be attained is never fully worked out. 'mais tu ne seras plus? et puis?... quand la paleur qui blemist nôtre corps sans chaleur ne lumière nous perd le sentiment?... the ampleness of that reverberance is almost isolated. ronsard's resources are indeed few. but he needed few. his simple mind was at ease in machinery of commonplaces, and he makes the pleasant impression of one to whom commonplaces are real. he felt them all over again. one imagines him reading the classics--the iliad in three days, or his beloved companion 'sous le bois amoureux,' tibullus--with an unfailing delight in all the concatenations of phrase which are foisted on to unripe youth nowadays in the pages of a gradus. one might almost say that he saw his loves at second-hand, through alien eyes, were it not that he faced them with some directness as physical beings, and that the artificiality implied in the criticism is incongruous with the honesty of such a natural man. but apart from a few particulars that would find a place in a census paper one would be hard put to it to distinguish cassandre from hélène. what charming things ronsard has to say of either might be said of any charming woman--'le mignard embonpoint de ce sein,'-- 'petit nombril, que mon penser adore, non pas mon oeil, qui n'eut oncques ce bien ...' and though he assures hélène that she has turned him from his grave early style, 'qui pour chanter si bas n'est point ordonné,' the difference is too hard to detect; one is forced to conclude that it is precisely the difference between a court lady and an inn-keeper's daughter. as far as art is concerned the most definite and distinctive thing that ronsard had to say of any of his ladies is said of one to whom he put forward none of his usually engrossing pretensions. it was the complexion of marguerite of navarre of which he wrote:-- 'de vif cinabre estoit faicte sa joue, pareille au teint d'un rougissant oeillet, ou d'une fraize, alors que dans de laict dessus le hault de la cresme se joue.' that is, whether it belonged to marguerite or not, a divine complexion. it is the kind of thing that cannot be said about two ladies; the image is too precise to be interchangeable. this may be a reason why it was applied to a lady _hors concours_ for ronsard. but we need, in fact, seek no reason other than the circumscription of ronsard's poetical gifts. they reduce to only two--the gift of convinced commonplace, and the gift of simple melody. his commonplace is genuine commonplace, quite distinct from the tense and pregnant condensation of a lifetime of impassioned experience in dante or shakespeare; things that would occur to a bookish country gentleman in after-dinner conversation, the sentiments that such a rare and amiable person would underscore in his horace. (from a not unimportant angle ronsard is a minor horace.) these things are the warp of his poetry; they range from the familiar 'le temps s'en va' to the masterly straightforwardness of 'plus heureus celui qui la fera et femme et mère, en lieu d'une pucelle.' his melody, likewise, is genuine melody; it is irrepressible. it led him to belie his own professed seriousness. he could not stop his sonnets from rippling even when he pretended to passionate argument. life came easily to him; he was never weary of it, at the most he acknowledged that he was 'saoûl de la vie.' it is not surprising, therefore, that his remonstrances as the tortured lover have a trick of opening to a delightful tune:-- 'rens-moi mon coeur, rens-moi mon coeur pillarde....' in another form this melody more closely recalls thomas campion:-- 'seule je l'ai veue, aussi je meurs pour elle....' but to compare ronsard's sonnet with 'follow your saint' is to see how infinitely more subtle a master of lyrical music was the elizabethan than the great french lyrist of the renaissance. from first to last ronsard was an amateur. [september, . _samuel butler_ the appearance of a new impression of _the way of all flesh_[ ] in mr fifield's edition of samuel butler's works gives us an occasion to consider more calmly the merits and the failings of that entertaining story. like all unique works of authors who stand, even to the most obvious apprehension, aside from the general path, it has been overwhelmed with superlatives. the case is familiar enough and the explanation is simple and brutal. it is hardly worth while to give it. the truth is that although there is no inherent reason why the isolated novel of an author who devotes himself to other forms should not be 'one of the great novels of the world,' the probabilities tell heavily against it. on the other hand, an isolated novel makes a good stick to beat the age. it is fairly certain to have something sufficiently unique about it to be useful for the purpose. even its blemishes have a knack of being _sui generis_. to elevate it is, therefore, bound to imply the diminution of its contemporaries. [footnote : _the way of all flesh_. by samuel butler, th impression of nd edition. (fifield.)] yet, apart from the general argument, there are particular reasons why the praise of _the way of all flesh_ should be circumspect. samuel butler knew extraordinarily well what he was about. his novel was written intermittently between and when he abandoned it. in the twenty remaining years of his life he did nothing to it, and we have mr streatfeild's word for it that 'he professed himself dissatisfied with it as a whole, and always intended to rewrite, or at any rate, to revise it.' we could have deduced as much from his refusal to publish the book. the certainty of commercial failure never deterred butler from publication; he was in the happy situation of being able to publish at his own expense a book of whose merit he was himself satisfied. his only reason for abandoning _the way of all flesh_ was his own dissatisfaction with it. his instruction that it should be published in its present form after his death proves nothing against his own estimate. butler knew, at least as well as we, that the good things in his book were legion. he did not wish the world or his own reputation to lose the benefit of them. but there are differences between a novel which contains innumerable good things and a great novel. the most important is that a great novel does not contain innumerable good things. you may not pick out the plums, because the pudding falls to pieces if you do. in _the way of all flesh_, however, a _compère_ is always present whose business it is to say good things. his perpetual flow of asides is pleasant because the asides are piquant and, in their way, to the point. butler's mind, being a good mind, had a predilection for the object, and his detestation of the rotunder platitudes of a greek chorus, if nothing else, had taught him that a corner-man should have something to say on the subject in hand. his arguments are designed to assist his narrative; moreover, they are sympathetic to the modern mind. an enlightened hedonism is about all that is left to us, and butler's hatred of humbug is, though a little more placid, like our own. we share his ethical likes and dislikes. as an audience we are ready to laugh at his asides, and, on the first night at least, to laugh at them even when they interrupt the play. but our liking for the theses cannot alter the fact that _the way of all flesh_ is a _roman à thèses_. not that there is anything wrong with the _roman à thèses_, if the theses emerge from the narrative without its having to be obviously doctored. nor does it matter very much that a _compère_ should be present all the while, provided that he does not take upon himself to replace the demonstration the narrative must afford, by arguments outside it. but what happens in _the way of all flesh_? we may leave aside the minor thesis of heredity, for it emerges, gently enough, from the story; besides, we are not quite sure what it is. we have no doubt, on the other hand, about the major thesis; it is blazoned on the title page, with its sub-malicious quotation from st paul to the romans. 'we know that all things work together for good to them that love god.' the necessary gloss on this text is given in chapter lxviii, where ernest, after his arrest, is thus described:-- 'he had nothing more to lose; money, friends, character, all were gone for a very long time, if not for ever; but there was something else also that had taken its flight along with these. i mean the fear of that which man could do unto him. _cantabit vacuus_. who could hurt him more than he had been hurt already? let him but be able to earn his bread, and he knew of nothing which he dared not venture if it would make the world a happier place for those who were young and lovable. herein he found so much comfort that he almost wished he had lost his reputation even more completely--for he saw that it was like a man's life which may be found of them that lose it and lost of them that would find it. he should not have had the courage to give up all for christ's sake, but now christ had mercifully taken all, and lo! it seemed as though all were found. 'as the days went slowly by he came to see that christianity and the denial of christianity after all met as much as any other extremes do; it was a fight about names--not about things; practically the church of rome, the church of england, and the freethinker have the same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman....' with this help the text and the thesis can be translated: 'all experience does a gentleman good.' it is the kind of thing we should like very much to believe; as an article of faith it was held with passion and vehemence by dostoevsky, though the connotation of the word 'gentleman' was for him very different from the connotation it had for butler. (butler's gentleman, it should be said in passing, was very much the ideal of a period, and not at all _quod semper, quod ubique_; a very victorian anti-victorianism.) dostoevsky worked his thesis out with a ruthless devotion to realistic probability. he emptied the cornucopia of misery upon his heroes and drove them to suicide one after another; and then had the audacity to challenge the world to say that they were not better, more human, and more lovable for the disaster in which they were inevitably overwhelmed. and, though it is hard to say 'yes' to his challenge, it is harder still to say 'no.' in the case of ernest pontifex, however, we do not care to respond to the challenge at all. the experiment is faked and proves nothing. it is mere humbug to declare that a man has been thrown into the waters of life to sink or swim, when there is an anxious but cool-headed friend on the bank with a £ , life-belt to throw after him the moment his head goes under. that is neither danger nor experience. even if ernest pontifex knew nothing of the future awaiting him (as we are assured he did not) it makes no difference. _we_ know he cannot sink; he is a lay figure with a pneumatic body. whether he became a lay figure for butler also we cannot say; we can merely register the fact that the book breaks down after ernest's misadventure with miss maitland, a deplorably unsubstantial episode to be the crisis of a piece of writing so firm in texture and solid in values as the preceding chapters. ernest as a man has an intense non-existence. after all, as far as the positive side of _the way of all flesh_' is concerned, butler's eggs are all in one basket. if the adult ernest does not materialise, the book hangs in empty air. whatever it may be instead it is not a great novel, nor even a good one. so much established, we may begin to collect the good things. christina is the best of them. she is, by any standard, a remarkable creation. butler was 'all round' christina. both by analysis and synthesis she is wholly his. he can produce her in either way. she lives as flesh and blood and has not a little of our affection; she is also constructed by definition, 'if it were not too awful a thing to say of anybody, she meant well'--the whole phrase gives exactly christina's stature. alethea pontifex is really a bluff; but the bluff succeeds, largely because, having experience of christina, we dare not call it. mrs jupp is triumphantly complete; there are even moments when she seems as great as mrs quickly. the novels that contain three such women (or two if we reckon the uncertain alethea, who is really only a vehicle for butler's very best sayings, as cancelled by the non-existent ellen) can be counted, we suppose, on our ten fingers. of the men, theobald is well worked out (in both senses of the word). but we know little of what went on inside him. we can fill out christina with her inimitable day-dreams; theobald remains something of a skeleton, whereas we have no difficulty at all with dr skinner, of roughborough. we have a sense of him in retirement steadily filling the shelves with volumes of skinner, and we know how it was done. when he reappears we assume the continuity of his existence without demur. the glimpse of george pontifex is also satisfying; after the christening party we know him for a solid reality. pryer was half-created when his name was chosen. butler did the rest in a single paragraph which contains a perfect delineation of 'the oxford manner' twenty years before it had become a disease known to ordinary diagnosis. the curious may find this towards the beginning of chapter li. but ernest, upon whom so much depends, is a phantom--a dream-child waiting the incarnation which butler refused him for twenty years. was it laziness, was it a felt incapacity? we do not know; but in the case of a novelist it is our duty to believe the worst. the particularity of our attitude to butler appears in the fact that we are disappointed, not with him, but with ernest. we are even angry with that young man. if it had not been for him, we believe, _the way of all flesh_ might have appeared in ; it might have short-circuited _robert elsmere_. [june, . * * * * * we approach the biography of an author whom we respect, and therefore have thought about, with contradictory feelings. we are excited at the thought of finding our conclusions reinforced, and apprehensive less the compact and definite figure which our imaginations have gradually shaped should become vague and incoherent and dull. it is a pity to purchase enlightenment at the cost of definition; and it is more important that we should have a clear notion of the final shape of a man in whom we are interested than an exact record of his phases. the essential quality of great artists is incommensurable with biography; they seem to be unconsciously engaged in a perpetual evasion of the event. all that piety can do for them is beside the mark. their wilful spirit is fled before the last stone of the mausoleum can be got in place, and as it flies it jogs the elbow of the cup-bearer and his libation is spilt idly upon the ground. although it would be too much and too ungrateful to say that the monumental piety of mr festing jones has been similarly turned to derision--after all, butler was not a great man--we feel that something analogous has happened. this laborious building is a great deal too large for him to dwell in. he had made himself a cosy habitation in the _note-books_, with the fire in the right place and fairly impervious to the direct draughts of criticism. in a two-volume memoir[ ] he shivers perceptibly, and at moments he looks faintly ridiculous more than faintly pathetic. [footnote : _samuel butler, author of 'erewhon'_ ( - ): _a memoir_. by henry festing jones. vols. (macmillan.)] and if it be said that a biography should make no difference to our estimate of the man who lives and has his being in his published works, we reply that it shifts the emphasis. an amusingly wrong-headed book about homer is a peccadillo; ten years of life lavished upon it is something a good deal more serious. and even _the way of all flesh_, which as an experimental novel is a very considerable achievement, becomes something different when we have to regard it as a laborious and infinitely careful record of experienced fact. further still, even the edge of the perfected inconsequence of certain of the 'notes' is somewhat dulled when we see the trick of it being exercised. the origin of the amusing remark on blake, who 'was no good because he learnt italian at over in order to read dante, and we know dante was no good because he was so fond of virgil, and virgil was no good because tennyson ran him--well, tennyson goes without saying,' is to be found in 'no, i don't like lamb. you see, canon ainger writes about him, and canon ainger goes to tea with my aunts.' repeated, it becomes merely a clever way of being stupid, as we should be if we were tempted to say we couldn't bear handel, because butler was mad on him, and butler was no good because he was run by mr jones, and, well, mr jones goes without saying. nevertheless, though butler lives with much discomfort and some danger in mr jones's tabernacle, he does continue to live. what his head loses by the inquisition of a biography his heart gains, though we wonder whether butler himself would have smiled upon the exchange. butler loses almost the last vestige of a title to be considered a creative artist when the incredible fact is revealed that the letters of theobald and christina in _the way of all flesh_ are merely reproduced from those which his father and mother sent him. nor was butler, even as a copyist, always adequate to his originals. the brilliantly witty letters of miss savage, by which the first volume is made precious, seem to us to indicate a real woman upon whom something more substantial might have been modelled than the delightful but evanescent picture of alethea pontifex. here, at least, is a picture of miss savage and butler together which, to our sense, gives some common element in both which escaped the expression of the author of _the way of all flesh_:-- 'i like the cherry-eating scene, too [miss savage wrote after reading the ms. of _alps and sanctuaries_], because it reminded me of your eating cherries when i first knew you. one day when i was going to the gallery, a very hot day i remember, i met you on the shady side of berners street, eating cherries out of a basket. like your italian friends, you were perfectly silent with content, and you handed the basket to me as i was passing, without saying a word. i pulled out a handful and went on my way rejoicing, without saying a word either. i had not before perceived you to be different from any one else. i was like peter bell and the primrose with the yellow brim. as i went away to france a day or two after that and did not see you again for months, the recollection of you as you were eating cherries in berners street abode with me and pleased me greatly.' again, we feel that the unsubstantial towneley of the novel should have been more like flesh and blood when we learn that he too was drawn from the life, and from a life which was intimately connected with butler's. here, most evidently, the heart gains what the head loses, for the story of butler's long-suffering generosity to charles paine pauli is almost beyond belief and comprehension. butler had met pauli, who was two years his junior, in new zealand, and had conceived a passionate admiration for him. learning that he desired to read for the bar, butler, who had made an unexpected success of his sheep-farming, offered to lend him £ to get to england and £ a year until he was called. very shortly after they both arrived in england, pauli separated from butler, refusing even to let him know his address, and thenceforward paid him one brief visit every day. he continued, however, to draw his allowance regularly until his death all through the period when, owing to the failure of butler's investments, £ seems to have been a good deal more than one-half butler's income. at pauli's death in butler discovered what he must surely at moments have suspected, that pauli had been making between £ and £ at the bar, and had left about £ --not to butler. butler wrote an account of the affair after pauli's death which is strangely self-revealing:-- '... everything that he had was good, and he was such a fine handsome fellow, with such an attractive manner that to me he seemed everything i should like myself to be, but knew very well that i was not.... 'i had felt from the very beginning that my intimacy with pauli was only superficial, and i also perceived more and more that i bored him.... he liked society and i hated it. moreover, he was at times very irritable and would find continual fault with me; often, i have no doubt, justly, but often, as it seemed to me, unreasonably. devoted to him as i continued to be for many years, those years were very unhappy as well as very happy ones. 'i set down a great deal to his ill-health, no doubt truly; a great deal more, i was sure, was my own fault--and i am so still; i excused much on the score of his poverty and his dependence on myself--for his father and mother, when it came to the point, could do nothing for him; i was his host and was bound to forbear on that ground if on no other. i always hoped that, as time went on, and he saw how absolutely devoted to him i was, and what unbounded confidence i had in him, and how i forgave him over and over again for treatment which i would not have stood for a moment from any one else--i always hoped that he would soften and deal as frankly and unreservedly with me as i with him; but, though for some fifteen years i hoped this, in the end i gave it up, and settled down into a resolve from which i never departed--to do all i could for him, to avoid friction of every kind, and to make the best of things for him and myself that circumstances would allow.' in love such as this there is a feminine tenderness and devotion which positively illuminates what otherwise appears to be a streak of perversity in butler; and the illumination becomes still more certain when we read butler's letters to the young swiss, hans faesch, to whom _out into the night_ was written. faesch had departed for singapore. 'the sooner we all of us,' wrote butler, 'as men of sense and sober reason, get through the very acute, poignant sorrow which we now feel, the better for us all. there is no fear of any of us forgetting when the acute stage is passed. i should be ashamed of myself for having felt as keenly and spoken with as little reserve as i have if it were any one but you; but i feel no shame at any length to which grief can take me when it is about you. i can call to mind no word which ever passed between us three which had been better unspoken: no syllable of irritation or unkindness; nothing but goodness and kindness ever came out of you, and such as our best was we gave it to you as you gave yours to us. who may not well be plunged up to the lips in sorrow at parting from one of whom he can say this in all soberness and truth? i feel as though i had lost an only son with no hope of another....' the love is almost pathetically lavish. letters like these reveal to us a man so avid of affection that he must of necessity erect every barrier and defence to avoid a mortal wound. his sensibility was _rentrée_, probably as a consequence of his appalling childhood; and the indication helps us to understand not only the inordinate suspiciousness with which he behaved to darwin, but the extent to which irony was his favoured weapon. the most threatening danger for such a man is to take the professions of the world at their face value; he can inoculate himself only by irony. the more extreme his case, the more devouring the hunger to love and be loved, the more extreme the irony, and in butler it reached the absolute maximum, which is to interpret the professions of the world as their exact opposite. as a reviewer of the _note-books_ in _the athenæum_ recently said, butler's method was to stand propositions on their heads. he universalised his method; he applied it not merely to scientific propositions of fact, but, even more ruthlessly, to the converse of daily life. he divided up the world into a vast majority who meant the opposite of what they said, and an infinitesimal minority who were sincere. the truth that the vast majority are borderland cases escaped him, largely because he was compelled by his isolation to regard all his honest beliefs as proven certainties. that a man could like and admire him and yet regard him as in many things mistaken and wrong-headed was strictly incomprehensible to him, and from this angle the curious relations which existed between him and dr richard garnett of the british museum are of uncommon interest. they afford a strange example of mutual mystification. thus at least one-half the world, not of life only (which does not greatly matter, for one can live as happily with half the world as with the whole) but of thought, was closed to him. most of the poetry, the music, and the art of the world was humbug to him, and it was only by insisting that homer and shakespeare were exactly like himself that he managed to except them from his natural aversion. so, in the last resort, he humbugged himself quite as vehemently as he imagined the majority of men were engaged in humbugging him. if his standard of truth was higher than that of the many, it was lower than that of the few. there is a kingdom where the crass division into sheep and goats is merely clumsy and inopportune. in the slow meanderings of this _memoir_ we too often catch a glimpse of butler measuring giants with the impertinent foot-rule of his common sense. one does not like him the less for it, but it is, in spite of all the disconcerting jokes with which it may be covered, a futile and ridiculous occupation. persistently there emerges from the record the impression of something childish, whether in petulance or _gaminerie_, a crudeness as well as a shrewdness of judgment and ideal. where butler thought himself complete, he was insufficient; and where he thought himself insufficient, he was complete. to himself he appeared a hobbledehoy by the side of pauli; to us he appears a hobbledehoy by the side of miss savage. [october, . _the poetry of mr hardy_ one meets fairly often with the critical opinion that mr hardy's poetry is incidental. it is admitted on all sides that his poetry has curious merits of its own, but it is held to be completely subordinate to his novels, and those who maintain that it must be considered as having equal standing with his prose, are not seldom treated as guilty of paradox and preciousness. we are inclined to wonder, as we review the situation, whether those of the contrary persuasion are not allowing themselves to be impressed primarily by mere bulk, and arguing that a man's chief work must necessarily be what he has done most of; and we feel that some such supposition is necessary to explain what appears to us as a visible reluctance to allow mr hardy's poetry a clean impact upon the critical consciousness. it is true that we have ranged against us critics of distinction, such as mr lascelles abercrombie and mr robert lynd, and that it may savour of impertinence to suggest that the case could have been unconsciously pre-judged in their minds when they addressed themselves to mr hardy's poetry. nevertheless, we find some significance in the fact that both these critics are of such an age that when they came to years of discretion the wessex novels were in existence as a _corpus_. there, before their eyes, was a monument of literary work having a unity unlike that of any contemporary author. the poems became public only after they had laid the foundations of their judgment. for them mr hardy's work was done. whatever he might subsequently produce was an interesting, but to their criticism an otiose appendix to his prose achievement. it happens therefore that to a somewhat younger critic the perspective may be different. by the accident of years it would appear to him that mr hardy's poetry was no less a _corpus_ than his prose. they would be extended equally and at the same moment before his eyes; he would embark upon voyages of discovery into both at roughly the same time; and he might find, in total innocence of preciousness and paradox, that the poetry would yield up to him a quality of perfume not less essential than any that he could extract from the prose. this is, as we see it, the case with ourselves. we discover all that our elders discover in mr hardy's novels; we see more than they in his poetry. to our mind it exists superbly in its own right; it is not lifted into significance upon the glorious substructure of the novels. they also are complete in themselves. we recognise the relation between the achievements, and discern that they are the work of a single mind; but they are separate works, having separate and unique excellences. the one is only approximately explicable in terms of the other. we incline, therefore, to attach a signal importance to what has always seemed to us the most important sentence in _who's who?_--namely, that in which mr hardy confesses that in he was compelled--that is his own word--to give up writing poetry for prose. for mr hardy's poetic gift is not a late and freakish flowering. in the volume into which has been gathered all his poetical work with the exception of 'the dynasts,'[ ] are pieces bearing the date which display an astonishing mastery, not merely of technique but of the essential content of great poetry. nor are such pieces exceptional. granted that mr hardy has retained only the finest of his early poetry, still there are a dozen poems of - which belong either entirely or in part to the category of major poetry. take, for instance, 'neutral tones':-- 'we stood by a pond that winter day, and the sun was white, as though chidden of god, and a few leaves lay on the starving sod; --they had fallen from an ash, and were gray. 'your eyes on me were as eyes that rove over tedious riddles long ago; and some winds played between us to and fro on which lost the more by our love. 'the smile on your mouth was the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die; and a grin of bitterness swept thereby like an ominous bird a-wing.... 'since then keen lessons that love deceives and wrings with wrong, have shaped to me your face, and the god-curst sun, and a tree and a pond edged with grayish leaves.' [footnote : _collected. poems of thomas hardy_. vol. i. (macmillan.)] that was written in . the date of _desperate remedies_, mr hardy's first novel, was . _desperate remedies_ may have been written some years before. it makes no difference to the astonishing contrast between the immaturity of the novel and the maturity of the poem. it is surely impossible in the face of such a juxtaposition then to deny that mr hardy's poetry exists in its own individual right, and not as a curious simulacrum of his prose. these early poems have other points of deep interest, of which one of the chief is in a sense technical. one can trace a quite definite influence of shakespeare's sonnets in his language and imagery. the four sonnets, 'she to him' ( ), are full of echoes, as:-- 'numb as a vane that cankers on its point true to the wind that kissed ere canker came.' or this from another sonnet of the same year:-- 'as common chests encasing wares of price are borne with tenderness through halls of state.' yet no one reading the sonnets of these years can fail to mark the impress of an individual personality. the effect is, at times, curious and impressive in the extreme. we almost feel that mr hardy is bringing some physical compulsion to bear on shakespeare and forcing him to say something that he does not want to say. of course, it is merely a curious tweak of the fancy; but there comes to us in such lines as the following an insistent vision of two youths of an age the one masterful, the other indulgent, and carrying out his companion's firm suggestion:-- 'remembering mine the loss is, not the blame that sportsman time rears but his brood to kill, knowing me in my soul the very same-- one who would die to spare you touch of ill!-- will you not grant to old affection's claim the hand of friendship down life's sunless hill?' but, fancies aside, the effect of these early poems is twofold. their attitude is definite:-- 'crass casualty obstructs the sun and rain and dicing time for gladness calls a moan ... these purblind doomsters had as readily thrown blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.' and the technique has the mark of mastery, a complete economy of statement which produces the conviction that the words are saying only what poet ordained they should say, neither less nor more. the early years were followed by the long period of the novels, in which, we are prepared to admit, poetry was actually if not in intention incidental. it is the grim truth that poetry cannot be written in between times; and, though we have hardly any dates on which to rely, we are willing to believe that few of mr hardy's characteristic poems were written between the appearance of _desperate remedies_ and his farewell to the activity of novel-writing with _the well-beloved_ ( ). but the few dates which we have tell us that 'thoughts of phena,' the beautiful poem beginning:-- 'not a line of her writing have i, not a thread of her hair....' which reaches forward to the love poems of - , was written in . whether the development of mr hardy's poetry was concealed or visible during the period of the novels, development there was into a maturity so overwhelming that by its touchstone the poetical work of his famous contemporaries appears singularly jejune and false. but, though by the accident of social conditions--for that mr hardy waited till to publish his first volume of poems is more a social than an artistic fact--it is impossible to follow out the phases of his poetical progress in the detail we would desire, it is impossible not to recognise that the mature poet, mr hardy, is of the same poetical substance as the young poet of the 'sixties. the attitude is unchanged; the modifications of the theme of 'crass casualty' leave its central asseveration unchanged. there are restatements, enlargements of perspective, a slow and forceful expansion of the personal into the universal, but the truth once recognised is never suffered for a moment to be hidden or mollified. only a superficial logic would point, for instance, to his 'wonder if man's consciousness was a mistake of god's,' as a denial of 'casualty.' to envisage an accepted truth from a new angle, to turn it over and over again in the mind in the hope of finding some aspect which might accord with a large and general view is the inevitable movement of any mind that is alive and not dead. to say that mr hardy has finally discovered unity may be paradoxical; but it is true. the harmony of the artist is not as the harmony of the preacher or the philosopher. neither would grant, neither would understand the profound acquiescence that lies behind 'adonais' or the 'ode to the grecian urn.' such acquiescence has no moral quality, as morality is even now understood, nor any logical compulsion. it does not stifle anger nor deny anguish; it turns no smiling face upon unsmiling things; it is not puffed up with the resonance of futile heroics. it accepts the things that are as the necessary basis of artistic creation. this unity which comes of the instinctive refusal in the great poet to deny experience, and subdues the self into the whole as part of that which is not denied, is to be found in every corner of mr hardy's mature poetry. it gives, as it alone can really give, to personal emotion what is called the impersonality of great poetry. we feel it as a sense of background, a conviction that a given poem is not the record, but the culmination of an experience, and that the experience of which it is the culmination is far larger and more profound than the one which it seems to record. at the basis of great poetry lies an all-embracing realism, an adequacy to all experience, a refusal of the merely personal in exultation or dismay. take the contrast between rupert brooke's deservedly famous lines: 'there is some corner of a foreign field ...' and mr hardy's 'drummer hodge':-- 'yet portion of that unknown plain will hodge for ever be; his homely northern heart and brain grow to some southern tree, and strange-eyed constellations reign his stars eternally.' we know which is the truer. which is the more beautiful? is it not mr hardy? and which (strange question) is the more consoling, the more satisfying, the more acceptable? is it not mr hardy? there is sorrow, but it is the sorrow of the spheres. and this, not the apparent anger and dismay of a self's discomfiture, is the quality of greatness in mr hardy's poetry. the mr hardy of the love poems of - is not a man giving way to memory in poetry; he is a great poet uttering the cry of the universe. a vast range of acknowledged experience returns to weight each syllable; it is the quality of life that is vocal, gathered into a moment of time with a vista of years:-- 'ignorant of what there is flitting here to see, the waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily, soon you will have, dear, to vanish from me, for the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily. trust me, i mind not, though life lours the bringing me here; nay, bring me here again! i am just the same as when our days were a joy and our paths through flowers.' [november, . we have read these poems of thomas hardy, read them not once, but many times. many of them have already become part of our being; their indelible impress has given shape to dumb and striving elements in our soul; they have set free and purged mute, heart-devouring regrets. and yet, though this is so, the reading of them in a single volume, the submission to their movement with a like unbroken motion of the mind, gathers their greatness, their poignancy and passion, into one stream, submerging us and leaving us patient and purified. there have been many poets among us in the last fifty years, poets of sure talent, and it may be even of genius, but no other of them has this compulsive power. the secret is not hard to find. not one of them is adequate to what we know and have suffered. we have in our own hearts a new touchstone of poetic greatness. we have learned too much to be wholly responsive to less than an adamantine honesty of soul and a complete acknowledgment of experience. 'give us the whole,' we cry, 'give us the truth.' unless we can catch the undertone of this acknowledgment, a poet's voice is in our ears hardly more than sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. therefore we turn--some by instinct and some by deliberate choice--to the greatest; therefore we deliberately set mr hardy among these. what they have, he has, and has in their degree--a plenary vision of life. he is the master of the fundamental theme; it enters into, echoes in, modulates and modifies all his particular emotions, and the individual poems of which they are the substance. each work of his is a fragment of a whole--not a detached and arbitrarily severed fragment, but a unity which implies, calls for and in a profound sense creates a vaster and completely comprehensive whole his reaction to an episode has behind and within it a reaction to the universe. an overwhelming endorsement descends upon his words: he traces them as with a pencil, and straightway they are graven in stone. thus his short poems have a weight and validity which sets them apart in kind from even the very finest work of his contemporaries. these may be perfect in and for themselves; but a short poem by mr hardy is often perfect in a higher sense. as the lines of a diagram may be produced in imagination to contain within themselves all space, one of mr hardy's most characteristic poems may expand and embrace all human experience. in it we may hear the sombre, ruthless rhythm of life itself--the dominant theme that gives individuation to the ripple of fragmentary joys and sorrows. take 'the broken appointment':-- 'you did not come, and marching time drew on, and wore me numb.-- yet less for loss of your dear presence there than that i thus found lacking in your make that high compassion which can overbear reluctance for pure lovingkindness' sake grieved i, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum, you did not come. 'you love not me, and love alone can lend you loyalty --i know and knew it. but, unto the store of human deeds divine in all but name, was it not worth a little hour or more to add yet this: once you, a woman, came to soothe a time-torn man; even though it be you love not me?' on such a seeming fragment of personal experience lies the visible endorsement of the universe. the hopes not of a lover but of humanity are crushed beneath its rhythm. the ruthlessness of the event is intensified in the motion of the poem till one can hear the even pad of destiny, and a moment comes when to a sense made eager by the strain of intense attention it seems to have been written by the destiny it records. what is the secret of poetic power like this? we do not look for it in technique, though the technique of this poem is masterly. but the technique of 'as the hope-hour stroked its sum' is of such a kind that we know as we read that it proceeds from a sheer compulsive force. for a moment it startles; a moment more and the echo of those very words is reverberant with accumulated purpose. they are pitiless as the poem; the sign of an ultimate obedience is upon them. whence came the power that compelled it? can the source be defined or indicated? we believe it can be indicated, though not defined. we can show where to look for the mystery, that in spite of our regard remains a mystery still. we are persuaded that almost on the instant that it was felt the original emotion of the poem was endorsed perhaps it came to the poet as the pain of a particular and personal experience; but in a little or a long while--creative time is not measured by days or years--it became, for him, a part of the texture of the general life. it became a manifestation of life, almost, nay wholly, in the sacramental sense, a veritable epiphany. the manifold and inexhaustible quality of life was focused into a single revelation. a critic's words do not lend themselves to the necessary precision. we should need to write with exactly the same power as mr hardy when he wrote 'the hope-hour stroked its sum,' to make our meaning likewise inevitable. the word 'revelation' is fertile in false suggestion; the creative act of power which we seek to elucidate is an act of plenary apprehension, by which one manifestation, one form of life, one experience is seen in its rigorous relation to all other and to all possible manifestations, forms, and experiences. it is, we believe, the act which mr hardy himself has tried to formulate in the phrase which is the title of one of his books of poems--_moments of vision_. only those who do not read mr hardy could make the mistake of supposing that on his lips such a phrase had a mystical implication. between belief and logic lies a third kingdom, which the mystics and the philosophers alike are too eager to forget--the kingdom of art, no less the residence of truth than the two other realms, and to some, perhaps, more authentic even than they. therefore when we expand the word 'vision' in the phrase to 'æsthetic vision' we mean, not the perception of beauty, at least in the ordinary sense of that ill-used word, but the apprehension of truth, the recognition of a complete system of valid relations incapable of logical statement. such are the acts of unique apprehension which mr hardy, we believe, implied by his title. in a 'moment of vision' the poet recognises in a single separate incident of life, life's essential quality. the uniqueness of the whole, the infinite multiplicity and variety of its elements, are manifested and apprehended in a part. since we are here at work on the confines of intelligible statement, it is better, even at the cost of brutalising a poem, to choose an example from the book that bears the mysterious name. the verses that follow come from 'near lanivet, .' we choose them as an example of mr hardy's method at less than its best, at a point at which the scaffolding of his process is just visible. 'there was a stunted hand-post just on the crest. only a few feet high: she was tired, and we stopped in the twilight-time for her rest, at the crossways close thereby. 'she leant back, being so weary, against its stem, and laid her arms on its own, each open palm stretched out to each end of them, her sad face sideways thrown. 'her white-clothed form at this dim-lit cease of day made her look as one crucified in my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way, and hurriedly "don't," i cried. 'i do not think she heard. loosing thence she said, as she stepped forth ready to go, "i am rested now.--something strange came into my head; i wish i had not leant so!'... 'and we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see in the running of time's far glass her crucified, as she had wondered if she might be some day.--alas, alas!' superstition and symbolism, some may say; but they mistakenly invert the order of the creative process. the poet's act of apprehension is wholly different from the lover's fear; and of this apprehension the chance-shaped crucifix is the symbol and not the cause. the concentration of life's vicissitude upon that white-clothed form was first recognised by a sovereign act of æsthetic understanding or intuition; the seeming crucifix supplied a scaffolding for its expression; it afforded a clue to the method of transposition into words which might convey the truth thus apprehended; it suggested an equivalence. the distinction may appear to be hair-drawn, but we believe that it is vital to the theory of poetry as a whole, and to an understanding of mr hardy's poetry in particular. indeed, in it must be sought the meaning of another of his titles, 'satires of circumstance,' where the particular circumstance is neither typical nor fortuitous, but a symbol necessary to communicate to others the sense of a quality in life more largely and variously apprehended by the poet. at the risk of appearing fantastic we will endeavour still further to elucidate our meaning. the poetic process is, we believe, twofold. the one part, the discovery of the symbol, the establishment of an equivalence, is what we may call poetic method. it is concerned with the transposition and communication of emotion, no matter what the emotion may be, for to poetic method the emotional material is, strictly, indifferent. the other part is an esthetic apprehension of significance, the recognition of the all in the one. this is a specifically poetic act, or rather the supreme poetic act. yet it may be absent from poetry. for there is no necessary connection between poetic apprehension and poetic method. poetic method frequently exists without poetic apprehension; and there is no reason to suppose that the reverse is not also true, for the recognition of greatness in poetry is probably not the peculiar privilege of great poets. we have here, at least a principle of division between major and minor poetry. mr hardy is a major poet; and we are impelled to seek further and ask what it is that enables such a poet to perform this sovereign act of apprehension and to recognise the quality of the all in the quality of the one. we believe that the answer is simple. the great poet knows what he is looking for. once more we speak too precisely, and so falsely, being compelled to use the language of the kingdom of logic to describe what is being done in the kingdom of art. the poet, we say, knows the quality for which he seeks; but this knowledge is rather a condition than a possession of soul. it is a state of responsiveness rather than a knowledge of that to which he will respond. but it is knowledge inasmuch as the choice of that to which he will respond is determined by the condition of his soul. on the purity of that condition depends his greatness as a poet, and that purity in its turn depends upon his denying no element of his profound experience. if he denies or forgets, the synthesis--again the word is a metaphor--which must establish itself within him is fragmentary and false. the new event can wake but partial echoes in his soul or none at all; it can neither be received into, nor can it create a complete relation, and so it passes incommensurable from limbo into forgetfulness. mr hardy stands high above all other modern poets by the deliberate purity of his responsiveness. the contagion of the world's slow stain has not touched him; from the first he held aloof from the general conspiracy to forget in which not only those who are professional optimists take a part. therefore his simplest words have a vehemence and strangeness of their own:-- 'it will have been: nor god nor demon can undo the done, unsight the seen make muted music be as unbegun though things terrene groan in their bondage till oblivion supervene.' what neither god nor demon can do, men are incessantly at work to accomplish. life itself rewards them for their assiduity, for she scatters her roses chiefly on the paths of those who forget her thorns. but the great poet remembers both rose and thorn; and it is beyond his power to remember them otherwise than together. it was fitting, then, and to some senses inevitable, that mr hardy should have crowned his work as a poet in his old age by a series of love poems that are unique for power and passion in even the english language. this late and wonderful flowering has no tinge of miracle; it has sprung straight from the main stem of mr hardy's poetic growth. into 'veteris vestigia flammas' is distilled the quintessence of the power that created the wessex novels and 'the dynasts'; all that mr hardy has to tell us of life, the whole of the truth that he has apprehended, is in these poems, and no poet since poetry began has apprehended or told us more. _sunt lacrimæ rerum_. [november, . * * * * * postscript three months after this essay was written the first volume of the long awaited definitive edition of mr hardy's works (the mellstock edition) appeared. it was with no common thrill that we read in the precious pages of introduction the following words confirming the theory upon which the first part of the essay is largely based. 'turning now to my verse--to myself the more individual part of my literary fruitage--i would say that, unlike some of the fiction, nothing interfered with the writer's freedom in respect of its form or content. several of the poems--indeed many--were produced before novel-writing had been thought of as a pursuit; but few saw the light till all the novels had been published.... 'the few volumes filled by the verse cover a producing period of some eighteen years first and last, while the seventeen or more volumes of novels represent correspondingly about four-and-twenty years. one is reminded by this disproportion in time and result how much more concise and quintessential expression becomes when given in rhythmic form than when shaped in the language of prose.' _present condition of english poetry_ shall we, or shall we not, be serious? to be serious nowadays is to be ill-mannered, and what, murmurs the cynic, does it matter? we have our opinion; we know that there is a good deal of good poetry in the georgian book, a little in _wheels_.[ ] we know that there is much bad poetry in the georgian book, and less in _wheels_. we know that there is one poem in _wheels_ beside the intense and sombre imagination of which even the good poetry of the georgian book pales for a moment. we think we know more than this. what does it matter? pick out the good things, and let the rest go. [footnote : _georgian poetry_, - . edited by e.m. (the poetry bookshop.) _wheels_. fourth cycle. (oxford: b.h. blackwell.)] and yet, somehow, this question of modern english poetry has become important for us, as important as the war, important in the same way as the war. we can even analogise. _georgian poetry_ is like the coalition government; _wheels_ is like the radical opposition. out of the one there issues an indefinable odour of complacent sanctity, an unctuous redolence of _union sacrée_; out of the other, some acidulation of perversity. in the coalition poets we find the larger number of good men, and the larger number of bad ones; in the opposition poets we find no bad ones with the coalition badness, no good ones with the coalition goodness, but in a single case a touch of the apocalyptic, intransigent, passionate honesty that is the mark of the martyr of art or life. on both sides we have the corporate and the individual flavour; on both sides we have those individuals-by-courtesy whose flavour is almost wholly corporate; on both sides the corporate flavour is one that we find intensely disagreeable. in the coalition we find it noxious, in the opposition no worse than irritating. no doubt this is because we recognise a tendency to take the coalition seriously, while the opposition is held to be ridiculous. but both the coalition and the opposition--we use both terms in their corporate sense--are unmistakably the product of the present age. in that sense they are truly representative and complementary each to the other; they are a fair sample of the goodness and badness of the literary epoch in which we live; they are still more remarkable as an index of the complete confusion of æsthetic values that prevails to-day. the corporate flavour of the coalition is a false simplicity. of the nineteen poets who compose it there are certain individuals whom we except absolutely from this condemnation, mr de la mare, mr davies, and mr lawrence; there are others who are more or less exempt from it, mr abercrombie, mr sassoon, mrs shove, and mr nichols; and among the rest there are varying degrees of saturation. this false simplicity can be quite subtle. it is compounded of worship of trees and birds and contemporary poets in about equal proportions; it is sicklied over at times with a quite perceptible varnish of modernity, and at other times with what looks to be technical skill, but generally proves to be a fairly clumsy reminiscence of somebody else's technical skill. the negative qualities of this _simplesse_ are, however, the most obvious; the poems imbued with it are devoid of any emotional significance whatever. if they have an idea it leaves you with the queer feeling that it is not an idea at all, that it has been defaced, worn smooth by the rippling of innumerable minds. then, spread in a luminous haze over these compounded elements, is a fundamental right-mindedness; you feel, somehow, that they might have been very wicked, and yet they are very good. there is nothing disturbing about them; _ils peuvent être mis dans toutes les mains_; they are kind, generous, even noble. they sympathise with animate and inanimate nature. they have shining foreheads with big bumps of benevolence, like flora casby's father, and one inclines to believe that their eyes must be frequently filmed with an honest tear, if only because their vision is blurred. they are fond of lists of names which never suggest things; they are sparing of similes. if they use them they are careful to see they are not too definite, for a definite simile makes havoc of their constructions, by applying to them a certain test of reality. but it is impossible to be serious about them. the more stupid of them supply the matter for a good laugh; the more clever the stuff of a more recondite amazement. what _is_ one to do when mr monro apostrophises the force of gravity in such words as these?-- 'by leave of you man places stone on stone; he scatters seed: you are at once the prop among the long roots of his fragile crop you manufacture for him, and insure house, harvest, implement, and furniture, and hold them all secure.' we are not surprised to learn further that 'i rest my body on your grass, and let my brain repose in you.' all that remains to be said is that mr monro is fond of dogs ('can you smell the rose?' he says to dog: 'ah, no!') and inclined to fish--both of which are georgian inclinations. then there is mr drinkwater with the enthusiasm of the just man for moonlit apples--'moon-washed apples of wonder'--and the righteous man's sense of robust rhythm in this chorus from 'lincoln':-- 'you who know the tenderness of old men at eve-tide, coming from the hedgerows, coming from the plough, and the wandering caress of winds upon the woodside, when the crying yaffle goes underneath the bough.' mr drinkwater, though he cannot write good doggerel, is a very good man. in this poem he refers to the sermon on the mount as 'the words of light from the mountain-way.' mr squire, who is an infinitely more able writer, would make an excellent subject for a critical investigation into false simplicity. he would repay a very close analysis, for he may deceive the elect in the same way as, we suppose, he deceives himself. his poem 'rivers' seems to us a very curious example of the _faux bon_. not only is the idea derivative, but the rhythmical treatment also. here is mr de la mare:-- 'sweet is the music of arabia in my heart, when out of dreams i still in the thin clear murk of dawn descry her gliding streams; hear her strange lutes on the green banks ring loud with the grief and delight of the dim-silked, dark-haired musicians in the brooding silence of night. they haunt me--her lutes and her forests; no beauty on earth i see but shadowed with that dream recalls her loveliness to me: still eyes look coldly upon me, cold voices whisper and say-- "he is crazed with the spell of far arabia, they have stolen his wits away."' and here is a verse from mr squire:-- 'for whatever stream i stand by, and whatever river i dream of, there is something still in the back of my mind from very far away; there is something i saw and see not, a country full of rivers that stirs in my heart and speaks to me more sure, more dear than they. 'and always i ask and wonder (though often i do not know it) why does this water not smell like water?...' to leave the question of reminiscence aside, how the delicate vision of mr de la mare has been coarsened, how commonplace his exquisite technique has become in the hands of even a first-rate ability! it remains to be added that mr squire is an amateur of nature,-- 'and skimming, fork-tailed in the evening air, when man first was were not the martens there?'-- and a lover of dogs. mr shanks, mr w.j. turner, and mr freeman belong to the same order. they have considerable technical accomplishment of the straightforward kind--and no emotional content. one can find examples of the disastrous simile in them all. they are all in their degree pseudo-naïves. mr turner wonders in this way:-- 'it is strange that a little mud should echo with sounds, syllables, and letters, should rise up and call a mountain popocatapetl, and a green-leafed wood oleander.' of course mr turner does not really wonder; those four lines are proof positive of that. but what matters is not so much the intrinsic value of the gift as the kindly thought which prompted the giver. mr shanks's speciality is beauty. he also is an amateur of nature. he bids us: 'hear the loud night-jar spin his pleasant note.' of course, mr shanks cannot have heard a real night-jar. his description is proof of that. but again, it was a kindly thought. mr freeman is, like mr squire, a more interesting case, deserving detailed analysis. for the moment we can only recommend a comparison of his first and second poems in this book with 'sabrina fair' and 'love in a valley' respectively. it is only when we are confronted with the strange blend of technical skill and an emotional void that we begin to hunt for reminiscences. reminiscences are no danger to the real poet. he is the splendid borrower who lends a new significance to that which he takes. he incorporates his borrowing in the new thing which he creates; it has its being there and there alone. one can see the process in the one fine poem in _wheels_, mr wilfred owen's 'strange meeting':-- 'it seemed that out of the battle i escaped down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped through granites which titanic wars had groined. yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. then, as i probed them, one sprang up, and stared with piteous recognition in fixed eyes, lifting distressful hands as if to bless. and by his smile, i knew that sullen hall. with a thousand fears that vision's face was grained; yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, and no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. "strange, friend," i said, "here is no cause to mourn." "none," said the other, "save the undone years, the hopelessness. whatever hope is yours, was my life also..."' the poem which begins with these lines is, we believe, the finest in these two books, both in intention and achievement. yet no one can mistake its source. it comes, almost bodily, from the revised induction to 'hyperion.' the sombre imagination, the sombre rhythm is that of the dying keats; the creative impulse is that of keats. 'none can usurp this height, return'd that shade, but those to whom the miseries of the world are misery, and will not let them rest.' that is true, word by word, and line by line, of wilfred owen's 'strange meeting.' it touches great poetry by more than the fringe; even in its technique there is the hand of the master to be. those monosyllabic assonances are the discovery of genius. we are persuaded that this poem by a boy like his great forerunner, who had the certainty of death in his heart, is the most magnificent expression of the emotional significance of the war that has yet been achieved by english poetry. by including it in his book, the editor of _wheels_ has done a great service to english letters. extravagant words, it may be thought. we appeal to the documents. read _georgian poetry_ and read 'strange meeting.' compare wilfred owen's poem with the very finest things in the georgian book--mr davies's 'lovely dames,' or mr de la mare's 'the tryst,' or 'fare well,' or the twenty opening lines of mr abercrombie's disappointing poem. you will not find those beautiful poems less beautiful than they are; but you will find in 'strange meeting' an awe, an immensity, an adequacy to that which has been most profound in the experience of a generation. you will, finally, have the standard that has been lost, and the losing of which makes the confusion of a book like _georgian poetry_ possible, restored to you. you will remember three forgotten things--that poetry is rooted in emotion, and that it grows by the mastery of emotion, and that its significance finally depends upon the quality and comprehensiveness of the emotion. you will recognise that the tricks of the trade have never been and never will be discovered by which ability can conjure emptiness into meaning. it seems hardly worth while to return to _wheels_. once the argument has been pitched on the plane of 'strange meeting,' the rest of the contents of the book become irrelevant. but for the sake of symmetry we will characterise the corporate flavour of the opposition as false sophistication. there are the same contemporary reminiscences. compare mr osbert sitwell's _english gothic_ with mr t.s. eliot's _sweeney_; and you will detect a simple mind persuading itself that it has to deal with the emotions of a complex one. the spectacle is almost as amusing as that of the similar process in the georgian book. nevertheless, in general, the affected sophistication here is, as we have said, merely irritating; while the affected simplicity of the coalition is positively noxious. miss edith sitwell's deliberate painted toys are a great deal better than painted canvas trees and fields, masquerading as real ones. in the poems of miss iris tree a perplexed emotion manages to make its way through a chaotic technique. she represents the solid impulse which lies behind the opposition in general. this impulse she describes, though she is very, very far from making poetry of it, in these not uninteresting verses:-- 'but since we are mere children of this age, and must in curious ways discover salvation i will not quit my muddled generation, but ever plead for beauty in this rage. 'although i know that nature's bounty yields unto simplicity a beautiful content, only when battle breaks me and my strength is spent will i give back my body to the fields.' there is the opposition. against the righteous man, the _mauvais sujet_. we sympathise with the _mauvais sujet_. if he is persistent and laborious enough, he may achieve poetry. but he must travel alone. in order to be loyal to your age you must make up your mind what your age is. to be muddled yourself is not loyalty, but treachery, even to a muddled generation. [december, . _the nostalgia of mr masefield_ mr masefiled is gradually finding his way to his self-appointed end, which is the glorification of england in narrative verse. _reynard the fox_ marks we believe, the end of a stage in his progress to this goal. he has reached a point at which his mannerisms have been so subdued that they no longer sensibly impede the movement of his verse, a point at which we may begin to speak (though not too loud) of mastery. we feel that he now approaches what he desires to do with some certainty of doing it, so that we in our turn can approach some other questions with some hope of answering them. the questions are various; but they radiate from and enter again into the old question whether what he is doing, and beginning to do well, is worth while doing, or rather whether it will have been worth while doing fifty years hence. for we have no doubt at all in our mind that, in comparison with the bulk of contemporary poetry, such work as _reynard the fox_ is valuable. we may use the old rough distinction and ask first whether _reynard the fox_ is durable in virtue of its substance, and second, whether it is durable in virtue of its form. the glorification of england! there are some who would give their souls to be able to glorify her as she has been glorified, by shakespeare, by milton, by wordsworth, and by hardy. for an englishman there is no richer inspiration, no finer theme; to have one's speech and thought saturated by the fragrance of this lovely and pleasant land was once the birthright of english poets and novelists. but something has crept between us and it, dividing. instead of an instinctive love, there is a conscious desire of england; instead of slow saturation, a desperate plunge into its mystery. the fragrance does not come at its own sweet will; we clutch at it. it does not enfold and pervade our most arduous speculations; no involuntary sweetness comes flooding in upon our confrontation of human destinies. hardy is the last of that great line. if we long for sweetness--as we do long for it, and with how poignant a pain!--we must seek it out, like men who rush dusty and irritable from the babble and fever of the town. the rhythm of the earth never enters into their gait; they are like spies among the birds and flowers, like collectors of antique furniture in the haunts of peace. the georgians snatch at nature; they are never part of it. and there is some element of this desperation in mr masefield. we feel in him an anxiety to load every rift with ore of this particular kind, a deliberate intention to emphasise that which is most english in the english country-side. how shall we say it? it is not that he makes a parade of arcane knowledge. the word 'parade' does injustice to his indubitable integrity. but we seem to detect behind his superfluity of technical, and at times archaic phrase, an unconscious desire to convince himself that he is saturated in essential englishness, and we incline to think that even his choice of an actual subject was less inevitable than self-imposed. he would isolate the quality he would capture, have it more wholly within his grasp; yet, in some subtle way, it finally eludes him. the intention is in excess, and in the manner of its execution everything is (though often very subtly) in excess also. the music of english place-names, for instance is too insistent; no one into whom they had entered with the english air itself would use them with so manifest an admiration. perhaps a comparison may bring definition nearer. the first part of mr masefield's poem, which describes the meet and the assembled persons one by one, recalls, not merely by the general cast of the subject, but by many actual turns of phrase, chaucer's _prologue_. mr masefield's parson has more than one point of resemblance to chaucer's monk:-- 'an out-ryder, that loved venerye; a manly man to ben an abbot able....' but it would take too long to quote both pictures. we may choose for our juxtaposition the prioress and one of mr masefield's young ladies:-- 'behind them rode her daughter belle, a strange, shy, lovely girl, whose face was sweet with thought and proud with race, and bright with joy at riding there. she was as good as blowing air, but shy and difficult to know. the kittens in the barley-mow, the setter's toothless puppies sprawling, the blackbird in the apple calling, all knew her spirit more than we. so delicate these maidens be in loving lovely helpless things.' and here is the prioress:-- 'but for to speken of hir conscience, she was so charitable and so pitous, she wolde weepe if that she sawe a mous caught in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde. of smalle houndes had she, that she fed with rosted flesh, or milk, or wastel bread, but sore wepte she if oon of hem were ded or if men smote it with a yerde smerte: and all was conscience and tendere herte.' ful semely hir wympel pynched was; his nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas; hir mouth full small, and thereto soft and red, but sikerly she hadde a fair forhed.' there is in the chaucer a naturalness, a lack of emphasis, a confidence that the object will not fail to make its own impression, beside which mr masefield's demonstration and underlining seem almost _malsain_. how far outside the true picture now appears that 'blackbird in the apple calling,' and how tainted by the desperate _bergerie_ of the georgian era! it is, we admit, a portentous experiment to make, to set mr masefield's prologue beside chaucer's. but not only is it a tribute to mr masefield that he brought us to reading chaucer over again, but the comparison is at bottom just. chaucer is not what we understand by a great poet; he has none of the imaginative comprehension and little of the music that belong to one: but he has perdurable qualities. he is at home with his speech and at home with his world; by his side mr masefield seems nervous and uncertain about both. he belongs, in fact, to a race (or a generation) of poets who have come to feel a necessity of overloading every rift with ore. the question is whether such a man can hope to express the glory and the fragrance of the english country-side. can there be an element of permanence in a poem of which the ultimate impulse is a _nostalgie de la boue_ that betrays itself in line after line, a nostalgia so conscious of separation that it cannot trust that any associations will be evoked by an unemphasised appeal? mr masefield, in his fervour to grasp at that which for all his love is still alien to him, seems almost to shovel english mud into his pages; he cannot (and rightly cannot) persuade himself that the scent of the mud will be there otherwise. for the same reason he must make his heroes like himself. here, for example, is the first whip, tom dansey:-- 'his pleasure lay in hounds and horses; he loved the seven springs water-courses, those flashing brooks (in good sound grass, where scent would hang like breath on glass). he loved the english country-side; the wine-leaved bramble in the ride, the lichen on the apple-trees, the poultry ranging on the lees, the farms, the moist earth-smelling cover, his wife's green grave at mitcheldover, where snowdrops pushed at the first thaw. under his hide his heart was raw with joy and pity of these things...' that 'raw heart' marks the outsider, the victim of nostalgia. apart from the fact that it is a manifest artistic blemish to impute it to the first whip of a pack of foxhounds, the language is such that it would be a mistake to impute it to anybody; and with that we come to the question of mr masefield's style in general. as if to prove how rough indeed was the provisionally accepted distinction between substance and form, we have for a long while already been discussing mr masefield's style under a specific aspect. but the particular overstrain we have been examining is part of mr masefield's general condition. overstrain is permanent with him. if we do not find it in his actual language (and, as we have said, he is ridding himself of the worst of his exaggerations) we are sure to find it in the very vitals of his artistic effort. he is seeking always to be that which he is not, to lash himself into the illusion of a certainty which he knows he can never wholly possess. 'from the gallows hill to the kineton copse there were ten ploughed fields, like ten full-stops, all wet red clay, where a horse's foot would be swathed, feet thick, like an ash-tree root. the fox raced on, on the headlands firm, where his swift feet scared the coupling worm; the rooks rose raving to curse him raw, he snarled a sneer at their swoop and caw. then on, then on, down a half-ploughed field where a ship-like plough drove glitter-keeled, with a bay horse near and a white horse leading, and a man saying "zook," and the red earth bleeding.' the rasp of exacerbation is not to be mistaken. it comes, we believe, from a consciousness of anæmia, a frenetic reaction towards what used, some years ago, to be called 'blood and guts.' and here, perhaps, we have the secret of mr masefield and of our sympathy with him. his work, for all its surface robustness and right-thinking (which has at least the advantage that it will secure for this 'epic of fox-hunting' a place in the library of every country house), is as deeply debilitated by reaction as any of our time. its colour is hectic; its tempo feverish. he has sought the healing virtue where he believed it undefiled, in that miraculous english country whose magic (as mr masefield so well knows) is in shakespeare, and whose strong rhythm is in hardy. but the virtue eludes all conscious inquisition. the man who seeks it feverishly sees riot where there is peace. and may it not be, in the long run, that mr masefield would have done better not to delude himself into an identification he cannot feel, but rather to face his own disquiet where alone the artist can master it, in his consciousness? we will not presume to answer, mindful that mr masefield may not recognise himself in our mirror, but we will content ourselves with recording our conviction that in spite of the almost heroic effort that has gone to its composition _reynard the fox_ lacks all the qualities essential to durability. [january, . _the lost legions_ one day, we believe, a great book will be written, informed by the breath which moves the spirits of pity in mr hardy's _dynasts_. it will be a delicate, yet undeviating record of the spiritual awareness of the generation that perished in the war. it will be a work of genius, for the essence that must be captured within it is volatile beyond belief, almost beyond imagination. we know of its existence by signs hardly more material than a dream-memory of beating wings or an instinctive, yet all but inexplicable refusal of that which has been offered us in its stead. the autobiographer-novelists have been legion, yet we turn from them all with a slow shake of the head. 'no, it was not that. had we lost only that we could have forgotten. it was not that.' no, it was the spirit that troubled, as in dream, the waters of the pool, some influence which trembled between silence and a sound, a precarious confidence, an unavowed quest, a wisdom that came not of years or experience, a dissatisfaction, a doubt, a devotion, some strange presentiment, it may have been, of the bitter years in store, in memory an ineffable, irrevocable beauty, a visible seal on the forehead of a generation. 'when the lamp is shattered. the light in the dust lies dead-- when the cloud is scattered the rainbow's glory is shed. when the lute is broken, sweet tones are remembered not...' yet out of a thousand fragments this memory must be created anew in a form that will outlast the years, for it was precious. it was something that would vindicate an epoch against the sickening adulation of the hero-makers and against the charge of spiritual sterility; a light in whose gleam the bewildering non-achievements of the present age, the art which seems not even to desire to be art, the faith which seems not to desire to be faith, have substance and meaning. it was shot through and through by an impulse of paradox, an unconscious straining after the impossible, gathered into two or three tremulous years which passed too swiftly to achieve their own expression. now, what remains of youth is cynical, is successful, publicly exploits itself. it was not cynical then. elements of the influence that was are remembered only if they lasted long enough to receive a name. there was unanimism. the name is remembered; perhaps the books are read. but it will not be found in the books. they are childish, just as the english novels which endeavoured to portray the soul of the generation were coarse and conceited. behind all the conscious manifestations of cleverness and complexity lay a fundamental candour of which only a flickering gleam can now be recaptured. it glints on a page of m. romains's _europe_; the memory of it haunts wilfred owen's poems; it touches keeling's letters; it hovers over these letters of charles sorley.[ ] from a hundred strange lurking-places it must be gathered by pious and sensitive fingers and withdrawn from under the very edge of the scythe-blade of time, for if it wander longer without a habitation it will be lost for ever. [footnote : _the letters of charles sorley_. (cambridge university press.)] charles sorley was the youngest fringe of the strange unity that included him and men by ten years his senior. he had not, as they had, plunged with fantastic hopes and unspoken fears into the world. he had not learned the slogans of the day. but, seeing that the slogans were only a disguise for the undefined desires which inspired them he lost little and gained much thereby. the years at oxford in which he would have taken a temporary sameness, a sameness in the long run protective and strengthening, were spared him. in his letters we have him unspoiled, as the sentimentalists would say--not yet with the distraction of protective colouring. one who knew him better than the mere reader of his letters can pretend to know him declares that, in spite of his poems, which are among the most remarkable of those of the boy-poets killed in the war, sorley would not have been a man of letters. the evidence of the letters themselves is heavy against the view; they insist upon being regarded as the letters of a potential writer. but a passionate interest in literature is not the inevitable prelude to a life as a writer, and although it is impossible to consider any thread in sorley's letters as of importance comparable to that which joins the enthronement and dethronement of his literary idols, we shall regard it as the record of a movement of soul which might as easily find expression (as did keeling's) in other than literary activities. it takes more than literary men to make a generation, after all. and sorley was typical above all in this, that, passionate and penetrating as was his devotion to literature, he never looked upon it as a thing existing in and for itself. it was, to him and his kind, the satisfaction of an impulse other and more complex than the æsthetic. art was a means and not an end to him, and it is perhaps the apprehension of this that has led one who endeavoured in vain to reconcile sorley to pater into rash prognostication. sorley would never have been an artist in pater's way; he belonged to his own generation, to which _l'art pour l'art_ had ceased to have meaning. there had come a pause, a throbbing silence, from which art might have emerged, may even now after the appointed time arise, with strange validities undreamed of or forgotten. let us not prophesy; let us be content with the recognition that sorley's generation was too keenly, perhaps too disastrously aware of destinies, of 'the beating of the wings of love shut out from his creation,' to seek the comfort of the ivory tower. sorley first appears before us radiant with the white-heat of a schoolboy enthusiasm for masefield. masefield is--how we remember the feeling!--the poet who has lived; his naked reality tears through 'the lace of putrid sentimentalism (educing the effeminate in man) which rotters like tennyson and swinburne have taught his (the superficial man's) soul to love.' it tears through more than tennyson and swinburne. the greatest go down before him. 'so you see what i think of john masefield. when i say that he has the rapidity, simplicity, nobility of homer, with the power of drawing character, the dramatic truth to life of shakespeare, along with a moral and emotional strength and elevation which is all his own, and therefore i am prepared to put him above the level of these two great men--i do not expect you to agree with me.'--(from a paper read at marlborough, november, .) that was sorley at seventeen, and that, it seems to us, is the quality of enthusiasm which should be felt by a boy of seventeen if he is to make his mark. it is infinitely more important to have felt that flaming enthusiasm for an idol who will be cast down than to have felt what we ought to feel for shakespeare and homer. the gates of heaven are opened by strange keys, but they must be our own. within six months masefield had gone the way of all flesh. in a paper on _the shropshire lad_ (may, ), curious both for critical subtlety and the faint taste of disillusion, sorley was saying: 'his (masefield's) return (to the earth) was purely emotional, and probably less interesting than the purely intellectual return of meredith.' at the beginning of , having gained a scholarship at university college, oxford, he went to germany. just before going he wrote:-- 'i am just discovering thomas hardy. there are two methods of discovery. one is when columbus discovers america. the other is when some one begins to read a famous author who has already run into seventy editions, and refuses to speak about anything else, and considers every one else who reads the author's works his own special converts. mine is the second method. i am more or less hardy-drunk.' the humorous exactness and detachment of the description are remarkable, and we feel that there was more than the supersession of a small by a great idol in this second phase. by april he is at jena, 'only miles from goethe's grave, whose inhabitant has taken the place of thomas hardy (successor to masefield) as my favourite prophet.' 'i hope (if nothing else) before i leave germany to get a thorough hang of _faust_.... the worst of a piece like _faust_ is that it completely dries up any creative instincts or attempts in oneself. there is nothing that i have ever thought or ever read that is not somewhere contained in it, and (what is worse) explained in it.' he had a sublime contempt for any one with whom he was not drunk. he lumped together 'nasty old lyttons, carlyles, and dickenses.' and the intoxication itself was swift and fleeting. there was something wrong with goethe by july; it is his 'entirely intellectual' life. 'if goethe really died saying "more light," it was very silly of him: what _he_ wanted was more warmth.' and he writes home for richard jefferies, the man of his own county--for through marlborough he had made himself the adopted son of the wiltshire downs. 'in the midst of my setting up and smashing of deities--masefield, hardy, goethe--i always fall back on richard jefferies wandering about in the background. i have at least the tie of locality with him.' a day or two after we incidentally discover that meredith is up (though not on olympus) from a denunciation of browning on the queer non- (or super-) æsthetic grounds of which we have spoken:-- 'there is much in b. i like. but my feeling towards him has (ever since i read his life) been that of his to the "lost leader." i cannot understand him consenting to live a purely literary life in italy, or (worse still) consenting to be lionised by fashionable london society. and then i always feel that if less people read browning, more would read meredith (his poetry, i mean.)' then, while he was walking in the moselle valley, came the war. he had loved germany, and the force of his love kept him strangely free from illusions; he was not the stuff that "our modern elizabethans" are made of. the keen candour of spiritual innocence is in what he wrote while training at shorncliffe:-- 'for the joke of seeing an obviously just cause defeated, i hope germany will win. it would do the world good, and show that real faith is not that which says "we _must_ win for our cause is just," but that which says "our cause is just: therefore we can disregard defeat."'... 'england--i am sick of the sound of the word. in training to fight for england, i am training to fight for that deliberate hypocrisy, that terrible middle-class sloth of outlook and appalling "imaginative indolence" that has marked us out from generation to generation.... and yet we have the impudence to write down germany (who with all their bigotry are at least seekers) as "huns," because they are doing what every brave man ought to do and making experiments in morality. not that i approve of the experiment in this particular case. indeed i think that after the war all brave men will renounce their country and confess that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth. "for they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country." but all these convictions are useless for me to state since i have not had the courage of them. what a worm one is under the cart-wheels--big, clumsy, careless, lumbering cart-wheels--of public opinion. i might have been giving my mind to fight against sloth and stupidity: instead, i am giving my body (by a refinement of cowardice) to fight against the most enterprising nation in the world.' the wise arm-chair patriots will shake their heads; but there is more wisdom of spirit in these words than in all the newspaper leaders written throughout the war. sorley was fighting for more than he said; he was fighting for his wiltshire downs as well. but he fought in complete and utter detachment. he died too soon (in october, ), to suffer the cumulative torment of those who lasted into the long agony of . there is little bitterness in his letters; they have to the last always the crystal clarity of the vision of the unbroken. his intellectual evolution went on to the end. no wonder that he found rupert brooke's sonnets overpraised:-- 'he is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice.... it was not that "they" gave up anything of that list he gives in one sonnet: but that the essence of these things had been endangered by circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to recapture them. he has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental attitude.' remember that a boy of nineteen is writing, and think how keen is this criticism of brooke's war sonnets; the seeker condemns without pity one who has given up the search. 'there is no such thing as a just war,' writes this boy. 'what we are doing is casting out satan by satan.' from this position sorley never flinched. never for a moment was he renegade to his generation by taking 'the sentimental attitude.' neither had he in him an atom of the narrowness of the straiter sect. though space forbids, we will follow out his progress to the last. we do not receive many such gifts as this book; the authentic voice of those lost legions is seldom heard. we can afford, surely, to listen to it to the end. in november, , sorley turns back to the hardy of the poems. after rejecting 'the actual "satires of circumstance"' as bad poetry, and passing an incisive criticism on 'men who march away,' he continues:-- 'i cannot help thinking that hardy is the greatest artist of the english character since shakespeare; and much of _the dynasts_ (except its historical fidelity) might be shakespeare. but i value his lyrics as presenting himself (the self he does not obtrude into the comprehensiveness of his novels and _the dynasts_) as truly, and with faults as well as strength visible in it, as any character in his novels. his lyrics have not the spontaneity of shakespeare's or shelley's; they are rough-hewn and jagged: but i like them and they stick.' a little later, having finished _the egoist_,-- 'i see now that meredith belongs to that class of novelists with whom i do not usually get on so well (_e.g._ dickens), who create and people worlds of their own so that one approaches the characters with amusement, admiration, or contempt, not with liking or pity, as with hardy's people, into whom the author does not inject his own exaggerated characteristics.' the great russians were unknown to sorley when he died. what would he not have found in those mighty seekers, with whom hardy alone stands equal? but whatever might have been his vicissitudes in that strange company, we feel that hardy could never have been dethroned in his heart, for other reasons than that the love of the wessex hills had crept into his blood. he was killed on october , , shot in the head by a sniper as he led his company at the 'hair-pin' trench near hulluch. [january, . _the cry in the wilderness_ we have in mr irving babbitt's _rousseau and romanticism_ to deal with a closely argued and copiously documented indictment of the modern mind. we gather that this book is but the latest of several books in which the author has gradually developed his theme, and we regret exceedingly that the preceding volumes have not fallen into our hands, because whatever may be our final attitude towards the author's conclusions, we cannot but regard _rousseau and romanticism_ as masterly. its style is, we admit, at times rather harsh and crabbed, but the critical thought which animates it is of a kind so rare that we are almost impelled to declare that it is the only book of modern criticism which can be compared for clarity and depth of thought with mr santayana's _three philosophical poets_. by endeavouring to explain the justice of that verdict we shall more easily give an indication of the nature and scope of professor babbitt's achievement. we think that it would be easy to show that in the last generation--we will go no further back for the moment, though our author's arraignment reaches at least a century earlier--criticism has imperceptibly given way to a different activity which we may call appreciation. the emphasis has been laid upon the uniqueness of the individual, and the unconscious or avowed aim of the modern 'critic' has been to persuade us to understand, to sympathise with and in the last resort to enter into the whole psychological process which culminated in the artistic creation of the author examined. and there modern criticism has stopped. there has been no indication that it was aware of the necessity of going further. many influences went to shape the general conviction that mere presentation was the final function of criticism, but perhaps the chief of these was the curious contagion of a scientific terminology. the word 'objectivity' had a great vogue; it was felt that the spiritual world was analogous to the physical; the critic was faced, like the man of science, with a mass of hard, irreducible facts, and his function was, like the scientist's, that of recording them as compendiously as possible and without prejudice. the unconscious programme was, indeed, impossible of fulfilment. all facts may be of equal interest to the scientist, but they are not to the literary critic. he chose those which interested him most for the exercise of his talent for demonstration. but that choice was, as a general rule, the only specifically critical act which he performed, and, since it was usually unmotived, it was difficult to attach even to that more than a 'scientific' importance. reasoned judgments of value were rigorously eschewed, and even though we may presume that the modern critic is at times vexed by the problem why (or whether) one work of art is better than another, when each seems perfectly expressive of the artist's intention, the preoccupation is seldom betrayed in the language of his appreciation. tacitly and insensibly we have reached a point at which all works of art are equally good if they are equally expressive. what every artist seeks to express is his own unique consciousness. as between things unique there is no possibility of subordination or comparison. that does not seem to us an unduly severe diagnosis of modern criticism, although it needs perhaps to be balanced by an acknowledgment that the impulse towards the penetration of an artist's consciousness is in itself salutary, as a valuable adjunct to the methods of criticism, provided that it is definitely subordinated to the final critical judgment, before which uniqueness is an impossible plea. such a diagnosis will no doubt be welcomed by those who belong to an older generation than that to which it is applied. but they should not rejoice prematurely. we require of them an answer to the question whether they were really in better case--whether they were not the fathers whose sins are visited upon the children. professor babbitt, at least, has no doubt of their responsibility. from his angle of approach we might rake their ranks with a cross-fire of questions such as these: when you invoked the sanction of criticism were you more than merely destructive? when you riddled religion with your scientific objections, did you not forget that religion is something more, far more than a nexus of historical facts or a cosmogony? when you questioned everything in the name of truth and science, why did you not dream of asking whether those creations of men's minds were _capax imperii_ in man's universe? what right had you to suppose that a man disarmed of tradition is stronger for his nakedness? why did you not examine in the name of that same truth and science the moral nature of man, and see whether it was fit to bear the burden of intolerable knowledge which you put upon it? why did you, the truth-seekers and the scientists, indulge yourselves in the most romantic dream of a natural man who followed instinctively the greatest good of the greatest number, which you yourselves never for one moment pursued? what hypocrisy or self-deception enabled you to clothe your statements of fact in a moral aura, and to blind yourselves and the world to the truth that you were killing a domesticated dragon who guarded the cave of a devouring hydra, whom you benevolently loosed? why did you not see that the end of all your devotion was to shift man's responsibility for himself from his shoulders? do you, because you clothed yourselves in the shreds of a moral respectability which you had not the time (or was it the courage?) to analyse, dare to denounce us because our teeth are set on edge by the sour grapes which you enjoyed? but this indictment, it may be said by a modern critic, deals with morals, and we are discussing art and criticism. that the objection is conceivable is precisely the measure of our decadence. for the vital centre of our ethics is also the vital centre of our art. moral nihilism inevitably involves an æsthetic nihilism, which can be obscured only temporarily by an insistence upon technical perfection as in itself a supreme good. neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is an adequate statement of the possibilities and purpose of art, but there is no doubt that the religion of art is by far the more vacuous of the two. the values of literature, the standards by which it must be criticised, and the scheme according to which it must be arranged, are in the last resort moral. the sense that they should be more moral than morality affords no excuse for accepting them when they are less so. literature should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous liberty prevails--where the artist may dispense if he will with the ethics of the society in which he lives, but only on condition of revealing a deeper insight into the moral law to whose allegiance man, in so far as he is man and not a beast, inevitably tends. never, we suppose, was an age in which art stood in greater need of the true law of decorum than this. its philosophy has played it false. it has passed from the nebulous hegelian adulation of the accomplished fact (though one would have thought that to a generation with even a vague memory of aristotle's _poetics_, the mere title, _the philosophy of history_ would have been an evident danger signal) to an adulation of science and of instinct. from one side comes the cry, 'man _is_ a beast'; from the other, 'trust your instincts.' the sole manifest employment of reason is to overthrow itself. yet it should be, in conjunction with the imagination, the vital principle of control. professor babbitt would have us back to aristotle, or back to our senses, which is roughly the same thing. at all events, it is certain that in aristotle the present generation would find the beginnings of a remedy for that fatal confusion of categories which has overcome the world. it is the confusion between existence and value. that strange malady of the mind by which in the nineteenth century material progress was supposed to create, _ipso facto_, a concomitant moral progress, and which so plunged the world into catastrophe, has its counterpart in a literature of objective realism. one of the most admired of contemporary works of fiction opens with an infant's memory of a mackintosh sheet, pleasantly warmed with its own water; another, of almost equal popularity among the cultivated, abounds with such reminiscences of the heroine as the paste of bread with which she filled her decaying teeth while she ate her breakfast. yet the young writers who abuse their talents so unspeakably have right on their side when they refuse to listen to the condemnation pronounced by an older generation. what right, indeed, have these to condemn the logical outcome of an anarchic individualism which they themselves so jealously cherished? they may not like the bastard progeny of the various mistresses they adored--of a science which they enthroned above instead of subordinating to humanistic values, of a brutal imperialism which the so-called conservatives among them set up in place of the truly humane devotion of which man is capable, of the sickening humanitarianism which appears in retrospect to have been merely an excuse for absolute indolence--but they certainly have forfeited the right to censure it. let those who are so eager to cast the first stone at the æsthetic and moral anarchy of the present day consider professor babbitt's indictment of themselves and decide whether they have no sin:-- '"if i am to judge by myself," said an eighteenth-century frenchman, "man is a stupid animal." man is not only a stupid animal, in spite of his conceit of his own cleverness, but we are here at the source of his stupidity. the source is the moral indolence that buddha, with his almost infallible sagacity, defined long ago. in spite of the fact that his spiritual and, in the long run, his material success, hinge on his ethical effort, man persists in dodging this effort, in seeking to follow the line of least or lesser resistance. an energetic material working does not mend, but aggravate the failure to work ethically, and is therefore especially stupid. just this combination has in fact led to the crowning stupidity of the ages--the great war. no more delirious spectacle has ever been witnessed than that of hundreds of millions of human beings using a vast machinery of scientific efficiency to turn life into a hell for one another. it is hard to avoid concluding that we are living in a world which has gone wrong on first principles, a world that, in spite of all the warnings of the past, has allowed itself to be caught once more in the terrible naturalistic trap. the dissolution of civilisation with which we are threatened is likely to be worse in some respects than that of greece or rome, in view of the success that has been obtained in 'perfecting the mystery of murder.' various traditional agencies are indeed still doing much to chain up the beast in man. of these the chief is no doubt the church. but the leadership of the occident is no longer here. the leaders have succumbed in greater or less degree to naturalism, and so have been tampering with the moral law. that the brutal imperialist who brooks no obstacle to his lust for domination has been tampering with this law goes without saying, but the humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own soul, has been tampering with it also, and in a more dangerous way, for the very reason that it is less obvious. this tampering with the moral law, or, what amounts to the same thing, this overriding of the veto power in man, has been largely a result, though not a necessary result, of the rupture with the traditional forms of wisdom. the baconian naturalist repudiated the past because he wished to be more positive and critical, to plant himself on the facts. but the veto power is itself a fact--the weightiest with which man has to reckon. the rousseauistic naturalist threw off traditional control because he wished to be more imaginative. yet without the veto power imagination falls into sheer anarchy. both baconian and rousseauist were very impatient of any outer authority that seemed to stand between them and their own perceptions. yet the veto power is nothing abstract, nothing that one needs to take on hearsay, but is very immediate. the naturalistic leaders may be proved wrong without going beyond their own principles, and their wrongness is of a kind to wreck civilisation.' we find it impossible to refuse our assent to the main counts of this indictment. the deanthropocentrised universe of science is not the universe in which man has to live. that universe is at once smaller and larger than the universe of science: smaller in material extent, larger in spiritual possibility. therefore to allow the perspective of science seriously to influence, much less control, our human values, is an invitation to disaster. humanism must reassert itself, for even we can see that shakespeares are better than hamlets. the reassertion of humanism involves the re-creation of a practical ideal of human life and conduct, and a strict subordination of the impulses of the individual to this ideal. there must now be a period of critical and humanistic positivism in regard to ethics and to art. we may say frankly that it is not to our elders that we think of applying for its rudiments. we regard them as no less misguided and a good deal less honest than ourselves, it is among our anarchists that we shall look most hopefully for our new traditionalists, if only because, in literature at least, they are more keenly aware of the nature of the abyss on the brink of which they are trembling. [february, . _poetry and criticism_ nowadays we are all vexed by this question of poetry, and in ways peculiar to ourselves. fifty years ago the dispute was whether browning was a greater poet than tennyson or swinburne; to-day it is apparently more fundamental, and perhaps substantially more threadbare. we are in a curious half-conscious way incessantly debating what poetry is, impelled by a sense that, although we have been living at a time of extraordinarily prolific poetic production, not very much good has come out of it. having thus passed the stage at which the theory that poetry is an end in itself will suffice us, we vaguely cast about in our minds for some fuller justification of the poetic activity. a presentiment that our poetic values are chaotic is widespread; we are uncomfortable with it, and there is, we believe, a genuine desire that a standard should be once more created and applied. what shall we require of poetry? delight, music, subtlety of thought, a world of the heart's desire, fidelity to comprehensible experience, a glimpse through magic casements, profound wisdom? all these things--all different, yet not all contradictory--have been required of poetry. what shall we require of her? the answer comes, it seems, as quick and as vague as the question. we require the highest. all that can be demanded of any spiritual activity of man we must demand of poetry. it must be adequate to all our experience; it must be not a diversion from, but a culmination of life; it must be working steadily towards a more complete universality. suddenly we may turn upon ourselves and ask what right we have to demand these things of poetry; or others will turn upon us and say: 'this is a lyrical age.' to ourselves and to the others we are bound to reply that poetry must be maintained in the proud position where it has always been, the sovereign language of the human spirit, the sublimation of all experience. in the past there has never been a lyrical age, though there have been ages of minor poetry, when poetry was no longer deliberately made the vehicle of man's profoundest thought and most searching experience. nor was it the ages of minor poetry which produced great lyrical poetry. great lyrical poetry has always been an incidental achievement, a parergon, of great poets, and great poets have always been those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel of the highest argument of which the soul of man is capable. yet a poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great prose, and not merely the prose which can most easily be assimilated to the condition of poetry, such as plato's _republic_ or milton's _areopagitica_, but the prose of the great novelists. surely the colloquial prose of tchehov's _cherry orchard_ has as good a claim to be called poetry as _the essay on man_, _tess of the d'urbervilles_ as _the ring and the book_, _the possessed_ as _phèdre_? where are we to call a halt in the inevitable process by which the kinds of literary art merge into one? if we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in danger of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening upon what will prove to be in the last analysis a merely formal difference. the difference we seek must be substantial and essential. the very striking merit of sir henry newbolt's _new study of english poetry_ is that he faces the ultimate problem of poetry with courage, sincerity, and an obvious and passionate devotion to the highest spiritual activity of man. it has seldom been our good fortune to read a book of criticism in which we were so impressed by what we can only call a purity of intention; we feel throughout that the author's aim is single, to set before us the results of his own sincere thinking on a matter of infinite moment. perhaps better, because subtler, books of literary criticism have appeared in england during the last ten years--if so, we have not read them; but there has been none more truly tolerant, more evidently free from malice, more certainly the product of a soul in which no lie remains. whether it is that sir henry has like plato's cephalus lived his literary life blamelessly, we do not know, but certainly he produces upon us an effect akin to that of cephalus's peaceful smile when he went on his way to sacrifice duly to the gods and left the younger men to the intricacies of their infinite debate. now it seems to us of importance that a writer like sir henry newbolt should declare roundly that creative poetry and creative prose belong to the same kind. it is important not because there is anything very novel in the contention, but because it is opportune; and it is opportune because at the present moment we need to have emphasis laid on the vital element that is common both to creative poetry and creative prose. the general mind loves confusion, blest mother of haze and happiness; it loves to be able to conclude that this is an age of poetry from the fact that the books of words cut up into lines or sprinkled with rhymes are legion. an age of fiddlesticks! whatever the present age is--and it is an age of many interesting characteristics--it is not an age of poetry. it would indeed have a better chance of being one if fifty instead of five hundred books of verse were produced every month; and if all the impresarios were shouting that it was an age of prose. the differentia of verse is a merely trivial accident; what is essential in poetry, or literature if you will, is an act of intuitive comprehension. where you have the evidence of that act, the sovereign æsthetic process, there you have poetry. what remains for you, whether you are a critic or a poet or both together, is to settle for yourself a system of values by which those various acts of intuitive comprehension may be judged. it does not suffice at any time, much less does it suffice at the present day, to be content with the uniqueness of the pleasure which you derive from each single act of comprehension made vocal. that contentment is the comfortable privilege of the amateur and the dilettante. it is not sufficient to get a unique pleasure from mr de la mare's _arabia_ or mr davies's _lovely dames_ or miss katherine mansfield's _prelude_ or mr eliot's _portrait of a lady_, in each of which the vital act of intuitive comprehension is made manifest. one must establish a hierarchy, and decide which act of comprehension is the more truly comprehensive, which poem has the completer universality. one must be prepared not only to relate each poetic expression to the finest of its kind in the past, or to recognise a new kind if a new kind has been created, but to relate the kind to the finest kind. that, as it seems to us, is the specifically critical activity, and one which is in peril of death from desuetude. the other important type of criticism which is analysis of poetic method, an investigation and appreciation of the means by which the poet communicates his intuitive comprehension to an audience, is in a less perilous condition. where there are real poets--and only a bigot will deny that there are real poets among us now: we have just named four--there will always be true criticism of poetic method, though it may seldom find utterance in the printed word. but criticism of poetic method has, by hypothesis, no perspective and no horizons; it is concerned with a unique thing under the aspect, of its uniqueness. it may, and happily most often does, assume that poetry is the highest expression of the spiritual life of man; but it makes no endeavour to assess it according to the standards that are implicit in such an assumption. that is the function of philosophical criticism. if philosophical criticism can be combined with criticism of method--and there is no reason why they should not coexist in a single person; the only two english critics of the nineteenth century, coleridge and arnold, were of this kind--so much the better; but it is philosophical criticism of which we stand in desperate need at this moment. a good friend of ours, who happens to be one of the few real poets we possess, once wittily summed up a general objection to criticism of the kind we advocate as 'always asking people to do what they can't.' but to point out, as the philosophical critic would, that poetry itself must inevitably languish if the more comprehensive kinds are neglected, or if a non-poetic age is allowed complacently to call itself lyrical, is not to urge the real masters in the less comprehensive kinds to desert their work. who but a fool would ask mr de la mare to write an epic or miss mansfield to give us a novel? but he might be a wise man who called upon mr eliot to set himself to the composition of a poetic drama; and without a doubt he would deserve well of the commonwealth who should summon the popular imitators of mr de la mare, mr davies, or mr eliot to begin by trying to express something that they did comprehend or desired to comprehend, even though it should take them into thousands of unprintable pages. it is infinitely preferable that those who have so far given evidence of nothing better than a fatal fluency in insipid imitation of true lyric poets should fall down a precipice in the attempt to scale the very pinnacles of parnassus. there is something heroic about the most unmitigated disaster at such an altitude. moreover, the most marked characteristic of the present age is a continual disintegration of the consciousness; more or less deliberately in every province of man's spiritual life the reins are being thrown on to the horse's neck. the power which controls and disciplines sensational experience is, in modern literature, daily denied; the counterpart of this power which envisages the ideal in the conduct of one's own or the nation's affairs and unfalteringly pursues it is held up to ridicule. opportunism in politics has its complement in opportunism in poetry. mr lloyd george's moods are reflected in mr ----'s. and, beneath these heights, we have the queer spectacle of a whole race of very young poets who somehow expect to attain poetic intensity by the physical intensity with which they look at any disagreeable object that happens to come under their eye. perhaps they will find some satisfaction in being reckoned among the curiosities of literature a hundred years hence; it is certainly the only satisfaction they will have. they, at any rate, have a great deal to gain from the acid of philosophical criticism. if a reaction to life has in itself the seeds of an intuitive comprehension it will stand explication. if a young poet's nausea at the sight of a toothbrush is significant of anything at all except bad upbringing, then it is capable of being refined into a vision of life and of being expressed by means of the appropriate mechanism or myth. but to register the mere facts of consciousness, undigested by the being, without assessment or reinforcement by the mind is, for all the connection it has with poetry, no better than to copy down the numbers of one's bus-tickets. we do not wish to suggest that sir henry newbolt would regard this lengthy gloss upon his book as legitimate deduction. he, we think, is a good deal more tolerant than we are; and he would probably hesitate to work out the consequences of the principles which he enunciates and apply them vigorously to the present time. but as a vindication of the supreme place of poetry as poetry in human life, as a stimulus to critical thought and a guide to exquisite appreciation of which his essay on chaucer is an honourable example--_a new study of english poetry_ deserves all the praise that lies in our power to give. [march, . _coleridge's criticism_ it is probably true that _biographia literaria_ is the best book of criticism in the english language; nevertheless, it is rash to assume that it is a book of criticism of the highest excellence, even when it has passed through the salutary process of drastic editing, such as that to which, in the present case,[ ] the competent hands of mr george sampson have submitted it. its garrulity, its digressions, its verbiage, the marks which even the finest portions show of submersion in the tepid transcendentalism that wrought such havoc upon coleridge's mind--these are its familiar disfigurements. they are not easily removed; for they enter fairly deeply even in the texture of those portions of the book in which coleridge devotes himself, as severely as he can, to the proper business of literary criticism. [footnote : _coleridge: biographia literaria_, chapters i.-iv., xiv.-xxii.--_wordsworth: prefaces and essays on poetry_, - . edited by george sampson, with an introductory essay by sir arthur quiller-couch. (cambridge university press.)] it may be that the prolixity with which he discusses and refutes the poetical principles expounded by wordsworth in the preface of _lyrical ballads_ was due to the tenderness of his consideration for wordsworth's feelings, an influence to which sir arthur quiller-couch directs our attention in his introduction. that is honourable to coleridge as a man; but it cannot exculpate him as a critic. for the points he had to make for and against wordsworth were few and simple. first, he had to show that the theory of a poetic diction drawn exclusively from the language of 'real life' was based upon an equivocation, and therefore was useless. this coleridge had to show to clear himself of the common condemnation in which he had been involved, as one wrongly assumed to endorse wordsworth's theory. he had an equally important point to make for wordsworth. he wished to prove to him that the finest part of his poetic achievement was based upon a complete neglect of this theory, and that the weakest portions of his work were those in which he most closely followed it. in this demonstration he was moved by the desire to set his friend on the road that would lead to the most triumphant exercise of his own powers. there is no doubt that coleridge made both his points; but he made them, in particular the former, at exceeding length, and at the cost of a good deal of internal contradiction. he sets out, in the former case, to maintain that the language of poetry is essentially different from the language of prose. this he professes to deduce from a number of principles. his axiom--and it is possibly a sound one--is that metre originated in a spontaneous effort of the mind to hold in check the workings of emotion. from this, he argues, it follows that to justify the existence of metre, the language of a poem must show evidence of emotion, by being different from the language of prose. further, he says, metre in itself stimulates the emotions, and for this condition of emotional excitement 'correspondent food' must be provided. thirdly, the emotion of poetical composition itself demands this same 'correspondent food.' the final argument, if we omit one drawn from an obscure theory of imitation very characteristic of coleridge, is the incontrovertible appeal to the authority of the poets. unfortunately, the elaborate exposition of the first three arguments is not only unnecessary but confusing, for coleridge goes on to distinguish, interestingly enough, between a language proper to poetry, a language proper to prose, and a neutral language which may be used indifferently in prose and poetry, and later still he quotes a beautiful passage from chaucer's _troilus and cressida_ as an example of this neutral language, forgetting that, if his principles are correct, chaucer was guilty of a sin against art in writing _troilus and cressida_ in metre. the truth, of course, is that the paraphernalia of principles goes by the board. in order to refute the wordsworthian theory of a language of real life supremely fitted for poetry you have only to point to the great poets, and to judge the fitness of the language of poetry you can only examine the particular poem. wordsworth was wrong and self-contradictory without doubt; but coleridge was equally wrong and self-contradictory in arguing that metre _necessitated_ a language essentially different from that of prose. so it is that the philosophic part of the specifically literary criticism of the _biographia_ takes us nowhere in particular. the valuable part is contained in his critical appreciation of wordsworth's poetry and that amazing chapter--a little forlorn, as most of coleridge's fine chapters are--on 'the specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis of shakespeare's _venus and adonis_. in these few pages coleridge is at the summit of his powers as a critic. so long as his attention could be fixed on a particular object, so long as he was engaged in deducing his general principles immediately from particular instances of the highest kind of poetic excellence, he was a critic indeed. every one of the four points characteristic of early poetic genius which he formulates deserves to be called back to the mind again and again:-- 'the delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently original and not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, i regard as a highly favourable promise in the compositions of a young man.... 'a second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. at least i have found, that where the subject is taken immediately from the author's personal sensations and experiences the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetical power.... 'images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterise the poet. they become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit.... 'the last character ... which would prove indeed but little, except as taken conjointly with the former--yet without which the former could scarce exist in a high degree ... is _depth_ and _energy_ of _thought_. no man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher. for poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.' in the context the most striking peculiarity of this enunciation of the distinguishing marks of poetic power, apart from the conviction which it brings, is that they are not in the least concerned with the actual language of poetry. the whole subject of poetic diction is dropped when coleridge's critical, as opposed to his logical, faculty is at work; and, although this chapter xv is followed by many pages devoted to the analysis and refutation of the wordsworthian theory and to the establishment of those principles of poetic diction to which we have referred, when coleridge comes once more to engage his pure critical faculty, in the appreciation of wordsworth's actual poetry in chapter xxii, we again find him ignoring his own principles precisely on those occasions when we might have thought them applicable. coleridge enumerates wordsworth's defects one by one. the first, he says, is an inconstancy of style. for a moment he appears to invoke his principles: 'wordsworth sinks too often and too abruptly to that style which i should place in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species; _first_, that which is peculiar to poetry; _second_, that which is proper only in prose; and _third_, the neutral or common to both.' but in the very first instance which coleridge gives we can see that the principles have been dragged in by the hair, and that they are really alien to the argument which he is pursuing. he gives this example of disharmony from the poem on 'the blind highland boy' (whose washing-tub in the edition, it is perhaps worth noting, had been changed at coleridge's own suggestion, with a rash contempt of probabilities, into a turtle shell in the edition of ):-- 'and one, the rarest, was a shell which he, poor child, had studied well: the shell of a green turtle, thin and hollow;--you might sit therein, it was so wide, and deep. 'our highland boy oft visited the house which held this prize; and led by choice or chance, did thither come one day, when no one was at home, and found the door unbarred.' the discord is, in any case, none too apparent; but if one exists, it does not in the least arise from the actual language which wordsworth has used. if in anything, it consists in a slight shifting of the focus of apprehension, a sudden and scarcely perceptible emphasis on the detail of actual fact, which is a deviation from the emotional key of the poem as a whole. in the next instance the lapse is, however, indubitable:-- 'thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest. and though little troubled with sloth, drunken lark! thou would'st be loth to be such a traveller as i. happy, happy liver! _with a soul as strong as a mountain river pouring out praise to th' almighty giver_, joy and jollity be with us both, hearing thee or else some other as merry as a brother i on the earth will go plodding on, by myself, cheerfully, till the day is done.' the two lines in italics are discordant. but again it is no question of language in itself; it is an internal discrepancy between the parts of a whole already debilitated by metrical insecurity. coleridge's second point against wordsworth is 'a _matter-of-factness_ in certain poems.' once more there is no question of language. coleridge takes the issue on to the highest and most secure ground. wordsworth's obsession with realistic detail is a contravention of the essential catholicity of poetry; and this accidentality is manifested in laboriously exact description both of places and persons. the poet sterilises the creative activity of poetry, in the first case, for no reason at all, and in the second, because he proposes as his immediate object a moral end instead of the giving of æsthetic pleasure. his prophets and wise men are pedlars and tramps not because it is probable that they should be of this condition--it is on the contrary highly improbable--but because we are thus to be taught a salutary moral lesson. the question of language in itself, if it enters at all here, enters only as the indifferent means by which a non-poetic end is sought. the accidentality lies not in the words, but in the poet's intention. coleridge's third and fourth points, 'an undue predilection for the dramatic form,' and 'an eddying instead of a progression of thought,' may be passed as quickly as he passes them himself, for in any case they could only be the cause of a jejuneness of language. the fifth, more interesting, is the appearance of 'thoughts and images too great for the subject ... an approximation to what might be called _mental_ bombast.' coleridge brings forward as his first instance of this four lines which have taken a deep hold on the affections of later generations:-- 'they flash upon the inward eye which is the bliss of solitude! and then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.' coleridge found an almost burlesque bathos in the second couplet after the first. it would be difficult for a modern critic to accept that verdict altogether; nevertheless his objection to the first couplet as a description of physical vision is surely sound. and it is interesting to note that the objection has been evaded by posterity in a manner which confirms coleridge's criticism. the 'inward eye' is almost universally remembered apart from its context, and interpreted as a description of the purely spiritual process to which alone, in coleridge's opinion, it was truly apt. the enumeration of wordsworth's excellences which follows is masterly; and the exhilaration with which one rises through the crescendo to the famous: 'last and pre-eminently, i challenge for this poet the gift of _imagination_ in the highest and strictest sense of the word ...' is itself a pleasure to be derived only from the gift of criticism of the highest and strictest kind. the object of this examination has been to show, not that the _biographia literaria_ is undeserving of the high praise which has been bestowed upon it, but that the praise has been to some extent undiscriminating. it has now become almost a tradition to hold up to our admiration coleridge's chapter on poetic diction, and sir arthur quiller-couch, in a preface that is as unconventional in manner as it is stimulating in most of its substance, maintains the tradition. as a matter of fact, what coleridge has to say on poetic diction is prolix and perilously near commonplace. instead of making to wordsworth the wholly sufficient answer that much poetry of the highest kind employs a language that by no perversion can be called essentially the same as the language of prose, he allows himself to be led by his german metaphysic into considering poetry as a _ding an sich_ and deducing therefrom the proposition that poetry _must_ employ a language different from that of prose. that proposition is false, as coleridge himself quite adequately shows from his remarks upon what he called the 'neutral' language of chaucer and herbert. but instead of following up the clue and beginning to inquire whether or not narrative poetry by nature demands a language approximating to that of prose, and whether wordsworth, in so far as he aimed at being a narrative poet, was not working on a correct but exaggerated principle, he leaves the bald contradiction and swerves off to the analysis of the defects and excellences of wordsworth's actual achievement. precisely because we consider it of the greatest importance that the best of coleridge's criticism should be studied and studied again, we think it unfortunate that sir arthur quiller-couch should recommend the apprentice to get the chapters on poetic diction by heart. he will be condemned to carry about with him a good deal of dubious logic and a false conclusion. what is worth while learning from coleridge is something different; it is not his behaviour with 'a principle,' but his conduct when confronted with poetry in the concrete, his magisterial ordonnance (to use his own word) and explication of his own æsthetic intuitions, and his manner of employing in this, the essential task of poetic criticism, the results of his own deep study of all the great poetry that he knew. [april, . _shakespeare criticism_ it is an exciting, though exhausting, experience to read a volume of the great modern variorum shakespeare from cover to cover. one derives from the exercise a sense of the evolution of shakespeare criticism which cannot be otherwise obtained; one begins to understand that pope had his merits as an editor, as indeed a man of genius could hardly fail to have, to appreciate the prosy and pedestrian pains of theobald, to admire the amazing erudition of steevens. one sees the phases of the curious process by which shakespeare was elevated at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a sphere wherein no mortal man of genius could breathe. for a dizzy moment every line that he wrote bore the authentic impress of the divine. _efflavit deus_. in a century, from being largely beneath criticism shakespeare had passed to a condition where he was almost completely beyond it. _king john_ affords an amusing instance of this reverential attitude. the play, as is generally known, was based upon a slightly earlier and utterly un-shakespearean production entitled _the troublesome raigne of king john_. the only character shakespeare added to those he found ready to his hand was that of james gurney, who enters with lady falconbridge after the scene between the bastard and his brother, says four words, and departs for ever. '_bast_.--james gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile? _gur_.--good leave, good philip. _bast_.--philip! sparrow! james.' it is obvious that shakespeare's sole motive in introducing gurney is to provide an occasion for the bastard's characteristic, though not to a modern mind quite obvious, jest, based on the fact that philip was at the time a common name for a sparrow. the bastard, just dubbed sir richard plantagenet by the king, makes a thoroughly natural jibe at his former name, philip, to which he had just shown such breezy indifference. the jest could not have been made to lady falconbridge without a direct insult to her, which would have been alien to the natural, blunt, and easygoing fondness of the relation which shakespeare establishes between the bastard and his mother. so gurney is quite casually brought in to receive it. but this is not enough for the shakespeare-drunken coleridge. 'for an instance of shakespeare's power _in minimis_, i generally quote james gurney's character in _king john_. how individual and comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life!' assuredly it is not with any intention of diminishing coleridge's title as a shakespearean critic that we bring forward this instance. he is the greatest critic of shakespeare; and the quality of his excellence is displayed in one of the other few notes he left on this particular play. in act iii, scene ii., warburton's emendation of 'airy' to 'fiery' had in coleridge's day been received into the text of the bastard's lines:-- 'now by my life, this day grows wondrous hot; some airy devil hovers in the sky.' on which coleridge writes:-- 'i prefer the old text: the word 'devil' implies 'fiery.' you need only to read the line, laying a full and strong emphasis on 'devil,' to perceive the uselessness and tastelessness of warburton's alteration.' the test is absolutely convincing--a poet's criticism of poetry. but that coleridge went astray not once but many times, under the influence of his idolatry of shakespeare, corroborates the general conclusion that is forced upon any one who will take the trouble to read a whole volume of the modern _variorum_. there has been much editing, much comment, but singularly little criticism of shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack. the pendulum has swung violently from niggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing exercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a typical example in the opening sentence of mr masefield's remarks upon the play: 'like the best shakespearean tragedies, _king john_ is an intellectual form in which a number of people with obsessions illustrate the idea of treachery.' we remember that mr masefield has much better than this to say of shakespeare in his little book; but we fasten upon this sentence because it is set before us in the _variorum_, and because it too 'is an intellectual form in which a literary man with obsessions illustrates his idea of criticism.' genetically, it is a continuation of the shoddy element in coleridge's shakespeare criticism, a continual bias towards transcendental interpretation of the obvious. to take the origin a phase further back, it is the portentous offspring of the feeble constituent of german philosophy (a refusal to see the object) after it had been submitted to an idle process of ferment in the softer part of coleridge's brain. _king john_ is not in the least what mr masefield, under this dangerous influence, has persuaded himself it is. it is simply the effort of a young man of great genius to rewrite a bad play into a good one. the effort was, on the whole, amazingly successful; that the play is only a good one, instead of a very good one, is not surprising. the miracle is that anything should have been made of _the troublesome raigne_ at all. the _variorum_ extracts show that, of the many commentators who studied the old play with shakespeare's version, only swinburne saw, or had the courage to say, how utterly null the old play really is. to have made shakespeare's falconbridge out of the old lay figure, to have created the scenes between hubert and john, and hubert and arthur, out of that decrepit skeleton--that is the work of a commanding poetical genius on the threshold of full mastery of its powers, worthy of all wonder, no doubt, but doubly worthy of close examination. but 'ideas of treachery'! into what cloud cuckoo land have we been beguiled by coleridge's laudanum trances? a limbo--of this we are confident--where shakespeare never set foot at any moment in his life, and where no robust critical intelligence can endure for a moment. we must save ourselves from this insidious disintegration by keeping our eye upon the object, and the object is just a good (not a very good) play. not an ibsen, a hauptmann, a shaw, or a masefield play, where the influence and ravages of these 'ideas' are certainly perceptible, but merely a shakespeare play, one of those works of true poetic genius which can only be produced by a mind strong enough to resist every attempt at invasion by the 'idea'-bacillus. in considering a shakespeare play the word 'idea' had best be kept out of the argument altogether; but there are two senses in which it might be intelligibly used. you might call the dramatic skeleton shakespeare's idea of the play. it is the half-mechanical, half-organic factor in the work of poetic creation--the necessary means by which a poet can conveniently explicate and express his manifold æsthetic intuitions. this dramatic skeleton is governed by laws of its own, which were first and most brilliantly formulated by aristotle in terms that, in essentials, hold good for all time. you may investigate this skeleton, seize, if you can, upon the peculiarity by which it is differentiated from all other skeletons; you may say, for instance, that _othello_ is a tragedy of jealousy, or _hamlet_ of the inhibition of self-consciousness. but if your 'idea' is to have any substance it must be moulded very closely upon the particular object with which you are dealing; and in the end you will find yourself reduced to the analysis of individual characters. on the other hand, the word 'idea' might be intelligibly used of shakespeare's whole attitude to the material of his contemplation, the centre of comprehension from which he worked, the aspect under which he viewed the universe of his interest. there is no reason to rest content with coleridge's application of the epithet 'myriad-minded,' which is, at the best, an evasion of a vital question. the problem is to see shakespeare's mind _sub specie unitatis_. it can be done; there never has been and never will be a human mind which can resist such an inquiry if it is pursued with sufficient perseverance and understanding. what chiefly stands in the way is that tradition of shakespeariolatry which coleridge so powerfully inaugurated, not least by the epithet 'myriad-minded.' but of 'ideas' in any other senses than these--and in neither of these cases is 'idea' the best word for the object of search--let us beware as we would of the plague, in criticism of shakespeare or any other great poet. poets do not have 'ideas'; they have perceptions. they do not have an 'idea'; they have comprehension. their creation is æsthetic, and the working of their mind proceeds from the realisation of one æsthetic perception to that of another, more comprehensive if they are to be great poets having within them the principle of poetic growth. there is undoubtedly an organic process in the evolution of a great poet, which you may, for convenience of expression, call logical; but the moment you forget that the use of the word 'logic,' in this context, is metaphorical, you are in peril. you can follow out this 'logical process' in a poet only by a kindred creative process of æsthetic perception passing into æsthetic comprehension. the hunt for 'ideas' will only make that process impossible; it prevents the object from ever making its own impression upon the mind. it has to speak with the language of logic, whereas its use and function in the world is to speak with a language not of logic, but of a process of mind which is at least as sovereign in its own right as the discursive reason. let us away then with 'logic' and away with 'ideas' from the art of literary criticism; but not, in a foolish and impercipient reaction, to revive the impressionistic criticism which has sapped the english brain for a generation past. the art of criticism is rigorous; impressions are merely its raw material; the life-blood of its activity is in the process of ordonnance of æsthetic impressions. it is time, however, to return for a moment to shakespeare, and to observe in one crucial instance the effect of the quest for logic in a single line. in the fine scene where john hints to hubert at arthur's murder, he speaks these lines (in the first folio text):-- 'i had a thing to say, but let it goe: the sunne is in the heauen, and the proud day, attended with the pleasure of the world, is all too wanton, and too full of gawdes to giue me audience: if the midnight bell did with his yron tongue, and brazen mouth sound on into the drowzie race of night, if this same were a churchyard where we stand, and thou possessed with a thousand wrongs: ... then, in despight of brooded watchfull day, i would into thy bosome poure my thoughts....' if one had to choose the finest line in this passage, the choice would fall upon 'sound on into the drowsy race of night.' yet you will have to look hard for it in the modern editions of shakespeare. at the best you will find it with the mark of corruption:-- +'sound on into the drowsy race of night ('globe'); and you run quite a risk of finding 'sound one into the drowsy race of night' ('oxford'). there are six pages of close-printed comment upon the line in the _variorum_. the only reason, we can see, why it should be the most commented line in _king john_ is that it is one of the most beautiful. no one could stand it. of all the commentators, only one, miss porter, whom we name _honoris causa_, stands by the line with any conviction of its beauty. every other person either alters it or regrets his inability to alter it. 'how can a bell sound on into a race?' pipe the little editors. what is 'the race of night?' what _can_ it mean? how _could_ a race be drowsy? what an _awful_ contradiction in terms! and so while you and i, and all the other ordinary lovers of shakespeare are peacefully sleeping in our beds, they come along with their little chisels, and chop out the horribly illogical word and pop in a horribly logical one, and we (unless we can afford the _variorum_, which we can't) know nothing whatever about it. we have no redress. if we get out of our beds and creep upon them while they are asleep--they never are--and take out our little chisels and chop off their horribly stupid little heads, we shall be put in prison and mr justice darling will make a horribly stupid little joke about us. there is only one thing to do. we must make up our minds that we have to combine in our single person the scholar and the amateur; we cannot trust these gentlemen. and, indeed, they have been up to their little games elsewhere in _king john_. they do not like the reply of the citizens of angiers to the summons of the rival kings:-- 'a greater powre than we denies all this, and till it be undoubted, we do locke our former scruple in our strong-barr'd gates; kings of our feare, untill our feares resolu'd be by some certaine king, purg'd and depos'd.' admirable sense, excellent poetry. but no! we must not have it. instead we are given 'king'd of our fears' ('globe') or 'kings of ourselves' ('oxford'). bad sense, bad poetry. they do not like pandulph's speech to france:-- 'france, thou maist hold a serpent by the tongue, a cased lion by the mortall paw, a fasting tiger safer by the tooth than keep in peace that hand which thou dost hold.' 'cased,' caged, is too much for them. we must have 'chafed,' in spite of 'if thou would'st not entomb thyself alive and case thy reputation in thy tent.' again, the folio text of the meeting between the bastard and hubert in act v., when hubert fails to recognise the bastard's voice, runs thus:-- 'unkinde remembrance: thou and endles night, have done me shame: brave soldier, pardon me that any accent breaking from thy tongue should scape the true acquaintaince of mine eare.' this time 'endless' is not poetical enough for the editors. theobald's emendation 'eyeless' is received into the text. one has only to read the brief scene through to realise that hubert is wearied and obsessed by the night that will never end. he is overwrought by his knowledge of 'news fitting to the night, black, fearful, comfortless, and horrible,' and by his long wandering in search of the bastard:-- 'why, here i walk in the black brow of night to find you out.' yet the dramatically perfect 'endless' has had to make way for the dramatically stupid 'eyeless.' is it surprising that we do not trust these gentlemen? [april, proofreading team. our stage and its critics by "e.f.s." of "the westminster gazette" _ _ preface whilst reading the proof-sheets of these articles i have been oppressed by the thought that they give a gloomy idea about the state of our stage. yet i am naturally sanguine. indeed, no one taking a deep interest in our drama could have written for a score or so of years about it unless of a naturally sanguine temperament. there has been great progress during my time, yet we still are far from possessing a modern national drama creditable to us. some imagine that the british have no inborn genius for writing drama, or acting it, and look upon those dramatists and players whose greatness cannot be denied as mere exceptions to a rule. without alleging that at the moment we have a shakespeare, a garrick or a siddons, i assert confidently that we own dramatists and players able, if rightly used, to make our theatre worthy of our country and also that the misuse of them is appalling. for very many years the history of the english stage has been chiefly a record of waste, of gross commercialism and of honest efforts ruined by adherence to mischievous traditions: the scottish and irish stage have been mere reflections of our own. at the moment ireland is making a brave and remarkably successful effort at emancipation, and during the last few years has laid the foundations of a national theatre and built a good deal upon them. scotland lags a little, yet the energy and enthusiasm of mr alfred wareing and the citizens of glasgow have enabled them to create an institution not unlikely to serve as the home of a real scots drama. they offer to the native playwright an opportunity of showing that a national drama--not a drama merely echoing the drama of other lands--lies inherent in the race. who knows that they may not induce that wayward man of genius, j.m. barrie, to become the parent of scots drama by honestly and sincerely using his rare gifts as dramatist in an effort to express the pathos and the humour, the courage and the shyness, the shrewdness and the imagination, and also the less agreeable qualities and characteristics of our brothers across the border. and england? i have little first-hand knowledge of the provinces, but with such as i possess, and the aid of the _era annual_ and the _stage year book_, can state unhesitatingly that the position is very unsatisfactory. admirable, valuable work is being done bravely by miss horniman at manchester; mr f.r. benson and his company devotedly carry the banner of shakespeare through the land; but in the main the playhouses of the provinces and great cities of england offer little more than echoes of the london theatres, and such original works as are produced in them generally are mere experiments made on the dog before a piece is presented in london. in this respect, the suburbs resemble the provinces, although mr j.b. mulholland courageously makes efforts to give hammersmith something new and good. the coronet has seen some valuable ventures--perhaps notting hill is not a suburb--and at the moment is devoted to the production of real novelties. in the west end theatres of london the position at first sight seems desperate. during the last twenty years, in consequence of the intervention of middlemen, rents have risen per cent.; owing to the folly of managers the salaries of the company have increased to a similar extent; whilst the cost of scenery, costumes and the like also has grown enormously. indeed, it is probably an under-statement to allege that the money spent in running a theatre on the customary commercial lines is twice as great as it was in . yet the price of seats has not been raised. consequently theatre management has become a huge gamble, in which there are few prizes, and the amount of money lost annually is great. naturally, under such circumstances the principal, almost the only, aim of the ordinary manager is to please the masses. many concessions are made to the wishes of the crowd, and by way of excuse the phrase "the drama's laws the drama's patrons give" is quoted. it is painful to think that people can quote johnson's line without a feeling of scorn, yet it necessarily contains an awful amount of truth when theatres are managed under the present mad conditions. what art has ever made progress under laws dictated by the great half-washed? half-a-dozen of the west end theatres are devoted to musico-dramatic works which, whatever their merits in other respects, have none as drama, and certainly have done little for the development of english music. as a rule several houses are under the management of american managers and they, putting mr frohman aside, rarely prove anything but the sterility of america drama or their contempt for the taste of our playgoers who, however, as a rule prefer native to imported rubbish--hence grumbles in the united states about prejudice and unfair play. mr frohman, as part of his repertory scheme, and otherwise as well, has done something to help the modern english dramatist. putting shakespeare out of the question, for of course he has nothing to do with english modern drama, we have little in the ordinary london theatre that is not the natural result of bad traditions, and the only progress made is in the direction of increased dexterity in playwriting--unfortunately increased dexterity as a rule in handling old subjects according to the old traditions, which leave the stage curiously outside the world of literature and also of ordinary human life. on the other hand, thanks to the efforts of many enthusiasts working by means of societies and clubs, such as the independent theatre--the first of all--the century theatre, the (incorporated) stage society, the pioneers, the play actors and others, and the play-goers' club, the o.p. club and the gallery first nighters, and also thanks to the efforts of messrs vedrenne and barker, at the court theatre, real progress has been made in london towards the creation of an english modern theatre, and we now possess a valuable body of dramatists, some to a great extent, others altogether, neglected by the ordinary theatre. speaking of these dramatists collectively, it may fairly be said that their gifts are greater, their ambitions higher and their theories of drama sounder than those of their rivals who work for the ordinary theatre; and i should add that the ordinary theatre is far richer in dramatists of quality than it was twenty years ago. so we have the playwrights. also we have the plays. the publication in book form of the best native pieces presented by the enthusiasts of whom i have spoken, but not offered to the general public for a run, would satisfy any critic that the english modern drama exists although we are still waiting for the english modern theatre. moreover, we have the players. some, though not many, of the fashionable stars would serve, whilst there are numbers of really able actresses and actors who have proved their ability to represent modern comedy, but owing to the strange policy of managers are rarely employed by the ordinary theatre--in london. in several cases the policy may be sound, since the regular fare of the fashionable houses as a rule demands a showy, but insincere, style out of the range, or at least the demonstrated range, of the neglected players. does the public for such a theatre exist? i think so. the number of playgoers is very large, and although only a comparatively small proportion goes out of its way to patronise the non-commercial drama a very large proportion has grown weary of the ordinary drama--a fact shown by the recent failure of plays which not many years ago would have been successful. do the critics exist? they are an important element in the matter. the question is a delicate one for me to answer. certainly some of our dramatic critics are men of culture and courage, able to appreciate new ideas. the difficulty is more with the newspapers than their representatives. for a sad aspect of the present state of affairs lies in the fact that the desire to obtain tittle-tattle and gossip concerning the players often outweighs the desire to obtain sincere, intelligent criticism, and the result is obvious. there is ten times more "copy" published about the persons and personal affairs of the author of a play and of its players than concerning its merits and faults. however, after taking all the elements into account, it may confidently be asserted that within the lifetime of the present generation of playgoers radical changes will have taken place, and even if we may not possess tragedy of the highest quality we shall have a theatre of modern english drama--serious comedy and also light comedy and farce--really expressive of current life and thought and fine enough in style to render the most critical englishman proud of his country's drama. e.f.s. _october _ the thanks of the author are due to the proprietors and the editor of _the westminster gazette_ for kindly consenting to the republication of articles which have already appeared in that journal. contents page chapter i the dramatic critic his qualifications--his knowledge of fashionable society--his duties and difficulties--his stock phrases--the circumstances under which he writes--his fear of libel actions chapter ii the dramatic critic his duty to be tolerant--his sympathies when young--the jaded critic--his unpaid labours and his letter bag chapter iii the dramatic critic an attack upon him--why he is disliked--his honesty--his abolition--the threatened theatrical trust chapter iv plays of particular types the pseudo-historical--the horrible in drama--the immorality play--scripture plays--anecdotal plays--the supernatural chapter v plays of particular types unsentimental drama--the second-hand drama--plays with a purpose--drama and social reform chapter vi the phenomena of the stage the optics--make-up--gesture--scenery at the french plays--stage costumes--colour--stage meals chapter vii the morality of our drama mr harry lauder on the morals of our drama--double entente--moral effect on audience--an advantage of french dramatists chapter viii casual notes on acting mr h.b. irving on his art--mr bourchier and "max" on english acting--the sicilian players--alleged dearth of great actresses--character actresses--stage misfits--stars chapter ix stage dancing the skirts of the drama--isadora duncan chapter x things in the theatre a defence of the matinée hat--a justification of certain deadheads--theatrical advertisements--music chapter xi in the playhouse laughter--smoking in the auditorium--conduct of the audience--concerning the pit--why do we go to the theatre? chapter xii miscellaneous signor borsa on the english theatre--g.b.s. and the amateurs--cant about shakespeare--yvette guilbert on dramatists chapter xiii miscellaneous finance in plays--some unsuccessful dramatists--the ending of the play--preposterous stage types--the professions of the dramatis personae chapter i the dramatic critic his qualifications the production of a play in the russian tongue renders topical a phrase once used, not unhappily, by mr cecil raleigh concerning the qualifications of the dramatic critic. after listening to a somewhat extravagant speech about the duties of the critic, he said that the dramatic critic ought, apparently, to be a "polyglot archangel." during the last few years we have had plays in russian, japanese, bavarian _patois_, dutch, german, french and italian, to say nothing of east end performances in hebrew and yiddish, which we neglect. latin drama we hear at westminster; a greek company came to the court but did not act. a chinese has been promised, and a turkish drama threatened; danish has been given; there are awful hopes of gaelic and erse; and goodness knows why we have escaped echegaray, lope di vega and calderon in the original. a mezzofanti would be at a premium in the craft if knowledge of languages alone were sufficient; but one may know many tongues and possess no judgment. we have to accept great responsibilities. some people measure the greatness of the responsibilities by the amount of money involved in theatrical enterprises; it is hardly necessary to discuss seriously this point of view. nevertheless the fact remains that the voice of the critics has some effect upon the fortunes of ventures involving large sums of money and the employment of many people. it is rather curious to see how lightly as a rule the influence of the critics is regarded; for instance, from some remarks uttered by sir john hare it appears that he thinks they are not influential. here are his words taken from an interview published in a newspaper. _the interviewer_: "how is public taste formed? do newspaper criticisms affect it?" _mr hare_: "very little." this view is rarely pressed upon a jury by the plaintiff in a libel action, and it may be remarked that although, when a play is running well, some managers almost ignore us, as soon as business drops they become delightfully amiable and long for our presence. moreover, at considerable expense, they quote our opinions if favourable--even with judicious modifications when unfavourable. perhaps the matter of languages is not of very great importance, seeing that most of the critic's work concerns english drama, or drama in what is supposed to be english, which, too often, is quite a different thing. what, then, are the necessary qualifications of the critic who takes his work and himself seriously? he should have some knowledge of music--enough, at least, to know whether incidental or "melodrama" music is congruous with the time, place and occasion of the play, and to be able to identify well-known works. at a time when money is spent very lavishly upon scenery and costumes, he ought to possess some theories, or at least ideas, concerning pictorial art, the history of modern painting and the like, and be capable of guessing what a daring experimentalist like mr gordon craig is aiming at and what relation his scene-pictures bear to the current cant of the art critic. it is deplorable when one finds serious critics gushing about the beauty of costly stage effects belonging to the standard of taste exhibited by wedding-cakes, christmas crackers, old-fashioned valentines and royal academicians. dancing must mean something more to him than a whirling and twirling of human beings--he should at the least know the distinctive styles and figures of different countries, and not confuse an _entrechat_ with a _pirouette_, should be aware of the meaning of the terms _arabesque_ and _rond de jambe_, and understand to some extent the conventional language and history of grand ballet. no one will deny that his study of history must be substantial and, to put the matter compendiously, he must have a good general education, which, however, will not carry him very far, since he must own a special knowledge of the history of drama and of literature and modern literary movements. then comes the question of theories of criticism--can he do with less than, say, an acquaintance with aristotle, and lessing's "laocoon," or even with so little? with shakespeare and some of his commentators he ought to be at home; the "paradoxe sur le comédien" he can hardly escape, and the works of some of the modern english and latest french critics may not be overlooked. of course he must have read and considered a large number of plays, and the theories on which they are based. politics he may almost neglect unless there be successors to _john bull's other island_, though he will have to keep abreast of the facts and fancies of modern life, including, to some extent, political matters. how he is to study the customs, usage and manners of polite society among the upper ten thousand it is hard to say. not a few of us are weak on this point, and feel ill at ease when dealing with the _nuances_ of the customs of mayfair. the study of books on _savoir faire_ and the manners of polite society certainly will give very little assistance. lastly, in this catalogue, which is far from exhaustive, he must study the art of writing, so that he may at least be able to keep clear of the vulgar faults. no one expects him to show any absolute merit in style--space and circumstances of time and place are against him, and to accomplish the negative is quite a positive triumph. correct grammar, avoidance of hackneyed _clichés_, clearness of phrase, reasonably scholar-like use of words, abstinence from alliteration unless there be due cause, and escape from uncouthness of expression and monotony of sound are all he can hope to exhibit in the way of virtue. of course a little wit or humour does no harm, provided that no sacrifice of truth is made for the sake of it. of the moral qualities nothing need be said; he will be exposed to a few great temptations and many little ones: to some of the latter he is certain to yield. if and when he has acquired all this knowledge, it will be his duty almost to conceal it. it is to be employed as apparatus for the formation of judgments rather than the embellishment of them, though, of course, it may be used reticently by way of illustration, explanation and the like. yet it may be useful and not illegitimate for him sometimes to try to convince the reader that his criticism is from the pen of one who knows more about the subject than lies within the range of the man in the street. the critic is not superior to the amateur judge by reason of a greater natural aptitude for judging, but because he has a larger stock of knowledge on which to base his judgments, possesses a wider basis for comparison--the foundation of all opinion--and has trained his natural aptitudes; consequently, whilst his criticism necessarily, like that of the man in the street, is relative, not absolute, is after all merely an _ipse dixit_, it is the personal view of the better-trained person. the pessimist may suggest that it is hardly worth while to endeavour to become such an admirable crichton, that the labour will not be sufficiently remunerated, that the existing british drama does not demand or deserve criticism by such cultured experts. there are few of us fully qualified, according to the standard put forward in these lines, and it may be added, without anything in the nature of mock-modesty, that the author is well aware of the fact that he cannot be reckoned among the few. his knowledge of fashionable society a passage in _lady huntworth's experiment_ did not earn the laugh deserved by it. captain dorvaston was supposed to read a passage from _the special monthly journal_, to this effect: "the shield bore for device a bar sinister, with _fleur-de-lys rampant_"; then he said, "that ain't heraldry." lady huntworth replied, "yes, it is; family heraldry," and he laughed. the passage in the play brought forward vividly the thought that those who really live in the aristocratic world may smile at our high-life dramas just as they do at the stories that appear concerning the nobility in obscure "family" papers. there is, and during a long time has been, a mania among playwrights for putting aristocratic characters upon the stage. it may be that this is due to the snobbishness of players, who, in comedy, love to represent a lord: they can be kings and queens only in tragedies; or to that of the audience, which likes to see the representation of the nobility; or, again, it may be caused by the snobbishness of the dramatist and his wish to suggest that he knows all about the "upper succles." it need not be assumed that we are much worse in this respect than our neighbours across that channel which some desire to have destroyed and so nullify the famous john of gaunt speech. in books and plays the gallic writers are almost as fond of presenting the french aristocracy as are our dramatists and novelists of writing works concerning the british peerage. even putting the actual peerage aside, the question is important, whether the pictures in fiction--particularly in drama--of what one may call belgravia or mayfair are correct. we critics hardly know; and it may be a solecism to suggest that the same applies to the studies of the faubourg st germain. perhaps that famous faubourg has lost its distinction. the question may seem a little difficult yet must be asked: how do our dramatists and the french manage to get a first-hand study of the real aristocracy? of course, nowadays, there are a large number of houses owned by people with titles, and sometimes very noble titles, which can easily be penetrated. speaking quite apart from politics, one may say that the british aristocracy year by year makes itself cheaper and cheaper, losing thereby its title to existence. the city clerk can do better than dick swiveller, and decorate his bed-sitting room with a photographic gallery of _décolletées_ duchesses, and bare-legged ladies of noble family, and he is able to obtain a vast amount of information, part of it quite accurate, concerning their doings. yet, even when we get far higher than the city clerk, and reach the fashionable playwright, to say nothing of the dramatic critic, there are mysteries unexplorable. there is a lhassa in mayfair, our efforts to attain which are burked. a big bohemian, sporting "smart-set," anglo-american, south african millionaire society exists which has in it a good many people acknowledged by debrett, and this it is quite easy to enter. there are a score or so of peers, and twice the number of peeresses, as well as smaller fry, possessing titles by birth or marriage, with whom it is not difficult, and not always desirable, to become acquainted. the real aristocracy looks askance at them. when we see pictures of these, or studies on the french stage of the titled _faiseurs_, or _rastaquouères_, we know that they may be correct, and indeed the figures in them have become to such an extent despecialised that we can judge of the truthfulness of the study by the simple process of assuming that they do not possess any titles at all. still, there remains a world beyond, where, to some extent at least, manners and ideas are different from those of the upper-middle-class, or the middle-middle-class, to whichever it may be that our craft belongs. people will recollect thackeray's remarks concerning the impossibility of getting to know the real domestic life of your french friends; whether his words are well founded or not, they illustrate the essential unknowability to the outsider of some of the great noble and even untitled county families of the land. it is said that there still exist some great ladies who have not cheapened themselves by allowing their photographs to be published in the sixpenny papers. yet our dramatists, or some at least, seem to think that a play is vulgar unless amongst the _dramatis personae_ one can find a lord or two. perhaps indolence is their excuse. you call a character the duke of smithfield, and thereby save yourself much trouble; you need not explain that he is rich, or how he came to be rich, or why he has no work to do. you have ready-made for you the supposition of a mass of details as to manner and prejudices. if the heroine's father is an earl and the hero a commoner, such as a barrister or a doctor, the mere statement of these facts is useful matter for your story. if the dramatist writes about the kind of earl who belongs to that inner set of the aristocracy, in the existence of which some of us innocently believe, how does he set about his task? even when the ordinary playwright handles the ruck-and-run of the "nobs," his acquaintance with them can hardly justify him in regarding his studies as founded upon observation. to see people in the stalls and meet them at public "functions," or the large entertainments of a semi-private character which it is easy to penetrate, gives poor opportunity for close scrutiny. is there amongst the dramatists--and novelists too--something akin to the system of the islanders who earned a living by taking in one another's washing? is there a vicious circle, in which each and all accept as true what others have written? do they merely help themselves out of the common fund of ignorance? possibly this is based upon a delusion. the whole aristocracy may have become so democratic that it is quite easy to study the most exclusive at first hand, if you happen to be a successful dramatist, but very few of the dramatic critics are successful dramatists. the opportunities for the critic are limited except when a peeress happens to have written a play, and even then a candid critic does not get very far. perhaps, too, if some inner circle exists there is no need to study it; for a knowledge of the titled folk floating in the great three-quarter world that is taking the place of society may suffice, and to have met a countess at a musical reception, of five hundred or so, given by some millionaire amateur, or to have been on the board of a catchpenny company with a baron, or to have suffered long at a charity ball and obtained introductions from a ducal steward, or to have bought a cup of bad tea at an albert hall bazaar from a marchioness whose manners would shock a cook, is a sufficient acquaintance with the customs, thoughts and ideals of all the inhabitants of debrett, and entitles one to present or to criticize the shyest member of the august house that is now beginning to wonder what is going to happen next. his duty and difficulties the title is the duty--not the duties--of a dramatic critic--the latter would be too large a subject. obviously his duty is to tell the truth. how easy it sounds! how difficult it is to tell even the relative truth; the absolute is out of the question. suppose that the critic has come to the conclusion that he knows the truth about a play, with what is he to tell it? with language, of course--an appallingly bad piece of machinery, which grows worse and worse every day. when a number of critics have formed the same opinion about a piece, and all wish to say that it is good--a very bad term to employ--one will call it good, another very good; a third, exceedingly good; a fourth, great; a fifth, splendid, a sixth, superb; and so on till some reckless language-monger uses the state-occasion term--a "work of genius." how is the reader to guess that they all mean the same thing? moreover, if they were to use identical words every reader would put a somewhat different meaning upon them. "one of my greatest difficulties," a famous physician once said, "lies in the fact that to a great extent i have to rely upon a patient's description of the nature and quantity of pain he or she has suffered from. one will speak of pain where another employs the word agony; the third complains of intense torture; a fourth describes it as intolerable anguish; and a fifth says it hurts a little. yet they all refer to the same thing. no wonder we are often at sea." the difficulty increases. many new words are coined, but old ones are rarely demonetised; they remain in circulation, defaced and worn, till the precise image and superscription are barely recognizable. we multiply negatives in order to get fine shades. if, then, the critic knows the truth he is aware that he has no means of conveying it to the reader. wherefore some make little effort and indulge merely in fine writing. hence, too, some excuse for the common incivility of our friends when they say to us, "well, old man, i read your notice on the ----; tell me, is it worth going to see?" the difficulty of expressing an opinion is hardly less than that of forming it; assume that the critic possesses all the qualifications, so far as knowledge and the natural gift for criticising are concerned--and, alas! knowledge and the gift are very often far apart--and then think of the obstacles to the proper employment of them. the play may belong to a class which the critic does not like, although it is legitimate; he may not flout it on that account. you should not blame a bream because it is not a barbel, or a chub for not being a trout, yet the angler grumbles if he catches the humbler fish when aiming at the noble; we are all agreed that the gardener was not justified in "larning" with a spade the squalid batrachians to be toads; even musical comedies ought not to be criticized with spade strokes, although in connection with them it is a pity that a spade so rarely has been called by its proper name. moreover, one may have an entirely unreasonable prejudice against the works of the particular dramatist. we all suffer from strange aversions in literary matters. there are readers of culture who find no pleasure in borrow, and some nearly shriek at the mere name of peacock and so on. in fact we have dislikes founded, or rather unfounded, upon the basis of bussy rabutin's lines: "je ne vous aime point, hylas; je n'en saurois dire la cause. je sais seulement une chose. c'est que je ne vous aime pas." next comes an even more intimate personal element--the critic's condition. the day may have been vexing. the present indecent haste of the income-tax collector may have worried him. his dinner may have been bad. perhaps he had to rush off without his coffee; new boots are a conceivable element; a bad seat in the theatre may annoy him; many managers give better places to their friends in the profession than to the critics. before now critics have sat out a boisterous farce when suffering from an excruciating tooth-ache. moreover, some of the principal players may not be to his taste. there are artists of indisputable merit who are no more palatable to some of us than an untravelled cigar or wines from across the ocean. think, then, of the unfortunate critic honestly endeavouring to make reasonable allowances for all the matters which may have affected him when forming his judgment. such elements are wickedly insidious; it is difficult to believe when one is bored that one would not be bored but for some such adventitious matter. the conscientious critic makes a great effort to be just under such circumstances, and there is great danger that he may out-brutus brutus--in the opposite direction. it is very galling, after writing a favourable notice on what seemed to be a tedious play, to have your fellow-workers ask why on earth you treated it so favourably. consequently, it will be seen that is it often difficult even for the qualified to form a true judgment. assuming that the critic has formed what he considers a true judgment, and flatters himself that he is able to find language in which to express it accurately, the question arises how far he ought to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. "praise, praise, praise," said mr pinero; and there is a fine maxim of vauvenargues--"c'est un grand signe de médiocrité de louer toujours modérément." however, the question whether we are or, worse still, seem mere mediocrities does not greatly trouble most of us poor "brushers of noblemen's clothes"; by-the-by the expression quoted by bacon might serve as an argument in a certain great controversy, if it be assumed that it was applied to the dramatic critics of his day. yet unmerited praise on the whole does more harm than undeserved blame. on the other hand, truth is wisely kept at the bottom of a well, for the world cannot stand much of it. perhaps it is judicious in the critic sometimes to be a little more amiable than the truth, in order to encourage the beginner and the manager who has given him a chance, and also sometimes to insist disproportionately upon defects, so as to stir up a too complacent dramatist of reputation. moreover, whilst the point is immaterial to the audience, the critic's expression of a judgment upon a particular piece must vary with the author, since, for instance, to censure without allowances the work of the tyro for faults of inexperience is obviously unreasonable, whilst one may easily praise with excess the mere dexterities of the trained pack. taking all these matters into account, it will be seen that it is very difficult for the critic to do his duty, and yet truth will out sometimes in a criticism. his stock phrases there are moments when the critics think that it might almost be wise to begin their notices on a new play by dealing with the acting. for the criticism of the acting is the most trying part of our work, and though, as a rule, it does not occupy more than say a fourth of the article--if so much--it often takes as long to write as the rest. indeed, the shorter it is the longer it takes, for the difficulty of nice employment of language is in direct ratio to the brevity of matter. with half-a-column in which to move about there is no trouble in finding finely contrasted adjectives and avoiding repetition of epithets. we all feel--and correctly--that when the play is new our greatest energy should be devoted to it. indeed, there is a strong tendency to adopt the idea contained in a phrase of mr gordon craig's to the effect that the players are "performers in an orchestra," and since a play is not like a piece of chamber-music, where the performers are treated individually, but rather resembles a work performed by a full band, there is an almost valid excuse for paying comparatively little attention to the acting. sometimes one makes desperate endeavours to avoid dealing with the company in a lump at the end by referring in the descriptive account (which is the journalistic contribution to the criticism) to the individual performers; but it is not easy to do so without interfering with the course of the description. there are many difficulties in treating the work of the actors and actresses briefly, but to handle it at length and in proportion would require a space which editors are unable to give. no doubt the first of the difficulties is the one already indicated. wrongly or rightly, it is felt (even by journalists who do not accept the traditions of _the daily telegraph_) that there is a poverty-stricken air about the use of the same adjective in consecutive sentences, and though we try to be honest in opinion, we have a workman's vanity in our efforts which asserts itself strongly and causes us, at some sacrifice of accuracy, to vary the epithets. moreover, single adjectives tell very little. to say that mr x. acted admirably, miss y. gave a capital performance, mr z. played in excellent style, gives little information, and when there are half-a-dozen to be named it is almost impossible to ring the changes. furthermore, perhaps unconsciously, we are moved, fatuously no doubt, by the feeling that the earlier part of the article is intensely interesting to all the world, but that no one save the players and their personal friends and enemies will even glance at these concluding sentences. yet one knows that they are of serious importance to the persons actually concerned, though some of them say that they never read them. the fact that so many theatres are in the hands of actor-managers is one reason why these phrases are important, for the actor-manager is compelled very often to choose or refuse a player on the strength of hearsay testimony: ours is hearsay evidence in the most accessible form, and even the managers have some belief in the soundness of the judgment of several of us. they all recognise the fact that we tend to create public opinion, and that an actor or actress much spoken of admiringly in the papers excites the curiosity of playgoers, and is a useful addition to a cast. consequently we feel that in speaking of or ignoring individual performers we are affecting them to some extent in earning their livelihood. there is a story concerning a critic upon whose death half the stage went into quarter-mourning. if it be true, it showed that he was very short-sighted in his amiability, for when dealing with an overcrowded profession one must remember that ill-earned praise of a may keep b, who is more worthy, from getting a's place, to which, of course, he has a better title. it is very hard to act upon this proposition, although it involves a duty, for it is much easier to imagine the positive hurt to a than the negative injury to b; the critic in question probably shut his eyes to this, if he ever thought of it, and died comfortably unaware of the fact that his indiscriminating praise had kept many meritorious people out of their rights. even supposing one masters the illogical feeling of the lamented critic, difficulties arise. we have grown very velvet-tongued in these days. there was no nonsense about our predecessors; if the leading lady was plain, they said so, whilst if one of us were to suggest that the heroine, whose beauty is talked of tiresomely during the play, in real life might sit in unflattering safety under mistletoe till the berries shrivelled he would be regarded as an ungentle manlike brute. this is rather awkward. there is an injustice in being forced into a conspiracy of silence about the figure or face of a lady who would catch cold at kiss-in-the-ring, yet is supposed at first sight to set romeo's pulses throbbing madly, and when the dear creatures whom we loved a quarter of a century ago appear to us unsuitable for _ingenue_ parts we feel that it is a terrible breach of duty not to say so, yet it is painful to be candid. now and again the matter becomes ridiculous, and we venture to make oblique suggestions; but even this is a poor accomplishment of our task. yet it seems appallingly rude and direct to say that miss x. showed intelligence and technical skill, but is too old or too fat or too ugly for her part; and managers rely upon our reticence and upon pictures in which the sun helps photographers in a game of deception--perhaps that unfortunate victim of the november fogs may resent the suggestion of conspiracy, and complain of fraudulent tricks with negatives--and so the public is deceived. also, undated photographs are used--fraudulently. this is a very irksome matter, for our friends are candid about our backwardness, and ask indignantly why we fail to mention that miss ---- is ugly enough to stop a clock, or that it is a long day's walk round the _jeune premier_ at the footlights theatre. something at least might be done by the managers to help us. they ought to cut the references to the heroine's beauty when it is obvious that she has none. it may be suggested that is this hard upon the plain women who possess the mysterious gift of charm. the answer is that no charming woman is ever plain, even if someone--voltaire, perhaps--spoke of "_les laides charmeuses_." the list of difficult points is not exhausted. for the question arises whether one ought to mention at all any acting that is not extraordinarily good or bad. as a rule, mediocrity has to pass unnoticed in this world; in most professions the person whose worth is not above or below the average is rarely mentioned. why should an exception be made in case of a player? if we know that the performance of miss x. is no better or worse than would have been that of the average actress, why should we torture our brains to find adjectives concerning her? perhaps in dealing with this, attention ought to be drawn to the fact that the point really relates almost exclusively to criticisms of new plays. when _hamlet_ is given, or any other classic drama, by a queer twist one finds in fact that from a journalistic point of view the performance is of more importance than the piece. we are not expected to add to the intolerable mass of matter already written about the prince; nobody cares twopence what we write concerning the play, since we have nothing to say that has not been said already, and by more important people; and the curiosity of the public in this case relates only to the acting and the setting. the circumstances under which he writes a little while ago the critic of an evening paper received a letter partly in the following words:--"i am deeply grateful to you, but for you, i should not have known that réjane made a speech at the end of _la souris_. such morning papers as i saw said nothing about it. things have changed sadly, you see. i write slowly, and i hate last acts; they always spoil a play. i noticed that a little while ago you suggested that it might be a good idea to begin a play with the last act; the idea is a mere _hysteron-proteron_, absolutely preposterous, prae-post-erous." this sounds as if the writer were the ghost of de quincey. "in the past i got my morning paper early enough to be able to send down to the office a correction of any error in my conjectural notice of the last act, and reception of the play, or even a report of the speech at the end; and if the theatre had been burnt down, or the leading player had fallen in a fit, i would have sent an account of it, so as not to lose my berth for apparent inattention to business. there are editors who think that they can get critics strong enough to sit out the whole of a play. now, alas! the morning papers do not help me." certainly there was a curious and pathetic humour about his position, for one of the features of the modern journal is that the more "up-to-date" the paper the staler the news. once upon a time the ordinary daily went to press at about half-past one; but now the printer's devil is at rest after midnight in some of these offices, and several terrifically modern morning papers, a copy of which you can read with your breakfast at timbuctoo, are completely printed before the extra-special edition of the evening paper of the (nominal) day before is sold out. the last statement may only be applicable to the country editions, by which the yokels are deceived. the result is strange so far as the theatre is concerned, for on an important occasion even a writer with such a rapid pen as that of clement scott needed the full time-allowance of the old system. the consequence is seen in two sets of announcements. according to one, there is to be a _répétition générale_ of several forthcoming plays, which, in plain english, means an anticipatory performance to a private audience, given in order to assist the critics--or some of them--in carrying out their duties and fighting the clock, and perhaps also for the purpose of giving seats to some of the swagger "deadheads" who crowd the stalls on a first night. the other announcement was by sir herbert tree, that his coming first night was to begin at seven o'clock, in order that we might have leisure on the same evening for the performance of our tasks. the representatives of the morning papers have a melancholy choice between having no time to dine and no time to write. perhaps the _répétition générale_ system will come into vogue, but it has disadvantages. for years it was worked at the savoy during the days of that theatre's vitality; but the public rehearsal was a real rehearsal, with three rows of stalls left empty for the to-and-fro of people directing the performance, and scenes were acted over again and songs resung. a procession in _utopia limited_ was sent back half-a-dozen times because it did not reach a particular position on the stage at the right moment. _répétitions_ of this character--and, it may be, of any character--are not wholly satisfactory to the critic. there is a sham-fight air about them--a good many of the players cannot work themselves up to the full fury of real combat; they are affected by the fact that the affair is not exactly genuine. one can even imagine that some of them say to themselves, "it will be all right on the night," and justice is by no means restored even if the critic afterwards sees the first public performance. the dress rehearsal has left him somewhat unfairly cold, because the circumstances were hostile, and in most cases a second dose of the affair within twenty-four hours makes him colder still, since, unless the work is the rare masterpiece, he does not wish to see it twice within a space of less than forty-eight hours, or years. no doubt the public will get the benefit of the critic's views as to the nature of the reception, since, having already written his notice, which he is not likely to alter in the least degree so far as impressions of the piece and acting are concerned, he will have plenty of time for a last paragraph about the "boos" or cheers and the non-appearance of the author or the speech. there was even a third announcement, for the critic of the paper lovingly called _the tizer_ by the members of the industry whose interests it protects with the utmost vehemence of laborious alliteration stated that in the future his first-night notices would only contain an account of the plot and reception, to which presumably were to be added the words _cur adv. vult_--let us hope there was no misunderstanding as to the middle word--whilst a day later his considered judgment was to be given. certainly this method is not quite a novelty, and has often been recommended. probably the reason why it has not hitherto been adopted has been the repugnance to it of the critics, based on a sneaking belief that the public does not take enough interest in criticism of the drama to read the second notice, on which, of course, the writer would have bestowed the greater labour. there is something very human in the belief; few of us have sufficient self-confidence to fancy that the public does more than glance at a notice to discover what sort of piece it deals with, and whether it was well received, and is the sort of thing the reader wants to see; and we fear there is only a very small percentage that pays any attention to our finest phrases, aptest quotations, and subtlest evidence of acquaintance with the easy aids to universal knowledge. indeed, we have a humiliating certainty that our friends would never get beyond the account of the plot and the reception and remarks about individual performers in whom they happen to take particular interest, friendly or otherwise. moreover, it is to be noted that the public has come to doubt the value of the first-night receptions which we record, the fact being incontestable that a good deal of the applause is quite unreal. perhaps an advantage of the _répétition générale_ system will be that if the managements can only persuade their friends that it is more _chic_ to be at the _répétition_ than the first performance we shall have genuine audiences at _premières_, whose verdict will be of real weight. there are certain difficulties about the new system. the invitation performance is an admirable means for the manufacture of enmities: to classify one's friends into boxes, stalls, dress circle, etc., is no doubt to have a delightful opportunity of snubbing people, but it is sure to breed bitter quarrels; whilst on the other hand, to let the guests shift for themselves creates no little trouble and imposes a very difficult task upon the attendants. it sounds easy under such circumstances to reserve places for the critics, but unless they come a long time in advance they are not likely to get them. his fear of libel actions some while ago--it was in - --the critics were aghast--editors, too, perhaps. mr justice ridley had permitted a jury to give £ as damages for libel in respect of a dramatic criticism less severe than dozens that most of us have written: it was said that some critics consulted their solicitors as to the best means of rendering their property "judgment proof"--a picturesque term that comes from america. later on the court of appeal interfered effectively, though possibly many actions were begun and settled before the appeal was heard; and it was held that in a libel action founded upon a criticism written concerning a work of art, unless there is some evidence of malice it is the judge's duty to consider whether the criticism can fairly be construed as being outside the range of fair comment, and if he thinks that the comments lie within the range of criticism he should decide the case in favour of the defendant, and not let it go to the jury. then the critics breathed again, and the story goes that fleet street laid in a large stock of vitriol. the next, and at present last, act in the matter was the recovery by mr frederick moy thomas of £ damages for a libel which appeared in _punch_ upon his book called "fifty years of fleet street." although the matter related to a book, and not to a play, the dramatic critics felt anxious again, because no distinction could be drawn between criticisms upon the two kinds of work. the case was peculiarly interesting to the dramatic critics because the plaintiff, who had been one of our craft for some length of time, enjoyed the reputation of being very learned in matters connected with the drama, as well as sound and conscientious. moreover, his father, william moy thomas, whose name was introduced into the case, was for many years past one of the most esteemed and admired of our profession, owing to his knowledge, fairness, judgment and excellence of style. the court of appeal upheld the verdict, and _punch's_ record of long existence without a verdict against it for libel is spoilt. its licence, the licence of a nation's jester, has been endorsed. it may be asked whether this is not a mere matter for the craft: in reality the public is concerned. the letter written by one friend to another, gossiping about a play or a book or a picture, exposes the writer to an action for libel unless it can be protected on the ground of truth, privilege or fair comment; and casually written remarks concerning any matter of public interest may result in damages and costs. indeed, to put the matter simply, the professional critics have no greater rights or privileges of criticism than any member of the public. it is therefore very important to all of us to know how the matter stands, and since the judgment of the master of the rolls is rather technical, it seems worth while briefly to state the law in unscientific phrases. the written opinion upon any matter of public interest--a play, a book, a piece of music, a picture, the speech of a politician, the sermon of a parson, the behaviour of a general, the conduct of an admiral, the methods of a judge, etc.--must fulfil two conditions. it must be honest and it must be expressed fairly in the point of form. in the "ridley" action the honesty of the opinion was admitted, and the question arose whether the opinion was fair in form. in the famous whistler _v._ ruskin cause there was no doubt about the critic's honesty--fancy doubting ruskin's honesty! however, the jury thought that he went too far in his phrase "nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture," and probably the word "coxcomb" was fatal, for it was irrelevant. it might almost be said that relevancy is the test of fairness in the form of a criticism. it was irrelevant as well as inaccurate to speak of a "naughty wife" in a criticism upon _the whip hand_, because there was "no naughty wife" in the play, and therefore the jury gave one shilling damages and the court of appeal upheld the verdict. in criticism of a book, play, picture, etc., the private life and character of the author are irrelevant; even his character as author, except in relation to the particular work or works criticized, is irrelevant. if you think that a book or play is immoral or indecent, say so, say so strongly, and if the criticism, though unsound, represents your honest opinion you will escape; but it is irrelevant to say that the author caused it to be immoral or indecent in order to obtain a _succès de scandale_, and you must prove that charge to be true or be punished. there is a distinction between alleging that smith's book, "the biography of brown," is dull, and that smith is a writer of dull books--_ex pede herculem_ would not be a valid plea. if honest and discreet in language you may be abominably incorrect in opinion. you are at liberty to say that a composition by strauss is a mess of hideous sounds, that one of sargent's pictures is ridiculous, that a novel by meredith is tiresome, but you must be very careful, when criticizing a particular work, if you make general allegations concerning the author. nevertheless, it is permissible to criticize the works of a dramatist generally upon a reasonable opportunity; yet there is a danger of your getting into trouble on the point of honesty, for it is not honest to comment upon his works generally unless you are well acquainted with them. to sum up: if the opinion expressed is honest and relevant, then mere unsoundness of judgment will not hurt you. the opinion of the jury, or even of the judge, is not to be substituted for yours, otherwise we should have to burn our pens. there is sense in this. the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, and even the learned judge, may have less knowledge of art, or less taste in music, than the starving critic of fleet street. honesty is the other element. yet it has been suggested, though unsuccessfully, that honesty is not a necessary ingredient in the defence of "fair comment." it was argued that a criticism, defensible if written by an honest critic, could not be indefensible because written by one whose motive was malicious--in other words, that the matter was objective, not subjective. certainly, at first sight, it seems strange that a can say with impunity that smith's book is dull and b may have to pay damages for saying the same thing in the same words. clearly the injury to the author may be the same in each case, might be greater in a's if he wrote for a paper of larger circulation than the one which published "b's" criticism. on the other hand, few acts can be regarded in law from the point of view of their consequences only. smith may be killed by "a" or "b," and the former, on account of the circumstances, may commit non-culpable homicide, the latter murder. to eliminate the ingredient of malice or, and it is the same thing, to say that a criticism need not be honest might lead to shocking consequences. the skilful craftsman would be able to write a fiendish criticism with impunity and boast of the gratification of his hatred. there is no half-way house. a plaintiff must be entitled to offer evidence to a jury that the so-called critic has stated that, although he called the plaintiff's book dull and clumsy, he really thought it a delightful masterpiece; or he must be limited to inviting judge and jury to study the defendant's article. who would be satisfied that justice had not slept if such evidence were excluded? if, then, you dislike the author, dip your pen in honey rather than in vinegar or, wiser still, leave his work alone. you must be more than human not to be biassed and if, to contradict the bias, you praise the book against your judgment, you act wrongly as a critic. what is honesty? there is the crux. courts of law are but man-made machinery and very imperfect, juries are often very stupid, even judges--but perhaps we ought to pause here. consequently, if the author has any grounds for suggesting that you are ill-disposed towards him, and yet you must act as critic (amateur or professional), be scrupulously relevant and decidedly colourless. at present the honesty has not been analysed by the courts; some day the question will be raised whether competence is not a necessary ingredient. could a gautier who hated music _honestly_ criticize a symphony; could a blind man _honestly_ criticize a picture? these are extreme cases, and a line must be drawn somewhere. still, some day the courts may require the defendant to give evidence of his fitness to act as a critic if his fitness be challenged. to these remarks one obvious matter should be added. all statements of fact in a criticism must be accurate. the line between matters of fact and matters of opinion is sometimes fine, but the law is clear. an allegation of fact is not comment, and all such allegations, if injurious, must be justified--that is--proved to be true, if the defence of fair comment is pleaded. chapter ii the dramatic critic his duty to be tolerant some remarks which appeared in a popular weekly paper concerning mrs patrick campbell's _deirdre_ and _electra_ deserve a little consideration. one of the critics attached to the paper spoke of the affair as being an "indifferent performance of indifferent tragedies," and then said it was "a simple affectation to profess to enjoy it," and that it was not, "as some people seem to think, a mark of culture, but only of insufficient culture not to acknowledge that one is bored by this kind of thing." an affronted critic wrote to the paper, complaining of the charge of affectation and insufficient culture, and was promptly rebuked as a "bumptious correspondent," and told that his letter convinced the critic that he was one of those affected persons whose misdirected zeal the writer deplored. this attitude is not a novelty. many of the critics, at one period, charged the professed admirers of wagner with being impostors or imbeciles; later on, anyone who professed to like the pictures of whistler or rossetti or burne-jones, or of any of the impressionists, was accused of affectation. when ibsen was introduced to england the conservative critics raved, and alleged that the ibsenites (or "obscenites"--the word was considered very witty) were humbugs; this was one of the least offensive charges. the same kind of thing happened in the case of maeterlinck. many other instances might be cited. it is a curious form of attack. why should a critic who alleged that he had much pleasure and certainly no boredom from mr yeats' play and mrs campbell's beautiful acting, be charged with affectation and also with insufficient culture? of course, the critics are insufficiently cultured. there are thousands of plays and books that they ought to have read, of dramas they ought to have witnessed, of pictures they ought to have seen, masses of music they ought to have heard--and have not--and, therefore, they are persons of very insufficient culture. but the writer in question should offer some evidence of his own sufficiency of culture before alleging that the critic's opinion concerning the play and the performance was due to a lack of culture. after all, one would seem entitled to express an opinion on a question of art or pleasure without being called a liar by someone who takes a different view. the matter is one of some importance because the attack is insidious and dangerous. the deadliest weapon in the hands of the critic is the allegation of boredom. you can say that a piece is vulgar, indelicate, inartistic, indecent, full of "chestnuts," old-fashioned, "melodramatic," ill-constructed or unoriginal, without doing fatal injury, but if you allege that you and everybody else suffered from boredom your attack may be fatal. this is the reason why the charge is so often made by people with strong prejudices. there is something to be said on both sides. no doubt the lovers of the severer form of drama, the worshippers of shaw, the playgoers who supported the societies of which the independent theatre was the first and regarded the court theatre for a while as a kind of mecca, are not always judicious when talking about musical comedy and comic opera, and some of them have been very narrow-minded. they have refused to admit the merit of any comic operas, except those of gilbert and sullivan, they have lavished indiscriminating abuse upon almost all others, have looked upon daly's theatre and the gaiety and the prince of wales' as so many nazareths. this, of course, has caused a great deal of annoyance to the lovers of musico-dramatic work. moreover, some of the austere folk have denounced melodrama and farce, and the so-called romantic comedy, without drawing nice distinctions. this indiscriminate denunciation has naturally caused annoyance and reprisals. because some critics disliked _a chinese honeymoon_ enormously, because wild motor 'buses could not drag them to see _the scarlet pimpernel_, they do not doubt, or pretend to doubt, that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people have enjoyed these pieces. without for one moment believing in the phrase "de gustibus non est disputandum" as ordinarily interpreted, one must fully recognise that palates differ. if m. steinheil chose to dine upon cold pork-pie, sausage, cold veal and lobster as the papers allege, it is not surprising that he died, only a little amazing that the french police were puzzled as to the cause of his death, but there was no reason for charging him with affectation in eating such a meal or insufficient culture, though it was hardly the banquet of a gourmet. one may pull a wry face at a costly _bouillabaisse chez_ roubillon at marseilles without doubting that poor old "g.a.s.," and thackeray too, loved the dish. some prefer homely beer to any of the white wines of the rhine, yet many people honestly enjoy those high-priced varieties of weak-minded vinegar; and no doubt it is not affectation which causes some people to allege that they like black pudding and tripe and onions. the matter has its serious aspect. the attacks made, very unfairly, upon the novel forms of drama by conservative critics, when they take this form of alleging that not only the critic but the audience was bored, and that professed admirers are insincere, undoubtedly are very effective, and certainly are sometimes made in good faith. there are people so foolish as to think that nobody can like what they do not; also so fatuous as to consider that no one ought to like what they do not; but to jump from this to alleging that the professed admirers of ambitious works are humbugs is outrageous. the butcher boy enjoys _sweeney todd, the barber of fleet street_: why should he disbelieve my statement that others get pleasure from a performance of a _hedda gabler_, which would hardly appeal to him? large numbers of playgoers have been kept away from able and ambitious dramas, written by dramatists with a true artistic aim, because of the oft-repeated allegations by newspaper writers, who did not like them, that everybody was bored; also the wholesale denunciation of the lighter forms of dramatic and musico-dramatic forms of entertainment by some of the critics has weakened their influence, has led the man in the street to think that if mr x. or y. or z. can find no pleasure in what he likes that he will get no entertainment from what they admire. one supposes, at least hopes, that dramatic critics of all kinds and grades have an honest desire for the advance and success of british drama. they will hardly be successful in their wishes unless on each side a little more tolerance is shown for the opinions professed by members of the other. his sympathies when young in some criticisms on certain demi-semi-private performances given in london by a well-known french actress and her company there seemed to be a note not often discoverable in english articles dealing with the theatre. it appeared as if several of the writers had a kind of fierce exultation in the thought that the play represented was likely to shock a good many people--people presumably entitled to have their feelings considered seriously. in the annals of english art there has been rather a scanty exhibition of the desire to do what may be most easily described by two french phrases, "_épater le bourgeois_" or "_ébouriffer le bourgeois_." it is, in fact, noticeable that we possess no recognised english set phrase, such as "to startle the philistine" or "to ruffle the hair of the philistine." indeed, before matthew arnold imported the term philistine from germany, as equivalent in art matters to the french "_le bourgeois_" or the later expression "_l'épicier_," we really had nothing at all to correspond with these terms. for to shock "mrs grundy" is quite off the point. this is the more remarkable because the _bourgeois_ feeling--treated, by the way, admirably in balzac's short story "pierre grassou"--has long been the curse of english art, and, as represented by the royal academy, still remains a paramount power for evil. it cannot be said that the desire to "_ébouriffer le bourgeois_" often leads to valuable results so far as the works intended to accomplish the feat are concerned, although it is possible that some of them have otherwise had a beneficial result. another french phrase, "_pour activer la digestion_," contains a hint that such an attempt may indirectly render service to art. our popular ideas of medical treatment have never adopted the theory suggested by the foreign phrase, which is that when the digestive apparatus is sluggish it is advisable to eat something violently indigestible so that the stomach, summoning all its forces to deal with the intruder, may be aroused to a state of activity. this is a kind of theory to be tried on the dog--not your own dog, of course. yet it may be that an occasional slap in the face of the public in respect of artistic matters awakens it from the complacent state of lethargy in which it lies with regard to most questions of art. the young english dramatist has very few opportunities of making the hair of the philistine stand on end or activating his digestion; he is worse off than the youthful british painter who, as those that have haunted the english studios and the ateliers on the surrey side of the seine well know, can give a kind of birth to his insults to the taste of the churchwarden. once down upon canvas a picture is at least half-alive, whilst nothing is more pitifully dead than the audacious play in manuscript. the théâtre de l'oeuvre gave to french revolutionaries in dramatic art the chance of setting the seine on fire, but the censor has allowed our playwrights little scope. the evasion of his authority by means of nominally private performances has brought into brief life on the boards very few pieces in my time in which one can really see evidence of the youthful desire to shock the philistine. in _ghosts_, _les trois filles de m. dupont_, and _monna vanna_, though all three were prohibited by the authority, there is no sign of the particular element in question. the first two are serious, sober studies of social problems, not intended to shock or startle but to educate the orthodox. the prohibition of the third was simply an official blunder in relation to a dignified work of art. on the other hand there is a trace of the spirit in _mrs warren's profession_, and _salome_ seems full of it. curiously enough, in some of the permitted dramas by mr bernard shaw there is evidence of this desire. mr shaw often seems to be saying, "i'm going to make your flesh creep." he is a brilliant dramatist, and also, desperately in earnest, and it may well be that they are right who think that his plays will live along after the death of most english works produced since the public and critics were bewildered at the first performance of _widowers' houses_, and he certainly appears to adopt as a policy the theory of stirring up into activity the lethargic stomach of the british playgoer by devices carefully calculated to make him howl. _salome_ stands in another category: the author had no lesson to teach. as a work of art his play would not be invalidated or even weakened if, instead of the biblical characters and phrases, he had invented his prophet, slightly altered time and place, and left out the quotations; but to have done this would have been to avoid shocking people. of course it is not always easy to be certain whether an audacity is employed with the desire to "_ébouriffer le bourgeois_" that may be excusable, or with the object of beating the big drum and calling attention, ignobly, to the existence of a work which, but for such means of publicity, might have remained unnoticed. in the case of _salome_ it is hard to guess to which of these two motives one ought to ascribe the choice of treatment made by the lamentable man of genius who illustrated the truth of the theory advocated by the late dramatic critic of _the times_ in his work "the insanity of genius." such audacities often deceive the youthful critic, and, in some of the notices referred to, the signs of youth are manifest in the ill-balanced enthusiasm, as well as in the employment of phrases of praise which the old hand shirks with a curious kind of bashfulness. in criticism there is a difficulty analogous to that which is supposed to beset the performance of the part of juliet; it is rather nicely put in the title of one of béranger's poems--and also of a rather dreary, once popular, novel, "si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait." in youth one has intense sympathy with the lost causes, or, rather, with those that have not yet been found, and superb contempt for the conventional, without possessing the judgment to distinguish the tares from the wheat; every novelty attracts, every audacity appeals, and we introduce obscure artists of alleged genius by the dozen to an unsympathetic world; as age and judgment come enthusiasm wanes, till at last the inevitable crystallization begins and new ideas beat vainly at the doors of our minds. even before the crystallization has become serious it is very hard to appreciate the rare novelties of idea offered in our theatres; weariness of stale conventions which affects the young critic in a less degree than the old, does not easily induce one to accept mere outrages upon them. _salome_, indeed, has some outrages upon stale conventions, but they are rather stale outrages. certain french comedies have reduced unconventionality in morals to a kind of spurious conventionality; in some of them the idea of marriage as a preliminary to connubial relations is regarded as rather shocking. some day madame granier will hide her face in her hands, shameful at the insult of "married woman" hurled at her; and our youthful critic will admire the audacity. caution requires the statement that it was not madame granier who gave the semi-demi-private performances: honesty compels one to admit that these remarks constitute a moan about lost youth, and are full of envy, hatred and malice towards those blessed with splendidly indiscreet enthusiasm for flaunting audacity in artistic matters. the jaded critic at this, the season of the country cousin, the gift and sometimes receipt of game, the abandonment of autumn underclothing and the overhauling of pike tackle, a question is often put to the critic. it comes from the country cousin, and is generally in these words or thereabouts: "what piece ought we to take tickets for?" which generally has an under-surface suggestion, and might be translated into: "for what theatre are you going to get us seats?" of course we are dense enough not to notice that the inquiry is more than skin-deep; the question of "paper" for the critics is not one concerning which it is necessary or desirable to write. the answer to the surface inquiry generally provokes a discussion. in a guarded way the critic makes a reply containing the formula "i think you would like ----" which does not altogether please the inquirer. for the country cousin suspects the existence of a lurking insult to him upon the point of taste or intelligence. the end of it is always, or nearly, the same, and to the effect that of course we "jaded critics" do not really care about any pieces at all, and only visit the theatre because we are paid to go, and that it is awfully unfair that such "jaded"--one cannot help insisting upon the word "jaded"--people should be allowed to act as critics. it has been suggested bluntly that we ought to be dismissed after fifteen years' labour, and of course, if there were a pension--but then we are no better off in that respect than county-court judges. yet even the cleverest country cousin cannot suggest any useful employment for superannuated, middle-aged dramatic critics. no doubt we have been advising our cousins quite wisely as to what is likely to please them, for if we learn nothing else by our labour we certainly get to know what kind of play and performance is to the taste of other people. sometimes one asks oneself what truth there is in the jaded critic theory. it cannot be pretended that a man who goes to the theatre three times or so a week pays each visit in the hopeful state of mind or with the expectation of intense enjoyment possible to those who only patronize the playhouse now and then and pick their pieces. indeed, he very often sets out with the knowledge that he is going to pass a dull evening. if he is unable to guess that, his experience will have told him little and his capacity is small. moreover, he cannot be expected to take such pleasure in the average play as if his visits were rare, and what has been said about the play necessarily applies to the acting. sometimes when watching a work of common quality, a painful idea comes into one's mind, and we wonder how people, compelled to see it night after night perhaps for half-a-year, can endure the strain. what, for instance, must be the sufferings of the conductor or of a member of the orchestra at a successful second-rate musical comedy; of a stage manager compelled for months, one after another, to direct a brainless farce? of course the people lumped together in the technical term as "the front of the house" have a remedy, and after the first night or two only appear in the auditorium when the curtain is down, or, to be more accurate, just before it descends, when all hands are expected to be on deck. there are critics that resemble the person who denied that any beer could be bad, and would sooner pass an evening in a theatre watching a mediocre play acted in a style no better than it deserves than at home in a well-stocked library. they resemble the journalist in a story by balzac who, when blind, haunted a newspaper office and revelled in the smell of printers' ink, and they have been known for their own pleasure to pay a second visit to a piece on which they wrote a condemnatory criticism. in fact, they have the curious mania for the theatre which induces many people with no talent for acting to abandon comfortable careers and starve on the stage--or at the stage door. that the critic's sufferings in the playhouse are considerable is incontestable, and they are keener at the performance of works of mediocrity than when watching very bad plays. fortunately there are two sides to every hedge. when the play has any touch of originality, or even novelty, our pleasure is far keener than that of the unsophisticated, and we often perceive originality or novelty where the public notices none. a whole field of enjoyment is open to us in the triumphs of technique which is almost untrodden by the general public. our poles of pain and pleasure are farther apart than those of the man in the street. there have been pieces and performances concerning which the praise of the critics, or some of them, has seemed mere raving to the ordinary playgoer. several actors and actresses whom we prefer to some of the popular favourites have been banished from london by the indifference of londoners, and there are "stars" beloved in the theatres who irritate the observant because they have never learnt their art, and nevertheless triumph by mere force of personality. no doubt the critics, so far as acting is concerned, often--very often--fall into an error and censure acting which does not move them yet impresses the audience, forgetting that it is the advantage and disadvantage of the actor that he need only affect, and must affect, those before him, and that to move only a minority of a normal audience is to act badly. one may write but cannot act for posterity, and therefore the actor, the pianist, the violinist, and the like should not be grudged their noisy, obvious demonstrations of admiration. does the critic really get jaded? is it unfair that the "jaded" critic should deal with the average play? in answering the latter question one should consider whether the notices of the younger critics, too fresh to have become jaded, are more valuable than those of the veterans. perhaps the two questions should be treated together. most critics do get jaded. the critic is jaded when he is saturated with theatrical impressions and cannot take up any more, when new pieces merely recall memories of old pieces or are disliked and distrusted because they do not. after a certain age, varying with the individual, all, or almost all, of us gradually move towards a condition of repugnance to new ideas--a repugnance that becomes hatred when they are inconsistent with the old theories that have grown to be part of ourselves as well as of our stock-in-trade; and when this movement has gone far we are "jaded," are unfit to estimate the value of new ideas; we are still competent to apply the old theories to plays and acting based on them, but of course cumber the ground and retard progress. in youth, having few theories of our own or that have cost us enough labour in acquirement to seem very precious, we tend to be over-hospitable to new ideas and accept dangerous guests. the notices of the veterans, even of the jaded, upon the average work are sounder, as a rule, than those of the young hands, because the latter very often mistake things merely new to them for things actually new, and they are kinder for the reason that the writers know how great are the difficulties in the way of writing plays from a novel standpoint and of getting them produced when written. there is less violence in their views. happy the critic during the years when he is old enough to be cautious about accepting new ideas and young enough to be enthusiastic concerning them after careful consideration, when he is so mature as not to desire to stagger the orthodox by the impudence of his opinions, and sufficiently youthful to be willing to shock the conservative by the audacity of his views. he may then seem jaded because he is not easily moved, but will be quicker to give encouragement to sincere effort, to perceive talent imperfectly manifested, and to appreciate technical triumphs than when he was younger and yet able to welcome novel ideas even if they assail cherished theories. his unpaid labours probably many of the craft have wasted a good deal of the last few first-nightless weeks in the trying task of reading plays, not the printed plays by dramatists of reputation, but the manuscripts with which we, or some of us, are flooded. it is hard to guess why strangers should assume that we are willing to spend our time in reading their plays, but they do. some apparently deem it to be part of our duties, and even believe that there exists a government fund which pays our expenses of postages and stationery, for many of the amateur authors make no provision for the return of their work. occasionally there comes a suggestion that we are really conferring no favour because the pleasure of reading the play will pay for our pains. some imagine us to be agents for the managers. even the proposal to pay a commission if we place the piece is not rare; now and then it is wrapped up gracefully, but frequently is expressed in the bluntest fashion. upon consideration of the batch lately waded through several things stand out. firstly, most of them exhibit no trace of cleverness; so far as one can see the writers are people without any gift at all for writing--for writing anything--but are ordinary commonplace people who, unless their conversation is more brilliant than their written matter, would not be considered clever by their friends in everyday life. they write farces or comedies, in an orthodox form, which contain a surprisingly small number of jokes or efforts at wit and humour. their works have the air of being mere preliminary plays--the playwrights apparently have set out scenes and written dialogue intended to indicate the nature of the proposed piece with the view afterwards not, indeed of polishing, for there is nothing to polish, but of rewriting, putting in the vital passages during the process. one cannot offer any useful advice to these people, save that of suggesting they should turn their attention to gardening or golf. they have only one fault, and it is that they have no quality. such writers, as a rule, have at least one small quite useless virtue--their pieces are not ridiculously unsuitable in point of form for the stage. a more interesting class consists of authors who possess some talent and no idea how to use it. they write comedies which have some clever passages, some lines witty enough to deserve a laugh, and exhibit capacity in character-drawing, but are not at all in an acceptable form. a comedy in six acts, with twenty scenes, would not be considered for a moment by a modern manager. we have returned in a curious way to something like the ideas underlying "the unities"; perhaps that statement is incorrect, but, at least, we have put upon our dramatists certain working laws almost as embarrassing as the unities. the average playgoer has no idea of the skill involved in writing the ordinary successful comedy of the present time. the modern dramatist has nothing approaching the licence of his predecessors. construction was comparatively easy in the time of a sheridan or a goldsmith; not only were they allowed to use explanatory dialogue, in which a told b a number of things which b knew already, because the author desired the audience to learn them; but they were permitted to give direct statements of fact in soliloquies. such licence has gone: asides are dead, statements of fact in soliloquies are only permitted in formal tragedies. moreover, having the right to make almost an unlimited number of changes of scenery, they were enabled to present in action the facts which in our days have to be told to the audience in dialogue--dialogue written under severe limitations. in consequence, the mechanical difficulties of construction were then very small. nowadays, except in the case of melodrama, complicated stories have to be told in three or four acts, with no change of scenery during an act. let anyone who doubts whether this creates a difficulty take an ordinary famous old comedy and rewrite it in a form in which it would be accepted as a new play by a london manager, and he will find the difficulty enormous. to the youthful dramatist this exercise is very valuable means of studying the art of construction. when, unassisted by the work of former adapters, he has succeeded in converting half-a-dozen eighteenth-century comedies into three or four act comedies, without any changes of scenery during an act, and has used all the matter of the old comedies in his versions and yet avoided the employment of the soliloquy, or the aside, or the explanatory dialogue in which a tells b what b knows already, he will have learnt a great deal of his craft. this explanatory dialogue is the sort of passage in which a son reminds his mother of the date of his birth, and the profession of his father, and of the period when she sent him to school and so on. it may be doubted confidently whether a change of style, which has increased so enormously the practical difficulties of writing acceptable plays, has been beneficial to drama. there are writers with wit and a sense of character who under the freer system of old days might have produced successful plays, but are never able to acquire the mechanical skill now demanded, and are kept off the stage by artificial regulations, some of them not based upon essential ideas of drama but in reality upon questions connected with scenery. one cannot have many changes of the elaborate scenery nowadays employed in comedy, and the illusion sought and to some extent obtained by these costly, complicated sets makes the very useful carpenter's scene impossible. it often happens that incongruities and absurdities in modern plays are due to desperate efforts to overcome these difficulties. scenes take place in the drawing-room that ought to have been out of doors; things are said that should have been done; and there are long passages of dialogue where short scenes of action would be preferable. in a large number of cases the manuscripts we read are unacceptable because the authors have not complied with these requirements of the modern stage; and it is impossible for us, with the best will in the world, to reconstruct the works. we can only point out, regretfully, that they do not comply with these modern regulations, and we know quite well that the dramatists will be unable to make the necessary changes. the modern system has had the great disadvantage of putting out of the range of the average writer of comedy a good many subjects that deserve treatment, but can only be handled with success by writers of great experience or those who possess remarkable gifts for the semi-mechanical work of construction, which are not necessarily allied to the higher qualities needed by the dramatist. of course, some of the manuscripts are ridiculous: five-act plays that would not last an hour and a half upon the stage and three-act comedies which would require an evening per act; tragedies in rhymed verse not up to the standard of cracker poetry. it is difficult to understand how such things come to be written. the authors must sometimes go to the theatre or read plays, and therefore ought to know that their works are unsuitable, and that they are wasting money in getting their stuff typewritten. presumably the phenomenon is somehow connected with the curious glamour of the stage. the person who would not dream of trying to cook a chop without some little study of the methods of the kitchen will try to write farce or comedy or tragedy and not deem it necessary seriously to consider the elementary laws governing such works. his letter bag possibly the editor sometimes looks with curiosity at the envelopes of letters addressed to a dramatic critic at the editorial office. let us trust that in the case of those envelopes obviously bearing a lady's handwriting curiosity is not tinged with suspicion. letters directed to "the dramatic editor" are generally american, and contain statements of tremendous importance concerning, as a rule, people of whom one has never heard and requesting the critic to publish them in the next issue of "his" paper. the documents forwarded by the office are only a tithe of those which come to the critic officially, there being several ways of ascertaining addresses. many consist of requests to read plays, and exhibit pitifully the strange blindness of parents. a number are almost according to a pattern and run about thus: "dear sir,--having been a constant reader of your admirable criticisms and sharing sincerely your views about the drama, now, alas! in such a deplorable condition, i feel that there is sufficient sympathy between us for you to be anxious to read the ms. that i enclose and give me your _candid_ opinion about it ["candid" is generally underlined], and if you share the opinion that my friends entertain concerning its merits you will perhaps be of assistance to me in getting it brought to the attention of the managers." with this there arrives, unaccompanied by stamps for its return, some work of a hopeless character, often an indifferent specimen of the sort of mechanical farce which, even when good, amuses us little. occasionally a romantic drama is received. once there came a really touching letter from a lady in great trouble on account of want of money, such trouble that she not only failed to enclose stamps for return of her ms. but did not use half enough to frank the heavy packet. she felt sure that the novelty of her plot would make up for any trifling defects due to inexperience. the drama, which was full of "gadzooks!" and the like, and roundheads and cavaliers, concerned oliver cromwell and charles i., and included a plot to rescue the unhappy monarch on the scaffold, which was only frustrated by the direct intervention of "old noll," who, after a struggle, used the axe with his own hands. it had seven acts and thirty-three scenes. we read scores of these pieces, and in most cases our "candid" criticism is not well received. ere now the reward for the unpaid labour of five or six hours has been a postcard explaining that the author can well understand the deplorable condition of our drama, seeing how incompetent the critics are. there is, of course, another side to the matter. a few pieces--a very small proportion, alas!--have merit, and a few of the authors of the few pieces accept the unpaid critic's remarks reasonably. another crop consists of letters from indignant authors or players, which contain argument or abuse, or both. the epistles from authors in some cases are so interesting that it is sad to think we are too obscure to have a biographer who might use them. those of the players have their humours, particularly when from the aggrieved actresses. one deserves to be mentioned; it stated that, reading between the lines, the lady understood the critic to suggest she was too old for the part of juliet, and therefore sent a copy of her birth certificate. it was only a _copy_--there was only _her_ word to show that it was a copy of _her_ certificate; in the law courts they will not accept your own evidence that you are a minor, even if you bring a certificate issued by somerset house; they want proof of your being the person named in the certificate. if the letter had contained a photograph it would have shown that, although alleged to be only twenty-two years old, the lady weighed about lbs., and had a large, flat face, with an inadequate pug-nose. in a number of cases one is implored to come to the pier concert hall at flushington-on-sea, or the like, because, "owing to your appreciative remarks about my performance as the second gravedigger in _hamlet_, i am sure you would like to see my king lear." these give a good deal of trouble, because it is difficult to decline without hurting feelings. another branch lies in the simple request from people with whom one is unacquainted for introduction to managers whom one does not know. fortunately there is another and a pleasanter side. there are letters that we prize, and unfortunately cannot quote, from authors, generally young authors, with thanks for words of encouragement, particularly in relation to unsuccessful work that seemed to have been unlucky; and there are letters from actors and actresses, speaking with gratitude--gratitude unearned, since only duty has been done--for words of praise which have helped to get an engagement or at least to give courage where hope had grown faint. they must be difficult letters to write, since it is clear that the writers generally feel doubtful whether they ought to be written. an ingenious phrase from one of them may be quoted: "i can hardly be taking a liberty in giving a harmless pleasure to a stranger, and i am sure from what i have read of your criticisms that it will be a pleasure to you to know that you have given great comfort and encouragement to one whom you deem worthy of praise." last of all are letters from persons who are or profess to be impartial critics of our criticisms, and desire to cause us to change our opinions. an unimportant article--a second-hand article borrowed from charles lamb--concerning the effect, on the stage, of shakespeare's dramas has brought in a respectable revenue to the post office, whilst correspondence concerning the wickedness of praising problem plays, however interesting, must have substantially helped some stationers to pay their rent. fewer but far more exasperating are the epistles in which people express their hearty agreement with opinions which we have never expressed, and give praise and encouragement to us for attacking institutions that we do not think undesirable or defending conduct really deplored by us. even the obscure are often misunderstood. chapter iii the dramatic critic an attack upon him after careful consideration, and almost taking the trouble of rereading some of my little essays, we have failed to discover exactly why the letter set out hereafter was written. apparently the articles have been a little bitter concerning what some of us call commercial drama, even rather ferocious about a recent crop of plays. certainly it seems well that the other side should be heard, that the middle-class sensualist--perhaps "the average hedonist" is a better translation of "_l'homme moyen sensual_"--should be allowed to express his views; for one is disinclined to attach importance to the philistine observations in the theatrical trade papers or in the interviews with managers. at the same time, some doubts are possible concerning the letter; it seems to contain some implicit evidence that it was concocted by somebody holding a brief, by a person accustomed to controversy; it is written on the sports club notepaper, and merely signed "a middle-aged pleasure-seeker." "dear sir,--i have read a great deal about the theatres in _the westminster gazette_, signed by 'e.f.s.' i take in the paper because i disagree with its views on all topics--particularly the drama--and i like to hear the other side. why have you not got a sense of humour? why do you not cease flogging that dead horse, the british drama? do you think you can flog it into life? do you believe that british drama, as you understand it, ever did live, or ever will? i don't. there is too much common sense in london. "why do you persist in girding at mr tree because he gives beautiful scenery instead of what you think fine plays? lots of people enjoy his entertainments. i don't myself, for i agree with you that shakespeare and phillips are tiresome. i notice, by the way, that you even begin to gibe at the scenery and suggest that it is not beautiful because it is too pretty, which is a mere paradox, and of course absurd. why do you keep howling against melodrama and musical comedy? "above all, what grounds have you for supposing that we can have, or ought to have, a drama based upon true observation of life? every one of us, every day of his existence, is the hero of a drama based upon the true observation of life, and a very tiresome drama too, as a rule, and we all want to see dramas in the theatre that take us out of ourselves. you seem to think that we can and ought to have a drama like the novels of meredith, which i believe nobody ever reads, or the pictures of whistler, that are simply ridiculous, or the ugly music of strauss--i don't mean the one who writes waltzes. "even assuming that there are people who like such novels, or pictures, or music, your case is none the better, for ordinary people don't get trapped into being bored by them, and such works can live without general support, whilst drama has to appeal to the bulk of us, and you cannot stick over the proscenium-arch some phrase such as 'philistines will be irritated.' "of course there are people who think drama ought to be educational, and preach moral lessons, and so on. well, the popular drama is pretty moral, except, perhaps, musical comedy, which does seem a little topsy-turvy in its lessons; and the censor prevents politics being introduced or religion being attacked. every attempt to teach what you would call moral lessons must fall because we know that after all the play is not real. i confess that the romantic and the sentimental rather bore me; but you cannot expect a fifty-year-old stockbroker to be sentimental or romantic. my wife and daughters enjoy that sort of thing, and they simply worship mr lewis waller, of whom i get a bit jealous at times. "i like the exciting pieces and the funny farces, and all the pretty dresses and pretty undresses and the pretty girls and pretty music of the musical comedies. "you appear to imagine that the business of the theatre is to make the audience think; perhaps that would be all right if it appealed merely to idle people, but ninety-nine folk out of a hundred who go to a theatre in the evening have already done a day's work; even those who don't earn their living are pretty tired after dinner. so it is clear that there are not people enough to support a drama which it is difficult to understand. moreover, you forget that when we have to read, as sometimes happens, the high-class books, we can skip the dull parts; indeed, i get to know all that i need about the important books by reading the reviews that tear the guts out of them and merely leave the padding behind; but, unfortunately, you cannot skip the dull parts of a play unless it is a very well-known work, like _hamlet_ or _macbeth_, when, if a man has a good seat, he can escape quite a lot of the philosophising passages. "the solid truth is that we english, like the americans, have too much good sense to worry about drama. there are a certain number of cranks and faddists who get an unholy delight out of eccentric plays, but they are few in the anglo-saxon countries, where good sense reigns. we only take fairy tales seriously when we are children; we never get intoxicated by ideas; this is where we differ from the continentals. art is all very well in its way and in its proper place. i like a good picture, or a good song, or a rattling story as well as anybody; but art ought not to be shoved down our throats. you will observe that the americans, really a great people, are like us in this respect, and none of their plays--at least those that come over here--belong to the intellectual drama about which you rave. when they want to be intellectual they play shakespeare, not giving us more of the bard than is absolutely necessary, but letting us have full measure of pretty music, scenery and dresses. augustin daly used to do it perfectly. "by all means have a little theatre of your own and enjoy dull plays in it, but don't denounce our cakes and ale, or think yourself any better than people with healthy tastes who can enjoy such works as _mrs dot_, or _the explorer_, or _the duke's motto_. and what does it matter where the plays come from any more than where the nuts come from? anyone would think you were a rabid protectionist who reads your howls about imported plays. art is universal, not local--i read that in some real high-toned book--and if a play is good, don't worry whether its author is french or german or american. you don't grumble if he is norwegian. why not? do be consistent even if you cannot be broad-minded. and, lastly, let the censor alone; you have flung enough mud at him; i am tired of reading energetic attacks which you know quite well are mere beating of the wind. your unfortunate reader, "a middle-aged pleasure-seeker" it is fair to add that the amiable correspondent is inaccurate in some of his allegations. we have never said that the plays of shakespeare or phillips are tiresome, or that mr tree's scenery is not beautiful because it is too pretty, but have hinted that it is sometimes too academically or conventionally pretty. and we have not protested against the importation of plays, but against the importation of rubbish no better than our rubbish of a similar character. we have not demanded that all drama should be intellectual, but merely that the intellectual should be given a fair hearing. why he is disliked it is to be feared that the dramatic critics are not really popular; people have even spoken of them as parasites, without displaying a nice acquaintance with language. on this side of the footlights most people regard us as mere beefeaters, but taste the fare approved by us suspiciously. there is a lurking doubt in the general mind as to our honesty. the people on the other side know that the "champagne and chicken" idea is ill-founded: perhaps they even regret this occasionally, but they love us none the better. clement scott used to be very bitter in print about the ingratitude of players; there was an article by him complaining that those who loved him on account of half-a-dozen laudatory notices turned round and reviled him because of an unflattering phrase in a seventh, and the topic was one upon which he had a means of knowledge quite unequalled. services weigh less than disservices. under such circumstances, mindful of the fact that our remarks are read very closely by people whom they affect deeply, it is most important that our censure should appear just--to others. we ought to be extremely careful that those whom we blame cannot point out that upon their face our remarks are unfair. it is not always easy to remember this, particularly when one is young, and sometimes it is difficult to sacrifice the pleasure of a neat phrase because it may do a little injustice. when looking at such a neat, crushing sentence as "a better company would have been wasted upon such a play, a better play upon such a company," one wonders anxiously whether, in order to write it, the critic may not have been unjust to somebody. there are dangerous phrases such as this one from a notice upon a play given a little while ago--it runs as follows:--"mr x. did everything that mortal actor could do for this indifferent comedy. whenever he had a chance to be funny he was very funny. more than that, he almost made a live figure of a dummy, and that means that mr x. did more for his author than his author had done for him." how on earth could the critic know whether his suggestions were true? the play was new; the part taken by mr x. had never been acted by anybody else; there was no basis for comparison. obviously there was no foundation for suggesting that from the performance it could be seen that the actor did anything not intended by the author. he spoke the author's text, and nothing indicates that he introduced any "business" unsuggested by him. the piece happens to have been printed for private circulation, so that one can make the assertion confidently. what means, then, could the writer have of coming to the conclusion that the part, as acted, was any better than the part as written, or that the actor had done more or less than carry out admirably the ideas of the dramatist? there are instances, of course, where a playwright does owe more to the actor than the actor to him. in _l'auberge des adrets_, known in england as _robert macaire_, frédéric lemaître put the author under an immense debt, perhaps without earning his gratitude, by deliberately converting a turgid, inept, hopeless melodrama into an almost immortal lucrative burlesque. in _our american cousin_ sothern worked up a minor part, that of dundreary, into something like the whole play, with the result that a piece which might have died in a month lived many years. it is well known that in certain classes of musico-dramatic pieces the so-called authors expect the leading low comedian to find his own jokes, or most of them, and certainly mr arthur roberts and others have contributed a bigger share of the effective dialogue than that of the persons supposed to have written the book. in such cases the critic has grounds for suggesting that mr x. "made a live figure of a dummy," and that means that "mr x. did more for his author than his author had done for him." the case under discussion is quite different. there was nothing to indicate that the actor did more than carry out admirably the very clever ideas of the author--an author, by-the-by, who happens to be very meticulous about having his ideas carried out, and therefore is in the habit of attending rehearsals and expressing his opinion at them. it is regrettable that criticism should be written in this fashion, since it causes a feeling of distrust. probably the writer had no desire to be unjust, or even unfair in the comparatively venial way of doing rather less than justice to the author in his desire to do rather more to the actor. it may be urged, by way of answer, that all of us at times are in peril of undervaluing the efforts of the player by suggesting that he has not got full measure out of his part. perhaps we do occasionally some injustice in this respect; we may imagine that a character ought to act better than it is acted when in fact the author has failed to carry out his intentions, and it is impossible for the player to make the part seem other than that of a dummy. even in cases where we make such a mistake there may be grounds for the opinion expressed. it cannot be shown _a priori_ that our opinion is unjust, though a failure afterwards by several actors of incontestable excellence to give life to the part might prove that we were wrong. in other words, the criticism upon the face of it is fair, and here is its distinction from what is being blamed. possibly it looks as if the whole matter were one of form; even if this be so, the fact is no answer. in some aspects of life it is more important to seem just than to be just. it is of real moment that nothing should be done to diminish the by no means extravagant weight of dramatic criticism either in the opinion of the public or that of authors and players. his honesty a little while ago there was a meeting of creditors. the debtor was a dramatic critic. there was a great deal of talking. the assets were in inverse ratio to the debts and one creditor, registered under the moneylenders act, was very wrathful. time after time he kept making his suggestion that the debtor was able to get something from his friends wherewith to pay his enemies; and at last, under some pressure, he spoke clearly. he suggested that as the debtor was still the dramatic critic of an important paper he ought to go and see some of the leading managers and get assistance from them. the speaker was confident that they would gladly advance a substantial sum to a man in the debtor's position without any expectation of direct repayment. what happened after this, of course, was a matter of no importance; but it was interesting and surprising to find a man of business believing that the dramatic critics are easily corruptible, corrupt and corrupted. we are very honest, without being entitled to boast of our honesty; we are like the ladies who from time to time on the stage are bitterly attacked by a heroine with a past. we are ferociously virtuous because we have not been sufficiently charming to be tempted. the phrase "chicken and champagne" still lingers, and i have heard it suggested, in the country, that after the play is over we are regaled by a banquet behind the scenes: "regaled" was the word actually used. it is not difficult to answer that suggestion since most of the critics who count are busily consuming midnight oil, not champagne, as soon as the play is over, and then go to bed tired. mr archer, in feigned indignation, once complained that he had never been insulted by the offer of a bribe, and, if my memory is accurate, he even suggested a doubt whether there existed a manager who would lend him half-a-crown! he certainly underrated his weight as well as his value. yet there is a memorable utterance of a manager to the effect that those of the critics worth bribing could not be bribed, and those willing to be bribed were not worth bribing. still, there have been instances of efforts. a manager, now no more, once sent an expensive trifle at christmas to one of us, who, embarrassed by it, indulged in a graceful but rather costly victory by sending a still more expensive trifle to the manager on his birthday, and this closed the incident. into the nice question whether and how far, apart from anything so vulgar as bribery, we are always strictly impartial i do not care to venture; it may be that even brutus was sometimes "influenced" without knowing it. it is painful to be honest and yet suspected. the other day it was brutally suggested that the formation of the society of dramatic critics had some connexion with the coming into force of the act for the suppression of bribery. foreigners always presume that we have itching palms, salved in due course by the managers or by the players. not long ago one of us received a letter from a continental artist saying that she was about to appear in london; that for a long time past she had received much pleasure and profit from his articles in _the ----_: that she was very anxious that an article concerning her should appear in _the ----_; and that if he would be so charming as to arrange it, she would be glad to pay any price--the word "any" was underlined. no photograph accompanied the letter. no answer came to his reply; probably she was surprised at the attitude adopted by him in referring her to the advertisement manager. it used to be--perhaps is still--the custom in france for players and dramatists to call upon the critics before or immediately after the _premières_; and not long ago some of the french actresses in london sent their cards to the representatives of the leading english newspapers. the most charitable would guess that these visits to the dramatic critic sometimes influence his notice to an undesirable extent. it has been said, no doubt untruly, that the rate of pay of the critics of paris is based in part upon the supposition that their post gives them collateral advantages. in england the popular idea is that the critics are paid vast sums by their editors and also enjoy these little extras. this idea is possibly the explanation of the fact that editors sometimes get letters from people offering to act as dramatic critics without any salary at all. apparently the writers of such letters think that the work would be well enough paid for otherwise. of course they may be merely sufferers from the curious first-night mania which induces a great many people to go to what, as a rule, is the worst but one of the performances of a play. the second, we know, is absolutely the worst, since the performers are suffering from a reaction and fatigue, and there has been no time for improvements to be made in consequence of criticism, amateur and professional. undoubtedly, in the case of many people, the desire to be present on the first night is merely a snobbish wish to take part in what journalists call "a function," and a large number of first-nighters would attend certain _premières_ even if absolutely sure that the performance would be tedious to them. they are present to be seen, and not to see, although nine out of ten of them are of no importance. the topic is one of delicacy, since everyone is anxious, naturally, not to write anything which could enable his friends to suggest that he is vexed because nobody has attempted to bribe him. the supreme humiliation is for the person who is willing to sin and never gets tempted. it is a little curious, seeing what large sums are at stake, that the new bribery act may be regarded as needless so far as we are concerned. in the past there may have been dishonesty; indeed, there was in the case of one or two very well-known critics. the best story in connection with this attempted briber relates to one of the most esteemed of our craft, a writer who has lately retired from the active service of life. a manager sent to him a present of game, and the critic, feeling embarrassed, applied to his editor, sir john robinson, for advice. sir john, who was rich enough in sense of humour, told him that he had better eat the birds promptly in order that corruption might not be added to bribery. in the fact that, except in rare cases, no efforts are made to bribe london critics there is an agreeable tribute to their honesty. a good many thousands of pounds are at stake; there are not a dozen critics worth bribing; the production budget would only require a small proportionate increase to provide quite a handsome sum to the dozen, yet the offer is not made. the uncharitable will say that there are not a dozen, or even two or three, worth bribing; yet, although from time to time managers, or rather actor-managers, allege that the critics have little influence, nearly all the managers, actor-managers included, occasionally admit that even if the critics cannot make plays succeed they may be able to kill some. after all, a failure may be more or less disastrous: the receipts of a piece which runs only three weeks may amount to a thousand pounds more or less; and, using a slightly irish phrase, the three weeks may be either a fortnight or a month, during which there are gross takings greater or less, while the disbursements are a constant figure. probably the critics could not kill a production--the word "production" is ugly, but needed to cover both play and performance--which has real elements of popularity in it, assuming that the management has the bold wisdom to run it against bad notices. moreover, the most amiable criticisms in the world could do no more than mitigate the disaster of an essentially unpopular production. some managers place a rather extravagant reliance upon our fairness. not only do they dissemble their love for some of us, but they even kick us upstairs, and some of us are compelled to pretend that we can see a play better from the dress circle than the stalls. on a first night in certain theatres there are unimportant deadheads in the best seats of the stalls, and the representatives of great english newspapers are hidden behind pillars or put in what, after the first night, will be fourth or fifth rows of the pit, or sent to coventry in the dress circle--sometimes back rows of it--and one may well feel proud to belong to a craft in the honesty of which the managers have such profound confidence. there are moments when the thought comes that managers put some of us into very bad seats because they feel that, conscious of unmerited ill-treatment, we will write opinions more favourable than we really hold, for fear lest what we think our true opinions have been unjustly affected by our ill-treatment. since this was written, one of us heard something quaint about the craft. he was in the torture chair of the dentist, who was talking of the theatres, ignorant of the fact that his victim was a dramatic critic--such is fame--and he spoke about the difficulty of getting tickets for a first-night, and said that most of the seats are given to the press and the only way is to go to the box office on the evening of the first night, since some tickets are generally sold back to the management by the poor hacks anxious to earn a dishonest penny. the sufferer did not contradict him or tell him that most of us get only one ticket and have to use it. you see, no wise man disputes with his "gum architect," who has too many methods of avenging himself if defeated in a controversy. no man is a hero to his dentist. his abolition the sun was on and the fish were off. strenuous efforts had failed to put the angler in the position of the gentleman _qui peut brâmer ses amis_. dr tench, the fresh-water physician, whose medical powers have been somewhat overrated, though he can keep himself alive for an astonishing length of time out of the water, declined the most abominably tempting baits. the pike were only represented by baby jacklets: the rudd and the roach were rare and almost microscopic; as for the carp, of course one did not expect to catch the sly, shy creatures. the friend who had been lured to fish in the big lake, modestly called a pond, put down his rod, and, after a few remarks about the fish, which ought not to be set out in print, said in a meditative way, "i wonder what would happen if there were no dramatic critics." to which came the reply, that there would be no performances, since performances without an audience are almost unimaginable, and every spectator acts to some extent as a dramatic critic. by the way, it is a curious distinction of the actor's art that he needs an audience more than any other artist. the singer, violinist, and other executants of music, if they really love music, can to almost the full extent of such love enjoy performing to themselves alone as much as before a crowd. the painter and sculptor have a keen pleasure in doing their work and seek no spectator save a model; it is true they desire the world to see the child of their efforts, but that is partly because they are creators, as well as executants. certainly, the singer would sing for pure pleasure in singing if stranded alone upon a desert island, and marooned men would write books or music if they could, and stranded painters would paint. would an actor in the position of robinson crusoe act to amuse himself--at least, would he do so before he had his man friday as an involuntary and perhaps ungratified spectator? the hapless _piscator_--the word ceased to be pretentious after walton's use of it--refused to bait his hook again, and said, "i mean, what would happen if there were none of you professional chaps who write criticisms that nobody reads except the other dramatic critics?" to remark that if only the critics read criticisms the suppression of criticism obviously would be needless was an easy triumph, so he continued in a grumbling way, "what i mean is--suppose that after a play you merely gave some sort of account of the plot and did not say whether the piece was good or bad, or proper or shocking, or how it was acted, and so on, would it make any difference? i mean," he added, hastily anticipating a question, "would people go more or less to the theatre, or would the kind of plays and acting change? i suppose it would make a little difference; would the difference be great?" the answer was "yes." after all, the public may award the farthings, but the critics are of weight upon the question of fame; the crowd to some extent acts as jury, the critics are judges; and to pursue the figure, whilst the verdicts are of immediate influence, the judgments remain on record. in the future it will often be difficult to find out what were the verdicts; but there will be no doubt about the judgments. moreover, whilst, as in the law courts, the verdicts are often due to prejudice and to mere temporary causes, the reasoned judgments, when and so far as reasonable, are based on a firmer foundation. probably the theatres would suffer, since there would be less talk about them. for the average englishman is timid in opinion, and, unless fortified by ideas gleaned from the papers, scamps his conversation on topics concerning which opinions may be expressed. when he has exhausted such subjects as the weather, his health, his private affairs and those of his neighbours, he is accustomed to bestow upon his listeners, in a distorted form, the opinions concerning books, plays, pictures, etc., that he has read in the papers and understood imperfectly; and he certainly would talk far less about plays if he had not the aid of the critic's views. of course he would be able to call a piece "awfully good," "simply ripping," "sweetly pretty," "beastly rot," "awfully dull," and to use ill-assorted adjectives concerning the players; but beyond this he would hardly venture for fear of uttering absurdities. a curious humour is that people who have read the opinions which he is misrepresenting, in the papers from which he got them, will listen without patent signs of boredom, and in their turn utter second-hand opinions on similar subjects. clearly, then, talk on the topic would languish but for our promptings; and if the theatres were less talked of there would be fewer visitors to them. furthermore, if there were to be no newspaper criticisms of plays or players, the gossip about them would be diminished even in the papers, for the thrilling personal paragraphs would lose their point if given without adjectives, and adjectives involve criticism of one kind or another. would the pieces and performances be affected by the suppression of criticism? certainly, to some extent. for even if the professional critics tell little more than the amateurs who offer friendly advice, their remarks have a greater weight--partly, indeed, because in a sense they are not gratuitous. all observers have noticed the fact that we rarely act on the opinion of mere friends, however sound. moreover, no one can deny that when the critics, belonging as they do to many schools of thought and thoughtlessness, agree, they are likely to be correct. even putting them on a humbler level, and assuming that some merely express the views of the public, they are serviceable, since the opinions of the world at large are almost wordless, and the author or player unguided save by those immediately around him, and unable to learn more of the public ideas concerning a play or performance than is shown by inarticulate noises and by good or bad houses, would remain curiously ignorant of errors against art and mistakes as to the desires of playgoers. no doubt, to voice the public's thoughts is not our loftiest task, but it is useful to do so, and there can be no denial of the fact that we know very well what the public likes. it has often been said that we make remarkably bad prophecies as to the fate of plays, but some of the instances quoted are not in point, since they concern works ultimately licked into shape, which, but for the adverse notices, would have remained unchanged till early death ended them. real mistakes are made by us in this respect, but generally the mistake is in believing that a piece will be successful which, however, proves to be a failure; we overrate the public taste, or fail to take into account matters quite foreign to the qualities of an entertainment which nevertheless determine its fate. of the more important aspect of the critic's mission, his duty in trying to aid in the development of art, the luckless angler was not thinking. certainly, few, even of those who denounce the critics, will, if they think the matter over, refuse to admit that to the public, the players, and even authors, the humble craftsmen render useful services, quite apart from the value of the work they do for art, by their power of giving voice to the public, whom they study carefully and under favourable circumstances, and by exercising to some extent the function of censor in addition to those of beefeater and guide. the threatened theatrical trust somebody has forwarded from america a newspaper article called "the theatrical syndicate's reply to its critics," to which is given the signature of mr marc klaw, partner of messrs klaw & erlanger, well-known american managers. during the last few years _the referee_ has been uttering a note of warning about the danger of the establishment in london or england of a theatrical trust. other papers have handled the subject, and in particular an interview with mr david belasco has appeared, in which he explained and vehemently defended his attitude towards the theatrical trust in the united states. mr klaw's article is amusing in its unconscious humour. in one part he denies the existence of certain facts, whilst in another he attempts to show that their existence is beneficial to everybody. the important feature of it is a candid admission that the aims of the syndicate are entirely commercial and that he, one of its principal members, looks upon the theatre from no other point of view than that of business. "the theatre," he says, "is governed by the rules and observances of all other commercial enterprises. it is not out to dictate to public taste. it is out to satisfy the public demand. while even such a purely business undertaking must be hedged about with essential suggestions of artistic refinement, i do not believe that the public demands of us that we should give over our commercialism. moreover, the public would have no such right." there is no need to criticise mr klaw's style: still it is rather amusing to think that he sometimes discusses the literary quality of his wares. if there be any chance of our theatres becoming subject to a syndicate which replies officially to its critics in such a fashion there is serious danger to be considered. now, according to certain statements by mr belasco and by writers in and to _the referee_, the theatrical syndicate does, in fact, control to a very great extent the drama in america, and there is no real doubt about the accuracy of the proposition that the drama in the states is in a worse plight than the drama in london. if, judging by the ordinary picked american productions over here, the evidence were otherwise insufficient, the tone of mr klaw's article would render it satisfying. according to mr klaw, the syndicate has conferred certain advantages upon all persons connected with the theatre--except the critics and the public. he does not venture to put his case any higher than that of a trade combination, and it is clear that he at least does not consider the theatre from the point of view of dramatic art. it is difficult to accept this with equanimity. a phrase of his--"the theatre itself is a business house, exhibiting the pictures of the dramatist and composer under the proper light and most attractive auspices, just as the picture-dealer has a picture-house in which he displays the best efforts of the painters and illustrators"--is based on a curious fallacy. the picture-dealer will not hurt his business if, in addition to stocking the royal academy works, upon which he relies for his bread-and-butter, in the front window, he devotes a little space at the back to the unconventional efforts of the true artists. to do this costs him nothing, and he may even make money by such a policy. the manager of the strictly commercial theatre cannot follow the picture-dealer's example; he must risk serious loss every time that he produces a non-commercial piece. in one respect mr klaw is in agreement with some of the english antagonists of the trust system; like them, he is almost indignant at the idea that the theatre should attempt to educate or dictate to the public. as a corollary, he and they must be opposed to the idea that the dramatist or player should have an educational value. do they think that the public needs no education in theatrical art? are they content that the great half-washed should remain in their present condition, which exhibits painfully a great lack of education? presumably. mr klaw deals with the dramatic critic. here, of course, our withers are wrung and we write with a bias. he is indignant because the syndicate is accused of an attempt to "stifle and muzzle" dramatic criticism. he thinks that it is "to his best interests to have it [dramatic criticism] absolutely impartial, absolutely just, and always on the most dignified plane." then he explains that it is because certain american dramatic critics have fallen from this high standard, or never reached it, that they have been driven from the syndicate's paradises. who is to decide whether the critic in a particular case is "absolutely impartial, absolutely just, and on the most dignified plane"? mr klaw and his colleagues, of course. there is a certain fable in which a wolf set itself up to judge the conduct of the relatives of an appetising lamb, and executed a vicarious injustice. from time to time london dramatic critics of the highest standard and most respected character have been excluded by particular managers for a while from their houses, because the managers thought they had not been "absolutely impartial, absolutely just, and on the most dignified plane." time and their friends have convinced the managers that they had blundered, and peace was made. suppose, however, that those individual managers, who really are people taking a far more dignified view of their calling than that of putting it on the level of the dry-goods store, had been part of a syndicate of klaws, would those critics have been readmitted? would the fact have been recognized that the unfavourable notices were really honest dignified criticisms, even if disputable upon the point of justice? of course not. if the newspapers had combined against the theatres, the syndicate managers would have climbed down. would they have combined? i think not. here, indeed, is the peril. it appears that the syndicate has already laid its claws on some of the london theatres. what combination is likely to be formed to fight it; and if there be none, what is the inevitable result? in this land, many centuries ago, even before the famous statute of james i. that regulates our patent law, the british feeling has been hostile to monopolies. apparently this spirit was thrown overboard during the famous passage of _the mayflower_, or when boston bay was turned into a teapot, and certainly the american takes everything on trust, except, indeed, the honesty of his rulers and judges. unfortunately one of the things we are importing from america--would that there were a real prohibitive tariff against it!--is the monopolistic spirit; and this being the case, it is very rash to hope that we shall band ourselves adequately to resist the attacks of the theatre syndicates. it is easy to see how such a thing would be worked: at the beginning quietly, pleasantly, until the hold became so strong that the gloves could be taken off and players might be warned not to accept engagements from outsiders on pain of getting none from the trust; and dramatists informed that unless they kept all their wares for the syndicate they must look to the few outsiders for a living. the american managers, in their big way, would buy up some of the irreconcilable newspapers, would acquire a preponderating influence in the neutral, and discover that the critics representing the independent journals were not "absolutely impartial, absolutely just, and always on the most dignified plane." truly, if we are to be judged by such a method, few, if any, of us will escape a whipping. does the syndicate regard any critic who expresses an unfavourable opinion about its wares as "absolutely impartial," etc.? surely no one who is not "absolutely impartial," etc., is entitled to apply such a standard to the critics: would this consideration prevent mr klaw from judging them and carrying out his sentences? it is to be feared that he would do jedburgh justice on some of us, and the out-of-work critics would join the crowd at poverty corner. chapter iv plays of particular types the pseudo-historical a play running at the savoy in march , concerning madame du barri, called forth the usual complaints about inaccuracy in detail and undesirability of subject. the latter point is not our theme, and may be dismissed with the remark that there was nothing in the life of the creature as presented upon the stage to serve as an excuse for requiring us to spend an evening with such a worthless baggage. at an early stage of his career the critic welcomes this class of pseudo-historical drama--but his welcome takes an unamiable form. he likes to have it produced on a saturday evening, so that he may pass a happy sunday. the inaccuracies fascinate him. they offer such a splendid chance of showing the knowledge possessed by him--and his library. when very young he deals with the matter in a straightforward fashion, and trounces the author for every unwitting solecism and willing falsification that is discovered. he writes a learned little disquisition headed by a remark, in the macaulay vein, as to matters of common knowledge, and shows from direct authority that the dramatist is quite wrong in mixing up the du barri who married the heroine with the du barri who took her away from the milliner's shop, and gives a facetious touch of lightness to his remarks by pointing out that neither of the scoundrels was connected with a certain much-advertised proprietary food. the more obscure the blunder the greater the writer's joy in it, for he will be able to introduce observations beginning "that little known but elegant author," etc., and if the subject is earlier than the du barri period he will present some quotations in the uneconomically spelt old french. a little later in his career his method changes: he relies upon his _batterie de cuisine_ as much as ever, but uses some art to conceal the employment of his apparatus. there will be mere hints about the errors; an adjective between two commas will sometimes represent a severe correction. the books are not referred to, the corrections are made in a fashion which suggests that no greater authority is needed than that of the critic. a time arrives when he comes to the conclusion that it is no part of his duties to deal with the historical aspect of the matter; but, of course, the habit is upon him, and he excuses himself by saying, after he has pointed out all the errors which he has noticed, that they would not matter in the least if the play were meritorious in other respects. it is difficult to defend his attitude, which, however, is due to his appreciation of the fact that nowadays a little knowledge is a well-paid thing. moreover, he does not wish it to be thought that his knowledge of history--and books--is less than that of his rivals. of course the inaccuracies do not matter very much unless they are so gross as to shock the great half-literate. there is, however, a more valid objection to the historical play than that it is certain to be inaccurate; the historical drama is rarely a good drama. the author is compelled by his matter to present it in a conventional fashion, for to give a du barri or a napoleon, a nelson or a wellington, not in accordance with the popular concept of such personages would be to seek failure. moreover, the writer is necessarily forced to belittle the subject if not bold enough to take a simple episode in the life of his hero or heroine, and even then, unless the miracle-working power of genius is employed, the great figure comes out as a small puppet. the player may be made to look up like napoleon, may follow traditions as to his gestures and mode of speech, but in none of the vast number of plays concerning the wonderful monster has he ever appeared to be a person of genius: whether handled facetiously, as in mr shaw's ingenious play _the man of destiny_, or _madame sans-gene_, pathetically as in the play presented by mr martin harvey, or formidably as in most works, he never seems at all different from any commonplace man put into the like circumstances. exactly that in which he differed from all others is exactly what cannot be put upon the stage. we have had nelson, and of course it was quite impassible to get any suggestion of the qualities that made him nelson. the modern tendency in the matter seems to be to choose the reprehensible--such, for instance, as mlle. mars, madame de pompadour, madame du barri, and la montansier, women in the career of whom no doubt there were many dramas, similar, however, to the dramas in the lives of other women of their class less famous and infamous. when, however, they are put upon the stage they cease to be remarkable, and the characters introduced to support them have the same fate; for instance, the louis xv. at the savoy does not give the faintest idea of the ineffably vile monarch, whilst no glimpse is shown of the quality which enabled a du barri to obtain her tremendous power. it is always a case of mountain and mouse in these plays; take as an example the sardou _dante_ play produced with prodigious drum-beating a while ago at drury lane. who, if names had been altered, would have guessed that the hero of the piece was the author of the immortal poems? there has been hardly a historical play in modern times in which the identity of the famous personages could be guessed except from the names, the make-up, the costumes, and the specific facts; at the best the pieces are _tableaux vivants_. perhaps there is nothing illegitimate in the ambition of the player to pose as one of the mighty dead, and it is rather humility in the author which urges him to seek adventitious interest than vanity that causes him to believe himself really able to give a true idea of a napoleon. into such delicate questions it is needless to inquire. the point is that the lives of the great are not more dramatic than the lives of the small. napoleon at st helena was not more unhappy than were millions of people of his day. there is a drama as poignant in the history of césar birotteau as in that of marie antoinette, as big a tragedy in the career of whitaker wright as in that of napoleon iii. there was a reason, which exists no longer, why the authors of the middle ages chose characters of great social status for their principal parts, and even this reason was not altogether well founded. it would be wrong to assert that historical plays ought not to be written, for, whilst not recommending the use of the stage instead of history classes, one can see that a historical play may illustrate ideas that could hardly be presented otherwise. there is a noteworthy instance in the work of the much-abused ibsen. _the pretenders_ is a historical drama amazingly rich in idea; whether the idea of kingship superbly handled in it is an anachronism it is hard to say, or to tell whether the dramatist chose his subject to illustrate his idea or the idea to embellish his subject; but in it, though obviously there is scope for magnificent mounting and interesting detail, one feels that the genius of the author has prevented him from making any sacrifice of the dramatic aspect. he has not chosen a popular historical personage and made him into the hero of the melodrama, as happens in the case of nine out of ten of the so-called historical plays, but has written a drama that demands a royal atmosphere, which he handles admirably. what a pity that the money lavished upon the du barri play--and lavished very cleverly, it must be admitted, so far as the production of beautiful stage-pictures is concerned--was not spent in the mounting of a great drama like _the pretenders_, rich in strong acting parts, magnificent in presentation of character, and really illuminated by ideas! the horrible in drama it has been alleged that _the monkey's paw_, a clever one-act play by messrs jacobs and barker, formerly presented at the haymarket theatre, is too horrible for the stage. the part complained of is confined to the last scene of three. a young man has been killed in a factory, and his body was so mangled by the fatal wheels that even his father was not allowed to see it. late at night the father, by means of a diabolical talisman--the monkey's paw--succeeds in recalling his son to life, and the audience hears a knocking at the door. what is knocking? the mother is making frantic efforts to pull back the bolts. her son is there, returned from the grave. the father, aware that the talisman, which promised the fulfilment of three wishes, is of a fiendish malignity, guesses that if the door be opened his son will stand before them alive, but fearfully mangled and mutilated, so he is groping upon the floor for the monkey's paw, and the audience feels that on the other side of the door is an obscene horror fresh from the grave. there was a sigh of relief in the theatre when the father found the talisman, and, using the last wish, prayed successfully that his son might be dead and at peace. the knock, knock, was decidedly impressive, like the knocking at the door in _macbeth_, which greatly affected charles lamb. is this matter too horrible for the stage? one may compare it with another horror given not long ago, _the soothing system_, which mr bourchier adapted cleverly from a story by edgar poe and produced at the garrick, showing the terrible adventures of two visitors to a lunatic asylum, the inmates of which had overpowered their keepers. this was very powerful and horrible, and perhaps would have given a shiver to the hero of a famous tale in the collection of goblin stories by the brothers grimm. nevertheless it was not legitimate, partly because the circumstances are rare when it is permissible to present madness on the stage, partly because some of the mad people were repulsive to the eye, and partly because horror was the sole means and end of the piece. many condemned _the monkey's paw_, yet a line can be drawn between it and _the soothing system_--not a nice sharp line, but one of those blurred lines so faint and so uncertain, that even if their existence be admitted, there is always room for a fight on the question whether a work lies on this or that side of it. speaking roughly, one may say that _the monkey's paw_ is legitimate because there is nothing in it repulsive to the eye, and for the reason that horror is not the sole means and end of it: the story, like its prototype folk-lore tale, "the three wishes," has an obvious moral. it belongs to art because the emotion caused is due to a stimulus to our imagination by the force of an idea and not of a thing exhibited. if an effort were made to show us any ghastly creature knocking, the work would be out of court. to illustrate the line of definition already indicated, a few instances of the horrible presented on the stage in our time may be given usefully; it must be added that most appear to lie on the wrong side. shakespeare's adventures in the horrible are legitimate, with an exception in the case of one play of doubtful authenticity, _titus andronicus_. on the other hand, _sweeney todd; or, the barber of fleet street_, would probably find no defender; whilst a historical drama i once saw in the south of france, where the hero was put upon the rack in front of the footlights and squirmed and screamed, was quite unendurable; and this is rather a pity, since there is a very powerful dramatic scene in balzac's _notes sur catherine de medicis_, which in consequence of this objection should not be used. there is a mitigated form of the torture business in _la tosca_ that caused great discussion. perhaps those who deem it illegitimate are somewhat supersensitive; it would be more polite, and perhaps accurate, to call them hyper-modern. _dr jekyll and mr hyde_ presented a very difficult case. i can remember nothing so "creepy" and "shuddery" as the first appearance of mr mansfield at the lyceum in the character of the evil doctor; the house gasped at the half-seen image of a sort of obscene beast at the conservatory window, and there was the silence of breathless horror when it bounded into the room and seized its victim. until the impression wore off the mansfield hyde was almost as horrible as the fantastic things born of the cruel imagination and brilliant pencil of mr s.h. sime, whose work is sometimes so richly embellished by imagination as well as by superb technique that one cannot deny its claim to be regarded as art. something of the distinction here discussed can be seen by comparing mr sime's drawings with the pictures of the mad painter wirtz, whose abominable gallery at brussels is a chamber of unimaginative horrors. it may be remembered that mr mansfield had a competitor in mr bandman palmer, who, however, missed horror by the simple vulgarity of his horrors, and, though he may have impressed the simple-minded, was ludicrous to the thoughtful. returning for a moment to the clearly unpermissible, one might take a book like "frankenstein." certainly any presentation on the stage of the man-monster as described by the talented authoress would fall under the censure of being disgusting. this term may be used concerning several needless exhibitions of blood on the stage, and of such a matter as _nana_, once presented in paris. when the hapless heroine appeared in the last act with wax spots to indicate the pustules of smallpox, she very nearly "took a lot out of us," if one may borrow a phrase from "mr hopkinson." obviously anything that reminds one of the ghastly horrors at the royal college of surgeons or the polyclinic institute is quite unforgivable. this brings us not unnaturally to a matter in which there has been some change of taste. a fearful exhibition of a man in a fit, given with horrible power by that admirable actor mr pateman in a melodrama called _master and man_, would perhaps not be condemned in our days, but probably we would not endure, and certainly there would be little praise for, some of the death scenes once famous in drama. the critics nowadays would apply to the actress the phrase of the auctioneer to his wife, and implore her to "get on with her dying." there was the famous mlle. croizette in _le sphinx_, by that detestable dramatist octave feuillet; she squirmed horribly after taking poison from a ring; and it was alleged that she had studied the death of patients in hospitals--a brutal, horrible thing to do. there is a good deal too much dying in _frou-frou_, _la dame aux camellias_ and _adrienne lecouvrer_. without going back to the traditions of the greek theatre, one may say confidently that, if death on the stage is permissible, dying is almost illegitimate, and trick falls, exhibitions of agony, and the like are mere pandering to a very vulgar taste. occasionally the dying is so handled that, though somewhat prolonged, such a vigorous phrase ought not to be applied to it. for instance, one may refer to _in the hospital_, once presented at the court, where mr beveridge, in an admirable performance, gave a very tactful, restrained exhibition of approaching death and actual decease. another objection exists to any exhibition upon the stage of dying as compared with death. the symptoms often call up terrible memories to some members of the audience which are not evoked by the simple fact of death itself. it cannot be pretended that these references to instances of the horrible and the trifling comments upon them establish the existence of the distinction indicated, but they may be of some assistance to those who endeavour to explore the matter. it is at least pleasant to note that there is a modern tendency to obtain effects of the horrible by appeals to the imagination rather than to the senses. it should be added that mr f.r. benson presented a frankenstein play written by mr stephen phillips, but the question of the horrible appearance was discreetly avoided. the immorality play the summer visit to london of foreign players generally gives birth to discussions upon several topics. of course the question as to the relative merits of french and english acting is raised. upon this, one may give a warning to the thoughtless not to accept as universal the vague proposition that the french are a nation of born actors. of course everybody each year points out that it is absurd there should be several foreign companies at a time in london cutting the throats of one another, as to which one may say that the matter is far more complicated than most people suppose. the point worth nothing is the choice of plays by our visitors. some of them no doubt are wise; bernhardt, for instance, recognizes the fact that a showy piece with a big part for her is exactly the right thing provided that it is easily understood by the berlitzians and ollendorffians. there are others, however, such as madame réjane, more ambitious, who in their selection of plays do some disservice to their country. the humour of mr gilbert's line "the not too french french bean" appeals irresistibly to the english. there has long been a vague idea in british bosoms that our neighbours in sexual matters are far more immoral than ourselves. this is not the occasion upon which to examine the causes and origin of such a decidedly erroneous view. one may, however, single out one of them. it is largely the fault of writers of fiction that we remain in ignorance, or rather--and this is worse--in error concerning the character of our amiable neighbours. in former days, putting aside the naughty farces not supposed to present a picture of actual life, most french dramas were quite sound in conventional morality. augier presented some wicked people, such as olympe, concerning whom he invented the phrase _la nostalgie de la boue_; but he was unequivocably moral in his aims, and preached the sanctity of marriage and maternity. dumas _fils_, putting aside one indiscretion, was equally vigorous in his desire to support accepted views of morality. his illustrious father, it may be admitted, occasionally propounded startling propositions, but without prejudice, i fancy, to a sound belief in the idea that exceptional cases must be regarded as exceptions. none, however, of these writers, however artificial their views of life, ever offered pictures of society based upon the proposition that the chastity of woman is of no importance. many of the present school of french dramatists write plays--unfortunately chosen for presentation in england--which assume the existence in society of a large class of people, otherwise amiable, who act upon the proposition that in paris as in heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. unmarried men and women live together, the males paying for the board and lodging, etc., of the females without there being any pretence that the intimacy of their relations is radically immoral under normal circumstances. they do not even indulge in fireworks in such plays. you do not have parodies of the famous phrase "property is theft"; for the heroines fail to justify themselves by remarking that marriage is immorality. there is simply a business of union and disunion, _collage_ and _décollage_, coupled with what one may call cross-unions, all of them apparently free from the embarrassment of children and none of them involving any of the more dignified of the human emotions. one of the worst of the number was _l'age d'aimer_, by m. pierre wolff, a piece so cynically immoral, and written with such an air of truth, that it might well cause some of us to shrink in horror from the idea of an _entente cordiale_ with a people which, if truly represented by its fashionable dramatists, has no concept of cleanliness of life. without posing as a champion of orthodox morality and certainly without taking objection to the study of sex questions on the stage, one may protest against works in which it is assumed there is no sex question, because every form of union, on any basis, except perhaps that of marriage, is permissible. by-the-by, why was the press that was so indignant about the so-called problem play almost silent concerning these french dramas? where were the phrases, such as miasmatic putrescence or putrescent miasma--i forget which it was--that used to greet the dramas of ibsen? where are the splendid puritans who howled about _a wife without a smile_? could it be--the thought is painful--that they did not quite understand _l'age d'aimer_ and imagined that all the people were married? this idea is simply humiliating to one of the craft. "ne rien comprendre, c'est tout pardonner" is a very novel view of a famous phrase. madame réjane, it was stated in the papers, has expressed herself shocked by _a wife without a smile_, and alleged that she would never act in such a piece; but it may well be that her horror lay in the fact that the parties concerned in the farce had been through a ceremony of marriage, and that she would have accepted it as permissible if it were correctly entitled _a cocotte without a leer_. the point is, not that those who understand these plays or those who do not are affected in their moral ideas by them, but that they give a deplorable picture of french life and in such a guise as to suggest that it is a picture of normal french life; unfortunately _l'age d'aimer_ is only one of many. it is a great pity to use such a powerful vehicle as the stage for slandering a nation. that there is a certain amount of truth in works of the _zaza_, _sapho_, _les demi-vierges_ and _l'age d'aimer_ type is incontestable; yet so far as they are true to general life one can find their parallel in this holy island. unfortunately, whilst the fast society of paris is no bigger than that of london, and whilst paris is infinitely less in relation to france than london in relation to england, the great french nation is generally judged over here by flashy pictures of the fast section of paris society, drawn, very often, if not always, from the outside, by clever people too indolent to know that the psychology of decent people is quite as interesting and dramatic as that of the gutter-creatures of mere passion who dignify their cynical desires with noble names, and, so far as the latest school is concerned, fail even to reach the humblest concept of free love. scripture plays there have been some complaints about the attitude of several of the dramatic critics concerning mr jerome's drama _the passing of the third floor back_. it has been suggested that they have not welcomed with sufficient warmth a sincere attempt "to broaden the basis," a phrase apparently borrowed from the tariff reformers, to enlarge the boundaries of the british drama, but have treated the production of the piece as an everyday affair, confining their remarks to criticism concerning the workmanship. in _the third floor back_ a character is introduced who is called "the stranger," but known by everybody in the theatre to represent jesus christ; and "the stranger" visits a somewhat remarkable boarding-house in which all the boarders and the landlady are vile, and after his visit all of them are fit for immediate translation to heaven. certainly, many of us are anxious to broaden the basis of our drama. a little while ago an important foreign paper contained a article saying that the object of the london stage is "to introduce living pictures to say pretty things for young girls," and that "of the social, religious, economic or intellectual struggles which agitate our time no trace is observable in the english stage literature of the day," and that english stage literature "has become nothing more than an insipid and dying study of the doings of the aristocratic and the rich." how sickening to know that in the main the charges are true, and that our drama, with, fortunately some exceptions, is merely a kind of pap and puppet affair. on the other hand, the broadening effect of a play such as mr jerome's is not obvious. the censor has been dodged, just as he was dodged many years ago, when verdi's opera _nebuchadonozor_ was called _ninus_ or when _ben hur_ was presented or _the daughters of babylon_. that official has already permitted the performance of _everyman_ and _hannele_. consequently, it is not easy to see that the suggested broadening of the basis has taken place. moreover, there are many who doubt whether broadening, so as to admit a free trade in what could be called religious or scripture drama, is desirable. we do not pretend that the office of censor ought to be maintained merely to keep back a flood of plays introducing scriptural characters. the office, no doubt, does good as well as harm, but the harm far outweighs the good. would it be beneficial if this particular restriction--this working rule that characters bearing the names of personages of the old and new testament are not to be presented on the stage--were relaxed. there are enthusiastic persons who desire a closer union between church and the stage, and wish to have the theatre employed as a kind of pulpit, who believe that scripture plays would be beneficial. it is conceivable that under certain circumstances the attitude of these persons would be sound, but not under the present circumstances. most of our theatres are run as a mere commercial speculation by people who care little enough about art, and probably nothing about religion. we have had one instance of the sort of thing that might be expected, _the sign of the cross_, in which a commonplace melodrama was mixed up with hymns and pseudo-religious talk and miracles, and a ballet as immodest, as pulse-disturbing, as any given in the theatres or the halls. many visited the play who had never been to a theatre before, since they believed that it was really a religious drama outside their ban. some were horrified, and from being potential playgoers became rapidly adverse to the stage and all its works; others were shocked and disturbed and delighted by the exhibition of female flesh in the ballet, with a result which can easily be guessed. no doubt a number of persons believed that the piece did good to them and other folk--some people will believe anything. the people of taste and sensibility, who, whatever their state of religious belief, would regard with abhorrence the exhibition on the ordinary commercial stage of the christ whom they were brought up to regard as divine, have a title to consideration. the traffic in blasphemy that would immediately follow the suggested enlargement of the boundary of the theatre is horrible to contemplate. such abominations as a combination of christ and semi-naked women doing more or less mitigated _danses du ventre_, would be justified as giving an oriental colour. there is another side. it may be taken that our laws against blasphemy have moved a good deal since lord coleridge's famous summing-up concerning the essential mutability of the common law about blasphemy which he gave in regina _v._ ramsey and foote; if the restriction were removed what power would prevent the atheists from producing distinctly anti-christian plays which might very well cause riots, which certainly would prove a serious counterblast, if discreetly handled, to the efforts of the church and stage enthusiasts. one can conceive every kind of crank with money producing a play to advocate his particular brand of religion. we could not expect all the actors chosen to represent christ to be gentlemen of fine sensibility, high character, and sincere feeling for art, like mr forbes robertson; it is hardly pleasant to think of the character in the hands of some members of the profession. one can imagine a feeling of revulsion if any of the actresses who have made history--in the divorce court--were chosen for the part of the virgin mary. this is said without for one moment suggesting that the players are one whit the worse in their way of living than the rest of us, or that managers of theatres are wickeder or more unscrupulously commercial than anyone else. yet, speaking of the managers, one is forced to admit that the majority consult the taste of the majority, that many are willing enough to pander to vulgar cravings, and it is not imaginable that, unless our stage can be put upon a new basis, a freedom to produce religious or scriptural drama would fail to cause great scandals. as the matter stands, the attitude of the censor, though not logical, is not wholly unsatisfactory; it is ludicrous enough that he should have adopted an ostrich policy towards mr jerome's piece, yet no harm has been done by the production of this sincere and respectful drama. indeed, some good may have come from it. in an ideal world, no doubt, we should all be severely logical; in england we are radically illogical, and we carry out most of our affairs on a basis of compromises. if you do not call your leading character christ in the theatre you may call him christ outside, seems the proposition implied in the licence for _the passing of the third floor back_, but the very basis of the authority of the lord chamberlain is such that one cannot apply logic to his decrees and say that because he has permitted this he must sanction that. some of these remarks may seem to suggest that it is advisable the office should be retained, which is not the case. we pay too high a price for it since it tends to paralyse the drama; on the other hand it is to be hoped that so long as the office exists the holders of it will be very careful concerning any efforts to exploit the scriptures for the profit of the theatres. the success of the st james's play will cause a rush of people, anxious to go "one better"--or worse--than mr jerome. no harm--possibly some good--may come from the present piece, but the circumstances should be regarded as exceptional. we have few playwrights so earnest as mr jerome, few actors or managers with such high ideals as those of mr forbes robertson. it seems permissible and advisable to add that this article is not written from the point of view of one who professes to be "on the side of the angels," but merely as a protest against what in the long run would be one more blow to our staggering stage. anecdotal plays it appears that "percival" of _the referee_ has made a great discovery. he has found out the reason why french plays are better than english, is able to put his "finger on the real difference which exists between french plays and english," he now knows why "many more plays are successfully adapted from french into english than _vice versa_." this sounded thrilling, but after finishing his article the reader was about in the humour of a person who has been promised "an awfully rippin' new story" and receives a feeble "chestnut." mr "percival" is really like the american who discovered on going home very late at night the fact that the sun rises in the east, and cackled as much about his discovery as a hen over her first egg. his explanation is that, "with one exception--pinero--the english playwright invents a plot and then writes in characters to carry that plot out. your french playwright does not do this.... he takes an idea and works it out with dramatic action instead of taking a dramatic action and working it out with such incident ideas as may happen along. and sometimes your french dramatist just takes people with characteristics and lets them work their own play out for him." there is no need to seek deeply to find out why "many more plays are successfully adopted from french into english than _vice versa_." the explanation is that owing to parisian prejudice hardly any english plays of any merit, shakespeare's excepted, have been adapted, and there is a ferocious hostility in france to foreign drama. the modern french drama may be better than the english; perhaps "percival" hardly asserts that it is, unless in the passage already quoted and in this phrase: "there is something about three plays in four in france which is lacking at home, and that something is something good." no doubt, if we take the past fifty years as a basis for comparison of the two dramas, the french is the better; but during the last fifteen there has been a change, and one could not make any sweeping assertion upon the subject as regards the plays of this period, unless it be limited to the plays produced in the ordinary way of theatrical commerce. if the alleged superiority exists, one can offer two reasons for it without relying upon the brilliant discovery of "percival." the first is the greater freedom of the french dramatist in choice of subject, and also in treatment; this gives him an enormous advantage. the second is that, whilst there are almost as many people in paris who will welcome rubbish as there are in london, there can also be found a large number of playgoers with a good deal of intellectual curiosity, whilst the intelligent amateur--using the phrase in its french sense--is comparatively rare in london. consequently, the french dramatist has not only more freedom in subject and treatment than the english, but in addition a greater public of playgoers who bring their intellect into the auditorium. probably "percival" will claim that this second ground of explanation enters into his, and there is some truth in this. on the other hand, his statement of fact that our dramatists, with the exception of pinero, are mere story-tellers, and that the french authors write plays based upon ideas, is quite inaccurate. roughly, one may put dramas into three categories--the play of anecdote, the play of idea, and the play of character. "percival" recognises the third category by his remark that "sometimes your french dramatist just takes people with characteristics and lets them work out their own play for him." as a matter of fact, few plays belong exclusively to any one of these categories. in which would "percival" place shakespeare's? he began to write a play by borrowing the plot from somebody, and primarily all his pieces may be regarded as anecdotal, but, in the passage of the story through his mind to the pen, in some cases it became the vehicle for an idea, and, in all, the story grew to be of infinitely less importance than the characters. take _othello_. you may give an account of it as a story in which it is merely an adaptation of another man's work. you may treat it as a study of the idea of jealousy, and be uncertain whether suspicion is not more correct as a definition than jealousy, or you may consider it as an amazing gallery of pictures of character. it may be put into each category, and belongs to all. probably the question whether a drama belongs primarily to this, that, or the other of the categories is as otiose as the discussion whether the hen or the egg came first. no play lives that does not belong to the second and third category, and it cannot be put upon the boards without some reliance upon the first. on the other hand, whatever may be the belief of individual dramatists, it is doubtful whether any dramas are produced primarily based upon "taking people with characteristics and letting them work out their own play." it is obvious that people, even people with strongly marked characteristics, can live for years in juxtaposition without their relation to one another resulting in anything dramatic, or even theatrical. paula tanqueray and her husband might have lived and died unhappily together without offering any materials to the playwright, and so indeed might any of the characters in any of the plays by the brilliant author. only when facts exterior to them begin to play upon the characters dramatically is there room for drama. there is an enormous amount of plot, psychological or physical, in every play. next to the first, the second category produces the plays most clearly defined. one might take the plays of brieux, and some of the dead-and-gone dramas of charles reade. here we have dramas of idea, more accurately of subject, still more accurately of problem. they are works in which the dramatist tries to prove something, or, at least, present some problem of social life, leaving to the audience the task of coming to a conclusion. however, even m. brieux cannot get on without category number one, whilst he puts as much of category number three in his work as he can. he invents a story, and he chooses and endeavours to display characters as a vehicle for exhibiting his subject. sometimes, to be just, he gets along--in a fashion--with a surprisingly small amount of plot, as in _les bienfaiteurs_. even then the necessity of having some sort of form makes a good deal of story necessary. jean jullien, the inventor of the phrase "une tranche de la vie," endeavoured to give plays without formal beginning or end, unconsciously, perhaps, tried to carry out a desire of merimée's to write a play in respect of which the audience needs no knowledge of antecedent facts; but his success--in more senses than one--was only partial. the english dramatists of what one might call the independent theatre, stage society, and court theatre management have struggled to avoid the anecdotal play, sometimes with a brilliant result, as in _the voysey inheritance_, _john bull's other island_, or _strife_; mr j.m. barrie in several successful works has minimised the story as much as possible. why does "percival" ignore them? has he overlooked the fact that most of the french dramas successfully adapted belong primarily to the category he condemns, and nearly all the rest to a subdivision of number three, ignored by him. this subdivision consists of star plays--that is, of dramas of theatrical character--in the manufacture of which the french dramatists excel. many of the dramas by dumas _fils_ show an ingenious combination of this subdivision with the anecdotal play. and pinero--our exception--how would "percival" classify _his house in order_, which has a strong story? in reality it is a very adroit mixture of story, idea, and comedy of character, this is the case with the other works of our leading dramatist. the fact is that "percival" has mistaken treatment for conception. all dramatists try to combine the three categories, but the worst class attaches too much importance to the mere story; unfortunately our audiences are like the bad dramatist in this respect: hence the almost purely anecdotal play, like the anecdotal picture, is the most popular. the supernatural that the forbidden is attractive is a commonplace and true. the third party in the divorce case is often less beautiful than the petitioner, the length of water beyond our own always promises better sport, the mushrooms seem to grow more thickly in the fields of others. in drama we see the same law in operation. no canon of art makes the "supernatural" unlawful to the dramatist, but it is generally looked upon as illegitimate in serious drama. the word "supernatural" is used in its popular sense, which is well enough understood, but indefinable. naturally the dramatist is tempted the more when he sees the novelist using the supernatural effectively. no wonder the playwright has tried to adapt _frankenstein_; he has merely succeeded in presenting a grotesque unterrible figure where mrs shelley gave a thrill of horror. we have had several plays on the boards which overstep bounds. one can read mr jerome's tale "the passing of the third floor back" without being oppressed by a sense of the inadequacy of his machinery, but when mr forbes robertson is supposed on the stage to "blarney" eight or nine people who have ugly souls into righteousness we are not only unconvinced but actively incredulous. possibly to simple minds the affair would be more impressive if the lodger wore a halo supposed to be invisible to the people on the stage, or produced an occasional flash of lightning or growl of thunder. take that dear old crusted melodrama _the corsican brothers_. the story was thrilling enough when merely read; it was easy to believe that the dei franchi had a special brand of constitution which enabled them to see the family ghost whilst the more sceptical could talk of brain waves and suggestions and of subjective phenomena. that is where the modern novelist gets out of all hobbles; if you will not accept his spook as a genuine, old-fashioned spook, you can hardly refuse to swallow it as a subjective phenomenon. the blessed word "subjective" extricates him from all troubles. the poor dramatist has no such refuge. occasionally he can work his plot by means of a vision; and the hypnotic trance has served, as in the case of _the polish jew_; but his ghosts have to be strictly objective. in fact, using a technical term frivolously, his ghosts expect the ghost to walk regularly on fridays. there is no humbug about them; no "pepper"--but they have to be taken with a ton of salt! this difficulty was, perhaps, of no great importance at a time when most people had faith in ghosts; when the most sceptical did not go further than madame de staël, who alleged that she did not believe in them but was afraid of them. it is not recorded what benjamin constant, her unhappy lover, thought about them. nowadays things have changed and ghosts and the personal devil have joined the ranks of the unemployed, or only obtain employment with mr stead and his julia. there is, of course, the spook of the spiritualist, who demands serious consideration; but plays dealing with spiritualism are not common. perhaps because such playgoers as will accept the more or less material ghost are even more sceptical than the scientific as to the objective phenomena of the spiritualist. no doubt managers try to rise to the occasion and to make a steady advance in ghosts, devils and angels, but the mechanical improvements seem small. indeed, in a sense there has been no advance since the days when pepper's ghost terrified us at the poor old polytechnic, and unfortunately the system of pepper can only be used to a limited extent. there were moments of thrill in _ulysses_ at his majesty's. the stage angels are the worst of the supernaturals. because angels are supposed to dwell off the earth it is assumed that they must fly. furthermore, it is imagined that as fliers they belong to the heavier-than-air order, the monoplane variety, and so must have gigantic wings; no one makes provision for the working of the wings, which would involve tremendous muscular energy. you may answer that they have miraculous energy wherewith to flap them. if, however, the miraculous enters into the matter, why not imagine a miraculous method of flying which does not demand wings--by so doing you would avoid the necessity of making the angels look like ill-constructed birds. something "smart" might be done in the way of a "dirigible balloon" species of angel! fiends are modelled as flying-machines on the lines of the bat--this may be taken from the latest mephisto. the contrivers of stage effects are not to be blamed because they cannot overcome the difficulties offered by the playwrights. yet they have not exhausted their means. they seem to be working on wrong lines, and so, too, are our scene-painters generally; but that is raising a very large question demanding separate treatment. certainly some years ago mr gordon craig experimentally, in a curious piece called _sword or song_, presented at the shaftesbury, gave suggestions in the supernatural that deserved attention, and in a broad way showed the possibility of arriving at striking stage effects by suggestion rather than actual depiction. it is, indeed, the fault of our play-mounters that they are too precise about dotting "i's" and crossing "t's," and like the pet photographers of amateurs they show too much detail. years ago, on the first night of _hansel und gretel_ at daly's--what a delightful first night!--for a while the effect of the troops of angels on the stairs was quite charming--for a while--but, alas! the stage grew lighter, gauzes were raised, and then we saw plainly the young women of the chorus, with big wings, and could identify face after face, recollecting this young lady as formerly a peasant boy in one comic opera, and that as a village maiden in another, and so on. what a "give away," to use a common effective phrase! the last prodigious production of _faust_? well, what thinking person can swallow the devil and the electric sparks from the sword, the wine drawn from the table, the comicalities of the witches' kitchen, or be moved by the brocken scenes? it is very well to say that goethe intended and expected his drama to be put on the stage, though this can hardly apply to the second part. even if he did he cannot have expected such material matters to be treated as of serious importance--of such importance that, as represented, his great drama seems chiefly contrived to lead up to spectacular effects, plus a seduction story occasionally hurt by needlessly plain phrases. it may be said that this is the jam used to induce us to swallow the powder; but really there is so much jam and so little powder that the benefit of the dose is doubtful. to be just to sir herbert tree--his _faust_ sinned no more in the matter than did the lyceum setting; perhaps even a little less. certainly there is rather more goethe in the matter than wills introduced. it may be said that shakespeare's plays were intended for the stage, and that he introduced "ghosts," as in _hamlet_, _macbeth_ and _richard iii._; possibly he believed in them. yet, so far as one can judge from such knowledge as we have of the stage as he knew it and its resources, the treatment of his ghosts must have been really quite conventional and scenically unimpressive. there was some gain in this, for the more directly the ghost business is effective the more the attention of the audience is drawn to it; though the interest of the scene is not in the ghost but the effect it produces on the other characters; the case is one that may be summed up in the phrase quoted for us by bacon--the better the worse. chapter v plays of particular types unsentimental drama it was suggested long ago that all the conceivable tunes would soon have been written, and possibly, if for "conceivable" one substitutes the word "obvious," there was truth in the suggestion. on the other hand experience breeds in us the belief that composers of genius could go on inventing novel melodies for centuries to come. things have been happening lately, and threaten soon to occur again, which appear to show that our popular dramatists imagine that there are no new plots or subjects open to them. it is said that one playwright is busily engaged upon a novel version of _la dame aux camellias_ which is to be distinguished from dumas' novel and drama by the fact that the heroine is chaste and does nothing worse than "a bit of flirting." it is to be hoped that dumas will never hear of this astounding impudent perversion of his play. perhaps ere now he has become hardened by the fact that the duse has represented marguerite as a creature of exquisite purity. moreover, it is alleged that somebody is going to write another version of _faust_--presumably the pantomime edition by wills is copyright. in addition, it appears that mr stephen phillips has concocted an adaptation of _the bride of lammermoor_ in which the story and characters are vastly improved. alas, poor scott! on top of all this we hear of countless adaptations on the market, so that the ignorant wonder whether our dramatists are played out. perhaps the secret is to be discovered in some passages that occurred during the trial of an action a little while ago, between two publishers, in which there was evidence to the effect that a book could not be a novel unless it had a love-story. of course, if upon our playwrights is imposed the limitation that all their plays must contain a love-story, the difficulty of the position is very great, and the greater still because they are not allowed to tell naughty love-stories unless they force upon them a moral ending, and they are very rarely permitted to indulge in a love-story which does not end in a wedding or the reconciliation of respectably wedded citizens. no wonder that as a body they seem to be getting bankrupt in imagination; they appear to be in the position of a cook who is never allowed to handle anything but sweets. the state of things is rather curious. it may be often asserted truthfully of the west end theatres that there are as many love-stories as playhouses. of late years, notwithstanding the evidence referred to, some of our novelists have shown a tendency to break away from the tradition; also some of the unfashionable playwrights exhibit signs of revolt; but the managers are timid, very timid, in the matter, and this is curious, because one has only to turn to shakespeare to see that we have had modern successes with plays in which the love-story is trifling when it exists at all--_hamlet_, for instance, and _macbeth_, _julius caesar_, _king lear_, _henry viii._, and other historical pieces. indeed, as soon as one begins to enumerate it appears that in most of the shakespearean plays presented of late years the love interest, if any, has been a minor matter. our managers might learn something from this. there is mighty little sentimental love in the plays of "g.b.s." that have, or have had, a perilously disturbing vogue. and, indeed, when that ferocious dramatist does handle love it is in an intensely unsentimental fashion. moreover, love in the gilbert and sullivan operas is treated with cruel levity. turn, by the way, to another great social satirist, molière; one finds again that love sometimes is ignored, and when handled at all often treated dryly, or as a matter of little moment. our most popular comedy, _the school for scandal_, though it has a reconciliation business, is quite independent of any sentimental matter of importance. in several of the works of mr barrie, our most original popular dramatist, the sentimental interest is slight where it exists at all. it seems needless to multiply instances; enough has been said to show that it is quite possible to make money with plays that are not at all sentimental. what a pity, then, that the dramatists who aim at general popularity should feel themselves constrained to be more or less sentimental, and also that managers should fight shy of the works of those dramatists, other than mr barrie, who have the courage to write unsentimental plays! for it is to be noticed that in the last ten years a great many unsentimental english plays have been written and produced by non-commercial managements. it does not from this follow that all of them ignore love and the relation of the sexes, or even avoid actual love-stories; but as a class they eschew the sentimental treatment which is and for a long time has been the distinguishing feature of british drama. a particular instance of the effect of the modern tradition may be mentioned. _the beloved vagabond_ had a great success as a novel; it enjoyed a london run as a play of about two months only. in the book the love-story is a minor matter, treated mainly with a sub-acid humour, and the author wisely avoids an absurd happy-ever-after conclusion. the play was supersaturated with sentiment, with a sentiment which drove out nearly all the humour and, roughly speaking, all the plausibility. is it easy to doubt that it is the sentimental treatment which has caused the history of the play to be so different from that of the novel? there are signs that the public is growing rather tired of molasses, which in fact is ceasing to be "golden" syrup. the main effect, apart from purely technical matters, of the new drama, that practically speaking began with the production of _the doll's house_ at the great queen street theatre, has been destructive; the outcome has included some brilliant plays, the drawing power of which has never been fairly and fully tested; but the most important result has been the discontentment of the ordinary playgoer with the fare which once would have delighted him. many bubbles have been pricked; many conventions killed; many plays ridiculed by houses that once would have accepted them eagerly. numerous causes have contributed to the fact that during the last few years the total sum lost in the london playhouses has been enormous, despite some big successes, several of which have been of unsentimental plays--such as _little mary_--and it seems to be time for the managers and playwrights to begin to consider the question whether they cannot go farther afield and handle themes from which they have held aloof hitherto. gorgeousness of mounting has ceased to help managers; even the maidens in their teens have grown sophisticated, and jeer at the bread-and-butter love-stories; and successful modern french drama offers a much smaller proportion of adaptable plays than used to be the case. there must be a bottom to the deepest purse, and things can hardly go on in the legitimate playhouses as they have during the last few years; so it seems to be almost time for the managers to try to get out of a groove and look about for the unsentimental drama. since this was written the phillips-comyns carr version of _faust_ was produced and not accepted by the critical, whilst the phillips version of _the bride of lammermoor_, called _the lost heir_, was a failure and deserved its fate. also it may be added mr frohman has produced _strife_, _justice_, _misalliance_ and _the madras house_. the second-hand drama for some time past people have been seeking an explanation of the weakness of our modern drama, of the fact that except in the byways of the theatre, and with rare instances on the highways, it is sadly unoriginal. numerous causes have been suggested, and probably many have played their part. there is one element in the matter the importance of which has been overlooked--it is the mania for making adaptations. no one will deny that most of the adaptations make bad plays, and that a large proportion prove unsuccessful; and the making of them has an evil effect upon the makers. the matter under discussion is not adaptations for the english stage of foreign plays--a topic of great importance, for the lack of protection to the foreign dramatists during a long period was a great cause of the sterility of british drama; and the habit of importing has not ceased merely because the foreigner acquired the right to payment. many a playwright who might have become an original dramatist had all his power of imagination and invention atrophied through disuse. nowadays we import less than formerly, but our playwrights still produce the second-hand drama, getting their material ready-made from novels, and they suffer in the same way as their predecessors, and injure their natural gifts. this is not an entirely new thing. it may be suggested that shakespeare was one of the most persistent of adapters. he may very well be left out of the question. such genius as his has its own laws and privileges, and cannot very well be brought in as an element when discussing the procedure of much lesser men, and yet few critics will deny that in some instances his plays were injured by his following too closely the course of his original. perhaps in his case the gifts of imagination and invention were sometimes dulled because he was to such a great extent an adapter. the idea of the novelist may inspire a dramatist with an idea for a play, but the novelist's treatment of his idea hardly ever supplies the dramatist with useful materials. we have had scores of radically bad plays adapted by clever men from good novels. at first sight it looks as if the playwright would gain an advantage from using ready-made materials, but careful consideration and experience show that this is not the case; he is overwhelmed by excess of material, and his task of selection is appallingly difficult. moreover, his material is all in the wrong form, and has to be transformed--and the process of transformation requires great skill. for it must be remembered that the methods of the dramatist and the novelist as a broad proposition are entirely different; and when the playwright is dealing with a long, finely-written, complex novel he can hardly expect his adaptation to bear a greater resemblance to the original than that of an easy pianoforte transcription to one of the later operas of wagner. one need only consider any of the novels of dickens and the stage version that impudently bears its name to see how entirely crushed the dramatist has been by excess of material--like a tarpeia by the gifts of the enemy--by difficulty in selection, and in transformation, and recollect that the product has almost always been an inconsecutive story, unintelligible to those unacquainted with the book, destitute of the peculiar atmosphere of dickens, irritating to lovers of the novel because pet characters have been entirely suppressed or cut down nearly to nothing, and only recognisable in many cases as a version of the original on account of costumes, names, make-up, scraps of eccentric dialogue, and general trend of the mutilated story. now, seeing that there are upon record a vast number of adaptations that have failed, a number that bears a proportion to the successful far higher than the proportion of failures in original works, it seems worth while to consider for a little what is at the bottom of the matter, since to do so may prevent some playwrights from wasting their time and other people's money. first, one may ask why so many dramatists indulge in the rather inglorious work of adaptation. no doubt there is one great advantage in producing an adaptation of a successful novel. a large mass of ready-made advertisement exists: of the thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands who read a popular novel, a very large proportion feel curious to see it upon the stage. consequently the adaptation starts with the enormous aid of having been advertised very effectively on a big scale. this element alone is not sufficient to command success; for if the piece is indifferent, if the critics condemn it, if the reception is unfavourable and the unofficial opinion of playgoers is hostile, it can do little to save the work, since the readers of the book get the idea that the dramatist has made a mess of it and they keep away, and so of course does the general public. it is, however, commonly believed that it is easier to manufacture a play from a book than to write an original drama. people imagine that the playwright, finding characters, plot and incidents ready-made in the novel, can produce the piece with less trouble and difficulty than if he has to look for them at large. this is a delusion founded upon the failure to perceive the radical difference between the technique of the novelist and the dramatist. it is true that in some cases adaptations have had enormous success: one might take two modern instances, _the little minister_ and _sherlock holmes_. the latter really confirms these remarks. the general public would fancy that in the stories of "sherlock holmes" there are plenty of effective plots. the ingenious authors of the play were shrewd enough to perceive this was not the case; consequently they merely used certain characters from the tales and invented an entirely new story. later on sir arthur did find one story suitable, and _the speckled band_ has been successful as a lurid melodrama at the adelphi and the globe. in _the little minister_ success was achieved by entirely vulgarising a charming book, by throwing away all that distinguished it, and converting what might be called a delicately sentimental comedy into a farce. we are not, however, dealing with the question from the point of view of the novelist's credit; incidentally it must be observed that there are few modern cases on record where the play has not borne to the novel the relation of a crude black-and-white copy to a picture. the difficulties are two: objective and subjective. the second is the subtler, therefore the more dangerous. the adapter, being well acquainted with the novel, rarely succeeds in forgetting that the general public is not, and he almost invariably assumes that the audience will supply from memory matters that he has left out. in the case of most adapted plays events that appear utterly improbable to those ignorant of the novel seem quite likely to the people who have read it and can supply the missing facts which explain the improbable matters. to the adapter, particularly when he is also the novelist, the characters and events have a real existence, and his task, unlike that of the original playwright, does not seem to be that of bringing them into existence but merely of exhibiting them. naturally, then, he takes comparatively little pains to prove what to him is axiomatic. the main objective difficulty is due to the fact that a play is a very short thing--though, alas! this does not always seem to be the case--and a novel is relatively long and often has many characters. in some cases, the playwright attempts to deal with this difficulty by ignoring the existence of half the people who figure in the original. even then, a mass of explanations has to be jettisoned. there is worse trouble than this: the characters built up in the novel by hundreds of fine touches have to be presented in the play by a few bold strokes. an extraordinary art is necessary in what is not a work of mere transcription, but almost a work of reconception. there is the further vast difficulty that whilst in most cases the novelist's procedure is to work on a system of exciting curiosity, it is an unwritten law of drama, almost universally true, that there must be no surprises for the audience, except, it may be, in farcical plays that do not pretend to represent life truly and in matters of detail. no doubt, unconscientious readers often commit an act of treason to the author, and cheat him by beginning at the end. one may urge that no one expects a play to do full justice to the novel, and that it is permissible to leave out much. the important fact, however, is that the much necessarily left out in the case of good novels as a rule is exactly that which distinguishes them from the bad. the atmosphere vanishes; secondary characters, often the most pleasing, have to be eliminated or rendered shadowy; thrilling incidents must be cut for want of space, and the remainder is almost inevitably the bare bones of the book, which never, however, really constitute anything like a complete skeleton. plays with a purpose during one season we had a comparatively large number of plays with a purpose--for instance, _an englishman's home_, _the head of the finn_, _strife_, and _the house of bondage_. for the sake of convenience let us refer to them and works of a similar character as "problem plays" although that useful term got spoilt some years ago by acquiring a secondary meaning, and became applied almost exclusively to pieces concerning fallen women. in respect of this rather rare branch of drama there is one matter worthy of notice which has not been quite sufficiently discussed. yet the point is one referred to several times in criticisms contained in these articles. this is the author's duty to write in such a fashion as to seem impartial. it is needless to suggest that he ought to be impartial, since no one ever takes a real interest in any debatable matter without ceasing to be impartial, and nobody will ever write a play worth seeing unless he takes a deep interest in his subject. now, looking at the four plays already mentioned, one may see to some extent how this impartiality operates. there is a difficulty connected with _an englishman's home_, for it was alleged--and also denied--that the author had no intention when writing it of dealing seriously with the question of national defence and invasion, and it must be recollected that some alterations were made without his knowledge, which included the addition of a vulgar clap-trap ending, that may do him real injustice. it has generally been regarded as a problem play, as intended to exhibit to us dramatically the fact that we live fondly in fancied security. as drama, it was seriously injured by the obvious bias, by the want of impartiality; it was taken by some to be a warning that we must not trust to the territorials; but, although the conscriptionist party has welcomed it as establishing their view, its manifest injustice to the citizen soldier has actually caused it to be used as an argument the other way. moreover, the feeling of insincerity caused by the bias seriously diminished its acting value in the eyes of the critical. the fact of its use as an argument by people of almost opposite views does not prove its impartiality, but rather that its injustice has bred a reaction. the next of the four is _the house of bondage_, which had less success than it deserved. the piece manifestly was intended to prove that a woman ought to be entitled at law to a dissolution of marriage on the single ground of her husband's infidelity; the proposition was put in the form of a claim to equality of rights in the sexes to divorce. the question has more than one side, and there is a good deal to be said against mr obermer's contention; unfortunately, the author did not attempt to put forward the other view, or even to suggest that there is one. the result was that only those who share the opinion of the author were in sympathy with the piece; to others it seemed manifestly unfair; in fact, the author appeared anxious to convince those who favour his own views, and not those opposed to them. in _the head of the firm_ and _strife_ one had quite a different state of things. the dramatist played the _advocatus diaboli_ very cleverly, and the other side felt that its case had been stated fairly. the best way to convince people of anything is to present their own views to them in a fashion which they deem just, and then offer them reasons for doubting the truth of their opinions. both works obviously are anti-capitalist in tendency, and yet, in different degrees and different ways, the capitalist view was stated so fairly, whilst the evil consequences of it were shown so vigorously, that many people who were on the side of the capitalist were forced to think, and therefore to doubt. mr galsworthy bravely went so far as to hint, without stating the proposition, that what seems bad in the labour point of view is really an evil consequence of the capitalist attitude. in this respect he has followed, legitimately, the treatment of the greatest "problem play" yet written, _the doll's house_, a work that in hundreds of thousands of households has caused something like a revolution in the relations between husband and wife. ibsen used the appearance of impartiality so finely, stated the husband's case so fairly, that there were terrific quarrels as to what was his point of view, and the result of the quarrels and discussions was the serious consideration by people of the question dealt with in the drama. it is this discussion that the reformer desires, being confident that the discussion of things long deemed right without discussion is the surest road to reform. from the point of view of dramatic art this impartiality is essential, because without it the necessary impersonal element cannot be given to a play. in such a work as the prison drama _it's never too late to mend_, by charles reade, one seems to see all the time the hand of the perfervid, almost frantic, reformer, and the same remark applies to several of his novels. of course, one does not ask the playwright to be, but only to seem, impartial. to demand real impartiality would be to ask that reality which is out of place upon the stage, the function of which is, not to present themselves, but, to borrow hamlet's idea, reflections of them, and, it would be more accurate to say, to give ideas of them by presenting images intentionally distorted. for that fourth wall, the existence of which mr jerome k. jerome rather quaintly and childishly suggested by the fender and fireirons laid in front of the footlights in _the passing of the third floor back_, really operates as a distorting glass, although it is not there. this sounds a little paradoxical, yet is clear enough. things upon the stage have not the same effect if regarded from the farther side of the footlights as when considered from the nearer. this does not apply merely to things seen, but also to things heard. in this respect there is a resemblance to the work of the impressionist painter. speaking more closely, one may say that the scene-painter's canvas, with what, when seen at a few feet, are coarse splashes and daubs of colour, is typical of the whole theatrical production. it is imperative, then, that even the impartiality should not be real impartiality. moreover, absolute impartiality would involve in many cases the suppression of the criticism of life which is the essence of comedy. "problem plays," works endeavouring truly to represent to the audience real life, and involving a criticism of life, are so rare that it is worth drawing attention to a danger to dramatists. there is no need to point it out to mr galsworthy, who in _the silver box_ and in _strife_ shows that he fully appreciates the point; nor to mr granville barker, who produced _strife_, for in _waste_, which is in most respects the greatest english drama of our times, he exhibited it with extraordinary intensity, and also in _the voysey inheritance_, an admirable play, which it is to be hoped we shall soon see again. it is to the beginners that one would like to insist on the proposition that you must not push your views down the throats of the audience, but leave spectators to draw their own conclusions, taking pains to see that the conclusions which they fancy are drawn voluntarily by them in reality are forced upon them. indeed, you must imitate the skilful professor of legerdemain, and "palm" your views upon the audience as he "palms" a card upon his victim. drama and social reform probably at no time and in no country has there been so much fuss about the stage as nowadays in england, and the annual budget of our theatre involves millions. moreover, people often talk about it as a great educational force, a great instrument for progress, a great vehicle for the dissemination of ideas and so on. yet the theatre in england remains almost entirely aloof from real life. to the majority of playgoers, an immense majority, it is merely a place of entertainment, except so far as the plays of shakespeare are concerned; they are supposed to have some educational value, of what nature goodness knows. perhaps this phenomenon is not surprising, if one regards the matter historically. the theatre has never forgotten that the puritans suppressed it for a time and have always been hostile, and it identifies them with the whig, the liberal, the radical, and the socialist. it recollects that the royalists revived it, and have always been friendly, and they are represented by the tory, the conservative, the unionists and the tariff reformers. so the stage does not lend itself readily to ideas of reform, or sober study of life, or sober anything--indeed, it has long been a little too closely connected with _the_ trade. there must be players, managers, and some playgoers belonging to the liberals or radicals, but they are much in the minority: rarely, if ever, is a suggestion of liberalism uttered in a theatre except by way of well-welcomed scorn. we are almost all pro-bungs, house-of-lords men, and ardent tariff reformers. there is another important element in the matter--the theatre appears to be peculiarly engrossing to those connected with it. persons entitled to speak have often said that to most of the people attached to the stage the theatre is a little world apart, in which they are content to live almost oblivious of the greater world around. it has been asserted that during the last siege of paris, whilst some of the players went out and fought bravely, the majority were more concerned at the fate of the stage than that of the city, and an actor of some eminence once bitterly declared that the majority of his _confrères_ had no interest outside the "shop" and never talked anything but "shop." it may be that all classes of stage-folk are tarred with the same brush; that these remarks concerning the actors apply to the managers, the dramatists, and the critics. moreover, there are certainly exceptions; indeed, it is well known that several players of distinction take an active part in civic life. at any rate, the fact remains that the stage seems to concern itself very little with the improvements of social life. in a nebulous way the theatre plays with certain aspects of the relations between the two sexes, but without seriously considering any question of feasible reform. upon one aspect which seemed to promise matter for powerful drama we had only one important work--i refer to the deceased wife's sister question, which was handled in an able play by a mr gatti, and presented at the court theatre. miss olga nethersole acted very powerfully in it. one would have thought that this and other questions of legislation would have attracted the attention of dramatists; they did at one time. the strenuous charles reade was prodigious in his stage attacks upon bad laws, and effective as well. at the present moment mm. brieux and paul hervieux are flogging some of the laws of france, and the german stage has seen a good many pieces which before the word became demonetised one would have called problem plays. looking back upon the english drama of the last twenty years one notices as a curiosity that it is the woman rather than the man dramatist who appreciates the utility of the stage as a means for seeking reform. _uncle tom's cabin_, one of the most tremendous law-changing influences ever exercised by fiction, came from the pen of a woman, though it may be that mrs beecher stowe was not the author of any of the stage versions presented over here. taking a long jump from the sixties, one finds that in modern times--indeed, within the last few years--four women dramatists have tackled political or politico-social problems. there was the hon. mrs alfred lyttleton, and her able, interesting play called _warp and woof_, dealing with the question of shopgirls and the factory act. next in order of date came _votes for women_, by miss elizabeth robins, a brilliant novelist and admirable actress, a little too much carried away by her subject to do more than write one big living scene in a conventional play. mrs alfred mond (now lady alfred mond) is the author of a short piece dealing with tariff reform. not long ago we had a revival of _diana of dobson's_, miss cicely hamilton's valuable comedy, in which the "living-in" system of shopgirls and the question of the cruel fines imposed upon them was vividly exhibited. lady bell gave us a very able drama concerning a social question in _the way the money goes_. what native plays have we had by men during the period covered by these four ladies dealing with similar questions? mr bernard shaw has been running amok during this time and before in a kind of "down-with-everything" way, but his philosophy of the stage is as terribly destructive as that of ibsen, and except in _widowers' houses_, and perhaps _mrs warren's profession_, few of his works handle directly matters capable of being dealt with by legislation. years earlier, in _the middleman_ and _judah_, mr henry arthur jones tackled two questions and strikes have been treated more than once--notably in george moore's clever, interesting, uneven work, _the strike at arlingford_. much further back there was _man and wife_, an attack upon the system of irregular marriages still existing in scotland and some of the states of the union. probably there have been some other native works touching more or less directly upon questions of legislative reform within my time, but it is difficult to remember all of them; yet there are many burning matters to-day with ample elements of drama in them. probably the censor is almost blameless in this affair. since the days of _the happy land_ he has not allowed politicians to be presented upon the stage; but this has little bearing upon the question. there has been interference with some scenes concerning "ragging" in the army. the office bearer has always been very fidgety as far as the army is concerned; but, in all likelihood, would not prevent the reasonable treatment upon the stage of any of the matters already referred to, though perhaps an education bill play would have difficulties in his hands, owing to the introduction of religious topics. it seems curious that the women are keener in seeking to use the stage, a tremendous weapon for the purposes of reform, than men, and the explanation is by no means obvious or necessarily flattering to men. some day those whom one may generally designate as puritans will become sensible of the vast potentialities of drama, and will see that it is foolish to leave all the good tunes to the devil. as a result, no doubt, we shall suffer for a while from a lot of bad plays with a good purpose. yet there will be a useful infusion of new blood and new ideas, and our drama, instead of running round and round after its tail, will get out of its present little vicious circle and become a living force in the country, instead of a mere medium of entertainment, and of entertainment which rarely has any substantial value from an artistic point of view. in connexion with these remarks the section "plays with a purpose" should be read--if possible. it should be added that mr galsworthy's admirable play, _justice_, has had some effect upon the treatment of prisoners. chapter vi the phenomena of the stage the optics thick-and-thin admirers of duse, an actress of indisputable genius, used to praise her because she dispensed with the "make-up" that other players deem necessary. they saw in this a glorious fidelity to nature. their position became a little ridiculous when, somewhat later, the actress--possibly in compliance with the advice of critical worshippers--adopted the ordinary devices of the stage and pressed into service the make-up box and even the aid of the wigmaker. presumably the change in policy was due to a more careful consideration of the optics of the stage. for it may be assumed that she "made up" in order to counteract the privative effects of the stage lights and appear neither more nor less beautiful and expressive to the public in the playhouse than to her friends in her drawing-room. this leads to the important paradox that in the theatre you must be artificial if you wish to appear natural; that on the stage, verisimilitude is greater truth than truth itself; or, to use the popular oxymoron, you must be "falsely true." in this respect the matter of "make-up" is only an instance of a general law prevailing in all matters theatrical. let no one think less of the players on account of it, for it is this fact that entitles the actor to speak of his art and not merely of his craft. it is because the player must select, eliminate, exaggerate, diminish and, in a word, modify his matter but may not be photographic, that he is entitled to call himself an artist. the term "photographic" used in this sense is rather unfair, for the photographer has become an artist by recognizing the fact that he too must select, etc. no doubt "make-up" renders other services, and belongs to the artifices as well as the arts of the stage, since it has the advantage in some cases of rendering the plain beautiful--to the discomfiture of stage-door loafers, and, indeed, possesses an abominable democratic effect. of course, too, it has legitimate value in effecting disguises, in changing young into old--its efforts in the contrary direction, as a rule, are ghastly failures--and in effecting transformations of the exterior of persons. however, "make-up," despite its mysteries, is but a small element in "the optics of the theatre," which term is here used largely--and inaccurately--in relation to all the phenomena covered by the paradox already mentioned. the player, having counterbalanced with "make-up" the robbery effected by the stage illumination and also by the disadvantage of distance, has to turn himself to the adjustment of other matters. one is this--he must recognize that his author labours under similar conditions, and should not be "photographic." when the dramatist in the dialogue has exaggerated the play of light and shade, bringing, indeed, legitimately for the sake of effect to his speeches, that energy of chiaroscuro which gives us a pleasure, somewhat distrustful in the pictures of joseph wright of derby, the player must attune his manner in order to make it congruous with the highly seasoned conversation so that there being no clash of methods, no jarring will result. every change of convention on the part of the author demands a corresponding change in the actor. clearly, he must speak verse differently from prose, though there are foes to poetry who beg him to break up the lines and defeat the efforts of the poet; and he must adopt a manner in a blank-verse tragedy unsuitable to a play by mr barrie. moreover, he ought to aim at seeming natural in both. here is the rub; he must aim at seeming, not being, natural. obviously, one cannot deliver blank verse naturally; such, however, is the power of make-believe in the audience that if the dramatist and his company can engage the sympathy of the spectators, a fairy tale in rhymed lines, a tragedy in unrhymed verse, a melodrama with flatulent phrases, and a comedy seeking the most exact reproduction of modern life permissible may seem equally plausible, credible, natural. it is to be noted, too, that the form of artificiality of truth varies not only with the type and quality of the drama but with the nature of the audience. speaking of our times, one may say that a little greater vigour of contrast is desirable in the provinces than in town, and in the "b" towns than the "a," in the "c" than the "b," and goodness knows what violence is not needed in the "fit-up" shows. there are reasons for believing that our ancestors demanded a more full-blooded style of acting than is relished by their anaemic descendants, and it is possible that such a performance as convinced the eighteenth century of the genius of some of its players might cause laughter nowadays, though neither audience nor actors would deserve censure. within the time of even our younger critics there have been at least two tragedians who enjoyed an immense reputation save in town, but failed to win success in the west end of the metropolis, though outside they held their own against the greatest favourites; and the london critics levelled at them the dreadful charge of "barn-storming"--a charge which some of us no doubt would make against several of the greatest tragedians in our proud records were they to appear to-day and act as in their own times. it is a feature of the actor's art that its excellence is never absolute. an audience is entitled to say, "what care i how good he be if he seem not good to me?" a performance that does not move the spectators is not only a failure but to some extent a culpable failure, since the actor's art is more utterly ephemeral than any other--possibly by aid of gramophone, biograph, and the like some fairly effective records will be made in the future--but, this consideration apart, he may not even take heed for the morrow. at the moment his mission is to move the particular collection of people before him, and though they may be culpable for not being moved he will not be wholly blameless. possibly this is putting the matter a little too harshly, and the observations should be considered as applicable only to a particular "run" and not to an individual night. doubtless, even thus restricted, it suggests that the player should make a remarkable series of modifications in his methods which are not within the practical politics of the stage; and, indeed, these remarks are pushed purposely too far in order to draw attention to the fact that the actors are prone to consider their own "reading" of a part without reference to the audience, and even, in some cases, to the author. in other words, they are misled by the delusive term "create," so often applied to acting as well as to millinery. the word is inappropriate to the rapidly evanescent. "original interpreters" is the highest phrase that can be justified. these observations would be incomplete without some reference to more material aspects of the "optics." for instance, one may comment on the fact that, regardless of seating arrangements, which in almost every theatre cause a considerable number of people to be unable to see the exits on one side or the other, important business is often transacted in the wings, to the intense annoyance of would-be spectators, who are left out in the cold, and of course imagine that what they miss is the plum of the play; also valuable scenes are sometimes played so far back that people in the higher parts of the house are unable to see them properly. this sounds perilously like an invitation to players to take the centre of the stage close to the footlights, but of course the matter is one of degree. yet, at the least, it must be urged that nothing, the exact understanding of which is necessary to the audience, should happen much on one side or very far back; to this may be added the suggestion, hardly novel, that the first few minutes of each act should be confined to immaterial affairs; blame the unpunctual--even if you blame unfairly, since, as a rule, the _entr'acte_ warning bell is inaudible in most parts of the theatre--but do not make the guiltless suffer by presenting important matters during the time when the stage is half hidden by the people struggling (through a passage as a rule shamefully narrow) to get to their seats. sardou's precepts may be pushed too far, and we do not need a whole first act of nothing in particular, but facts should be recognized and simple common-sense considered. there is always some trouble during the first few minutes of each act. make-up the word "make-up" is very ugly, but seems irreplaceable, and therefore is employed in the book called "the art of theatrical make-up," by mr cavendish morton, the object of which is to tell players--amateurs as well as professionals--how to make-up. no doubt it will render useful service to the actor--to the actor, since nothing is said in it about the actress and make-up in relation to her. thereby hangs something of importance. the actress has held her own against the actor: even the most unkind critic of the fair sex cannot deny that the achievements of women on the stage are as great as the achievements of men, although they have been a shorter time at the game, and have not had so many splendid parts written for them. yet make-up has been of little assistance to actresses. eleanora duse at the present moment is probably accepted as the greatest living player of the world. of late years she has, to some extent, used make-up, but with great moderation. one can imagine her tossing aside a book such as mr morton's, and asking what on earth it has to do with the art of acting, and i fancy that tremendously rapid speech of hers would be used effectively if she were to read such a sentence as this: "is not half the battle won when one perfectly physically realizes the character to be impersonated?" by which the author clearly means that half the battle is won when, by the aid of nose-paste or "toupee" paste and grease-paint, powder, crêpe hair, spirit-gum, wig and the like, one has arrived at looking like the character. instead of this being half the battle, it does not amount to a tenth. of course something must be done to counteract the effect of the lighting on the stage, and no one can complain if the players use the well-known devices to heighten their charms; and wigs and false beards and moustaches and whiskers may be serviceable at times; but to take such matters seriously seems an egregious mistake. indeed, when looking at the result, one is inclined, unconsciously, to use a criticism by employing the phrase, "what a capital make-up." mr so-and-so enters as caliban, or napoleon bonaparte, or charles ii., or falstaff. in a few seconds, or it may be minutes, we can identify him without the aid of the programme; and, of course, we say, "what a capital make-up," but the whole thing is merely a madame tussaud aspect of drama. make-up has comparatively little to do with the capacity of an actor for differentiating his parts. take mr dennis eadie, who has an extraordinary gift for changing his personality. those who have seen this admirable actor as henry jackson in _the return of the prodigal_, as lord charles cantelupe in _waste_, and mr wylder in _strife_, must admit that changes of voice, of gesture and manner, and general expression of countenance are of greater value than tons of the cleverest make-up. the service of make-up in its higher branches is merely to render, or, rather, seem to render, actors fit for tasks for which they are physically unsuited. take for instance, the nose; there is a picture of mr morton with flattened nose and enlarged nostrils; he is said to represent othello. "the nose is first depressed by crossing it near the tip with a silk thread, which is tied at the back of the head. a small piece of kid is placed under the thread, thus keeping it from coming in contact with the skin. the nostrils are built out until the nose has a moorish appearance." now, nobody thinks a whit the worse or less of mr forbes robertson's othello because he played no tricks with his striking aquiline nose; and the idea that he would have gained anything by flattening it with a bit of silk thread is absurd. what he would have gained would have been a feeling of physical inconvenience during the quiet passages, and terror during the tremendous scenes of passion at the thought that the string might snap. there are photographs of other noses, built up with nose-paste or, preferably, with "toupee" paste; one is of falstaff, another of shylock, and there is also one called "the professor." in each case the whole nose looks wooden; it may be suggested that in an ordinary way movements of the nose do not play much of a part in expressing emotions, yet we have phrases about swelling nostrils and turning up one's nose that possess some foundation in fact. further, one can hardly render the nose a dead thing without, to some extent, effecting the mobility of other features. probably the built-up nose of coquelin as cyrano de bergerac will be thrown in my face; it must, however, be remembered, that apart from his large elastic mouth coquelin's face was rather wooden, and he relied for expression chiefly on voice, mouth, gesture and movement. no doubt in this particular character there is a necessity, and, therefore, a justification for a built-up nose; but more than one actor has failed to fight successfully against the artificial proboscis of cyrano. used as more than a counteracting or embellishing contrivance, "make-up" is curiously ineffective. many napoleons have appeared on the stage, only one of them by a writer capable of even suggesting the distinguishing qualities of the man of genius. in most cases there have been advance paragraphs about the pictures, miniatures, statues, statuettes, medallions, bas-reliefs, etc., consulted by the actor, and concerning the contrivances of the wigmaker, even the bootmaker and tailor. what has been the outcome? merely that for half-a-minute people have said: "what a clever make-up," and for the rest of the time one has been no more content to accept the player as jupiter scapin than if he had washed his face, brushed his hair and acted in his dress clothes. does mr cavendish morton think players were really worse off before the latest refinements in make-up were invented? some of the greatest acting triumphs of the world were accomplished when the players dressed their parts absurdly, trusting almost exclusively to their own powers. one is forced to wonder to what extent covering the face with the mass of muck hinders the actor in his work. people can be trained to endure it, but it would be interesting to see the difference in the performance of a given part by an actor with an elaborate make-up--false nose, etc.--and by the same actor without. mr arthur bourchier, when growing a beard for the purpose of playing henry viii., stated that he would have been embarrassed by a sham beard. can it be that the triumph that we sometimes see, of the actress over the actor, is partly due to the fact that she reduces make-up to the minimum? no one denies the necessity for make-up. when young players have to represent old people it is their duty to take advantage of the advice of experts such as mr morton, and every one may find valuable hints in his book. the really important fact is that all should be warned against such a proposition as lies in the hideous sentence, "is not half the battle won when one perfectly physically realizes the character to be impersonated?" gesture some years ago, at one of the theatrical clubs, the existence of which is one of the many tokens of the great interest at present taken in the drama, mr alfred robbins, a very able, highly esteemed critic, gave a lecture upon "the value of ballet in dramatic art," which was illustrated charmingly. for, in order to show how a story could be interpreted without words, miss genée, the brilliant dancer, ably assisted by miss d. craske, represented the ballet scene from _nicholas nickleby_, between the infant phenomenon and the indian. there was no little discussion afterwards upon the question whether the art of miming, one of the two main elements of the ballet, is or can be serviceable to the ordinary stage. several seemed to have the opinion that the art of dumb show is almost useless to the player, the argument being that, as far at least as modern comedies are concerned, so little gesture is used on the stage that training in the mode of employing it is superfluous. the introduction of trouser pockets was said to have destroyed the need for gesture. in such views lie certain dangerous fallacies. the actor who thinks that by mode of speech and facial display, and without carefully calculated gesture, he can carry through a part in a modern comedy probably is misled by the thought that the english are more sober in gesture than the latin races: and his contempt for the work of the mime is based on a belief that certain purely conventional gestures, inapplicable save in wordless scenes, constitute the whole materials of the mime's art. the mime certainly has a kind of dumb language with a limited vocabulary, understood, unfortunately, by few english people save those connected with the stage; part of his silent speech has never crept into the common language; yet to sneer at it as conventional is wrong, it is merely a case of certain conventional gestures not having been generally adopted, and therefore remaining unintelligible to the world. for most of our gestures are conventional. nearly all peoples understand what the european means when he shakes his head and when he nods it; nevertheless, there are races which use these movements in an exactly opposite sense. the offer to rub noses as a sign of welcome employed by some tribes was misunderstood by early explorers, and when, in friendly spirit, certain tribes stroked the waistcoat of the missionary, he guessed that they were cannibals. kissing (in one aspect a matter of gesture) is unused by whole nations, and so, too, is handshaking. it has been said by a traveller that the vulgar operation described by barham in the line "put his thumb unto his nose and spread his fingers out" is a mark of courtesy and esteem in one remote nation; nor is putting out the tongue a sign of contempt everywhere. certain of the gestures of ballet still strictly conventional in england are employed outside the theatre in france. gesture and facial expression, except so far as mechanically due to emotion, are entirely conventional, though some of the conventions are so old as to have become second nature. most people are unaware how largely they adopt the conventions; this unconscious adoption in the end has turned the conventional into the natural. it is the study of this conventional-natural which enables the mime to accomplish remarkable feats; combining it with simple descriptive movements, and a few of the gestures still purely conventional in england, signor rossi, in _a pierrot's life_, was able to delight our audiences by his dumb-show narration of the complicated tale of the two pigeons, and signora litini in the same piece showed with subtlety a whole gamut of emotions. miss genée, at the empire, without uttering a sound, used to be more eloquent than many of our players with whole lengths of dialogue. to a great extent duse fascinates most playgoers by her plastic art, since they do not understand her speech. now, to employ to its full extent the art of the mime in conjunction with spoken speech would be absurd. the light and shade in the speech of the most "natural" actor--say, mr charles hawtrey--is violently exaggerated on account of the peculiar acoustics of the theatre; amongst other things, the player has to address those far off in the galleries as well as those close to in the stalls, and therefore his work requires a series of compromises like that of a piano-tuner anxious to avoid "wolves" or a politician eager to win votes. moreover, on account of the lack of speech the plastic art of the mime involves great exaggeration in the conventional-natural gestures and also in the movements and facial expression intended to represent those mechanically caused by emotion. it is therefore necessary for the actor to mime in a modified and restrained fashion, abandoning, of course, all the still purely conventional and showing much moderation in the rest. when he nicely combines expression by the voice with expression by face, gesture and pose the result is very valuable. few can do this, and the failure is nearly always in respect of gesture, which is misused or insufficiently employed. a study of the great statues and pictures, and such works as those of sir charles bell, lavater, duchesne, gratiolet and darwin has enabled the mime to collect a series of rules for the expression of emotions. how rash of the player to trust entirely to his own ideas, and not avail himself of the knowledge of others! some may regard such conduct as exhibiting originality: it is, however, a sad waste of time to try to find out for oneself what others are willing and able to teach, and there is a great risk of error. moreover, the mime teaches grace of movement and pose, and enables the player to employ usefully the limbs which as a rule seem an encumbrance to him. the poor ladies have not even trouser-pockets wherein to hide the hands, the existence of which embarrasses them, but they can conceal the legs, which so often are troublesome to the actor. the restlessness of english acting--one of its worst faults--is, i believe, due to the player feeling half-consciously that he does not know what to do when he is not speaking. in a conversation scene, during which two finely trained artists would not leave their seats, our players generally appear to be having a game of musical chairs; and actors could be named who take their "constitutionals" on the stage. moreover, one very rarely sees a player listening effectively, yet i have watched an actor who, though silent during a long speech, has by means of finely studied poses and nicely calculated gestures greatly increased the force of the speech to which he was supposed to be listening. no doubt all actors and actresses seek the aid of pose and gesture and get advice from stage-managers: very often the case is one of the blind leading the blind. it will be objected that a study of such a system may tend to make the player mechanical, and also to cause all the members of a company to resemble one another too greatly: there is some truth in the objection. still, this is an abuse not inseparable from the use. the intelligent mime fully recognizes the fact that the gestures proper to the members of one class of people are not necessarily suitable to those of another, and that there are individual differences as well. he distinguishes between the sober, and therefore striking, gesture of the englishman and the unimpressive gesticulation of the meridional; between the poses of the king and attitudes of the peasant, and so on. the highly trained artist knows how, upon rare occasions, to produce a great effect by conscious breach of a rule. to argue against a use from a _needless_ abuse is not legitimate, a proposition dear to jeremy bentham. there is also a grave fallacy in the idea that gesture is less important in presenting an englishman than a member of a gesticulative race, for vehement gesture is impressive in direct proportion to its rarity, and effects have been produced by the fine, slight movement of one of our actresses at a critical moment which surpassed in force anything possible if she had been lavish in gesture throughout. need it be added that the training of the body insisted upon by the mime would cause some of our players to move more gracefully on the stage? several of our popular players walk as if they had hired their limbs and not had time to become accustomed to them. scenery at the french plays one might almost say there is none. a foreign management at the new royalty theatre produced a number of works mounted in a fashion that would horrify an ordinary west end london manager, and yet the rather daring season was really successful. so much the better. probably if the cost of production of each play had been ten times greater nobody's pleasure would have been appreciably increased and the receipts would not have advanced perceptibly. it is doubtful whether the scenery for the baker's dozen or so of plays cost as much as is often expended by our managers on a single work. is there no lesson in this? why, if an audience can be attracted, interested, and even delighted in the soho house, though play and players are not aided by the expenditure of barrelfuls of money on the mounting, should it be deemed necessary to employ a small fortune every time a work is presented by our native managers? as far as i can judge, the french season, although triumphant, was not marked by the appearance of any prodigious star with whom we were not already familiar, nor were the new pieces of astounding quality. the truth is that the assistance given by costly mounting is very little. the scene which by its magnificence causes a gasp of surprise loses all its effect after two or three minutes, and unless the play and acting are really meritorious the audience is quite as much bored when the mounting is splendid as when it is merely decent. possibly it is even more bored; unwittingly it is affected by a sense of disproportion. we all know that jewellery does not embellish a plain woman; that, on the contrary, after a minute or two, one ceases to gaze on the gewgaws and then the sight of the ugly face comes as something of a shock. consider the jarring effect of a noble pearl necklace upon a scraggy neck, and, changing the figure, think how disappointing is a bad dinner served beautifully. there is a french phrase concerning a scanty meal on a flower-decked table that seems in point: _il m'a invité à brouter et je l'ai envoye paître._ sydney smith, after a mean dinner served in a gorgeous room, observed that he would prefer "a little less gilding and a little more carving." mr h.b. irving, in a lecture given at the royal institution, ascribed the alleged pre-eminence of actors during the garrick period to the weakness of the current drama and the economy in stage-mounting, two matters that forced the players to tremendous exertion in order to hold the house, which, by the way, he believes to have been very finely critical. an audience is more truly observant of plays and playing when its attention is not distracted by considering the cost of the costumes, by wondering if the marble pillars are solid, by curiosity as to how the lighting effects are contrived, and by asking whether the play will run long enough to earn its initial cost. whether the large sums of money expended produce an effect agreeable to the trained eye is a little outside the topic. yet it must be suggested that such beauty as the costly stage pictures present generally belongs to the category of the very obvious. this is not surprising; if a great deal of money is spent in order to produce a gorgeous spectacle, common-sense demands that the result should be to the taste of a vast number of people, otherwise the management must lose money. it would be idle to pretend that there are very many playgoers who possess fine taste, consequently the money must be lavished in order to delight people with a more or less uncultivated taste. no doubt a great deal of money may be spent on quiet details, and sometimes is, without the attention of the ordinary playgoer being drawn to the expenditure, but the case is exceptional. in plain english, it very rarely happens that the extravagant sums employed in mounting plays produce a beauty that appeals successfully to any people save those whose ideas of the pictorial art are bounded by the exhibitions of the royal academy. moreover, consideration is paid to the fact that there are philistines who will admire a thing merely because they believe it to be costly. certainly there is much to be said on the other side, or at least a great deal is urged by people who believe what they say. it has been pretended that shakespeare would have been delighted by such productions of his works as we have seen in modern times, and have rejoiced in the pictures contrived by the scene-painter, costumier and others working under the direction of the producer. to this it has been objected that, though the pictures might have pleased him, he would have been disgusted by the fact that a good many of his beautiful lines have to be cut because of the length of _entr'actes_ and occasional pieces of stage business designed in order to draw the attention of the audience to the beauty of the scenery. the reply is made that a large quantity of the most famous passages in shakespeare are descriptive of scenery, and would not have been written but for the fact that he had no other means of conveying his ideas to the audience. if there be any truth in this, one may be very thankful for the fact which coerced him into his word-painting. certainly the world has profited by this compulsion, for millions who have never and will never see the theatre's efforts to represent shakespeare's pictures have had infinite pleasure from the author's successful endeavours to realize his ideas by the force of words. as i have already mentioned, mr h.b. irving ascribes the alleged superiority of the garrick-period actors to their lacking the help of the fine scenery of notable contemporary dramas. it would seem to follow that in his opinion the alleged weakness of modern acting is due to the fact that the players rely too much upon the plays and scenery. upon this aspect of the matter no opinion need be offered, but it may be said confidently that mr irving's theory applies to dramatists, and that the existing playwrights unconsciously become somewhat less self-reliant because they have such assistance from the producers. the art of the theatre is the art of illusion and also of compromise, and no rule connected with the stage can be pushed quite home to its apparent logical conclusions: therefore one must have some amount of appropriate scenery, and costumes may not be flagrantly incongruous; but when once these modest demands have been satisfied the audience will be well content with mounting in which nothing more is involved if the play be well written and acted, and agreeable in style to its taste; and we know very well that some of the longest runs have been enjoyed by works produced at little cost. the new royalty productions would not have pleased people any the more by having money lavished upon scenery. in one or two cases, for a moment or two some of us smiled a little unkindly at the black cloth and wings, and yet after a minute or two we ceased to notice them, with the result that the management has been able to save its money in the individual works and to produce a large number of pieces in a short time. putting aside plays merely intended for spectacular effect, after a few hundred pounds have been spent managers do not get the benefit to the extent of more than a shilling in the pound or so of the really enormous sums expended upon plays. stage costumes there is a story concerning an enthusiastic collector who devoted almost a fortune and nearly a lifetime to decorating and furnishing his drawing-room so that it should resemble perfectly a louis xv. _salon_. he invited an expert to visit it and express his opinion. the critic came, inspected, left the room, and locked the door; then he said, "it is perfect," and promptly threw the key into the moat. "why did you do that?" asked the collector. "for fear," replied the expert, "lest anybody should spoil the effect of your _salon_ by entering it in modern costume inharmonious with it." there is another tale about a hostess who wept sorely because the effect of her dinner-table decoration was marred by the appearance of a lady in a costume of pillar-box vermilion. these stories are entirely untrue, and were invented by "g.f.s.": nevertheless, they have a moral when applied to the stage. of course it is very rash for a male, unless he happens to be a man milliner, to write about the costumes of actresses; and we leave untouched the clothes of the actor, lest our own and their lack of style should be put forward as a ground for disqualification. still it is impossible to avoid noticing the dresses of the ladies upon the stage; it would even be bad manners not to do so, seeing how much trouble the dear creatures take to please our eyes, for we are too gallant or vain to believe the cynical idea that they only dress to crush one another. after noticing them, it is amusing and amazing to read the newspaper articles generally called "dresses at the * * * theatre" which appear after a _première_. of course exception is made of the articles written for a paper necessarily nameless. even with good opera-glasses one can yet never detect a tenth of the details described in these articles, and at times it appears that the writers suffer from colour-blindness, for they often differ utterly as to the colours of the gowns; perhaps it is more modern to call them "frocks." there is, however, a simple explanation. the clothes critics have described their subjects from an inspection at the milliner's or modiste's or in dressing-rooms, and thus have noticed the minutiae invisible across the footlights, and recorded colours which have changed when viewed in another light. moreover, they never suggest that the dresses are ugly, or clash with one another; partly, no doubt, because their ideal of criticism has for foundation the epitaph upon an alleged dramatic critic to the effect that he had never caused an actor's wife to shed a tear, and partly for the reason that they do not see the dresses in relation to one another or from the point of view of an audience on the other side of the orchestra. even less charitable explanations might be made. the scene-painter works with a broad brush; he knows that microscopic detail would be wasted, and worse than wasted, for it would cause a muddy effect. sometimes, but too rarely, he is even a believer in pure colour. the stage _modiste_ has other theories, or perhaps none. instead of seeing that all demanded or permitted by the optics of the stage lies in line and colour, she breaks up line by ridiculous ribbon, foolish flounces and impertinent bows, and the dresses in colouring often "swear at one another." even the translated french phrase is not quite strong enough to indicate the discord. does she ever consider the costumes in relation to the scenery? sometimes we see frocks in tender hues against richly toned scenes that make them appear mere shades of dirty yellows, blues and pinks. at others a cool, tranquilly pleasing background is degraded to mere dulness in consequence of the gaudy gowns in front of it. does the word _repoussoir_ mean any thing to her? perhaps she is unacquainted with the meaning of it although she possesses a jargon of french as staggering as that of a menu in a british hotel. there are other crimes. it has been said that your fashionable milliner sometimes "tries it on the dog." it is hinted that she makes upon the beautiful ladies of the stage experiments which she dare not risk upon her more exalted patrons. if this be true it will explain the fact that many an actress who is beautiful outside the theatre seems plain on the boards because her costume does not suit her style, because her figure is sacrificed for the sake of the frock, because dainty little features are overwhelmed by gowns of strident colour and overshadowed by terrific headgear. the coiffeur is often to be blamed. questions of "make-up" may be concerned with the case. the question, like all questions, has another side. these remarks may be answered with some force by saying that the illusion of the stage would disappear if all the costumes in a play were harmonious, since no one could pretend that all the characters are likely to have dressed themselves in order to agree with the colouring of the scenery, or to have chosen costumes in order to harmonize with one another. the cynic would even hint that probably if the dear ladies thought of the matter at all they would try to chose frocks likely to crush those of their friends, and that no one going into society would venture to use subtle shades or tranquil tints for fear of suffering like the painters of delicate pictures at the hands of the waggish hanging committee of the royal academy, which loves to put a work shrieking with vigorous colour by the side of a placid canvas that appears insipid by reason of the contrast. the reply to this answer is that we have hardly reached a degree of truth to life which renders it pertinent--and probably never will. certainly there might be a noticeable fault if all the dresses of ladies of different families obviously showed the design and _facture_ of one modiste. this could easily be avoided without prejudice to the point of harmony in colour and congruity of line. is it extravagant to hope that some day a dress rehearsal will be a rehearsal of dresses at which some person of taste--everyone would accept mr wilhelm--will see all the frocks actually worn by the actresses upon the stage under the ordinary lighting conditions, against the scenery intended to be employed and then point out what is necessary to produce a real harmony of colour and also to take full advantage of, and in some cases enhance, the beauty of face and form possessed by the ladies who are to appear in the play? one more point may be touched upon. stage managers should pay more attention to suitability of costume and require actresses to make sacrifices repugnant to their natural and desirable instinct for coquettishness. one often sees a player in a costume utterly inconsistent with the poverty of the character misrepresented by her, particularly if she is acting the part of a peasant or poor shopgirl and the like, when her hair will show that it has been dressed by a coiffeur at a cost that would be unpayable by the character. things like this destroy the illusion of the stage. it may be noted that in this respect the french and german actresses behave better than ours, and accept, doubtless with reluctance, a sacrifice of personal charm for sake of character too rarely seen upon our stage. a last matter--why is it supposed that almost all the characters in a play are wearing new clothes on a first night? colour some time ago a musical comedy was produced the notices upon which were a little amazing. several were impolite about the book, others unfriendly to the music; but almost all agreed that the scenery and costumes were of remarkable beauty. now, in the first act an excellent opportunity for picturesque mounting had been wasted, and the setting of the second act was deplorable. it was a great blaze of gold and yellow, which endured for about an hour and a half, with, of course, some little relief here and there, and it fatigued some eyes and caused some headaches. no doubt we were in the minority. it may be that most people are not sensitive to colour; any of our senses may be irresponsive. a friend of mine puts a lot of cayenne pepper and mustard and worcester sauce on toasted cheese; obviously he has a dull palate. there are people to whom nothing in the way of music appeals except violent tunes. we know that colour-blindness in different degrees is the common lot; very possibly what to the sensitive seems a picture rich in tender colour, to the mass appears dull drab; and the scene whose shrieking gorgeousness oppresses the eye and brain of the artist is subtle to the philistine--it is difficult to know. who can imagine a picture gallery as seen by the person who suffers even mildly from colour-blindness? there are those who have a dull sense of smell, and the case has happened of a girl only stopped by accident from going to a ball decked in flowers that looked pretty and smelt abominably. this raises rather a large question about stage-mounting; if the majority are not sensitive, then business instinct demands that the colour-scheme should be crude. some time ago much admiration was expressed in the press at the beauty of a ballet designed by mr wilhelm, a real colourist, who is able not only to produce lovely delicate effects but to present pictures of vivid gorgeous colour so strong and subtle as to delight the artist and the philistine. the same phrases that had been bestowed upon the empire ballet were lavished by the same writers upon an entertainment at another house at which, in fact, there was a horrible debauch of crude, yelping, clashing colours. the matter is difficult for the managers, or at least for those of them who have a sense of colour. in one way their position is easy enough; if they spend a lot of money on the dress and scenery, the press, with rare exceptions, will gush about the beauty of the setting, however vicious it may be. the englishman who uses violent bottled sauces to destroy the delicate flavour of a sole or to add taste to toasted cheese rules the roast. people often proclaim that they like "colour"--by "colour" they mean bright, showy colours. their taste is that of the negro; give him plenty of gaudy red and yellow and he is happy. in modern comedies the difficulty might be avoided, since as a rule modern people in society do not employ violent colours, and the modern interiors in most instances exhibit agreeably the influence of the so-called aesthetic craze. yet we have plenty of horrors. ellen terry in her interesting biography says that she never settled on her dresses without seeing whether they would harmonize with the scenery. this wisdom, alas! is rarely shown, and we very often see a charming interior ruined by gowns hostile to it in colour. the question of form in the costumes is somewhat different; yet one cannot pass from it without expressing regret that the stage is so weak-minded as to permit itself to be the subject of the maddest experiments of milliners, and to accept tamely their _rossignols_. a few of our actresses know how to dress and to wear their gowns; nobody except the milliners seems to look after the others, and they form the majority. in many instances, no doubt, the ladies in the cast ought not to be blamed: they have a very restricted choice, if any. lately there was a case where a handsome sum of money was put up by a syndicate for the ladies' costumes in a play, and nine-tenths of it was appropriated by the powerful leading lady, leaving for the others a ridiculous amount. it is in romantic comedy we suffer most. to begin with, one may assert the general proposition that the sense of pictorial art on the stage is entirely conventional and academic; of course there are exceptional cases--rare, alas! the ideal seems to be to reach chromo-lithographic effects and the beauties of the old-fashioned valentine; for the suggestive, the mysterious, the imaginative little affection is shown. the real tub has developed into the real tree with real blossoms and real leaves wired on, not a thing regarded as a matter of form and colour, but as a realistic imitation of a natural object. broad effects are frittered away by masses of irritating detail, the production of which costs a a great deal of money. scenes and costumes are designed without due consideration of the fact that they are to be before our eyes for a long time. occasionally we are pleased by a striking picture for five minutes, during which the play is forgotten; then the play asserts itself and the money spent on the mounting ceases to bear fruit, and a little later on the vivid spectacular effect, charming for five minutes, becomes trying by reason of its quality, and it reasserts itself aggressively, to the hurt of the play. we have gorgeous costumes which, when first presented and grouped, produce beautiful effects; afterwards costumes inharmonious with them are introduced, the grouping is altered, and the colour-scheme destroyed; then the question comes into mind, how is it that all these characters have brand-new costumes, although the circumstances of the drama show that most of the dresses would be torn or dirty or faded? it may be an answer that this convention is so firmly established as not to be absurd; but the convention is constantly violated where it would be too blatantly ridiculous by somebody presenting himself with torn or dirtied or faded costume. how much more beautiful as a rule the costumes become after the play has run a while! from the colour point of view, it was the blessing of the romantic period that the ruck and run of people had to wear their velvets and silks and satins till time and wear and tear had toned down and harmonized the colours. it must be remembered, too, that in the evening they were seen under favourable circumstances, for the lights and shades must have been strong, although the lighting was feeble before the use of gas was discovered and before the oil-wells were found that have made half the population of the united states slaves to a few plutocrats. also, "shoddy" had not been invented, nor had coal-tar dyes been discovered by the english and exploited by the germans now groaning over the wise tyranny of the provisions of the new patent act, to which ignorant people have applied the offensive term "protectionist." shoddy treated with aniline dyes can produce effects that overwhelm the colours of the honest old materials which owed their hues to the efforts of the vegetable and the insect. a modern manufacturer is proud when his scarlet shoddy shrieks like a steam siren. unfortunately some of the managers seem to like the shriek. stage meals an undistinguished foreigner from france was talking the other day about the english stage, of which apparently he had seen a good deal. after being asked many searching questions put in the hopes of eliciting material for "copy" it was discovered that what he most admired in our theatre is the way in which stage meals are treated. in the first place, he was astonished at the "exquisite distinction" displayed by the players in eating them. the "perfect elegance" which one actress exhibited in consuming an egg had fascinated him and he stated with conviction that he could have spent a happy evening simply watching her eat these ill-starred hopes of chickens. it was pointed out that the management could hardly afford to pay her a sufficient salary for the strain on her digestive faculties, and also that the eggs--real boat race eggs, not election missiles--cost something. he is quite an undistinguished person and utterly _bourgeois_, though he has written some successful funny farces which as yet have not suffered the dishonour of adaptation, and during his many visits to london has acquired an even more perfect ignorance of the english and their ways than if he had never paid tribute to neptune; for he always stays at a little french hotel where there is absolutely nothing british, not even the meat or the matches or the washing arrangements. now, if there is one matter of manners in which we are better than the people of the continent it is in our mode of eating. how this has come about it is difficult to say. one knows that good french families sometimes engage english nursery governesses in order that the children may be brought up to feed themselves daintily, and that people in good society on the other side of the streak certainly commit acts at dinner which are rather ugly. goodness knows what is the reason. possibly the cynic would discover in our greater refinement a curious form of snobbishness, the sort of timidity about accomplishing before other people a natural function which in other aspects of life is certainly carried too far by us. we have an extraordinary amount of eating nowadays upon the stage, managed very badly. in the old days, when people got through a banquet, consisting chiefly of a special brand of cardboard chicken, a real _dîner à la carte_ at the present time only used in pantomime, washed down by copious draughts of nothing from gilded _papier-maché_ goblets which refuse to make the chink of metal, and spent no more than five minutes over the whole affair, it was recognized that the banquet was a mere convention; nobody pretended to believe in any aspect of it, and therefore no one questioned its verisimilitude. in the twentieth century real food is consumed, the diet being chiefly vegetarian, and damp decoctions are drunk with gusto. occasionally, it is said, persian sherbet, or lemon kali, once joys of our youth, give a theatrical fizziness to toast and water in bottles with deceitful lordly labels. unfortunately, except in _the man from blankley's_, these real things are consumed as fast as a midday meal at an american boarding-house, with the result that they are a mixture of realism and convention profoundly unconvincing. art would be better served by the old-fashioned method, for the playgoer is more willing to concede a whole than a half "make-belief." one amusing result of the fact that we have so many adaptations from the french is that not only are the names abominably mispronounced--which can hardly be avoided--but that the efforts at representing the foreign feeding as a rule are all wrong. simili-champagne is consumed where no frenchman would dream of drinking "fizz," for across the channel the detestable snobbishness of the english in relation to champagne is imitated chiefly by the modern plutocracy and by the prosperous members of what is alleged to be the most ancient, if hardly the most honourable, of professions. when we see a french company in a play, the leading lady solemnly wipes the inside of her glass with her napkin, occasionally goes a little further and breathes into it--breathes rather dampishly. in the subsequent english version the leading actress is far too much of a lady to do anything of the kind. the foreigners cut up everything on their plates, clean their knives upon the bread, sometimes before and sometimes afterwards scooping out the salt with them, and then lay them by for the next dish. of course the english company is not guilty of such solecisms. the original troupe stuffs a napkin, half-way in size between a bath-towel and a tablecloth, inside its neck-band so as to protect its clothes against the little _taches_ concerning which, as a rule, it is more anxious in relation to its costume than its character--in the play; but our better-bred players ignore this, and merely spread their "serviettes" upon their unimperilled knees. has anyone ever seen a british player, even when he called himself "ongri" or "gontrang," wipe his plate with a piece of bread and swallow the latter rapturously? it may be contended that the english players are wise, perhaps without knowing it. unadulterated truth sometimes comes off second best in the theatre, as is proved by the ancient story of the actor who was hissed because instead of imitating the squeaks of a pig he pinched the tail of a real porker in a poke; upon the stage a little truth is sometimes dangerous, a great deal often fatal. as a last word, in these as in all other germane matters our british productions are vastly more accurate than those that come from the other side of the atlantic. it may be the fact that the good americans, when they die, go to paris; they do not take the trouble to learn anything beforehand concerning the french. this, however, is not remarkable; there are very few really french people in paris. chapter vii the morality of our drama mr harry lauder on the morals of our drama a little while ago mr harry lauder made some statements to a representative of _the daily chronicle_ concerning the relations between music-halls and theatres. some readers may be aware that mr harry lauder is a popular music-hall singer, and by many people regarded as the chief of his calling. consequently his utterances have a little importance. according to mr lauder a gulf exists between the theatres and the music-halls, and it is due to the fact that the playhouses traffic in immorality and the halls are pure. the variety theatres shudder at the thought of presenting plays that introduce people who are or have been unduly intimate without marriage. let us use the words of the stern moralist: "now, take certain plays produced in certain theatres. the curtain rises, and you ask yourself the question, 'will they marry?'" the attitude reminds one a little of the dear ladies at the seaside who use prism field-glasses in order to be sure whether the costumes of the bathers are really indecent. "sometimes you think, 'are they married?' in that play there is throughout a suggestiveness which would not be allowed in a music-hall." ye gods and little lauder, how beautiful and simple is the morality of the music-hall! "be married and you will be virtuous" seems to sum it up. from the lauder point of view there are no difficult questions of morality; there are sheep and there are goats, but no hybrids, and we ought never to refer to the goats in public. there are no problem plays, for there are no problems; everything is plain and easy. intimate relations between people not married to one another are beyond discussion, and it is vulgar to present such law-breakers upon the stage. the great lauder attacks mr barrie; he complains of _what every woman knows_. it has one fault, for "there is a touch of immorality in it which does not exist, as he must know, in the true character of a scotsman. the man going away with another woman is the only part of the play which i did not like; and it was quite unnecessary. jimmy barrie is a far cleverer man than he thinks he is, but i am sorry for this piece." poor mr barrie, the great lauder is sorry for you. still, it must be some comfort for you to know that the great illustrious immortal lauder calls you "jimmy." let us dig a little deeper into the gold-mine. it is very touching to see the confidence of mr lauder in the virtue of his fellow-countrymen. according to him, "no touch of immorality exists in the true character of a scotsman." yet it is said that the streets of bonnie glasgow and other great towns of virtuous scotland are not free from the presence of the hapless followers of rahab, but perhaps they are only there for the entertainment of english visitors. according to the last edition of _chambers's encyclopaedia_, the proportion of illegitimate births in scotland to legitimate is nearly twice the proportion in england, and almost three times as great as that in ireland. no doubt this, again, is due to the foul saxon. it is wonderful that the scots do not prevent us from coming into their virtuous country. yet an idea comes to mind--uncharitable, no doubt. some people have thought it an ugly touch in mr barrie's play when one of maggie's brothers hissed the term of reproach "englishman" to john shand on discovering his faithlessness to his wife. it seemed a brutal charge of pharisaism to the minds of us benighted southerners. was the author making an anticipatory hit at mr lauder? somewhat later in the interview are these words: "now, when you go to the theatre you get the good and the bad characters, and i contend that there is no necessity to show the bad." alas! poor shakespeare, lauder obliterates you with a sentence, and under his severe censure your warmest admirers should try to save your reputation by accepting the view that bacon wrote the plays--and the poems as well. it would be thrilling to have a drama in which all the characters were good, but how would the dramatists construct their plots without the use of a villain? however, to be just to mr lauder, by badness of character he means lack of reverence for chastity. it is a curious point of view that involves the banishment from the stage of all questions concerning right and wrong in the traffic between man and woman, which condemns _what every woman knows_ as immoral. people used to think that the music-hall stage might be a kind of feeding-ground for drama, might breed playgoers capable of taking the view that drama has other functions than merely that of amusing; but, if the illustrious lauder is correct, the music-halls stand aloof. even the ladies of the promenade would be shocked by _the second mrs tanqueray_, fly blushingly from _the notorious mrs ebbsmith_, and put ashes on their dyed hair if _iris_ were offered to them. what a topsy-turvydom the entertainment world seems when a popular star ventures to censure in a great daily paper the modern drama of the country and takes himself quite seriously in urging the superiority of the music-halls in taste and morality to the theatres! mr lauder, in addition to his curious ideas about drama from a moral point of view, seems to have strange opinions concerning the nature of plays. he says: "moreover, in a theatre only one or two stars appear, and they appear only now and again; otherwise they would not shine! if they were always on the stage there would be a sameness in the performance. and the other members of the company are only playing up to these stars, giving so much padding to the entertainment. little wonder that the public is not satisfied with the play of to-day." if we understand this correctly, and we have honestly tried to do so, it involves a complete misunderstanding as to the nature of drama, and means that mr lauder thinks that its whole purpose is to provide star acting parts, and that, since plays cannot be written in which all the characters are star parts, drama is a poor sort of stuff of no great interest. in his calling, of course, all are stars, though, perhaps, he would hardly admit that all are of equal brilliance; and one fancies that he regards as inacceptable any entertainment during which part of the stage is occupied by persons receiving no greater salary than that of a county court judge. of course, every man is entitled to his own point of view, and if mr lauder considers that his turns are preferable to drama, he is quite right to say so. there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of persons to whom his performances represent the summit of art; they, of course, are entitled to their opinions. there is no reason for supposing that his remarks are not uttered in good faith. indeed, it is their obviously complacent sincerity which renders them so exquisitely comic. if he were half as funny on the stage as he is in cold print, the whole world would be at his feet. from one point of view his utterances are quite unimportant: to the world outside the music-hall they only represent the unintentional humours of a man without weight, save in his branch of his calling; but, so far as they are the opinions of the variety stage, the matter is serious, since it suggests that the modern drama has an enemy, not a friend, in the music-halls, and an enemy which works under such unfair conditions of advantage and is so powerfully organised that it may become the duty of the theatre to wage a fierce war upon it. no great change would be needed in the conduct of the playhouses in london to enable them to cut into the music-halls. the sympathy with the music-halls of those who have been advocating free trade in drama may become exhausted, and, on the other hand, a system may be devised under which the theatres take music-hall licences, and then the inflated salaries which have led to swollen heads will soon shrink. double entente the correspondence provoked concerning mr harry lauder and his views about the drama and the music-halls was a little disappointing owing to its onesidedness. the music-hall performer in one respect resembled st athanasius. a passage in a letter on the topic was surprising. miss violet vanbrugh said: "the english language, too, is so difficult; it leaves so little to the imagination. it seems to come down definitely, in a fearfully flat-footed fashion. the french dramatist finds his task made easy, as his language can suggest simply without definitely stating, more easily than can be done in english." this opinion is surprising. it would be amazing if it were correct, seeing the enormous wealth of our language in words and forms of expression, and the fact that for the best part of a century our dramatists lived chiefly on "hints," upon suggesting more than they durst say. the very word "hint" is significant. we use it frequently; who can find a word in the french language that exactly represents it? one may add that we have english equivalents for most, perhaps all, of the french phrases that have to serve for our handy word "hint." when one recollects the hundreds of adaptations of more or less indelicate or indecent french plays seen on our boards, the idea that it is difficult for the english expert to say nasty things nicely seems absurd. our journalists have used more often the incorrect phrase _double entendre_ than the french critics the phrase _double entente_, which is the term that our writers intend to employ. were it otherwise, one would be amazed. the french always have been, and still are, very candid in the use of language; whilst we for a long time past have been prudish to an extent sometimes comic. readers of laurence sterne can hardly deny that the english tongue enables one to be indelicate in idea whilst decent in expression, and it is noteworthy that this writer, so often censured for the immodest salt of his wit, is one of those who comment with surprise upon the simple frankness of the french of his time. there is an episode in "tristram shandy," or "the sentimental journey" concerning a lady, the author and a carriage drive, which shows this very well; but the printers would strike if asked to set it up in these chaste pages. our own native prudery, enriched by a quantity imported from the united states, has led to an immense hypocrisy of language, and consequently to an extraordinary facility in hinting unseemly ideas which on the french stage would be expressed bluntly. it is true that, so far as love is concerned, the french have invented a funny little language of prudery for the benefit of schoolgirls, and countless books have been printed, and received the benediction of monseigneur l'archevêque de tours, in which the word _tambour_ is printed instead of the word _amour_, and so on. by-the-by, it is rather quaint that the archbishop of tours should be chosen as godfather of these superchaste books, seeing that touraine has a rather famous reputation for naughty stories, and balzac alleges that his naughty "contes drolatiques" are "colliges ez abbayes de touraine." it would be remarkable if the french tongue lent itself as easily as ours to the _double entente_. we have a far larger vocabulary available and in common use, and we possess slang not only of the different nations constituting the united kingdom, but also slang from the united states, and from our colonies, whilst we have a lawlessness in the use of our language not permitted to the french. there are disadvantages as well as advantages from this, for as a result our tongue is abominably rich in ambiguities, and it is a common observation that french scientific works are clearer than ours, not only because the nation is more logical, but also on account of the fact that the language is more precise. some people, no doubt, fancy that the french dramatists are conveying indelicate ideas delicately, because they do not exactly understand what is being said or sung. remarks have been made about the subtlety of french after speeches and songs which, if literally translated, would have cleared the house. "_ne rien comprendre c'est tout gober_" is a convenient twist of language. did not yvette guilbert sing publicly in london the song with the refrain "_hors du mariage_" ... we must stop there. our stage has suffered because our dramatists have been able to get much of the indelicate fun out of french farces by using, hypocritically, decent phrases which all parties understand in a bad sense whilst pretending to see nothing shocking in them; for without this elasticity of our tongue british playwrights would have been thrown upon their own resources. nowadays our playwrights have to some extent abandoned their subservience to france, and it is noticeable that those who take their work seriously, and deal with the difficult questions of life sincerely, are showing a tendency to abandon the language of suggestion, to give up hinting, and to avoid the _double entente_. the result is that many prudes are shocked, and people who have no real objection to certain subjects or ideas denounce plays embodying them because this hypocrisy of language has been abandoned. the censor, of course, is one obstacle to plain speaking. he and his office are the superb representatives of english cant, hypocrisy and prudery, and one advantage that must follow from the abolition, if it comes, will be the ousting of the comedy of indecent suggestion by the drama of honest candour. he possesses his little vocabulary in which _tambour_ passes for _amour_, and in fact his office has been worked on the ostrich head-in-the-sand system for many years past. the chief duty of the official has been to prevent people from calling a spade a spade, and most, though not all, of the pieces banned would have obtained a licence if in place of straightforward phrase the author had employed some hypocritical, prudish suggestion. who doubts that a licensed english version of _monna vanna_ could have been prepared, although fully giving to the audience the meaning of the awful line, "_nue sous son manteau_"? one may doubt the comic story that mr redford mistook the _sous_ for _sans_. the motto for the office, if it has a crest, should be the famous line from a music-hall song: "it ain't exac'ly wot 'e sez, it's the narsty way 'e sez it." no wonder foreigners are puzzled by our theatre. the parisian sees a palais royal farce played before an audience of which many members are girls in the bread-and-butter stage. in his great city maidens are--or, at least, were--not allowed to enter the theatre so long famous for its naughty farces. he gasps; he wonders whether the english _mees_ is as innocent as she looks--or used to look--and does not know the _perfide_ tongue of the _perfide albion_ well enough to be aware that nothing shocking is said, and that it is pretended that the _cocotte_ is a mere kindly friend, the _collage_ a trifling flirtation, the _debauche_ a viceless lark, and that the foulest conduct of husband or wife does not reach a real breach of the commandment more often broken in england than the rest of the sacred ten. the real sin of the censor's office lies as much in what it permits as in what it forbids; and a growing sense of decency in the public is displacing prudery so that the abolition of the office will not cause the ill-results announced by the managers, who regard the existence of the censor as valuable to them, because it frees them from responsibility and enables them to gratify the taste of the prurient prude, the person who revels in and blushes at the indelicacy of his own thoughts. moral effect on audience there was quite a pretty hubbub in theatredom caused by a circular letter of "the church pastoral aid society," calling upon incumbents and curates to regard theatrical performances as "a serious menace to the spiritual influence of the church," and suggesting that in future they should refuse to take money raised by means of theatrical performances, or by bazaars or whist-drives or dances. of course, all people connected with the theatres were very indignant at the insult implied; whilst, on the other hand, many parsons and nonconformist ministers rushed into print and said very unflattering things about the stage. the matter certainly had considerable public importance, and deserved to be considered in cold blood; and one may well raise, and attempt to answer, the plain question whether the church is right or wrong in adopting an attitude of hostility towards the stage. the question of gratitude has been put forward, but is not really relevant: no doubt players and managers in the past have been very liberal with their services for charitable purposes, including matters specifically connected with churches, and although very often the actual motive of the liberality has been the desire for advertisement and notoriety--and the desire is natural and blameless--yet it is fair to assume that in many instances the real motive has been truly charitable. it is, however, obvious that a person might steal with the object of giving the money to a church restoration fund, and clearly his intention would not excuse his act nor enable the church to endorse it. the plain question is whether the stage "makes for righteousness." into the very thorny question raised some years ago by clement scott with disastrous consequences to himself as to whether the stage is demoralizing to the actors and actresses we do not now propose to venture. much has been said and written on the topic, but it is largely one of fact, which demands the examination of a great deal of evidence. for the moment, then, let us merely discuss the question whether the effect of the stage on the audience is good or bad: in many cases there is no appreciable effect at all, and they may be eliminated. now, it must be admitted by all, save the extreme puritans, that not only are there a great number of harmless pieces, but also many entirely moral in scope and aim, and likely to produce some good effect upon playgoers; but there are others. no doubt the famous _george barnwell_ has gone out of date, and the dick turpin and jack sheppard plays, which did a great deal of harm, are not presented often in our days. nevertheless there are so many pieces still produced which in one way or another are injurious to playgoers as to render it fairly arguable that the effect of the stage as a whole is bad. so long as religion enjoins the virtue of chastity, its professors must look with hostility upon the very numerous pieces in which women, young and beautiful, are presented in dresses radically immodest. it seems impossible to deny that the sexual instincts of young men are often provoked to an extreme degree by the sight upon the stage of beautiful, half-nude young women; and it must be remembered that the spectacle is frequently accompanied by music of an erotic character. there is not the least doubt that the lighter musico-dramatic works and the pantomimes, in consequence of these matters, are the direct and immediate cause of many acts which religious people regard as acts of sexual immorality. the degree of nudity, of display of the human form in our theatres, and, of course, music-halls as well, to those unaccustomed to such matters is certainly quite startling, and by many people such displays are regarded as being entirely demoralizing to hot-blooded young men. it is, therefore, not surprising that there are religious people who have no objection to innocent amusements or to drama as drama, yet regard the theatre as causing a great deal of immorality in the way already indicated. the censor, not the present occupant of the post, at one time interfered and dealt with the question of costume at the lyceum in the pre-irving days, but his efforts were a failure, and, as far as is publicly known, have not been renewed since. lately the degree of nudity considered permissible has been largely increased. the salome dancers built a bridge of beads across what was regarded as a fixed gulf: it is difficult for stern moralists to stomach the _danse du ventre_. the next aspect of the matter is that the tendency of the stage, broadly speaking, is to preach a kind of conventional morality somewhat below the standard considered admissible by serious people; one may go further, and say that plays have been produced, particularly french plays, such as the clever works of m. capus, in which the accepted ideas of the sanctity of marriage are treated with contempt. some works of this character have been translated and played at first-class theatres, and in popular dramas of the _zaza_ and _sapho_ type we were invited to grieve over the disappointments in lawless love of women quite shameless in character. for years past a large proportion of plays have concerned themselves with the question of the seventh commandment; and whilst, as a rule, in order to dodge the censor, it is pretended that no actual breach has occurred, the audience know that this is merely a pretence. in a large number of these plays the question of adultery is handled so facetiously as to tend to cause people to regard it as a trivial matter; whilst in numbers of the others, where the matter is handled more seriously, the actual consequences of sin are of such little inconvenience to the sinners that, although theoretically the plays preach a moral, the actual lesson is of no weight at all. a curious aspect of the matter is that theatredom, as appears from the bulk of the evidence before the censorship commission, is opposed to the class of play in which the proposition is preached that "the wages of sin is death." plays like _ghosts_ and _a doll's house_--as far as the episode of nora's hopeless lover is concerned--and the works of that fierce moralist m. brieux are banned by most of official theatredom, and some of them are censored. in fact, the whole note of the theatre is that gloomy or painful matters should be excluded. it is not too much to say that the theatre insists strongly upon being regarded simply as a place of entertainment, and objects almost savagely to dramas which really show sin as ugly and vice as harmful, both to the vicious and innocent; it refuses to be a moralizing institution, and those who seek to justify such an attitude do so by claiming that it is a branch of art and not morals. no doubt there are exceptions. we have had _everyman_ upon the stage, and _the passing of the third floor back_, in which the highest morality is preached, and in _the fires of fate_ sir arthur conan doyle made a sincere effort to use the stage for noble purposes; nor would it be difficult to multiply instances. moreover, it may be claimed that the dramas of shakespeare, on the whole, have a high standard of morality which might satisfy the church, and they play a considerable part on our modern stage; yet, speaking with a really substantial knowledge of the subject, one may say confidently that, despite much that is good and admirable, the balance is seriously to the bad. our theatre does a little good and a great deal of harm. it is possible that views such as these may be in the minds of those who wrote the circular of the church pastoral aid society, and if so they were justified in writing. if, on the other hand, they were merely actuated by the puritanic idea that drama and the theatre are necessarily immoral, we strongly dissent, for the drama might be made a very powerful influence for good, and this renders the more regrettable the fact that, although in some respects there is a little advance towards the good, it is very slow, and it is doubtful whether the balance will be turned in our time. there is a greater advance in art than in morality as far as the theatre is concerned, but even in art the progress is very disappointing. an advantage of french dramatists there are many people who entertain the idea that modern french drama is better than modern english drama; and from this it seems a natural deduction that the french playwrights of to-day are abler than their contemporary english dramatists. a study of the large collection of french plays produced at the new royalty theatre by m. gaston mayer, as well as those presented under other managements during the last few years, and some knowledge of those which have not crossed the unamiable channel, causes me to wonder. the careless may make the mistake of comparing the imported french pieces with the average english plays; this, of course, is absurd, since only the successful foreign works are played over here; consequently, for purposes of fair comparison, one must eliminate not only our failures but our plays of average merit. even after the process of elimination has been made there lurks the danger of error, for when comparing the efforts of our playwrights with those of paris one is making a comparison between men working under a heavy handicap and men unburdened by it. there is a whole world, or at least a whole half-world, open freely to the french writer into which the english dramatist is only permitted to crawl furtively. a large proportion of the foreign works in question, if faithfully translated and presented in london, would cause a howl of horror, based on the proposition that some of them are immoral and some are indelicate, and many both. no sane people pretend to agree with the observation of some celebrated person, to the effect that anybody can be witty who is willing to be indecent; it is not more universally true than the proposition that no one can be witty unless he condescends to be indecent. nevertheless there is something in it. many real witticisms are indecent; some profoundly immoral plays are brilliant, and it is doubtful whether the authors of them would have been as successful if forbidden to be indecent or immoral. let us contrast fairly the positions of the french and the english dramatist. the former has at his disposal all the material for drama available to the latter, except perhaps a limited particular branch of local humour, whilst the englishman not only would be unwise to employ the foreign local humour, but is forbidden to use a very large number of subjects and ideas open to his competitor. in other words, the englishman's stock may be regarded as _x_, and the frenchman's as _x_ + _y_, for the local humour on one side may be set off against the local humour on the other. now _y_, far from being unimportant, is the chief material employed by many of the parisian playwrights. they and their audiences have grown tired of _x_, whilst our unhappy writers are almost bound to confine themselves to this far from unknown quantity. thackeray is said to have regretted that he did not enjoy the freedom of a fielding. which of our playwrights does not envy the licence of a capus? think of our poor british dramatist compelled to write for a public that likes anecdotal plays, demands happy-ever-after endings and is easily shocked. really his position is pitiful. the peculiar laws of the theatre require such brutal directness of method that although our novelists are able, by means of delicate treatment, to handle almost any subject, the playwright is condemned to something like a gin-horse revolution, round a little track of conventional morality. it is a rather curious fact that two different schools of french dramatists approach the forbidden half-world from opposite poles--but they get there. emile augier and dumas _fils_ were sincere moralists according to their points of view, though the methods of their moralizing some times seem quaint to us. both of them preached the importance of chastity and the beauty of conjugal love and parental and filial affection, and each admired fervently the idea of family--an idea deemed comparatively unimportant in our colonizing country. on the whole their ideals are ours, though sometimes there seems to us a queer twist in their expression of them. in order to support their ideas of social and family life and their view of the sanctity of true marriage they were forced to exhibit the perils caused by lawless passion, and frequently their works, as in such extreme instances as _le mariage d'olympe_ and _la femme de claude_, which has the memorable preface with the _tue la_ phrase, deal candidly with very ugly matters. their successors, putting aside such men as brieux and hervieu--whose intentions are strictly honourable--may pretend to be moralists, but they adopt an impudently unconventional attitude. they seem to modify the phrase that "property is theft" into the proposition that "marriage is a selfish monopoly." we have had play after play apparently based upon a merely sensual idea of free love. like their predecessors they handle mud, and they handle it as walton bade the angler handle the frog when using it as bait. some of them seem to have no prejudice in favour of people who try to exercise decent self-restraint. without pleading their cause, one must point out that in the domain of lawless passion there are hundreds of thrilling or vastly comic situations at the command of the dramatist, whether he be moralist or simply boulevardier. no wonder then that there seem to be far more original plays in france than in england. the advantage of the foreigners is even greater in the matter of dialogue than subject. with the aid of tact and certain elaborate conventions the english dramatist is able to handle many of his competitor's themes and has contrived to adapt some of his forward, if hardly advanced, plays and by ridiculous changes decidedly emasculating them, has succeeded in presenting a sort of version of a number of the saucy farces. the dialogue baffles him. it cannot be denied that a great deal of the dialogue of french plays is very funny, rather shocking, and not exactly gross. as a rule the more distinguished writers avoid the tone of the _joyeusetés_ of an armand sylvestre, a writer capable of using bluntly without acknowledgement the crudest of chaucer's tales and also of writing beautiful poetry quite free from offence; but even when the humbler _gauloiseries_ are neglected the finer indelicacy is employed, and the men laugh and ladies pretend to put up their fans. nobody, perhaps, is at all worse, for the _jeune fille_ is only taken to carefully selected plays, except at the seaside, where in the casino she attends performances of works that in paris she would not be allowed to see; and, moreover, there is truth in what a french manager once shrewdly observed--"those who can't understand the jokes won't be hurt, and those who can, can't." chapter viii casual notes on acting mr h.b. irving on his art to the reviewer of books fell the task of criticizing mr h.b. irving's book, "occasional papers," as literature. the dramatic critic has the right of considering the views expressed in it concerning the stage. there are two essays of importance, from reading which one may learn the ideas, admirably expressed, of mr irving concerning his art--"the english stage in the eighteenth century" and "the art and status of the actor." the study of them, which they deserve, leads to certain conclusions hardly, it may be, anticipated by the author. in his defence of the actor's art against its detractors mr irving seems to ignore a fact which may be expressed in a phrase taken from the greatest of actor-dramatist-managers, and modified. there is acting and acting: the distinction is not merely in quality but also in kind. it would be difficult to define acting so as not to include the efforts of the music-hall artist, and even of the circus clown; any definition excluding them would be arbitrary, and also historically inaccurate. if, then, acting is to embrace these as well as the admirable performance of mr irving in _hamlet_, disputes concerning the status of the actor as an artist must often arise. in fact, until one reaches the actor's performance in dramas sincerely intended to be works of art, it is difficult to treat his art seriously. a step farther: one cannot accept as a work of dramatic art a piece that does not seek to cause an illusion, or any play which formally admits the existence of the audience. a workable distinction may be found in using the terms "drama" and "entertainment," "actor" and "entertainer." mr irving's essays lead to another distinction--artificial, no doubt. he speaks of the sixteenth century as "the century of great drama," of the seventeenth as "a century in which the interest shifts from the drama to its exponents, the players." the nineteenth, according to him, is "noteworthy for the extraordinary advance made in the presentation of plays on the stage." in other words, the seventeenth is great drama, the eighteenth great acting, and the nineteenth great stage-mounting. the seventeenth, says mr irving, "is in theatrical history the century of the actor; he and not the dramatist is the dominating figure, his the achievement that survives, his that finds in this century its highest opportunity for distinction.... for the plays that attracted audiences in the eighteenth century are for the most part dead things." later on: "there was another and a very strong reason why the actor of the eighteenth century was encouraged--nay, driven--to exert his powers to the utmost. it lay in the conditions under which he was compelled to exercise his art." these conditions were unsuitability of costume, the conduct of an unruly audience, and the meanness of the mounting. the eighteenth-century players pursued "the pure art of acting, unassisted by the collaboration of other arts," and in them their art received its highest expression. from this it appears that if you wish for great acting you must have poor plays cheaply mounted. probably mr irving would shun such a conclusion. he would say that the great acting was the result of the conditions, but not an inevitable result, and that whilst modesty of mounting may be a necessary condition, worthlessness of drama is not. yet we see a distinction and a truth emerging. the actors of the golden age--of acting--had to make silk purses out of sows' ears, and they made them. their age was less golden when they had great drama to play. the triumph of a play, so far as the co-operation of author and actor is concerned, may be regarded as one hundred, and the greater the share in it of the one the less that of the other. since the actor's proportion is higher as the dramatist's is lower, it follows that his work is more brilliant in mediocre plays than in masterpieces. this, however, cannot be accepted without taking into account the fact that many plays have been written very skilfully as mere vehicles for the actor. it is sometimes a nice question which is the horse and which the cart. how often in the heyday of her fame did we see bernhardt in any save "built-up" dramas--plays "written round" her and intended to give her an opportunity of showing off her amazing physical gifts? need it be added that the "star" actresses of other nations were all eager to appear in these pieces? is, then, the actor's art at its greatest when the player is thrilling the house in a mediocre drama, or when he and the true dramatist are producing a great effect together? mr irving will probably reply that the actors of the golden age had great triumphs in shakespeare. now, it may be observed that in most of his tragedies, though not guilty of writing "star" parts, shakespeare, himself an actor, took very great pains to create "fat" acting parts, and the actor-managers of the eighteenth century were careful that, in the mutilated versions which they presented, these parts did not shrink in relative importance. the great dramatist's action in this respect is not, as a general rule, followed by the serious playwrights of the present. whilst speaking of shakespeare, one may refer to a passage in the essays which has some bearing on the question of the place of acting in the hierarchy of the arts. garrick clearly was the greatest actor of his century; but in speaking of barry, mr irving says: "he had not garrick's fire or versatility; he had no gift for comedy; but in such parts as othello, romeo and alexander the great his superior physique, his stately grace, his charming pathos gave him the victory." _his superior physique_ is a phrase which explains the reluctance of some fully to admit the actor's claim for his art: they think that the purely physical enters too often into the matter. there may even be detractors moved by jealousy, unknown, perhaps, to themselves, of the "superior physique." possibly there are more subtle reasons why many writers are unwilling to recognize the highest claims of the actor. they are perhaps, discernible in what mr irving calls "the sympathetic reflections of charles lamb" and the "impressive nonsense that doctor johnson talked" about acting. in one of the essays we find: "there has been at all times a certain resentment on the part of some writers against the player, against his immediate fame.... it is a form of jealousy that has warped many otherwise enlightened minds: an envy that forgets that a capacity to act is a much rarer gift than a capacity to write." what is the meaning of the last sentence. does it mean that garricks are rarer than tuppers?--a sad thought: or that siddonses are rarer than shakespeares?--which may be denied confidently. does it mean anything? perhaps not. it merely exhibits a confusion between the relative and the absolute. this warping jealousy--if it exist--really is due to a feeling that the actor becomes great in popularity at the expense of the author. when the actor causes the triumph of the play the author should be grateful; when the play causes the triumph of the actor the playwright may feel a little jealous, and writers may sympathize with him. there are plays and plays, just as there is acting and acting. in subtle modern pieces conscientious actors of fair ability rarely fail, and success (within certain limits) is common in _hamlet_. mr bourchier and "max" on english acting mr bourchier has written rather bitterly about some remarks of mr max beerbohm concerning english acting. apparently "max" has asserted that "the average level of acting is admittedly lower in england than in france, germany or italy." hence mr bourchier's wrath, which obviously is unselfish, since remarks about the average level of acting have nothing to do with him, for no country is rich enough in histrionic talent to deny that mr bourchier is far above the average. is mr max beerbohm's assertion well founded? the "admittedly" inspires distrust. experience teaches the middle-aged that as a rule people allege that a proposition is admitted when they have no evidence to offer of its truth, and are aware that it will be disputed. does anyone exist who knows really what is the average level of acting in the four countries named? such knowledge could only be based upon a first-hand study of acting in all kinds of theatres in many towns of england, france, germany and italy. a music-hall agent is the only kind of person likely to have made such a study. has mr max made it? probably the clever caricaturist and lively critic is really talking about the so-called west end theatres and the foreigners who come to us, and of occasional visits paid by him to selected pieces in important continental cities. if so, his observations are based upon quite insufficient materials. critics are wont to praise foreign acting unfairly at the expense of our own performers, and they receive the support of opinions expressed by some foreigners, notably french and italians. members of gesticulative races are apt to think english players very wooden, because when representing british people our actors and actresses are much restrained in movement. a french or italian critic can hardly appreciate some of the splendid "stage society" or court theatre performances, such, for instance, as that of _the voysey inheritance_, which could not have been surpassed in any theatre or country. the offensive comparisons often, even generally, are based upon performances where our players are at a serious disadvantage. on what may be called neutral ground, such as ibsen plays, we have held our own very well against any performances in london by continental players; miss janet achurch was a more characteristic nora than duse or réjane; nor have we seen a mrs linden, hedda gabler or hilda wangle comparable with that of miss elizabeth robins. there is no need to multiply instances. english players do not represent certain foreign characters as well as do the foreigners. is this surprising? they are handicapped, obviously. how often have we seen a french, german or italian performance of an english play concerning english people? was the great eleonora as painfully truthful as mrs patrick campbell in _the second mrs tanqueray_? no one can deny that her companions were almost ludicrous to us. can one imagine any foreign company able to present _his house in order_ without entirely destroying the stage illusion and losing the colour? there was a very fine performance at the st james's, with intense soberness of manner in important matters as a keynote. it is largely a question of geography; the englishman expresses rapture by the phrase "not half-bad" where the foreigner piles superlative on superlative of gush. it is our quality and our defect that we have a strange shyness, which prevents the exhibition of emotion for fear of ridicule. on our stage, as in our real life, the beloved son comes home from a long voyage, and, meeting his father, shakes hands a little warmly and says, "hallo, governor!" or something poetic like that; whilst abroad the two men kiss one another and utter highly emotional phrases of rapture. everyone knows that the feelings are equally deep in the two cases, but our cross-channel critics doubt the depth of the english feeling, whilst our native players cannot do the kissing and hugging with an air of sincerity. now, when taking these facts into account we should be very careful in appraising the efforts of our own players. not only ought we to avoid comparing select teams of foreign players with our own scratch companies, but also it is our duty to consider whether the strangers are appearing in plays better or worse than the average of our own, and we must take into account the fact that they are gaining from the advantage of novelty. lastly, there remains the question how far they would appear to be better than ours if appearing on neutral ground. it would be idle to assert that the average level of our acting is as good as it ought to be. many theatres suffer severely from the lack of satisfactory stage-management; some from the determination of an actor-manager to be the central figure of every scene. bitter complaints are uttered by young players about not receiving sufficient suggestions at rehearsal and finding that the stage-manager has so little authority that not only the leading players act as they chose, but even the smaller stars refuse successfully to obey him. there is another point in mr bourchier's letter. he suggests that mr max beerbohm is not competent to criticize actors because he is not a master of any branch of the difficult art of acting. this is a very foolish old fallacy. people who do work essentially ephemeral, such as acting, do it for those who are to witness it; and their merit is in direct proportion to their impression upon the audience, and they can have no effect upon anybody else. actors, with trifling exceptions, do not form part of the audience. critics do, and the actor seeks to affect the audience and the critics, and not the brother "pro." occasionally found in the auditorium. the merit of his work lies entirely in affecting an audience _in the way intended by the author_. the technical devices adopted have nothing to do with the question. no doubt there is much technical knowledge involved in acting, but it must be remembered that it is all a means to an end. the cult of technique for itself is perilous to an art. after all, the matter may be reduced to an absurdity. would mr bourchier refuse to say that a man is well dressed, or a dinner ill cooked because he is (presumably) ignorant of the mysteries of the arts of tailoring and cooking? moreover, some of us, perhaps even mr beerbohm, know a good deal about the technique of acting, even if we could not "make-up" mr bourchier to look like a costermonger. the actor must be very vain in his conceit who has not had valuable hints concerning his acting from the critics, unless he be one of those who, unlike mr bourchier, never read notices--yet often complain of an unfavourable one. the article called "signor borza on the english theatre," which appears on page , should be considered in relation to these remarks. the sicilian players during many years our stage has seen nothing like the success of the sicilians. they presented themselves at the shaftesbury theatre with little in the shape of preliminary paragraphs to "boom" them. most of their repertoire consisted of works unknown to london playgoers. several of their plays were performed in a puzzling dialect. even the judicious step of offering a fairly full synopsis of the plays was neglected. notwithstanding all this, the theatre was well patronized during two seasons and the audiences have exhibited enthusiasm. what is the meaning of all this; why should these village folk, playing what in the main seem to be simple peasant melodramas, have troubled the senses of londoners? the obvious answer is that the affair is a triumph of pure acting. one pauses to inquire whether this is true. in the case of most of their plays the judgment of the audience concerning the acting must be very rough and ready--so far, at least, as the performance is fulfilling its true purpose of presenting in action the ideas of the author. how are we to know, when watching a play in sicilian dialect and provided with a printed "argument" comprised in about a couple of hundred words, whether the players are doing anything like their duty to the author? by-the-by the poor censor had to admit that he passed their plays on the strength of these inadequate synopses! yet there was absolute conviction in most of us that their work was sincere and at times quite tremendous as a matter of pure acting. the word "tremendous" must be confined to the efforts of signora mimi aguglia ferrau and signor grasso. the others form a very good company, but it is only in respect of these two that one employs the word "genius," which cautious writers use very rarely, though there are journalists who lavish it upon everybody a thumb-nail's thickness above mediocrity. concerning the lady there is no doubt at all. she is a little woman, with a rather strongly featured, intelligent face, brilliant teeth and big eyes who has, to begin with, the rare gift of filling the stage. there is a perceptible difference whenever she is present. she may be one of a crowd of twenty, and saying and doing nothing, but her presence is felt. at her command is a delightful roguish comedy and a horrible realistic tragedy. in _malia_ she is a phèdre burnt up with unslakable passion, a rustic phèdre, no doubt, but bernhardt never gave more strongly the idea of "_vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée_." there are tricks in her work; she is fond of standing her profile parallel with the footlights, and of exhibiting the whites of her large eyes; she is conscious of the extraordinary eloquence of her shoulders and back, and likes to exhibit distress by the play of them. there is often excess in violent contrast of light and shade. yet no one can display subsiding emotion more finely than she does. most of our players turn off emotion as one turns off the gas. in the sicilian one notices a kind of aftermath; her fury may be succeeded by rapture; her grief by joy; but for a while underneath the rapture or joy one detects signs of the fact that physically she is recovering gradually from the effects of fury or grief. the voice is a little harsh, the gestures are not exactly elegant, she is always somewhat _peuple_, and always magnificent. in some respects, signor grasso is quite different; his appearance is unpleasant, he is an ugly man, often with a fatuous air, but his grace of movement is quite extraordinary; occasionally he gives snatches of dance so exquisitely rhythmical that one longs for more. his pantomime is larger in movement than hers; his passion less terrible. he too has tricks; he is over-fond of playing with the chairs; in _malia_ one might say that he plays skittles with them. there is rather an excess of gesture, of a naturalistic explanatory gesture, apparently borrowed from pantomime; one feels that some of it is deliberately used to aid the ignorant foreigner to understand; he does things which make the briton squirm; has a habit of kissing the ugly, male members of his troupe with big, resounding smacks on both cheeks, and in a loving fashion pats them like a graeco-roman wrestler; but there is always the extraordinarily graceful, lithe movement and, with curious exceptions, a supreme unconsciousness of the audience; whilst the passionate volubility and the almost brutal ferocity thrill the house. they are a queer lot, these village players; supremely unself-conscious when actually acting, yet guilty of taking "calls" in the middle of a scene. if pressed, they probably would give an encore, and with a little urging signora mimi would yield to a cry of "bis" and give a repetition of her abominable, appalling, vastly clever fit in _malia_, to please the friendly britons. at the end of a scene the players come forward, hand in hand, bobbing and bowing, grinning and smiling, in a way that suggests a troupe of acrobats after a successful turn. it is not difficult to overrate their work as a company, or rather--and this in a sense is the same thing--to underrate that of our own players by comparison. there is one very noteworthy fact: from the point of view of a london manager the scenery and appointments were contemptible, and this apparently did not matter a rap. an audience, five-sixths of it british, was enthralled by these players, although the scenery and the furniture of the indoor sets had no pretension to magnificence, were sometimes almost absurdly squalid. the venture at the shaftesbury showed that if you give what the public deems good acting you need not bother about painted canvas and furniture; and what applies to good acting applies to good plays. the sicilians taught us this, even if, perhaps, little else; for our players, unless they are to represent sicilians, or such volcanic creatures, can learn comparatively little from them. indeed, our delightful visitors could be taught something by our despised stage in the way of reticence, for there is little doubt that they love a horror for horror's sake and revel in the gory joys of the penny gaff. this may be said with full recognition of the fact that, according to their own standard, they are intensely sincere and superbly equipped in consequence of hard work and natural gifts. alleged dearth of great actresses lately there have appeared some remarks by an unnamed "prominent dramatic author" alleging that "there is a dearth of great actresses just now," and stating that "several serious plays which it was hoped might be produced next autumn are in danger of being indefinitely postponed because of the inability of finding actresses capable of playing strongly emotional parts in drama of deep and complex interest." these dramas of "deep and complex interest" are quite as rare in our theatre as great actresses and we only believe in their existence when we see them. of course there is a dearth of great actresses--there always was and always will be: "great" is only a relatively term. thank goodness for this, seeing that they are sadly injurious to drama. on the other hand, to allege a lack of actresses competent to play strong emotional parts seems quite unjust. the remarks of the "prominent dramatic author" were followed by a letter to the same effect by mr george rollit, known to fame as the author of a fairly good farce produced in at the royalty. he appears to have allowed it to get known that a new play of his was to be produced in the west end, but he was unable to find "an adequate exponent for the leading role"--what a pretty phrase!--"which requires an emotional young actress, capable of portraying strong light and shade." he received many offers from actresses, none of whom were suitable. these two complainants are making a mistake concerning the task of the dramatist, who fails in his labours if his plays cannot adequately be acted without the assistance of great actresses. they are foolishly pandering to the vanity of the players, who as a rule have a tendency to exaggerate their importance in relation to drama. the error is very common, and the idea that plays should be written primarily to exhibit the players and not the ideas of the author is the bane of our theatre. until our dramatists act firmly on the view that their duty is to write plays interesting when rendered by a good, starless company, they will only produce as a rule _bravura_ pieces of little artistic value. by all means let them write strongly emotional parts, if they can; but they are not worthy of their royalties if their characters do not generally lie within the range of a fair number of actresses. there is a grotesque mixture of vanity and modesty in the mind of an author who thinks his work worthy of performance by an actress of genius and at the same time believes it to be too weak to succeed without her help. it will be answered, probably, that shakespeare's plays demand players of genius and yet certainly are not mere _bravura_ pieces. there is truth und untruth in this--truth that our public will not patronize shakespeare when acted by average performers; untruth in the proposition that they cannot adequately be represented by players without genius. we have unfortunately got into the very bad habit of going to see his works not for their intrinsic interest but for the sake of the acting and mounting. it is not _hamlet_ but mr smith as the prince of denmark; not _romeo and juliet_ but miss brown and mr jones as the lovers of verona, and so on, which form the attraction; and the works are cut and played out of balance in order to meet the demand. the author would have resented a suggestion that his characters are so superhuman as to need marvellous performance: these remarks are without prejudice to the question whether even with the aid of great players shakespeare's dramas reveal a fair proportion of their merits on the stage. the outcry concerning the alleged dearth of good actresses is very commonly uttered and exceedingly ill-founded. it is wise to avoid the thorny question how far the recognized leading ladies of our first-class theatres are satisfactory--yet it may be said that a successful playwright recently complained that as a body they were not, and that, despite his protests, he was compelled to have his works performed by the ladies in possession--and judicious to shirk the proposition, sometimes put forward, that some of these do not hold their positions by mere force of merit. putting, then, aside the actresses enjoying grandeur in london, and leaving out of account a still more remarkable group which includes mrs kendal, mrs patrick campbell and miss olga nethersole--whom we too rarely see in town--and even ignoring what may be called "recognized leading ladies" who are "resting" reluctantly, there remains a powerful group of young actresses of experience and talent fully competent to satisfy the reasonable requirements of these gentlemen who are complaining of the "dearth." since this was written a number of young ladies then on the boards but not accepted as leading ladies have made their way to the front. character actresses several letters have been written lately, pathetic letters, from actresses unable to get engagements. all of the writers have enjoyed successes, have been referred to by important papers as "promising" or "coming leading ladies," each has had at least one engagement at a very handsome weekly salary, yet every one of them is in doleful dumps. here is a passage from one: "in i did so well that i lived in luxury, and, i fear, somewhat extravagantly, and my performance as heroine in ---- was so highly praised that i had no doubt my future was well assured. last year i earned £ , and i have to live on what i earn, and if i look dowdy when i go seeking an engagement i have little chance of getting it. yet i am under thirty, and although not one of the little group of alleged beauties whose faces appear monotonously week after week in the illustrated papers, i am well-enough-looking when made up, and have read in criticisms references to my 'charm of presence' and even to my 'beauty.' what is to become of me, i don't know. of course i am particularly hopeless seeing that nine of the london theatres out of less than three times that number are now devoted to musical comedy and i am unable to sing, nor should i be enthusiastic about taking work sadly in contrast with my once high and hopeful ambition." the last phrase deserves some consideration. to a great extent the reason why the stage causes so much unhappiness among actresses is that a large proportion enter the profession not in a simple straightforward way in the choice of a career, but because they dream of great triumphs. probably the career of ellen terry, and the exhibition of public affection shown upon the occasion of her jubilee, brought many recruits to the stage. putting aside the fact that ellen terry is unique, one may remark that very few actresses can hope to get close to the top of the tree, for obvious reasons. in the case of most careers and professions, nine men out of ten who join them know perfectly well that they will never do more than earn a decent living, and they shape their lives accordingly; but nearly every young actress expects to become a leading lady at a west end theatre, though there are few west end theatres devoted to real drama, and in some out of the small number there will always be a manager's wife or friend as an obstacle. the misfortune is that few young actresses--if any--say to themselves deliberately that they will aim at character parts, or old-woman parts. nearly all the old-woman and _grande-dame_ characters are played by actresses who have been leading ladies and during some period have had the painful experience of failing, on account of their age, to get the engagements they have sought. the juliet of one season is not the nurse or the lady capulet of the next; a considerable time passes before there is such a shift of characters, and she acts nothing at all during the interregnum, which is spent in vain attempts to get the juliet parts, met with cruel rebuffs on the score of age. now, some of the old-man actors on the stage are quite young; they have chosen a particular line, conscious of the fact that nature has denied them the privilege of playing parts that will cause the stage-door-keeper to be deluged with amorous letters addressed to them, and aware, too, that the triumphs of the broad comedian will never be theirs. these young old-men are often quite as successful in old-man parts as those who have served most of a lifetime upon the stage. it is not more difficult for a young woman to play the old-woman character or the _grande-dame_ part than for the young man to tackle the sir peter teazle or the ordinary modern old-man; nor is this the only class of work other than that of lovely heroine which lies open to the actress. when one hears discussion concerning the casting of plays there is often talk about the difficulty of finding an actress for a fanny brough part, which, of course, is quite distinct from what may be considered specifically a _soubrette_ character. complaints are uttered about the difficulty of finding a player to represent the comic mother-in-law; indeed, playwrights are sometimes affected in their work by the fear that if they write broad comedy for feminine parts the difficulty of casting them will be insurmountable. handsome salaries are paid to the few ladies who have a well-deserved reputation as actresses in the class of character thus indicated, and there is a demand for them--a demand generally supplied by superannuated leading ladies and aged _soubrettes_. it may be offensive to a girl's vanity deliberately to choose a path in which her personal charms, or those which she believes herself to possess, must be of little service. on the english stage it may be doubted if such a policy will ever be adopted, though on french there are instances which might be cited of actresses who have played dowager characters during the whole of a profitable, long and respected career. no doubt there is another side of the matter. many, most actresses, join the stage with other ideas than of merely gaining a reasonably comfortable living wage. pure ambition in some cases, vanity in others, are the motive-force, to say nothing of the numbers who may be regarded simply as stagestruck; and to such as these nothing seems worth striving for save to represent the triumphant heroine, the fascinating _soubrette_, or lady macbeth. upon all, these prudent counsels will be wasted--indeed, those who know a little of what passes behind the scenes are well aware that young actresses, almost starving, refuse to accept character parts that would help them out of poverty because they are afraid of jeopardising their chance--their one-to-a-hundred chance--of obtaining the perilous position of leading lady. there is, of course, another class. some, perhaps many, become actresses simply from a pure love of what they deem a beautiful, noble art, and for them it is only natural to think that nothing is worth representing save the greater characters; it is difficult to gratify such a love by representing a middle-aged comic spinster, or one of the elderly duchesses, without whom a modern comedy is deemed ungenteel. let us hope that sir herbert beerbohm tree's academy, which already is bearing fruit, will affect this deplorable phenomenon. those responsible may succeed in convincing a fair number of their charming pupils that it is wise not to aim at glittering triumphs which fall to few, but to qualify for work necessary in most plays, and very often done indifferently. stage misfits "one of those things no fellah can understand," to quote a phrase of lord dundreary, is the way in which players get chosen for their parts. most cases, no doubt, are not instances of square pegs in round holes; but the number of exceptions is enormous, a fact which has lately been made manifest by one of the short french seasons. an actress of really great talent has appeared as a star in her husband's company, and the obvious judgment upon her first two appearances was that the characters chosen were quite unsuitable to her. the reference is to madame suzanne desprès. in _la rafale_ and _le détour_ she had to represent a parisian, a _chic parisienne_, a creature of nerves, elegance and, according to balzac, sound business calculation, madame desprès suggested none of these qualities; in physique she seems an agreeable-looking, strong-minded countrywoman with brains; obviously she has no instinct for dress; and, despite remarkable skill and a fine exhibition of acting, she presented a woman quite different from the author's character, one also who would never have behaved like m. bernstein's heroines. the play suffered and the player suffered, and probably only the critical could see what an admirable actress she is and guess how perfectly she would represent a higher type of woman. this is no isolated case. we often see the race-horse used in pulling heavy weights and the suffolk punch employed for speed, and each blamed for the unsatisfactory accomplishment of the absurd task. many of the disasters in the theatre are due to this. as a rule the actor-manager or manageress demands the principal character, however unsuitable. going back a little, one recalls with astonishment the experiment of irving in representing romeo, and many have wondered why ellen terry in appeared as lady macbeth. some of the pleasantest memories of the playgoer concern superb performances by miss elizabeth robins, and yet they can recollect two or three appearances in commonplace dramas that were flat failures. mrs patrick campbell has had several checks which would be astounding if one did not recollect that she was constitutionally unsuited for the task she attempted. the most ardent bensonian will hardly suggest that his idols are always judicious in their choice of characters. to use the stock stage term, players often "see themselves" in characters in which the public sees only them and not the characters. are there no kind friends on the stage to give unpalatable advice? one reason for the extraordinary success of the performances by the stage society and the vedrenne-barker management and of pinero plays was the judicious choice of players whose physique and temperament coincided with their parts. several times we had what seemed brilliant pieces of acting by performers who never did anything before or afterwards worthy of admiration. at almost every fresh production enthusiastic young critics discovered a new actor or actress who, after all, was only an old friend well fitted at last. the lack of attention by managers to this matter of suitability often leads to very awkward results, chiefly in the case of the ladies. many times we have listened to ravings about the beauty of the heroine, and when she has appeared there has been a giggle in the house on account of her lack of beauty. we have frequently heard references to the tiny feet of a healthy young woman who would hardly have got three of her toes into the glass slipper, or to the dainty hands of a lady who would split a pair of eights. the beauty of the men is not so frequently referred to, but we sometimes have an ugly fellow vainly trying to live up to suggestions that he is an adonis and merely looking ridiculous in consequence. the matter of age, too, enters into the question--at times disastrously. some actresses are like cleopatra or ninon de l'enclos, but many look twice their reputed age. it is only in the case of juliet that it is deemed decent to refer to this difficulty, and then merely because shakespeare has set her so cruelly young that everybody knows nobody can play and look the part. in this matter a little good sense would work wonders. we critics are much to blame, and blamed, for not trying to force the entry of good sense. some of our forebrothers never hesitated to talk bluntly about the physical unsuitability of players for their parts, but we have grown so mealy-mouthed that if miss florence haydon were to play rosalind or mr louis calvert romeo, we should merely use some obscure phrases about unsuitability of temperament instead of saying something usefully brutal about the folly of these admirable artists. if we go a little further, our editors are pestered with letters to which we have the privilege of replying. the whole thing is absurd. the public is not deluded, and we hear murmurs in the theatre and outcries in the streets about the fact that miss so-and-so is far too ugly for her part and mr so-and-so too old, and the plays fail because the charges are true and the stage illusion has never been created, and the critic's authority--if any--is weakened. there are as many bad performances because the players are physically unsuitable as because they are otherwise incompetent. if these ideas were acted upon the profession at large would gain, for the players would be put more constantly in circulation; on the other hand it will be suggested that the actors and actresses would grow less skilful, since it may be imagined that their highest achievements are exhibited when overcoming the greatest difficulties, in which proposition there is an obvious fallacy; and also that they would gain less experience, having a smaller variety in parts. the advocates of the old stock system certainly would howl, because they think it did an actor good to play a great number of vastly different characters. it must, however, be recollected that in the time when the stock system flourished, putting aside the comparatively small classic repertoire, a very large proportion of the pieces were written upon more mechanical lines than the better plays of the present time, and parts tended to become classifiable into distinct well-known categories. to-day popular players are often engaged for long terms at theatres, where they are inevitably given characters for many of which they are unsuited in physique or temperament, to say nothing of age. another matter is the question of accent. from time to time we have players on our boards who speak english with a foreign accent in parts where such an accent is an absurdity. no doubt some have grappled with this difficulty very cleverly. modjeska, for instance, bandmann, mlle. béatrice, marius, juliette nesville and the lady who played here as madame simon le bargy. the memory of few goes back to fechter, and it would hardly be tactful to refer on this topic to several american players. the effect, however, necessarily is unfortunate; it is difficult enough on the stage to create illusions, and very important not to multiply difficulties. opera, with the magic aid of music, may contend successfully against such monstrosities as one singer singing an italian part in french, whilst the others offer various styles of italian, anglo-italian, german-italian, swedish-italian--almost any italian save the _lingua toscana_. spoken drama is not so robust in this particular, and the matter in question does not happen often enough to acquire validity by becoming a convention. stars the past season has been comparatively disastrous to the theatres, and many pieces have failed; this state of things is coincident with healthy progress in english drama, and the year has seen several productions that would have startled as well as delighted enthusiasts a few years ago. putting aside musical comedy and comic opera, one asks why it is that a great deal of money has been lost at the playhouses and a very large proportion of pieces have been failures. there are outcries about a dearth of good plays and competent players, and the supposed deficiency in these elements is generally offered as an explanation. is it the true one? certainly not. the development of the star system is the chief cause of the disaster. in former days we used to blame the actor-manager, but since the time when all were throwing stones at him a good deal has happened for which the ordinary actor-manager is not responsible--directly. to-day several of the managers who are not actors run their theatres on the star system, and we find the announcement frequently made that mr x. will present miss so-and-so, or mr so-and-so, or mrs so-and-so, in a new play by mr xxx. in other words, the manager is really offering his star to the public, and not the play. moreover, a number of players are run as stars by syndicates. in plain english, most of our theatres are managed, or rather mismanaged, upon the supposition that the principal players are more important than what they represent. it is the opinion of many disinterested observers that only three or four of our actors and actress in legitimate drama draw an appreciable amount of money in london to the theatre, and sacrifices made for those who do not obviously are futile. the unfortunate result of the system is that the playwright is sacrificed to the stars--most of whom are ineffectual. he is required to fit his drama to the personality of one, or it may be two, in the cast. let us tell briefly the story of one failure of the year. a play of some merit was shown to a popular actor, who suggested that if certain changes were made in it he would recommend it to his syndicate. the changes were suggested comprehensively under the phrase "if you can strengthen my part." the part was strengthened--that is to say, other parts were weakened, speeches were taken from them and given to the hero, scenes for minor characters were excised or shortened, and the star was dragged into the finale of the second act at great sacrifice of plausibility. the play was then recommended. it happened that the star had just separated from the leading lady who generally appeared with him, so the syndicate was free in choice of a heroine. three names were suggested. it was admitted that two of the actresses were more suitable than the third, who, however, had a "backer" willing to put money into the venture. the money prevailed and the lady was chosen. she promptly insisted upon having her part strengthened, so the play was remutilated till her wishes were complied with. is it surprising that when it was produced the critics fell foul of it and denounced the faults due to these transactions, or amazing that it did not run long? this is by no means an isolated case: there has been one comedy given this year, the last act of which was blamed by everybody. why? because the star, who was not the chief figure in it as the play was written, insisted upon his prerogatives, therefore the part of the second actor in the cast was cut down to next to nothing and a big irrelevant scene was introduced for the star, in which he uttered some of the speeches taken from the second actor's part. to think of a work of art being submitted to such treatment! it is difficult to emphasize it by a parallel. one might ask what would be the result if a painter were to attempt to convert a purely imaginative picture into a portrait, and, in addition to altering the face and the lines of the figures, were to put in a number of accessories to please the patron's taste, and also to accept suggestions from the sitter as to changes in the colour-scheme. now, it may be asserted confidently that a number of the plays produced this year have undergone the process of being altered to please managers, actor-managers, star players and syndicates. in addition a good many have been written from the start with a view of fitting the stars without alteration, and such works, in most cases, are quite out of balance and proportion, and, moreover, put a burden upon the stars that they are quite unable to bear, or we to endure. it was bad enough when there were only two or three stars, but now the managers have starred a whole shoal of mediocre players and sacrificed plays and dramatist to them. that there seems to be a dearth of good plays is in part because of the fact that some good ones are ruined by changes made in them, whilst others are refused because they do not contain star parts, and the authors cannot or will not convert them into star plays. the stars, created by the managers and industriously boomed by their press agents, by the newspapers and by the postcard merchants, have become frankensteins to their creators. they demand and get extravagant salaries. yet experience shows that few really draw people to the theatre. when the manager makes his calculation he can only put a limited sum to the salary list, and since he starts with one or two star salaries there is an insufficient amount left for the rest of the company--that is to say, instead of having the other characters represented by players who would be chosen for them if money were no object, they have to be taken by the cheapest performers who can possibly be deemed competent. the position of the unstarred actor is peculiarly precarious, for he is often passed over, although the salary expected by him is not very large, in favour of somebody cheaper and less competent. some casts remind one of the women who think themselves well dressed merely because they have a new hat. they begin with one or two good players--when the stars happen to be good players--and immediately drop below mediocrity. chapter ix stage dancing the skirts of the drama a case lately came on for trial in paris relating to a quarrel that arose a long time ago. incidentally, it may be observed that "the law's delay" is even greater in france than over here, where, indeed, until the most august regions of the courts are reached procedure is comparatively rapid, and on the chancery side cases are tried as hats are ironed, "while you wait." the question in paris raises one of importance, but in itself is mere matter for merriment. mademoiselle sarcy sued her manager because he tried to make her depart from traditions; and, although she is a prima ballerina, required her to wear flowing petticoats in the ballet of _hérodiade_. the matter stirred paris prodigiously. with us, of course, the ballet has ceased to be of importance. in mademoiselle genée we had a dancer as well entitled to immortality as those about whom our fathers raved, and russian dancers of brilliance have appeared, but opera and the legitimate theatre pay no attention to ballet except at pantomime season; and whilst probably the average keen playgoer of paris is acquainted with the names of the orthodox steps, and is aware that in the ballet one begins as _petit rat_, then becomes a quadrille ballerina, develops into a coryphée, blossoms into a minor subject, grows into a subject, and eventually emerges and reaches the stars as a prima ballerina, few of us know anything about the subject. the whole fight in paris raged round the question whether, regardless of period or nation or style of music, the prima ballerina is entitled to wear the scanty parasol skirt and petticoats in which she delights. the ladies of the ballet, with modern tradition on their side, resent any alteration in costume. the matter is not one of propriety in the ordinary sense of the word; the propriety of ballet costumes is out of the range of rational discussion. no one can doubt that if we had never seen anything but ordinary society drama and a ballet were launched at us in customary costume the police courts would take up the matter. it is even known that there was a time (not sir henry's) when the lord chamberlain interfered at the lyceum and was defeated by ridicule. custom has settled the question of propriety, and it may be confidently asserted that it never occurs to the mind of the prima ballerina that any human being could regard her costume as indelicate. the trouble in paris was that, despite the wish of the other persons concerned in the ballet, the star insisted upon proving lavishly to the public that she did not resemble the traditional queen of spain. she went further: she demanded her pound of flesh--or padding--she wished to exhibit what in technical slang is called _le tutu_, a term descriptive of the abbreviated costume and possessed also of a secondary meaning, which may be imagined by taking the ordinary tourist's pronunciation of the words and translating it. trilby's "the altogether" in connexion with tights explains the matter. the question is one of art, and here lies its humour. it is not physical vanity on the part of the ladies, for they know that sculptors would hardly choose as subjects the lower portion of women whose legs have been over-developed by a training so arduous that it is found almost impossible to get english girls to go through with it. but--and here's the rub--the dancer has a respect for her craft, which, like the actor's devotion to his art, tends to produce erroneous ideas, and this is why the fight has taken place. at the bottom, it becomes a question of virtuosity. art has suffered appallingly in every branch from the mania for cultivation of dexterity in accomplishment. to the prima ballerina the dancing is more important than the dance, to the actors the playing than the play, to many painters the _facture_ than the picture, and so on. music has been the main sufferer, particularly on the vocal side, and certain kinds of opera have been buried under the vocal acrobatics of the singers. one sees occasionally in shop windows, and, it may be, in human habitations, a species of abominable clock that has no kind of casing to conceal the works; it suggests the image of a prima ballerina. with the perfectly modest immodesty of the little boy cited in discussion by laurence sterne, she delights in exhibiting the works; more truthfully than a once famous conjuror, she insists upon showing us "how it is done"; and that really is quite the last thing a person of any taste wishes to know, or, rather, desires to have forced upon him. obviously, it is the duty of everyone who pretends to be educated to have some acquaintance with the mechanics of the different branches of art, but he does not want to be taught in public. unfortunately the performer displays a natural desire to show his own cleverness rather than that of the dramatist. he treats himself as the cart when he is only the--horse. drama has suffered severely from this; indeed, in our theatres we have reached the topsy-turvydom of having the dramatist write for the players instead of having the players act for the dramatist. sterile art is the general outcome. a great form of architecture perished with the architect who, forgetful of noble design, indulged in desperate _tours de force_ and offered to the stonemason the opportunity of executing miracles in stone lacework. dancing has stood still since the dancers have gyrated frantically in order to prove their mechanical dexterity, and drama is in the doldrums because the players, with the assistance of the press, have induced the public to regard their performance as more important than the work which it is their duty to represent. the last statement is becoming inaccurate. it is hardly extravagant to say that when a play is written at the dictation of an actor the acting will be more important than the piece, for but little good work comes out of drama concocted under such circumstances. the dancers are really dancing on the ruins of their art. they have lessened their skirts and their popularity at the same time. old pictures show (and i believe that old measurements are preserved to indicate the fact) that in the days of the famous _pas de quatre_--not, of course, the one at the gaiety--skirts were worn far longer than the modern _tutu_. the costume of the prima ballerina assoluta in our grandfather's days was something like an umbrella and a pair of braces: the umbrella shrank to the _en-tout-cas_, and the _en-tout-cas_ to the open parasol; unless the movement is arrested, in the course of time a lampshade will be reached, and ultimately, say, fifty years hence, the genée of the period will have nothing more of skirt and petticoat than some kind of fringe round the waist, indicating, like our coccygeal vertebrae, or the rudimentary limbs of the whale, a mere useless atrophied apparatus. it was once possible for the poses and movements of the dancer to be graceful--the phrase "the poetry of motion" had a meaning. with the stiff _tutu_ sticking out almost at right angles, elegance is quite impossible. the present "star" resembles in outline one of the grotesques used by hogarth to illustrate his theories in his "analysis of beauty," and one is inclined to laugh at her awkwardness when she walks; nor is it easy to admire when she whirls round like a dancing dervish, the _tutu_ mounting higher and becoming more and more rectangular the faster she goes. mlle. genée, delicious and graceful, in some flowing character-costume, and then ridiculous in the _tutu_ that she adores, proved this more than any amount of written explanation. she was such a great performer, so perfect in mechanism, so harmonious from little foot to dainty head, so brilliant in her miming, that one was forced to say sorrowfully "_et tu-tu_, genée." unfortunately the virtuoso mania is irresistible, and, so far as graceful dancing is concerned, there is no hope that we may see such a _pas de quatre_ as won fame in the palmy days of the ballet; we have reached the reign of the _pas du tutu_, and, almost wish we had arrived at the _pas du tout_. during the last few years there has been a great stir in the dancing world. some time ago isadora duncan gave a private exhibition at the new gallery of certain dances in a style intended to be a revival of old greek dancing. a little later miss ruth st denis presented in public some strange, quite beautiful, performances consisting of dancing, miming and posturing supposed to suggest ideas of indian life, and her finely restrained, truly artistic work deeply impressed both the critics and audiences. afterwards came miss maud allan, alleged--no matter with what degree of truth--to be an imitator of isadora duncan, and she made a great "hit," her most popular performance being a "salome" dance, which was considered by some people to be indecent. certainly of her costume the french phrase "_qui commence trop tard et finit trop tôt_" might justly be used, for she carried nudity on the stage to a startling degree. in a good many other dances her work was rather pretty and quite unobjectionable, but vastly inferior to the art of isadora duncan or ruth st denis. isadora duncan the theatrical season of ended in a blaze of--dancing. at what is generally deemed about the dullest moment in the year isadora duncan appeared at the duke of york's theatre, and kept it open and well attended for almost a month. the affair is unique in the history of our theatre. one can imagine a playhouse running on the basis of a big ballet, with a story, popular music, magnificent scenery, gorgeous costumes, huge _corps de ballet_, half-a-dozen principals and immense advertisement. in this case we have had more or less isolated dances to music generally severe; for scenery only a background of subtle yellow, taking strange tones under the influence of different lights; for costumes only some beautiful, tranquil, simple greek drapery; for _corps de ballet_ a few children; for principals one woman, with an intelligent face, but certainly no great beauty; and in the way of advertisement very little, except some honestly enthusiastic press notices, and fortunately nothing in the form of photographs of nudities or half-nudities. there has been a triumph of pure art under austere conditions, such as can hardly be recollected on our stage, unless in the case of _everyman_--pure art akin to the theatrical, indeed parent of the drama. the word histrionic is derived through the latin from an etruscan word which means "to leap" and was originally applied to dancers. historically, the matter is interesting. drama began in dance and developed from it, dance and drama going hand-in-hand for a long while; then a separation came, and dance has tended more and more to become meaningless and conventional, and, in the chief school of dancing, purely technical. the spanish school is still alive, reinforced by the north african, and in the main showing some tendency, often perfectly restrained, towards the indecent. our own step-dancing remains popular, and for a while the hybrid skirt-dancing triumphed, chiefly because of the genius of kate vaughan and talent of her successors, one of whom, katie seymour, worked out a clever individual compound of styles. the "classic" school, classic in quite a secondary sense, which has been represented by what one can conveniently call the ballet, year after year has worked towards its extinction by the over-cultivation of mere technique, of execution rather than imagination. the greatest artist of this school in our times is genée; natural grace, a piquant individuality, and a fine power of miming, have lent charm to work the foundation of which is really acrobatic, and consists of remarkable feats made too manifest by an abominably ugly costume. isadora duncan goes back in style to the early greek; dancing, however, necessarily to more modern music, for the reason that we do not know how to reproduce much of the old, and possibly would not like it if we could. to her work one may apply the phrase of simonides, that "dancing is silent poetry." preferable is the term that has been used concerning architecture: schelling, in his "philosophie der kunst," calls it "frozen music," a term ridiculed by madame de staël. peter legh wrote a book on the topic, published in , with the title "the music of the eye." the book is poor, pretentious stuff, but the title seems nicely applicable to the dancing of isadora duncan. to a deaf man her work would be entirely musical--to a beethoven or robert franz, deaf after, for a while, full enjoyment of sound, her dances would, i believe, represent complete, delightful, musical impressions. it may be that sometimes in her work she attempts impossible subtleties, endeavouring to express ideas beyond the range of melody--for it is difficult to imagine that any dancing can be more than expressive of melody, though no doubt to make this true "melody" must be understood in a large sense. how far away this is from dancing which consists in the main of executing more or less complicated steps "in time" with the music, or such appalling vulgarities as a cake-walk. it must be admitted that one of the tanagra figurines is sadly suggestive of a characteristic pose in the cake-walk--though it may well be that it is a mere pose which led to none of the abominations with which our stage has been deluged! in the case of isadora duncan we have seen poses and movements of extraordinary beauty, exquisitely sympathetic with fine music. no doubt occasionally she has made a concession, as on her first night, when she danced to "the blue danube" waltz by way of an encore, putting, however, her own interpretation on the music and her sense of it. those who are acquainted with greek sculpture and with some of the classic drawings of the old masters will see that to a very large extent her work is a revival rather than an invention; but this fact--which she acknowledges--in no degree diminishes the merit of her performances, for the execution is of wonderful beauty and the application of the old ideas to music of a different type is very clever. her work alone has well repaid the audiences, many members of which have made several visits to the theatre; it has, however, been supplemented by dances in which young children were the performers, dances so pretty in conception and delightful in execution that one has felt the whole house thrilling with pleasure. nothing like these children dances, nothing of the kind half as charming, has been given on the stage in our day. the one complaint possible against isadora duncan is that she has rendered us immoderately dissatisfied with what had once moderately contented us; and the fear is that we shall promptly have a host of half-baked imitators, who will copy the mere accidentals of her system without understanding the essentials, and will fancy that the whole matter is one of clothes and music, and prance about bare-legged, meaninglessly. it is hard to see how this is to be avoided until there has been time for her pupils to grow up; it is certain, however, that if the new idea, the new-old idea, takes root, there will be a revolution in dancing, which may have far-reaching effects. drama of the strictly intellectual type will remain unaffected; possibly there will be a new development of the musico-dramatic. it has been suggested that musical comedy is waning, and the period has been reached when the average piece of this class spells failure. there is, of course, nothing in the work of isadora duncan which limits it to one principal, and naught to prevent the combination of singing and dancing. off-hand it seems rash to suggest that spoken dialogue could be harmonized with these. it is imaginable that the authors of _prunella_ could see their way to combine with work somewhat on the lines of their charming piece such ideas of dancing as have been suggested by isadora duncan. the result should be a novel, delightful form of art, not necessarily hybrid. after isadora duncan's public performances came the deluge and the country was flooded with women indecently unclad, who flapped about on the stage displaying their persons and their incompetence lavishly. the authorities have been very lax as regards such performances, many of which were so obviously crude and clumsy that it was clear that a _succès de scandale_ was sought deliberately. of course some of the performers may have had merit. later on (in ) there arrived some brilliant russian dancers whose work is of too great value and importance to be dealt with in a single paragraph. chapter x things in the theatre a defence of the matinée hat the number of matinées at christmas-time has caused the usual outcry against the matinée hat, and wrathful or sarcastic letters on the subject; and it is said that some french managers are taking the strong step of excluding from the front rows those ladies who, to use the queer gallic term, are not "_en cheveux_." it seems surprising that an evil denounced so universally should be permitted to exist, and that loud complaints made during many years should have had little or no effect. the average man regards the matter as quite simple, and wonders why women are so selfish as to keep on their hats, and thinks that there is no reasonable explanation of their conduct or excuse for it. it seemed clear that there must be greater difficulties than are obvious. so questions were put to an ardent playgoer, who spends appalling sums of money on her dress, as to why she makes a fuss about taking off her hat in the theatre. "my good man," she said to the questioner, "you are talking 'through your hat' as well as about mine. if my hair was as simple a matter as yours--" this hit at his unprotected pate seemed rather a blow below the belt--"there would be no difficulty. unfortunately, it is a very complex matter." he hid all but the smallest conceivable fraction of a smile. "i am not referring to colour," she continued with some asperity, "but to the fact that, at present, fashion requires me to wear a prodigious number of little curls. my native crop is ample in quantity, but i should hardly be in time for a matinée or even an evening performance if i had it turned into all these little necessary curls. so, like most of my friends, in order to save time and trouble, i have a number which are pinned on. do you think i care to run the risk of removing my hat without even a looking-glass to guide me? heaven knows what might happen. the case is a little better, though far from satisfactory, with those who wear nothing but their own crop." this view of the subject seemed to have something in it, a fact which, of course, could not be admitted. there were, not long before, in _the westminster gazette_ some remarks by "madame qui vive" to the effect that even a female absalom or a mélisande could not do without what she called the "clever devices of the coiffeur," and claims were made of woman's right to adopt the fashion of the days when both men and women wore wigs, on the ground that the coiffeur's "little devices"--english for sham curls--save time, and also remain "trimmer and neater" than natural curls. "do you think," she said, "that it is pleasant to hold an eight or ten guinea hat on your knees, to say nothing of a boa and muff and veil? and what about the damage to a delicate hat caused by people who shove in front of you and brush against it and crush the tulle and break the feathers? a lot of style it possesses after being treated in that fashion!" "don't you think you might have special hats for matinées--something undamageable." "perhaps you would like to see me in a tam-o'-shanter, or a yachting cap, or one of those nice 'sensible' straw hats you men admire; and suppose i want to go to a lunch _en route_ for the play, or tea afterwards, or to drive in the park, or to go anywhere except to my _cabinet de toilette_?" "they might make you something extra small and low that would serve for all these purposes." "indeed; don't you think half-a-guinea is enough to pay for a stall without buying a special hat into the bargain? a nice fuss my husband would make about my extravagance. besides, people want us to wear no hat at all. what does your wife do?" the interviewer replied that his wife thought it her duty to take off her hat. "she behaves better than many ladies of the theatrical world. the other day i could not see a bit because of the enormous hat worn by miss ----, and miss ----and miss ---- were just as bad." it would be pleasant to give the names which would identify popular actresses who are great shiners in this matter. "moreover," she continued, "there is the difficulty of putting it on again. you men wear your hats on your heads, and can easily get them straight; we don't, we wear them on our hair, or our scalpettes, or our transformations, or on any _postiche_ that may be fashionable or necessary, and can only tell whether they are straight, or even the right way round, by means of a looking-glass. a pretty thing if i were to sail out of a theatre with my hat really askew, or before behind; people might fail to take a charitable view of the situation, and suspect i had had a glass too much instead of a glass too little." "all this is irrelevant," said the interviewer, "and the whole difficulty is--you are too mean to go to the ladies' room and pay or give sixpence to the attendant." she smiled pityingly. "my dear man, you grumble about our being late at the theatre. what would happen if fifty of us were to take off our hats and touch up our hair in a room too small for fifteen, before taking our seats? i know one ladies' room where there is only one looking-glass, and there are only a few horrid little hooks on which to hang hats and veils. i would gladly patronize the waiting-room if there were ample accommodation, but that would be out of the question in most theatres, and one would have to come much too early and get away needlessly late; and there might be little mistakes about the hats and furs unless half-a-dozen attendants were provided, for it can't be a simple question of handing hats and coats over the counter as it is with you men." it is undeniable that in some cases the ladies' cloak-rooms have not been designed so as to deal with the question under discussion, because, of course, theatres are primarily built for the evening performances, and matinées are only a little extra as a rule. "the matter," said the lady thoughtfully, "is more important than you think. i consider that the matinée hat has settled the fate of many new enterprises. if the lady is asked to take off her hat and does not, she is uncomfortable during the afternoon, because she knows the people are hating her, not quite unjustly, and also because they sometimes whisper at her offensively. if she does take it off she is worried lest she has made a guy of herself; she is often upset because her hat has been crushed, and her mind is distracted by wonder if she will get it on right at the end. the result is that she is in a bad mood for the play and judges it unfairly. "i think something could be done. the seats might be so arranged as to have an open box underneath each stall for the hat and muff of the lady immediately behind. i do not say it would be easy to get at them; but even in the case of the narrowest stalls--and many are an outrage--it would be possible. something of the sort indeed exists at one or two theatres, such as the haymarket. of course the cartwheel hats would not go into them, but ladies don't wear such things, only women who want to advertize themselves. next," she continued, "comes the question of the looking-glass. i have made efforts to use a small _miroir de poche_, but it is far from adequate. in cases where the backs of the stalls are of a good height, a fair-sized mirror might be fixed high up on the back, with some little contrivance in the way of a curtain which could be drawn over it; and aided by these we might be able to grapple with our difficulties." a penny-in-the-slot mirror might pay. a justification of certain deadheads in efforts, certainly justifiable, to discover the reason for the failure of the theatrical season, some people have made quite a ferocious attack upon the "deadhead," who really has nothing to do with the case. he has been spoken of as an incubus. some people regard the free entry of the _caput mortuum_ with a hostility like that shown by our ancestors (and to some extent ourselves) to the mortmain of the church. let us consider the deadhead for a while. first, it is necessary to point out that there are several species. the genus includes all members of the audience who do not pay for their seats. of course the species of deadhead critic is not attacked on this particular point; yet indirectly some members of it affect the situation, for it is said that there are critics who demand a good deal of "paper" for their friends from managers, even when the tickets are really saleable. london critics are not treated like their brethren in paris--the great city in which drama flourishes--where a reverence is exhibited for our craft not manifested in london. on a first night over here you will find that in many theatres the representatives of first-class papers are in back rows of the stalls or in the dress circle, whilst deadheads of another species are occupying most of the better places. moreover, there are very, very few journals to which more than one ticket is sent. the next kind of deadhead is the unprofessional first-night deadhead, a mixture of personal friends of the manager, the author, the principal players and of "the backers," if any. it is said that they are the most troublesome of all to handle, being utterly unreasonable as a body, and refusing contemptuously seats accepted without a murmur by newspapers that have a million or so of readers. many are only willing to lend the support of their presence on the first night; seats for the second or a later night are scorned. in this class may be reckoned members of _the_ profession, who, with a strange disregard for the convenience of the management, demand a couple of stalls for the _première_, though they are in the habit of complaining that a first performance does justice neither to the piece nor to the players. lastly, in the group of first-night deadheads come the members of the unrecognised, ill-organised, generally tactless claque. the species that lately has been attacked is divisible into two groups. the first consists of the people who will not go to the theatre without an order, but do not expect first-night tickets--one may call them the "cadgers." the second species might be entitled the "window-dressers." volumes have been written about the "cadgers," and countless stories told. no doubt they cause trouble and some expense in stamps, stationery and clerical work. probably they do not really affect the fate of a piece, for there seems no reason to doubt the truth of the general assertion, that nearly all of them would stay away if they could not get a ticket for nothing. now we come to the really lamentable class, people who have to be brought into a theatre "with a lassoo," to use an american term. let us look at the position--the melancholy position. the play is not quite a hopeless failure; it is in a mahomet's coffin position. if it can last a little longer the season may improve and money be made; or it is neither making nor losing on ordinary nights and does paying business on saturdays. there is a third state of affairs--perhaps the commonest: it is necessary to keep the piece running for a certain number of weeks, even at a loss, in order that it may visit the provinces and the colonies or the states as a big london success that has enjoyed a long run. yet paying playgoers keep aloof. what is the manager to do? if his house is but half full the applause will be faint, the players are likely to act without spirit, and, worse still, the audience may be chilled, and the members of it will tell their friends that the house was almost empty, thereby causing them to think that the entertainment is poor. so half full might become quite empty. what method does the manager adopt? he knows that the general public is as uncritical of an audience as of a play or of acting, so he fills his house as well as he can with the very deadest of deadheads; "orders" are distributed lavishly to people whose presence in the theatre is actually a favour to the management. it is said that these playgoers are peculiarly severe in their judgments and remarkably apathetic! to the truth of part of this we can testify, since we study such deadheads with great curiosity on the occasions, rather rare, when we see them, for sometimes a dramatic critic gets taken to the theatre by a friend. we think ourselves very famous, yet most of us have friends ignorant of the fact that our trade is to criticize plays. the position is a little quaint; one is asked to dine at about the time that is customary to take afternoon tea; the dinner is short though, if at a fashionable restaurant, the waits are long; and there comes an awful moment when the host mentions that he has got six stalls for the ----. generally there is some friend present who knows the true position, and exhibits a smile of fiendish mirth. when this happens we examine the professional deadhead with interest. he reminds one of the hired mourner at the hebrew funeral. fantastic clothes, strange devices for keeping shirt-fronts clean, queer contrivances for protecting the throat during the bus-ride home, furtive umbrellas, ample reticules (in which perhaps goloshes are hidden), and a genteel reticence in applause or laughter, are marks of the stranger in the stalls--the harmless, necessary deadhead. he may not be ornamental, nor even she, despite her sex; perhaps they give little encouragement to the players; they bring nothing directly to the exchequer, but they fill a place. few of us do more; some of us merely fill a column, and wish we did that duty as conscientiously as most of these poor creatures do theirs, for, though obviously determined not to enjoy themselves, they come punctually, do not cause inconvenience by going out between the acts to waste money on high-priced refreshments, and remain in their places to the bitter end--unlike the cash patrons, so many of whom bustle away brutally towards the close of the entertainment for fear lest they should miss the chance of earning a nightmare at a fashionable restaurant. seeing what service they render to the managers the deadheads are perhaps entitled to the protection of the phrase "_de mortuis_." the foregoing article brought several letters, amongst them one that deserves a little consideration. all responsibility is disclaimed for the letter that is published verbatim: dear sir,--i have lately read an article by you on the subject of the matinée hat, with almost every word of which i have the honour of expressing my entire disagreement. although your views on the topic may be absurd, they show that you have a mind capable of appreciating more than one side of a case; so i venture to write to you about the great question of the day, the proposed suppression of the deadhead. "ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend," to use the words of the bard; to think that after all our services to them, the managers, too blind to see the obvious causes of their distress, should dream of abolishing the "harmless necessary" deadhead, who often has rendered to them assistance like that of the mouse "i' the fable" to the lion. permit me to discuss the matter seriously. let me begin by employing, with trifling modification, a famous phrase by one of the dramatists of the land from which most of our english drama comes: "there are deadheads and deadheads!" they may be put into two main groups--the first-night deadheads and the other-nights deadheads--and there are subdivisions. few save those immediately concerned would mourn if the first group were abolished--you can guess that i do not belong to it. yet i am well acquainted with the group, since a cousin of mine, long time a popular actor, has been of late a too-frequent attendant at these functions. of first-night deadheads there are four varieties: friends of the management, including their brother pros.; friends of the author; friends of principal players in the cast; and the critics. it is a source of great joy to my cousin to see that on these occasion the managers know how to put the critics in their proper places, grouping them, for instance, in rows of stalls bearing the more remote letters of the alphabet, whilst between them and the footlights come the deadheads of the other varieties. personally, i wonder whether it is wise to put the gentry of the pen in seats from which they often hear with difficulty, and see without accuracy, in rows of seats normally belonging to the pit, and merely posing, _pro hoc vice_, as stalls, and situate in the headachy region underneath the dress circle. according to my cousin, the first-night deadheads, as a body, are unpunctual and unappreciative. they chatter a good deal and seem more interested in the audience than the play, and might well be replaced by the many people who would be glad to plank down their money for a seat. let them go; and i warrant the managers will be none the worse--i should, indeed, except the gentlemen of the fourth estate. the case of myself and the deadheads of other nights is quite different. the managers will find it difficult to do without us. we are present as much for their benefit as for our pleasure. _constatons les faits_, if i may borrow another phrase from the french. under what circumstances are we invited? when a play is doing good business? certainly not. it is when the company are discussing in whispers whether the notice will go up or not, that the fiery cross is sent round to us and we come and fill the house. without us there would be an aching void, and the few paying people, aghast at the gloom, would spread very bad reports. managers, like nature, abhor a vacuum. our presence saves the situation and the face of the management. no doubt our assistance is often vain, but the cases are numerous when, thanks to us, the management has been able to tide over a bad week or two during a run. "they also serve who only sit and watch" is our motto, taken, you will see, from a line by the "organ-mouthed voice of england." would not _dorothy_ have died young but for our intervention? would not _the lion and the mouse_ have enjoyed the success it deserved if we had been called in to dress the house until the public had discovered the piece? many are the cases where, during weeks of bad weather or sudden gloom we have rallied loyally to the theatre and kept a play going. do services such as this count for nothing? is my occupation to become like that of the moor of venice--merely because managers are forgetful? do we make no sacrifices when we come to their aid? what about the expense of coming to and fro? what about wear and tear of dress clothes, useless to some of us except for such purposes, and, in honesty i should add, so far as the nether portions are concerned, for attending funerals? let me discuss what is urged against us. it is said that if we did not get free tickets we should pay to visit the play. there is a little truth in this, but not much. we might take tickets for the pit to see the good plays; our judgment tells us they are but few, whereas a sense of duty compels us in our quasi-professional capacity to attend even the most deplorable rubbish. this aspect of the matter amounts to no more than a trifle. the managers would gain little from our occasional shillings and lose much by our frequent absence. it is urged that we do not applaud. i maintain that deceitful applause is not in our implied contract; certainly we never hiss or boo, though there is a splendid tradition rendered popular by poor lal brough that one of us found a play so utterly bad that he left his seat, went to the box-office, and bought a ticket, in order that he might express his opinion without prejudice to his conscience. as a body we are playgoers of judgment and experience, and, though i protest that we clap generously when there is a reasonable opportunity, the suggestion that we are a claque failing to do its duty because we do not applaud bad pieces is an outrageous insult. no, sir; i do but humbly voice the opinion of my fellow-deadheads when i say that we would rather be abolished than have to offer sycophantic applause as part of the bargain. i insist a little upon this aspect, because the refusal to applaud rubbish seems to be looked upon as the dead head and front of our offending, if i may take a trifling liberty with the words of the swan of avon. i had forgotten, sir, to mention one of our most important services. it is notorious that many plays are run in london without there being any expectation that they will make money in the metropolis, but in the belief that if they can be called "a great london success," our simple-minded cousins in the country will accept them with enthusiasm. how, i ask you, are these london successes manufactured? how could they be without our aid? i could name plays that have been run for a hundred nights in town at a heavy loss, and yet have proved gold-mines; and i have visited them at the call of duty and seen with my trained eyes so few of the paying public that a mere sense of decency would have compelled the managers to close the doors if we had not been present. our assistance on these occasions is an odious part of our duty. it goes sadly against my conscience to be one of a kind of stage-army audience, playing a part in order to deceive country or colonial managers into the belief that some piece of rubbish has had a genuinely successful london run. is not service of this character to be counted? surely, at the least, if we are to be abolished it should be recognized that the old hands amongst us are entitled to some compensation. why, sir, seeing that serious politicians do not propose to suppress licences for the sale of poisons without giving compensations, surely we, who have done much and suffered much, ought not to be put into limbo without some recognition of our services. i remain, yours sincerely, caput mortuum just a line. on careful consideration of this letter, it seems only right to make a suggestion that some doubts exist whether it is entirely genuine, but it certainly appears to contain some grains of truth. theatrical advertisements it may be doubted whether the historian will call our period "the age of advertisement," though some have thought so. for there are such rapid and prodigious growths in the base craft of beating the big drum that our most audacious and colossal efforts may, to our grandchildren, seem like a brown bess to a modern repeater in comparison with their means of man-allurement. of all the arts the one relying most upon advertisement is the drama; yet the phrase is half-unjust to real drama. perhaps it is fairer to say that there is more advertisement in connexion with the theatrical art than any other, or, indeed, all the others put together. the position is surprising; a large mass of the reading matter of the london papers is filled with copy concerning the theatres and players, though only a small percentage is criticism. more people would recognize each of thirty popular performers than could identify even one of the great in other branches of art or in science. a recent squabble about a couple of actresses has been the subject of greater fuss than would be caused by the discovery of the lost books of livy, of a picture by apelles, of the ms. of an unknown opera by beethoven, of a method of making accumulators out of _papier-maché_, or a mode of manufacturing radium at a cost of twopence a pound. there have been thousands of columns printed concerning the marriages of (so-called) actresses to young gentlemen of family. a digression about these marriages is permissible. each has led to many articles on alliances between the aristocracy and the stage, and lists of the ladies who in our times have honoured (or dishonoured) the nobility with their hands have been given. yet there has been little comment upon the fact that, with two or three exceptions, the so-called actresses have had no position of importance in the legitimate ranks of the profession. a woman may perform in a theatre, and even draw a big salary, without being an actress, and she may have brains, beauty and popularity, and nevertheless enjoy little chance of marrying anybody with a "handle to his name," if she confines her work to the non-musical stage. a distinction suggests itself--it might be that in music and the love of it by the nobly born lies the explanation of the phenomenon; it might be that the blue-blooded youths captured these charmers of the musico-dramatic department in order to enjoy a selfish monopoly of lovely voices, but such is not the case. two or three of the ladies who have won their way to the "hupper succles" possess talent; one of them has a beautiful voice and great gifts as an actress, and one was a brilliant dancer and became an excellent comedienne. the ruck and run of them, however, have triumphed owing to advertisement in subtle and also in crude forms. really the actresses of legitimate drama, whom one should call the _actresses_, have a grievance not merely in the fact that the peerage does not woo them (since in a good many instances the bride has paid dearly for her elevation), nor merely because women of the oldest profession open to the sex miscall themselves actresses when in trouble--the term actress being like the word "charity"--but because their title includes many persons of notoriety who, if forced to rely solely upon their talent, could hardly earn a pound a week in true drama. "true drama," for the common term "musico-dramatic" points to the fact that the fortunate nymphs belong to the lighter (and sometimes degraded) forms of musical work and not of the legitimate drama. some wag, no doubt, has called their branch the _leg_-itimate drama. in the mid-victorian days the advertisements of drama were trifling. thirty years ago the photographs of miss maud branscombe, a real beauty, but not an actress of great quality, created quite a stir, and made her name well known throughout the land; and the publication of them was, probably, the beginning of the present deluge. the two illustrated papers of importance published pictures only of actresses who by means of their talent had made a genuine sensation; and therefore but few were presented in the year. nowadays there are from thirty to forty photographs a week in the illustrated papers of actresses--using the term in its widest sense. many young ladies, who twenty years ago could not by any decent means have got their likenesses exhibited to the public except in shop-window photographs, now simper at us fifty-two times a year, or more, and are sometimes described as "the celebrated actress," though a few of them never get beyond the dignity of a single silly line in the book of a musical hodge-podge. miss xxx smiles at us from her -h.p. "bloater car" which has cost a larger sum than eight years of her salary, and the simple-minded think she must be a great star to be able to afford such a luxury, not knowing that she herself is the luxury which someone else is unable to afford. the humble old devices are now stale tricks. the actress in search of notoriety does not lose her jewels: she brings an action which is reported at great length, and during it half-a-dozen members of the profession get a splendid chance of blowing their own trumpets. there was a cruel case a little while ago: one of these "damaged darlings" of the stage did lose her jewels--which had cost about as much as that admirable actress amy roselle earned in her honourable career with a tragic ending--but felt bound to keep silent about the loss, since to have mentioned it would have seemed like "out-of-date" advertising. "view jew," she called it. it would be unfair to suggest that the ladies have a monopoly, for many of the actors also are busy in the art of advertisement--some so busy as to have little time to study the technique of their art. however, they get rather less help from the illustrated papers, for reasons not quite obvious, if it be correct, as some suppose, that the picture journals are bought for the--not by--the ladies of the family. the puff system is disadvantageous to the managers, since they have to pay fancy prices for the services of players, no better than others who could be engaged at humble rates, because they have acquired a specious importance by advertisement. the result has been a prodigious increase of salaries, without any corresponding gain in revenue, for although the much-"boomed" artist may attract people to a particular theatre, it is not to be assumed that the quantity of playgoers is increased, or that more money is spent on the whole by the public because of all this advertising. the consequence to the managers, as a rule, is that expenditure is much greater, but the total amount of receipts remains the same. yet the managers as a body are not to be pitied, since not only do they, unwisely, assist in this artificial glorification of the members of their companies, but some of them also push the advertisement of their theatres beyond delicate limits, and by the cunning strenuous efforts of their "press agents" and others beat the big drum very loudly, sometimes sounding a false note, as when they publish, in advertisements, garbled criticisms upon their wares. there are some in the theatrical world who dislike and disdain the illegitimate advertisement. others there are less nicely scrupulous, perhaps, but not sufficiently "smart" or lucky enough to "boom" themselves. these suffer. advertisement is to the theatrical world like ground bait to anglers. we who, to some extent are behind the scenes, know too well how many admirable actors and actresses have a hard fight for a bare living because their places are taken by people of less knowledge and skill, but more "push" and cunning. even the general rise in salaries does not help these reticent players, for a salary at the rate of twenty pounds a week is not very useful if you are resting ten months in the year. it is quite incontestable that we journalists are to be blamed. we help in the "booming"; we are the big drum, the players provide their own trumpets. a conspiracy of silence on our part would do much to mend matters. if for a little while we were to suppress the "personal pars." and keep out the photographs and only write concerning the theatres strictly as critics, a great change would take place. probably the revenue of the theatres would not diminish sensibly, but the expenses would. managers and players would be forced to rely for success upon merit and nothing else, and as a result the standard of drama and acting would be raised. this has been so far perceived that even people belonging to the other side of the footlights have expressed publicly the opinion that the unsatisfactory state of the theatres is partly due to their being too much talked and written about. rosalind's phrase that a "good wine needs no bush" is but partly true; merit rarely succeeds by its own virtue when it has to meet unfair competition in the shape of advertisement. music a little while ago a man, who had not been to the theatre for some years, was asked his reason. "the last time i went," he replied, "it was to a tragedy, well written and interesting, if hardly inspired, and after the first act the band--nobody would call it an 'orchestra'--played a thing called 'the washington post,' which i discovered by the aid of the programme was written by a noise-concocter called sousa. i sat it out; i had no choice, for i was in the middle of a row, and in order to escape i should have had to trample upon a dozen inoffensive strangers. during the next act the abominable noise kept coming back into my ears and distracting me, so the drama was ruined for me." it was pointed out to him that mr sousa is a very popular composer, that millions of people love his compositions, that it is merely a minority, contemptible in number, which loathes them. still he caused thoughts. for a long time the musical folk have regarded the _entr'acte_ music simply as one of the unavoidable discomforts of the playhouse; but, really, managers might be more careful. apparently it is impossible to deal satisfactorily with the question. there is a horrible dilemma; if the music is good you cannot enjoy it, because you can hardly hear it, for the audience talk too loudly, and there is the bustle of people coming in and out, and one catches the voices of young ladies inviting people in the stalls to take tea or coffee or to buy chocolates, and the occupants of the pit to refresh themselves with "ginger-beer, lemonade, bottled ale or stout," a phrase to which they give a species of rhythmical crescendo. the difficulty is enhanced in some houses by the fact that the orchestra is hidden in a species of box which is almost noise-proof. on the other hand, if the music is bad--generally the case--well, it is bad; worse, still, you can hear it easily. there is a kind of kink in nature which breeds the law that very small interruptions will mar your pleasure in good music, but nothing less than a dynamite explosion can drown the bad; even cotton wool in your ears or the wax employed by the sailors of ulysses will not keep it out. some time ago miss lena ashwell added to the debt of playgoers towards her by installing an admirable string quartet, which rendered real music so well that many people went to her theatre almost as much for the music as for the drama. alas! the string quartet soon disappeared. inquiries--of course not of persons officially connected with the theatre--disclosed the fact that there had been many complaints. people found it difficult to hear themselves talk, and when they talked loud enough playgoers who were enjoying the music said "hush!" and in other ways suggested that they thought it bad form to chatter whilst the quartet was playing; so miss ashwell--very reluctantly--was forced to change the system. the kingsway theatre formed an exception--not, indeed, the only exception--to these remarks. the whole question is very difficult. theoretically, at least, it is deplorable that there should be any interruption from the beginning to the end of a play. dramas, for full effect, should be in one act, or if they are too long, and if a concession must be made to human physical weakness, if an opportunity must be given to people to stretch themselves or move in their seats, there should be an interval of absolute silence or occupied by music finely indicative of the emotional states intended to be created by the drama. this no doubt is a theory demanding perfection. up to a certain point efforts are made to realize it. under the generous management of sir herbert beerbohm tree, we often have music composed expressly for the drama by musicians of quality, and sometimes it is well enough written to deserve and afterwards obtain performance in the concert-room. yet in a sense it is a failure, since it is imperfectly heard in the theatre; the fault lies with the audience, but it is hard to blame the members of it. there is no crime in not being musical, despite shakespeare's prodigious phrase, "the man that hath no music in himself ... is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils," or congreve's phrase concerning music and the savage breast. we know that there are many people otherwise finely equipped and alert in matters of art who have no taste in or for music; that there are some of irreproachable judgment in literature or painting who, like the officer in the story, recognize no tune save "god save the king," and that only because people stand up when it is played. also we are aware that some musicians are utter philistines so far as other branches of art are concerned. it is difficult enough to get people to patronize the theatres, and it would be madness to keep any away by requiring them to make great sacrifices on the altar of music. the fact remains that the selection of music is often very carelessly or foolishly made. to begin with, there is an appalling lack of variety. at one period "pomp and circumstance" was played in almost every theatre, sometimes well, often badly, till we got sick of it. pieces such as "après le bal" and "simple aveu" were hurled at us every night. a statement of the number of times that nicolai's overture to _the merry wives of windsor_ has been played in the theatres would stagger people; gounod's _faust_ music and edward german's charming dances from _henry viii._, and one or two overtures by suppé and the stradella music, have become intolerable. without posing as the so-called "superior person," without demanding unpopular classics or asking for the performance of serious chamber music or severe symphonies, or expressing a desire for bach--a holiday might very well be given to the bach-gounod "ave maria"--we merely pray for greater variety and also for more careful consideration of the congruity between the play and the character of the _entr'acte_ and introductory music. it should be the duty of somebody to see that an effort is made to confine the music to works harmonious with the emotions which the dramatist intends to excite. we ought not to have the "teddy bears' picnic" just after hearing the heroine weep over the idea that her husband is faithless; whilst the feelings caused by the agonies of othello are not strengthened by hearing the "light cavalry" overture; and the _faust_ ballad music falls queerly upon the despair of the hero when he learns that he is ruined. it may be admitted that in many instances an effort is made to carry out these entirely unoriginal views, but even in some of our most carefully conducted playhouses there are strange lapses. there is another point. it very often happens that the list of pieces printed upon the programme, for which in most of the theatres a charge of sixpence is made, is a mere snare. sometimes none of the pieces mentioned is played, whilst to alter the order is quite a common matter. no doubt this gives some uncharitable amusement to people who overhear the conversation of ignorant playgoers misled by the programme. there was an unfortunate foreigner who said to his neighbour, "_pas un aigle, leur fameux elgar_" when he thought he was listening to "pomp and circumstance," whilst the orchestra in fact was playing "whistling rufus." the ideal system, no doubt, was that of miss ashwell, who gave a long list of pieces in the programme with numbers to them, and then had the number appropriate to the particular work hoisted before it was played. this is only the ideal in one sense. in reality, the best course is suggested by a famous maxim: "_optima medicina est medicina non uti_." the stage society is wise in following the custom sanctioned by such an august institution as la comédie française. after all, we want to make the theatres less of a gamble and to reduce needless expenses so as not to render the battle a triumph for the long purse. if the orchestras of the theatres were in the habit of giving a real service to music by producing the shorter pieces of talented composers who are struggling for recognition; if, as might well be the case, they offered a hearing to the young musicians of talent of whom we now have plenty, then no doubt they would deserve encouragement. as the matter stands, they perform too small a service to music to warrant the tax imposed by them on drama. chapter xi in the playhouse laughter of late years there has been a good deal of censure, most of it unwritten, upon the stage management of plays. despite brilliant exhibitions of the art of stage management by people such as pinero and mr granville barker, there have been more bad performances in modern times than of old. the matter is one into which it is needless to go at large upon the present occasion; yet there is one vice that should be mentioned. we often have much loud laughter upon the stage that hardly causes so much as a faint echo on the other side of the footlights. now, when the characters in a piece laugh heartily, or at least loudly, at something supposed to divert them, which does not appeal successfully to the sense of humour of the audience, the effect is disastrous. it is exasperating to hear laughter--even feigned laughter--in which one cannot join. there are people who believe that laughter is infectious, and that if the persons of the play laugh a great deal the audience will catch the infection. this is not universally or even generally true. a few individual players no doubt have an infectious laugh. samary was famous for it, and her laughter in one of molière's farces drew all paris; and another french actress by her prodigious laughter in a farce at the royalty raised the audience to hearty sympathetic outbursts. most players, however, though they may mimic laughter very well, are unable to make the audience laugh sympathetically, unless really amused by what is supposed to entertain the characters of the play. if someone were to invent a laughter-recording machine and use it in the theatre during farces the stage-managers would be amazed to find how often it happens that the noise of laughter made by two or three persons on the stage is greater than that made by the whole audience; whenever this occurs it is certain that a kind of irritation is being bred in the house for which someone has to suffer. this is the sort of thing that happens. a character enters and announces that something very ludicrous has befallen another character, and proceeds to state what it is to the other persons in the scene, the statement being interrupted by his outbursts of laughter, and they in turn roar and hold their sides; yet often enough what is being told does not seem very amusing to us--even, perhaps, appears puerile--so we are vexed, and smile coldly at the piece and players. if the laughter on the stage were more moderate ours would not be the less, and we should feel more benevolent to the play and laugh with greater freedom if and when something funny took place. the whole question of laughter is curious and difficult. there is one fairly constant first-nighter whose loud laughter upon insufficient provocation sometimes irritates the house, to the prejudice of the play; not long ago one of our young actresses laughed so immoderately, as a spectator, at trifles during a performance that some of the audience actually uttered inarticulate sounds, intended to suggest to her that she should be quieter. everybody knows the terrible people who laugh in a theatre at the wrong place, or indulge in the wrong kind of laughter, and are hilarious during pathetic passages, the pathos of which is heightened by touches of cruel humour. some commit this crime from simple stupidity, not perceiving that the humour is tragic, not comic; others because they think that dignity of character is shown if they refuse to be moved by imaginary woes. the person is hateful who cannot shed an honest, if furtive, tear at a finely conceived and executed pathetic incident in a play, and the more if he is proud of his insensibility or lack of imagination; and we love an honest fellow who, like jules janin, wept "_comme un veau_" during _la dame aux camellias_. such insensible creatures resemble "the man that hath no music in himself." sometimes their conduct is so severely resented by audible protest that they are shamed into restraint. it seems quite a long time since we have had a genuine debauch of hearty laughter in the theatre, of "laughter holding both his sides." there has been a great deal of laughter, but it must be remembered that there are several kinds of laughter. so much difference exists between one species of laughter and another that the close observer can guess from the nature of the laughter in the theatre what is the sort of piece which provokes it. no doubt the subject of laughter is one of great difficulty. on the point one may quote a passage from darwin: "many curious discussions have been written on the causes of laughter with grown-up persons. the subject is extremely complex ... laughter seems primarily to be the expression of mere joy or happiness. the laughter of the gods is described by homer as 'the exuberance of their celestial joy after their daily banquet.'" this, perhaps, hardly agrees with the popular idea of the term "homeric laughter." it may be that in the phrases of darwin one sees a key to the difference between the laughter at witty dialogue and the laughter caused by comic situation, the former being an expression of intellectual amusement, not necessarily accompanied by "mere joy or happiness," whilst the latter is to a great extent the outcome of simple, non-intellectual human pleasure. in the case of a witty comedy one hears ripples of laughter rather than waves, and they have no cumulative effect, one may even laugh during a great part of the evening without reaching that agony of laughter which comes from an intensely funny situation--in fact, each laugh at dialogue is to some extent independent of the others. in the case of a funny situation there is a crescendo, and sometimes each outburst of laughter begins at the highest point reached by the outburst before it, till an intense pitch is attained; and, in fact, there is really no complete subsidence at all till the top of the climax is arrived at, but one is chuckling in between every spasm. the term "screamingly funny" has a real meaning; one reaches an almost screaming pitch that leads to something like physical exhaustion, and certainly causes an aching of the sides, and even tears. another quotation from darwin: "during excessive laughter the whole body is often thrown backwards and shakes, or is almost convulsed; the respiration is much disturbed; the head and face become gorged with blood, with the veins distorted; and the orbicular muscles are spasmodically contracted in order to protect the eyes. tears are freely shed." on this one may refer to a phrase by sir joshua reynolds: "it is curious to observe, and it is certainly true, that the extremes of contrary passions are, with very little variation, expressed by the same action." yet another passage from darwin: "with europeans hardly anything excites laughter so easily as mimicry, and it is rather curious to find the same fact with the savages of australia, who constitute one of the most distinct races in the world." probably the enjoyment of the spectator simply as an animal is higher, if in a sense lower, when it comes from situations than when it is due to dialogue. of course there is no sharp line of demarcation. one understands, however, why successful farce is more popular than a successful comedy, even if afterwards the audience suffer a little from aching sides; the ache itself causes a pleasurable memory. some time ago there was a popular comic picture of the awakening of a young man who had been very drunk the night before, and was suffering from a headache and a black eye, and clearly had had some exciting adventures, of which his memory was faint; the simple legend attached was, "what a ripping time i must have had last night!" one can imagine the playgoer after the farce, rare, alas! which honestly may be called side-splitting, saying to himself next morning, "what a ripping time i must have had last night!" and advising all his friends to go and see the play. smoking in the auditorium at last permission has been given, and the statement "you may smoke" can be printed on the programmes of the theatres licensed by the l.c.c.; and it is believed that the lord chamberlain is willing to follow suit. some of our more important managers have already announced that they will not permit smoking in the auditorium of their playhouses, nor is this surprising. some of us would sooner sacrifice our own smoke than get a headache from that of others; and the reason for the rareness of our attendance at music-halls is that we have to pay for every visit by a smarting of the eyes and a feeling in the head somewhat like that caused by the famous sicilian torture. what the ladies suffer goodness and they--the terms are perhaps synonymous--alone know. if and when the suffragettes come into power, we shall have a prodigious counterblast to tobacco that would delight the stuart james of unsainted memory or the now illustrious balzac. for although the militant sex has many members who rejoice in a cigarette, the majority are bitterly adverse to an expensive habit, offensive to those who do not practise it, and exceedingly uncoquettish when indulged in seriously. probably if the reign of my lady nicotine had never begun, and if no other enslaving habit of a like nature had taken a similar place, the theatres would be better off than at present. permission to smoke will not deal with the difficulty; yet probably the habit of smoking keeps a very large number of people away from the theatre. without proposing to win any of the colossal prizes offered to people who guess the quantity of tobacco imported into this country in a particular month, one may venture to assert that there has been a tremendous increase in smoking during the last twenty years; and, indeed, we all know that the man who does not smoke is almost a curiosity nowadays. the rules of offices, the customs of certain trades, the etiquette of some professions, and the like, prevent a great many men from having more than a trifling flirtation with tobacco till after dinner. the greedy smoker may get a pipe after breakfast, a whiff during lunch-time, and a pipe before dinner, which he takes distrustfully, because he has been told not to smoke on an empty stomach, but he looks to the hours after dinner for the debauch that turns his lungs from pink to brown. moreover, there are many men who do not care to smoke till after dinner. what a deprivation to all these to be bustled through a shortened dinner, to be scalded by coffee hastily drunk, and merely get a few puffs before they find themselves in a playhouse, where, by the way, so that insult may be added to injury, they often watch the actors smoking comfortably. a wise manager would not allow smoking _on_ the stage except in very rare cases. the _entr'actes_ amount to little; there is a rush of smokers, but many cannot leave their seats without giving offence to their companions, and some are too timid to fight their way from the centre of a row; and, after all, the _entr'acte_ smoke, which takes place in a crowd so thick that you cannot tell the flavour of your own cigarette from that of other people, is rather irritating than satisfying. of course there remains the period after the theatre, but it is comparatively brief for the man of whom we are speaking, since after the labours of the day and the fatigue of the evening he is tired enough to be rather anxious for sleep. when the british householder is invited to take his womenfolk to the theatre, the thought that he will have to make such a sacrifice affects his judgment, a fact of which he is probably unaware. very often it is the determining cause of refusal, and when he thinks consciously of it, of course he is not so foolish as to put it forward, but pleads this and that and indeed every other cause for keeping away. many times have men said, "i don't care to go to the theatre unless there is something awfully good, because one is not allowed to smoke"; and the question may well be asked, what is offered to the man in place of his cigar or pipe? shakespeare, unless severely adapted, and, in fact, treated as the book for a picturesque musico-dramatic performance, does not appeal very movingly to _l'homme moyen sensuel_, nor do the sentimental puppet stories which form the stock of our theatre fascinate him. a rousing farce will serve, but then the womenfolk do not want that. they are all for sentiment and dainty frocks which they may imitate--unsuccessfully--and for handsome heroes and love-making and other prettinesses which appeal to the daughters who live a kind of second-hand life in them, and to the mothers rendered for a while young by them, whilst paterfamilias looks on, uncomfortable in his seat, irritated very often by draughts which his _décolletée_ dame does not notice--till afterwards--a little curious as to the cost of the whole affair, and after a while, in a state of semi-somnolence, thinking a good deal of the events of the day and the alpine attitude of the bank rate or the slump in consols. the poor dear man would be in a better humour if he were allowed his pipe. according to the french, the plain housewife looks charming to her husband when seen through the fumes of a good soup, and so too the plays of mr ---- (perhaps it is wise to suppress the name) might appear entertaining to the british householder if a cloud of tobacco smoke were to intervene. one of the victims made a suggestion the other day which may be worth consideration. "why not," he said, "add to the theatre a comfortable kind of club-room, where a fellow might see the papers, and perhaps have a game of bridge, or even billiards, when the curtain was up, whilst he could keep his wife in good humour by paying her a call during the intervals?" there is something rather touching in the idea of a little crowd trooping in instead of bustling out when the curtain falls. the innovation might at least have one advantage--it would force the managers to be intelligent enough to make a really audible noise a few minutes before the end of each _entr'acte_, so as to give people the chance of settling down in their places before the curtain rises. of the many incomprehensible things connected with the theatre one of the most puzzling is the fact that quite conscientious playgoers get caught outside the auditorium after the curtain is up. the management is anxious that as many people as possible should go to the bars, yet they render it very difficult to get there; they desire that those who have gone should return to their seats before the curtain rises, lest friction should be caused, but all they do as a rule is to ring some inaudible bell, and cause the attendant to whisper, as if delicately announcing bad news, "curtain just going up, gentlemen," and neither curtain nor whisper gives long enough time to enable people to settle down comfortably. it is to be feared that this sort of club idea would not really work, for reasons some of them quite obvious. the fact remains that paterfamilias, still a person of some importance, is invited to patronize the theatre, and not only asked to pay a good deal of money in order to do so but forced to make a number of physical sacrifices; and at the end is offered, as a rule, the kind of piece not intended to please him, but designed for the taste of his womenfolk. here we see one of the reasons for the popularity of the musical comedy. the householder is not required to trouble himself to understand a plot which hardly exists; he may go to sleep if he pleases, or think over his affairs in between the tit-bits without losing the thread; there are simple tunes, which certainly aid his digestion, and broad elementary humours that appeal to his sense of fun; and, if he is in a sentimental vein, whatever love-making there may be in the piece has no subtlety to exasperate him. despite these things, let us hope that the west end managers will be hostile to the smoking; for, after all, far too much of our drama at present is intended to please the comfortable philistine and his appropriate womenfolk; and the people keenly interested in drama as a branch of art are prepared even to sacrifice a pipe or a cigar in the pursuit of their peculiar and hardly popular pleasure. moreover, it is likely the theatres would exhibit the snobbishness of the fashionable halls and restaurants and taboo the pipe which every wise man prefers to the cigar or cigarette for serious smoking. conduct of the audience when mr joseph holbrooke was conducting the overture to _pierrot and pierrette_ at his majesty's theatre he interrupted the orchestra in order to request some members of the audience to stop talking. these speakers were people in the stalls, and the composer-conductor could hear that their conversation was about shopping--not chopin, which, alas! is sometimes pronounced as if the name rhymed with "popping." no one can feel surprised that a composer finds it impossible to do his work adequately as conductor when there is audible conversation among members of the audience. mr holbrooke drew attention to what happens very often in our playhouses: people come apparently entertaining the idea that if they have paid for their seats they owe no duty towards their neighbours or the author, composer or players. this idea, unfortunately, is not confined to those who have paid for their seats, since some of the dramatic critics, and also several of the ordinary "deadheads," set a bad example. the most noisome offenders are those who come late on purpose, because they are anxious to draw public attention to their existence. they, of course, are snobs of the worst water, whatever their social status or the cost of their clothes, furs and jewellery; you see them bustling in a quarter of an hour after the curtain has risen, shoving their way along past people who rise reluctantly, and hear them chattering whilst they take off cloaks and wraps before settling down in their seats. very little less detestable are those who, arriving late unwillingly, behave otherwise in the same fashion. one of these brawlers defended herself by alleging that there ought to be a gangway down the middle of the stalls, and that her conduct was a protest. of course there ought to be a gangway, and some day the county council will insist upon the formation of one in every theatre, or else force the manager to put the rows of stalls so far apart that people can pass along them in comfort. we know that on the whole managers do not care much about the comfort of their patrons; they seem to act on the supposition that plays are of only two classes, those so attractive that you cannot keep the public away and those so unattractive that you cannot get it to come. the london _théâtre de luxe_ is still a dream of the future, though undoubtedly some playhouses are vastly more comfortable than others. the authorities are lax in this matter, as in the matter of exits; the crush in getting out of most of the playhouses is abominable. no doubt there are extra exits which might be used in case of peril; people ought to be compelled to use them every night, so that a habit would be established on the part of audiences and also of the attendants. the patience with which the audience endures the misconduct of some of its members is surprising. we hear inarticulate noises of disapproval when people gossip in the stalls and occasionally somebody goes so far as to whisper "don't talk"; the result is that the chatterers chatter rather more quietly for a little while, and soon are as noisy as before. frequently some members laugh scornfully at pathetic passages moving the heart of most of the house, and this laughter is often due to a snobbish desire to show superiority to those who weep. we have heard something lately of a phrase about "collective psychology and the psychology of crowds." the phenomenon referred to very rarely has much effect in the london playhouses at the first night: on these occasions there are too many discordant elements. most of the critics form non-conductors to the passage of what has been regarded as analogous to an electrical current, and their non-conductivity is very little greater than that of many of the people who receive complimentary tickets or have the honour of being on the first-night list. perhaps the general public is unaware that the more fashionable theatres have a list of people to whom is accorded a preferential allotment of seats. sometimes there is a momentary thrill; one feels distinctly that the audience is in unison, and that the pitch of feeling of the individual is heightened by the feelings of the crowd. these moments are generally caused by pieces of acting or by what is rarely contrived, and can only happen once in the history of a piece, a successful, effective surprise. as an instance, there was a unanimous gasp of surprise and pleasure at the brilliant _coup de théâtre_ with which john oliver hobbes ended a difficult scene in _the ambassador_, and then came a prodigious outburst of applause. what a loss to our stage the premature death of that admirable novelist, who showed an amazing gift for the technique of the theatre. one reads not unfrequently accounts of an exhibition of this "collective psychology" in the playhouse, even in the london theatres. some of such accounts are untrustworthy, and due to mere hysterical writing by those who profess to record them. no doubt the curious shyness of the english plays its part: a man will laugh, or clap his hands, or hiss, or "boo" when others are so doing, who from mere _mauvaise honte_--a convenient untranslatable term--would make no noise if alone. perhaps one might safely say that the smaller the crowd the smaller relatively as well as absolutely the noise due to the exhibition of the emotion of its component parts. this, however, has little to do with the phenomenon in question, which very rarely operates in london, because the upper classes think it ungenteel to express emotion in public. people read stories of scenes of "tremendous enthusiasm" on a first night, of miss or mrs a or mr b receiving a dozen calls: as a rule they are absurdly exaggerated--they mean that the bulk of the pit and gallery have applauded heartily and persistently, and so, too, a small proportion of people in the upper boxes, dress circle, and stalls, the ratio steadily decreasing; that the employees of "the front of the house" energetically did their duty; in many cases that the unrecognized claque has earned its fee; that the curtain has been raised and lowered with frantic energy, and that a large number of people, after some preliminary clapping, regarded the scene with curiosity and amusement, their pulses beating at quite a normal pace. things may be different in other lands. perhaps our ancestors were less "genteel," certainly there were fewer "non-conductors" in the houses; but still it is doubtful whether belief should be given to some of the old stories about tremendous exhibitions of emotion in the playhouse. one has to discount many of the triumphs of great singers because there is an element of desire for an "encore" in them. moreover, music is beside the question, because its appeal is of a different character from that of drama. these remarks may seem to have a grudging tone, to sound as if one desired to belittle the triumphs of the stage: in reality their object is simply to state what a careful observer regards as facts bearing upon an interesting, important question. broadly speaking, it is doubtful whether in our theatres the phenomenon discussed under the name of "the psychology of crowds" is manifested to a substantial effect, except on very rare occasions, partly, no doubt, because a london audience is intensely heterogeneous--a wave of emotion in a west end playhouse has to surmount a large number of obstacles, losing force at each, or, to change the figure, a current of emotion has to pass through a great many bad conductors. in respect only of laughter does the crowd exercise its power at all frequently, and then, as a rule, the subject-matter is not of the finest quality. laughter certainly is infectious, curiously infectious, but it is more catching when caused by farce than by comedy. few of us could deny that, as a member of the crowd, he has not sometimes laughed against his will and judgment at matters possessing a humble standard of humour. we are not grateful afterwards to the author or the low comedians--we suffer from an unpleasant loss of self-respect when we have been coerced by the crowd into laughing at mere buffooneries. concerning the pit sometimes the ticket sent for a first night suggests a belief by the manager in the theory that the further one is from the stage the better one can see and hear--a theory which is accepted as accurate by none save the managers themselves. possibly the seats in question are allotted in order to keep us at an agreeable distance from the orchestra, which in many theatres is altogether undesirable, or at least plays much music of an exasperating character. when such tickets come, and the seat is in the last row of the stalls, it is worth while to go to the theatre unpunctually before the appointed time. by the way, it is noticeable that theatres are divisible into two classes--those at which the curtain is raised with a military severity at the very moment when the clock strikes, and others where a quarter of an hour's grace is given--to the players. in the case of french companies, old hands never hesitate about playing "another hundred up" before starting for the playhouse. a wise manager would be guided a little by the weather and always allow a few minutes' margin when it is foggy or rainy, for the audiences are necessarily delayed by such weather. by getting to one's seat early, even before the time when the band is indulging in that part of its performance which is said to have been peculiarly agreeable to the shah of persia who visited london in the seventies, we enjoy certain humours. incidentally, it may be asked whether the ordinary playgoer exactly appreciates the position of the last rows of the stalls. probably he believes that there is a gulf fixed between the stalls and the pit, and does not know that there is merely a barrier. now a barrier can be removed easily--a gulf cannot. when paying his half-guinea the simple visitor imagines that the difference between the price of his seat and that of a place in the pit is to a great extent based upon an advantage of nearness--although it appears that some managers do not think that propinquity involves a gain. as a matter of fact, a considerable portion of the floor of the house is occupied by stalls or pit, according to the nature of the business done in the theatre. if a piece is not attracting fashionable folk the barrier is moved towards the footlights, the chairs are changed to benches, and the place which at the _première_ some deadhead proudly occupied as a stall takes a "back seat," and sinks to the indignity of becoming pit; and, of course, the converse sometimes happens. it is amusing to hear the people on the other side discussing the entrance of the stall first-nighters, many of whom are identified. one hears comments upon the gowns, and sometimes severe remarks about the alleged misdeeds of the professional critics, as well as unflattering observations concerning the personal appearance of some of us. we might a tale unfold that would freeze a good many young bloods, but for a nice question of confidence. the inhabitants of the pit really deserve a study. it may be said that they are sometimes more interesting than the play itself. there is a tradition that wisdom lies in the pit as truth at the bottom of a well. many articles have been written pointing out that the judgment of the pit is sounder than the opinion of other parts of the house, that the pitites are the real, serious, reflective, critical playgoers whose views are worth more than those of the playgoers either in the gallery or the most costly seats. for a long time some of us believed in this tradition, probably, in fact, until circumstances caused us to move forward and study plays from the other side of the ambulatory barrier. one thing is certain--the pit plays a very great part in determining on a first night the apparent failure or success of a play, for on most occasions comparatively little noise is made by way of applause or condemnation save in the pit and gallery. the stalls are remarkably frigid, though, on the other hand, they never, or hardly ever, show any active signs of disapproval. somewhat false impressions are produced upon critics nearer to the footlights than the back seats. one of them the other day stated "the fall of the curtain was greeted with hearty and long-sustained applause from all parts of the house." yet three of us noted--and compared notes--that after a little clapping, followed by one elevation of the curtain, the stalls did not contribute at all to the cheers. that evening there was a peculiarity in the pit's applause. it was "patchy." here and there little groups were very noisy, and at the wings were some people from the "front of the house," quite enthusiastic about a performance of which they could have seen very little if they had attended to their duties, whilst there were noiseless areas of considerable size. there is no need to suggest that the pit lacks judgment merely because it is composed very largely of those from whose mouths, according to the psalmist, cometh forth wisdom; not, indeed, that in our west end houses there are present those very youthful playgoers who cause a disturbance by their audible refusal of the attendant's proposal of "ginger-beer, lemonade, bottled ale, or ... stout," being tired perhaps of the last-named beverage owing to the quantities they have taken--vicariously. nevertheless, the pit on many first nights is wonderfully young; indeed, we calculated the other night that the average age of its temporary inhabitants was much less than half that of the distinguished company representing the play, and considerably less than that of the people whose late arrival caused murmurs and even words of disapproval. it is natural for youth to be more enthusiastic than middle age, so one may easily explain the fact that the pit is more exuberant in demonstration than the stalls without the theory of the electrical effect of contact on crowds, a theory which every journalist at some stage of his career believes himself to be the first to have discovered. not only are they very youthful in the pit, but they have grace as well as youth. the other night in the front row there were only three members of the sex which does not know how to get out of a shop without making a purchase, and in the back rows, although the percentage of "angels" was not so high, it was quite noteworthy. probably in all parts of the house, except at one or two theatres, there is a preponderance of women in the audience, and this may have some subtle connexion with the converse proportion of male and female characters in the cast; it may be observed that there is some change in the proportion of the sexes at theatres where there is no actor whose photographs sell prodigiously. a sort of alteration seems quietly taking place in the costume of the pit, and not a few of the young ladies have come very close to a solution of a problem baffling to the englishwomen belonging to what one may fairly regard as of somewhat higher stratum--the problem of inventing and wearing a demi-toilette. it should be added that in some theatres the critics have good seats allotted to them. indeed as a rule the courtesy shown to us is in something like direct ratio to the importance of the management. speaking for a moment seriously, one may say that whilst the ordinary first-night pit is full of enthusiasts, it would be rash to attach very great value to its manifestations of opinion concerning the value of really ambitious plays, though in respect of most pieces, and performances too, its judgment may be regarded as satisfactory, since it fairly represents those aimed at by authors and players. the higher class of comedy and the severely intellectual drama demand a more mature judgment. why do we go to the theatre? to ask why people go to the theatre seems silly; for the answer appears to be quite obvious; yet as soon as one answer is offered half-a-dozen others suggest themselves. let us put down a few roughly: for entertainment, for amusement, for distraction, for instruction, to see the play or players in vogue, to be seen, to have something to talk about. also there are cross-divisions and combinations of these; perhaps none of them is quite exclusive. another question may be asked: why do people stay away though able to go? how is it that some find insufficient pleasure in them?--for "pleasure" may be used as a term embracing the first four answers. a cook, a frenchwoman, once in the service of a dramatic critic, did not visit the theatre, and stated as her reason for not caring to do so that she took no interest in the affairs of other people; and secondly, that if she went and got moved by the troubles of the _dramatis personae_ the thought suddenly occurred to her that they were not real persons and real troubles, and therefore she had wasted her sympathy, wherefore she was vexed, being an economical creature, so far as sympathy, not butter, is concerned. on the other hand, she admitted the payment of a number of visits to pézon's circus, where they had a lion with a bad reputation, into whose jaw at every performance a _décolletée_ lady put her painted head. for the _cordon-bleu_ hoped that the lion would exhibit disapproval of the paint and powder by chumping off the offending head, and that would have been frightfully thrilling. also she had a grievance because our executions are not public. she would like to see the murderers _gigoter un peu_; to her that would be a more sublime spectacle than the most prodigious effects at his majesty's. the papers lately contained accounts of the production at a music-hall of bioscope pictures of a horrible catastrophe in which many lives were lost, and stated that they were received with applause from the spectators, who derived much pleasure from looking at them. the french wielder of the _bouquet-garni_, in default of more bloodthirsty entertainment, would be delighted by them. it has often been remarked that an element of danger in a public performance is an element of attraction, and that the attraction is in proportion to the danger. these remarks are not entirely disconnected: they are relevant in considering the question why people go to the theatre. for, with all respect to the establishments of the highest class, one must recognize the fact that there is a family relation between the noblest theatre and the humblest side-show at a country fair or east end museum. to be juster, the family relation is not between the things seen, but between the feelings which prompt people to pay money to see them. it is often a mere toss-up whether x, y or z goes to a theatre or a music-hall, or a collection of "side shows" or a boxing-match; and the only solid wall of demarcation in pleasuredom lies between going to see something which pretends to be something else, and going to see something which admits itself to be its painful self. on the one hand, we have smith posing as the prince of denmark; on the other the fat woman, whose unpleasant mass of unhealthy flesh is real--the lady giant hovers between reality and fiction. on the one side art, on the other artless entertainment; but, after all, it is difficult to say that this wall is very solid, since sometimes the artless department is abominably artful, and sometimes, as in the famous story of the mimic with a live pig in a poke, the real is an impostor. the interest in the matter lies mainly with the audience, with the human beings greedy for pleasure and entertainment, with the traveller who, after a happy evening at the comédie française, endeavours to get taken to the abattoirs of paris, or risks his life in a visit to the outer boulevards in order to visit some pestilential café de la mort where he will see crude horrors contrived by looking-glasses, drink bad beer out of _papier-maché_ skulls, and receive, in change for his money, base or demonetised coin from waiters dressed as undertakers. and, again, our traveller, after getting a headache at the louvre and vainly trying to find the mediaeval improprieties at the maison cluny, will refresh himself by a visit to the morgue, to say nothing of le musée grévin. why, then, do we go to the theatre? why does the theatre exist? why do the enthusiasts rage and profess that it ought to be endowed? well, upon reflection, one sees that there are two bodies of playgoers, both, no doubt, in search of pleasure: and, speaking very broadly, the one is the little group whose curiosity concerning life is almost entirely intellectual, and the other is the vast body of sensation-hunters, to whom the latest showy play, the newest musical comedy, the divorce case of the moment, the freak in vogue, are the means of real excitement--an excitement which they want to obtain with the minimum expenditure of time, trouble or thought. a remarkable thing to the observer is the hostility of the sensation-monger to intellectual amusement. if a play has a gloomy ending it is promptly denounced as painful by the people who welcome an entertainment consisting of biograph pictures representing some awful catastrophe, and by persons who revel in a good series of animated photographs of somebody being guillotined, or tortured in a russian gaol, and do not care to waste their tears over the sorrows of people in a play, though perhaps a really roaring farce would entertain them, if it included a good deal of knockabout business. the uncivilized people who consider that practical joking is permissible are as a rule bitterly hostile to serious drama. it is hard to discover any clear theory in relation to these facts. attempts to establish a proposition are met by the fact that the sensation-monger who delights in the horrors of real life, who gets joy from a thrillingly dangerous performance at a music-hall, when he goes to the theatre sometimes seems pleased by a piece almost in a direct ratio to its unreality. a finely observed comedy, such as _the silver box_ of mr galsworthy, irritates the sensation-monger; it is so absurdly true that he does not think it clever of the author to have written it. _tom jones_ contains useful matter for thought on the subject. something prodigious out of the lumber-room of the theatres impresses him far more. in england the explanation of this may be a strangely twisted feeling of utilitarianism, which causes us to object to thinking without being paid for thinking; wherefore it seems an act almost of impudence to ask us to pay money to see a play which cannot be understood or appreciated without serious thought. chapter xii miscellaneous signor borsa on the english theatres those mere casual playgoers who may think that the articles on drama in _the westminster gazette_ have been needlessly pessimistic ought to read "the english stage of to-day," by mario borsa, translated by mr selwyn brinton, and published by mr john lane; a lively, interesting book, in which are expressed vigourously the ideas of a very acute, intelligent writer upon our modern theatre. "hence it is no wonder that all that is artificial, absurd, commonplace, spectacular, and puerile is rampant upon the english stage; that theatrical wares are standardized, like all other articles of trade...." "still, in spite of all this booming and histriomania, one of the greatest intellectual privations from which the foreigner suffers in london is, i repeat, the lack of good comedy and good prose drama." such sentences are specimens of his views about the current drama of london, and he endorses the sad phrase of auguste filon, "_le drame anglais, à peine né, se meurt_." in some respects the book is surprising. the author exhibits an intimacy of knowledge that appears almost impossible in one who, for a long time after his arrival in london, was "ignorant of the very language of the country." he has learnt our tongue well enough to give us some literary criticisms of value, notably upon the irish theatre and the poetry of mr w.b. yeats, and he has made himself acquainted in a remarkable way with the plays of the last fifteen years or so, with the theatrical clubs and the various movements of revolt against our puppet theatre. there are slips, no doubt, such as the suggestion that the independent theatre introduced ibsen to london, it being the fact that several of his plays had been presented before this society was born. signor borsa has something to say on most of the topics of the times. for instance, he deals with the censor! "and here we touch the root of the evil--the censor! it is the censor who is the real enemy--the ruthless, insatiable cerberus." he writes upon the question of speeches in the theatres. "in italy a new play is sometimes so heartily hissed after one or two acts that the manager is forced to cut short the performance and proceed forthwith to the farce. this never happens in england, partly because every 'first night' is attended by a _claque_, judiciously posted and naturally well disposed. not that these 'first-nighters' are paid to applaud, as in paris or vienna. neither are they labelled as _claqueurs_. they are simply enthusiasts, and their name is legion.... it is they who salute the actor-manager after the curtain has fallen with persistent demands of 'speech! speech!' and it is to the request of these good and faithful friends that he accedes at last, in a voice broken by emotion, due to their spontaneous and generous reception." of late some people have been suggesting gleefully that the vogue of "g.b.s." is on the wane. his popularity has been the cause of great annoyance to the mass of the public and those critics who stand up for a theatre of "old scenic tricks which were long familiar to me--sensational intrigues, impossible situations, men and women who could have been neither english nor french nor italian." they will be glad to learn that signor borsa says: "shaw's dramatic work is pure journalism, destined to enjoy a certain vogue, and then to be swallowed up in the deep pit of oblivion. nor should i be surprised if this vogue of his were already on the decline.... shaw, with all his wit and all his go, already shows signs of becoming terribly monotonous." according to him, in "shaw there were the makings of a writer of talent." let us add that no evidence exists to show the decline of the author's popularity; it may also be said that much of "g.b.s." is quite incomprehensible to a foreigner. what signor borsa calls the "restaurateurs-proprietors," and also the actor-managers--with a few exceptions--may hold aloof, but mr shaw has brought to the theatres a new public, and taken a good many of the old as well. apparently signor borsa's hostility to "g.b.s." is founded on the fact that the dramatist is a revolutionary and refuses to accept the theatrical formulae which satisfy the italian. one must, however, point out that whilst signor borsa's general conclusions concerning the most remarkable person of the english theatre are unsound, his remarks in detail are acute and luminous, and some of them well deserve the consideration of the victim. the curiosity of the book is the treatment of the acting. according to signor borsa, "the acting has little to boast of. a century, or even half-a-century, ago the case was different. but the glories of kean, macready, kemble, and siddons now belong to history and but yesterday sir henry irving stood alone--the unique representative in england of the great tragic art.... in conveying irony, the english actor is in his element; in comic parts, he is simply grotesque. the buffoon may occasionally be found upon the english stage--the brilliant comedian never. in tragic parts he easily assumes an exaggerated gravity and solemnity; in sentimental _rôles_ he is frankly ridiculous." _frankly_ is a mistranslation, or else the adjective is ridiculous, if not "frankly" ridiculous. signor borsa falls into a very common error. he thinks that because english actors do not gesticulate a great deal they act badly. this might be true if they represented on the stage a gesticulative race. the author points out carefully that we are not a gesticulative race, and fails to see that it would be bad acting for the player to represent an englishman as being naturally gesticulative. the english jew is more gesticulative than the ordinary englishman; the anglo-jewish players--and there are many--curb themselves when they are playing british characters, and of course they act artistically in so doing. the function of the actor is to impress the audience before him, nine-tenths of which consist of people who would regard him as ridiculous and unnatural if, when acting an ordinary english part, he were to gesticulate very much. we have seen italian players of ability representing english characters, and, putting aside duse, the obvious and correct criticism was that they were very funny and quite incorrect in their exuberance of gesture. irving is the only actor whom he discusses; ellen terry the one english actress. this, of course, is absurd. it indicates, however, very usefully the attitude of the foreign critic towards our stage. also, perhaps, it is a little chastening to our players. the foreigner is able to understand and appreciate to some extent the best of our plays; the acting says nothing to him, or at least nothing flattering. our comedians are "buffoons," our lovers are "frankly ridiculous," and the italian actors are superior in "temperament"--whatever that may mean. ours, it appears, are better than the italians in some humble ways: "they dress their parts better and wear their clothes better," and they even know their parts--a vulgar quality which apparently is rare on the italian stage--also they are more cultured, and "possess to a greater degree the dramatic literary sense." one may accept, sadly, signor borsa's view, which is shared by most continental and many british critics, that the ordinary english drama is utterly unworthy of the english people; but we certainly have abundance of competent players, and a fair number of dramatists anxious and able to give the public far better drama than they get, as soon as managers are willing to produce it; the great trouble is that the managers are afraid of the public, and although they might wisely be more venturesome, they have, in the present mass of playgoers, a terrible public to cater for. the facts and figures offered by signor borsa show too eloquently that the managers attempt to deal with the difficulty by a very short-sighted policy. still, the position is less desperate than the italian critic supposes, and much of what has happened since auguste filon wrote the line already quoted shows that he was too hasty in his judgment. "g.b.s." and the amateurs there is a story--its untruth is indisputable--to the effect that on a death of a man of unconventional character his mournful family, after much trouble, hit upon the happy thought of satisfying their desire to leave an amiable and incontestable record concerning him by having inscribed upon his tombstone the following epitaph:--"he never acted in private theatricals." a touch of acrimony seems discernible in certain utterances of mr george bernard shaw about amateur theatricals which makes one doubt whether such a statement in his case would contain even the trifling percentage of truth that is customary in epitaphs. indeed, he causes an impression that he has really done something worse than play in amateur theatricals, and even, although an amateur, has appeared in a professional performance. there has been a rather needless fury in his remarks; it is a case doubtless of more sound than sentiment. this, however, is pretty george's way; where some would use a whip he "fillips" people with "a three-man beetle." they say that all the amateur thespians' clubs in the kingdom have passed fierce resolutions about him, and a monster petition is being prepared praying for his outlawry or excommunication. the cause was a letter concerning the question whether dramatists ought to reduce their fees for performance by amateur clubs of copyright works, and the trump card of the opponents was the fact that many of the entertainments are given for the benefit of charities. mr zangwill it was who observed that "charity uncovers a multitude of shins"; perhaps one may add, clumsily, that charity suffereth long and applauds. certainly, amateur performances rarely contain anything intentionally so humorous as the idea of suggesting to "g.b.s." that he should reduce his fees by way of an indirect contribution to the fund for the restoration of some village church or the like. apparently the common answer to the author of _mrs warren's profession_ is a sort of paraphrase of the line "nobody axt you, sir, she said." it would be interesting to know how many performances, if any, have been given by the great unpaid of pieces by the now successful theatrical iconoclast. who knows whether his wrath has not a touch of the _spretae injuria formae_? perhaps he is longing to have _caesar and cleopatra_ represented by some amiable association that has hitherto confined itself to the comedies of bulwer lytton and farces by maddison morton. it may be the dream of his life to see what people untrammelled by considerations of filthy lucre, except so far as the benefit of the charity is concerned, can make of _the philanderers_. judging by the public press and the circulars, mr shaw is not inaccurate in his view that the army of amateurs does comparatively little service for drama. its taste seems to be for showy, artificial plays, and its tendency to seek out works that do not act themselves because of their truth of characterisation but afford unlimited scope for originality on the part of performers--generally half-baked performers. this does not apply to all amateur societies; at least we know that there are a number of associations not for the purposes of gain, such as the elizabethan stage society, now, alas! dead, which showed a very stern enthusiasm for the higher forms of art. they appear to be the exception. there was a time when it was difficult to find a man in the street who had not acted in _ici on parle français_ or played in _money_ or appeared in _our boys_, and nowadays it seems that though there has been some progress, the austere drama is still unpopular, and that when funds are sufficient artificial costume plays are in vogue. mr shaw apparently believes that vanity is the fundamental motive of amateur performances. it may be that this is not wholly true, and that the real impulse is the elementary instinct for dressing-up. savages, we know, have a craving for strange costumes which enable them to disguise and even disfigure their persons. children delight in dressing up. possibly one of the great joys of the amateur lies in the fact that he has an opportunity of wearing clothes pertinent to somebody else, and, if he be a male, is curious to see how he looks and is looked upon with the whiskers of the mid-victorian beau or the imperial of the third empire, and so on. the amiable philosopher would find a pleasanter explanation, would suggest that the desire to "dress up" is based upon a modest doubt concerning the charms of one's own individuality--how agreeable to believe this! at the bottom of the matter lies this ugly contention on the part of the cynic--he alleges that the amateur wants to act not for the benefit of the charity, the name of which is invoked hypocritically, but for the gratification of his vanity, and the authors are unable to see why the clubs should gratify the conceit of their members at the expense of those who write the plays. after all, the matter is one of domestic economy, and the wisest thing seems to be to leave people to make their own bargains; and if the result is that the best plays are the dearest and the least performed, the result may be somewhat advantageous. it is always uncertain whether the individual spectator who has witnessed an amateur performance of a piece will be anxious to see how it really acts or determine never to suffer from it again. perhaps it is rather cheap to scoff at the amateur performances, some of which, no doubt, are excellent. moreover, it cannot be doubted that in a good many cases the amateur stage provides recruits for _the_ profession, and some of our most popular players--like mr shrubb and other famous runners--have begun their careers by merely striving for "the fun of the thing." probably many who now stroll the strand or haunt "poverty corner" fruitlessly, were induced to embark upon their vain career by the polite plaudits of amiable friends whose judgments were worthless even when honest. perhaps some of them, or of their friends, begin to believe that mr zangwill was not quite untruthful in his phrase that "players are only men and women--spoilt," which, of course, he did not intend to be of universal application. still, it can hardly be denied that "g.b.s." was needlessly severe. the amateur actors do very little harm and cause a great deal of innocent amusement which outweighs the harm. it may be that, except in dealing with serious plays, there is an unfair proportion of amusement on the farther side of the footlights, but it must be recollected that the performers have many trials and annoyances, and often make severe sacrifices--of friendships. if the authors of established reputation seem too greedy the clubs have an easy remedy. at the present moment the cry of the unacted is unusually bitter and loud. why, then, should not these associations, able as some are to give performances that are at least adequate if not exactly brilliant, save as regards a few individual players, assist the drama by giving a chance to the unacted of seeing their works on the stage? in many cases plays now rejected by managers because they have an instinctive feeling that there is some flaw which defies precise indication might, after such a production, be corrected and rendered acceptable and valuable. cant about shakespeare in a criticism upon the new lyceum revival of _hamlet_ there was a sentence which impressed me greatly. it appeared in a morning paper of prodigious circulation, and was in these words: "mr matheson lang's hamlet ... is what may be called a popular one, and likely to be extremely popular. and this is well, for 'tis better to see shakespeare in any form than not to see him at all, so that these performances deserve every support, being in some ways not unlike the productions ... which serve to keep alive the classics and old traditions of art." this criticism, or rather statement, is popular--"extremely popular." people seem to think that there is virtue in producing shakespeare and in acting shakespeare and in reading shakespeare. it would be pleasant to feel confident that there is virtue in writing about him--i have written so much--but probably nobody takes this extreme view. now, some have a different opinion. a strenuous dramatist, namesake of a contemporary of the national dramatist, ventures to call the "swan of avon" a "blackleg" instead of a black swan, and ascribes his popularity with managers to the fact that his name no longer spells bankruptcy, and that no royalties have to be paid on performances of his plays, in consequence of which they are often, or sometimes, produced where, otherwise, modern works would be presented. it is not necessary to go so far as this to reach a sane view on the subject--a view which probably lies between the extremes. certainly we may well wonder whether and why it is a good thing to produce shakespeare plays unless the production is of fine quality. everybody is acquainted with lamb's essay, with what one may call "elia's" paradox, on shakespeare, the vigorous truth of which is partly counterbalanced by the fact that few play readers have anything like his powers of imagination, and that he probably underrated the knowledge of shakespeare possessed by playgoers, or at least by west end first-nighters. indeed, one may go further and say that during any run of a shakespearean play it will be visited by some thousands of people well acquainted with it and some hundreds who immediately detect any alteration of the text. the enjoyment of these expert or semi-expert playgoers of a performance of a shakespeare play, when compared with their pleasure in reading it, is probably much higher than lamb imagined. it is, however, hardly for them that these dramas are revived, and clearly for quite a different audience that the lyceum production is given. is it a really good thing that _hamlet_ should be offered to those who have little or no acquaintance with the tragedy? a study of the audience on the first night of _hamlet_ at the lyceum gave the idea that the majority were far from appreciating the work, and did not, at any rate, get a greater or different pleasure from it than they would have had if instead of the shakespearean dialogue they had been offered the blank verse of any ordinary respectable writer. why should it be otherwise? why should the hundreds of people in the sixpenny gallery understand the conduct of hamlet, which has puzzled the most learned and acute critics of all countries for centuries? a person hearing the play on the stage, and otherwise unacquainted with it, must be bewildered. how is he to understand why hamlet is so rude to ophelia, yet later on declares that he loved her prodigiously? what is he to think of a hamlet who takes so much trouble to find out whether his uncle is guilty, and then tamely submits to be sent out of the country by him, leaving his father unavenged? what opinion is he to form of the perfectly idiotic, complex conspiracy between the king and laertes to get rid of hamlet? why should _hamlet_ appeal to him, except as a melodrama with a flabby hero, a feeble heroine, a very small amount of comic relief, and far too much dialogue, much of which is almost unintelligible? what can he make of the great soliloquies, of the purple patches, written in involved sentences, embellished by curious archaic terms of speech, elaborate figures, and puzzling inversions, which at the best can only give him a vague idea of what is supposed to be said? if you were to send a highly educated man, ignorant of the play--perhaps an apparent contradiction--he would at first be bored or irritated. no doubt his ear might catch and his mind retain some profound phrases, and he would promptly recognize the grandeur of the verse in many passages, so that his curiosity would be awakened, and cause him either to read the play or see it time after time. what about the man in the street, the railway guard, the 'bus conductor, the "shover," the humbler clerks, and their womenfolk, who are patrons of the gallery; will they get beyond one visit? can they recognize profound thoughts at first hearing, or at all? are they able to distinguish beautiful blank verse from bombast? are the soliloquies of hamlet likely to lure them to the severe intellectual task of reading the play scrupulously? of course these questions do not concern members of the "gallery first-nighters'" club. they may or may not patronize the sixpenny gallery or shilling pit of the lyceum. no doubt the members of the club are fully competent to appreciate the play, but they certainly formed the minority last saturday week, and will be rare during the later performances. it was not they who laughed in the wrong places, or laughed with the wrong laughter, or coughed, during the uneventful scenes. it will be said that thousands have gone and will go to this revival and enjoy it, and, therefore, these views must be wrong. these remarks are not in disparagement at all of this particular revival. it is, however, certain that the pleasure of the majority of those who visit this revival would be none the less if the work had been written by a second-rate playwright; indeed, mr cecil raleigh who, compared with shakespeare, may, perhaps, be called second-rate, could write them a new _hamlet_ on the old plot which would give them far greater pleasure than they get at present. critics ought to speak with perfect sincerity about the drama; great harm is done by people who, with excellent motives, write insincerely. the average schoolboy is prevented from enjoying the classics by being bored with them when he is too young to understand them. the average man never reads the bible for pleasure, because he has been brought up to regard it as a kind of religious medicine; and it is unlikely that the great half-educated will be brought to a taste for shakespeare by a stage performance of his works. this is no plea against the performance of his plays, but against writing carelessly and conventionally about them. nobody will deny lamb's love of the dramatist. he would say that if shakespeare is to be played to the masses there should be some preliminary training of them. at least they might be broken in gently. to present _hamlet_ as successor to the pantomime and not long after some of the simple melodramas acted at this theatre seems rather irrational. a better service is done to the public and to drama by presenting modern english plays, written sincerely and on a reasonably high standard of truth, than by reviving works that can only appeal to most of the half-educated despite, and not because of, their finer qualities. shakespeare, indeed, might ask the gallery in the phrase of benedick, "for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?" the important matter is to get rid of humbug, to try to see things truly. drama is worthy of serious consideration as a great branch of art and a great force, but will never fulfil its mission if it is to lie in a mortmain to dead dramatists, and if it is to be regarded as more meritorious to try to make money by producing the non-copyright dramas of the past than by presenting the works of living men who need a royalty. this is not a plea against revivals of the english classics, the production of which under certain circumstances may be praiseworthy and valuable, but against such propositions as "'tis better to see shakespeare in any form than not at all," which cause people to form false judgments and push them to enterprises of little value. yvette guilbert on dramatists lately yvette guilbert has been making some strange remarks concerning drama and dramatists. her words demand attention since they come from the lips of a woman of genius. in our time the domain between the theatre and the concert-room has produced no artist of her rank. one recollects her different styles. first, in the amazing delivery of almost frankly indecent songs--a delivery so extraordinarily fine as to convert them for the moment into works of art--the image of beautiful iridescent scum on foul water suggests itself. secondly, in the presentation by short song and very sober gesture and facial expression of grim tragedies, a presentation more vivid and poignant than the ordinary theatre can give, despite its numerous aids to art. then came the charming utterance of quaint old songs--who can forget béranger's "la grandmère" as it came from her? paris, insatiable in craving for novelty, is said to have grown tired of her, but her place as the greatest of singers in the variety theatres cannot be gainsaid. it is alleged that she intends to go upon the stage, and imaginable that her search for suitable plays has caused her outburst against playwrights. whether she will be successful as actress or not is a question of interest concerning which _a priori_ reasoning is futile. certainly she must be a difficult person for whom to write a play. apparently she has gone to some fashionable dramatist and given him a commission to write a drama as a vehicle for the exhibition of her histrionic gifts, and is dissatisfied by the result. one is justified in making the guess by her theories concerning the future of drama when the "arenas" are again opened, and "histrionic" art is rejuvenated. "let the actors enter," she says, "with their ideas boiling over, their nerves strung to the highest pitch, and let the public suggest to each the action or character to be mimicked. let a dozen different ideals be impersonated, then real, true and original talent will be revealed, new ideas will be discovered which will no longer be guided by the author and stage manager and theatrical director, but which will be free, untrammelled, and no longer ready-made emotions." this sounds rather daring, and the lady, before kicking the dramatists out of the theatre, might consider carefully what is to become of the players who have not sufficient brains in their skulls for there to be any "boiling over." some actors, no doubt, are intellectual men, but not a few of the best possess no ideas of their own. this quotation and others that follow come from a translation which appeared in _the daily telegraph_ of a letter written by yvette guilbert to _the figaro_. it is noteworthy that this idea of dispensing with dramatists is not new. efforts were made in the days of _le chat noir_ to evolve a new kind of drama, in which the playwright had little concern. moreover, mr gordon craig, one of the forces of the future--and of the present--has revolutionary ideas on the subject. let us now see what the great _diseuse_ thinks of dramas and dramatists. here is a strong sentence by her: "the author ignores, or will not admit, that, despite all his efforts, he never produces anything but a half-dead child. the talented actor animates, nurses, consolidates, fortifies and clothes it, suggests the proper gestures and attitudes, infuses his own health and strength into this weakling, gives it blood and, so to speak, makes it live. the playwright contributes the soul, it is true; but, the soul being intangible, it is only a pitiable gift so far as the dramatic art is concerned." to anticipate an obvious objection she says, "of course i know there were a shakespeare, a racine, a molière, and some others.... what a pity they had no descendants!" it is permissible to wonder whether the lady has read much drama. possibly she would ask why she should spend time in reading mere "souls," and admit that her acquaintance with plays is almost confined to works witnessed by her; and, indeed, seeing that, according to her, "the _rôle_ of the comedian is superior to that of the author," she may believe that a play only exists when it is acted, and be quite unaware that an imaginative, intelligent person can get a high degree of pleasure from reading a play. the dramatist may well rest content with the suggestion that his work is the soul, the immortal, noble part of drama, and that the players form only the gross, corporeal element. there may be some truth in guilbert's remarks: "the dramatic is the most inferior of all arts. the play passes through too many channels, and comes before the public as a cramped, crushed and faded form. the writer ... sees his play in one light, the theatrical manager receives it and sees it in another, the stage-manager adds his own way of understanding it, the actor takes it up according to his own temperament and talents, and the public sees it from a fifth point of view. add to this ten or twelve subsidiary characters. how can an author claim, under such circumstances, to remain the absolute master of his work?" the term "subsidiary characters" to some extent explains the attitude of the actress. it is a suggestion of the famous "_moi-même et quelques poupées_" which exhibits the clash of ideas that forms the basis of the ineradicable antagonism between the original author and the actor. each naturally thinks himself the master. to the true dramatist the players are as the colours on the palette, the instruments in the orchestra--or, perhaps, the players of them--the stone of the sculptor; their task is to give bodily form to his ideas, clothes and flesh to the "soul" of his drama, and, as far as possible, to efface themselves in doing their duty. the player, on the other hand, regards the dramatist as someone intended to write splendid parts for him--parts in which, to use the stock phrase, he "sees himself"--sees _himself_. unfortunately the dramatists have, on the whole, been the sufferers, the slaves. sardou enslaved himself to bernhardt; there are grounds for thinking that but for this slavery he might have been a great dramatist and not merely a rich, supremely skilful play fabricator. for a long time the players have had the upper hand, mainly because of the servility of the dramatists, but there are signs of a change. already the "ten or twelve subsidiary actors" phrase is becoming out of date. we have seen play after play at the court with parts of different degrees of importance, but hardly any "subsidiary" characters in the sense in which yvette guilbert uses the term. there are moments when the letter of guilbert seems a joke or a hoax. one does not like to think that she said, "the true comedian finds his success in himself, and can do without the dramatic author. he easily utilizes his own comic or tragic gifts, as is witnessed in shakespeare, molière, and a hundred others." to think that we do not know whether shakespeare was "a true comedian," and that it is not unlikely that he was a poor actor! the lady is wise not to attempt to name the "hundred others" presumably _ejusdem generis_ with shakespeare and molière. "there have always been, since the beginning of the ages, mimics and improvisators who did without the text of others." possibly this is true but it does not follow that there are many players who could hold an audience by their mimicry or improvisations; not a few of the greatest actors and actresses might starve if they had to rely upon their own ideas. it is even notorious that some of our most illustrious actors have had their brilliant after-dinner impromptu speeches written for them. after reading the whole letter one may hint that guilbert's own ideas might not serve her very well if she tried to appear as improvisator. chapter xiii miscellaneous finance in plays it is to be hoped that the title will not be misunderstood. the finance _of_ plays is quite another story, often an ugly story, sometimes with a comic aspect, and frequently disclosed in a bankruptcy or a winding-up. occasionally in pieces supposed to be quite modern we are told, incorrectly, a good deal about the way in which plays are financed, which does not mean the mode of spending money on the production and performance of dramas and in keeping theatres open--or closed--but the method of raising money for theatrical enterprises. certainly, the subject is worthy of consideration, and some day we hope to handle it almost adequately. the remarks, however, concern the ideas of general finance exhibited by authors. mr sutro's drama _the perfect lover_ set us thinking. no doubt the title does not suggest money, nor, indeed, does it give an idea of the real subject of the drama. in his new work the author preaches a sermon about the corrupting influence of wealth and the desire for it. as business men, in a sort of second-hand way, most of us were interested in the talk concerning money. everything turns upon the fact that willie, the wicked solicitor, wishes to buy the cardew estates, which (though the property of a noble family) happen to be unsettled, because he has discovered that there is coal under them, and therefore scents a fortune in the purchase. the moment that the word "coal" is mentioned to the persons in the play everything is understood--by them. all assume that the property is multiplied in value by its existence. joe is to be offered £ to bring about the sale. a simple practical person, such as a dramatic critic, is inclined to ask whether willie is not buying a pig in a poke. he can hardly have had shafts sunk surreptitiously on the cardew estates in order to ascertain whether the coal-mines would be a curse or a blessing to the owner; and if the property adjoined valuable collieries, the cardews would have made some investigation. for it by no means follows that a coal-mine is a source of wealth, since the "black diamonds," concerning our available quantity of which professor jevons scared our fathers when some of us were agreeably younger, may be indifferent in quality or lie with such faults and in a manner so inconvenient that it can only be worked at a ruinous cost. nevertheless, whenever the magic word "coal" is whispered the characters are thrilled, like housewives reminded by their husband that they have forgotten to order it at the "lowest summer prices." no doubt the author will say that after all coal is coal, and may be reminded of the plaintive retort by the little girl in _punch_ that "mother said the last lot was nearly all slates." willie talks of making a million out of the purchase; he is fortified in his views by the fact that the great central railway is going to run through part of the property. writers of fiction are apt to believe that in these times land-owners receive on compulsory purchase the extravagant sums that used to be awarded in past days and by their magnitude have hampered the railway companies and the general public ever since; juries or arbitrators have come to their senses, and compensation no longer spells unmerited fortune, except by the reaping of a large crop of "unearned increment." and now there are the new taxes. it may be suggested that we do not demand exact finance or correct law in our fiction nowadays. a few, indeed, are meticulous in the matter, but it is generally assumed that the public would be bored by correct details. no one has ventured to dramatize laurence oliphant's brilliantly humorous "autobiography of a joint stock company"--apologies if by slip of memory the title is given at all incorrectly. occasionally, it is true, our plays treat financial matters with some particularity; one may cite _mammon_ and _a bunch of violets_, both versions of feuillet's drama _montjoie_, and mr arthur jones's clever piece _a rogue's comedy_, and _business is business_, the adaptation of _les affaires sont les affaires_. moreover, there was a melodrama given at the opéra comique which, despite the care of the censor, contained caricatures of several notorious living financiers. they were financiers touching whom one may record the story, perhaps unpublished, of an american who asserted vaingloriously that we have no great financiers in england such as are to be found in the united states, and on being answered that we have, and thereupon inquiring scornfully where they could be found, received the curt reply, "in gaol." unfortunately, the finances of the opéra comique production were almost as unsubstantial as the finance in the other plays, and it did not last long. mr cecil raleigh also, in some of the drury lane dramas which used to give us vast entertainment, handled company matters in a broad, generous, comic fashion which baffled criticism. would a public so abominably engrossed as ours in money, a people that is exchanging the ascendency of an aristocracy for the despotism of a plutocracy, a nation a large proportion of which gambles on the stock exchange whilst another plays bridge for shocking stakes, really reject a drama turning on financial matters and containing a moderate amount of accurate detail? if there is little poetry in throgmorton street, at least there is plenty of romance, and more imagination is exhibited in the average prospectus than in the ordinary play. it would not be impossible to introduce a touch of sentiment, assuming, sadly, that the playgoers cannot be happy without a little bit of sugar; whilst the fierce clash of men in the mad pursuit for wealth--a pursuit, after all, more engrossing than that of love--is often terribly dramatic. there was a piece called _the wheat king_, an adaptation of one of the few books by the powerful american novelist norris, who died too young. the version, made by two ladies, very nearly fulfilled the conditions suggested, and it almost achieved success. doubtless everybody connected with theatres believes that love in some form or another is the only possible basis for a successful drama, although we are well aware that romantic love such as the dramatists trade in is only an episode in the lives of a minority of the nation, and does not come at all to the rest. apparently it is presumed that those who have never felt it wish to hear about it, and that those who have, desire to revive their memories. indeed, many experts imagine there are very few topics which will lure the public to the box-office. there is before us at the moment a letter from henry irving, in answer to a suggestion that ibsen's great drama _the pretenders_ was worthy of production by him, and he says, "of the power of ibsen's _pretenders_ i am quite sensible, but unfortunately there are considerations which prevent me from accepting the suggestion. in the first place, i believe the theme of ambition has no great dramatic hold, or a very slender one, on the playgoing public of to-day.... i am compelled as a manager to take these things into account. were i conducting an endowed theatre, the case would be different." many things have happened in stageland since april , when this letter was written by irving, and it is by no means improbable that the scope of the theatre has been somewhat extended. after all, it is fantastic that money, the element which plays the greatest part in the lives of most of us, should generally be treated superficially if at all, and, as a rule, when not neglected, should be handled without accuracy or even verisimilitude of detail. one might refer to _macbeth_ as a successful play with ambition as its theme. since irving's letter was written a fair number of unsentimental plays have been produced and well received, such, for instance, as _strife_ and _the silver box_ and _the voysey inheritance_, all works of great quality. some unsuccessful dramatists when considering some of the criticisms upon _becket_, and accepting them as accurate, one is inclined to ask why tennyson failed as a dramatist. that he did, judged by the ordinary standard, can hardly be denied, nor could any degree of success with _becket_ disprove the statement, since the acted work is a bold, free adaptation of the printed play. he was anxious for success as a playwright, and in fact no fewer than five of his plays have been presented on the stage--all of them published after he was sixty-six years old. now, tennyson, undoubtedly, from every point of view that one can classify exactly, was far better equipped for playwriting than hundreds of successful dramatists--yet he failed. why? the puzzle does not end nor begin with him. one can name a number of literary men of great rank who have written vainly for the stage, to say nothing of others who are authors of works in the form of drama, but nevertheless, like a shelley, swinburne or longfellow, may not have been stagestruck. as conspicuous modern instances balzac, byron and browning may be selected, and a writer who, if hardly of the same class, has written at least one masterpiece. this is charles reade, whose delightful book "the cloister and the hearth" seems likely to attain immortality. reade, we know, was absolutely stagestruck, and wrote dozens of plays and spent a great deal of money over them; indeed, it is not too much to say that his mania for the theatre seriously injured his work as a novelist. yet who will pretend that any of the pieces that he concocted alone or in conjunction with others is worth the least valuable of his novels? balzac, though not stagestruck in the same degree as charles reade, had a great desire for success as a playwright; part of the desire may have been due to eagerness to make money with which to pay off those terrible debts. yet in one biography of him no mention is made of his dramas. nevertheless, he sweated hard over _vautrin_, _la marâtre_, _les ressources de quinola_ and _mercadet_; none of them helped substantially to pay off the debts, nor can any be rated equally with the poorest of his novels. _mercadet_, certainly, has one brilliant scene of comedy in it, and under the name of _a game of speculation_ proved a trump-card with charles mathews. g.h. lewes was author of the version which, according to a popular story, was written and rehearsed between saturday and monday. the original, with the full title of _mercadet ou le faiseur_ was not acted till after the death of balzac, when it was reduced to three acts by d'ennery and given with success at le gymnase. everybody knows that browning wrote a number of plays. _a soul's tragedy_ was lately presented by the stage society, an interesting hardly successful experiment. _a blot on the 'scutcheon_ was produced at drury lane in and revived by phelps at sadler's wells, and also in by the independent theatre, when miss may harvey gave an admirable performance as mildred; whilst _strafford_, _colombe's birthday_ and _in a balcony_ have all seen the footlights and achieved at the most a _succès d'estime_. few, however, even putting aside the vulgar, fallacious test of the box-office, would say that these works are really valuable stage dramas, despite the superb qualities obvious in them. some of lord byron's plays have been given upon the boards; but the real byron of the stage is the author of _our boys_ and goodness knows how many more successful works, all as dead to-day as the dramas of sheridan knowles. it has been said that _the cenci_, when produced privately by sir percy bysshe shelley, with miss alma murray as heroine, acted very well. has the stage society ever considered the question of a revival? how, then, did it happen that balzac, byron, browning and reade failed as dramatists, despite the eager desire of three of them, at least, to win success on the boards? it is undeniable that the three--one may put aside byron--are intensely "dramatic" writers. _les chouans_ reads almost as if it were a play converted into a novel, and has been adapted successfully, and like _le père goriot_, which someone has called the french _king lear_, has been used for the stage after the time when the long-desired marriage with madame hanska was ended by the premature death of the author of the fine phrase, "_vierges de corps nous étions hardis en paroles_." indeed, in half the works composing the prodigious _comédie humaine_ are passages of immense dramatic force. clearly, too, the author of "the cloister and the hearth" could paint character and was a splendid storyteller into the bargain. it would be impossible to say this without certain qualifications in the case of browning; yet who that has been fascinated by that colossal work "the ring and the book" can deny it? why, then, should balzac and browning have failed where shakespeare and sardou have succeeded? the question brings forward another, and it is this: whether shakespeare, if he were writing nowadays, would be a successful dramatist. at first sight it seems an absurd question, but it is permissible because one must recognize the fact that what perhaps prevented balzac and browning from being successful has not proved an impediment to the triumph of shakespeare. the dramas of our national dramatist are the most heavily thought-burdened plays that have had popular success in modern times, and in the works of browning there are so many ideas that it is often difficult to see the idea. to the modern writer of anything like shakespeare's calibre, or browning's, the simple joy in the story is no longer possible, and probably shakespeare, if born forty years ago, and if content to work for such a medium as the stage, would, like an ibsen, have chosen themes that do not appeal to our people. but was shakespeare, "shakespeare"? it is not merely a want of the knack of playwriting--a vulgar, useful term--that kept browning or tennyson from success on the stage. no one ever had such a prodigious "knack" as ibsen, and _rosmersholm_ is the most amazing _tour de force_ of craftmanship. yet despite his influence upon modern drama, ibsen--a great poet, a great thinker, a great observer, and the greatest of craftsmen--has been unpopular as a dramatist in england. one begins to see that an element in the answer to be given to the question is the fact that some of the great writers who have failed upon the stage owe their want of success in part to their over-estimation of the power of the acting play to convey ideas, and consequently to their putting so much more into their work than the average audience can get out that the public shirks the task of grappling with them at all. shakespeare, under peculiar circumstances, was grappled with before our time, and has been predigested for us; but the others have had no such fortune. moreover, much of the national dramatist's finest work is cut when his works are produced and some are rarely given, others never. several able writers, such as robert buchanan, have rushed to the opposite extreme and obtained ephemeral success by empty plays injurious to their reputation as men of letters, and a few of us think that one of our most successful and brilliant novelist-playwrights has a dangerous tendency in this direction. it is, of course, given to few to judge so perfectly as pinero what is the extreme quantity of thought that can be put into a play without frightening the public, and he has had more than one splendid failure from taking too hopeful a view of the intelligence of playgoers. the ending of the play a large number of readers begin a novel at the wrong end, particularly those of the sex many members of which are threatened with moustaches, according to the latest hysterical shriek of certain medicine-men, because of their weakness for putting cigarettes between their dainty lips. they look at the last chapter before reading the first; the practice is indefensible, criminal. authors take an immense amount of trouble in working up logically to a conclusion and preparing the minds of their readers for it, and most of this trouble goes by the board if you begin by reading the last chapter. in the case of the humbler classes of fiction the injury to the writer is even greater: he has endeavoured by manoeuvres, limited in character by certain laws of the game, to spring a surprise upon the reader by puzzling her as to the ending of the story and she, instead of "playing the game" and trying to unravel it, "cuts the gordian knot," the most hackneyed _cliché_ in the _répertoire_ of the journalist. this grossly unfair treatment of novelists ought to be punished, or at least be subject to procedure in the chancery division for breach of confidence. the really honest reader shrinks from such an offence as if it were eavesdropping. it is well known that many novels actually begin with the last chapter. the irishism represents the fact that the author starts by exhibiting people in a dramatic position and then proceeds to show how they came to be there. there is always something of this method in a play. one cannot conveniently begin, like sterne, with the birth of the hero--and even a little before--and work steadily forward. "tristram shandy," it may be, is a poor example, since "steadily" is perhaps the worst adjective in the dictionary to describe the progress of that novel. of course there are plays in which a prologue is employed, but the device is clumsy; and in these instances, when the real drama is reached, an explanation of what has happened during the gap between the prologue and the first act is necessary. in other words, part of the author's work and a great part of his difficulty lie in telling the audience a number of antecedent facts. the task has grown very difficult since soliloquies have gone out of vogue and audiences become so sophisticated as to smile at the old-fashioned conversations in which information is given to the house by causing the hero to tell to his friend--"his friend charles"--a number of matters with which, to the knowledge of everybody, charles is already well acquainted. it is a misfortune that in the case of cleverly constructed dramas the uncritical members of the playgoing world, whilst half-conscious of the fact that the preliminary circumstances are not being told to them in the clumsy method now out of date, fail to get the full amount of pleasure from the technical skill exhibited. take, for instance, what in this respect is perhaps the masterpiece, _rosmersholm_. few spectators consider it closely enough to appreciate the wonderful skill shown in conveying to the audience the vast number of facts and ideas necessary to explain the exact relations between rosmer and rebecca west when the play begins. however, it is hardly worth the while of the casual playgoer to study the structure of dramas sufficiently to appreciate fully such marvels of technique--the marvels are very rare. something might be said in favour of plays--and it was said by prosper mérimée--in which no knowledge of the previous histories of the parties is necessary. it is doubtful, however, whether there exists any specimen of this class of drama, and perhaps it is impossible completely to comply with such conditions. whether much or little is told to the audience of the things that have happened and the characters before the play begins, the last act in the ordinary drama is of an extravagant importance in relation to the whole. it has been said, with a fair amount of truth, that anybody can write a good first act, and that most plays fail towards the end. instead of putting his confidence in the maxim "well begun is half done," the author must rely on another which may be expressed as "well ended is much mended." the question how to bring a play to a close has been terribly difficult on very many occasions to the dramatist. there are various kinds of conclusion, most of them more or less formal or conventional. for instance, everyone knows what will happen towards the last fall of the curtain in the peculiarly exasperating species of drama founded upon a misunderstanding which in real life would be cleared up in five minutes, but on the stage remains unsolved for three hours or so. countless plays end with a definite engagement of young sweethearts the course of whose love became rough at the close of the first act, or with the reconciliation of youthful spouses who quarrelled in the earlier part of the piece. this, of course, is the so-called "happy-ever-after" ending: in most cases the comedies of this type are so artificial that few of the audience take sufficient interest in the characters to think of them as people who live after the play, and to notice the fact that the sweethearts are from their nature unlikely to live happily together, or that the young husband and wife, on account of their dispositions, are certain to quarrel within a week of the reconciliation. plays of these kinds are essentially unimportant. nobody cares very much how they end provided that the curtain falls not later than at a quarter-past eleven. real tragedies, whether of the classic, modern or romantic type, end in death or deaths. obviously there is no other solution in most cases. perhaps in real life hamlet would have remained letting i dare not wait upon i would until his mother and stepfather died in the ordinary course of nature; without any amazing interposition of providence, romeo and juliet might have healed the quarrel between their hostile houses and established a large family of little montague-capulets, and so on; but one accepts the proposition that such outcomes would be contrary to the essential laws of the existence of such plays. difficulties grow when we come to comedy that seeks to represent, however timidly, the life of real human beings. the bold dramatists who endeavour to represent a slice of life--jean jullien invented the phrase--find more difficulty in the beginning of their plays than the conventional writer: to bring them to anything like a full stop is a very rare achievement. a great many end at a comma, a semi-colon is noteworthy, a colon superb, and very often one has a mere mark of interrogation at the last fall of the curtain. of course a full stop sometimes is achieved, for instance in the case of _the second mrs tanqueray_; but _iris_ ends with something very much like a comma, and _the notorious mrs ebbsmith_ can scarcely boast of more than a colon. ibsen has not always been successful in coming to his conclusions. in a sense _a doll's house_ might be called a failure: the case is one of the note of interrogation, and the audience is left in a mood of dissatisfaction, since, being deeply interested in the character of nora, it is intensely curious to know what she will do next. homes have been broken up and friendships wrecked by discussion upon the question, though it must be admitted that most of the quarrels concerning the play have been upon the irrelevant question whether the child-wife ought to have left her husband and children. one half of the disputants fail to see that the fact that she does abandon them is the catastrophe and not the conclusion of the comedy. in _an enemy of society_ and _a lady from the sea_ the author has been remarkably adroit in getting to a definite conclusion. on the other hand, one sees that even such a master of his craft was forced to call death to his aid in many cases; for instance, _hedda gabler_, _the master-builder_, _rosmersholm_, _john gabriel borkmann_, and _when we dead awaken_. in nearly all of these the death is not accidental but inevitable. _the wild duck_ has a tragic death in it which is by no means conclusive; indeed, it is a horrible humour of the work that the last idea of all is the suggestion of a continuing tragic comedy. the inconclusive conclusion is unpopular. there is a strong craving in the public to have plays nicely rounded off, and this is a serious obstacle to writers who seek to represent real life, which seems to have a sort of prejudice against rounding-off human affairs neatly. in a vast number of cases the great crises in human life are followed by a tedious kind of dragging anti-climax. great monarchs still live after their fall. the napoleon of the stage would have died at waterloo instead of crawling out of life at st helena. one need not multiply instances after such a prodigious example. managers naturally respect--some will say "pander to"--the public taste; wherefore our real life plays rarely see the footlights, and when they do sometimes are cruelly forced into an artificial ending. from time to time one even sees quaint announcements that, owing to the wishes of the public, the conclusion of a particular play has been twisted from the author's original idea into some termination that gratifies the audience's desire to leave the theatre in a mood to enjoy a supper afterwards. the question of art involved in the matter hardly needs discussion. no one will deny that, in comedy at least, the greatest suggestion of truth is the greatest art, even whilst admitting that the inevitable circumstances of the production of a play demand certain modifications and adjustment of truth. the dramatist can never hold the mirror up to nature; he can only reflect her in a distorting glass. a few years ago in a play that made a sensation came the worst example of the forced conventional "happy-ever-after" ending on record. the case was that of _an englishman's home_, where there was foisted upon the author, who was abroad, a quite imbecile happy ending which caused much discussion: it is not unlikely that this crime against drama and the dramatist prevented the piece from enjoying the immense success confidently prophesied for it. nowadays authors are in a greater difficulty, because people--particularly the so-called "smart" folk--are eager to get away early for supper, whilst many are compelled to steal off to catch trains to brighton and other suburbs, and leave the theatre before the ending of a play. the result threatens to be curious. the dramatists will be induced to make their big effort in the penultimate act, leaving nothing for the last but some tranquil rounding off which you may miss without serious loss. instead of the notice, often, alas! untrue: "the audience is requested to be seated punctually at eight o'clock, since the interest in the play begins at the rise of the curtain," we shall have: "members of the audience anxious for supper or to catch suburban trains are requested to leave before the curtain rises on the last act, which is only a kind of needless epilogue." we had some trace of this new epilogue method in _leah kleschna_, as well as in _letty_. how the critics of the morning papers would bless such a system! at the same time, it is imaginable that the authors will raise a difficulty--they are such an exacting race! however, a brilliant suggestion has been made of a way of dealing with the difficulty. "why not," asks a fair correspondent, whose letter has incited this article--"why not begin with the last act?" the scornful may answer with the question, "why begin at all if you've nothing better than our ordinary drama?" but they must be kept out of court. there really is something in the idea. public interest flags somewhat in the case of ordinary plays because the house knows too well the things that are going to happen; it might be stimulated by seeing them happen and then watching the development of the facts leading up to them. this suggestion is not protected in any way, either in england or the united states. preposterous stage types the title may sound a little misleading, ruskinian, horne-tookian: probably the word "preposterous" would not have been used but for an accidental remembrance of de quincey, who was so fond of using and explaining it, of pointing out that it signified the behind-before, the cart before the horse, the hysteron-proteron. by-the-by, why has de quincey gone out of fashion? there are charming reprints of almost everybody who is somebody, and of somebodies who really are nobodies; even alexander smith is being talked of; yet, if you want a full feast of de quincey you must go to ill-printed pages bound horribly. however, except so far as shakespeare is concerned, the author of a famous essay on wilhelm meister has left us little on the topic of the stage. a casual question brought forward the subject: it was whether sothern's dundreary really represented an english type. to answer this is a matter of some difficulty. the fact remains that if dundreary did not represent a type, at least it created one. dundrearys became quite numerous after sothern's success; and the observant have remarked that not infrequently a stage character has verified itself by a species of ratification--a remark that has a flavour of ireland, or, if a famous essay by miss edgeworth is to be accepted, a flavour of france--this is a reference to her essay on irish bulls, a title itself which happens to be unconsciously a bull. the "mashers" and "crutch and toothpick brigade" of the stage were rather the progenitors than imitators of the type, and the gibson girls were more numerous after the appearance of miss camille clifford than before she came to london. it might be indiscreet to go further into details and cite more modern instances on the topic. one can hardly call this, holding the mirror up to nature, yet, in a curious roundabout way, the stage seems to justify itself and become true after the event. there was a rather bitter discussion some time ago between an author and a critic; the latter had remarked that the language of the dramatist's people did not sound true, that it seemed composed of scraps from the stage, that he generally could guess from the cue the words of the answering speech. this, of course, is very often the case; probably to the simple-minded playgoer when it happens there seems to be evidence that the dialogue is true. the characters say what he expects them to say--therefore, that which to him it seems natural for them to say. perhaps the judgment of the simple-minded playgoer is sounder on this point than that of the critic, who is hoping that the characters will utter something that he does not expect them to say. probably a large number of the stereotyped phrases of our actual speech come from the novel or stage, and although when they were first spoken the truth was not in them, they have come to be truly representative of the characters. novelists of standing are more nicely squeamish on the subject than dramatists of similar rank; they endeavour to avoid--in dialogue--the ready-made article; at the same time one notes that the important dramatist is very anxious to keep clear of the stage-worn phrases. we know that to some extent people do accept the judgments in plays as judgments on life, and mould their conduct on that of the characters. even the daughter in _alice sit-by-the-fire_, with her views based on melodrama concerning her mother, was not wholly extravagant. of course this puts a rather heavy responsibility upon dramatists. the _jack sheppard_ and _dick turpin_ plays are said to have fired many youths with a desire to become romantic criminals, and even caused them to make efforts to carry out their desires. nowadays--at least in the theatres within our province--such pieces are not presented; nor would one quarrel with the censor if he were to prohibit one of them. there is little peril in a work like _raffles_; for though it would not be difficult to exhibit skill in crime as great as that of the hero, a capacity for being a first-class cricketer and an education at eton seem to be essential elements of the character, and these serve as insurmountable stumbling-blocks to many. yet a raffles may set a fashion and have humble imitators, so far as personal style is concerned, among the professors of the fine art of crib-cracking. the professor moriarty of _sherlock holmes_ really employed too much machinery to be copied by the crowd. that the stage sometimes takes the lead in the matter of costume cannot be disputed--possibly the day will arrive when the emancipation of man from the thrall of the "topper," the frock-coat and stiff collar is brought about through the energies of the theatre--though it will require a london actor of the le bargy type to achieve such a triumph, and he is not yet in sight, and may not appear until after the motorist has accomplished the miracle. at present, even in the matter of ladies' frocks, the london stage has less influence than one might have expected. at the moment one seeks vainly for any stage type likely to create a character which afterwards it will seem to reflect. perhaps mr g.p. huntley has had some success in this respect; certainly it is imaginable that if he were to represent a well-written part in comedy as a kind of twentieth-century dundreary we should meet imitators of him in shoals; but this has yet to come, and if it does a good many people will fail to rejoice--a phrase without prejudice to admiration for a player concerning the limits of whose power as a comedian one may well have real curiosity. turning back for a moment to the dialogue, one can hardly feel surprised that playwrights are easily satisfied with ready-made phrases; we journalists cannot "throw stones" at them--a figure the almost unintentional use of which illustrates the difficulty. it is a very hard task to invent new phrases for your characters that will seem congruous, and there is always the peril of appearing affected in style. yet success is possible, as may be seen in the works of a few, such as pinero; even he shows a tendency, noteworthy in _letty_ and, to a less degree, in _his house in order_, towards causing some characters to talk "bookily," which, after all, is better than making them speak journalistically. still, in dealing with this point the dramatist must remember that many people in real life use habitually a large number of ready-made phrases, even when they are in a serious mood. the professions of the dramatis personae if the historian of the future, in the endeavour to get a clear idea of the social life of our times, turns to the contemporary drama in search for information, he will find very little matter of value. yet the mere fact of the success of some of the plays will give him an idea of the taste, or lack of taste, of the public, and the failure of others will speak eloquently, but sadly, to him about the audiences of to-day. the first phenomenon to impress him must be the fact that in a large proportion of the dramas professing to deal with current social life the chief persons are the drones of society and the rich people of leisure or labour, most of them with handles or tails to their names. half of our comedies are supposed to pass among the "nobs," and the middle-class characters are merely introduced as a necessary part of the machinery. it has been said that the british people dearly loves a lord, and a belief in this may be one reason why the upper ten thousand furnish so many of the heroes and heroines. a further fact is that certain managers are alleged to think that their theatres gain in dignity by presenting mayfair plays, and perhaps there are players who take a great joy in appearing as lord this, or lady that, or the honourable somebody. indeed, there was a case where an actor-manager usurped a king's prerogative and transferred the chief characters in a play by a young dramatist to the celestial regions of burke, notwithstanding the protest of the author, who admitted his absolute ignorance of the manners, ways of thought, and style in conversation of the inhabitants of belgravia: no changes were made except in the names, and yet nobody suggested that the play was particularly rich in solecisms. this form of snobbery has at least one advantage, it saves the playwright from the trouble of considering the questions of money in the play. if there is to be an elopement in it there is no difficulty on the score of expense--a difficulty that, in vulgar real life, has caused some intrigues to become sordid hole-and-corner divorce dramas instead of idylls of passionate irregular love. one notices that certain professions are under a kind of ban upon the stage. the country contains thousands of solicitors, most of them well educated and drawn from the class that feeds the bar, the church, the army, navy, medicine, science and the arts. this body of solicitors has an enormous influence upon the conscience of the country--more influence than any other class, except, perhaps, that of the parsons. how is the solicitor treated on the stage? almost always with contempt, at the best as a humble adviser. he is the comic character or the villain; generally, as a further insult, the secondary villain. the attorney is sometimes the hero of a farce, as in _the headless man_--never in comedy, or to be more correct, hardly ever, for mr granville barker in _the voysey inheritance_ gave a very fine and sympathetic study of a young solicitor. the dramatist may say in defence that he is truthful, that he merely reflects the vulgar prejudice against the profession, founded upon the misdeeds of a very small proportion of its members. the barrister receives better treatment, but, of course, he is generally deemed to be a more "genteel" person; yet, in considering stage barristers, one notices that they are drawn very superficially, that their profession is accidental to the play, and little or nothing turns on the influence of the career upon the man. judges, like solicitors, are usually regarded as comic. our stage has hardly inherited molière traditions concerning the doctors; there were two important plays, _the medicine man_ and _the physician_, in which members of the healing art are treated seriously--though dr tregenna in the former was rather a caricature, and in _the doctor's dilemma_ we had a brilliantly painted group of medical men. the christian scientist may complain of neglect, even if there was some anticipation of him in _judah_, and a humble branch of the craft was handled ably by mrs merrick in _jimmy's mother_. the real quack has remained almost unscathed. the army, of course, has not been neglected. half the lotharios of modern drama belong to the destructive profession, and the peppery or tedious colonel is an old stock friend; whilst the "dobbin" type is handled very frequently, and the v.c. has been bestowed more often by dramatists than by royalty. the modern officer of the good type, the man with an honest, energetic interest in his profession, is rarely presented. what about the navy? there was _the flag-lieutenant_ and also _captain drew on leave_, the latter a somewhat unpleasant picture, fortunately exhibiting no trace of the sailor's spirit or style of thought. one cannot complain nowadays of a lack of parsons or nonconformist ministers, though it is irksome to see that the latter, as a rule, are presented in an odious light, by way, probably, of a mean little revenge for the hostility of the nonconformist to the theatre--a hostility which could hardly surprise any dispassionate person who considers the present state of the stage. the architect, save in _the master builder_, is almost unknown; the engineer, unspecialised as a rule, figures vaguely sometimes. perhaps one ought to write guardedly concerning the journalist. still, at least, facts may be stated. as a rule he appears as reporter or interviewer, and is treated comically. in _the perfect lover_ mr sutro handles him seriously, and that play contains an elaborate picture of a weak-minded journalist as well as a wicked solicitor. of the existence of thousands of men, highly educated and many of them possessing brilliant degrees, connected with the enormous newspaper interest of this country, the stage takes no cognizance. a dramatic critic occasionally is exhibited--as a rule in connexion with the champagne-and-chicken theory. the vast army devoted to science is almost ignored, though sometimes the inventor has a kind of "innings": in _the middleman_ mr henry arthur jones made a striking figure of him. financiers, business men, merchants and the like have little justice done to them. to the dramatist the fraudulent is the only interesting financier. he certainly is very fond of working on the _mercadet_ basis. he commonly confounds the stockbroker with the bucket-shop keeper, and invariably assumes that the company promoter is a thief. the merchant or manufacturer tends to replace the french uncle from america, and his wealth rather than himself is employed by the playwright to get his characters out of a mess. the novelist or poet is a difficult person for stage treatment; the pictures of the dramatist in the theatre are curiously unlifelike--as unlifelike as the theatrical managers on the stage. there are reasons for this that need not be discussed. it seems a pity that the playwrights, when dealing with life in the strata above shopkeeping, should not apply themselves more fully to the study of the enormous class which is the backbone of the country, instead of choosing so often merely the idle classes, members of which as a rule are less highly individualized. one may apply to the characters in many of our comedies certain phrases used by théophile gautier: "the personages belong to no particular time or country. they come and go without our knowing why or how; they neither eat nor drink, they do not live in any particular place, and have no _métier_." the "neither eat nor drink," of course, is quite inapplicable; we have far too much eating and drinking on the stage. the low, comic meals of the adelphi are replaced by similar or slightly more "genteel" humours of comic eating in comedies. it may be that this phenomenon is due to a belief that playgoers want to see something in the theatres far divorced from its ordinary life, but this belief seems hardly consistent with certain notable tendencies towards realism. undoubtedly the public has not grown tired of plays dealing seriously with current human life; it has had no opportunity of growing tired of them. since this was written the "yellow journalism" editor has twice appeared, once in the brilliant comedy called _what the public wants_, by mr arnold bennett, where mr james hearn represented him superbly, and on the other occasion in mr fagan's clever work called _the earth_, when mr m'kinnel acted ably. also we have had an engineer in _the building of bridges_ and a doctor in _fires of fate_. none criticism and fiction by william dean howells the question of a final criterion for the appreciation of art is one that perpetually recurs to those interested in any sort of aesthetic endeavor. mr. john addington symonds, in a chapter of 'the renaissance in italy' treating of the bolognese school of painting, which once had so great cry, and was vaunted the supreme exemplar of the grand style, but which he now believes fallen into lasting contempt for its emptiness and soullessness, seeks to determine whether there can be an enduring criterion or not; and his conclusion is applicable to literature as to the other arts. "our hope," he says, "with regard to the unity of taste in the future then is, that all sentimental or academical seekings after the ideal having been abandoned, momentary theories founded upon idiosyncratic or temporary partialities exploded, and nothing accepted but what is solid and positive, the scientific spirit shall make men progressively more and more conscious of these 'bleibende verhaltnisse,' more and more capable of living in the whole; also, that in proportion as we gain a firmer hold upon our own place in the world, we shall come to comprehend with more instinctive certitude what is simple, natural, and honest, welcoming with gladness all artistic products that exhibit these qualities. the perception of the enlightened man will then be the task of a healthy person who has made himself acquainted with the laws of evolution in art and in society, and is able to test the excellence of work in any stage from immaturity to decadence by discerning what there is of truth, sincerity, and natural vigor in it." i that is to say, as i understand, that moods and tastes and fashions change; people fancy now this and now that; but what is unpretentious and what is true is always beautiful and good, and nothing else is so. this is not saying that fantastic and monstrous and artificial things do not please; everybody knows that they do please immensely for a time, and then, after the lapse of a much longer time, they have the charm of the rococo. nothing is more curious than the charm that fashion has. fashion in women's dress, almost every fashion, is somehow delightful, else it would never have been the fashion; but if any one will look through a collection of old fashion plates, he must own that most fashions have been ugly. a few, which could be readily instanced, have been very pretty, and even beautiful, but it is doubtful if these have pleased the greatest number of people. the ugly delights as well as the beautiful, and not merely because the ugly in fashion is associated with the young loveliness of the women who wear the ugly fashions, and wins a grace from them, not because the vast majority of mankind are tasteless, but for some cause that is not perhaps ascertainable. it is quite as likely to return in the fashions of our clothes and houses and furniture, and poetry and fiction and painting, as the beautiful, and it may be from an instinctive or a reasoned sense of this that some of the extreme naturalists have refused to make the old discrimination against it, or to regard the ugly as any less worthy of celebration in art than the beautiful; some of them, in fact, seem to regard it as rather more worthy, if anything. possibly there is no absolutely ugly, no absolutely beautiful; or possibly the ugly contains always an element of the beautiful better adapted to the general appreciation than the more perfectly beautiful. this is a somewhat discouraging conjecture, but i offer it for no more than it is worth; and i do not pin my faith to the saying of one whom i heard denying, the other day, that a thing of beauty was a joy forever. he contended that keats's line should have read, "some things of beauty are sometimes joys forever," and that any assertion beyond this was too hazardous. ii i should, indeed, prefer another line of keats's, if i were to profess any formulated creed, and should feel much safer with his "beauty is truth, truth beauty," than even with my friend's reformation of the more quoted verse. it brings us back to the solid ground taken by mr. symonds, which is not essentially different from that taken in the great mr. burke's essay on the sublime and the beautiful--a singularly modern book, considering how long ago it was wrote (as the great mr. steele would have written the participle a little longer ago), and full of a certain well-mannered and agreeable instruction. in some things it is of that droll little eighteenth-century world, when philosophy had got the neat little universe into the hollow of its hand, and knew just what it was, and what it was for; but it is quite without arrogance. "as for those called critics," the author says, "they have generally sought the rule of the arts in the wrong place; they have sought among poems, pictures, engravings, statues, and buildings; but art can never give the rules that make an art. this is, i believe, the reason why artists in general, and poets principally, have been confined in so narrow a circle; they have been rather imitators of one another than of nature. critics follow them, and therefore can do little as guides. i can judge but poorly of anything while i measure it by no other standard than itself. the true standard of the arts is in every man's power; and an easy observation of the most common, sometimes of the meanest things, in nature will give the truest lights, where the greatest sagacity and industry that slights such observation must leave us in the dark, or, what is worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights." if this should happen to be true and it certainly commends itself to acceptance--it might portend an immediate danger to the vested interests of criticism, only that it was written a hundred years ago; and we shall probably have the "sagacity and industry that slights the observation" of nature long enough yet to allow most critics the time to learn some more useful trade than criticism as they pursue it. nevertheless, i am in hopes that the communistic era in taste foreshadowed by burke is approaching, and that it will occur within the lives of men now overawed by the foolish old superstition that literature and art are anything but the expression of life, and are to be judged by any other test than that of their fidelity to it. the time is coming, i hope, when each new author, each new artist, will be considered, not in his proportion to any other author or artist, but in his relation to the human nature, known to us all, which it is his privilege, his high duty, to interpret. "the true standard of the artist is in every man's power" already, as burke says; michelangelo's "light of the piazza," the glance of the common eye, is and always was the best light on a statue; goethe's "boys and blackbirds" have in all ages been the real connoisseurs of berries; but hitherto the mass of common men have been afraid to apply their own simplicity, naturalness, and honesty to the appreciation of the beautiful. they have always cast about for the instruction of some one who professed to know better, and who browbeat wholesome common-sense into the self-distrust that ends in sophistication. they have fallen generally to the worst of this bad species, and have been "amused and misled" (how pretty that quaint old use of amuse is!) "by the false lights" of critical vanity and self-righteousness. they have been taught to compare what they see and what they read, not with the things that they have observed and known, but with the things that some other artist or writer has done. especially if they have themselves the artistic impulse in any direction they are taught to form themselves, not upon life, but upon the masters who became masters only by forming themselves upon life. the seeds of death are planted in them, and they can produce only the still-born, the academic. they are not told to take their work into the public square and see if it seems true to the chance passer, but to test it by the work of the very men who refused and decried any other test of their own work. the young writer who attempts to report the phrase and carriage of every-day life, who tries to tell just how he has heard men talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of something low and unworthy by people who would like to have him show how shakespeare's men talked and looked, or scott's, or thackeray's, or balzac's, or hawthorne's, or dickens's; he is instructed to idealize his personages, that is, to take the life-likeness out of them, and put the book-likeness into them. he is approached in the spirit of the pedantry into which learning, much or little, always decays when it withdraws itself and stands apart from experience in an attitude of imagined superiority, and which would say with the same confidence to the scientist: "i see that you are looking at a grasshopper there which you have found in the grass, and i suppose you intend to describe it. now don't waste your time and sin against culture in that way. i've got a grasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains and expense out of the grasshopper in general; in fact, it's a type. it's made up of wire and card-board, very prettily painted in a conventional tint, and it's perfectly indestructible. it isn't very much like a real grasshopper, but it's a great deal nicer, and it's served to represent the notion of a grasshopper ever since man emerged from barbarism. you may say that it's artificial. well, it is artificial; but then it's ideal too; and what you want to do is to cultivate the ideal. you'll find the books full of my kind of grasshopper, and scarcely a trace of yours in any of them. the thing that you are proposing to do is commonplace; but if you say that it isn't commonplace, for the very reason that it hasn't been done before, you'll have to admit that it's photographic." as i said, i hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common, average man, who always "has the standard of the arts in his power," will have also the courage to apply it, and will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art, because it is not "simple, natural, and honest," because it is not like a real grasshopper. but i will own that i think the time is yet far off, and that the people who have been brought up on the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic card-board grasshopper, must die out before the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper can have a fair field. i am in no haste to compass the end of these good people, whom i find in the mean time very amusing. it is delightful to meet one of them, either in print or out of it--some sweet elderly lady or excellent gentleman whose youth was pastured on the literature of thirty or forty years ago --and to witness the confidence with which they preach their favorite authors as all the law and the prophets. they have commonly read little or nothing since, or, if they have, they have judged it by a standard taken from these authors, and never dreamed of judging it by nature; they are destitute of the documents in the case of the later writers; they suppose that balzac was the beginning of realism, and that zola is its wicked end; they are quite ignorant, but they are ready to talk you down, if you differ from them, with an assumption of knowledge sufficient for any occasion. the horror, the resentment, with which they receive any question of their literary saints is genuine; you descend at once very far in the moral and social scale, and anything short of offensive personality is too good for you; it is expressed to you that you are one to be avoided, and put down even a little lower than you have naturally fallen. these worthy persons are not to blame; it is part of their intellectual mission to represent the petrifaction of taste, and to preserve an image of a smaller and cruder and emptier world than we now live in, a world which was feeling its way towards the simple, the natural, the honest, but was a good deal "amused and misled" by lights now no longer mistakable for heavenly luminaries. they belong to a time, just passing away, when certain authors were considered authorities in certain kinds, when they must be accepted entire and not questioned in any particular. now we are beginning to see and to say that no author is an authority except in those moments when he held his ear close to nature's lips and caught her very accent. these moments are not continuous with any authors in the past, and they are rare with all. therefore i am not afraid to say now that the greatest classics are sometimes not at all great, and that we can profit by them only when we hold them, like our meanest contemporaries, to a strict accounting, and verify their work by the standard of the arts which we all have in our power, the simple, the natural, and the honest. those good people must always have a hero, an idol of some sort, and it is droll to find balzac, who suffered from their sort such bitter scorn and hate for his realism while he was alive, now become a fetich in his turn, to be shaken in the faces of those who will not blindly worship him. but it is no new thing in the history of literature: whatever is established is sacred with those who do not think. at the beginning of the century, when romance was making the same fight against effete classicism which realism is making to-day against effete romanticism, the italian poet monti declared that "the romantic was the cold grave of the beautiful," just as the realistic is now supposed to be. the romantic of that day and the real of this are in certain degree the same. romanticism then sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds of sympathy, to level every barrier against aesthetic freedom, to escape from the paralysis of tradition. it exhausted itself in this impulse; and it remained for realism to assert that fidelity to experience and probability of motive are essential conditions of a great imaginative literature. it is not a new theory, but it has never before universally characterized literary endeavor. when realism becomes false to itself, when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish too. every true realist instinctively knows this, and it is perhaps the reason why he is careful of every fact, and feels himself bound to express or to indicate its meaning at the risk of overmoralizing. in life he finds nothing insignificant; all tells for destiny and character; nothing that god has made is contemptible. he cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthy of notice, any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the material world beneath the dignity of his inquiry. he feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of men; his soul is exalted, not by vain shows and shadows and ideals, but by realities, in which alone the truth lives. in criticism it is his business to break the images of false gods and misshapen heroes, to take away the poor silly, toys that many grown people would still like to play with. he cannot keep terms with "jack the giant-killer" or "puss-in-boots," under any name or in any place, even when they reappear as the convict vautrec, or the marquis de montrivaut, or the sworn thirteen noblemen. he must say to himself that balzac, when he imagined these monsters, was not balzac, he was dumas; he was not realistic, he was romanticistic. iii such a critic will not respect balzac's good work the less for contemning his bad work. he will easily account for the bad work historically, and when he has recognized it, will trouble himself no further with it. in his view no living man is a type, but a character; now noble, now ignoble; now grand, now little; complex, full of vicissitude. he will not expect balzac to be always balzac, and will be perhaps even more attracted to the study of him when he was trying to be balzac than when he had become so. in 'cesar birotteau,' for instance, he will be interested to note how balzac stood at the beginning of the great things that have followed since in fiction. there is an interesting likeness between his work in this and nicolas gogol's in 'dead souls,' which serves to illustrate the simultaneity of the literary movement in men of such widely separated civilizations and conditions. both represent their characters with the touch of exaggeration which typifies; but in bringing his story to a close, balzac employs a beneficence unknown to the russian, and almost as universal and as apt as that which smiles upon the fortunes of the good in the vicar of wakefield. it is not enough to have rehabilitated birotteau pecuniarily and socially; he must make him die triumphantly, spectacularly, of an opportune hemorrhage, in the midst of the festivities which celebrate his restoration to his old home. before this happens, human nature has been laid under contribution right and left for acts of generosity towards the righteous bankrupt; even the king sends him six thousand francs. it is very pretty; it is touching, and brings the lump into the reader's throat; but it is too much, and one perceives that balzac lived too soon to profit by balzac. the later men, especially the russians, have known how to forbear the excesses of analysis, to withhold the weakly recurring descriptive and caressing epithets, to let the characters suffice for themselves. all this does not mean that 'cesar birotteau' is not a beautiful and pathetic story, full of shrewdly considered knowledge of men, and of a good art struggling to free itself from self-consciousness. but it does mean that balzac, when he wrote it, was under the burden of the very traditions which he has helped fiction to throw off. he felt obliged to construct a mechanical plot, to surcharge his characters, to moralize openly and baldly; he permitted himself to "sympathize" with certain of his people, and to point out others for the abhorrence of his readers. this is not so bad in him as it would be in a novelist of our day. it is simply primitive and inevitable, and he is not to be judged by it. iv in the beginning of any art even the most gifted worker must be crude in his methods, and we ought to keep this fact always in mind when we turn, say, from the purblind worshippers of scott to scott himself, and recognize that he often wrote a style cumbrous and diffuse; that he was tediously analytical where the modern novelist is dramatic, and evolved his characters by means of long-winded explanation and commentary; that, except in the case of his lower-class personages, he made them talk as seldom man and never woman talked; that he was tiresomely descriptive; that on the simplest occasions he went about half a mile to express a thought that could be uttered in ten paces across lots; and that he trusted his readers' intuitions so little that he was apt to rub in his appeals to them. he was probably right: the generation which he wrote for was duller than this; slower-witted, aesthetically untrained, and in maturity not so apprehensive of an artistic intention as the children of to-day. all this is not saying scott was not a great man; he was a great man, and a very great novelist as compared with the novelists who went before him. he can still amuse young people, but they ought to be instructed how false and how mistaken he often is, with his mediaeval ideals, his blind jacobitism, his intense devotion to aristocracy and royalty; his acquiescence in the division of men into noble and ignoble, patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, as if it were the law of god; for all which, indeed, he is not to blame as he would be if he were one of our contemporaries. something of this is true of another master, greater than scott in being less romantic, and inferior in being more german, namely, the great goethe himself. he taught us, in novels otherwise now antiquated, and always full of german clumsiness, that it was false to good art--which is never anything but the reflection of life--to pursue and round the career of the persons introduced, whom he often allowed to appear and disappear in our knowledge as people in the actual world do. this is a lesson which the writers able to profit by it can never be too grateful for; and it is equally a benefaction to readers; but there is very little else in the conduct of the goethean novels which is in advance of their time; this remains almost their sole contribution to the science of fiction. they are very primitive in certain characteristics, and unite with their calm, deep insight, an amusing helplessness in dramatization. "wilhelm retired to his room, and indulged in the following reflections," is a mode of analysis which would not be practised nowadays; and all that fancifulness of nomenclature in wilhelm meister is very drolly sentimental and feeble. the adventures with robbers seem as if dreamed out of books of chivalry, and the tendency to allegorization affects one like an endeavor on the author's part to escape from the unrealities which he must have felt harassingly, german as he was. mixed up with the shadows and illusions are honest, wholesome, every-day people, who have the air of wandering homelessly about among them, without definite direction; and the mists are full of a luminosity which, in spite of them, we know for common-sense and poetry. what is useful in any review of goethe's methods is the recognition of the fact, which it must bring, that the greatest master cannot produce a masterpiece in a new kind. the novel was too recently invented in goethe's day not to be, even in his hands, full of the faults of apprentice work. v. in fact, a great master may sin against the "modesty of nature" in many ways, and i have felt this painfully in reading balzac's romance--it is not worthy the name of novel--'le pere goriot,' which is full of a malarial restlessness, wholly alien to healthful art. after that exquisitely careful and truthful setting of his story in the shabby boarding-house, he fills the scene with figures jerked about by the exaggerated passions and motives of the stage. we cannot have a cynic reasonably wicked, disagreeable, egoistic; we must have a lurid villain of melodrama, a disguised convict, with a vast criminal organization at his command, and "so dyed double red" in deed and purpose that he lights up the faces of the horrified spectators with his glare. a father fond of unworthy children, and leading a life of self-denial for their sake, as may probably and pathetically be, is not enough; there must be an imbecile, trembling dotard, willing to promote even the liaisons of his daughters to give them happiness and to teach the sublimity of the paternal instinct. the hero cannot sufficiently be a selfish young fellow, with alternating impulses of greed and generosity; he must superfluously intend a career of iniquitous splendor, and be swerved from it by nothing but the most cataclysmal interpositions. it can be said that without such personages the plot could not be transacted; but so much the worse for the plot. such a plot had no business to be; and while actions so unnatural are imagined, no mastery can save fiction from contempt with those who really think about it. to balzac it can be forgiven, not only because in his better mood he gave us such biographies as 'eugenie grandet,' but because he wrote at a time when fiction was just beginning to verify the externals of life, to portray faithfully the outside of men and things. it was still held that in order to interest the reader the characters must be moved by the old romantic ideals; we were to be taught that "heroes" and "heroines" existed all around us, and that these abnormal beings needed only to be discovered in their several humble disguises, and then we should see every-day people actuated by the fine frenzy of the creatures of the poets. how false that notion was, few but the critics, who are apt to be rather belated, need now be told. some of these poor fellows, however, still contend that it ought to be done, and that human feelings and motives, as god made them and as men know them, are not good enough for novel-readers. this is more explicable than would appear at first glance. the critics --and in speaking of them one always modestly leaves one's self out of the count, for some reason--when they are not elders ossified in tradition, are apt to be young people, and young people are necessarily conservative in their tastes and theories. they have the tastes and theories of their instructors, who perhaps caught the truth of their day, but whose routine life has been alien to any other truth. there is probably no chair of literature in this country from which the principles now shaping the literary expression of every civilized people are not denounced and confounded with certain objectionable french novels, or which teaches young men anything of the universal impulse which has given us the work, not only of zola, but of tourguenief and tolstoy in russia, of bjornson and ibsen in norway, of valdes and galdos in spain, of verga in italy. till these younger critics have learned to think as well as to write for themselves they will persist in heaving a sigh, more and more perfunctory, for the truth as it was in sir walter, and as it was in dickens and in hawthorne. presently all will have been changed; they will have seen the new truth in larger and larger degree; and when it shall have become the old truth, they will perhaps see it all. vi. in the mean time the average of criticism is not wholly bad with us. to be sure, the critic sometimes appears in the panoply of the savages whom we have supplanted on this continent; and it is hard to believe that his use of the tomahawk and the scalping-knife is a form of conservative surgery. it is still his conception of his office that he should assail those who differ with him in matters of taste or opinion; that he must be rude with those he does not like. it is too largely his superstition that because he likes a thing it is good, and because he dislikes a thing it is bad; the reverse is quite possibly the case, but he is yet indefinitely far from knowing that in affairs of taste his personal preference enters very little. commonly he has no principles, but only an assortment of prepossessions for and against; and this otherwise very perfect character is sometimes uncandid to the verge of dishonesty. he seems not to mind misstating the position of any one he supposes himself to disagree with, and then attacking him for what he never said, or even implied; he thinks this is droll, and appears not to suspect that it is immoral. he is not tolerant; he thinks it a virtue to be intolerant; it is hard for him to understand that the same thing may be admirable at one time and deplorable at another; and that it is really his business to classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind very much as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to praise or blame them; that there is a measure of the same absurdity in his trampling on a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him as in the botanist's grinding a plant underfoot because he does not find it pretty. he does not conceive that it is his business rather to identify the species and then explain how and where the specimen is imperfect and irregular. if he could once acquire this simple idea of his duty he would be much more agreeable company than he now is, and a more useful member of society; though considering the hard conditions under which he works, his necessity of writing hurriedly from an imperfect examination of far more books, on a greater variety of subjects, than he can even hope to read, the average american critic--the ordinary critic of commerce, so to speak--is even now very, well indeed. collectively he is more than this; for the joint effect of our criticism is the pretty thorough appreciation of any book submitted to it. vii. the misfortune rather than the fault of our individual critic is that he is the heir of the false theory and bad manners of the english school. the theory of that school has apparently been that almost any person of glib and lively expression is competent to write of almost any branch of polite literature; its manners are what we know. the american, whom it has largely formed, is by nature very glib and very lively, and commonly his criticism, viewed as imaginative work, is more agreeable than that of the englishman; but it is, like the art of both countries, apt to be amateurish. in some degree our authors have freed themselves from english models; they have gained some notion of the more serious work of the continent: but it is still the ambition of the american critic to write like the english critic, to show his wit if not his learning, to strive to eclipse the author under review rather than illustrate him. he has not yet caught on to the fact that it is really no part of his business to display himself, but that it is altogether his duty to place a book in such a light that the reader shall know its class, its function, its character. the vast good-nature of our people preserves us from the worst effects of this criticism without principles. our critic, at his lowest, is rarely malignant; and when he is rude or untruthful, it is mostly without truculence; i suspect that he is often offensive without knowing that he is so. now and then he acts simply under instruction from higher authority, and denounces because it is the tradition of his publication to do so. in other cases the critic is obliged to support his journal's repute for severity, or for wit, or for morality, though he may himself be entirely amiable, dull, and wicked; this necessity more or less warps his verdicts. the worst is that he is personal, perhaps because it is so easy and so natural to be personal, and so instantly attractive. in this respect our criticism has not improved from the accession of numbers of ladies to its ranks, though we still hope so much from women in our politics when they shall come to vote. they have come to write, and with the effect to increase the amount of little-digging, which rather superabounded in our literary criticism before. they "know what they like"--that pernicious maxim of those who do not know what they ought to like and they pass readily from censuring an author's performance to censuring him. they bring a stock of lively misapprehensions and prejudices to their work; they would rather have heard about than known about a book; and they take kindly to the public wish to be amused rather than edified. but neither have they so much harm in them: they, too, are more ignorant than malevolent. viii. our criticism is disabled by the unwillingness of the critic to learn from an author, and his readiness to mistrust him. a writer passes his whole life in fitting himself for a certain kind of performance; the critic does not ask why, or whether the performance is good or bad, but if he does not like the kind, he instructs the writer to go off and do some other sort of thing--usually the sort that has been done already, and done sufficiently. if he could once understand that a man who has written the book he dislikes, probably knows infinitely more about its kind and his own fitness for doing it than any one else, the critic might learn something, and might help the reader to learn; but by putting himself in a false position, a position of superiority, he is of no use. he is not to suppose that an author has committed an offence against him by writing the kind of book he does not like; he will be far more profitably employed on behalf of the reader in finding out whether they had better not both like it. let him conceive of an author as not in any wise on trial before him, but as a reflection of this or that aspect of life, and he will not be tempted to browbeat him or bully him. the critic need not be impolite even to the youngest and weakest author. a little courtesy, or a good deal, a constant perception of the fact that a book is not a misdemeanor, a decent self-respect that must forbid the civilized man the savage pleasure of wounding, are what i would ask for our criticism, as something which will add sensibly to its present lustre. ix. i would have my fellow-critics consider what they are really in the world for. the critic must perceive, if he will question himself more carefully, that his office is mainly to ascertain facts and traits of literature, not to invent or denounce them; to discover principles, not to establish them; to report, not to create. it is so much easier to say that you like this or dislike that, than to tell why one thing is, or where another thing comes from, that many flourishing critics will have to go out of business altogether if the scientific method comes in, for then the critic will have to know something besides his own mind. he will have to know something of the laws of that mind, and of its generic history. the history of all literature shows that even with the youngest and weakest author criticism is quite powerless against his will to do his own work in his own way; and if this is the case in the green wood, how much more in the dry! it has been thought by the sentimentalist that criticism, if it cannot cure, can at least kill, and keats was long alleged in proof of its efficacy in this sort. but criticism neither cured nor killed keats, as we all now very well know. it wounded, it cruelly hurt him, no doubt; and it is always in the power of the critic to give pain to the author--the meanest critic to the greatest author --for no one can help feeling a rudeness. but every literary movement has been violently opposed at the start, and yet never stayed in the least, or arrested, by criticism; every author has been condemned for his virtues, but in no wise changed by it. in the beginning he reads the critics; but presently perceiving that he alone makes or mars himself, and that they have no instruction for him, he mostly leaves off reading them, though he is always glad of their kindness or grieved by their harshness when he chances upon it. this, i believe, is the general experience, modified, of course, by exceptions. then, are we critics of no use in the world? i should not like to think that, though i am not quite ready to define our use. more than one sober thinker is inclining at present to suspect that aesthetically or specifically we are of no use, and that we are only useful historically; that we may register laws, but not enact them. i am not quite prepared to admit that aesthetic criticism is useless, though in view of its futility in any given instance it is hard to deny that it is so. it certainly seems as useless against a book that strikes the popular fancy, and prospers on in spite of condemnation by the best critics, as it is against a book which does not generally please, and which no critical favor can make acceptable. this is so common a phenomenon that i wonder it has never hitherto suggested to criticism that its point of view was altogether mistaken, and that it was really necessary to judge books not as dead things, but as living things--things which have an influence and a power irrespective of beauty and wisdom, and merely as expressions of actuality in thought and feeling. perhaps criticism has a cumulative and final effect; perhaps it does some good we do not know of. it apparently does not affect the author directly, but it may reach him through the reader. it may in some cases enlarge or diminish his audience for a while, until he has thoroughly measured and tested his own powers. if criticism is to affect literature at all, it must be through the writers who have newly left the starting-point, and are reasonably uncertain of the race, not with those who have won it again and again in their own way. x. sometimes it has seemed to me that the crudest expression of any creative art is better than the finest comment upon it. i have sometimes suspected that more thinking, more feeling certainly, goes to the creation of a poor novel than to the production of a brilliant criticism; and if any novel of our time fails to live a hundred years, will any censure of it live? who can endure to read old reviews? one can hardly read them if they are in praise of one's own books. the author neglected or overlooked need not despair for that reason, if he will reflect that criticism can neither make nor unmake authors; that there have not been greater books since criticism became an art than there were before; that in fact the greatest books seem to have come much earlier. that which criticism seems most certainly to have done is to have put a literary consciousness into books unfelt in the early masterpieces, but unfelt now only in the books of men whose lives have been passed in activities, who have been used to employing language as they would have employed any implement, to effect an object, who have regarded a thing to be said as in no wise different from a thing to be done. in this sort i have seen no modern book so unconscious as general grant's 'personal memoirs.' the author's one end and aim is to get the facts out in words. he does not cast about for phrases, but takes the word, whatever it is, that will best give his meaning, as if it were a man or a force of men for the accomplishment of a feat of arms. there is not a moment wasted in preening and prettifying, after the fashion of literary men; there is no thought of style, and so the style is good as it is in the 'book of chronicles,' as it is in the 'pilgrim's progress,' with a peculiar, almost plebeian, plainness at times. there is no more attempt at dramatic effect than there is at ceremonious pose; things happen in that tale of a mighty war as they happened in the mighty war itself, without setting, without artificial reliefs one after another, as if they were all of one quality and degree. judgments are delivered with the same unimposing quiet; no awe surrounds the tribunal except that which comes from the weight and justice of the opinions; it is always an unaffected, unpretentious man who is talking; and throughout he prefers to wear the uniform of a private, with nothing of the general about him but the shoulder-straps, which he sometimes forgets. xi. canon fairfax,'s opinions of literary criticism are very much to my liking, perhaps because when i read them i found them so like my own, already delivered in print. he tells the critics that "they are in no sense the legislators of literature, barely even its judges and police"; and he reminds them of mr. ruskin's saying that "a bad critic is probably the most mischievous person in the world," though a sense of their relative proportion to the whole of life would perhaps acquit the worst among them of this extreme of culpability. a bad critic is as bad a thing as can be, but, after all, his mischief does not carry very far. otherwise it would be mainly the conventional books and not the original books which would survive; for the censor who imagines himself a law-giver can give law only to the imitative and never to the creative mind. criticism has condemned whatever was, from time to time, fresh and vital in literature; it has always fought the new good thing in behalf of the old good thing; it has invariably fostered and encouraged the tame, the trite, the negative. yet upon the whole it is the native, the novel, the positive that has survived in literature. whereas, if bad criticism were the most mischievous thing in the world, in the full implication of the words, it must have been the tame, the trite, the negative, that survived. bad criticism is mischievous enough, however; and i think that much if not most current criticism as practised among the english and americans is bad, is falsely principled, and is conditioned in evil. it is falsely principled because it is unprincipled, or without principles; and it is conditioned in evil because it is almost wholly anonymous. at the best its opinions are not conclusions from certain easily verifiable principles, but are effects from the worship of certain models. they are in so far quite worthless, for it is the very nature of things that the original mind cannot conform to models; it has its norm within itself; it can work only in its own way, and by its self-given laws. criticism does not inquire whether a work is true to life, but tacitly or explicitly compares it with models, and tests it by them. if literary art travelled by any such road as criticism would have it go, it would travel in a vicious circle, and would arrive only at the point of departure. yet this is the course that criticism must always prescribe when it attempts to give laws. being itself artificial, it cannot conceive of the original except as the abnormal. it must altogether reconceive its office before it can be of use to literature. it must reduce this to the business of observing, recording, and comparing; to analyzing the material before it, and then synthetizing its impressions. even then, it is not too much to say that literature as an art could get on perfectly well without it. just as many good novels, poems, plays, essays, sketches, would be written if there were no such thing as criticism in the literary world, and no more bad ones. but it will be long before criticism ceases to imagine itself a controlling force, to give itself airs of sovereignty, and to issue decrees. as it exists it is mostly a mischief, though not the greatest mischief; but it may be greatly ameliorated in character and softened in manner by the total abolition of anonymity. i think it would be safe to say that in no other relation of life is so much brutality permitted by civilized society as in the criticism of literature and the arts. canon farrar is quite right in reproaching literary criticism with the uncandor of judging an author without reference to his aims; with pursuing certain writers from spite and prejudice, and mere habit; with misrepresenting a book by quoting a phrase or passage apart from the context; with magnifying misprints and careless expressions into important faults; with abusing an author for his opinions; with base and personal motives. every writer of experience knows that certain critical journals will condemn his work without regard to its quality, even if it has never been his fortune to learn, as one author did from a repentent reviewer, that in a journal pretending to literary taste his books were given out for review with the caution, "remember that the clarion is opposed to mr. blank's books." the final conclusion appears to be that the man, or even the young lady, who is given a gun, and told to shoot at some passer from behind a hedge, is placed in circumstances of temptation almost too strong for human nature. xii. as i have already intimated, i doubt the more lasting effects of unjust criticism. it is no part of my belief that keats's fame was long delayed by it, or wordsworth's, or browning's. something unwonted, unexpected, in the quality of each delayed his recognition; each was not only a poet, he was a revolution, a new order of things, to which the critical perceptions and habitudes had painfully to adjust themselves: but i have no question of the gross and stupid injustice with which these great men were used, and of the barbarization of the public mind by the sight of the wrong inflicted on them with impunity. this savage condition still persists in the toleration of anonymous criticism, an abuse that ought to be as extinct as the torture of witnesses. it is hard enough to treat a fellow-author with respect even when one has to address him, name to name, upon the same level, in plain day; swooping down upon him in the dark, panoplied in the authority of a great journal, it is impossible. every now and then some idealist comes forward and declares that you should say nothing in criticism of a man's book which you would not say of it to his face. but i am afraid this is asking too much. i am afraid it would put an end to all criticism; and that if it were practised literature would be left to purify itself. i have no doubt literature would do this; but in such a state of things there would be no provision for the critics. we ought not to destroy critics, we ought to reform them, or rather transform them, or turn them from the assumption of authority to a realization of their true function in the civilized state. they are no worse at heart, probably, than many others, and there are probably good husbands and tender fathers, loving daughters and careful mothers, among them. it is evident to any student of human nature that the critic who is obliged to sign his review will be more careful of an author's feelings than he would if he could intangibly and invisibly deal with him as the representative of a great journal. he will be loath to have his name connected with those perversions and misstatements of an author's meaning in which the critic now indulges without danger of being turned out of honest company. he will be in some degree forced to be fair and just with a book he dislikes; he will not wish to misrepresent it when his sin can be traced directly to him in person; he will not be willing to voice the prejudice of a journal which is "opposed to the books" of this or that author; and the journal itself, when it is no longer responsible for the behavior of its critic, may find it interesting and profitable to give to an author his innings when he feels wronged by a reviewer and desires to right himself; it may even be eager to offer him the opportunity. we shall then, perhaps, frequently witness the spectacle of authors turning upon their reviewers, and improving their manners and morals by confronting them in public with the errors they may now commit with impunity. many an author smarts under injuries and indignities which he might resent to the advantage of literature and civilization, if he were not afraid of being browbeaten by the journal whose nameless critic has outraged him. the public is now of opinion that it involves loss of dignity to creative talent to try to right itself if wronged, but here we are without the requisite statistics. creative talent may come off with all the dignity it went in with, and it may accomplish a very good work in demolishing criticism. in any other relation of life the man who thinks himself wronged tries to right himself, violently, if he is a mistaken man, and lawfully if he is a wise man or a rich one, which is practically the same thing. but the author, dramatist, painter, sculptor, whose book, play, picture, statue, has been unfairly dealt with, as he believes, must make no effort to right himself with the public; he must bear his wrong in silence; he is even expected to grin and bear it, as if it were funny. every body understands that it is not funny to him, not in the least funny, but everybody says that he cannot make an effort to get the public to take his point of view without loss of dignity. this is very odd, but it is the fact, and i suppose that it comes from the feeling that the author, dramatist, painter, sculptor, has already said the best he can for his side in his book, play, picture, statue. this is partly true, and yet if he wishes to add something more to prove the critic wrong, i do not see how his attempt to do so should involve loss of dignity. the public, which is so jealous for his dignity, does not otherwise use him as if he were a very great and invaluable creature; if he fails, it lets him starve like any one else. i should say that he lost dignity or not as he behaved, in his effort to right himself, with petulance or with principle. if he betrayed a wounded vanity, if he impugned the motives and accused the lives of his critics, i should certainly feel that he was losing dignity; but if he temperately examined their theories, and tried to show where they were mistaken, i think he would not only gain dignity, but would perform a very useful work. xiii. i would beseech the literary critics of our country to disabuse themselves of the mischievous notion that they are essential to the progress of literature in the way critics have imagined. canon farrar confesses that with the best will in the world to profit by the many criticisms of his books, he has never profited in the least by any of them; and this is almost the universal experience of authors. it is not always the fault of the critics. they sometimes deal honestly and fairly by a book, and not so often they deal adequately. but in making a book, if it is at all a good book, the author has learned all that is knowable about it, and every strong point and every weak point in it, far more accurately than any one else can possibly learn them. he has learned to do better than well for the future; but if his book is bad, he cannot be taught anything about it from the outside. it will perish; and if he has not the root of literature in him, he will perish as an author with it. but what is it that gives tendency in art, then? what is it makes people like this at one time, and that at another? above all, what makes a better fashion change for a worse; how can the ugly come to be preferred to the beautiful; in other words, how can an art decay? this question came up in my mind lately with regard to english fiction and its form, or rather its formlessness. how, for instance, could people who had once known the simple verity, the refined perfection of miss austere, enjoy, anything less refined and less perfect? with her example before them, why should not english novelists have gone on writing simply, honestly, artistically, ever after? one would think it must have been impossible for them to do otherwise, if one did not remember, say, the lamentable behavior of the actors who support mr. jefferson, and their theatricality in the very presence of his beautiful naturalness. it is very difficult, that simplicity, and nothing is so hard as to be honest, as the reader, if he has ever happened to try it, must know. "the big bow-wow i can do myself, like anyone going," said scott, but he owned that the exquisite touch of miss austere was denied him; and it seems certainly to have been denied in greater or less measure to all her successors. but though reading and writing come by nature, as dogberry justly said, a taste in them may be cultivated, or once cultivated, it may be preserved; and why was it not so among those poor islanders? one does not ask such things in order to be at the pains of answering them one's self, but with the hope that some one else will take the trouble to do so, and i propose to be rather a silent partner in the enterprise, which i shall leave mainly to senor armando palacio valdes. this delightful author will, however, only be able to answer my question indirectly from the essay on fiction with which he prefaces one of his novels, the charming story of 'the sister of san sulpizio,' and i shall have some little labor in fitting his saws to my instances. it is an essay which i wish every one intending to read, or even to write, a novel, might acquaint himself with; for it contains some of the best and clearest things which have been said of the art of fiction in a time when nearly all who practise it have turned to talk about it. senor valdes is a realist, but a realist according to his own conception of realism; and he has some words of just censure for the french naturalists, whom he finds unnecessarily, and suspects of being sometimes even mercenarily, nasty. he sees the wide difference that passes between this naturalism and the realism of the english and spanish; and he goes somewhat further than i should go in condemning it. "the french naturalism represents only a moment, and an insignificant part of life." . . . it is characterized by sadness and narrowness. the prototype of this literature is the 'madame bovary' of flaubert. i am an admirer of this novelist, and especially of this novel; but often in thinking of it i have said, how dreary would literature be if it were no more than this! there is something antipathetic and gloomy and limited in it, as there is in modern french life; but this seems to me exactly the best possible reason for its being. i believe with senor valdes that "no literature can live long without joy," not because of its mistaken aesthetics, however, but because no civilization can live long without joy. the expression of french life will change when french life changes; and french naturalism is better at its worst than french unnaturalism at its best. "no one," as senor valdes truly says, "can rise from the perusal of a naturalistic book . . . without a vivid desire to escape" from the wretched world depicted in it, "and a purpose, more or less vague, of helping to better the lot and morally elevate the abject beings who figure in it. naturalistic art, then, is not immoral in itself, for then it would not merit the name of art; for though it is not the business of art to preach morality, still i think that, resting on a divine and spiritual principle, like the idea of the beautiful, it is perforce moral. i hold much more immoral other books which, under a glamour of something spiritual and beautiful and sublime, portray the vices in which we are allied to the beasts. such, for example, are the works of octave feuillet, arsene houssaye, georges ohnet, and other contemporary novelists much in vogue among the higher classes of society." but what is this idea of the beautiful which art rests upon, and so becomes moral? "the man of our time," says senor valdes, "wishes to know everything and enjoy everything: he turns the objective of a powerful equatorial towards the heavenly spaces where gravitates the infinitude of the stars, just as he applies the microscope to the infinitude of the smallest insects; for their laws are identical. his experience, united with intuition, has convinced him that in nature there is neither great nor small; all is equal. all is equally grand, all is equally just, all is equally beautiful, because all is equally divine." but beauty, senor valdes explains, exists in the human spirit, and is the beautiful effect which it receives from the true meaning of things; it does not matter what the things are, and it is the function of the artist who feels this effect to impart it to others. i may add that there is no joy in art except this perception of the meaning of things and its communication; when you have felt it, and portrayed it in a poem, a symphony, a novel, a statue, a picture, an edifice, you have fulfilled the purpose for which you were born an artist. the reflection of exterior nature in the individual spirit, senor valdes believes to be the fundamental of art. "to say, then, that the artist must not copy but create is nonsense, because he can in no wise copy, and in no wise create. he who sets deliberately about modifying nature, shows that he has not felt her beauty, and therefore cannot make others feel it. the puerile desire which some artists without genius manifest to go about selecting in nature, not what seems to them beautiful, but what they think will seem beautiful to others, and rejecting what may displease them, ordinarily produces cold and insipid works. for, instead of exploring the illimitable fields of reality, they cling to the forms invented by other artists who have succeeded, and they make statues of statues, poems of poems, novels of novels. it is entirely false that the great romantic, symbolic, or classic poets modified nature; such as they have expressed her they felt her; and in this view they are as much realists as ourselves. in like manner if in the realistic tide that now bears us on there are some spirits who feel nature in another way, in the romantic way, or the classic way, they would not falsify her in expressing her so. only those falsify her who, without feeling classic wise or romantic wise, set about being classic or romantic, wearisomely reproducing the models of former ages; and equally those who, without sharing the sentiment of realism, which now prevails, force themselves to be realists merely to follow the fashion." the pseudo-realists, in fact, are the worse offenders, to my thinking, for they sin against the living; whereas those who continue to celebrate the heroic adventures of "puss-in-boots" and the hair-breadth escapes of "tom thumb," under various aliases, only cast disrespect upon the immortals who have passed beyond these noises. xiv. "the principal cause," our spaniard says, "of the decadence of contemporary literature is found, to my thinking, in the vice which has been very graphically called effectism, or the itch of awaking at all cost in the reader vivid and violent emotions, which shall do credit to the invention and originality of the writer. this vice has its roots in human nature itself, and more particularly in that of the artist; he has always some thing feminine in him, which tempts him to coquet with the reader, and display qualities that he thinks will astonish him, as women laugh for no reason, to show their teeth when they have them white and small and even, or lift their dresses to show their feet when there is no mud in the street . . . . what many writers nowadays wish, is to produce an effect, grand and immediate, to play the part of geniuses. for this they have learned that it is only necessary to write exaggerated works in any sort, since the vulgar do not ask that they shall be quietly made to think and feel, but that they shall be startled; and among the vulgar, of course, i include the great part of those who write literary criticism, and who constitute the worst vulgar, since they teach what they do not know .. . . there are many persons who suppose that the highest proof an artist can give of his fantasy is the invention of a complicated plot, spiced with perils, surprises, and suspenses; and that anything else is the sign of a poor and tepid imagination. and not only people who seem cultivated, but are not so, suppose this, but there are sensible persons, and even sagacious and intelligent critics, who sometimes allow themselves to be hoodwinked by the dramatic mystery and the surprising and fantastic scenes of a novel. they own it is all false; but they admire the imagination, what they call the 'power' of the author. very well; all i have to say is that the 'power' to dazzle with strange incidents, to entertain with complicated plots and impossible characters, now belongs to some hundreds of writers in europe; while there are not much above a dozen who know how to interest with the ordinary events of life, and by the portrayal of characters truly human. if the former is a talent, it must be owned that it is much commoner than the latter . . . . if we are to rate novelists according to their fecundity, or the riches of their invention, we must put alexander dumas above cervantes. cervantes wrote a novel with the simplest plot, without belying much or little the natural and logical course of events. this novel which was called 'don quixote,' is perhaps the greatest work of human wit. very well; the same cervantes, mischievously influenced afterwards by the ideas of the vulgar, who were then what they are now and always will be, attempted to please them by a work giving a lively proof of his inventive talent, and wrote the 'persiles and sigismunda,' where the strange incidents, the vivid complications, the surprises, the pathetic scenes, succeed one another so rapidly and constantly that it really fatigues you . . . . but in spite of this flood of invention, imagine," says seflor valdes, "the place that cervantes would now occupy in the heaven of art, if he had never written 'don quixote,'" but only 'persiles and sigismund!' from the point of view of modern english criticism, which likes to be melted, and horrified, and astonished, and blood-curdled, and goose- fleshed, no less than to be "chippered up" in fiction, senor valdes were indeed incorrigible. not only does he despise the novel of complicated plot, and everywhere prefer 'don quixote' to 'persiles and sigismunda,' but he has a lively contempt for another class of novels much in favor with the gentilities of all countries. he calls their writers "novelists of the world," and he says that more than any others they have the rage of effectism. "they do not seek to produce effect by novelty and invention in plot . . . they seek it in character. for this end they begin by deliberately falsifying human feelings, giving them a paradoxical appearance completely inadmissible . . . . love that disguises itself as hate, incomparable energy under the cloak of weakness, virginal innocence under the aspect of malice and impudence, wit masquerading as folly, etc., etc. by this means they hope to make an effect of which they are incapable through the direct, frank, and conscientious study of character." he mentions octave feuillet as the greatest offender in this sort among the french, and bulwer among the english; but dickens is full of it (boffin in 'our mutual friend' will suffice for all example), and most drama is witness of the result of this effectism when allowed full play. but what, then, if he is not pleased with dumas, or with the effectists who delight genteel people at all the theatres, and in most of the romances, what, i ask, will satisfy this extremely difficult spanish gentleman? he would pretend, very little. give him simple, lifelike character; that is all he wants. "for me, the only condition of character is that it be human, and that is enough. if i wished to know what was human, i should study humanity." but, senor valdes, senor valdes! do not you know that this small condition of yours implies in its fulfilment hardly less than the gift of the whole earth? you merely ask that the character portrayed in fiction be human; and you suggest that the novelist should study humanity if he would know whether his personages are human. this appears to me the cruelest irony, the most sarcastic affectation of humility. if you had asked that character in fiction be superhuman, or subterhuman, or preterhuman, or intrahuman, and had bidden the novelist go, not to humanity, but the humanities, for the proof of his excellence, it would have been all very easy. the books are full of those "creations," of every pattern, of all ages, of both sexes; and it is so much handier to get at books than to get at men; and when you have portrayed "passion" instead of feeling, and used "power" instead of common-sense, and shown yourself a "genius" instead of an artist, the applause is so prompt and the glory so cheap, that really anything else seems wickedly wasteful of one's time. one may not make one's reader enjoy or suffer nobly, but one may give him the kind of pleasure that arises from conjuring, or from a puppet-show, or a modern stage-play, and leave him, if he is an old fool, in the sort of stupor that comes from hitting the pipe; or if he is a young fool, half crazed with the spectacle of qualities and impulses like his own in an apotheosis of achievement and fruition far beyond any earthly experience. but apparently senor valdes would not think this any great artistic result. "things that appear ugliest in reality to the spectator who is not an artist, are transformed into beauty and poetry when the spirit of the artist possesses itself of them. we all take part every day in a thousand domestic scenes, every day we see a thousand pictures in life, that do not make any impression upon us, or if they make any it is one of repugnance; but let the novelist come, and without betraying the truth, but painting them as they appear to his vision, he produces a most interesting work, whose perusal enchants us. that which in life left us indifferent, or repelled us, in art delights us. why? simply because the artist has made us see the idea that resides in it. let not the novelists, then, endeavor to add anything to reality, to turn it and twist it, to restrict it. since nature has endowed them with this precious gift of discovering ideas in things, their work will be beautiful if they paint these as they appear. but if the reality does not impress them, in vain will they strive to make their work impress others." xv. which brings us again, after this long way about, to jane austen and her novels, and that troublesome question about them. she was great and they were beautiful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with nature nearly a hundred years ago as realism deals with it to-day. realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material, and jane austen was the first and the last of the english novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness. because she did this, she remains the most artistic of the english novelists, and alone worthy to be matched with the great scandinavian and slavic and latin artists. it is not a question of intellect, or not wholly that. the english have mind enough; but they have not taste enough; or, rather, their taste has been perverted by their false criticism, which is based upon personal preference, and not upon, principle; which instructs a man to think that what he likes is good, instead of teaching him first to distinguish what is good before he likes it. the art of fiction, as jane austen knew it, declined from her through scott, and bulwer, and dickens, and charlotte bronte, and thackeray, and even george eliot, because the mania of romanticism had seized upon all europe, and these great writers could not escape the taint of their time; but it has shown few signs of recovery in england, because english criticism, in the presence of the continental masterpieces, has continued provincial and special and personal, and has expressed a love and a hate which had to do with the quality of the artist rather than the character of his work. it was inevitable that in their time the english romanticists should treat, as senor valdes says, "the barbarous customs of the middle ages, softening and distorting them, as walter scott and his kind did;" that they should "devote themselves to falsifying nature, refining and subtilizing sentiment, and modifying psychology after their own fancy," like bulwer and dickens, as well as like rousseau and madame de stael, not to mention balzac, the worst of all that sort at his worst. this was the natural course of the disease; but it really seems as if it were their criticism that was to blame for the rest: not, indeed, for the performance of this writer or that, for criticism can never affect the actual doing of a thing; but for the esteem in which this writer or that is held through the perpetuation of false ideals. the only observer of english middle-class life since jane austen worthy to be named with her was not george eliot, who was first ethical and then artistic, who transcended her in everything but the form and method most essential to art, and there fell hopelessly below her. it was anthony trollope who was most like her in simple honesty and instinctive truth, as unphilosophized as the light of common day; but he was so warped from a wholesome ideal as to wish at times to be like thackeray, and to stand about in his scene, talking it over with his hands in his pockets, interrupting the action, and spoiling the illusion in which alone the truth of art resides. mainly, his instinct was too much for his ideal, and with a low view of life in its civic relations and a thoroughly bourgeois soul, he yet produced works whose beauty is surpassed only by the effect of a more poetic writer in the novels of thomas hardy. yet if a vote of english criticism even at this late day, when all continental europe has the light of aesthetic truth, could be taken, the majority against these artists would be overwhelmingly in favor of a writer who had so little artistic sensibility, that he never hesitated on any occasion, great or small, to make a foray among his characters, and catch them up to show them to the reader and tell him how beautiful or ugly they were; and cry out over their amazing properties. "how few materials," says emerson, "are yet used by our arts! the mass of creatures and of qualities are still hid and expectant," and to break new ground is still one of the uncommonest and most heroic of the virtues. the artists are not alone to blame for the timidity that keeps them in the old furrows of the worn-out fields; most of those whom they live to please, or live by pleasing, prefer to have them remain there; it wants rare virtue to appreciate what is new, as well as to invent it; and the "easy things to understand" are the conventional things. this is why the ordinary english novel, with its hackneyed plot, scenes, and figures, is more comfortable to the ordinary american than an american novel, which deals, at its worst, with comparatively new interests and motives. to adjust one's self to the enjoyment of these costs an intellectual effort, and an intellectual effort is what no ordinary person likes to make. it is only the extraordinary person who can say, with emerson: "i ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic . . . . i embrace the common; i sit at the feet of the familiar and the low . . . . man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote . . . . the perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries . . . . the foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual . . . . to-day always looks mean to the thoughtless; but to-day is a king in disguise . . . . banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of troy and the temple of delphos." perhaps we ought not to deny their town of troy and their temple of delphos to the dull people; but if we ought, and if we did, they would still insist upon having them. an english novel, full of titles and rank, is apparently essential to the happiness of such people; their weak and childish imagination is at home in its familiar environment; they know what they are reading; the fact that it is hash many times warmed over reassures them; whereas a story of our own life, honestly studied and faithfully represented, troubles them with varied misgiving. they are not sure that it is literature; they do not feel that it is good society; its characters, so like their own, strike them as commonplace; they say they do not wish to know such people. everything in england is appreciable to the literary sense, while the sense of the literary worth of things in america is still faint and weak with most people, with the vast majority who "ask for the great, the remote, the romantic," who cannot "embrace the common," cannot "sit at the feet of the familiar and the low," in the good company of emerson. we are all, or nearly all, struggling to be distinguished from the mass, and to be set apart in select circles and upper classes like the fine people we have read about. we are really a mixture of the plebeian ingredients of the whole world; but that is not bad; our vulgarity consists in trying to ignore "the worth of the vulgar," in believing that the superfine is better. xvii. another spanish novelist of our day, whose books have given me great pleasure, is so far from being of the same mind of senor valdes about fiction that he boldly declares himself, in the preface to his 'pepita ximenez,' "an advocate of art for art's sake." i heartily agree with him that it is "in very bad taste, always impertinent and often pedantic, to attempt to prove theses by writing stories," and yet if it is true that "the object of a novel should be to charm through a faithful representation of human actions and human passions, and to create by this fidelity to nature a beautiful work," and if "the creation of the beautiful" is solely "the object of art," it never was and never can be solely its effect as long as men are men and women are women. if ever the race is resolved into abstract qualities, perhaps this may happen; but till then the finest effect of the "beautiful" will be ethical and not aesthetic merely. morality penetrates all things, it is the soul of all things. beauty may clothe it on, whether it is false morality and an evil soul, or whether it is true and a good soul. in the one case the beauty will corrupt, and in the other it will edify, and in either case it will infallibly and inevitably have an ethical effect, now light, now grave, according as the thing is light or grave. we cannot escape from this; we are shut up to it by the very conditions of our being. for the moment, it is charming to have a story end happily, but after one has lived a certain number of years, and read a certain number of novels, it is not the prosperous or adverse fortune of the characters that affects one, but the good or bad faith of the novelist in dealing with them. will he play us false or will he be true in the operation of this or that principle involved? i cannot hold him to less account than this: he must be true to what life has taught me is the truth, and after that he may let any fate betide his people; the novel ends well that ends faithfully. the greater his power, the greater his responsibility before the human conscience, which is god in us. but men come and go, and what they do in their limited physical lives is of comparatively little moment; it is what they say that really survives to bless or to ban; and it is the evil which wordsworth felt in goethe, that must long sur vive him. there is a kind of thing--a kind of metaphysical lie against righteousness and common-sense which is called the unmoral; and is supposed to be different from the immoral; and it is this which is supposed to cover many of the faults of goethe. his 'wilhelm meister,' for example, is so far removed within the region of the "ideal" that its unprincipled, its evil principled, tenor in regard to women is pronounced "unmorality," and is therefore inferably harmless. but no study of goethe is complete without some recognition of the qualities which caused wordsworth to hurl the book across the room with an indignant perception of its sensuality. for the sins of his life goethe was perhaps sufficiently punished in his life by his final marriage with christiane; for the sins of his literature many others must suffer. i do not despair, however, of the day when the poor honest herd of man kind shall give universal utterance to the universal instinct, and shall hold selfish power in politics, in art, in religion, for the devil that it is; when neither its crazy pride nor its amusing vanity shall be flattered by the puissance of the "geniuses" who have forgotten their duty to the common weakness, and have abused it to their own glory. in that day we shall shudder at many monsters of passion, of self-indulgence, of heartlessness, whom we still more or less openly adore for their "genius," and shall account no man worshipful whom we do not feel and know to be good. the spectacle of strenuous achievement will then not dazzle or mislead; it will not sanctify or palliate iniquity; it will only render it the more hideous and pitiable. in fact, the whole belief in "genius" seems to me rather a mischievous superstition, and if not mischievous always, still always a superstition. from the account of those who talk about it, "genius" appears to be the attribute of a sort of very potent and admirable prodigy which god has created out of the common for the astonishment and confusion of the rest of us poor human beings. but do they really believe it? do they mean anything more or less than the mastery which comes to any man according to his powers and diligence in any direction? if not, why not have an end of the superstition which has caused our race to go on so long writing and reading of the difference between talent and genius? it is within the memory of middle-aged men that the maelstrom existed in the belief of the geographers, but we now get on perfectly well without it; and why should we still suffer under the notion of "genius" which keeps so many poor little authorlings trembling in question whether they have it, or have only "talent"? one of the greatest captains who ever lived [general u. s. grant d.w.] --a plain, taciturn, unaffected soul--has told the story of his wonderful life as unconsciously as if it were all an every-day affair, not different from other lives, except as a great exigency of the human race gave it importance. so far as he knew, he had no natural aptitude for arms, and certainly no love for the calling. but he went to west point because, as he quaintly tells us, his father "rather thought he would go"; and he fought through one war with credit, but without glory. the other war, which was to claim his powers and his science, found him engaged in the most prosaic of peaceful occupations; he obeyed its call because he loved his country, and not because he loved war. all the world knows the rest, and all the world knows that greater military mastery has not been shown than his campaigns illustrated. he does not say this in his book, or hint it in any way; he gives you the facts, and leaves them with you. but the personal memoirs of u. s. grant, written as simply and straightforwardly as his battles were fought, couched in the most unpretentious phrase, with never a touch of grandiosity or attitudinizing, familiar, homely in style, form a great piece of literature, because great literature is nothing more nor less than the clear expression of minds that have some thing great in them, whether religion, or beauty, or deep experience. probably grant would have said that he had no more vocation to literature than he had to war. he owns, with something like contrition, that he used to read a great many novels; but we think he would have denied the soft impeachment of literary power. nevertheless, he shows it, as he showed military power, unexpectedly, almost miraculously. all the conditions here, then, are favorable to supposing a case of "genius." yet who would trifle with that great heir of fame, that plain, grand, manly soul, by speaking of "genius" and him together? who calls washington a genius? or franklin, or bismarck, or cavour, or columbus, or luther, or darwin, or lincoln? were these men second-rate in their way? or is "genius" that indefinable, preternatural quality, sacred to the musicians, the painters, the sculptors, the actors, the poets, and above all, the poets? or is it that the poets, having most of the say in this world, abuse it to shameless self-flattery, and would persuade the inarticulate classes that they are on peculiar terms of confidence with the deity? xviii. in general grant's confession of novel-reading there is a sort of inference that he had wasted his time, or else the guilty conscience of the novelist in me imagines such an inference. but however this may be, there is certainly no question concerning the intention of a correspondent who once wrote to me after reading some rather bragging claims i had made for fiction as a mental and moral means. "i have very grave doubts," he said, "as to the whole list of magnificent things that you seem to think novels have done for the race, and can witness in myself many evil things which they have done for me. whatever in my mental make-up is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever is injurious, i can trace to the perusal of some work of fiction. worse than that, they beget such high-strung and supersensitive ideas of life that plain industry and plodding perseverance are despised, and matter- of-fact poverty, or every-day, commonplace distress, meets with no sympathy, if indeed noticed at all, by one who has wept over the impossibly accumulated sufferings of some gaudy hero or heroine." i am not sure that i had the controversy with this correspondent that he seemed to suppose; but novels are now so fully accepted by every one pretending to cultivated taste and they really form the whole intellectual life of such immense numbers of people, without question of their influence, good or bad, upon the mind that it is refreshing to have them frankly denounced, and to be invited to revise one's ideas and feelings in regard to them. a little honesty, or a great deal of honesty, in this quest will do the novel, as we hope yet to have it, and as we have already begun to have it, no harm; and for my own part i will confess that i believe fiction in the past to have been largely injurious, as i believe the stage-play to be still almost wholly injurious, through its falsehood, its folly, its wantonness, and its aimlessness. it may be safely assumed that most of the novel-reading which people fancy an intellectual pastime is the emptiest dissipation, hardly more related to thought or the wholesome exercise of the mental faculties than opium-eating; in either case the brain is drugged, and left weaker and crazier for the debauch. if this may be called the negative result of the fiction habit, the positive injury that most novels work is by no means so easily to be measured in the case of young men whose character they help so much to form or deform, and the women of all ages whom they keep so much in ignorance of the world they misrepresent. grown men have little harm from them, but in the other cases, which are the vast majority, they hurt because they are not true --not because they are malevolent, but because they are idle lies about human nature and the social fabric, which it behooves us to know and to understand, that we may deal justly with ourselves and with one another. one need not go so far as our correspondent, and trace to the fiction habit "whatever is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever is injurious," in one's life; bad as the fiction habit is it is probably not responsible for the whole sum of evil in its victims, and i believe that if the reader will use care in choosing from this fungus-growth with which the fields of literature teem every day, he may nourish himself as with the true mushroom, at no risk from the poisonous species. the tests are very plain and simple, and they are perfectly infallible. if a novel flatters the passions, and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous; it may not kill, but it will certainly injure; and this test will alone exclude an entire class of fiction, of which eminent examples will occur to all. then the whole spawn of so-called unmoral romances, which imagine a world where the sins of sense are unvisited by the penalties following, swift or slow, but inexorably sure, in the real world, are deadly poison: these do kill. the novels that merely tickle our prejudices and lull our judgment, or that coddle our sensibilities or pamper our gross appetite for the marvellous, are not so fatal, but they are innutritious, and clog the soul with unwholesome vapors of all kinds. no doubt they too help to weaken the moral fibre, and make their readers indifferent to "plodding perseverance and plain industry," and to "matter-of-fact poverty and commonplace distress." without taking them too seriously, it still must be owned that the "gaudy hero and heroine" are to blame for a great deal of harm in the world. that heroine long taught by example, if not precept, that love, or the passion or fancy she mistook for it, was the chief interest of a life, which is really concerned with a great many other things; that it was lasting in the way she knew it; that it was worthy of every sacrifice, and was altogether a finer thing than prudence, obedience, reason; that love alone was glorious and beautiful, and these were mean and ugly in comparison with it. more lately she has begun to idolize and illustrate duty, and she is hardly less mischievous in this new role, opposing duty, as she did love, to prudence, obedience, and reason. the stock hero, whom, if we met him, we could not fail to see was a most deplorable person, has undoubtedly imposed himself upon the victims of the fiction habit as admirable. with him, too, love was and is the great affair, whether in its old romantic phase of chivalrous achievement or manifold suffering for love's sake, or its more recent development of the "virile," the bullying, and the brutal, or its still more recent agonies of self-sacrifice, as idle and useless as the moral experiences of the insane asylums. with his vain posturings and his ridiculous splendor he is really a painted barbarian, the prey of his passions and his delusions, full of obsolete ideals, and the motives and ethics of a savage, which the guilty author of his being does his best--or his worst --in spite of his own light and knowledge, to foist upon the reader as something generous and noble. i am not merely bringing this charge against that sort of fiction which is beneath literature and outside of it, "the shoreless lakes of ditch-water," whose miasms fill the air below the empyrean where the great ones sit; but i am accusing the work of some of the most famous, who have, in this instance or in that, sinned against the truth, which can alone exalt and purify men. i do not say that they have constantly done so, or even commonly done so; but that they have done so at all marks them as of the past, to be read with the due historical allowance for their epoch and their conditions. for i believe that, while inferior writers will and must continue to imitate them in their foibles and their errors, no one here after will be able to achieve greatness who is false to humanity, either in its facts or its duties. the light of civilization has already broken even upon the novel, and no conscientious man can now set about painting an image of life without perpetual question of the verity of his work, and without feeling bound to distinguish so clearly that no reader of his may be misled, between what is right and what is wrong, what is noble and what is base, what is health and what is perdition, in the actions and the characters he portrays. the fiction that aims merely to entertain--the fiction that is to serious fiction as the opera-bouffe, the ballet, and the pantomime are to the true drama--need not feel the burden of this obligation so deeply; but even such fiction will not be gay or trivial to any reader's hurt, and criticism should hold it to account if it passes from painting to teaching folly. i confess that i do not care to judge any work of the imagination without first of all applying this test to it. we must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, is it true?--true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women? this truth, which necessarily includes the highest morality and the highest artistry --this truth given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak; and without it all graces of style and feats of invention and cunning of construction are so many superfluities of naughtiness. it is well for the truth to have all these, and shine in them, but for falsehood they are merely meretricious, the bedizenment of the wanton; they atone for nothing, they count for nothing. but in fact they come naturally of truth, and grace it without solicitation; they are added unto it. in the whole range of fiction i know of no true picture of life--that is, of human nature--which is not also a masterpiece of literature, full of divine and natural beauty. it may have no touch or tint of this special civilization or of that; it had better have this local color well ascertained; but the truth is deeper and finer than aspects, and if the book is true to what men and women know of one another's souls it will be true enough, and it will be great and beautiful. it is the conception of literature as something apart from life, superfinely aloof, which makes it really unimportant to the great mass of mankind, without a message or a meaning for them; and it is the notion that a novel may be false in its portrayal of causes and effects that makes literary art contemptible even to those whom it amuses, that forbids them to regard the novelist as a serious or right-minded person. if they do not in some moment of indignation cry out against all novels, as my correspondent does, they remain besotted in the fume of the delusions purveyed to them, with no higher feeling for the author than such maudlin affection as the frequenter of an opium-joint perhaps knows for the attendant who fills his pipe with the drug. or, as in the case of another correspondent who writes that in his youth he "read a great many novels, but always regarded it as an amusement, like horse racing and card-playing," for which he had no time when he entered upon the serious business of life, it renders them merely contemptuous. his view of the matter may be commended to the brotherhood and sisterhood of novelists as full of wholesome if bitter suggestion; and i urge them not to dismiss it with high literary scorn as that of some boeotian dull to the beauty of art. refuse it as we may, it is still the feeling of the vast majority of people for whom life is earnest, and who find only a distorted and misleading likeness of it in our books. we may fold ourselves in our scholars' gowns, and close the doors of our studies, and affect to despise this rude voice; but we cannot shut it out. it comes to us from wherever men are at work, from wherever they are truly living, and accuses us of unfaithfulness, of triviality, of mere stage-play; and none of us can escape conviction except he prove himself worthy of his time--a time in which the great masters have brought literature back to life, and filled its ebbing veins with the red tides of reality. we cannot all equal them; we need not copy them; but we can all go to the sources of their inspiration and their power; and to draw from these no one need go far--no one need really go out of himself. fifty years ago, carlyle, in whom the truth was always alive, but in whom it was then unperverted by suffering, by celebrity, and by despair, wrote in his study of diderot: "were it not reasonable to prophesy that this exceeding great multitude of novel-writers and such like must, in a new generation, gradually do one of two things: either retire into the nurseries, and work for children, minors, and semi-fatuous persons of both sexes, or else, what were far better, sweep their novel-fabric into the dust-cart, and betake themselves with such faculty as they have to understand and record what is true, of which surely there is, and will forever be, a whole infinitude unknown to us of infinite importance to us? poetry, it will more and more come to be understood, is nothing but higher knowledge; and the only genuine romance (for grown persons), reality." if, after half a century, fiction still mainly works for "children, minors, and semi-fatuous persons of both sexes," it is nevertheless one of the hopefulest signs of the world's progress that it has begun to work for "grown persons," and if not exactly in the way that carlyle might have solely intended in urging its writers to compile memoirs instead of building the "novel-fabric," still it has, in the highest and widest sense, already made reality its romance. i cannot judge it, i do not even care for it, except as it has done this; and i can hardly conceive of a literary self-respect in these days compatible with the old trade of make-believe, with the production of the kind of fiction which is too much honored by classification with card-playing and horse-racing. but let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires; let it show the different interests in their true proportions; let it forbear to preach pride and revenge, folly and insanity, egotism and prejudice, but frankly own these for what they are, in whatever figures and occasions they appear; let it not put on fine literary airs; let it speak the dialect, the language, that most americans know--the language of unaffected people everywhere--and there can be no doubt of an unlimited future, not only of delightfulness but of usefulness, for it. xix. this is what i say in my severer moods, but at other times i know that, of course, no one is going to hold all fiction to such strict account. there is a great deal of it which may be very well left to amuse us, if it can, when we are sick or when we are silly, and i am not inclined to despise it in the performance of this office. or, if people find pleasure in having their blood curdled for the sake of having it uncurdled again at the end of the book, i would not interfere with their amusement, though i do not desire it. there is a certain demand in primitive natures for the kind of fiction that does this, and the author of it is usually very proud of it. the kind of novels he likes, and likes to write, are intended to take his reader's mind, or what that reader would probably call his mind, off himself; they make one forget life and all its cares and duties; they are not in the least like the novels which make you think of these, and shame you into at least wishing to be a helpfuller and wholesomer creature than you are. no sordid details of verity here, if you please; no wretched being humbly and weakly struggling to do right and to be true, suffering for his follies and his sins, tasting joy only through the mortification of self, and in the help of others; nothing of all this, but a great, whirling splendor of peril and achievement, a wild scene of heroic adventure and of emotional ground and lofty tumbling, with a stage "picture" at the fall of the curtain, and all the good characters in a row, their left hands pressed upon their hearts, and kissing their right hands to the audience, in the old way that has always charmed and always will charm, heaven bless it! in a world which loves the spectacular drama and the practically bloodless sports of the modern amphitheatre the author of this sort of fiction has his place, and we must not seek to destroy him because he fancies it the first place. in fact, it is a condition of his doing well the kind of work he does that he should think it important, that he should believe in himself; and i would not take away this faith of his, even if i could. as i say, he has his place. the world often likes to forget itself, and he brings on his heroes, his goblins, his feats, his hair-breadth escapes, his imminent deadly breaches, and the poor, foolish, childish old world renews the excitements of its nonage. perhaps this is a work of beneficence; and perhaps our brave conjurer in his cabalistic robe is a philanthropist in disguise. within the last four or five years there has been throughout the whole english-speaking world what mr. grant allen happily calls the "recrudescence" of taste in fiction. the effect is less noticeable in america than in england, where effete philistinism, conscious of the dry-rot of its conventionality, is casting about for cure in anything that is wild and strange and unlike itself. but the recrudescence has been evident enough here, too; and a writer in one of our periodicals has put into convenient shape some common errors concerning popularity as a test of merit in a book. he seems to think, for instance, that the love of the marvellous and impossible in fiction, which is shown not only by "the unthinking multitude clamoring about the book counters" for fiction of that sort, but by the "literary elect" also, is proof of some principle in human nature which ought to be respected as well as tolerated. he seems to believe that the ebullition of this passion forms a sufficient answer to those who say that art should represent life, and that the art which misrepresents life is feeble art and false art. but it appears to me that a little carefuller reasoning from a little closer inspection of the facts would not have brought him to these conclusions. in the first place, i doubt very much whether the "literary elect" have been fascinated in great numbers by the fiction in question; but if i supposed them to have really fallen under that spell, i should still be able to account for their fondness and that of the "unthinking multitude" upon the same grounds, without honoring either very much. it is the habit of hasty casuists to regard civilization as inclusive of all the members of a civilized community; but this is a palpable error. many persons in every civilized community live in a state of more or less evident savagery with respect to their habits, their morals, and their propensities; and they are held in check only by the law. many more yet are savage in their tastes, as they show by the decoration of their houses and persons, and by their choice of books and pictures; and these are left to the restraints of public opinion. in fact, no man can be said to be thoroughly civilized or always civilized; the most refined, the most enlightened person has his moods, his moments of barbarism, in which the best, or even the second best, shall not please him. at these times the lettered and the unlettered are alike primitive and their gratifications are of the same simple sort; the highly cultivated person may then like melodrama, impossible fiction, and the trapeze as sincerely and thoroughly as a boy of thirteen or a barbarian of any age. i do not blame him for these moods; i find something instructive and interesting in them; but if they lastingly established themselves in him, i could not help deploring the state of that person. no one can really think that the "literary elect," who are said to have joined the "unthinking multitude" in clamoring about the book counters for the romances of no-man's land, take the same kind of pleasure in them as they do in a novel of tolstoy, tourguenief, george eliot, thackeray, balzac, manzoni, hawthorne, mr. henry james, mr. thomas hardy, senor palacio valdes, or even walter scott. they have joined the "unthinking multitude," perhaps because they are tired of thinking, and expect to find relaxation in feeling--feeling crudely, grossly, merely. for once in a way there is no great harm in this; perhaps no harm at all. it is perfectly natural; let them have their innocent debauch. but let us distinguish, for our own sake and guidance, between the different kinds of things that please the same kind of people; between the things that please them habitually and those that please them occasionally; between the pleasures that edify them and those that amuse them. otherwise we shall be in danger of becoming permanently part of the "unthinking multitude," and of remaining puerile, primitive, savage. we shall be so in moods and at moments; but let us not fancy that those are high moods or fortunate moments. if they are harmless, that is the most that can be said for them. they are lapses from which we can perhaps go forward more vigorously; but even this is not certain. my own philosophy of the matter, however, would not bring me to prohibition of such literary amusements as the writer quoted seems to find significant of a growing indifference to truth and sanity in fiction. once more, i say, these amusements have their place, as the circus has, and the burlesque and negro minstrelsy, and the ballet, and prestidigitation. no one of these is to be despised in its place; but we had better understand that it is not the highest place, and that it is hardly an intellectual delight. the lapse of all the "literary elect" in the world could not dignify unreality; and their present mood, if it exists, is of no more weight against that beauty in literature which comes from truth alone, and never can come from anything else, than the permanent state of the "unthinking multitude." yet even as regards the "unthinking multitude," i believe i am not able to take the attitude of the writer i have quoted. i am afraid that i respect them more than he would like to have me, though i cannot always respect their taste, any more than that of the "literary elect." i respect them for their good sense in most practical matters; for their laborious, honest lives; for their kindness, their good-will; for that aspiration towards something better than themselves which seems to stir, however dumbly, in every human breast not abandoned to literary pride or other forms of self-righteousness. i find every man interesting, whether he thinks or unthinks, whether he is savage or civilized; for this reason i cannot thank the novelist who teaches us not to know but to unknow our kind. yet i should by no means hold him to such strict account as emerson, who felt the absence of the best motive, even in the greatest of the masters, when he said of shakespeare that, after all, he was only master of the revels. the judgment is so severe, even with the praise which precedes it, that one winces under it; and if one is still young, with the world gay before him, and life full of joyous promise, one is apt to ask, defiantly, well, what is better than being such a master of the revels as shakespeare was? let each judge for himself. to the heart again of serious youth, uncontaminate and exigent of ideal good, it must always be a grief that the great masters seem so often to have been willing to amuse the leisure and vacancy of meaner men, and leave their mission to the soul but partially fulfilled. this, perhaps, was what emerson had in mind; and if he had it in mind of shakespeare, who gave us, with his histories and comedies and problems, such a searching homily as "macbeth," one feels that he scarcely recognized the limitations of the dramatist's art. few consciences, at times, seem so enlightened as that of this personally unknown person, so withdrawn into his work, and so lost to the intensest curiosity of after-time; at other times he seems merely elizabethan in his coarseness, his courtliness, his imperfect sympathy. xx. of the finer kinds of romance, as distinguished from the novel, i would even encourage the writing, though it is one of the hard conditions of romance that its personages starting with a 'parti pris' can rarely be characters with a living growth, but are apt to be types, limited to the expression of one principle, simple, elemental, lacking the god-given complexity of motive which we find in all the human beings we know. hawthorne, the great master of the romance, had the insight and the power to create it anew as a kind in fiction; though i am not sure that 'the scarlet letter' and the 'blithedale romance' are not, strictly speaking, novels rather than romances. they, do not play with some old superstition long outgrown, and they do not invent a new superstition to play with, but deal with things vital in every one's pulse. i am not saying that what may be called the fantastic romance--the romance that descends from 'frankenstein' rather than 'the scarlet letter'--ought not to be. on the contrary, i should grieve to lose it, as i should grieve to lose the pantomime or the comic opera, or many other graceful things that amuse the passing hour, and help us to live agreeably in a world where men actually sin, suffer, and die. but it belongs to the decorative arts, and though it has a high place among them, it cannot be ranked with the works of the imagination--the works that represent and body forth human experience. its ingenuity, can always afford a refined pleasure, and it can often, at some risk to itself, convey a valuable truth. perhaps the whole region of historical romance might be reopened with advantage to readers and writers who cannot bear to be brought face to face with human nature, but require the haze of distance or a far perspective, in which all the disagreeable details shall be lost. there is no good reason why these harmless people should not be amused, or their little preferences indulged. but here, again, i have my modest doubts, some recent instances are so fatuous, as far as the portrayal of character goes, though i find them admirably contrived in some respects. when i have owned the excellence of the staging in every respect, and the conscience with which the carpenter (as the theatrical folks say) has done his work, i am at the end of my praises. the people affect me like persons of our generation made up for the parts; well trained, well costumed, but actors, and almost amateurs. they have the quality that makes the histrionics of amateurs endurable; they are ladies and gentlemen; the worst, the wickedest of them, is a lady or gentleman behind the scene. yet, no doubt it is well that there should be a reversion to the earlier types of thinking and feeling, to earlier ways of looking at human nature, and i will not altogether refuse the pleasure offered me by the poetic romancer or the historical romancer because i find my pleasure chiefly in tolstoy and valdes and thomas hardy and tourguenief, and balzac at his best. xxi. it used to be one of the disadvantages of the practice of romance in america, which hawthorne more or less whimsically lamented, that there were so few shadows and inequalities in our broad level of prosperity; and it is one of the reflections suggested by dostoievsky's novel, 'the crime and the punishment,' that whoever struck a note so profoundly tragic in american fiction would do a false and mistaken thing--as false and as mistaken in its way as dealing in american fiction with certain nudities which the latin peoples seem to find edifying. whatever their deserts, very few american novelists have been led out to be shot, or finally exiled to the rigors of a winter at duluth; and in a land where journeymen carpenters and plumbers strike for four dollars a day the sum of hunger and cold is comparatively small, and the wrong from class to class has been almost inappreciable, though all this is changing for the worse. our novelists, therefore, concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more american, and seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests. it is worth while, even at the risk of being called commonplace, to be true to our well-to-do actualities; the very passions themselves seem to be softened and modified by conditions which formerly at least could not be said to wrong any one, to cramp endeavor, or to cross lawful desire. sin and suffering and shame there must always be in the world, i suppose, but i believe that in this new world of ours it is still mainly from one to another one, and oftener still from one to one's self. we have death, too, in america, and a great deal of disagreeable and painful disease, which the multiplicity of our patent medicines does not seem to cure; but this is tragedy that comes in the very nature of things, and is not peculiarly american, as the large, cheerful average of health and success and happy life is. it will not do to boast, but it is well to be true to the facts, and to see that, apart from these purely mortal troubles, the race here has enjoyed conditions in which most of the ills that have darkened its annals might be averted by honest work and unselfish behavior. fine artists we have among us, and right-minded as far as they go; and we must not forget this at evil moments when it seems as if all the women had taken to writing hysterical improprieties, and some of the men were trying to be at least as hysterical in despair of being as improper. other traits are much more characteristic of our life and our fiction. in most american novels, vivid and graphic as the best of them are, the people are segregated if not sequestered, and the scene is sparsely populated. the effect may be in instinctive response to the vacancy of our social life, and i shall not make haste to blame it. there are few places, few occasions among us, in which a novelist can get a large number of polite people together, or at least keep them together. unless he carries a snap-camera his picture of them has no probability; they affect one like the figures perfunctorily associated in such deadly old engravings as that of "washington irving and his friends." perhaps it is for this reason that we excel in small pieces with three or four figures, or in studies of rustic communities, where there is propinquity if not society. our grasp of more urbane life is feeble; most attempts to assemble it in our pictures are failures, possibly because it is too transitory, too intangible in its nature with us, to be truthfully represented as really existent. i am not sure that the americans have not brought the short story nearer perfection in the all-round sense that almost any other people, and for reasons very simple and near at hand. it might be argued from the national hurry and impatience that it was a literary form peculiarly adapted to the american temperament, but i suspect that its extraordinary development among us is owing much more to more tangible facts. the success of american magazines, which is nothing less than prodigious, is only commensurate with their excellence. their sort of success is not only from the courage to decide which ought to please, but from the knowledge of what does please; and it is probable that, aside from the pictures, it is the short stories which please the readers of our best magazines. the serial novels they must have, of course; but rather more of course they must have short stories, and by operation of the law of supply and demand, the short stories, abundant in quantity and excellent in quality, are forthcoming because they are wanted. by another operation of the same law, which political economists have more recently taken account of, the demand follows the supply, and short stories are sought for because there is a proven ability to furnish them, and people read them willingly because they are usually very good. the art of writing them is now so disciplined and diffused with us that there is no lack either for the magazines or for the newspaper "syndicates" which deal in them almost to the exclusion of the serials. an interesting fact in regard to the different varieties of the short story among us is that the sketches and studies by the women seem faithfuller and more realistic than those of the men, in proportion to their number. their tendency is more distinctly in that direction, and there is a solidity, an honest observation, in the work of such women, which often leaves little to be desired. i should, upon the whole, be disposed to rank american short stories only below those of such russian writers as i have read, and i should praise rather than blame their free use of our different local parlances, or "dialects," as people call them. i like this because i hope that our inherited english may be constantly freshened and revived from the native sources which our literary decentralization will help to keep open, and i will own that as i turn over novels coming from philadelphia, from new mexico, from boston, from tennessee, from rural new england, from new york, every local flavor of diction gives me courage and pleasure. alphonse daudet, in a conversation with h. h. boyesen said, speaking of tourguenief, "what a luxury it must be to have a great big untrodden barbaric language to wade into! we poor fellows who work in the language of an old civilization, we may sit and chisel our little verbal felicities, only to find in the end that it is a borrowed jewel we are polishing. the crown- jewels of our french tongue have passed through the hands of so many generations of monarchs that it seems like presumption on the part of any late-born pretender to attempt to wear them." this grief is, of course, a little whimsical, yet it has a certain measure of reason in it, and the same regret has been more seriously expressed by the italian poet aleardi: "muse of an aged people, in the eve of fading civilization, i was born. . . . . . . oh, fortunate, my sisters, who in the heroic dawn of races sung! to them did destiny give the virgin fire and chaste ingenuousness of their land's speech; and, reverenced, their hands ran over potent strings." it will never do to allow that we are at such a desperate pass in english, but something of this divine despair we may feel too in thinking of "the spacious times of great elizabeth," when the poets were trying the stops of the young language, and thrilling with the surprises of their own music. we may comfort ourselves, however, unless we prefer a luxury of grief, by remembering that no language is ever old on the lips of those who speak it, no matter how decrepit it drops from the pen. we have only to leave our studies, editorial and other, and go into the shops and fields to find the "spacious times" again; and from the beginning realism, before she had put on her capital letter, had divined this near-at-hand truth along with the rest. lowell, almost the greatest and finest realist who ever wrought in verse, showed us that elizabeth was still queen where he heard yankee farmers talk. one need not invite slang into the company of its betters, though perhaps slang has been dropping its "s" and becoming language ever since the world began, and is certainly sometimes delightful and forcible beyond the reach of the dictionary. i would not have any one go about for new words, but if one of them came aptly, not to reject its help. for our novelists to try to write americanly, from any motive, would be a dismal error, but being born americans, i then use "americanisms" whenever these serve their turn; and when their characters speak, i should like to hear them speak true american, with all the varying tennesseean, philadelphian, bostonian, and new york accents. if we bother ourselves to write what the critics imagine to be "english," we shall be priggish and artificial, and still more so if we make our americans talk "english." there is also this serious disadvantage about "english," that if we wrote the best "english" in the world, probably the english themselves would not know it, or, if they did, certainly would not own it. it has always been supposed by grammarians and purists that a language can be kept as they find it; but languages, while they live, are perpetually changing. god apparently meant them for the common people; and the common people will use them freely as they use other gifts of god. on their lips our continental english will differ more and more from the insular english, and i believe that this is not deplorable, but desirable. in fine, i would have our american novelists be as american as they unconsciously can. matthew arnold complained that he found no "distinction" in our life, and i would gladly persuade all artists intending greatness in any kind among us that the recognition of the fact pointed out by mr. arnold ought to be a source of inspiration to them, and not discouragement. we have been now some hundred years building up a state on the affirmation of the essential equality of men in their rights and duties, and whether we have been right or been wrong the gods have taken us at our word, and have responded to us with a civilization in which there is no "distinction" perceptible to the eye that loves and values it. such beauty and such grandeur as we have is common beauty, common grandeur, or the beauty and grandeur in which the quality of solidarity so prevails that neither distinguishes itself to the disadvantage of anything else. it seems to me that these conditions invite the artist to the study and the appreciation of the common, and to the portrayal in every art of those finer and higher aspects which unite rather than sever humanity, if he would thrive in our new order of things. the talent that is robust enough to front the every-day world and catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face, need not fear the encounter, though it seems terrible to the sort nurtured in the superstition of the romantic, the bizarre, the heroic, the distinguished, as the things alone worthy of painting or carving or writing. the arts must become democratic, and then we shall have the expression of america in art; and the reproach which arnold was half right in making us shall have no justice in it any longer; we shall be "distinguished." xxii. in the mean time it has been said with a superficial justice that our fiction is narrow; though in the same sense i suppose the present english fiction is as narrow as our own; and most modern fiction is narrow in a certain sense. in italy the best men are writing novels as brief and restricted in range as ours; in spain the novels are intense and deep, and not spacious; the french school, with the exception of zola, is narrow; the norwegians are narrow; the russians, except tolstoy, are narrow, and the next greatest after him, tourguenief, is the narrowest great novelist, as to mere dimensions, that ever lived, dealing nearly always with small groups, isolated and analyzed in the most american fashion. in fact, the charge of narrowness accuses the whole tendency of modern fiction as much as the american school. but i do not by any means allow that this narrowness is a defect, while denying that it is a universal characteristic of our fiction; it is rather, for the present, a virtue. indeed, i should call the present american work, north and south, thorough rather than narrow. in one sense it is as broad as life, for each man is a microcosm, and the writer who is able to acquaint us intimately with half a dozen people, or the conditions of a neighborhood or a class, has done something which cannot in any, bad sense be called narrow; his breadth is vertical instead of lateral, that is all; and this depth is more desirable than horizontal expansion in a civilization like ours, where the differences are not of classes, but of types, and not of types either so much as of characters. a new method was necessary in dealing with the new conditions, and the new method is worldwide, because the whole world is more or less americanized. tolstoy is exceptionally voluminous among modern writers, even russian writers; and it might be said that the forte of tolstoy himself is not in his breadth sidewise, but in his breadth upward and downward. 'the death of ivan ilyitch' leaves as vast an impression on the reader's soul as any episode of 'war and peace,' which, indeed, can be recalled only in episodes, and not as a whole. i think that our writers may be safely counselled to continue their work in the modern way, because it is the best way yet known. if they make it true, it will be large, no matter what its superficies are; and it would be the greatest mistake to try to make it big. a big book is necessarily a group of episodes more or less loosely connected by a thread of narrative, and there seems no reason why this thread must always be supplied. each episode may be quite distinct, or it may be one of a connected group; the final effect will be from the truth of each episode, not from the size of the group. the whole field of human experience as never so nearly covered by imaginative literature in any age as in this; and american life especially is getting represented with unexampled fulness. it is true that no one writer, no one book, represents it, for that is not possible; our social and political decentralization forbids this, and may forever forbid it. but a great number of very good writers are instinctively striving to make each part of the country and each phase of our civilization known to all the other parts; and their work is not narrow in any feeble or vicious sense. the world was once very little, and it is now very large. formerly, all science could be grasped by a single mind; but now the man who hopes to become great or useful in science must devote himself to a single department. it is so in everything--all arts, all trades; and the novelist is not superior to the universal rule against universality. he contributes his share to a thorough knowledge of groups of the human race under conditions which are full of inspiring novelty and interest. he works more fearlessly, frankly, and faithfully than the novelist ever worked before; his work, or much of it, may be destined never to be reprinted from the monthly magazines; but if he turns to his book-shelf and regards the array of the british or other classics, he knows that they, too, are for the most part dead; he knows that the planet itself is destined to freeze up and drop into the sun at last, with all its surviving literature upon it. the question is merely one of time. he consoles himself, therefore, if he is wise, and works on; and we may all take some comfort from the thought that most things cannot be helped. especially a movement in literature like that which the world is now witnessing cannot be helped; and we could no more turn back and be of the literary fashions of any age before this than we could turn back and be of its social, economical, or political conditions. if i were authorized to address any word directly to our novelists i should say, do not trouble yourselves about standards or ideals; but try to be faithful and natural: remember that there is no greatness, no beauty, which does not come from truth to your own knowledge of things; and keep on working, even if your work is not long remembered. at least three-fifths of the literature called classic, in all languages, no more lives than the poems and stories that perish monthly in our magazines. it is all printed and reprinted, generation after generation, century after century; but it is not alive; it is as dead as the people who wrote it and read it, and to whom it meant something, perhaps; with whom it was a fashion, a caprice, a passing taste. a superstitious piety preserves it, and pretends that it has aesthetic qualities which can delight or edify; but nobody really enjoys it, except as a reflection of the past moods and humors of the race, or a revelation of the author's character; otherwise it is trash, and often very filthy trash, which the present trash generally is not. xxiii. one of the great newspapers the other day invited the prominent american authors to speak their minds upon a point in the theory and practice of fiction which had already vexed some of them. it was the question of how much or how little the american novel ought to deal with certain facts of life which are not usually talked of before young people, and especially young ladies. of course the question was not decided, and i forget just how far the balance inclined in favor of a larger freedom in the matter. but it certainly inclined that way; one or two writers of the sex which is somehow supposed to have purity in its keeping (as if purity were a thing that did not practically concern the other sex, preoccupied with serious affairs) gave it a rather vigorous tilt to that side. in view of this fact it would not be the part of prudence to make an effort to dress the balance; and indeed i do not know that i was going to make any such effort. but there are some things to say, around and about the subject, which i should like to have some one else say, and which i may myself possibly be safe in suggesting. one of the first of these is the fact, generally lost sight of by those who censure the anglo-saxon novel for its prudishness, that it is really not such a prude after all; and that if it is sometimes apparently anxious to avoid those experiences of life not spoken of before young people, this may be an appearance only. sometimes a novel which has this shuffling air, this effect of truckling to propriety, might defend itself, if it could speak for itself, by saying that such experiences happened not to come within its scheme, and that, so far from maiming or mutilating itself in ignoring them, it was all the more faithfully representative of the tone of modern life in dealing with love that was chaste, and with passion so honest that it could be openly spoken of before the tenderest society bud at dinner. it might say that the guilty intrigue, the betrayal, the extreme flirtation even, was the exceptional thing in life, and unless the scheme of the story necessarily involved it, that it would be bad art to lug it in, and as bad taste as to introduce such topics in a mixed company. it could say very justly that the novel in our civilization now always addresses a mixed company, and that the vast majority of the company are ladies, and that very many, if not most, of these ladies are young girls. if the novel were written for men and for married women alone, as in continental europe, it might be altogether different. but the simple fact is that it is not written for them alone among us, and it is a question of writing, under cover of our universal acceptance, things for young girls to read which you would be put out-of-doors for saying to them, or of frankly giving notice of your intention, and so cutting yourself off from the pleasure--and it is a very high and sweet one of appealing to these vivid, responsive intelligences, which are none the less brilliant and admirable because they are innocent. one day a novelist who liked, after the manner of other men, to repine at his hard fate, complained to his friend, a critic, that he was tired of the restriction he had put upon himself in this regard; for it is a mistake, as can be readily shown, to suppose that others impose it. "see how free those french fellows are!" he rebelled. "shall we always be shut up to our tradition of decency?" "do you think it's much worse than being shut up to their tradition of indecency?" said his friend. then that novelist began to reflect, and he remembered how sick the invariable motive of the french novel made him. he perceived finally that, convention for convention, ours was not only more tolerable, but on the whole was truer to life, not only to its complexion, but also to its texture. no one will pretend that there is not vicious love beneath the surface of our society; if he did, the fetid explosions of the divorce trials would refute him; but if he pretended that it was in any just sense characteristic of our society, he could be still more easily refuted. yet it exists, and it is unquestionably the material of tragedy, the stuff from which intense effects are wrought. the question, after owning this fact, is whether these intense effects are not rather cheap effects. i incline to think they are, and i will try to say why i think so, if i may do so without offence. the material itself, the mere mention of it, has an instant fascination; it arrests, it detains, till the last word is said, and while there is anything to be hinted. this is what makes a love intrigue of some sort all but essential to the popularity of any fiction. without such an intrigue the intellectual equipment of the author must be of the highest, and then he will succeed only with the highest class of readers. but any author who will deal with a guilty love intrigue holds all readers in his hand, the highest with the lowest, as long as he hints the slightest hope of the smallest potential naughtiness. he need not at all be a great author; he may be a very shabby wretch, if he has but the courage or the trick of that sort of thing. the critics will call him "virile" and "passionate"; decent people will be ashamed to have been limed by him; but the low average will only ask another chance of flocking into his net. if he happens to be an able writer, his really fine and costly work will be unheeded, and the lure to the appetite will be chiefly remembered. there may be other qualities which make reputations for other men, but in his case they will count for nothing. he pays this penalty for his success in that kind; and every one pays some such penalty who deals with some such material. but i do not mean to imply that his case covers the whole ground. so far as it goes, though, it ought to stop the mouths of those who complain that fiction is enslaved to propriety among us. it appears that of a certain kind of impropriety it is free to give us all it will, and more. but this is not what serious men and women writing fiction mean when they rebel against the limitations of their art in our civilization. they have no desire to deal with nakedness, as painters and sculptors freely do in the worship of beauty; or with certain facts of life, as the stage does, in the service of sensation. but they ask why, when the conventions of the plastic and histrionic arts liberate their followers to the portrayal of almost any phase of the physical or of the emotional nature, an american novelist may not write a story on the lines of 'anna karenina' or 'madame bovary.' they wish to touch one of the most serious and sorrowful problems of life in the spirit of tolstoy and flaubert, and they ask why they may not. at one time, they remind us, the anglo-saxon novelist did deal with such problems--de foe in his spirit, richardson in his, goldsmith in his. at what moment did our fiction lose this privilege? in what fatal hour did the young girl arise and seal the lips of fiction, with a touch of her finger, to some of the most vital interests of life? whether i wished to oppose them in their aspiration for greater freedom, or whether i wished to encourage them, i should begin to answer them by saying that the young girl has never done anything of the kind. the manners of the novel have been improving with those of its readers; that is all. gentlemen no longer swear or fall drunk under the table, or abduct young ladies and shut them up in lonely country-houses, or so habitually set about the ruin of their neighbors' wives, as they once did. generally, people now call a spade an agricultural implement; they have not grown decent without having also grown a little squeamish, but they have grown comparatively decent; there is no doubt about that. they require of a novelist whom they respect unquestionable proof of his seriousness, if he proposes to deal with certain phases of life; they require a sort of scientific decorum. he can no longer expect to be received on the ground of entertainment only; he assumes a higher function, something like that of a physician or a priest, and they expect him to be bound by laws as sacred as those of such professions; they hold him solemnly pledged not to betray them or abuse their confidence. if he will accept the conditions, they give him their confidence, and he may then treat to his greater honor, and not at all to his disadvantage, of such experiences, such relations of men and women as george eliot treats in 'adam bede,' in 'daniel deronda,' in 'romola,' in almost all her books; such as hawthorne treats in 'the scarlet letter;' such as dickens treats in 'david copperfield;' such as thackeray treats in 'pendennis,' and glances at in every one of his fictions; such as most of the masters of english fiction have at same time treated more or less openly. it is quite false or quite mistaken to suppose that our novels have left untouched these most important realities of life. they have only not made them their stock in trade; they have kept a true perspective in regard to them; they have relegated them in their pictures of life to the space and place they occupy in life itself, as we know it in england and america. they have kept a correct proportion, knowing perfectly well that unless the novel is to be a map, with everything scrupulously laid down in it, a faithful record of life in far the greater extent could be made to the exclusion of guilty love and all its circumstances and consequences. i justify them in this view not only because i hate what is cheap and meretricious, and hold in peculiar loathing the cant of the critics who require "passion" as something in itself admirable and desirable in a novel, but because i prize fidelity in the historian of feeling and character. most of these critics who demand "passion" would seem to have no conception of any passion but one. yet there are several other passions: the passion of grief, the passion of avarice, the passion of pity, the passion of ambition, the passion of hate, the passion of envy, the passion of devotion, the passion of friendship; and all these have a greater part in the drama of life than the passion of love, and infinitely greater than the passion of guilty love. wittingly or unwittingly, english fiction and american fiction have recognized this truth, not fully, not in the measure it merits, but in greater degree than most other fiction. xxiv. who can deny that fiction would be incomparably stronger, incomparably truer, if once it could tear off the habit which enslaves it to the celebration chiefly of a single passion, in one phase or another, and could frankly dedicate itself to the service of all the passions, all the interests, all the facts? every novelist who has thought about his art knows that it would, and i think that upon reflection he must doubt whether his sphere would be greatly enlarged if he were allowed to treat freely the darker aspects of the favorite passion. but, as i have shown, the privilege, the right to do this, is already perfectly recognized. this is proved again by the fact that serious criticism recognizes as master-works (i will not push the question of supremacy) the two great novels which above all others have, moved the world by their study of guilty love. if by any chance, if by some prodigious miracle, any american should now arise to treat it on the level of 'anna karenina' and 'madame bovary,' he would be absolutely sure of success, and of fame and gratitude as great as those books have won for their authors. but what editor of what american magazine would print such a story? certainly i do not think any one would; and here our novelist must again submit to conditions. if he wishes to publish such a story (supposing him to have once written it), he must publish it as a book. a book is something by itself, responsible for its character, which becomes quickly known, and it does not necessarily penetrate to every member of the household. the father or the mother may say to the child, "i would rather you wouldn't read that book"; if the child cannot be trusted, the book may be locked up. but with the magazine and its serial the affair is different. between the editor of a reputable english or american magazine and the families which receive it there is a tacit agreement that he will print nothing which a father may not read to his daughter, or safely leave her to read herself. after all, it is a matter of business; and the insurgent novelist should consider the situation with coolness and common-sense. the editor did not create the situation; but it exists, and he could not even attempt to change it without many sorts of disaster. he respects it, therefore, with the good faith of an honest man. even when he is himself a novelist, with ardor for his art and impatience of the limitations put upon it, he interposes his veto, as thackeray did in the case of trollope when a contributor approaches forbidden ground. it does not avail to say that the daily papers teem with facts far fouler and deadlier than any which fiction could imagine. that is true, but it is true also that the sex which reads the most novels reads the fewest newspapers; and, besides, the reporter does not command the novelist's skill to fix impressions in a young girl's mind or to suggest conjecture. the magazine is a little despotic, a little arbitrary; but unquestionably its favor is essential to success, and its conditions are not such narrow ones. you cannot deal with tolstoy's and flaubert's subjects in the absolute artistic freedom of tolstoy and flaubert; since de foe, that is unknown among us; but if you deal with them in the manner of george eliot, of thackeray, of dickens, of society, you may deal with them even in the magazines. there is no other restriction upon you. all the horrors and miseries and tortures are open to you; your pages may drop blood; sometimes it may happen that the editor will even exact such strong material from you. but probably he will require nothing but the observance of the convention in question; and if you do not yourself prefer bloodshed he will leave you free to use all sweet and peaceable means of interesting his readers. it is no narrow field he throws open to you, with that little sign to keep off the grass up at one point only. its vastness is still almost unexplored, and whole regions in it are unknown to the fictionist. dig anywhere, and do but dig deep enough, and you strike riches; or, if you are of the mind to range, the gentler climes, the softer temperatures, the serener skies, are all free to you, and are so little visited that the chance of novelty is greater among them. xxv. while the americans have greatly excelled in the short story generally, they have almost created a species of it in the thanksgiving story. we have transplanted the christmas story from england, while the thanksgiving story is native to our air; but both are of anglo-saxon growth. their difference is from a difference of environment; and the christmas story when naturalized among us becomes almost identical in motive, incident, and treatment with the thanksgiving story. if i were to generalize a distinction between them, i should say that the one dealt more with marvels and the other more with morals; and yet the critic should beware of speaking too confidently on this point. it is certain, however, that the christmas season is meteorologically more favorable to the effective return of persons long supposed lost at sea, or from a prodigal life, or from a darkened mind. the longer, darker, and colder nights are better adapted to the apparition of ghosts, and to all manner of signs and portents; while they seem to present a wider field for the intervention of angels in behalf of orphans and outcasts. the dreams of elderly sleepers at this time are apt to be such as will effect a lasting change in them when they awake, turning them from the hard, cruel, and grasping habits of a lifetime, and reconciling them to their sons, daughters, and nephews, who have thwarted them in marriage; or softening them to their meek, uncomplaining wives, whose hearts they have trampled upon in their reckless pursuit of wealth; and generally disposing them to a distribution of hampers among the sick and poor, and to a friendly reception of gentlemen with charity subscription papers. ships readily drive upon rocks in the early twilight, and offer exciting difficulties of salvage; and the heavy snows gather quickly round the steps of wanderers who lie down to die in them, preparatory to their discovery and rescue by immediate relatives. the midnight weather is also very suitable for encounter with murderers and burglars; and the contrast of its freezing gloom with the light and cheer in-doors promotes the gayeties which merge, at all well-regulated country-houses, in love and marriage. in the region of pure character no moment could be so available for flinging off the mask of frivolity, or imbecility, or savagery, which one has worn for ten or twenty long years, say, for the purpose of foiling some villain, and surprising the reader, and helping the author out with his plot. persons abroad in the alps, or apennines, or pyrenees, or anywhere seeking shelter in the huts of shepherds or the dens of smugglers, find no time like it for lying in a feigned slumber, and listening to the whispered machinations of their suspicious looking entertainers, and then suddenly starting up and fighting their way out; or else springing from the real sleep into which they have sunk exhausted, and finding it broad day and the good peasants whom they had so unjustly doubted, waiting breakfast for them. we need not point out the superior advantages of the christmas season for anything one has a mind to do with the french revolution, of the arctic explorations, or the indian mutiny, or the horrors of siberian exile; there is no time so good for the use of this material; and ghosts on shipboard are notoriously fond of christmas eve. in our own logging camps the man who has gone into the woods for the winter, after quarrelling with his wife, then hears her sad appealing voice, and is moved to good resolutions as at no other period of the year; and in the mining regions, first in california and later in colorado, the hardened reprobate, dying in his boots, smells his mother's doughnuts, and breathes his last in a soliloquized vision of the old home, and the little brother, or sister, or the old father coming to meet him from heaven; while his rude companions listen round him, and dry their eyes on the butts of their revolvers. it has to be very grim, all that, to be truly effective; and here, already, we have a touch in the americanized christmas story of the moralistic quality of the american thanksgiving story. this was seldom written, at first, for the mere entertainment of the reader; it was meant to entertain him, of course; but it was meant to edify him, too, and to improve him; and some such intention is still present in it. i rather think that it deals more probably with character to this end than its english cousin, the christmas story, does. it is not so improbable that a man should leave off being a drunkard on thanksgiving, as that he should leave off being a curmudgeon on christmas; that he should conquer his appetite as that he should instantly change his nature, by good resolutions. he would be very likely, indeed, to break his resolutions in either case, but not so likely in the one as in the other. generically, the thanksgiving story is cheerfuller in its drama and simpler in its persons than the christmas story. rarely has it dealt with the supernatural, either the apparition of ghosts or the intervention of angels. the weather being so much milder at the close of november than it is a month later, very little can be done with the elements; though on the coast a northeasterly storm has been, and can be, very usefully employed. the thanksgiving story is more restricted in its range; the scene is still mostly in new england, and the characters are of new england extraction, who come home from the west usually, or new york, for the event of the little drama, whatever it may be. it may be the reconciliation of kinsfolk who have quarrelled; or the union of lovers long estranged; or husbands and wives who have had hard words and parted; or mothers who had thought their sons dead in california and find themselves agreeably disappointed in their return; or fathers who for old time's sake receive back their erring and conveniently dying daughters. the notes are not many which this simple music sounds, but they have a sabbath tone, mostly, and win the listener to kindlier thoughts and better moods. the art is at its highest in some strong sketch of rose terry cooke's, or some perfectly satisfying study of miss jewett's, or some graphic situation of miss wilkins's; and then it is a very fine art. but mostly it is poor and rude enough, and makes openly, shamelessly, for the reader's emotions, as well as his morals. it is inclined to be rather descriptive. the turkey, the pumpkin, the corn-field, figure throughout; and the leafless woods are blue and cold against the evening sky behind the low hip-roofed, old-fashioned homestead. the parlance is usually the yankee dialect and its western modifications. the thanksgiving story is mostly confined in scene to the country; it does not seem possible to do much with it in town; and it is a serious question whether with its geographical and topical limitations it can hold its own against the christmas story; and whether it would not be well for authors to consider a combination with its elder rival. the two feasts are so near together in point of time that they could be easily covered by the sentiment of even a brief narrative. under the agglutinated style of 'a thanksgiving-christmas story,' fiction appropriate to both could be produced, and both could be employed naturally and probably in the transaction of its affairs and the development of its characters. the plot for such a story could easily be made to include a total-abstinence pledge and family reunion at thanksgiving, and an apparition and spiritual regeneration over a bowl of punch at christmas. xxvi. it would be interesting to know the far beginnings of holiday literature, and i commend the quest to the scientific spirit which now specializes research in every branch of history. in the mean time, without being too confident of the facts, i venture to suggest that it came in with the romantic movement about the beginning of this century, when mountains ceased to be horrid and became picturesque; when ruins of all sorts, but particularly abbeys and castles, became habitable to the most delicate constitutions; when the despised gothick of addison dropped its "k," and arose the chivalrous and religious gothic of scott; when ghosts were redeemed from the contempt into which they had fallen, and resumed their place in polite society; in fact, the politer the society; the welcomer the ghosts, and whatever else was out of the common. in that day the annual flourished, and this artificial flower was probably the first literary blossom on the christmas tree which has since borne so much tinsel foliage and painted fruit. but the annual was extremely oriental; it was much preoccupied with, haidees and gulnares and zuleikas, with hindas and nourmahals, owing to the distinction which byron and moore had given such ladies; and when it began to concern itself with the actualities of british beauty, the daughters of albion, though inscribed with the names of real countesses and duchesses, betrayed their descent from the well-known eastern odalisques. it was possibly through an american that holiday literature became distinctively english in material, and washington irving, with his new world love of the past, may have given the impulse to the literary worship of christmas which has since so widely established itself. a festival revived in popular interest by a new-yorker to whom dutch associations with new-year's had endeared the german ideal of christmas, and whom the robust gayeties of the season in old-fashioned country-houses had charmed, would be one of those roundabout results which destiny likes, and "would at least be early english." if we cannot claim with all the patriotic confidence we should like to feel that it was irving who set christmas in that light in which dickens saw its aesthetic capabilities, it is perhaps because all origins are obscure. for anything that we positively know to the contrary, the druidic rites from which english christmas borrowed the inviting mistletoe, if not the decorative holly, may have been accompanied by the recitations of holiday triads. but it is certain that several plays of shakespeare were produced, if not written, for the celebration of the holidays, and that then the black tide of puritanism which swept over men's souls blotted out all such observance of christmas with the festival itself. it came in again, by a natural reaction, with the returning stuarts, and throughout the period of the restoration it enjoyed a perfunctory favor. there is mention of it; often enough in the eighteenth-century essayists, in the spectators and idlers and tatlers; but the world about the middle of the last century laments the neglect into which it had fallen. irving seems to have been the first to observe its surviving rites lovingly, and dickens divined its immense advantage as a literary occasion. he made it in some sort entirely his for a time, and there can be no question but it was he who again endeared it to the whole english-speaking world, and gave it a wider and deeper hold than it had ever had before upon the fancies and affections of our race. the might of that great talent no one can gainsay, though in the light of the truer work which has since been done his literary principles seem almost as grotesque as his theories of political economy. in no one direction was his erring force more felt than in the creation of holiday literature as we have known it for the last half-century. creation, of course, is the wrong word; it says too much; but in default of a better word, it may stand. he did not make something out of nothing; the material was there before him; the mood and even the need of his time contributed immensely to his success, as the volition of the subject helps on the mesmerist; but it is within bounds to say that he was the chief agency in the development of holiday literature as we have known it, as he was the chief agency in universalizing the great christian holiday as we now have it. other agencies wrought with him and after him; but it was he who rescued christmas from puritan distrust, and humanized it and consecrated it to the hearts and homes of all. very rough magic, as it now seems, he used in working his miracle, but there is no doubt about his working it. one opens his christmas stories in this later day--'the carol, the chimes, the haunted man, the cricket on the hearth,' and all the rest--and with "a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed," asks himself for the preternatural virtue that they once had. the pathos appears false and strained; the humor largely horseplay; the character theatrical; the joviality pumped; the psychology commonplace; the sociology alone funny. it is a world of real clothes, earth, air, water, and the rest; the people often speak the language of life, but their motives are as disproportioned and improbable, and their passions and purposes as overcharged, as those of the worst of balzac's people. yet all these monstrosities, as they now appear, seem to have once had symmetry and verity; they moved the most cultivated intelligences of the time; they touched true hearts; they made everybody laugh and cry. this was perhaps because the imagination, from having been fed mostly upon gross unrealities, always responds readily to fantastic appeals. there has been an amusing sort of awe of it, as if it were the channel of inspired thought, and were somehow sacred. the most preposterous inventions of its activity have been regarded in their time as the greatest feats of the human mind, and in its receptive form it has been nursed into an imbecility to which the truth is repugnant, and the fact that the beautiful resides nowhere else is inconceivable. it has been flattered out of all sufferance in its toyings with the mere elements of character, and its attempts to present these in combinations foreign to experience are still praised by the poorer sort of critics as masterpieces of creative work. in the day of dickens's early christmas stories it was thought admirable for the author to take types of humanity which everybody knew, and to add to them from his imagination till they were as strange as beasts and birds talking. now we begin to feel that human nature is quite enough, and that the best an author can do is to show it as it is. but in those stories of his dickens said to his readers, let us make believe so-and- so; and the result was a joint juggle, a child's-play, in which the wholesome allegiance to life was lost. artistically, therefore, the scheme was false, and artistically, therefore, it must perish. it did not perish, however, before it had propagated itself in a whole school of unrealities so ghastly that one can hardly recall without a shudder those sentimentalities at secondhand to which holiday literature was abandoned long after the original conjurer had wearied of his performance. under his own eye and of conscious purpose a circle of imitators grew up in the fabrication of christmas stories. they obviously formed themselves upon his sobered ideals; they collaborated with him, and it was often hard to know whether it was dickens or sala or collins who was writing. the christmas book had by that time lost its direct application to christmas. it dealt with shipwrecks a good deal, and with perilous adventures of all kinds, and with unmerited suffering, and with ghosts and mysteries, because human nature, secure from storm and danger in a well-lighted room before a cheerful fire, likes to have these things imaged for it, and its long-puerilized fancy will bear an endless repetition of them. the wizards who wrought their spells with them contented themselves with the lasting efficacy of these simple means; and the apprentice-wizards and journeyman-wizards who have succeeded them practise the same arts at the old stand; but the ethical intention which gave dignity to dickens's christmas stories of still earlier date has almost wholly disappeared. it was a quality which could not be worked so long as the phantoms and hair-breadth escapes. people always knew that character is not changed by a dream in a series of tableaux; that a ghost cannot do much towards reforming an inordinately selfish person; that a life cannot be turned white, like a head of hair, in a single night, by the most allegorical apparition; that want and sin and shame cannot be cured by kettles singing on the hob; and gradually they ceased to make believe that there was virtue in these devices and appliances. yet the ethical intention was not fruitless, crude as it now appears. it was well once a year, if not oftener, to remind men by parable of the old, simple truths; to teach them that forgiveness, and charity, and the endeavor for life better and purer than each has lived, are the principles upon which alone the world holds together and gets forward. it was well for the comfortable and the refined to be put in mind of the savagery and suffering all round them, and to be taught, as dickens was always teaching, that certain feelings which grace human nature, as tenderness for the sick and helpless, self-sacrifice and generosity, self-respect and manliness and womanliness, are the common heritage of the race; the direct gift of heaven, shared equally by the rich and poor. it did not necessarily detract from the value of the lesson that, with the imperfect art of the time, he made his paupers and porters not only human, but superhuman, and too altogether virtuous; and it remained true that home life may be lovely under the lowliest roof, although he liked to paint it without a shadow on its beauty there. it is still a fact that the sick are very often saintly, although he put no peevishness into their patience with their ills. his ethical intention told for manhood and fraternity and tolerance, and when this intention disappeared from the better holiday literature, that literature was sensibly the poorer for the loss. xxvii. but if the humanitarian impulse has mostly disappeared from christmas fiction, i think it has never so generally characterized all fiction. one may refuse to recognize this impulse; one may deny that it is in any greater degree shaping life than ever before, but no one who has the current of literature under his eye can fail to note it there. people are thinking and feeling generously, if not living justly, in our time; it is a day of anxiety to be saved from the curse that is on selfishness, of eager question how others shall be helped, of bold denial that the conditions in which we would fain have rested are sacred or immutable. especially in america, where the race has gained a height never reached before, the eminence enables more men than ever before to see how even here vast masses of men are sunk in misery that must grow every day more hopeless, or embroiled in a struggle for mere life that must end in enslaving and imbruting them. art, indeed, is beginning to find out that if it does not make friends with need it must perish. it perceives that to take itself from the many and leave them no joy in their work, and to give itself to the few whom it can bring no joy in their idleness, is an error that kills. the men and women who do the hard work of the world have learned that they have a right to pleasure in their toil, and that when justice is done them they will have it. in all ages poetry has affirmed something of this sort, but it remained for ours to perceive it and express it somehow in every form of literature. but this is only one phase of the devotion of the best literature of our time to the service of humanity. no book written with a low or cynical motive could succeed now, no matter how brilliantly written; and the work done in the past to the glorification of mere passion and power, to the deification of self, appears monstrous and hideous. the romantic spirit worshipped genius, worshipped heroism, but at its best, in such a man as victor hugo, this spirit recognized the supreme claim of the lowest humanity. its error was to idealize the victims of society, to paint them impossibly virtuous and beautiful; but truth, which has succeeded to the highest mission of romance, paints these victims as they are, and bids the world consider them not because they are beautiful and virtuous, but because they are ugly and vicious, cruel, filthy, and only not altogether loathsome because the divine can never wholly die out of the human. the truth does not find these victims among the poor alone, among the hungry, the houseless, the ragged; but it also finds them among the rich, cursed with the aimlessness, the satiety, the despair of wealth, wasting their lives in a fool's paradise of shows and semblances, with nothing real but the misery that comes of insincerity and selfishness. i do not think the fiction of our own time even always equal to this work, or perhaps more than seldom so. but as i once expressed, to the long-reverberating discontent of two continents, fiction is now a finer art than it, has been hitherto, and more nearly meets the requirements of the infallible standard. i have hopes of real usefulness in it, because it is at last building on the only sure foundation; but i am by no means certain that it will be the ultimate literary form, or will remain as important as we believe it is destined to become. on the contrary, it is quite imaginable that when the great mass of readers, now sunk in the foolish joys of mere fable, shall be lifted to an interest in the meaning of things through the faithful portrayal of life in fiction, then fiction the most faithful may be superseded by a still more faithful form of contemporaneous history. i willingly leave the precise character of this form to the more robust imagination of readers whose minds have been nurtured upon romantic novels, and who really have an imagination worth speaking of, and confine myself, as usual, to the hither side of the regions of conjecture. the art which in the mean time disdains the office of teacher is one of the last refuges of the aristocratic spirit which is disappearing from politics and society, and is now seeking to shelter itself in aesthetics. the pride of caste is becoming the pride of taste; but as before, it is averse to the mass of men; it consents to know them only in some conventionalized and artificial guise. it seeks to withdraw itself, to stand aloof; to be distinguished, and not to be identified. democracy in literature is the reverse of all this. it wishes to know and to tell the truth, confident that consolation and delight are there; it does not care to paint the marvellous and impossible for the vulgar many, or to sentimentalize and falsify the actual for the vulgar few. men are more like than unlike one another: let us make them know one another better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity. neither arts, nor letters, nor sciences, except as they somehow, clearly or obscurely, tend to make the race better and kinder, are to be regarded as serious interests; they are all lower than the rudest crafts that feed and house and clothe, for except they do this office they are idle; and they cannot do this except from and through the truth. pg editor's bookmarks: a thanksgiving-christmas story anthony trollope authorities browbeat wholesome common-sense into the self-distrust canon fairfax,'s opinions of literary criticism comfort from the thought that most things cannot be helped concerning popularity as a test of merit in a book critical vanity and self-righteousness critics are in no sense the legislators of literature dickens rescued christmas from puritan distrust effectism fact that it is hash many times warmed over reassures them forbear the excesses of analysis glance of the common eye, is and always was the best light greatest classics are sometimes not at all great holiday literature imitators of one another than of nature jane austen languages, while they live, are perpetually changing let fiction cease to lie about life long-puerilized fancy will bear an endless repetition made them talk as seldom man and never woman talked michelangelo's "light of the piazza," no greatness, no beauty, which does not come from truth novels hurt because they are not true plain industry and plodding perseverance are despised pseudo-realists public wish to be amused rather than edified teach what they do not know tediously analytical to break new ground unless we prefer a luxury of grief vulgarity: bad art to lug it in what makes a better fashion change for a worse whatever is established is sacred with those who do not think literature and life--short stories and essays by william dean howells contents: worries of a winter walk summer isles of eden wild flowers of the asphalt a circus in the suburbs a she hamlet the midnight platoon the beach at rockaway sawdust in the arena at a dime museum american literature in exile the horse show the problem of the summer aesthetic new york fifty-odd years ago from new york into new england the art of the adsmith the psychology of plagiarism puritanism in american fiction the what and how in art politics in american authors storage "floating down the river on the o-hi-o" worries of a winter walk the other winter, as i was taking a morning walk down to the east river, i came upon a bit of our motley life, a fact of our piebald civilization, which has perplexed me from time to time, ever since, and which i wish now to leave with the reader, for his or her more thoughtful consideration. i. the morning was extremely cold. it professed to be sunny, and there was really some sort of hard glitter in the air, which, so far from being tempered by this effulgence, seemed all the stonier for it. blasts of frigid wind swept the streets, and buffeted each other in a fury of resentment when they met around the corners. although i was passing through a populous tenement-house quarter, my way was not hindered by the sports of the tenement-house children, who commonly crowd one from the sidewalks; no frowzy head looked out over the fire-escapes; there were no peddlers' carts or voices in the road-way; not above three or four shawl-hooded women cowered out of the little shops with small purchases in their hands; not so many tiny girls with jugs opened the doors of the beer saloons. the butchers' windows were painted with patterns of frost, through which i could dimly see the frozen meats hanging like hideous stalactites from the roof. when i came to the river, i ached in sympathy with the shipping painfully atilt on the rocklike surface of the brine, which broke against the piers, and sprayed itself over them like showers of powdered quartz. but it was before i reached this final point that i received into my consciousness the moments of the human comedy which have been an increasing burden to it. within a block of the river i met a child so small that at first i almost refused to take any account of her, until she appealed to my sense of humor by her amusing disproportion to the pail which she was lugging in front of her with both of her little mittened hands. i am scrupulous about mittens, though i was tempted to write of her little naked hands, red with the pitiless cold. this would have been more effective, but it would not have been true, and the truth obliges me to own that she had a stout, warm-looking knit jacket on. the pail-which was half her height and twice her bulk-was filled to overflowing with small pieces of coal and coke, and if it had not been for this i might have taken her for a child of the better classes, she was so comfortably clad. but in that case she would have had to be fifteen or sixteen years old, in order to be doing so efficiently and responsibly the work which, as the child of the worse classes, she was actually doing at five or six. we must, indeed, allow that the early self-helpfulness of such children is very remarkable, and all the more so because they grow up into men and women so stupid that, according to the theories of all polite economists, they have to have their discontent with their conditions put into their heads by malevolent agitators. from time to time this tiny creature put down her heavy burden to rest; it was, of course, only relatively heavy; a man would have made nothing of it. from time to time she was forced to stop and pick up the bits of coke that tumbled from her heaping pail. she could not consent to lose one of them, and at last, when she found she could not make all of them stay on the heap, she thriftily tucked them into the pockets of her jacket, and trudged sturdily on till she met a boy some years older, who planted himself in her path and stood looking at her, with his hands in his pockets. i do not say he was a bad boy, but i could see in his furtive eye that she was a sore temptation to him. the chance to have fun with her by upsetting her bucket, and scattering her coke about till she cried with vexation, was one which might not often present itself, and i do not know what made him forego it, but i know that he did, and that he finally passed her, as i have seen a young dog pass a little cat, after having stopped it, and thoughtfully considered worrying it. i turned to watch the child out of sight, and when i faced about towards the river again i received the second instalment of my present perplexity. a cart, heavily laden with coke, drove out of the coal-yard which i now perceived i had come to, and after this cart followed two brisk old women, snugly clothed and tightly tucked in against the cold like the child, who vied with each other in catching up the lumps of coke that were jolted from the load, and filling their aprons with them; such old women, so hale, so spry, so tough and tireless, with the withered apples red in their cheeks, i have not often seen. they may have been about sixty years, or sixty-five, the time of life when most women are grandmothers and are relegated on their merits to the cushioned seats of their children's homes, softly silk-gowned and lace-capped, dear visions of lilac and lavender, to be loved and petted by their grandchildren. the fancy can hardly put such sweet ladies in the place of those nimble beldams, who hopped about there in the wind-swept street, plucking up their day's supply of firing from the involuntary bounty of the cart. even the attempt is unseemly, and whether mine is at best but a feeble fancy, not bred to strenuous feats of any kind, it fails to bring them before me in that figure. i cannot imagine ladies doing that kind of thing; i can only imagine women who had lived hard and worked hard all their lives doing it; who had begun to fight with want from their cradles, like that little one with the pail, and must fight without ceasing to their graves. but i am not unreasonable; i understand and i understood what i saw to be one of the things that must be, for the perfectly good and sufficient reason that they always have been; and at the moment i got what pleasure i could out of the stolid indifference of the cart-driver, who never looked about him at the scene which interested me, but jolted onward, leaving a trail of pungent odors from his pipe in the freezing eddies of the air behind him. ii. it is still not at all, or not so much, the fact that troubles me; it is what to do with the fact. the question began with me almost at once, or at least as soon as i faced about and began to walk homeward with the wind at my back. i was then so much more comfortable that the aesthetic instinct thawed out in me, and i found myself wondering what use i could make of what i had seen in the way of my trade. should i have something very pathetic, like the old grandmother going out day after day to pick up coke for her sick daughter's freezing orphans till she fell sick herself? what should i do with the family in that case? they could not be left at that point, and i promptly imagined a granddaughter, a girl of about eighteen, very pretty and rather proud, a sort of belle in her humble neighborhood, who should take her grandmother's place. i decided that i should have her italian, because i knew something of italians, and could manage that nationality best, and i should call her maddalena; either maddalena or marina; marina would be more venetian, and i saw that i must make her venetian. here i was on safe ground, and at once the love-interest appeared to help me out. by virtue of the law of contrasts; it appeared to me in the person of a scandinavian lover, tall, silent, blond, whom i at once felt i could do, from my acquaintance with scandinavian lovers in norwegian novels. his name was janssen, a good, distinctive scandinavian name; i do not know but it is swedish; and i thought he might very well be a swede; i could imagine his manner from that of a swedish waitress we once had. janssen--jan janssen, say-drove the coke-cart which marina's grandmother used to follow out of the coke-yard, to pick up the bits of coke as they were jolted from it, and he had often noticed her with deep indifference. at first he noticed marina--or nina, as i soon saw i must call her--with the same unconcern; for in her grandmother's hood and jacket and check apron, with her head held shamefacedly downward, she looked exactly like the old woman. i thought i would have nina make her self-sacrifice rebelliously, as a girl like her would be apt to do, and follow the cokecart with tears. this would catch janssen's notice, and he would wonder, perhaps with a little pang, what the old woman was crying about, and then he would see that it was not the old woman. he would see that it was nina, and he would be in love with her at once, for she would not only be very pretty, but he would know that she was good, if she were willing to help her family in that way. he would respect the girl, in his dull, sluggish, northern way. he would do nothing to betray himself. but little by little he would begin to befriend her. he would carelessly overload his cart before he left the yard, so that the coke would fall from it more lavishly; and not only this, but if he saw a stone or a piece of coal in the street he would drive over it, so that more coke would be jolted from his load. nina would get to watching for him. she must not notice him much at first, except as the driver of the overladen, carelessly driven cart. but after several mornings she must see that he is very strong and handsome. then, after several mornings more, their eyes must meet, her vivid black eyes, with the tears of rage and shame in them, and his cold blue eyes. this must be the climax; and just at this point i gave my fancy a rest, while i went into a drugstore at the corner of avenue b to get my hands warm. they were abominably cold, even in my pockets, and i had suffered past several places trying to think of an excuse to go in. i now asked the druggist if he had something which i felt pretty sure he had not, and this put him in the wrong, so that when we fell into talk he was very polite. we agreed admirably about the hard times, and he gave way respectfully when i doubted his opinion that the winters were getting milder. i made him reflect that there was no reason for this, and that it was probably an illusion from that deeper impression which all experiences made on us in the past, when we were younger; i ought to say that he was an elderly man, too. i said i fancied such a morning as this was not very mild for people that had no fires, and this brought me back again to janssen and marina, by way of the coke-cart. the thought of them rapt me so far from the druggist that i listened to his answer with a glazing eye, and did not know what he said. my hands had now got warm, and i bade him good-morning with a parting regret, which he civilly shared, that he had not the thing i had not wanted, and i pushed out again into the cold, which i found not so bad as before. my hero and heroine were waiting for me there, and i saw that to be truly modern, to be at once realistic and mystical, to have both delicacy and strength, i must not let them get further acquainted with each other. the affair must simply go on from day to day, till one morning jan must note that it was again the grandmother and no longer the girl who was following his cart. she must be very weak from a long sickness--i was not sure whether to have it the grippe or not, but i decided upon that provisionally and she must totter after janssen, so that he must get down after a while to speak to her under pretence of arranging the tail-board of his cart, or something of that kind; i did not care for the detail. they should get into talk in the broken english which was the only language they could have in common, and she should burst into tears, and tell him that now nina was sick; i imagined making this very simple, but very touching, and i really made it so touching that it brought the lump into my own throat, and i knew it would be effective with the reader. then i had jan get back upon his cart, and drive stolidly on again, and the old woman limp feebly after. there should not be any more, i decided, except that one very cold morning, like that; jan should be driving through that street, and should be passing the door of the tenement house where nina had lived, just as a little procession should be issuing from it. the fact must be told in brief sentences, with a total absence of emotionality. the last touch must be jan's cart turning the street corner with jan's figure sharply silhouetted against the clear, cold morning light. nothing more. but it was at this point that another notion came into my mind, so antic, so impish, so fiendish, that if there were still any evil one, in a world which gets on so poorly without him, i should attribute it to his suggestion; and this was that the procession which jan saw issuing from the tenement-house door was not a funeral procession, as the reader will have rashly fancied, but a wedding procession, with nina at the head of it, quite well again, and going to be married to the little brown youth with ear-rings who had long had her heart. with a truly perverse instinct, i saw how strong this might be made, at the fond reader's expense, to be sure, and how much more pathetic, in such a case, the silhouetted figure on the coke-cart would really be. i should, of course, make it perfectly plain that no one was to blame, and that the whole affair had been so tacit on jan's part that nina might very well have known nothing of his feeling for her. perhaps at the very end i might subtly insinuate that it was possible he might have had no such feeling towards her as the reader had been led to imagine. iii. the question as to which ending i ought to have given my romance is what has ever since remained to perplex me, and it is what has prevented my ever writing it. here is material of the best sort lying useless on my hands, which, if i could only make up my mind, might be wrought into a short story as affecting as any that wring our hearts in fiction; and i think i could get something fairly unintelligible out of the broken english of jan and nina's grandmother, and certainly something novel. all that i can do now, however, is to put the case before the reader, and let him decide for himself how it should end. the mere humanist, i suppose, might say, that i am rightly served for having regarded the fact i had witnessed as material for fiction at all; that i had no business to bewitch it with my miserable art; that i ought to have spoken to that little child and those poor old women, and tried to learn something of their lives from them, that i might offer my knowledge again for the instruction of those whose lives are easy and happy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in us. i own there is something in this, but then, on the other hand, i have heard it urged by nice people that they do not want to know about such squalid lives, that it is offensive and out of taste to be always bringing them in, and that we ought to be writing about good society, and especially creating grandes dames for their amusement. this sort of people could say to the humanist that he ought to be glad there are coke-carts for fuel to fall off from for the lower classes, and that here was no case for sentiment; for if one is to be interested in such things at all, it must be aesthetically, though even this is deplorable in the presence of fiction already overloaded with low life, and so poor in grades dames as ours. summer isles of eden it may be all an illusion of the map, where the summer islands glimmer a small and solitary little group of dots and wrinkles, remote from continental shores, with a straight line descending southeastwardly upon them, to show how sharp and swift the ship's course is, but they seem so far and alien from my wonted place that it is as if i had slid down a steepy slant from the home-planet to a group of asteroids nebulous somewhere in middle space, and were resting there, still vibrant from the rush of the meteoric fall. there were, of course, facts and incidents contrary to such a theory: a steamer starting from new york in the raw march morning, and lurching and twisting through two days of diagonal seas, with people aboard dining and undining, and talking and smoking and cocktailing and hot-scotching and beef-teaing; but when the ship came in sight of the islands, and they began to lift their cedared slopes from the turquoise waters, and to explain their drifted snows as the white walls and white roofs of houses, then the waking sense became the dreaming sense, and the sweet impossibility of that drop through air became the sole reality. i. everything here, indeed, is so strange that you placidly accept whatever offers itself as the simplest and naturalest fact. those low hills, that climb, with their tough, dark cedars, from the summer sea to the summer sky, might have drifted down across the gulf stream from the coast of maine; but when, upon closer inspection, you find them skirted with palms and bananas, and hedged with oleanders, you merely wonder that you had never noticed these growths in maine before, where you were so familiar with the cedars. the hotel itself, which has brought the green mountains with it, in every detail, from the dormer-windowed mansard-roof, and the white-painted, green-shuttered walls, to the neat, school-mistressly waitresses in the dining-room, has a clump of palmettos beside it, swaying and sighing in the tropic breeze, and you know that when it migrates back to the new england hill-country, at the end of the season, you shall find it with the palmettos still before its veranda, and equally at home, somewhere in the vermont or new hampshire july. there will be the same american groups looking out over them, and rocking and smoking, though, alas! not so many smoking as rocking. but where, in that translation, would be the gold braided red or blue jackets of the british army and navy which lend their lustre and color here to the veranda groups? where should one get the house walls of whitewashed stone and the garden walls which everywhere glow in the sun, and belt in little spaces full of roses and lilies? these things must come from some other association, and in the case of him who here confesses, the lustrous uniforms and the glowing walls rise from waters as far away in time as in space, and a long-ago apparition of venetian junes haunts the coral shore. (they are beginning to say the shore is not coral; but no matter.) to be sure, the white roofs are not accounted for in this visionary presence; and if one may not relate them to the snowfalls of home winters, then one must frankly own them absolutely tropical, together with the green-pillared and green-latticed galleries. they at least suggest the tropical scenery of prue and i as one remembers seeing it through titbottom's spectacles; and yet, if one supplies roofs of brown-red tiles, it is all venetian enough, with the lagoon-like expanses that lend themselves to the fond effect. it is so venetian, indeed, that it wants but a few silent gondolas and noisy gondoliers, in place of the dark, taciturn oarsmen of the clumsy native boats, to complete the coming and going illusion; and there is no good reason why the rough little isles that fill the bay should not call themselves respectively san giorgio and san clemente, and sant' elena and san lazzaro: they probably have no other names! ii. these summer isles of eden have this advantage over the scriptural eden, that apparently it was not woman and her seed who were expelled, when once she set foot here, but the serpent and his seed: women now abound in the summer islands, and there is not a snake anywhere to be found. there are some tortoises and a great many frogs in their season, but no other reptiles. the frogs are fabled of a note so deep and hoarse that its vibration almost springs the environing mines of dynamite, though it has never yet done so; the tortoises grow to a great size and a patriarchal age, and are fond of boston brown bread and baked beans, if their preferences may be judged from those of a colossal specimen in the care of an american family living on the islands. the observer who contributes this fact to science is able to report the case of a parrot-fish, on the same premises, so exactly like a large brown and purple cockatoo that, seeing such a cockatoo later on dry land, it was with a sense of something like cruelty in its exile from its native waters. the angel-fish he thinks not so much like angels; they are of a transparent purity of substance, and a cherubic innocence of expression, but they terminate in two tails, which somehow will not lend themselves to the resemblance. certainly the angel-fish is not so well named as the parrot-fish; it might better be called the ghostfish, it is so like a moonbeam in the pools it haunts, and of such a convertible quality with the iridescent vegetable growths about it. all things here are of a weird convertibility to the alien perception, and the richest and rarest facts of nature lavish themselves in humble association with the commonest and most familiar. you drive through long stretches of wayside willows, and realize only now and then that these willows are thick clumps of oleanders; and through them you can catch glimpses of banana-orchards, which look like dishevelled patches of gigantic cornstalks. the fields of easter lilies do not quite live up to their photographs; they are presently suffering from a mysterious blight, and their flowers are not frequent enough to lend them that sculpturesque effect near to, which they wear as far off as new york. the potato-fields, on the other hand, are of a tender delicacy of coloring which compensates for the lilies' lack, and the palms give no just cause for complaint, unless because they are not nearly enough to characterize the landscape, which in spite of their presence remains so northern in aspect. they were much whipped and torn by a late hurricane, which afflicted all the vegetation of the islands, and some of the royal palms were blown down. where these are yet standing, as four or five of them are in a famous avenue now quite one-sided, they are of a majesty befitting that of any king who could pass by them: no sovereign except philip of macedon in his least judicial moments could pass between them. the century-plant, which here does not require pampering under glass, but boldly takes its place out doors with the other trees of the garden, employs much less than a hundred years to bring itself to bloom. it often flowers twice or thrice in that space of time, and ought to take away the reproach of the inhabitants for a want of industry and enterprise: a century-plant at least could do no more in any air, and it merits praise for its activity in the breath of these languorous seas. one such must be in bloom at this very writing, in the garden of a house which this very writer marked for his own on his first drive ashore from the steamer to the hotel, when he bestowed in its dim, unknown interior one of the many multiples of himself which are now pretty well dispersed among the pleasant places of the earth. it fills the night with a heavy heliotropean sweetness, and on the herb beneath, in the effulgence of the waxing moon, the multiple which has spiritually expropriated the legal owners stretches itself in an interminable reverie, and hears youth come laughing back to it on the waters kissing the adjacent shore, where other white houses (which also it inhabits) bathe their snowy underpinning. in this dream the multiple drives home from the balls of either hotel with the young girls in the little victorias which must pass its sojourn; and, being but a vision itself, fore casts the shapes of flirtation which shall night-long gild the visions of their sleep with the flash of military and naval uniforms. of course the multiple has been at the dance too (with a shadowy heartache for the dances of forty years ago), and knows enough not to confuse the uniforms. iii. in whatever way you walk, at whatever hour, the birds are sweetly calling in the way-side oleanders and the wild sage-bushes and the cedar-tops. they are mostly cat-birds, quite like our own; and bluebirds, but of a deeper blue than ours, and redbirds of as liquid a note, but not so varied, as that of the redbirds of our woods. how came they all here, seven hundred miles from any larger land? some think, on the stronger wings of tempests, for it is not within the knowledge of men that men brought them. men did, indeed, bring the pestilent sparrows which swarm about their habitations here, and beat away the gentler and lovelier birds with a ferocity unknown in the human occupation of the islands. still, the sparrows have by no means conquered, and in the wilder places the catbird makes common cause with the bluebird and the redbird, and holds its own against them. the little ground-doves mimic in miniature the form and markings and the gait and mild behavior of our turtle-doves, but perhaps not their melancholy cooing. nature has nowhere anything prettier than these exquisite creatures, unless it be the long-tailed white gulls which sail over the emerald shallows of the landlocked seas, and take the green upon their translucent bodies as they trail their meteoric splendor against the midday sky. full twenty-four inches they measure from the beak to the tip of the single pen that protracts them a foot beyond their real bulk; but it is said their tempers are shorter than they, and they attack fiercely anything they suspect of too intimate a curiosity concerning their nests. they are probably the only short-tempered things in the summer islands, where time is so long that if you lose your patience you easily find it again. sweetness, if not light, seems to be the prevailing human quality, and a good share of it belongs to such of the natives as are in no wise light. our poor brethren of a different pigment are in the large majority, and they have been seventy years out of slavery, with the full enjoyment of all their civil rights, without lifting themselves from their old inferiority. they do the hard work, in their own easy way, and possibly do not find life the burden they make it for the white man, whom here, as in our own country, they load up with the conundrum which their existence involves for him. they are not very gay, and do not rise to a joke with that flashing eagerness which they show for it at home. if you have them against a background of banana-stems, or low palms, or feathery canes, nothing could be more acceptably characteristic of the air and sky; nor are they out of place on the box of the little victorias, where visitors of the more inquisitive sex put them to constant question. such visitors spare no islander of any color. once, in the pretty public garden which the multiple had claimed for its private property, three unmerciful american women suddenly descended from the heavens and began to question the multiple's gardener, who was peacefully digging at the rate of a spadeful every five minutes. presently he sat down on his wheelbarrow, and then shifted, without relief, from one handle of it to the other. then he rose and braced himself desperately against the tool-house, where, when his tormentors drifted away, he seemed to the soft eye of pity pinned to the wall by their cruel interrogations, whose barbed points were buried in the stucco behind him, and whose feathered shafts stuck out half a yard before his breast. whether he was black or not, pity could not see, but probably he was. at least the garrison of the islands is all black, being a jamaican regiment of that color; and when one of the warriors comes down the white street, with his swagger-stick in his hand, and flaming in scarlet and gold upon the ground of his own blackness, it is as if a gigantic oriole were coming towards you, or a mighty tulip. these gorgeous creatures seem so much readier than the natives to laugh, that you wish to test them with a joke. but it might fail. the summer islands are a british colony, and the joke does not flourish so luxuriantly, here as some other things. to be sure, one of the native fruits seems a sort of joke when you hear it first named, and when you are offered a 'loquat', if you are of a frivolous mind you search your mind for the connection with 'loquor' which it seems to intimate. failing in this, you taste the fruit, and then, if it is not perfectly ripe, you are as far from loquaciousness as if you had bitten a green persimmon. but if it is ripe, it is delicious, and may be consumed indefinitely. it is the only native fruit which one can wish to eat at all, with an unpractised palate, though it is claimed that with experience a relish may come for the pawpaws. these break out in clusters of the size of oranges at the top of a thick pole, which may have some leaves or may not, and ripen as they fancy in the indefinite summer. they are of the color and flavor of a very insipid little muskmelon which has grown too near a patch of squashes. one may learn to like this pawpaw, yes, but one must study hard. it is best when plucked by a young islander of italian blood whose father orders him up the bare pole in the sunny sunday morning air to oblige the signori, and then with a pawpaw in either hand stands talking with them about the two bad years there have been in bermuda, and the probability of his doing better in nuova york. he has not imagined our winter, however, and he shrinks from its boldly pictured rigors, and lets the signori go with a sigh, and a bunch of pink and crimson roses. the roses are here, budding and blooming in the quiet bewilderment which attends the flowers and plants from the temperate zone in this latitude, and which in the case of the strawberries offered with cream and cake at another public garden expresses itself in a confusion of red, ripe fruit and white blossoms on the same stem. they are a pleasure to the nose and eye rather than the palate, as happens with so many growths of the tropics, if indeed the summer islands are tropical, which some plausibly deny; though why should not strawberries, fresh picked from the plant in mid-march, enjoy the right to be indifferent sweet? iv. what remains? the events of the summer islands are few, and none out of the order of athletics between teams of the army and navy, and what may be called societetics, have happened in the past enchanted fortnight. but far better things than events have happened: sunshine and rain of such like quality that one could not grumble at either, and gales, now from the south and now from the north, with the languor of the one and the vigor of the other in them. there were drives upon drives that were always to somewhere, but would have been delightful the same if they had been mere goings and comings, past the white houses overlooking little lawns through the umbrage of their palm-trees. the lawns professed to be of grass, but were really mats of close little herbs which were not grass; but which, where the sparse cattle were grazing them, seemed to satisfy their inexacting stomachs. they are never very green, and in fact the landscape often has an air of exhaustion and pause which it wears with us in late august; and why not, after all its interminable, innumerable summers? everywhere in the gentle hollows which the coral hills (if they are coral) sink into are the patches of potatoes and lilies and onions drawing their geometrical lines across the brown-red, weedless soil; and in very sheltered spots are banana-orchards which are never so snugly sheltered there but their broad leaves are whipped to shreds. the white road winds between gray walls crumbling in an amiable disintegration, but held together against ruin by a network of maidenhair ferns and creepers of unknown name, and overhung by trees where the cactus climbs and hangs in spiky links, or if another sort, pierces them with speary stems as tall and straight as the stalks of the neighboring bamboo. the loquat-trees cluster--like quinces in the garden closes, and show their pale golden, plum-shaped fruit. for the most part the road runs by still inland waters, but sometimes it climbs to the high downs beside the open sea, grotesque with wind-worn and wave-worn rocks, and beautiful with opalescent beaches, and the black legs of the negro children paddling in the tints of the prostrate rainbow. all this seems probable and natural enough at the writing; but how will it be when one has turned one's back upon it? will it not lapse into the gross fable of travellers, and be as the things which the liars who swap them cannot themselves believe? what will be said to you when you tell that in the summer islands one has but to saw a hole in his back yard and take out a house of soft, creamy sandstone and set it up and go to living in it? what, when you relate that among the northern and southern evergreens there are deciduous trees which, in a clime where there is no fall or spring, simply drop their leaves when they are tired of keeping them on, and put out others when they feel like it? what, when you pretend that in the absence of serpents there are centipedes a span long, and spiders the bigness of bats, and mosquitoes that sweetly sing in the drowsing ear, but bite not; or that there are swamps but no streams, and in the marshes stand mangrove-trees whose branches grow downward into the ooze, as if they wished to get back into the earth and pull in after them the holes they emerged from? these every-day facts seem not only incredible to the liar himself, even in their presence, but when you begin the ascent of that steep slant back to new york you foresee that they will become impossible. as impossible as the summit of the slant now appears to the sense which shudderingly figures it a bermuda pawpaw-tree seven hundred miles high, and fruiting icicles and snowballs in the march air! wild flowers of the asphalt looking through mrs. caroline a. creevey's charming book on the flowers of field, hill, and swamp, the other day, i was very forcibly reminded of the number of these pretty, wilding growths which i had been finding all the season long among the streets of asphalt and the sidewalks of artificial stone in this city; and i am quite sure that any one who has been kept in new york, as i have been this year, beyond the natural time of going into the country, can have as real a pleasure in this sylvan invasion as mine, if he will but give himself up to a sense of it. i. of course it is altogether too late, now, to look for any of the early spring flowers, but i can recall the exquisite effect of the tender blue hepatica fringing the centre rail of the grip-cars, all up and down broadway, and apparently springing from the hollow beneath, where the cable ran with such a brooklike gurgle that any damp-living plant must find itself at home there. the water-pimpernel may now be seen, by any sympathetic eye, blowing delicately along the track, in the breeze of the passing cabs, and elastically lifting itself from the rush of the cars. the reader can easily verify it by the picture in mrs. creevey's book. he knows it by its other name of brook weed; and he will have my delight, i am sure, in the cardinal-flower which will be with us in august. it is a shy flower, loving the more sequestered nooks, and may be sought along the shady stretches of third avenue, where the elevated road overhead forms a shelter as of interlacing boughs. the arrow-head likes such swampy expanses as the converging surface roads form at dead man's curve and the corners of twenty third street. this is in flower now, and will be till september; and st.-john's-wort, which some call the false goldenrod, is already here. you may find it in any moist, low ground, but the gutters of wall street, or even the banks of the stock exchange, are not too dry for it. the real golden-rod is not much in evidence with us, for it comes only when summer is on the wane. the other night, however, on the promenade of the madison square roof garden, i was delighted to see it growing all over the oblong dome of the auditorium, in response to the cry of a homesick cricket which found itself in exile there at the base of a potted ever green. this lonely insect had no sooner sounded its winter-boding note than the fond flower began sympathetically to wave and droop along those tarry slopes, as i have seen it on how many hill-side pastures! but this may have been only a transitory response to the cricket, and i cannot promise the visitor to the roof garden that he will find golden-rod there every night. i believe there is always golden seal, but it is the kind that comes in bottles, and not in the gloom of "deep, cool, moist woods," where mrs. creevey describes it as growing, along with other wildings of such sweet names or quaint as celandine, and dwarf larkspur, and squirrel-corn, and dutchman's breeches, and pearlwort, and wood-sorrel, and bishop's--cap, and wintergreen, and indian-pipe, and snowberry, and adder's-tongue, and wakerobin, and dragon-root, and adam-and-eve, and twenty more, which must have got their names from some fairy of genius. i should say it was a female fairy of genius who called them so, and that she had her own sex among mortals in mind when she invented their nomenclature, and was thinking of little girls, and slim, pretty maids, and happy young wives. the author tells how they all look, with a fine sense of their charm in her words, but one would know how they looked from their names; and when you call them over they at once transplant themselves to the depths of the dells between our sky-scrapers, and find a brief sojourn in the cavernous excavations whence other sky-scrapers are to rise. ii. that night on the roof garden, when the cricket's cry flowered the dome with golden-rod, the tall stems of rye growing among the orchestra sloped all one way at times, just like the bows of violins, in the half-dollar gale that always blows over the city at that height. but as one turns the leaves of mrs. creevey's magic book-perhaps one ought to say turns its petals--the forests and the fields come and make themselves at home in the city everywhere. by virtue of it i have been more in the country in a half-hour than if i had lived all june there. when i lift my eyes from its pictures or its letter-press my vision prints the eidolons of wild flowers everywhere, as it prints the image of the sun against the air after dwelling on his brightness. the rose-mallow flaunts along fifth avenue and the golden threads of the dodder embroider the house fronts on the principal cross streets; and i might think at times that it was all mere fancy, it has so much the quality of a pleasing illusion. yet mrs. creevey's book is not one to lend itself to such a deceit by any of the ordinary arts. it is rather matter of fact in form and manner, and largely owes what magic it has to the inherent charm of its subject. one feels this in merely glancing at the index, and reading such titles of chapters as "wet meadows and low grounds"; "dry fields--waste places --waysides"; "hills and rocky woods, open woods"; and "deep, cool, moist woods"; each a poem in itself, lyric or pastoral, and of a surpassing opulence of suggestion. the spring and, summer months pass in stately processional through the book, each with her fillet inscribed with the names of her characteristic flowers or blossoms, and brightened with the blooms themselves. they are plucked from where nature bade them grow in the wild places, or their own wayward wills led them astray. a singularly fascinating chapter is that called "escaped from gardens," in which some of these pretty runagates are catalogued. i supposed in my liberal ignorance that the bouncing bet was the only one of these, but i have learned that the pansy and the sweet violet love to gad, and that the caraway, the snapdragon, the prince's feather, the summer savory, the star of bethlehem, the day-lily, and the tiger-lily, and even the sluggish stone crop are of the vagrant, fragrant company. one is not surprised to meet the tiger-lily in it; that must always have had the jungle in its heart; but that the baby's breath should be found wandering by the road-sides from massachusetts and virginia to ohio, gives one a tender pang as for a lost child. perhaps the poor human tramps, who sleep in barns and feed at back doors along those dusty ways, are mindful of the baby's breath, and keep a kindly eye out for the little truant. iii. as i was writing those homely names i felt again how fit and lovely they were, how much more fit and lovely than the scientific names of the flowers. mrs. creevey will make a botanist of you if you will let her, and i fancy a very good botanist, though i cannot speak from experience, but she will make a poet of you in spite of yourself, as i very well know; and she will do this simply by giving you first the familiar name of the flowers she loves to write of. i am not saying that the day-lily would not smell as sweet by her title of 'hemerocallis fulva', or that the homely, hearty bouncing bet would not kiss as deliciously in her scholar's cap and gown of 'saponaria officinalis'; but merely that their college degrees do not lend themselves so willingly to verse, or even melodious prose, which is what the poet is often after nowadays. so i like best to hail the flowers by the names that the fairies gave them, and the children know them by, especially when my longing for them makes them grow here in the city streets. i have a fancy that they would all vanish away if i saluted them in botanical terms. as long as i talk of cat-tail rushes, the homeless grimalkins of the areas and the back fences help me to a vision of the swamps thickly studded with their stiff spears; but if i called them 'typha latifolia', or even 'typha angustifolia', there is not the hardiest and fiercest prowler of the roof and the fire-escape but would fly the sound of my voice and leave me forlorn amid the withered foliage of my dream. the street sparrows, pestiferous and persistent as they are, would forsake my sylvan pageant if i spoke of the bird-foot violet as the 'viola pedata'; and the commonest cur would run howling if he beard the gentle poison dogwood maligned as the 'rhus venenata'. the very milk-cans would turn to their native pumps in disgust from my attempt to invoke our simple american cowslip as the 'dodecatheon meadia'. iv yet i do not deny that such scientific nomenclature has its uses; and i should be far from undervaluing this side of mrs. creevey's book. in fact, i secretly respect it the more for its botanical lore, and if ever i get into the woods or fields again i mean to go up to some of the humblest flowers, such as i can feel myself on easy terms with, and tell them what they are in latin. i think it will surprise them, and i dare say they will some of them like it, and will want their initials inscribed on their leaves, like those signatures which the medicinal plants bear, or are supposed to bear. but as long as i am engaged in their culture amid this stone and iron and asphalt, i find it best to invite their presence by their familiar names, and i hope they will not think them too familiar. i should like to get them all naturalized here, so that the thousands of poor city children, who never saw them growing in their native places, might have some notion of how bountifully the world is equipped with beauty, and how it is governed by many laws which are not enforced by policemen. i think that would interest them very much, and i shall not mind their plucking my barmecide blossoms, and carrying them home by the armfuls. when good-will costs nothing we ought to practise it even with the tramps, and these are very welcome, in their wanderings over the city pave, to rest their weary limbs in any of my pleached bowers they come to. a circus in the suburbs we dwellers in cities and large towns, if we are well-to-do, have more than our fill of pleasures of all kinds; and for now many years past we have been used to a form of circus where surfeit is nearly as great misery as famine in that kind could be. for our sins, or some of our friends' sins, perhaps, we have now gone so long to circuses of three rings and two raised-platforms that we scarcely realize that in the country there are still circuses of one ring and no platform at all. we are accustomed, in the gross and foolish-superfluity of these city circuses, to see no feat quite through, but to turn our greedy eyes at the most important instant in the hope of greater wonders in another ring. we have four or five clowns, in as many varieties of grotesque costume, as well as a lady clown in befitting dress; but we hear none of them speak, not even the lady clown, while in the country circus the old clown of our childhood, one and indivisible, makes the same style of jokes, if not the very same jokes, that we used to hear there. it is not easy to believe all this, and i do not know that i should quite believe it myself if i had not lately been witness of it in the suburban village where i was passing the summer. i. the circus announced itself in the good old way weeks beforehand by the vast posters of former days and by a profusion of small bills which fell upon the village as from the clouds, and left it littered everywhere with their festive pink. they prophesied it in a name borne by the first circus i ever saw, which was also an animal show, but the animals must all have died during the fifty years past, for there is now no menagerie attached to it. i did not know this when i heard the band braying through the streets of the village on the morning of the performance, and for me the mangy old camels and the pimpled elephants of yore led the procession through accompanying ranks of boys who have mostly been in their graves for half a lifetime; the distracted ostrich thrust an advertising neck through the top of its cage, and the lion roared to himself in the darkness of his moving prison. i felt the old thrill of excitement, the vain hope of something preternatural and impossible, and i do not know what could have kept me from that circus as soon as i had done lunch. my heart rose at sight of the large tent (which was yet so very little in comparison with the tents of the three-ring and two-platform circuses); the alluring and illusory sideshows of fat women and lean men; the horses tethered in the background and stamping under the fly-bites; the old, weather-beaten grand chariot, which looked like the ghost of the grand chariot which used to drag me captive in its triumph; and the canvas shelters where the cooks were already at work over their kettles on the evening meal of the circus folk. i expected to be kept a long while from the ticket-wagon by the crowd, but there was no crowd, and perhaps there never used to be much of a crowd. i bought my admittances without a moment's delay, and the man who sold me my reserve seats had even leisure to call me back and ask to look at the change he had given me, mostly nickels. "i thought i didn't give you enough," he said, and he added one more, and sent me on to the doorkeeper with my faith in human nature confirmed and refreshed. it was cool enough outside, but within it was very warm, as it should be, to give the men with palm-leaf fans and ice-cold lemonade a chance. they were already making their rounds, and crying their wares with voices from the tombs of the dead past; and the child of the young mother who took my seat-ticket from me was going to sleep at full length on the lowermost tread of the benches, so that i had to step across its prostrate form. these reserved seats were carpeted; but i had forgotten how little one rank was raised above another, and how very trying they were upon the back and legs. but for the carpeting, i could not see how i was advantaged above the commoner folk in the unreserved seats, and i reflected how often in this world we paid for an inappreciable splendor. i could not see but they were as well off as i; they were much more gayly dressed, and some of them were even smoking cigars, while they were nearly all younger by ten, twenty, forty, or fifty years, and even more. they did not look like the country people whom i rather hoped and expected to see, but were apparently my fellow-villagers, in different stages of excitement. they manifested by the usual signs their impatience to have the performance begin, and i confess that i shared this, though i did not take part in the demonstration. ii. i have no intention of following the events seriatim. front time to time during their progress i renewed my old one-sided acquaintance with the circus-men. they were quite the same people, i believe, but strangely softened and ameliorated, as i hope i am, and looking not a day older, which i cannot say of myself, exactly. the supernumeraries were patently farmer boys who had entered newly upon that life in a spirit of adventure, and who wore their partial liveries, a braided coat here and a pair of striped trousers there, with a sort of timorous pride, a deprecating bravado, as if they expected to be hooted by the spectators and were very glad when they were not. the man who went round with a dog to keep boys from hooking in under the curtain had grown gentler, and his dog did not look as if he would bite the worst boy in town. the man came up and asked the young mother about her sleeping child, and i inferred that the child had been sick, and was therefore unusually interesting to all the great, kind-hearted, simple circus family. he was good to the poor supes, and instructed them, not at all sneeringly, how best to manage the guy ropes for the nets when the trapeze events began. there was, in fact, an air of pleasing domesticity diffused over the whole circus. this was, perhaps, partly an effect from our extreme proximity to its performances; i had never been on quite such intimate terms with equitation and aerostation of all kinds; but i think it was also largely from the good hearts of the whole company. a circus must become, during the season, a great brotherhood and sisterhood, especially sisterhood, and its members must forget finally that they are not united by ties of blood. i dare say they often become so, as husbands and wives and fathers and mothers, if not as brothers. the domestic effect was heightened almost poignantly when a young lady in a turkish-towel bath-gown came out and stood close by the band, waiting for her act on a barebacked horse of a conventional pattern. she really looked like a young goddess in a turkish-towel bath-gown: goddesses must have worn bath-gowns, especially venus, who was often imagined in the bath, or just out of it. but when this goddess threw off her bath-gown, and came bounding into the ring as gracefully as the clogs she wore on her slippers would let her, she was much more modestly dressed than most goddesses. what i am trying to say, however, is that, while she stood there by the band, she no more interested the musicians than if she were their collective sister. they were all in their shirt-sleeves for the sake of the coolness, and they banged and trumpeted and fluted away as indifferent to her as so many born brothers. indeed, when the gyrations of her horse brought her to our side of the ring, she was visibly not so youthful and not so divine as she might have been; but the girl who did the trapeze acts, and did them wonderfully, left nothing to be desired in that regard; though really i do not see why we who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it of other people. i think it would have been quite enough for her to do the trapeze acts so perfectly; but her being so pretty certainly added a poignancy to the contemplation of her perils. one could follow every motion of her anxiety in that close proximity: the tremor of her chin as she bit her lips before taking her flight through the air, the straining eagerness of her eye as she measured the distance, the frown with which she forbade herself any shrinking or reluctance. iii. how strange is life, how sad and perplexing its contradictions! why should such an exhibition as that be supposed to give pleasure? perhaps it does not give pleasure, but is only a necessary fulfilment of one of the many delusions we are in with regard to each other in this bewildering world. they are of all sorts and degrees, these delusions, and i suppose that in the last analysis it was not pleasure i got from the clown and his clowning, clowned he ever so merrily. i remember that i liked hearing his old jokes, not because they were jokes, but because they were old and endeared by long association. he sang one song which i must have heard him sing at my first circus (i am sure it was he), about "things that i don't like to see," and i heartily agreed with him that his book of songs, which he sent round to be sold, was fully worth the half-dime asked for it, though i did not buy it. perhaps the rival author in me withheld me, but, as a brother man, i will not allow that i did not feel for him and suffer with him because of the thick, white pigment which plentifully coated his face, and, with the sweat drops upon it, made me think of a newly painted wall in the rain. he was infinitely older than his personality, than his oldest joke (though you never can be sure how old a joke is), and, representatively, i dare say he outdated the pyramids. they must have made clowns whiten their faces in the dawn of time, and no doubt there were drolls among the antediluvians who enhanced the effect of their fun by that means. all the same, i pitied this clown for it, and i fancied in his wildest waggery the note of a real irascibility. shall i say that he seemed the only member of that little circus who was not of an amiable temper? but i do not blame him, and i think it much to have seen a clown once more who jested audibly with the ringmaster and always got the better of him in repartee. it was long since i had known that pleasure. iv. throughout the performance at this circus i was troubled by a curious question, whether it were really of the same moral and material grandeur as the circuses it brought to memory, or whether these were thin and slight, too. we all know how the places of our childhood, the heights, the distances, shrink and dwindle when we go back to them, and was it possible that i had been deceived in the splendor of my early circuses? the doubt was painful, but i was forced to own that there might be more truth in it than in a blind fealty to their remembered magnificence. very likely circuses have grown not only in size, but in the richness and variety of their entertainments, and i was spoiled for the simple joys of this. but i could see no reflection of my dissatisfaction on the young faces around me, and i must confess that there was at least so much of the circus that i left when it was half over. i meant to go into the side-shows and see the fat woman and the living skeleton, and take the giant by the hand and the armless man by his friendly foot, if i might be so honored. but i did none of these things, and i am willing to believe the fault was in me, if i was disappointed in the circus. it was i who had shrunk and dwindled, and not it. to real boys it was still the size of the firmament, and was a world of wonders and delights. at least i can recognize this fact now, and can rejoice in the peaceful progress all over the country of the simple circuses which the towns never see, but which help to render the summer fairer and brighter to the unspoiled eyes and hearts they appeal to. i hope it will be long before they cease to find profit in the pleasure they give. a she hamlet the other night as i sat before the curtain of the garden theatre and waited for it to rise upon the hamlet of mme. bernhardt, a thrill of the rich expectation which cannot fail to precede the rise of any curtain upon any hamlet passed through my eager frame. there is, indeed, no scene of drama which is of a finer horror (eighteenth-century horror) than that which opens the great tragedy. the sentry pacing up and down upon the platform at elsinore under the winter night; the greeting between him and the comrade arriving to relieve him, with its hints of the bitter cold; the entrance of horatio and marcellus to these before they can part; the mention of the ghost, and, while the soldiers are in the act of protesting it a veridical phantom, the apparition of the ghost, taking the word from their lips and hushing all into a pulseless awe: what could be more simply and sublimely real, more naturally supernatural? what promise of high mystical things to come there is in the mere syllabling of the noble verse, and how it enlarges us from ourselves, for that time at least, to a disembodied unity with the troubled soul whose martyry seems foreboded in the solemn accents! as the many hamlets on which the curtain had risen in my time passed in long procession through my memory, i seemed to myself so much of their world, and so little of the world that arrogantly calls itself the actual one, that i should hardly have been surprised to find myself one of the less considered persons of the drama who were seen but not heard in its course. i. the trouble in judging anything is that if you have the materials for an intelligent criticism, the case is already prejudiced in your hands. you do not bring a free mind to it, and all your efforts to free your mind are a species of gymnastics more or less admirable, but not really effective for the purpose. the best way is to own yourself unfair at the start, and then you can have some hope of doing yourself justice, if not your subject. in other words, if you went to see the hamlet of mme. bernhardt frankly expecting to be disappointed, you were less likely in the end to be disappointed in your expectations, and you could not blame her if you were. to be ideally fair to that representation, it would be better not to have known any other hamlet, and, above all, the hamlet of shakespeare. from the first it was evident that she had three things overwhelmingly against her--her sex, her race, and her speech. you never ceased to feel for a moment that it was a woman who was doing that melancholy dane, and that the woman was a jewess, and the jewess a french jewess. these three removes put a gulf impassable between her utmost skill and the impassioned irresolution of that inscrutable northern nature which is in nothing so masculine as its feminine reluctances and hesitations, or so little french as in those obscure emotions which the english poetry expressed with more than gallic clearness, but which the french words always failed to convey. the battle was lost from the first, and all you could feel about it for the rest was that if it was magnificent it was not war. while the battle went on i was the more anxious to be fair, because i had, as it were, pre-espoused the winning side; and i welcomed, in the interest of critical impartiality, another hamlet which came to mind, through readily traceable associations. this was a hamlet also of french extraction in the skill and school of the actor, but as much more deeply derived than the hamlet of mme. bernhardt as the large imagination of charles fechter transcended in its virile range the effect of her subtlest womanish intuition. his was the first blond hamlet known to our stage, and hers was also blond, if a reddish-yellow wig may stand for a complexion; and it was of the quality of his hamlet in masterly technique. ii. the hamlet of fechter, which rose ghostlike out of the gulf of the past, and cloudily possessed the stage where the hamlet of mme. bernhardt was figuring, was called a romantic hamlet thirty years ago; and so it was in being a break from the classic hamlets of the anglo-american theatre. it was romantic as shakespeare himself was romantic, in an elder sense of the word, and not romanticistic as dumas was romanticistic. it was, therefore, the most realistic hamlet ever yet seen, because the most naturally poetic. mme. bernhardt recalled it by the perfection of her school; for fechter's poetic naturalness differed from the conventionality of the accepted hamlets in nothing so much as the superiority of its self-instruction. in mme. bernhardt's hamlet, as in his, nothing was trusted to chance, or "inspiration." good or bad, what one saw was what was meant to be seen. when fechter played edmond dantes or claude melnotte, he put reality into those preposterous inventions, and in hamlet even his alien accent helped him vitalize the part; it might be held to be nearer the elizabethan accent than ours; and after all, you said hamlet was a foreigner, and in your high content with what he gave you did not mind its being in a broken vessel. when he challenged the ghost with "i call thee keeng, father, rawl-dane," you would hardly have had the erring utterance bettered. it sufficed as it was; and when he said to rosencrantz, "will you pleh upon this pyip?" it was with such a princely authority and comradely entreaty that you made no note of the slips in the vowels except to have pleasure of their quaintness afterwards. for the most part you were not aware of these betrayals of his speech; and in certain high things it was soul interpreted to soul through the poetry of shakespeare so finely, so directly, that there was scarcely a sense of the histrionic means. he put such divine despair into the words, "except my life, except my life, except my life!" following the mockery with which he had assured polonius there was nothing he would more willingly part withal than his leave, that the heart-break of them had lingered with me for thirty years, and i had been alert for them with every hamlet since. but before i knew, mme. bernhardt had uttered them with no effect whatever. her hamlet, indeed, cut many of the things that we have learned to think the points of hamlet, and it so transformed others by its interpretation of the translator's interpretation of shakespeare that they passed unrecognized. soliloquies are the weak invention of the enemy, for the most part, but as such things go that soliloquy of hamlet's, "to be or not to be," is at least very noble poetry; and yet mme. bernhardt was so unimpressive in it that you scarcely noticed the act of its delivery. perhaps this happened because the sumptuous and sombre melancholy of shakespeare's thought was transmitted in phrases that refused it its proper mystery. but there was always a hardness, not always from the translation, upon this feminine hamlet. it was like a thick shell with no crevice in it through which the tenderness of shakespeare's hamlet could show, except for the one moment at ophelia's grave, where he reproaches laertes with those pathetic words-- "what is the reason that you use me thus? i loved you ever; but it is no matter." here mme. bernhardt betrayed a real grief, but as a woman would, and not a man. at the close of the gonzago play, when hamlet triumphs in a mad whirl, her hamlet hopped up and down like a mischievous crow, a mischievous she-crow. there was no repose in her hamlet, though there were moments of leaden lapse which suggested physical exhaustion; and there was no range in her elocution expressive of the large vibration of that tormented spirit. her voice dropped out, or jerked itself out, and in the crises of strong emotion it was the voice of a scolding or a hysterical woman. at times her movements, which she must have studied so hard to master, were drolly womanish, especially those of the whole person. her quickened pace was a woman's nervous little run, and not a man's swift stride; and to give herself due stature, it was her foible to wear a woman's high heels to her shoes, and she could not help tilting on them. in the scene with the queen after the play, most english and american hamlets have required her to look upon the counterfeit presentment of two brothers in miniatures something the size of tea-plates; but mme. bernhardt's preferred full-length, life-size family portraits. the dead king's effigy did not appear a flattered likeness in the scene-painter's art, but it was useful in disclosing his ghost by giving place to it in the wall at the right moment. she achieved a novelty by this treatment of the portraits, and she achieved a novelty in the tone she took with the wretched queen. hamlet appeared to scold her mother, but though it could be said that her mother deserved a scolding, was it the part of a good daughter to give it her? one should, of course, say a good son, but long before this it had become impossible to think at all of mme. bernhardt's hamlet as a man, if it ever had been possible. she had traversed the bounds which tradition as well as nature has set, and violated the only condition upon which an actress may personate a man. this condition is that there shall be always a hint of comedy in the part, that the spectator shall know all the time that the actress is a woman, and that she shall confess herself such before the play is over; she shall be fascinating in the guise of a man only because she is so much more intensely a woman in it. shakespeare had rather a fancy for women in men's roles, which, as women's roles in his time were always taken by pretty and clever boys, could be more naturally managed then than now. but when it came to the eclaircissement, and the pretty boys, who had been playing the parts of women disguised as men, had to own themselves women, the effect must have been confused if not weakened. if mme. bernhardt, in the necessity of doing something shakespearean, had chosen to do rosalind, or viola, or portia, she could have done it with all the modern advantages of women in men's roles. these characters are, of course, "lighter motions bounded in a shallower brain" than the creation she aimed at; but she could at least have made much of them, and she does not make much of hamlet. iii. the strongest reason against any woman hamlet is that it does violence to an ideal. literature is not so rich in great imaginary masculine types that we can afford to have them transformed to women; and after seeing mme. bernhardt's hamlet no one can altogether liberate himself from the fancy that the prince of denmark was a girl of uncertain age, with crises of mannishness in which she did not seem quite a lady. hamlet is in nothing more a man than in the things to which as a man he found himself unequal; for as a woman he would have been easily superior to them. if we could suppose him a woman as mme. bernhardt, in spite of herself, invites us to do, we could only suppose him to have solved his perplexities with the delightful precipitation of his putative sex. as the niece of a wicked uncle, who in that case would have had to be a wicked aunt, wedded to hamlet's father hard upon the murder of her mother, she would have made short work of her vengeance. no fine scruples would have delayed her; she would not have had a moment's question whether she had not better kill herself; she would have out with her bare bodkin and ended the doubt by first passing it through her aunt's breast. to be sure, there would then have been no play of "hamlet," as we have it; but a hamlet like that imagined, a frankly feminine hamlet, mme. bernhardt could have rendered wonderfully. it is in attempting a masculine hamlet that she transcends the imaginable and violates an ideal. it is not thinkable. after you have seen it done, you say, as mr. clemens is said to have said of bicycling: "yes, i have seen it, but it's impossible. it doesn't stand to reason." art, like law, is the perfection of reason, and whatever is unreasonable in the work of an artist is inartistic. by the time i had reached these bold conclusions i was ready to deduce a principle from them, and to declare that in a true civilization such a thing as that hamlet would be forbidden, as an offence against public morals, a violence to something precious and sacred. in the absence of any public regulation the precious and sacred ideals in the arts must be trusted to the several artists, who bring themselves to judgment when they violate them. after mme. bernhardt was perversely willing to attempt the part of hamlet, the question whether she did it well or not was of slight consequence. she had already made her failure in wishing to play the part. her wish impugned her greatness as an artist; of a really great actress it would have been as unimaginable as the assumption of a sublime feminine role by a really great actor. there is an obscure law in this matter which it would be interesting to trace, but for the present i must leave the inquiry with the reader. i can note merely that it seems somehow more permissible for women in imaginary actions to figure as men than for men to figure as women. in the theatre we have conjectured how and why this may be, but the privilege, for less obvious reasons, seems yet more liberally granted in fiction. a woman may tell a story in the character of a man and not give offence, but a man cannot write a novel in autobiographical form from the personality of a woman without imparting the sense of something unwholesome. one feels this true even in the work of such a master as tolstoy, whose katia is a case in point. perhaps a woman may play hamlet with a less shocking effect than a man may play desdemona, but all the same she must not play hamlet at all. that sublime ideal is the property of the human imagination, and may not be profaned by a talent enamoured of the impossible. no harm could be done by the broadest burlesque, the most irreverent travesty, for these would still leave the ideal untouched. hamlet, after all the horse-play, would be hamlet; but hamlet played by a woman, to satisfy her caprice, or to feed her famine for a fresh effect, is hamlet disabled, for a long time, at least, in its vital essence. i felt that it would take many returns to the hamlet of shakespeare to efface the impression of mme. bernhardt's hamlet; and as i prepared to escape from my row of stalls in the darkening theatre, i experienced a noble shame for having seen the dane so disnatured, to use mr. lowell's word. i had not been obliged to come; i had voluntarily shared in the wrong done; by my presence i had made myself an accomplice in the wrong. it was high ground, but not too high for me, and i recovered a measure of self-respect in assuming it. the midnight platoon he had often heard of it. connoisseurs of such matters, young newspaper men trying to make literature out of life and smuggle it into print under the guard of unwary editors, and young authors eager to get life into their literature, had recommended it to him as one of the most impressive sights of the city; and he had willingly agreed with them that he ought to see it. he imagined it very dramatic, and he was surprised to find it in his experience so largely subjective. if there was any drama at all it was wholly in his own consciousness. but the thing was certainly impressive in its way. i. he thought it a great piece of luck that he should come upon it by chance, and so long after he had forgotten about it that he was surprised to recognize it for the spectacle he had often promised himself the pleasure of seeing. pleasure is the right word; for pleasure of the painful sort that all hedonists will easily imagine was what he expected to get from it; though upon the face of it there seems no reason why a man should delight to see his fellow-men waiting in the winter street for the midnight dole of bread which must in some cases be their only meal from the last midnight to the next midnight. but the mere thought of it gave him pleasure, and the sight of it, from the very first instant. he was proud of knowing just what it was at once, with the sort of pride which one has in knowing an earthquake, though one has never felt one before. he saw the double file of men stretching up one street, and stretching down the other from the corner of the bakery where the loaves were to be given out on the stroke of twelve, and he hugged himself in a luxurious content with his perspicacity. it was all the more comfortable to do this because he was in a coup, warmly shut against the sharp, wholesome christmas-week weather, and was wrapped to the chin in a long fur overcoat, which he wore that night as a duty to his family, with a conscience against taking cold and alarming them for his health. he now practised another piece of self-denial: he let the cabman drive rapidly past the interesting spectacle, and carry him to the house where he was going to fetch away the child from the christmas party. he wished to be in good time, so as to save the child from anxiety about his coming; but he promised himself to stop, going back, and glut his sensibility in a leisurely study of the scene. he got the child, with her arms full of things from the christmas-tree, into the coup, and then he said to the cabman, respectfully leaning as far over from his box to listen as his thick greatcoat would let him: "when you get up there near that bakery again, drive slowly. i want to have a look at those men." "all right, sir," said the driver intelligently, and he found his why skilfully out of the street among the high banks of the seasonable christmas-week snow, which the street-cleaners had heaped up there till they could get round to it with their carts. when they were in broadway again it seemed lonelier and silenter than it was a few minutes before. except for their own coup, the cable-cars, with their flaming foreheads, and the mechanical clangor of their gongs at the corners, seemed to have it altogether to themselves. a tall, lumbering united states mail van rolled by, and impressed my friend in the coup with a cheap and agreeable sense of mystery relative to the letters it was carrying to their varied destination at the grand central station. he listened with half an ear to the child's account of the fun she had at the party, and he watched with both eyes for the sight of the men waiting at the bakery for the charity of the midnight loaves. he played with a fear that they might all have vanished, and with an apprehension that the cabman might forget and whirl him rapidly by the place where he had left them. but the driver remembered, and checked his horses in good time; and there were the men still, but in even greater number than before, stretching farther up broadway and farther out along the side street. they stood slouched in dim and solemn phalanx under the night sky, so seasonably, clear and frostily atwinkle with christmas-week stars; two by two they stood, slouched close together, perhaps for their mutual warmth, perhaps in an unconscious effort to get near the door where the loaves were to be given out, in time to share in them before they were all gone. ii. my friend's heart beat with glad anticipation. he was really to see this important, this representative thing to the greatest possible advantage. he rapidly explained to his companion that the giver of the midnight loaves got rid of what was left of his daily bread in that way: the next day it could not be sold, and he preferred to give it away to those who needed it, rather than try to find his account in it otherwise. she understood, and he tried to think that sometimes coffee was given with the bread, but he could not make sure of this, though he would have liked very much to have it done; it would have been much more dramatic. afterwards he learned that it was done, and he was proud of having fancied it. he decided that when he came alongside of the broadway file he would get out, and go to the side door of the bakery and watch the men receiving the bread. perhaps he would find courage to speak to them, and ask them about themselves. at the time it did not strike him that it would be indecent. a great many things about them were open to reasonable conjecture. it was not probable that they were any of them there for their health, as the saying is. they were all there because they were hungry, or else they were there in behalf of some one else who was hungry. but it was always possible that some of them were impostors, and he wondered if any test was applied to them that would prove them deserving or undeserving. if one were poor, one ought to be deserving; if one were rich, it did not so much matter. it seemed to him very likely that if he asked these men questions they would tell him lies. a fantastic association of their double files and those of the galley-slaves whom don quixote released, with the tonguey gines de passamonte at their head, came into his mind. he smiled, and then he thought how these men were really a sort of slaves and convicts --slaves to want and self-convicted of poverty. all at once he fancied them actually manacled there together, two by two, a coffle of captives taken in some cruel foray, and driven to a market where no man wanted to buy. he thought how old their slavery was; and he wondered if it would ever be abolished, as other slaveries had been. would the world ever outlive it? would some new-year's day come when some president would proclaim, amid some dire struggle, that their slavery was to be no more? that would be fine. iii. he noticed how still the most of them were. a few of them stepped a little out of the line, and stamped to shake off the cold; but all the rest remained motionless, shrinking into themselves, and closer together. they might have been their own dismal ghosts, they were so still, with no more need of defence from the cold than the dead have. he observed now that not one among them had a fur overcoat on; and at a second glance he saw that there was not an overcoat of any kind among them. he made his reflection that if any of them were impostors, and not true men, with real hunger, and if they were alive to feel that stiff, wholesome, christmas-week cold, they were justly punished for their deceit. he was interested by the celerity, the simultaneity of his impressions, his reflections. it occurred to him that his abnormal alertness must be something like that of a drowning person, or a person in mortal peril, and being perfectly safe and well, he was obscurely flattered by the fact. to test his condition further he took note of the fine mass of the great dry-goods store on the hither corner, blocking itself out of the blue-black night, and of the gothic beauty of the church beyond, so near that the coffle of captives might have issued from its sculptured portal, after vain prayer. fragments of conjecture, of speculation, drifted through his mind. how early did these files begin to form themselves for the midnight dole of bread? as early as ten, as nine o'clock? if so, did the fact argue habitual destitution, or merely habitual leisure? did the slaves in the coffle make acquaintance, or remain strangers to one another, though they were closely neighbored night after night by their misery? perhaps they joked away the weary hours of waiting; they must have their jokes. which of them were old-comers, and which novices? did they ever quarrel over questions of precedence? had they some comity, some etiquette, which a man forced to leave his place could appeal to, and so get it back? could one say to his next-hand man, "will you please keep my place?" and would this man say to an interloper, "excuse me, this place is engaged"? how was it with them, when the coffle worked slowly or swiftly past the door where the bread and coffee were given out, and word passed to the rear that the supply was exhausted? this must sometimes happen, and what did they do then? iv. my friend did not quite like to think. vague, reproachful thoughts for all the remote and immediate luxury of his life passed through his mind. if he reformed that and gave the saving to hunger and cold? but what was the use? there was so much hunger, so much cold, that it could not go round. the cabman was obeying his orders too faithfully. he was not only walking by the broadway coffle, he was creeping by. his action caught the notice of the slaves, and as the coups passed them they all turned and faced it, like soldiers under review making ready to salute a superior. they were perfectly silent, perfectly respectful, but their eyes seemed to pierce the coupe through and through. my friend was suddenly aware of a certain quality of representivity; he stood to these men for all the ease and safety that they could never, never hope to know. he was society: society that was to be preserved because it embodies civilization. he wondered if they hated him in his capacity of better classes. he no longer thought of getting out and watching their behavior as they took their bread and coffee. he would have liked to excuse that thought, and protest that he was ashamed of it; that he was their friend, and wished them well--as well as might be without the sacrifice of his own advantages or superfluities, which he could have persuaded them would be perfectly useless. he put his hand on that of his companion trembling on his arm with sympathy, or at least with intelligence. "you mustn't mind. what we are and what we do is all right. it's what they are and what they suffer that's all wrong." v. "does that view of the situation still satisfy you?" i asked, when he had told me of this singular experience; i liked his apparently not coloring it at all. "i don't know," he answered. "it seems to be the only way out." "well, it's an easy way," i admitted, "and it's an idea that ought to gratify the midnight platoon." the beach at rockaway i confess that i cannot hear people rejoice in their summer sojourn as beyond the reach of excursionists without a certain rebellion; and yet i have to confess also that after spending a sunday afternoon of late july, four or five years ago, with the excursionists at one of the beaches near new york, i was rather glad that my own summer sojourn was not within reach of them. i know very well that the excursionists must go somewhere, and as a man and a brother i am willing they should go anywhere, but as a friend of quiet and seclusion i should be sorry to have them come much where i am. it is not because i would deny them a share of any pleasure i enjoy, but because they are so many and i am so few that i think they would get all the pleasure and i none. i hope the reader will see how this attitude distinguishes me from the selfish people who inhumanly exult in their remoteness from excursionists. i. it was at rockaway beach that i saw these fellow-beings whose mere multitude was too much for me. they were otherwise wholly without offence towards me, and so far as i noted, towards each other; they were, in fact, the most entirely peaceable multitude i ever saw in any country, and the very quietest. there were thousands, mounting well up towards tens of thousands, of them, in every variety of age and sex; yet i heard no voice lifted above the conversational level, except that of some infant ignorant of its privileges in a day at the sea-side, or some showman crying the attractions of the spectacle in his charge. i used to think the american crowds rather boisterous and unruly, and many years ago, when i lived in italy, i celebrated the greater amiability and self-control of the italian crowds. but we have certainly changed all that within a generation, and if what i saw the other day was a typical new york crowd, then the popular joy of our poorer classes is no longer the terror it once was to the peaceful observer. the tough was not visibly present, nor the toughness, either of the pure native east side stock or of the celtic extraction; yet there were large numbers of americans with rather fewer recognizable irish among the masses, who were mainly germans, russians, poles, and the jews of these several nationalities. there was eating and drinking without limit, on every hand and in every kind, at the booths abounding in fried seafood, and at the tables under all the wide-spreading verandas of the hotels and restaurants; yet i saw not one drunken man, and of course not any drunken women. no one that i saw was even affected by drink, and no one was guilty of any rude or unseemly behavior. the crowd was, in short, a monument to the democratic ideal of life in that very important expression of life, personal conduct, i have not any notion who or what the people were, or how virtuous or vicious they privately might be; but i am sure that no society assemblage could be of a goodlier outside; and to be of a goodly outside is all that the mere spectator has a right to ask of any crowd. i fancied, however, that great numbers of this crowd, or at least all the americans in it, were long-islanders from the inland farms and villages within easy distance of the beach. they had probably the hereditary habit of coming to it, for it was a favorite resort in the time of their fathers and grandfathers, who had --"many an hour whiled away listening to the breakers' roar that washed the beach at rockaway." but the clothing store and the paper pattern have equalized the cheaper dress of the people so that you can no longer know citizen and countryman apart by their clothes, still less citizeness and countrywoman; and i can only conjecture that the foreign-looking folk i saw were from new york and brooklyn. they came by boat, and came and went by the continually arriving and departing trains, and last but not least by bicycles, both sexes. a few came in the public carriages and omnibuses of the neighborhood, but by far the vaster number whom neither the boats nor the trains had brought had their own vehicles, the all-pervading bicycles, which no one seemed so poor as not to be able to keep. the bicyclers stormed into the frantic village of the beach the whole afternoon, in the proportion of one woman to five men, and most of these must have ridden down on their wheels from the great cities. boys ran about in the roadway with bunches of brasses, to check the wheels, and put them for safekeeping in what had once been the stable-yards of the hotels; the restaurants had racks for them, where you could see them in solid masses, side by side, for a hundred feet, and no shop was without its door-side rack, which the wheelman might slide his wheel into when he stopped for a soda, a cigar, or a sandwich. all along the road the gay bicycler and bicycless swarmed upon the piazzas of the inns, munching, lunching, while their wheels formed a fantastic decoration for the underpinning of the house and a novel balustering for the steps. ii. the amusements provided for these throngs of people were not different from those provided for throngs of people everywhere, who must be of much the same mind and taste the world over. i had fine moments when i moved in an illusion of the midway plaisance; again i was at the fete de neuilly, with all of paris but the accent about me; yet again the county agricultural fairs of my youth spread their spectral joys before me. at none of these places, however, was there a sounding sea or a mountainous chute, and i made haste to experience the variety these afforded, beginning with the chute, since the sea was always there, and the chute might be closed for the day if i waited to view it last. i meant only to enjoy the pleasure of others in it, and i confined my own participation to the ascent of the height from which the boat plunges down the watery steep into the oblong pool below. when i bought my ticket for the car that carried passengers up, they gave me also a pasteboard medal, certifying for me, "you have shot the chute," and i resolved to keep this and show it to doubting friends as a proof of my daring; but it is a curious evidence of my unfitness for such deceptions that i afterwards could not find the medal. so i will frankly own that for me it was quite enough to see others shoot the chute, and that i came tamely down myself in the car. there is a very charming view from the top, of the sea with its ships, and all the mad gayety of the shore, but of course my main object was to exult in the wild absurdity of those who shot the chute. there was always a lady among the people in the clumsy flat-boat that flew down the long track, and she tried usually to be a pretty girl, who clutched her friends and lovers and shrieked aloud in her flight; but sometimes it was a sober mother of a family, with her brood about her, who was probably meditating, all the way, the inculpation of their father for any harm that came of it. apparently no harm came of it in any case. the boat struck the water with the impetus gained from a half- perpendicular slide of a hundred feet, bounded high into the air, struck again and again, and so flounced awkwardly across the pond to the farther shore, where the passengers debarked and went away to commune with their viscera, and to get their breath as they could. i did not ask any of them what their emotions or sensations were, but, so far as i could conjecture, the experience of shooting the chute must comprise the rare transport of a fall from a ten-story building and the delight of a tempestuous passage of the atlantic, powerfully condensed. the mere sight was so athletic that it took away any appetite i might have had to witness the feats of strength performed by madame la noire at the nearest booth on my coming out, though madame herself was at the door-to testify, in her own living picture, how much muscular force may be masked in vast masses of adipose. she had a weary, bored look, and was not without her pathos, poor soul, as few of those are who amuse the public; but i could not find her quite justifiable as a sunday entertainment. one forgot, however, what day it was, and for the time i did not pretend to be so much better than my neighbors that i would not compromise upon a visit to, an animal show a little farther on. it was a pretty fair collection of beasts that had once been wild, perhaps, and in the cage of the lions there was a slight, sad-looking, long-haired young man, exciting them to madness by blows of a whip and pistol-shots whom i was extremely glad to have get away without being torn in pieces, or at least bitten in two. a little later i saw him at the door of the tent, very breathless, dishevelled, and as to his dress not of the spotlessness one could wish. but perhaps spotlessness is not compatible with the intimacy of lions and lionesses. he had had his little triumph; one spectator of his feat had declared that you would not see anything like that at coney island; and soiled and dusty as he was in his cotton tights, he was preferable to the living picture of a young lady whom he replaced as an attraction of the show. it was professedly a moral show; the manager exhorted us as we came out to say whether it was good or not; and in the box-office sat a kind and motherly faced matron who would have apparently abhorred to look upon a living picture at any distance, much less have it at her elbow. upon the whole, there seemed a melancholy mistake in it all; the people to whom the showmen made their appeal were all so much better, evidently, than the showmen supposed; the showmen themselves appeared harmless enough, and one could not say that there was personally any harm in the living picture; rather she looked listless and dull, but as to the face respectable enough. i would not give the impression that most of the amusements were not in every respect decorous. as a means of pleasure, the merry-go-round, both horizontal with horses and vertical with swinging cradles, prevailed, and was none the worse for being called by the french name of carrousel, for our people aniglicize the word, and squeeze the last drop of gallic wickedness from it by pronouncing it carousal. at every other step there were machines for weighing you and ascertaining your height; there were photographers' booths, and x-ray apparatus for showing you the inside of your watch; and in one open tent i saw a gentleman (with his back to the public) having his fortune read in the lines of his hand by an egyptian seeress. of course there was everywhere soda, and places of the softer drinks abounded. iii. i think you could only get a hard drink by ordering something to eat and sitting down to your wine or beer at a table. again i say that i saw no effects of drink in the crowd, and in one of the great restaurants built out over the sea on piers, where there was perpetual dancing to the braying of a brass-band, the cotillon had no fire imparted to its figures by the fumes of the bar. in fact it was a very rigid sobriety that reigned here, governing the common behavior by means of the placards which hung from the roof over the heads of the dancers, and repeatedly announced that gentlemen were not allowed to dance together, or to carry umbrellas or canes while dancing, while all were entreated not to spit on the floor. the dancers looked happy and harmless, if not very wise or splendid; they seemed people of the same simple neighborhoods, village lovers, young wives and husbands, and parties of friends who had come together for the day's pleasure. a slight mother, much weighed down by a heavy baby, passed, rapt in an innocent envy of them, and i think she and the child's father meant to join them as soon as they could find a place where to lay it. almost any place would do; at another great restaurant i saw two chairs faced together, and a baby sleeping on them as quietly amid the coming and going of lagers and frankfurters as if in its cradle at home. lagers and frankfurters were much in evidence everywhere, especially frankfurters, which seemed to have whole booths devoted to broiling them. they disputed this dignity with soft-shell crabs, and sections of eels, piled attractively on large platters, or sizzling to an impassioned brown in deep skillets of fat. the old acrid smell of frying brought back many holidays of italy to me, and i was again at times on the riva at venice, and in the mercato vecchio at florence. but the continental sunday cannot be felt to have quite replaced the old american sabbath yet; the puritan leaven works still, and though so many of our own people consent willingly to the transformation, i fancy they always enjoy themselves on sunday with a certain consciousness of wrong-doing. iv. i have already said that the spectator quite lost sense of what day it was. nothing could be more secular than all the sights and sounds. it was the fourth of july, less the fire-crackers and the drunkenness, and it was the high day of the week. but if it was very wicked, and i must recognize that the scene would be shocking to most of my readers, i feel bound to say that the people themselves did not look wicked. they looked harmless; they even looked good, the most of them. i am sorry to say they were not very good-looking. the women were pretty enough, and the men were handsome enough; perhaps the average was higher in respect of beauty than the average is anywhere else; i was lately from new england, where the people were distinctly more hard-favored; but among all those thousands at rockaway i found no striking types. it may be that as we grow older and our satisfaction with our own looks wanes, we become more fastidious as to the looks of others. at any rate, there seems to be much less beauty in the world than there was thirty or forty years ago. on the other hand, the dresses seem indefinitely prettier, as they should be in compensation. when we were all so handsome we could well afford to wear hoops or peg-top trousers, but now it is different, and the poor things must eke out their personal ungainliness with all the devices of the modiste and the tailor. i do not mean that there was any distinction in the dress of the crowd, but i saw nothing positively ugly or grotesquely out of taste. the costumes were as good as the customs, and i have already celebrated the manners of this crowd. i believe i must except the costumes of the bicyclesses, who were unfailingly dumpy in effect when dismounted, and who were all the more lamentable for tottering about, in their short skirts, upon the tips of their narrow little, sharp-pointed, silly high-heeled shoes. how severe i am! but those high heels seemed to take all honesty from their daring in the wholesome exercise of the wheel, and to keep them in the tradition of cheap coquetry still, and imbecilly dependent. v. i have almost forgotten in the interest of the human spectacle that there is a sea somewhere about at rockaway beach, and it is this that the people have come for. i might well forget that modest sea, it is so built out of sight by the restaurants and bath-houses and switch-backs and shops that border it, and by the hotels and saloons and shows flaring along the road that divides the village, and the planked streets that intersect this. but if you walk southward on any of the streets, you presently find the planks foundering in sand, which drifts far up over them, and then you find yourself in full sight of the ocean and the ocean bathing. swarms and heaps of people in all lolling and lying and wallowing shapes strew the beach, and the water is full of slopping and shouting and shrieking human creatures, clinging with bare white arms to the life-lines that run from the shore to the buoys; beyond these the lifeguard stays himself in his boat with outspread oars, and rocks on the incoming surf. all that you can say of it is that it is queer. it is not picturesque, or poetic, or dramatic; it is queer. an enfilading glance gives this impression and no other; if you go to the balcony of the nearest marine restaurant for a flanking eye-shot, it is still queer, with the added effect, in all those arms upstretched to the life-lines, of frogs' legs inverted in a downward plunge. on the sand before this spectacle i talked with a philosopher of humble condition who backed upon me and knocked my umbrella out of my hand. this made us beg each other's pardon; he said that he did not know i was there, and i said it did not matter. then we both looked at the bathing, and he said: "i don't like that." "why," i asked, "do you see any harm in it?" "no. but i don't like the looks of it. it ain't nice. it's queer." it was indeed like one of those uncomfortable dreams where you are not dressed sufficiently for company, or perhaps at all, and yet are making a very public appearance. this promiscuous bathing was not much in excess of the convention that governs the sea-bathing of the politest people; it could not be; and it was marked by no grave misconduct. here and there a gentleman was teaching a lady to swim, with his arms round her; here and there a wild nereid was splashing another; a young jew pursued a flight of naiads with a section of dead eel in his hand. but otherwise all was a damp and dreary decorum. i challenged my philosopher in vain for a specific cause of his dislike of the scene. most of the people on the sand were in bathing-dress, but there were a multitude of others who had apparently come for the sea-air and not the sea-bathing. a mother sat with a sick child on her knees; babies were cradled in the sand asleep, and people walked carefully round and over them. there were everywhere a great many poor mothers and children, who seemed getting the most of the good that was going. vi. but upon the whole, though i drove away from the beach celebrating the good temper and the good order of the scene to an applausive driver, i have since thought of it as rather melancholy. it was in fact no wiser or livelier than a society function in the means of enjoyment it afforded. the best thing about it was that it left the guests very much to their own devices. the established pleasures were clumsy and tiresome-looking; but one could eschew them. the more of them one eschewed, the merrier perhaps; for i doubt if the race is formed for much pleasure; and even a day's rest is more than most people can bear. they endure it in passing, but they get home weary and cross, even after a twenty-mile run on the wheel. the road, by-the-by, was full of homeward wheels by this time, single and double and tandem, and my driver professed that their multitude greatly increased the difficulties of his profession. sawdust in the arena it was in the old roman arena of beautiful verona that the circus events i wish to speak of took place; in fact, i had the honor and profit of seeing two circuses there. or, strictly speaking, it was one entire circus that i saw, and the unique speciality of another, the dying glory of a circus on its last legs, the triumphal fall of a circus superb in adversity. i. the entire circus was altogether italian, with the exception of the clowns, who, to the credit of our nation, are always americans, or advertised as such, in italy. its chief and almost absorbing event was a reproduction of the tournament which had then lately been held at rome in celebration of prince tommaso's coming of age, and for a copy of a copy it was really fine. it had fitness in the arena, which must have witnessed many such mediaeval shows in their time, and i am sensible still of the pleasure its effects of color gave me. there was one beautiful woman, a red blonde in a green velvet gown, who might have ridden, as she was, out of a canvas of titian's, if he had ever painted equestrian pictures, and who at any rate was an excellent carpaccio. then, the 'clowns americani' were very amusing, from a platform devoted solely to them, and it was a source of pride if not of joy with me to think that we were almost the only people present who understood their jokes. in the vast oval of the arena, however, the circus ring looked very little, not half so large, say, as the rim of a lady's hat in front of you at the play; and on the gradines of the ancient amphitheatre we were all such a great way off that a good field-glass would have been needed to distinguish the features of the actors. i could not make out, therefore, whether the 'clowns americani' had the national expression or not, but one of them, i am sorry to say, spoke the united states language with a cockney accent. i suspect that he was an englishman who had passed himself off upon the italian management as a true yankee, and who had formed himself upon our school of clowning, just as some of the recent english humorists have patterned after certain famous wits of ours. i do not know that i would have exposed this impostor, even if occasion had offered, for, after all, his fraud was a tribute to our own primacy in clowning, and the veronese were none the worse for his erring aspirates. the audience was for me the best part of the spectacle, as the audience always is in italy, and i indulged my fancy in some cheap excursions concerning the place and people. i reflected that it was the same race essentially as that which used to watch the gladiatorial shows in that arena when it was new, and that very possibly there were among these spectators persons of the same blood as those veronese patricians who had left their names carved on the front of the gradines in places, to claim this or that seat for their own. in fact, there was so little difference, probably, in their qualities, from that time to this, that i felt the process of the generations to be a sort of impertinence; and if nature had been present, i might very well have asked her why, when she had once arrived at a given expression of humanity, she must go on repeating it indefinitely? how were all those similar souls to know themselves apart in their common eternity? merely to have been differently circumstanced in time did not seem enough; and i think nature would have been puzzled to answer me. but perhaps not; she may have had her reasons, as that you cannot have too much of a good thing, and that when the type was so fine in most respects as the italian you could not do better than go on repeating impressions from it. certainly i myself could have wished no variation from it in the young officer of 'bersaglieri', who had come down from antiquity to the topmost gradine of the arena over against me, and stood there defined against the clear evening sky, one hand on his hip, and the other at his side, while his thin cockerel plumes streamed in the light wind. i have since wondered if he knew how beautiful he was, and i am sure that, if he did not, all the women there did, and that was doubtless enough for the young officer of 'bersaglieri'. ii. i think that he was preliminary to the sole event of that partial circus i have mentioned. this event was one that i have often witnessed elsewhere, but never in such noble and worthy keeping. the top of the outer arena wall must itself be fifty feet high, and the pole in the centre of its oval seemed to rise fifty feet higher yet. at its base an immense net was stretched, and a man in a prince albert coat and a derby hat was figuring about, anxiously directing the workmen who were fixing the guy-ropes, and testing every particular of the preparation with his own hands. while this went on, a young girl ran out into the arena, and, after a bow to the spectators, quickly mounted to the top of the pole, where she presently stood in statuesque beauty that took all eyes even from the loveliness of the officer of 'bersaglieri'. there the man in the prince albert coat and the derby hat stepped back from the net and looked up at her. she called down, in english that sounded like some delocalized, denaturalized speech, it was so strange then and there, "is it all right?" he shouted back in the same alienated tongue, "yes; keep to the left," and she dived straight downward in the long plunge, till, just before she reached the net, she turned a quick somersault into its elastic mesh. it was all so exquisitely graceful that one forgot how wickedly dangerous it was; but i think that the brief english colloquy was the great wonder of the event for me, and i doubt if i could ever have been perfectly happy again, if chance had not amiably suffered me to satisfy my curiosity concerning the speakers. a few evenings after that, i was at that copy of a copy of a tournament, and, a few gradines below me, i saw the man of the prince albert coat and the derby hat. i had already made up my mind that he was an american, for i supposed that an englishman would rather perish than wear such a coat with such a hat, and as i had wished all my life to speak to a circus-man, i went down and boldly accosted him. "are you a brother yankee?" i asked, and he laughed, and confessed that he was an englishman, but he said he was glad to meet any one who spoke english, and he made a place for me by his side. he was very willing to tell how he happened to be there, and he explained that he was the manager of a circus, which had been playing to very good business all winter in spain. in an evil hour he decided to come to italy, but he found the prices so ruinously low that he was forced to disband his company. this diving girl was all that remained to him of its many attractions, and he was trying to make a living for both in a country where the admission to a circus was six of our cents, with fifty for a reserved seat. but he was about to give it up and come to america, where he said barnum had offered him an engagement. i hope he found it profitable, and is long since an american citizen, with as good right as any of us to wear a prince albert coat with a derby hat. iii. there used to be very good circuses in venice, where many venetians had the only opportunity of their lives to see a horse. the horses were the great attraction for them, and, perhaps in concession to their habitual destitution in this respect, the riding was providentially very good. it was so good that it did not bore me, as circus-riding mostly does, especially that of the silk-clad jockey who stands in his high boots, on his back-bared horse, and ends by waving an american flag in triumph at having been so tiresome. i am at a loss to know why they make such an ado about the lady who jumps through paper hoops, which have first had holes poked in them to render her transit easy, or why it should be thought such a merit in her to hop over a succession of banners which are swept under her feet in a manner to minify her exertion almost to nothing, but i observe it is so at all circuses. at my first venetian circus, which was on a broad expanse of the riva degli schiavoni, there was a girl who flung herself to the ground and back to her horse again, holding by his mane with one hand, quite like the goddess out of the bath-gown at my village circus the other day; and apparently there are more circuses in the world than circus events. it must be as hard to think up anything new in that kind as in romanticistic fiction, which circus-acting otherwise largely resembles. at a circus which played all one winter in florence i saw for the first time-outside of polite society--the clown in evening dress, who now seems essential to all circuses of metropolitan pretensions, and whom i missed so gladly at my village circus. he is nearly as futile as the lady clown, who is one of the saddest and strangest developments of new womanhood. of the clowns who do not speak, i believe i like most the clown who catches a succession of peak-crowned soft hats on his head, when thrown across the ring by an accomplice. this is a very pretty sight always, and at the hippodrome in paris i once saw a gifted creature take his stand high up on the benches among the audience and catch these hats on his head from a flight of a hundred feet through the air. this made me proud of human nature, which is often so humiliating; and altogether i do not think that after a real country circus there are many better things in life than the hippodrome. it had a state, a dignity, a smoothness, a polish, which i should not know where to match, and when the superb coach drove into the ring to convey the lady performers to the scene of their events, there was a majesty in the effect which i doubt if courts have the power to rival. still, it should be remembered that i have never been at court, and speak from a knowledge of the hippodrome only. at a dime museum "i see," said my friend, "that you have been writing a good deal about the theatre during the past winter. you have been attacking its high hats and its high prices, and its low morals; and i suppose that you think you have done good, as people call it." i. this seemed like a challenge of some sort, and i prepared myself to take it up warily. i said i should be very sorry to do good, as people called it; because such a line of action nearly always ended in spiritual pride for the doer and general demoralization for the doee. still, i said, a law had lately been passed in ohio giving a man who found himself behind a high hat at the theatre a claim for damages against the manager; and if the passage of this law could be traced ever so faintly and indirectly to my teachings, i should not altogether grieve for the good i had done. i added that if all the states should pass such a law, and other laws fixing a low price for a certain number of seats at the theatres, or obliging the managers to give one free performance every month, as the law does in paris, and should then forbid indecent and immoral plays-- "i see what you mean," said my friend, a little impatiently. "you mean sumptuary legislation. but i have not come to talk to you upon that subject, for then you would probably want to do all the talking yourself. i want to ask you if you have visited any of the cheaper amusements of this metropolis, or know anything of the really clever and charming things one may see there for a very little money." "ten cents, for instance?" "yes." i answered that i would never own to having come as low down as that; and i expressed a hardy and somewhat inconsistent doubt of the quality of the amusement that could be had for that money. i questioned if anything intellectual could be had for it. "what do you say to the ten-cent magazines?" my friend retorted. "and do you pretend that the two-dollar drama is intellectual?" i had to confess that it generally was not, and that this was part of my grief with it. then he said: "i don't contend that it is intellectual, but i say that it is often clever and charming at the ten-cent shows, just as it is less often clever and charming in the ten-cent magazines. i think the average of propriety is rather higher than it is at the two-dollar theatres; and it is much more instructive at the ten-cent shows, if you come to that. the other day," said my friend, and in squaring himself comfortably in his chair and finding room for his elbow on the corner of my table he knocked off some books for review, "i went to a dime museum for an hour that i had between two appointments, and i must say that i never passed an hour's time more agreeably. in the curio hall, as one of the lecturers on the curios called it--they had several lecturers in white wigs and scholars' caps and gowns--there was not a great deal to see, i confess; but everything was very high-class. there was the inventor of a perpetual motion, who lectured upon it and explained it from a diagram. there was a fortune-teller in a three-foot tent whom i did not interview; there were five macaws in one cage, and two gloomy apes in another. on a platform at the end of the hall was an australian family a good deal gloomier than the apes, who sat in the costume of our latitude, staring down the room with varying expressions all verging upon melancholy madness, and who gave me such a pang of compassion as i have seldom got from the tragedy of the two-dollar theatres. they allowed me to come quite close up to them, and to feed my pity upon their wild dejection in exile without stint. i couldn't enter into conversation with them, and express my regret at finding them so far from their native boomerangs and kangaroos and pinetree grubs, but i know they felt my sympathy, it was so evident. i didn't see their performance, and i don't know that they had any. they may simply have been there ethnologically, but this was a good object, and the sight of their spiritual misery was alone worth the price of admission. "after the inventor of the perpetual motion had brought his harangue to a close, we all went round to the dais where a lady in blue spectacles lectured us upon a fire-escape which she had invented, and operated a small model of it. none of the events were so exciting that we could regret it when the chief lecturer announced that this was the end of the entertainment in the curio hall, and that now the performance in the theatre was about to begin. he invited us to buy tickets at an additional charge of five, ten, or fifteen cents for the gallery, orchestra circle, or orchestra. "i thought i could afford an orchestra stall, for once. we were three in the orchestra, another man and a young mother, not counting the little boy she had with her; there were two people in the gallery, and a dozen at least in the orchestra circle. an attendant shouted, 'hats off!' and the other man and i uncovered, and a lady came up from under the stage and began to play the piano in front of it. the curtain rose, and the entertainment began at once. it was a passage apparently from real life, and it involved a dissatisfied boarder and the daughter of the landlady. there was not much coherence in it, but there was a good deal of conscience on the part of the actors, who toiled through it with unflagging energy. the young woman was equipped for the dance she brought into it at one point rather than for the part she had to sustain in the drama. it was a very blameless dance, and she gave it as if she was tired of it, but was not going to falter. she delivered her lines with a hard, southwestern accent, and i liked fancying her having come up in a simpler-hearted section of the country than ours, encouraged by a strong local belief that she was destined to do juliet and lady macbeth, or peg woffington at the least; but very likely she had not. "her performance was followed by an event involving a single character. the actor, naturally, was blackened as to his skin, but as to his dress he was all in white, and at the first glance i could see that he had temperament. i suspect that he thought i had, too, for he began to address his entire drama to me. this was not surprising, for it would not have been the thing for him to single out the young mother; and the other man in the orchestra stalls seemed a vague and inexperienced youth, whom he would hardly have given the preference over me. i felt the compliment, but upon the whole it embarrassed me; it was too intimate, and it gave me a publicity i would willingly have foregone. i did what i could to reject it, by feigning an indifference to his jokes; i even frowned a measure of disapproval; but this merely stimulated his ambition. he was really a merry creature, and when he had got off a number of very good things which were received in perfect silence, and looked over his audience with a woe-begone eye, and said, with an effect of delicate apology, 'i hope i'm not disturbing you any,' i broke down and laughed, and that delivered me into his hand. he immediately said to me that now he would tell me about a friend of his, who had a pretty large family, eight of them living, and one in philadelphia; and then for no reason he seemed to change his mind, and said he would sing me a song written expressly for him--by an expressman; and he went on from one wild gayety to another, until he had worked his audience up to quite a frenzy of enthusiasm, and almost had a recall when he went off. "i was rather glad to be rid of him, and i was glad that the next performers, who were a lady and a gentleman contortionist of spanish- american extraction, behaved more impartially. they were really remarkable artists in their way, and though it's a painful way, i couldn't help admiring their gift in bowknots and other difficult poses. the gentleman got abundant applause, but the lady at first got none. i think perhaps it was because, with the correct feeling that prevailed among us, we could not see a lady contort herself with so much approval as a gentleman, and that there was a wound to our sense of propriety in witnessing her skill. but i could see that the poor girl was hurt in her artist pride by our severity, and at the next thing she did i led off the applause with my umbrella. she instantly lighted up with a joyful smile, and the young mother in the orchestra leaned forward to nod her sympathy to me while she clapped. we were fast becoming a domestic circle, and it was very pleasant, but i thought that upon the whole i had better go." "and do you think you had a profitable hour at that show?" i asked, with a smile that was meant to be sceptical. "profitable?" said my friend. "i said agreeable. i don't know about the profit. but it was very good variety, and it was very cheap. i understand that this is the kind of thing you want the two-dollar theatre to come down to, or up to." "not exactly, or not quite," i returned, thoughtfully, "though i must say i think your time was as well spent as it would have been at most of the plays i have seen this winter." my friend left the point, and said, with a dreamy air: "it was all very pathetic, in a way. three out of those five people were really clever, and certainly artists. that colored brother was almost a genius, a very common variety of genius, but still a genius, with a gift for his calling that couldn't be disputed. he was a genuine humorist, and i sorrowed over him--after i got safely away from his intimacy--as i should over some author who was struggling along without winning his public. why not? one is as much in the show business as the other. there is a difference of quality rather than of kind. perhaps by-and-by my colored humorist will make a strike with his branch of the public, as you are always hoping to do with yours." "you don't think you're making yourself rather offensive?" i suggested. "not intentionally. aren't the arts one? how can you say that any art is higher than the others? why is it nobler to contort the mind than to contort the body?" "i am always saying that it is not at all noble to contort the mind," i returned, "and i feel that to aim at nothing higher than the amusement of your readers is to bring yourself most distinctly to the level of the show business." "yes, i know that is your pose," said my friend. "and i dare say you really think that you make a distinction in facts when you make a distinction in terms. if you don't amuse your readers, you don't keep them; practically, you cease to exist. you may call it interesting them, if you like; but, really, what is the difference? you do your little act, and because the stage is large and the house is fine, you fancy you are not of that sad brotherhood which aims to please in humbler places, with perhaps cruder means--" "i don't know whether i like your saws less than your instances, or your instances less than your saws," i broke in. "have you been at the circus yet?" ii. "yet?" demanded my friend. "i went the first night, and i have been a good deal interested in the examination of my emotions ever since. i can't find out just why i have so much pleasure in the trapeze. half the time i want to shut my eyes, and a good part of the time i do look away; but i wouldn't spare any actor the most dangerous feat. one of the poor girls, that night, dropped awkwardly into the net after her performance, and limped off to the dressing-room with a sprained ankle. it made me rather sad to think that now she must perhaps give up her perilous work for a while, and pay a doctor, and lose her salary, but it didn't take away my interest in the other trapezists flying through the air above another net. "if i had honestly complained of anything it would have been of the superfluity which glutted rather than fed me. how can you watch three sets of trapezists at once? you really see neither well. it's the same with the three rings. there should be one ring, and each act should have a fair chance with the spectator, if it took six hours; i would willingly give the time. fancy three stages at the theatre, with three plays going on at once!" "no, don't fancy that!" i entreated. "one play is bad enough." "or fancy reading three novels simultaneously, and listening at the same time to a lecture and a sermon, which could represent the two platforms between the rings," my friend calmly persisted. "the three rings are an abuse and an outrage, but i don't know but i object still more to the silencing of the clowns. they have a great many clowns now, but they are all dumb, and you only get half the good you used to get out of the single clown of the old one-ring circus. why, it's as if the literary humorist were to lead up to a charming conceit or a subtle jest, and then put asterisks where the humor ought to come in." "don't you think you are going from bad to worse?" i asked. my friend went on: "i'm afraid the circus is spoiled for me. it has become too much of a good thing; for it is a good thing; almost the best thing in the way of an entertainment that there is. i'm still very fond of it, but i come away defeated and defrauded because i have been embarrassed with riches, and have been given more than i was able to grasp. my greed has been overfed. i think i must keep to those entertainments where you can come at ten in the morning and stay till ten at night, with a perpetual change of bill, only one stage, and no fall of the curtain. i suppose you would object to them because they're getting rather dear; at the best of them now they ask you a dollar for the first seats." i said that i did not think this too much for twelve hours, if the intellectual character of the entertainment was correspondingly high. "it's as high as that of some magazines," said my friend, "though i could sometimes wish it were higher. it's like the matter in the sunday papers--about that average. some of it's good, and most of it isn't. some of it could hardly be worse. but there is a great deal of it, and you get it consecutively and not simultaneously. that constitutes its advantage over the circus." my friend stopped, with a vague smile, and i asked: "then, do i understand that you would advise me to recommend the dime museums, the circus, and the perpetual-motion varieties in the place of the theatres?" "you have recommended books instead, and that notion doesn't seem to have met with much favor, though you urged their comparative cheapness. now, why not suggest something that is really level with the popular taste?" american literature in exile a recently lecturing englishman is reported to have noted the unenviable primacy of the united states among countries where the struggle for material prosperity has been disastrous to the pursuit of literature. he said, or is said to have said (one cannot be too careful in attributing to a public man the thoughts that may be really due to an imaginative frame in the reporter), that among us, "the old race of writers of distinction, such as longfellow, bryant, holmes, and washington irving, have (sic) died out, and the americans who are most prominent in cultivated european opinion in art or literature, like sargent, henry james, or marion crawford, live habitually out of america, and draw their inspiration from england, france, and italy." i. if this were true, i confess that i am so indifferent to what many americans glory in that it would not distress me, or wound me in the sort of self-love which calls itself patriotism. if it would at all help to put an end to that struggle for material prosperity which has eventuated with us in so many millionaires and so many tramps, i should be glad to believe that it was driving our literary men out of the country. this would be a tremendous object-lesson, and might be a warning to the millionaires and the tramps. but i am afraid it would not have this effect, for neither our very rich nor our very poor care at all for the state of polite learning among us; though for the matter of that, i believe that economic conditions have little to do with it; and that if a general mediocrity of fortune prevailed and there were no haste to be rich and to get poor, the state of polite learning would not be considerably affected. as matters stand, i think we may reasonably ask whether the americans "most prominent in cultivated european opinion," the americans who "live habitually out of america," are not less exiles than advance agents of the expansion now advertising itself to the world. they may be the vanguard of the great army of adventurers destined to overrun the earth from these shores, and exploit all foreign countries to our advantage. they probably themselves do not know it, but in the act of "drawing their inspiration" from alien scenes, or taking their own where they find it, are not they simply transporting to europe "the struggle for material prosperity," which sir lepel supposes to be fatal to them here? there is a question, however, which comes before this, and that is the question whether they have quitted us in such numbers as justly to alarm our patriotism. qualitatively, in the authors named and in the late mr. bret harte, mr. harry harland, and the late mr. harold frederic, as well as in mark twain, once temporarily resident abroad, the defection is very great; but quantitatively it is not such as to leave us without a fair measure of home-keeping authorship. our destitution is not nearly so great now in the absence of mr. james and mr. crawford as it was in the times before the "struggle for material prosperity" when washington irving went and lived in england and on the european continent well-nigh half his life. sir lepel griffin--or sir lepel griffin's reporter--seems to forget the fact of irving's long absenteeism when he classes him with "the old race" of eminent american authors who stayed at home. but really none of those he names were so constant to our air as he seems--or his reporter seems --to think. longfellow sojourned three or four years in germany, spain, and italy; holmes spent as great time in paris; bryant was a frequent traveller, and each of them "drew his inspiration" now and then from alien sources. lowell was many years in italy, spain, and england; motley spent more than half his life abroad; hawthorne was away from us nearly a decade. ii. if i seem to be proving too much in one way, i do not feel that i am proving too much in another. my facts go to show that the literary spirit is the true world-citizen, and is at home everywhere. if any good american were distressed by the absenteeism of our authors, i should first advise him that american literature was not derived from the folklore of the red indians, but was, as i have said once before, a condition of english literature, and was independent even of our independence. then i should entreat him to consider the case of foreign authors who had found it more comfortable or more profitable to live out of their respective countries than in them. i should allege for his consolation the case of byron, shelley, and leigh hunt, and more latterly that of the brownings and walter savage landor, who preferred an italian to an english sojourn; and yet more recently that of mr. rudyard kipling, who voluntarily lived several years in vermont, and has "drawn his inspiration" in notable instances from the life of these states. it will serve him also to consider that the two greatest norwegian authors, bjornsen and ibsen, have both lived long in france and italy. heinrich heine loved to live in paris much better than in dusseldorf, or even in hamburg; and tourguenief himself, who said that any man's country could get on without him, but no man could get on without his country, managed to dispense with his own in the french capital, and died there after he was quite free to go back to st. petersburg. in the last century rousseau lived in france rather than switzerland; voltaire at least tried to live in prussia, and was obliged to a long exile elsewhere; goldoni left fame and friends in venice for the favor of princes in paris. literary absenteeism, it seems to me, is not peculiarly an american vice or an american virtue. it is an expression and a proof of the modern sense which enlarges one's country to the bounds of civilization. i cannot think it justly a reproach in the eyes of the world, and if any american feels it a grievance, i suggest that he do what he can to have embodied in the platform of his party a plank affirming the right of american authors to a public provision that will enable them to live as agreeably at home as they can abroad on the same money. in the mean time, their absenteeism is not a consequence of "the struggle for material prosperity," not a high disdain of the strife which goes on not less in europe than in america, and must, of course, go on everywhere as long as competitive conditions endure, but is the result of chances and preferences which mean nothing nationally calamitous or discreditable. the horse show "as good as the circus--not so good as the circus--better than the circus." these were my varying impressions, as i sat looking down upon the tanbark, the other day, at the horse show in madison square garden; and i came away with their blend for my final opinion. i. i might think that the horse show (which is so largely a man show and a woman show) was better or worse than the circus, or about as good; but i could not get away from the circus, in my impression of it. perhaps the circus is the norm of all splendors where the horse and his master are joined for an effect upon the imagination of the spectator. i am sure that i have never been able quite to dissociate from it the picturesqueness of chivalry, and that it will hereafter always suggest to me the last correctness of fashion. it is through the horse that these far extremes meet; in all times the horse has been the supreme expression of aristocracy; and it may very well be that a dream of the elder world prophesied the ultimate type of the future, when the swell shall have evolved into the centaur. some such teasing notion of their mystical affinity is what haunts you as you make your round of the vast ellipse, with the well-groomed men about you and the well-groomed horses beyond the barrier. in this first affair of the new-comer, the horses are not so much on show as the swells; you get only glimpses of shining coats and tossing manes, with a glint here and there of a flying hoof through the lines of people coming and going, and the ranks of people, three or four feet deep, against the rails of the ellipse; but the swells are there in perfect relief, and it is they who finally embody the horse show to you. the fact is that they are there to see, of course, but the effect is that they are there to be seen. the whole spectacle had an historical quality, which i tasted with pleasure. it was the thing that had eventuated in every civilization, and the american might feel a characteristic pride that what came to rome in five hundred years had come to america in a single century. there was something fine in the absolutely fatal nature of the result, and i perceived that nowhere else in our life, which is apt to be reclusive in its exclusiveness, is the prime motive at work in it so dramatically apparent. "yes," i found myself thinking, "this is what it all comes to: the 'subiti guadagni' of the new rich, made in large masses and seeking a swift and eager exploitation, and the slowly accumulated fortunes, put together from sparing and scrimping, from slaving and enslaving, in former times, and now in the stainless white hands of the second or third generation, they both meet here to the purpose of a common ostentation, and create a horse show." i cannot say that its creators looked much as if they liked it, now they had got it; and, so far as i have been able to observe them, people of wealth and fashion always dissemble their joy, and have the air of being bored in the midst of their amusements. this reserve of rapture may be their delicacy, their unwillingness to awaken envy in the less prospered; and i should not have objected to the swells at the horse show looking dreary if they had looked more like swells; except for a certain hardness of the countenance (which i found my own sympathetically taking on) i should not have thought them very patrician, and this hardness may have been merely the consequence of being so much stared at. perhaps, indeed, they were not swells whom i saw in the boxes, but only companies of ordinary people who had clubbed together and hired their boxes; i understand that this can be done, and the student of civilization so far misled. but certainly if they were swells they did not look quite up to themselves; though, for that matter, neither do the nobilities of foreign countries, and on one or two occasions when i have seen them, kings and emperors have failed me in like manner. they have all wanted that indescribable something which i have found so satisfying in aristocracies and royalties on the stage; and here at the horse show, while i made my tour, i constantly met handsome, actor-like folk on foot who could much better have taken the role of the people in the boxes. the promenaders may not have been actors at all; they may have been the real thing for which i was in vain scanning the boxes, but they looked like actors, who indeed set an example to us all in personal beauty and in correctness of dress. i mean nothing offensive either to swells or to actors. we have not distinction, as a people; matthew arnold noted that; and it is not our business to have it: when it is our business our swells will have it, just as our actors now have it, especially our actors of english birth. i had not this reflection about me at the time to console me for my disappointment, and it only now occurs to me that what i took for an absence of distinction may have been such a universal prevalence of it that the result was necessarily a species of indistinction. but in the complexion of any social assembly we americans are at a disadvantage with europeans from the want of uniforms. a few military scattered about in those boxes, or even a few sporting bishops in shovel-hats and aprons, would have done much to relieve them from the reproach i have been heaping upon them. our women, indeed, poor things, always do their duty in personal splendor, and it is not of a poverty in their modes at the horse show that i am complaining. if the men had borne their part as well, there would not have been these tears: and yet, what am i saying? there was here and there a clean-shaven face (which i will not believe was always an actor's), and here and there a figure superbly set up, and so faultlessly appointed as to shoes, trousers, coat, tie, hat, and gloves as to have a salience from the mass of good looks and good clothes which i will not at last call less than distinction. ii. at any rate, i missed these marked presences when i left the lines of the promenaders around the ellipse, and climbed to a seat some tiers above the boxes. i am rather anxious to have it known that my seat was not one of those cheap ones in the upper gallery, but was with the virtuous poor who could afford to pay a dollar and a half for their tickets. i bought it of a speculator on the sidewalk, who said it was his last, so that i conceived it the last in the house; but i found the chairs by no means all filled, though it was as good an audience as i have sometimes seen in the same place at other circuses. the people about me were such as i had noted at the other circuses, hotel-sojourners, kindly-looking comers from provincial towns and cities, whom i instantly felt myself at home with, and free to put off that gloomy severity of aspect which had grown upon me during my association with the swells below. my neighbors were sufficiently well dressed, and if they had no more distinction than their betters, or their richers, they had not the burden of the occasion upon them, and seemed really glad of what was going on in the ring. there again i was sensible of the vast advantage of costume. the bugler who stood up at one end of the central platform and blew a fine fanfare (i hope it was a fanfare) towards the gates where the horses were to enter from their stalls in the basement was a hussar-like shape that filled my romantic soul with joy; and the other figures of the management i thought very fortunate compromises between grooms and ringmasters. at any rate, their nondescript costumes were gay, and a relief from the fashions in the boxes and the promenade; they were costumes, and costumes are always more sincere, if not more effective, than fashions. as i have hinted, i do not know just what costumes they were, but they took the light well from the girandole far aloof and from the thousands of little electric bulbs that beaded the roof in long lines, and dispersed the sullenness of the dull, rainy afternoon. when the knights entered the lists on the seats of their dog-carts, with their squires beside them, and their shining tandems before them, they took the light well, too, and the spectacle was so brilliant that i trust my imagery may be forgiven a novelist pining for the pageantries of the past. i do not know to this moment whether these knights were bona fide gentlemen, or only their deputies, driving their tandems for them, and i am equally at a loss to account for the variety, of their hats. some wore tall, shining silk hats; some flat-topped, brown derbys; some simple black pot-hats;--and is there, then, no rigor as to the head-gear of people driving tandems? i felt that there ought to be, and that there ought to be some rule as to where the number of each tandem should be displayed. as it was, this was sometimes carelessly stuck into the seat of the cart; sometimes it was worn at the back of the groom's waist, and sometimes full upon his stomach. in the last position it gave a touch of burlesque which wounded me; for these are vital matters, and i found myself very exacting in them. with the horses themselves i could find no fault upon the grounds of my censure of the show in some other ways. they had distinction; they were patrician; they were swell. they felt it, they showed it, they rejoiced in it; and the most reluctant observer could not deny them the glory of blood, of birth, which the thoroughbred horse has expressed in all lands and ages. their lordly port was a thing that no one could dispute, and for an aristocracy i suppose that they had a high average of intelligence, though there might be two minds about this. they made me think of mettled youths and haughty dames; they abashed the humble spirit of the beholder with the pride of their high-stepping, their curvetting and caracoling, as they jingled in their shining harness around the long ring. their noble uselessness took the fancy, for i suppose that there is nothing so superbly superfluous as a tandem, outside or inside of the best society. it is something which only the ambition of wealth and unbroken leisure can mount to; and i was glad that the display of tandems was the first event of the horse show which i witnessed, for it seemed to me that it must beyond all others typify the power which created the horse show. i wished that the human side of it could have been more unquestionably adequate, but the equine side of the event was perfect. still, i felt a certain relief, as in something innocent and simple and childlike, in the next event. iii. this was the inundation of the tan-bark with troops of pretty shetland ponies of all ages, sizes, and colors. a cry of delight went up from a group of little people near me, and the spell of the horse show was broken. it was no longer a solemnity of fashion, it was a sweet and kindly pleasure which every one could share, or every one who had ever had, or ever wished to have, a shetland pony; the touch of nature made the whole show kin. i could not see that the freakish, kittenish creatures did anything to claim our admiration, but they won our affection by every trait of ponyish caprice and obstinacy. the small colts broke away from the small mares, and gambolled over the tanbark in wanton groups, with gay or plaintive whinnyings, which might well have touched a responsive chord in the bosom of fashion itself: i dare say it is not so hard as it looks. the scene remanded us to a moment of childhood; and i found myself so fond of all the ponies that i felt it invidious of the judges to choose among them for the prizes; they ought every one to have had the prize. i suppose a shetland pony is not a very useful animal in our conditions; no doubt a good, tough, stubbed donkey would be worth all their tribe when it came down to hard work; but we cannot all be hard-working donkeys, and some of us may be toys and playthings without too great reproach. i gazed after the broken, refluent wave of these amiable creatures, with the vague toleration here formulated, but i was not quite at peace in it, or fully consoled in my habitual ethicism till the next event brought the hunters with their high-jumping into the ring. these noble animals unite use and beauty in such measure that the censor must be of catonian severity who can refuse them his praise. when i reflected that by them and their devoted riders our civilization had been assimilated to that of the mother-country in its finest expression, and another tie added to those that bind us to her through the language of shakespeare and milton; that they had tamed the haughty spirit of the american farmer in several parts of the country so that he submitted for a consideration to have his crops ridden over, and that they had all but exterminated the ferocious anise-seed bag, once so common and destructive among us, i was in a fit mood to welcome the bars and hurdles which were now set up at four or five places for the purposes of the high-jumping. as to the beauty of the hunting-horse, though, i think i must hedge a little, while i stand firmly to my admiration of his use. to be honest, the tandem horse is more to my taste. he is better shaped, and he bears himself more proudly. the hunter is apt to behave, whatever his reserve of intelligence, like an excited hen; he is apt to be ewe-necked and bred away to nothing where the ideal horse abounds; he has the behavior of a turkey-hen when not behaving like the common or garden hen. but there can be no question of his jumping, which seems to be his chief business in a world where we are all appointed our several duties, and i at once began to take a vivid pleasure in his proficiency. i have always felt a blind and insensate joy in running races, which has no relation to any particular horse, and i now experienced an impartial rapture in the performances of these hunters. they looked very much alike, and if it had not been for the changing numbers on the sign-board in the centre of the ring announcing that , , or was now jumping, i might have thought it was all the time. a high jump is not so fine a sight as a running race when the horses have got half a mile away and look like a covey of swift birds, but it is still a fine sight. i became very fastidious as to which moment of it was the finest, whether when the horse rose in profile, or when his aerial hoof touched the ground (with the effect of half jerking his rider's head half off), or when he showed a flying heel in perspective; and i do not know to this hour which i prefer. but i suppose i was becoming gradually spoiled by my pleasure, for as time went on i noticed that i was not satisfied with the monotonous excellence of the horses' execution. will it be credited that i became willing something should happen, anything, to vary it? i asked myself why, if some of the more exciting incidents of the hunting-field which i had read of must befall; i should not see them. several of the horses had balked at the barriers, and almost thrown their riders across them over their necks, but not quite done it; several had carried away the green-tufted top rail with their heels; when suddenly there came a loud clatter from the farther side of the ellipse, where a whole panel of fence had gone down. i looked eagerly for the prostrate horse and rider under the bars, but they were cantering safely away. iv. it was enough, however. i perceived that i was becoming demoralized, and that if i were to write of the horse show with at all the superiority one likes to feel towards the rich and great, i had better come away. but i came away critical, even in my downfall, and feeling that, circus for circus, the greatest show on earth which i had often seen in that place had certain distinct advantages of the horse show. it had three rings and two platforms; and, for another thing, the drivers and riders in the races, when they won, bore the banner of victory aloft in their hands, instead of poorly letting a blue or red ribbon flicker at their horses' ears. the events were more frequent and rapid; the costumes infinitely more varied and picturesque. as for the people in the boxes, i do not know that they were less distinguished than these at the horse show, but if they were not of the same high level in which distinction was impossible, they did not show it in their looks. the horse show, in fine, struck me as a circus of not all the first qualities; and i had moments of suspecting that it was no more than the evolution of the county cattle show. but in any case i had to own that its great success was quite legitimate; for the horse, upon the whole, appeals to a wider range of humanity, vertically as well as horizontally, than any other interest, not excepting politics or religion. i cannot, indeed, regard him as a civilizing influence; but then we cannot be always civilizing. the problem of the summer it has sometimes seemed to me that the solution of the problem how and where to spend the summer was simplest with those who were obliged to spend it as they spent the winter, and increasingly difficult in the proportion of one's ability to spend it wherever and however one chose. few are absolutely released to this choice, however, and those few are greatly to be pitied. i know that they are often envied and hated for it by those who have no such choice, but that is a pathetic mistake. if we could look into their hearts, indeed, we should witness there so much misery that we should wish rather to weep over them than to reproach them with their better fortune, or what appeared so. i. for most people choice is a curse, and it is this curse that the summer brings upon great numbers who would not perhaps otherwise be afflicted. they are not in the happy case of those who must stay at home; their hard necessity is that they can go away, and try to be more agreeably placed somewhere else; but although i say they are in great numbers, they are an infinitesimal minority of the whole bulk of our population. their bane is not, in its highest form, that of the average american who has no choice of the kind; and when one begins to speak of the summer problem, one must begin at once to distinguish. it is the problem of the east rather than of the west (where people are much more in the habit of staying at home the year round), and it is the problem of the city and not of the country. i am not sure that there is one practical farmer in the whole united states who is obliged to witness in his household those sad dissensions which almost separate the families of professional men as to where and how they shall pass the summer. people of this class, which is a class with some measure of money, ease, and taste, are commonly of varying and decided minds, and i once knew a family of the sort whose combined ideal for their summer outing was summed up in the simple desire for society and solitude, mountain-air and sea-bathing. they spent the whole months of april, may, and june in a futile inquiry for a resort uniting these attractions, and on the first of july they drove to the station with no definite point in view. but they found that they could get return tickets for a certain place on an inland lake at a low figure, and they took the first train for it. there they decided next morning to push on to the mountains, and sent their baggage to the station, but before it was checked they changed their minds, and remained two weeks where they were. then they took train for a place on the coast, but in the cars a friend told them they ought to go to another place; they decided to go there, but before arriving at the junction they decided again to keep on. they arrived at their original destination, and the following day telegraphed for rooms at a hotel farther down the coast. the answer came that there were no rooms, and being by this time ready to start, they started, and in due time reported themselves at the hotel. the landlord saw that something must be done, and he got them rooms, at a smaller house, and 'mealed' them (as it used to be called at mt. desert) in his own. but upon experiment of the fare at the smaller house they liked it so well that they resolved to live there altogether, and they spent a summer of the greatest comfort there, so that they would hardly come away when the house closed in the fall. this was an extreme case, and perhaps such a venture might not always turn out so happily; but i think that people might oftener trust themselves to providence in these matters than they do. there is really an infinite variety of pleasant resorts of all kinds now, and one could quite safely leave it to the man in the ticket-office where one should go, and check one's baggage accordingly. i think the chances of an agreeable summer would be as good in that way as in making a hard-and- fast choice of a certain place and sticking to it. my own experience is that in these things chance makes a very good choice for one, as it does in most non-moral things. ii. a joke dies hard, and i am not sure that the life is yet quite out of the kindly ridicule that was cast for a whole generation upon the people who left their comfortable houses in town to starve upon farm-board or stifle in the narrow rooms of mountain and seaside hotels. yet such people were in the right, and their mockers were in the wrong, and their patient persistence in going out of town for the summer in the face of severe discouragements has multiplied indefinitely the kinds of summer resorts, and reformed them altogether. i believe the city boarding-house remains very much what it used to be; but i am bound to say that the country boarding-house has vastly improved since i began to know it. as for the summer hotel, by steep or by strand, it leaves little to be complained of except the prices. i take it for granted, therefore, that the out-of- town summer has come to stay, for all who can afford it, and that the chief sorrow attending it is that curse of choice, which i have already spoken of. i have rather favored chance than choice, because, whatever choice you make, you are pretty sure to regret it, with a bitter sense of responsibility added, which you cannot feel if chance has chosen for you. i observe that people who own summer cottages are often apt to wish they did not, and were foot-loose to roam where they listed, and i have been told that even a yacht is not a source of unmixed content, though so eminently detachable. to great numbers europe looks from this shore like a safe refuge from the american summer problem; and yet i am not sure that it is altogether so; for it is not enough merely to go to europe; one has to choose where to go when one has got there. a european city is certainly always more tolerable than an american city, but one cannot very well pass the summer in paris, or even in london. the heart there, as here, will yearn for some blessed seat "where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns and bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea," and still, after your keel touches the strand of that alluring old world, you must buy your ticket and register your trunk for somewhere in particular. iii. it is truly a terrible stress, this summer problem, and, as i say, my heart aches much more for those who have to solve it and suffer the consequences of their choice than for those who have no choice, but must stay the summer through where their work is, and be humbly glad that they have any work to keep them there. i am not meaning now, of course, business men obliged to remain in the city to earn the bread--or, more correctly, the cake--of their families in the country, or even their clerks and bookkeepers, and porters and messengers, but such people as i sometimes catch sight of from the elevated trains (in my reluctant midsummer flights through the city), sweltering in upper rooms over sewing-machines or lap-boards, or stewing in the breathless tenement streets, or driving clangorous trucks, or monotonous cars, or bending over wash-tubs at open windows for breaths of the no-air without. these all get on somehow, and at the end of the summer they have not to accuse themselves of folly in going to one place rather than another. their fate is decided for them, and they submit to it; whereas those who decide their fate are always rebelling against it. they it is whom i am truly sorry for, and whom i write of with tears in my ink. their case is hard, and it will seem all the harder if we consider how foolish they will look and how flat they will feel at the judgment-day, when they are asked about their summer outings. i do not really suppose we shall be held to a very strict account for our pleasures because everybody else has not enjoyed them, too; that would be a pity of our lives; and yet there is an old-fashioned compunction which will sometimes visit the heart if we take our pleasures ungraciously, when so many have no pleasures to take. i would suggest, then, to those on whom the curse of choice between pleasures rests, that they should keep in mind those who have chiefly pains to their portion in life. i am not, i hope, urging my readers to any active benevolence, or counselling them to share their pleasures with others; it has been accurately ascertained that there are not pleasures enough to go round, as things now are; but i would seriously entreat them to consider whether they could not somewhat alleviate the hardships of their own lot at the sea-side or among the mountains, by contrasting it with the lot of others in the sweat-shops and the boiler-factories of life. i know very well that it is no longer considered very good sense or very good morality to take comfort in one's advantages from the disadvantages of others, and this is not quite what i mean to teach. perhaps i mean nothing more than an overhauling of the whole subject of advantages and disadvantages, which would be a light and agreeable occupation for the leisure of the summer outer. it might be very interesting, and possibly it might be amusing, for one stretched upon the beach or swaying in the hammock to inquire into the reasons for his or her being so favored, and it is not beyond the bounds of expectation that a consensus of summer opinion on this subject would go far to enlighten the world upon a question that has vexed the world ever since mankind was divided into those who work too much and those who rest too much. aesthetic new york fifty-odd years ago a study of new york civilization in has lately come into my hands, with a mortifying effect, which i should like to share with the reader, to my pride of modernity. i had somehow believed that after half a century of material prosperity, such as the world has never seen before, new york in must be very different from new york in , but if i am to trust either the impressions of the earlier student or my own, new york is essentially the same now that it was then. the spirit of the place has not changed; it is as it was, splendidly and sordidly commercial. even the body of it has undergone little or no alteration; it was as shapeless, as incongruous; as ugly when the author of 'new york in slices' wrote as it is at this writing; it has simply grown, or overgrown, on the moral and material lines which seem to have been structural in it from the beginning. he felt in his time the same vulgarity, the same violence, in its architectural anarchy that i have felt in my time, and he noted how all dignity and beauty perished, amid the warring forms, with a prescience of my own affliction, which deprives me of the satisfaction of a discoverer and leaves me merely the sense of being rather old-fashioned in my painful emotions. i. i wish i could pretend that my author philosophized the facts of his new york with something less than the raw haste of the young journalist; but i am afraid i must own that 'new york in slices' affects one as having first been printed in an evening paper, and that the writer brings to the study of the metropolis something like the eager horror of a country visitor. this probably enabled him to heighten the effect he wished to make with readers of a kindred tradition, and for me it adds a certain innocent charm to his work. i may make myself better understood if i say that his attitude towards the depravities of a smaller new york is much the same as that of mr. stead towards the wickedness of a much larger chicago. he seizes with some such avidity upon the darker facts of the prisons, the slums, the gambling-houses, the mock auctions, the toughs (who then called themselves b'hoys and g'hals), the quacks, the theatres, and even the intelligence offices, and exploits their iniquities with a ready virtue which the wickedest reader can enjoy with him. but if he treated of these things alone, i should not perhaps have brought his curious little book to the polite notice of my readers. he treats also of the press, the drama, the art, and, above all, "the literary soirees" of that remote new york of his in a manner to make us latest new-yorkers feel our close proximity to it. fifty-odd years ago journalism had already become "the absorbing, remorseless, clamorous thing" we now know, and very different from the thing it was when "expresses were unheard of, and telegraphs were uncrystallized from the lightning's blue and fiery film." reporterism was beginning to assume its present importance, but it had not yet become the paramount intellectual interest, and did not yet "stand shoulder to shoulder" with the counting-room in authority. great editors, then as now, ranked great authors in the public esteem, or achieved a double primacy by uniting journalism and literature in the same personality. they were often the owners as well as the writers of their respective papers, and they indulged for the advantage of the community the rancorous rivalries, recriminations, and scurrilities which often form the charm, if not the chief use, of our contemporaneous journals. apparently, however, notarially authenticated boasts of circulation had not yet been made the delight of their readers, and the press had not become the detective agency that it now is, nor the organizer and distributer of charities. but as dark a cloud of doubt rested upon its relations to the theatre as still eclipses the popular faith in dramatic criticism. "how can you expect," our author asks, "a frank and unbiassed criticism upon the performance of george frederick cooke snooks . . . when the editor or reporter who is to write it has just been supping on beefsteak and stewed potatoes at windust's, and regaling himself on brandy-and-water cold, without, at the expense of the aforesaid george frederick cooke snooks?" the severest censor of the press, however, would hardly declare now that "as to such a thing as impartial and independent criticism upon theatres in the present state of the relations between editors, reporters, managers, actors--and actresses--the thing is palpably out of the question," and if matters were really at the pass hinted, the press has certainly improved in fifty years, if one may judge from its present frank condemnations of plays and players. the theatre apparently has not, for we read that at that period "a very great majority of the standard plays and farces on the stage depend mostly for their piquancy and their power of interesting an audience upon intrigues with married women, elopements, seductions, bribery, cheating, and fraud of every description . . . . stage costume, too, wherever there is half a chance, is usually made as lascivious and immodest as possible; and a freedom and impropriety prevails among the characters of the piece which would be kicked out of private society the instant it would have the audacity to make its appearance there." ii. i hope private society in new york would still be found as correct if not quite so violent; and i wish i could believe that the fine arts were presently in as flourishing a condition among us as they were in . that was the prosperous day of the art unions, in which the artists clubbed their output, and the subscribers parted the works among themselves by something so very like raffling that the art unions were finally suppressed under the law against lotteries. while they lasted, however, they had exhibitions thronged by our wealth, fashion, and intellect (to name them in the order they hold the new york mind), as our private views now are, or ought to be; and the author "devotes an entire number" of his series "to a single institution"--fearless of being accused of partiality by any who rightly appreciate the influences of the fine arts upon the morals and refinement of mankind. he devotes even more than an entire number to literature; for, besides treating of various literary celebrities at the "literary soirees," he imagines encountering several of them at the high-class restaurants. at delmonico's, where if you had "french and money" you could get in that day "a dinner which, as a work of art, ranks with a picture by huntington, a poem by willis, or a statue by powers," he meets such a musical critic as richard grant white, such an intellectual epicurean as n. p. willis, such a lyric poet as charles fenno hoffman. but it would be a warm day for delmonico's when the observer in this epoch could chance upon so much genius at its tables, perhaps because genius among us has no longer the french or the money. indeed, the author of 'new york in slices' seems finally to think that he has gone too far, even for his own period, and brings himself up with the qualifying reservation that if willis and hoffman never did dine together at delmonico's, they ought to have done so. he has apparently no misgivings as to the famous musical critic, and he has no scruple in assembling for us at his "literary soiree" a dozen distinguished-looking men and "twice as many women.... listening to a tall, deaconly man, who stands between two candles held by a couple of sticks summoned from the recesses of the back parlor, reading a basketful of gilt-edged notes. it is . . . the annual valentine party, to which all the male and female authors have contributed for the purpose of saying on paper charming things of each other, and at which, for a few hours, all are gratified with the full meed of that praise which a cold world is chary of bestowing upon its literary cobweb- spinners." it must be owned that we have no longer anything so like a 'salon' as this. it is, indeed, rather terrible, and it is of a quality in its celebrities which may well carry dismay to any among us presently intending immortality. shall we, one day, we who are now in the rich and full enjoyment of our far-reaching fame, affect the imagination of posterity as these phantoms of the past affect ours? shall we, too, appear in some pale limbo of unimportance as thin and faded as "john inman, the getter-up of innumerable things for the annuals and magazines," or as dr. rufus griswold, supposed for picturesque purposes to be "stalking about with an immense quarto volume under his arm . . . an early copy of his forthcoming 'female poets of america'"; or as lewis gaylord clark, the "sunnyfaced, smiling" editor of the knickerbocker magazine, "who don't look as if the ink-fiend had ever heard of him," as he stands up to dance a polka with "a demure lady who has evidently spilled the inkstand over her dress"; or as "the stately mrs. seba smith, bending aristocratically over the centre-table, and talking in a bright, cold, steady stream, like an antique fountain by moonlight"; or as "the spiritual and dainty fanny osgood, clapping her hands and crowing like a baby," where she sits "nestled under a shawl of heraldic devices, like a bird escaped from its cage"; or as margaret fuller, "her large, gray eyes tamping inspiration, and her thin, quivering lip prophesying like a pythoness"? i hope not; i earnestly hope not. whatever i said at the outset, affirming the persistent equality of new york characteristics and circumstances, i wish to take back at this point; and i wish to warn malign foreign observers, of the sort who have so often refused to see us as we see ourselves, that they must not expect to find us now grouped in the taste of . possibly it was not so much the taste of as the author of 'new york in slices' would have us believe; and perhaps any one who trusted his pictures of life among us otherwise would be deceived by a parity of the spirit in which they are portrayed with that of our modern "society journalism." from new york into new england there is, of course, almost a world's difference between england and the continent anywhere; but i do not recall just now any transition between continental countries which involves a more distinct change in the superficial aspect of things than the passage from the middle states into new england. it is all american, but american of diverse ideals; and you are hardly over the border before you are sensible of diverse effects, which are the more apparent to you the more american you are. if you want the contrast at its sharpest you had better leave new york on a sound boat; for then you sleep out of the middle state civilization and wake into the civilization of new england, which seems to give its stamp to nature herself. as to man, he takes it whether native or alien; and if he is foreign-born it marks him another irishman, italian, canadian, jew, or negro from his brother in any other part of the united states. i. when you have a theory of any kind, proofs of it are apt to seek you out, and i, who am rather fond of my faith in new england's influence of this sort, had as pretty an instance of it the day after my arrival as i could wish. a colored brother of massachusetts birth, as black as a man can well be, and of a merely anthropoidal profile, was driving me along shore in search of a sea-side hotel when we came upon a weak-minded young chicken in the road. the natural expectation is that any chicken in these circumstances will wait for your vehicle, and then fly up before it with a loud screech; but this chicken may have been overcome by the heat (it was a land breeze and it drew like the breath of a furnace over the hay-cocks and the clover), or it may have mistimed the wheel, which passed over its head and left it to flop a moment in the dust and then fall still. the poor little tragedy was sufficiently distressful to me, but i bore it well, compared with my driver. he could hardly stop lamenting it; and when presently we met a young farmer, he pulled up. "you goin' past jim marden's?" "yes." "well, i wish you'd tell him i just run over a chicken of his, and i killed it, i guess. i guess it was a pretty big one." "oh no," i put in, "it was only a broiler. what do you think it was worth?" i took out some money, and the farmer noted the largest coin in my hand; "about half a dollar, i guess." on this i put it all back in my pocket, and then he said, "well, if a chicken don't know enough to get out of the road, i guess you ain't to blame." i expressed that this was my own view of the case, and we drove on. when we parted i gave the half-dollar to my driver, and begged him not to let the owner of the chicken come on me for damages; and though he chuckled his pleasure in the joke, i could see that he was still unhappy, and i have no doubt that he has that pullet on his conscience yet, unless he has paid for it. he was of a race which elsewhere has so immemorially plundered hen-roosts that chickens are as free to it as the air it breathes, without any conceivable taint of private ownership. but the spirit of new england had so deeply entered into him that the imbecile broiler of another, slain by pure accident and by its own contributory negligence, was saddening him, while i was off in my train without a pang for the owner and with only an agreeable pathos for the pullet. ii. the instance is perhaps extreme; and, at any rate, it has carried me in a psychological direction away from the simpler differences which i meant to note in new england. they were evident as soon as our train began to run from the steamboat landing into the country, and they have intensified, if they have not multiplied, themselves as i have penetrated deeper and deeper into the beautiful region. the land is poorer than the land to the southward--one sees that at once; the soil is thin, and often so thickly burdened with granite bowlders that it could never have borne any other crop since the first puritans, or pilgrims, cut away the primeval woods and betrayed its hopeless sterility to the light. but wherever you come to a farm-house, whether standing alone or in one of the village groups that new england farm-houses have always liked to gather themselves into, it is of a neatness that brings despair, and of a repair that ought to bring shame to the beholder from more easy-going conditions. everything is kept up with a strenuous virtue that imparts an air of self-respect to the landscape, which the bleaching and blackening stone walls, wandering over the hill-slopes, divide into wood lots of white birch and pine, stony pastures, and little patches of potatoes and corn. the mowing-lands alone are rich; and if the new england year is in the glory of the latest june, the breath of the clover blows honey--sweet into the car windows, and the fragrance of the new-cut hay rises hot from the heavy swaths that seem to smoke in the sun. we have struck a hot spell, one of those torrid mood of continental weather which we have telegraphed us ahead to heighten our suffering by anticipation. but the farmsteads and village houses are safe in the shade of their sheltering trees amid the fluctuation of the grass that grows so tall about them that the june roses have to strain upward to get themselves free of it. behind each dwelling is a billowy mass of orchard, and before it the gothic archway of the elms stretches above the quiet street. there is no tree in the world so full of sentiment as the american elm, and it is nowhere so graceful as in these new england villages, which are themselves, i think, the prettiest and wholesomest of mortal sojourns. by a happy instinct, their wooden houses are all painted white, to a marble effect that suits our meridional sky, and the contrast of their dark-green shutters is deliciously refreshing. there was an evil hour, the terrible moment of the aesthetic revival now happily past, when white walls and green blinds were thought in bad taste, and the village houses were often tinged a dreary ground color, or a doleful olive, or a gloomy red, but now they have returned to their earlier love. not the first love; that was a pale buff with white trim; but i doubt if it were good for all kinds of village houses; the eye rather demands the white. the pale buff does very well for large colonial mansions, like lowell's or longfellow's in cambridge; but when you come, say, to see the great square houses built in portsmouth, new hampshire; early in this century, and painted white, you find that white, after all, is the thing for our climate, even in the towns. in such a village as my colored brother drove me through on the way to the beach it was of an absolute fitness; and i wish i could convey a due sense of the exquisite keeping of the place. each white house was more or less closely belted in with a white fence, of panels or pickets; the grassy door-yards glowed with flowers, and often a climbing rose embowered the door-way with its bloom. away backward or sidewise stretched the woodshed from the dwelling to the barn, and shut the whole under one cover; the turf grew to the wheel-tracks of the road-way, over which the elms rose and drooped; and from one end of the village to the other you could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog. i know holland; i have seen the wives of scheveningen scrubbing up for sunday to the very middle of their brick streets, but i doubt if dutch cleanliness goes so far without, or comes from so deep a scruple within, as the cleanliness of new england. i felt so keenly the feminine quality of its motive as i passed through that village, that i think if i had dropped so much as a piece of paper in the street i must have knocked at the first door and begged the lady of the house (who would have opened it in person after wiping her hands from her work, taking off her apron, and giving a glance at herself in the mirror and at me through the window blind) to report me to the selectmen in the interest of good morals. iii. i did not know at once quite how to reconcile the present foulness of the new england capital with the fairness of the new england country; and i am still somewhat embarrassed to own that after new york (even under the relaxing rule of tammany) boston seemed very dirty when we arrived there. at best i was never more than a naturalized bostonian; but it used to give me great pleasure--so penetratingly does the place qualify even the sojourning westerner--to think of the defect of new york in the virtue that is next to godliness; and now i had to hang my head for shame at the mortifying contrast of the boston streets to the well-swept asphalt which i had left frying in the new york sun the afternoon before. later, however, when i began to meet the sort of boston faces i remembered so well--good, just, pure, but set and severe, with their look of challenge, of interrogation, almost of reproof--they not only ignored the disgraceful untidiness of the streets, but they convinced me of a state of transition which would leave the place swept and garnished behind it; and comforted me against the litter of the winding thoroughfares and narrow lanes, where the dust had blown up against the brick walls, and seemed permanently to have smutched and discolored them. in new york you see the american face as europe characterizes it; in boston you see it as it characterizes europe; and it is in boston that you can best imagine the strenuous grapple of the native forces which all alien things must yield to till they take the american cast. it is almost dismaying, that physiognomy, before it familiarizes itself anew; and in the brief first moment while it is yet objective, you ransack your conscience for any sins you may have committed in your absence from it and make ready to do penance for them. i felt almost as if i had brought the dirty streets with me, and were guilty of having left them lying about, so impossible were they with reference to the boston face. it is a face that expresses care, even to the point of anxiety, and it looked into the window of our carriage with the serious eyes of our elderly hackman to make perfectly sure of our destination before we drove away from the station. it was a little rigorous with us, as requiring us to have a clear mind; but it was not unfriendly, not unkind, and it was patient from long experience. in new york there are no elderly hackmen; but in boston they abound, and i cannot believe they would be capable of bad faith with travellers. in fact, i doubt if this class is anywhere as predatory as it is painted; but in boston it appears to have the public honor in its keeping. i do not mean that it was less mature, less self-respectful in portsmouth, where we were next to arrive; more so it could not be; an equal sense of safety, of ease, began with it in both places, and all through new england it is of native birth, while in new york it is composed of men of many nations, with a weight in numbers towards the celtic strain. the prevalence of the native in new england helps you sensibly to realize from the first moment that here you are in america as the first americans imagined and meant it; and nowhere in new england is the original tradition more purely kept than in the beautiful old seaport of new hampshire. in fact, without being quite prepared to defend a thesis to this effect, i believe that portsmouth is preeminently american, and in this it differs from newburyport and from salem, which have suffered from different causes an equal commercial decline, and, though among the earliest of the great puritan towns after boston, are now largely made up of aliens in race and religion; these are actually the majority, i believe, in newburyport. iv. the adversity of portsmouth began early in the century, but before that time she had prospered so greatly that her merchant princes were able to build themselves wooden palaces with white walls and green shutters, of a grandeur and beauty unmatched elsewhere in the country. i do not know what architect had his way with them, though his name is richly worth remembrance, but they let him make them habitations of such graceful proportion and of such delicate ornament that they have become shrines of pious pilgrimage with the young architects of our day who hope to house our well-to-do people fitly in country or suburbs. the decoration is oftenest spent on a porch or portal, or a frieze of peculiar refinement; or perhaps it feels its way to the carven casements or to the delicate iron-work of the transoms; the rest is a simplicity and a faultless propriety of form in the stately mansions which stand under the arching elms, with their gardens sloping, or dropping by easy terraces behind them to the river, or to the borders of other pleasances. they are all of wood, except for the granite foundations and doorsteps, but the stout edifices rarely sway out of the true line given them, and they look as if they might keep it yet another century. between them, in the sun-shotten shade, lie the quiet streets, whose gravelled stretch is probably never cleaned because it never needs cleaning. even the business streets, and the quaint square which gives the most american of towns an air so foreign and old worldly, look as if the wind and rain alone cared for them; but they are not foul, and the narrower avenues, where the smaller houses of gray, unpainted wood crowd each other, flush upon the pavements, towards the water--side, are doubtless unvisited by the hoe or broom, and must be kept clean by a new england conscience against getting them untidy. when you get to the river-side there is one stretch of narrow, high- shouldered warehouses which recall holland, especially in a few with their gables broken in steps, after the dutch fashion. these, with their mouldering piers and grass-grown wharves, have their pathos, and the whole place embodies in its architecture an interesting record of the past, from the time when the homesick exiles huddled close to the water's edge till the period of post-colonial prosperity, when proud merchants and opulent captains set their vast square houses each in its handsome space of gardened ground. my adjectives might mislead as to size, but they could not as to beauty, and i seek in vain for those that can duly impart the peculiar charm of the town. portsmouth still awaits her novelist; he will find a rich field when he comes; and i hope he will come of the right sex, for it needs some minute and subtle feminine skill, like that of jane austen, to express a fit sense of its life in the past. of its life in the present i know nothing. i could only go by those delightful, silent houses, and sigh my longing soul into their dim interiors. when now and then a young shape in summer silk, or a group of young shapes in diaphanous muslin, fluttered out of them, i was no wiser; and doubtless my elderly fancy would have been unable to deal with what went on in them. some girl of those flitting through the warm, odorous twilight must become the creative historian of the place; i can at least imagine a jane austen now growing up in portsmouth. v. if miss jewett were of a little longer breath than she has yet shown herself in fiction, i might say the jane austen of portsmouth was already with us, and had merely not yet begun to deal with its precious material. one day when we crossed the piscataqua from new hampshire into maine, and took the trolley-line for a run along through the lovely coast country, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of her own people, who are a little different sort of new-englanders from those of miss wilkins. they began to flock into the car, young maidens and old, mothers and grandmothers, and nice boys and girls, with a very, very few farmer youth of marriageable age, and more rustic and seafaring elders long past it, all in the sunday best which they had worn to the graduation exercises at the high school, where we took them mostly up. the womenkind were in a nervous twitter of talk and laughter, and the men tolerantly gay beyond their wont, "passing the time of day" with one another, and helping the more tumultuous sex to get settled in the overcrowded open car. they courteously made room for one another, and let the children stand between their knees, or took them in their laps, with that unfailing american kindness which i am prouder of than the american valor in battle, observing in all that american decorum which is no bad thing either. we had chanced upon the high and mighty occasion of the neighborhood year, when people might well have been a little off their balance, but there was not a boisterous note in the subdued affair. as we passed the school-house door, three dear, pretty maids in white gowns and white slippers stood on the steps and gently smiled upon our company. one could see that they were inwardly glowing and thrilling with the excitement of their graduation, but were controlling their emotions to a calm worthy of the august event, so that no one might ever have it to say that they had appeared silly. the car swept on, and stopped to set down passengers at their doors or gates, where they severally left it, with an easy air as of private ownership, into some sense of which the trolley promptly flatters people along its obliging lines. one comfortable matron, in a cinnamon silk, was just such a figure as that in the miss wilkins's story where the bridegroom fails to come on the wedding-day; but, as i say, they made me think more of miss jewett's people. the shore folk and the down-easters are specifically hers; and these were just such as might have belonged in 'the country of the pointed firs', or 'sister wisby's courtship', or 'dulham ladies', or 'an autumn ramble', or twenty other entrancing tales. sometimes one of them would try her front door, and then, with a bridling toss of the head, express that she had forgotten locking it, and slip round to the kitchen; but most of the ladies made their way back at once between the roses and syringas of their grassy door-yards, which were as neat and prim as their own persons, or the best chamber in their white- walled, green-shuttered, story-and-a-half house, and as perfectly kept as the very kitchen itself. the trolley-line had been opened only since the last september, but in an effect of familiar use it was as if it had always been there, and it climbed and crooked and clambered about with the easy freedom of the country road which it followed. it is a land of low hills, broken by frequent reaches of the sea, and it is most amusing, most amazing, to see how frankly the trolley-car takes and overcomes its difficulties. it scrambles up and down the little steeps like a cat, and whisks round a sharp and sudden curve with a feline screech, broadening into a loud caterwaul as it darts over the estuaries on its trestles. its course does not lack excitement, and i suppose it does not lack danger; but as yet there have been no accidents, and it is not so disfiguring as one would think. the landscape has already accepted it, and is making the best of it; and to the country people it is an inestimable convenience. it passes everybody's front door or back door, and the farmers can get themselves or their produce (for it runs an express car) into portsmouth in an hour, twice an hour, all day long. in summer the cars are open, with transverse seats, and stout curtains that quite shut out a squall of wind or rain. in winter the cars are closed, and heated by electricity. the young motorman whom i spoke with, while we waited on a siding to let a car from the opposite direction get by, told me that he was caught out in a blizzard last winter, and passed the night in a snowdrift. "but the cah was so wa'm, i neva suff'ed a mite." "well," i summarized, "it must be a great advantage to all the people along the line." "well, you wouldn't 'a' thought so, from the kick they made." "i suppose the cottagers"--the summer colony--"didn't like the noise." "oh yes; that's what i mean. the's whe' the kick was. the natives like it. i guess the summa folks 'll like it, too." he looked round at me with enjoyment of his joke in his eye, for we both understood that the summer folks could not help themselves, and must bow to the will of the majority. the art of the adsmith the other day, a friend of mine, who professes all the intimacy of a bad conscience with many of my thoughts and convictions, came in with a bulky book under his arm, and said, "i see by a guilty look in your eye that you are meaning to write about spring." "i am not," i retorted, "and if i were, it would be because none of the new things have been said yet about spring, and because spring is never an old story, any more than youth or love." "i have heard something like that before," said my friend, "and i understand. the simple truth of the matter is that this is the fag-end of the season, and you have run low in your subjects. now take my advice and don't write about spring; it will make everybody hate you, and will do no good. write about advertising." he tapped the book under his arm significantly. "here is a theme for you." i. he had no sooner pronounced these words than i began to feel a weird and potent fascination in his suggestion. i took the book from him and looked it eagerly through. it was called good advertising, and it was written by one of the experts in the business who have advanced it almost to the grade of an art, or a humanity. "but i see nothing here," i said, musingly, "which would enable a self-respecting author to come to the help of his publisher in giving due hold upon the public interest those charming characteristics of his book which no one else can feel so penetratingly or celebrate so persuasively." "i expected some such objection from you," said my friend. "you will admit that there is everything else here?" "everything but that most essential thing. you know how we all feel about it: the bitter disappointment, the heart-sickening sense of insufficiency that the advertised praises of our books give us poor authors. the effect is far worse than that of the reviews, for the reviewer is not your ally and copartner, while your publisher--" "i see what you mean," said my friend. "but you must have patience. if the author of this book can write so luminously of advertising in other respects, i am sure he will yet be able to cast a satisfactory light upon your problem. the question is, i believe, how to translate into irresistible terms all that fond and exultant regard which a writer feels for his book, all his pervasive appreciation of its singular beauty, unique value, and utter charm, and transfer it to print, without infringing upon the delicate and shrinking modesty which is the distinguishing ornament of the literary spirit?" "something like that. but you understand." "perhaps a roentgen ray might be got to do it," said my friend, thoughtfully, "or perhaps this author may bring his mind to bear upon it yet. he seems to have considered every kind of advertising except book-advertising." "the most important of all!" i cried, impatiently. "you think so because you are in that line. if you were in the line of varnish, or bicycles, or soap, or typewriters, or extract of beef, or of malt--" "still i should be interested in book--advertising, because it is the most vital of human interests." "tell me," said my friend, "do you read the advertisements of the books of rival authors?" "brother authors," i corrected him. "well, brother authors." i said, no, candidly, i did not; and i forbore to add that i thought them little better than a waste of the publishers' money. ii. my friend did not pursue his inquiry to my personal disadvantage, but seemed to prefer a more general philosophy of the matter. "i have often wondered," he said, "at the enormous expansion of advertising, and doubted whether it was not mostly wasted. but my author, here, has suggested a brilliant fact which i was unwittingly groping for. when you take up a sunday paper"--i shuddered, and my friend smiled intelligence--"you are simply appalled at the miles of announcements of all sorts. who can possibly read them? who cares even to look at them? but if you want something in particular--to furnish a house, or buy a suburban place, or take a steamer for europe, or go, to the theatre--then you find out at once who reads the advertisements, and cares to look at them. they respond to the multifarious wants of the whole community. you have before you the living operation of that law of demand and supply which it has always been such a bore to hear about. as often happens, the supply seems to come before the demand; but that's only an appearance. you wanted something, and you found an offer to meet your want." "then you don't believe that the offer to meet your want suggested it?" "i see that my author believes something of the kind. we may be full of all sorts of unconscious wants which merely need the vivifying influence of an advertisement to make them spring into active being; but i have a feeling that the money paid for advertising which appeals to potential wants is largely thrown away. you must want a thing, or think you want it; otherwise you resent the proffer of it as a kind of impertinence." "there are some kinds of advertisements, all the same, that i read without the slightest interest in the subject matter. simply the beauty of the style attracts me." "i know. but does it ever move you to get what you don't want?" "never; and i should be glad to know what your author thinks of that sort of advertising: the literary, or dramatic, or humorous, or quaint." "he doesn't contemn it, quite. but i think he feels that it may have had its day. do you still read such advertisements with your early zest?" "no; the zest for nearly everything goes. i don't care so much for tourguenief as i used. still, if i come upon the jaunty and laconic suggestions of a certain well-known clothing-house, concerning the season's wear, i read them with a measure of satisfaction. the advertising expert--" "this author calls him the adsmith." "delightful! ad is a loathly little word, but we must come to it. it's as legitimate as lunch. but as i was saying, the adsmith seems to have caught the american business tone, as perfectly as any of our novelists have caught the american social tone." "yes," said my friend, "and he seems to have prospered as richly by it. you know some of those chaps make fifteen or twenty thousand dollars by adsmithing. they have put their art quite on a level with fiction pecuniarily." "perhaps it is a branch of fiction." "no; they claim that it is pure fact. my author discourages the slightest admixture of fable. the truth, clearly and simply expressed, is the best in an ad. "it is best in a wof, too. i am always saying that." "wof?" "well, work of fiction. it's another new word, like lunch or ad." "but in a wof," said my friend, instantly adopting it, "my author insinuates that the fashion of payment tempts you to verbosity, while in an ad the conditions oblige you to the greatest possible succinctness. in one case you are paid by the word; in the other you pay by the word. that is where the adsmith stands upon higher moral ground than the wofsmith." "i should think your author might have written a recent article in 'the---------, reproaching fiction with its unhallowed gains." "if you mean that for a sneer, it is misplaced. he would have been incapable of it. my author is no more the friend of honesty in adsmithing than he is of propriety, he deprecates jocosity in apothecaries and undertakers, not only as bad taste, but as bad business; and he is as severe as any one could be upon ads that seize the attention by disgusting or shocking the reader. "he is to be praised for that, and for the other thing; and i shouldn't have minded his criticising the ready wofsmith. i hope he attacks the use of display type, which makes our newspapers look like the poster- plastered fences around vacant lots. in new york there is only one paper whose advertisements are not typographically a shock to the nerves." "well," said my friend, "he attacks foolish and ineffective display." "it is all foolish and ineffective. it is like a crowd of people trying to make themselves heard by shouting each at the top of his voice. a paper full of display advertisements is an image of our whole congested and delirious state of competition; but even in competitive conditions it is unnecessary, and it is futile. compare any new york paper but one with the london papers, and you will see what i mean. of course i refer to the ad pages; the rest of our exception is as offensive with pictures and scare heads as all the rest. i wish your author could revise his opinions and condemn all display in ads." "i dare say he will when he knows what you think," said my friend, with imaginable sarcasm. iii. "i wish," i went on, "that he would give us some philosophy of the prodigious increase of advertising within the last twenty-five years, and some conjecture as to the end of it all. evidently, it can't keep on increasing at the present rate. if it does, there will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things." "before that time, perhaps," my friend suggested, "adsmithing will have become so fine and potent an art that advertising will be reduced in bulk, while keeping all its energy and even increasing its effectiveness." "perhaps," i said, "some silent electrical process will be contrived, so that the attractions of a new line of dress-goods or the fascination of a spring or fall opening may be imparted to a lady's consciousness without even the agency of words. all other facts of commercial and industrial interest could be dealt with in the same way. a fine thrill could be made to go from the last new book through the whole community, so that people would not willingly rest till they had it. yes, one can see an indefinite future for advertising in that way. the adsmith may be the supreme artist of the twentieth century. he may assemble in his grasp, and employ at will, all the arts and sciences." "yes," said my friend, with a sort of fall in his voice, "that is very well. but what is to become of the race when it is penetrated at every pore with a sense of the world's demand and supply?" "oh, that is another affair. i was merely imagining the possible resources of invention in providing for the increase of advertising while guarding the integrity of the planet. i think, very likely, if the thing keeps on, we shall all go mad; but then we shall none of us be able to criticise the others. or possibly the thing may work its own cure. you know the ingenuity of the political economists in justifying the egotism to which conditions appeal. they do not deny that these foster greed and rapacity in merciless degree, but they contend that when the wealth- winner drops off gorged there is a kind of miracle wrought, and good comes of it all. i never could see how; but if it is true, why shouldn't a sort of ultimate immunity come back to us from the very excess and invasion of the appeals now made to us, and destined to be made to us still more by the adsmith? come, isn't there hope in that?" "i see a great opportunity for the wofsmith in some such dream," said my friend. "why don't you turn it to account?" "you know that isn't my line; i must leave that sort of wofsmithing to the romantic novelist. besides, i have my well-known panacea for all the ills our state is heir to, in a civilization which shall legislate foolish and vicious and ugly and adulterate things out of the possibility of existence. most of the adsmithing is now employed in persuading people that such things are useful, beautiful, and pure. but in any civilization they shall not even be suffered to be made, much less foisted upon the community by adsmiths." "i see what you mean," said my friend; and he sighed gently. "i had much better let you write about spring." the psychology of plagiarism a late incident in the history of a very widespread english novelist, triumphantly closed by the statement of his friend that the novelist had casually failed to accredit a given passage in his novel to the real author, has brought freshly to my mind a curious question in ethics. the friend who vindicated the novelist, or, rather, who contemptuously dismissed the matter, not only confessed the fact of adoption, but declared that it was one of many which could be found in the novelist's works. the novelist, he said, was quite in the habit of so using material in the rough, which he implied was like using any fact or idea from life, and he declared that the novelist could not bother to answer critics who regarded these exploitations as a sort of depredation. in a manner he brushed the impertinent accusers aside, assuring the general public that the novelist always meant, at his leisure, and in his own way, duly to ticket the flies preserved in his amber. i. when i read this haughty vindication, i thought at first that if the case were mine i would rather have several deadly enemies than such a friend as that; but since, i have not been so sure. i have asked myself upon a careful review of the matter whether plagiarism may not be frankly avowed, as in nowise dishonest, and i wish some abler casuist would take the affair into consideration and make it clear for me. if we are to suppose that offences against society disgrace the offender, and that public dishonor argues the fact of some such offence, then apparently plagiarism is not such an offence; for in even very flagrant cases it does not disgrace. the dictionary, indeed, defines it as "the crime of literary theft"; but as no penalty attaches to it, and no lasting shame, it is hard to believe it either a crime or a theft; and the offence, if it is an offence (one has to call it something, and i hope the word is not harsh), is some such harmless infraction of the moral law as white-lying. the much-perverted saying of moliere, that he took his own where he found it, is perhaps in the consciousness of those who appropriate the things other people have rushed in with before them. but really they seem to need neither excuse nor defence with the impartial public if they are caught in the act of reclaiming their property or despoiling the rash intruder upon their premises. the novelist in question is by no means the only recent example, and is by no means a flagrant example. while the ratification of the treaty with spain was pending before the senate of the united states, a member of that body opposed it in a speech almost word for word the same as a sermon delivered in new york city only a few days earlier and published broadcast. he was promptly exposed by the parallel-column system; but i have never heard that his standing was affected or his usefulness impaired by the offence proven against him. a few years ago an eminent divine in one of our cities preached as his own the sermon of a brother divine, no longer living; he, too, was detected and promptly exposed by the parallel-column system, but nothing whatever happened from the exposure. every one must recall like instances, more or less remote. i remember one within my youthfuller knowledge of a journalist who used as his own all the denunciatory passages of macaulay's article on barrere, and applied them with changes of name to the character and conduct of a local politician whom he felt it his duty to devote to infamy. he was caught in the fact, and by means of the parallel column pilloried before the community. but the community did not mind it a bit, and the journalist did not either. he prospered on amid those who all knew what he had done, and when he removed to another city it was to a larger one, and to a position of more commanding influence, from which he was long conspicuous in helping shape the destinies of the nation. so far as any effect from these exposures was concerned, they were as harmless as those exposures of fraudulent spiritistic mediums which from time to time are supposed to shake the spiritistic superstition to its foundations. they really do nothing of the kind; the table-tippings, rappings, materializations, and levitations keep on as before; and i do not believe that the exposure of the novelist who has been the latest victim of the parallel column will injure him a jot in the hearts or heads of his readers. ii. i am very glad of it, being a disbeliever in punishments of all sorts. i am always glad to have sinners get off, for i like to get off from my own sins; and i have a bad moment from my sense of them whenever another's have found him out. but as yet i have not convinced myself that the sort of thing we have been considering is a sin at all, for it seems to deprave no more than it dishonors; or that it is what the dictionary (with very unnecessary brutality) calls a "crime" and a "theft." if it is either, it is differently conditioned, if not differently natured, from all other crimes and thefts. these may be more or less artfully and hopefully concealed, but plagiarism carries inevitable detection with it. if you take a man's hat or coat out of his hall, you may pawn it before the police overtake you; if you take his horse out of his stable, you may ride it away beyond pursuit and sell it; if you take his purse out of his pocket, you may pass it to a pal in the crowd, and easily prove your innocence. but if you take his sermon, or his essay, or even his apposite reflection, you cannot escape discovery. the world is full of idle people reading books, and they are only too glad to act as detectives; they please their miserable vanity by showing their alertness, and are proud to hear witness against you in the court of parallel columns. you have no safety in the obscurity of the author from whom you take your own; there is always that most terrible reader, the reader of one book, who knows that very author, and will the more indecently hasten to bring you to the bar because he knows no other, and wishes to display his erudition. a man may escape for centuries and yet be found out. in the notorious case of william shakespeare the offender seemed finally secure of his prey; and yet one poor lady, who ended in a lunatic asylum, was able to detect him at last, and to restore the goods to their rightful owner, sir francis bacon. in spite, however, of this almost absolute certainty of exposure, plagiarism goes on as it has always gone on; and there is no probability that it will cease as long as there are novelists, senators, divines, and journalists hard pressed for ideas which they happen not to have in mind at the time, and which they see going to waste elsewhere. now and then it takes a more violent form and becomes a real mania, as when the plagiarist openly claims and urges his right to a well-known piece of literary property. when mr. william allen butler's famous poem of "nothing to wear" achieved its extraordinary popularity, a young girl declared and apparently quite believed that she had written it and lost the ms. in an omnibus. all her friends apparently believed so, too; and the friends of the different gentlemen and ladies who claimed the authorship of "beautiful snow" and "rock me to sleep" were ready to support them by affidavit against the real authors of those pretty worthless pieces. from all these facts it must appear to the philosophic reader that plagiarism is not the simple "crime" or "theft" that the lexicographers would have us believe. it argues a strange and peculiar courage on the part of those who commit it or indulge it, since they are sure of having it brought home to them, for they seem to dread the exposure, though it involves no punishment outside of themselves. why do they do it, or, having done it, why do they mind it, since the public does not? their temerity and their timidity are things almost irreconcilable, and the whole position leaves one quite puzzled as to what one would do if one's own plagiarisms were found out. but this is a mere question of conduct, and of infinitely less interest than that of the nature or essence of the thing itself. puritanism in american fiction the question whether the fiction which gives a vivid impression of reality does truly represent the conditions studied in it, is one of those inquiries to which there is no very final answer. the most baffling fact of such fiction is that its truths are self-evident; and if you go about to prove them you are in some danger of shaking the convictions of those whom they have persuaded. it will not do to affirm anything wholesale concerning them; a hundred examples to the contrary present themselves if you know the ground, and you are left in doubt of the verity which you cannot gainsay. the most that you can do is to appeal to your own consciousness, and that is not proof to anybody else. perhaps the best test in this difficult matter is the quality of the art which created the picture. is it clear, simple, unaffected? is it true to human experience generally? if it is so, then it cannot well be false to the special human experience it deals with. i. not long ago i heard of something which amusingly, which pathetically, illustrated the sense of reality imparted by the work of one of our writers, whose art is of the kind i mean. a lady was driving with a young girl of the lighter-minded civilization of new york through one of those little towns of the north shore in massachusetts, where the small; wooden houses cling to the edges of the shallow bay, and the schooners slip, in and out on the hidden channels of the salt meadows as if they were blown about through the tall grass. she tried to make her feel the shy charm of the place, that almost subjective beauty, which those to the manner born are so keenly aware of in old-fashioned new england villages; but she found that the girl was not only not looking at the sad-colored cottages, with their weather-worn shingle walls, their grassy door-yards lit by patches of summer bloom, and their shutterless windows with their close-drawn shades, but she was resolutely averting her eyes from them, and staring straightforward until she should be out of sight of them altogether. she said that they were terrible, and she knew that in each of them was one of those dreary old women, or disappointed girls, or unhappy wives, or bereaved mothers, she had read of in miss wilkins's stories. she had been too little sensible of the humor which forms the relief of these stories, as it forms the relief of the bare, duteous, conscientious, deeply individualized lives portrayed in them; and no doubt this cannot make its full appeal to the heart of youth aching for their stoical sorrows. without being so very young, i, too, have found the humor hardly enough at times, and if one has not the habit of experiencing support in tragedy itself, one gets through a remote new england village, at nightfall, say, rather limp than otherwise, and in quite the mood that miss wilkins's bleaker studies leave one in. at midday, or in the bright sunshine of the morning, it is quite possible to fling off the melancholy which breathes the same note in the fact and the fiction; and i have even had some pleasure at such times in identifying this or, that one-story cottage with its lean-to as a mary wilkins house and in placing one of her muted dramas in it. one cannot know the people of such places without recognizing her types in them, and one cannot know new england without owning the fidelity of her stories to new england character, though, as i have already suggested, quite another sort of stories could be written which should as faithfully represent other phases of new england village life. to the alien inquirer, however, i should be by no means confident that their truth would evince itself, for the reason that human nature is seldom on show anywhere. i am perfectly certain of the truth of tolstoy and tourguenief to russian life, yet i should not be surprised if i went through russia and met none of their people. i should be rather more surprised if i went through italy and met none of verga's or fogazzaro's, but that would be because i already knew italy a little. in fact, i suspect that the last delight of truth in any art comes only to the connoisseur who is as well acquainted with the subject as the artist himself. one must not be too severe in challenging the truth of an author to life; and one must bring a great deal of sympathy and a great deal of patience to the scrutiny. types are very backward and shrinking things, after all; character is of such a mimosan sensibility that if you seize it too abruptly its leaves are apt to shut and hide all that is distinctive in it; so that it is not without some risk to an author's reputation for honesty that he gives his readers the impression of his truth. ii. the difficulty with characters in fiction is that the reader there finds them dramatized; not only their actions, but also their emotions are dramatized; and the very same sort of persons when one meets them in real life are recreantly undramatic. one might go through a new england village and see mary wilkins houses and mary wilkins people, and yet not witness a scene nor hear a word such as one finds in her tales. it is only too probable that the inhabitants one met would say nothing quaint or humorous, or betray at all the nature that she reveals in them; and yet i should not question her revelation on that account. the life of new england, such as miss wilkins deals with, and miss sarah o. jewett, and miss alice brown, is not on the surface, or not visibly so, except to the accustomed eye. it is puritanism scarcely animated at all by the puritanic theology. one must not be very positive in such things, and i may be too bold in venturing to say that while the belief of some new englanders approaches this theology the belief of most is now far from it; and yet its penetrating individualism so deeply influenced the new england character that puritanism survives in the moral and mental make of the people almost in its early strength. conduct and manner conform to a dead religious ideal; the wish to be sincere, the wish to be just, the wish to be righteous are before the wish to be kind, merciful, humble. a people are not a chosen people for half a dozen generations without acquiring a spiritual pride that remains with them long after they cease to believe themselves chosen. they are often stiffened in the neck and they are often hardened in the heart by it, to the point of making them angular and cold; but they are of an inveterate responsibility to a power higher than themselves, and they are strengthened for any fate. they are what we see in the stories which, perhaps, hold the first place in american fiction. as a matter of fact, the religion of new england is not now so puritanical as that of many parts of the south and west, and yet the inherited puritanism stamps the new england manner, and differences it from the manner of the straightest sects elsewhere. there was, however, always a revolt against puritanism when puritanism was severest and securest; this resulted in types of shiftlessness if not wickedness, which have not yet been duly studied, and which would make the fortune of some novelist who cared to do a fresh thing. there is also a sentimentality, or pseudo-emotionality (i have not the right phrase for it), which awaits full recognition in fiction. this efflorescence from the dust of systems and creeds, carried into natures left vacant by the ancestral doctrine, has scarcely been noticed by the painters of new england manners. it is often a last state of unitarianism, which prevailed in the larger towns and cities when the calvinistic theology ceased to be dominant, and it is often an effect of the spiritualism so common in new england, and, in fact, everywhere in america. then, there is a wide-spread love of literature in the country towns and villages which has in great measure replaced the old interest in dogma, and which forms with us an author's closest appreciation, if not his best. but as yet little hint of all this has got into the short stories, and still less of that larger intellectual life of new england, or that exalted beauty of character which tempts one to say that puritanism was a blessing if it made the new-englanders what they are; though one can always be glad not to have lived among them in the disciplinary period. boston, the capital of that new england nation which is fast losing itself in the american nation, is no longer of its old literary primacy, and yet most of our right thinking, our high thinking, still begins there, and qualifies the thinking of the country at large. the good causes, the generous causes, are first befriended there, and in a wholesome sort the new england culture, as well as the new england conscience, has imparted itself to the american people. even the power of writing short stories, which we suppose ourselves to have in such excellent degree, has spread from new england. that is, indeed, the home of the american short story, and it has there been brought to such perfection in the work of miss wilkins, of miss jewett, of miss brown, and of that most faithful, forgotten painter of manners, mrs. rose terry cook, that it presents upon the whole a truthful picture of new england village life in some of its more obvious phases. i say obvious because i must, but i have already said that this is a life which is very little obvious; and i should not blame any one who brought the portrait to the test of reality, and found it exaggerated, overdrawn, and unnatural, though i should be perfectly sure that such a critic was wrong. the what and the how in art one of the things always enforcing itself upon the consciousness of the artist in any sort is the fact that those whom artists work for rarely care for their work artistically. they care for it morally, personally, partially. i suspect that criticism itself has rather a muddled preference for the what over the how, and that it is always haunted by a philistine question of the material when it should, aesthetically speaking, be concerned solely with the form. i. the other night at the theatre i was witness of a curious and amusing illustration of my point. they were playing a most soul-filling melodrama, of the sort which gives you assurance from the very first that there will be no trouble in the end, but everything will come out just as it should, no matter what obstacles oppose themselves in the course of the action. an over-ruling providence, long accustomed to the exigencies of the stage, could not fail to intervene at the critical moment in behalf of innocence and virtue, and the spectator never had the least occasion for anxiety. not unnaturally there was a black-hearted villain in the piece; so very black-hearted that he seemed not to have a single good impulse from first to last. yet he was, in the keeping of the stage providence, as harmless as a blank cartridge, in spite of his deadly aims. he accomplished no more mischief, in fact, than if all his intents had been of the best; except for the satisfaction afforded by the edifying spectacle of his defeat and shame, he need not have been in the play at all; and one might almost have felt sorry for him, he was so continually baffled. but this was not enough for the audience, or for that part of it which filled the gallery to the roof. perhaps he was such an uncommonly black-hearted villain, so very, very cold-blooded in his wickedness that the justice unsparingly dealt out to him by the dramatist could not suffice. at any rate, the gallery took such a vivid interest in his punishment that it had out the actor who impersonated the wretch between all the acts, and hissed him throughout his deliberate passage across the stage before the curtain. the hisses were not at all for the actor, but altogether for the character. the performance was fairly good, quite as good as the performance of any virtuous part in the piece, and easily up to the level of other villanous performances (i never find much nature in them, perhaps because there is not much nature in villany itself; that is, villany pure and simple); but the mere conception of the wickedness this bad man had attempted was too much for an audience of the average popular goodness. it was only after he had taken poison, and fallen dead before their eyes, that the spectators forbore to visit him with a lively proof of their abhorrence; apparently they did not care to "give him a realizing sense that there was a punishment after death," as the man in lincoln's story did with the dead dog. ii. the whole affair was very amusing at first, but it has since put me upon thinking (i like to be put upon thinking; the eighteenth-century essayists were) that the attitude of the audience towards this deplorable reprobate is really the attitude of most readers of books, lookers at pictures and statues, listeners to music, and so on through the whole list of the arts. it is absolutely different from the artist's attitude, from the connoisseur's attitude; it is quite irreconcilable with their attitude, and yet i wonder if in the end it is not what the artist works for. art is not produced for artists, or even for connoisseurs; it is produced for the general, who can never view it otherwise than morally, personally, partially, from their associations and preconceptions. whether the effect with the general is what the artist works for or not, he, does not succeed without it. their brute liking or misliking is the final test; it is universal suffrage that elects, after all. only, in some cases of this sort the polls do not close at four o'clock on the first tuesday after the first monday of november, but remain open forever, and the voting goes on. still, even the first day's canvass is important, or at least significant. it will not do for the artist to electioneer, but if he is beaten, he ought to ponder the causes of his defeat, and question how he has failed to touch the chord of universal interest. he is in the world to make beauty and truth evident to his fellowmen, who are as a rule incredibly stupid and ignorant of both, but whose judgment he must nevertheless not despise. if he can make something that they will cheer, or something that they will hiss, he may not have done any great thing, but if he has made something that they will neither cheer nor hiss, he may well have his misgivings, no matter how well, how finely, how truly he has done the thing. this is very humiliating, but a tacit snub to one's artist-pride such as one gets from public silence is not a bad thing for one. not long ago i was talking about pictures with a painter, a very great painter, to my thinking; one whose pieces give me the same feeling i have from reading poetry; and i was excusing myself to him with respect to art, and perhaps putting on a little more modesty than i felt. i said that i could enjoy pictures only on the literary side, and could get no answer from my soul to those excellences of handling and execution which seem chiefly to interest painters. he replied that it was a confession of weakness in a painter if he appealed merely or mainly to technical knowledge in the spectator; that he narrowed his field and dwarfed his work by it; and that if he painted for painters merely, or for the connoisseurs of painting, he was denying his office, which was to say something clear and appreciable to all sorts of men in the terms of art. he even insisted that a picture ought to tell a story. the difficulty in humbling one's self to this view of art is in the ease with which one may please the general by art which is no art. neither the play nor the playing that i saw at the theatre when the actor was hissed for the wickedness of the villain he was personating, was at all fine; and yet i perceived, on reflection, that they had achieved a supreme effect. if i may be so confidential, i will say that i should be very sorry to have written that piece; yet i should be very proud if, on the level i chose and with the quality i cared for, i could invent a villain that the populace would have out and hiss for his surpassing wickedness. in other words, i think it a thousand pities whenever an artist gets so far away from the general, so far within himself or a little circle of amateurs, that his highest and best work awakens no response in the multitude. i am afraid this is rather the danger of the arts among us, and how to escape it is not so very plain. it makes one sick and sorry often to see how cheaply the applause of the common people is won. it is not an infallible test of merit, but if it is wanting to any performance, we may be pretty sure it is not the greatest performance. iii. the paradox lies in wait here, as in most other human affairs, to confound us, and we try to baffle it, in this way and in that. we talk, for instance, of poetry for poets, and we fondly imagine that this is different from talking of cookery for cooks. poetry is not made for poets; they have enough poetry of their own, but it is made for people who are not poets. if it does not please these, it may still be poetry, but it is poetry which has failed of its truest office. it is none the less its truest office because some very wretched verse seems often to do it. the logic of such a fact is not that the poet should try to achieve this truest office of his art by means of doggerel, but that he should study how and where and why the beauty and the truth he has made manifest are wanting in universal interest, in human appeal. leaving the drama out of the question, and the theatre which seems now to be seeking only the favor of the dull rich, i believe that there never was a time or a race more open to the impressions of beauty and of truth than ours. the artist who feels their divine charm, and longs to impart it, has now and here a chance to impart it more widely than ever artist had in the world before. of course, the means of reaching the widest range of humanity are the simple and the elementary, but there is no telling when the complex and the recondite may not universally please. the art is to make them plain to every one, for every one has them in him. lowell used to say that shakespeare was subtle, but in letters a foot high. the painter, sculptor, or author who pleases the polite only has a success to be proud of as far as it goes, and to be ashamed of that it goes no further. he need not shrink from giving pleasure to the vulgar because bad art pleases them. it is part of his reason for being that he should please them, too; and if he does not it is a proof that he is wanting in force, however much he abounds in fineness. who would not wish his picture to draw a crowd about it? who would not wish his novel to sell five hundred thousand copies, for reasons besides the sordid love of gain which i am told governs novelists? one should not really wish it any the less because chromos and historical romances are popular. sometime, i believe, the artist and his public will draw nearer together in a mutual understanding, though perhaps not in our present conditions. i put that understanding off till the good time when life shall be more than living, more even than the question of getting a living; but in the mean time i think that the artist might very well study the springs of feeling in others; and if i were a dramatist i think i should quite humbly go to that play where they hiss the villain for his villany, and inquire how his wickedness had been made so appreciable, so vital, so personal. not being a dramatist, i still cannot indulge the greatest contempt of that play and its public. politics of american authors no thornier theme could well be suggested than i was once invited to consider by an englishman who wished to know how far american politicians were scholars, and how far american authors took part in politics. in my mind i first revolted from the inquiry, and then i cast about, in the fascination it began to have for me, to see how i might handle it and prick myself least. in a sort, which it would take too long to set forth, politics are very intimate matters with us, and if one were to deal quite frankly with the politics of a contemporary author, one might accuse one's self of an unwarrantable personality. so, in what i shall have to say in answer to the question asked me, i shall seek above all things not to be quite frank. i. my uncandor need not be so jealously guarded in speaking of authors no longer living. not to go too far back among these, it is perfectly safe to say that when the slavery question began to divide all kinds of men among us, lowell, longfellow, whittier, curtis, emerson, and bryant more or less promptly and openly took sides against slavery. holmes was very much later in doing so, but he made up for his long delay by his final strenuousness; as for hawthorne, he was, perhaps, too essentially a spectator of life to be classed with either party, though his associations, if not his sympathies, were with the northern men who had southern principles until the civil war came. after the war, when our political questions ceased to be moral and emotional and became economic and sociological, literary men found their standing with greater difficulty. they remained mostly republicans, because the republicans were the anti-slavery party, and were still waging war against slavery in their nerves. i should say that they also continued very largely the emotional tradition in politics, and it is doubtful if in the nature of things the politics of literary men can ever be otherwise than emotional. in fact, though the questions may no longer be so, the politics of vastly the greater number of americans are so. nothing else would account for the fact that during the last ten or fifteen years men have remained republicans and remained democrats upon no tangible issues except of office, which could practically concern only a few hundreds or thousands out of every million voters. party fealty is praised as a virtue, and disloyalty to party is treated as a species of incivism next in wickedness to treason. if any one were to ask me why then american authors were not active in american politics, as they once were, i should feel a certain diffidence in replying that the question of other people's accession to office was, however emotional, unimportant to them as compared with literary questions. i should have the more diffidence because it might be retorted that literary men were too unpractical for politics when they did not deal with moral issues. such a retort would be rather mild and civil, as things go, and might even be regarded as complimentary. it is not our custom to be tender with any one who doubts if any actuality is right, or might not be bettered, especially in public affairs. we are apt to call such a one out of his name and to punish him for opinions he has never held. this may be a better reason than either given why authors do not take part in politics with us. they are a thin-skinned race, fastidious often, and always averse to hard knocks; they are rather modest, too, and distrust their fitness to lead, when they have quite a firm faith in their convictions. they hesitate to urge these in the face of practical politicians, who have a confidence in their ability to settle all affairs of state not surpassed even by that of business men in dealing with economic questions. i think it is a pity that our authors do not go into politics at least for the sake of the material it would yield them; but really they do not. our politics are often vulgar, but they are very picturesque; yet, so far, our fiction has shunned them even more decidedly than it has shunned our good society--which is not picturesque or apparently anything but a tiresome adaptation of the sort of drama that goes on abroad under the same name. in nearly the degree that our authors have dealt with our politics as material, they have given the practical politicians only too much reason to doubt their insight and their capacity to understand the mere machinery, the simplest motives, of political life. ii. there are exceptions, of course, and if my promise of reticence did not withhold me i might name some striking ones. privately and unprofessionally, i think our authors take as vivid an interest in public affairs as any other class of our citizens, and i should be sorry to think that they took a less intelligent interest. now and then, but only very rarely, one of them speaks out, and usually on the unpopular side. in this event he is spared none of the penalties with which we like to visit difference of opinion; rather they are accumulated on him. such things are not serious, and they are such as no serious man need shrink from, but they have a bearing upon what i am trying to explain, and in a certain measure they account for a certain attitude in our literary men. no one likes to have stones, not to say mud, thrown at him, though they are not meant to hurt him badly and may be partly thrown in joke. but it is pretty certain that if a man not in politics takes them seriously, he will have more or less mud, not to say stones, thrown at him. he might burlesque or caricature them, or misrepresent them, with safety; but if he spoke of public questions with heart and conscience, he could not do it with impunity, unless he were authorized to do so by some practical relation to them. i do not mean that then he would escape; but in this country, where there were once supposed to be no classes, people are more strictly classified than in any other. business to the business man, law to the lawyer, medicine to the physician, politics to the politician, and letters to the literary man; that is the rule. one is not expected to transcend his function, and commonly one does not. we keep each to his last, as if there were not human interests, civic interests, which had a higher claim than the last upon our thinking and feeling. the tendency has grown upon us severally and collectively through the long persistence of our prosperity; if public affairs were going ill, private affairs were going so well that we did not mind the others; and we americans are, i think, meridional in our improvidence. we are so essentially of to-day that we behave as if to-morrow no more concerned us than yesterday. we have taught ourselves to believe that it will all come out right in the end so long that we have come to act upon our belief; we are optimistic fatalists. iii. the turn which our politics have taken towards economics, if i may so phrase the rise of the questions of labor and capital, has not largely attracted literary men. it is doubtful whether edward bellamy himself, whose fancy of better conditions has become the abiding faith of vast numbers of americans, supposed that he was entering the field of practical politics, or dreamed of influencing elections by his hopes of economic equality. but he virtually founded the populist party, which, as the vital principle of the democratic party, came so near electing its candidate for the presidency some years ago; and he is to be named first among our authors who have dealt with politics on their more human side since the days of the old antislavery agitation. without too great disregard of the reticence concerning the living which i promised myself, i may mention dr. edward everett hale and colonel thomas wentworth higginson as prominent authors who encouraged the nationalist movement eventuating in populism, though they were never populists. it may be interesting to note that dr. hale and colonel higginson, who later came together in their sociological sympathies, were divided by the schism of , when the first remained with the republicans and the last went off to the democrats. more remotely, colonel higginson was anti slavery almost to the point of abolitionism, and he led a negro regiment in the war. dr. hale was of those who were less radically opposed to slavery before the war, but hardly so after it came. since the war a sort of refluence of the old anti-slavery politics carried from his moorings in southern tradition mr. george w. cable, who, against the white sentiment of his section, sided with the former slaves, and would, if the indignant renunciation of his fellow-southerners could avail, have consequently ceased to be the first of southern authors, though he would still have continued the author of at least one of the greatest american novels. if i must burn my ships behind me in alleging these modern instances, as i seem really to be doing, i may mention mr. r. w. gilder, the poet, as an author who has taken part in the politics of municipal reform, mr. hamlin garland has been known from the first as a zealous george man, or single-taxer. mr. john hay, mr. theodore roosevelt, and mr. henry cabot lodge are republican politicians, as well as recognized literary men. mr. joel chandler harris, when not writing uncle remus, writes political articles in a leading southern journal. mark twain is a leading anti-imperialist. iv. i am not sure whether i have made out a case for our authors or against them; perhaps i have not done so badly; but i have certainly not tried to be exhaustive; the exhaustion is so apt to extend from the subject to the reader, and i wish to leave him in a condition to judge for himself whether american literary men take part in american politics or not. i think they bear their share, in the quieter sort of way which we hope (it may be too fondly) is the american way. they are none of them politicians in the latin sort. few, if any, of our statesmen have come forward with small volumes of verse in their hands as they used to do in spain; none of our poets or historians have been chosen presidents of the republic as has happened to their french confreres; no great novelist of ours has been exiled as victor hugo was, or atrociously mishandled as zola has been, though i have no doubt that if, for instance, one had once said the spanish war wrong he would be pretty generally 'conspue'. they have none of them reached the heights of political power, as several english authors have done; but they have often been ambassadors, ministers, and consuls, though they may not often have been appointed for political reasons. i fancy they discharge their duties in voting rather faithfully, though they do not often take part in caucuses or conventions. as for the other half of the question--how far american politicians are scholars--one's first impulse would be to say that they never were so. but i have always had an heretical belief that there were snakes in ireland; and it may be some such disposition to question authority that keeps me from yielding to this impulse. the law of demand and supply alone ought to have settled the question in favor of the presence of the scholar in our politics, there has been such a cry for him among us for almost a generation past. perhaps the response has not been very direct, but i imagine that our politicians have never been quite so destitute of scholarship as they would sometimes make appear. i do not think so many of them now write a good style, or speak a good style, as the politicians of forty, or fifty, or sixty years ago; but this may be merely part of the impression of the general worsening of things, familiar after middle life to every one's experience, from the beginning of recorded time. if something not so literary is meant by scholarship, if a study of finance, of economics, of international affairs is in question, it seems to go on rather more to their own satisfaction than that of their critics. but without being always very proud of the result, and without professing to know the facts very profoundly, one may still suspect that under an outside by no means academic there is a process of thinking in our statesmen which is not so loose, not so unscientific, and not even so unscholarly as it might be supposed. it is not the effect of specific training, and yet it is the effect of training. i do not find that the matters dealt with are anywhere in the world intrusted to experts; and in this sense scholarship has not been called to the aid of our legislation or administration; but still i should not like to say that none of our politicians were scholars. that would be offensive, and it might not be true. in fact, i can think of several whom i should be tempted to call scholars if i were not just here recalled to a sense of my purpose not to deal quite frankly with this inquiry. storage it has been the belief of certain kindly philosophers that if the one half of mankind knew how the other half lived, the two halves might be brought together in a family affection not now so observable in human relations. probably if this knowledge were perfect, there would still be things, to bar the perfect brotherhood; and yet the knowledge itself is so interesting, if not so salutary as it has been imagined, that one can hardly refuse to impart it if one has it, and can reasonably hope, in the advantage of the ignorant, to find one's excuse with the better informed. i. city and country are still so widely apart in every civilization that one can safely count upon a reciprocal strangeness in many every-day things. for instance, in the country, when people break up house-keeping, they sell their household goods and gods, as they did in cities fifty or a hundred years ago; but now in cities they simply store them; and vast warehouses in all the principal towns have been devoted to their storage. the warehouses are of all types, from dusty lofts over stores, and ammoniacal lofts over stables, to buildings offering acres of space, and carefully planned for the purpose. they are more or less fire-proof, slow-burning, or briskly combustible, like the dwellings they have devastated. but the modern tendency is to a type where flames do not destroy, nor moth corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal. such a warehouse is a city in itself, laid out in streets and avenues, with the private tenements on either hand duly numbered, and accessible only to the tenants or their order. the aisles are concreted, the doors are iron, and the roofs are ceiled with iron; the whole place is heated by steam and lighted by electricity. behind the iron doors, which in the new york warehouses must number hundreds of thousands, and throughout all our other cities, millions, the furniture of a myriad households is stored--the effects of people who have gone to europe, or broken up house-keeping provisionally or definitively, or have died, or been divorced. they are the dead bones of homes, or their ghosts, or their yet living bodies held in hypnotic trances; destined again in some future time to animate some house or flat anew. in certain cases the spell lasts for many years, in others for a few, and in others yet it prolongs itself indefinitely. i may mention the case of one owner whom i saw visiting the warehouse to take out the household stuff that had lain there a long fifteen years. he had been all that while in europe, expecting any day to come home and begin life again, in his own land. that dream had passed, and now he was taking his stuff out of storage and shipping it to italy. i did not envy him his feelings as the parts of his long-dead past rose round him in formless resurrection. it was not that they were all broken or defaced. on the contrary, they were in a state of preservation far more heartbreaking than any decay. in well-managed storage warehouses the things are handled with scrupulous care, and they are so packed into the appointed rooms that if not disturbed they could suffer little harm in fifteen or fifty years. the places are wonderfully well kept, and if you will visit them, say in midwinter, after the fall influx of furniture has all been hidden away behind the iron doors of the several cells, you shall find their far-branching corridors scrupulously swept and dusted, and shall walk up and down their concrete length with some such sense of secure finality as you would experience in pacing the aisle of your family vault. that is what it comes to. one may feign that these storage warehouses are cities, but they are really cemeteries: sad columbaria on whose shelves are stowed exanimate things once so intimately of their owners' lives that it is with the sense of looking at pieces and bits of one's dead self that one revisits them. if one takes the fragments out to fit them to new circumstance, one finds them not only uncomformable and incapable, but so volubly confidential of the associations in which they are steeped, that one wishes to hurry them back to their cell and lock it upon them forever. one feels then that the old way was far better, and that if the things had been auctioned off, and scattered up and down, as chance willed, to serve new uses with people who wanted them enough to pay for them even a tithe of their cost, it would have been wiser. failing this, a fire seems the only thing for them, and their removal to the cheaper custody of a combustible or slow-burning warehouse the best recourse. desperate people, aging husbands and wives, who have attempted the reconstruction of their homes with these "portions and parcels of the dreadful past" have been known to wish for an earthquake, even, that would involve their belongings in an indiscriminate ruin. ii. in fact, each new start in life should be made with material new to you, if comfort is to attend the enterprise. it is not only sorrowful but it is futile to store your possessions, if you hope to find the old happiness in taking them out and using them again. it is not that they will not go into place, after a fashion, and perform their old office, but that the pang they will inflict through the suggestion of the other places where they served their purpose in other years will be only the keener for the perfection with which they do it now. if they cannot be sold, and if no fire comes down from heaven to consume them, then they had better be stored with no thought of ever taking them out again. that will be expensive, or it will be inexpensive, according to the sort of storage they are put into. the inexperienced in such matters may be surprised, and if they have hearts they may be grieved, to learn that the fire-proof storage of the furniture of the average house would equal the rent of a very comfortable domicile in a small town, or a farm by which a family's living can be earned, with a decent dwelling in which it can be sheltered. yet the space required is not very great; three fair-sized rooms will hold everything; and there is sometimes a fierce satisfaction in seeing how closely the things that once stood largely about, and seemed to fill ample parlors and chambers, can be packed away. to be sure they are not in their familiar attitudes; they lie on their sides or backs, or stand upon their heads; between the legs of library or dining tables are stuffed all kinds of minor movables, with cushions, pillows, pictures, cunningly adjusted to the environment; and mattresses pad the walls, or interpose their soft bulk between pieces of furniture that would otherwise rend each other. carpets sewn in cotton against moths, and rugs in long rolls; the piano hovering under its ample frame a whole brood of helpless little guitars, mandolins, and banjos, and supporting on its broad back a bulk of lighter cases to the fire-proof ceiling of the cell; paintings in boxes indistinguishable outwardly from their companioning mirrors; barrels of china and kitchen utensils, and all the what-not of householding and house-keeping contribute to the repletion. there is a science observed in the arrangement of the various effects; against the rear wall and packed along the floor, and then in front of and on top of these, is built a superstructure of the things that may be first wanted, in case of removal, or oftenest wanted in some exigency of the homeless life of the owners, pending removal. the lightest and slightest articles float loosely about the door, or are interwoven in a kind of fabric just within, and curtaining the ponderous mass behind. the effect is not so artistic as the mortuary mosaics which the roman capuchins design with the bones of their dead brethren in the crypt of their church, but the warehousemen no doubt have their just pride in it, and feel an artistic pang in its provisional or final disturbance. it had better never be disturbed, for it is disturbed only in some futile dream of returning to the past; and we never can return to the past on the old terms. it is well in all things to accept life implicitly, and when an end has come to treat it as the end, and not vainly mock it as a suspense of function. when the poor break up their homes, with no immediate hope of founding others, they must sell their belongings because they cannot afford to pay storage on them. the rich or richer store their household effects, and cheat themselves with the illusion that they are going some time to rehabilitate with them just such a home as they have dismantled. but the illusion probably deceives nobody so little as those who cherish the vain hope. as long as they cherish it, however--and they must cherish it till their furniture or themselves fall to dust--they cannot begin life anew, as the poor do who have kept nothing of the sort to link them to the past. this is one of the disabilities of the prosperous, who will probably not be relieved of it till some means of storing the owner as well as the' furniture is invented. in the immense range of modern ingenuity, this is perhaps not impossible. why not, while we are still in life, some sweet oblivious antidote which shall drug us against memory, and after time shall elapse for the reconstruction of a new home in place of the old, shall repossess us of ourselves as unchanged as the things with which we shall again array it? here is a pretty idea for some dreamer to spin into the filmy fabric of a romance, and i handsomely make a present of it to the first comer. if the dreamer is of the right quality he will know how to make the reader feel that with the universal longing to return to former conditions or circumstances it must always be a mistake to do so, and he will subtly insinuate the disappointment and discomfort of the stored personality in resuming its old relations. with that just mixture of the comic and pathetic which we desire in romance, he will teach convincingly that a stored personality is to be desired only if it is permanently stored, with the implication of a like finality in the storage of its belongings. save in some signal exception, a thing taken out of storage cannot be established in its former function without a sense of its comparative inadequacy. it stands in the old place, it serves the old use, and yet a new thing would be better; it would even in some subtle wise be more appropriate, if i may indulge so audacious a paradox; for the time is new, and so will be all the subconscious keeping in which our lives are mainly passed. we are supposed to have associations with the old things which render them precious, but do not the associations rather render them painful? if that is true of the inanimate things, how much truer it is of those personalities which once environed and furnished our lives! take the article of old friends, for instance: has it ever happened to the reader to witness the encounter of old friends after the lapse of years? such a meeting is conventionally imagined to be full of tender joy, a rapture that vents itself in manly tears, perhaps, and certainly in womanly tears. but really is it any such emotion? honestly is not it a cruel embarrassment, which all the hypocritical pretences cannot hide? the old friends smile and laugh, and babble incoherently at one another, but are they genuinely glad? is not each wishing the other at that end of the earth from which he came? have they any use for each other such as people of unbroken associations have? i have lately been privy to the reunion of two old comrades who are bound together more closely than most men in a community of interests, occupations, and ideals. during a long separation they had kept account of each other's opinions as well as experiences; they had exchanged letters, from time to time, in which they opened their minds fully to each other, and found themselves constantly in accord. when they met they made a great shouting, and each pretended that he found the other just what he used to be. they talked a long, long time, fighting the invisible enemy which they felt between them. the enemy was habit, the habit of other minds and hearts, the daily use of persons and things which in their separation they had not had in common. when the old friends parted they promised to meet every day, and now, since their lines had been cast in the same places again, to repair the ravage of the envious years, and become again to each other all that they had ever been. but though they live in the same town, and often dine at the same table, and belong to the same club, yet they have not grown together again. they have grown more and more apart, and are uneasy in each other's presence, tacitly self-reproachful for the same effect which neither of them could avert or repair. they had been respectively in storage, and each, in taking the other out, has experienced in him the unfitness which grows upon the things put away for a time and reinstated in a former function. iii. i have not touched upon these facts of life, without the purpose of finding some way out of the coil. there seems none better than the counsel of keeping one's face set well forward, and one's eyes fixed steadfastly upon the future. this is the hint we will get from nature if we will heed her, and note how she never recurs, never stores or takes out of storage. fancy rehabilitating one's first love: how nature would mock at that! we cannot go back and be the men and women we were, any more than we can go back and be children. as we grow older, each year's change in us is more chasmal and complete. there is no elixir whose magic will recover us to ourselves as we were last year; but perhaps we shall return to ourselves more and more in the times, or the eternity, to come. some instinct or inspiration implies the promise of this, but only on condition that we shall not cling to the life that has been ours, and hoard its mummified image in our hearts. we must not seek to store ourselves, but must part with what we were for the use and behoof of others, as the poor part with their worldly gear when they move from one place to another. it is a curious and significant property of our outworn characteristics that, like our old furniture, they will serve admirably in the life of some other, and that this other can profitably make them his when we can no longer keep them ours, or ever hope to resume them. they not only go down to successive generations, but they spread beyond our lineages, and serve the turn of those whom we never knew to be within the circle of our influence. civilization imparts itself by some such means, and the lower classes are clothed in the cast conduct of the upper, which if it had been stored would have left the inferiors rude and barbarous. we have only to think how socially naked most of us would be if we had not had the beautiful manners of our exclusive society to put on at each change of fashion when it dropped them. all earthly and material things should be worn out with use, and not preserved against decay by any unnatural artifice. even when broken and disabled from overuse they have a kind of respectability which must commend itself to the observer, and which partakes of the pensive grace of ruin. an old table with one leg gone, and slowly lapsing to decay in the woodshed, is the emblem of a fitter order than the same table, with all its legs intact, stored with the rest of the furniture from a broken home. spinning-wheels gathering dust in the garret of a house that is itself falling to pieces have a dignity that deserts them when they are dragged from their refuge, and furbished up with ribbons and a tuft of fresh tow, and made to serve the hollow occasions of bric-a-brac, as they were a few years ago. a pitcher broken at the fountain, or a battered kettle on a rubbish heap, is a venerable object, but not crockery and copper-ware stored in the possibility of future need. however carefully handed down from one generation to another, the old objects have a forlorn incongruity in their successive surroundings which appeals to the compassion rather than the veneration of the witness. it was from a truth deeply mystical that hawthorne declared against any sort of permanence in the dwellings of men, and held that each generation should newly house itself. he preferred the perishability of the wooden american house to the durability of the piles of brick or stone which in europe affected him as with some moral miasm from the succession of sires and sons and grandsons that had died out of them. but even of such structures as these it is impressive how little the earth makes with the passage of time. where once a great city of them stood, you shall find a few tottering walls, scarcely more mindful of the past than "the cellar and the well" which holmes marked as the ultimate monuments, the last witnesses, to the existence of our more transitory habitations. it is the law of the patient sun that everything under it shall decay, and if by reason of some swift calamity, some fiery cataclysm, the perishable shall be overtaken by a fate that fixes it in unwasting arrest, it cannot be felt that the law has been set aside in the interest of men's happiness or cheerfulness. neither pompeii nor herculaneum invites the gayety of the spectator, who as he walks their disinterred thoroughfares has the weird sense of taking a former civilization out of storage, and the ache of finding it wholly unadapted to the actual world. as far as his comfort is concerned, it had been far better that those cities had not been stored, but had fallen to the ruin that has overtaken all their contemporaries. iv no, good friend, sir or madam, as the case may be, but most likely madam: if you are about to break up your household for any indefinite period, and are not so poor that you need sell your things, be warned against putting them in storage, unless of the most briskly combustible type. better, far better, give them away, and disperse them by that means to a continuous use that shall end in using them up; or if no one will take them, then hire a vacant lot, somewhere, and devote them to the flames. by that means you shall bear witness against a custom that insults the order of nature, and crowds the cities with the cemeteries of dead homes, where there is scarcely space for the living homes. do not vainly fancy that you shall take your stuff out of storage and find it adapted to the ends that it served before it was put in. you will not be the same, or have the same needs or desire, when you take it out, and the new place which you shall hope to equip with it will receive it with cold reluctance, or openly refuse it, insisting upon forms and dimensions that render it ridiculous or impossible. the law is that nothing taken out of storage is the same as it was when put in, and this law, hieroglyphed in those rude 'graffiti' apparently inscribed by accident in the process of removal, has only such exceptions as prove the rule. the world to which it has returned is not the same, and that makes all the difference. yet, truth and beauty do not change, however the moods and fashions change. the ideals remain, and these alone you can go back to, secure of finding them the same, to-day and to-morrow, that they were yesterday. this perhaps is because they have never been in storage, but in constant use, while the moods and fashions have been put away and taken out a thousand times. most people have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions, but such people, least of all, are fitted to find in them that pleasure of the rococo which consoles the idealist when the old moods and fashions reappear. "floating down the river on the o-hi-o" there was not much promise of pleasure in the sodden afternoon of a mid-march day at pittsburg, where the smoke of a thousand foundry chimneys gave up trying to rise through the thick, soft air, and fell with the constant rain which it dyed its own black. but early memories stirred joyfully in the two travellers in whose consciousness i was making my tour, at sight of the familiar stern-wheel steamboat lying beside the wharf boat at the foot of the dilapidated levee, and doing its best to represent the hundreds of steamboats that used to lie there in the old days. it had the help of three others in its generous effort, and the levee itself made a gallant pretence of being crowded with freight, and succeeded in displaying several saturated piles of barrels and agricultural implements on the irregular pavement whose wheel-worn stones, in long stretches, were sunken out of sight in their parent mud. the boats and the levee were jointly quite equal to the demand made upon them by the light-hearted youngsters of sixty-five and seventy, who were setting out on their journey in fulfilment of a long-cherished dream, and for whom much less freight and much fewer boats would have rehabilitated the past. i. when they mounted the broad stairway, tidily strewn with straw to save it from the mud of careless boots, and entered the long saloon of the steamboat, the promise of their fancy was more than made good for them. from the clerk's office, where they eagerly paid their fare, the saloon stretched two hundred feet by thirty away to the stern, a cavernous splendor of white paint and gilding, starred with electric bulbs, and fenced at the stern with wide windows of painted glass. midway between the great stove in the bow where the men were herded, and the great stove at the stern where the women kept themselves in the seclusion which the tradition of western river travel still guards, after well-nigh a hundred years, they were given ample state-rooms, whose appointments so exactly duplicated those they remembered from far-off days that they could have believed themselves awakened from a dream of insubstantial time, with the events in which it had seemed to lapse, mere feints of experience. when they sat down at the supper-table and were served with the sort of belated steamboat dinner which it recalled as vividly, the kind, sooty faces and snowy aprons of those who served them were so quite those of other days that they decided all repasts since were mere barmecide feasts, and made up for the long fraud practised upon them with the appetites of the year . ii. a rigider sincerity than shall be practised here might own that the table of the good steamboat 'avonek' left something to be desired, if tested by more sophisticated cuisines, but in the article of corn-bread it was of an inapproachable preeminence. this bread was made of the white corn which north knows not, nor the hapless east; and the buckwheat cakes at breakfast were without blame, and there was a simple variety in the abundance which ought to have satisfied if it did not flatter the choice. the only thing that seemed strangely, that seemed sadly, anomalous in a land flowing with ham and bacon was that the 'avonek' had not imagined providing either for the guests, no one of whom could have had a religious scruple against them. the thing, indeed, which was first and last conspicuous in the passengers, was their perfectly american race and character. at the start, when with an acceptable observance of western steamboat tradition the 'avonek' left her wharf eight hours behind her appointed time, there were very few passengers; but they began to come aboard at the little towns of both shores as she swam southward and westward, till all the tables were so full that, in observance of another western steamboat tradition; one did well to stand guard over his chair lest some other who liked it should seize it earlier. the passengers were of every age and condition, except perhaps the highest condition, and they seemed none the worse for being more like americans of the middle of the last century than of the beginning of this. their fashions were of an approximation to those of the present, but did not scrupulously study detail; their manners were those of simpler if not sincerer days. the women kept to themselves at their end of the saloon, aloof from the study of any but their husbands or kindred, but the men were everywhere else about, and open to observation. they were not so open to conversation, for your mid-westerner is not a facile, though not an unwilling, talker. they sat by their tall, cast-iron stove (of the oval pattern unvaried since the earliest stove of the region), and silently ruminated their tobacco and spat into the clustering, cuspidors at their feet. they would always answer civilly if questioned, and oftenest intelligently, but they asked nothing in return, and they seemed to have none of that curiosity once known or imagined in them by dickens and other averse aliens. they had mostly faces of resolute power, and such a looking of knowing exactly what they wanted as would not have promised well for any collectively or individually opposing them. if ever the sense of human equality has expressed itself in the human countenance it speaks unmistakably from american faces like theirs. they were neither handsome nor unhandsome; but for a few striking exceptions, they had been impartially treated by nature; and where they were notably plain their look of force made up for their lack of beauty. they were notably handsomest in a tall young fellow of a lean face, absolute greek in profile, amply thwarted with a branching mustache, and slender of figure, on whom his clothes, lustrous from much sitting down and leaning up, grew like the bark on a tree, and who moved slowly and gently about, and spoke with a low, kind voice. in his young comeliness he was like a god, as the gods were fancied in the elder world: a chewing and a spitting god, indeed, but divine in his passionless calm. he was a serious divinity, and so were all the mid-western human-beings about him. one heard no joking either of the dapper or cockney sort of cities, or the quaint graphic phrasing of eastern country folk; and it may have been not far enough west for the true western humor. at any rate, when they were not silent these men still were serious. the women were apparently serious, too, and where they were associated with the men were, if they were not really subject, strictly abeyant, in the spectator's eye. the average of them was certainly not above the american woman's average in good looks, though one young mother of six children, well grown save for the baby in her arms, was of the type some masters loved to paint, with eyes set wide under low arched brows. she had the placid dignity and the air of motherly goodness which goes fitly with such beauty, and the sight of her was such as to disperse many of the misgivings that beset the beholder who looketh upon the woman when she is new. as she seemed, so any man might wish to remember his mother seeming. all these river folk, who came from the farms and villages along the stream, and never from the great towns or cities, were well mannered, if quiet manners are good; and though the men nearly all chewed tobacco and spat between meals, at the table they were of an exemplary behavior. the use of the fork appeared strange to them, and they handled it strenuously rather than agilely, yet they never used their knives shovel-wise, however they planted their forks like daggers in the steak: the steak deserved no gentler usage, indeed. they were usually young, and they were constantly changing, bent upon short journeys between the shore villages; they were mostly farm youth, apparently, though some were said to be going to find work at the great potteries up the river for wages fabulous to home-keeping experience. one personality which greatly took the liking of one of our tourists was a kentucky mountaineer who, after three years' exile in a west virginia oil town, was gladly returning to the home for which he and all his brood-of large and little comely, red-haired boys and girls-had never ceased to pine. his eagerness to get back was more than touching; it was awing; for it was founded on a sort of mediaeval patriotism that could own no excellence beyond the borders of the natal region. he had prospered at high wages in his trade at that oil town, and his wife and children had managed a hired farm so well as to pay all the family expenses from it, but he was gladly leaving opportunity behind, that he might return to a land where, if you were passing a house at meal-time, they came out and made you come in and eat. "when you eat where i've been living you pay fifty cents," he explained. "and are you taking all your household stuff with you?" "only the cook-stove. well, i'll tell you: we made the other things ourselves; made them out of plank, and they were not worth-moving." here was the backwoods surviving into the day of trusts; and yet we talk of a world drifted hopelessly far from the old ideals! iii. the new ideals, the ideals of a pitiless industrialism, were sufficiently expressed along the busy shores, where the innumerable derricks of oil-wells silhouetted their gibbet shapes against the horizon, and the myriad chimneys of the foundries sent up the smoke of their torment into the quiet skies and flamed upon the forehead of the evening like baleful suns. but why should i be so violent of phrase against these guiltless means of millionairing? there must be iron and coal as well as wheat and corn in the world, and without their combination we cannot have bread. if the combination is in the form of a trust, such as has laid its giant clutch upon all those warring industries beside the ohio and swept them into one great monopoly, why, it has still to show that it is worse than competition; that it is not, indeed, merely the first blind stirrings of the universal cooperation of which the dreamers of ideal commonwealths have always had the vision. the derricks and the chimneys, when one saw them, seem to have all the land to themselves; but this was an appearance only, terrifying in its strenuousness, but not, after all, the prevalent aspect. that was rather of farm, farms, and evermore farms, lying along the rich levels of the stream, and climbing as far up its beautiful hills as the plough could drive. in the spring and in the mall, when it is suddenly swollen by the earlier and the later rains, the river scales its banks and swims over those levels to the feet of those hills, and when it recedes it leaves the cornfields enriched for the crop that, has never failed since the forests were first cut from the land. other fertilizing the fields have never had any, but they teem as if the guano islands had been emptied into their laps. they feel themselves so rich that they part with great lengths and breadths of their soil to the river, which is not good for the river, and is not well for the fields; so that the farmers, whose ease learns slowly, are beginning more and more to fence their borders with the young willows which form a hedge in the shallow wash such a great part of the way up and down the ohio. elms and maples wade in among the willows, and in time the river will be denied the indigestion which it confesses in shoals and bars at low water, and in a difficulty of channel at all stages. meanwhile the fields flourish in spite of their unwise largesse to the stream, whose shores the comfortable farmsteads keep so constantly that they are never out of sight. most commonly they are of brick, but sometimes of painted wood, and they are set on little eminences high enough to save them from the freshets, but always so near the river that they cannot fail of its passing life. usually a group of planted evergreens half hides the house from the boat, but its inmates will not lose any detail of the show, and come down to the gate of the paling fence to watch the 'avonek' float by: motionless men and women, who lean upon the supporting barrier, and rapt children who hold by their skirts and hands. there is not the eager new england neatness about these homes; now and then they have rather a sloven air, which does not discord with their air of comfort; and very, very rarely they stagger drunkenly in a ruinous neglect. except where a log cabin has hardily survived the pioneer period, the houses are nearly all of one pattern; their facades front the river, and low chimneys point either gable, where a half-story forms the attic of the two stories below. gardens of pot-herbs flank them, and behind cluster the corn-cribs, and the barns and stables stretch into the fields that stretch out to the hills, now scantily wooded, but ever lovely in the lines that change with the steamer's course. except in the immediate suburbs of the large towns, there is no ambition beyond that of rustic comfort in the buildings on the shore. there is no such thing, apparently, as a summer cottage, with its mock humility of name, up or down the whole tortuous length of the ohio. as yet the land is not openly depraved by shows of wealth; those who amass it either keep it to themselves or come away to spend it in european travel, or pause to waste it unrecognized on the ungrateful atlantic seaboard. the only distinctions that are marked are between the homes of honest industry above the banks and the homes below them of the leisure, which it is hoped is not dishonest. but, honest or dishonest, it is there apparently to stay in the house-boats which line the shores by thousands, and repeat on occidental terms in our new land the river-life of old and far cathay. they formed the only feature of their travel which our tourists found absolutely novel; they could clearly or dimly recall from the past every other feature but the houseboats, which they instantly and gladly naturalized to their memories of it. the houses had in common the form of a freight-car set in a flat-bottomed boat; the car would be shorter or longer, with one, or two, or three windows in its sides, and a section of stovepipe softly smoking from its roof. the windows might be curtained or they might be bare, but apparently there was no other distinction among the houseboat dwellers, whose sluggish craft lay moored among the willows, or tied to an elm or a maple, or even made fast to a stake on shore. there were cases in which they had not followed the fall of the river promptly enough, and lay slanted on the beach, or propped up to a more habitable level on its slope; in a sole, sad instance, the house had gone down with the boat and lay wallowing in the wash of the flood. but they all gave evidence of a tranquil and unhurried life which the soul of the beholder envied within him, whether it manifested itself in the lord of the house-boat fishing from its bow, or the lady coming to cleanse some household utensil at its stern. infrequently a group of the house- boat dwellers seemed to be drawing a net, and in one high event they exhibited a good-sized fish of their capture, but nothing so strenuous characterized their attitude on any other occasion. the accepted theory of them was that they did by day as nearly nothing as men could do and live, and that by night their forays on the bordering farms supplied the simple needs of people who desired neither to toil nor to spin, but only to emulate solomon in his glory with the least possible exertion. the joyful witness of their ease would willingly have sacrificed to them any amount of the facile industrial or agricultural prosperity about them and left them slumberously afloat, unmolested by dreams of landlord or tax- gatherer. their existence for the fleeting time seemed the true interpretation of the sage's philosophy, the fulfilment of the poet's aspiration. "why should we only toil, that are the roof and crown of things." how did they pass their illimitable leisure, when they rested from the fishing-net by day and the chicken-coop by night? did they read the new historical fictions aloud to one another? did some of them even meditate the thankless muse and not mind her ingratitude? perhaps the ladies of the house-boats, when they found themselves--as they often did--in companies of four or five, had each other in to "evenings," at which one of them read a paper on some artistic or literary topic. iv. the trader's boat, of an elder and more authentic tradition, sometimes shouldered the house-boats away from a village landing, but it, too, was a peaceful home, where the family life visibly went hand-in-hand with commerce. when the trader has supplied all the wants and wishes of a neighborhood, he unmoors his craft and drops down the river's tide to where it meets the ocean's tide in the farthermost mississippi, and there either sells out both his boat and his stock, or hitches his home to some returning steamboat, and climbs slowly, with many pauses, back to the upper ohio. but his home is not so interesting as that of the houseboatman, nor so picturesque as that of the raftsman, whose floor of logs rocks flexibly under his shanty, but securely rides the current. as the pilots said, a steamboat never tries to hurt a raft of logs, which is adapted to dangerous retaliation; and by night it always gives a wide berth to the lantern tilting above the raft from a swaying pole. by day the raft forms one of the pleasantest aspects of the river-life, with its convoy of skiffs always searching the stream or shore for logs which have broken from it, and which the skiffmen recognize by distinctive brands or stamps. here and there the logs lie in long ranks upon the shelving beaches, mixed with the drift of trees and fence-rails, and frames of corn-cribs and hencoops, and even house walls, which the freshets have brought down and left stranded. the tops of the little willows are tufted gayly with hay and rags, and other spoil of the flood; and in one place a disordered mattress was lodged high among the boughs of a water- maple, where it would form building material for countless generations of birds. the fat cornfields were often littered with a varied wreckage which the farmers must soon heap together and burn, to be rid of it, and everywhere were proofs of the river's power to devastate as well as enrich its shores. the dwellers there had no power against it, in its moments of insensate rage, and the land no protection from its encroachments except in the simple device of the willow hedges, which, if planted, sometimes refused to grow, but often came of themselves and kept the torrent from the loose, unfathomable soil of the banks, otherwise crumbling helplessly into it. the rafts were very well, and the house-boats and the traders' boats, but the most majestic feature of the riverlife was the tow of coal-barges which, going or coming, the 'avonek' met every few miles. whether going or coming they were pushed, not pulled, by the powerful steamer which gathered them in tens and twenties before her, and rode the mid-current with them, when they were full, or kept the slower water near shore when they were empty. they claimed the river where they passed, and the 'avonek' bowed to an unwritten law in giving them the full right of way, from the time when their low bulk first rose in sight, with the chimneys of their steamer towering above them and her gay contours gradually making themselves seen, till she receded from the encounter, with the wheel at her stern pouring a cataract of yellow water from its blades. it was insurpassably picturesque always, and not the tapering masts or the swelling sails of any sea-going craft could match it. v. so at least the travellers thought who were here revisiting the earliest scenes of childhood, and who perhaps found them unduly endeared. they perused them mostly from an easy seat at the bow of the hurricane-deck, and, whenever the weather favored them, spent the idle time in selecting shelters for their declining years among the farmsteads that offered themselves to their choice up and down the shores. the weather commonly favored them, and there was at least one whole day on the lower river when the weather was divinely flattering. the soft, dull air lulled their nerves while it buffeted their faces, and the sun, that looked through veils of mist and smoke, gently warmed their aging frames and found itself again in their hearts. perhaps it was there that the water- elms and watermaples chiefly budded, and the red-birds sang, and the drifting flocks of blackbirds called and clattered; but surely these also spread their gray and pink against the sky and filled it with their voices. there were meadow-larks and robins without as well as within, and it was no subjective plough that turned the earliest furrows in those opulent fields. when they were tired of sitting there, they climbed, invited or uninvited, but always welcomed, to the pilothouse, where either pilot of the two who were always on watch poured out in an unstinted stream the lore of the river on which all their days had been passed. they knew from indelible association every ever-changing line of the constant hills; every dwelling by the low banks; every aspect of the smoky towns; every caprice of the river; every-tree, every stump; probably every bud and bird in the sky. they talked only of the river; they cared for nothing else. the cuban cumber and the philippine folly were equally far from them; the german prince was not only as if he had never been here, but as if he never had been; no public question concerned them but that of abandoning the canals which the ohio legislature was then foolishly debating. were not the canals water-ways, too, like the river, and if the state unnaturally abandoned them would not it be for the behoof of those railroads which the rivermen had always fought, and which would have made a solitude of the river if they could? but they could not, and there was nothing more surprising and delightful in this blissful voyage than the evident fact that the old river traffic had strongly survived, and seemed to be more strongly reviving. perhaps it was not; perhaps the fondness of those ohio-river-born passengers was abused by an illusion (as subjective as that of the buds and birds) of a vivid variety of business and pleasure on the beloved stream. but again, perhaps not. they were seldom out of sight of the substantial proofs of both in the through or way packets they encountered, or the nondescript steam craft that swarmed about the mouths of the contributory rivers, and climbed their shallowing courses into the recesses of their remotest hills, to the last lurking-places of their oil and coal. vi. the avonek was always stopping to put off or take on merchandise or men. she would stop for a single passenger, plaited in the mud with his telescope valise or gripsack under the edge of a lonely cornfield, or to gather upon her decks the few or many casks or bales that a farmer wished to ship. she lay long hours by the wharf-boats of busy towns, exchanging one cargo for another, in that anarchic fetching and carrying which we call commerce, and which we drolly suppose to be governed by laws. but wherever she paused or parted, she tested the pilot's marvellous skill; for no landing, no matter how often she landed in the same place, could be twice the same. at each return the varying stream and shore must be studied, and every caprice of either divined. it was always a triumph, a miracle, whether by day or by night, a constant wonder how under the pilot's inspired touch she glided softly to her moorings, and without a jar slipped from them again and went on her course. but the landings by night were of course the finest. then the wide fan of the search-light was unfurled upon the point to be attained and the heavy staging lowered from the bow to the brink, perhaps crushing the willow hedges in it's fall, and scarcely touching the land before a black, ragged deck-hand had run out through the splendor and made a line fast to the trunk of the nearest tree. then the work of lading or unlading rapidly began in the witching play of the light that set into radiant relief the black, eager faces and the black, eager figures of the deck-hands struggling up or down the staging under boxes of heavy wares, or kegs of nails, or bales of straw, or blocks of stone, steadily mocked or cursed at in their shapeless effort, till the last of them reeled back to the deck down the steep of the lifting stage, and dropped to his broken sleep wherever he could coil himself, doglike, down among the heaps of freight. no dog, indeed, leads such a hapless life as theirs; and ah! and ah! why should their sable shadows intrude in a picture that was meant to be all so gay and glad? but ah! and ah! where, in what business of this hard world, is not prosperity built upon the struggle of toiling men, who still endeavor their poor best, and writhe and writhe under the burden of their brothers above, till they lie still under the lighter load of their mother earth? pg editor's bookmarks: absence of distinction advertising aim at nothing higher than the amusement of your readers anise-seed bag any man's country could get on without him begun to fight with want from their cradles blasts of frigid wind swept the streets clemens is said to have said of bicycling could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog disbeliever in punishments of all sorts do not want to know about such squalid lives early self-helpfulness of children is very remarkable encounter of old friends after the lapse of years even a day's rest is more than most people can bear eyes fixed steadfastly upon the future face that expresses care, even to the point of anxiety for most people choice is a curse general worsening of things, familiar after middle life happy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in us hard to think up anything new heart of youth aching for their stoical sorrows heighten our suffering by anticipation if one were poor, one ought to be deserving lascivious and immodest as possible literary spirit is the true world-citizen look of challenge, of interrogation, almost of reproof malevolent agitators meet here to the purpose of a common ostentation neatness that brings despair noble uselessness openly depraved by shows of wealth people have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions people might oftener trust themselves to providence people of wealth and fashion always dissemble their joy plagiarism carries inevitable detection with it pure accident and by its own contributory negligence refused to see us as we see ourselves should be very sorry to do good, as people called it so many millionaires and so many tramps so touching that it brought the lump into my own throat solution of the problem how and where to spend the summer some of it's good, and most of it isn't some of us may be toys and playthings without reproach superiority one likes to feel towards the rich and great take our pleasures ungraciously the old and ugly are fastidious as to the looks of others they are so many and i am so few those who decide their fate are always rebelling against it those who work too much and those who rest too much unfailing american kindness visitors of the more inquisitive sex we cannot all be hard-working donkeys we who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it whatever choice you make, you are pretty sure to regret it famous reviews _from the same publishers_ famous speeches. first series. from cromwell to gladstone. selected and edited with introductory notes by herbert paul. in demy vo, cloth, pp. s. d. net. famous speeches. second series. from lord macaulay to lord rosebery. selected and edited with introductory notes by herbert paul. in demy vo, cloth, pp. s. d. net. famous sermons by english preachers. from the venerable bede to h.p. liddon. edited with historical and biographical notes by canon douglas macleane, m.a. in demy vo, cloth gilt. s. net. famous reviews selected and edited with introductory notes by r. brimley johnson authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true, but are not critics to their judgment too? _pope_. london contents preface of criticism and the critic the edinburgh review: editor's note from _the edinburgh review_ (founded ) lord jeffrey on-- [southey's "thalaba" [southey's laureate lays [thomas moore [wordsworth's "excursion" ["endymion" lord brougham on byron sydney smith on hannah more macaulay on-- [southey's colloquies [croker's "boswell" [w. e. gladstone [madame d'arblay anonymous on-- [wordsworth [maturin's "melmoth" the quarterly review: editor's note from _the quarterly review_ (founded ) gifford on-- [weber's "ford" [keats croker on-- [sydney smith [macaulay lockhart on-- [the author of "vathek" [s. t. coleridge sir walter scott on jane austen archbishop whately on jane austen w. e. gladstone on tennyson's poems canon wilberforce on--[darwin [cardinal newman anonymous on scott's--["waverley" ["tales of my landlord" anonymous on-- [leigh hunt's "rimini" ["shakespeare himself again" [moxon's sonnets ["vanity fair" and "jane eyre" [george eliot blackwood's magazine: editor's note from _blackwood's magazine_ (founded ) professor wilson on--[pope and wordsworth (_christopher north_) [lord byron [dr. johnson [crumbs from the "noctes" anonymous on-- [s. t. coleridge [the cockney school i [" " " iii [" " " iv [shelley's "prometheus" the westminster review: editor's note from _the westminster review_ (founded ) j. s. mill on-- [tennyson's poems [macaulay's "lays" john sterling on carlyle fraser's magazine: editor's note from _fraser's magazine_ thackeray on dickens's christmas stories charles kingsley on the lake poets anonymous on christmas books, w. f. fox: editor's note from _the monthly repository_ w. f. fox on browning's "pauline" de quincey: editor's note from tail's _edinburgh magazine_ de quincey on pope preface although regular literary organs, and the critical columns of the press, are both of comparatively recent origin, we find that almost from the beginning our journalists aspired to be critics as well as newsmongers. under charles ii, sir roger l'estrange issued his _observator_ ( ), which was a weekly review, not a chronicle; and john dunton's _the athenian mercury_ ( ), is best described as a sort of early "notes and queries." here, as elsewhere, defoe developed this branch of journalism, particularly in his _review_ ( ), and in _mist's journal_ ( ). and, again, as in all other departments, his methods were not materially improved upon until leigh hunt, and his brother john, started _the examiner_ in , soon after the rise of the reviews. addison and steele, of course, had treated literary topics in _the spectator_ or _the tatler_; but the serious discussion of contemporary writers began with the whig _edinburgh_ of and the tory _quarterly_ of . by the end of george iii's reign every daily paper had its column of book-notices; while marks an epoch in the weekly press; when william jerdan started _the observator_ (parent of our _athenaeum_) in order to furnish (for one shilling weekly) "a clear and instructive picture of the moral and literary improvement of the time, and a complete and authentic chronological literary record for reference." though probably there is no form of literature more widely practised, and less organised, than the review, it would be safe to say that every example stands somewhere between a critical essay and a publisher's advertisement. we need not, however, consider here the many influences which may corrupt newspaper criticism to-day, nor concern ourselves with those legitimate "notices of books" which only aim at "telling the story" or otherwise offering guidance for an "order from the library." the question remains, on which we do not propose to dogmatise, whether the ideal of a reviewer should be critical or explanatory: whether, in other words, he should attempt final judgment or offer comment and analysis from which we may each form our own opinion. probably no hard and fast line can be drawn between the review and the essay; yet a good volume of criticism can seldom be gleaned from periodicals. for one thing all journalism, whether consciously or unconsciously, must contain an appeal to the moment. the reviewer is introducing new work to his reader, the essayist, or critic proper, may nearly always assume some familiarity with his subject. the one hazards prophecy; the other discusses, and illumines, a judgment already formed, if not established. it is obvious that such reviews as macaulay's in the _edinburgh_ were often permanent contributions to critical history; while, on the other hand, many ponderous effusions of the _quarterly_ are only interesting as a sign of the times. the fame of a review, however, does not always depend on merit. the scandalous attacks on the cockney school, for example, were neither good literature nor honest criticism. we still pause in wonder before the streams of virulent personal abuse and unbridled licence in temper which disgrace the early pages of volumes we now associate with sound and dignified, if somewhat conventional, utterances on the art of literature as viewed from the table-land of authority. and, as inevitably the most famous reviews are those which attend the birth of genius, we must include more respectable errors of judgment, if we find also several remarkable appreciations which prove singular insight. following the "early" reviews, whether distinguished for culpable blindness, private hostility, or rare sympathy, we must depend for our second main source of material upon that fortunate combination of circumstances when one of the mighty has been invited to pass judgment upon his peers. when scott notices jane austen, macaulay james boswell, gladstone and john stuart mill lord tennyson, the article acquires a double value from author and subject. curiously enough, as it would seem to us in these days of advertisement, many such treasures of criticism were published anonymously; and accident has often aided research in the discovery of their authorship. it is only too probable that more were written than we have yet on record. in reviewing, as elsewhere, the growth of professionalism has tended to level the quality of work. the mass of thoroughly competent criticism issued to-day has raised enormously the general tone of the press; but genuine men of letters are seldom employed to welcome, or stifle, a newcomer; though meredith, and more frequently swinburne, have on occasion elected to pronounce judgment upon the passing generation; as mrs. meynell or mr. g.k. chesterton have sometimes said the right thing about their contemporaries. the days when postcard notices from gladstone secured a record in sales are over; and, from whatever combination of causes, we hear no more of famous reviews. r. brimley johnson. it is with regret that i have found it impossible to print more than a few of the following reviews complete. the writing of those days was, in almost every case, extremely prolix, and often irrelevant. it nearly always makes heavy reading in the originals. the _principle_ of selection adopted is to retain the most pithy, and attractive, portion of each article: omitting quotations and the discussion of particular passages. it therefore becomes necessary to remark--in justice to the writers--that most of the criticisms here quoted were accompanied by references to what was regarded by the reviewer as evidence supporting them. most of the authors, or books, noticed however, are sufficiently well known for the reader to have no difficulty in judging for himself. r. b. j. of criticism and critic dr. johnson there is a certain race of men, that either imagine it their duty, or make it their amusement, to hinder the reception of every work of learning or genius, who stand as sentinels in the avenues of fame, and value themselves upon giving ignorance and envy the first notice of a prey. to these men, who distinguish themselves by the appellation of critics, it is necessary for a new author to find some means of recommendation. it is probable, that the most malignant of these persecutors might be somewhat softened, and prevailed on, for a short time, to remit their fury. having for this purpose considered many expedients, i find in the records of ancient times, that argus was lulled by music, and cerberus quieted with a sop; and am, therefore, inclined to believe that modern critics, who, if they have not the eyes, have the watchfulness of argus, and can bark as loud as cerberus, though, perhaps, they cannot bite with equal force, might be subdued by methods of the same kind. i have heard that some have been pacified with claret and a supper, and others laid asleep with the soft notes of flattery.--_the rambler_. christopher north i care not one single curse for all the criticism that ever was canted or decanted, or recanted. neither does the world. the world takes a poet as it finds him, and seats him above or below the salt. the world is as obstinate as a million mules, and will not turn its head on one side or another for all the shouting of the critical population that ever was shouted. it is very possible that the world is a bad judge. well, then-- appeal to posterity, and be hanged to you--and posterity will affirm the judgment, with costs.--_noctes ambrosianae, sept_., . our current literature teems with thought and feeling,--with passion and imagination. there was gifford, and there are jeffrey, and southey ... and twenty--forty--fifty--other crack contributors to the reviews, magazines and gazettes, who have said more tender, and true, and fine, and deep things in the way of criticism, than ever was said before since the reign of cadmus, ten thousand times over,--not in long, dull, heavy, formal, prosy theories--but flung off-hand, out of the glowing mint--a coinage of the purest ore--and stamped with the ineffaceable impress of genius.--_noctes ambrosianae_, april, . the cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment. edmund burke. we must not underrate him who uses wit for subsistence, and flies from the ingratitude of the age even to a bookseller for redress. oliver goldsmith. the critical faculty is a _rara avis_; almost as rare, indeed, as the phoenix, which appears only once in five hundred years. arthur schopenhauer. the supreme critic ... is ... that unity, that oversoul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other. r. w. emerson. criticism's best spiritual work which is to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarising, to lead him towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things. matthew arnold. the whole history of criticism has been a triumph of authors over critics. r. g. moulton. our criticism is disabled by the unwillingness of the critic to learn from an author, and his readiness to mistrust him. d. h. howells. we have too many small schoolmasters; yet not only do i not question in literature the high utility of criticism, but i should be tempted to say that the part it plays may be the supremely beneficent one when it proceeds from deep sources, from the efficient combination of experience and perception. in this light one sees the critic as the real helper of mankind, a torch-bearing outrider, the interpreter _par excellence_. henry james. famous reviews * * * * * the edinburgh review "a confederacy (the word _conspiracy_ may be libellous) to defend the worst atrocities of the french, and to cry down every author to whom england was dear and venerable. a better spirit now prevails in the _edinburgh review_ from the generosity and genius of macaulay. but in the days when brougham and his confederates were writers in it, more falsehood and more malignity marked its pages than any other journal in the language." w.s. landor. landor is speaking, of course, with his usual impetuosity, particularly moved by antipathy to lord brougham. a fairer estimate of the "bluff and blue" exponent of whig principles may be obtained from our brief estimate of jeffrey below. his was the informing spirit, at least in its earliest days, and that spirit would brook no divided sway. francis lord jeffrey ( - ) jeffrey was editor of the _edinburgh review_ from its foundation in october th, , till june, ; and continued to write for it until june, . he was more patronising in his abuse than either _blackwood_ or the _quarterly_, and on the whole fairer and more dignified; though he was considerably influenced by political bias. in fact, his judgments--though versatile--were narrow, his most marked limitations arising from blindness to the imaginative. the short, vivacious figure (so low that he might pass under your chin without ever catching the eye even for a moment, says lockhart), was far more impressive when familiar than at first sight. lord cockburn praises his legal abilities (whether as judge or advocate) almost without qualification; but wilson derides his appearance in the house:--"a cold thin voice, doling out little, quaint, metaphysical sentences with the air of a provincial lecturer on logic and _belles-lettres_. a few good whigs of the old school adjourned upstairs, the tories began to converse _de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis_, the radicals were either snoring or grinning, and the great gun of the north ceased firing amidst such a hubbub of inattention, that even i was not aware of the fact for several minutes." he has been called "almost a lecturer in society," and it is clear that his difficulty always was to cease talking. men as different as macaulay and charles dickens have spoken with deep personal affection of his memory. in one of carlyle's inimitable "pen-portraits" he is described as "a delicate, attractive, dainty little figure, as he merely walked about, much more if he were speaking: uncommonly bright, black eyes, instinct with vivacity, intelligence and kindly fire; roundish brow, delicate oval face, full, rapid expression; figure light, nimble, pretty, though so small, perhaps hardly five feet four in height.... his voice clear, harmonious, and sonorous, had something of metallic in it, something almost plangent ... a strange, swift, sharp-sounding, fitful modulation, part of it pungent, _quasi latrant_, other parts of it cooing, bantery, lovingly quizzical, which no charm of his fine ringing voice (_metallic_ tenor, of sweet tone), and of his vivacious rapid looks and pretty little attitudes and gestures, could altogether reconcile you to, but in which he persisted through good report and bad." * * * * * perhaps jeffrey's most famous criticism was the "this will never do" on wordsworth; of which southey wrote to scott, "jeffrey, i hear, has written what his friends call a _crushing_ review of the excursion. he might as well seat himself on skiddaw, and fancy that he crushed the mountain." it is obvious, indeed, that the lake poets had little respect for their "superior" reviewers; whose opinions, on the other hand, were not subject to influences from high places. it will be noticed that jefferey is even more severe on southey's laureate "lays" than on his "thalaba." the review on moore, quoted below, was followed by formal arrangements for a duel at chalk farm on th august, ; but the police had orders to interrupt, and pistols were loaded with paper. even the semblance of animosity was not maintained, as we find moore contributing to the _edinburgh_ before the end of the same year. we fear that the appreciation of keats was partly influenced by political considerations; since leigh hunt had so emphatically welcomed him into the camp. it remains, however, a pleasing contrast to the ferocious onslaught on _endymion_ of gifford printed below. henry lord brougham ( - ) brougham was intimately associated with jeffrey in the foundation of the _edinburgh review_: he is said to have written eighty articles in the first twenty numbers, though like all his work, the criticism was spoilt by egotism and vanity. the fact is that an over-brilliant versatility injured his work. combining "in his own person the characters of solon, lycurgus, demosthenes, archimedes, sir isaac newton, lord chesterfield, and a great many more," his restless genius accomplished nothing substantial or sound. his writing was far less careful than his oratory. a man from whom almost everything was expected, and who was always before the eye of the public; he has been described as "the god of whiggish idolatry," and as "impossible" in society. harriet martineau is unsparing in her criticism of his manners and language; and evidently he was an inveterate swearer. his enthusiasm for noble causes was infectious; only, as coleridge happily expressed it, "because his heart was placed in what should have been his head, you were never sure of him--you always doubted his sincerity." in the opposition and at the bar this eloquent energy had full scope, "but as lord chancellor his selfish disloyalty offended his colleagues while," as o'connell remarked, "if brougham knew a little of law, he would know a little of everything." unquestionably his obvious failings obscured his real eminence, and even hinder us, to-day, from doing full justice to his memory. * * * * * it was the following, somewhat heavy-handed, review which inspired the _english bards and scotch reviewers_, with all its "extraordinary powers of malicious statement"--truly a roland for his oliver. sydney smith ( - ) the third founder of the _edinburgh_ and one of its most aggressive reviewers, until march, , sydney smith has been described as "most provokingly and audaciously personal in his strictures.... he was too complacent, too aboundingly self-satisfied, too buoyantly full of spirits, to hate anybody; but he burlesques them, derides them, and abuses them with the most exasperating effrontery--in a way that is great fun to the reader, but exquisite torture to the victim." at the same time, his wit was always governed by commonsense (its most prevailing distinction); and, though almost unique among humorists for his personal gaiety, "his best work was done in promoting practical ends, and his wit in its airiest gambols never escaped his control." there was, in fact, considerable independence--and even courage--in his seriously inspired attacks on various abuses, and on every form of affectation and cant. though his manners and conversation were not precisely those we generally associate with the cloth, sydney smith published several volumes of sermons, and always accepted the responsibilities of his position as a clergyman with becoming industry. croker's veiled sarcasm in the _quarterly_ (printed below) was no more bitter, or truthful, than similar utterances on any whig. * * * * * we know little to-day of-- the sacred dramas of miss hannah more where moses and the little muses snore, but, in her own day, she was flattered in society and a real influence among the serious-minded. she understood the poor and gave them practical advice. sydney smith, of course, would be in sympathy with her "good works," but could not resist his joke. thomas babington lord macaulay ( - ) to quote one of his own favourite expressions, "every schoolboy knows" the outlines of macaulay's life and work. we have recited the lays, probably read some of the history, possibly even heard of his eloquent and unmeasured attacks on those whose literary work incurred his displeasure. we know that his memory was phenomenal, if his statements were not always accurate. the biographers tell us further that no one could be more simple in private life, or more devoted to his own family: his nephews and nieces having no idea that their favourite "uncle tom" was a great man. criticism, of course, is by no means so unanimous. mr. augustine birrell has wittily remarked that his "style is ineffectual for the purpose of telling the truth about anything"; and james thomson epitomised his political bias in a biting paragraph:--"macaulay, historiographer in chief to the whigs, and the great prophet of whiggery which never had or will have a prophet, vehemently judged that a man who could pass over from the celestial whigs to the infernal tories must be a traitor false as judas, an apostate black as the devil." always a boy at heart, and singularly careless of his appearance, macaulay was so phenomenally successful in every direction that envy may account for most personal criticism not inspired by recognised opponents. those who called him a bore were most probably over-sensitive about their own inability to hold up against arguments, or opinions, they longed to combat. he was a student at lincoln's inn when the brilliant article on the translation of a newly-found treatise by milton on _christian doctrine_ appeared in the _edinburgh_ ( ), and inaugurated a new power in english prose. macaulay himself declared that it was "overloaded with gaudy and ungraceful argument"; but it secured his literary reputation and determined much of his career. he became an influence on the _edinburgh_, probably somewhat modifying its whole tone, and generally identified with its reputation. "the son of a saint," says christopher north, "who seems himself to be something of a reviewer, is insidious as the serpent, but fangless, as the glow worm"; and the tory press were, naturally, up in arms against the champion critic of their pet prodigies. * * * * * _southey_ received, as we must now admit, more than his fair share of abuse from the liberal press, for the comfortable conservatism of his maturity; and macaulay did not love the laureate. we note that _blackwood's_ defended him with spirit, and wilson's protracted, and furious, attack on macaulay for this particular review may be found in the _nodes ambrosianae_, april, . _croker_, in all probability, deserved much of the scorn here poured upon his editorial labour (though it _had_ merits which his critic deliberately ignores); wilson, again _(noctes ambrosianae,_ november, ), examines, and professes to confute, almost every criticism in the review. croker himself found a convenient occasion for revenge in his review of macaulay's history printed below. the interesting recognition of _gladstone_ awakes pleasanter sentiments; especially when we notice the return compliment (in the same _quarterly_, but twenty-seven years later than croker's attack) of the statesman's generous tribute. "macaulay," says gladstone, "was singularly free of vices ... one point only we reserve, a certain tinge of occasional vindictiveness. was he envious? never. was he servile? no. was he insolent? no.... was he idle? the question is ridiculous. was he false? no; but true as steel and transparent as crystal. was he vain? we hold that he was not. at every point in the ugly list he stands the trial." * * * * * anonymous this earlier notice of wordsworth is certainly in exact sympathy with jeffrey on the excursion, and may very well have come from the same pen. at any rate, it introduces the edinburgh attitude towards the lakers. the criticism of maturin has all the tone of moral authority which provoked many readers of the review, and was, probably, in part responsible for the less "measured" attitude adopted by the _quarterly_. lord jeffrey on southey's "thalaba" [from _the edinburgh review_, october, ] _thalaba, the destroyer: a metrical romance_. by robert southey. vols. mo. london. poetry has this much, at least, in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago, by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question; and that many profess to be entirely devoted to it, who have no _good works_ to produce in support of their pretensions. the catholic poetical church, too, has worked but few miracles since the first ages of its establishment; and has been more prolific, for a long time, of doctors, than of saints: it has had its corruptions and reformation also, and has given birth to an infinite variety of heresies and errors, the followers of which have hated and persecuted each other as cordially as other bigots. the author who is now before us, belongs to a _sect_ of poets, that has established itself in this country within these ten or twelve years, and is looked upon, we believe, as one of its chief champions and apostles. the peculiar doctrines of this sect, it would not, perhaps, be very easy to explain; but, that they are _dissenters_ from the established systems in poetry and criticism, is admitted, and proved indeed, by the whole tenor of their compositions. though they lay claim, we believe, to a creed and a revelation of their own, there can be little doubt, that their doctrines are of _german_ origin, and have been derived from some of the great modern reformers in that country. some of their leading principles, indeed, are probably of an earlier date, and seem to have been borrowed from the great apostle of geneva. as mr. southey is the first author, of this persuasion, that has yet been brought before us for judgment, we cannot discharge our inquisitorial office conscientiously, without premising a few words upon the nature and tendency of the tenets he has helped to promulgate. the disciples of this school boast much of its originality, and seem to value themselves very highly, for having broken loose from the bondage of ancient authority, and re-asserted the independence of genius. originality, however, we are persuaded, is rarer than mere alteration; and a man may change a good master for a bad one, without finding himself at all nearer to independence. that our new poets have abandoned the old models, may certainly be admitted; but we have not been able to discover that they have yet created any models of their own; and are very much inclined to call in question the worthiness of those to which they have transferred their admiration. the productions of this school, we conceive, are so far from being entitled to the praise of originality, that they cannot be better characterised, than by an enumeration of the sources from which their materials have been derived. the greater part of them, we apprehend, will be found to be composed of the following elements: ( ) the antisocial principles, and distempered sensibility of rousseau--his discontent with the present constitution of society--his paradoxical morality, and his perpetual hankerings after some unattainable state of voluptuous virtue and perfection. ( ) the simplicity and energy (_horresco referens_) of kotzebue and schiller. ( ) the homeliness and harshness of some of cowper's language and versification, interchanged occasionally with the _innocence_ of ambrose philips, or the quaintness of quarles and dr. donne. from the diligent study of these few originals, we have no doubt that an entire art of poetry may be collected, by the assistance of which, the very _gentlest_ of our readers may soon be qualified to compose a poem as correctly versified as thalaba, and to deal out sentiment and description, with all the sweetness of lamb, and all the magnificence of coleridge. the authors, of whom we are now speaking, have, among them, unquestionably, a very considerable portion of poetical talent, and have, consequently, been enabled to seduce many into an admiration of the false taste (as it appears to us) in which most of their productions are composed. they constitute, at present, the most formidable conspiracy that has lately been formed against sound judgment in matters poetical; and are entitled to a larger share of our censorial notice, than could be spared for an individual delinquent. we shall hope for the indulgence of our readers, therefore, in taking this opportunity to inquire a little more particularly into their merits, and to make a few remarks upon those peculiarities which seem to be regarded by their admirers as the surest proofs of their excellence. their most distinguishing symbol, is undoubtedly an affectation of great simplicity and familiarity of language. they disdain to make use of the common poetical phraseology, or to ennoble their diction by a selection of fine or dignified expressions. there would be too much _art_ in this, for that great love of nature with which they are all of them inspired; and their sentiments, they are determined shall be indebted, for their effect, to nothing but their intrinsic tenderness or elevation. there is something very noble and conscientious, we will confess, in this plan of composition; but the misfortune is, that there are passages in all poems, that can neither be pathetic nor sublime; and that, on these occasions, a neglect of the embellishments of language is very apt to produce absolute meanness and insipidity. the language of passion, indeed, can scarcely be deficient in elevation; and when an author is wanting in that particular, he may commonly be presumed to have failed in the truth, as well as in the dignity of his expression. the case, however, is extremely different with the subordinate parts of a composition; with the narrative and description, that are necessary to preserve its connection; and the explanation, that must frequently prepare us for the great scenes and splendid passages. in these, all the requisite ideas may be conveyed, with sufficient clearness, by the meanest and most negligent expressions; and if magnificence or beauty is ever to be observed in them, it must have been introduced from some other motive than that of adapting the style to the subject. it is in such passages, accordingly, that we are most frequently offended with low and inelegant expressions; and that the language, which was intended to be simple and natural, is found oftenest to degenerate into mere slovenliness and vulgarity. it is in vain, too, to expect that the meanness of those parts may be redeemed by the excellence of others. a poet, who aims at all at sublimity or pathos, is like an actor in a high tragic character, and must sustain his dignity throughout, or become altogether ridiculous. we are apt enough to laugh at the mock-majesty of those whom we know to be but common mortals in private; and cannot permit hamlet to make use of a single provincial intonation, although it should only be in his conversation with the grave-diggers. the followers of simplicity are, therefore, at all times in danger of occasional degradation; but the simplicity of this new school seems intended to ensure it. _their_ simplicity does not consist, by any means, in the rejection of glaring or superfluous ornament--in the substitution of elegance to splendour, or in that refinement of art which seeks concealment in its own perfection. it consists, on the contrary, in a very great degree, in the positive and _bonâ fide_ rejection of art altogether, and in the bold use of those rude and negligent expressions, which would be banished by a little discrimination. one of their own authors, indeed, has very ingeniously set forth (in a kind of manifesto that preceded one of their most flagrant acts of hostility), that it was their capital object "to adapt to the uses of poetry, the ordinary language of conversation among the middling and lower orders of the people." what advantages are to be gained by the success of this project, we confess ourselves unable to conjecture. the language of the higher and more cultivated orders may fairly be presumed to be better than that of their inferiors: at any rate, it has all those associations in its favour, by means of which, a style can ever appear beautiful or exalted, and is adapted to the purposes of poetry, by having been long consecrated to its use. the language of the vulgar, on the other hand, has all the opposite associations to contend with; and must seem unfit for poetry (if there were no other reason), merely because it has scarcely ever been employed in it. a great genius may indeed overcome these disadvantages; but we can scarcely conceive that he should court them. we may excuse a certain homeliness of language in the productions of a ploughman or a milkwoman; but we cannot bring ourselves to admire it in an author, who has had occasion to indite odes to his college bell, and inscribe hymns to the penates. but the mischief of this new system is not confined to the depravation of language only; it extends to the sentiments and emotions, and leads to the debasement of all those feelings which poetry is designed to communicate. it is absurd to suppose, that an author should make use of the language of the vulgar, to express the sentiments of the refined. his professed object, in employing that language, is to bring his compositions nearer to the true standard of nature; and his intention to copy the sentiments of the lower orders, is implied in his resolution to make use of their style. now, the different classes of society have each of them a distinct character, as well as a separate idiom; and the names of the various passions to which they are subject respectively, have a signification that varies essentially according to the condition of the persons to whom they are applied. the love, or grief, or indignation of an enlightened and refined character, is not only expressed in a different language, but is in itself a different emotion from the love, or grief, or anger, of a clown, a tradesman, or a market-wench. the things themselves are radically and obviously distinct; and the representation of them is calculated to convey a very different train of sympathies and sensations to the mind. the question, therefore, comes simply to be--which of them is the most proper object for poetical imitation? it is needless for us to answer a question, which the practice of all the world has long ago decided irrevocably. the poor and vulgar may interest us, in poetry, by their _situation_; but never, we apprehend, by any sentiments that are peculiar to their condition, and still less by any language that is characteristic of it. the truth is, that it is impossible to copy their diction or their sentiments correctly, in a serious composition; and this, not merely because poverty makes men ridiculous, but because just taste and refined sentiment are rarely to be met with among the uncultivated part of mankind; and a language, fitted for their expression, can still more rarely form any part of their "ordinary conversation." the low-bred heroes, and interesting rustics of poetry, have no sort of affinity to the real vulgar of this world; they are imaginary beings, whose characters and language are in contrast with their situation; and please those who can be pleased with them, by the marvellous, and not by the nature of such a combination. in serious poetry, a man of the middling or lower order _must necessarily_ lay aside a great deal of his ordinary language; he must avoid errors in grammar and orthography; and steer clear of the cant of particular professions, and of every impropriety that is ludicrous or disgusting: nay, he must speak in good verse, and observe all the graces in prosody and collocation. after all this, it may not be very easy to say how we are to find him out to be a low man, or what marks can remain of the ordinary language of conversation in the inferior orders of society. if there be any phrases that are not used in good society, they will appear as blemishes in the composition, no less palpably, than errors in syntax or quality; and, if there be no such phrases, the style cannot be characteristic of that condition of life, the language of which it professes to have adopted. all approximation to that language, in the same manner, implies a deviation from that purity and precision, which no one, we believe, ever violated spontaneously. it has been argued, indeed (for men will argue in support of what they do not venture to practise), that as the middling and lower orders of society constitute by far the greater part of mankind, so, their feelings and expressions should interest more extensively, and may be taken, more fairly than any other, for the standards of what is natural and true. to this it seems obvious to answer, that the arts that aim at exciting admiration and delight, do not take their models from what is ordinary, but from what is excellent; and that our interest in the representation of any event, does not depend upon our familiarity with the original, but on its intrinsic importance, and the celebrity of the parties it concerns. the sculptor employs his art in delineating the graces of antinous or apollo, and not in the representation of those ordinary forms that belong to the crowd of his admirers. when a chieftain perishes in battle, his followers mourn more for him, than for thousands of their equals that may have fallen around him. after all, it must be admitted, that there is a class of persons (we are afraid they cannot be called _readers_), to whom the representation of vulgar manners, in vulgar language, will afford much entertainment. we are afraid, however, that the ingenious writers who supply the hawkers and ballad-singers, have very nearly monopolised that department, and are probably better qualified to hit the taste of their customers, than mr. southey, or any of his brethren, can yet pretend to be. to fit them for the higher task of original composition, it would not be amiss if they were to undertake a translation of pope or milton into the vulgar tongue, for the benefit of those children of nature. there is another disagreeable effect of this affected simplicity, which, though of less importance than those which have been already noticed, it may yet be worth while to mention: this is, the extreme difficulty of supporting the same low tone of expression throughout, and the inequality that is consequently introduced into the texture of the composition. to an author of reading and education, it is a style that must always be assumed and unnatural, and one from which he will be perpetually tempted to deviate. he will rise, therefore, every now and then, above the level to which he has professedly degraded himself; and make amends for that transgression, by a fresh effort of descension. his composition, in short, will be like that of a person who is attempting to speak in an obsolete or provincial dialect; he will betray himself by expressions of occasional purity and elegance, and exert himself to efface that impression, by passages of unnatural meanness or absurdity. in making these strictures on the perverted taste for simplicity, that seems to distinguish our modern school of poetry, we have no particular allusion to mr. southey, or the production now before us: on the contrary, he appears to us, to be less addicted to this fault than most of his fraternity; and if we were in want of examples to illustrate the preceding observations, we should certainly look for them in the effusions of that poet who commemorates, with so much effect, the chattering of harry gill's teeth, tells the tale of the one-eyed huntsman "who had a cheek like a cherry," and beautifully warns his studious friend of the risk he ran of "growing double." * * * * * the _style_ of our modern poets, is that, no doubt, by which they are most easily distinguished: but their genius has also an internal character; and the peculiarities of their taste may be discovered, without the assistance of their diction. next after great familiarity of language, there is nothing that appears to them so meritorious as perpetual exaggeration of thought. there must be nothing moderate, natural, or easy, about their sentiments. there must be a "qu'il mourut," and a "let there be light," in every line; and all their characters must be in agonies and ecstasies, from their entrance to their exit. to those who are acquainted with their productions, it is needless to speak of the fatigue that is produced by this unceasing summons to admiration, or of the compassion which is excited by the spectacle of these eternal strainings and distortions. those authors appear to forget, that a whole poem cannot be made up of striking passages; and that the sensations produced by sublimity, are never so powerful and entire, as when they are allowed to subside and revive, in a slow and spontaneous succession. it is delightful, now and then, to meet with a rugged mountain, or a roaring stream; but where there is no funny slope, nor shaded plain, to relieve them--where all is beetling cliff and yawning abyss, and the landscape presents nothing on every side but prodigies and terrors--the head is apt to gow giddy, and the heart to languish for the repose and security of a less elevated region. the effect even of genuine sublimity, therefore, is impaired by the injudicious frequency of its exhibition, and the omission of those intervals and breathing-places, at which the mind should be permitted to recover from its perturbation or astonishment: but, where it has been summoned upon a false alarm, and disturbed in the orderly course of its attention, by an impotent attempt at elevation, the consequences are still more disastrous. there is nothing so ridiculous (at least for a poet) as to fail in great attempts. if the reader foresaw the failure, he may receive some degree of mischievous satisfaction from its punctual occurrence; if he did not, he will be vexed and disappointed; and, in both cases, he will very speedily be disgusted and fatigued. it would be going too far, certainly, to maintain, that our modern poets have never succeeded in their persevering endeavours at elevation and emphasis; but it is a melancholy fact, that their successes bear but a small proportion to their miscarriages; and that the reader who has been promised an energetic sentiment, or sublime allusion, must often be contented with a very miserable substitute. of the many contrivances they employ to give the appearance of uncommon force and animation to a very ordinary conception, the most usual is, to wrap it up in a veil of mysterious and unintelligible language, which flows past with so much solemnity, that it is difficult to believe it conveys nothing of any value. another device for improving the effect of a cold idea, is, to embody it in a verse of unusual harshness and asperity. compound words, too, of a portentous sound and conformation, are very useful in giving an air of energy and originality; and a few lines of scripture, written out into verse from the original prose, have been found to have a very happy effect upon those readers to whom they have the recommendation of novelty. the qualities of style and imagery, however, form but a small part of the characteristics by which a literary faction is to be distinguished. the subject and object of their compositions, and the principles and opinions they are calculated to support, constitute a far more important criterion, and one to which it is usually altogether as easy to refer. some poets are sufficiently described as the flatterers of greatness and power, and others as the champions of independence. one set of writers is known by its antipathy to decency and religion; another, by its methodistical cant and intolerance. our new school of poetry has a moral character also; though it may not be possible, perhaps, to delineate it quite so concisely. a splenetic and idle discontent with the existing institutions of society, seems to be at the bottom of all their serious and peculiar sentiments. instead of contemplating the wonders and the pleasures which civilization has created for mankind, they are perpetually brooding over the disorders by which its progress has been attended. they are filled with horror and compassion at the sight of poor men spending their blood in the quarrels of princes, and brutifying their sublime capabilities in the drudgery of unremitting labour. for all sorts of vice and profligacy in the lower orders of society, they have the same virtuous horror, and the same tender compassion. while the existence of these offences overpowers them with grief and confusion, they never permit themselves to feel the smallest indignation or dislike towards the offenders. the present vicious constitution of society alone is responsible for all these enormities: the poor sinners are but the helpless victims or instruments of its disorders, and could not possibly have avoided the errors into which they have been betrayed. though they can bear with crimes, therefore, they cannot reconcile themselves to punishments; and have an unconquerable antipathy to prisons, gibbets, and houses of correction, as engines of oppression, and instruments of atrocious injustice. while the plea of moral necessity is thus artfully brought forward to convert all the excesses of the poor into innocent misfortunes, no sort of indulgence is shown to the offences of the powerful and rich. their oppressions, and seductions, and debaucheries, are the theme of many an angry verse; and the indignation and abhorrence of the reader is relentlessly conjured up against those perturbators of society, and scourges of mankind. it is not easy to say, whether the fundamental absurdity of this doctrine, or the partiality of its application, be entitled to the severest reprehension. if men are driven to commit crimes, through a certain moral necessity; other men are compelled, by a similar necessity, to hate and despise them for their commission. the indignation of the sufferer is at least as natural as the guilt of him who makes him suffer; and the good order of society would probably be as well preserved, if our sympathies were sometimes called forth in behalf of the former. at all events, the same apology ought certainly to be admitted for the wealthy, as for the needy offender. they are subject alike to the overruling influence of necessity, and equally affected by the miserable condition of society. if it be natural for a poor man to murder and rob, in order to make himself comfortable, it is no less natural for a rich man to gormandise and domineer, in order to have the full use of his riches. wealth is just as valid an excuse for the one class of vices, as indigence is for the other. there are many other peculiarities of false sentiment in the productions of this class of writers, that are sufficiently deserving of commemoration; but we have already exceeded our limits in giving these general indications of their character, and must now hasten back to the consideration of the singular performance which has given occasion to all this discussion. the first thing that strikes the reader of thalaba, is the singular structure of the versification, which is a jumble of all the measures that are known in english poetry (and a few more), without rhyme, and without any sort of regularity in their arrangement. blank odes have been known in this country about as long as english sapphics and dactylics; and both have been considered, we believe, as a species of monsters, or exotics, that were not very likely to propagate, or thrive, in so unpropitious a climate. mr. southey, however, has made a vigorous effort for their naturalisation, and generously endangered his own reputation in their behalf. the melancholy fate of his english sapphics, we believe, is but too generally known; and we can scarcely predict a more favourable issue to the present experiment. every combination of different measures is apt to perplex and disturb the reader who is not familiar with it; and we are never reconciled to a stanza of a new structure, till we have accustomed our ear to it by two or three repetitions. this is the case, even where we have the assistance of rhyme to direct us in our search after regularity, and where the definite form and appearance of a stanza assures us that regularity is to be found. where both of these are wanting, it may be imagined that our condition will be still more deplorable; and a compassionate author might even excuse us, if we were unable to distinguish this kind of verse from prose. in reading verse, in general, we are guided to the discovery of its melody, by a sort of preconception of its cadence and compass; without which, it might often fail to be suggested by the mere articulation of the syllables. if there be any one, whose recollection does not furnish him with evidence of this fact, he may put it to the test of experiment, by desiring any of his illiterate acquaintances to read off some of mr. southey's dactylics, or sir philip sidney's hexameters. it is the same thing with the more unusual measures of the ancient authors. we have never known any one who fell in, at the first trial, with the proper rhyme and cadence of the _pervigilium veneris_, or the choral lyrics of the greek dramatists. the difficulty, however, is virtually the same, as to every new combination; and it is an unsurmountable difficulty, where such new combinations are not repeated with any degree of uniformity, but are multiplied, through the whole composition, with an unbounded licence of variation. such, however, is confessedly the case with the work before us; and it really seems unnecessary to make any other remark on its versification. the author, however, entertains a different opinion of it. so far from apprehending that it may cost his readers some trouble to convince themselves that the greater part of the book is not mere prose, written out into the form of verse, he is persuaded that its melody is more obvious and perceptible than that of our vulgar measures. "one advantage," says mr. southey, "this metre _assuredly_ possesses; the dullest reader cannot distort it into discord: he may read it with a _prose mouth_, but its flow and fall will still be perceptible." we are afraid, there are duller readers in the world than mr. southey is aware of. * * * * * the subject of this poem is almost as ill chosen as the diction; and the conduct of the fable as disorderly as the versification. the corporation of magicians, that inhabit "the domdaniel caverns, under the roots of the ocean," had discovered, that a terrible _destroyer_ was likely to rise up against them from the seed of hodeirah, a worthy arab, with eight fine children. immediately the murder of all those innocents is resolved on; and a sturdy assassin sent with instructions to destroy the whole family (as mr. southey has it) "root and branch." the good man, accordingly, and seven of his children, are dispatched; but a cloud comes over the mother and the remaining child; and the poem opens with the picture of the widow and her orphan wandering, by night, over the desarts of arabia. the old lady, indeed, might as well have fallen under the dagger of the domdanielite; for she dies, without doing anything for her child, in the end of the first book; and little thalaba is left crying in the wilderness. here he is picked up by a good old arab, who takes him home, and educates him like a pious mussulman; and he and the old man's daughter fall in love with each other, according to the invariable custom in all such cases. the magicians, in the meantime, are hunting him over the face of the whole earth; and one of them gets near enough to draw his dagger to stab him, when a providential _simoom_ lays him dead on the sand. from the dead sorcerer's finger, thalaba takes a ring, inscribed with some unintelligible characters, which he is enabled to interpret by the help of some other unintelligible characters that he finds on the forehead of a locust; and soon after takes advantage of an eclipse of the sun, to set out on his expedition against his father's murderers, whom he understands (we do not very well know how) he has been commissioned to exterminate. though they are thus seeking him, and he seeking them, it is amazing what difficulty they find in meeting: they do meet, however, every now and then, and many sore evils does the destroyer suffer at their hands. by faith and fortitude, however, and the occasional assistance of the magic implements he strips them of, he is enabled to baffle and elude their malice, till he is conducted, at last, to the domdaniel cavern, where he finds them assembled, and pulls down the roof of it upon their heads and his own; perishing, like samson, in the final destruction of his enemies. from this little sketch of the story, our readers will easily perceive, that it consists altogether of the most wild and extravagant fictions, and openly sets nature and probability at defiance. in its action, it is not an imitation of anything; and excludes all rational criticism, as to the choice and succession of its incidents. tales of this sort may amuse children, and interest, for a moment, by the prodigies they exhibit, and the multitude of events they bring together: but the interest expires with the novelty; and attention is frequently exhausted, even before curiosity has been gratified. the pleasure afforded by performances of this sort, is very much akin to that which may be derived from the exhibition of a harlequin farce; where, instead of just imitations of nature and human character, we are entertained with the transformation of cauliflowers and beer-barrels, the apparition of ghosts and devils, and all the other magic of the wooden sword. those who can prefer this eternal sorcery, to the just and modest representation of human actions and passions, will probably take more delight in walking among the holly griffins, and yew sphinxes of the city gardener, than in ranging among the groves and lawns which have been laid out by a hand that feared to violate nature, as much as it aspired to embellish her; and disdained the easy art of startling by novelties, and surprising by impropriety. supernatural beings, though easily enough raised, are known to be very troublesome in the management, and have frequently occasioned much perplexity to poets and other persons who have been rash enough to call for their assistance. it is no very easy matter to preserve consistency in the disposal of powers, with the limits of which we are so far from being familiar; and when it is necessary to represent our spiritual persons as ignorant, or suffering, we are very apt to forget the knowledge and the powers with which we had formerly invested them. the ancient poets had several unlucky rencounters of this sort with destiny and the other deities; and milton himself is not a little hampered with the material and immaterial qualities of his angels. enchanters and witches may, at first sight, appear more manageable; but mr. southey has had difficulty enough with them; and cannot be said, after all, to have kept his fable quite clear and intelligible. the stars had said, that the destroyer might be cut off in that hour when his father and brethren were assassinated; yet he is saved by a special interposition of heaven. heaven itself, however, had destined him to extirpate the votaries of eblis; and yet, long before this work is done, a special message is sent to him, declaring, that, if he chooses, the death-angel is ready to take him away instead of the sorcerer's daughter. in the beginning of the story, too, the magicians are quite at a loss where to look for him; and abdaldar only discovers him by accident, after a long search; yet, no sooner does he leave the old arab's tent, than lobaba comes up to him, disguised and prepared for his destruction. the witches have also a decoy ready for him in the desart; yet he sups with okba's daughter, without any of the sorcerers being aware of it; and afterwards proceeds to consult the simorg, without meeting with any obstacle or molestation. the simoom kills abdaldar, too, in spite of that ring which afterwards protects thalaba from lightning, and violence, and magic. the destroyer's arrow then falls blunted from lobaba's breast, who is knocked down, however, by a shower of sand of his own raising; and this same arrow, which could make no impression on the sorcerer, kills the magic bird of aloadin, and pierces the rebellious _spirit_ that guarded the domdaniel door. the whole infernal band, indeed, is very feebly and heavily pourtrayed. they are a set of stupid, undignified, miserable wretches, quarrelling with each other, and trembling in the prospect of inevitable destruction. none of them even appears to have obtained the price of their self-sacrifice in worldly honours and advancement, except mohareb; and he, though assured by destiny that there was one death-blow appointed for him and thalaba, is yet represented, in the concluding scene, as engaged with him in furious combat, and aiming many a deadly blow at that life on which his own was dependent. if the innocent characters in this poem were not delineated with more truth and feeling, the notoriety of the author would scarcely have induced us to bestow so much time on its examination. though the tissue of adventures through which thalaba is conducted in the course of this production, be sufficiently various and extraordinary, we must not set down any part of the incidents to the credit of the author's invention. he has taken great pains, indeed, to guard against such a supposition; and has been as scrupulously correct in the citation of his authorities, as if he were the compiler of a true history, and thought his reputation would be ruined by the imputation of a single fiction. there is not a prodigy, accordingly, or a description, for which he does not fairly produce his vouchers, and generally lays before his readers the whole original passage from which his imitation has been taken. in this way, it turns out, that the book is entirely composed of scraps, borrowed from the oriental tale books, and travels into the mahometan countries, seasoned up for the english reader with some fragments of our own ballads, and shreds of our older sermons. the composition and harmony of the work, accordingly, is much like the pattern of that patch-work drapery that is sometimes to be met with in the mansions of the industrious, where a blue tree overshadows a shell-fish, and a gigantic butterfly seems ready to swallow up palemon and lavinia. the author has the merit merely of cutting out each of his figures from the piece where its inventor had placed it, and stitching them down together in these judicious combinations. it is impossible to peruse this poem, with the notes, without feeling that it is the fruit of much reading, undertaken for the express purpose of fabricating some such performance. the author has set out with a resolution to make an oriental story, and a determination to find the materials of it in the books to which he had access. every incident, therefore, and description--every superstitious usage, or singular tradition, that appeared to him susceptible of poetical embellishment, or capable of picturesque representation, he has set down for this purpose, and adopted such a fable and plan of composition, as might enable him to work up all his materials, and interweave every one of his quotations, without any _extraordinary_ violation of unity or order. when he had filled his common-place book, he began to write; and his poem is little else than his common-place book versified. it may easily be imagined, that a poem constructed upon such a plan, must be full of cumbrous and misplaced description, and overloaded with a crowd of incidents equally unmeaning and ill assorted. the tedious account of the palace of shedad, in the first book--the description of the summer and winter occupations of the arabs, in the third--the ill-told story of haruth and maruth--the greater part of the occurrences in the island of mohareb--the paradise of aloadin, etc., etc.--are all instances of disproportioned and injudicious ornaments, which never could have presented themselves to an author who wrote from the suggestions of his own fancy; and have evidently been introduced, from the author's unwillingness to relinquish the corresponding passages in d'herbelot, sale, volney, etc., which appeared to him to have great capabilities for poetry. this imitation, or admiration of oriental imagery, however, does not bring so much suspicion on his taste, as the affection he betrays for some of his domestic models. the former has, for the most part, the recommendation of novelty; and there is always a certain pleasure in contemplating the _costume_ of a distant nation, and the luxuriant landscape of an asiatic climate. we cannot find the same apology, however, for mr. southey's partiality to the drawling vulgarity of some of our old english ditties. * * * * * from the extracts and observations which we have hitherto presented to our readers, it will be natural for them to conclude, that our opinion of this poem is very decidedly unfavourable; and that we are not disposed to allow it any sort of merit. this, however, is by no means the case. we think it written, indeed, in a very vicious taste, and liable, upon the whole, to very formidable objections: but it would not be doing justice to the genius of the author, if we were not to add, that, it contains passages of very singular beauty and force, and displays a richness of poetical conception, that would do honour to more faultless compositions. there is little of human character in the poem, indeed; because thalaba is a solitary wanderer from the solitary tent of his protector: but the home group, in which his infancy was spent, is pleasingly delineated; and there is something irresistibly interesting in the innocent love, and misfortunes, and fate of his oneiza. the catastrophe of her story is given, it appears to us, with great spirit and effect, though the beauties are of that questionable kind, that trespass on the border of impropriety, and partake more of the character of dramatic, than of narrative poetry. after delivering her from the polluted paradise of aloadin, he prevails on her to marry him before his mission is accomplished. she consents with great reluctance; and the marriage feast, with its processions, songs, and ceremonies, is described in some joyous stanzas. the book ends with these verses-- and now the marriage feast is spread, and from the finished banquet now the wedding guests are gone. * * * * * who comes from the bridal chamber? it is azrael, the angel of death. the next book opens with thalaba lying distracted upon her grave, in the neighbourhood of which he had wandered, till "the sun, and the wind, and the rain, had rusted his raven locks"; and there he is found by the father of his bride, and visited by her ghost, and soothed and encouraged to proceed upon his holy enterprise. he sets out on his lonely way, and is entertained the first night by a venerable dervise: as they are sitting at meal, a _bridal procession_ passes by, with dance, and song, and merriment. the old dervise blessed them as they passed; but thalaba looked on, "and breathed a low deep groan, and hid his face." these incidents are skilfully imagined, and are narrated in a very impressive manner. though the _witchery_ scenes are in general but poorly executed, and possess little novelty to those who have read the arabian nights entertainments, there is, occasionally, some fine description, and striking combination. we do not remember any poem, indeed, that presents, throughout, a greater number of lively images, or could afford so many subjects for the pencil. * * * * * all the productions of this author, it appears to us, bear very distinctly the impression of an amiable mind, a cultivated fancy, and a perverted taste. his genius seems naturally to delight in the representation of domestic virtues and pleasures, and the brilliant delineation of external nature. in both these departments, he is frequently very successful; but he seems to want vigour for the loftier flights of poetry. he is often puerile, diffuse, and artificial, and seems to have but little acquaintance with those chaster and severer graces, by whom the epic muse would be most suitably attended. his faults are always aggravated, and often created, by his partiality for the peculiar manner of that new school of poetry, of which he is a faithful disciple, and to the glory of which he has sacrificed greater talents and acquisitions, than can be boasted of by any of his associates. on southey's laureate lays [from _the edinburgh review_, june, ] _the lay of the laureate. carmen nuptiale_. by robert southey, esq., poet laureate, &c., &c. mo. pp. . london, . a poet laureate, we take it, is naturally a ridiculous person: and has scarcely any safe course to follow, in times like the present, but to bear his faculties with exceeding meekness, and to keep as much as possible in the shade. a stipendiary officer of the royal household, bound to produce two lyrical compositions ever year, in praise of his majesty's person and government, is undoubtedly an object which it is difficult to contemplate with gravity; and which can only have been retained in existence, from that love of antique pomp and establishment which has embellished our court with so many gold-sticks and white rods, and such trains of beef-eaters and grooms of the stole--though it has submitted to the suppression of the more sprightly appendages of a king's fool, or a court jester. that the household poet should have survived the other wits of the establishment, can only be explained by the circumstance of his office being more easily converted into one of mere pomp and ceremony, and coming thus to afford an antient and well-sounding name for a moderate sinecure. for more than a century, accordingly, it has existed on this footing; and its duties, like those of the other personages to whom we have just alluded, have been discharged with a decorous gravity and unobtrusive quietness, which has provoked no derision, merely because it has attracted no notice. the present possessor, however, appears to have other notions on the subject; and has very distinctly manifested his resolution not to rest satisfied with the salary, sherry, and safe obscurity of his predecessors, but to claim a real power and prerogative in the world of letters, in virtue of his title and appointment. now, in this, we conceive, with all due humility, that there is a little mistake of fact, and a little error of judgment. the laurel which the king gives, we are credibly informed, has nothing at all in common with that which is bestowed by the muses; and the prince regent's warrant is absolutely of no authority in the court of apollo. if this be the case, however, it follows, that a poet laureate has no sort of precedency among poets,-- whatever may be his place among pages and clerks of the kitchen;--and that he has no more pretensions as an author, than if his appointment had been to the mastership of the stag-hounds. when he takes state upon him with the public, therefore, in consequence of his office, he really is guilty of as ludicrous a blunder as the worthy american _consul_, in one of the hanse towns, who painted the roman _fasces_ on the pannel of his buggy, and insisted upon calling his foot-boy and clerk his _lictors_. except when he is in his official duty, therefore, the king's house-poet would do well to keep the nature of his office out of sight; and, when he is compelled to appear in it in public, should try to get through with the business as quickly and quietly as possible. the brawny drayman who enacts the champion of england in the lord mayor's show, is in some danger of being sneered at by the spectators, even when he paces along with the timidity and sobriety that becomes his condition; but if he were to take it into his head to make serious boast of his prowess, and to call upon the city bards to celebrate his heroic acts, the very apprentices could not restrain their laughter,--and "the humorous man" would have but small chance of finishing his part in peace. mr. southey could not be ignorant of all this; and yet it appears that he could not have known it all. he must have been conscious, we think, of the ridicule attached to his office, and might have known that there were only two ways of counteracting it,--either by sinking the office altogether in his public appearances, or by writing such very good verses in the discharge of it, as might defy ridicule, and render neglect impossible. instead of this, however, he has allowed himself to write rather worse than any laureate before him, and has betaken himself to the luckless and vulgar expedient of endeavouring to face out the thing by an air of prodigious confidence and assumption:--and has had the usual fortune of such undertakers, by becoming only more conspicuously ridiculous. the badness of his official productions indeed is something really wonderful,--though not more so than the amazing self-complacency and self-praise with which they are given to the world. with the finest themes in the world for that sort of writing, they are the dullest, tamest, and most tedious things ever poor critic was condemned, or other people vainly invited, to read. they are a great deal more wearisome, and rather more unmeaning and unnatural, than the effusions of his predecessors, messrs. pye and whitehead; and are moreover disfigured with the most abominable egotism, conceit and dogmatism, than we ever met with in any thing intended for the public eye. they are filled, indeed, with praises of the author himself, and his works, and his laurel, and his dispositions; notices of his various virtues and studies; puffs of the productions he is preparing for the press, and anticipations of the fame which he is to reap by their means, from a less ungrateful age; and all this delivered with such an oracular seriousness and assurance, that it is easy to see the worthy laureate thinks himself entitled to share in the prerogatives of that royalty which he is bound to extol, and has resolved to make it --his great example as it is his theme. for, as sovereign princes are permitted, in their manifestoes and proclamations, to speak of their own gracious pleasure and royal wisdom, without imputation of arrogance, so, our laureate has persuaded himself that he may address the subject world in the same lofty strains, and that they will listen with as dutiful an awe to the authoritative exposition of his own genius and glory. what might have been the success of the experiment, if the execution had been as masterly as the design is bold, we shall not trouble ourselves to conjecture; but the contrast between the greatness of the praise and the badness of the poetry in which it is conveyed, and to which it is partly applied, is abundantly decisive of its result in the present instance, as well as in all the others in which the ingenious author has adopted the same style. we took some notice of the _carmen triumphale_, which stood at the head of the series. but of the odes which afterwards followed to the prince regent, and the sovereigns and generals who came to visit him, we had the charity to say nothing; and were willing indeed to hope, that the lamentable failure of that attempt might admonish the author, at least as effectually as any intimations of ours. here, however, we have him again, with a _lay of the laureate_, and a _carmen nuptiale_, if possible still more boastful and more dull than any of his other celebrations. it is necessary, therefore, to bring the case once more before the public, for the sake both of correction and example; and as the work is not likely to find many readers, and is of a tenor which would not be readily believed upon any general representation, we must now beg leave to give a faithful analysis of its different parts, with a few specimens of the taste and manner of its execution. its object is to commemorate the late auspicious marriage of the presumptive heiress of the english crown with the young prince of saxe-cobourg; and consists of a proem, a dream, and an epilogue--with a l'envoy, and various annotations. the proem, as was most fitting, is entirely devoted to the praise of the laureate himself; and contains an account, which cannot fail to be very interesting, both to his royal auditors and to the world at large, of his early studies and attainments--the excellence of his genius--the nobleness of his views-- and the happiness that has been the result of these precious gifts. then there is mention made of his pleasure in being appointed poet laureate, and of the rage and envy which that event excited in all the habitations of the malignant. this is naturally followed up by a full account of all his official productions, and some modest doubts whether his genius is not too heroic and pathetic for the composition of an _epithalamium,_-- which doubts, however, are speedily and pleasingly resolved by the recollection, that as spenser made a hymn on his own marriage, so, there can be nothing improper in mr. southey doing as much on that of the princess charlotte. this is the general argument of the proem. but the reader must know a little more of the details. in his early youth, the ingenious author says he aspired to the fame of a poet; and then fancy came to him, and showed him the glories of his future career, addressing him in these encouraging words-- thou whom rich nature at thy happy birth blest in her bounty with the largest dower that heaven indulges to a child of earth! being fully persuaded of the truth of her statements, we have then the satisfaction of learning that he has lived a very happy life; and that, though time has made his hair a little grey, it has only matured his understanding; and that he is still as habitually cheerful as when he was a boy. he then proceeds to inform us, that he sometimes does a little in poetry still; but that, of late years, he spends most of his time in writing histories--from which he has no doubt that he will one day or another acquire great reputation. thus in the ages which are past i live, and those which are to come my sure reward will give.... we come next, of course, to the dream; and nothing more stupid or heavy, we will venture to say, ever arose out of sleep, or tended to sleep again. the unhappy laureate, it seems, just saw, upon shutting his eyes, what he might have seen as well if he had been able to keep them open--a great crowd of people and coaches in the street, with marriage favours in their bosoms; church bells ringing merrily, and _feux-de-joie_ firing in all directions. eftsoons, says the dreaming poet, i came to a great door, where there were guards placed to keep off the mob; but when they saw my laurel crown, they made way for me, and let me in!-- but i had entrance through that guarded door, in honour to the laureate crown i wore. when he gets in, he finds himself in a large hall, decorated with trophies, and pictures, and statues, commemorating the triumphs of british valour, from aboukir to waterloo. the room, moreover, was filled with a great number of ladies and gentlemen very finely dressed; and in two chairs, near the top, were seated the princess charlotte and prince leopold. hitherto, certainly, all is sufficiently plain and probable;-- nor can the muse who dictated this to the slumbering laureate be accused of any very extravagant or profuse invention. we come, now, however, to allegory and learning in abundance. in the first place, we are told, with infinite regard to the probability as well as the novelty of the fiction, that in this drawing-room there were two great lions couching at the feet of the royal pair;--the prince's being very lean and in poor condition, with the hair rubbed off his neck as if from a heavy collar-- and the princess's in full vigour, with a bushy mane, and littered with torn french flags. then there were two heavenly figures stationed on each side of the throne, one called honour, and the other faith;--so very like each other, that it was impossible not to suppose them brother and sister. it turns out, however, that they were only second cousins; or so at least we interpret the following precious piece of theogony. akin they were,--yet not as thus it seemed, for he of valour was the eldest son, from areté in happy union sprung. but her to phronis eusebeia bore, she whom her mother dicé sent to earth; what marvel then if thus their features wore resemblant lineaments of kindred birth? dicé being child of him who rules above, valour his earth-born son; so both derived from jove. p. . this, we think, is delicious; but there is still more goodly stuff toward. the two heavenly cousins stand still without doing any thing; but then there is a sound of sweet music, and a whole "heavenly company" appear, led on by a majestic female, whom we discover, by the emblems on our halfpence, to be no less a person than britannia, who advances and addresses a long discourse of flattery and admonition to the royal bride; which, for the most part, is as dull and commonplace as might be expected from the occasion; though there are some passages in which the author has reconciled his gratitude to his patron, and his monitory duty to his daughter, with singular spirit and delicacy. after enjoining to her the observance of all public duties, and the cultivation of all domestic virtues, britannia is made to sum up the whole sermon in this emphatic precept-- look to thy sire, and in his steady way --learn thou to tread. now, considering that mr. southey was at all events incapable of sacrificing truth to court favour, it cannot but be regarded as a rare felicity in his subject, that he could thus select a pattern of private purity and public honour in the person of the actual sovereign, without incurring the least suspicion either of base adulation or lax morality.... it is impossible to feel any serious or general contempt for a person of mr. southey's genius;--and, in reviewing his other works, we hope we have shown a proper sense of his many merits and accomplishments. but his laureate odes are utterly and intolerably bad; and, if he had never written any thing else, must have ranked him below colley cibber in genius, and above him in conceit and presumption. we have no toleration for this sort of perversity, or prostitution of great gifts; and do not think it necessary to qualify the expression of opinions which we have formed with as much positiveness as deliberation.--we earnestly wish he would resign his livery laurel to lord thurlow, and write no more odes on court galas. we can assure him too, most sincerely, that this wish is not dictated in any degree by envy, or any other hostile or selfish feeling. we are ourselves, it is but too well known, altogether without pretensions to that high office--and really see no great charms either in the salary or the connexion--and, for the glory of writing such verses as we have now been reviewing, we do not believe that there is a scribbler in the kingdom so vile as to think it a thing to be coveted. on thomas moore [from _the edinburgh review_, july, ] _epistles, odes, and other poems_. by thomas moore, esq. to. pp. . london, . a singular sweetness and melody of versification,--smooth, copious, and familiar diction,--with some brilliancy of fancy, and some show of classical erudition, might have raised mr. moore to an innocent distinction among the song-writers and occasional poets of his day: but he is indebted, we fear, for the celebrity he actually enjoys to accomplishments of a different description; and may boast, if the boast can please him, of being the most licentious of modern versifiers, and the most poetical of those who, in our times, have devoted their talents to the propagation of immorality. we regard his book, indeed, as a public nuisance; and would willingly trample it down by one short movement of contempt and indignation, had we not reason to apprehend, that it was abetted by patrons who are entitled to a more respectful remonstrance, and by admirers who may require a more extended exposition of their dangers. there is nothing, it will be allowed, more indefensible than a cold-blooded attempt to corrupt the purity of an innocent heart; and we can scarcely conceive any being more truly despicable, than he who, without the apology of unruly passion or tumultuous desires, sits down to ransack the impure places of his memory for inflammatory images and expressions, and commits them laboriously to writing, for the purpose of insinuating pollution into the minds of unknown and unsuspecting readers. this is almost a new crime among us. while france has to blush for so many tomes of "poesies erotiques," we have little to answer for, but the coarse indecencies of rochester and dryden; and these, though sufficiently offensive to delicacy and good taste, can scarcely be regarded as dangerous. there is an antidote to the poison they contain, in the open and undisguised profligacy with which it is presented. if they are wicked, they have the honesty at least to profess wickedness. the mark of the beast is set visibly on their foreheads; and though they have the boldness to recommend vice, they want the effrontery to make her pass for virtue. in their grossest immoralities, too, they scarcely ever seem to be perfectly in earnest; and appear neither to wish nor to hope to make proselytes. they indulge their own vein of gross riot and debauchery; but they do not seek to corrupt the principles of their readers; and are contented to be reprobated as profligate, if they are admired at the same time for wit and originality. the immorality of mr. moore is infinitely more insidious and malignant. it seems to be his aim to impose corruption upon his readers, by concealing it under the mask of refinement; to reconcile them imperceptibly to the most vile and vulgar sensuality, by blending its language with that of exalted feeling and tender emotion; and to steal impurity into their hearts, by gently perverting the most simple and generous of their affections. in the execution of this unworthy task, he labours with a perseverance at once ludicrous and detestable. he may be seen in every page running round the paltry circle of his seductions with incredible zeal and anxiety, and stimulating his jaded fancy for new images of impurity, with as much melancholy industry as ever outcast of the muses hunted for epithets or metre. it is needless, we hope, to go deep into the inquiry, why certain compositions have been reprobated as licentious, and their authors ranked among the worst enemies of morality. the criterion by which their delinquency may be determined, is fortunately very obvious: no scene can be tolerated in description, which could not be contemplated in reality, without a gross violation of propriety: no expression can be pardoned in poetry to which delicacy could not listen in the prose of real life. no writer can transgress those limits, and be held guiltless; but there are degrees of guiltiness, and circumstances of aggravation or apology, which ought not to be disregarded. a poet of a luxuriant imagination may give too warm a colouring to the representation of innocent endearments, or be betrayed into indelicacies in delineating the allurements of some fair seducer, while it is obviously his general intention to give attraction to the picture of virtue, and to put the reader on his guard against the assault of temptation. mr. moore has no such apology;--he takes care to intimate to us, in every page that the raptures which he celebrates do not spring from the excesses of an innocent love, or the extravagance of a romantic attachment; but are the unhallowed fruits of cheap and vulgar prostitution, the inspiration of casual amours, and the chorus of habitual debauchery. he is at pains to let the world know that he is still fonder of roving, than of loving; and that all the caras and the fannys, with whom he holds dalliance in these pages, have had each a long series of preceding lovers, as highly favoured as their present poetical paramour: that they meet without any purpose of constancy, and do not think it necessary to grace their connexion with any professions of esteem or permanent attachment. the greater part of the book is filled with serious and elaborate description of the ecstasies of such an intercourse, and with passionate exhortations to snatch the joys, which are thus abundantly poured forth from "the fertile fount of sense." to us, indeed, the perpetual kissing, and twining, and panting of these amorous persons, is rather ludicrous than seductive; and their eternal sobbing and whining, raises no emotion in our bosoms, but those of disgust and contempt. even to younger men, we believe, the book will not be very dangerous: nor is it upon their account that we feel the indignation and alarm which we have already endeavoured to express. the life and conversation of our sex, we are afraid is seldom so pure as to leave them much to learn from publications of this description; and they commonly know enough of the reality, to be aware of the absurd illusions and exaggerations of such poetical voluptuaries. in them, therefore, such a composition can work neither corruption nor deception; and it will, in general, be despised and thrown aside, as a tissue of sickly and fantastical conceits, equally remote from truth and respectability. it is upon the other sex, that we conceive its effects may be most pernicious; and it is chiefly as an insult upon their delicacy, and an attack upon their purity, that we are disposed to resent its publication. the reserve in which women are educated; the natural vivacity of their imaginations; and the warmth of their sensibility, renders them peculiarly liable to be captivated by the appearance of violent emotions, and to be misled by the affectation of tenderness or generosity. they easily receive any impression that is made under the apparent sanction of these feelings; and allow themselves to be seduced into any thing, which they can be persuaded is dictated by disinterested attachment, and sincere and excessive love. it is easy to perceive how dangerous it must be for such beings to hang over the pages of a book, in which supernatural raptures, and transcendent passion, are counterfeited in every page; in which, images of voluptuousness are artfully blended with expressions of refined sentiment, and delicate emotion; and the grossest sensuality is exhibited in conjunction with the most gentle and generous affections. they who have not learned from experience, the impossibility of such an union, are apt to be captivated by its alluring exterior. they are seduced by their own ignorance and sensibility; and become familiar with the demon, for the sake of the radiant angel to whom he has been linked by the malignant artifice of the poet. we have been induced to enter this strong protest, and to express ourselves thus warmly against this and the former publications of this author, both from what we hear of the circulation which they have already obtained, and from our conviction that they are calculated, if not strongly denounced to the public, to produce, at this moment, peculiar and irremediable mischief. the style of composition, as we have already hinted, is almost new in this country: it is less offensive than the old fashion of obscenity; and for these reasons, perhaps, is less likely to excite the suspicion of the moralist, or to become the object of precaution to those who watch over the morals of the young and inexperienced. we certainly have known it a permitted study, where performances, infinitely less pernicious, were rigidly interdicted. there can be no time in which the purity of the female character can fail to be of the first importance to every community; but it appears to us, that it requires at this moment to be more carefully watched over than at any other; and that the constitution of society has arrived among us to a sort of crisis, the issue of which may be powerfully influenced by our present neglect or solicitude. from the increasing diffusion of opulence, enlightened or polite society is greatly enlarged, and necessarily becomes more promiscuous and corruptible; and women are now beginning to receive a more extended education, to venture more freely and largely into the fields of literature, and to become more of intellectual and independent creatures, than they have yet been in these islands. in these circumstances, it seems to be of incalculable importance, that no attaint should be given to the delicacy and purity of their expanding minds; that their increasing knowledge should be of good chiefly, and not of evil; that they should not consider modesty as one of the prejudices from which they are now to be emancipated; nor found any part of their new influence upon the licentiousness of which mr. moore invites them to be partakers. the character and the morality of women exercises already a mighty influence upon the happiness and the respectability of the nation; and it is destined, we believe, to exercise a still higher one: but if they should ever cease to be the pure, the delicate, and timid creatures that they now are--if they should cease to overawe profligacy, and to win and to shame men into decency, fidelity, and love of unsullied virtue--it is easy to see that this influence, which has hitherto been exerted to strengthen and refine our society, will operate entirely to its corruption and debasement; that domestic happiness and private honour will be extinguished, and public spirit and national industry most probably annihilated along with them. there is one other consideration which has helped to excite our apprehension on occasion of this particular performance. many of the pieces are dedicated to persons of the first consideration in the country, both for rank and accomplishments; and the author appears to consider the greater part of them as his intimate friends, and undoubted patrons and admirers. now, this we will confess is to us a very alarming consideration. by these channels, the book will easily pass into circulation in those classes of society, which it is of most consequence to keep free of contamination; and from which its reputation and its influence will descend with the greatest effect to the great body of the community. in this reading and opulent country, there are no fashions which diffuse themselves so fast, as those of literature and immorality: there is no palpable boundary between the _noblesse_ and the _bourgeoisie_, as in old france, by which the corruption and intelligence of the former can be prevented from spreading to the latter. all the parts of the mass, act and react upon each other with a powerful and unintermitted agency; and if the head be once infected, the corruption will spread irresistibly through the whole body. it is doubly necessary, therefore, to put the law in force against this delinquent, since he has not only indicated a disposition to do mischief, but seems unfortunately to have found an opportunity. on wordsworth's "the excursion" [from _the edinburgh review_, november, ] _the excursion, being a portion of the recluse, a poem_. by william wordsworth. to. pp. . london, . this will never do. it bears no doubt the stamp of the author's heart and fancy; but unfortunately not half so visibly as that of his peculiar system. his former poems were intended to recommend that system, and to bespeak favour for it by their individual merit;--but this, we suspect, must be recommended by the system--and can only expect to succeed where it has been previously established. it is longer, weaker, and tamer, than any of mr. wordsworth's other productions; with less boldness of originality, and less even of that extreme simplicity and lowliness of tone which wavered so prettily, in the lyrical ballads, between silliness and pathos. we have imitations of cowper, and even of milton here, engrafted on the natural drawl of the lakers--and all diluted into harmony by that profuse and irrepressible wordiness which deluges all the blank verse of this school of poetry, and lubricates and weakens the whole structure of their style. though it fairly fills four hundred and twenty good quarto pages, without note, vignette, or any sort of extraneous assistance, it is stated in the title--with something of an imprudent candour--to be but "a portion" of a larger work; and in the preface, where an attempt is rather unsuccessfully made to explain the whole design, it is still more rashly disclosed, that it is but "a part of the second part of a _long_ and laborious work"--which is to consist of three parts. what mr. wordsworth's ideas of length are, we have no means of accurately judging; but we cannot help suspecting that they are liberal, to a degree that will alarm the weakness of most modern readers. as far as we can gather from the preface, the entire poem--or one of them, for we really are not sure whether there is to be one or two--is of a biographical nature; and is to contain the history of the author's mind, and of the origin and progress of his poetical powers, up to the period when they were sufficiently matured to qualify him for the great work on which he has been so long employed. now, the quarto before us contains an account of one of his youthful rambles in the vales of cumberland, and occupies precisely the period of three days; so that, by the use of a very powerful _calculus_, some estimate may be formed of the probable extent of the entire biography. this small specimen, however, and the statements with which it is prefaced, have been sufficient to set our minds at rest in one particular. the case of mr. wordsworth, we perceive, is now manifestly hopeless; and we give him up as altogether incurable, and beyond the power of criticism. we cannot indeed altogether omit taking precautions now and then against the spreading of the malady;--but for himself, though we shall watch the progress of his symptoms as a matter of professional curiosity and instruction, we really think it right not to harass him any longer with nauseous remedies,--but rather to throw in cordials and lenitives, and wait in patience for the natural termination of the disorder. in order to justify this desertion of our patient, however, it is proper to state why we despair of the success of a more active practice. a man who has been for twenty years at work on such matter as is now before us, and who comes complacently forward with a whole quarto of it after all the admonitions he has received, cannot reasonably be expected to "change his hand, or check his pride," upon the suggestion of far weightier monitors than we can pretend to be. inveterate habit must now have given a kind of sanctity to the errors of early taste; and the very powers of which we lament the perversion, have probably become incapable of any other application. the very quantity, too, that he has written, and is at this moment working up for publication upon the old pattern, makes it almost hopeless to look for any change of it. all this is so much capital already sunk in the concern; which must be sacrificed if it be abandoned: and no man likes to give up for lost the time and talent and labour which he has embodied in any permanent production. we were not previously aware of these obstacles to mr. wordsworth's conversion; and, considering the peculiarities of his former writings merely as the result of certain wanton and capricious experiments on public taste and indulgence, conceived it to be our duty to discourage their repetition by all the means in our power. we now see clearly, however, how the case stands;--and, making up our minds, though with the most sincere pain and reluctance, to consider him as finally lost to the good cause of poetry, shall endeavour to be thankful for the occasional gleams of tenderness and beauty which the natural force of his imagination and affections must still shed over all his productions,--and to which we shall ever turn with delight, in spite of the affectation and mysticism and prolixity, with which they are so abundantly contrasted. long habits of seclusion, and an excessive ambition of originality, can alone account for the disproportion which seems to exist between this author's taste and his genius; or for the devotion with which he has sacrificed so many precious gifts at the shrine of those paltry idols which he has set up for himself among his lakes and his mountains. solitary musings, amidst such scenes, might no doubt be expected to nurse up the mind to the majesty of poetical conception,--(though it is remarkable, that all the greater poets lived or had lived, in the full current of society):--but the collision of equal minds,--the admonition of prevailing impressions--seems necessary to reduce its redundancies, and repress that tendency to extravagance or puerility, into which the self-indulgence and self-admiration of genius is so apt to be betrayed, when it is allowed to wanton, without awe or restraint, in the triumph and delight of its own intoxication. that its flights should be graceful and glorious in the eyes of men, it seems almost to be necessary that they should be made in the consciousness that men's eyes are to behold them,--and that the inward transport and vigour by which they are inspired, should be tempered by an occasional reference to what will be thought of them by those-ultimate dispensers of glory. an habitual and general knowledge of the few settled and permanent maxims, which form the canon of general taste in all large and polished societies--a certain tact, which informs us at once that many things, which we still love and are moved by in secret, must necessarily be despised as childish, or derided as absurd, in all such societies--though it will not stand in the place of genius, seems necessary to the success of its exertions; and though it will never enable any one to produce the higher beauties of art, can alone secure the talent which does produce them, from errors that must render it useless. those who have most of the talent, however, commonly acquire this knowledge with the greatest facility;--and if mr. wordsworth, instead of confining himself almost entirely to the society of the dalesmen and cottagers, and little children, who form the subjects of his book, had condescended to mingle a little more with the people that were to read and judge of it, we cannot help thinking, that its texture would have been considerably improved: at least it appears to us to be absolutely impossible, that any one who had lived or mixed familiarly with men of literature and ordinary judgment in poetry (of course we exclude the coadjutors and disciples of his own school), could ever have fallen into such gross faults, or so long mistaken them for beauties. his first essays we looked upon in a good degree as poetical paradoxes,--maintained experimentally, in order to display talent, and court notoriety;--and so maintained, with no more serious belief in their truth, than is usually generated by an ingenious and animated defence of other paradoxes. but when we find, that he has been for twenty years exclusively employed upon articles of this very fabric, and that he has still enough of raw material on hand to keep him so employed for twenty years to come, we cannot refuse him the justice of believing that he is a sincere convert to his own system, and must ascribe the peculiarities of his composition, not to any transient affectation, or accidental caprice of imagination, but to a settled perversity of taste or understanding, which has been fostered, if not altogether created, by the circumstances to which we have already alluded. the volume before us, if we were to describe it very shortly, we should characterize as a tissue of moral and devotional ravings, in which innumerable changes are rung upon a few very simple and familiar ideas: --but with such an accompaniment of long words, long sentences, and unwieldy phrases--such a hubbub of strained raptures and fantastical sublimities, that it is often extremely difficult for the most skilful and attentive student to obtain a glimpse of the author's meaning--and altogether impossible for an ordinary reader to conjecture what he is about. moral and religious enthusiasm, though undoubtedly poetical emotions, are at the same time but dangerous inspirers of poetry; nothing being so apt to run into interminable dulness or mellifluous extravagance, without giving the unfortunate author the slightest intimation of his danger. his laudable zeal for the efficacy of his preachments, he very naturally mistakes for the ardour of poetical inspiration;--and, while dealing out the high words and glowing phrases which are so readily supplied by themes of this description, can scarcely avoid believing that he is eminently original and impressive:-- all sorts of commonplace notions and expressions are sanctified in his eyes, by the sublime ends for which they are employed; and the mystical verbiage of the methodist pulpit is repeated, till the speaker entertains no doubt that he is the elected organ of divine truth and persuasion. but if such be the common hazards of seeking inspiration from those potent fountains, it may easily be conceived what chance mr. wordsworth had of escaping their enchantment,--with his natural propensities to wordiness, and his unlucky habit of debasing pathos with vulgarity. the fact accordingly is, that in this production he is more obscure than a pindaric poet of the seventeenth century; and more verbose "than even himself of yore"; while the wilfulness with which he persists in choosing his examples of intellectual dignity and tenderness exclusively from the lowest ranks of society, will be sufficiently apparent, from the circumstance of his having thought fit to make his chief prolocutor in this poetical dialogue, and chief advocate of providence and virtue, _an old scotch pedlar_--retired indeed from business--but still rambling about in his former haunts, and gossiping among his old customers, without his pack on his shoulders. the other persons of the drama are, a retired military chaplain, who has grown half an atheist and half a misanthrope--the wife of an unprosperous weaver--a servant girl with her infant--a parish pauper, and one or two other personages of equal rank and dignity. the character of the work is decidedly didactic; and more than nine-tenths of it are occupied with a species of dialogue, or rather a series of long sermons or harangues which pass between the pedlar, the author, the old chaplain, and a worthy vicar, who entertains the whole party at dinner on the last day of their excursion. the incidents which occur in the course of it are as few and trifling as can be imagined;--and those which the different speakers narrate in the course of their discourses, are introduced rather to illustrate their arguments or opinions, than for any interest they are supposed to possess of their own.--the doctrine which the work is intended to enforce, we are by no means certain that we have discovered. in so far as we can collect, however, it seems to be neither more nor less than the old familiar one, that a firm belief in the providence of a wise and beneficent being must be our great stay and support under all afflictions and perplexities upon earth--and that there are indications of his power and goodness in all the aspects of the visible universe, whether living or inanimate--every part of which should therefore be regarded with love and reverence, as exponents of those great attributes. we can testify, at least, that these salutary and important truths are inculcated at far greater length, and with more repetitions, than in any ten volumes of sermons that we ever perused. it is also maintained, with equal conciseness and originality, that there is frequently much good sense, as well as much enjoyment, in the humbler conditions of life; and that, in spite of great vices and abuses, there is a reasonable allowance both of happiness and goodness in society at large. if there be any deeper or more recondite doctrines in mr. wordsworth's book, we must confess that they have escaped us;--and, convinced as we are of the truth and soundness of those to which we have alluded, we cannot help thinking that they might have been better enforced with less parade and prolixity. his effusions on what may be called the physiognomy of external nature, or its moral and theological expression, are eminently fantastic, obscure, and affected.--it is quite time, however, that we should give the reader a more particular account of this singular performance. it opens with a picture of the author toiling across a bare common in a hot summer day, and reaching at last a ruined hut surrounded with tall trees, where he meets by appointment with a hale old man, with an iron-pointed staff lying beside him. then follows a retrospective account of their first acquaintance--formed, it seems, when the author was at a village school; and his aged friend occupied "one room,--the fifth part of a house" in the neighbourhood. after this, we have the history of this reverend person at no small length. he was born, we are happy to find, in scotland--among the hills of athol; and his mother, after his father's death, married the parish schoolmaster--so that he was taught his letters betimes: but then, as it is here set forth with much solemnity, from his sixth year, the boy, of whom i speak, in summer, tended cattle on the hills. and again, a few pages after, that there may be no risk of mistake as to a point of such essential importance-- from early childhood, even, as hath been said, from his _sixth year_, he had been sent abroad, _in summer_, to tend herds: such was his task! in the course of this occupation, it is next recorded, that he acquired such a taste for rural scenery and open air, that when he was sent to teach a school in a neighbouring village, he found it "a misery to him," and determined to embrace the more romantic occupation of a pedlar--or, as mr. wordsworth more musically expresses it, a vagrant merchant bent beneath his load; --and in the course of his peregrinations had acquired a very large acquaintance, which, after he had given up dealing, he frequently took a summer ramble to visit. the author, on coming up to this interesting personage, finds him sitting with his eyes half shut;--and, not being quite sure whether he's asleep or awake, stands "some minutes space" in silence beside him. "at length," says he, with his own delightful simplicity-- at length i hailed him--_seeing that his hat was moist_ with water-drops, as if the brim had newly scooped a running stream!-- --"'tis," said i, "a burning day; my lips are parched with thirst;--but you, i guess, have somewhere found relief." upon this, the benevolent old man points him out a well in a corner, to which the author repairs; and, after minutely describing its situation, beyond a broken wall, and between two alders that "grew in a cold damp nook," he thus faithfully chronicles the process of his return-- my thirst i slaked--and from the cheerless spot withdrawing, straightway to the shade returned, where sate the old man on the cottage bench. the pedlar then gives an account of the last inhabitants of the deserted cottage beside them. these were, a good industrious weaver and his wife and children. they were very happy for a while; till sickness and want of work came upon them; and then the father enlisted as a soldier, and the wife pined in the lonely cottage--growing every year more careless and desponding, as her anxiety and fears for her absent husband, of whom no tidings ever reached her, accumulated. her children died, and left her cheerless and alone; and at last she died also; and the cottage fell to decay. we must say, that there is very considerable pathos in the telling of this simple story; and that they who can get over the repugnance excited by the triteness of its incidents, and the lowness of its objects, will not fail to be struck with the author's knowledge of the human heart, and the power he possesses of stirring up its deepest and gentlest sympathies. his prolixity, indeed, it is not so easy to get over. this little story fills about twenty-five quarto pages; and abounds, of course, with mawkish sentiment, and details of preposterous minuteness. when the tale is told, the travellers take their staffs, and end their first day's journey, without further adventure, at a little inn. the second book sets them forward betimes in the morning. they pass by a village wake; and as they approach a more solitary part of the mountains, the old man tells the author that he is taking him to see an old friend of his, who had formerly been chaplain to a highland regiment--had lost a beloved wife--been roused from his dejection by the first euthusiasm [transcriber's note: sic] of the french revolution--had emigrated on its miscarriage to america--and returned disgusted to hide himself in the retreat to which they were now ascending. that retreat is then most tediously described--a smooth green valley in the heart of the mountain, without trees, and with only one dwelling. just as they get sight of it from the ridge above, they see a funeral train proceeding from the solitary abode, and hurry on with some apprehension for the fate of the misanthrope--whom they find, however, in very tolerable condition at the door, and learn that the funeral was that of an aged pauper who had been boarded out by the parish in that cheap farm-house, and had died in consequence of long exposure to heavy rain. the old chaplain, or, as mr. wordsworth is pleased to call him, the solitary, tells this dull story at prodigious length; and after giving an inflated description of an effect of mountain-mists in the evening sun, treats his visitors with a rustic dinner--and they walk out to the fields at the close of the second book. the third makes no progress in the excursion. it is entirely filled with moral and religious conversation and debate, and with a more ample detail of the solitary's past life, than had been given in the sketch of his friend. the conversation is exceedingly dull and mystical; and the solitary's confessions insufferably diffuse. yet there is very considerable force of writing and tenderness of sentiment in this part of the work. the fourth book is also filled with dialogues ethical and theological; and, with the exception of some brilliant and forcible expressions here and there, consists of an exposition of truisms, more cloudy, wordy, and inconceivably prolix, than any thing we ever met with. in the beginning of the fifth book, they leave the solitary valley, taking its pensive inhabitant along with them, and stray on to where the landscape sinks down into milder features, till they arrive at a church, which stands on a moderate elevation in the centre of a wide and fertile vale. here they meditate for a while among the monuments, till the vicar comes out and joins them;--and recognizing the pedlar for an old acquaintance, mixes graciously in the conversation, which proceeds in a very edifying manner till the close of the book. the sixth contains a choice obituary, or characteristic account of several of the persons who lie buried before this groupe of moralizers; --an unsuccessful lover, who finds consolation in natural history--a miner, who worked on for twenty years, in despite of universal ridicule, and at last found the vein he had expected--two political enemies reconciled in old age to each other--an old female miser--a seduced damsel--and two widowers, one who devoted himself to the education of his daughters, and one who married a prudent middle-aged woman to take care of them. in the beginning of the eighth book, the worthy vicar expresses, in the words of mr. wordsworth's own epitome, "his apprehensions that he had detained his auditors too long--invites them to his house--solitary, disinclined to comply, rallies the wanderer, and somewhat playfully draws a comparison between his itinerant profession and that of a knight-errant--which leads to the wanderer giving an account of changes in the country, from the manufacturing spirit--its favourable effects-- the other side of the picture," etc., etc. after these very poetical themes are exhausted, they all go into the house, where they are introduced to the vicar's wife and daughter; and while they sit chatting in the parlour over a family dinner, his son and one of his companions come in with a fine dish of trouts piled on a blue slate; and, after being caressed by the company, are sent to dinner in the nursery.--this ends the eighth book. the ninth and last is chiefly occupied with the mystical discourses of the pedlar; who maintains, that the whole universe is animated by an active principle, the noblest seat of which is in the human soul; and moreover, that the final end of old age is to train and enable us to hear the mighty stream of _tendency_ uttering, for elevation of our thought, a clear sonorous voice, inaudible to the vast multitude whose doom it is to run the giddy round of vain delight-- with other matters as luminous and emphatic. the hostess at length breaks off the harangue, by proposing that they should all make a little excursion on the lake,--and they embark accordingly; and, after navigating for some time along its shores, and drinking tea on a little island, land at last on a remote promontory, from which they see the sun go down,--and listen to a solemn and pious, but rather long prayer from the vicar. they then walk back to the parsonage door, where the author and his friend propose to spend the evening;--but the solitary prefers walking back in the moonshine to his own valley, after promising to take another ramble with them-- if time, with free consent, be yours to give, and season favours. --and here the publication somewhat abruptly closes. our abstract of the story has been so extremely concise, that it is more than usually necessary for us to lay some specimens of the work itself before our readers. its grand staple, as we have already said, consists of a kind of mystical morality: and the chief characteristics of the style are, that it is prolix and very frequently unintelligible: and though we are very sensible that no great gratification is to be expected from the exhibition of those qualities, yet it is necessary to give our readers a taste of them, both to justify the sentence we have passed, and to satisfy them that it was really beyond our power to present them with any abstract or intelligible account of those long conversations which we have had so much occasion to notice in our brief sketch of its contents. * * * * * there is no beauty, we think, it must be admitted, in such passages; and so little either of interest or curiosity in the incidents they disclose, that we can scarcely conceive that any man to whom they had actually occurred, should take the trouble to recount them to his wife and children by his idle fireside--but, that man or child should think them worth writing down in blank verse, and printing in magnificent quarto, we should certainly have supposed altogether impossible, had it not been for the ample proofs which mr. wordsworth has afforded to the contrary. sometimes their silliness is enhanced by a paltry attempt at effect and emphasis:--as in the following account of that very touching and extraordinary occurrence of a lamb bleating among the mountains. the poet would actually persuade us that he thought the mountains themselves were bleating;--and that nothing could be so grand or impressive. "list!" cries the old pedlar, suddenly breaking off in the middle of one of his daintiest ravings-- --"list!--i heard, from yon huge breast of rock, a solemn bleat; sent forth as if it were the mountain's voice! as if the visible mountain made the cry! again!"--the effect upon the soul was such as he expressed; for, from the mountain's heart the solemn bleat appeared to come; there was no other--and the region all around stood silent, empty of all shape of life. --it was a lamb--left somewhere to itself! what we have now quoted will give the reader a notion of the taste and spirit in which this volume is composed; and yet, if it had not contained something a good deal better, we do not know how we should have been justified in troubling him with any account of it. but the truth is, that mr. wordsworth, with all his perversities, is a person of great powers; and has frequently a force in his moral declamations, and a tenderness in his pathetic narratives, which neither his prolixity nor his affectation can altogether deprive of their effect. * * * * * besides those more extended passages of interest or beauty, which we have quoted, and omitted to quote, there are scattered up and down the book, and in the midst of its most repulsive portions, a very great number of single lines and images, that sparkle like gems in the desart, and startle us with an intimation of the great poetic powers that lie buried in the rubbish that has been heaped around them. it is difficult to pick up these, after we have once passed them by; but we shall endeavour to light upon one or two. the beneficial effect of intervals of relaxation and pastime on youthful minds, is finely expressed, we think, in a single line, when it is said to be-- like vernal ground to sabbath sunshine left. the following image of the bursting forth of a mountain-spring, seems to us also to be conceived with great elegance and beauty. and a few steps may bring us to the spot, where haply crown'd with flowrets and green herbs; the mountain infant to the sun comes forth like human life from darkness.-- the ameliorating effects of song and music on the minds which most delight in them, are likewise very poetically expressed. --and when the stream which overflowed the soul was passed away, a consciousness remained that it had left, deposited upon the silent shore of memory, images and precious thoughts, that shall not die, and cannot be destroyed. nor is any thing more elegant than the representation of the graceful tranquillity occasionally put on by one of the author's favourites; who, though gay and airy, in general-- was graceful, when it pleased him, smooth and still as the mute swan that floats adown the stream, or on the waters of th' unruffled lake anchored her placid beauty. not a leaf that flutters on the bough more light than he, and not a flower that droops in the green shade, more winningly reserved.-- nor are there wanting morsels of a sterner and more majestic beauty; as when, assuming the weightier diction of cowper, he says, in language which the hearts of all readers of modern history must have responded-- --earth is sick, and heaven is weary of the hollow words which states and kingdoms utter when they speak of truth and justice. these examples, we perceive, are not very well chosen--but we have not leisure to improve the selection; and, such as they are, they may serve to give the reader a notion of the sort of merit which we meant to illustrate by their citation.--when we look back to them, indeed, and to the other passages which we have now extracted, we feel half inclined to rescind the severe sentence which we passed on the work at the beginning:--but when we look into the work itself, we perceive that it cannot be rescinded. nobody can be more disposed to do justice to the great powers of mr. wordsworth than we are; and, from the first time that he came before us, down to the present moment, we have uniformly testified in their favour, and assigned indeed our high sense of their value as the chief ground of the bitterness with which we resented their perversion. that perversion, however, is now far more visible than their original dignity; and while we collect the fragments, it is impossible not to lament the ruins from which we are condemned to pick them. if any one should doubt of the existence of such a perversion, or be disposed to dispute about the instances we have hastily brought forward, we would just beg leave to refer him to the general plan and the characters of the poem now before us.--why should mr. wordsworth have made his hero a superannuated pedlar? what but the most wretched and provoking perversity of taste and judgment, could induce any one to place his chosen advocate of wisdom and virtue in so absurd and fantastic a condition? did mr. wordsworth really imagine, that he favourite doctrines were likely to gain any thing in point of effect or authority by being put into the mouth of a person accustomed to higgle about tape, or brass sleeve-buttons? or is it not plain that, independent of the ridicule and disgust which such a personification must give to many of his readers, its adoption exposes his work throughout to the charge of revolting incongruity, and utter disregard of probability or nature? for, after he has thus wilfully debased his moral teacher by a low occupation, is there one word that he puts into his mouth, or one sentiment of which he makes him the organ, that has the most remote reference to that occupation? is there any thing in his learned, abstracted, and logical harangues, that savours of the calling that is ascribed to him? are any of their materials such as a pedlar could possibly have dealt in? are the manners, the diction, the sentiments, in any, the very smallest degree, accommodated to a person in that condition? or are they not eminently and conspicuously such as could not by possibility belong to it? a man who went about selling flannel and pocket-handkerchiefs in this lofty diction, would soon frighten away all his customers; and would infallibly pass either for a madman, or for some learned and affected gentleman, who, in a frolic, had taken up a character which he was peculiarly ill qualified for supporting. the absurdity in this case, we think, is palpable and glaring; but it is exactly of the same nature with that which infects the whole substance of the work--a puerile ambition of singularity engrafted on an unlucky predilection for truisms; and an affected passion for simplicity and humble life, most awkwardly combined with a taste for mystical refinements, and all the gorgeousness of obscure phraseology. his taste for simplicity is evinced, by sprinkling up and down his interminable declamations, a few descriptions of baby-houses, and of old hats with wet brims; and his amiable partiality for humble life, by assuring us, that a wordy rhetorician, who talks about thebes, and allegorizes all the heathen mythology, was once a pedlar--and making him break in upon his magnificent orations with two or three awkward notices of something that he had seen when selling winter raiment about the country--or of the changes in the state of society, which had almost annihilated his former calling. on keats [from _the edinburgh review_, august, ] . _endymion: a poetic romance_. by john keats. vo. pp. . london, . . _lamia, isabella, the eve of st. agnes, and other poems._ by john keats, author of _endymion_. mo. pp. . london, . we had never happened to see either of these volumes till very lately-- and have been exceedingly struck with the genius they display, and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their extravagance. that imitation of our older writers, and especially of our older dramatists, to which we cannot help flattering ourselves that we have somewhat contributed, has brought on, as it were, a second spring in our poetry; --and few of its blossoms are either more profuse of sweetness or richer in promise, than this which is now before us. mr. keats, we understand, is still a very young man; and his whole works, indeed, bear evidence enough of the fact. they are full of extravagance and irregularity, rash attempts at originality, interminable wanderings, and excessive obscurity. they manifestly require, therefore, all the indulgence that can be claimed for a first attempt:--but we think it no less plain that they deserve it; for they are flushed all over with the rich lights of fancy, and so coloured and bestrewn with the flowers of poetry, that even while perplexed and bewildered in their labyrinths, it is impossible to resist the intoxication of their sweetness, or to shut our hearts to the enchantments they so lavishly present. the models upon which he has formed himself, in the endymion, the earliest and by much the most considerable of his poems, are obviously the faithful shepherdess of fletcher, and the sad shepherd of ben jonson;--the exquisite metres and inspired diction of which he has copied with great boldness and fidelity--and, like his great originals, has also contrived to impart to the whole piece that true rural and poetical air which breathes only in them and in theocritus--which is at once homely and majestic, luxurious and rude, and sets before us the genuine sights and sounds and smells of the country, with all the magic and grace of elysium. his subject has the disadvantage of being mythological; and in this respect, as well as on account of the raised and rapturous tone it consequently assumes, his poetry may be better compared perhaps to the comus and the arcades of milton, of which, also, there are many traces of imitation. the great distinction, however, between him and these divine authors, is, that imagination in them is subordinate to reason and judgment, while, with him, it is paramount and supreme--that their ornaments and images are employed to embellish and recommend just sentiments, engaging incidents, and natural characters, while his are poured out without measure or restraint, and with no apparent design but to unburden the breast of the author, and give vent to the overflowing vein of his fancy. the thin and scanty tissue of his story is merely the light framework on which his florid wreaths are suspended; and while his imaginations go rambling and entangling themselves everywhere, like wild honeysuckles, all idea of sober reason, and plan, and consistency, is utterly forgotten, and is "strangled in their waste fertility." a great part of the work, indeed, is written in the strangest and most fantastical manner that can be imagined. it seems as if the author had ventured everything that occurred to him in the shape of a glittering image or striking expression--taken the first word that presented itself to make up a rhyme, and then made that word the germ of a new cluster of images--a hint for a new excursion of the fancy--and so wandered on, equally forgetful whence he came, and heedless whither he was going, till he had covered his pages with an interminable arabesque of connected and incongruous figures, that multiplied as they extended, and were only harmonized by the brightness of their tints, and the graces of their forms. in this rash and headlong career he has of course many lapses and failures. there is no work, accordingly, from which a malicious critic could cull more matter for ridicule, or select more obscure, unnatural, or absurd passages. but we do not take _that_ to be our office;--and just beg leave, on the contrary, to say, that any one who, on this account, would represent the whole poem as despicable, must either have no notion of poetry, or no regard to truth. it is, in truth, at least as full of genius as of absurdity; and he who does not find a great deal in it to admire and to give delight, cannot in his heart see much beauty in the two exquisite dramas to which we have already alluded, or find any great pleasure in some of the finest creations of milton and shakespeare. there are very many such persons, we verily believe, even among the reading and judicious part of the community--correct scholars we have no doubt many of them, and, it may be, very classical composers in prose and in verse--but utterly ignorant of the true genius of english poetry, and incapable of estimating its appropriate and most exquisite beauties. with that spirit we have no hesitation in saying that mr. k. is deeply imbued--and of those beauties he has presented us with many striking examples. we are very much inclined indeed to add, that we do not know any book which we would sooner employ as a test to ascertain whether any one had in him a native relish for poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm. the greater and more distinguished poets of our country have so much else in them to gratify other tastes and propensities, that they are pretty sure to captivate and amuse those to whom their poetry is but an hindrance and obstruction, as well as those to whom it constitutes their chief attraction. the interest of the stories they tell--the vivacity of the characters they delineate--the weight and force of the maxims and sentiments in which they abound--the very pathos and wit and humour they display, which may all and each of them exist apart from their poetry and independent of it, are quite sufficient to account for their popularity, without referring much to that still higher gift, by which they subdue to their enchantments those whose souls are attuned to the finer impulses of poetry. it is only where those other recommendations are wanting, or exist in a weaker degree, that the true force of the attraction, exercised by the pure poetry with which they are so often combined, can be fairly appreciated--where, without much incident or many characters, and with little wit, wisdom, or arrangement, a number of bright pictures are presented to the imagination, and a fine feeling expressed of those mysterious relations by which visible external things are assimilated with inward thoughts and emotions, and become the images and exponents of all passions and affections. to an unpoetical reader such passages always appear mere raving and absurdity--and to this censure a very great part of the volume before us will certainly be exposed, with this class of readers. even in the judgment of a fitter audience, however, it must, we fear, be admitted, that, besides the riot and extravagance of his fancy, the scope and substance of mr. k.'s poetry is rather too dreary and abstracted to excite the strongest interest, or to sustain the attention through a work of any great compass or extent. he deals too much with shadowy and incomprehensible beings, and is too constantly rapt into an extramundane elysium, to command a lasting interest with ordinary mortals--and must employ the agency of more varied and coarser emotions, if he wishes to take rank with the seducing poets of this or of former generations. there is something very curious too, we think, in the way in which he, and mr. barry cornwall also, have dealt with the pagan mythology, of which they have made so much use in their poetry. instead of presenting its imaginary persons under the trite and vulgar traits that belong to them in the ordinary systems, little more is borrowed from these than the general conception of their conditions and relations; and an original character and distinct individuality is bestowed upon them, which has all the merit of invention, and all the grace and attraction of the fictions on which it is engrafted. the antients, though they probably did not stand in any great awe of their deities, have yet abstained very much from any minute or dramatic representation of their feelings and affections. in hesiod and homer, they are coarsely delineated by some of their actions and adventures, and introduced to us merely as the agents in those particular transactions; while in the hymns, from those ascribed to orpheus and homer, down to those of callimachus, we have little but pompous epithets and invocations, with a flattering commemoration of their most famous exploits--and are never allowed to enter into their bosoms, or follow out the train of their feelings, with the presumption of our human sympathy. except the love-song of the cyclops to his sea nymph in theocritus--the lamentation of venus for adonis in moschus--and the more recent legend of apuleius, we scarcely recollect a passage in all the writings of antiquity in which the passions of an immortal are fairly disclosed to the scrutiny and observation of men. the author before us, however, and some of his contemporaries, have dealt differently with the subject;--and, sheltering the violence of the fiction under the ancient traditionary fable, have created and imagined an entire new set of characters, and brought closely and minutely before us the loves and sorrows and perplexities of beings, with whose names and supernatural attributes we had long been familiar, without any sense or feeling of their personal character. we have more than doubts of the fitness of such personages to maintain a permanent interest with the modern public;--but the way in which they are here managed, certainly gives them the best chance that now remains for them; and, at all events, it cannot be denied that the effect is striking and graceful. * * * * * there is a fragment of a projected epic, entitled "hyperion," on the expulsion of saturn and the titanian deities by jupiter and his younger adherents, of which we cannot advise the completion: for, though there are passages of some force and grandeur, it is sufficiently obvious, from the specimen before us, that the subject is too far removed from all the sources of human interest, to be successfully treated by any modern author. mr. keats has unquestionably a very beautiful imagination, and a great familiarity with the finest diction of english poetry; but he must learn not to misuse or misapply these advantages; and neither to waste the good gifts of nature and study on intractable themes, nor to luxuriate too recklessly on such as are more suitable. lord brougham on byron [from _the edinburgh review_, january, ] _hours of idleness: a series of poems, original and translated._ by george gordon, lord byron, a minor. newark, . the poesy of this young lord belongs to the class which neither gods nor men are said to permit. indeed, we do not recollect to have seen a quantity of verse with so few deviations in either direction from that exact standard. his effusions are spread over a dead flat, and can no more get above or below the level, than if they were so much stagnant water. as an extenuation of this offence, the noble author is peculiarly forward in pleading minority. we have it in the title-page, and on the very back of the volume; it follows his name like a favourite part of his _style_. much stress is laid upon it in the preface, and the poems are connected with this general statement of his case, by particular dates, substantiating the age at which each was written. now, the law upon the point of morality, we hold to be perfectly clear. it is a plea available only to the defendant; no plaintiff can offer it as a supplementary ground of action. thus, if any suit could be brought against lord byron, for the purpose of compelling him to put into court a certain quantity of poetry; and if judgment were given against him, it is highly probable that an exception would be taken, were he to deliver _for poetry_, the contents of this volume. to this he might plead _minority;_ but as he now makes voluntary tender of the article, he hath no right to sue, on that ground, for the price is in good current praise, should the goods be unmarketable. this is our view of the law on the point, and we dare to say, so will it be ruled. perhaps, however, in reality, all that he tells us about his youth, is rather with a view to increase our wonder, than to soften our censures. he possibly means to say, "see how a minor can write! this poem was actually composed by a young man of eighteen, and this by one of only sixteen!" but, alas, we all remember the poetry of cowley at ten, and pope at twelve; and so far from hearing, with any surprise, that very poor verses were written by a youth from his leaving school to his leaving college, inclusive, we really believe this to be the most common of all occurrences; that it happens in the life of nine men in ten who are educated in england; and that the tenth man writes better verse than lord byron. his other plea of privilege, our author rather brings forward to wave it. he certainly, however, does allude frequently to his family and ancestors--sometimes in poetry, sometimes in notes; and while giving up his claim on the score of rank, he takes care to remember us of dr. johnson's saying, that when a nobleman appears as an author, his merit should be handsomely acknowledged. in truth, it is this consideration only, that induces us to give lord byron's poems a place in our review, besides our desire to counsel him, that he do forthwith abandon poetry, and turn his talents, which are considerable, and his opportunities, which are great, to better account. with this view, we must beg leave seriously to assure him, that the mere rhyming of the final syllable, even when accompanied by a certain number of feet; nay, although (which does not always happen) those feet should scan regularly, and have been all counted accurately upon the fingers-- is not the whole art of poetry. we would entreat him to believe, that a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, is necessary to constitute a poem; and that a poem in the present day, to be read, must contain at least one thought, either in a little degree different from the ideas of former writers, or differently expressed. we put it to his candour, whether there is anything so deserving the name of poetry in verses like the following, written in , and whether, if a youth of eighteen could say anything so uninteresting to his ancestors, a youth of nineteen should publish it. shades of heroes farewell! your descendant, departing from the seat of his ancestors, bids you, adieu! etc., etc. lord byron should also have a care of attempting what the greatest poets have done before him, for comparisons (as he must have had occasion to see at his writing-master's) are odious. gray's ode on eton college, should really have kept out the ten hobbling stanzas "on a distant view of the village and school of harrow." ... however, be this as it may, we fear his translations and imitations are great favourites with lord byron. we have them of all kinds, from anacreon to ossian; and, viewing them as school exercises, they may pass. only why print them after they have had their day and served their turn?... it is a sort of privilege of poets to be egotists; but they should "use it as not abusing it"; and particularly one who piques himself (though indeed at the ripe age of nineteen) of being "an infant bard"--("the artless helicon i boast is youth";)--should either not know, or not seem to know, so much about his own ancestry. besides a poem on the family seat of the byrons, we have another on the self same subject, introduced with an apology, "he certainly had no intention of inserting it"; but really, "the particular request of some friends," etc., etc. it concludes with five stanzas on himself, "the last and youngest of a noble line." there is a good deal also about his maternal ancestors, in a poem on lachin-y-gair, a mountain where he spent part of his youth, and might have learnt that a _pibroch_ is not a bagpipe, any more than a duet means a fiddle.... but whatever judgment may be passed on the poems of this noble junior, it seems we must take them as we find them, and be content; for they are the last we shall ever have from him. he is at best, he says, but an intruder into the groves of parnassus; he never lived in a garret, like thorough-bred poets; and "though he once roved a careless mountaineer in the highlands of scotland," he has not of late enjoyed this advantage. moreover, he expects no profit from his publication; and whether it succeeds or not, "it is highly improbable, from his situation and pursuits hereafter," that he should again condescend to become an author. therefore, let us take what we can get and be thankful. what right have we poor devils to be nice? we are well off to have got so much from a man of this lord's station, who does not live in a garret, but "has the sway" of newstead abbey. again we say, let us be thankful; and, with honest sancho, bid god bless the giver, nor look the gift horse in the mouth. sydney smith on hannah moore [from _the edinburgh review_, april, ] _caelebs in search of a wife; comprehending observations on domestic habits and manners, religion and morals._ vols. london, . this book is written, or supposed to be written (for we would speak timidly of the mysteries of superior beings), by the celebrated mrs. hannah moore! we shall probably give great offence by such indiscretion; but still we must be excused for treating it as a book merely human,--an uninspired production,--the result of mortality left to itself, and depending on its own limited resources. in taking up the subject in this point of view, we solemnly disclaim the slightest intention of indulging in any indecorous levity, or of wounding the religious feelings of a large class of very respectable persons. it is the only method in which we can possibly make this work a proper object of criticism. we have the strongest possible doubts of the attributes usually ascribed to this authoress; and we think it more simple and manly to say so at once, than to admit nominally superlunary claims, which, in the progress of our remarks, we should virtually deny. caelebs wants a wife; and, after the death of his father, quits his estate in northumberland to see the world, and to seek for one of its best productions, a woman, who may add materially to the happiness of his future life. his first journey is to london, where, in the midst of the gay society of the metropolis, of course, he does not find a wife; and his next journey is to the family of mr. stanley, the head of the methodists, a serious people, where, of course, he does find a wife. the exaltation, therefore, of what the authoress deems to be the religious, and the depretiation of what she considers to be the worldly character, and the influence of both upon matrimonial happiness, form the subject of this novel--rather of this _dramatic sermon_. the machinery upon which the discourse is suspended, is of the slightest and most inartificial texture, bearing every mark of haste, and possessing not the slightest claim to merit. events there are none; and scarcely a character of any interest. the book is intended to convey religious advice; and no more labour appears to have been bestowed upon the story, than was merely sufficient to throw it out of the dry, didactic form. lucilla is totally uninteresting; so is mr. stanley; dr. barlow still worse; and caelebs a mere clod or dolt. sir john and lady belfield are rather more interesting--and for a very obvious reason, they have some faults;--they put us in mind of men and women;--they seem to belong to one common nature with ourselves. as we read, we seem to think we might act as such people act, and therefore we attend; whereas imitation is hopeless in the more perfect characters which mrs. moore has set before us; and therefore, they inspire us with very little interest. there are books however of all kinds; and those may not be unwisely planned which set before us very pure models. they are less probable, and therefore less amusing than ordinary stories; but they are more amusing than plain, unfabled precept. sir charles grandison is less agreeable than tom jones; but it is more agreeable than sherlock and tillotson; and teaches religion and morality to many who would not seek it in the productions of these professional writers. but, making every allowance for the difficulty of the task which mrs. moore has prescribed to herself, the book abounds with marks of negligence and want of skill; with representations of life and manners which are either false or trite. temples to friendship and virtue must be totally laid aside, for many years to come, in novels. mr. lane, of the minerva press, has given them up long since; and we were quite surprised to find such a writer as mrs. moore busied in moral brick and mortar. such an idea, at first, was merely juvenile; the second time a little nauseous; but the ten thousandth time, it is quite intolerable. caelebs, upon his first arrival in london, dines out,--meets with a bad dinner,--supposes the cause of that bad dinner to be the erudition of the ladies of the house,--talks to them upon learned subjects, and finds them as dull and ignorant as if they had piqued themselves upon all the mysteries of housewifery. we humbly submit to mrs. moore, that this is not humorous, but strained and unnatural. philippics against frugivorous children after dinner, are too common. lady melbury has been introduced into every novel for these four years last past. peace to her ashes!... the great object kept in view throughout the whole of this introduction, is the enforcement of religious principle, and the condemnation of a life lavished in dissipation and fashionable amusement. in the pursuit of this object, it appears to us, that mrs. moore is much too severe upon the ordinary amusements of mankind, many of which she does not object to in this, or that degree; but altogether. caelebs and lucilla, her _optimus_ and _optima_, never dance, and never go to the play. they not only stay away from the comedies of congreve and farquhar, for which they may easily enough be forgiven; but they never go to see mrs. siddons in the gamester, or in jane shore. the finest exhibition of talent, and the most beautiful moral lessons, are interdicted, at the theatre. there is something in the word _playhouse_, which seems so closely connected, in the minds of these people, with sin, and satan,-- that it stands in their vocabulary for every species of abomination. and yet why? where is every feeling more roused in favour of virtue, than at a good play? where is goodness so feelingly, so enthusiastically learnt? what so solemn as to see the excellent passions of the human heart called forth by a great actor, animated by a great poet? to hear siddons repeat what shakespeare wrote! to behold the child, and his mother--the noble, and the poor artisan,--the monarch, and his subjects--all ages and all ranks convulsed with one common passion--wrung with one common anguish, and, with loud sobs and cries, doing involuntary homage to the god that made their hearts! what wretched infatuation to interdict such amusements as these! what a blessing that mankind can be allured from sensual gratification, and find relaxation and pleasure in such pursuits! but the excellent mr. stanley is uniformly paltry and narrow, --always trembling at the idea of being entertained, and thinking no christian safe who is not dull. as to the spectacles of impropriety which are sometimes witnessed in parts of the theatre; such reasons apply, in much stronger degree, to not driving along the strand, or any of the great public streets of london, after dark; and if the virtue of well educated young persons is made of such very frail materials, their best resource is a nunnery at once. it is a very bad rule, however, never to quit the house for fear of catching cold. mrs. moore practically extends the same doctrine to cards and assemblies. no cards--because cards are employed in gaming; no assemblies--because many dissipated persons pass their lives in assemblies. carry this but a little further, and we must say,--no wine, because of drunkenness; no meat, because of gluttony; no use, that there may be no abuse! the fact is, that mr. stanley wants not only to be religious, but to be at the head of the religious. these little abstinences are the cockades by which the party are known,--the rallying points for the evangelical faction. so natural is the love of power, that it sometimes becomes the influencing motive with the sincere advocates of that blessed religion, whose very characteristic excellence is the humility which it inculcates. we observe that mrs. moore, in one part of her work, falls into the common error about dress. she first blames ladies for exposing their persons in the present style of dress; and then says, if they knew their own interest,--if they were aware how much more alluring they were to men when their charms are less displayed, they would make the desired alteration from motives merely selfish. "oh! if women in general knew what was their real interest! if they could guess with what a charm even the _appearance_ of modesty invests its possessor, they would dress decorously from mere self-love, if not from principle. the designing would assume modesty as an artifice; the coquet would adopt it as an allurement; the pure as her appropriate attraction; and the voluptuous as the most infallible art of seduction." i. . if there is any truth in this passage, nudity becomes a virtue; and no decent woman, for the future, can be seen in garments. we have a few more of mrs. moore's opinions to notice.--it is not fair to attack the religion of the times, because, in large and indiscriminate parties, religion does not become the subject of conversation. conversation must and ought to grow out of materials on which men can agree, not upon subjects which try the passions. but this good lady wants to see men chatting together upon the pelagian heresy-- to hear, in the afternoon, the theological rumours of the day--and to glean polemical tittle-tattle at a tea-table rout. all the disciples of this school uniformly fall into the same mistake. they are perpetually calling upon their votaries for religious thoughts and religious conversation in every thing; inviting them to ride, walk, row, wrestle, and dine out religiously;--forgetting that the being to whom this impossible purity is recommended, is a being compelled to scramble for his existence and support for ten hours out of the sixteen he is awake; --forgetting that he must dig, beg, read, think, move, pay, receive, praise, scold, command and obey;--forgetting, also, that if men conversed as often upon religious subjects as they do upon the ordinary occurrences of the world, that they would converse upon them with the same familiarity, and want of respect,--that religion would then produce feelings not more solemn or exalted than any other topics which constitute at present the common furniture of human understandings. we are glad to find in this work, some strong compliments to the efficacy of works,--some distinct admissions that it is necessary to be honest and just, before we can be considered as religious. such sort of concessions are very gratifying to us; but how will they be received by the children of the tabernacle? it is quite clear, indeed, throughout the whole of the work, that an apologetical explanation of certain religious opinions is intended; and there is a considerable abatement of that tone of insolence with which the improved christians are apt to treat the bungling specimens of piety to be met with in the more antient churches. so much for the extravagances of this lady.--with equal sincerity, and with greater pleasure, we bear testimony to her talents, her good sense, and her real piety. there occurs every now and then in her productions, very original, and very profound observations. her advice is very often characterised by the most amiable good sense, and conveyed in the most brilliant and inviting style. if, instead of belonging to a trumpery gospel faction, she had only watched over those great points of religion in which the hearts of every sect of christians are interested, she would have been one of the most useful and valuable writers of her day. as it is, every man would wish his wife and his children to read _caelebs_;--watching himself its effects;--separating the piety from the puerility;--and showing that it is very possible to be a good christian, without degrading the human understanding to the trash and folly of methodism. macaulay on southey [from _the edinburgh review_, january, ] southey's "colloquies" _sir thomas more; or, colloquies on the progress and prospects of society_. by robert southey, esq., ll.d., poet laureate. vols. vo. london, . it would be scarcely possible for a man of mr. southey's talents and acquirements to write two volumes so large as those before us, which should be wholly destitute of information and amusement. yet we do not remember to have read with so little satisfaction any equal quantity of matter, written by any man of real abilities. we have, for some time past, observed with great regret the strange infatuation which leads the poet laureate to abandon those departments of literature in which he might excel, and to lecture the public on sciences of which he has still the very alphabet to learn. he has now, we think, done his worst. the subject which he has at last undertaken to treat is one which demands all the highest intellectual and moral qualities of a philosophical statesman, an understanding at once comprehensive and acute, a heart at once upright and charitable. mr. southey brings to the task two faculties which were never, we believe, vouchsafed in measure so copious to any human being, the faculty of believing without a reason, and the faculty of hating without a provocation. it is, indeed, most extraordinary, that a mind like mr. southey's, a mind richly endowed in many respects by nature, and highly cultivated by study, a mind which has exercised considerable influence on the most enlightened generation of the most enlightened people that ever existed, should be utterly destitute of the power of discerning truth from falsehood. yet such is the fact. government is to mr. southey one of the fine arts. he judges of a theory, of a public measure, of a religion or a political party, of a peace or a war, as men judge of a picture or a statue, by the effect produced on his imagination. a chain of associations is to him what a chain of reasoning is to other men; and what he calls his opinions are in fact merely his tastes.... now in the mind of mr. southey reason has no place at all, as either leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. he does not seem to know what an argument is. he never uses arguments himself. he never troubles himself to answer the arguments of his opponents. it has never occurred to him, that a man ought to be able to give some better account of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions than merely that it is his will and pleasure to hold them. it has never occurred to him that there is a difference between assertion and demonstration, that a rumour does not always prove a fact, that a single fact, when proved, is hardly foundation enough for a theory, that two contradictory propositions cannot be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the way to settle it, or that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with something more convincing than "scoundrel" and "blockhead." it would be absurd to read the works of such a writer for political instruction. the utmost that can be expected from any system promulgated by him is that it may be splendid and affecting, that it may suggest sublime and pleasing images. his scheme of philosophy is a mere day-dream, a poetical creation, like the domdaniel cavern, the swerga, or padalon; and indeed it bears no inconsiderable resemblance to those gorgeous visions. like them, it has something of invention, grandeur, and brilliancy. but, like them, it is grotesque and extravagant, and perpetually violates even that conventional probability which is essential to the effect of works of art. the warmest admirers of mr. southey will scarcely, we think, deny that his success has almost always borne an inverse proportion to the degree in which his undertakings have required a logical head. his poems, taken in the mass, stand far higher than his prose works. his official odes, indeed, among which the vision of judgement must be classed, are, for the most part, worse than pye's and as bad as cibber's; nor do we think him generally happy in short pieces. but his longer poems, though full of faults, are nevertheless very extraordinary productions. we doubt greatly whether they will be read fifty years hence; but that, if they are read, they will be admired, we have no doubt whatever.... the extraordinary bitterness of spirit which mr. southey manifests towards his opponents is, no doubt, in a great measure to be attributed to the manner in which he forms his opinions. differences of taste, it has often been remarked, produce greater exasperation than differences on points of science. but this is not all. a peculiar austerity marks almost all mr. southey's judgments of men and actions. we are far from blaming him for fixing on a high standard of morals and for applying that standard to every case. but rigour ought to be accompanied by discernment; and of discernment mr. southey seems to be utterly destitute. his mode of judging is monkish. it is exactly what we should expect from a stern old benedictine, who had been preserved from many ordinary frailties by the restraints of his situation. no man out of a cloister ever wrote about love, for example, so coldly and at the same time so grossly. his descriptions of it are just what we should hear from a recluse who knew the passion only from the details of the confessional. almost all his heroes make love either like seraphim or like cattle. he seems to have no notion of any thing between the platonic passion of the glendoveer who gazes with rapture on his mistress's leprosy, and the brutal appetite of arvalan and roderick. in roderick, indeed, the two characters are united. he is first all clay, and then all spirit. he goes forth a tarquin, and comes back too ethereal to be married. the only love scene, as far as we can recollect, in madoc, consists of the delicate attentions which a savage, who has drunk too much of the prince's excellent metheglin, offers to goervyl. it would be the labour of a week to find, in all the vast mass of mr. southey's poetry, a single passage indicating any sympathy with those feelings which have consecrated the shades of vaucluse and the rocks of meillerie. indeed, if we except some very pleasing images of paternal tenderness and filial duty, there is scarcely any thing soft or humane in mr. southey's poetry. what theologians call the spiritual sins are his cardinal virtues, hatred, pride, and the insatiable thirst of vengeance. these passions he disguises under the name of duties; he purifies them from the alloy of vulgar interests; he ennobles them by uniting them with energy, fortitude, and a severe sanctity of manners; and he then holds them up to the admiration of mankind. this is the spirit of thalaba, of ladurlad, of adosinda, of roderick after his conversion. it is the spirit which, in all his writings, mr. southey appears to affect. "i do well to be angry," seems to be the predominant feeling of his mind. almost the only mark of charity which he vouchsafes to his opponents is to pray for their reformation; and this he does in terms not unlike those in which we can imagine a portuguese priest interceding with heaven for a jew, delivered over to the secular arm after a relapse. we have always heard, and fully believe, that mr. southey is a very amiable and humane man; nor do we intend to apply to him personally any of the remarks which we have made on the spirit of his writings. such are the caprices of human nature. even uncle toby troubled himself very little about the french grenadiers who fell on the glacis of namur. and mr. southey, when he takes up his pen, changes his nature as much as captain shandy, when he girt on his sword. the only opponents to whom the laureate gives quarter are those in whom he finds something of his own character reflected. he seems to have an instinctive antipathy for calm, moderate men, for men who shun extremes, and who render reasons. he treated mr. owen of lanark, for example, with infinitely more respect than he has shown to mr. hallam or to dr. lingard; and this for no reason that we can discover, except that mr. owen is more unreasonably and hopelessly in the wrong than any speculator of our time. mr. southey's political system is just what we might expect from a man who regards politics, not as matter of science, but as matter of taste and feeling. all his schemes of government have been inconsistent with themselves. in his youth he was a republican; yet, as he tells us in his preface to these colloquies, he was even then opposed to the catholic claims. he is now a violent ultra-tory. yet, while he maintains, with vehemence approaching to ferocity, all the sterner and harsher parts of the ultra-tory theory of government, the baser and dirtier part of that theory disgusts him. exclusion, persecution, severe punishments for libellers and demagogues, proscriptions, massacres, civil war, if necessary, rather than any concession to a discontented people; these are the measures which he seems inclined to recommend. a severe and gloomy tyranny, crushing opposition, silencing remonstrance, drilling the minds of the people into unreasoning obedience, has in it something of grandeur which delights his imagination. but there is nothing fine in the shabby tricks and jobs of office; and mr. southey, accordingly, has no toleration for them. when a jacobin, he did not perceive that his system led logically, and would have led practically, to the removal of religious distinctions. he now commits a similar error. he renounces the abject and paltry part of the creed of his party, without perceiving that it is also an essential part of that creed. he would have tyranny and purity together; though the most superficial observation might have shown him that there can be no tyranny without corruption. it is high time, however, that we should proceed to the consideration of the work which is our more immediate subject, and which, indeed, illustrates in almost every page our general remarks on mr. southey's writings. in the preface, we are informed that the author, notwithstanding some statements to the contrary, was always opposed to the catholic claims. we fully believe this; both because we are sure that mr. southey is incapable of publishing a deliberate falsehood, and because his assertion is in itself probable. we should have expected that, even in his wildest paroxysms of democratic enthusiasm, mr. southey would have felt no wish to see a simple remedy applied to a great practical evil. we should have expected that the only measure which all the great statesmen of two generations have agreed with each other in supporting would be the only measure which mr. southey would have agreed with himself in opposing. he has passed from one extreme of political opinion to another, as satan in milton went round the globe, contriving constantly to "ride with darkness." wherever the thickest shadow of the night may at any moment chance to fall, there is mr. southey. it is not every body who could have so dexterously avoided blundering on the daylight in the course of a journey to the antipodes. * * * * * it is not by the intermeddling of mr. southey's idol, the omniscient and omnipotent state, but by the prudence and energy of the people, that england has hitherto been carried forward in civilisation; and it is to the same prudence and the same energy that we now look with comfort and good hope. our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of the state. let the government do this: the people will assuredly do the rest. on croker's "boswell" [from _the edinburgh review_, september, ] _the life of samuel johnson, ll.d. including a journal of a tour to the hebrides, by james boswell, esq. a new edition, with numerous additions and notes._ by john wilson croker, ll.d., f.r.s. vols., vo. london, . this work has greatly disappointed us. whatever faults we may have been prepared to find in it, we fully expected that it would be a valuable addition to english literature; that it would contain many curious facts, and many judicious remarks; that the style of the notes would be neat, clear, and precise; and that the typographical execution would be, as in new editions of classical works it ought to be, almost faultless. we are sorry to be obliged to say that the merits of mr. croker's performance are on a par with those of a certain leg of mutton on which dr. johnson dined, while travelling from london to oxford, and which he, with characteristic energy, pronounced to be "as bad as bad could be, ill fed, ill killed, ill kept, and ill dressed." this edition is ill compiled, ill arranged, ill written, and ill printed. nothing in the work has astonished us so much as the ignorance or carelessness of mr. croker with respect to facts and dates. many of his blunders are such as we should be surprised to hear any well educated gentleman commit, even in conversation. the notes absolutely swarm with misstatements, into which the editor never would have fallen, if he had taken the slightest pains to investigate the truth of his assertions, or if he had even been well acquainted with the book on which he undertook to comment. we will give a few instances-- * * * * * we will not multiply instances of this scandalous inaccuracy. it is clear that a writer who, even when warned by the text on which he is commenting, falls into such mistakes as these, is entitled to no confidence whatever. mr. croker has committed an error of five years with respect to the publication of goldsmith's novel, an error of twelve years with respect to the publication of part of gibbon's history, an error of twenty-one years with respect to an event in johnson's life so important as the taking of the doctoral degree. two of these three errors he has committed, while ostentatiously displaying his own accuracy, and correcting what he represents as the loose assertions of others. how can his readers take on trust his statements concerning the births, marriages, divorces, and deaths of a crowd of people, whose names are scarcely known to this generation? it is not likely that a person who is ignorant of what almost everybody knows can know that of which almost everybody is ignorant. we did not open this book with any wish to find blemishes in it. we have made no curious researches. the work itself, and a very common knowledge of literary and political history, have enabled us to detect the mistakes which we have pointed out, and many other mistakes of the same kind. we must say, and we say it with regret, that we do not consider the authority of mr. croker, unsupported by other evidence, as sufficient to justify any writer who may follow him in relating a single anecdote or in assigning a date to a single event. mr. croker shows almost as much ignorance and heedlessness in his criticisms as in his statements concerning facts. dr. johnson said, very reasonably as it appears to us, that some of the satires of juvenal are too gross for imitation. mr. croker, who, by the way, is angry with johnson for defending prior's tales against the charge of indecency, resents this aspersion on juvenal, and indeed refuses to believe that the doctor can have said anything so absurd. "he probably said--some _passages_ of them--for there are none of juvenal's satires to which the same objection may be made as to one of horace's, that it is _altogether_ gross and licentious."[ ] surely mr. croker can never have read the second and ninth satires of juvenal. [ ] i. . indeed the decisions of this editor on points of classical learning, though pronounced in a very authoritative tone, are generally such that, if a schoolboy under our care were to utter them, our soul assuredly should not spare for his crying. it is no disgrace to a gentleman who has been engaged during near thirty years in political life that he has forgotten his greek and latin. but he becomes justly ridiculous if, when no longer able to construe a plain sentence, he affects to sit in judgment on the most delicate questions of style and metre. from one blunder, a blunder which no good scholar would have made, mr. croker was saved, as he informs us, by sir robert peel, who quoted a passage exactly in point from horace. we heartily wish that sir robert, whose classical attainments are well known, had been more frequently consulted. unhappily he was not always at his friend's elbow; and we have therefore a rich abundance of the strangest errors. boswell has preserved a poor epigram by johnson, inscribed "ad lauram parituram." mr. croker censures the poet for applying the word puella to a lady in laura's situation, and for talking of the beauty of lucina. "lucina," he says, "was never famed for her beauty."[ ] if sir robert peel had seen this note, he probably would have again refuted mr. croker's criticisms by an appeal to horace. in the secular ode, lucina is used as one of the names of diana, and the beauty of diana is extolled by all the most orthodox doctors of the ancient mythology, from homer in his odyssey, to claudian in his rape of proserpine. in another ode, horace describes diana as the goddess who assists the "laborantes utero puellas." but we are ashamed to detain our readers with this fourth-form learning. * * * * * a very large proportion of the two thousand five hundred notes which the editor boasts of having added to those of boswell and malone consists of the flattest and poorest reflections, reflections such as the least intelligent reader is quite competent to make for himself, and such as no intelligent reader would think it worth while to utter aloud. they remind us of nothing so much as of those profound and interesting annotations which are penciled by sempstresses and apothecaries' boys on the dog-eared margins of novels borrowed from circulating libraries; "how beautiful!" "cursed prosy!" "i don't like sir reginald malcolm at all." "i think pelham is a sad dandy." mr. croker is perpetually stopping us in our progress through the most delightful narrative in the language, to observe that really dr. johnson was very rude, that he talked more for victory than for truth, that his taste for port wine with capillaire in it was very odd, that boswell was impertinent, that it was foolish in mrs. thrale to marry the music-master; and so forth. we cannot speak more favourably of the manner in which the notes are written than of the matter of which they consist. we find in every page words used in wrong senses, and constructions which violate the plainest rules of grammar. we have the vulgarism of "mutual friend," for "common friend." we have "fallacy" used as synonymous with "falsehood." we have many such inextricable labyrinths of pronouns as that which follows: "lord erskine was fond of this anecdote; he told it to the editor the first time that he had the honour of being in his company." lastly, we have a plentiful supply of sentences resembling those which we subjoin. "markland, _who_, with jortin and thirlby, johnson calls three contemporaries of great eminence."[ ] "warburton himself did not feel, as mr. boswell was disposed to think he did, kindly or gratefully _of_ johnson."[ ] "it was _him_ that horace walpole called a man who never made a bad figure but as an author."[ ] one or two of these solecisms should perhaps be attributed to the printer, who has certainly done his best to fill both the text and the notes with all sorts of blunders. in truth, he and the editor have between them made the book so bad, that we do not well see how it could have been worse. [ ] iv. . [ ] iv. . [ ] ii. . when we turn from the commentary of mr. croker to the work of our old friend boswell, we find it not only worse printed than in any other edition with which we are acquainted, but mangled in the most wanton manner. much that boswell inserted in his narrative is, without the shadow of a reason, degraded to the appendix. the editor has also taken upon himself to alter or omit passages which he considers as indecorous. this prudery is quite unintelligible to us. there is nothing immoral in boswell's book, nothing which tends to inflame the passions. he sometimes uses plain words. but if this be a taint which requires expurgation, it would be desirable to begin by expurgating the morning and evening lessons. the delicate office which mr. croker has undertaken he has performed in the most capricious manner. one strong, old-fashioned, english word, familiar to all who read their bibles, is changed for a softer synonyme in some passages, and suffered to stand unaltered in others. in one place a faint allusion made by johnson to an indelicate subject, an allusion so faint that, till mr. croker's note pointed it out to us, we had never noticed it, and of which we are quite sure that the meaning would never be discovered by any of those for whose sake books are expurgated, is altogether omitted. in another place, a coarse and stupid jest of dr. taylor on the subject, expressed in the broadest language, almost the only passage, as far as we remember, in all boswell's book, which we should have been inclined to leave out, is suffered to remain. we complain, however, much more of the additions than of the omissions. we have half of mrs. thrale's book, scraps of mr. tyers, scraps of mr. murphy, scraps of mr. cradock, long prosings of sir john hawkins, and connecting observations by mr. croker himself, inserted into the midst of boswell's text. * * * * * the _life of johnson_ is assuredly a great, a very great work. homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, shakspeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators than boswell is the first of biographers. he has no second. he has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere. we are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. he was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not having been alive when the _dunciad_ was written. beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. he was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. he was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. he was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. he exhibited himself, at the shakespeare jubilee, to all the crowd which filled stratford-on-avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription of corsica boswell. in his tour, he proclaimed to all the world that at edinburgh he was known by the appellation of paoli boswell. servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of london, so curious to know everybody who was talked about, that, tory and high churchman as he was, he manoeuvred, we have been told, for an introduction to _tom paine_, so vain of the most childish distinctions, that when he had been to court he drove to the office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and summoned all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and sword; such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be. everything which another man would have hidden, everything the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind. what silly things he said, what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one place he was troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the prayerbook and took a hair of the dog that had bitten him, how he went to see men hanged and came away maudlin, how he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his babies because she was not scared at johnson's ugly face, how he was frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he was at lady cork's one evening and how much his merriment annoyed the ladies, how impertinent he was to the duchess of argyle and with what stately contempt she put down his impertinence, how colonel macleod sneered to his face at his impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries; all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicing. all the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. he has used many people ill; but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself. that such a man should have written one of the best books in the world is strange enough. but this is not all. many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works. goldsmith was very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an inspired idiot, and by another as a being who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor poll. la fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. his blunders would not come in amiss among the stories of hierocles. but these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. if he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. he was a slave, proud of his servitude, a paul pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as tacitus, clarendon, alfieri, and his own idol johnson. of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, boswell had absolutely none. there is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which is not either common-place or absurd. his dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. to say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. they have no pretence to argument, or even to meaning. he has reported innumerable observations made by himself in the course of conversation. of those observations we do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. he has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling. logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. he had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. these qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal. those parts of his book which, considered abstractedly, are most utterly worthless, are delightful when we read them as illustrations of the character of the writer. bad in themselves, they are good dramatically, like the nonsense of justice shallow, the clipped english of dr. caius, or the misplaced consonants of fluellen. of all confessors, boswell is the most candid. * * * * * johnson came among [the distinguished writers of his age] the solitary specimen of a past age, the last survivor of the genuine race of grub street hacks; the last of that generation of authors whose abject misery and whose dissolute manners had furnished inexhaustible matter to the satirical genius of pope. from nature he had received an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution, and an irritable temper. the manner in which the earlier years of his manhood had been passed had given to his demeanour, and even to his moral character, some peculiarities appalling to the civilised beings who were the companions of his old age. the perverse irregularity of his hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion, interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence, and his equally strange voracity, his active benevolence, contrasted with the constant rudeness and the occasional ferocity of his manners in society, made him, in the opinion of those with whom he lived during the last twenty years of his life, a complete original. an original he was, undoubtedly, in some respects. but if we possessed full information concerning those who shared his early hardships, we should probably find that what we call his singularities of manner were, for the most part, failings which he had in common with the class to which he belonged. he ate at streatham park as he had been used to eat behind the screen at st. john's gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged clothes. he ate as it was natural that a man should eat, who, during a great part of his life, had passed the morning in doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. the habits of his early life had accustomed him to bear privation with fortitude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation. he could fast; but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner like a famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead, and the perspiration running down his cheeks. he scarcely ever took wine. but when he drank it, he drank it greedily and in large tumblers. these were, in fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral disease which raged with such deadly malignity in his friends savage and boyse. the roughness and violence which he showed in society were to be expected from a man whose temper, not naturally gentle, had been long tried by the bitterest calamities, by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes, by the importunity of creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, by the derision of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick. through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence and command. it was natural that, in the exercise of his power, he should be "eo immitior, quia toleraverat," that, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanour in society should be harsh and despotic. for severe distress he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but munificent relief. but for the suffering which a harsh word inflicts upon a delicate mind he had no pity; for it was a kind of suffering which he could scarcely conceive. he would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from the streets. he turned his house into a place of refuge for a crowd of wretched old creatures who could find no other asylum; nor could all their peevishness and ingratitude weary out his benevolence. but the pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous; and he scarcely felt sufficient compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection. he had seen and felt so much of sharp misery, that he was not affected by paltry vexations; and he seemed to think that everybody ought to be as much hardened to those vexations as himself. he was angry with boswell for complaining of a head-ache, with mrs. thrale for grumbling about the dust on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. these were, in his phrase, "foppish lamentations," which people ought to be ashamed to utter in a world so full of sin and sorrow. goldsmith crying because the good-natured man had failed, inspired him with no pity. though his own health was not good, he detested and despised valetudinarians. pecuniary losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary, moved him very little. people whose hearts had been softened by prosperity might weep, he said, for such events; but all that could be expected of a plain man was not to laugh. he was not much moved even by the spectacle of lady tavistock dying of a broken heart for the loss of her lord. such grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and the wealthy. a washer-woman, left a widow with nine small children, would not have sobbed herself to death. a person who troubled himself so little about small or sentimental grievances was not likely to be very attentive to the feelings of others in the ordinary intercourse of society. he could not understand how a sarcasm or a reprimand could make any man really unhappy. "my dear doctor," said he to goldsmith, "what harm does it do to a man to call him holofernes?" "pooh, ma'am," he exclaimed to mrs. carter, "who is the worse for being talked of uncharitably?" politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things. johnson was impolite, not because he wanted benevolence, but because small things appeared smaller to him than to people who had never known what it was to live for fourpence halfpenny a day. the characteristic peculiarity of his intellect was the union of great powers with low prejudices. if we judged of him by the best parts of his mind, we should place him almost as high as he was placed by the idolatry of boswell; if by the worst parts of his mind, we should place him even below boswell himself. where he was not under the influence of some strange scruple, or some domineering passion, which prevented him from boldly and fairly investigating a subject, he was a wary and acute reasoner, a little too much inclined to scepticism, and a little too fond of paradox. no man was less likely to be imposed upon by fallacies in argument, or by exaggerated statements of facts. but, if while he was beating down sophisms and exposing false testimony, some childish prejudices, such as would excite laughter in a well managed nursery, came across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment. his mind dwindled away under the spell from gigantic elevation to dwarfish littleness. those who had lately been admiring its amplitude and its force were now as much astonished at its strange narrowness and feebleness as the fisherman in the arabian tale, when he saw the genie, whose stature had overshadowed the whole sea-coast, and whose might seemed equal to a contest with armies, contract himself to the dimensions of his small prison, and lie there the helpless slave of the charm of solomon. * * * * * the characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all our readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it is almost superfluous to point them out. it is well-known that he made less use than any other eminent writer of those strong plain words, anglo-saxon or norman-french, of which the roots lie in the inmost depths of our language; and that he felt a vicious partiality for terms which, long after our own speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the greek and latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalised must be considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank with the king's english. his constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the best of an exquisite, his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed, his big words wasted on little things, his harsh inversions, so widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old writers, all these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers and parodied by his assailants, till the public has become sick of the subject. goldsmith said to him, very wittily, and very justly, "if you were to write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little fishes talk like whales." no man surely ever had so little talent for personation as johnson. whether he wrote in the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style. his speech, like sir piercy shafton's euphuistic eloquence, bewrayed him under every disguise. euphelia and rhodoclea talk as finely as imlac the poet, or seged, emperor of ethiopia. the gay cornelia describes her reception at the country-house of her relations, in such terms as these: "i was surprised, after the civilities of my first reception, to find, instead of the leisure and tranquillity which a rural life always promises, and, if well conducted, might always afford, a confused wildness of care, and a tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which every face was clouded, and every motion agitated." the gentle tranquilla informs us, that she "had not passed the earlier part of life without the flattery of courtship, and the joys of triumph; but had danced the round of gaiety amidst the murmurs of envy and the gratulations of applause, had been attended from pleasure to pleasure by the great, the sprightly, and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited by the obsequiousness of gallantry, the gaiety of wit, and the timidity of love." surely sir john falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats with a worse grace. the reader may well cry out, with honest sir hugh evans, "i like not when a 'oman has a great peard: i spy a great peard under her muffler."[ ] [ ] it is proper to observe that this passage bears a very close resemblance to a passage in the _rambler_ (no. ). the resemblance may possibly be the effect of unconscious plagiarism. we had something more to say. but our article is already too long; and we must close it. we would fain part in good humour from the hero, from the biographer, and even from the editor, who, ill as he has performed his task, has at least this claim to our gratitude, that he has induced us to read boswell's book again. as we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table on which stands the omelet for nugent, and the lemons for johnson. there are assembled those heads which live for ever on the canvas of reynolds. there are the spectacles of burke and the tall thin form of langton, the courtly sneer of beauclerk and the beaming smile of garrick, gibbon tapping his snuff-box and sir joshua with his trumpet in his ear. in the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and paired to the quick. we see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "why, sir!" and the "what then, sir?" and the "no, sir!" and the "you don't see your way through the question, sir!" what a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! to be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion. to receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received from posterity! to be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries! that kind of fame which is commonly the most transient is, in his case, the most durable. the reputation of those writings, which he probably expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the english language is spoken in any quarter of the globe. on w. e. gladstone [from _the edinburgh review_, april, ] _the state in its relations with the church_. by w. e. gladstone, esq., student of christ church, and m.p. for newark. vo. second edition. london, . the author of this volume is a young man of unblemished character, and of distinguished parliamentary talents, the rising hope of those stern and unbending tories who follow, reluctantly and mutinously, a leader whose experience and eloquence are indispensable to them, but whose cautious temper and moderate opinions they abhor. it would not be at all strange if mr. gladstone were one of the most unpopular men in england. but we believe that we do him no more than justice when we say that his abilities and his demeanour have obtained for him the respect and good will of all parties. his first appearance in the character of an author is therefore an interesting event; and it is natural that the gentle wishes of the public should go with him to his trial. we are much pleased, without any reference to the soundness or unsoundness of mr. gladstone's theories, to see a grave and elaborate treatise on an important part of the philosophy of government proceed from the pen of a young man who is rising to eminence in the house of commons. there is little danger that people engaged in the conflicts of active life will be too much addicted to general speculation. the opposite vice is that which most easily besets them. the times and tides of business and debate tarry for no man. a politician must often talk and act before he has thought and read. he may be very ill informed respecting a question; all his notions about it may be vague and inaccurate; but speak he must; and if he is a man of ability, of tact, and of intrepidity, he soon finds that, even under such circumstances, it is possible to speak successfully. he finds that there is a great difference between the effect of written words, which are perused and reperused in the stillness of the closet, and the effect of spoken words which, set off by the graces of utterance and gesture, vibrate for a single moment on the ear. he finds that he may blunder without much chance of being detected, that he may reason sophistically, and escape unrefuted. he finds that, even on knotty questions of trade and legislation, he can, without reading ten pages, or thinking ten minutes, draw forth loud plaudits, and sit down with the credit of having made an excellent speech.... the tendency of institutions like those of england is to encourage readiness in public men, at the expense both of fulness and of exactness. the keenest and most vigorous minds of every generation, minds often admirably fitted for the investigation of truth, are habitually employed in producing arguments such as no man of sense would ever put into a treatise intended for publication, arguments which are just good enough to be used once, when aided by fluent delivery and pointed language. the habit of discussing questions in this way necessarily reacts on the intellects of our ablest men, particularly of those who are introduced into parliament at a very early age, before their minds have expanded to full maturity. the talent for debate is developed in such men to a degree which, to the multitude, seems as marvellous as the performance of an italian _improvisatore._ but they are fortunate indeed if they retain unimpaired the faculties which are required for close reasoning or for enlarged speculation. indeed we should sooner expect a great original work on political science, such a work, for example, as the wealth of nations, from an apothecary in a country town, or from a minister in the hebrides, than from a statesman who, ever since he was one-and-twenty, had been a distinguished debater in the house of commons. we therefore hail with pleasure, though assuredly not with unmixed pleasure, the appearance of this work. that a young politician should, in the intervals afforded by his parliamentary avocations, have constructed and propounded, with much study and mental toil, an original theory on a great problem in politics, is a circumstance which, abstracted from all consideration of the soundness or unsoundness of his opinions, must be considered as highly creditable to him. we certainly cannot wish that mr. gladstone's doctrines may become fashionable among public men. but we heartily wish that his laudable desire to penetrate beneath the surface of questions, and to arrive, by long and intent meditation, at the knowledge of great general laws, were much more fashionable than we at all expect it to become. mr. gladstone seems to us to be, in many respects, exceedingly well qualified for philosophical investigation. his mind is of large grasp; nor is he deficient in dialectical skill. but he does not give his intellect fair play. there is no want of light, but a great want of what bacon would have called dry light. whatever mr. gladstone sees is refracted and distorted by a false medium of passions and prejudices. his style bears a remarkable analogy to his mode of thinking, and indeed exercises great influence on his mode of thinking. his rhetoric, though often good of its kind, darkens and perplexes the logic which it should illustrate. half his acuteness and diligence, with a barren imagination and a scanty vocabulary, would have saved him from almost all his mistakes. he has one gift most dangerous to a speculator, a vast command of a kind of language, grave and majestic, but of vague and uncertain import; of a kind of language which affects us much in the same way in which the lofty diction of the chorus of clouds affected the simple-hearted athenian. [greek: o gae tou phthegmatos, os hieron, kai semnon, kai teratodes.] when propositions have been established, and nothing remains but to amplify and decorate them, this dim magnificence may be in place. but if it is admitted into a demonstration, it is very much worse than absolute nonsense; just as that transparent haze, through which the sailor sees capes and mountains of false sizes and in false bearings, is more dangerous than utter darkness. now, mr. gladstone is fond of employing the phraseology of which we speak in those parts of his works which require the utmost perspicuity and precision of which human language is capable; and in this way he deludes first himself, and then his readers. the foundations of his theory which ought to be buttresses of adamant, are made out of the flimsy materials which are fit only for perorations. this fault is one which no subsequent care or industry can correct. the more strictly mr. gladstone reasons on his premises, the more absurd are the conclusions which he brings out; and, when at last his good sense and good nature recoil from the horrible practical inferences to which this theory leads, he is reduced sometimes to take refuge in arguments inconsistent with his fundamental doctrines, and sometimes to escape from the legitimate consequences of his false principles, under cover of equally false history. it would be unjust not to say that this book, though not a good book, shows more talent than many good books. it abounds with eloquent and ingenious passages. it bears the signs of much patient thought. it is written throughout with excellent taste and excellent temper; nor does it, so far as we have observed, contain one expression unworthy of a gentleman, a scholar, or a christian. but the doctrines which are put forth in it appear to us, after full and calm consideration, to be false, to be in the highest degree pernicious, and to be such as, if followed out in practice to their legitimate consequences, would inevitably produce the dissolution of society; and for this opinion we shall proceed to give our reasons with that freedom which the importance of the subject requires, and which mr. gladstone, both by precept and by example, invites us to use, but, we hope, without rudeness, and, we are sure, without malevolence. before we enter on an examination of this theory, we wish to guard ourselves against one misconception. it is possible that some persons who have read mr. gladstone's book carelessly, and others who have merely heard in conversation, or seen in a newspaper, that the member for newark has written in defence of the church of england against the supporters of the voluntary system, may imagine that we are writing in defence of the voluntary system, and that we desire the abolition of the established church. this is not the case. it would be as unjust to accuse us of attacking the church, because we attack mr. gladstone's doctrines, as it would be to accuse locke of wishing for anarchy, because he refuted filmer's patriarchal theory of government, or to accuse blackstone of recommending the confiscation of ecclesiastical property, because he denied that the right of the rector to tithe was derived from the levitical law. it is to be observed, that mr. gladstone rests his case on entirely new grounds, and does not differ more widely from us than from some of those who have hitherto been considered as the most illustrious champions of the church. he is not content with the ecclesiastical polity, and rejoices that the latter part of that celebrated work "does not carry with it the weight of hooker's plenary authority." he is not content with bishop warburton's alliance of church and state. "the propositions of that work generally," he says, "are to be received with qualification"; and he agrees with bolingbroke in thinking that warburton's whole theory rests on a fiction. he is still less satisfied with paley's defence of the church, which he pronounces to be "tainted by the original vice of false ethical principles," and "full of the seeds of evil." he conceives that dr. chalmers has taken a partial view of the subject, and "put forth much questionable matter." in truth, on almost every point on which we are opposed to mr. gladstone, we have on our side the authority of some divine, eminent as a defender of existing establishments. mr. gladstone's whole theory rests on this great fundamental proposition, that the propagation of religious truth is one of the principal ends of government, as government. if mr. gladstone has not proved this proposition, his system vanishes at once. we are desirous, before we enter on the discussion of this important question, to point out clearly a distinction which, though very obvious, seems to be overlooked by many excellent people. in their opinion, to say that the ends of government are temporal and not spiritual is tantamount to saying that the temporal welfare of man is of more importance than his spiritual welfare. but this is an entire mistake. the question is not whether spiritual interests be or be not superior in importance to temporal interests; but whether the machinery which happens at any moment to be employed for the purpose of protecting certain temporal interests of a society be necessarily such a machinery as is fitted to promote the spiritual interests of that society. without a division of labour the world could not go on. it is of very much more importance that men should have food than that they should have pianofortes. yet it by no means follows that every pianoforte-maker ought to add the business of a baker to his own; for, if he did so, we should have both much worse music and much worse bread. it is of much more importance that the knowledge of religious truth should be wisely diffused than that the art of sculpture should flourish among us. yet it by no means follows that the royal academy ought to unite with its present functions those of the society for promoting christian knowledge, to distribute theological tracts, to send forth missionaries, to turn out nollekens for being a catholic, bacon for being a methodist, and flaxman for being a swedenborgian. for the effect of such folly would be that we should have the worst possible academy of arts, and the worst possible society for the promotion of christian knowledge. the community, it is plain, would be thrown into universal confusion, if it were supposed to be the duty of every association which is formed for one good object to promote every other good object. as to some of the ends of civil government, all people are agreed. that it is designed to protect our persons and our property; that it is designed to compel us to satisfy our wants, not by rapine, but by industry; that it is designed to compel us to decide our differences, not by the strong hand, but by arbitration; that it is designed to direct our whole force, as that of one man, against any other society which may offer us injury; these are propositions which will hardly be disputed. now these are matters in which man, without any reference to any higher being, or to any future state, is very deeply interested. every human being, be he idolater, mahometan, jew, papist, socinian, deist, or atheist, naturally loves life, shrinks from pain, desires comforts which can be enjoyed only in communities where property is secure. to be murdered, to be tortured, to be robbed, to be sold into slavery, these are evidently evils from which men of every religion, and men of no religion, wish to be protected; and therefore it will hardly be disputed that men of every religion, and of no religion, have thus far a common interest in being well governed. but the hopes and fears of man are not limited to this short life and to this visible world. he finds himself surrounded by the signs of a power and wisdom higher than his own; and, in all ages and nations, men of all orders of intellect, from bacon and newton, down to the rudest tribes of cannibals, have believed in the existence of some superior mind. thus far the voice of mankind is almost unanimous. but whether there be one god, or many, what may be god's natural and what his mortal attributes, in what relation his creatures stand to him, whether he have ever disclosed himself to us by any other revelation than that which is written in all the parts of the glorious and well ordered world which he has made, whether his revelation be contained in any permanent record, how that record should be interpreted, and whether it have pleased him to appoint any unerring interpreter on earth, these are questions respecting which there exists the widest diversity of opinion, and respecting some of which a large part of our race has, ever since the dawn of regular history, been deplorably in error. now here are two great objects: one is the protection of the persons and estates of citizens from injury; the other is the propagation of religious truth. no two objects more entirely distinct can well be imagined. the former belongs wholly to the visible and tangible world in which we live; the latter belongs to that higher world which is beyond the reach of our senses. the former belongs to this life; the latter to that which is to come. men who are perfectly agreed as to the importance of the former object, and as to the way of obtaining it, differ as widely as possible respecting the latter object. we must, therefore, pause before we admit that the persons, be they who they may, who are trusted with power for promotion of the former object, ought always to use that power for the promotion of the latter object. * * * * * the truth is, that mr. gladstone has fallen into an error very common among men of less talents than his own. it is not unusual for a person who is eager to prove a particular proposition to assume a _major_ of huge extent, which includes that particular proposition, without ever reflecting that it includes a great deal more. the fatal facility with which mr. gladstone multiplies expressions stately and sonorous, but of indeterminate meaning, eminently qualifies him to practise this sleight on himself and on his readers. he lays down broad general doctrines about power, when the only power of which he is thinking is the power of governments, and about conjoint action when the only conjoint action of which he is thinking is the conjoint action of citizens in a state. he first resolves on his conclusion. he then makes a _major_ of most comprehensive dimensions, and having satisfied himself that it contains his conclusion, never troubles himself about what else it may contain: and as soon as we examine it we find that it contains an infinite number of conclusions, every one of which is a monstrous absurdity. it is perfectly true that it would be a very good thing if all the members of all the associations in the world were men of sound religious views. we have no doubt that a good christian will be under the guidance of christian principles, in his conduct as director of a canal company or steward of a charity dinner. if he were, to recur to a case which we have before put, a member of a stage-coach company, he would, in that capacity, remember that "a righteous man regardeth the life of his beast." but it does not follow that every association of men must, therefore, as such association, profess a religion. it is evident that many great and useful objects can be attained in this world only by co-operation. it is equally evident that there cannot be efficient co-operation, if men proceed on the principle that they must not co-operate for one object unless they agree about other objects. nothing seems to us more beautiful or admirable in our social system than the facility with which thousands of people, who perhaps agree only on a single point, can combine their energies for the purpose of carrying that single point. we see daily instances of this. two men, one of them obstinately prejudiced against missions, the other president of a missionary society, sit together at the board of a hospital, and heartily concur in measures for the health and comfort of the patients. two men, one of whom is a zealous supporter and the other a zealous opponent of the system pursued in lancaster's schools, meet at the mendicity society, and act together with the utmost cordiality. the general rule we take to be undoubtedly this, that it is lawful and expedient for men to unite in an association for the promotion of a good object, though they may differ with respect to other objects of still higher importance. * * * * * if, indeed, the magistrate would content himself with laying his opinions and reasons before the people, and would leave the people, uncorrupted by hope or fear, to judge for themselves, we should see little reason to apprehend that his interference in favour of error would be seriously prejudicial to the interests of truth. nor do we, as will hereafter be seen, object to his taking this course, when it is compatible with the efficient discharge of his more especial duties. but this will not satisfy mr. gladstone. he would have the magistrate resort to means which have a great tendency to make malcontents, to make hypocrites, to make careless nominal conformists, but no tendency whatever to produce honest and rational conviction. it seems to us quite clear that an inquirer who has no wish except to know the truth is more likely to arrive at the truth than an inquirer who knows that, if he decides one way, he shall be rewarded, and that, if he decides the other way, he shall be punished. now, mr. gladstone would have governments propagate their opinions by excluding all dissenters from all civil offices. that is to say, he would have governments propagate their opinions by a process which has no reference whatever to the truth or falsehood of those opinions, by arbitrarily uniting certain worldly advantages with one set of doctrines, and certain worldly inconveniences with another set. it is of the very nature of argument to serve the interests of truth; but if rewards and punishments serve the interests of truth, it is by mere accident. it is very much easier to find arguments for the divine authority of the gospel than for the divine authority of the koran. but it is just as easy to bribe or rack a jew into mahometanism as into christianity. from racks, indeed, and from all penalties directed against the persons, the property, and the liberty of heretics, the humane spirit of mr. gladstone shrinks with horror. he only maintains that conformity to the religion of the state ought to be an indispensable qualification for office; and he would, unless we have greatly misunderstood him, think it his duty, if he had the power, to revive the test act, to enforce it rigorously, and to extend it to important classes who were formerly exempt from its operation. this is indeed a legitimate consequence of his principles. but why stop here? why not roast dissenters at slow fires? all the general reasonings on which this theory rests evidently leads to sanguinary persecution. if the propagation of religious truth be a principal end of government, as government; if it be the duty of government to employ for that end its constitutional power; if the constitutional power of governments extends, as it most unquestionably does, to the making of laws for the burning of heretics; if burning be, as it most assuredly is, in many cases, a most effectual mode of suppressing opinions; why should we not burn? if the relation in which government ought to stand to the people be, as mr. gladstone tells us, a paternal relation, we are irresistibly led to the conclusion that persecution is justifiable. for the right of propagating opinions by punishment is one which belongs to parents as clearly as the right to give instruction. a boy is compelled to attend family worship: he is forbidden to read irreligious books: if he will not learn his catechism, he is sent to bed without his supper: if he plays truant at church-time a task is set him. if he should display the precocity of his talents by expressing impious opinions before his brothers and sisters, we should not much blame his father for cutting short the controversy with a horse-whip. all the reasons which lead us to think that parents are peculiarly fitted to conduct the education of their children, and that education is the principal end of a parental relation, lead us also to think that parents ought to be allowed to use punishment, if necessary, for the purpose of forcing children, who are incapable of judging for themselves, to receive religious instruction and to attend religious worship. why, then, is this prerogative of punishment, so eminently paternal, to be withheld from a paternal government? it seems to us, also, to be the height of absurdity to employ civil disabilities for the propagation of an opinion, and then to shrink from employing other punishments for the same purpose. for nothing can be clearer than that, if you punish at all, you ought to punish enough. the pain caused by punishment is pure unmixed evil, and never ought to be inflicted, except for the sake of some good. it is mere foolish cruelty to provide penalties which torment the criminal without preventing the crime. now it is possible, by sanguinary persecution unrelentingly inflicted, to suppress opinions. in this way the albigenses were put down. in this way the lollards were put down. in this way the fair promise of the reformation was blighted in italy and spain. but we may safely defy mr. gladstone to point out a single instance in which the system which he recommends has succeeded. * * * * * but we must proceed in our examination of his theory. having, as he conceives, proved that it is the duty of every government to profess some religion or other, right or wrong, and to establish that religion, he then comes to the question what religion a government ought to prefer; and he decides this question in favour of the form of christianity established in england. the church of england is, according to him, the pure catholic church of christ, which possesses the apostolical succession of ministers, and within whose pale is to be found that unity which is essential to truth. for her decisions he claims a degree of reverence far beyond what she has ever, in any of her formularies, claimed for herself; far beyond what the moderate school of bossuet demands for the pope; and scarcely short of what that school would ascribe to pope and general council together. to separate from her communion is schism. to reject her traditions or interpretations of scripture is sinful presumption. mr. gladstone pronounces the right of private judgment, as it is generally understood throughout protestant europe, to be a monstrous abuse. he declares himself favourable, indeed, to the exercise of private judgment, after a fashion of his own. we have, according to him, a right to judge all the doctrines of the church of england to be sound, but not to judge any of them to be unsound. he has no objection, he assures us, to active inquiry into religious questions. on the contrary, he thinks such inquiry highly desirable, as long as it does not lead to diversity of opinion; which is much the same thing as if he were to recommend the use of fire that will not burn down houses, or of brandy that will not make men drunk. he conceives it to be perfectly possible for mankind to exercise their intellects vigorously and freely on theological subjects, and yet to come to exactly the same conclusions with each other and with the church of england. and for this opinion he gives, as far as we have been able to discover, no reason whatever, except that everybody who vigorously and freely exercises his understanding on euclid's theorems assents to them. "the activity of private judgment," he truly observes, "and the unity and strength of conviction in mathematics vary directly as each other." on this unquestionable fact he constructs a somewhat questionable argument. everybody who freely inquires agrees, he says, with euclid. but the church is as much in the right as euclid. why, then, should not every free inquirer agree with the church? we could put many similar questions. either the affirmative or the negative of the proposition that king charles wrote the _icon basilike_ is as true as that two sides of a triangle are greater than the third side. why, then, do dr. wordsworth and mr. hallam agree in thinking two sides of a triangle greater than the third side, and yet differ about the genuineness of the _icon basilike?_ the state of the exact sciences proves, says mr. gladstone, that, as respects religion, "the association of these two ideas, activity of inquiry, and variety of conclusion, is a fallacious one." we might just as well turn the argument the other way, and infer from the variety of religious opinions that there must necessarily be hostile mathematical sects, some affirming, and some denying, that the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the squares of the sides. but we do not think either the one analogy or the other of the smallest value. our way of ascertaining the tendency of free inquiry is simply to open our eyes and look at the world in which we live; and there we see that free inquiry on mathematical subjects produces unity, and that free inquiry on moral subjects produces discrepancy. there would undoubtedly be less discrepancy if inquirers were more diligent and candid. but discrepancy there will be among the most diligent and candid, as long as the constitution of the human mind, and the nature of moral evidence, continue unchanged. that we have not freedom and unity together is a very sad thing; and so it is that we have not wings. but we are just as likely to see the one defect removed as the other. it is not only in religion that this discrepancy is found. it is the same with all matters which depend on moral evidence, with judicial questions, for example, and with political questions. all the judges will work a sum in the rule of three on the same principle, and bring out the same conclusion. but it does not follow that, however honest and laborious they may be, they will all be of one mind on the douglas case. so it is vain to hope that there may be a free constitution under which every representative will be unanimously elected, and every law unanimously passed; and it would be ridiculous for a statesman to stand wondering and bemoaning himself because people who agree in thinking that two and two make four cannot agree about the new poor law, or the administration of canada. there are two intelligible and consistent courses which may be followed with respect to the exercise of private judgment; the course of the romanist, who interdicts private judgment because of its inevitable inconveniences; and the course of the protestant, who permits private judgment in spite of its inevitable inconveniences. both are more reasonable than mr. gladstone, who would have private judgment without its inevitable inconveniences. the romanist produces repose by means of stupefaction. the protestant encourages activity, though he knows that where there is much activity there will be some aberration. mr. gladstone wishes for the unity of the fifteenth century with the active and searching spirit of the sixteenth. he might as well wish to be in two places at once. * * * * * we have done; and nothing remains but that we part from mr. gladstone with the courtesy of antagonists who bear no malice. we dissent from his opinions, but we admire his talents; we respect his integrity and benevolence; and we hope that he will not suffer political avocations so entirely to engross him, as to leave him no leisure for literature and philosophy. on madame d'arblay [from _the edinburgh review_, january, ] art. ix.--_diary and letters of madame d'arblay_. vols. vo. london, . though the world saw and heard little of madame d'arblay during the last forty years of her life, and though that little did not add to her fame, there were thousands, we believe, who felt a singular emotion when they learned that she was no longer among us. the news of her death carried the minds of men back at one leap, clear over two generations, to the time when her first literary triumphs were won. all those whom we have been accustomed to revere as intellectual patriarchs, seemed children when compared with her; for burke had sate up all night to read her writings, and johnson had pronounced her superior to fielding, when rogers was still a schoolboy, and southey still in petticoats. yet more strange did it seem that we should just have lost one whose name had been widely celebrated before any body had heard of some illustrious men who, twenty, thirty, or forty years ago, were, after a long and splendid career, borne with honour to the grave. yet so it was. frances burney was at the height of fame and popularity before cowper had published his first volume, before person had gone up to college, before pitt had taken his seat in the house of commons, before the voice of erskine had been once heard in westminster hall. since the appearance of her first work, sixty-two years had passed; and this interval had been crowded, not only with political, but also with intellectual revolutions. thousands of reputations had, during that period, sprung up, bloomed, withered, and disappeared. new kinds of composition had come into fashion, had gone out of fashion, had been derided, had been forgotten. the fooleries of della crusca, and the fooleries of kotzebue, had for a time bewitched the multitude, but had left no trace behind them; nor had misdirected genius been able to save from decay the once flourishing school of godwin, of darwin, and of radcliffe. many books, written for temporary effect, had run through six or seven editions, and had then been gathered to the novels of afra behn, and the epic poems of sir richard blackmore. yet the early works of madame d'arblay, in spite of the lapse of years, in spite of the change of manners, in spite of the popularity deservedly obtained by some of her rivals, continued to hold a high place in the public esteem. she lived to be a classic. time set on her fame, before she went hence, that seal which is seldom set except on the fame of the departed. like sir condy rackrent in the tale, she survived her own wake, and overheard the judgment of posterity. having always felt a warm and sincere, though not a blind admiration for her talents, we rejoiced to learn that her diary was about to be made public. our hopes, it is true, were not unmixed with fears. we could not forget the fate of the memoirs of dr. burney, which were published ten years ago. the unfortunate book contained much that was curious and interesting. yet it was received with a cry of disgust, and was speedily consigned to oblivion. the truth is, that it deserved its doom. it was written in madame d'arblay's later style--the worst style that has ever been known among men. no genius, no information, could have saved from proscription a book so written. we, therefore, open the diary with no small anxiety, trembling lest we should light upon some of that peculiar rhetoric which deforms almost every page of the memoirs, and which it is impossible to read without a sensation made up of mirth, shame and loathing. we soon, however, discovered to our great delight that this diary was kept before madame d'arblay became eloquent. it is, for the most part, written in her earliest and best manner; in true woman's english, clear, natural, and lively. the two works are lying side by side before us, and we never turn from the memoirs to the diary without a sense of relief. the difference is as great as the difference between the atmosphere of a perfumer's shop, fetid with lavender water and jasmine soap, and the air of a heath on a fine morning in may. both works ought to be consulted by every person who wishes to be well acquainted with the history of our literature and our manners. but to read the diary is a pleasure; to read the memoirs will always be a task. * * * * * the progress of the mind of frances burney, from her ninth to her twenty-fifth year, well deserves to be recorded. when her education had proceeded no further than the horn-book, she lost her mother, and thenceforward she educated herself. her father appears to have been as bad a father as a very honest, affectionate, and sweet-tempered man can well be. he loved his daughter dearly; but it never seems to have occurred to him that a parent has other duties to perform to children than that of fondling them. it would indeed have been impossible for him to superintend their education himself. his professional engagements occupied him all day. at seven in the morning he began to attend his pupils, and, when london was full, was sometimes employed in teaching till eleven at night. he was often forced to carry in his pocket a tin box of sandwiches, and a bottle of wine and water, on which he dined in a hackney-coach while hurrying from one scholar to another. two of his daughters he sent to a seminary at paris; but he imagined that frances would run some risk of being perverted from the protestant faith if she were educated in a catholic country, and he therefore kept her at home. no governess, no teacher of any art or of any language, was provided for her. but one of her sisters showed her how to write; and, before she was fourteen, she began to find pleasure in reading. it was not, however, by reading that her intellect was formed. indeed, when her best novels were produced, her knowledge of books was very small. when at the height of her fame, she was unacquainted with the most celebrated works of voltaire and molière; and, what seems still more extraordinary, had never heard or seen a line of churchill, who, when she was a girl, was the most popular of living poets. it is particularly deserving of observation, that she appears to have been by no means a novel-reader. her father's library was large; and he had admitted into it so many books which rigid moralists generally exclude, that he felt uneasy, as he afterwards owned, when johnson began to examine the shelves. but in the whole collection there was only a single novel, fielding's amelia. an education, however, which to most girls would have been useless, but which suited fanny's mind better than elaborate culture, was in constant progress during her passage from childhood to womanhood. the great book of human nature was turned over before her. her father's social position was very peculiar. he belonged in fortune and station to the middle class. his daughters seem to have been suffered to mix freely with those whom butlers and waiting-maids call vulgar. we are told that they were in the habit of playing with the children of a wig-maker who lived in the adjoining house. yet few nobles could assemble in the most stately mansions of grosvenor square or st. james's square, a society so various and so brilliant as was sometimes to be found in dr. burney's cabin. his mind, though not very powerful or capacious, was restlessly active; and, in the intervals of his professional pursuits, he had contrived to lay up much miscellaneous information. his attainments, the suavity of his temper, and the gentle simplicity of his manners, had obtained for him ready admission to the first literary circles. while he was still at lynn, he had won johnson's heart by sounding with honest zeal the praises of the english dictionary. in london the two friends met frequently, and agreed most harmoniously. one tie, indeed, was wanting to their mutual attachment. burney loved his own art passionately; and johnson just knew the bell of st. clement's church from the organ. they had, however, many topics in common; and on winter nights their conversations were sometimes prolonged till the fire had gone out, and the candles had burned away to the wicks. burney's admiration of the powers which had produced rasselas and the rambler, bordered on idolatry. he gave a singular proof of this at his first visit to johnson's ill-furnished garret. the master of the apartment was not at home. the enthusiastic visitor looked about for some relique which he might carry away; but he could see nothing lighter than the chairs and the fire-irons. at last he discovered an old broom, tore some bristles from the stump, wrapped them in silver paper, and departed as happy as louis ix when the holy nail of st. denis was found. johnson, on the other hand, condescended to growl out that burney was an honest fellow, a man whom it was impossible not to like. garrick, too, was a frequent visitor in poland street and st. martin's lane. that wonderful actor loved the society of children, partly from good-nature, and partly from vanity. the ecstasies of mirth and terror which his gestures and play of countenance never failed to produce in a nursery, flattered him quite as much as the applause of mature critics. he often exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in st. lukes', and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney-sweeper, or an old woman, and made them laugh till the tears ran down their cheeks. but it would be tedious to recount the names of all the men of letters and artists whom frances burney had an opportunity of seeing and hearing. colman, twining, harris, baretti, hawkesworth, reynolds, barry, were among those who occasionally surrounded the tea-table and supper-tray at her father's modest dwelling. this was not all. the distinction which dr. burney had acquired as a musician, and as the historian of music, attracted to his house the most eminent musical performers of that age. the greatest italian singers who visited england regarded him as the dispenser of fame in their art, and exerted themselves to obtain his suffrage. pachierotti became his intimate friend. the rapacious agujari, who sang for nobody else under fifty pounds an air, sang her best for dr. burney without a fee; and in the company of dr. burney even the haughty and eccentric gabrielli constrained herself to behave with civility. it was thus in his power to give, with scarcely any expense, concerts equal to those of the aristocracy. on such occasions the quiet street in which he lived was blocked up by coroneted chariots, and his little drawing-room was crowded with peers, peeresses, ministers, and ambassadors. on one evening, of which we happen to have a full account, there were present lord mulgrave, lord bruce, lord and lady edgecumbe, lord barrington from the war-office, lord sandwich from the admiralty, lord ashburnham, with his gold key dangling from his pocket, and the french ambassador, m. de guignes, renowned for his fine person and for his success in gallantry. but the great show of the night was the russian ambassador, count orloff, whose gigantic figure was all in a blaze with jewels, and in whose demeanour the untamed ferocity of the scythian might be discerned through a thin varnish of french politeness. as he stalked about the small parlour, brushing the ceiling with his toupee, the girls whispered to each other, with mingled admiration and horror, that he was the favoured lover of his august mistress; that he had borne the chief part in the revolution to which she owed her throne; and that his huge hands, now glittering with diamond rings, had given the last squeeze to the windpipe of her unfortunate husband. with such illustrious guests as these were mingled all the most remarkable specimens of the race of lions--a kind of game which is hunted in london every spring with more than meltonian ardour and perseverance. bruce, who had washed down steaks cut from living oxen with water from the fountains of the nile, came to swagger and talk about his travels. omai lisped broken english, and made all the assembled musicians hold their ears by howling otaheitean love-songs, such as those with which oberea charmed her opano. with the literary and fashionable society which occasionally met under dr. burney's roof, frances can scarcely be said to have mingled. she was not a musician, and could therefore bear no part in the concerts. she was shy almost to awkwardness, and scarcely ever joined in the conversation. the slightest remark from a stranger disconcerted her; and even the old friends of her father who tried to draw her out could seldom extract more than a yes or a no. her figure was small, her face not distinguished by beauty. she was therefore suffered to withdraw quietly to the background, and, unobserved herself, to observe all that passed. her nearest relations were aware that she had good sense, but seem not to have suspected, that under her demure and bashful deportment were concealed a fertile invention and a keen sense of the ridiculous. she had not, it is true, an eye for the fine shades of character. but every marked peculiarity instantly caught her notice and remained engraven on her imagination. thus, while still a girl, she had laid up such a store of materials for fiction as few of those who mix much in the world are able to accumulate during a long life. she had watched and listened to people of every class, from princes and great officers of state down to artists living in garrets, and poets familiar with subterranean cook-shops. hundreds of remarkable persons had passed in review before her, english, french, german, italian, lords and fiddlers, deans of cathedrals and managers of theatres, travellers leading about newly caught savages, and singing women escorted by deputy-husbands. so strong was the impression made on the mind of frances by the society which she was in the habit of seeing and hearing, that she began to write little fictitious narratives as soon as she could use her pen with ease, which, as we have said, was not very early. her sisters were amused by her stories. but dr. burney knew nothing of their existence; and in another quarter her literary propensities met with serious discouragement. when she was fifteen, her father took a second wife. the new mrs. burney soon found out that her daughter-in-law was fond of scribbling, and delivered several good-natured lectures on the subject. the advice no doubt was well-meant, and might have been given by the most judicious friend; for at that time, from causes to which we may hereafter advert, nothing could be more disadvantageous to a young lady than to be known as a novel-writer. frances yielded, relinquished her favourite pursuit, and made a bonfire of all her manuscripts.[ ] [ ] there is some difficulty here as to the chronology. "this sacrifice," says the editor of the diary, "was made in the young authoress's fifteenth year." this could not be; for the sacrifice was the effect, according to the editor's own showing, of the remonstrances of the second mrs. burney; and frances was in her sixteenth year when her father's second marriage took place. she now hemmed and stitched from breakfast to dinner with scrupulous regularity. but the dinners of that time were early; and the afternoon was her own. though she had given up novel-writing, she was still fond of using her pen. she began to keep a diary, and she corresponded largely with a person who seems to have had the chief share in the formation of her mind. this was samuel crisp, an old friend of her father. his name, well known, near a century ago, in the most splendid circles of london, has long been forgotten. crisp was an old and very intimate friend of the burneys. to them alone was confided the name of the desolate old hall in which he hid himself like a wild beast in a den. for them were reserved such remains of his humanity as had survived the failure of his play. frances burney he regarded as his daughter. he called her his fannikin, and she in return called him her dear daddy. in truth, he seems to have done much more than her real father for the development of her intellect; for though he was a bad poet, he was a scholar, a thinker, and an excellent counsellor. he was particularly fond of dr. burney's concerts. they had, indeed, been commenced at his suggestion, and when he visited london he constantly attended them. but when he grew old, and when gout, brought on partly by mental irritation, confined him to his retreat, he was desirous of having a glimpse of that gay and brilliant world from which he was exiled, and he pressed fannikin to send him full accounts of her father's evening parties. a few of her letters to him have been published; and it is impossible to read them without discerning in them all the powers which afterwards produced evelina and cecilia, the quickness in catching every odd peculiarity of character and manner, the skill in grouping, the humour, often richly comic, sometimes even farcical. fanny's propensity to novel-writing had for a time been kept down. it now rose up stronger than ever. the heroes and heroines of the tales which had perished in the flames, were still present to the eye of her mind. one favourite story, in particular, haunted her imagination. it was about a certain caroline evelyn, a beautiful damsel who made an unfortunate love match, and died, leaving an infant daughter. frances began to imagine to herself the various scenes, tragic and comic, through which the poor motherless girl, highly connected on one side, meanly connected on the other, might have to pass. a crowd of unreal beings, good and bad, grave and ludicrous, surrounded the pretty, timid, young orphan; a coarse sea-captain; an ugly insolent fop, blazing in a superb court-dress; another fop, as ugly and as insolent, but lodged on snow hill, and tricked out in second-hand finery for the hampstead ball; an old woman, all wrinkles and rouge, flirting her fan with the air of a miss of seventeen, and screaming in a dialect made up of vulgar french and vulgar english; a poet lean and ragged, with a broad scotch accent. by degrees these shadows acquired stronger and stronger consistence: the impulse which urged frances to write became irresistible; and the result was the history of evelina. then came, naturally enough, a wish, mingled with many fears, to appear before the public; for, timid as frances was, and bashful, and altogether unaccustomed to hear her own praises, it is clear that she wanted neither a strong passion for distinction, nor a just confidence in her own powers. her scheme was to become, if possible, a candidate for fame without running any risk of disgrace. she had no money to bear the expense of printing. it was therefore necessary that some bookseller should be induced to take the risk; and such a bookseller was not readily found. dodsley refused even to look at the manuscript unless he were trusted with the name of the author. a publisher in fleet street, named lowndes, was more complaisant. some correspondence took place between this person and miss burney, who took the name of grafton, and desired that the letters addressed to her might be left at the orange coffee-house. but, before the bargain was finally struck, fanny thought it her duty to obtain her father's consent. she told him that she had written a book, that she wished to have his permission to publish [transcriber's note: "published" in original] it anonymously, but that she hoped that he would not insist upon seeing it. what followed may serve to illustrate what we meant when we said that dr. burney was as bad a father as so good-hearted a man could possibly be. it never seems to have crossed his mind that fanny was about to take a step on which the whole happiness of her life might depend, a step which might raise her to an honourable eminence, or cover her with ridicule and contempt. several people had already been trusted, and strict concealment was therefore not to be expected. on so grave an occasion, it was surely his duty to give his best counsel to his daughter, to win her confidence, to prevent her from exposing herself if her book were a bad one, and, if it were a good one, to see that the terms which she made with the publisher were likely to be beneficial to her. instead of this, he only stared, burst out a laughing, kissed her, gave her leave to do as she liked, and never even asked the name of her work. the contract with lowndes was speedily concluded. twenty pounds were given for the copyright, and were accepted by fanny with delight. her father's inexcusable neglect of his duty, happily caused her no worse evil than the loss of twelve or fifteen hundred pounds. after many delays evelina appeared in january . poor fanny was sick with terror, and durst hardly stir out of doors. some days passed before any thing was heard of the book. it had, indeed, nothing but its own merits to push it into public favour. its author was unknown. the house by which it was published, was not, we believe, held in high estimation. no body of partisans had been engaged to applaud. the better class of readers expected little from a novel about a young lady's entrance into the world. there was, indeed, at that time a disposition among the most respectable people to condemn novels generally; nor was this disposition by any means without excuse; for works of that sort were then almost always silly, and very frequently wicked. soon, however, the first faint accents of praise began to be heard. the keepers of the circulating libraries reported that every body was asking for evelina, and that some person had guessed anstey to be the author. then came a favourable notice in the london review; then another still more favourable in the monthly. and now the book found its way to tables which had seldom been polluted by marble-covered volumes. scholars and statesmen who contemptuously abandoned the crowd of romances to miss lydia languish and miss sukey saunter, were not ashamed to own that they could not tear themselves away from evelina. fine carriages and rich liveries, not often seen east of temple bar, were attracted to the publisher's shop in fleet street. lowndes was daily questioned about the author; but was himself as much in the dark as any of the questioners. the mystery, however, could not remain a mystery long. it was known to brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins: and they were far too proud and too happy to be discreet. dr. burney wept over the book in rapture. daddy crisp shook his fist at his fannikin in affectionate anger at not having been admitted to her confidence. the truth was whispered to mrs. thrale; and then it began to spread fast. the book had been admired while it was ascribed to men of letters long conversant with the world, and accustomed to composition. but when it was known that a reserved, silent young woman had produced the best work of fiction that had appeared since the death of smollett, the acclamations were redoubled. what she had done was, indeed, extraordinary. but, as usual, various reports improved the story till it became miraculous. evelina, it was said, was the work of a girl of seventeen. incredible as this tale was, it continued to be repeated down to our own time. frances was too honest to confirm it. probably she was too much a woman to contradict it; and it was long before any of her detractors thought of this mode of annoyance. yet there was no want of low minds and bad hearts in the generation which witnessed her first appearance. there was the envious kenrick and the savage wolcot, the asp george steevens and the polecat john williams. it did not, however, occur to them to search the parish-register of lynn, in order that they might be able to twit a lady with having concealed her age. that truly chivalrous exploit was reserved for a bad writer of our own time, whose spite she had provoked by not furnishing him with materials for a worthless edition of boswell's life of johnson, some sheets of which our readers have doubtless seen round parcels of better books. but we must return to our story. the triumph was complete. the timid and obscure girl found herself on the highest pinnacle of fame. great men, on whom she had gazed at a distance with humble reverence, addressed her with admiration, tempered by the tenderness due to her sex and age. burke, windham, gibbon, reynolds, sheridan, were among her most ardent eulogists. cumberland acknowledged her merit, after his fashion, by biting his lips and wriggling in his chair whenever her name was mentioned. but it was at streatham that she tasted, in the highest perfection, the sweets of flattery, mingled with the sweets of friendship. mrs. thrale, then at the height of prosperity and popularity--with gay spirits, quick wit, showy though superficial acquirements, pleasing though not refined manners, a singularly amiable temper, and a loving heart--felt towards fanny as towards a younger sister. with the thrales johnson was domesticated. he was an old friend of dr. burney; but he had probably taken little notice of dr. burney's daughters, and fanny, we imagine, had never in her life dared to speak to him, unless to ask whether he wanted a nineteenth or a twentieth cup of tea. he was charmed by her tale, and preferred it to the novels of fielding, to whom, indeed, he had always been grossly unjust. he did not, indeed, carry his partiality so far as to place evelina by the side of clarissa and sir charles grandison; yet he said that his favourite had done enough to have made even richardson feel uneasy. with johnson's cordial approbation of the book was mingled a fondness, half gallant half paternal, for the writer; and his fondness his age and character entitled him to show without restraint. he began by putting her hand to his lips. but soon he clasped her in his huge arms, and implored her to be a good girl. she was his pet, his dear love, his dear little burney, his little character-monger. at one time, he broke forth in praise of the good taste of her caps. at another time, he insisted on teaching her latin. that, with all his coarseness and irritability, he was a man of sterling benevolence, has long been acknowledged. but how gentle and endearing his deportment could be, was not known till the recollections of madame d'arblay were published. we have mentioned a few of the most eminent of those who paid their homage to the author of evelina. the crowd of inferior admirers would require a catalogue as long as that in the second book of the iliad. in that catalogue would be mrs. cholmondeley, the sayer of odd things, and seward, much given to yawning, and baretti, who slew the man in the haymarket, and paoli, talking broken english, and langton, taller by the head than any other member of the club, and lady millar, who kept a vase wherein fools were wont to put bad verses, and jerningham, who wrote verses fit to be put into the vase of lady millar, and dr. franklin-- not, as some have dreamed, the great pennsylvanian dr. franklin, who could not then have paid his respects to miss burney without much risk of being hanged, drawn, and quartered, but dr. franklin the less-- [greek: _aias meion, outi tosos ge osos telamonios aias, alla polu meion._] it would not have been surprising if such success had turned even a strong head, and corrupted even a generous and affectionate nature. but, in the diary, we can find no trace of any feeling inconsistent with a truly modest and amiable disposition. there is, indeed, abundant proof that frances enjoyed, with an intense, though a troubled, joy, the honours which her genius had won; but it is equally clear that her happiness sprang from the happiness of her father, her sister, and her dear daddy crisp. while flattered by the great, the opulent, and the learned, while followed along the steyne at brighton and the pantiles at tunbridge wells by the gaze of admiring crowds, her heart seems to have been still with the little domestic circle in st. martin's street. if she recorded with minute diligence all the compliments, delicate and coarse, which she heard wherever she turned, she recorded them for the eyes of two or three persons who had loved her from infancy, who had loved her in obscurity, and to whom her fame gave the purest and most exquisite delight. nothing can be more unjust than to confound these outpourings of a kind heart, sure of perfect sympathy, with the egotism of a blue-stocking, who prates to all who come near her about her own novel or her own volume of sonnets. it was natural that the triumphant issue of miss burney's first venture should tempt her to try a second. evelina, though it had raised her fame, had added nothing to her fortune. some of her friends urged her to write for the stage. johnson promised to give her his advice as to the composition. murphy, who was supposed to understand the temper of the pit as well as any man of his time, undertook to instruct her as to stage-effect. sheridan declared that he would accept a play from her without even reading it. thus encouraged she wrote a comedy named the witlings. fortunately it was never acted or printed. we can, we think, easily perceive from the little which is said on the subject in the diary, that the witlings would have been damned, and that murphy and sheridan thought so, though they were too polite to say so. happily frances had a friend who was not afraid to give her pain. crisp, wiser for her than he had been for himself, read the manuscript in his lonely retreat, and manfully told her that she had failed, that to remove blemishes here and there would be useless, that the piece had abundance of wit but no interest, that it was bad as a whole, that it would remind every reader of the _femmes savantes_, which, strange to say, she had never read, and that she could not sustain so close a comparison with molière. this opinion, in which dr. burney concurred, was sent to frances in what she called a "hissing, groaning, cat-calling epistle." but she had too much sense not to know that it was better to be hissed and cat-called by her daddy than by a whole sea of heads in the pit of drury-lane theatre; and she had too good a heart not to be grateful for so rare an act of friendship. she returned an answer which shows how well she deserved to have a judicious, faithful, and affectionate adviser. "i intend," she wrote, "to console myself for your censure by this greatest proof i have ever received of the sincerity, candour, and, let me add, esteem, of my dear daddy. and as i happen to love myself rather more than my play, this consolation is not a very trifling one. this, however, seriously i do believe, that when my two daddies put their heads together to concert that hissing, groaning, cat-calling epistle they sent me, they felt as sorry for poor little miss bayes as she could possibly do for herself. you see i do not attempt to repay your frankness with the air of pretended carelessness. but, though somewhat disconcerted just now, i will promise not to let my vexation live out another day. adieu, my dear daddy! i won't be mortified, and i won't be _downed_; but i will be proud to find i have, out of my own family, as well as in it, a friend who loves me well enough to speak plain truth to me." frances now turned from her dramatic schemes to an undertaking far better suited to her talents. she determined to write a new tale, on a plan excellently contrived for the display of the powers in which her superiority to other writers lay. it was in truth a grand and various picture-gallery, which presented to the eye a long series of men and women, each marked by some strong peculiar feature. there were avarice and prodigality, the pride of blood and the pride of money, morbid restlessness and morbid apathy, frivolous garrulity, supercilious silence, a democritus to laugh at every thing, and a heraclitus to lament over every thing. the work proceeded fast, and in twelve months was completed. it wanted something of the simplicity which had been among the most attractive charms of evelina; but it furnished ample proof that the four years which had elapsed since evelina appeared, had not been unprofitably spent. those who saw cecilia in manuscript pronounced it the best novel of the age. mrs. thrale laughed and wept over it. crisp was even vehement in applause, and offered to insure the rapid and complete success of the book for half a crown. what miss burney received for the copyright is not mentioned in the diary; but we have observed several expressions from which we infer that the sum was considerable. that the sale would be great nobody could doubt; and frances now had shrewd and experienced advisers, who would not suffer her to wrong herself. we have been told that the publishers gave her two thousand pounds, and we have no doubt that they might have given a still larger sum without being losers. cecilia was published in the summer of . the curiosity of the town was intense. we have been informed by persons who remember those days, that no romance of sir walter scott was more impatiently awaited, or more eagerly snatched from the counters of the booksellers. high as public expectation was, it was amply satisfied; and cecilia was placed, by general acclamation, among the classical novels of england. miss burney was now thirty. her youth had been singularly prosperous; but clouds soon began to gather over that clear and radiant dawn. events deeply painful to a heart so kind as that of frances, followed each other in rapid succession. she was first called upon to attend the death-bed of her best friend, samuel crisp. when she returned to st. martin's street, after performing this melancholy duty, she was appalled by hearing that johnson had been struck with paralysis; and, not many months later, she parted from him for the last time with solemn tenderness. he wished to look on her once more; and on the day before his death she long remained in tears on the stairs leading to his bedroom, in the hope that she might be called in to receive his blessing. but he was then sinking fast, and, though he sent her an affectionate message, was unable to see her. but this was not the worst. there are separations far more cruel than those which are made by death. frances might weep with proud affection for crisp and johnson. she had to blush as well as to weep for mrs. thrale. life, however, still smiled upon her. domestic happiness, friendship, independence, leisure, letters, all these things were hers; and she flung them all away. * * * * * then the prison was opened, and frances was free once more. johnson, as burke observed, might have added a striking page to his poem on the vanity of human wishes, if he had lived to see his little burney as she went into the palace and as she came out of it. the pleasures, so long untasted, of liberty, of friendship, of domestic affection, were almost too acute for her shattered frame. but happy days and tranquil nights soon restored the health which the queen's toilette and madame schwellenberg's card-table had impaired. kind and anxious faces surrounded the invalid. conversation the most polished and brilliant revived her spirits. travelling was recommended to her; and she rambled by easy journeys from cathedral to cathedral, and from watering-place to watering-place. she crossed the new forest, and visited stonehenge and wilton, the cliffs of lyme, and the beautiful valley of sidmouth. thence she journeyed by powderham castle, and by the ruins of glastonbury abbey, to bath, and from bath, when the winter was approaching, returned well and cheerful to london. there she visited her old dungeon, and found her successor already far on the way to the grave, and kept to strict duty, from morning till midnight, with a sprained ankle and a nervous fever. at this time england swarmed with french exiles driven from their country by the revolution. a colony of these refugees settled at juniper hall in surrey, not far from norbury park, where mr. lock, an intimate friend of the burney family, resided. frances visited norbury, and was introduced to the strangers. she had strong prejudices against them; for her toryism was far beyond, we do not say that of mr. pitt, but that of mr. reeves; and the inmates of juniper hall were all attached to the constitution of , and were therefore more detested by the royalists of the first emigration than petion or marat. but such a woman as miss burney could no longer resist the fascination of that remarkable society. she had lived with johnson and windham, with mrs. montague and mrs. thrale. yet she was forced to own that she had never heard conversation before. the most animated eloquence, the keenest observation, the most sparkling wit, the most courtly grace, were united to charm her. for madame de staël was there, and m. de talleyrand. there too was m. de narbonne, a noble representative of french aristocracy; and with m. de narbonne was his friend and follower general d'arblay, an honourable and amiable man, with a handsome person, frank soldier-like manners, and some taste for letters. the prejudices which frances had conceived against the constitutional royalists of france rapidly vanished. she listened with rapture to talleyrand and madame de staël, joining with m. d'arblay in execrating the jacobins, and in weeping for the unhappy bourbons, took french lessons from him, fell in love with him, and married him on no better provision [transcriber's note: "pro-provision" in original] than a precarious annuity of one hundred pounds. * * * * * we now turn from the life of madame d'arblay to her writings. there can, we apprehend, be little difference of opinion as to the nature of her merit, whatever differences may exist as to its degree. she was emphatically what johnson called her, a character-monger. it was in the exhibition of human passions and whims that her strength lay; and in this department of art she had, we think, very distinguished skill. highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue, stands shakespeare. his variety is like the variety of nature, endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity. the characters of which he has given us an impression, as vivid as that which we receive from the characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned by scores. yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found which deviates widely from the common standard, and which we should call very eccentric if we met it in real life. the silly notion that every man has one ruling passion, and that this clue, once known, unravels all the mysteries of his conduct, finds no countenance in the plays of shakespeare. there man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn. what is hamlet's ruling passion? or othello's? or harry the fifth's? or wolsey's? or lear's? or shylock's? or benedick's? or macbeth's? or that of cassius? or that of falconbridge? but we might go on for ever. take a single example--shylock. is he so eager for money as to be indifferent to revenge? or so eager for revenge as to be indifferent to money? or so bent on both together as to be indifferent to the honour of his nation and the law of moses? all his propensities are mingled with each other; so that, in trying to apportion to each its proper part, we find the same difficulty which constantly meets us in real life. a superficial critic may say, that hatred is shylock's ruling passion. but how many passions have amalgamated to form that hatred? it is partly the result of wounded pride: antonio has called him dog. it is partly the result of covetousness: antonio has hindered him of half a million; and, when antonio is gone, there will be no limit to the gains of usury. it is partly the result of national and religious feeling: antonio has spit on the jewish gaberdine; and the oath of revenge has been sworn by the jewish sabbath. we might go through all the characters which we have mentioned, and through fifty more in the same way; for it is the constant manner of shakespeare to represent the human mind as lying, not under the absolute dominion of one despotic propensity, but under a mixed government, in which a hundred powers balance each other. admirable as he was in all parts of his art, we most admire him for this, that, while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature. shakespeare has had neither equal nor second. but among the writers who, in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing jane austen, a woman of whom england is justly proud. she has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings. there are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom, mr. edward ferrars, mr. henry tilney, mr. edmund bertram, and mr. elton. they are all specimens of the upper part of the middle class. they have all been liberally educated. they all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession. they are all young. they are all in love. not one of them has any hobbyhorse, to use the phrase of sterne. not one has a ruling passion, such as we read of in pope. who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? no such thing. harpagon is not more unlike to jourdain, joseph surface is not more unlike to sir lucius o'trigger, than every one of miss austen's young divines to all his reverend brethren. and almost all this is done by touches so delicate, that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed. a line must be drawn, we conceive, between artists of this class, and those poets and novelists whose skill lies in the exhibiting of what ben jonson called humours. the words of ben are so much to the purpose, that we will quote them-- when some one peculiar quality doth so possess a man, that it doth draw all his affects, his spirits, and his powers, in their confluxions all to run one way, this may be truly said to be a humour. there are undoubtedly persons, in whom humours such as ben describes have attained a complete ascendency. the avarice of elwes, the insane desire of sir egerton brydges for a barony to which he had no more right than to the crown of spain, the malevolence which long meditation on imaginary wrongs generated in the gloomy mind of bellingham, are instances. the feeling which animated clarkson and other virtuous men against the slave-trade and slavery, is an instance of a more honourable kind. seeing that such humours exist, we cannot deny that they are proper subjects for the imitations of art. but we conceive that the imitation of such humours, however skilful and amusing, is not an achievement of the highest order; and, as such humours are rare in real life, they ought, we conceive, to be sparingly introduced into works which profess to be pictures of real life. nevertheless, a writer may show so much genius in the exhibition of these humours, as to be fairly entitled to a distinguished and permanent rank among classics. the chief seats of all, however, the places on the dais and under the canopy, are reserved for the few who have excelled in the difficult art of portraying characters in which no single feature is extravagantly overcharged. if we have expounded the law soundly, we can have no difficulty in applying it to the particular case before us. madame d'arblay has left us scarcely any thing but humours. almost every one of her men and women has some one propensity developed to a morbid degree. in cecilia, for example, mr. delvile never opens his lips without some allusion to his own birth and station; or mr. briggs, without some allusion to the hoarding of money; or mr. hobson, without betraying the self-indulgence and self-importance of a purse-proud upstart; or mr. simkins, without uttering some sneaking remark for the purpose of currying favour with his customers; or mr. meadows, without expressing apathy and weariness of life; or mr. albany, without declaiming about the vices of the rich and the misery of the poor; or mrs. belfield, without some indelicate eulogy on her son; or lady margaret, without indicating jealousy of her husband. morrice is all skipping, officious impertinence, mr. gosport all sarcasm, lady honoria all lively prattle, miss larolles all silly prattle. if ever madame d'arblay aimed at more, as in the character of monckton, we do not think that she succeeded well. we are, therefore, forced to refuse to madame d'arblay a place in the highest rank of art; but we cannot deny that, in the rank to which she belonged, she had few equals, and scarcely any superior. the variety of humours which is to be found in her novels is immense; and though the talk of each person separately is monotonous, the general effect is not monotony, but a very lively and agreeable diversity. her plots are rudely constructed and improbable, if we consider them in themselves. but they are admirably framed for the purpose of exhibiting striking groups of eccentric characters, each governed by his own peculiar whim, each talking his own peculiar jargon, and each bringing out by opposition the oddities of all the rest. we will give one example out of many which occur to us. all probability is violated in order to bring mr. delvile, mr. briggs, mr. hobson, and mr. albany into a room together. but when we have them there, we soon forget probability in the exquisitely ludicrous effect which is produced by the conflict of four old fools, each raging with a monomania of his own, each talking a dialect of his own, and each inflaming all the others anew every time he opens his mouth. yet one word more. it is not only on account of the intrinsic merit of madame d'arblay's early works that she is entitled to honourable mention. her appearance is an important epoch in our literary history. evelina was the first tale written by a woman, and purporting to be a picture of life and manners, that lived or deserved to live. the female quixote is no exception. that work has undoubtedly great merit, when considered as a wild satirical harlequinade; but, if we consider it as a picture of life and manners, we must pronounce it more absurd than any of the romances which it was designed to ridicule. indeed, most of the popular novels which preceded evelina, were such as no lady would have written; and many of them were such as no lady could without confusion own that she had read. the very name of novel was held in horror among religious people. in decent families which did not profess extraordinary sanctity, there was a strong feeling against all such works. sir anthony absolute, two or three years before evelina appeared, spoke the sense of the great body of sober fathers and husbands, when he pronounced the circulating library an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. this feeling, on the part of the grave and reflecting, increased the evil from which it had sprung. the novelist, having little character to lose, and having few readers among serious people, took without scruple liberties which in our generation seem almost incredible. miss burney did for the english novel what jeremy collier did for the english drama; and she did it in a better way. she first showed that a tale might be written in which both the fashionable and the vulgar life of london might be exhibited with great force, and with broad comic humour, and which yet should not contain a single line inconsistent with rigid morality, or even with virgin delicacy. she took away the reproach which lay on a most useful and delightful species of composition. she vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in a fair and noble province of letters. several accomplished women have followed in her track. at present, the novels which we owe to english ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. no class of works is more honourably distinguished by fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure moral feeling. several among the successors of madame d'arblay have equalled her; two, we think, have surpassed her. but the fact that she has been surpassed, gives her an additional claim to our respect and gratitude; for in truth we owe to her, not only evelina, cecilia, and camilla, but also mansfield park and the absentee. anonymous on wordsworth [from _the edinburgh review_, october, ] _poems_, in two volumes. by w. wordsworth. london, . this author is known to belong to a certain brotherhood of poets, who have haunted for some years about the lakes of cumberland; and is generally looked upon, we believe, as the purest model of the excellences and peculiarities of the school which they have been labouring to establish. of the general merits of that school, we have had occasion to express our opinion pretty fully, in more places than one, and even to make some allusion to the former publications of the writer now before us. we are glad, however, to have found an opportunity of attending somewhat more particularly to his pretentions. the lyrical ballads were unquestionably popular; and, we have no hesitation in saying, deservedly popular: for in spite of their occasional vulgarity, affectation, and silliness, they were undoubtedly characterised by a strong spirit of originality, of pathos, and natural feeling; and recommended to all good minds by the clear impression which they bore of the amiable disposition and virtuous principles of the author. by the help of these qualities, they were enabled, not only to recommend themselves to the indulgence of many judicious readers, but even to beget among a pretty numerous class of persons, a sort of admiration of the very defects by which they were attended. it was on this account chiefly, that we thought it necessary to set ourselves against the alarming innovation. childishness, conceit, and affectation, are not of themselves very popular or attractive; and though mere novelty has sometimes been found sufficient to give them a temporary currency, we should have had no fear of their prevailing to any dangerous extent, if they had been graced with no more seductive accompaniments. it was precisely because the perverseness and bad taste of this new school was combined with a great deal of genius and of laudable feeling, that we were afraid of their spreading and gaining ground among us, and that we entered into the discussion with a degree of zeal and animosity which some might think unreasonable towards authors, to whom so much merit had been conceded. there were times and moods, indeed, in which we were led to suspect ourselves of unjustifiable severity, and to doubt, whether a sense of public duty had not carried us rather too far in reprobation of errors, that seemed to be atoned for, by excellences of no vulgar description. at other times the magnitude of these errors--the disgusting absurdities into which they led their feebler admirers, and the derision and contempt which they drew from the more fastidious, even upon the merits with which they were associated, made us wonder more than ever at the perversity by which they were retained, and regret that we had not declared ourselves against them with still more formidable and decided hostility. in this temper of mind, we read the _annonce_ of mr. wordsworth's publication with a good deal of interest and expectation, and opened his volumes with greater anxiety, than he or his admirers will probably give us credit for. we have been greatly disappointed certainly as to the quality of the poetry; but we doubt whether the publication has afforded so much satisfaction to any other of his readers:--it has freed us from all doubt or hesitation as to the justice of our former censures, and has brought the matter to a test, which we cannot help hoping may be convincing to the author himself. mr. wordsworth, we think, has now brought the question, as to the merit of his new school of poetry, to a very fair and decisive issue. the volumes before us are much more strongly marked by its peculiarities than any former publication of the fraternity. in our apprehension, they are, on this very account, infinitely less interesting or meritorious; but it belongs to the public, and not to us, to decide upon their merit, and we will confess, that so strong is our conviction of their obvious inferiority, and the grounds of it, that we are willing for once to waive our right of appealing to posterity, and to take the judgment of the present generation of readers, and even of mr. wordsworth's former admirers, as conclusive on this occasion. if these volumes, which have all the benefit of the author's former popularity, turn out to be nearly as popular as the lyrical ballads--if they sell nearly to the same extent--or are quoted and imitated among half as many individuals, we shall admit that mr. wordsworth has come much nearer the truth in his judgment of what constitutes the charm of poetry, than we had previously imagined--and shall institute a more serious and respectful inquiry into his principles of composition than we have yet thought necessary. on the other hand,--if this little work, selected from the compositions of five maturer years, and written avowedly for the purpose of exalting a system, which has already excited a good deal of attention, should be generally rejected by those whose prepossessions were in its favour, there is room to hope, not only that the system itself will meet with no more encouragement, but even that the author will be persuaded to abandon a plan of writing, which defrauds his industry and talents of their natural reward. putting ourselves thus upon our country, we certainly look for a verdict against this publication; and have little doubt indeed of the result, upon a fair consideration of the evidence contained in these volumes. to accelerate that result, and to give a general view of the evidence, to those into whose hands the record may not have already fallen, we must now make a few observations and extracts. we shall not resume any of the particular discussions by which we formerly attempted to ascertain the value of the improvements which this new school has effected in poetry: but shall lay the grounds of our opposition, for this time, a little more broadly. the end of poetry, we take it, is to please--and the same, we think, is strictly applicable to every metrical composition from which we receive pleasure, without any laborious exercise of the understanding. their pleasure may, in general, be analysed into three parts--that which we receive from the excitement of passion or emotion--that which is derived from the play of imagination, or the easy exercise of reason--and that which depends on the character and qualities of the diction. the two first are the vital and primary springs of poetical delight, and can scarcely require explanation to anyone. the last has been alternately over-rated and undervalued by the possessors of the poetical art, and is in such low estimation with the author now before us and his associates, that it is necessary to say a few words in explanation of it. one great beauty of diction exists only for those who have some degree of scholarship or critical skill. this is what depends on the exquisite _propriety_ of the words employed, and the delicacy with which they are adapted to the meaning which is to be expressed. many of the finest passages in virgil and pope derive their principal charm from the fine propriety of their diction. another source of beauty, which extends only to the more instructed class of readers, is that which consists in the judicious or happy application of expressions which have been sanctified by the use of famous writers, or which bear the stamp of a simple or venerable antiquity. there are other beauties of diction, however, which are perceptible by all--the beauties of sweet sounds and pleasant associations. the melody of words and verses is indifferent to no reader of poetry; but the chief recommendation of poetical language is certainly derived from those general associations, which give it a character of dignity or elegance, sublimity or tenderness. everyone knows that there are low and mean expressions, as well as lofty and grave ones; and that some words bear the impression of coarseness and vulgarity, as clearly as others do of refinement and affection. we do not mean, of course, to say anything in defiance of the hackneyed commonplace of ordinary versemen. whatever might have been the original character of these unlucky phrases, they are now associated with nothing but ideas of schoolboy imbecility and vulgar affectation. but what we do maintain is, that much of the most popular poetry in the world owes its celebrity chiefly to the beauty of its diction; and that no poetry can be long or generally acceptable, the language of which is coarse, inelegant, or infantine. from this great source of pleasure, we think the readers of mr. wordsworth are in great measure cut off. his diction has nowhere any pretensions to elegance or dignity; and he has scarcely ever condescended to give the grace of correctness or melody to his versification. if it were merely slovenly or neglected, however, all this might be endured. strong sense and powerful feeling will ennoble any expressions; or, at least, no one who is capable of estimating these higher merits, will be disposed to mark these little defects. but, in good truth, no man, now-a-days, composes verses for publication, with a slovenly neglect of their language. it is a fine and laborious manufacture, which can scarcely ever be made in a hurry; and the faults which it has, may, for the most part, be set down to bad taste or incapacity, rather than to carelessness or oversight. with mr. wordsworth and his friends it is plain that their peculiarities of diction are things of choice, and not of accident. they write as they do, upon principle and system; and it evidently costs them much pains to keep _down_ to the standard which they have proffered themselves. they are to the full as much mannerists, too, as the poetasters who ring changes on the commonplaces of magazine versification; and all the difference between them is that they borrow their phrases from a different and a scantier _gradus ad parnassum_. if they were, indeed, to discard all imitation and set phraseology, and bring in no words merely for show or for metre,--as much, perhaps, might be gained in freedom and originality, as would infallibly be lost in allusion and authority; but, in point of fact, the new poets are just as much borrowers as the old; only that, instead of borrowing from the more popular passages of their illustrious predecessors, they have preferred furnishing themselves from vulgar ballads and plebian nurseries. their peculiarities of diction alone, are enough, perhaps, to render them ridiculous; but the author before us really seems anxious to court this literary martyrdom by a device still more infallible,--we mean that of connecting his most lofty, tender, or impassioned conceptions, with objects and incidents which the greater part of his readers will probably persist in thinking low, silly, or uninteresting. whether this is done from affectation and conceit alone, or whether it may not arise, in some measure, from the self-illusion of a mind of extraordinary sensibility, habituated to solitary meditation, we cannot undertake to determine. it is possible enough, we allow, that the sights of a friend's garden-spade, of a sparrow's-nest, or a man gathering leeches, might really have suggested to such a mind a train of powerful impressions and interesting reflections; but it is certain, that, to most minds, such associations will always appear forced, strained, and unnatural; and that the composition in which it is attempted to exhibit them, will always have the air of parody, or ludicrous and affected singularity. all the world laughs at eligiac stanzas to a sucking pig--a hymn on washing-day, sonnets to one's grandmother--or pindarics on gooseberry-pie; and yet, we are afraid, it will not be quite easy to persuade mr. wordsworth, that the same ridicule must infallibly attach to most of the pathetic pieces in these volumes. to satisfy our readers, however, as to the justice of this and our other anticipations, we shall proceed without further preface, to lay before them a short view of their contents. the first is a kind of ode "to the daisy,--" very flat, feeble, and affected; and in diction as artificial, and as much encumbered with heavy expletives as the theme of an unpractised schoolboy.... the scope of the piece is to say, that the flower is found everywhere; and that it has suggested many pleasant thoughts to the author--some chime of fancy, "_wrong or right_"--some feeling of devotion _more or less_--and other elegancies of the same stamp.... the next is called "louisa," and begins in this dashing and affected manner. i met louisa in the shade; and, having seen that lovely maid, _why should i fear to say_ that she is ruddy, fleet and strong; _and down the rocks can leap along_, like rivulets in may? i. . does mr. wordsworth really imagine that this is more natural or engaging than the ditties of our common song-writers?... by and by, we have a piece of namby-pamby "to the small celandine," which we should almost have taken for a professed imitation of one of mr. phillips's prettyisms.... further on, we find an "ode to duty," in which the lofty vein is very unsuccessfully attempted. this is the concluding stanza. stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear the godhead's most benignant grace; nor know we anything so fair as is the smile upon thy face; flowers laugh before thee on their beds; and fragrance in thy footing treads; thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; and the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong. i. . the two last lines seem to be utterly without meaning; at least we have no sort of conception in what sense _duty_ can be said to keep the old skies _fresh_, and the stars from wrong. the next piece, entitled "the beggars," may be taken, in fancy, as a touchstone of mr. wordsworth's merit. there is something about it that convinces us it is a favourite of the author's; though to us, we will confess, it appears to be a very paragon of silliness and affectation.... "alice fell" is a performance of the same order.... if the printing of such trash as this be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted. after this follows the longest and most elaborate poem in the volume, under the title of "resolution and independence." the poet roving about on a common one fine morning, falls into pensive musings on the fate of the sons of song, which he sums up in this fine distich. we poets in our youth begin in gladness; but thereof comes in the end despondency and madness. i, p. . in the midst of his meditations-- i saw a man before me unawares, the oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs.... the very interesting account, which he is lucky enough at last to comprehend, fills the poet with comfort and admiration; and, quite glad to find the old man so cheerful, he resolves to take a lesson of contentedness from him; and the poem ends with this pious ejaculation-- "god," said i, "be my help and stay secure; i'll think of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor." i, p. . we defy the bitterest enemy of mr. wordsworth to produce anything at all parallel to this from any collection of english poetry, or even from the specimens of his friend mr. southey.... the first poems in the second volume were written during a tour in scotland. the first is a very dull one about rob roy, but the title that attracted us most was "an address to the sons of burns," after visiting their father's grave. never was anything, however, more miserable.... the next is a very tedious, affected performance, called "the yarrow unvisited." ... after this we come to some ineffable compositions, which the poet has entitled, "moods of my own mind." ... we have then a rapturous mystical ode to the cuckoo; in which the author, striving after force and originality, produces nothing but absurdity ... after this there is an address to a butterfly.... we come next to a long story of a "blind highland boy," who lived near an arm of the sea, and had taken a most unnatural desire to venture on that perilous element. his mother did all she could to prevent him; but one morning, when the good woman was out of the way, he got into a vessel of his own, and pushed out from the shore. in such a vessel ne'er before did human creature leave the shore. ii, p. . and then we are told, that if the sea should get rough, "a beehive would be ship as safe." "but say, what was it?" a poetical interlocutor is made to exclaim most naturally; and here followeth the answer, upon which all the pathos and interest of the story depend. a household tub, like one of those which women use to wash their clothes!! ii, p. . this, it will be admitted, is carrying the matter as far as it will go; nor is there anything,--down to the wiping of shoes or the evisceration of chickens, which may not be introduced in poetry, if this is tolerated.... afterwards come some stanzas about an echo repeating a cuckoo's voice.... then we have elegiac stanzas "to the spade of a friend," beginning-- spade! with which wilkinson hath till'd his lands. but too dull to be quoted any further. after this there is a minstrel's song, on the restoration of lord clifford the shepherd, which is in a very different strain of poetry; and then the volume is wound up with an "ode," with no other title but the motto _paulo majora canamus_. this is, beyond all doubt, the most illegible and unintelligible part of the publication. we can pretend to no analysis or explanation of it.... we have thus gone through this publication, with a view to enable our readers to determine, whether the author of these verses which have now been exhibited, is entitled to claim the honours of an improver or restorer of our poetry, and to found a new school to supersede or new-model all our maxims on the subject. if we were to stop here, we do not think that mr. wordsworth, or his admirers, would have any reason to complain; for what we have now quoted is undeniably the most peculiar and characteristic part of his publication, and must be defended and applauded if the merit or originality of his system is to be seriously maintained. in our opinion, however, the demerit of that system cannot be fairly appreciated, until it be shown, that the author of the bad verses which we have already extracted, can write good verses when he pleases; and that, in point of fact, he does always write good verses, when, by any account, he is led to abandon his system, and to transgress the laws of that school which he would fain establish on the ruin of all existing authority. the length to which our extracts and observations have already extended, necessarily restrains us within more narrow limits in this part of our citations; but it will not require much labour to find a pretty decided contrast to some of the passages we have already detailed. the song on the restoration of lord clifford is put into the mouth of an ancient minstrel of the family; and in composing it, the author was led, therefore, almost irresistibly to adopt the manner and phraseology that is understood to be connected with that sort of composition, and to throw aside his own babyish incidents and fantastical sensibilities.... all english writers of sonnets have imitated milton; and, in this way, mr. wordsworth, when he writes sonnets, escapes again from the trammels of his own unfortunate system; and the consequence is, that his sonnets are as much superior to the greater part of his other poems, as milton's sonnets are superior to his.... when we look at these, and many still finer passages, in the writings of this author, it is impossible not to feel a mixture of indignation and compassion, at that strange infatuation which has bound him up from the fair exercise of his talents, and withheld from the public the many excellent productions that would otherwise have taken the place of the trash now before us. even in the worst of these productions, there are, no doubt, occasional little traits of delicate feeling and original fancy; but these are quite lost and obscured in the mass of childishness and insipidity with which they are incorporated, nor can anything give us a more melancholy view of the debasing effects of this miserable theory, than that it has given ordinary men a right to wonder at the folly and presumption of a man gifted like mr. wordsworth, and made him appear, in his second avowed publication, like a bad imitator of the worst of his former productions. we venture to hope, that there is now an end of this folly; and that, like other follies, it will be found to have cured itself by the extravagances resulting from its unbridled indulgence. in this point of view, the publication of the volumes before us may ultimately be of service to the good cause of literature. many a generous rebel, it is said, has been reclaimed to his allegiance by the spectacle of lawless outrage and excess presented in the conduct of the insurgents; and we think there is every reason to hope, that the lamentable consequences which have resulted from mr. wordsworth's open violation of the established laws of poetry, will operate as a wholesome warning to those who might otherwise have been seduced by his example, and be the means of restoring to that antient and venerable code its due honour and authority. on maturin's "melmoth" [from _the edinburgh review_, july, ] _melmoth, the wanderer_. vols. by the author of _bertram_. constable & co. edinburgh, . it was said, we remember, of dr. darwin's botanic garden--that it was the sacrifice of genius in the temple of false taste; and the remark may be applied to the work before us, with the qualifying clause, that in this instance the genius is less obvious, and the false taste more glaring. no writer of good judgment would have attempted to revive the defunct horrors of mrs. radcliffe's school of romance, or the demoniacal incarnations of mr. lewis: but, as if he were determined not to be arraigned for a single error only, mr. maturin has contrived to render his production almost as objectionable in the manner as it is in the matter. the construction of his story, which is singularly clumsy and inartificial, we have no intention to analyze:--many will probably have perused the work, before our review reaches them; and to those who have not, it may be sufficient to announce, that the imagination of the author runs riot, even beyond the usual license of romance;--that his hero is a modern faustus, who has bartered his soul with the powers of darkness for protracted life, and unlimited worldly enjoyment;--his heroine, a species of insular goddess, a virgin calypso of the indian ocean, who, amid flowers and foliage, lives upon figs and tamarinds; associates with peacocks, loxias and monkeys; is worshipped by the occasional visitants of her island; finds her way to spain, where she is married to the aforesaid hero by the hand of a dead hermit, the ghost of a murdered domestic being the witness of their nuptials; and finally dies in the dungeons of the inquisition at madrid!--to complete this phantasmagoric exhibition, we are presented with sybils and misers; parricides; maniacs in abundance; monks with scourges pursuing a naked youth streaming with blood; subterranean jews surrounded by the skeletons of their wives and children; lovers blasted by lightning; irish hags, spanish grandees, shipwrecks, caverns, donna claras and donna isidoras, all opposed to each other in glaring and violent contrast, and all their adventures narrated with the same undeviating display of turgid, vehement, and painfully elaborated language. such are the materials, and the style of this expanded nightmare: and as we can plainly perceive, among a certain class of writers, a disposition to haunt us with similar apparitions, and to describe them with a corresponding tumor of words, we conceive it high time to step forward and abate a nuisance which threatens to become a besetting evil, unless checked in its outset. political changes were not the sole cause of the rapid degeneracy in letters that followed the augustan era of rome. similar corruptions and decay have succeeded to the intellectual eminence of other nations; and we might be almost led to conclude, that mental as well as physical power, after attaining a certain perfection, became weakened by expansion, and sunk into a state of comparative imbecility, until time and circumstance gave it a new progressive impetus. one great cause of this deterioration is the insatiable thirst for novelty, which, becoming weary even of excellence, will "sate itself in a celestial bed, and prey on garbage." in the torpidity produced by an utter exhaustion of sensual enjoyment, the arreoi club of otaheite is recorded to have found a miserable excitement, by swallowing the most revolting filth; and the jaded intellectual appetites of more civilized communities will sometimes seek a new stimulus in changes almost as startling. some adventurous writer, unable to obtain distinction among a host of competitors, all better qualified than himself to win legitimate applause, strikes out a fantastic or monstrous innovation; and arrests the attention of many who would fall asleep over monotonous excellence. imitators are soon found;--fashion adopts the new folly;--the old standard of perfection is deemed stale and obsolete;--and thus, by degrees, the whole literature of a country becomes changed and deteriorated. it appears to us, that we are now labouring in a crisis of this nature. in our last number, we noticed the revolution in our poetry; the transition from the lucid terseness and exquisite polish of pope and goldsmith, to the rambling, diffuse, irregular, and imaginative style of composition by which the present era is characterized; and we might have added, that a change equally complete, though diametrically opposite in its tendency, has been silently introduced into our prose. in this we have oscillated from freedom to restraint;--from the easy, natural, and colloquial style of swift, addison and steele, to the perpetually strained, ambitious, and overwrought stiffness, of which the author we are now considering affords a striking exemplification. "he's knight o' the shire, and represents them all." there is not the smallest keeping in his composition:--less solicitous what he shall say, than how he shall say it, he exhausts himself in a continual struggle to produce effect by dazzling, terrifying, or surprising. annibal caracci was accused of an affectation of muscularity, and an undue parade of anatomical knowledge, even upon quiescent figures: but the artist whom we are now considering has no quiescent figures:--even his repose is a state of rigid tension, if not extravagant distortion. he is the fuseli of novelists. does he deem it necessary to be energetic, he forthwith begins foaming at the mouth, and falling into convulsions; and this orgasm is so often repeated, and upon such inadequate occasions, that we are perpetually reminded of the tremendous puerilities of the della cruscan versifiers, or the ludicrous grand eloquence of the spaniard, who tore a certain portion of his attire, "as if heaven and earth were coming together." in straining to reach the sublime, he perpetually takes that single unfortunate step which conducts him to the ridiculous --a failure which, in a less gifted author, might afford a wicked amusement to the critic, but which, when united with such undoubted genius as the present work exhibits, must excite a sincere and painful regret in every admirer of talent. whatever be the cause, the fact, we think, cannot be disputed, that a peculiar tendency to this gaudy and ornate style, exists among the writers of ireland. their genius runs riot in the wantonness of its own uncontrolled exuberance;--their imagination, disdaining the restraint of judgment, imparts to their literature the characteristics of a nation in one of the earlier stages of civilization and refinement. the florid imagery, gorgeous diction, and oriental hyperboles, which possess a sort of wild propriety in the vehement sallies of antar the bedoween chieftain of the twelfth century, become cold extravagance and floundering fustian in the mouth of a barrister of the present age; and we question whether any but a native of the sister island would have ventured upon the experiment of their adoption. even in the productions of mr. moore, the sweetest lyric poet of this or perhaps any age, this national peculiarity is not infrequently perceptible; and we were compelled, in our review of his lalla rookh, a subject which justified the introduction of much eastern splendour and elaboration, to point out the excessive finery, the incessant sparkle and efflorescence by which the attention of the reader was fatigued, and his senses overcome. he rouged his roses, and poured perfume upon his jessamines, until we fainted under the oppression of beauty and odour, and were ready to "die of a rose in aromatic pain." dryden, in alluding to the metaphysical poets, exclaims "rather than all things wit, let none be there":--though we would not literally adopt this dictum, we can safely confirm the truth of the succeeding lines-- men doubt, because so thick they lie, if those be stars that paint the galaxy:-- and we scruple not to avow, whatever contempt may be expressed for our taste by the advocates of the toiling and turgid style, both in and out of ireland, that the prose works which we have lately perused with the greatest pleasure, so far as their composition was concerned, have been belzoni's travels, and salame's account of the attack upon algiers. unable, from their insufficient mastery of our tongue, to rival the native manufacture of stiff and laborious verbosity, these foreigners have contented themselves with the plainest and most colloquial language that was consistent with a clear exposition of their meaning;--a practice to which swift was indebted for the lucid and perspicuous character of his writings, and which alone has enabled a great living purveyor of "twopenny trash" to retain a certain portion of popularity, in spite of his utter abandonment of all consistency and public principle. if the writers to whom we are alluding will not condescend to this unstudied and familiar mode of communing with the public, let them at least have the art to conceal their art, and not obtrude the conviction that they are more anxious to display themselves than inform their readers; and let them, above all things, consent to be intelligible to the plainest capacity; for though speech, according to the averment of a wily frenchman, was given to us to conceal our thoughts, no one has yet ventured to extend the same mystifying definition to the art of writing ... after this, let us no longer smile at the furious hyperboles of della crusca upon mrs. robinson's eyes. in the same strain we are told of a convent whose "walls sweat, and its floors quiver," when a contumacious brother treads them;--and when the parents of the same personage are torn from his room by the director of the convent, we are informed that "the rushing of their robes as he dragged them out, seemed like the whirlwind that attends the presence of the destroying angel." in a similar spirit, of pushing every thing to extremes when he means to be impressive, the author is sometimes offensively minute; as when he makes the aforesaid persecuted monk declare, that "the cook had learned the secret of the convent (that of tormenting those whom they had no longer hopes of commanding), and mixed the fragments he threw to me with ashes, hair, and dust;"--and sometimes the extravagance of his phrases becomes simply ludicrous. two persons are trying to turn a key--"it grated, resisted; the lock seemed invincible. again we tried with cranched teeth, indrawn breath, and fingers stripped almost to the bone--in vain." and yet, after they had almost stripped their fingers to the bone, they succeed in turning that which they could not move when their hands were entire. we have said that mr. maturin had contrived to render his work as objectionable in the matter as in the manner; and we proceed to the confirmation of our assertion. we do not arraign him solely for the occasional indecorousness of his conceptions, or the more offensive tone of some of his colloquies, attempted to be palliated by the flimsy plea, that they are, appropriate in the mouths that utter them. dr. johnson, as a proof of the total suppression of the reasoning faculty in dreams, used to cite one of his own, wherein he imagined himself to be holding an argument with an adversary, whose superior powers filled him with a mortification which a moment's reflection would have dissipated, by reminding him that he himself supplied the repartees of his opponent as well as his own. in his waking dreams, mr. maturin is equally the parent of all the parties who figure in his romance; and, though not personally responsible for their sentiments, he is amenable to the bar of criticism for every phrase or thought which transgresses the bounds of decorum, or violates the laws that regulate the habitual intercourse of polished society. it is no defence to say, that profane or gross language is natural to the characters whom he embodies. why does he select such? it may be proper in them; but what can make it proper to us? there are wretches who never open their lips but to blaspheme; but would any author think himself justified in filling his page with their abominations? it betrays a lamentable deficiency of tact and judgment, to imagine, as the author of melmoth appears to do, that he may seize upon nature in her most unhallowed or disgusting moods, and dangle her in the eyes of a decorous and civilized community. we shall not stop to stigmatize, as it deserves, the wild and flagrant calumnies which he insinuates against three-fourths of his countrymen, by raking in the long-forgotten rubbish of popery for extinct enormities, which he exaggerates as the inevitable result, rather than the casual abuse of the system, and brands with an intolerant zeal, quite as uncharitable as that which he condemns. these faults are either so peculiar to the individual, or in their nature so obviously indefensible, as to repel rather than invite imitation. but there is another peculiarity in the productions of this gentleman which claims a more detailed notice, because it seems likely to have extensive effects in corrupting others: --we mean his taste for horrible and revolting subjects. we thought we had supped full of this commodity; but it seems as if the most ghastly and disgusting portion of the meal was reserved for the present day, and its most hideous concoction for the writer before us,--who is never so much in his favourite element as when he can "on horror's head horrors accumulate." he assimilates the sluggish sympathies of his readers to those of sailors and vulgar ballad readers, who cannot be excited to an interest in the battle of the arethusa, unless they learn that "her sails smoaked with brains, and her scuppers ran blood;"--a line which threatens him with formidable competitors from before the mast. mere physical horror, unalleviated by an intense mental interest, or redeeming charities of the heart, may possess a certain air of originality, not from the want of ability in former writers to delineate such scenes, but from then-deference to the "_multaque tolles ex oculis_" of horace; from the conviction of their utter unfitness for public exhibition. there is, however, a numerous class of inferior caterers to the public, ready to minister to any appetite, however foul and depraved, if they be once furnished with a precedent; and we foresee an inundation of blood and abomination if they be not awed or ridiculed into silence. we have quietly submitted to these inflictions from two or three distinguished writers, whose talents may extenuate, though they cannot justify, such outrages upon feeling. when regular artists and professors conduct us into their dissecting room, the skill with which they anatomise may reconcile us to the offensiveness of the operation; but if butchers and resurrection-men are to drag us into their shambles, while they mangle human carcases with their clumsy and unhallowed hands, the stoutest spectators must turn from the exhibition with sickness and disgust. were any proof wanting that this golgotha style of writing is likely to become contagious, and to be pushed to a more harrowing extravagance at each successive imitation, mr. maturin would himself supply it.... we have omitted this miscreant's flippant allusion to madame de sevigné and his own damnation, uttered in a spirit which (to use the author's own words upon another occasion), "mingled ridicule with horror, and seemed like a harlequin in the infernal regions flirting with the furies:"--but we must not forget to mention, as little characteristic touches in this scene of preposterous horrors, that the monster who describes it was also a parricide, and that the female, on whose dying agonies he had feasted, was his only sister! after this appalling extract, we need not pursue our quotations from pages which, as more than one of the personages say of themselves, seem to swim in blood and fire; and we shall conclude with the following passage from a dream-- the next moment i was chained to my chair again,--the fires were lit, the bells rang out, the litanies were sung;--my feet were scorched to a cinder,--my muscles cracked, my blood and marrow hissed, my flesh consumed like shrinking leather,--the bones of my leg hung two black withering and moveless sticks in the ascending blaze;--it ascended, caught my hair,--i was crowned with fire,--my head was a ball of molten metal, my eyes flashed and melted in their sockets:--i opened my mouth, it drank fire,--i closed it, the fire was within,--and still the bells rang on, and the crowd shouted, and the king and queen, and all the nobility and priesthood looked on, and we burned and burned! i was a cinder, body and soul, in my dream. ii. . these, and other scenes equally wild and abominable, luckily counteract themselves;--they present such a fee-fa-fum for grown up people, such a burlesque upon tragic horrors, that a sense of the ludicrous irresistibly predominates over the terrific; and, to avoid disgust, our feelings gladly take refuge in contemptuous laughter. pathos like this may affect women, and people of weak nerves, with sickness at the stomach;--it may move those of stouter fibre to scornful derision; but we doubt whether, in the whole extensive circle of novel readers, it has ever drawn a single tear. the society for the suppression of mendicity has fortunately cleared our streets of the offensive vagrants who used to thrust their mangled limbs and putrid sores into our faces to extort from our disgust what they could not wring from our compassion:--be it _our_ care to suppress those greater nuisances who, infesting the high ways of literature, would attempt, by a still more revolting exhibition, to terrify or nauseate us out of those sympathies which they might not have the power to awaken by any legitimate appeal. let it not be imagined, from any thing we have now said, that we think meanly of mr. maturin's genius and abilities. it is precisely because we hold both in respect that we are sincerely anxious to point out their misapplication; and we have extended our observations to a greater length than we contemplated, partly because we fear that his strong though unregulated imagination, and unlimited command of glowing language, may inflict upon us a herd of imitators who, "possessing the contortions of the sybil without her inspiration," will deluge us with dull, turgid, and disgusting enormities;--and partly because we are not without hopes that our animadversions, offered in a spirit of sincerity, may induce the author himself to abandon this new apotheosis of the old raw-head-and-bloody-bones, and assume a station in literature more consonant to his high endowments, and to that sacred profession to which, we understand, he does honour by the virtues of his private life. the quarterly review if macaulay represents a new _edinburgh_ from the days of jeffrey, brougham, and sydney smith, the variety of criticism embraced by the _quarterly_ is even more startling. there was more malice, and far coarser personalities in the early days, and almost continuously while gifford, croker, and lockhart held the reins: it is--almost certainly-- among these three that the responsibility for our "anonymous" group of onslaughts may be distributed. the two earliest appreciations of jane austen (from scott and whately) offer an interlude--actually in the same period--which positively startles us by the honesty of its attempt at fair criticism and the entire freedom from personality. gladstone's interesting recognition of tennyson, and the "church in arms" against darwin (so ably pleaded by wilberforce), belong to yet another school of criticism which comes much nearer to our day, though retaining the solemnity, the prolixity, and the _ex cathedra_ assumption of authority with which all the reviews began their career; and is singularly cautious in its independence. william gifford ( - ) gifford was the editor of the _quarterly_ from its foundation in february, , until september, , and undoubtedly established its reputation for scurrility. it is probable that more reviews were written, or directly inspired, by him than have been actually traced to his pen; and, in any case, as leigh hunt puts it, he made it his business to see that others misdeem and miscontrue, like miscreant brothers; misquote, and misplace, and mislead, and misstate, misapply, misinterpret, misreckon, misdate, missinform, misconjecture, misargue, in short miss all that is good, that ye miss not the court. gifford was hated even more than his associates; not only, we fear, for his venal sycophancy, but because he had been apprenticed to a shoemaker and never concealed the lowness of his origin. moreover, "the little man, dumpled up together and so ill-made as to seem almost deformed," received from fortune-- one eye not overgood, two sides that to their cost have stood a ten years' hectic cough, aches, stitches, all the various ills that swell the devilish doctor's bills, and sweep poor mortals off. scott is almost alone in his generosity towards the learning and industry of an editor who helped to make infamous the title of critic. his original poems (_the baviad_ and _the moeviad_) have a certain sledge-hammer merit; and he did yeoman service by suppressing the _della cruscans_. it was gifford also "who did the butchering business in the anti-jacobin." he was far heavier, in bludgeoning, than jeffrey; while hazlitt epitomized his principles of criticism with his accustomed vigour:--"he believes that modern literature should wear the fetters of classical antiquity; that truth is to be weighed in the scales of opinion and prejudice; that power is equivalent to right; that genius is dependent on rules; that taste and refinement of language consist in _word-catching_." * * * * * gifford's review of _ford's weber_ is, perhaps, no more than can be expected of the man who had edited _massinger_ six years before he wrote it; and produced a _ben jonson_ in and a _ford_ in . of these works thomas moore exclaimed "what a canker'd carle it is! strange that a man should be able to lash himself up into such a spiteful fury, not only against the living but the dead, with whom he engages in a sort of _sciomachy_ in every page. poor dull and dead malone is the shadow at which he thrusts his 'jonson,' as he did at poor monck mason, still duller and deader, in his _massinger_." mr. a.h. bullen, again, remarks of his ford, "gifford was so intent on denouncing the inaccuracy of others that he frequently failed to secure accuracy himself.... in reading the old dramatists we do not want to be distracted by editorial invectives and diatribes." the review of _endymion_ called forth byron's famous apostrophe to-- john keats, who was killed off by one critique just as he really promised something great, if not intelligible, without greek contrived to talk about the gods of late much as they might have been supposed to speak. poor fellow! his was an untoward fate; 'tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, should let itself be snuff'd out by one article. it is but just to say, however, that the _blackwood_ review of the same poem, printed below, was scarcely less virulent; and later critics have scouted the notion of the poet not having more strength of mind than he is credited with by byron. it is strange to notice that de quincey found in _endymion_ "the very midsummer madness of affectation, of false vapoury sentiment, and of fantastic effeminacy"; while one is ashamed for the timidity of the publisher who chose to return all unsold copies to george keats because of "the ridicule which has, time after time, been showered upon it." john wilson croker ( - ) croker was certainly unfortunate in his enemies, though they have given him immortality. the contemptible rigby in disraeli's _coningsby_ (admittedly drawn from him) is scarcely more damaging to his reputation than the sound, if prejudiced, onslaught of macaulay's review, of which we find echoes, after twelve years, in the same essayist's madame d'arblay. dr. hill tells us that he "added considerably to our knowledge of johnson," yet he was a thoroughly bad editor and had no real sympathy with either the subject or the author of that incomparable "life": through his essentially low mind. he was not a scholar, and he was inaccurate. croker was intimately associated with the _quarterly_ from its foundation until , retaining his bitterness and spite to the year of his death. but he was a born fighter, and never happier than in the heat of controversy. that he secured the friendship of scott, peel, and wellington must go to prove that his political, and literary prejudices, had not destroyed altogether his private character. he is credited with being the first writer to use the word "conservatives" in the _quarterly_, january, . he was a member of the irish bar, m.p. for dublin, acting chief secretary for ireland, secretary of the admiralty (where his best work was accomplished), and a privy councillor. * * * * * the veiled sarcasm of his attack on _sydney smith_ was only to be expected from a tory reviewer, and was probably inflamed by that heated loyalty to the church which characterised his paper. _macaulay_ had certainly provoked his retaliation, and we may notice here the same eager partisanship of church and state, pervading even his personal malice. john gibson lockhart ( - ) it is to be regretted that lockhart, who is so honourably remembered by his great _life of scott_, his "fine and animated translation" of spanish ballads, and his neglected--but powerful--_adam blair_, should be so intimately associated with the black record of the _quarterly_. he was also a contributor to _blackwood_ from october, , succeeding gifford in the editorial chair of mr. murray's review in until . but lockhart was "more than a satirist and a snarler." his polished jibes were more mischievous than brutal. "this reticent, sensitive, attractive, yet dangerous youth ... slew his victims mostly by the midnight oil, not by any blaze of gaiety, or in the accumulative fervour of social sarcasm. from him came most of those sharp things which the victims could not forget.... lockhart put in his sting in a moment, inveterate, instantaneous, with the effect of a barbed dart, yet almost, as it seemed, with the mere intention of giving point to his sentences, and no particular feeling at all." carlyle describes him as "a precise, brief, active person of considerable faculty, which however, had shaped itself _gigmanically_ only. fond of quizzing, yet not _very_ maliciously. has a broad, black brow, indicating force and penetration, but the lower half of the face diminishing into the character at best of distinctness, almost of triviality." * * * * * there is certainly a good deal of perversity about the _abuse_ of vathek, so startlingly combined with almost immoderate eulogy: to which the discriminating enthusiasm of his coleridge affords a pleasing contrast. it should be noticed that lockhart has also been credited with the bitter critical part of the _jane eyre_ review, printed below--of which any man ought to have been ashamed--as miss rigby (afterwards lady eastlake) is believed to have written "the part about the governess." he probably had a hand in the blackwood series on "the cockney school of poetry" (see below); and, in some ways, those reviews are more characteristic. sir walter scott ( - ) it would be out of place here to enter upon any biography or criticism of the author of _waverley_, or for that matter of jane austen. it is sufficient to notice that scott has found something generous to say (in diaries, letters, or formal criticism) on every writer he had occasion to mention, and that in his somewhat neglected, but frequently quoted, _lives of the novelists_, a striking pre-eminence was given to women; particularly mrs. radcliffe and clara reeve. indeed, the essay on mrs. radcliffe, a "very novel and rather heretical revelation" is "probably the best in the whole set." we remember, too, the famous passage in his _general preface to the waverley novels_:--"without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic tenderness and admirable tact of my accomplished friend, i felt that something might be attempted for my own country, of the same kind with that which miss edgeworth so fortunately achieved for ireland";--an ambition of which the modesty only equals the success achieved. in "appreciating" jane austen, indeed, scott is far more cautious, if not apologetic, than any critic of to-day would dream of being; but, when we remember the prejudices then existing against women writers (despite the popularity of madame d'arblay) and the well-nigh universal neglect accorded the author of _pride and prejudice_, we should perhaps rather marvel at the independent sincerity of his pronounced praise. the article, at any rate, has historic significance, as the first serious recognition of her immortal work. richard whately ( - ) the "dogmatical and crotchety" archbishop of dublin was looked at askance by the extreme evangelicals of his day (though thomas arnold has eulogised his holiness), and there is no doubt that his theology, however able and sincere, was mainly inspired by the "daylight of ordinary reason and of historical fact," opposed to the dogmas of tradition. he combated sceptical criticism by an ingenious parody entitled "historical doubts relative to napoleon buonaparte," and his epigram on the majority of preachers--that "they aim at nothing and they hit it," proves his freedom from any touch of sacerdotalism. his "rhetoric," his "logic," and his "political economy" were praised by so eminent a judge as john stuart mill, though criticised by hamilton; and lecky remarks on the "admirable lucidity of his style." his work, however, was as a whole too fragmentary to become standard, and he regarded it himself as "the mission of his life to make up cartridges for others to fire." * * * * * we may notice that in writing of _jane austen_, only six years after scott, though still measured and judicial, he permits himself a much more assured attitude of applause; and the article affords most valuable indication of the steady progress by which her masterpieces achieved the supremacy now acknowledged by all. william ewart gladstone ( - ) it would be no less impertinent, and unnecessary, to dwell in these pages upon the political, or literary, work of the greatest of modern premiers. it is sufficient to recall the certainty which used to follow a notice by gladstone of a large and immediate rise in sales. mr. john morley remarking that gladstone's "place is not in literary or critical history, but elsewhere," reminds us that his style was sometimes called johnsonian, though without good ground.... some critics charged him in with "prolix clearness." "the old charge," says mr. gladstone upon this, was obscure compression. i do not doubt that both may be true, and the former may have been the result of a well-meant effort to escape from the latter. * * * * * mr. morley, again, selects the essay on tennyson for especial praise. though one is apt to forget it, the laureate did not meet with anything like immediate recognition; and, though coming twenty-eight years after the appreciation by j.s. mill, this article does not assume the supremacy afterwards accorded the poet by common consent. samuel wilberforce ( - ) "one of the most conspicuous and remarkable figures" of his generation the versatile bishop of oxford is said to have come "next to gladstone as a man of inexhaustible powers of work." known from his oxford days as soapy sam, he was involved through no fault of his own, in some of the odium attached to the "essays and reviews" and "colenso" cases: his private life was embittered by the secession to rome of his two brothers, his brother-in-law, his only daughter, and his son-in-law. "he was an unwearied ecclesiastical politician, always involved in discussions and controversies, sometimes, it was thought, in intrigues; without whom nothing was done in convocation, nor, where church interests were involved, in the house of lords." the energy with which he governed his diocese for twenty-four years earned for him the title of "romodeller [transcriber's note: sic] of the episcopate." * * * * * the attempt, by a man whose "relaxations" were botany and ornithology, but who had no claims to be called an expert, to defeat darwin on his own ground--and the dignified horror of a churchman at some deductions from evolution--is eminently characteristic of the period. the earnest criticism of newman's conversion to rome concerns one of the most striking events of his generation, and illustrates the "church" attitude on such questions. anonymous we have hinted already that the responsibility for this group of ill-mannered recriminations may probably be distributed between gifford, croker, and lockhart. it is curious to notice that the second attack on scott appeared after his admission to the ranks of contributors; and the author of _waverley_ is perhaps the one man said to have friends both on the _edinburgh_ and the _quarterly_. that on leigh hunt, always the pet topic of toryism, from whom he certainly provoked some retaliation, is only paralleled in _blackwood_. we have included the _shakespeare_ and the _moxon_ as attractively brief samples on the approved model of savage banter, and the _jane eyre_ as perhaps the most flagrant example of bad taste to be found in these merciless pages. it was george henry lewis, by the way, who so much offended charlotte brontë by the greeting, "there ought to be a bond between us, for we have both written naughty books." it is interesting to find thackeray among those it was permitted to praise: though the "moral" objection to his "realism" reveals a strange attitude. we may notice, with some surprise, that the attitude towards george eliot is nearly as hostile as towards charlotte brontë. gifford on weber's "ford" [from _the quarterly review_, december, ] ... when it is determined to reprint the writings of an ancient author, it is usual, we believe, to bestow a little labour in gratifying the natural desire of the reader to know something of his domestic circumstances. ford had declared in the title-pages of his several plays, that he was of the inner temple; and, from his entry there, mr. malone, following up the inquiry, discovered that he was the second son of thomas ford, esq., and that he was baptized at ilsington, in devonshire, the th of april, . to this information mr. weber has added nothing; and he hopes that the meagreness of his biographical account will be readily excused by the reader who has examined the lives of his (ford's) dramatical contemporaries, in which we are continually "led to lament that our knowledge respecting them amounts to little better than nothing." it would surely be unjust to appear dissatisfied at the imperfect account of an ancient author, when all the sources of information have been industriously explored. but, in the present case, we doubt whether mr. weber can safely "lay this flattering unction to his soul"; and we shall therefore give such a sketch of the poet's life, as an attentive examination of his writings has enabled us to compile.... reversing the observation of dryden on shakespeare, it may be said of ford that "he wrote laboriously, not luckily": always elegant, often elevated, never sublime, he accomplished by patient and careful industry what shakespeare and fletcher produced by the spontaneous exuberance of native genius. he seems to have acquired early in life, and to have retained to the last a softness of versification peculiar to himself. without the majestic march of verse which distinguishes the poetry of massinger, and with none of that playful gaiety which characterises the dialogue of fletcher, he is still easy and harmonious. there is, however, a monotony in his poetry, which those who have perused his scenes long together must have inevitably perceived. his dialogue is declamatory and formal, and wants that quick chace of replication and rejoinder so necessary to effect in representation. if we could put out of our remembrance the singular merits of "the lady's trial," we should consider the genius of ford as altogether inclined to tragedy; and even there so large a proportion of the pathetic pervades the drama, that it requires the "humours" of guzman and fulgoso, in addition to a happy catastrophe, to warrant the name of comedy. in the plots of his tragedies ford is far from judicious; they are for the most part too full of the horrible, and he seems to have had recourse to an accumulation of terrific incidents, to obtain that effect which he despairs of producing by pathos of language. another defect in ford's poetry, proceeding from the same source, is the alloy of pedantry which pervades his scenes, at one time exhibited in the composition of uncouth phrases, at another in perplexity of language; and he frequently labours with a remote idea, which, rather than throw it away, he obtrudes upon his reader, involved in inextricable obscurity. we cannot agree with the editor in praising his delineation of the female character: less than women in their passions, they are more than masculine in their exploits and sufferings; but, excepting spinella in "the lady's trial," and perhaps penthea, we do not remember in ford's plays, any example of that meekness and modesty which compose the charm of the female character.... mr. weber is known to the admirers of our antient literature by two publications which, although they may not be deemed of great importance in themselves, have yet a fair claim to notice. we speak of the battle of flodden field, and the romances of the fourteenth century: which, as far as we have looked into them, appear very creditable to his industry and accuracy: his good genius, we sincerely regret to say, appears in a great measure to have forsaken him from the moment that he entered upon the task of editing a dramatic poet. in the mechanical construction of his work mr. weber has followed the last edition of massinger, with a servility which appears, in his mind, to have obviated all necessity of acknowledging the obligation: we will not stop to enquire whether he might not have found a better model; but proceed to the body of the work. as we feel a warm interest in everything which regards our ancient literature, on the sober cultivation of which the purity, copiousness, and even harmony of the english language must, in no small degree, depend, we shall notice some of the peculiarities of the volumes before us, in the earnest hope that while we relieve ford from a few of the errors and misrepresentations with which he is here encumbered, we may convince mr. weber that something more is necessary to a faithful editor than the copying of printers' blunders, and to a judicious commentator, than a blind confidence in the notes of every collection of old plays. mr. weber's attempts at explanation (for explanations it seems, there must be) are sometimes sufficiently humble. "carriage," he tells us, "is behaviour." it is so; we remember it in our spelling-book, among the words of three syllables, we have therefore no doubt of it. but you must have, rejoins the editor; and accordingly, in every third or fourth page, he persists in affirming that "carriage is behaviour." in the same strain of thankless kindness, he assures us that "fond is foolish," "but, except," "content, contentment," and _vice versa_, "period [transcriber's note: 'peroid' in original], end," "demur, delay," "ever, always," "sudden, quickly," "quick, suddenly," and so on through a long vocabulary of words of which a girl of six years old would blush to ask the meaning.... the confidence which mr. weber reposes in steevens, not only on one but on every occasion, is quite exemplary: the name alone operates as a charm, and supersedes all necessity of examining into the truth of his assertions; and he gently reminds those who occasionally venture to question it, that "they are ignorant and superficial critics." vol. ii, p. .--"i have seen summer go up and down with _hot codlings!_ mr. steevens observes that a codling _antiently_ meant an immature apple, and the present passage _plainly_ proves it, as none but immature apples could be had in summer," all this wisdom is thrown away. we can assure mr. weber, on the authority of ford himself, that "hot codlings" are _not_ apples, either mature or immature. steevens is a dangerous guide for such as do not look well about them. his errors are specious: for he was a man of ingenuity: but he was often wantonly mischievous, and delighted to stumble for the mere gratification of dragging unsuspecting innocents into the mire with him. he was, in short, the very puck of commentators.... no writer, in our remembrance, meets with so many "singular words" as the present editor. he conjectures, however, that _unvamp'd_ means _disclosed_. it means not stale, not patched up. we should have supposed it impossible to miss the sense of so trite an expression.... mr. weber's acquaintance with our dramatic writers extends, as the reader must have observed, very little beyond the indexes of steevens and reed. if he cannot find the word of which he is in quest, in them, he sets it down as an uncommon expression, or a coinage of his author.... these inadvertences, and many others which might be noticed, being chiefly confined to the notes, do not, perhaps, detract much from the value of the text: we now turn to some of a different kind, which bear hard on the editor, and prove that his want of knowledge is not compensated by any extraordinary degree of attention. it is not sufficient for mr. weber to say that many of the errors which we shall point out are found in the old copy. it was his duty to reform them. a facsimile of blunders no one requires. modern editions of our old poets are purchased upon the faith of a corrected text: this is their only claim to notice; and, if defective here, they become at once little better than waste-paper.... there is something extremely capricious in mr. weber's mode of proceeding: words are tampered with which are necessary to the right understanding of the text, while others, which reduce it to absolute jargon, are left unmolested.... we might carry this part of our examination to an immense extent; but we forbear. enough, and more than enough, is done to show that a strict revision of the text is indispensible; and, if it should fall to the lot of the present editor to undertake it, we trust that he will evince somewhat more care than he manifests in the conclusion of the work before us. it will scarcely be credited that mr. weber should travel through such a volume as we have just passed, in quest of errata, and find only one. "vol. ii (he says), p. , line , for satiromastrix read satiromastix!" we could be well content to rest here; but we have a more serious charge to bring against the editor, than the omission of points, or the misapprehension of words. he has polluted his pages with the blasphemies of a poor maniac, who, it seems, once published some detached scenes of the "broken heart." for this unfortunate creature, every feeling mind will find an apology in his calamitous situation; but--for mr. weber, we know not where the warmest of his friends will seek either palliation or excuse. on keats [from _the quarterly review_, april, ] reviewers have sometimes been accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticise. on the present occasion we shall anticipate the author's complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read his work. not that we have been wanting in our duty--far from it--indeed, we have made efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it; but with the fullest stretch of our perseverence, we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four books[ ] of which this poetic romance consists. we should extremely lament this want of energy, or whatever it may be, on our parts, were it not for one consolation--namely, that we are no better acquainted with the meaning of that book through which we have so painfully toiled than we are with that of the three which we have not looked into. [ ] _endymion: a poetic romance_. by john keats. london, . it is not that mr. keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody) it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius--he has all these; but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called cockney poetry; which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language. of this school mr. leigh hunt, as we observed in a former number, aspires to be the hierophant. our readers will recollect the pleasant recipes for harmonious and sublime poetry which he gave us in his preface to _rimini_, and the still more facetious instances of his harmony and sublimity in the verses themselves; and they will recollect above all the contempt of pope, johnson, and such like poetasters and pseudo-critics, which so forcibly contrasted itself with mr. leigh hunt's approbation of --all the things itself had wrote, of special merit though of little note. the author is a copyist of mr. hunt, but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype, who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning. but mr. keats had advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples, his nonsense therefore is quite gratuitous; he writes it for its own sake, and being bitten by mr. leigh hunt's insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his poetry. mr. keats's preface hints that his poem was produced under peculiar circumstances.... the two first books, and indeed the two last, are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the press. p. vii. thus, "the two first books" are, even in his own judgment, unfit to appear, and "the two last" are, it seems, in the same condition--and as two and two make four, and as that is the whole number of books, we have a clear and, we believe, a very just estimate of the entire work. mr. keats, however, deprecates criticism on this "immature and feverish" work in terms which are themselves sufficiently feverish; and we confess that we should have abstained from inflicting upon him any of the tortures of the "_fierce hell_" of criticism, which terrify his imagination, if he had not begged to be spared in order that he might write more; if we had not observed in him a certain degree of talent which deserves to be put in the right way, or which, at least, ought to be warned of the wrong; and if, finally, he had not told us that he is of an age and temper which imperiously require mental discipline. of the story we have been able to make out but little; it seems to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves of diana and endymion; but of this, as the scope of the work has altogether escaped us, we cannot speak with any degree of certainty: and must therefore content ourselves with giving some instances of its diction and versification.-- and here again we are perplexed and puzzled.--at first it appeared to us, that mr. keats had been amusing himself and wearying his readers with an immeasurable game at _bouts rimés_; but, if we recollect rightly, it is an indispensable condition at this play, that the rhymes when filled up shall have a meaning; and our author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning. he seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the _rhyme_ with which it concludes. there is hardly a complete couplet inclosing a complete idea in the whole book. he wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds, and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on which they turn.... be still the unimaginable lodge for solitary thinkings; such as dodge conception to the very bourne of heaven, then leave the naked brain: be still the leaven, that spreading in this dull and clodded earth gives it a touch ethereal--a new birth. p. . _lodge, dodge--heaven, leaven--earth, birth_; such, in six words, is the sum and substance of six lines. we come now to the author's taste in versification. he cannot indeed write a sentence, but perhaps he may be able to spin a line. let us see. the following are specimens of his prosodial notions of our english heroic metre. dear as the temple's self, so does the moon, the passion poesy, glories infinite, p. . so plenteously all weed-hidden roots, p. . ... by this time our readers must be pretty well satisfied as to the meaning of his sentences and the structures of his lines: we now present them with some of the new words with which, in imitation of mr. leigh hunt, he adorns our language. we are told that "turtles _passion_ their voices" (p. ); that "an arbour was _nested_" (p. ); and a lady's locks "_gordian'd_" up (p. ); and to supply the place of nouns thus verbalised mr. keats, with great fecundity, spawns new ones; such as "men-slugs and human _serpentry_" (p. ); "_honey-feel_ of bliss" (p. ); "wives prepare _needments_" (p. )--and so forth. then he has formed new verbs by the process of cutting off their tails, the adverbs, and affixing them to their foreheads; thus "the wine out-sparkled" (p. ); the "multitude up-follow'd" (p. ); and "night up-took" (p. ). "the wind up-blows" (p. ); and the "hours are down-sunken" (p. ). but if he sinks some adverbs in the verbs he compensates the language with adverbs and adjectives which he separates from the parent stock. thus, a lady "whispers _pantingly_ and close," makes "_hushing_ signs," and steers her skiff into a "_ripply_ cove" (p. ); a shower falls "_refreshfully_" (p. ); and a vulture has a "_spreaded_ tail" (p. ). but enough of mr. leigh hunt and his simple neophite.--if anyone should be bold enough to purchase this "poetic romance," and so much more patient than ourselves, as to get beyond the first book, and so much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted with his success; we shall then return to the task which we now abandon in despair, and endeavour to make all due amends to mr. keats and to our readers. croker on sydney smith [from _the quarterly review_, february, ] this sermon[ ] is written on the characters and duties of the clergy. perhaps it would have produced more effect upon the yorkshire divines had it come from one who had lived longer among them, and of the correspondence of whose life with his doctrines, they had better opportunities of judging; one whom, from long experience, they knew to be neither sullied by the little "affectations," nor "agitated by the little vanities of the world," whose strict observance of "those decencies and proprieties," which persons in their profession "owe to their situation in society," they had remarked through a long course of years. whether the life of mr. smith would form an illustration of his own precepts remains to be proved. but, if we rightly recollect dates, he is still to his neighbours a sort of unknown person, and hardly yet tried in his new situation of a parish priest. we therefore think, in spite of all the apologies with which he has prefaced his advice, that a more judicious topic might easily have been selected. [ ] a sermon preached before his grace the archbishop of york, and the clergy, at malton, at the visitation, aug., . by the rev. sydney smith, a.m., rector of foston, in yorkshire, and late fellow of new college, oxford. carpenter, . in the execution of this sermon there is little to commend. as a system of duties for any body of clergy, it is wretchedly deficient:--and really, when we call to mind the rich, the full, the vigorous, eloquent, and impassioned manner in which these duties are recommended and inforced in the writings of our old divines, we are mortified beyond measure at the absolute poverty, crudeness, and meanness of the present attempt to mimic them. as a composition, it is very imperfect: it has nearly the same merits, and rather more than the same defects, which characterise his former publications. mr. smith never writes but in a loose declamatory way. he is careless of connection, and not very anxious about argument. his sole object is to produce an effect at the moment, a strong first impression upon an audience, and if that can be done he is very indifferent as to what may be the result of examination and reflection.... if mr. smith is not only not a socinian, but if in his heart he doubts as to the least important point of the most abstruce and controverted subject on which our articles have decided, if, in short, he is not one of the most rigorously orthodox divines that exists, he has been guilty of the grossest and most disgusting hypocrisy--he has pronounced in the face of the public to which he appeals, and of the church to which he belongs, in the most solemn manner, and on the most solemn subject, a direct, intentional, and scandalous falsehood--he has acted in a way utterly subversive of all confidence among men; and the greater part of the wretches who retire from a course of justice degraded for perjury rank higher in the scale of morality, than an educated man holding a respectable place in society, who could thus trifle with the most sacred obligations. he could be induced to this base action only by a base motive, that of obviating any difficulties which a suspicion of his holding opinions different from those avowed by the establishment, might throw in the way of his preferment: and of rendering himself a possible object of the bounty of "his worthy masters and mistresses," whenever the golden days arrive, in which they shall again dispense the favours of the crown. such must be the case, if mr. smith is not sincere. there is no alternative. now this is scarcely to be believed of any gentleman of tolerably fair character, still less of a teacher of morality and religion, who holds forth in all his writings the most refined sentiments of honour and disinterestedness. the style of his profession of faith, however, partakes very much of the most offensive peculiarities of his manner. it is abrupt and violent to a degree which not only shocks good taste, but detracts considerably from the appearance of sincerity. it seems as if he considered his creed as a sort of nauseous medicine which could only be taken off at a draught, and he looks round for applause at the heroic effort by which he has drained the cup to its very dregs. but the passage about the verse in st. john is yet more extraordinary. has mr. smith really gone through the controversy upon this subject? and even if he has, is this the light way in which a man wholly unknown in the learned world, is entitled to contradict the opinion of some of the greatest scholars of europe? we have, however, the mere word of the facetious rector of foston, opposite to the authority and the arguments of a porson and a griesbach. it is at his command, unsupported by the smallest attempt at reasoning, that we are to set aside the opinion of men whose lives have been spent in the study of the greek language, and of biblical criticism, and which has been acquiesced in by many of the most competent judges both here and abroad. such audacity (to call it by no coarser name) is in itself only calculated to excite laughter and contempt: coupled as it is with a most unprovoked and unwarrantable mention of the name of the bishop of lincoln, it excites indignation. we feel no morbid sensibility for the character of a mitred divine: but we cannot see a blow aimed at the head of one of the chiefs of the church, a pious, learned, and laborious man, by the hand of ignorance and presumption, without interposing, not to heal the wound, for no wound has been made, but to chastise the assailant. the bishop of lincoln gives up these verses, not carelessly, and unadvisedly, but doubtless because he is persuaded that the cause of true religion can never be so much injured as by resting its defence upon passages liable to so much suspicion; and because he knows, that the doctrine of the trinity by no means depends upon that particular passage, but may be satisfactorily deduced from various other expressions, and from the general tenor of holy writ. indeed, if we were not prevented from harbouring any such suspicion by mr. smith's flaming profession of the _iotal_ accuracy of his creed; and if we could doubt the orthodoxy of the divine, without impugning the honesty of the man, we should be inclined to suspect that his defence of the verses proceeded from a concealed enemy. we are not unaware that the question cannot even yet be regarded as finally and incontrovertibly settled, but we apprehend the truth to be that mr. smith, not having read one syllable upon the subject, but having accidentally heard that there was a disputed verse in st. john relative to the doctrine of the trinity, and that it had been given up by the bishop of lincoln, thought he could not do better than by one dash of the pen, to show his knowledge of controversy, and the orthodoxy of his belief, at the expense of that prelate's character for discretion and zeal.... the next note is mere political, an ebullition of party rage, in which mr. smith abuses the present ministry with great bitterness, talks of "wickedness," "weakness," "ignorance," "temerity," after the usual fashion of opposition pamphlets, and clamours loudly against what, with an obstinacy of misrepresentation hardly to be credited, he persists in terming the "persecuting laws" against the roman catholics.... he is very anxious that his political friends should not desist from urging the question--an act of tergiversation and unconsistency which, he thinks, would ruin them in the estimation of the public. yet, if we mistake not, these gentlemen, at least that portion of them with which mr. smith (as we are told) is most closely connected, gave up, without a blush, india, reform, and peace, all of which they taught us to believe were vital questions in which the honour or the security of the country was involved. but catholic emancipation has some peculiar recommendations. it is odious to the people, and painful to the king, and therefore it cannot be delayed, without an utter sacrifice of character.... now we are by no means so eager on mr. smith in what he would term the cause of _religious freedom_. we belong to that vulgar school of timid churchmen, to whom the elevation of a vast body of sectaries to a level with the establishment, is a matter of very grave consideration, if not of alarm. we think that something is due to the prejudices (supposing them to be no more than prejudices) of nine-tenths of the people of england; and we are even so childish (for which we crave mr. smith's pardon) as to pay some regard to the feelings of the king, in whose personal mortification, we fairly own, we should not take the smallest pleasure.... we now take leave of the sermon and its notes. but, before we conclude, we are desirous ... to convey to mr. smith a little salutary advice ... to remind him that unmeasured severity of invective against others, will naturally produce, at the first favourable opportunity, a retort of similar harshness upon himself; and that unless he feels himself completely invulnerable, the conduct which he has hitherto pursued, is not only uncharitable and violent, but foolish. he should be told that, although he possesses some talents, they are by no means, as he supposes, of the first order. he writes in a tone of superiority which would hardly be justifiable at the close of a long and successful literary career. his acquirements are very moderate, though he wants neither boldness nor dexterity in displaying them to the best advantage; and he is far, very far indeed, from being endowed with that powerful, disciplined, and comprehensive mind, which should entitle him to decide authoritatively and at once upon the most difficult parts of subjects so far removed from one another as biblical criticism and legislation. his style is rapid and lively, but hasty and inaccurate; and he either despises or is incapable of regular and finished composition. humour, indeed (we speak now generally, of all these performances which have been ascribed to him by common consent), is his strong point; and here he is often successful; but even from this praise many deductions must be made. his jokes are broad and coarse; he is altogether a mannerist, and never knows where to stop. the [greek: _paedenagan_] seems quite unknown to him. his pleasantry does not proceed from keen and well-supported irony; just, but unexpected comparisons; but depends, for effect, chiefly upon strange polysyllabic epithets, and the endless enumeration of minute circumstances. in this he, no doubt, displays considerable ingenuity, and a strong sense of what is ludicrous; but his good things are almost all prepared after one receipt. there is some talent, but more trick, in their composition. the thing is well done, but it is of a low order; we meet with nothing graceful, nothing exquisite, nothing that pleases upon repetition and reflection. in everything that mr. smith attempts, in all his "bravura" passages, serious or comic, one is always shocked by some affectation or absurdity; something in direct defiance of all those principles which have been established by the authority of the best critics, and the example of the best writers: indeed, bad taste seems to be mr. smith's evil genius, both as to sentiment and expression. it is always hovering near him, and, like one of the harpies, is sure to pounce down before the end of the feast, and spoil the banquet, and disgust the guests. the present publication is by far the worst of all his performances, avowed or imputed. literary merit it has none; but in arrogance, presumption, and absurdity, it far outdoes all his former outdoings. indeed, we regard it as one of the most deplorable mistakes that has ever been committed by a man of supposed talents.... on macaulay [from _the quarterly review_, march, ] _the history of england from the accession of james ii_. by thomas babington macaulay. vols. vo. . the reading world will not need our testimony, though we willingly give it, that mr. macaulay possesses great talents and extraordinary acquirements. he unites powers and has achieved successes, not only various, but different in their character, and seldom indeed conjoined in one individual. he was while in parliament, though not quite an orator, and still less a debater, the most brilliant rhetorician of the house. his roman ballads (as we said in an article on their first appearance) exhibit a novel idea worked out with a rare felicity, so as to combine the spirit of the ancient minstrels with the regularity of construction and sweetness of versification which modern taste requires; and his critical essays exhibit a wide variety of knowledge with a great fertility of illustration, and enough of the salt of pleasantry and sarcasm to flavour and in some degree disguise a somewhat declamatory and pretentious dogmatism. it may seem too epigrammatic, but it is, in our serious judgment, strictly true, to say that his history seems to be a kind of combination and exaggeration of the peculiarities of all his former efforts. it is as full of political prejudice and partisan advocacy as any of his parliamentary speeches. it makes the facts of english history as fabulous as his lays do those of roman tradition; and it is written with as captious, as dogmatical, and as cynical a spirit as the bitterest of his reviews. that upon so serious an undertaking he has lavished uncommon exertion, is not to be doubted; nor can any one during the first reading escape the _entraînement_ of his picturesque, vivid, and pregnant execution: but we have fairly stated the impression left on ourselves by a more calm and leisurely perusal. we have been so long the opponents of the political party to which mr. macaulay belongs that we welcomed the prospect of again meeting him on the neutral ground of literature. we are of that class of tories--protestant tories, as they were called--that have no sympathy with the jacobites. we are as strongly convinced as mr. macaulay can be of the necessity of the revolution of --of the general prudence and expediency of the steps taken by our whig and tory ancestors of the convention parliament, and of the happiness, for a century and a half, of the constitutional results. we were, therefore, not without hope that at least in these two volumes, almost entirely occupied with the progress and accomplishment of that revolution, we might without any sacrifice of our political feelings enjoy unalloyed the pleasures reasonably to be expected from mr. macaulay's high powers both of research and illustration. that hope has been deceived: mr. macaulay's historical narrative is poisoned with a rancour more violent than even the passions of the time; and the literary qualities of the work, though in some respects very remarkable, are far from redeeming its substantial defects. there is hardly a page-- we speak literally, hardly a page--that does not contain something objectionable either in substance or in colour: and the whole of the brilliant and at first captivating narrative is perceived on examination to be impregnated to a really marvellous degree with bad taste, bad feeling, and, we are under the painful necessity of adding--bad faith. these are grave charges: but we make them in sincerity, and we think that we shall be able to prove them; and if, here or hereafter, we should seem to our readers to use harsher terms than good taste might approve, we beg in excuse to plead that it is impossible to fix one's attention on, and to transcribe large portions of a work, without being in some degree infected with its spirit; and mr. macaulay's pages, whatever may be their other characteristics, are as copious a repertorium of vituperative eloquence as, we believe, our language can produce, and especially against everything in which he chooses (whether right or wrong) to recognise the shibboleth of toryism. we shall endeavour, however, in the expression of our opinions, to remember the respect we owe to our readers and to mr. macaulay's general character and standing in the world of letters, rather than the provocations and examples of the volumes immediately before us. mr. macaulay announces his intention of bringing down the history of england almost to our own times; but these two volumes are complete in themselves, and we may fairly consider them as a history of the revolution; and in that light the first question that presents itself to us is why mr. macaulay has been induced to re-write what had already been so often and even so recently written--among others, by dalrymple, a strenuous but honest whig, and by mr. macaulay's own oracles, fox and mackintosh? it may be answered that both fox and mackintosh left their works imperfect. fox got no farther than monmouth's death; but mackintosh came down to the orange invasion, and covered full nine-tenths of the period as yet occupied by mr. macaulay. why then did mr. macaulay not content himself with beginning where mackintosh left off-- that is, with the revolution? and it would have been the more natural, because, as our readers know, it is there that hume's history terminates. what reason does he give for this work of supererogation? none. he does not (as we shall see more fully by and by) take the slightest notice of mackintosh's history, no more than if it had never existed. has he produced a new fact? not one. has he discovered any new materials? none, as far as we can judge, but the collections of fox and mackintosh, confided to him by their families.[ ] it seems to us a novelty in literary practice that a writer raised far by fame and fortune above the vulgar temptations of the craft should undertake to tell a story already frequently and recently told by masters of the highest authority and most extensive information, without having, or even professing to have, any additional means or special motive to account for the attempt. [ ] it appears from two notes of acknowledgments to m. guizot and the keepers of the archives at the hague, that mr. macaulay obtained some additions to the copies which mackintosh already had of the letters of ronquillo the spanish and citters the dutch minister at the court of james. we may conjecture that these additions were insignificant, since mr. macaulay has nowhere, that we have observed, specially noticed them; but except these, whatever they may be, we find no trace of anything that fox and mackintosh had not already examined and classed. we suspect, however, that we can trace mr. macaulay's design to its true source--the example and success of the author of waverley. the historical novel, if not invented, at least first developed and illustrated by the happy genius of scott, took a sudden and extensive hold of the public taste; he himself, in most of his subsequent novels, availed himself largely of the historical element which had contributed so much to the popularity of waverley. the press has since that time groaned with his imitators. we have had historical novels of all classes and grades. we have had served up in this form the norman conquest and the wars of the roses, the gunpowder plot and the fire of london, darnley and richelieu--and almost at the same moment with mr. macaulay's appeared a professed romance of mr. ainsworth's on the same subject-- james ii. nay, on a novelist of this popular order has been conferred the office of _historiographer_ to the queen. mr. macaulay, too mature not to have well measured his own peculiar capacities, not rich in invention but ingenious in application, saw the use that might be made of this principle, and that history itself would be much more popular with a large embroidery of personal, social, and even topographical anecdote and illustration, instead of the sober garb in which we had been in the habit of seeing it. few histories indeed ever were or could be written without some admixture of this sort. the father of the art himself, old herodotus, vivified his text with a greater share of what we may call personal anecdote than any of his classical followers. modern historians, as they happened to have more or less of what we may call _artistic_ feeling, admitted more or less of this decoration into their text, but always with an eye (which mr. macaulay never exercises) to the appropriateness and value of the illustration. generally, however, such matters have been thrown into notes, or, in a few instances--as by dr. henry and in mr. knight's interesting and instructive "pictorial history"--into separate chapters. the large class of memoir-writers may also be fairly considered as anecdotical historians--and they are in fact the sources from which the novelists of the new school extract their principal characters and main incidents. mr. macaulay deals with history, evidently, as we think, in imitation of the novelists--his first object being always picturesque effect--his constant endeavour to give from all the repositories of gossip that have reached us a kind of circumstantial reality to his incidents, and a sort of dramatic life to his personages. for this purpose he would not be very solicitous about contributing any substantial addition to history, strictly so called; on the contrary, indeed, he seems to have willingly taken it as he found it, adding to it such lace and trimmings as he could collect from the monmouth-street of literature, seldom it may be safely presumed of very delicate quality. it is, as johnson drolly said, "an old coat with a new facing--the old dog in a new doublet." the conception was bold, and--so far as availing himself, like other novelists, of the fashion of the day to produce a popular and profitable effect--the experiment has been eminently successful. but besides the obvious incentives just noticed, mr. macaulay had also the stimulus of what we may compendiously call a strong party spirit. one would have thought that the whigs might have been satisfied with their share in the historical library of the revolution:--besides rapin, echard, and jones, who, though of moderate politics in general, were stout friends to the revolution, they have had of professed and zealous whigs, burnet, the foundation of all, kennett, oldmixon, dalrymple, laing, brodie, fox, and finally mackintosh and his continuator, besides innumerable writers of less note, who naturally adopted the successful side; and we should not have supposed that the reader of any of those historians, and particularly the later ones, could complain that they had been too sparing of imputation, or even vituperation, to the opposite party. but not so mr. macaulay. the most distinctive feature on the face of his pages is personal virulence--if he has at all succeeded in throwing an air of fresh life into his characters, it is mainly due, as any impartial and collected reader will soon discover, to the simple circumstance of his hating the individuals of the opposite party as bitterly, as passionately, as if they were his own personal enemies-- more so, indeed, we hope than he would a mere political antagonist of his own day. when some one suggested to the angry o'neil that one of the anglo-irish families whom he was reviling as strangers had been four hundred years settled in ireland, the milesian replied, "_i hate the churls as if they had come but yesterday_." mr. macaulay seems largely endowed with this (as with a more enviable) species of memory, and he hates, for example, king charles i as if he had been murdered only yesterday. let us not be understood as wishing to abridge an historian's full liberty of censure--but he should not be a satirist, still less a libeller. we do not say nor think that mr. macaulay's censures were always unmerited--far from it--but they are always, we think without exception, immoderate. nay, it would scarcely be too much to say that this massacre of character is the point on which mr. macaulay must chiefly rest any claims he can advance to the praise of impartiality, for while he paints everything that looks like a tory in the blackest colours, he does not altogether spare any of the whigs against whom he takes a spite, though he always visits them with a gentler correction. in fact, except oliver cromwell, king william, a few gentlemen who had the misfortune to be executed or exiled for high treason, and every dissenting minister that he has or can find occasion to notice, there are hardly any persons mentioned who are not stigmatized as knaves or fools, differing only in degrees of "turpitude" and "imbecility". mr. macaulay has almost realized the work that alexander chalmers's playful imagination had fancied, a _biographia flagitiosa_, or _the lives of eminent scoundrels_. this is also an imitation of the historical novel, though rather in the track of eugene aram and jack sheppard than of waverley or woodstock; but what would you have? to attain the picturesque--the chief object of our artist--he adopts the ready process of dark colours and a rough brush. nature, even at the worst, is never gloomy enough for a spagnoletto, and judge jeffries himself, for the first time, excites a kind of pity when we find him (like one to whom he was nearly akin) not so black as he is painted. from this first general view of mr. macaulay's historical novel, we now proceed to exhibit in detail some grounds for the opinion which we have ventured to express. we premise that we are about to enter into details, because there is in fact little to question or debate about but details. we have already hinted that there is absolutely no new fact of any consequence, and, we think we can safely add, hardly a new view of any historical fact, in the whole book. whatever there may remain questionable or debatable in the history of the period, we should have to argue with burnet, dalrymple, or mackintosh, and not with mr. macaulay. it would, we know, have a grander air if we were to make his book the occasion of disquisitions on the rise and progress of the constitution--on the causes by which the monarchy of the tudors passed, through the murder of charles, to the despotism of cromwell--how again that produced a restoration which settled none of the great moral or political questions which had generated all those agitations, and which, in return, those agitations had complicated and inflamed--and how, at last, the undefined, discordant, and antagonistic pretensions of the royal and democratical elements were reconciled by the revolution and the bill of rights--and finally, whether with too much or too little violence to the principles of the ancient constitution--all these topics, we say, would, if we were so inclined, supply us, as they have supplied mr. macaulay, with abundant opportunities of grave tautology and commonplace; but we decline to raise sham debates on points where there is no contest. we can have little historic difference, properly so called, with one who has no historical difference on the main facts with anybody else: instead, then, of pretending to treat any great questions, either of constitutional learning or political philosophy, we shall confine ourselves to the humbler but more practical and more useful task above stated. our first complaint is of a comparatively small and almost mechanical, and yet very real, defect--the paucity and irregularity of his dates, and the mode in which the few that he does give are overlaid, as it were, by the text. this, though it may be very convenient to the writer, and quite indifferent to the reader, of an historical romance, is perplexing to any one who might wish to read and weigh the book as a serious history, of which dates are the guides and landmarks; and when they are visibly neglected we cannot but suspect that the historian will be found not very solicitous about strict accuracy. this negligence is carried to such an extent that, in what looks like a very copious table of contents, one of the most important events of the whole history-- that, indeed, on which the revolution finally turned--the marriage of princess mary to the prince of orange, is not noticed; nor is any date affixed to the very cursory mention of it in the text. it is rather hard to force the reader who buys this last new model history, in general so profuse of details, to recur to one of the old-fashioned ones to discover that this important event happened in the year , and on the th of november--a day thrice over remarkable in william's history--for his birth, his marriage, and his arrival with his invading army on the coast of devon. our second complaint is of one of the least important, perhaps, but most prominent defects of mr. macaulay's book--his style--not merely the choice and order of words, commonly called style, but the turn of mind which prompts the choice of expressions as well as of topics. we need not repeat that mr. macaulay has a great facility of language, a prodigal _copia verborum_--that he narrates rapidly and clearly--that he paints very forcibly,--and that his readers throughout the tale are carried on, or away, by something of the sorcery which a brilliant orator exercises over his auditory. but he has also in a great degree the faults of the oratorical style. he deals much too largely in epithets--a habit exceedingly dangerous to historical truth. he habitually constructs a piece of what should be calm, dispassionate narrative, upon the model of the most passionate peroration--adhering in numberless instances to precisely the same specific formula of artifice. his diction is often inflated into fustian, and he indulges in exaggeration till it sometimes, unconsciously no doubt, amounts to falsehood. it is a common fault of those who strive at producing oratorical effects, to oscillate between commonplace and extravagance; and while studying mr. macaulay, one feels as if vibrating between facts that every one knows and consequences which nobody can believe. we are satisfied that whoever will take, as we have been obliged to do, the pains of sifting what mr. macaulay has produced from his own mind with what he has borrowed from others, will be entirely of our opinion. in truth, when, after reading a page or two of this book, we have occasion to turn to the same transaction in burnet, dalrymple, or hume, we feel as if we were exchanging the glittering agility of a rope-dancer for gentlemen in the attire and attitude of society. and we must say that there is not one of those writers that does not give a clearer and more trustworthy account of all that is really historical in the period than can be collected from mr. macaulay's more decorated pages. we invite our readers to try mr. macaulay's merits as an historian by the test of comparison with his predecessors. * * * * * every great painter is supposed to make a larger use of one particular colour. what a monstrous bladderful of _infamy_ mr. macaulay must have squeezed on his palette when he took to portrait-painting! we have no concern, except as friends to historical justice, for the characters of any of the parties thus stigmatized, nor have we room or time to discuss these, or the hundred other somewhat similar cases which the volumes present; but we have looked at the authorities cited by mr. macaulay, and we do not hesitate to say that, "as is his wont," he has, with the exception of jeffries, outrageously exaggerated them. we must next notice the way in which mr. macaulay refers to and uses his authorities--no trivial points in the execution of a historical work-- though we shall begin with comparatively small matters. in his chapter on manners, which we may call the most remarkable in his book, one of his most frequent references is to "chamberlayne's state of england, ." it is referred to at least a dozen or fourteen times in that chapter alone; but we really have some doubt whether mr. macaulay knew the nature of the book he so frequently quoted. chamberlayne's work, of which the real title is "_angliae_ [or, after the scotch union, _magnae britanniae_] _notitia, or the present state of england_" [or _great britain_], was a kind of periodical publication, half history and half court-calendar. it was first published in , and new editions or reprints, with new dates, were issued, not annually, we believe, but so frequently that there are between thirty and forty of them in the museum, ending with . from the way and for the purposes for which mr. macaulay quotes chamberlayne, we should almost suspect that he had lighted on the volume for , and, knowing of no other, considered it as a substantive work published in that year. _once_ indeed he cites the date of , but there was, it seems, no edition of that year, and this may be an accidental error; but however that may be, our readers will smile when they hear that the two first and several following passages which mr. macaulay cites from chamberlayne (i. and ), as _characteristic_ of the _days of charles ii_, distinctively from more modern times, are to be found _literatim_ in every succeeding "chamberlayne" down to --the last we have seen--were thus continually reproduced because the proprietors and editors of the table book knew they were _not_ particularly characteristical of one year or reign more than another--and now, in , might be as well quoted as characteristics of the reign of george ii as of charles ii. we must add that there are references to chamberlayne and to several weightier books (some of which we shall notice more particularly hereafter), as justifying assertions for which, on examining the said books with our best diligence, we have not been able to find a shadow of authority. our readers know that there was a dr. john eachard who wrote a celebrated work on the "grounds and occasions of the contempt of the clergy." they also know that there was a dr. lawrence echard who wrote both a history of england, and a history of the revolution. both of these were remarkable men; but we almost doubt whether mr. macaulay, who quotes the works of each, does not confound their persons, for he refers to them both by the common (as it may once have been) name of _each_ard, and at least twenty times by the wrong name. this, we admit, is a small matter; but what will some edinburgh reviewer (_temp_. albert v) say if he finds a writer confounding _catherine_ and _thomas_ macaulay as "the celebrated author of the great whig history of england"--a confusion hardly worse than that of the two eachards--for catherine, though now forgotten by an ungrateful public, made quite as much noise in her day as thomas does in ours. but we are sorry to say we have a heavier complaint against mr. macaulay. we accuse him of a habitual and really injurious perversion of his authorities. this unfortunate indulgence, in whatever juvenile levity it may have originated, and through whatever steps it may have grown into an unconscious habit, seems to us to pervade the whole work-- from alpha to omega--from procopius to mackintosh--and it is on that very account the more difficult to bring to the distinct conception of our readers. individual instances can be, and shall be, produced; but how can we extract and exhibit the minute particles that colour every thread of the texture?--how extract the impalpable atoms that have fermented the whole brewing? we must do as dr. faraday does at the institution when he exhibits in miniature the larger processes of nature. we will suppose, then--taking a simple phrase as the fairest for the experiment--that mr. macaulay found barillon saying in french, "_le drôle m'a fait peur_," or burnet saying in english, "_the fellow frightened me_." we should be pretty sure not to find the same words in mr. macaulay. he would pause--he would first consider whether "the fellow" spoken of was a _whig_ or a _tory_. if a whig, the thing would be treated as a joke, and mr. macaulay would transmute it playfully into "_the rogue startled me_"; but if a _tory_, it would take a deeper dye, and we should find "_the villain assaulted me_"; and in either case we should have a grave reference to jan. , "barillon,-------- "; or, "burnet, i. ." feb. , if our reader will keep this formula in his mind, he will find it a fair exponent of mr. macaulay's _modus operandi_.... we shall now proceed to more general topics. we decline, as we set out by saying, to treat this "new atalantis" as a serious history, and therefore we shall not trouble our readers with matters of such remote interest as the errors and anachronisms with which the chapter that affects to tell our earlier history abounds. our readers would take no great interest in a discussion whether hengist was as fabulous as hercules, alaric a christian born, and "the fair chapels of new college and st. george" at windsor of the same date. but there is one subject in that chapter on which we cannot refrain from saying a few words--the church. we decline to draw any inferences from this work as to mr. macaulay's own religious opinions; but it is our duty to say--and we trust we may do so without offence--that mr. macaulay's mode of dealing with the general principle of church government, and the doctrine, discipline, and influence of the church of england, cannot fail to give serious pain, and sometimes to excite a stronger feeling than pain, in the mind of every friend to that church, whether in its spiritual or corporate character. he starts with a notion that the fittest engine to redeem england from the mischiefs and mistakes of oligarchical feudalism was to be found in the imposing machinery and deception of the roman church; overlooking the great truth that it was not the romish church, but the genius of christianity, working its vast but silent change, which was really guiding on the chariot of civilization; but in this broad principle there was not enough of the picturesqueness of detail to captivate his mind. it would not suit him to distinguish between the church of christ and the web of corruptions that had grown about her, but could not effectually arrest the benignant influence inherent in her mainspring. he therefore leads his readers to infer that christianity came first to britain with st. austin, and for aught that mr. macaulay condescends to inform us, the existence of a prior anglo-saxon church was a monkish fiction. the many unhappy circumstances of the position taken up by the romish church in its struggles for power--some of them unavoidable, it may be, if such a battle were to be fought--are actually displayed as so many blessings, attainable only by a system which the historian himself condemns elsewhere as baneful and untrue. he maintains these strange paradoxes and contradictions with a pertinacity quite surprising. he doubts whether a true form of christianity would have answered the purposes of liberty and civilization half so well as the acknowledged duplicities of the church of rome. it may perhaps be doubted whether a purer religion might not have been found a less efficient agent.--i. . there is a point in the life both of an individual and a society at which submission and faith, such as at a later period would be justly called servility and credulity, are useful qualities.--i. . these are specimens of the often exposed fallacies in which he delights to indulge. place right and wrong in a state of uncertainty by reflected lights, and you may fill up your picture as you like. and such for ever is mr. macaulay's principle of art. it is not the elimination of error that he seeks for, but an artistic balance of conflicting forces. and this he pursues throughout: deposing the dignity of the historian for the clever antithesis of the pamphleteer. at last, on this great and important point of religious history--a point which more than any other influences every epoch of english progress, he arrives at this pregnant and illustrative conclusion-- it is difficult to say whether england owes more to the roman catholic religion or to the reformation.--i. . england owes nothing to "the roman catholic religion." she owes everything to christianity, which romanism injured and hampered but could not destroy, and which the reformation freed at least from the worst of those impure and impeding excrescences. with regard to his treatment of the reformation, and especially of the church of england, it is very difficult to give our readers an adequate idea. throughout a system of depreciation--we had almost said insult--is carried on: sneers, sarcasms, injurious comparisons, sly misrepresentations, are all adroitly mingled throughout the narrative, so as to produce an unfavourable impression, which the author has not the frankness to attempt directly. even when obliged to approach the subject openly, it is curious to observe how, under a slight veil of impartiality, imputations are raised and calumnies accredited. for instance, early in the first volume he gives us his view of the english reformation, as a kind of middle term, emerging out of the antagonist struggles of the catholics and calvinists: and it is impossible not to see that, between the three parties, he awards to the catholics the merit of unity and consistency; to the calvinists, of reason and independence; to the anglicans, the lowest motives of expediency and compromise. to enforce this last topic he relies on the inconsistencies, some real and some imaginary, imputed to cranmer, whose notions of worldly expedience he chooses to represent as the source of the anglican church.... every one of the circumstances on which we may presume that mr. macaulay would rely as justifying these charges has been long since, to more candid judgments, either disproved, explained, or excused, and in truth whatever blame can be justly attributed to any of them, belongs mainly, if not exclusively, to those whose violence and injustice drove a naturally upright and most conscientious man into the shifts and stratagems of self-defence. with the greatest fault and the only crime that charles in his whole life committed mr. macaulay does not reproach him--the consent to the execution of lord strafford--that indeed, as he himself penitentially confessed, was a deadly weight on his conscience, and is an indelible stain on his character; but even that guilt and shame belongs in a still greater degree to mr. macaulay's patriot heroes. this leads us to the conclusive plea which we enter to mr. macaulay's indictment, namely--that all those acts alleged as the excuses of rebellion and regicide occurred after the rebellion had broken out, and were at worst only devices of the unhappy king to escape from the regicide which he early foresaw. it was really the old story of the wolf and the lamb. it was far down the stream of rebellion that these acts of supposed perfidy on the part of charles could be said to have troubled it. but while he thus deals with the lamb, let us see how he treats the wolf. we have neither space nor taste for groping through the long and dark labyrinth of cromwell's proverbial duplicity and audacious apostacy: we shall content ourselves with two facts, which, though stated in the gentlest way by mr. macaulay, will abundantly justify the opinion which all mankind, except a few republican zealots, hold of that man's sincerity, of whose abilities, wonderful as they were, the most remarkable, and perhaps the most serviceable to his fortunes, was his hypocrisy; so much so, that south--a most acute observer of mankind, and who had been educated under the commonwealth and protectorate--in his sermon on "worldly wisdom," adduces cromwell as an instance of "habitual dissimulation and imposture." oliver, mr. macaulay tells us, modelled his army on the principle of composing it of men fearing god, and zealous for _public liberty_, and in the very next page he is forced to confess that thirteen years followed in which for the first and the last time the civil power of our country was subjected to military dictation.--i. . again, oliver had made his choice. he had kept the hearts of his soldiers, but he had _broken_ with every other class of his fellow citizens.--i. . that is, he had broken through all the promises, pledges, and specious pretences by which he had deceived and enslaved the nation, which mr. macaulay calls with such opportune _naïveté, his fellow citizens_! then follows, not a censure of this faithless usurpation, but many laboured apologies, and even defences of it, and a long series of laudatory epithets, some of which are worth collecting as a rare contrast to mr. macaulay's usual style, and particularly to the abuse of charles, which we have just exhibited. his _genius and resolution_ made him more _absolute master of his country_ than any of her legitimate kings had been.--i. . he having cut off the legitimate king's head on a pretence that charles had wished to make himself _absolutely master of the country_. everything yielded to the _vigour and ability_ of cromwell.--i. . the government, though in the form of a republic, was in truth a despotism, moderated only by the _wisdom, the sober-mindedness, and the magnanimity_ of the despot.--i. . with a vast deal more of the same tone. but mr. macaulay particularly expatiates on the influence that cromwell exercised over foreign states: and there is hardly any topic to which he recurs with more pleasure, or, as we think, with less sagacity, than the terror with which cromwell and the contempt with which the stuarts inspired the nations of europe. he somewhat exaggerates the extent of this feeling, and greatly misstates or mistakes the cause; and as this subject is in the present state of the world of more importance than any others in the work, we hope we may be excused for some observations tending to a sounder opinion on that subject. it was not, as mr. macaulay everywhere insists, the personal abilities and genius of cromwell that exclusively, or even in the first degree, carried his foreign influence higher than that of the stuarts. the internal struggles that distracted and consumed the strength of these islands throughout their reigns necessarily rendered us little formidable to our neighbours; and it is with no good grace that a whig historian stigmatises that result as shameful; for, without discussing whether it was justifiable or not, the fact is certain, that it was opposition of the whigs--often in rebellion and always in faction against the government--which disturbed all progress at home and paralysed every effort abroad. we are not, we say, now discussing whether that opposition was not justifiable and may not have been ultimately advantageous in several constitutional points; we think it decidedly was: but at present all we mean to do is to show that it had a great share in producing on our foreign influence the lowering effects of which mr. macaulay complains. and there is still another consideration which escapes mr. macaulay in his estimate of such usurpers as cromwell and buonaparte. a usurper is always more terrible both at home and abroad than a legitimate sovereign: first, the usurper is likely to be (and in these two cases was) a man of superior genius and military glory, wielding the irresistible power of the sword; but there is still stronger contrast-- legitimate governments are bound--at home by laws--abroad by treaties, family ties, and international interests; they acknowledge the law of nations, and are limited, even in hostilities, by many restraints and bounds. the despotic usurpers had no fetters of either sort--they had no opposition at home, and no scruples abroad. law, treaties, rights, and the like, had been already broken through like cobwebs, and kings naturally humbled themselves before a vigour that had dethroned and murdered kings, and foreign nations trembled at a power that had subdued in their own fields and cities the pride of england and the gallantry of france! to contrast cromwell and charles ii, napoleon and louis xviii, is sheer nonsense and mere verbiage--it is as if one should compare the house-dog and the wolf, and argue that the terror inspired by the latter was very much to his honour. all this is such a mystery to mr. macaulay that he wanders into two theories so whimsical, that we hesitate between passing them by as absurdities, or producing them for amusement; we adopt the latter. one is that cromwell could have no interest and therefore no personal share in the death of charles. "whatever cromwell was," says mr. macaulay, "he was no fool; and he must have known that charles i was obviously a less difficulty in his way than charles ii." cromwell, we retain the phrase, "was no fool," and he thought and _found_ that charles ii, was, as far as he was concerned, no difficulty at all. the real truth was, that the revolutionary party in england in , like that in france in , was but a rope of sand which nothing could cement and consolidate but the _blood of the kings--that_ was a common crime and a common and indissoluble tie which gave all their consistency and force to both revolutions--a stroke of original sagacity in cromwell and of imitative dexterity in robespierre. if mr. macaulay admits, as he subsequently does (i. ), that the regicide was "a sacrament of blood," by which the party became irrevocably bound to each other and separated from the rest of the nation, how can he pretend that cromwell derived no advantage from it? in fact, his admiration--we had almost said fanaticism--for cromwell betrays him throughout into the blindest inconsistencies. the second vision of mr. macaulay is, if possible, still more absurd. he imagines a cromwell dynasty! if it had not been for monk and his army, the rest of the nation would have been loyal to the son of the illustrious oliver. had the protector and the parliament been suffered to proceed undisturbed, there can be little doubt that an order of things similar to that which was afterwards established under the house of hanover, would have been established under the house of cromwell.--i. . and yet in a page or two mr. macaulay is found making an admission-- made, indeed, with the object of disparaging monk and the royalists--but which gives to his theory of a cromwellian dynasty the most conclusive refutation. it was probably not till monk had been some days in the capital that he made up his mind. the cry of the whole people was for a free parliament; and there could _be no doubt that a parliament really free would instantly restore the exiled family_.--i. . all this hypothesis of a cromwellian dynasty _looks_ like sheer nonsense; but we have no doubt it has a meaning, and we request our readers not to be diverted by the almost ludicrous partiality and absurdity of mr. macaulay's speculations from an appreciation of the deep hostility to the monarchy from which they arise. they are like bubbles on the surface of a dark pool, which indicate there is something rotten below. we should if we had time have many other complaints to make of the details of this chapter, which are deeply coloured with all mr. macaulay's prejudices and passions. he is, we may almost say of course, violent and unjust against strafford and clarendon; and the most prominent touch of candour that we can find in this period of his history is, that he slurs over the murder of laud in an abscure half-line (i. ) as if he were--as we hope he really is--ashamed of it. we now arrive at what we have heard called the celebrated third chapter --celebrated it deserves to be, and we hope our humble observations may add something to its celebrity. there is no feature of mr. macaulay's book on which, we believe, he more prides himself, and which has been in truth more popular with his readers, than the descriptions which he introduces of the residences, habits, and manners of our ancestors. they are, provided you do not look below the surface, as entertaining as pepys or pennant, or any of the many scrap-book histories which have been recently fabricated from those old materials; but when we come to examine them, we find that in these cases, as everywhere else, mr. macaulay's propensity to caricature and exaggerate leads him not merely to disfigure circumstances, but totally to forget the principle on which such episodes are admissible into regular history--namely, the illustration of the story. they should be, as it were, woven into the narrative, and not, as mr. macaulay generally treats them, stitched on like patches. this latter observation does not of course apply to the collecting a body of miscellaneous facts into a separate chapter, as hume and others have done; but mr. macaulay's chapter, besides, as we shall show, the prevailing inaccuracy of its details, has one general and essential defect specially its own. the moment mr. macaulay has selected for suspending his narrative to take a view of the surface and society of england is the death of charles ii. now we think no worse point of time could have been chosen for tracing the obscure but very certain connection between political events and the manners of a people. the restoration, for instance, was an era in manners as well as in politics--so was in a fainter degree the revolution--either, or both, of those periods would have afforded a natural position for contemplating a going and a coming order of things; but we believe that there are no two periods in our annals which were so identical in morals and politics--so undistinguishable, in short, in any national view--as the latter years of charles and the earlier years of james. here then is an objection _in limine_ to this famous chapter--and not _in limine_ only, but in substance; for in fact the period he has chosen would not have furnished out the chapter, four-fifths of which belong to a date later than that which he professes to treat of. in short, the chapter is like an old curiosity-shop, into which--no matter whether it happens to stand in charles street, william street, or george street--the knick-knacks of a couple of centuries are promiscuously jumbled. what does it signify, in a history of the reign of charles ii, that a writer, "_sixty years after the revolution_" (i. ), says that in the lodging-houses at bath "the hearth-slabs" were "freestone, not marble"--that "the best apartments were hung with coarse woollen stuff, and furnished with rush-bottomed chairs"?--nay, that he should have the personal good taste to lament that in those boeotian days "_not a wainscot was painted_" ( ); and yet this twaddle of the reign of george ii, patched into the times of charles ii, is the appropriate occasion which he takes to panegyrise this new mode of elucidating history?--... it is a curious and, to persons of our opinions, not unsatisfactory circumstance, that, though mr. macaulay almost invariably applies the term _tory_ in an opprobrious or contemptuous sense, yet so great is the power of truth in surmounting the fantastical forms and colours laid over it by this brilliant _badigeonneur_, that on the whole no one, we believe, can rise from the work without a conviction that the tories (whatever may be said of their prejudices) were the honestest and most conscientious of the whole _dramatis personae_; and it is this fact that in several instances and circumstances imprints, as it were by force, upon mr. macaulay's pages an air of impartiality and candour very discordant from their general spirit. we are now arrived at the fourth chapter--really the first, strictly speaking, of mr. macaulay's history--the accession of james ii, where also sir james mackintosh's history commences. and here we have to open to our readers the most extraordinary instance of _parallelism_ between two writers, unacknowledged by the later one, which we have ever seen. sir james mackintosh left behind him a history of the revolution, which was published in , three years after his death, in quarto: it comes down to the orange invasion, and, though it apparently had not received the author's last corrections, and was clumsily edited, and tagged with a continuation by a less able hand, the work is altogether (bating not a little ultra-whiggery) very creditable to mackintosh's diligence, taste, and power of writing; it is indeed, we think, his best and most important work, and that by which he will be most favourably known to posterity. from that work mr. macaulay has borrowed largely--prodigally-- helped himself with both hands--not merely without acknowledging his obligation, but without so much as alluding to the existence of any such work. nay--though this we are sure was never designed--he inserts a note full of kindness and respect to sir james mackintosh, which would naturally lead an uninformed reader to conclude that sir james mackintosh, though he had _meditated_ such a work, had never even begun writing it. on the st page of mr. macaulay's first volume, at the mention of the old news-letters which preceded our modern newspapers, mr. macaulay says, that "they form a valuable part of the literary treasures collected by the late sir james mackintosh"; and to this he adds the following foot-note: i take this opportunity of expressing my warm gratitude to the family of my dear and honoured friend sir james mackintosh, for confiding to me the materials collected by him _at a time when he meditated a work similar to that which i have undertaken._ i have never seen, and i do not believe that there anywhere exists, within the same compass, so noble a _collection of extracts_ from public and private archives. the judgment with which sir james, in great masses of the rudest ore of history, selected what was valuable and rejected what was worthless, can be fully appreciated only by one who has toiled after him in the same mine.--i. . could any one imagine from this that mackintosh had not only _meditated_ a work, but actually written, and that his friends had published, a large closely printed quarto volume, on the same subject, from the same materials, and sometimes in the very same words as mr. macaulay's? the coincidence--the identity, we might almost say--of the two works is so great, that, while we have been comparing them, we have often been hardly able to distinguish which was which. we rest little on the similiarity of facts, for the facts were ready made for both; and mr. macaulay tells us that he worked from mackintosh's materials; there would, therefore, even if he had never seen mackintosh's work, be a community of topics and authorities; but, seeing as we do in every page that he was writing with mackintosh's volume before his eyes, we cannot account for his utter silence about it.... having thus shown mr. macaulay's mode of dealing with what forms the chief and most characteristic feature of his book--its anecdotical gossip--we shall now endeavour to exhibit the deceptive style in which he treats the larger historical facts: in truth the style is the same--a general and unhesitating sacrifice of accuracy and reality to picturesque effect and party prejudices. he treats historical personages as the painter does his _layman_--a supple figure which he models into what he thinks the most striking attitude, and dresses up with the gaudiest colours and most fantastical draperies. it is very difficult to condense into any manageable space the proofs of a general system of accumulating and aggravating all that was ever, whether truly or falsely, reproached to the tories, and alleviating towards the whigs the charges which he cannot venture to deny or even to question. the mode in which this is managed so as to keep up some show of impartiality is very dexterous. the reproach, well or ill founded, which he thinks most likely to damage the character of any one he dislikes, is repeated over and over again in hope that the iteration will at last be taken for proof, such as the perfidy of charles i, the profligacy and selfishness of charles ii, the cold and cruel stupidity of james, the baseness of churchill, the indecent violence of rochester, the contemptible subserviency of his brother, clarendon, and so on through a whole dictionary of abuse on every one whom he takes or mistakes for a tory, and on a few whigs whom for some special reasons of his own he treats like tories. on the other hand, when he finds himself reluctantly forced to acknowledge even the greatest enormity of the whigs--corruption--treason--murder he finds much gentler terms for the facts; selects a scapegoat, some subaltern villain, or some one whom history has already gibbeted, "to bear upon him all their iniquities," and that painful sacrifice once made, he avoids with tender care a recurrence to so disagreeable a subject.... after so much political detail it will be some kind of diversion to our readers to examine mr. macaulay's most elaborate strategic and topographical effort, worked up with all the combined zeal and skill of an ex-secretary-at-war and a pictorial historian--a copious description of the battle of sedgemoor. mr. macaulay seems to have visited bridgwater with a zeal worthy of a better result: for it has produced a description of the surrounding country as pompous and detailed as if it had been the scene of some grand strategic operations--a parade not merely unnecessary, but absurd, for the so-called battle was but a bungling skirmish. monmouth had intended to surprise the king's troops in their quarters by a midnight attack, but was stopped by a wide and deep trench, of which he was not apprised, called bussex rhine, behind which the king's army lay. "the trenches which drain the moor are," mr. macaulay adds, "in that country called _rhines_." on each side of this ditch the parties stood firing at each other in the dark. lord grey and the cavalry ran away without striking a blow; monmouth followed them, too, soon; for some time the foot stood with a degree of courage and steadiness surprising in such raw and half-armed levies; at last the king's cavalry got round their flank, and they too ran: the king's foot then crossed the ditch with little or no resistance, and slaughtered, with small loss on their own side, a considerable number of the fugitives, the rest escaping back to bridgwater. our readers will judge whether such a skirmish required a long preliminary description of the surrounding country. mr. macaulay might just as usefully have described the plain of troy. indeed at the close of his long topographical and etymological narrative mr. macaulay has the tardy candour to confess that-- little is now to be learned by visiting the field of battle, for the face of the country has been greatly changed, and the old _bussex rhine_, on the banks of which the great struggle took place, has long disappeared. this is droll. after spending a deal of space and fine writing in describing the present prospect, he concludes by telling us candidly it is all of no use, for the whole scene has changed. this is like walpole's story of the french lady who asked for her lover's picture; and when he demurred observing that, if her husband were to see it, it might betray their secret--"o dear, no," she said--just like mr. macaulay--"i _will have the picture_, but it _need not be like_!" but even as to the change, we again doubt mr. macaulay's accuracy. the word _rhine_ in somersetshire, as perhaps--_parva componere magnis_--in the great german river, means _running_ water, and we therefore think it very unlikely that a running stream should have disappeared; but we also find in the ordnance survey of somersetshire, made in our own time, the course and name of _bussck's rhine_ distinctly laid down in front of weston, where it probably ran in monmouth's day; and we are further informed, in return to some inquiries that we have caused to be made, that the _rhine_ is now, in , as visible and well known as ever it was. but this grand piece of the military topography of a battlefield where there was no battle must have its picturesque and pathetic episode, and mr. macaulay finds one well suited to such a novel. when monmouth had made up his mind to attempt to _surprise_ the royal army, mr. macaulay is willing (for a purpose which we shall see presently) to persuade himself that the duke let the whole town into his secret:-- that an attack was to be made under cover of the night was no secret in bridgwater. the town was full of women, who had repaired thither by hundreds from the surrounding region to see their husbands, sons, lovers, and brothers once more. there were many sad partings that day; and many parted never to meet again. the report of the intended attack came to the ears of a young girl who was zealous for the king. though of modest character, she had the courage to resolve that she would herself bear the intelligence to feversham. she stole out of bridgwater, and made her way to the royal camp. but that camp was not a place where female innocence could be safe. even the officers, despising alike the irregular force to which they were opposed, and the negligent general who commanded them, had indulged largely in wine, and were ready for any excess of licentiousness and cruelty. one of them seized the unhappy maiden, refused to listen to her errand, and brutally outraged her. she fled in agonies of rage and shame, leaving the wicked army to its doom.--i. , . --the _doom of the wicked army_, be it noted _en passant_, being a complete victory. mr. macaulay cites kennett for this story, and adds that he is "_forced_ to believe the story to be true, because kennett declares that it was communicated to him in the year by a brave officer who had fought at sedgemoor, and had himself seen the poor girl depart in an agony of distress,"--_ib_. we shall not dwell on the value of an anonymous story told _three-and-thirty years_ after the battle of sedgemoor. the tale is sufficiently refuted by notorious facts and dates, and indeed by its internal absurdity. we know from the clear and indisputable evidence of wade, who commanded monmouth's infantry, all the proceedings of that day. monmouth no doubt intended to move that night, and made open preparation for it, and the partings so pathetically described may have, therefore, taken place, and the rather because the intended movement was to leave that part of the country altogether--_not_ to meet the king's troops, but to endeavour to escape them by a forced march across the avon and into gloucestershire. so far might have been known. but about _three_ o'clock that afternoon monmouth received intelligence by a spy that the king's troops had advanced to sedgemoor, but had taken their positions so injudiciously, that there seemed a possibility of surprising them in a night attack. on this monmouth assembled a council of war, which agreed that, instead of retreating that night towards the avon as they had intended, they should advance and attack, provided the spy, who was to be sent out to a new reconnoissance, should report that the troops were not intrenched. we may be sure that--as the news only arrived at three in the afternoon--the assembling the council of war--the deliberation-- the sending back the spy--his return and another deliberation--must have protracted the final decision to so late an hour that evening, that it is utterly impossible that the change of the design of a march northward to that of an "_attack to be made under cover of the night_," could have been that _morning_ no secret in bridgwater. but our readers see it was necessary for mr. macaulay to raise this fable, in order to account for the poor girl's knowing so important a secret. so far we have argued the case on mr. macaulay's own showing, which, we confess, was very incautious on our part; but on turning to his authority we find, as usual, a story essentially different. kennett says-- a brave captain in the horse guards, now living ( ), was in the action at sedgemoor, and gave me the account of it:--that on _sunday morning, july _, a young woman came from monmouth's quarters to give notice of his design to surprise the king's camp _that night_; but this young woman being carried to a chief officer in a neighbouring village, she was led upstairs and debauched by him, and, coming down in a great fright and disorder (as he himself saw her), she went back, and her message was not told.--_kennett_, in. . this knocks the whole story on the head. kennett was not aware (wade's narrative not being published when he wrote) that the king's troops did not come in sight of sedgemoor till about three o'clock p.m. of that sunday on the early morning of which he places the girl's visit to the camp, and it was not till late that same evening that monmouth changed his original determination, and formed the sudden resolution with which, to support kennett's story, the whole town must have been acquainted at least twelve hours before. these are considerations which ought not to have escaped a philosophical historian who had the advantage, which kennett had not, of knowing the exact time when these details occurred.... we must here conclude. we have exhausted our time and our space, but not our topics. we have selected such of the more prominent defects and errors of mr. macaulay as were manageable within our limits; but numerous as they are, we beg that they may be considered as specimens only of the infinitely larger assortment that the volumes would afford, and be read not merely as individual instances, but as indications of the general style of the work, and the prevailing _animus_ of the writer. we have chiefly directed our attention to points of mere historical inaccuracy and infidelity; but they are combined with a greater admixture of other--we know not whether to call them literary or moral--defects, than the insulated passages sufficiently exhibit. these faults, as we think them, but which may to some readers be the prime fascinations of the work, abound on its surface. and their very number and their superficial prominence constitute a main charge against the author, and prove, we think, his mind to be unfitted for the severity of historical inquiry. he takes much pains to parade--perhaps he really believes in--his impartiality, with what justice we appeal to the foregoing pages; but he is guilty of a prejudice as injurious in its consequences to truth as any political bias. he abhors whatever is not in itself picturesque, while he clings with the tenacity of a novelist to the _piquant_ and the startling. whether it be the boudoir of a strumpet or the death-bed of a monarch--the strong character of a statesman-warrior abounding in contrasts and rich in mystery, or the personal history of a judge trained in the old bailey to vulgarize and ensanguine the king's bench--he luxuriates with a vigour and variety of language and illustration which renders his "history" an attractive and absorbing story-book. and so spontaneously redundant are these errors-- so inwoven in the very texture of mr. macaulay's mind--that he seems never able to escape from them. even after the reader is led to believe that all that can be said either of praise or vituperation as to character, of voluptuous description and minute delineation as to fact and circumstance, has been passed in review before him--when a new subject, indeed, seems to have been started--all at once the old theme is renewed, and the old ideas are redressed in all the affluent imagery and profuse eloquence of which mr. macaulay is so eminent a master. now of the fancy and fashion of this we should not complain--quite the contrary--in a professed novel: there is a theatre in which it would be exquisitely appropriate and attractive; but the temple of history is not the floor for a morris-dance--the muse clio is not to be worshipped in the halls of terpsichore. we protest against this species of _carnival_ history; no more like the reality than the eglintoun tournament or the costume quadrilles of buckingham palace; and we deplore the squandering of so much melodramatic talent on a subject which we have hitherto reverenced as the figure of truth arrayed in the simple argments [transcriber's note: sic] of philosophy. we are ready to admit an hundred times over mr. macaulay's literary powers--brilliant even under the affectation with which he too frequently disfigures them. he is a great painter, but a suspicious narrator; a grand proficient in the picturesque, but a very poor professor of the historic. these volumes have been, and his future volumes as they appear will be, devoured with the same eagerness that _oliver twist_ or _vanity fair_ excite--with the same quality of zest, though perhaps with a higher degree of it;--but his pages will seldom, we think, receive a second perusal--and the work, we apprehend, will hardly find a permanent place on the historic shelf-- nor ever assuredly, if continued in the spirit of the first two volumes, be quoted as authority on any question or point of the history of england. lockhart on the author of "vathek"[ ] [from _the quarterly review_, june, ] [ ] "italy: with sketches of spain and portugal. in a series of letters written during a residence in these countries." by william beckford, esq., author of _vathek_. london, . vathek is, indeed, without reference to the time of life [before he had closed his twentieth year] when the author penned it, a very remarkable performance; but, like most of the works of the great poet (byron) who has eloquently praised it, it is stained with poison-spots--its inspiration is too often such as might have been inhaled in the "hall of eblis." we do not allude so much to its audacious licentiousness, as to the diabolical levity of its contempt for mankind. the boy-author appears to have already rubbed all the bloom off his heart; and, in the midst of his dazzling genius, one trembles to think that a stripling of years so tender should have attained the cool cynicism of a _candide_. how different is the effect of that eastern tale of our own days, which lord byron ought not to have forgotten when he was criticising his favourite romance. how perfectly does _thalaba_ realize the ideal demanded in the welsh triad, of "fulness of erudition, simplicity of language, and purity of manners." but the critic was repelled by the purity of that delicious creation, more than attracted by the erudition which he must have respected, and the diction which he could not but admire-- the low sweet voice so musical, that with such deep and undefined delight fills the surrender'd soul. it has long been known that mr. beckford prepared, shortly after the publication of his _vathek_, some other tales in the same vein--the histories, it is supposed, of the princes in his "hall of eblis." a rumour had also prevailed, that the author drew up, early in life, some account of his travels in various parts of the world; nay, that he had printed a few copies of this account, and that its private perusal had been eminently serviceable to more than one of the most popular poets of the present age. but these were only vague reports; and mr. beckford, after achieving, on the verge of manhood, a literary reputation, which, however brilliant, could not satisfy the natural ambition of such an intellect--seemed, for more than fifty years, to have wholly withdrawn himself from the only field of his permanent distinction. the world heard enough of his gorgeous palace at cintra (described in _childe harold_), afterwards of the unsubstantial pageant of his splendour at fonthill, and latterly of his architectural caprices at bath. but his literary name seemed to have belonged to another age; and, perhaps, in this point of view, it may not have been unnatural for lord byron, when comparing _vathek_ with other eastern tales, to think rather of _zadig_ and _rasselas_, than of thalaba--the wild and wondrous song. the preface to the present volumes informs us that they include a reprint of the book of travels, of which a small private edition passed through the press forty years ago, and of the existence of which--though many of our readers must have heard some hints--few could have had any _knowledge_. mr. beckford has at length been induced to publish his letters, in order to vindicate his own original claim to certain thoughts, images, and expressions, which had been adopted by other authors whom he had from time to time received beneath his roof, and indulged with a perusal of his secret lucubrations. the mere fact that such a work has lain for near half-a-century, printed but unpublished, would be enough to stamp the author's personal character as not less extraordinary than his genius. it is, indeed, sufficiently obvious that mr. rogers had read it before he wrote his "italy "--a poem, however, which possesses so many exquisite beauties entirely its own, that it may easily afford to drop the honour of some, perhaps unconsciously, appropriated ones; and we are also satisfied that this book had passed through mr. moore's hands before he gave us his light and graceful "rhymes on the road," though the traces of his imitation are rarer than those which must strike everyone who is familiar with the "italy." we are not so sure as to lord byron; but, although we have not been able to lay our finger on any one passage in which he has evidently followed mr. beckford's vein, it will certainly rather surprise us should it hereafter be made manifest that he had not seen, or at least heard an account of, this performance, before he conceived the general plan of his "childe harold." mr. beckford's book is entirely unlike any book of travel _in prose_ that exists in any european language; and if we could fancy lord byron to have written the "harold" in the measure of "don juan," and to have availed himself of the facilities which the _ottima rima_ affords for intermingling high poetry with merriment of all sorts, and especially with sarcastic sketches of living manners, we believe the result would have been a work more nearly akin to that now before us than any other in the library. mr. beckford, like "harold," passes through various regions of the world, and, disdaining to follow the guide-book, presents his reader with a series of detached, or very slenderly connected sketches of _the scenes that had made the deepest impression upon himself_. he, when it suits him, puts the passage of the alps into a parenthesis. on one occasion, he really treats rome as if it had been nothing more than a post station on the road from florence to naples; but, again, if the scenery and people take his fancy, "he has a royal reluctance to move on, as his own hero showed when his eye glanced on the grands caractères rouges, tracés par la main de carathis?... _qui me donnera des loix_?-- s'écria le caliphe." "england's wealthiest son" performs his travels, of course, in a style of great external splendour. conspictuus longé cunctisque notabilis intrat-- courts and palaces, as well as convents and churches, and galleries of all sorts, fly open at his approach: he is caressed in every capital--he is _fêté_ in every château. but though he appears amidst such accompaniments with all the airiness of a juan, he has a thread of the blackest of harold in his texture; and every now and then seems willing to draw a veil between him and the world of vanities. he is a poet, and a great one too, though we know not that he ever wrote a line of verse. his rapture amidst the sublime scenery of mountains and forests--in the tyrol especially, and in spain--is that of a spirit cast originally in one of nature's finest moulds; and he fixes it in language which can scarcely be praised beyond its deserts--simple, massive, nervous, apparently little laboured, yet revealing, in its effect, the perfection of art. some immortal passages in gray's letters and byron's diaries, are the only things, in our tongue, that seem to us to come near the profound melancholy, blended with a picturesqueness of description at once true and startling, of many of these extraordinary pages. nor is his sense for the _highest_ beauty of art less exquisite. he seems to describe classical architecture, and the pictures of the great italian schools, with a most passionate feeling of the grand, and with an inimitable grace of expression. on the other hand, he betrays, in a thousand places, a settled voluptuousness of temperament, and a capricious recklessness of self-indulgence, which will lead the world to identify him henceforth with his _vathek_, as inextricably as it has long since connected harold with the poet that drew him; and then, that there may be no limit to the inconsistencies of such a strange genius, this spirit, at once so capable of the noblest enthusiasm, and so dashed with the gloom of over-pampered luxury, can stoop to chairs and china, ever and anon, with the zeal of an auctioneer--revel in the design of a clock or a candlestick, and be as ecstatic about a fiddler or a soprano as the fools in hogarth's _concert_. on such occasions he reminds us, and will, we think, remind everyone, of the lord of strawberry hill. but even here all we have is on a grander scale. the oriental prodigality of his magnificence shines out even in trifles. he buys a library where the other would have cheapened a missal. he is at least a male horace walpole; as superior to the "silken baron," as fonthill, with its york-like tower embosomed among hoary forests, was to that silly band-box which may still be admired on the road to twickenham ... we have no discussions of any consequence in these volumes: even the ultra-aristocratical opinions and feelings of the author--who is, we presume, a whig--are rather hinted than avowed. from a thousand passing sneers, we may doubt whether he has any religion at all; but still he _may_ be only thinking of the outward and visible absurdities of popery--therefore we have hardly a pretext for treating these matters seriously. in short, this is meant to be, as he says in his preface, nothing but a "book of light reading"; and though no one can read it without having many grave enough feelings roused and agitated within him, there are really no passages to provoke or justify any detailed criticism either as to morals or politics ... we risk nothing in predicting that mr. beckford's _travels_ will henceforth be classed among the most elegant productions of modern literature: they will be forthwith translated into every language of the continent--and will keep his name alive, centuries after all the brass and marble he ever piled together have ceased to vibrate with the echoes of _modenhas_. on coleridge [from _the quarterly review_, august, ] _the poetical works of s.t. coleridge_. vols. mo. london, . let us be indulged, in the mean time, in this opportunity of making a few remarks on the genius of the extraordinary man whose poems, now for the first time completely collected, are named at the head of this article. the larger part of this publication is, of course, of old date, and the author still lives; yet, besides the considerable amount of new matter in this edition, which might of itself, in the present dearth of anything eminently original in verse, justify our notice, we think the great, and yet somewhat hazy, celebrity of coleridge, and the ill-understood character of his poetry, will be, in the opinion of a majority of our readers, more than an excuse for a few elucidatory remarks upon the subject. idolized by many, and used without scruple by more, the poet of "christabel" and the "ancient mariner" is but little truly known in that common literary world, which, without the prerogative of conferring fame hereafter, can most surely give or prevent popularity for the present. in that circle he commonly passes for a man of genius, who has written some very beautiful verses, but whose original powers, whatever they were, have been long since lost or confounded in the pursuit of metaphysic dreams. we ourselves venture to think very differently of mr. coleridge, both as a poet and a philosopher, although we are well enough aware that nothing which we can say will, as matters now stand, much advance his chance of becoming a fashionable author. indeed, as we rather believe, we should earn small thanks from him for our happiest exertions in such a cause; for certainly, of all the men of letters whom it has been our fortune to know, we never met any one who was so utterly regardless of the reputation of the mere author as mr. coleridge--one so lavish and indiscriminate in the exhibition of his own intellectual wealth before any and every person, no matter who--one so reckless who might reap where he had most prodigally sown and watered. "god knows,"--as we once heard him exclaim upon the subject of his unpublished system of philosophy,--"god knows, i have no author's vanity about it. i should be absolutely glad if i could hear that the _thing_ had been done before me." it is somewhere told of virgil, that he took more pleasure in the good verses of varius and horace than in his own. we would not answer for that; but the story has always occurred to us, when we have seen mr. coleridge criticising and amending the work of a contemporary author with much more zeal and hilarity than we ever perceived him to display about anything of his own. perhaps our readers may have heard repeated a saying of mr. wordsworth, that many men of this age had done wonderful _things_, as davy, scott, cuvier, &c.; but that coleridge was the only wonderful _man_ he ever knew. something, of course, must be allowed in this as in all other such cases for the antithesis; but we believe the fact really to be, that the greater part of those who have occasionally visited mr. coleridge have left him with a feeling akin to the judgment indicated in the above remark. they admire the man more than his works, or they forget the works in the absorbing impression made by the living author. and no wonder. those who remember him in his more vigorous days can bear witness to the peculiarity and transcendant power of his conversational eloquence. it was unlike anything that could be heard elsewhere; the kind was different, the degree was different, the manner was different. the boundless range of scientific knowledge, the brilliancy and exquisite nicety of illustration, the deep and ready reasoning, the strangeness and immensity of bookish lore--were not all; the dramatic story, the joke, the pun, the festivity, must be added--and with these the clerical-looking dress, the thick waving silver hair, the youthful-coloured cheek, the indefinable mouth and lips, the quick yet steady and penetrating greenish grey eye, the slow and continuous enunciation, and the everlasting music of his tones,--all went to make up the image and constitute the living presence of the man. he is now no longer young, and bodily infirmities, we regret to know, have pressed heavily upon him. his natural force is indeed abated; but his eye is not dim, neither is his mind yet enfeebled. "o youth!" he says in one of the most exquisitely finished of his later poems-- o youth! for years so many and sweet, 'tis known that thou and i were one, i'll think it but a fond conceit-- it cannot be that thou art gone! thy vesper bell hath not yet tolled:-- and thou wert aye a masker bold! what strange disguise hast now put on, to make believe that thou art gone? i see these locks in silvery slips, this drooping gait, this altered size;-- but springtide blossoms on thy lips, and tears take sunshine from thine eyes! life is but thought: so think i will that youth and i are house-mates still. mr. coleridge's conversation, it is true, has not now all the brilliant versatility of his former years; yet we know not whether the contrast between his bodily weakness and his mental power does not leave a deeper and more solemnly affecting impression, than his most triumphant displays in youth could ever have done. to see the pain-stricken countenance relax, and the contracted frame dilate under the kindling of intellectual fire alone--to watch the infirmities of the flesh shrinking out of sight, or glorified and transfigured in the brightness of the awakening spirit--is an awful object of contemplation; and in no other person did we ever witness such a distinction,--nay, alienation of mind from body,--such a mastery of the purely intellectual over the purely corporeal, as in the instance of this remarkable man. even now his conversation is characterized by all the essentials of its former excellence; there is the same individuality, the same _unexpectedness_, the same universal grasp; nothing is too high, nothing too low for it: it glances from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, with a speed and a splendour, an ease and a power, which almost seem inspired: yet its universality is not of the same kind with the superficial ranging of the clever talkers whose criticism and whose information are called forth by, and spent upon, the particular topics in hand. no; in this more, perhaps, than in anything else is mr. coleridge's discourse distinguished: that it springs from an inner centre, and illustrates by light from the soul. his thoughts are, if we may so say, as the radii of a circle, the centre of which may be in the petals of a rose, and the circumference as wide as the boundary of things visible and invisible. in this it was that we always thought another eminent light of our time, recently lost to us, an exact contrast to mr. coleridge as to quality and style of conversation. you could not in all london or england hear a more fluent, a more brilliant, a more exquisitely elegant converser than sir james mackintosh; nor could you ever find him unprovided. but, somehow or other, it always seemed as if all the sharp and brilliant things he said were poured out of so many vials filled and labelled for the particular occasion; it struck us, to use a figure, as if his mind were an ample and well-arranged _hortus siccus_, from which you might have specimens of every kind of plant, but all of them cut and dried for store. you rarely saw nature working at the very moment in him. with coleridge it was and still is otherwise. he may be slower, more rambling, less pertinent; he may not strike at the instant as so eloquent; but then, what he brings forth is fresh coined; his flowers are newly gathered, they are wet with dew, and, if you please, you may almost see them growing in the rich garden of his mind. the projection is visible; the enchantment is done before your eyes. to listen to mackintosh was to inhale perfume; it pleased, but did not satisfy. the effect of an hour with coleridge is to set you thinking; his words haunt you for a week afterwards; they are spells, brightenings, revelations. in short, it is, if we may venture to draw so bold a line, the whole difference between talent and genius. a very experienced short-hand writer was employed to take down mr. coleridge's lectures on shakespeare, but the manuscript was almost entirely unintelligible. yet the lecturer was, as he always is, slow and measured. the writer--we have some notion it was no worse an artist than mr. gurney himself--gave this account of the difficulty: that with regard to every other speaker whom he had ever heard, however rapid or involved, he could almost always, by long experience in his art, guess the form of the latter part, or apodosis, of the sentence by the form of the beginning; but that the conclusion of every one of coleridge's sentences was a _surprise_ upon him. he was obliged to listen to the last word. yet this unexpectedness, as we termed it before, is not the effect of quaintness or confusion of construction; so far from it, that we believe foreigners of different nations, especially germans and italians, have often borne very remarkable testimony to the grammatical purity and simplicity of his language, and have declared that they generally understood what he said much better than the sustained conversation of any other englishman whom they had met. it is the uncommonness of the thoughts or the image which prevents your anticipating the end. we owe, perhaps, an apology to our readers for the length of the preceding remarks; but the fact is, so very much of the intellectual life and influence of mr. coleridge has consisted in the oral communication of his opinions, that no sketch could be reasonably complete without a distinct notice of the peculiar character of his powers in this particular. we believe it has not been the lot of any other literary man in england, since dr. johnson, to command the devoted admiration and steady zeal of so many and such widely differing disciples--some of them having become, and others being likely to become, fresh and independent sources of light and moral action in themselves upon the principles of their common master. one half of these affectionate disciples have learned their lessons of philosophy from the teacher's mouth. he has been to them as an old oracle of the academy or lyceum. the fulness, the inwardness, the ultimate scope of his doctrines has never yet been published in print, and if disclosed, it has been from time to time in the higher moments of conversation, when occasion, and mood, and person begot an exalted crisis. more than once has mr. coleridge said, that with pen in hand, he felt a thousand checks and difficulties in the expression of his meaning; but that--authorship aside--he never found the smallest hitch or impediment in the fullest utterance of his most subtle fancies by word of mouth. his abstrusest thoughts became rhythmical and clear when chaunted to their own music. but let us proceed now to the publication before us. this is the first complete collection of the poems of samuel taylor coleridge. the addition to the last edition is not less than a fourth of the whole, and the greatest part of this matter has never been printed before. it consists of many juvenile pieces, a few of the productions of the poet's middle life, and more of his later years. with regard to the additions of the first class, we should not be surprised to hear friendly doubts expressed as to the judgment shown in their publication. we ourselves think otherwise; and we are very glad to have had an opportunity of perusing them. there may be nothing in these earlier pieces upon which a poet's reputation could be built; yet they are interesting now as measuring the boyish powers of a great author. we never read any juvenile poems that so distinctly foretokened the character of all that the poet has since done; in particular, the very earliest and loosest of these little pieces indicate that unintermitting thoughtfulness, and that fine ear for verbal harmony in which we must venture to think that not one of our modern poets approaches to coleridge. * * * * * we, of course, cite these lines for little besides their luxurious smoothness; and it is very observable, that although the indications of the more strictly intellectual qualities of a great poet are very often extremely faint, as in byron's case, in early youth,--it is universally otherwise with regard to high excellence in _versification_ considered apart and by itself. like the ear for music, the sense of metrical melody is always a natural gift; both indeed are evidently connected with the physical arrangement of the organs, and never to be acquired by any effort of art. when possessed, they by no means necessarily lead on to the achievement of consummate harmony in music or in verse; and yet consummate harmony in either has never been found where the natural gift has not made itself conspicuous long before. spenser's hymns, and shakespeare's "venus and adonis," and "rape of lucrece," are striking instances of the overbalance of mere sweetness of sound. even "comus" is what we should, in this sense, call luxurious; and all four gratify the outward ear much more than that inner and severer sense which is associated with the reason, and requires a meaning even in the very music for its full satisfaction. compare the versification of the youthful pieces mentioned above with that of the maturer works of those great poets, and you will recognize how possible it is for verses to be exquisitely melodious, and yet to fall far short of that exalted excellence of numbers of which language is in itself capable. you will feel the simple truth, that melody is a part only of harmony. those early flashes were indeed auspicious tokens of the coming glory, and involved some of the conditions and elements of its existence; but the rhythm of the "faerie queene" and of "paradise lost" was also the fruit of a distinct effort of uncommon care and skill. the endless variety of the pauses in the versification of these poems could not have been the work of chance, and the adaptation of words with reference to their asperity, or smoothness, or strength, is equally refined and scientific. unless we make a partial exception of the "castle of indolence," we do not remember a single instance of the reproduction of the exact rhythm of the spenserian stanza, especially of the concluding line. the precise miltonic movement in blank verse has never, to our knowledge, been caught by any later poet. it is mr. coleridge's own strong remark, that you might as well think of pushing a brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of the finished passages in shakespeare or milton. the motion or transposition will alter the thought, or the feeling, or at least the tone. they are as pieces of mosaic work, from which you cannot strike the smallest block without making a hole in the picture. and so it is--in due proportion--with coleridge's best poems. they are distinguished in a remarkable degree by the perfection of their rhythm and metrical arrangement. the labour bestowed upon this point must have been very great; the tone and quantity of words seem weighed in scales of gold. it will, no doubt, be considered ridiculous by the fannii and fanniae of our day to talk of varying the trochee with the iambus, or of resolving either into the tribrach. yet it is evident to us that these, and even minuter points of accentual scansion, have been regarded by mr. coleridge as worthy of study and observation. we do not, of course, mean that rules of this kind were always in his mind while composing, any more than that an expert disputant is always thinking of the distinctions of mood and figure, whilst arguing; but we certainly believe that mr. coleridge has almost from the commencement of his poetic life looked upon versification as constituting in and by itself a much more important branch of the art poetic than most of his eminent contemporaries appear to have done. and this more careful study shows itself in him in no technical peculiarities or fantastic whims, against which the genius of our language revolts; but in a more exact adaptation of the movement to the feeling, and in a finer selection of particular words with reference to their local fitness for sense and sound. some of his poems are complete models of versification, exquisitely easy to all appearance, and subservient to the meaning, and yet so subtle in the links and transitions of the parts as to make it impossible to produce the same effect merely by imitating the syllabic metre as it stands on the surface. the secret of the sweetness lies within, and is involved in the feeling. it is this remarkable power of making his verse musical that gives a peculiar character to mr. coleridge's lyric poems. in some of the smaller pieces, as the conclusion of the "kubla khan," for example, not only the lines by themselves are musical, but the whole passage sounds all at once as an outburst or crash of harps in the still air of autumn. the verses seem as if _played_ to the ear upon some unseen instrument. and the poet's manner of reciting verse is similar. it is not rhetorical, but musical: so very near recitative, that for any one else to attempt it would be ridiculous; and yet it is perfectly miraculous with what exquisite searching he elicits and makes sensible every particle of the meaning, not leaving a shadow of a shade of the feeling, the mood, the degree, untouched. we doubt if a finer rhapsode ever recited at the panathenaic festival; and the yet unforgotten doric of his native devon is not altogether without a mellowing effect in his utterance of greek. he would repeat the [greek: autar achilleus dakrusas, etaron aphar ezeto. k. t. l.] with such an interpreting accompaniment of look, and tone and gesture, that we believe any commonly-educated person might understand the import of the passage without knowing alpha from omega. a chapter of isaiah from his mouth involves the listener in an act of exalted devotion. we have mentioned this, to show how the whole man is made up of music; and yet mr. coleridge has no _ear_ for music, as it is technically called. master as he is of the intellectual recitative, he could not _sing_ an air to save his life. but his delight in music is intense and unweariable, and he can detect good from bad with unerring discrimination. poor naldi, whom most of us remember, and all who remember must respect, said to our poet once at a concert--"that he did not seem much interested with a piece of rossini's which had just been performed." coleridge answered, "it sounded to me exactly like _nonsense verses_. but this thing of beethoven's that they have begun--stop, let us listen to this, i beg!" ... the minute study of the laws and properties of metre is observable in almost every piece in these volumes. every kind of lyric measure, rhymed and unrhymed, is attempted with success; and we doubt whether, upon the whole, there are many specimens of the heroic couplet or blank verse superior in construction to what mr. coleridge has given us. we mention this the rather, because it was at one time, although that time is past, the fashion to say that the lake school--as two or three poets, essentially unlike to each other, were foolishly called--had abandoned the old and established measures of the english poetry for new conceits of their own. there was no truth in that charge; but we will say this, that, notwithstanding the prevalent opinion to the contrary, we are not sure, after perusing _some passages_ in mr. southey's "vision of judgment," and the entire "hymn to the earth," in hexameters, in the second of the volumes now before us, that the question of the total inadmissibility of that measure in english verse can be considered as finally settled; the true point not being whether such lines are as good as, or even like, the homeric or virgilian models, but whether they are not in themselves a pleasing variety, and on that account alone, if for nothing else, not to be rejected as wholly barbarous ... we should not have dwelt so long upon this point of versification, unless we had conceived it to be one distinguishing excellence of mr. coleridge's poetry, and very closely connected with another, namely, fulness and individuality of thought. it seems to be a fact, although we do not pretend to explain it, that condensation of meaning is generally found in poetry of a high import in proportion to perfection in metrical harmony. petrarch, spenser, shakespeare, and milton are obvious instances. goethe and coleridge are almost equally so. indeed, whether in verse, or prose, or conversation, mr. coleridge's mind may be fitly characterized as an energetic mind--a mind always at work, always in a course of reasoning. he cares little for anything, merely because it was or is; it must be referred, or be capable of being referred, to some law or principle, in order to attract his attention. this is not from ignorance of the facts of natural history or science. his written and published works alone sufficiently show how constantly and accurately he has been in the habit of noting all the phenomena of the material world around us; and the great philosophical system now at length in preparation for the press demonstrates, we are told, his masterly acquaintance with almost all the sciences, and with not a few of the higher and more genial of the arts. yet his vast acquirements of this sort are never put forward by or for themselves; it is in his apt and novel illustrations, his indications of analogies, his explanation of anomalies, that he enables the hearer or reader to get a glimpse of the extent of his practical knowledge. he is always reasoning out from an inner point, and it is the inner point, the principle, the law which he labours to bring forward into light. if he can convince you or himself of the principle _à priori_, he generally leaves the facts to take care of themselves. he leads us into the laboratories of art or nature as a showman guides you through a caravan crusted with spar and stalactites, all cold, and dim, and motionless, till he lifts his torch aloft, and on a sudden you gaze in admiration on walls and roof of flaming crystals and stars of eternal diamond. all this, whether for praise or for blame, is perceptible enough in mr. coleridge's verse, but perceptible, of course, in such degree and mode as the law of poetry in general, and the nature of the specific poem in particular, may require. but the main result from this frame and habit of his mind is very distinctly traceable in the uniform subjectivity of almost all his works. he does not belong to that grand division of poetry and poets which corresponds with painting and painters; or which pindar and dante are the chief;--those masters of the picturesque, who, by a felicity inborn, view and present everything in the completeness of actual objectivity--and who have a class derived from and congenial with them, presenting few pictures indeed, but always full of picturesque matter; of which secondary class spenser and southey may be mentioned as eminent instances. to neither of these does mr. coleridge belong; in his "christabel," there certainly are several _distinct pictures_ of great beauty; but he, as a poet, clearly comes within the other division which answers to music and the musician, in which you have a magnificent mirage of words with the subjective associations of the poet curling, and twisting, and creeping round, and through, and above every part of it. this is the class to which milton belongs, in whose poems we have heard mr. coleridge say that he remembered but two proper pictures--adam bending over the sleeping eve at the beginning of the fifth book of the "paradise lost," and delilah approaching samson towards the end of the "agonistes." but when we point out the intense personal feeling, the self-projection, as it were, which characterizes mr. coleridge's poems, we mean that such feeling is the soul and spirit, not the whole body and form, of his poetry. for surely no one has ever more earnestly and constantly borne in mind the maxim of milton, that poetry ought to be _simple, sensuous, and impassioned_. the poems in these volumes are no authority for that dreamy, half-swooning style of verse which was criticized by lord byron (in language too strong for print) as the fatal sin of mr. john keats, and which, unless abjured betimes, must prove fatal to several younger aspirants--male and female-- who for the moment enjoy some popularity. the poetry before us is distinct and clear, and accurate in its imagery; but the imagery is rarely or never exhibited for description's sake alone; it is rarely or never exclusively objective; that is to say, put forward as a spectacle, a picture on which the mind's eye is to rest and terminate. you may if your sight is short, or your imagination cold, regard the imagery in itself and go no farther; but the poet's intention is that you should feel and imagine a great deal more than you see. his aim is to awaken in the reader the same mood of mind, the same cast of imagination and fancy whence issued the associations which animate and enlighten his pictures. you must think with him, must sympathize with him, must suffer yourself to be lifted out of your own school of opinion or faith, and fall back upon your own consciousness, an unsophisticated man. if you decline this, _non tibi spirat_. from his earliest youth to this day, mr. coleridge's poetry has been a faithful mirror reflecting the images of his mind. hence he is so original, so individual. with a little trouble, the zealous reader of the "biographia literaria" may trace in these volumes the whole course of mental struggle and self-evolvement narrated in that odd but interesting work; but he will see the track marked in light; the notions become images, the images glorified, and not unfrequently the abstruse position stamped clearer by the poet than by the psychologist. no student of coleridge's philosophy can fully understand it without a perusal of the illumining, and if we may so say, _popularizing_ commentary of his poetry. it is the greek put into the vulgar tongue. and we must say, it is somewhat strange to hear any one condemn those philosophical principles as altogether unintelligible, which are inextricably interwoven in every page of a volume of poetry which he professes to admire.... to this habit of intellectual introversion we are very much inclined to attribute mr. coleridge's never having seriously undertaken a great heroic poem. the "paradise lost" may be thought to stand in the way of our laying down any general rule on the subject; yet that poem is as peculiar as milton himself, and does not materially affect our opinion, that the pure epic can hardly be achieved by the poet in whose mind the reflecting turn _greatly_ predominates. the extent of the action in such a poem requires a free and fluent stream of narrative verse; description, purely objective, must fill a large space in it, and its permanent success depends on a rapidity, or at least a liveliness, of movement which is scarcely compatible with much of what bacon calls _inwardness_ of meaning. the reader's attention could not be preserved; his journey being long, he expects his road to be smooth and unembarrassed. the condensed passion of the ode is out of place in heroic song. few persons will dispute that the two great homeric poems are the most delightful of epics; they may not have the sublimity of the "paradise lost," nor the picturesqueness of the "divine comedy," nor the etherial brilliancy of the "orlando"; but, dead as they are in language, metre, accent,--obsolete in religion, manners, costume, and country,-- they nevertheless even now _please_ all those who can read them beyond all other narrative poems. there is a salt in them which keeps them sweet and incorruptible throughout every change. they are the most popular of all the remains of ancient genius, and translations of them for the twentieth time are amongst the very latest productions of our contemporary literature. from beginning to end, these marvellous poems are exclusively objective; everything is in them, except the poet himself. it is not to vico or wolfe that we refer, when we say that _homer_ is _vox et praeterea nihil_; as musical as the nightingale, and as invisible.... the "remorse" and "zapolya" strikingly illustrate the predominance of the meditative, pausing habit of mr. coleridge's mind. the first of these beautiful dramas was acted with success, although worse acting was never seen. indeed, kelly's sweet music was the only part of the theatrical apparatus in any respect worthy of the play. the late mr. kean made some progress in the study of ordonio, with a view of reproducing the piece; and we think that mr. macready, either as ordonio or alvar, might, with some attention to music, costume, and scenery, make the representation attractive even in the present day. but in truth, taken absolutely and in itself, the "remorse" is more fitted for the study than the stage; its character is romantic and pastoral in a high degree, and there is a profusion of poetry in the minor parts, the effect of which could never be preserved in the common routine of representation. what this play wants is dramatic movement; there is energetic dialogue and a crisis of great interest, but the action does not sufficiently grow on the stage itself. perhaps, also, the purpose of alvar to waken remorse in ordonio's mind is put forward too prominently, and has too much the look of a mere moral experiment to be probable under the circumstances in which the brothers stand to each other. nevertheless, there is a calmness as well as superiority of intellect in alvar which seem to justify, in some measure, the sort of attempt on his part, which, in fact, constitutes the theme of the play; and it must be admitted that the whole underplot of isidore and alhadra is lively and affecting in the highest degree. we particularly refer to the last scene between ordonio and isidore in the cavern, which we think genuine shakespeare; and alhadra's narrative of her discovery of her husband's murder is not surpassed in truth and force by anything of the kind that we know.... we have not yet referred to the "ancient mariner," "christabel," the "odes on france," and the "departing year," or the "love poems." all these are well known by those who know no other parts of coleridge's poetry, and the length of our preceding remarks compels us to be brief in our notice. mrs. barbauld, meaning to be complimentary, told our poet, that she thought the "ancient mariner" very beautiful, but that it had the fault of containing no moral. "nay, madam," replied the poet, "if i may be permitted to say so, the only fault in the poem is that there is _too much_ in a work of such pure imagination i ought not to have stopped to give reasons for things, or inculcate humanity to beasts. 'the arabian nights' might have taught me better." they might-- the tale of the merchant's son who puts out the eyes of a genii by flinging his date-shells down a well, and is therefore ordered to prepare for death--might have taught this law of imagination; but the fault is small indeed; and the "ancient mariner" is, and will ever be, one of the most perfect pieces of imaginative poetry, not only in our language, but in the literature of all europe. we have, certainly, sometimes doubted whether the miraculous destruction of the vessel in the presence of the pilot and hermit, was not an error, in respect of its bringing the purely preternatural into too close contact with the actual frame-work of the poem. the only link between those scenes of out-of-the-world wonders, and the wedding guest, should, we rather suspect, have been the blasted, unknown being himself who described them. there should have been no other witnesses of the truth of any part of the tale, but the "ancient mariner" himself. this is by the way: but take the work altogether, there is nothing else like it; it is a poem by itself; between it and other compositions, in _pari materia_, there is a chasm which you cannot overpass; the sensitive reader feels himself insulated, and a sea of wonder and mystery flows round him as round the spell-stricken ship itself. it was a sad mistake in the ablest artist-- mr. scott, we believe--who in his engravings has made the ancient mariner an old decrepit man. that is not the true image; no! he should have been a growthless, decayless being, impassive to time or season, a silent cloud--the wandering jew. the curse of the dead men's eyes should not have passed away. but this was, perhaps, too much for any pencil, even if the artist had fully entered into the poet's idea. indeed, it is no subject for painting. the "ancient mariner" displays mr. coleridge's peculiar mastery over the wild and preternatural in a brilliant manner; but in his next poem, "christabel," the exercise of his power in this line is still more skilful and singular. the thing attempted in "christabel" is the most difficult of execution in the whole field of romance--witchery by daylight; and the success is complete. geraldine, so far as she goes, is perfect. she is _sui generis_. the reader feels the same terror and perplexity that christabel in vain struggles to express, and the same spell that fascinates her eyes. who and what is geraldine--whence come, whither going, and what designing? what did the poet mean to make of her? what could he have made of her? could he have gone on much farther without having had recourse to some of the ordinary shifts of witch tales? was she really the daughter of roland de vaux, and would the friends have met again and embraced?... we are not amongst those who wish to have "christabel" finished. it cannot be finished. the poet has spun all he could without snapping. the theme is too fine and subtle to bear much extension. it is better as it is, imperfect as a story, but complete as an exquisite production of the imagination, differing in form and colour from the "ancient mariner," yet differing in effect from it only so as the same powerful faculty is directed to the feudal or the mundane phases of the preternatural.... it has been impossible to express, in the few pages to which we are necessarily limited, even a brief opinion upon all those pieces which might seem to call for notice in an estimate of this author's poetical genius. we know no writer of modern times whom it would not be easier to characterize in one page than coleridge in two. the volumes before us contain so many integral efforts of imagination, that a distinct notice of each is indispensable, if we would form a just conclusion upon the total powers of the man. wordsworth, scott, moore, byron, southey, are incomparably more uniform in the direction of their poetic mind. but if you look over these volumes for indications of their author's poetic powers, you find him appearing in at least half a dozen shapes, so different from each other, that it is in vain to attempt to mass them together. it cannot indeed be said, that he has ever composed what is popularly termed a _great_ poem; but he is great in several lines, and the union of such powers is an essential term in a fair estimate of his genius. the romantic witchery of the "christabel," and "ancient mariner," the subtle passion of the love-strains, the lyrical splendour of the three great odes, the affectionate dignity, thoughtfulness, and delicacy of the blank verse poems--especially the "lover's resolution," "frost at midnight," and that most noble and interesting "address to mr. wordsworth"--the dramas, the satires, the epigrams--these are so distinct and so whole in themselves, that they might seem to proceed from different authors, were it not for that same individualizing power, that "shaping spirit of imagination" which more or less sensibly runs through them all. it is the _predominance_ of this power, which, in our judgment, constitutes the essential difference between coleridge and any other of his great contemporaries. he is the most imaginative of the english poets since milton. whatever he writes, be it on the most trivial subject, be it in the most simple strain, his imagination, _in spite of himself_, affects it. there never was a better illustrator of the dogma of the schoolmen--_in omnem actum intellectualem imaginatio influit_. we believe we might affirm, that throughout all the mature original poems in these volumes, there is not one image, the _expression_ of which does not, in a greater or less degree, individualize it and appropriate it to the poet's feelings. tear the passage out of its place, and nail it down at the head of a chapter of a modern novel, and it will be like hanging up in a london exhibition-room a picture painted for the dim light of a cathedral. sometimes a single word--an epithet--has the effect to the reader of a claude lorraine glass; it tints without obscuring or disguising the object. the poet has the same power in conversation. we remember him once settling an elaborate discussion carried on in his presence, upon the respective sublimity of shakespeare and schiller in othello and the robbers, by saying, "both are sublime; only schiller's is the _material_ sublime-- that's all!" _all_ to be sure; but more than enough to show the whole difference. and upon another occasion, where the doctrine of the sacramentaries and the roman catholics on the subject of the eucharist was in question, the poet said, "they are both equally wrong; the first have volatilized the eucharist into a metaphor--the last have condensed it into an idol." such utterance as this flashes light; it supersedes all argument--it abolishes proof by proving itself. we speak of coleridge, then, as the poet of imagination; and we add, that he is likewise the poet of thought and verbal harmony. that his thoughts are sometimes hard and sometimes even obscure, we think must be admitted; it is an obscurity of which all very subtle thinkers are occasionally guilty, either by attempting to express evanescent feelings for which human language is an inadequate vehicle, or by expressing, however adequately, thoughts and distinctions to which the common reader is unused. as to the first kind of obscurity, the words serving only as hieroglyphics to denote a once existing state of mind in the poet, but not logically inferring what that state was, the reader can only guess for himself by the context, whether he ever has or not experienced in himself a corresponding feeling; and, therefore, undoubtedly this is an obscurity which strict criticism cannot but condemn. but, if an author be obscure, merely because this or that reader is unaccustomed to the mode or direction of thinking in which such author's genius makes him take delight--such a writer must indeed bear the consequence as to immediate popularity; but he cannot help the consequence, and if he be worth anything for posterity, he will disregard it. in this sense almost every great writer, whose natural bent has been to turn the mind upon itself, is--must be--obscure; for no writer, with such a direction of intellect, will be great, unless he is individual and original; and if he is individual and original, then he must, in most cases, himself make the readers who shall be competent to sympathize with him. the english flatter themselves by a pretence that shakespeare and milton are popular in england. it is good taste, indeed, to wish to have it believed that those poets are popular. their names are so; but if it be said that the works of shakespeare and milton are popular--that is, liked and studied--amongst the wide circle whom it is now the fashion to talk of as enlightened, we are obliged to express our doubts whether a grosser delusion was ever promulgated. not a play of shakespeare's can be ventured on the london stage without mutilation--and without the most revolting balderdash foisted into the rents made by managers in his divine dramas; nay, it is only some three or four of his pieces that can be borne at all by our all-intelligent public, unless the burthen be lightened by dancing, singing, or processioning. this for the stage. but is it otherwise with "the _reading_ public"? we believe it is worse; we think, verily, that the apprentice or his master who sits out othello or richard at the theatres, does get a sort of glimpse, a touch, an atmosphere of intellectual grandeur; but he could not keep himself awake during the perusal of that which he admires--or fancies he admires--in scenic representation. as to understanding shakespeare--as to entering into all shakespeare's thoughts and feelings--as to seeing the idea of hamlet, or lear, or othello, as shakespeare saw it--this we believe falls, and can only fall, to the lot of the really cultivated few, and of those who may have so much of the temperament of genius in themselves, as to comprehend and sympathize with the criticism of men of genius. shakespeare is now popular by name, because, in the first place, great men, more on a level with the rest of mankind, have said that he is admirable, and also because, in the absolute universality of his genius, he has presented points to all. every man, woman, and child, may pick at least one flower from his garden, the name and scent of which are familiar. to all which must of course be added, the effect of theatrical representation, be that representation what it may. there are tens of thousands of persons in this country whose only acquaintance with shakespeare, such as it is, is through the stage. we have been talking of the contemporary mass; but this is not all; a great original writer _of a philosophic turn_--especially a poet--will almost always have the fashionable world also against him at first, because he does not give the sort of pleasure expected of him at the time, and because, not contented with that, he is sure, by precept or example, to show a contempt for the taste and judgment of the expectants. he is always, and by the law of his being, an idoloclast. by and by, after years of abuse or neglect, the aggregate of the single minds who think for themselves, and have seen the truth and force of his genius, becomes important; the merits of the poet by degrees constitute a question for discussion; his works are one by one read; men recognize a superiority in the abstract, and learn to be modest where before they had been scornful; the coterie becomes a sect; the sect dilates into a party; and lo! after a season, no one knows how, the poet's fame is universal. all this, to the very life, has taken place in this country within the last twenty years. the noblest philosophical poem since the time of lucretius was, within time of short memory, declared to be intolerable, by one of the most brilliant writers in one of the most brilliant publications of the day. it always puts us in mind of waller-- no mean parallel--who, upon the coming out of the "paradise lost," wrote to the duke of buckingham, amongst other pretty things, as follows:-- "milton, the old blind schoolmaster, has lately written a poem on the fall of man--_remarkable for nothing but its extreme length!_" our divine poet asked a fit audience, although it should be but few. his prayer was heard; a fit audience for the "paradise lost" has ever been, and at this moment must be, a small one, and we cannot affect to believe that it is destined to be much increased by what is called the march of intellect. can we lay down the pen without remembering that coleridge the poet is but half the name of coleridge? this, however, is not the place, nor the time, to discuss in detail his qualities or his exertions as a psychologist, moralist, and general philosopher. that time may come, when his system, as a whole, shall be fairly placed before the world, as we have reason to hope it will soon be; and when the preliminary works-- the "friend," the "lay sermons," the "aids to reflection," and the "church and state,"--especially the last two--shall be seen in their proper relations as preparatory exercises for the reader. his "church and state, according to the idea of each"--a little book--we cannot help recommending as a storehouse of grand and immovable principles, bearing upon some of the most vehemently disputed topics of constitutional interest in these momentous times. assuredly this period has not produced a profounder and more luminous essay. we have heard it asked, what was the proposed object of mr. coleridge's labours as a metaphysical philosopher? he once answered that question himself, in language never to be forgotten by those who heard it, and which, whatever may be conjectured of the probability or even possibility of its being fully realized, must be allowed to express the completest idea of a system of philosophy ever yet made public. "my system," said he, "if i may venture to give it so fine a name, is the only attempt that i know, ever made, to reduce all knowledge into harmony. it opposes no other system, but shows what was true in each; and how that which was true in the particular in each of them, became error, _because_ it was only half the truth. i have endeavoured to unite the insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to frame a perfect mirror. i show to each system that i fully understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then i lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which i enable it to see its former position, where it was indeed, but under another light and with different relations,--so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged, but explained. so the old astronomers discovered and maintained much that was true; but because they were placed on a false ground, and looked from a wrong point of view, they never did--they never could--discover the truth--that is, the whole truth. as soon as they left the earth, their false centre, and took their stand in the sun, immediately they saw the whole system in its true light, and the former station remaining--but remaining _as a part_ of the prospect. i wish, in short, to connect a moral copula, natural history with political history; or, in other words, to make history scientific, and science historical:--to take from history its accidentality, and from science its fatalism." whether we shall ever, hereafter, have occasion to advert to any new poetical efforts of mr. coleridge, or not, we cannot say. we wish we had a reasonable cause to expect it. if not, then this hail and farewell will have been well made. we conclude with, we believe, the last verses he has written-- _my baptismal birth-day._ god's child in christ adopted,--christ my all,-- what that earth boasts were not lost cheaply, rather than forfeit the blest name, by which i call the holy one, the almighty god, my father? father! in christ we live, and christ in thee; eternal thou, and everlasting we. the heir of heaven, henceforth i fear not death: in christ i live: in christ i draw the breath of the true life:--let then earth, sea, and sky make war against me! on my heart i show their mighty master's seal. in vain they try to end my life, that can but end its woe. is that a death-bed where a christian lies? yes! but not his--'tis death itself there dies.--vol. ii, p. . sir walter scott on jane austen [from. _the quarterly review_, october, ] _emma; a novel_. by the author of _sense and sensibility, pride and prejudice_, etc. vols. mo. london. . there are some vices in civilized society so common that they are hardly acknowledged as stains upon the moral character, the propensity to which is nevertheless carefully concealed, even by those who most frequently give way to them; since no man of pleasure would willingly assume the gross epithet of a debauchee or a drunkard. one would almost think that novel-reading fell under this class of frailties, since among the crowds who read little else, it is not common to find an individual of hardihood sufficient to avow his taste for these frivolous studies. a novel, therefore, is frequently "bread eaten in secret"; and it is not upon lydia languish's toilet alone that tom jones and peregrine pickle are to be found ambushed behind works of a more grave and instructive character. and hence it has happened, that in no branch of composition, not even in poetry itself, have so many writers, and of such varied talents, exerted their powers. it may perhaps be added, that although the composition of these works admits of being exalted and decorated by the higher exertions of genius; yet such is the universal charm of narrative, that the worst novel ever written will find some gentle reader content to yawn over it, rather than to open the page of the historian, moralist, or poet. we have heard, indeed, of one work of fiction so unutterably stupid, that the proprietor, diverted by the rarity of the incident, offered the book, which consisted of two volumes in duodecimo, handsomely bound, to any person who would declare, upon his honour, that he had read the whole from beginning to end. but although this offer was made to the passengers on board an indiaman, during a tedious outward-bound voyage, the _memoirs of clegg the clergyman_ (such was the title of this unhappy composition) completely baffled the most dull and determined student on board, and bid fair for an exception to the general rule above-mentioned,--when the love of glory prevailed with the boatswain, a man of strong and solid parts, to hazard the attempt, and he actually conquered and carried off the prize! the judicious reader will see at once that we have been pleading our own cause while stating the universal practice, and preparing him for a display of more general acquaintance with this fascinating department of literature, than at first sight may seem consistent with the graver studies to which we are compelled by duty: but in truth, when we consider how many hours of languor and anxiety, of deserted age and solitary celibacy, of pain even and poverty, are beguiled by the perusal of these light volumes, we cannot austerely condemn the source from which is drawn the alleviation of such a portion of human misery, or consider the regulation of this department as beneath the sober consideration of the critic. if such apologies may be admitted in judging the labours of ordinary novelists, it becomes doubly the duty of the critic to treat with kindness as well as candour works which, like this before us, proclaim a knowledge of the human heart, with the power and resolution to bring that knowledge to the service of honour and virtue. the author is already known to the public by the two novels announced in her title-page, and both, the last especially, attracted, with justice, an attention from the public far superior to what is granted to the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering-places and circulating libraries. they belong to a class of fictions which has arisen almost in our own times, and which draws the characters and incidents introduced more immediately from the current of ordinary life than was permitted by the former rules of the novel. in its first appearance, the novel was the legitimate child of the romance; and though the manners and general turn of the composition were altered so as to suit modern times, the author remained fettered by many peculiarities derived from the original style of romantic fiction. these may be chiefly traced in the conduct of the narrative, and the tone of sentiment attributed to the fictitious personages. on the first point, although the talisman and magic wand were broke, knights, dwarfs, and genii vanish'd into smoke, still the reader expected to peruse a course of adventures of a nature more interesting and extraordinary than those which occur in his own life, or that of his next-door neighbours. the hero no longer defeated armies by his single sword, clove giants to the chine, or gained kingdoms. but he was expected to go through perils by sea and land, to be steeped in poverty, to be tried by temptation, to be exposed to the alternate vicissitudes of adversity and prosperity, and his life was a troubled scene of suffering and achievement. few novelists, indeed, adventured to deny to the hero his final hour of tranquillity and happiness, though it was the prevailing fashion never to relieve him out of his last and most dreadful distress until the finishing chapters of his history; so that although his prosperity in the record of his life was short, we were bound to believe it was long and uninterrupted when the author had done with him. the heroine was usually condemned to equal hardships and hazards. she was regularly exposed to being forcibly carried off like a sabine virgin by some frantic admirer. and even if she escaped the terrors of masked ruffians, an insidious ravisher, a cloak wrapped forcibly around her head, and a coach with the blinds up driving she could not conjecture whither, she had still her share of wandering, of poverty, of obloquy, of seclusion, and of imprisonment, and was frequently extended upon a bed of sickness, and reduced to her last shilling before the author condescended to shield her from persecution. in all these dread contingencies the mind of the reader was expected to sympathize, since by incidents so much beyond the bounds of his ordinary experience, his wonder and interest ought at once to be excited. but gradually he became familiar with the land of fiction, the adventures of which he assimilated not with those of real life, but with each other. let the distress of the hero or heroine be ever so great, the reader reposed an imperturbable confidence in the talents of the author, who, as he had plunged them into distress, would in his own good time, and when things, as tony lumkin says, were in a concatenation accordingly, bring his favourites out of all their troubles. mr. crabbe has expressed his own and our feelings excellently on this subject. for should we grant these beauties all endure severest pangs, they've still the speediest cure; before one charm be withered from the face, except the bloom which shall again have place, in wedlock ends each wish, in triumph all disgrace. and life to come, we fairly may suppose, one light bright contrast to these wild dark woes. in short, the author of novels was, in former times, expected to tread pretty much in the limits between the concentric circles of probability and possibility; and as he was not permitted to transgress the latter, his narrative, to make amends, almost always went beyond the bounds of the former. now, although it may be urged that the vicissitudes of human life have occasionally led an individual through as many scenes of singular fortune as are represented in the most extravagant of these fictions, still the causes and personages acting on these changes have varied with the progress of the adventurer's fortune, and do not present that combined plot, (the object of every skilful novelist), in which all the more interesting individuals of the dramatis personae have their appropriate share in the action and in bringing about the catastrophe. here, even more than in its various and violent changes of fortune, rests the improbability of the novel. the life of man rolls forth like a stream from the fountain, or it spreads out into tranquillity like a placid or stagnant lake. in the latter case, the individual grows old among the characters with whom he was born, and is contemporary,--shares precisely the sort of weal and woe to which his birth destined him,-- moves in the same circle,--and, allowing for the change of seasons, is influenced by, and influences the same class of persons by which he was originally surrounded. the man of mark and of adventure, on the contrary, resembles, in the course of his life, the river whose mid-current and discharge into the ocean are widely removed from each other, as well as from the rocks and wild flowers which its fountains first reflected; violent changes of time, of place, and of circumstances, hurry him forward from one scene to another, and his adventures will usually be found only connected with each other because they have happened to the same individual. such a history resembles an ingenious, fictitious narrative, exactly in the degree in which an old dramatic chronicle of the life and death of some distinguished character, where all the various agents appear and disappear as in the page of history, approaches a regular drama, in which every person introduced plays an appropriate part, and every point of the action tends to one common catastrophe. we return to the second broad line of distinction between the novel, as formerly composed, and real life,--the difference, namely, of the sentiments. the novelist professed to give an imitation of nature, but it was, as the french say, _la belle nature_. human beings, indeed, were presented, but in the most sentimental mood, and with minds purified by a sensibility which often verged on extravagance. in the serious class of novels, the hero was usually a knight of love, who never broke a vow. and although, in those of a more humorous cast, he was permitted a licence, borrowed either from real life or from the libertinism of the drama, still a distinction was demanded even from peregrine pickle, or tom jones; and the hero, in every folly of which he might be guilty, was studiously vindicated from the charge of infidelity of the heart. the heroine was, of course, still more immaculate; and to have conferred her affections upon any other than the lover to whom the reader had destined her from their first meeting, would have been a crime against sentiment which no author, of moderate prudence, would have hazarded, under the old _régime_. here, therefore, we have two essentials and important circumstances, in which the earlier novels differed from those now in fashion, and were more nearly assimilated to the old romances. and there can be no doubt that, by the studied involution and extrication of the story, by the combination of incidents new, striking and wonderful beyond the course of ordinary life, the former authors opened that obvious and strong sense of interest which arises from curiosity; as by the pure, elevated, and romantic cast of the sentiment, they conciliated those better propensities of our nature which loves to contemplate the picture of virtue, even when confessedly unable to imitate its excellences. but strong and powerful as these sources of emotion and interest may be, they are, like all others, capable of being exhausted by habit. the imitators who rushed in crowds upon each path in which the great masters of the art had successively led the way, produced upon the public mind the usual effect of satiety. the first writer of a new class is, as it were, placed on a pinnacle of excellence, to which, at the earliest glance of a surprised admirer, his ascent seems little less than miraculous. time and imitation speedily diminish the wonder, and each successive attempt establishes a kind of progressive scale of ascent between the lately deified author, and the reader, who had deemed his excellence inaccessible. the stupidity, the mediocrity, the merit of his imitators, are alike fatal to the first inventor, by showing how possible it is to exaggerate his faults and to come within a certain point of his beauties. materials also (and the man of genius as well as his wretched imitator must work with the same) become stale and familiar. social life, in our civilized days, affords few instances capable of being painted in the strong dark colours which excite surprise and horror; and robbers, smugglers, bailiffs, caverns, dungeons, and mad-houses, have been all introduced until they ceased to interest. and thus in the novel, as in every style of composition which appeals to the public taste, the more rich and easily worked mines being exhausted, the adventurous author must, if he is desirous of success, have recourse to those which were disdained by his predecessors as unproductive, or avoided as only capable of being turned to profit by great skill and labour. accordingly a style of novel has arisen, within the last fifteen or twenty years, differing from the former in the points upon which the interest hinges; neither alarming our credulity nor amusing our imagination by wild variety of incident, or by those pictures of romantic affection and sensibility, which were formerly as certain attributes of fictitious characters as they are of rare occurrence among those who actually live and die. the substitute for these excitements, which had lost much of their poignancy by the repeated and injudicious use of them, was the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him. in adventuring upon this task, the author makes obvious sacrifices, and encounters peculiar difficulty. he who paints from _le beau idéal_, if his scenes and sentiments are striking and interesting, is in a great measure exempted from the difficult task of reconciling them with the ordinary probabilities of life: but he who paints a scene of common occurrence, places his composition within that extensive range of criticism which general experience offers to every reader. the resemblance of a statue of hercules we must take on the artist's judgment; but every one can criticize that which is presented as the portrait of a friend, or neighbour. something more than a mere sign-post likeness is also demanded. the portrait must have spirit and character, as well as resemblance; and being deprived of all that, according to bayes, goes "to elevate and surprize," it must make amends by displaying depth of knowledge and dexterity of execution. we, therefore, bestow no mean compliment upon the author of _emma_, when we say that, keeping close to common incidents, and to such characters as occupy the ordinary walks of life, she has produced sketches of such spirit and originality, that we never miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising from the consideration of minds, manners and sentiments, greatly above our own. in this class she stands almost alone; for the scenes of miss edgeworth are laid in higher life, varied by more romantic incident, and by her remarkable power of embodying and illustrating national character. but the author of _emma_ confines herself chiefly to the middling classes of society; her most distinguished characters do not rise greatly above well-bred country gentlemen and ladies; and those which are sketched with most originality and precision, belong to a class rather below that standard. the narrative of all her novels is composed of such common occurrences as may have fallen under the observation of most folks; and her dramatis personae conduct themselves upon the motives and principles which the readers may recognize as ruling their own and that of most of their acquaintances. the kind of moral, also, which these novels inculcate, applies equally to the paths of common life, as will best appear from a short notice of the author's former works, with a more full abstract of that which we at present have under consideration. _sense and sensibility_, the first of these compositions, contains the history of two sisters. the elder, a young lady of prudence and regulated feelings, becomes gradually attached to a man of an excellent heart and limited talents, who happens unfortunately to be fettered by a rash and ill-assorted engagement. in the younger sister, the influence of sensibility and imagination predominates; and she, as was to be expected, also falls in love, but with more unbridled and wilful passion. her lover, gifted with all the qualities of exterior polish and vivacity, proves faithless, and marries a woman of large fortune. the interest and merit of the piece depend altogether upon the behaviour of the elder sister, while obliged at once to sustain her own disappointment with fortitude, and to support her sister, who abandons herself, with unsuppressed feelings, to the indulgence of grief. the marriage of the unworthy rival at length relieves her own lover from his imprudent engagement, while her sister, turned wise by precept, example, and experience, transfers her affection to a very respectable and somewhat too serious admirer, who had nourished an unsuccessful passion through the three volumes. in _pride and prejudice_ the author presents us with a family of young women, bred up under a foolish and vulgar mother, and a father whose good abilities lay hid under such a load of indolence and insensibility, that he had become contented to make the foibles and follies of his wife and daughters the subject of dry and humorous sarcasm, rather than of admonition, or restraint. this is one of the portraits from ordinary life which shews our author's talents in a very strong point of view. a friend of ours, whom the author never saw or heard of, was at once recognized by his own family as the original of mr. bennet, and we do not know if he has yet got rid of the nickname. a mr. collins, too, a formal, conceited, yet servile young sprig of divinity, is drawn with the same force and precision. the story of the piece consists chiefly in the fates of the second sister, to whom a man of high birth, large fortune, but haughty and reserved manners, becomes attached, in spite of the discredit thrown upon the object of his affection by the vulgarity and ill-conduct of her relations. the lady, on the contrary, hurt at the contempt of her connections, which the lover does not even attempt to suppress, and prejudiced against him on other accounts, refuses the hand which he ungraciously offers, and does not perceive that she has done a foolish thing until she accidentally visits a very handsome seat and grounds belonging to her admirer. they chance to meet exactly as her prudence had begun to subdue her prejudice; and after some essential services rendered to her family, the lover becomes encouraged to renew his addresses, and the novel ends happily. _emma_ has even less story than either of the preceding novels. miss emma woodhouse, from whom the book takes its name, is the daughter of a gentleman of wealth and consequence residing at his seat in the immediate vicinage of a country village called highbury. the father, a good-natured, silly valetudinary, abandons the management of his household to emma, he himself being only occupied by his summer and winter walk, his apothecary, his gruel, and his whist table. the latter is supplied from the neighbouring village of highbury with precisely the sort of persons who occupy the vacant corners of a regular whist table, when a village is in the neighbourhood, and better cannot be found within the family. we have the smiling and courteous vicar, who nourishes the ambitious hope of obtaining miss woodhouse's hand. we have mrs. bates, the wife of a former rector, past everything but tea and whist; her daughter, miss bates, a good-natured, vulgar, and foolish old maid; mr. weston, a gentleman of a frank disposition and moderate fortune, in the vicinity, and his wife an amiable and accomplished person, who had been emma's governess, and is devotedly attached to her. amongst all these personages, miss woodhouse walks forth, the princess paramount, superior to all her companions in wit, beauty, fortune, and accomplishments, doated upon by her father and the westons, admired, and almost worshipped by the more humble companions of the whist table. the object of most young ladies is, or at least is usually supposed to be, a desirable connection in marriage. but emma woodhouse, either anticipating the taste of a later period of life, or, like a good sovereign, preferring the weal of her subjects of highbury to her own private interest, sets generously about making matches for her friends without thinking of matrimony on her own account. we are informed that she had been eminently successful in the case of mr. and mrs. weston; and when the novel commences she is exerting her influence in favour of miss harriet smith, a boarding-school girl without family or fortune, very good humoured, very pretty, very silly, and, what suited miss woodhouse's purpose best of all, very much disposed to be married. in these conjugal machinations emma is frequently interrupted, not only by the cautions of her father, who had a particular objection to any body committing the rash act of matrimony, but also by the sturdy reproof and remonstrances of mr. knightley, the elder brother of her sister's husband, a sensible country gentleman of thirty-five, who had known emma from her cradle, and was the only person who ventured to find fault with her. in spite, however, of his censure and warning, emma lays a plan of marrying harriet smith to the vicar; and though she succeeds perfectly in diverting her simple friend's thoughts from an honest farmer who had made her a very suitable offer, and in flattering her into a passion for mr. elton, yet, on the other hand, that conceited divine totally mistakes the nature of the encouragement held out to him, and attributes the favour which he found in miss woodhouse's eyes to a lurking affection on her own part. this at length encourages him to a presumptuous declaration of his sentiments; upon receiving a repulse, he looks abroad elsewhere, and enriches the highbury society by uniting himself to a dashing young woman with as many thousands as are usually called ten, and a corresponding quantity of presumption and ill breeding. while emma is thus vainly engaged in forging wedlock-fetters for others, her friends have views of the same kind upon her, in favour of a son of mr. weston by a former marriage, who bears the name, lives under the patronage, and is to inherit the fortune of a rich uncle. unfortunately mr. frank churchill had already settled his affections on miss jane fairfax, a young lady of reduced fortune; but as this was a concealed affair, emma, when mr. churchill first appears on the stage, has some thoughts of being in love with him herself; speedily, however, recovering from that dangerous propensity, she is disposed to confer him upon her deserted friend harriet smith. harriet has in the interim, fallen desperately in love with mr. knightley, the sturdy, advice-giving bachelor; and, as all the village supposes frank churchill and emma to be attached to each other, there are cross purposes enough (were the novel of a more romantic cast) for cutting half the men's throats and breaking all the women's hearts. but at highbury cupid walks decorously, and with good discretion, bearing his torch under a lanthorn, instead of flourishing it around to set the house on fire. all these entanglements bring on only a train of mistakes and embarrassing situations, and dialogues at balls and parties of pleasure, in which the author displays her peculiar powers of humour and knowledge of human life. the plot is extricated with great simplicity. the aunt of frank churchill dies; his uncle, no longer under her baneful influence, consents to his marriage with jane fairfax. mr. knightley and emma are led, by this unexpected incident, to discover that they had been in love with each other all along. mr. woodhouse's objections to the marriage of his daughter are overpowered by the fears of house-breakers, and the comfort which he hopes to derive from having a stout son-in-law resident in the family; and the facile affections of harriet smith are transferred, like a bank bill by indorsation, to her former suitor, the honest farmer, who had obtained a favourable opportunity of renewing his addresses. such is the simple plan of a story which we peruse with pleasure, if not with deep interest, and which perhaps we might more willingly resume than one of those narratives where the attention is strongly riveted, during the first perusal, by the powerful excitement of curiosity. the author's knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognize, reminds us something of the merits of the flemish school of painting. the subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader. this is a merit which it is very difficult to illustrate by extracts, because it pervades the whole work, and is not to be comprehended from a single passage. the following is a dialogue between mr. woodhouse, and his elder daughter isabella, who shares his anxiety about health, and has, like her father, a favourite apothecary. the reader must be informed that this lady, with her husband, a sensible, peremptory sort of person, had come to spend a week with her father. * * * * * perhaps the reader may collect from the preceding specimen both the merits and faults of the author. the former consists much in the force of a narrative conducted with much neatness and point, and a quiet yet comic dialogue, in which the characters of the speakers evolve themselves with dramatic effect. the faults, on the contrary, arise from the minute detail which the author's plan comprehends. characters of folly or simplicity, such as those of old woodhouse and miss bates, are ridiculous when first presented, but if too often brought forward or too long dwelt upon, their prosing is apt to become as tiresome in fiction as in real society. upon the whole, the turn of this author's novels bears the same relation to that of the sentimental and romantic cast, that cornfields and cottages and meadows bear to the highly adorned grounds of a show mansion, or the rugged sublimities of a mountain landscape. it is neither so captivating as the one, nor so grand as the other, but it affords to those who frequent it a pleasure nearly allied with the experience of their own social habits; and what is of some importance, the youthful wanderer may return from his promenade to the ordinary business of life, without any chance of having his head turned by the recollection of the scene through which he has been wandering. one word, however, we must say in behalf of that once powerful divinity, cupid, king of gods and men, who in these times of revolution, has been assailed, even in his own kingdom of romance, by the authors who were formerly his devoted priests. we are quite aware that there are few instances of first attachment being brought to a happy conclusion, and that it seldom can be so in a state of society so highly advanced as to render early marriages among the better class, acts, generally speaking, of imprudence. but the youth of this realm need not at present be taught the doctrine of selfishness. it is by no means their error to give the world or the good things of the world all for love; and before the authors of moral fiction couple cupid indivisibly with calculating prudence, we would have them reflect, that they may sometimes lend their aid to substitute more mean, more sordid, and more selfish motives of conduct, for the romantic feelings which their predecessors perhaps fanned into too powerful a flame. who is it, that in his youth has felt a virtuous attachment, however romantic or however unfortunate, but can trace back to its influence much that his character may possess of what is honourable, dignified, and disinterested? if he recollects hours wasted in unavailing hope, or saddened by doubt and disappointment; he may also dwell on many which have been snatched from folly or libertinism, and dedicated to studies which might render him worthy of the object of his affection, or pave the way perhaps to that distinction necessary to raise him to an equality with her. even the habitual indulgence of feelings totally unconnected with ourself and our own immediate interest, softens, graces, and amends the human mind; and after the pain of disappointment is past, those who survive (and by good fortune those are the greater number) are neither less wise nor less worthy members of society for having felt, for a time, the influence of a passion which has been well qualified as the "tenderest, noblest and best." archbishop whately on jane austen [from _the quarterly review_, january, ] _northanger abbey, and persuasion_. by the author of _sense and sensibility, pride and prejudice, mansfield park_, and _emma_. vols. new edition. the times seem to be past when an apology was requisite from reviewers for condescending to notice a novel; when they felt themselves bound in dignity to deprecate the suspicion of paying much regard to such trifles, and pleaded the necessity of occasionally stooping to humour the taste of their fair readers. the delights of fiction, if not more keenly or more generally relished, are at least more readily acknowledged by men of sense and taste; and we have lived to hear the merits of the best of this class of writings earnestly discussed by some of the ablest scholars and soundest reasoners of the present day. we are inclined to attribute this change, not so much to an alteration in the public taste, as in the character of the productions in question. novels may not, perhaps, display more genius now than formerly, but they contain more solid sense; they may not afford higher gratification, but it is of a nature which men are less disposed to be ashamed of avowing. we remarked, in a former number, in reviewing a work of the author now before us, that "a new style of novel has arisen, within the last fifteen or twenty years, differing from the former in the points upon which the interest hinges; neither alarming our credulity nor amusing our imagination by wild variety of incident, or by those pictures of romantic affection and sensibility, which were formerly as certain attributes of fictitious characters as they are of rare occurrence among those who actually live and die. the substitute for these excitements, which had lost much of their poignancy by the repeated and injudicious use of them, was the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him." now, though the origin of this new school of fiction may probably be traced, as we there suggested, to the exhaustion of the mines from which materials for entertainment had been hitherto extracted, and the necessity of gratifying the natural craving of the reader for variety, by striking into an untrodden path; the consequences resulting from this change have been far greater than the mere supply of this demand. when this flemish painting, as it were, is introduced--this accurate and unexaggerated delineation of events and characters--it necessarily follows, that a novel, which makes good its pretensions of giving a perfectly correct picture of common life, becomes a far more _instructive_ work than one of equal or superior merit of the other class; it guides the judgment, and supplies a kind of artificial experience. it is a remark of the great father of criticism, that poetry (_i.e._, narrative, and dramatic poetry) is of a more philosophical character than history; inasmuch as the latter details what has actually happened, of which many parts may chance to be exceptions to the general rules of probability, and consequently illustrate no general principles; whereas the former shews us what must naturally, or would probably, happen under given circumstances; and thus displays to us a comprehensive view of human nature, and furnishes general rules of practical wisdom. it is evident, that this will apply only to such fictions as are quite _perfect_ in respect of the probability of their story; and that he, therefore, who resorts to the fabulist rather than the historian, for instruction in human character and conduct, must throw himself entirely on the judgment and skill of his teacher, and give him credit for talents much more rare than the accuracy and veracity which are the chief requisites in history. we fear, therefore, that the exultation which we can conceive some of our gentle readers to feel, at having aristotle's warrant for (what probably they had never dreamed of) the _philosophical character_ of their studies, must, in practice, be somewhat qualified, by those sundry little violations of probability which are to be met with in most novels; and which so far lower their value, as models of real life, that a person who had no other preparation for the world than is afforded by them, would form, probably, a less accurate idea of things as they are, than he would of a lion from studying merely the representations on china tea-pots. accordingly, a heavy complaint has long lain against works of fiction, as giving a false picture of what they profess to imitate, and disqualifying their readers for the ordinary scenes and everyday duties of life. and this charge applies, we apprehend, to the generality of what are strictly called novels, with even more justice than to romances. when all the characters and events are very far removed from what we see around us,--when, perhaps, even supernatural agents are introduced, the reader may indulge, indeed, in occasional day-dreams, but will be so little reminded by what he has been reading, of anything that occurs in actual life, that though he may perhaps feel some disrelish for the tameness of the scene before him, compared with the fairy-land he has been visiting, yet at least his judgment will not be depraved, nor his expectations misled; he will not apprehend a meeting with algerine banditti on english shores, nor regard the old woman who shews him about an antique country seat, as either an enchantress or the keeper of an imprisoned damsel. but it is otherwise with those fictions which differ from common life in little or nothing but the improbability of the occurrences: the reader is insensibly led to calculate upon some of those lucky incidents and opportune coincidences of which he has been so much accustomed to read, and which, it is undeniable, _may_ take place in real life; and to feel a sort of confidence, that however romantic his conduct may be, and in whatever difficulties it may involve him, all will be sure to come right at last, as is invariably the case with the hero of a novel. on the other hand, so far as these pernicious effects fail to be produced, so far does the example lose its influence, and the exercise of poetical justice is rendered vain. the reward of virtuous conduct being brought about by fortunate accidents, he who abstains (taught, perhaps, by bitter disappointments) from reckoning on such accidents, wants that encouragement to virtue, which alone has been held out to him. "if i were _a man in a novel_," we remember to have heard an ingenious friend observe, "i should certainly act so and so, because i should be sure of being no loser by the most heroic self-devotion and of ultimately succeeding in the most daring enterprises." it may be said, in answer, that these objections apply only to the _unskilful_ novelist, who, from ignorance of the world, gives an unnatural representation of what he professes to delineate. this is partly true, and partly not; for there is a distinction to be made between the _unnatural_ and the merely _improbable_: a fiction is unnatural when there is some assignable reason against the events taking place as described,--when men are represented as acting contrary to the character assigned them, or to human nature in general; as when a young lady of seventeen, brought up in ease, luxury and retirement, with no companions but the narrow-minded and illiterate, displays (as a heroine usually does) under the most trying circumstances, such wisdom, fortitude, and knowledge of the world, as the best instructors and the best examples can rarely produce without the aid of more mature age and longer experience.--on the other hand, a fiction is still _improbable_, though _not unnatural_, when there is no reason to be assigned why things should not take place as represented, except that the _overbalance of chances is_ against it; the hero meets, in his utmost distress, most opportunely, with the very person to whom he had formerly done a signal service, and who happens to communicate to him a piece of intelligence which sets all to rights. why should he not meet him as well as any one else? all that can be said is, that there is no reason why he should. the infant who is saved from a wreck, and who afterwards becomes such a constellation of virtues and accomplishments, turns out to be no other than the nephew of the very gentleman, on whose estate the waves had cast him, and whose lovely daughter he had so long sighed for in vain: there is no reason to be given, except from the calculation of chances, why he should not have been thrown on one part of the coast as well as another. nay, it would be nothing unnatural, though the most determined novel-reader would be shocked at its improbability, if all the hero's enemies, while they were conspiring his ruin were to be struck dead together by a lucky flash of lightning: yet many denouements which _are_ decidedly unnatural, are better tolerated than this would be. we shall, perhaps, best explain our meaning by examples, taken from a novel of great merit in many respects. when lord glenthorn, in whom a most unfavourable education has acted on a most unfavourable disposition, after a life of torpor, broken only by short sallies of forced exertion, on a sudden reverse of fortune, displays at once the most persevering diligence in the most repulsive studies, and in middle life, without any previous habits of exertion, any hope of early business, or the example of friends, or the stimulus of actual want, to urge him, outstrips every competitor, though every competitor has every advantage against him; this is unnatural.--when lord glenthorn, the instant he is stripped of his estates, meets, falls in love with, and is conditionally accepted by the very lady who is remotely intitled to those estates; when, the instant he has fulfilled the conditions of their marriage, the family of the person possessed of the estates becomes extinct, and by the concurrence of circumstances, against every one of which the chances were enormous, the hero is re-instated in all his old domains; this is merely improbable. the distinction which we have been pointing out may be plainly perceived in the events of real life; when any thing takes place of such a nature as we should call, in a fiction, merely improbable, because there are many chances against it, we call it a lucky or unlucky accident, a singular coincidence, something very extraordinary, odd, curious, etc.; whereas any thing which, in a fiction, would be called unnatural, when it actually occurs (and such things do occur), is still called unnatural, inexplicable, unaccountable, inconceivable, etc., epithets which are not applied to events that have merely the balance of chances against them. now, though an author who understands human nature is not likely to introduce into his fictions any thing that is unnatural, he will often have much that is improbable: he may place his personages, by the intervention of accident, in striking situations, and lead them through a course of extraordinary adventures; and yet, in the midst of all this, he will keep up the most perfect consistency of character, and make them act as it would be natural for men to act in such situations and circumstances. fielding's novels are a good illustration of this: they display great knowledge of mankind; the characters are well preserved; the persons introduced all act as one would naturally expect they should, in the circumstances in which they are placed; but these circumstances are such as it is incalculably improbable should ever exist: several of the events, taken singly, are much against the chances of probability; but the combination of the whole in a connected series, is next to impossible. even the romances which admit a mixture of supernatural agency, are not more unfit to prepare men for real life, than such novels as these; since one might just as reasonably calculate on the intervention of a fairy, as on the train of lucky chances which combine first to involve tom jones in his difficulties, and afterwards to extricate him. perhaps, indeed, the supernatural fable is of the two not only (as we before remarked) the less mischievous in its moral effects, but also the more correct kind of composition in point of taste: the author lays down a kind of hypothesis of the existence of ghosts, witches, or fairies, and professes to describe what would take place under that hypothesis; the novelist, on the contrary, makes no demand of extraordinary machinery, but professes to describe what may actually take place, according to the existing laws of human affairs: if he therefore present us with a series of events quite unlike any which ever do take place, we have reason to complain that he has not made good his professions. when, therefore, the generality, even of the most approved novels, were of this character (to say nothing of the heavier charges brought, of inflaming the passions of young persons by warm descriptions, weakening their abhorrence of profligacy by exhibiting it in combination with the most engaging qualities, and presenting vice in all its allurements, while setting forth the triumphs of "virtue rewarded") it is not to be wondered that the grave guardians of youth should have generally stigmatized the whole class, as "serving only to fill young people's heads with romantic love-stories, and rendering them unfit to mind anything else." that this censure and caution should in many instances be indiscriminate, can surprize no one, who recollects how rare a quality discrimination is; and how much better it suits indolence, as well as ignorance, to lay down a rule, than to ascertain the exceptions to it: we are acquainted with a careful mother whose daughters while they never in their lives read a _novel_ of any kind, are permitted to peruse, without reserve, any _plays_ that happen to fall in their way; and with another, from whom no lessons, however excellent, of wisdom and piety, contained in a _prose-fiction,_ can obtain quarter; but who, on the other hand, is no less indiscriminately indulgent to her children in the article of tales in _verse_, of whatever character. the change, however, which we have already noticed, as having taken place in the character of several modern novels, has operated in a considerable degree to do away this prejudice; and has elevated this species of composition, in some respects at least, into a much higher class. for most of that instruction which used to be presented to the world in the shape of formal dissertations, or shorter and more desultory moral essays, such as those of the _spectator_ and _rambler_, we may now resort to the pages of the acute and judicious, but not less amusing, novelists who have lately appeared. if their views of men and manners are no less just than those of the essayists who preceded them, are they to be rated lower because they present to us these views, not in the language of general description, but in the form of well-constructed fictitious narrative? if the practical lessons they inculcate are no less sound and useful, it is surely no diminution of their merit that they are conveyed by example instead of precept: nor, if their remarks are neither less wise nor less important, are they the less valuable for being represented as thrown out in the course of conversations suggested by the circumstances of the speakers, and perfectly in character. the praise and blame of the moralist are surely not the less effectual for being bestowed, not in general declamation, on classes of men, but on individuals representing those classes, who are so clearly delineated and brought into action before us, that we seem to be acquainted with them, and feel an interest in their fate. biography is allowed, on all hands, to be one of the most attractive and profitable kinds of reading: now such novels as we have been speaking of, being a kind of fictitious biography, bear the same relation to the real, that epic and tragic poetry, according to aristotle, bear to history: they present us (supposing, of course, each perfect in its kind) with the general, instead of the particular,--the probable, instead of the true; and, by leaving out those accidental irregularities, and exceptions to general rules, which constitute the many improbabilities of real narrative, present us with a clear and _abstracted_ view of the general rules themselves; and thus concentrate, as it were, into a small compass, the net result of wide experience. among the authors of this school there is no one superior, if equal, to the lady whose last production is now before us, and whom we have much regret in finally taking leave of: her death (in the prime of life, considered as a writer) being announced in this the first publication to which her name is prefixed. we regret the failure not only of a source of innocent amusement, but also of that supply of practical good sense and instructive example, which she would probably have continued to furnish better than any of her contemporaries:--miss edgeworth, indeed, draws characters and details conversations, such as they occur in real life, with a spirit and fidelity not to be surpassed; but her stories are most romantically improbable (in the sense above explained), almost all the important events of them being brought about by most _providential_ coincidences; and this, as we have already remarked, is not merely faulty, inasmuch as it evinces a want of skill in the writer, and gives an air of clumsiness to the fiction, but is a very considerable drawback on its practical utility: the personages either of fiction or history being then only profitable examples, when their good or ill conduct meets its appropriate reward, not from a sort of independent machinery of accidents, but as a necessary or probable result, according to the ordinary course of affairs. miss edgeworth also is somewhat too avowedly didactic: that seems to be true of her, which the french critics, in the extravagance of their conceits, attributed to homer and virgil; viz., that they first thought of a moral, and then framed a fable to illustrate it; she would, we think, instruct more successfully, and she would, we are sure, please more frequently, if she kept the design of teaching more out of sight, and did not so glaringly press every circumstance of her story, principal or subordinate, into the service of a principle to be inculcated, or information to be given. a certain portion of moral instruction must accompany every well-invented narrative. virtue must be represented as producing, at the long run, happiness; and vice, misery; and the accidental events, that in real life interrupt this tendency, are anomalies which, though true individually, are as false generally as the accidental deformities which vary the average outline of the human figure. they would be as much out of place in a fictitious narrative, as a wen in an academic model. but any _direct_ attempt at moral teaching, and any attempt whatever to give scientific information will, we fear, unless managed with the utmost discretion, interfere with what, after all, is the immediate and peculiar object of the novelist, as of the poet, _to please_. if instruction do not join as a volunteer, she will do no good service. miss edgeworth's novels put us in mind of those clocks and watches which are condemned "a double or a treble debt to pay": which, besides their legitimate object, to show the hour, tell you the day of the month or the week, give you a landscape for a dial-plate, with the second hand forming the sails of a windmill, or have a barrel to play a tune, or an alarum to remind you of an engagement: all very good things in their way; but so it is that these watches never tell the time so well as those in which that is the exclusive object of the maker. every additional movement is an obstacle to the original design. we do not deny that we have learned much physic, and much law, from _patronage_, particularly the latter, for miss edgeworth's law is of a very original kind; but it was not to learn law and physic that we took up the book, and we suspect we should have been more pleased if we had been less taught. with regard to the influence of religion, which is scarcely, if at all, alluded to in miss edgeworth's novels, we would abstain from pronouncing any decision which should apply to her personally. she may, for aught we know, entertain opinions which would not permit her, with consistency, to attribute more to it than she has done; in that case she stands acquitted, in _foro conscientiae_, of wilfully suppressing any thing which she acknowledges to be true and important; but, as a writer, it must still be considered as a blemish, in the eyes at least of those who think differently, that virtue should be studiously inculcated with scarcely any reference to what they regard as the main spring of it; that vice should be traced to every other source except the want of religious principle; that the most radical change from worthlessness to excellence should be represented as wholly independent of that agent which they consider as the only one that can accomplish it; and that consolation under affliction should be represented as derived from every source except the one which they look to as the only true and sure one: "is it not because there is no god in israel that ye have sent to inquire of baalzebub the god of ekron?" miss austin has the merit (in our judgment most essential) of being evidently a christian writer: a merit which is much enhanced, both on the score of good taste, and of practical utility, by her religion being not at all obtrusive. she might defy the most fastidious critic to call any of her novels (as _caelebs_ was designated, we will not say altogether without reason), a "dramatic sermon." the subject is rather alluded to, and that incidentally, than studiously brought forward and dwelt upon. in fact she is more sparing of it than would be thought desirable by some persons; perhaps even by herself, had she consulted merely her own sentiments; but she probably introduced it as far as she thought would be generally acceptable and profitable: for when the purpose of inculcating a religious principle is made too palpably prominent, many readers, if they do not throw aside the book with disgust, are apt to fortify themselves with that respectful kind of apathy with which they undergo a regular sermon, and prepare themselves as they do to swallow a dose of medicine, endeavouring to _get it down_ in large gulps, without tasting it more than is necessary. the moral lessons also of this lady's novels, though clearly and impressively conveyed, are not offensively put forward, but spring incidentally from the circumstances of the story; they are not forced upon the reader, but he is left to collect them (though without any difficulty) for himself: hers is that unpretending kind of instruction which is furnished by real life; and certainly no author has ever conformed more closely to real life, as well in the incidents, as in the characters and descriptions. her fables appear to us to be, in their own way, nearly faultless; they do not consist (like those of some of the writers who have attempted this kind of common-life novel writing) of a string of unconnected events which have little or no bearing on one main plot, and are introduced evidently for the sole purpose of bringing in characters and conversations; but have all that compactness of plan and unity of action which is generally produced by a sacrifice of probability: yet they have little or nothing that is not probable; the story proceeds without the aid of extraordinary accidents; the events which take place are the necessary or natural consequences of what has preceded; and yet (which is a very rare merit indeed) the final catastrophe is scarcely ever clearly foreseen from the beginning, and very often comes, upon the generality of readers at least, quite unexpected. we know not whether miss austin ever had access to the precepts of aristotle; but there are few, if any, writers of fiction who have illustrated them more successfully. the vivid distinctness of description, the minute fidelity of detail, and air of unstudied ease in the scenes represented, which are no less necessary than probability of incident, to carry the reader's imagination along with the story, and give fiction the perfect appearance of reality, she possesses in a high degree; and the object is accomplished without resorting to those deviations from the ordinary plan of narrative in the third person, which have been patronized by some eminent masters. we allude to the two other methods of conducting a fictitious story, viz., either by narrative in the first person, when the hero is made to tell his own tale, or by a series of letters; both of which we conceive have been adopted with a view of heightening the resemblance of the fiction to reality. at first sight, indeed, there might appear no reason why a story told in the first person should have more the air of a real history than in the third; especially as the majority of real histories actually are in the third person; nevertheless, experience seems to show that such is the case: provided there be no want of skill in the writer, the resemblance to real life, of a fiction thus conducted, will approach much the nearest (other points being equal) to a deception, and the interest felt in it, to that which we feel in real transactions. we need only instance defoe's novels, which, in spite of much improbability, we believe have been oftener mistaken for true narratives, than any fictions that ever were composed. colonel newport is well known to have been cited as an historical authority; and we have ourselves found great difficulty in convincing many of our friends that defoe was not himself the citizen, who relates the plague of london. the reason probably is, that in the ordinary form of narrative, the writer is not content to exhibit, like a real historian, a bare detail of such circumstances as might actually have come under his knowledge; but presents us with a description of what is passing in the minds of the parties, and gives an account of their feelings and motives, as well as their most private conversations in various places at once. all this is very amusing, but perfectly unnatural: the merest simpleton could hardly mistake a fiction of _this_ kind for a true history, unless he believed the writer to be endued with omniscience and omnipresence, or to be aided by familiar spirits, doing the office of homer's muses, whom he invokes to tell him all that could not otherwise be known; [greek: _umeis gar theoi eote pareote te, iote te panta._] let the events, therefore, which are detailed, and the characters described, be ever so natural, the way in which they are presented to us is of a kind of supernatural cast, perfectly unlike any real history that ever was or can be written, and thus requiring a greater stretch of imagination in the reader. on the other hand, the supposed narrator of his own history never pretends to dive into the thoughts and feelings of the other parties; he merely describes his own, and gives his conjectures as to those of the rest, just as a real autobiographer might do; and thus an author is enabled to assimilate his fiction to reality, without withholding that delineation of the inward workings of the human heart, which is so much coveted. nevertheless novels in the first person have not succeeded so well as to make that mode of writing become very general. it is objected to them, not without reason, that they want a _hero_: the person intended to occupy that post being the narrator himself, who of course cannot so describe his own conduct and character as to make the reader thoroughly acquainted with him; though the attempt frequently produces an offensive appearance of egotism. the plan of a fictitious correspondence seems calculated in some measure to combine the advantages of the other two; since, by allowing each personage to be the speaker in turn, the feelings of each may be described by himself, and his character and conduct by another. but these novels are apt to become excessively tedious; since, to give the letters the appearance of reality (without which the main object proposed would be defeated), they must contain a very large proportion of matter which has no bearing at all upon the story. there is also generally a sort of awkward disjointed appearance in a novel which proceeds entirely in letters, and holds together, as it were, by continual splicing. miss austin, though she has in a few places introduced letters with great effect, has on the whole conducted her novels on the ordinary plan, describing, without scruple, private conversations and uncommunicated feelings: but she has not been forgetful of the important maxim, so long ago illustrated by homer, and afterwards enforced by aristotle,[ ] of saying as little as possible in her own person, and giving a dramatic air to the narrative, by introducing frequent conversations; which she conducts with a regard to character hardly exceeded even by shakespeare himself. like him, she shows as admirable a discrimination in the characters of fools as of people of sense; a merit which is far from common. to invent, indeed, a conversation full of wisdom or of wit, requires that the writer should himself possess ability; but the converse does not hold good: it is no fool that can describe fools well; and many who have succeeded pretty well in painting superior characters, have failed in giving individuality to those weaker ones, which it is necessary to introduce in order to give a faithful representation of real life: they exhibit to us mere folly in the abstract, forgetting that to the eye of a skilful naturalist the insects on a leaf present as wide differences as exist between the elephant and the lion. slender, and shallow, and aguecheek, as shakespeare has painted them, though equally fools, resemble one another no more than "richard," and "macbeth," and "julius caesar"; and miss austin's "mrs. bennet," "mr. rushworth," and "miss bates," are no more alike than her "darcy," "knightley," and "edmund bertram." some have complained, indeed, of finding her fools too much like nature, and consequently tiresome; there is no disputing about tastes; all we can say is, that such critics must (whatever deference they may outwardly pay to received opinions) find the "merry wives of windsor" and "twelfth night" very tiresome; and that those who look with pleasure at wilkie's pictures, or those of the dutch school, must admit that excellence of imitation may confer attraction on that which would be insipid or disagreeable in the reality. [ ] [greek: _ouden anthes_] arist. poet. her minuteness of detail has also been found fault with; but even where it produces, at the time, a degree of tediousness, we know not whether that can justly be reckoned a blemish, which is absolutely essential to a very high excellence. now, it is absolutely impossible, without this, to produce that thorough acquaintance with the characters, which is necessary to make the reader heartily interested in them. let any one cut out from the _iliad_ or from shakespeare's plays every thing (we are far from saying that either might not lose some parts with advantage, but let him reject every thing) which is absolutely devoid of importance and of interest _in itself_; and he will find that what is left will have lost more than half its charms. we are convinced that some writers have diminished the effect of their works by being scrupulous to admit nothing into them which had not some absolute, intrinsic, and independent merit. they have acted like those who strip off the leaves of a fruit tree, as being of themselves good for nothing, with the view of securing more nourishment to the fruit, which in fact cannot attain its full maturity and flavour without them. * * * * * to say the truth, we suspect one of miss austin's great merits in our eyes to be, the insight she gives us into the peculiarities of female character. authoresses can scarcely ever forget the _esprit de corps_-- can scarcely ever forget that they _are authoresses_. they seem to feel a sympathetic shudder at exposing naked a female mind. _elles se peignent en buste_, and leave the mysteries of womanhood to be described by some interloping male, like richardson or marivaux, who is turned out before he has seen half the rites, and is forced to spin from his own conjectures the rest. now from this fault miss austin is free. her heroines are what one knows women must be, though one never can get them to acknowledge it. as liable to "fall in love first," as anxious to attract the attention of agreeable men, as much taken with a striking manner, or a handsome face, as unequally gifted with constancy and firmness, as liable to have their affections biassed by convenience or fashion, as we, on our part, will admit men to be. as some illustration of what we mean, we refer our readers to the conversation between miss crawford and fanny, vol. iii, p. . fanny's meeting with her father, p. ; her reflections after reading edmund's letter, ; her happiness (good, and heroine though she be) in the midst of the misery of all her friends, when she finds that edmund has decidedly broken with her rival; feelings, all of them, which, under the influence of strong passion, must alloy the purest mind, but with which scarcely any _authoress_ but miss austin would have ventured to temper the aetherial materials of a heroine. but we must proceed to the publication of which the title is prefixed to this article. it contains, it seems, the earliest and the latest productions of the author; the first of them having been purchased, we are told, many years back by a bookseller, who, for some reason unexplained, thought proper to alter his mind and withhold it. we do not much applaud his taste; for though it is decidedly inferior to her other works, having less plot, and what there is, less artificially wrought up, and also less exquisite nicety of moral painting; yet the same kind of excellences which characterise the other novels may be perceived in this, in a degree which would have been highly creditable to most other writers of the same school, and which would have entitled the author to considerable praise, had she written nothing better. we already begin to fear, that we have indulged too much in extracts, and we must save some room for _persuasion_, or we could not resist giving a specimen of john thorpe, with his horse that _cannot_ go less than miles an hour, his refusal to drive his sister "because she has such thick ankles," and his sober consumption of five pints of port a day; altogether the best portrait of a species, which, though almost extinct, cannot yet be quite classed among the palaeotheria, the bang-up oxonian. miss thorpe, the jilt of middling life, is, in her way, quite as good, though she has not the advantage of being the representative of a rare or a diminishing species. we fear few of our readers, however they may admire the naïveté, will admit the truth of poor john morland's postscript, "i can never expect to know such another woman." the latter of these novels, however, _persuasion_, which is more strictly to be considered as a posthumous work, possesses that superiority which might be expected from the more mature age at which it was written, and is second, we think, to none of the former ones, if not superior to all. in the humorous delineation of character it does not abound quite so much as some of the others, though it has great merit even on that score; but it has more of that tender and yet elevated kind of interest which is aimed at by the generality of novels, and in pursuit of which they seldom fail of running into romantic extravagance: on the whole, it is one of the most elegant fictions of common life we ever remember to have met with. sir walter elliot, a silly and conceited baronet, has three daughters, the eldest two, unmarried, and the third, mary, the wife of a neighbouring gentleman, mr. charles musgrove, heir to a considerable fortune, and living in a genteel cottage in the neighbourhood of the great house which he is hereafter to inherit. the second daughter, anne, who is the heroine, and the only one of the family possessed of good sense (a quality which miss austin is as sparing of in her novels, as we fear her great mistress, nature, has been in real life), when on a visit to her sister, is, by that sort of instinct which generally points out to all parties the person on whose judgment and temper they may rely, appealed to in all the little family differences which arise, and which are described with infinite spirit and detail. * * * * * we ventured, in a former article, to remonstrate against the dethronement of the once powerful god of love, in his own most especial domain, the novel; and to suggest that, in shunning the ordinary fault of recommending by examples a romantic and uncalculating extravagance of passion, miss austin had rather fallen into the opposite extreme of exclusively patronizing what are called prudent matches, and too much disparaging sentimental enthusiasm. we urged, that, mischievous as is the extreme on this side, it is not the one into which the young folks of the present day are the most likely to run: the prevailing fault is not now, whatever it may have been, to sacrifice all for love: venit enim magnum donandi parca juventus, nec tantum veneris quantum studiosa culinae. we may now, without retracting our opinion, bestow unqualified approbation; for the distresses of the present heroine all arise from her prudent refusal to listen to the suggestions of her heart. the catastrophe, however, is happy, and we are left in doubt whether it would have been better for her or not, to accept the first proposal; and this we conceive is precisely the proper medium; for, though we would not have prudential calculations the sole principle to be regarded in marriage, we are far from advocating their exclusion. to disregard the advice of sober-minded friends on an important point of conduct, is an imprudence we would by no means recommend; indeed, it is a species of selfishness, if, in listening only to the dictates of passion, a man sacrifices to its gratification the happiness of those most dear to him as well as his own; though it is not now-a-days the most prevalent form of selfishness. but it is no condemnation of a sentiment to say, that it becomes blameable when it interferes with duty, and is uncontrolled by conscience: the desire of riches, power, or distinction--the taste for ease and comfort--are to be condemned when they transgress these bounds; and love, if it keep within them, even though it be somewhat tinged with enthusiasm, and a little at variance with what the worldly call prudence, _i.e._, regard for pecuniary advantage, may afford a better moral discipline to the mind than most other passions. it will not at least be denied, that it has often proved a powerful stimulus to exertion where others have failed, and has called forth talents unknown before even to the possessor. what, though the pursuit may be fruitless, and the hopes visionary? the result may be a real and substantial benefit, though of another kind; the vineyard may have been cultivated by digging in it for the treasure which is never to be found. what though the perfections with which imagination has decorated the beloved object, may, in fact, exist but in a slender degree? still they are believed in and admired as real; if not, the love is such as does not merit the name; and it is proverbially true that men become assimilated to the character (_i.e._, what they _think_ the character) of the being they fervently adore: thus, as in the noblest exhibitions of the stage, though that which is contemplated be but a fiction, it may be realized in the mind of the beholder; and, though grasping at a cloud, he may become worthy of possessing a real goddess. many a generous sentiment, and many a virtuous resolution, have been called forth and matured by admiration of one, who may herself perhaps have been incapable of either. it matters not what the object is that a man aspires to be worthy of, and proposes as a model for imitation, if he does but _believe_ it to be excellent. moreover, all doubts of success (and they are seldom, if ever, entirely wanting) must either produce or exercise humility; and the endeavour to study another's interests and inclinations, and prefer them to one's own, may promote a habit of general benevolence which may outlast the present occasion. every thing, in short, which tends to abstract a man in any degree, or in any way, from self,--from self-admiration and self-interest, has, so far at least, a beneficial influence in forming the character. on the whole, miss austin's works may safely be recommended, not only as among the most unexceptionable of their class, but as combining, in an eminent degree, instruction with amusement, though without the direct effort at the former, of which we have complained, as sometimes defeating its object. for those who cannot, or will not, _learn_ anything from productions of this kind, she has provided entertainment which entitles her to thanks; for mere innocent amusement is in itself a good, when it interferes with no greater: especially as it may occupy the place of some other that may _not_ be innocent. the eastern monarch who proclaimed a reward to him who should discover a new pleasure, would have deserved well of mankind had he stipulated that it should be blameless. those, again, who delight in the study of human nature, may improve in the knowledge of it, and in the profitable application of that knowledge, by the perusal of such fictions as those before us. w. e. gladstone on tennyson [from _the quarterly review_, october, ] . _tennyson's poems_. in two volumes. london, . . _the princess: a medley_. london, . . _in memoriam_. london, . . _maud, and other poems_. london, . . _idylls of the king_. london, . mr. tennyson published his first volume, under the title of "poems chiefly lyrical," in , and his second, with the name simply of "poems," in . in he reappeared before the world in two volumes, partly made up from the _débris_ of his earlier pieces; and from this time forward he came into the enjoyment of a popularity at once great, growing, and select. with a manly resolution, which gave promise of the rare excellence he was progressively to attain, he had at this time amputated altogether from the collection about one-half of the contents of his earliest work, with some considerable portion of the second; he had almost rewritten or carefully corrected other important pieces, and had added a volume of new compositions. the latter handiwork showed a great advance upon the earlier; as, indeed, had shown upon . from the very first, however, he had been noteworthy in performance as well as in promise, and it was plain that, whatever else might happen, at least neglect was not to be his lot. but, in the natural heat of youth he had at the outset certainly mixed up some trivial with a greater number of worthy productions, and had shown an impatience of criticism by which, however excusable, he was sure to be himself the chief sufferer. his higher gifts, too, were of the quality which, by the changeless law of nature, cannot ripen fast; and there was, accordingly, some portion both of obscurity and of crudity in the results of his youthful labours. men of slighter materials would have come more quickly to their maturity, and might have given less occasion not only for cavil but for animadversion. it was yet more creditable to him, than it could be even to the just among his critics, that he should, and while yet young, have applied himself with so resolute a hand to the work of castigation. he thus gave a remarkable proof alike of his reverence for his art, of his insight into its powers, of the superiority he had acquired to all the more commonplace illusions of self-love, and perhaps of his presaging consciousness that the great, if they mean to fulfil the measure of their greatness, should always be fastidious against themselves. it would be superfluous to enter upon any general criticism of this collection, which was examined when still recent in this review, and a large portion of which is established in the familiar recollection and favour of the public. we may, however, say that what may be termed at large the classical idea (though it is not that of troas nor of the homeric period) has, perhaps, never been grasped with greater force and justice than in "oenone," nor exhibited in a form of more consummate polish. "ulysses" is likewise a highly finished poem; but it is open to the remark that it exhibits (so to speak) a corner-view of a character which was in itself a _cosmos_. never has political philosophy been wedded to the poetic form more happily than in the three short pieces on england and her institutions, unhappily without title, and only to be cited, like writs of law and papal bulls, by their first words. even among the rejected pieces there are specimens of a deep metaphysical insight; and this power reappears with an increasing growth of ethical and social wisdom in "locksley hall" and elsewhere. the wordsworthian poem of "dora" is admirable in its kind. from the firmness of its drawing, and the depth and singular purity of its colour, "godiva" stood, if we judge aright, as at once a great performance and a great pledge. but, above all, the fragmentary piece on the death of arthur was a fit prelude to that lordly music which is now sounding in our ears. if we pass onward from these volumes, it is only because space forbids a further enumeration. the "princess" was published in . the author has termed it "a medley": why, we know not. it approaches more nearly to the character of a regular drama, with the stage directions written into verse, than any other of his works, and it is composed consecutively throughout on the basis of one idea. it exhibits an effort to amalgamate the place and function of woman with that of man, and the failure of that effort, which duly winds up with the surrender and marriage of the fairest and chief enthusiast. it may be doubted whether the idea is one well suited to exhibition in a quasi-dramatic form. certainly the mode of embodying it, so far as it is dramatic, is not successful; for here again the persons are little better than mere _personae_. they are _media_, and weak _media_, for the conveyance of the ideas. the poem is, nevertheless, one of high interest, on account of the force, purity and nobleness of the main streams of thought, which are clothed in language full of all mr. tennyson's excellences; and also because it marks the earliest effort of his mind in the direction of his latest and greatest achievements. * * * * * with passages like these still upon the mind and ear, and likewise having in view many others in the "princess" and elsewhere, we may confidently assert it as one of mr. tennyson's brightest distinctions that he is now what from the very first he strove to be, and what when he wrote "godiva" he gave ample promise of becoming--the poet of woman. we do not mean, nor do we know, that his hold over women as his readers is greater than his command or influence over men; but that he has studied, sounded, painted woman in form, in motion, in character, in office, in capability, with rare devotion, power, and skill; and the poet who best achieves this end does also most and best for man. in mr. tennyson gave to the world, under the title of "in memoriam," perhaps the richest oblation ever offered by the affection of friendship at the tomb of the departed. the memory of arthur henry hallam, who died suddenly in , at the age of twenty-two, will doubtless live chiefly in connection with this volume; but he is well known to have been one who, if the term of his days had been prolonged, would have needed no aid from a friendly hand, would have built for himself an enduring monument, and would have bequeathed to his country a name in all likelihood greater than that of his very distinguished father. there was no one among those who were blessed with his friendship, nay, as we see, not even mr. tennyson,[ ] who did not feel at once bound closely to him by commanding affection, and left far behind by the rapid, full, and rich development of his ever-searching mind; by his all comprehensive tenderness, all subtilising intellect. [ ] see "in memoriam," pp. , . it would be easy to show what, in the varied forms of human excellence, he might, had life been granted him, have accomplished; much more difficult to point the finger and to say, "this he never could have done." enough remains from among his early efforts to accredit whatever mournful witness may now be borne of him. but what can be a nobler tribute than this, that for seventeen years after his death a poet, fast rising towards the lofty summits of his art, found that young fading image the richest source of his inspiration, and of thoughts that gave him buoyancy for a flight such as he had not hitherto attained? it would be very difficult to convey a just idea of this volume either by narrative or by quotation. in the series of monodies or meditations which compose it, and which follow in long series without weariness or sameness, the poet never moves away a step from the grave of his friend, but, while circling round it, has always a new point of view. strength of love, depth of grief, aching sense of loss, have driven him forth as it were on a quest of consolation, and he asks it of nature, thought, religion, in a hundred forms which a rich and varied imagination continually suggests, but all of them connected by one central point, the recollection of the dead. this work he prosecutes, not in vain effeminate complaint, but in a manly recognition of the fruit and profit even of baffled love, in noble suggestions of the future, in heart-soothing and heart-chastening thoughts of what the dead was and of what he is, and of what one who has been, and therefore still is, in near contact with him is bound to be. the whole movement of the poem is between the mourner and the mourned: it may be called one long soliloquy; but it has this mark of greatness, that, though the singer is himself a large part of the subject, it never degenerates into egotism-- for he speaks typically on behalf of humanity at large, and in his own name, like dante on his mystic journey, teaches deep lessons of life and conscience to us all. * * * * * by the time "in memoriam" had sunk into the public mind, mr. tennyson had taken his rank as our first then living poet. over the fresh hearts and understandings of the young, notwithstanding his obscurities, his metaphysics, his contempt of gewgaws, he had established an extraordinary sway. we ourselves, with some thousands of other spectators, saw him receive in that noble structure of wren, the theatre of oxford, the decoration of d.c.l., which we perceive he always wears on his title-page. among his colleagues in the honour were sir de lacy evans and sir john burgoyne, fresh from the stirring exploits of the crimea; but even patriotism, at the fever heat of war, could not command a more fervent enthusiasm for the old and gallant warriors than was evoked by the presence of mr. tennyson. in the year mr. tennyson proceeded to publish his "maud," the least popular, and probably the least worthy of popularity, among his more considerable works. a somewhat heavy dreaminess, and a great deal of obscurity, hang about this poem; and the effort required to dispel the darkness of the general scheme is not repaid when we discover what it hides. the main thread of "maud" seems to be this:--a love once accepted, then disappointed, leads to blood-shedding, and onward to madness with lucid alternations. the insanity expresses itself in the ravings of the homicide lover, who even imagines himself among the dead, in a clamour and confusion closely resembling an ill-regulated bedlam, but which, if the description be a faithful one, would for ever deprive the grave of its title to the epithet of silent. it may be good frenzy, but we doubt its being as good poetry. of all this there may, we admit, be an esoteric view: but we speak of the work as it offers itself to the common eye. both maud and the lover are too nebulous by far; and they remind us of the boneless and pulpy personages by whom, as dr. whewell assures us, the planet jupiter is inhabited, if inhabited at all. but the most doubtful part of the poem is its climax. a vision of the beloved image (p. ) "spoke of a hope for the world in the coming wars," righteous wars, of course, and the madman begins to receive light and comfort; but, strangely enough, it seems to be the wars, and not the image, in which the source of consolation lies (p. ). no more shall commerce be all in all, and peace pipe on her pastoral hillock a languid note, and watch her harvest ripen, her herd increase. ... a peace that was full of wrongs and shames, horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told ... for the long long canker of peace is over and done: and now by the side of the black and the baltic deep, and deathful grinning mouths of the fortress, names the blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire! what interpretation are we meant to give to all this sound and fury? we would fain have put it down as intended to be the finishing-stroke in the picture of a mania which has reached its zenith. we might call in aid of this construction more happy and refreshing passages from other poems, as when mr. tennyson is certain, if knowledge brings the sword, that knowledge takes the sword away.[ ] [ ] "poems," p. , ed. . see also "locksley hall," p. . and again in "the golden dream,"-- when shall all men's good be each man's rule, and universal peace lie like a shaft of light across the land? and yet once more in a noble piece of "in memoriam,"-- ring out old shapes of foul disease, ring out the narrowing lust of gold; ring out the thousand wars of old, ring in the thousand years of peace. but on the other hand we must recollect that very long ago, when the apparition of invasion from across the channel had as yet spoiled no man's slumbers, mr. tennyson's blood was already up:[ ]-- for the french, the pope may shrive them ... and the merry devil drive them through the water and the fire. [ ] "poems chiefly lyrical," , p. . and unhappily in the beginning of "maud," when still in the best use of such wits as he possesses, its hero deals largely in kindred extravagances (p. ):-- when a mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee, and timour-mammon grins on a pile of children's bones, is it peace or war? better war! loud war by land and by sea, war with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones. he then anticipates that, upon an enemy's attacking this country, "the smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogue," who typifies the bulk of the british people, "the nation of shopkeepers," as it has been emasculated and corrupted by excess of peace, will leap from his counter and till to charge the enemy; and thus it is to be reasonably hoped that we shall attain to the effectual renovation of society. we frankly own that our divining rod does not enable us to say whether the poet intends to be in any and what degree sponsor to these sentiments, or whether he has put them forth in the exercise of his undoubted right to make vivid and suggestive representations of even the partial and narrow aspects of some endangered truth. this is at best, indeed, a perilous business, for out of such fervid partial representations nearly all grave human error springs; and it should only be pursued with caution and in season. but we do not recollect that was a season of serious danger from a mania for peace and its pursuits; and even if it had been so, we fear that the passages we have quoted far overpass all the bounds of moderation and good sense. it is, indeed, true that peace has its moral perils and temptations for degenerate man, as has every other blessing, without exception, that he can receive from the hand of god. it is moreover not less true that, amidst the clash of arms, the noblest forms of character may be reared, and the highest acts of duty done; that these great and precious results may be due to war as their cause; and that one high form of sentiment in particular, the love of country, receives a powerful and general stimulus from the bloody strife. but this is as the furious cruelty of pharaoh made place for the benign virtue of his daughter; as the butchering sentence of herod raised without doubt many a mother's love into heroic sublimity; as plague, as famine, as fire, as flood, as every curse and every scourge that is wielded by an angry providence for the chastisement of man, is an appointed instrument for tempering human souls in the seven-times heated furnace of affliction, up to the standard of angelic and archangelic virtue. war, indeed, has the property of exciting much generous and noble feeling on a large scale; but with this special recommendation it has, in its modern forms especially, peculiar and unequalled evils. as it has a wider sweep of desolating power than the rest, so it has the peculiar quality that it is more susceptible of being decked in gaudy trappings, and of fascinating the imagination of those whose passions it inflames. but it is on this very account a perilous delusion to teach that war is a cure for moral evil in any other sense than as the sister tribulations are. the eulogies of the frantic hero in "maud," however, deviate into grosser folly. it is natural that such vagaries should overlook the fixed laws of providence; and under these laws the mass of mankind is composed of men, women, and children who can but just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness; whose whole ideas of mammon-worship are comprised in the search for their daily food, clothing, shelter, fuel; whom any casualty reduces to positive want; and whose already low estimate is yet further lowered and ground down when "the blood-red blossom of war flames with its heart of fire." but what is a little strange is, that war should be recommended as a specific for the particular evil of mammon-worship. such it never was, even in the days when the greek heroes longed for the booty of troy, and anticipated lying by the wives of its princes and its citizens. still it had, in times now gone by, ennobling elements and tendencies of the less sordid kind. but one inevitable characteristic of modern war is, that it is associated throughout, in all its particulars, with a vast and most irregular formation of commercial enterprise. there is no incentive to mammon-worship so remarkable as that which it affords. the political economy of war is now one of its most commanding aspects. every farthing, with the smallest exceptions conceivable, of the scores or hundreds of millions which a war may cost, goes directly to stimulate production, though it is intended ultimately for waste or for destruction. apart from the fact that war destroys every rule of public thrift, and saps honesty itself in the use of the public treasure for which it makes such unbounded calls, it therefore is the greatest feeder of that lust of gold which we are told is the essence of commerce, though we had hoped it was only its occasional besetting sin. it is, however, more than this; for the regular commerce of peace is tameness itself compared with the gambling spirit which war, through the rapid shiftings and high prices which it brings, always introduces into trade. in its moral operation it more resembles, perhaps, the finding of a new gold-field, than anything else. meantime, as the most wicked mothers do not kill their offspring from a taste for the practice in the abstract, but under the pressure of want, and as war always brings home want to a larger circle of the people than feel it in peace, we ask the hero of "maud" to let us know whether war is more likely to reduce or to multiply the horrors which he denounces? will more babies be poisoned amidst comparative ease and plenty, or when, as before the fall of napoleon, provisions were twice as dear as they now are, and wages not much more than half as high? romans and carthaginians were pretty much given to war: but no nations were more sedulous in the cult of mammon. again, the scriptures are pretty strong against mammon-worship, but they do not recommend this original and peculiar cure. nay, once more: what sad errors must have crept into the text of the prophet isaiah when he is made to desire that our swords shall be converted into ploughshares, and our spears into pruning-hooks! but we have this solid consolation after all, that mr. tennyson's war poetry is not comparable to his poetry of peace. indeed he is not here successful at all: the work, of a lower order than his, demands the abrupt force and the lyric fire which do not seem to be among his varied and brilliant gifts. we say more. mr. tennyson is too intimately and essentially the poet of the nineteenth century to separate himself from its leading characteristics, the progress of physical science and a vast commercial, mechanical, and industrial development. whatever he may say or do in an occasional fit, he cannot long either cross or lose its sympathies; for while he elevates as well as adorns it, he is flesh of its flesh and bone of its bone. we fondly believe it is his business to do much towards the solution of that problem, so fearful from its magnitude, how to harmonise this new draught of external power and activity with the old and more mellow wine of faith, self devotion, loyalty, reverence, and discipline. and all that we have said is aimed, not at mr. tennyson, but at a lay-figure which he has set up, and into the mouth of which he has put words that cannot be his words. we return to our proper task, "maud," if an unintelligible or even, for mr. tennyson, an inferior work, is still a work which no inferior man could have produced; nor would it be difficult to extract abundance of lines, and even passages, obviously worthy of their author. and if this poem would have made while alone a volume too light for his fame, the defect is supplied by the minor pieces, some of which are admirable. "the brook," with its charming interstitial soliloquy, and the "letters" will, we are persuaded, always rank among mr. tennyson's happy efforts; while the "ode on the death of the duke of wellington," written from the heart and sealed by the conscience of the poet, is worthy of that great and genuine piece of manhood, its immortal subject. we must touch for a moment upon what has already been mentioned as a separate subject of interest in the "princess." we venture to describe it as in substance a drama, with a plot imperfectly worked and with characters insufficiently chiselled and relieved. its author began by presenting, and for many years continued to present, personal as well as natural pictures of individual attitude or movement; and, as in "oenone" and "godiva," he carried them to a very high pitch of perfection. but he scarcely attempted, unless in his more homely narrations, anything like grouping or combination. it now appears that for the higher effort he has been gradually accumulating and preparing his resources. in the sections of the prolonged soliloquy of "maud" we see a crude attempt at representing combined interests and characters with heroic elevation, under the special difficulty of appearing, like mathews, in one person only; in the "princess" we had a happier effort, though one that still left more to be desired. each, however, in its own stage was a preparation for an enterprise at once bolder and more mature. we now come to the recent work of the poet--the "idylls of the king." the field, which mr. tennyson has chosen for this his recent and far greatest exploit, is one of so deep and wide-reaching an interest as to demand some previous notice of a special kind. lofty example in comprehensive forms is, without doubt, one of the great standing needs of our race. to this want it has been from the first one main purpose of the highest poetry to answer. the quest of beauty leads all those who engage in it to the ideal or normal man as the summit of attainable excellence. by no arbitrary choice, but in obedience to unchanging laws, the painter and the sculptor must found their art upon the study of the human form, and must reckon its successful reproduction as their noblest and most consummate exploit. the concern of poetry with corporal beauty is, though important, yet secondary: this art uses form as an auxiliary, as a subordinate though proper part in the delineation of mind and character, of which it is appointed to be a visible organ. but with mind and character themselves lies the highest occupation of the muse. homer, the patriarch of poets, has founded his two immortal works upon two of these ideal developments in achilles and ulysses; and has adorned them with others, such as penelope and helen, hector and diomed, every one an immortal product, though as compared with the others either less consummate or less conspicuous. though deformed by the mire of after-tradition, all the great characters of homer have become models and standards, each in its own kind, for what was, or was supposed to be, its distinguishing gift. at length, after many generations and great revolutions of mind and of events, another age arrived, like, if not equal, in creative power to that of homer. the gospel had given to the whole life of man a real resurrection, and its second birth was followed by its second youth. this rejuvenescence was allotted to those wonderful centuries which popular ignorance confounds with the dark ages properly so called--an identification about as rational as if we were to compare the life within the womb to the life of intelligent though early childhood. awakened to aspirations at once fresh and ancient, the mind of man took hold of the venerable ideals bequeathed to us by the greeks as a precious part of its inheritance, and gave them again to the light, appropriated but also renewed. the old materials came forth, but not alone; for the types which human genius had formerly conceived were now submitted to the transfiguring action of a law from on high. nature herself prompted the effort to bring the old patterns of worldly excellence and greatness--or rather the copies of those patterns still legible, though depraved, and still rich with living suggestion--into harmony with that higher pattern, once seen by the eyes and handled by the hands of men, and faithfully delineated in the gospels for the profit of all generations. the life of our saviour, in its external aspect, was that of a teacher. it was in principle a model for all, but it left space and scope for adaptations to the lay life of christians in general, such as those by whom the every-day business of the world is to be carried on. it remained for man to make his best endeavour to exhibit the great model on its terrestrial side, in its contact with the world. here is the true source of that new and noble cycle which the middle ages have handed down to us in duality of form, but with a nearly identical substance, under the royal sceptres of arthur in england and of charlemagne in france. of the two great systems of romance, one has lancelot, the other has orlando for its culminating point; these heroes being exhibited as the respective specimens in whose characters the fullest development of man, such as he was then conceived, was to be recognised. the one put forward arthur for the visible head of christendom, signifying and asserting its social unity; the other had charlemagne. each arrays about the sovereign a fellowship of knights. in them valour is the servant of honour; in an age of which violence is the besetting danger, the protection of the weak is elevated into a first principle of action; and they betoken an order of things in which force should be only known as allied with virtue, while they historically foreshadow the magnificent aristocracy of mediaeval europe. the one had guinevere for the rarest gem of beauty, the other had angelica. each of them contained figures of approximation to the knightly model, and in each these figures, though on the whole secondary, yet in certain aspects surpassed it: such were sir tristram, sir galahad, sir lamoracke, sir gawain, sir geraint, in the arthurian cycle; rinaldo and ruggiero, with others, in the carlovingian. they were not twin systems, but they were rather twin investitures of the same scheme of ideals and feelings. their consanguinity to the primitive homeric types is proved by a multitude of analogies of character and by the commanding place which they assign to hector as the flower of human excellence. without doubt, this preference was founded on his supposed moral superiority to all his fellows in homer; and the secondary prizes of strength, valour, and the like, were naturally allowed to group themselves around what, under the christian scheme, had become the primary ornament of man. the near relation of the two cycles to one another may be sufficiently seen in the leading references we have made, and it runs into a multitude of details both great and small, of which we can only note a few. in both the chief hero passes through a prolonged term of madness. judas, in the college of apostles, is represented under charlemagne in gano di maganza and his house, who appear, without any development in action, in the arthurian romance as "the traitours of magouns," and who are likewise reflected in sir modred, sir agravain, and others; while the mahometan element, which has a natural place ready made in a history that acknowledges charlemagne and france, for its centres, finds its way sympathetically into one which is bound for the most part by the shores of albion. both schemes cling to the tradition of the unity of the empire as well as of christendom; and accordingly, what was historical in charlemagne is represented in the case of arthur by an imaginary conquest reaching as far as rome, the capital of the west: even the sword _durindana_ has its counterpart in the sword _excalibur_. the moral systems of the two cycles are essentially allied: and perhaps the differences between them may be due in greater or in less part to the fact that they come to us through different _media_. we of the nineteenth century read the carlovingian romance in the pages of ariosto and bojardo, who gave to their materials the colour of their times, and of a civilization rank in some respects, while still unripe in some others. the genius of poetry was not at the same period applying its transmuting force to the romance of the round table. the date of sir thomas mallory, who lived under edward iv, is something earlier than that of the great italian romances; he appears, too, to have been on the whole content with the humble offices of a compiler and a chronicler, and we may conceive that his spirit and diction are still older than his date. the consequence is, that we are brought into more immediate and fresher contact with the original forms of this romance. so that, as they present themselves to us, the carlovingian cycle is the child of the latest middle age, while the arthurian represents the earlier. much might be said on the differences which have thus arisen, and on those which may be due to a more northern and more southern extraction respectively. suffice it to say that the romance of the round table, far less vivid and brilliant, far ruder as a work of skill and art, has more of the innocence, the emotion, the transparency, the inconsistency of childhood. its political action is less specifically christian than that of the rival scheme, its individual more so. it is more directly and seriously aimed at the perfection of man. it is more free from gloss and varnish; it tells its own tale with more entire simplicity. the ascetic element is more strongly, and at the same time more quaintly, developed. it has a higher conception of the nature of woman; and like the homeric poems, appears to eschew exhibiting her perfections in alliance with warlike force and exploits. so also love, while largely infused into the story, is more subordinate to the exhibition of other qualities. again, the romance of the round table bears witness to a more distinct and keener sense of sin: and on the whole, a deeper, broader, and more manly view of human character, life, and duty. it is in effect more like what the carlovingian cycle might have been had dante moulded it. it hardly needs to be added that it is more mythical, inasmuch as arthur of the round table is a personage, we fear, wholly doubtful, though not impossible; while the broad back of the historic charlemagne, like another atlas, may well sustain a world of mythical accretions. this slight comparison, be it remarked, refers exclusively to what may be termed the latest "redactions" of the two cycles of romance. their early forms, in the lays of troubadours, and in the pages of the oldest chroniclers, offer a subject of profound interest, and one still unexhausted, although it has been examined by mr. panizzi and m. fauriel,[ ] but one which is quite beyond the scope of our present subject. [ ] essay on the romantic narrative poetry of the italians: london, . histoire de la poésie provençale: paris, . it is to this rich repository that mr. tennyson has resorted for his material. he has shown, as we think, rare judgment in the choice. the arthurian romance has every recommendation that should win its way to the homage of a great poet. it is national: it is christian. it is also human in the largest and deepest sense; and, therefore, though highly national, it is universal; for it rests upon those depths and breadths of our nature to which all its truly great developments in all nations are alike essentially and closely related. the distance is enough for atmosphere, not too much for detail; enough for romance, not too much for sympathy. a poet of the nineteenth century, the laureate has adopted characters, incidents, and even language in the main, instead of attempting to project them on a basis of his own in the region of illimitable fancy. but he has done much more than this. evidently by reading and by deep meditation, as well as by sheer force of genius, he has penetrated himself down to the very core of his being, with all that is deepest and best in the spirit of the time, or the representation, with which he deals; and as others, using old materials, have been free to alter them in the sense of vulgarity or licence, so he has claimed and used the right to sever and recombine, to enlarge, retrench, and modify, for the purposes at once of a more powerful and elaborate art than his original presents, and of a yet more elevated, or at least of a far more sustained, ethical and christian strain. we are rather disposed to quarrel with the title of idylls: for no diminutive ([greek: _eidullion_]) can be adequate to the breadth, vigour, and majesty which belong to the subjects, as well as to the execution, of the volume. the poet used the name once before; but he then applied it to pieces generally small in the scale of their delineations, whereas these, even if broken away one from the other, are yet like the disjoined figures from the pediment of the parthenon in their dignity and force. one indeed among mr. tennyson's merits is, that he does not think it necessary to keep himself aloft by artificial effort, but undulates with his matter, and flies high or low as it requires. but even in the humblest parts of these poems--as where the little novice describes the miniature sorrows and discipline of childhood--the whole receives its tone from an atmosphere which is heroic, and which, even in its extremest simplicity, by no means parts company with grandeur, or ceases to shine in the reflected light of the surrounding objects. following the example which the poet has set us in a former volume, we would fain have been permitted, at least provisionally, to call these idylls by the name of books. term them what we may, there are four of them--arranged, as we think, in an ascending scale. the simplicity and grace of the principal character in enid, with which the volume opens, touches, but does not too strongly agitate, the deeper springs of feeling. she is the beautiful daughter of earl yniol, who, by his refusal of a turbulent neighbour as a suitor, has drawn upon himself the ruin of his fortunes, and is visited in his depressed condition by (p. )-- the brave geraint, a knight of arthur's court, a tributary prince of devon, one of that great order of the table round.... geraint wins her against the detested cousin. they wed, and she becomes the purest gem of the court of guinevere, her place in which is described in the beautiful exordium of the poem. an accident, slight perhaps for the weight it is made to carry, arouses his jealousy, and he tries her severely by isolation and rude offices on one of his tours; but her gentleness, purity, and patience are proof against all, and we part from the pair in a full and happy reconciliation, which is described in lines of a beauty that leaves nothing to be desired. the treatment of enid by her husband has appeared to some of mr. tennyson's readers to be unnatural. it is no doubt both in itself repulsive, and foreign to our age and country. but the brutal element in man, which now only invades the conjugal relation in cases where it is highly concentrated, was then far more widely diffused, and not yet dissociated from alternations and even habits of attachment. something of what we now call eastern manners at one time marked the treatment even of the women of the west. unnatural means contrary to nature, irrespectively of time or place; but time and place explain and warrant the treatment of enid by geraint. vivien, which follows enid, is perhaps the least popular of the four books. no pleasure, we grant, can be felt from the character either of the wily woman, between elf and fiend, or of the aged magician, whose love is allowed to travel whither none of his esteem or regard can follow it: and in reading this poem we miss the pleasure of those profound moral harmonies, with which the rest are charged. but we must not on these grounds proceed to the conclusion that the poet has in this case been untrue to his aims. for he has neither failed in power, nor has he led our sympathies astray; and if we ask why he should introduce us to those we cannot love, there is something in the reply that poetry, the mirror of the world, cannot deal with its attractions only, but must present some of its repulsions also, and avail herself of the powerful assistance of its contrasts. the example of homer, who allows thersites to thrust himself upon the scene in the debates of heroes, gives a sanction to what reason and all experience teach, namely, the actual force of negatives in heightening effect; and the gentle and noble characters and beautiful combinations, which largely predominate in the other poems, stand in far clearer and bolder relief when we perceive the dark and baleful shadow of vivien lowering from between them. vivien exhibits a well-sustained conflict between the wizard and, in another sense, the witch; on one side is the wit of woman, on the other are the endowments of the prophet and magician, at once more and less than those of nature. she has heard from him of a charm, a charm of "woven paces, and of waving hands," which paralyses its victim for ever and without deliverance, and her object is to extract from him the knowledge of it as a proof of some return for the fervid and boundless love that she pretends. we cannot but estimate very highly the skill with which mr. tennyson has secured to what seemed the weaker vessel the ultimate mastery in the fight. out of the eater comes forth meat. when she seems to lose ground with him by her slander against the round table which he loved, she recovers it by making him believe that she saw all other men, "the knights, the court, the king, dark in his light": and when in answer to her imprecation on herself a fearful thunderbolt descends and storm rages, then, nestling in his bosom, part in fear but more in craft, she overcomes the last remnant of his resolution, wins the secret she has so indefatigably wooed, and that instant uses it to close in gloom the famous career of the over-mastered sage. * * * * * nowhere could we more opportunely than at this point call attention to mr. tennyson's extraordinary felicity and force in the use of metaphor and simile. this gift appears to have grown with his years, alike in abundance, truth, and grace. as the showers descend from heaven to return to it in vapour, so mr. tennyson's loving observation of nature, and his muse, seem to have had a compact of reciprocity well kept on both sides. when he was young, and when "oenone" was first published, he almost boasted of putting a particular kind of grasshopper into troas, which, as he told us in a note, was probably not to be found there. it is a small but yet an interesting and significant indication that, when some years after he retouched the poem, he omitted the note, and generalised the grasshopper. whether we are right or not in taking this for a sign of the movement of his mind, there can be no doubt that his present use of figures is both the sign and the result of a reverence for nature alike active, intelligent, and refined. sometimes applying the metaphors of art to nature, he more frequently draws the materials of his analogies from her unexhausted book, and, however often he may call for some new and beautiful vehicle of illustration, she seems never to withhold an answer. with regard to this particular and very critical gift, it seems to us that he may challenge comparison with almost any poet either of ancient or modern times. we have always been accustomed to look upon ariosto as one of the greatest among the masters of the art of metaphor and simile; and it would be easy to quote from him instances which in tenderness, grace, force, or all combined, can never be surpassed. but we have rarely seen the power subjected to a greater trial than in the passages just quoted from mr. tennyson, where metaphor lies by metaphor as thick as shells upon their bed; yet each individually with its outline as well drawn, its separateness as clear, its form as true to nature, and with the most full and harmonious contribution to the general effect. * * * * * mr. tennyson practises largely, and with an extraordinary skill and power, the art of designed and limited repetitions. they bear a considerable resemblance to those homeric _formulae_ which have been so usefully remarked by colonel mure--not the formulae of constant recurrence, which tells us who spoke and who answered, but those which are connected with pointing moral effects, and with ulterior purpose. these repetitions tend at once to give more definite impressions of character, and to make firmer and closer the whole tissue of the poem. thus, in the last speech of guinevere, she echoes back, with other ideas and expressions, the sentiment of arthur's affection, which becomes in her mouth sublime:-- i must not scorn myself: he loves me still: let no one dream but that he loves me still. she prays admission among the nuns, that she may follow the pious and peaceful tenor of their life (p. ):-- and so wear out in almsdeed and in prayer the sombre close of that voluptuous day which wrought the ruin of my lord the king. and it is but a debt of justice to the guinevere of the romancers to observe, that she loses considerably by the marked transposition which mr. tennyson has effected in the order of greatness between lancelot and arthur. with him there is an original error in her estimate, independently of the breach of a positive and sacred obligation. she prefers the inferior man; and this preference implies a rooted ethical defect in her nature. in the romance of sir t. mallory the preference she gives to lancelot would have been signally just, had she been free to choose. for lancelot is of an indescribable grandeur; but the limit of arthur's character is thus shown in certain words that he uses, and that lancelot never could have spoken. "much more i am sorrier for my good knight's loss than for the loss of my queen; for queens might i have enough, but, such a fellowship of good knights shall never be together in company." we began with the exordium of this great work: we must not withhold the conclusion. we left her praying admission to the convent-- she said. they took her to themselves; and she, still hoping, fearing, "is it yet too late?" dwelt with them, till in time their abbess died. then she, for her good deeds and her pure life, and for the power of ministration in her, and likewise for the high rank she had borne, was chosen abbess: there, an abbess, lived for three brief years; and there, an abbess, pass'd to where beyond these voices there is peace. no one, we are persuaded, can read this poem without feeling, when it ends, what may be termed the pangs of vacancy--of that void in heart and mind for want of its continuance of which we are conscious when some noble strain of music ceases, when some great work of raphael passes from the view, when we lose sight of some spot connected with high associations, or when some transcendent character upon the page of history disappears, and the withdrawal of it is like the withdrawal of the vital air. we have followed the guinevere of mr. tennyson through its detail, and have extracted largely from its pages, and yet have not a hope of having conveyed an idea of what it really is; still we have thought that in this way we should do it the least injustice, and we are also convinced that even what we have shown will tend to rouse an appetite, and that any of our readers, who may not yet have been also mr. tennyson's, will become more eager to learn and admire it at first hand. we have no doubt that mr. tennyson has carefully considered how far his subject is capable of fulfilling the conditions of an epic structure. the history of arthur is not an epic as it stands, but neither was the cyclic song, of which the greatest of all epics, the "iliad," handles a part. the poem of ariosto is scarcely an epic, nor is that of bojardo; but it is not this because each is too promiscuous and crowded in its brilliant phantasmagoria to conform to the severe laws of that lofty and inexorable class of poem? though the arthurian romance be no epic, it does not follow that no epic can be made from out of it. it is grounded in certain leading characters, men and women, conceived upon models of extraordinary grandeur; and as the laureate has evidently grasped the genuine law which makes man and not the acts of man the base of epic song, we should not be surprised were he hereafter to realize the great achievement towards which he seems to be feeling his way. there is a moral unity and a living relationship between the four poems before us, and the first effort of as a fifth, which, though some considerable part of their contents would necessarily rank as episode, establishes the first and most essential condition of their cohesion. the achievement of vivien bears directly on the state of arthur by withdrawing his chief councillor--the brain, as lancelot was the right arm, of his court; the love of elaine is directly associated with the final catastrophe of the passion of lancelot for guinevere. enid lies somewhat further off the path, nor is it for profane feet to intrude into the sanctuary, for reviewers to advise poets in these high matters; but while we presume nothing, we do not despair of seeing mr. tennyson achieve on the basis he has chosen the structure of a full-formed epic. in any case we have a cheerful hope that, if he continues to advance upon himself as he has advanced heretofore, nay, if he can keep the level he has gained, such a work will be the greatest, and by far the greatest poetical creation, that, whether in our own or in foreign poetry, the nineteenth century has produced. in the face of all critics, the laureate of england has now reached a position which at once imposes and instils respect. they are self-constituted; but he has won his way through the long dedication of his manful energies, accepted and crowned by deliberate, and, we rejoice to think, by continually growing, public favour. he has after all, and it is not the least nor lowest item in his praise, been the severest of his own critics, and has not been too proud either to learn or to unlearn in the work of maturing his genius and building up his fame. from his very first appearance he has had the form and fashion of a true poet: the insight into beauty, the perception of harmony, the faculty of suggestion, the eye both in the physical and moral world for motion, light, and colour, the sympathetic and close observation of nature, the dominance of the constructive faculty, and that rare gift the thorough mastery and loving use of his native tongue. many of us, the common crowd, made of the common clay, may be lovers of nature, some as sincere or even as ardent as mr. tennyson; but it does not follow that even these favoured few possess the privilege that he enjoys. to them she speaks through vague and indeterminate impressions: for him she has a voice of the most delicate articulation; all her images to him are clear and definite, and he translates them for us into that language of suggestion, emphasis, and refined analogy which links the manifold to the simple and the infinite to the finite. he accomplishes for us what we should in vain attempt for ourselves, enables the puny hand to lay hold on what is vast, and brings even coarseness of grasp into a real contact with what is subtle and ethereal. his turn for metaphysical analysis is closely associated with a deep ethical insight: and many of his verses form sayings of so high a class that we trust they are destined to form a permanent part of the household-words of england. considering the quantity of power that mr. tennyson can make available, it is a great proof of self-discipline that he is not given to a wanton or tyrannous use of it. an extraordinary master of diction, he has confined himself to its severe and simple forms. in establishing this rule of practice his natural gift has evidently been aided by the fine english of the old romances, and we might count upon the fingers the cases in which he has lately deviated into the employment of any stilted phrase, or given sanction to a word not of the best fabric. profuse in the power of graphic[ ] representation, he has chastened some of his earlier groups of imagery, which were occasionally overloaded with particulars; and in his later works, as has been well remarked, he has shown himself thoroughly aware that in poetry half is greater than the whole. that the chastity of style he has attained is not from exhaustion of power may easily be shown. no poet has evinced a more despotic mastery over intractable materials, or has been more successful in clothing what is common with the dignity of his art. the downs are not the best subjects in the world for verse; but they will be remembered with and by his descriptive line in the "idylls"-- far o'er the long backs of the bushless downs. [ ] we use the word in what we conceive to be its only legitimate meaning; namely, after the manner and with the effect of painting. it signifies the _quid_, not the _quale_. how becoming is the appearance of what we familiarly term the "clod" in the "princess"! (p. )-- nor those horn-handled breakers of the glebe. of all imaginable subjects, mathematics might seem the most hopeless to make mention of in verse; but they are with him the hard-grained muses of the cube and square. thus at a single stroke he gives an image alike simple, true, and poetical to boot, because suited to its place and object in his verse, like the heavy caryatides well placed in architecture. after this, we may less esteem the feat by which in "godiva" he describes the clock striking mid-day:-- all at once, with twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon was clashed and hammered from a hundred towers. but even the contents of a pigeon-pie are not beneath his notice, nor yet beyond his powers of embellishment, in "audley court":-- a pasty, costly made, where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks imbedded and injellied. what excites more surprise is that he can, without any offence against good taste, venture to deal with these contents even after they have entered the mouth of the eater ("enid," p. ):-- the brawny spearman let his cheek bulge with the unswallowed piece, and turning, stared. the delicate insight of fine taste appears to show him with wonderful precision up to what point his art can control and compel his materials, and from what point the materials are in hopeless rebellion and must be let alone. so in the "princess" (p. ) we are introduced to-- eight daughters of the plough, stronger than men, huge women _blowzed_ with health, and wind, and rain, and labour. it was absolutely necessary for him to heighten, nay, to coarsen, the description of these masses of animated beef, who formed the standing army of the woman-commonwealth. few would have obeyed this law without violating another; but mr. tennyson saw that the verb was admissible, while the adjective would have been intolerable. in his purging process made it evident that he did not mean to allow his faults or weaknesses to stint the growth and mar the exhibition of his genius. when he published "in memoriam" in , all readers were conscious of the progressive widening and strengthening, but, above all, deepening of his mind. we cannot hesitate to mark the present volume as exhibiting another forward and upward stride, and that by perhaps the greatest of all, in his career. if we are required to show cause for this opinion under any special head, we would at once point to that which is, after all, the first among the poet's gifts--the gift of conceiving and representing human character. mr. tennyson's arthurian essays continually suggest to us comparisons not so much with any one poet as a whole, but rather with many or most of the highest poets. the music and the just and pure modulation of his verse carry us back not only to the fine ear of shelley, but to milton and to shakespeare: and his powers of fancy and of expression have produced passages which, if they are excelled by that one transcendent and ethereal poet of our nation whom we have last named, yet could have been produced by no other english minstrel. our author has a right to regard his own blank verse as highly characteristic and original: but yet milton has contributed to its formation, and occasionally there is a striking resemblance in turn and diction, while mr. tennyson is the more idiomatic of the two. the chastity and moral elevation of this volume, its essential and profound though not didactic christianity, are such as perhaps cannot be matched throughout the circle of english literature in conjunction with an equal power: and such as to recall a pattern which we know not whether mr. tennyson has studied, the celestial strain of dante.[ ] this is the more remarkable, because he has had to tread upon the ground which must have been slippery for any foot but his. we are far from knowing that either lancelot or guinevere would have been safe even for mature readers, were it not for the instinctive purity of his mind and the high skill of his management. we do not know that in other times they have had their noble victims, whose names have become immortal as their own. noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto di lancilotto, e come amor lo strinse. * * * * * galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse.[ ] [ ] it is no reproach to say that neither dante nor homer could have been studied by mr. tennyson at the time--a very early period of his life--when he wrote the lines which are allotted to them respectively in "the palace of art." [ ] "inferno," c. v, v. . how difficult it is to sustain the elevation of such a subject, may be seen in the well-meant and long popular "jane shore" of rowe. how easily this very theme may be vulgarised, is shown in the _"chevaliers de la table ronde"_ of m. creuzé de lesser, who nevertheless has aimed at a peculiar delicacy of treatment. but the grand poetical quality in which this volume gives to its author a new rank and standing is the dramatic power: the power of drawing character and of representing action. these faculties have not been precocious in mr. tennyson: but what is more material, they have come out in great force. he has always been fond of personal delineations, from claribel and lilian down to his ida, his psyche, and his maud; but they have been of shadowy quality, doubtful as to flesh and blood, and with eyes having little or no speculation in them. but he is far greater and far better when he has, as he now has, a good raw material ready to his hand, than when he draws only on the airy or chaotic regions of what carlyle calls unconditioned possibility. he is made not so much to convert the moor into the field, as the field into the rich and gorgeous garden. the imperfect _nisus_ which might be remarked in some former works has at length reached the fulness of dramatic energy: in the idylls we have nothing vague or dreamy to complain of: everything lives and moves, in the royal strength of nature: the fire of prometheus has fairly caught the clay: every figure stands clear, broad, and sharp before us, as if it had sky for its background: and this of small as well as great, for even the "little novice" is projected on the canvas with the utmost truth and vigour, and with that admirable effect in heightening the great figure of guinevere, which patroclus produces for the character of achilles, and (as some will have it) the modest structure of saint margaret's for the giant proportions of westminster abbey. and this, we repeat, is the crowning gift of the poet: the power of conceiving and representing man. we do not believe that a milton--or, in other words, the writer of a "paradise lost"--could ever be so great as a shakespeare or a homer, because (setting aside all other questions) his chief characters are neither human, nor can they be legitimately founded upon humanity; and, moreover, what he has to represent of man is, by the very law of its being, limited in scale and development. here at least the saying is a true one: _antiquitas saeculi, juventus mundi;_ rendered by our poet in "the day-dream," for we are ancients of the earth, and in the morning of the times. the adam and eve of paradise exhibit to us the first inception of our race; and neither then, nor after their first sad lesson, could they furnish those materials for representation, which their descendants have accumulated in the school of their incessant and many-coloured, but on the whole too gloomy, experience. to the long chapters of that experience every generation of man makes its own addition. again we ask the aid of mr. tennyson in "locksley hall":-- yet i doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, and the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. the substitution of law for force has indeed altered the relations of the strong and the weak; the hardening or cooling down of political institutions and social traditions, the fixed and legal track instead of the open pathless field, have removed or neutralised many of those occasions and passages of life, which were formerly the schools of individual character. the genius of mechanism has vied, in the arts of both peace and war, with the strong hand, and has well-nigh robbed it of its place. but let us not be deceived by that smoothness of superficies, which the social prospect offers to the distant eye. nearness dispels the illusion; life is still as full of deep, of ecstatic, of harrowing interests as it ever was. the heart of man still beats and bounds, exults and suffers, from causes which are only less salient and conspicuous because they are more mixed and diversified. it still undergoes every phase of emotion, and even, as seems probable, with a susceptibility which has increased and is increasing, and which has its index and outer form in the growing delicacy and complexities of the nervous system. does any one believe that ever at any time there was a greater number of deaths referable to that comprehensive cause a broken heart? let none fear that this age, or any coming one, will extinguish the material of poetry. the more reasonable apprehension might be lest it should sap the vital force necessary to handle that material, and mould it into appropriate forms. to those especially, who cherish any such apprehension, we recommend the perusal of this volume. of it we will say without fear, what we would not dare to say of any other recent work; that of itself it raises the character and the hopes of the age and the country which have produced it, and that its author, by his own single strength, has made a sensible addition to the permanent wealth of mankind. canon wilberforce on darwin [from _the quarterly review_, july, ] _on the origin of species, by means of natural selection; or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life._ by charles darwin, m.a., f.r.s. london, . any contribution to our natural history literature from the pen of mr. c. darwin is certain to command attention. his scientific attainments, his insight and carefulness as an observer, blended with no scanty measure of imaginative sagacity, and his clear and lively style, make all his writings unusually attractive. his present volume on the _origin of species_ is the result of many years of observation, thought, and speculation; and is manifestly regarded by him as the "opus" upon which his future fame is to rest. it is true that he announces it modestly enough as the mere precursor of a mightier volume. but that volume is only intended to supply the facts which are to support the completed argument of the present essay. in this we have a specimen-collection of the vast accumulation; and, working from these as the high analytical mathematician may work from the admitted results of his conic sections, he proceeds to deduce all the conclusions to which he wishes to conduct his readers. the essay is full of mr. darwin's characteristic excellences. it is a most readable book; full of facts in natural history, old and new, of his collecting and of his observing; and all of these are told in his own perspicuous language, and all thrown into picturesque combinations, and all sparkle with the colours of fancy and the lights of imagination. it assumes, too, the grave proportions of a sustained argument upon a matter of the deepest interest, not to naturalists only, or even to men of science exclusively, but to every one who is interested in the history of man and of the relations of nature around him to the history and plan of creation. with mr. darwin's "argument" we may say in the outset that we shall have much and grave fault to find. but this does not make us the less disposed to admire the singular excellences of his work; and we will seek _in limine_ to give our readers a few examples of these. here, for instance, is a beautiful illustration of the wonderful interdependence of nature--of the golden chain of unsuspected relations which bind together all the mighty web which stretches from end to end of this full and most diversified earth. who, as he listened to the musical hum of the great humble-bees, or marked their ponderous flight from flower to flower, and watched the unpacking of their trunks for their work of suction, would have supposed that the multiplication or diminution of their race, or the fruitfulness and sterility of the red clover, depend as directly on the vigilance of our cats as do those of our well-guarded game-preserves on the watching of our keepers? yet this mr. darwin has discovered to be literally the case:-- from experiments which i have lately tried, i have found that the visits of bees are necessary for the fertilisation of some kinds of clover; but humble-bees alone visit the red clover (trifolium pratense), as other bees cannot reach the nectar. hence i have very little doubt, that if the whole genus of humble-bees became extinct or very rare in england, the heartsease and red clover would become very rare or wholly disappear. the number of humble-bees in any district depends in a great degree on the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and mr. h. newman, who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, believes that "more than two-thirds of them are thus destroyed all over england." now the number of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats; and mr. newman says, "near villages and small towns i have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which i attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice." hence, it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention, first of mice, and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district.--p. . * * * * * now, all this is, we think, really charming writing. we feel as we walk abroad with mr. darwin very much as the favoured object of the attention of the dervise must have felt when he had rubbed the ointment around his eye, and had it opened to see all the jewels, and diamonds, and emeralds, and topazes, and rubies, which were sparkling unregarded beneath the earth, hidden as yet from all eyes save those which the dervise had enlightened. but here we are bound to say our pleasure terminates; for, when we turn with mr. darwin to his "argument," we are almost immediately at variance with him. it is as an "argument" that the essay is put forward; as an argument we will test it. we can perhaps best convey to our readers a clear view of mr. darwin's chain of reasoning, and of our objections to it, if we set before them, first, the conclusion to which he seeks to bring them; next, the leading propositions which he must establish in order to make good his final inference; and then the mode by which he endeavours to support his propositions. the conclusion, then, to which mr. darwin would bring us is, that all the various forms of vegetable and animal life with which the globe is now peopled, or of which we find the remains preserved in a fossil state in the great earth-museum around us, which the science of geology unlocks for our instruction, have come down by natural succession of descent from father to son,--"animals from at most four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or less number" (p. ), as mr. darwin at first somewhat diffidently suggests; or rather, as, growing bolder when he has once pronounced his theory, he goes on to suggest to us, from one single head:-- analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. but analogy may be a deceitful guide. nevertheless, all living things have much in common in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction.... therefore i shall infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth (man therefore of course included) have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed by the creator.--p. . this is the theory which really pervades the whole volume. man, beast, creeping thing, and plant of the earth, are all the lineal and direct descendants of some one individual _ens_, whose various progeny have been simply modified by the action of natural and ascertainable conditions into the multiform aspect of life which we see around us. this is undoubtedly at first sight a somewhat startling conclusion to arrive at. to find that mosses, grasses, turnips, oaks, worms, and flies, mites and elephants, infusoria and whales, tadpoles of to-day and venerable saurians, truffles and men, are all equally the lineal descendants of the same aboriginal common ancestor, perhaps of the nucleated cell of some primaeval fungus, which alone possessed the distinguishing honour of being the "one primordial form into which life was first breathed by the creator "--this, to say the least of it, is no common discovery--no very expected conclusion. but we are too loyal pupils of inductive philosophy to start back from any conclusion by reason of its strangeness. newton's patient philosophy taught him to find in the falling apple the law which governs the silent movements of the stars in their courses; and if mr. darwin can with the same correctness of reasoning demonstrate to us our fungular descent, we shall dismiss our pride, and avow, with the characteristic humility of philosophy, our unsuspected cousinship with the mushrooms,-- claim kindred there, and have our claim allowed, --only we shall ask leave to scrutinise carefully every step of the argument which has such an ending, and demur if at any point of it we are invited to substitute unlimited hypothesis for patient observation, or the spasmodic fluttering flight of fancy for the severe conclusions to which logical accuracy of reasoning has led the way. now, the main propositions by which mr. darwin's conclusion is attained are these:-- . that observed and admitted variations spring up in the course of descents from a common progenitor. . that many of these variations tend to an improvement upon the parent stock. . that, by a continued selection of these improved specimens as the progenitors of future stock, its powers may be unlimitedly increased. . and, lastly, that there is in nature a power continually and universally working out this selection, and so fixing and augmenting these improvements. mr. darwin's whole theory rests upon the truth of these propositions and crumbles utterly away if only one of them fail him. these, therefore, we must closely scrutinise. we will begin with the last in our series, both because we think it the newest and the most ingenious part of mr. darwin's whole argument, and also because, whilst we absolutely deny the mode in which he seeks to apply the existence of the power to help him in his argument, yet we think that he throws great and very interesting light upon the fact that such self-acting power does actively and continuously work in all creation around us. mr. darwin finds then the disseminating and improving power, which he needs to account for the development of new forms in nature, in the principle of "natural selection," which is evolved in the strife for room to live and flourish which is evermore maintained between themselves by all living things. one of the most interesting parts of mr. darwin's volume is that in which he establishes this law of natural selection; we say establishes, because--repeating that we differ from him totally in the limits which he would assign to its action--we have no doubt of the existence or of the importance of the law itself. * * * * * we come then to these conclusions. all the facts presented to us in the natural world tend to show that none of the variations produced in the fixed forms of animal life, when seen in its most plastic condition under domestication, give any promise of a true transmutation of species; first, from the difficulty of accumulating and fixing variations within the same species; secondly, from the fact that these variations, though most serviceable for man, have no tendency to improve the individual beyond the standard of his own specific type, and so to afford matter, even if they were infinitely produced, for the supposed power of natural selection on which to work; whilst all variations from the mixture of species are barred by the inexorable law of hybrid sterility. further, the embalmed records of , years show that there has been no beginning of transmutation in the species of our most familiar domesticated animals; and beyond this, that in the countless tribes of animal life around us, down to its lowest and most variable species, no one has ever discovered a single instance of such transmutation being now in prospect; no new organ has ever been known to be developed--no new natural instinct to be formed--whilst, finally, in the vast museum of departed animal life which the strata of the earth imbed for our examination, whilst they contain far too complete a representation of the past to be set aside as a mere imperfect record, yet afford no one instance of any such change as having ever been in progress, or give us anywhere the missing links of the assumed chain, or the remains which would enable now existing variations, by gradual approximations, to shade off into unity. on what then is the new theory based? we say it with unfeigned regret, in dealing with such a man as mr. darwin, on the merest hypothesis, supported by the most unbounded assumptions. these are strong words, but we will give a few instances to prove their truth:-- all physiologists admit that the swim-bladder is homologous or "ideally similar" in position and structure with the lungs of the higher vertebrate animals; hence there _seems to me to be no great difficulty in believing_ that natural selection has actually converted a swim-bladder into a lung, or organ used exclusively for respiration.--p. . _i can indeed hardly doubt_ that all vertebrate animals having true lungs have descended by ordinary generation from the ancient prototype, of which we know nothing, furnished with a floating apparatus or swim-bladder--p. . we must be cautious in concluding that the most different habits of all _could not_ graduate into each other; that a bat, for instance, _could not_ have been formed by natural selection from an animal which at first could only glide through the air.--p. . again:-- _i see no difficulty in supposing_ that such links formerly existed, and that each had been formed by the same steps as in the case of the less perfectly gliding squirrels, and that each grade of structure was useful to its possessor. nor _can i see any insuperable difficulty in further believing_ it possible that the membrane-connected fingers and forearm of the galeopithecus might be greatly lengthened by natural selection, and this, as far as the organs of flight are concerned, would convert it into a bat.--p. . for instance, a swim-bladder has _apparently_ been converted into an air-breathing lung.--p. . and again:-- the electric organs of fishes offer another case of special difficulty: it is impossible to conceive by what steps these wondrous organs have been produced; but, as owen and others have remarked, their intimate structure closely resembles that of common muscle; and as it has lately been shown that rays have an organ closely analogous to the electric apparatus, and yet do not, as matteucci asserts, discharge any electricity, we must own that we are far too ignorant to argue that _no transition of any kind is possible._--pp. - . sometimes mr. darwin seems for a moment to recoil himself from this extravagant liberty of speculation, as when he says, concerning the eye,-- to suppose that the eye, with its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, i freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.--p. . but he soon returns to his new wantonness of conjecture, and, without the shadow of a fact, contents himself with saying that-- he _suspects_ that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.--p- . and in the following passage he carries this extravagance to the highest pitch, requiring a licence for advancing as true any theory which cannot be demonstrated to be actually impossible:-- if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, _which could not possibly_ have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. but i can find no such case.--p. . another of these assumptions is not a little remarkable. it suits his argument to deduce all our known varieties of pigeons from the rock-pigeon (the columba livia), and this parentage is traced out, though not, we think, to demonstration, yet with great ingenuity and patience. but another branch of the argument would be greatly strengthened by establishing the descent of our various breeds of dogs with their perfect power of fertile inter-breeding from different natural species. and accordingly, though every fact as to the canine race is parallel to the facts which have been used before to establish the common parentage of the pigeons in columba livia, all these are thrown over in a moment, and mr. darwin, first assuming, without the shadow of proof, that our domestic breeds are descended from different species, proceeds calmly to argue from this, as though it were a demonstrated certainty. it _seems to me unlikely_ in the case of the dog-genus, which is distributed in a wild state throughout the world, that since man first appeared one species alone should have been domesticated.--p. . in some cases _i do not doubt_ that the intercrossing of species aboriginally distinct has played an important part in the origin of our domestic productions.--p. . what new words are these for a loyal disciple of the true baconian philosophy?--"i can conceive"--"it is not incredible"--"i do not doubt" --"it is conceivable." for myself, _i venture confidently_ to look back thousands on thousands of generations, and i see an animal striped like a zebra, but perhaps otherwise very differently constructed, the common parent of our domestic horse, whether or not it be descended from one or more wild stocks of the ass, hemionous, quagga, or zebra.--p. . in the name of all true philosophy we protest against such a mode of dealing with nature, as utterly dishonourable to all natural science, as reducing it from its present lofty level of being one of the noblest trainers of man's intellect and instructors of his mind, to being a mere idle play of the fancy, without the basis of fact or the discipline of observation. in the "arabian nights" we are not offended as at an impossibility when amina sprinkles her husband with water and transforms him into a dog, but we cannot open the august doors of the venerable temple of scientific truth to the genii and magicians of romance. we plead guilty to mr. darwin's imputation that the chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth to other and distinct species is that we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps.--p. . in this tardiness to admit great changes suggested by the imagination, but the steps of which we cannot see, is the true spirit of philosophy. analysis, says professor sedgwick, consists in making experiments and observations, and in drawing general conclusions from them by induction, and admitting of no objections against the conclusions but such as are taken from experiments or other certain truths; for _hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental philosophy._[ ] [ ] "a discourse on the studies of the university," by a. sedgwick, p. . the other solvent which mr. darwin most freely and, we think, unphilosophically employs to get rid of difficulties, is his use of time. this he shortens or prolongs at will by the mere wave of his magician's rod. thus the duration of whole epochs, during which certain forms of animal life prevailed, is gathered up into a point, whilst an unlimited expanse of years, "impressing his mind with a sense of eternity," is suddenly interposed between that and the next series, though geology proclaims the transition to have been one of gentle and, it may be, swift accomplishment. all this too is made the more startling because it is used to meet the objections drawn from facts. "we see none of your works," says the observer of nature; "we see no beginnings of the portentous change; we see plainly beings of another order in creation, but we find amongst them no tendencies to these altered organisms." "true," says the great magician, with a calmness no difficulty derived from the obstinacy of facts can disturb; "true, but remember the effect of time. throw in a few hundreds of millions of years more or less, and why should not all these changes be possible, and, if possible, why may i not assume them to be real?" together with this large licence of assumption we notice in this book several instances of receiving as facts whatever seems to bear out the theory upon the slightest evidence, and rejecting summarily others, merely because they are fatal to it. we grieve to charge upon mr. darwin this freedom in handling facts, but truth extorts it from us. that the loose statements and unfounded speculations of this book should come from the author of the monograms on cirripedes, and the writer, in the natural history of the voyage of the "beagle," of the paper on the coral reefs, is indeed a sad warning how far the love of a theory may seduce even a first-rate naturalist from the very articles of his creed. this treatment of facts is followed up by another favourite line of argument, namely, that by this hypothesis difficulties otherwise inextricable are solved. such passages abound. take a few, selected almost at random, to illustrate what we mean:-- how inexplicable are these facts on the ordinary view of creation!--p. . such facts as the presence of peculiar species of bats and the absence of other mammals on oceanic islands are utterly inexplicable on the theory of independent acts of creation.--pp. - . it must be admitted that these facts receive no explanation on the theory of creation.--p. . the inhabitants of the cape de verde islands are related to those of africa, like those of the galapagos to america. i believe this grand fact can receive no sort of explanation on the ordinary view of independent creation.--pp. - . now what can be more simply reconcilable with that theory than mr. darwin's own account of the mode in which the migration of animal life from one distant region to another is continually accomplished? take another of these suggestions:-- it is inexplicable, on the theory of creation, why a part developed in a very unusual manner in any one species of a genus, and therefore, as we may naturally infer, of great importance to the species, should be eminently liable to variation.--p. . why "inexplicable"? such a liability to variation might most naturally be expected in the part "unusually developed," because such unusual development is of the nature of a monstrosity, and monsters are always tending to relapse into likeness to the normal type. yet this argument is one on which he mainly relies to establish his theory, for he sums all up in this triumphant inference:-- i cannot believe that a false theory would explain, as it seems to me that the theory of natural selection does explain, the several large classes of facts above specified.--p. . now, as to all this, we deny, first, that many of these difficulties are "inexplicable on any other supposition." of the greatest of them ( , ) we shall have to speak before we conclude. we will here touch only on one of those which are continually reappearing in mr. darwin's pages, in order to illustrate his mode of dealing with them. he finds, then, one of these "inexplicable difficulties" in the fact, that the young of the blackbird, instead of resembling the adult in the colour of its plumage, is like the young of many other birds spotted, and triumphantly declaring that-- no one will suppose that the stripes on the whelp of a lion, or the spots on the young blackbird, are of any use to these animals, or are related to the conditions to which they are exposed.--pp. - -- he draws from them one of his strongest arguments for this alleged community of descent. yet what is more certain to every observant field-naturalist than that this alleged uselessness of colouring is one of the greatest protections to the young bird, imperfect in its flight, perching on every spray, sitting unwarily on every bush through which the rays of sunshine dapple every bough to the colour of its own plumage, and so give it a facility of escape which it would utterly want if it bore the marked and prominent colours, the beauty of which the adult bird needs to recommend him to his mate, and can safely bear with his increased habits of vigilance and power of wing? but, secondly, as to many of these difficulties, the alleged solving of which is one great proof of the truth of mr. darwin's theory, we are compelled to join issue with him on another ground, and deny that he gives us any solution at all. thus, for instance, mr. darwin builds a most ingenious argument on the tendency of the young of the horse, ass, zebra, and quagga, to bear on their shoulders and on their legs certain barred stripes. up these bars (bars sinister, as we think, as to any true descent of existing animals from their fancied prototype) he mounts through his "thousands and thousands of generations," to the existence of his "common parent, otherwise perhaps very differently constructed, but striped like a zebra."--(p. .) "how inexplicable," he exclaims, "on the theory of creation, is the occasional appearance of stripes on the shoulder and legs of several species of the horse genus and in their hybrids!"--(p. .) he tells us that to suppose that each species was created with a tendency "like this, is to make the works of god a mere mockery and deception"; and he satisfies himself that all difficulty is gone when he refers the stripes to his hypothetical thousands on thousands of years removed progenitor. but how is his difficulty really affected? for why is the striping of one species a less real difficulty than the striping of many? another instance of this mode of dealing with his subject, to which we must call the attention of our readers, because it too often recurs, is contained in the following question:-- were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as eggs, or seed, or as full grown? and, in the case of mammals, were they created bearing the false marks of nourishment from the mother's womb?--p. . the difficulty here glanced at is extreme, but it is one for the solution of which the transmutation-theory gives no clue. it is inherent in the idea of the creation of beings, which are to reproduce their like by natural succession; for, in such a world, place the first beginning where you will, that beginning _must_ contain the apparent history of a _past_, which existed only in the mind of the creator. if, with mr. darwin, to escape the difficulty of supposing the first man at his creation to possess in that framework of his body "false marks of nourishment from his mother's womb," with mr. darwin you consider him to have been an improved ape, you only carry the difficulty up from the first man to the first ape; if, with mr. darwin, in violation of all observation, you break the barrier between the classes of vegetable and animal life, and suppose every animal to be an "improved" vegetable, you do but carry your difficulty with you into the vegetable world; for, how could there be seeds if there had been no plants to seed them? and if you carry up your thoughts through the vista of the darwinian eternity up to the primaeval fungus, still the primaeval fungus must have had a humus, from which to draw into its venerable vessels the nourishment of its archetypal existence, and that humus must itself be a "false mark" of a pre-existing vegetation. we have dwelt a little upon this, because it is by such seeming solutions of difficulties as that which this passage supplies that the transmutationist endeavours to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation. there are no parts of mr. darwin's ingenious book in which he gives the reins more completely to his fancy than where he deals with the improvement of instinct by his principle of natural selection. we need but instance his assumption, without a fact on which to build it, that the marvellous skill of the honey-bee in constructing its cells is thus obtained, and the slave-making habits of the formica polyerges thus formed. there seems to be no limit here to the exuberance of his fancy, and we cannot but think that we detect one of those hints by which mr. darwin indicates the application of his system from the lower animals to man himself, when he dwells so pointedly upon the fact that it is always the _black_ ant which is enslaved by his other coloured and more fortunate brethren. "the slaves are black!" we believe that, if we had mr. darwin in the witness-box, and could subject him to a moderate cross-examination, we should find that he believed that the tendency of the lighter-coloured races of mankind to prosecute the negro slave-trade was really a remains, in their more favoured condition, of the "extraordinary and odious instinct" which had possessed them before they had been "improved by natural selection" from formica polyerges into homo. this at least is very much the way in which (p. ) he slips in quite incidentally the true identity of man with the horse, the bat, and the porpoise:-- the framework of bones being the same in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, fin of a porpoise, and leg of the horse, the same number of vertebrae forming the neck of the giraffe and of the elephant, and innumerable other such facts, at once explain themselves on the theory of descent with slow and slight successive modifications.--p. . such assumptions as these, we once more repeat, are most dishonourable and injurious to science; and though, out of respect to mr. darwin's high character and to the tone of his work, we have felt it right to weigh the "argument" again set by him before us in the simple scales of logical examination, yet we must remind him that the view is not a new one, and that it has already been treated with admirable humour when propounded by another of his name and of his lineage. we do not think that, with all his matchless ingenuity, mr. darwin has found any instance which so well illustrates his own theory of the improved descendant under the elevating influences of natural selection exterminating the progenitor whose specialities he has exaggerated as he himself affords us in this work. for if we go back two generations we find the ingenious grandsire of the author of the _origin of species_ speculating on the same subject, and almost in the same manner with his more daring descendant. * * * * * our readers will not have failed to notice that we have objected to the views with which we have been dealing solely on scientific grounds. we have done so from our fixed conviction that it is thus that the truth or falsehood of such arguments should be tried. we have no sympathy with those who object to any facts or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears to them is taught by revelation. we think that all such objections savour of a timidity which is really inconsistent with a firm and well-instructed faith:-- "let us for a moment," profoundly remarks professor sedgwick, "suppose that there are some religious difficulties in the conclusions of geology. how, then, are we to solve them? not by making a world after a pattern of our own--not by shifting and shuffling the solid strata of the earth, and then dealing them out in such a way as to play the game of an ignorant or dishonest hypothesis--not by shutting our eyes to facts, or denying the evidence of our senses--but by patient investigation, carried on in the sincere love of truth, and by learning to reject every consequence not warranted by physical evidence."[ ] he who is as sure as he is of his own existence that the god of truth is at once the god of nature and the god of revelation, cannot believe it to be possible that his voice in either, rightly understood, can differ, or deceive his creatures. to oppose facts in the natural world because they seem to oppose revelation, or to humour them so as to compel them to speak its voice, is, he knows, but another form of the ever-ready feebleminded dishonesty of lying for god, and trying by fraud or falsehood to do the work of the god of truth. it is with another and a nobler spirit that the true believer walks amongst the works of nature. the words graven on the everlasting rocks are the words of god, and they are graven by his hand. no more can they contradict his word written in his book, than could the words of the old covenant graven by his hand on the stony tables contradict the writings of his hand in the volume of the new dispensation. there may be to man difficulty in reconciling all the utterances of the two voices. but what of that? he has learned already that here he knows only in part, and that the day of reconciling all apparent contradictions between what must agree is nigh at hand. he rests his mind in perfect quietness on this assurance, and rejoices in the gift of light without a misgiving as to what it may discover:-- "a man of deep thought and great practical wisdom," says sedgwick,[ ] "one whose piety and benevolence have for many years been shining before the world, and of whose sincerity no scoffer (of whatever school) will dare to start a doubt, recorded his opinion in the great assembly of the men of science who during the past year were gathered from every corner of the empire within the walls of this university, 'that christianity had everything to hope and nothing to fear from the advancement of philosophy.'"[ ] [ ] "a discourse on the studies of the university," p. . [ ] ibid., p. . [ ] speech of dr. chalmers at the meeting of the british association for the advancement of science, june, . this is as truly the spirit of christianity as it is that of philosophy. few things have more deeply injured the cause of religion than the busy fussy energy with which men, narrow and feeble alike in faith and in science, have bustled forth to reconcile all new discoveries in physics with the word of inspiration. for it continually happens that some larger collection of facts, or some wider view of the phenomena of nature, alter the whole philosophic scheme; whilst revelation has been committed to declare an absolute agreement with what turns out after all to have been a misconception or an error. we cannot, therefore, consent to test the truth of natural science by the word of revelation. but this does not make it the less important to point out on scientific grounds scientific errors, when those errors tend to limit god's glory in creation, or to gainsay the revealed relations of that creation to himself. to both these classes of error, though, we doubt not, quite unintentionally on his part, we think that mr. darwin's speculations directly tend. mr. darwin writes as a christian, and we doubt not that he is one. we do not for a moment believe him to be one of those who retain in some corner of their hearts a secret unbelief which they dare not vent; and we therefore pray him to consider well the grounds on which we brand his speculations with the charge of such a tendency. first, then, he not obscurely declares that he applies his scheme of the action of the principle of natural selection to man himself, as well as to the animals around him. now, we must say at once, and openly, that such a notion is absolutely incompatible not only with single expressions in the word of god on that subject of natural science with which it is not immediately concerned, but, which in our judgment is of far more importance, with the whole representation of that moral and spiritual condition of man which is its proper subject-matter. man's derived supremacy over the earth; man's power of articulate speech; man's gift of reason; man's free-will and responsibility; man's fall and man's redemption; the incarnation of the eternal son; the indwelling of the eternal spirit,-- all are equally and utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of god, and redeemed by the eternal son assuming to himself his nature. equally inconsistent, too, not with any passing expressions, but with the whole scheme of god's dealings with man as recorded in his word, is mr. darwin's daring notion of man's further development into some unknown extent of powers, and shape, and size, through natural selection acting through that long vista of ages which he casts mistily over the earth upon the most favoured individuals of his species. we care not in these pages to push the argument further. we have done enough for our purpose in thus succinctly intimating its course. if any of our readers doubt what must be the result of such speculations carried to their logical and legitimate conclusion, let them turn to the pages of _oken_, and see for themselves the end of that path the opening of which is decked out in these pages with the bright hues and seemingly innocent deductions of the transmutation-theory. nor can we doubt, secondly, that this view, which thus contradicts the revealed relation of creation to its creator, is equally inconsistent with the fullness of his glory. it is, in truth, an ingenious theory for diffusing throughout creation the working and so the personality of the creator. and thus, however unconsciously to him who holds them, such views really tend inevitably to banish from the mind most of the peculiar attributes of the almighty. how, asks mr. darwin, can we possibly account for the manifest plan, order, and arrangement which pervade creation, except we allow to it this self-developing power through modified descent? as milne-edwards has well expressed it, nature is prodigal in variety, but niggard in innovation. why, on the theory of creation, should this be so? why should all the parts and organs of many independent beings, each supposed to have been separately created for its proper place in nature, be so commonly linked together by graduated steps? why should not nature have taken a leap from structure to structure?--p. . and again:-- it is a truly wonderful fact--the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity--that all animals and plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group, in the manner which we everywhere behold, namely, varieties of the same species most closely related together, species of the same genus less closely and unequally related together, forming sections and sub-genera, species of distinct genera much less closely related, and genera related in different degrees, forming sub-families, families, orders, sub-classes, and classes.--pp. - . how can we account for all this? by the simplest and yet the most comprehensive answer. by declaring the stupendous fact that all creation is the transcript in matter of ideas eternally existing in the mind of the most high--that order in the utmost perfectness of its relation pervades his works, because it exists as in its centre and highest fountain-head in him the lord of all. here is the true account of the fact which has so utterly misled shallow observers, that man himself, the prince and head of this creation, passes in the earlier stages of his being through phases of existence closely analogous, so far as his earthly tabernacle is concerned, to those in which the lower animals ever remain. at that point of being the development of the protozoa is arrested. through it the embryo of their chief passes to the perfection of his earthly frame. but the types of those lower forms of being must be found in the animals which never advance beyond them--not in man for whom they are but the foundation for an after-development; whilst he too, creation's crown and perfection, thus bears witness in his own frame to the law of order which pervades the universe. in like manner could we answer every other question as to which mr. darwin thinks all oracles are dumb unless they speak his speculation. he is, for instance, more than once troubled by what he considers imperfections in nature's work. "if," he says, "our reason leads us to admire with enthusiasm a multitude of inimitable contrivances in nature, this same reason tells us that some other contrivances are less perfect." nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect; and if some of them be abhorrent to our idea of fitness. we need not marvel at the sting of the bee causing the bee's own death; at drones being produced in such vast numbers for one single act, and with the great majority slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our fir-trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen-bee for her own fertile daughters; at ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars; and at other such cases. the wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the want of absolute perfection have not been observed.--p. . we think that the real temper of this whole speculation as to nature itself may be read in these few lines. it is a dishonouring view of nature. that reverence for the work of god's hands with which a true belief in the all-wise worker fills the believer's heart is at the root of all great physical discovery; it is the basis of philosophy. he who would see the venerable features of nature must not seek with the rudeness of a licensed roysterer violently to unmask her countenance; but must wait as a learner for her willing unveiling. there was more of the true temper of philosophy in the poetic fiction of the pan-ic shriek, than in the atheistic speculations of lucretius. but this temper must beset those who do in effect banish god from nature. and so mr. darwin not only finds in it these bungling contrivances which his own greater skill could amend, but he stands aghast before its mightier phenomena. the presence of death and famine seems to him inconceivable on the ordinary idea of creation; and he looks almost aghast at them until reconciled to their presence by his own theory that "a ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural selection entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved forms, is decidedly followed by the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals" (p. ). but we can give him a simpler solution still for the presence of these strange forms of imperfection and suffering amongst the works of god. we can tell him of the strong shudder which ran through all this world when its head and ruler fell. when he asks concerning the infinite variety of these multiplied works which are set in such an orderly unity, and run up into man as their reasonable head, we can tell him of the exuberance of god's goodness and remind him of the deep philosophy which lies in those simple words--"all thy works praise thee, o god, and thy saints give thanks unto thee." for it is one office of redeemed man to collect the inarticulate praises of the material creation, and pay them with conscious homage into the treasury of the supreme lord. * * * * * it is by putting restraint upon fancy that science is made the true trainer of our intellect:-- "a study of the newtonian philosophy," says sedgwick, "as affecting our moral powers and capacities, does not terminate in mere negations. it teaches us to see the finger of god in all things animate and inaminate [transcriber's note: sic], and gives us an exalted conception of his attributes, placing before us the clearest proof of their reality; and so prepares, or ought to prepare, the mind for the reception of that higher illumination which brings the rebellious faculties into obedience to the divine will."--_studies of the university_, p. . it is by our deep conviction of the truth and importance of this view for the scientific mind of england that we have been led to treat at so much length mr. darwin's speculation. the contrast between the sober, patient, philosophical courage of our home philosophy, and the writings of lamarck and his followers and predecessors, of mm. demaillet, bory de saint vincent, virey, and oken,[ ] is indeed most wonderful; and it is greatly owing to the noble tone which has been given by those great men whose words we have quoted to the school of british science. that mr. darwin should have wandered from this broad highway of nature's works into the jungle of fanciful assumption is no small evil. we trust that he is mistaken in believing that he may count sir c. lyell as one of his converts. we know indeed the strength of the temptations which he can bring to bear upon his geological brother. the lyellian hypothesis, itself not free from some of mr. darwin's faults, stands eminently in need for its own support of some such new scheme of physical life as that propounded here. yet no man has been more distinct and more logical in the denial of the transmutation of species than sir c. lyell, and that not in the infancy of his scientific life, but in its full vigour and maturity. [ ] it may be worth while to exhibit to our readers a few of dr. oken's postulates or arguments as specimens of his views:-- i wrote the first edition of in a kind of inspiration. . spirit is the motion of mathematical ideas. . physio-philosphy [transcriber's note: sic] has to ... pourtray the first period of the world's development from nothing; how the elements and heavenly bodies originated; in what method by self-evolution into higher and manifold forms they separated into minerals, became finally organic, and in man attained self-consciousness. . the mathematical monad is eternal. . the eternal is one and the same with the zero of mathematics. sir c. lyell devotes the rd to the th chapter of his "principles of geology" to an examination of this question. he gives a clear account of the mode in which lamarck supported his belief of the transmutation of species; he interrupts the author's argument to observe that "no positive fact is cited to exemplify the substitution of some _entirely new_ sense, faculty, or organ--because no examples were to be found"; and remarks that when lamarck talks of "the effects of internal sentiment," etc., as causes whereby animals and plants may acquire _new organs_, he substitutes names for things, and with a disregard to the strict rules of induction, resorts to fictions. he shows the fallacy of lamarck's reasoning, and by anticipation confutes the whole theory of mr. darwin, when gathering clearly up into a few heads the recapitulation of the whole argument in favour of the reality of species in nature. he urges:--[transcriber's note: numbering in original] . that there is a capacity in all species to accommodate themselves to a certain extent to a change of external circumstances. . the entire variation from the original type ... may usually be effected in a brief period of time, after which no further deviation can be obtained. . the intermixing distinct species is guarded against by the sterility of the mule offspring. . it appears that species have a real existence in nature, and that each was endowed at the time of its creation with the attributes and organization by which it is now distinguished.[ ] [ ] "principles of geology," edit. . we trust that sir c. lyell abides still by these truly philosophical principles; and that with his help and with that of his brethren this flimsy speculation may be as completely put down as was what in spite of all denials we must venture to call its twin though less-instructed brother, the "vestiges of creation." in so doing they will assuredly provide for the strength and continually growing progress of british science. indeed, not only do all laws for the study of nature vanish when the great principle of order pervading and regulating all her processes is given up, but all that imparts the deepest interest in the investigation of her wonders will have departed too. under such influences a man soon goes back to the marvelling stare of childhood at the centaurs and hippogriffs of fancy, or if he is of a philosophic turn, he comes like oken to write a scheme of creation under "a sort of inspiration"; but it is the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of mephitic gas. the whole world of nature is laid for such a man under a fantastic law of glamour, and he becomes capable of believing anything: to him it is just as probable that dr. livingstone will find the next tribe of negroes with their heads growing under their arms as fixed on the summit of the cervical vertebrae; and he is able, with a continually growing neglect of all the facts around him, with equal confidence and equal delusion, to look back to any past and to look on to any future. on cardinal newman [from _the quarterly review_, october, ] _apologia pro vita suâ_. by john henry newman, d.d. few books have been published of late years which combine more distinct elements of interest than the "apologia" of dr. newman. as an autobiography, in the highest sense of that word, as the portraiture, that is, and record of what the man was, irrespective of those common accidents of humanity which too often load the biographer's pages, it is eminently dramatic. to produce such a portrait was the end which the writer proposed to himself, and which he has achieved with a rare fidelity and completeness. hardly do the "confessions of st. augustine" more vividly reproduce the old african bishop before successive generations in all the greatness and struggles of his life than do these pages the very inner being of this remarkable man--"the living intelligence," as he describes it, "by which i write, and argue, and act" (p. ). no wonder that when he first fully recognised what he had to do, he shrank from both the task and the exposure which it would entail. i must, i said, give the true key to my whole life; i must show what i am, that it may be seen what i am not, and that the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead of me. i wish to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my clothes.... i will draw out, as far as may be, the history of my mind; i will state the point at which i began, in what external suggestion or accident each opinion had its rise, how far and how they were developed from within, how they grew, were modified, were combined, were in collision with each other, and were changed. again, how i conducted myself towards them; and how, and how far, and for how long a time, i thought i could hold them consistently with the ecclesiastical engagements which i had made, and with the position which i filled.... it is not at all pleasant for me to be egotistical nor to be criticised for being so. it is not pleasant to reveal to high and low, young and old, what has gone on within me from my early years. it is not pleasant to be giving to every shallow or flippant disputant the advantage over me of knowing my most private thoughts, i might even say the intercourse between myself and my maker. --pp. - . here is the task he set himself, and the task which he has performed. there is in these pages an absolute revealing of the hidden life in its acting, and its processes, which at times is almost startling, which is everywhere of the deepest interest. for the life thus revealed is well worthy of the pen by which it is portrayed. of all those who, in these later years, have quitted the church of england for the roman communion --esteemed, honoured, and beloved, as were many of them--no one, save dr. newman, appears to us to possess the rare gift of undoubted genius. that life, moreover, which anywhere and at any time must have marked its own character on his fellows, was cast precisely at the time and place most favourable for stamping upon others the impress of itself. the plate was ready to receive and to retain every line of the image which was thrown so vividly upon it. the history, therefore, of this life in its shifting scenes of thought, feeling, and purpose, becomes in fact the history of a school, a party, and a sect. from its effect on us, who, from without, judge of it with critical calmness, we can form some idea of what must be its power on those who were within the charmed ring; who were actually under the wand of the enchanter, for whom there was music in that voice, fascination in that eye, and habitual command in that spare but lustrous countenance; and who can trace again in this retrospect the colours and shadows which in those years which fixed their destiny, passed, though in less distinct hues, into their own lives, and made them what they are. again, in another aspect, the "apologia" will have a special interest for most of our readers. almost every page of it will throw some light upon the great controversy which has been maintained for these three hundred years, and which now spreads itself throughout the world, between the anglican church and her oldest and greatest antagonist, the papal see.... the first names to which it introduces us indicate the widely-differing influences under which was formed that party within our church which has acted so powerfully and in such various directions upon its life and teaching. they are those of mr.--afterwards archbishop--whately and dr. hawkins, afterwards and still the provost of oriel college. to intercourse with both of whom dr. newman attributes great results in the formation of his own character: the first emphatically opening his mind and teaching him to use his reason, whilst in religious opinion he taught him the existence of a church, and fixed in him anti-erastian views of church polity; the second being a man of most exact mind, who through a course of severe snubbing taught him to weigh his words and be cautious in his statements. to an almost unknown degree, oriel had at that time monopolised the active speculative intellect of oxford. her fellowships being open, whilst those of other colleges were closed, drew to her the ablest men of the university: whilst the nature of the examination for her fellowships, which took no note of ordinary university honours, and stretched boldly out beyond inquiries as to classical and mathematical attainments in everything which could test the dormant powers of the candidates, had already impressed upon the society a distinctive character of intellectual excellence. the late lord grenville used at this time to term an oriel fellowship the blue ribbon of the university; and, undoubtedly, the results of those examinations have been marvellously confirmed by the event, if we think to what an extent the mind, and opinions, and thoughts of england have been moulded by them who form the list of those "orielenses," of whom it was said in an academic squib of the time, with some truth, flavoured perhaps with a spice of envy, that they were wont to enter the academic circle "under a flourish of trumpets." such a "flourish" certainly has often preceded the entry of far lesser men than e. coplestone, e. hawkins, j. davison, j. keble, r. whately, t. arnold, e.b. pusey, j. h. newman, h. froude, r. j. wilberforce, s. wilberforce, g. a. denison, &c., &c. into a society leavened with such intellectual influences as these, dr. newman, soon after taking his degree, was ushered. it could at this time have borne no distinctively devout character in its religious aspect. rather must it have been marked by the opposite of this. whately, whose powerful and somewhat rude intellect must almost have overawed the common room when the might of davison had been taken from it, was, with all his varied excellences, never by any means an eminently devout, scarcely perhaps an orthodox man. all his earlier writings bristle with paradoxes, which affronted the instincts of simpler and more believing minds. whately, accordingly, appears in these pages as "generous and warmhearted--particularly loyal to his friends" (p. ); as teaching his pupil "to see with my own eyes and to walk with my own feet"; yet as exercising an influence over him (p. ) which, "in a higher respect than intellectual advance, had not been satisfactory," under which he "was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral, was drifting in the direction of liberalism"; a "dream" out of which he was "rudely awakened at the end of , by two great blows--illness and bereavement" (p. ). though this change in his views is traced by dr. newman to the action of these strictly personal causes of illness and bereavement, yet other influences, we suspect, were working strongly in the same direction. it is plain that, so far as regards early permanent impression on the character of his religious opinions, the influence of whately was calculated rather to stir up reaction than to win a convert. "whately's mind," he says himself (p. ), "was too different from mine for us to remain long on one line." the course of events round him impelled him in the same direction, and furnished him with new comrades, on whom henceforth he was to act, and who were to react most powerfully on him. the torrent of reform was beginning its full rush through the land; and its turbulent waters threatened not only to drown the old political landmarks of the constitution, but also to sweep away the church of the nation. abhorrence of these so-called liberal opinions was the electric current which bound together the several minds which speedily appeared as instituting and directing the great oxford church movement. not that it was in any sense the offspring of the old cry of "the church in danger." the meaning of that alarm was the apprehension of danger to the emoluments or position of the church as the established religion in the land. from the very first the oxford movement pointed more to the maintenance of the church as a spiritual society, divinely incorporated to teach certain doctrines, and do certain acts which none other could do, than to the preservation of those temporal advantages which had been conferred by the state. from the first there was a tendency to undervalue these external aids, which made the movement an object of suspicion to thorough church-and-state men. this suspicion was repaid by the members of the new school with a return of contempt. they believed that in struggling for the temporal advantages of the establishment, men had forgotten the essential characteristics of the church, and had been led to barter their divine birthright for the mess of pottage which acts of parliament secured them. thus we find dr. newman remembering his early oxford dislike of "the bigoted two-bottle orthodox." he records (p. ) the characteristic mode in which on the appearance of the first symptoms of his "leaving the clientela" of dr. whately he was punished by that rough humorist. "whately was considerably annoyed at me; and he took a humorous revenge, of which he had given me due notice beforehand.... he asked a set of the least intellectual men in oxford to dinner, and men most fond of port; he made me one of the party; placed me between provost this and principal that, and then asked me if i was proud of my friends" (p. ). it is easy to conceive how he liked them. he had, indeed, though formerly a supporter of catholic emancipation, "acted with them in opposing mr. peel's re-election in , on 'simple academical grounds,' because he thought that a great university ought not to be bullied even by a great duke of wellington" (p. ); but he soon parted with his friends of "two-bottle orthodoxy," and joined the gathering knot of men of an utterly different temper, who "disliked the duke's change of policy as dictated by liberalism" (p. ). this whole company shared the feelings which even yet, after so many years and in such altered circumstances, break forth from dr. newman like the rumblings and smoke of a long extinct volcano, in such utterances as this: "the new bill for the suppression of the irish sees was in prospect, and had filled my mind. i had fierce thoughts against the liberals. it was the success of the liberal cause which fretted me inwardly. i became fierce against its instruments and its manifestations. a french vessel was at algiers; i would not even look at the tricolor" ( ). this was the temper of the whole band. most of these men appear in dr. newman's pages; and from their common earnestness and various endowments a mighty band they were. * * * * * here then was the band which have accomplished so much; which have failed in so much; which have added a new party-name to our vocabulary; which have furnished materials for every scribbling or declaiming political protestant, from the writer of the durham letter down to mr. whalley and mr. harper; which aided so greatly in reawakening the dormant energies of the english church; which carried over to the ranks of her most deadly opponent some of the ablest and most devoted of her sons. the language of these pages has never varied concerning this movement. we have always admitted its many excellences--we have always lamented its evils. as long ago as in , whilst we protested openly and fully against what we termed at the time the "strange and lamentable" publication of mr. froude's "remains,"[ ] we declared our hope that "the publication of the oxford tracts was a very seasonable and valuable contribution to the cause both of the church and the state." and in , even after so many of our hopes had faded away, we yet spoke in the same tone of "this religious movement in our church," as one "from which, however clouded be the present aspect, we doubt not that great blessings have resulted and will result, unless we forfeit them by neglect or wilful abuse."[ ] [ ] "quarterly review," vol. lxiii, p. . [ ] ibid., vol. lxxviii, p. . the history of the progress of the movement lies scattered through these pages. all that we can collect concerning its first intention confirms absolutely mr. perceval's statements, , that it was begun for two leading objects: "first, the firm and practical maintenance of the doctrine of the apostolical succession.... secondly, the preservation in its integrity of the christian doctrine in our prayerbooks."[ ] its unity of action was shaken by the first entrance of doubts into its leader's mind. his retirement from it tended directly to break it up as an actual party. but it would be a monstrous error to suppose that the influence of this movement was extinguished when its conductors were dispersed as a party. so far from it, the system of the church of england took in all the more freely the elements of truth which it had all along been diffusing, because they were no longer scattered abroad by the direct action of an organised party under ostensible chiefs. where, we may ask, is not at this moment the effect of that movement perfectly appreciable within our body? look at the new-built and restored churches of the land; look at the multiplication of schools; the greater exactness of ritual observance; the higher standard of clerical life, service, and devotion; the more frequent celebrations; the cathedrals open; the loving sisterhoods labouring, under episcopal sanction, with the meek, active saintliness of the church's purest time; look--above all, perhaps--at the raised tone of devotion and doctrine amongst us, and see in all these that the movement did not die, but rather flourished with a new vigour when the party of the movement was so greatly broken up. it is surely one of the strangest objections which can be urged against a living spiritual body, that the loss of many of its foremost sons still left its vital strength unimpaired. yet this was dr. newman's objection, and his witness, fourteen years ago, when he complained of the church of england, that though it had given "a hundred educated men to the catholic church, yet the huge creature from which they went forth showed no consciousness of its loss, but shook itself, and went about its work as of old time."[ ] [ ] "collection of papers connected with the theological movement of ." by the hon. and rev. a.p. perceval. . second edition. [ ] "lectures on anglican difficulties," p. . as the unity of the party was broken up, the fire which had burned hitherto in but a single beacon was scattered upon a thousand hills. nevertheless, the first breaking up of the party was eminently disheartening to its living members. but it was not by external violence that it was broken, but by the development within itself of a distinctive romeward bias. dr. newman lays his hand upon a particular epoch in its progress, at which, he says, it was crossed by a new set of men, who imparted to it that leaning to romanism which ever after perceptibly beset it. "a new school of thought was rising, as is usual in such movements, and was sweeping the original party of the movement aside, and was taking its place" (p. ). this is a curious instance of self-delusion. he was, as we maintain, throughout, the romanising element in the whole movement. but for him it might have continued, as its other great chiefs still continue, the ornament and strength of the english church. these younger men, to whom he attributes the change, were, in fact, the minds whom he had consciously or unconsciously fashioned and biassed. some of them, as is ever the case, had outrun their leader. some of them were now, in their sensitive spiritual organism, catching the varying outline of the great leader whom they almost worshipped, and beginning at once to give back his own altering image. instead of seeing in their changing minds this reflection of himself, he dwelt upon it as an original element, and read in its presence an indication of its being the will of god that the stream should turn its flow towards the gulf to which he himself had unawares, it may be, directed its waters. those who remember how at this time he was followed will know how easily such a result might follow his own incipient change. those who can still remember how many often involuntarily caught his peculiar intonation--so distinctively singular, and therefore so attractive in himself and so repulsive in his copyists --will understand how the altering fashion of the leader's thoughts was appropriated with the same unconscious fidelity. one other cause acted powerfully on him and on them to give this bias to the movement, and that was the bitterness and invectives of the liberal party. dr. newman repeatedly reminds us that it was the liberals who drove him from oxford. the four tutors--the after course of one of whom, at least, was destined to display so remarkable a nemesis--and the pack who followed them turned by their ceaseless baying the noble hart who led the rest towards this evil covert. he and they heard incessantly that they were papists in disguise: men dishonoured by professing one thing and holding another; until they began to doubt their own fidelity, and in that doubt was death. nor was this all. the liberals ever (as is their wont), most illiberal to those who differ from them, began to use direct academic persecution; until, in self-distrust and very weariness, the great soul began to abandon the warfare it had waged inwardly against its own inclinations and the fascinations of its enemy, and to yield the first defences to the foe. it will remain written, as dr. newman's deliberate judgment, that it was the liberals who forced him from oxford. how far, if he had not taken that step, he might have again shaken off the errors which were growing on him--how far therefore in driving him from oxford they drove him finally to rome--man can never know. in the new light thrown upon it from the pages of the "apologia," we see with more distinctness than was ever shown before, how greatly this tendency to rome, which at last led astray so many of the masters of the party, was infused into it by the single influence of dr. newman himself. we do not believe that, in spite of his startling speeches, the bias towards rome was at all as strong even in h. froude himself. let his last letter witness for him:--"if," he says, "i was to assign my reasons for belonging to the church of england in preference to any other religious community, it would be simply this, that she has retained an apostolical clergy, and enacts no sinful terms of communion; whereas, on the other hand, the romanists, though retaining an apostolical clergy, do exact sinful terms of communion."[ ] this was the tone of the movement until it was changed in dr. newman. we believe that in tracing this out we shall be using these pages entirely as their author intended them to be used. they were meant to exhibit to his countrymen the whole secret of his moral and spiritual anatomy; they were intended to prove that he was altogether free from that foul and disgraceful taint of innate dishonesty, the unspoken suspicion of which in so many quarters had so long troubled him; the open utterance of which, from the lips of a popular and respectable writer, was so absolutely intolerable to him. from that imputation it is but bare justice to say he does thoroughly clear himself. the post-mortem examination of his life is complete; the hand which guided the dissecting-knife has trembled nowhere, nor shrunk from any incision. all lies perfectly open, and the foul taint is nowhere. and yet, looking back with the writer on the changes which this strange narrative records, from his subscribing, in , towards the first start of the "record" newspaper to his receiving on the th of october, , at littlemore, the "remarkable-looking man, evidently a foreigner, shabbily dressed in black,"[ ] who received him into the papal communion, we see abundant reason, even without the action of that prevalent suspicion of secret dishonesty somewhere, which in english minds inevitably connects itself with the spread of popery, for the widely-diffused impression of that being true which it is so pleasant to find unfounded. [ ] "collection of papers, &c." p. . [ ] "historical notes of the tractarian movement," by canon oakley. dublin review, no. v, p. . from first to last these pages exhibit the habit of dr. newman's mind as eminently subjective. it might almost be described as the exact opposite of that of s. athanasius: with a like all-engrossing love for truth; with ecclesiastical habits often strangely similar; with cognate gifts of the imperishable inheritance of genius, the contradiction here is almost absolute. the abstract proposition, the rightly-balanced proposition, is everything to the eastern, it is well-nigh nothing to the english divine. when led by circumstances to embark in the close examination of dogma, as in his "history of the arians," his nazarite locks of strength appear to have been shorn, and the giant, at whose might we have been marvelling, becomes as any other man. the dogmatic portion of this work is poor and tame; it is only when the writer escapes from dogma into the dramatic representation of the actors in the strife that his powers reappear. for abstract truth it is true to us that he has no engrossing affection: his strength lay in his own apprehension of it, in his power of defending it when once it had been so apprehended and had become engrafted into him; and it is to this as made one with himself, and to his own inward life as fed and nourished by it, that he perpetually reverts. all this is the more remarkable because he conceives himself to have been, even from early youth, peculiarly devoted to dogma in the abstract; he returns continually to this idea, confounding, as we venture to conceive, his estimate of the effect of truth when he received it, on himself, with truth as it exists in the abstract. and as this affected him in regard to dogma, so it reached to his relations to every part of the church around him. it led him to gather up in a dangerous degree, into the person of his "own bishop," the deference due to the whole order. "i did not care much for the bench of bishops, nor should i have cared much for a provincial council.... all these matters seemed to me to be jure ecclesiastico; but what to me was jure divino was the voice of my bishop in his own person. my own bishop was my pope."--(p. .) his intense individuality had substituted the personal bond to the individual for the general bond to the collective holders of the office: and so when the strain became violent it snapped at once. this doubtless natural disposition seems to have been developed, and perhaps permanently fixed, as the law of his intellectual and spiritual being, by the peculiarities of his early religious training. educated in what is called the "evangelical" school, early and consciously converted, and deriving his first religious tone, in great measure, from the vehement but misled calvinism, of which thomas scott, of aston sandford, was one of the ablest and most robust specimens, he was early taught to appreciate, and even to judge of, all external truth mainly in its ascertainable bearings on his own religious experience. in many a man the effect of this teaching is to fix him for life in a hard, narrow, and exclusive school of religious thought and feeling, in which he lives and dies profoundly satisfied with himself and his co-religionists, and quite hopeless of salvation for any beyond the immediate pale in which his own shibboleth is pronounced with the exactest nicety of articulation. but dr. newman's mind was framed upon a wholly different idea, and the results were proportionally dissimilar. with the introvertive tendency which we have ascribed to him, was joined a most subtle and speculative intellect, and an ambitious temper. the "apologia" is the history of the practical working out of those various conditions. his hold upon any truth external to and separate from himself, was so feeble when placed in comparison with his perception of what was passing within himself, that the external truth was always liable to corrections which would make its essential elements harmonize with what was occurring within his own intellectual or spiritual being. we think that we can distinctly trace in these pages a twofold consequence from all this: first, an inexhaustible mutability in his views on all subjects; and secondly, a continually recurring temptation to entire scepticism as to everything external to himself. every page gives illustrations of the first of these. he votes for what was called catholic emancipation, and is drifting into the ranks of liberalism. but the external idea of liberty is very soon metamorphosed, in his view, from the figure of an angel of light into that of a spirit of darkness; first, by his academical feeling that a great university ought not to be bullied even by a great duke, and then by the altered temper of his own feelings, as they are played upon by the alternate vibrations of the gibes of "hurrell froude," and the deep tones of mr. keble's ministrelsy. the history of his religious alternations is in exact keeping with all this. at every separate stage of his course, he constructs for himself a tabernacle in which for a while he rests. this process he repeats with an incessant simplicity of renewed commencements, which is almost like the blind acting of instinct leading the insect, which is conscious of its coming change, to spin afresh and afresh its ever-broken cocoon. he is at one time an anglo-catholic, and sees antichrist in rome; he falls back upon the via media--that breaks down, and left him, he says (p. ), "very nearly a pure protestant"; and again he has a "new theory made expressly for the occasion, and is pleased with his new view" (p. ); he then rests in "samaria" before he finds his way over to rome. for the time every one of these transient tabernacles seems to accomplish its purpose. he finds certain repose for his spirit. whilst sheltered by it, all the great unutterable phenomena of the external world are viewed by him in relation to himself and to his home of present rest. the gourd has grown up in a night, and shelters him by its short-lived shadow from the tyrannous rays of the sunshine. but some sudden irresistible change in his own inward preceptions alters everything. the idea shoots across his mind that the english church is in the position of the monophysite heretics of the fifth century (p. ). at once all his views of truth are changed. he moves on to a new position; pitches anew his tent; builds himself up a new theory; and finds the altitudes of the stars above him, and the very forms of the heavenly constellations, change with the change of his earthly habitation. * * * * * in october the final step is taken, and in the succeeding january the mournful history is closed in the following most touching words:-- jan. , .--you may think how lonely i am. _obliviscere populum tuum et domum patris tui_, has been in my ears for the last twelve hours. i realize more that we are leaving littlemore, and it is like going on the open sea. i left oxford for good on monday, february , . on the saturday and sunday before, i was in my house at littlemore simply by myself, as i had been for the first day or two when i had originally taken possession of it. i slept on sunday night at my dear friend's, mr. johnson's, at the observatory. various friends came to see the last of me--mr. copeland, mr. church, mr. buckle, mr. pattison, and mr. lewis. dr. pusey, too, came up to take leave of me; and i called on dr. ogle, one of my very oldest friends, for he was my private tutor when i was an undergraduate. in him i took leave of my first college, trinity, which was so dear to me, and which held on its foundation so many who have been kind to me, both when i was a boy and all through my oxford life. trinity had never been unkind to me. there used to be much snapdragon growing on the walls opposite my freshman's rooms there, and i had for years taken it as the emblem of my own perpetual residence, even unto death, in my university. on the morning of the rd i left the observatory. i have never seen oxford since, excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway. what an exceeding sadness is gathered up in these words! and yet the impress of this time left upon some of dr. newman's writings seems, like the ruin which records what was the violence of the throes of the long-passed earthquake, even still more indicative of the terrible character of the struggle through which at this time he passed. we have seen how keenly he felt the suspicious intrusions upon his privacy which haunted his last years in the church of england. but in "loss and gain" there is a yet more expressive exhibition of the extremity of that suffering. he denies as "utterly untrue" the common belief that he "introduced friends or partisans into the tale"; and of course he is to be implicitly believed. and yet one there is whom no one who reads the pages can for a moment doubt is there, and that is dr. newman himself. the weary, unresting, hunted condition of the leading figure in the tale, with all its accompaniment of keen, flashing wit, always seemed to us the history of those days when a well-meant but impertinent series of religious intrusions was well-nigh driving the wise man mad. we have followed out these steps thus in detail, not only because of their intense interest as an autobiography, but also because the narrative itself seems to throw the strongest possible light on the mainly-important question how far this defection of one of her greatest sons does really tend to weaken the argumentative position of the english church in her strife with rome. what has been said already will suffice to prove that in our opinion no such consequence can justly follow from it. we acknowledge freely the greatness of the individual loss. but the causes of that defection are, we think, clearly shown to have been the peculiarities of the individual, not the weakness of the side which he abandoned. his steps mark no path to any other. he sprang clear over the guarding walls of the sheepfold, and opened no way through them for other wanderers. men may have left the church of england because their leader left it; but they could not leave it as he left it, or because of his reasons for leaving it. in truth, he appears never to have occupied a thoroughly real church-of-england position. he was at first, by education and private judgment, a calvinistic puritan; he became dissatisfied with the coldness and barrenness of this theory, and set about finding a new position for himself, and in so doing he skipped over true, sound english churchmanship into a course of feeling and thought allied with and leading on to rome. even the hindrances which so long held him back can scarcely be said to have been indeed the logical force of the unanswerable credentials of the english church. on the contrary they were rather personal impressions, feelings, and difficulties. his faithful, loving nature made him cling desperately to early hopes, friendships, and affections. even to the end thomas scott never loses his hold upon him. his narrative is not the history of the normal progress of a mind from england to rome; it is so thoroughly exceptional that it does not seem calculated to seduce to rome men governed in such high matters by argument and reason rather than by impulse and feeling. we do not therefore think that the mere fact of this secession tells with any force against that communion whose claims satisfied to their dying day such men as hooker and andrewes, and ussher and hammond, and bramhall and butler. but, beyond this, his present view of the english church appears to be incompatible with that fierce and internecine hostility to the claim upon the loyalty of her children which is really essential to clear the act of perverting others from her ranks from the plainest guilt of schism. it is not merely that the nobleness and tenderness of his nature make his tone so unlike that of many of those who have taken the same step with himself. it is not that every provocation--and how many they have been!--every misunderstanding--and they have been all but universal; every unworthy charge or insinuation--down to those of professor kingsley, failed to embitter his feelings against the communion he has deserted and the friends whom he has left. it is not this to which we refer, for this is personal to himself, and the fruit of his own generosity and true greatness of soul. but we refer to his calm, deliberate estimate of the forsaken church. he says, indeed, that since his change he has "had no changes to record, no anxiety of heart whatever. i have been in perfect peace and contentment. i never had one doubt" (p. ). but, as we have seen already, this was always the temporary condition in which every new phase of opinion landed him. he was always able to build up these tabernacles of rest. the difference between this and those former resting-places is clear. in those he was still a searcher after truth: he needed and required conviction, and a new conviction might shake the old comfort. but his present resting-place is built upon the denial of all further enquiry. "i have," he says (p. ), "no further history of religious opinions to narrate": and some following words show how entirely it is this abandonment of the idea of the actual conviction of truth for the blind admission of the dictates of a despotic external authority on which he rests. * * * * * there is another deeply interesting question raised by dr. newman's work, on which, if our limits did not absolutely prevent, we should be glad to enter. we mean the present position of the church of rome with that great rationalistic movement with which we, too, are called to contend. everywhere in europe this contest is proceeding, and the relations of the church of rome towards it are becoming daily more and more embarrassed. mr. ffoulkes tells us that "the 'home and foreign review' is the _only_ publication professing to emanate from roman catholics in this country that can be named in the same breath with the leading protestant reviews."[ ] since he wrote these words its course has been closed by pontifical authority. m. montalembert has barely escaped censure with the payment of the penalty--so heavy to his co-religionists--of an enforced silence; and dr. newman "interprets recent acts of authority as tying the hands of a controversialist such as i should be,"[ ] and so is prevented completing the great work which has occupied so much of his thoughts, and which promised, more than any other work this country is likely to see, to set some limiting boundary line between the provinces of a humble faith in revelation and an ardent love of advancing science. this is an evil inflicted by rome on this whole generation. but in truth, whenever the mind of christendom is active, the attitude of the papal communion before this new enemy is that of a startled, trembling minaciousness, which invites the deadly combat it can so ill maintain. [ ] "union review," ix, . [ ] "apol." . these facts are patent to every one who knows anything whatever of the present state of religious thought throughout roman catholic europe. almost every one knows further that the struggle between those who would subject all science and all the actings of the human mind to the authority of the church, and those who would limit the exercise of that authority more or less to the proper subject-matter of theology, is rife and increasing. the words of, perhaps, the ablest living member of the roman catholic communion have rung through europe, and many a heart in all religious communions has been saddened by the thought of dr. döllinger's virtual censure. and yet it is at such a time as this that dr. manning ventures to put forth his "letters to a friend," painting all as peace, unanimity, and obedient faith within the roman church; all dissension, unbelief, and letting slip of the ancient faith within our own communion. surely such are not the weapons by which the cause of god's truth can be advanced! but we must bring our remarks on the "apologia" to a close. some lessons there are, and those great ones, which this book is calculated to instil into members of our own communion. pre-eminently it shows the rottenness of that mere act-of-parliament foundation on which some, now-a-days, would rest our church. dr. newman suggests, more than once, that such a course must rob us of all our present strength. dr. manning sings his paean with wild and premature delight, as if the evil was already accomplished. in his first letter he triumphed in the silence of convocation, but that silence has since been broken. a solemn synodical judgment, couched in the most explicit language, has condemned the false teaching which had been our church's scandal. but because a "very exalted person in the house of lords"[ ] (p. ), with an ignorance or an ignoring of law, as was shown in the debate, which was simply astonishing, chose, in a manner which even dr. manning condemns, to assert, without a particle of real evidence, that the convocation had exceeded its legitimate powers, dr. manning is in ecstasies. the "very exalted person" becomes "a righteous judge, a learned judge, a daniel come to judgment--yea, a daniel." these shouts of joy ought to be enough to show men where the real danger lies. our present position is impregnable. but if we abandon it for the new one proposed to us by the rationalist party, how shall we be able to stand? how could a national religious establishment which should seek to rest its foundations--not on god's word; on the ancient creeds; on a true apostolic ministry; on valid sacraments; on a living, even though it be an obscured, unity with the universal church, and so on the presence with her of her lord, and on the gifts of his spirit--but upon the critical reason of individuals, and the support of acts of parliament--ever stand in the coming struggle? how could it meet rationalism on the one hand? how could it withstand popery on the other? after such a fatal change its career might be easily foreshadowed. under the assaults of rationalism, it would year by year lose some parts of the great deposit of the catholic faith. under the attacks of rome, it would lose many of those whom it can ill spare, because they believe most firmly in the verities for which she is ready to witness. thus it might continue until our ministry were filled with the time-serving, the ignorant, and the unbelieving; and, when this has come to pass, the day of final doom cannot be far distant. how such evils are to be averted is the anxious question of the present day. the great practical question seems to us to be that to which we have before this alluded,[ ]--how the supreme court of appeal can be made fitter for the due discharge of its momentous functions? we cannot enter here upon that great question. but solved it must be, and solved upon the principles of the great reformation statutes of our land, which maintain, in the supremacy of the crown, our undoubted nationality; which, besides maintaining this great principle of national life, save us from all the terrible practical evils of appeals to rome, and yet which maintain the spirituality of the land, as the guardians under god of the great deposit of the faith, in the very terms in which the catholic church of christ has from the beginning received, and to this day handed down in its completeness, the inestimable gift. [ ] hansard's "house of lord's debates," july , [ ] "quarterly review," vol. cxv. p. anonymous on "waverley" [from _the quarterly review_, july, ] _waverley; or, 'tis sixty years since_. vols. mo. edinburgh, . we have had so many occasions to invite our readers' attention to that species of composition called novels, and have so often stated our general views of the principles of this very agreeable branch of literature, that we shall venture on the consideration of our present subject with but a few observations, and those applicable to a class of novels, of which it is a favourable specimen. the earlier novelists wrote at periods when society was not perfectly formed, and we find that their picture of life was an embodying of their own conceptions of the "_beau idéal_."--heroes all generosity and ladies all chastity, exalted above the vulgarities of society and nature, maintain, through eternal folios, their visionary virtues, without the stain of any moral frailty, or the degradation of any human necessities. but this high-flown style went out of fashion as the great mass of mankind became more informed of each other's feelings and concerns, and as a nearer intercourse taught them that the real course of human life is a conflict of duty and desire, of virtue and passion, of right and wrong; in the description of which it is difficult to say whether uniform virtue or unredeemed vice would be in the greater degree tedious and absurd. the novelists next endeavoured to exhibit a general view of society. the characters in gil blas and tom jones are not individuals so much as specimens of the human race; and these delightful works have been, are, and ever will be popular, because they present lively and accurate delineations of the workings of the human soul, and that every man who reads them is obliged to confess to himself, that in similar circumstances with the personages of le sage and fielding, he would probably have acted in the way in which they are described to have done. from this species the transition to a third was natural. the first class was theory--it was improved into a _generic_ description, and that again led the way to a more particular classification--a copying not of man in general, but of men of a peculiar nation, profession, or temper, or, to go a step further--of _individuals_. thus alcander and cyrus could never have existed in human society--they are neither french, nor english, nor italian, because it is only allegorically that they are _men_. tom jones might have been a frenchman, and gil blas an englishman, because the essence of their characters is human nature, and the personal situation of the individual is almost indifferent to the success of the object which the author proposed to himself: while, on the other hand, the characters of the most popular novels of later times are irish, or scotch, or french, and not in the abstract, _men_.--the general operations of nature are circumscribed to her effects on an individual character, and the modern novels of this class, compared with the broad and noble style of the earlier writers, may be considered as dutch pictures, delightful in their vivid and minute details of common life, wonderfully entertaining to the close observer of peculiarities, and highly creditable to the accuracy, observation and humour of the painter, but exciting none of those more exalted feelings, giving none of those higher views of the human soul which delight and exalt the mind of the spectator of raphael, correggio, or murillo. but as in a gallery we are glad to see every style of excellence, and are ready to amuse ourselves with teniers and gerard dow, so we derive great pleasure from the congenial delineations of castle rack-rent and waverley; and we are well assured that any reader who is qualified to judge of the illustration we have borrowed from a sister art, will not accuse us of undervaluing, by this comparison, either miss edgeworth or the ingenious author of the work now under consideration. we mean only to say, that the line of writing which they have adopted is less comprehensive and less sublime, but not that it is less entertaining or less useful than that of their predecessors. on the contrary, so far as utility constitutes merit in a novel, we have no hesitation in preferring the moderns to their predecessors. we do not believe that any man or woman was ever improved in morals or manners by the reading of tom jones or peregrine pickle, though we are confident that many have profited by the tales of fashionable life, and the cottagers of glenburnie. we have heard waverley called a scotch castle rack-rent; and we have ourselves alluded to a certain resemblance between these works; but we must beg leave to explain that the resemblance consists only in this, that the one is a description of the peculiarities of scottish manners as the other is of those of ireland; and that we are far from placing on the same level the merits and qualities of the works. waverley is of a much higher strain, and may be safely placed far above the amusing vulgarity of castle rack-rent, and by the side of ennui or the absentee, the best undoubtedly of miss edgeworth's compositions. * * * * * we shall conclude this article, which has grown to an immoderate length, by observing what, indeed, our readers must have already discovered, that waverley, who gives his name to the story, is far from being its hero, and that in truth the interest and merit of the work is derived, not from any of the ordinary qualities of a novel, but from the truth of its facts, and the accuracy of its delineations. we confess that we have, speaking generally, a great objection to what may be called historical romance, in which real and fictitious personages, and actual and fabulous events are mixed together to the utter confusion of the reader, and the unsettling of all accurate recollections of past transactions; and we cannot but wish that the ingenious and intelligent author of waverley had rather employed himself in recording _historically_ the character and transactions of his countrymen _sixty years since_, than in writing a work, which, though it may be, in its facts, almost true, and in its delineations perfectly accurate, will yet, in sixty years _hence_, be regarded, or rather, probably, _disregarded_, as a _mere_ romance, and the gratuitous invention of a facetious fancy. on scott's "tales of my landlord" [from _the quarterly review_, january, ] _tales of my landlord_. vols. mo. third edition. blackwood, edinburgh. john murray, london. . these tales belong obviously to a class of novels which we have already had occasion repeatedly to notice, and which have attracted the attention of the public in no common degree,--we mean waverley, guy mannering, and the antiquary, and we have little hesitation to pronounce them either entirely, or in a great measure, the work of the same author. why he should industriously endeavour to elude observation by taking leave of us in one character, and then suddenly popping out upon us in another, we cannot pretend to guess without knowing more of his personal reasons for preserving so strict an incognito that has hitherto reached us. we can, however, conceive many reasons for a writer observing this sort of mystery; not to mention that it has certainly had its effect in keeping up the interest which his works have excited. we do not know if the imagination of our author will sink in the opinion of the public when deprived of that degree of invention which we have been hitherto disposed to ascribe to him; but we are certain that it ought to increase the value of his portraits, that human beings have actually sate for them. these coincidences between fiction and reality are perhaps the very circumstances to which the success of these novels is in a great measure to be attributed: for, without depreciating the merit of the artist, every spectator at once recognizes in those scenes and faces which are copied from nature an air of distinct reality, which is not attached to fancy-pieces however happily conceived and elaborately executed. by what sort of freemasonry, if we may use the term, the mind arrives at this conviction, we do not pretend to guess, but every one must have felt that he instinctively and almost insensibly recognizes in painting, poetry, or other works of imagination, that which is copied from existing nature, and that he forthwith clings to it with that kindred interest which thinks nothing which is human indifferent to humanity. before therefore we proceed to analyse the work immediately before us, we beg leave briefly to notice a few circumstances connected with its predecessors. our author has told us it was his object to present a succession of scenes and characters connected with scotland in its past and present state, and we must own that his stories are so slightly constructed as to remind us of the showman's thread with which he draws up his pictures and presents them successively to the eye of the spectator. he seems seriously to have proceeded on mr. bays's maxim--"what the deuce is a plot good for, but to bring in fine things?"--probability and perspicuity of narrative are sacrificed with the utmost indifference to the desire of producing effect; and provided the author can but contrive to "surprize and elevate," he appears to think that he has done his duty to the public. against this slovenly indifference we have already remonstrated, and we again enter our protest. it is in justice to the author himself that we do so, because, whatever merit individual scenes and passages may possess, (and none have been more ready than ourselves to offer our applause), it is clear that their effect would be greatly enhanced by being disposed in a clear and continued narrative. we are the more earnest in this matter, because it seems that the author errs chiefly from carelessness. there may be something of system in it, however: for we have remarked, that with an attention which amounts even to affectation, he has avoided the common language of narrative, and thrown his story, as much as possible, into a dramatic shape. in many cases this has added greatly to the effect, by keeping both the actors and action continually before the reader, and placing him, in some measure, in the situation of the audience at a theatre, who are compelled to gather the meaning of the scene from what the _dramatis personae_ say to each other, and not from any explanation addressed immediately to themselves. but though the author gain this advantage, and thereby compel the reader to think of the personages of the novel and not of the writer, yet the practice, especially pushed to the extent we have noticed, is a principal cause of the flimsiness and incoherent texture of which his greatest admirers are compelled to complain. few can wish his success more sincerely than we do, and yet without more attention on his own part, we have great doubts of its continuance. in addition to the loose and incoherent style of the narration, another leading fault in these novels is the total want of interest which the reader attaches to the character of the hero. waverley, brown, or bertram in guy mannering, and lovel in the antiquary, are all brethren of a family; very amiable and very insipid sort of young men. we think we can perceive that this error is also in some degree occasioned by the dramatic principle upon which the author frames his plots. his chief characters are never actors, but always acted upon by the spur of circumstances, and have their fates uniformly determined by the agency of the subordinate persons. this arises from the author having usually represented them as foreigners to whom every thing in scotland is strange,--a circumstance which serves as his apology for entering into many minute details which are reflectively, as it were, addressed to the reader through the medium of the hero. while he is going into explanations and details which, addressed directly to the reader, might appear tiresome and unnecessary, he gives interest to them by exhibiting the effect which they produce upon the principal person of his drama, and at the same time obtains a patient hearing for what might otherwise be passed over without attention. but if he gains this advantage, it is by sacrificing the character of the hero. no one can be interesting to the reader who is not himself a prime agent in the scene. this is understood even by the worthy citizen and his wife, who are introduced as prolocutors in fletcher's knight of the burning pestle. when they are asked what the principal person of the drama shall do?--the answer is prompt and ready--"marry, let him come forth and kill a giant." there is a good deal of tact in the request. every hero in poetry, in fictitious narrative, ought to come forth and do or say something or other which no other person could have done or said; make some sacrifice, surmount some difficulty, and become interesting to us otherwise than by his mere appearance on the scene, the passive tool of the other characters. the insipidity of this author's heroes may be also in part referred to the readiness with which the twists and turns his story to produce some immediate and perhaps temporary effect. this could hardly be done without representing the principal character either as inconsistent or flexible in his principles. the ease with which waverley adopts and after forsakes the jacobite party in is a good example of what we mean. had he been painted as a steady character, his conduct would have been improbable. the author was aware of this; and yet, unwilling to relinquish an opportunity of introducing the interior of the chevalier's military court, the circumstances of the battle of preston-pans, and so forth, he hesitates not to sacrifice poor waverley, and to represent him as a reed blown about at the pleasure of every breeze: a less careless writer would probably have taken some pains to gain the end proposed in a more artful and ingenious manner. but our author was hasty, and has paid the penalty of his haste. we have hinted that we are disposed to question the originality of these novels in point of invention, and that in doing so, we do not consider ourselves as derogating from the merit of the author, to whom, on the contrary, we give the praise due to one who has collected and brought out with accuracy and effect, incidents and manners which might otherwise have slept in oblivion. we proceed to our proofs.[ ] [ ] it will be readily conceived that the curious mss. and other information of which we have availed ourselves were not accessible to us in this country; but we have been assiduous in our inquiries; and are happy enough to possess a correspondent whose researches on the spot have been indefatigable, and whose kind, and ready communications have anticipated all our wishes. * * * * * the traditions and manners of the scotch were so blended with superstitious practices and fears, that the author of these novels seems to have deemed it incumbent on him, to transfer many more such incidents to his novels, than seem either probable or natural to an english reader. it may be some apology that his story would have lost the national cast, which it was chiefly his object to preserve, had this been otherwise. there are few families of antiquity in scotland, which do not possess some strange legends, told only under promise of secrecy, and with an air of mystery; in developing which, the influence of the powers of darkness is referred to. the truth probably is, that the agency of witches and demons was often made to account for the sudden disappearance of individuals and similar incidents, too apt to arise out of the evil dispositions of humanity, in a land where revenge was long held honourable--where private feuds and civil broils disturbed the inhabitants for ages--and where justice was but weakly and irregularly executed. mr. law, a conscientious but credulous clergyman of the kirk of scotland, who lived in the seventeenth century, has left behind him a very curious manuscript, in which, with the political events of that distracted period, he has intermingled the various portents and marvellous occurrences which, in common with his age, he ascribed to supernatural agency. the following extract will serve to illustrate the taste of this period for the supernatural. when we read such things recorded by men of sense and education, (and mr. law was deficient in neither), we cannot help remembering the times of paganism, when every scene, incident, and action, had its appropriate and presiding deity. it is indeed curious to consider what must have been the sensations of a person, who lived under this peculiar species of hallucination, believing himself beset on all hands by invisible agents; one who was unable to account for the restiveness of a nobleman's carriage horses otherwise than by the immediate effect of witchcraft: and supposed that the _sage femme_ of the highest reputation was most likely to devote the infants to the infernal spirits, upon their very entrance into life. * * * * * to the superstitions of the north britons must be added their peculiar and characteristic amusements; and here we have some atonement to make to the memory of the learned paulus pleydell, whose compotatory relaxations, better information now inclines us to think, we mentioned with somewhat too little reverence. before the new town of edinburgh (as it is called) was built, its inhabitants lodged, as is the practice of paris at this day, in large buildings called _lands_, each family occupying a story, and having access to it by a stair common to all the inhabitants. these buildings, when they did not front the high street of the city, composed the sides of little, narrow, unwholesome _closes_ or lanes. the miserable and confined accommodation which such habitations afforded, drove _men of business_, as they were called, that is, people belonging to the law, to hold their professional rendezvouses in taverns, and many lawyers of eminence spent the principal part of their time in some tavern of note, transacted their business there, received the visits of clients with their writers or attornies, and suffered no imputation from so doing. this practice naturally led to habits of conviviality, to which the scottish lawyers, till of very late years, were rather too much addicted. few men drank so hard as the counsellors of the old school, and there survived till of late some veterans who supported in that respect the character of their predecessors. to vary the humour of a joyous evening many frolics were resorted to, and the game of _high jinks_ was one of the most common.[ ] in fact, high jinks was one of the _petits jeux_ with which certain circles were wont to while away the time; and though it claims no alliance with modern associations, yet, as it required some shrewdness and dexterity to support the characters assumed for the occasion, it is not difficult to conceive that it might have been as interesting and amusing to the parties engaged in it, as counting the spots of a pack of cards, or treasuring in memory the rotation in which they are thrown on the table. the worst of the game was what that age considered as its principal excellence, namely, that the forfeitures being all commuted for wine, it proved an encouragement to hard drinking, the prevailing vice of the age. [ ] we have learned, with some dismay, that one of the ablest lawyers scotland ever produced, and who lives to witness (although in retirement) the various changes which have taken place in her courts of judicature, a man who has filled with marked distinction the highest offices of his profession, _tush'd_ (pshaw'd) extremely at the delicacy of our former criticism. and certainly he claims some title to do so, having been in his youth not only a witness of such orgies as are described as proceeding under the auspices of mr. pleydell, but himself a distinguished performer. on the subject of davie gellatley, the fool of the baron of bradwardine's family, we are assured there is ample testimony that a custom, referred to shakespeare's time in england, had, and in remote provinces of scotland, has still its counterpart, to this day. we do not mean to say that the professed jester with his bauble and his party-coloured vestment can be found in any family north of the tweed. yet such a personage held this respectable office in the family of the earls of strathemore within the last century, and his costly holiday dress, garnished with bells of silver, is still preserved in the castle of glamis. but we are assured, that to a much later period, and even to this moment, the habits and manners of scotland have had some tendency to preserve the existence of this singular order of domestics. there are (comparatively speaking) no poor's rates in the country parishes of scotland, and of course no work-houses to immure either their worn out poor or the "moping idiot and the madman gay," whom crabbe characterizes as the happiest inhabitants of these mansions, because insensible of their misfortunes. it therefore happens almost necessarily in scotland, that the house of the nearest proprietor of wealth and consequence proves a place of refuge for these outcasts of society; and until the pressure of the times, and the calculating habits which they have necessarily generated had rendered the maintenance of a human being about such a family an object of some consideration, they usually found an asylum there, and enjoyed the degree of comfort of which their limited intellect rendered them susceptible. such idiots were usually employed in some simple sort of occasional labour; and if we are not misinformed, the situation of turn-spit was often assigned them, before the modern improvement of the smoke-jack. but, however employed, they usually displayed towards their benefactors a sort of instinctive attachment which was very affecting. we knew one instance in which such a being refused food for many days, pined away, literally broke his heart, and died within the space of a very few weeks after his benefactor's decease. we cannot now pause to deduce the moral inference which might be derived from such instances. it is however evident, that if there was a coarseness of mind in deriving amusement from the follies of these unfortunate beings, a circumstance to the disgrace of which they were totally insensible, their mode of life was, in other respects, calculated to promote such a degree of happiness as their faculties permitted them to enjoy. but besides the amusement which our forefathers received from witnessing their imperfections and extravagancies, there was a more legitimate source of pleasure in the wild wit which they often flung around them with the freedom of shakespeare's licensed clowns. there are few houses in scotland of any note or antiquity where the witty sayings of some such character are not occasionally quoted at this very day. the pleasure afforded to our forefathers by such repartees was no doubt heightened by their wanting the habits of more elegant amusement. but in scotland the practice long continued, and in the house of one of the very first noblemen of that country (a man whose name is never mentioned without reverence) and that within the last twenty years, a jester such as we have mentioned stood at the side-table during dinner, and occasionally amused the guests by his extemporaneous sallies. imbecility of this kind was even considered as an apology for intrusion upon the most solemn occasions. all know the peculiar reverence with which the scottish of every rank attend on funeral ceremonies. yet within the memory of most of the present generation, an idiot of an appearance equally hideous and absurd, dressed, as if in mockery, in a rusty and ragged black coat, decorated with a cravat and weepers made of white paper in the form of those worn by the deepest mourners, preceded almost every funeral procession in edinburgh, as if to turn into ridicule the last rites paid to mortality. it has been generally supposed that in the case of these as of other successful novels, the most prominent and peculiar characters were sketched from real life. it was only after the death of smollet, that two barbers and a shoemaker contended about the character of strap, which each asserted was modelled from his own: but even in the lifetime of the present author, there is scarcely a dale in the pastoral districts of the southern counties but arrogates to itself the possession of the original dandie dinmont. as for baillie mac wheeble, a person of the highest eminence in the law perfectly well remembers having received fees from him. * * * * * although these strong resemblances occur so frequently, and with such peculiar force, as almost to impress us with the conviction that the author sketched from nature, and not from fancy alone; yet we hesitate to draw any positive conclusion, sensible that a character dashed off as the representative of a certain class of men will bear, if executed with fidelity to the general outlines, not only that resemblance which he ought to possess as "knight of the shire," but also a special affinity to some particular individual. it is scarcely possible it should be otherwise. when emery appears on the stage as a yorkshire peasant, with the habit, manner, and dialect peculiar to the character, and which he assumes with so much truth and fidelity, those unacquainted with the province or its inhabitants see merely the abstract idea, the beau ideal of a yorkshireman. but to those who are intimate with both, the action and manner of the comedian almost necessarily recall the idea of some individual native (altogether unknown probably to the performer) to whom his exterior and manners bear a casual resemblance. we are therefore on the whole inclined to believe, that the incidents are frequently copied from _actual_ occurrences, but that the characters are either entirely fictitious, or if any traits have been borrowed from real life, as in the anecdote which we have quoted respecting invernahyle, they have been carefully disguised and blended with such as are purely imaginary. we now proceed to a more particular examination of the volumes before us. they are entitled "tales of my landlord": why so entitled, excepting to introduce a quotation from don quixote, it is difficult to conceive: for tales of my landlord they are _not_, nor is it indeed easy to say whose tales they ought to be called. there is a proem, as it is termed, supposed to be written by jedediah cleishbotham, the schoolmaster and parish clerk of the village of gandercleugh, in which we are given to understand that these tales were compiled by his deceased usher, mr. peter pattieson, from the narratives or conversations of such travellers as frequented the wallace inn, in that village. of this proem we shall only say that it is written in the quaint style of that prefixed by gay to his pastorals, being, as johnson terms it, "such imitation as he could obtain of obsolete language, and by consequence in a style that was never written nor spoken in any age or place." * * * * * we have given these details partly in compliance with the established rules which our office prescribes, and partly in the hope that the authorities we have been enabled to bring together might give additional light and interest to the story. from the unprecedented popularity of the work, we cannot flatter ourselves that our summary has made any one of our readers acquainted with events with which he was not previously familiar. the causes of that popularity we may be permitted shortly to allude to; we cannot even hope to exhaust them, and it is the less necessary that we should attempt it, since we cannot suggest a consideration which a perusal of the work has not anticipated in the minds of all our readers. one great source of the universal admiration which this family of novels has attracted, is their peculiar plan, and the distinguished excellence with which it has been executed. the objections that have frequently been stated against what are called historical romances, have been suggested, we think, rather from observing the universal failure of that species of composition, than from any inherent and constitutional defect in the species of composition itself. if the manners of different ages are injudiciously blended together,--if unpowdered crops and slim and fairy shapes are commingled in the dance with volumed wigs and far-extending hoops,--if in the portraiture of real character the truth of history be violated, the eyes of the spectator are necessarily averted from a picture which excites in every well regulated and intelligent mind the hatred of incredulity. we have neither time nor inclination to enforce our remark by giving illustrations of it. but if those unpardonable sins against good taste can be avoided, and the features of an age gone by can be recalled in a spirit of delineation at once faithful and striking, the very opposite is the legitimate conclusion: the composition itself is in every point of view dignified and improved; and the author, leaving the light and frivolous associates with whom a careless observer would be disposed to ally him, takes his seat on the bench of the historians of his time and country. in this proud assembly, and in no mean place of it, we are disposed to rank the author of these works; for we again express our conviction--and we desire to be understood to use the term as distinguished from _knowledge_--that they are all the offspring of the same parent. at once a master of the great events and minuter incidents of history, and of the manners of the times he celebrates, as distinguished from those which now prevail,--the intimate thus of the living and of the dead, his judgment enables him to separate those traits which are characteristic from those that are generic; and his imagination, not less accurate and discriminating than vigorous and vivid, presents to the mind of the reader the manners of the times, and introduces to his familiar acquaintance the individuals of his drama as they thought and spoke and acted. we are not quite sure that any thing is to be found in the manner and character of the black dwarf which would enable us, without the aid of the author's information, and the facts he relates, to give it to the beginning of the last century; and, as we have already remarked, his free-booting robber lives, perhaps, too late in time. but his delineation is perfect. with palpable and inexcusable defects in the _dénouement_, there are scenes of deep and overwhelming interest; and every one, we think, must be delighted with the portrait of the grandmother of hobbie elliott, a representation soothing and consoling in itself, and heightened in its effect by the contrast produced from the lighter manners of the younger members of the family, and the honest but somewhat blunt and boisterous bearing of the shepherd himself. the second tale, however, as we have remarked, is more adapted to the talents of the author, and his success has been proportionably triumphant. we have trespassed too unmercifully on the time of our gentle readers to indulge our inclination in endeavouring to form an estimate of that melancholy but, nevertheless, most attractive period in our history, when by the united efforts of a corrupt and unprincipled government, of extravagant fanaticism, want of education, perversion of religion, and the influence of ill-instructed teachers, whose hearts and understandings were estranged and debased by the illapses of the wildest enthusiasm, the liberty of the people was all but extinguished, and the bonds of society nearly dissolved. revolting as all this is to the patriot, it affords fertile materials to the poet. as to the _beauty_ of the delineation presented to the reader in this tale, there is, we believe, but one opinion: and we are persuaded that the more carefully and dispassionately it is contemplated, the more perfect will it appear in the still more valuable qualities of fidelity and truth. we have given part of the evidence on which we say this, and we will again recur to the subject. the opinions and language of the _honest party_ are detailed with the accuracy of a witness; and he who could open to our view the state of the scottish peasantry, perishing in the field or on the scaffold, and driven to utter and just desperation, in attempting to defend their first and most sacred rights; who could place before our eyes the leaders of these enormities, from the notorious duke of lauderdale downwards to the fellow mind that executed his behest, precisely as they lived and looked,--such a chronicler cannot justly be charged with attempting to extenuate or throw into the shade the corruptions of a government that soon afterwards fell a victim to its own follies and crimes. independently of the delineation of the manners and characters of the times to which the story refers, it is impossible to avoid noticing, as a separate excellence, the faithful representation of general nature. looking not merely to the litter of novels that peep out for a single day from the mud where they were spawned, but to many of more ambitious pretensions--it is quite evident that in framing them, the authors have first addressed themselves to the involutions and developement of the story, as the principal object of their attention; and that in entangling and unravelling the plot, in combining the incidents which compose it, and even in depicting the characters, they sought for assistance chiefly in the writings of their predecessors. baldness, and uniformity, and inanity are the inevitable results of this slovenly and unintellectual proceeding. the volume which this author has studied is the great book of nature. he has gone abroad into the world in quest of what the world will certainly and abundantly supply, but what a man of great discrimination alone will find, and a man of the very highest genius will alone depict after he has discovered it. the characters of shakespeare are not more exclusively human, not more perfectly men and women as they live and move, than those of this mysterious author. it is from this circumstance that, as we have already observed, many of his personages are supposed to be sketched from real life. he must have mixed much and variously in the society of his native country; his studies must have familiarized him to systems of manners now forgotten; and thus the persons of his drama, though in truth the creatures of his own imagination, convey the impression of individuals who we are persuaded must exist, or are evoked from their graves in all their original freshness, entire in their lineaments, and perfect in all the minute peculiarities of dress and demeanour. * * * * * admitting, however, that these portraits are sketched with spirit and effect, two questions arise of much more importance than any thing affecting the merits of the novels--namely, whether it is safe or prudent to imitate, in a fictitious narrative, and often with a view to a ludicrous effect, the scriptural style of the zealots of the seventeenth century; and secondly, whether the recusant presbyterians, collectively considered, do not carry too reverential and sacred a character to be treated by an unknown author with such insolent familiarity. on the first subject, we frankly own we have great hesitation. it is scarcely possible to ascribe scriptural expressions to hypocritical or extravagant characters without some risk of mischief, because it will be apt to create an habitual association between the expression and the ludicrous manner in which it is used, unfavourable to the reverence due to the sacred text. and it is no defence to state that this is an error inherent in the plan of the novel. bourdaloue, a great authority, extends this restriction still farther, and denounces all attempts to unmask hypocrisy by raillery, because in doing so the satirist is necessarily compelled to expose to ridicule the religious vizard of which he has divested him. yet even against such authority it may be stated, that ridicule is the friend both of religion and virtue, when directed against those who assume their garb, whether from hypocrisy or fanaticism. the satire of butler, not always decorous in these particulars, was yet eminently useful in stripping off their borrowed gravity and exposing to public ridicule the affected fanaticism of the times in which he lived. it may also be remembered, that in the days of queen anne a number of the camisars or huguenots of dauphiné arrived as refugees in england, and became distinguished by the name of the french prophets. the fate of these enthusiasts in their own country had been somewhat similar to that of the covenanters. like them, they used to assemble in the mountains and desolate places, to the amount of many hundreds, in arms, and like them they were hunted and persecuted by the military. like them, they were enthusiasts, though their enthusiasm assumed a character more decidedly absurd. the fugitive camisars who came to london had convulsion-fits, prophesied, made converts, and attracted the public attention by an offer to raise the dead. the english minister, instead of fine and imprisonment and other inflictions which might have placed them in the rank and estimation of martyrs, and confirmed in their faith their numerous disciples, encouraged a dramatic author to bring out a farce on the subject which, though neither very witty nor very delicate, had the good effect of laughing the french prophets out of their audience and putting a stop to an inundation of nonsense which could not have failed to disgrace the age in which it appeared. the camisars subsided into their ordinary vocation of psalmodic whiners, and no more was heard of their sect or their miracles. it would be well if all folly of the kind could be so easily quelled: for enthusiastic nonsense, whether of this day or of those which have passed away, has no more title to shelter itself under the veil of religion than a common pirate to be protected by the reverence due to an honoured and friendly flag. still, however, we must allow that there is great delicacy and hesitation to be used in employing the weapon of ridicule on any point connected with religion. some passages occur in the work before us for which the writer's sole apology must be the uncontroulable disposition to indulge the peculiarity of his vein of humour--a temptation which even the saturnine john knox was unable to resist either in narrating the martyrdom of his friend wisheart or the assassination of his enemy beatson, and in the impossibility of resisting which his learned and accurate biographer has rested his apology for this mixture of jest and earnest. "there are writers," he says (rebutting the charge of hume against knox), "who can treat the most sacred subjects with a levity bordering on profanity. must we at once pronounce them profane, and is nothing to be set down to the score of natural temper inclining them to wit and humour? the pleasantry which knox has mingled with his narrative of his (cardinal beatson's) death and burial is unseasonable and unbecoming. but it is to be imputed not to any pleasure which he took in describing a bloody scene, but to the strong propensity which he had to indulge his vein of humour. those who have read his history with attention must have perceived that he is not able to check this even on the very serious occasions."--_macrie's life of knox_, p. . indeed dr. macrie himself has given us a striking instance of the indulgence which the presbyterian clergy, even of the strictest persuasion, permit to the _vis comica_. after describing a polemical work as "ingeniously constructed and occasionally enlivened with strokes of humour," he transfers, to embellish his own pages, (for we can discover no purpose of edification which the tale serves), a ludicrous parody made by an ignorant parish-priest on certain words of a psalm, too sacred to be here quoted. our own innocent pleasantry cannot, in this instance, be quite reconciled with that of the learned biographer of john knox, but we can easily conceive that his authority may be regarded in scotland as decisive of the extent to which a humourist may venture in exercising his wit upon scriptural expressions without incurring censure even from her most rigid divines. it may however be a very different point how far the author is entitled to be acquitted upon the second point of indictment. to use too much freedom with things sacred is a course much more easily glossed over than that of exposing to ridicule the persons of any particular sect. every one knows the reply of the great prince of condé to louis xiv when this monarch expressed his surprize at the clamour excited by molière's tartuffe, while a blasphemous farce called _scaramouche hermite_ was performed without giving any scandal: "c'est parceque scaramouche ne jouoit que le ciel et la religion, dont les dévots se soucioient beaucoup moins que d'eux-mêmes." we believe, therefore, the best service we can do our author in the present case is to shew that the odious part of his satire applies only to that fierce and unreasonable set of extra-presbyterians, whose zeal, equally absurd and cruel, afforded pretexts for the severities inflicted on non-conformists without exception, and gave the greatest scandal and offence to the wise, sober, enlightened, and truly pious among the presbyterians. the principal difference betwixt the cameronians and the rational presbyterians has been already touched upon. it may be summed in a very few words. after the restoration of charles ii episcopacy was restored in scotland, upon the unanimous petition of the scottish parliament. had this been accompanied with a free toleration of the presbyterians, whose consciences preferred a different mode of church-government, we do not conceive there would have been any wrong done to that ancient kingdom. but instead of this, the most violent means of enforcing conformity were resorted to without scruple, and the ejected presbyterian clergy were persecuted by penal statutes and prohibited from the exercise of their ministry. these rigours only made the people more anxiously seek out and adhere to the silenced preachers. driven from the churches, they held conventicles in houses. expelled from cities and the mansions of men, they met on the hills and deserts like the french huguenots. assailed with arms, they repelled force by force. the severity of the rulers, instigated by the episcopal clergy, increased with the obstinacy of the recusants, until the latter, in , assumed arms for the purpose of asserting their right to worship god in their own way. they were defeated at pentland; and in a gleam of common sense and justice seems to have beamed upon the scottish councils of charles. they granted what was called an _indulgence_ (afterwards repeatedly renewed) to the presbyterian clergy, assigned them small stipends, and permitted them to preach in such deserted churches as should be assigned to them by the scottish privy council. this "indulgence," though clogged with harsh conditions and frequently renewed or capriciously recalled, was still an acceptable boon to the wiser and better part of the presbyterian clergy, who considered it as an opening to the exercise of their ministry under the lawful authority, which they continued to acknowledge. but fiercer and more intractable principles were evinced by the younger ministers of that persuasion. they considered the submitting to exercise their ministry under the controul of any visible authority as absolute erastianism, a desertion of the great invisible and divine head of the church, and a line of conduct which could only be defended, says one of their tracts, by nullifidians, time-servers, infidels, or the archbishop of canterbury. they held up to ridicule and abhorrence such of their brethren as considered mere toleration as a boon worth accepting. every thing, according to these fervent divines, which fell short of re-establishing presbytery as the sole and predominating religion, all that did not imply a full restoration of the solemn league and covenant, was an imperfect and unsound composition between god and mammon, episcopacy and prelacy. the following extracts from a printed sermon by one of them, on the subject of "soul-confirmation," will at once exemplify the contempt and scorn with which these high-flyers regarded their more sober-minded brethren, and serve as a specimen of the homely eloquence with which they excited their followers. the reader will probably be of opinion that it is worthy of kettledrummle himself, and will serve to clear mr. jedediah cleishbotham of the charge of exaggeration. there is many folk that has a face to the religion that is in fashion, and there is many folk, they have ay a face to the old company, they have a face for godly folk, and they have a face for persecutors of godly folk, and they will be daddies bairns and minnies bairns both; they will be _prelates_ bairns and they will be _malignants_ bairns and they will be the people of god's bairns. and what think ye of that bastard temper? poor peter had a trial of this soupleness, but god made paul an instrument to take him by the neck and shake it from him: and o that god would take us by the neck and shake our soupleness from us. therefore you that keeps only your old job-trot, and does not mend your pace, you will not wone at _soul-confirmation,_ there is a whine (i.e., _a few_) old job-trot, and does not mend your pace, you will not wone at _soul-confirmation,_ there is a whine old job-trot ministers among us, a whine old job-trot professors, they have their own pace, and faster they will not go; o therefore they could never wine to _soul-confirmation_ in the mettere of god. and our old job-trot ministers is turned _curates_, and our old job-trot professors is joined with them, and now this way god has turned them inside out, and has made it manifest and when their heart is hanging upon this braw, i will not give a gray groat for them and their profession both. the devil has the ministers and professors of scotland, now in a sive, and o as he sifts, and o as he riddles, and o as he rattles, and o the chaff he gets; and i fear there be more chaff nor there be good corn, and that will be found among us or all be done: but the _soul-confirmed_ man leaves ever the devil at two more, and he has ay the matter gadged, and leaves ay the devil in the lee side,--sirs o work in the day of the cross. the more moderate presbyterian ministers saw with pain and resentment the lower part of their congregation, who had least to lose by taking desperate courses, withdrawn from their flocks, by their more zealous pretenders to purity of doctrine, while they themselves were held up to ridicule, old jog trot professors and chaff-winnowed out and flung away by satan. they charged the cameronian preachers with leading the deluded multitude to slaughter at bothwell, by prophesying a certainty of victory, and dissuading them from accepting the amnesty offered by monmouth. "all could not avail," says mr. law, himself a presbyterian minister, "with mccargill, kidd, douglas, and other witless men amongst them, to hearken to any proposals of peace. among others that douglas, sitting on his horse, and preaching to the confused multitude, told them that they would come to terms with them, and like a drone was always droning on these terms with them: 'they would give us a half christ, but we will have a whole christ,' and such like impertinent speeches as these, good enough to feed those that are served with wind and not with the sincere milk of the word of god." law also censures these irritated and extravagant enthusiasts, not only for intending to overthrow the government, but as binding themselves to kill all that would not accede to their opinion, and he gives several instances of such cruelty being exercised by them, not only upon straggling soldiers whom they shot by the way or surprized in their quarters, but upon those who, having once joined them, had fallen away from their principles. being asked why they committed these cruelties in cold blood, they answered, 'they were obliged to do it by their sacred bond.' upon these occasions they practised great cruelties, mangling the bodies of their victims that each man might have his share of the guilt. in these cases the cameronians imagined themselves the direct and inspired executioners of the vengeance of heaven. nor did they lack the usual incentives of enthusiasm. peden and others among them set up a claim to the gift of prophecy, though they seldom foretold any thing to the purpose. they detected witches, had bodily encounters with the enemy of mankind in his own shape, or could discover him as, lurking in the disguise of a raven, he inspired the rhetoric of a quaker's meeting. in some cases, celestial guardians kept guard over their field-meetings. at a conventicle held on the lomond-hills, the rev. mr. blacader was credibly assured, under the hands of four honest men, that at the time the meeting was disturbed by the soldiers, some women who had remained at home, "clearly perceived as the form of a tall man, majestic-like, stand in the air in stately posture with the one leg, as it were, advanced before the other, standing above the people all the time of the soldiers shooting." unluckily this great vision of the guarded mount did not conclude as might have been expected. the divine sentinel left his post too soon, and the troopers fell upon the rear of the audience, plundered and stripped many, and made eighteen prisoners. but we have no delight to dwell either upon the atrocities or absurdities of a people whose ignorance and fanaticism were rendered frantic by persecution. it is enough for our present purpose to observe that the present church of scotland, which comprizes so much sound doctrine and learning, and has produced so many distinguished characters, is the legitimate representative of the indulged clergy of the days of charles ii, settled however upon a comprehensive basis. that after the revolution, it should have succeeded episcopacy as the national religion, was natural and regular, because it possessed all the sense, learning, and moderation fit for such a change, and because among its followers were to be found the only men of property and influence who acknowledged presbytery. but the cameronians continued long as a separate sect, though their preachers were bigoted and ignorant, and their hearers were gleaned out of the lower ranks of the peasantry. their principle, so far as it was intelligible, asserted that paramount species of presbyterian church-government which was established in the year , and they continued to regard the established church as erastian and time-serving, because they prudently remained silent upon certain abstract and delicate topics, where there might be some collision between the absolute liberty asserted by the church and the civil government of the state. the cameronians, on the contrary, disowned all kings and government whatsoever, which should not take the solemn league and covenant; and long retained hopes of re-establishing that great national engagement, a bait which was held out to them by all those who wished to disturb the government during the reign of william and anne, as is evident from the memoirs of ker of kersland, and the negotiations of colonel hooke with the jacobites and disaffected of the year. a party so wild in their principles, so vague and inconsistent in their views, could not subsist long under a free and unlimited toleration. they continued to hold their preachings on the hills, but they lost much of their zeal when they were no longer liable to be disturbed by dragoons, sheriffs, and lieutenants of militia.--the old fable of the traveller's cloak was in time verified, and the fierce sanguinary zealots of the days of claverhouse sunk into such quiet and peaceable enthusiasts as howie of lochgoin, or old mortality himself. it is, therefore, upon a race of sectaries who have long ceased to exist, that mr. jedediah cleishbotham has charged all that is odious, and almost all that is ridiculous, in his fictitious narrative; and we can no more suppose any moderate presbyterian involved in the satire, than we should imagine that the character of hampden stood committed by a little raillery on the person of ludovic claxton, the muggletonian. if, however, there remain any of those sectaries who, confining the beams of the gospel to the goshen of their own obscure synagogue, and with james mitchell, the intended assassin, giving their sweeping testimony against prelacy and popery, the whole duty of man and bordles, promiscuous dancing and the common prayer-book, and all the other enormities and backslidings of the time, may perhaps be offended at this idle tale, we are afraid they will receive their answer in the tone of the revellers to malvolio, who, it will be remembered, was something a kind of puritan: "doest thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?--aye, by saint anne, and ginger will be hot in the mouth too." on leigh hunt [from _the quarterly review_, january, ] _the story of rimini, a poem_. by leigh hunt. fc. vo. pp. . london, . a considerable part of this poem was written in newgate, where the author was some time confined, we believe for a libel which appeared in a newspaper, of which he is said to be the conductor. such an introduction is not calculated to make a very favourable impression. fortunately, however, we are as little prejudiced as possible on this subject: we have never seen mr. hunt's newspaper; we have never heard any particulars of his offence; nor should we have known that he had been imprisoned but for his own confession. we have not, indeed, ever read one line that he has written, and are alike remote from the knowledge of his errors or the influence of his private character. we are to judge him solely from the work now before us; and our criticism would be worse than uncandid if it were swayed by any other consideration. the poem is not destitute of merit; but--and this, we confess, was our main inducement to notice it--it is written on certain pretended _principles_, and put forth as a pattern for imitation, with a degree of arrogance which imposes on us the duty of making some observations on this new theory, which mr. leigh hunt, with the weight and authority of his venerable name, has issued, ex cathedra, as the canons of poetry and criticism. these canons mr. hunt endeavours to explain and establish in a long preface, written in a style which, though mr. hunt implies that it is meant to be perfectly natural and unaffected, appears to us the most strange, laboured, uncouth, and unintelligible species of prose that we ever read, only indeed to be exceeded in these qualities by some of the subsequent verses; and both the prose and the verse are the first eruptions of this disease with which mr. leigh hunt insists upon inoculating mankind. mr. hunt's _first_ canon is that there should be a _great freedom_ _of versification_--this is a proposition to which we should have readily assented; but when mr. hunt goes on to say that by _freedom of versification_ he means something which neither pope nor johnson possessed, and of which even "they knew less than any poets perhaps who ever wrote," we check our confidence; and, after a little consideration, find that by freedom mr. hunt means only an inaccurate, negligent, and harsh style of versification, which our early poets fell into from want of polish, and such poets as mr. hunt still practise from want of ease, of expression, and of taste. "_license_ he means, when he cries _liberty_." mr. hunt tells us that dryden, spenser and ariosto, shakespeare and chaucer (so he arranges them), are the greatest masters of _modern_ versification; but he, in the next few sentences, leads us to suspect that he really does not think much more reverently of these great names than of pope and of johnson; and that, if the whole truth were told, he is decidedly of opinion that the only good master of versification, in modern times, is--mr. leigh hunt. dryden, mr. hunt thinks, is apt to be _artificial_ in his style; or, in other words, he has improved the harmony of our language from the rudeness of chaucer, whom mr. hunt (in a sentence which is not grammar, p. xv) says that dryden (though he spoke of and borrowed from him) neither relished nor understood. spenser, he admits, was musical from pure taste, but milton was only, as he elegantly expresses it, "_learnedly_ so." being _learned in music_, is intelligible, and, of milton, true; but what can mr. hunt mean by saying that milton had "_learnedly_ a _musical ear_"? "ariosto's fine ear and _animal spirits_ gave a _frank_ and exquisite tone to all he said"--what does this mean?-- a fine ear may, perhaps, be said to _give_, as it contributes to, an exquisite tone; but what have _animal spirits_ to do here? and what, in the matter of _tones_ and _sounds_, is the effect of _frankness_? we shrewdly suspect that mr. hunt, with all his affectation of italian literature, knows very little of ariosto; it is clear that he knows nothing of tasso. of shakespeare he tells us, "that his versification escapes us because he _over-informed_ it with knowledge and sentiment," by which it appears (as well, indeed, as by his own verses), that this new stagyrite thinks that good versification runs a risk of being spoiled by having _too much meaning_ included in its lines. to wind up the whole of this admirable, precise, and useful criticism by a recapitulation as useful and precise, he says, "all these are about as different from pope as the church organ is from the bell in the steeple, or, to give him a more decorous comparison, the song of the nightingale from that of the cuckoo."--p. xv. now we own that what there is so _indecorous_ in the first comparison, or so especially _decorous_ in the second, we cannot discover; neither can we make out whether pope is the organ or the bell--the nightingale or the cuckoo; we suppose that mr. hunt knows that pope was called by his contemporaries the _nightingale_, but we never heard milton and dryden called _cuckoos_; or, if the comparison is to be taken the other way, we apprehend that, though chaucer may be to mr. hunt's ears a _church organ_, pope cannot, to any ear, sound like the _church bell_. but all this theory, absurd and ignorant as it is, is really nothing to the practice of which it effects to be the defence. hear the warblings of mr. hunt's nightingales. a horseman is described-- the patting hand, that best persuades the check, _and makes the quarrel up with a proud neck_, the thigh broad pressed, the spanning palm _upon it_, and the jerked feather _swaling_ in the _bonnet_.--p. . knights wear ladies' favours-- some tied about their arm, some at the breast, _some, with a drag, dangling from the cap's crest_.--p. . paulo pays his compliments to the destined bride of his brother-- and paid them with an air so frank and bright, as to a friend _appreciated at sight_; that air, in short, which sets you at your ease, without _implying_ your perplexities, that _what with the surprize in every way_, the hurry of the time, the appointed day,-- she knew _not how to object_ in her confusion.--p. . the meeting of the brothers, on which the catastrophe turns, is excellent: the politeness with which the challenge is given would have delighted the heart of old caranza. may i request, sir, said the prince, and frowned, your ear a moment in the tilting ground? _there_, brother? answered paulo with an _air_ surprized and _shocked_. yes, _brother_, cried he, _there_. the word smote _crushingly_.--p. . before the duel, the following spirited explanation takes place: the prince spoke low, and said: before _you answer what you can_, i wish to tell you, _as a gentleman_, that what you may confess-- will implicate no person known to you, more than disquiet in _its_ sleep may do.--p. . paulo falls--and the event is announced in these exquisite lines: her _aged_ nurse-- who, shaking her _old_ head, and pressing close her withered _lips_ to _keep the tears_ that rose--p. . "by the way," does mr. leigh hunt suppose that the aged nurses of rimini weep with their mouths? or does he mistake crying for drivelling?--in fact, the young lady herself seems to have adopted the same mode of weeping: with that, a _keen_ and _quivering glance of_ tears scarce moves her _patient mouth_, and disappears. but to the nurse.--she introduces the messenger of death to the princess, who communicates his story, in pursuance of her command-- something, i'm sure, has happened--tell me what-- i can bear all, though _you may fancy not_. madam, replied the squire, you are, i know, all sweetness--_pardon me for saying so_. my master bade _me_ say then, resumed _he_, that _he_ spoke firmly, when he told it _me_,-- that i was also, madam, to your ear firmly to speak, and you firmly to hear,-- that he was forced this day, _whether or no_, to combat with the prince;--'--p. . the _second_ of mr. hunt's new principles he thus announces: with the endeavour to recur to a freer spirit of versification, i have joined one of still greater importance--that of having a _free and idiomatic_ cast of language. there is a cant of art as well as of nature, though the former is not so unpleasant as the latter, which affects non-affectation.--(what does all this mean?)--but the proper _language of poetry_ is in fact nothing different from that of real life, and depends for its dignity upon the strength and sentiment of what it speaks. it is only adding _musical modulation_ to what a _fine understanding_ might actually utter in the midst of its griefs or enjoyments. the poet therefore should do as chaucer or shakespeare did,--not copy what is obsolete or peculiar in either, any more than they copied from their predecessors,--but use as much as possible an _actual, existing language,_--omitting of course _mere vulgarisms_ and _fugitive phrases_, which are the cant of ordinary discourse, just as tragedy phrases, _dead idioms,_ and exaggerations of dignity, are of the artificial style, and yeas, verilys, and exaggerations of simplicity, are of the natural.--p. xvi. this passage, compared with the verses to which it preludes, affords a more extraordinary instance of self-delusion than even mr. hunt's notion of the merit of his versification; for if there be one fault more eminently conspicuous and ridiculous in mr. hunt's work than another, it is,--that it is full of _mere vulgarisms_ and _fugitive phrases_, and that in every page the language is--not only not _the actual, existing language_, but an ungrammatical, unauthorised, chaotic jargon, such as we believe was never before spoken, much less written. in what vernacular tongue, for instance, does mr. hunt find a lady's waist called _clipsome_ (p. )--or the shout of a mob "enormous" (p. )--or a fit, _lightsome_;--or that a hero's nose is "_lightsomely_ brought down from a forehead of clear-spirited thought" (p. )--or that his back "drops" _lightsomely in_ (p. ). where has he heard of a _quoit-like drop_--of _swaling_ a jerked feather--of _unbedinned_ music (p. )--of the death of _leaping_ accents (p. )--of the _thick reckoning_ of a hoof (p. )--of a _pin-drop_ silence (p. )--a _readable_ look (p. )--a _half indifferent wonderment_ (p. )--or of _boy-storied_ trees and _passion-plighted_ spots,--p. . of ships coming up with _scattery_ light,--p. . or of self-knowledge being _cored_, after all, in our complacencies?--p. . we shall now produce a few instances of what "_a fine understanding might utter_," with "the addition of _musical modulation_," and of the _dignity_ and _strength_ of mr. hunt's sentiments and expressions. a crowd, which divided itself into groups, is-- --the multitude, who _got_ in clumps----p. . the impression made on these "clumps" by the sight of the princess, is thus "musically" described: there's not in all that croud one _gallant_ being, whom, if his heart were whole, and _rank agreeing_, it would not _fire to twice of what he is_,--p. . "dignity and strength"-- first came the trumpeters-- and as they _sit along_ their easy way, stately and _heaving_ to the croud below.--p. . this word is deservedly a great favourite with the poet; he _heaves_ it in upon all occasions. the deep talk _heaves_.--p. . with _heav'd_ out tapestry the windows glow.--p. . then _heave_ the croud.--_id_. and after a rude _heave_ from side to side.--p. . the marble bridge comes _heaving_ forth below.--p. . "fine understanding"-- the youth smiles _up_, and with a _lowly_ grace, _bending_ his _lifted_ eyes--p. . this is very neat: no peevishness there was-- but a _mute_ gush of _hiding_ tears from one, clasped to the _core_ of him who yet shed none.--p. . the heroine is suspected of wishing to have some share in the choice of her own husband, which is thus elegantly expressed: she had stout notions on the marrying _score_.--p. . this noble use of the word _score_ is afterwards carefully repeated in speaking of the prince, her husband-- --no suspicion could have touched him more, than that of _wanting_ on the generous _score_.--p. . but though thus punctilious on the _generous score_, his highness had but a bad temper, and kept no reckoning with his _sweets and sours_.--p. . this, indeed, is somewhat qualified by a previous observation, that-- _the worst of prince giovanni_, as his bride too quickly found, was an ill-tempered pride. how nobly does mr. hunt celebrate the combined charms of the fair sex, and the country! _the two divinest things this world_ has got, a lovely woman in a rural spot!--p. . a rural spot, indeed, seems to inspire mr. hunt with peculiar elegance and sweetness: for he says, soon after, of prince paulo-- for welcome grace, there rode not such another, nor yet for strength, except his lordly brother. was there a court day, or a sparkling feast, or better still--_to my ideas, at least!_-- a summer party in the green wood shade.--p. . so much for this new invented _strength_ and _dignity_: we shall add a specimen of his syntax: but fears like these he never entertain'd, and had they crossed him, would have been disdain'd.--p. . * * * * * after these extracts, we have but one word more to say of mr. hunt's poetry; which is, that amidst all his vanity, vulgarity, ignorance, and coarseness, there are here and there some well-executed descriptions, and occasionally a line of which the sense and the expression are good-- the interest of the story itself is so great that we do not think it wholly lost even in mr. hunt's hands. he has, at least, the merit of telling it with decency; and, bating the qualities of versification, expression, and dignity, on which he peculiarly piques himself, and in which he has utterly failed, the poem is one which, in our opinion at least, may be read with satisfaction after galt's tragedies. mr. hunt prefixes to his work a dedication to lord byron, in which he assumes a high tone, and talks big of his "_fellow-dignity_" and independence: what fellow-dignity may mean, we know not; perhaps the _dignity_ of a _fellow_; but this we will say, that mr. hunt is not more unlucky in his pompous pretension to versification and good language, than he is in that which he makes, in this dedication, to _proper spirit_, as he calls it, and _fellow-dignity_; for we never, in so few lines, saw so many clear marks of the vulgar impatience of a low man, conscious and ashamed of his wretched vanity, and labouring, with coarse flippancy, to scramble over the bounds of birth and education, and fidget himself into the _stout-heartedness_ of being familiar with a lord. of shakespeare [from _the quarterly review_, october, ] _shakespeare's himself again! or the language of the poet asserted; being a full and dispassionate examen of the readings and interpretations of the several editors. comprised in a series of notes, sixteen hundred in number, illustrative of the most difficult passages in his plays_--_to the various editions of which the present volumes form a complete and necessary supplement_. by andrew becket. vols. vo. pp. . . if the dead could be supposed to take any interest in the integrity of their literary reputation, with what complacency might we not imagine our great poet to contemplate the labours of the present writer! two centuries have passed away since his death--the mind almost sinks under the reflection that he has been all that while exhibited to us so "transmographied" by the joint ignorance and malice of printers, critics, etc., as to be wholly unlike himself. but--_post nubila, phoebus!_ mr. andrew becket has at length risen upon the world, and shakespeare is about to shine forth in genuine and unclouded glory! what we have at present is a mere scantling of the great work _in procinctu_--[greek: _pidakos ex ieraes oligaelizas_]--sixteen hundred "restorations," and no more! but if these shall be favourably received, a complete edition of the poet will speedily follow. mr. becket has taken him to develop; and it is truly surprizing to behold how beautiful he comes forth as the editor proceeds in unrolling those unseemly and unnatural rags in which he has hitherto been so disgracefully wrapped: tandem aperit vultum, et tectoria prima reponit,-- incipit agnosci!-- mr. becket has favoured us, in the preface, with a comparative estimate of the merits of his predecessors. he does not, as may easily be conjectured, rate any of them very highly; but he places warburton at the top of the scale, and steevens at the bottom: this, indeed, was to be expected. "warburton," he says, "is the _best_, and steevens the _worst_ of shakespeare's commentators"; (p. xvii) and he ascribes it solely to his forbearance that the latter is not absolutely crushed: it not being in his nature, as he magnanimously insinuates, "to break a butterfly upon a wheel!" dr. johnson is shoved aside with very little ceremony; mr. malone fares somewhat better; and the rest are dismissed with the gentle valediction of pandarus to the trojans--"asses, fools, dolts! chaff and bran! porridge after meat!" with respect to our author himself, it is but simple justice to declare, that he comes to the great work of "restoring shakespeare"--not only with more negative advantages than the unfortunate tribe of critics so cavalierly dismissed, but than all who have aspired to illumine the page of a defunct writer since the days of aristarchus. as far as we are enabled to judge, mr. becket never examined an old play in his life:--he does not seem to have the slightest knowledge of any writer, or any subject, or any language that ever occupied the attention of his contemporaries; and he possesses a mind as innocent of all requisite information as if he had dropped, with the last thunderstone, from the moon. "addison has well observed, that 'in works of criticism it is absolutely necessary to have a _clear and logical head_.'" (p.v.) in this position, mr. becket cheerfully agrees with him; and, indeed, it is sufficiently manifest, that without the internal conviction of enjoying that indispensable advantage, he would not have favoured the public with those matchless "restorations"; a few specimens of which we now proceed to lay before them. where all are alike admirable, there is no call for selection; we shall therefore open the volumes at random, and trust to fortune. "_hamlet_. for who would bear the whips and scorns of time?" this reading, mr. becket says, he cannot admit; and he says well: since it appears that shakespeare wrote-- "for who would bear the _scores_ of _weapon'd_ time?" using _scores_ in the sense of stripes. formerly, _i.e.,_ when becket was _in his sallad days_, he augured, he says, that the true reading was-- --"the scores of _whip-hand_ time." time having always the _whip-hand,_ the advantage; but he now reverts to the other emendation; though, as he modestly hints, the epithet _whip-hand_ (which he still regards with parental fondness) will perhaps be thought to have much of the manner of shakespeare.--vol. i, p. . "_horatio_.--while they, distill'd almost to jelly with the act of fear, stand dumb, and speak not to him!" we had been accustomed to find no great difficulty here: the words seemed, to us, at least, to express the usual effect of inordinate terror--but we gladly acknowledge our mistake. "the passage is not to be understood." how should it, when both the pointing and the language are corrupt? read, as shakespeare gave it-- --"while they _bestill'd_ almost to _gelèe_ with the act. of fear stand dumb," &c.--that is, petrified (or rather icefied) p. . "_lear_. and my poor fool is hang'd!" with these homely words, which burst from the poor old king on reverting to the fate of his loved cordelia, whom he then holds in his arms, we have been always deeply affected, and therefore set them down as one of the thousand proofs of the poet's intimate knowledge of the human heart. but mr. becket has made us ashamed of our simplicity and our tears. shakespeare had no such "lenten" language in his thoughts; he wrote, as mr. becket tells us, "and my _pure soot_ is hang'd!" poor, he adds, might be easily mistaken for _pure_; while the _s_ in _soot_ (sweet) was scarcely discernible from the _f_, or the _t_ from the _l_.--p. . we are happy to find that so much can be offered in favour of the old printers. and yet--were it not that the genuine text is always to be preferred--we could almost wish that the critic had left their blunder as it stood. "_wolsey_.--that his bones may have a tomb of orphans' tears wept on them." a tomb of tears is ridiculous. i read--a _coomb_ of tears--a _coomb_ is a liquid measure containing forty gallons. thus the expression, which was before absurd, becomes forcible and just.--vol. ii, p. . it does indeed! "_sir andrew_. i sent thee six-pence for thy leman (mistress): had'st it?" read as shakespeare wrote: "i sent thee sixpence for thy _lemma_"--_lemma_ is properly an _argument_, or _proposition assumed_, and is used by sir andrew aguecheek for a story.--p. . "_viola_. she pined in thought, and with a green and yellow melancholy."--correct it thus: "she pined in thought and with _agrein_ and _hollow_ melancholy."--p. . "_iago_. i have rubb'd this young quat almost to the sense, and he grows angry"-- that is, or rather _was_, according to our homely apprehension, i have rubb'd this pimple (roderigo) almost to bleeding:--but, no; mr. becket has furnished us not only with the genuine words, but the meaning of shakespeare-- i have _fubb'd_ this young _quat_--_quat_, or cat, appears to be a contraction of cater-cousin--and this reading will be greatly strengthened when it is remembered that roderigo was really the intimate of iago.--p. . in a subsequent passage, "i am as melancholy as a gibb'd cat"--we are told that _cat_ is not the domestic animal of that name, but a contraction of _catin_, a woman of the town. but, indeed, mr. becket possesses a most wonderful faculty for detecting these latent contractions and filling them up. thus, "_parolles_. sir, he will steal an egg out of a cloister." read (as shakespeare wrote), "sir, he will steal an _ag_ (i.e., an _agnes_) out of a cloister." _agnes_ is the name of a woman, and may easily stand for chastity.--p. . no doubt. "_carter_. prithee, tom, put a few flocks in cut's saddle; the poor beast is wrung in the withers out of all cess." out of all cess, we used to think meant, in vulgar phraseology, out of all measure, very much, &c.--but see how foolishly! _cess_ is a mere contraction of _cessibility_, which signifies the _quality of receding_, and may very well stand for _yielding_, as spoken of a tumour.--p. . "_hamlet_. a cry of players." this we once thought merely a sportive expression for a _company of_ players, but mr. becket has undeceived us--"_cry_ (he tells us) is contracted from _cryptic_, and cryptic is precisely of the same import as mystery."--p. . how delightful it is when learning and judgment walk thus hand in hand! but enough-- --"the sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness"-- and we would not willingly cloy our readers. sufficient has been produced to encourage them--not perhaps to contend for the possession of the present volumes, though mr. becket conscientiously affirms, in his title-page, that "they form a complete and _necessary_ supplement to every former edition"--but, with us, to look anxiously forward to the great work in preparation. meanwhile we have gathered some little consolation from what is already in our hands. very often, on comparing the dramas of the present day (not even excepting mr. tobin's) with those of elizabeth's age, we have been tempted to think that we were born too late, and to exclaim with the poet-- "infelix ego, non illo qui tempore natus, quo facilis natura fuit; sors o mea laeva nascendi, miserumque genus!" &c. but we now see that unless mr. andrew becket had also been produced at that early period, we should have derived no extraordinary degree of satisfaction from witnessing the first appearance of shakespeare's plays, since it is quite clear that we could not have understood them. one difficulty yet remains. we scarcely think that the managers will have the confidence, in future, to play shakespeare as they have been accustomed to do; and yet, to present him, as now so happily "restored," would, for some time at least, render him _caviare to the general_. we know that livius andronicus, when grown hoarse with repeated declamation, was allowed a second rate actor, who stood at his back and spoke while he gesticulated, or gesticulated while he spoke. a hint may be borrowed from this fact. we therefore propose that mr. andrew becket be forthwith taken into the pay of the two theatres, and divided between them. he may then be instructed to follow the _dramatis personae_ of our great poet's plays on the stage, and after each of them has made his speech in the present corrupt reading, to pronounce aloud the words as "restored" by himself. this may have an awkward effect at first; but a season or two will reconcile the town to it; shakespeare may then be presented in his genuine language, or, as our author better expresses it, be himself again. on moxon's sonnets [from _the quarterly review_, july, ] _sonnets by_ edward moxon. second edition. london, . this is quite a _dandy_ of a book. some seventy pages of drawing-paper-- fifty-five of which are impressed each with a single sonnet in all the luxury of type, while the rest are decked out with vignettes of nymphs in clouds and bowers, and cupids in rose-bushes and cockle-shells. and all these coxcombries are the appendages of, as it seems to us, as little intellect as the rings and brooches of the exquisite in a modern novel. we shall see presently, by what good fortune so moderate a poet has found so liberal a publisher. we are no great admirers of the sonnet at its best--concurring in dr. johnson's opinion that it does not suit the genius of our language, and that the great examples of shakespeare and milton have failed to domesticate it with us. it seems to be, even in master hands, that species of composition which is at once the most artificial and the least effective, which bears the appearance of the greatest labour and produces the least pleasure. its peculiar and unvaried construction must inevitably inflict upon it something of pedantry and monotony, and although some powerful minds have used it as a form for condensing and elaborating a particular train of thought--_an iliad in a nutshell_--yet the vast majority of sonneteers employ it as an economical expedient, by which one idea can be expanded into fourteen lines--fourteen lines into one page--and, as we see, fifty-four pages into a costly volume. the complex construction, which at first sight seems a difficulty, is, in fact, like all mechanism, a great saving of labour to the operator. a sonnet almost makes itself, as a musical snuff-box plays a tune, or rather as a cotton _jenny_ spins twist. when a would-be poet has collected in his memory a few of what may have struck him as poetical ideas, he puts them into his machine, and after fourteen turns, out comes a sonnet, or--if it be his pleasure to spin out his reminiscences very fine--a dozen sonnets. mr. moxon inscribes as a motto on his title-page four lines of mr. wordsworth's vindication of his own use of the sonnet-form-- in truth, the prison, into which we doom ourselves, no prison is: and hence to _me_, in sundry moods 'twas pastime to be bound within the _sonnet's_ scanty plot of ground. yes, mr. moxon, to _him_ perhaps, but not to every one--the "plot of ground" which is "_scanty_" to an elephant is a wilderness to a mouse; and the garment in which wordsworth might feel straitened hangs flabby about a puny imitator. there seems no great modesty in the estimate which mr. moxon thus exhibits of his own superior powers, but we fear there is, at least, as much modesty as truth--for really, so far from being "_bound_" within the narrow limit of the sonnet, it seems to us to be --a world too wide for his shrunk shank. ordinary sonneteers, as we have said, will spin a single thought through the fourteen lines. mr., moxon will draw you out a single thought into fourteen sonnets:--and these are his best--for most of the others appear to us mere soap bubbles, very gay and gaudy, but which burst at the fourteenth line and leave not the trace of an idea behind. of two or three mr. moxon has kindly told us the meaning, which, without that notice, we confess we should never have guessed. * * * * * another of the same genus--though, he had just told us my love i can _compare_ with _nought_ on earth-- is like _nought on earth_ we ever read but dean swift's song of similes. i _will prove_, he says, that a swan-- a fawn-- an artless lamb-- a hawthorn tree-- a willow-- a laburnum-- a dream-- a rainbow-- diana-- aurora-- a dove that _singeth_-- a lily,--and finally, venus herself! --i in truth will prove these are not _half_ so _fair_ as she i love. _sonnet_ iii, p. . such heterogeneous compliments remind us of shacabac's gallantry to _beda_ in _blue beard:_ "ah, you little rogue, you have a prettier mouth _than an elephant_, and you know it!"--a _fawn-coloured_ countenance rivalling in _fairness a laburnum_ blossom, seems to us a more dubious type of female beauty than even an elephant's mouth. _love_, it may be said, has carried away better poets and graver men than mr. moxon seems to be, into such namby-pamby nonsense; but mr. moxon is just as absurd in his _grief_ or his _musings_, as in his _love_. when he hears a nightingale--"sad philomel!"--he concludes that the bird was originally created for no other purpose than to prophesy in paradise _the fall of man_, or, as he chooses to collocate the words, _prophetic_ to have mourned of _man_ the _fall_,--p. . but he does not tell us what she has been doing ever since. when he sees two cumberland streams--the brathay and rothay--flowing down, first to a confluence, and afterwards to the sea, he fancies "a _soul-knit_ pair," man and wife, mingling their waters and gliding to their final haven-- in kindred love, the haven contemplation sees _above_! _below_, he would--following his allegory--have said; but rhyme forbade-- and _allegories_ are not _so headstrong_ on the banks of the brathay as on those of the _nile_. a sonnet on thomson's grave is a fine specimen of empty sounds and solid nonsense:-- whene'er i linger, thomson, near thy tomb, where _thamis_-- "_classic cam_" will be somewhat amazed to hear his learned brother called _thamis_-- where thamis urges his majestic way, and the muse loves at twilight hour to stray, i think how in thy theme all _seasons_ bloom;-- what, all four?--_autumn_, nay, _winter_--blooming? what _heart_ so cold that of thy fame has _heard_, and _pauses_ not to _gaze_ upon each scene. we are inclined to be very indulgent to what is called a confusion of metaphors, when it arises from a rush of ideas--but when it is produced by an author's having no idea at all, we can hardly forgive him for equipping the _heart_ with eyes, ears, and legs:--he might just as well have said that on entering twickenham church to visit the tomb, every _heart_ would take off _its hat_, and on going out again would put _its hand_ in _its pockets_ to fee the sexton. and pauses not to gaze upon each scene that was familiar to thy raptured view, those walks beloved by thee while i pursue, musing upon the years that intervene-- why this line _intervenes_ or what it means we do not see--it seems inserted just to make up the number-- methinks, as eve descends, a hymn of praise to thee, their bard, the _sister seasons_ raise! that is, as we understand it, all the _seasons meet together_ on one or more evenings of the year, to sing a hymn to the memory of thompson. this _simultaneous entree_ of the four seasons would be a much more appropriate fancy for the opera stage than for twickenham meadows. such are the tame extravagances--the vapid affectations--the unmeaning mosaic which mr. moxon has laboriously tesselated into fifty and four sonnets. if he had been--as all this childishness at first led us to believe--a very young man--we should have discussed the matter with him in a more conciliatory and persuasive tone; but we find that he is, what we must call, an old offender. we have before us two little volumes of what he entitles poetry--one dated , and the other --which, though more laughable, are not in substance more absurd than his new production. from the first of these we shall extract two or three stanzas of the introductory poem, not only on account of their intrinsic merit, but because they state, pretty roundly, mr. moxon's principles of poetry. he modestly disclaims all rivalry with pope, byron, moore, campbell, scott, rogers, goldsmith, dryden, gray, spenser, milton, and shakespeare; but he, at the same time, intimates that he follows, what he thinks, a truer line of poetry than the before-named illustrious, but, in this point, _mistaken_ individuals. 'tis not a poem with learning fraught, to that i ne'er pretended; nor yet with pope's fine touches wrought, _from that my time prevented_. we skip four intermediate stanzas; then comes milton divine and great shakespeare with reverence i mention; my name with theirs shall ne'er appear, _'tis far from my intention!_ if poetry, as one _pretends, be all imagination!_ why then, at once, _my bardship ends-- 'mong prose i take my station._ _moxon's poems, p. , ed. ._ but as _"common sense"_ must see, says mr. moxon, that _imagination_ can have nothing to do with _poetry_, he engages to pursue his tuneful vocation, subject to _one_ condition-- you'll hear no more from me, if _critics prove unkind;_ my next _in simple prose_ must be, _unless i favour find!_ we regret that some _kind_--or, as mr. moxon would have thought it, _unkind_--critic, did not, on the appearance of this first volume, confirm his own misgivings that he had been all this time, like the man in the farce, talking not only _prose_, but _nonsense_ into the bargain: this disagreeable information the pretension of his recent publication obliges us to convey to him. the fact is, that the volume at first struck us with serious alarm. its typographical splendour led us to fear that this style of writing was getting into fashion; and the hints about _"classic cam"_ seemed to impute the production to one of our universities: on turning, with some curiosity, to the title-page, for the name of the too indulgent bookseller who had bestowed such unmerited embellishment on a work which we think of so little value--_we found none_; and on further inquiry learned that _dover street, piccadilly_, and not the banks of _"classic cam"_ is the seat of this sonneteering muse--in short, that mr. moxon, the bookseller, is his own poet, and that mr. moxon, the poet, is his own bookseller. this discovery at once calmed both our anxieties--it relieved the university of cambridge from an awful responsibility, which might have called down upon it the vengeance of lord radnor; and it accounted--without any imputation on the public taste--for the extraordinary care and cost with which the paternal solicitude of the poet-publisher had adorned his own volume. mr. moxon seems to be--like most sonneteers--a man of amiable disposition, and to have an ear--as he certainly has a _memory_--for poetry; and--if he had not been an old hand--we should not have presumed to say that he is incapable of anything better than this tumid commonplace. but, however that may be, we do earnestly exhort him to abandon the self-deluding practice of being his own publisher. whatever may have been said in disparagement of the literary taste of the booksellers, it will at least be admitted that their experience of public opinion and a due attention to their own pecuniary interest, enable them to operate as a salutary check upon the blind and presumptive vanity of small authors. the necessity of obtaining the _"imprimatur"_ of a publisher is a very wholesome restraint, from which mr. moxon--unluckily for himself and for us--found himself relieved. if he could have looked at his own work with the impartiality, and perhaps the good taste, that he would have exercised on that of a stranger, _he_ would have saved himself a good deal of expense and vexation--and _we_ should have been spared the painful necessity of contrasting the ambitious pretensions of his volume with its very moderate literary merit. on "vanity fair" and "jane eyre" [from _the quarterly review_, december, ] . _vanity fair; a novel without a hero._ by william makepeace thackeray. london, . . _jane eyre; an autobiography._ edited by currer bell. in vols. london. . a remarkable novel is a great event for english society. it is a kind of common friend, about whom people can speak the truth without fear of being compromised, and confess their emotions without being ashamed. we are a particularly shy and reserved people, and set about nothing so awkwardly as the simple art of getting really acquainted with each other. we meet over and over again in what is conventionally called "easy society," with the tacit understanding to go so far and no farther; to be as polite as we ought to be, and as intellectual as we can; but mutually and honourably to forbear lifting those veils which each spreads over his inner sentiments and sympathies. for this purpose a host of devices have been contrived by which all the forms of friendship may be gone through, without committing ourselves to one spark of the spirit. we fly with eagerness to some common ground in which each can take the liveliest interest, without taking the slightest in the world in his companion. our various fashionable manias, for charity one season, for science the next, are only so many clever contrivances for keeping our neighbour at arm's length. we can attend committees, and canvass for subscribers, and archaeologise, and geologise, and take ether with our fellow christians for a twelvemonth, as we might sit cross-legged and smoke the pipe of fraternity with a turk for the same period--and know at the end of the time as little of the real feelings of the one as we should about the domestic relations of the other. but there are ways and means for lifting the veil which equally favour our national idiosyncrasy; and a new and remarkable novel is one of them--especially the nearer it comes to real life. we invite our neighbour to a walk with the deliberate and malicious object of getting thoroughly acquainted with him. we ask no impertinent questions-- we proffer no indiscreet confidences--we do not even sound him, ever so delicately, as to his opinion of a common friend, for he would be sure not to say, lest we should go and tell; but we simply discuss becky sharp, or jane eyre, and our object is answered at once. there is something about these two new and noticeable characters which especially compels everybody to speak out. they are not to be dismissed with a few commonplace moralities and sentimentalities. they do not fit any ready-made criticism. they give the most stupid something to think of, and the most reserved something to say; the most charitable too are betrayed into home comparisons which they usually condemn, and the most ingenious stumble into paradoxes which they can hardly defend. becky and jane also stand well side by side both in their analogies and their contrasts. both the ladies are governesses, and both make the same move in society; the one, in jane eyre phraseology, marrying her "master," and the other her master's son. neither starts in life with more than a moderate capital of good looks--jane eyre with hardly that--for it is the fashion now-a-days with novelists to give no encouragement to the insolence of mere beauty, but rather to prove to all whom it may concern how little a sensible woman requires to get on with in the world. both have also an elfish kind of nature, with which they divine the secrets of other hearts, and conceal those of their own; and both rejoice in that peculiarity of feature which mademoiselle de luzy has not contributed to render popular, viz., green eyes. beyond this, however, there is no similarity either in the minds, manners, or fortunes of the two heroines. they think and act upon diametrically opposite principles-- at least so the author of "jane eyre" intends us to believe--and each, were they to meet, which we should of all things enjoy to see them do, would cordially despise and abominate the other. which of the two, however, would most successfully _dupe_ the other is a different question, and one not so easy to decide; though we have our own ideas upon the subject. we must discuss "vanity fair" first, which, much as we were entitled to expect from its author's pen, has fairly taken us by surprise. we were perfectly aware that mr. thackeray had of old assumed the jester's habit, in order the more unrestrainedly to indulge the privilege of speaking the truth;--we had traced his clever progress through "fraser's magazine" and the ever-improving pages of "punch"--which wonder of the time has been infinitely obliged to him--but still we were little prepared for the keen observation, the deep wisdom, and the consummate art which he has interwoven in the slight texture and whimsical pattern of "vanity fair." everybody, it is to be supposed, has read the volume by this time; and even for those who have not, it is not necessary to describe the order of the story. it is not a novel, in the common acceptation of the word, with a plot purposely contrived to bring about certain scenes, and develop certain characters, but simply a history of those average sufferings, pleasures, penalties, and rewards to which various classes of mankind gravitate as naturally and certainly in this world as the sparks fly upward. it is only the same game of life which every player sooner or later makes for himself--were he to have a hundred chances, and shuffle the cards of circumstance every time. it is only the same busy, involved drama which may be seen at any time by any one, who is not engrossed with the magnified minutiae of his own petty part, but with composed curiosity looks on to the stage where his fellow-men and women are the actors; and that not even heightened by the conventional colouring which madame de staël philosophically declares that fiction always wants in order to make up for its not being truth. indeed, so far from taking any advantage of this novelist's licence, mr. thackeray has hardly availed himself of the natural average of remarkable events that really do occur in this life. the battle of waterloo, it is true, is introduced; but, as far as regards the story, it brings about only one death and one bankruptcy, which might either of them have happened in a hundred other ways. otherwise the tale runs on, with little exception, in that humdrum course of daily monotony, out of which some people coin materials to act, and others excuses to doze, just as their dispositions may be. it is this reality which is at once the charm and the misery here. with all these unpretending materials it is one of the most amusing, but also one of the most distressing books we have read for many a long year. we almost long for a little exaggeration and improbability to relieve us of that sense of dead truthfulness which weighs down our hearts, not for the amelias and georges of the story, but for poor kindred human nature. in one light this truthfulness is even an objection. with few exceptions the personages are too like our every-day selves and neighbours to draw any distinct moral from. we cannot see our way clearly. palliations of the bad and disappointments in the good are perpetually obstructing our judgment, by bringing what should decide it too close to that common standard of experience in which our only rule of opinion is charity. for it is only in fictitious characters which are highly coloured for one definite object, or in notorious personages viewed from a distance, that the course of the true moral can be seen to run straight--once bring the individual with his life and circumstances closely before you, and it is lost to the mental eye in the thousand pleas and witnesses, unseen and unheard before, which rise up to overshadow it. and what are all these personages in "vanity fair" but feigned names for our own beloved friends and acquaintances, seen under such a puzzling cross-light of good in evil, and evil in good, of sins and sinnings against, of little to be praised virtues, and much to be excused vices, that we cannot presume to moralise upon them--not even to judge them,--content to exclaim sorrowfully with the old prophet, "alas! my brother!" every actor on the crowded stage of "vanity fair" represents some type of that perverse mixture of humanity in which there is ever something not wholly to approve or to condemn. there is the desperate devotion of a fond heart to a false object, which we cannot respect; there is the vain, weak man, half good and half bad, who is more despicable in our eyes than the decided villain. there are the irretrievably wretched education, and the unquenchably manly instincts, both contending in the confirmed _roué_, which melt us to the tenderest pity. there is the selfishness and self-will which the possessor of great wealth and fawning relations can hardly avoid. there is the vanity and fear of the world, which assist mysteriously with pious principles in keeping a man respectable; there are combinations of this kind of every imaginable human form and colour, redeemed but feebly by the steady excellence of an awkward man, and the genuine heart of a vulgar woman, till we feel inclined to tax mr. thackeray with an under estimate of our nature, forgetting that madame de staël is right after all, and that without a little conventional rouge no human conplexion can stand the stage-lights of fiction. but if these performers give us pain, we are not ashamed to own, as we are speaking openly, that the chief actress herself gives us none at all. for there is of course a principal pilgrim in vanity fair, as much as in its emblematical original, bunyan's "progress"; only unfortunately this one is travelling the wrong way. and we say "unfortunately" merely by way of courtesy, for in reality we care little about the matter. no, becky--our hearts neither bleed for you, nor cry out against you. you are wonderfully clever, and amusing, and accomplished, and intelligent, and the soho _ateliers_ were not the best nurseries for a moral training; and you were married early in life to a regular blackleg, and you have had to live upon your wits ever since, which is not an improving sort of maintenance; and there is much to be said for and against; but still you are not one of us, and there is an end to our sympathies and censures. people who allow their feelings to be lacerated by such a character and career as yours, are doing both you and themselves great injustice. no author could have openly introduced a near connexion of satan's into the best london society, nor would the moral end intended have been answered by it; but really and honestly, considering becky in her human character, we know of none which so thoroughly satisfies our highest _beau idéal_ of feminine wickedness, with so slight a shock to our feelings and properties. it is very dreadful, doubtless, that becky neither loved the husband who loved her, nor the child of her own flesh and blood, nor indeed any body but herself; but, as far as she is concerned, we cannot pretend to be scandalized--for how could she without a heart? it is very shocking of course that she committed all sorts of dirty tricks, and jockeyed her neighbours, and never cared what she trampled under foot if it happened to obstruct her step; but how could she be expected to do otherwise without a conscience? the poor little woman was most tryingly placed; she came into the world without the customary letters of credit upon those two great bankers of humanity, "heart and conscience," and it was no fault of hers if they dishonoured all her bills. all she could do in this dilemma was to establish the firmest connexion with the inferior commercial branches of "sense and tact," who secretly do much business in the name of the head concern, and with whom her "fine frontal development" gave her unlimited credit. she saw that selfishness was the metal which the stamp of heart was suborned to pass; that hypocrisy was the homage that vice rendered to virtue; that honesty was, at all events, acted, because it was the best policy; and so she practised the arts of selfishness and hypocrisy like anybody else in vanity fair, only with this difference, that she brought them to their highest possible pitch of perfection. for why is it that, looking round in this world, we find plenty of characters to compare with her up to a certain pitch, but none which reach her actual standard? why is it that, speaking of this friend or that, we say in the tender mercies of our hearts, "no, she is not _quite_ so bad as becky?" we fear not only because she has more heart and conscience, but also because she has less cleverness. no; let us give becky her due. there is enough in this world of ours, as we all know, to provoke a saint, far more a poor little devil like her. she had none of those fellow-feelings which make us wondrous kind. she saw people around her cowards in vice, and simpletons in virtue, and she had no patience with either, for she was as little the one as the other herself. she saw women who loved their husbands and yet teazed them, and ruining their children although they doated upon them, and she sneered at their utter inconsistency. wickedness or goodness, unless coupled with strength, were alike worthless to her. that weakness which is the blessed pledge of our humanity, was to her only the despicable badge of our imperfection. she thought, it might be, of her master's words, "fallen cherub! to be weak is to be miserable!" and wondered how we could be such fools as first to sin and then to be sorry. becky's light was defective, but she acted up to it. her goodness goes as far as good temper, and her principles as far as shrewd sense, and we may thank her consistency for showing us what they are both worth. it is another thing to pretend to settle whether such a character be _primâ facie_ impossible, though devotion to the better sex might well demand the assertion. there are mysteries of iniquity, under the semblance of man and woman, read of in history, or met with in the unchronicled sufferings of private life, which would almost make us believe that the powers of darkness occasionally made use of this earth for a foundling hospital, and sent their imps to us, already provided with a return-ticket. we shall not decide on the lawfulness or otherwise of any attempt to depict such importations; we can only rest perfectly satisfied that, granting the author's premises, it is impossible to imagine them carried out with more felicitous skill and more exquisite consistency than in the heroine of "vanity fair." at all events, the infernal regions have no reason to be ashamed of little becky, nor the ladies either: she has, at least, all the cleverness of the sex. the great charm, therefore, and comfort of becky is, that we may study her without any compunctions. the misery of this life is not the evil that we see, but the good and the evil which are so inextricably twisted together. it is that perpetual memento ever meeting one-- how in this vile world below noblest things find vilest using, that is so very distressing to those who have hearts as well as eyes. but becky relieves them of all this pain--at least in her own person. pity would be thrown away upon one who has not heart enough for it to ache even for herself. becky is perfectly happy, as all must be who excel in what they love best. her life is one exertion of successful power. shame never visits her, for "'tis conscience that makes cowards of us all"--and she has none. she realizes that _ne plus ultra_ of sublunary comfort which it was reserved for a frenchman to define--the blessed combination of _"le bon estomac et le mauvais coeur"_: for becky adds to her other good qualities that of an excellent digestion. upon the whole, we are not afraid to own that we rather enjoy her _ignis fatuus_ course, dragging the weak and the vain and the selffish [transcriber's note: sic], through mud and mire, after her, and acting all parts, from the modest rushlight to the gracious star, just as it suits her. clever little imp that she is! what exquisite tact she shows!--what unflagging good humour!--what ready self-possession! becky never disappoints us; she never even makes us tremble. we know that her answer will come exactly suiting her one particular object, and frequently three or four more in prospect. what respect, too, she has for those decencies which more virtuous, but more stupid humanity, often disdains! what detection of all that is false and mean! what instinct for all that is true and great! she is her master's true pupil in that: she knows what is really divine as well as he, and bows before it. she honours dobbin in spite of his big feet; she respects her husband more than ever she did before, perhaps for the first time, at the very moment when he is stripping not only her jewels, but name, honour, and comfort off her. we are not so sure either whether we are justified in calling hers _"le mauvais coeur."_ becky does not pursue any one vindictively; she never does gratuitous mischief. the fountain is more dry than poisoned. she is even generous--when she can afford it. witness that burst of plain speaking in dobbin's favour to the little dolt amelia, for which we forgive her many a sin. 'tis true she wanted to get rid of her; but let that pass. becky was a thrifty dame, and liked to despatch two birds with one stone. and she was honest, too, after a fashion. the part of wife she acts at first as well, and better than most; but as for that of mother, there she fails from the beginning. she knew that maternal love was no business of hers--that a fine frontal development could give her no help there--and puts so little spirit into her imitation that no one could be taken in for a moment. she felt that that bill, of all others, would be sure to be dishonoured, and it went against her conscience--we mean her sense--to send it in. in short, the only respect in which becky's course gives us pain is when it locks itself into that of another, and more genuine child of this earth. no one can regret those being entangled in her nets whose vanity and meanness of spirit alone led them into its meshes--such are rightly served; but we do grudge her that real sacred thing called _love_, even of a rawdon crawley, who has more of that self-forgetting, all-purifying feeling for his little evil spirit than many a better man has for a good woman. we do grudge becky _a heart_, though it belong only to a swindler. poor, sinned against, vile, degraded, but still true-hearted rawdon!--you stand next in our affections and sympathies to honest dobbin himself. it was the instinct of a good nature which made the major feel that the stamp of the evil one was upon becky; and it was the stupidity of a good nature which made the colonel never suspect it. he was a cheat, a black-leg, an unprincipled dog; but still "rawdon _is_ a man, and be hanged to him," as the rector says. we follow him through the illustrations, which are, in many instances, a delightful enhancement to the text--as he stands there, with his gentle eyelid, coarse moustache, and foolish chin, bringing up becky's coffee-cup with a kind of dumb fidelity; or looking down at little rawdon with a more than paternal tenderness. all amelia's philoprogenitive idolatries do not touch us like one fond instinct of "stupid rawdon." dobbin sheds a halo over all the long-necked, loose-jointed, scotch-looking gentlemen of our acquaintance. flat feet and flap ears seem henceforth incompatible with evil. he reminds us of one of the sweetest creations that have appeared from any modern pen--that plain, awkward, loveable "long walter," in lady georgina fullerton's beautiful novel of "grantley manor." like him, too, in his proper self-respect; for dobbin--lumbering, heavy, shy, and absurdly over modest as the ugly fellow is--is yet true to himself. at one time he seems to be sinking into the mere abject dangler after amelia; but he breaks his chains like a man, and resumes them again like a man, too, although half disenchanted of his amiable delusion. but to return for a moment to becky. the only criticism we would offer is one which the author has almost disarmed by making her mother a frenchwoman. the construction of this little clever monster is diabolically french. such a _lusus naturae_ as a woman without a heart and conscience would, in england, be a mere brutal savage, and poison half a village. france is the land for the real syren, with the woman's face and the dragon's claws. the genus of pigeon and laffarge claims it for its own--only that our heroine takes a far higher class by not requiring the vulgar matter of fact of crime to develop her full powers. it is an affront to becky's tactics to believe that she could ever be reduced to so low a resource, or, that if she were, anybody would find it out. we, therefore, cannot sufficiently applaud the extreme discretion with which mr. thackeray has hinted at the possibly assistant circumstances of joseph sedley's dissolution. a less delicacy of handling would have marred the harmony of the whole design. such a casualty as that suggested to our imagination was not intended for the light net of vanity fair to draw on shore; it would have torn it to pieces. besides it is not wanted. poor little becky is bad enough to satisfy the most ardent student of "good books." wickedness, beyond a certain pitch, gives no increase of gratification even to the sternest moralist; and one of mr. thackeray's excellences is the sparing quantity he consumes. the whole _use_, too, of the work--that of generously measuring one another by this standard--is lost, the moment you convict becky of a capital crime. who can, with any face, liken a dear friend to a murderess? whereas now there are no little symptoms of fascinating ruthlessness, graceful ingratitude, or ladylike selfishness, observable among our charming acquaintance, that we may not immediately detect to an inch, and more effectually intimidate by the simple application of the becky gauge than by the most vehement use of all ten commandments. thanks to mr. thackeray, the world is now provided with an _idea_, which, if we mistake not, will be the skeleton in the corner of every ball-room and boudoir for a long time to come. let us leave it intact in its unique fount and freshness--a becky, and nothing more. we should, therefore, advise our readers to cut out that picture of our heroine's "second appearance as clytemnestra," which casts so uncomfortable a glare over the latter part of the volume, and, disregarding all hints and inuendoes, simply to let the changes and chances of this moral life have due weight in their minds. jos had been much in india. his was a bad life; he ate and drank most imprudently, and his digestion was not to be compared with becky's. no respectable office would have ensured "waterloo sedley." "vanity fair" is pre-eminently a novel of the day--not in the vulgar sense, of which there are too many, but as a literal photograph of the manners and habits of the nineteenth century, thrown on to paper by the light of a powerful mind; and one also of the most artistic effect. mr. thackeray has a peculiar adroitness in leading on the fancy, or rather memory of his readers from one set of circumstances to another by the seeming chances and coincidences of common life, as an artist leads the spectator's eye through the subject of his picture by a skilful repetition of colour. this is why it is impossible to quote from his book with any justice to it. the whole growth of the narrative is so matted and interwoven together with tendril-like links and bindings, that there is no detaching a flower with sufficient length of stalk to exhibit it to advantage. there is that mutual dependence in his characters which is the first requisite in painting every-day life: no one is stuck on a separate pedestal--no one is sitting for his portrait. there may be one exception--we mean sir pitt crawley, senior; it is possible, nay, we hardly doubt, that this baronet was closer drawn from individual life than anybody else in the book; but granting that fact, the animal was so unique an exception, that we wonder so shrewd an artist could stick him into a gallery so full of our familiars. the scenes in germany, we can believe, will seem to many readers of an english book hardly less extravagantly absurd--grossly and gratuitously overdrawn; but the initiated will value them as containing some of the keenest strokes of truth and humour that "vanity fair" exhibits, and not enjoy them the less for being at our neighbour's expense. for the thorough appreciation of the chief character they are quite indispensable too. the whole course of the work may be viewed as the _wander-jahre_ of a far cleverer female, _wilhelm meister_. we have watched her in the ups-and-downs of life--among the humble, the fashionable, the great, and the pious--and found her ever new, yet ever the same; but still becky among the students was requisite to complete the full measure of our admiration. "jane eyre," as a work, and one of equal popularity, is, in almost every respect, a total contrast to "vanity fair." the characters and events, though some of them masterly in conception, are coined expressly for the purpose of bringing out great effects. the hero and heroine are beings both so singularly unattractive that the reader feels they can have no vocation in the novel but to be brought together; and they do things which, though not impossible, lie utterly beyond the bounds of probability. on this account a short sketch of the plan seems requisite; not but what it is a plan familiar enough to all readers of novels-- especially those of the old school and those of the lowest school of our own day. for jane eyre is merely another pamela, who, by the force of her character and the strength of her principles, is carried victoriously through great trials and temptations from the man she loves. nor is she even a pamela adapted and refined to modern notions; for though the story is conducted without those derelictions of decorum which we are to believe had their excuse in the manners of richardson's time, yet it stamped with a coarseness of language and laxity of tone which have certainly no excuse in ours. it is a very remarkable book: we have no remembrance of another combining such genuine power with such horrid taste. both together have equally assisted to gain the great popularity it has enjoyed; for in these days of extravagant adoration of all that bears the stamp of novelty and originality, sheer rudeness and vulgarity have come in for a most mistaken worship. the story is written in the first person. jane begins with her earliest recollections, and at once takes possession of the readers' intensest interest by the masterly picture of a strange and oppressed child she raises up in a few strokes before him. she is an orphan, and a dependant in the house of a selfish, hard-hearted aunt, against whom the disposition of the little jane chafes itself in natural antipathy, till she contrives to make the unequal struggle as intolerable to her oppressor as it is to herself. she is, therefore, at eight years of age, got rid of to a sort of dothegirls hall, where she continues to enlist our sympathies for a time with her little pinched fingers, cropped hair, and empty stomach. but things improve: the abuses of the institution are looked into. the puritan patron, who holds that young orphan girls are only safely brought up upon the rules of la trappe, is superseded by an enlightened committee--the school assumes a sound english character-- jane progresses duly from scholar to teacher, and passes ten profitable and not unhappy years at lowood. then she advertises for a situation as governess, and obtains one immediately in one of the midland counties. we see her, therefore, as she leaves lowood, to enter upon a new life--a small, plain, odd creature, who has been brought up dry upon school learning, and somewhat stunted accordingly in mind and body, and who is now thrown upon the world as ignorant of its ways, and as destitute of its friendships, as a shipwrecked mariner upon a strange coast. thornfield hall is the property of mr. rochester--a bachelor addicted to travelling. she finds it at first in all the peaceful prestige of an english gentleman's seat when "nobody is at the hall." the companions are an old decayed gentlewoman housekeeper--a far away cousin of the squire's--and a young french child, jane's pupil, mr. rochester's ward and reputed daughter. there is a pleasing monotony in the summer solitude of the old country house, with its comfort, respectability, and dulness, which jane paints to the life; but there is one circumstance which varies the sameness and casts a mysterious feeling over the scene. a strange laugh is heard from time to time in a distant part of the house--a laugh which grates discordantly upon jane's ear. she listens, watches, and inquires, but can discover nothing but a plain matter of fact woman, who sits sewing somewhere in the attics, and goes up and down stairs peaceably to and from her dinner with the servants. but a mystery there is, though nothing betrays it, and it comes in with marvellous effect from the monotonous reality of all around. after awhile mr. rochester comes to thornfield, and sends for the child and her governess occasionally to bear him company. he is a dark, strange-looking man--strong and large--of the brigand stamp, with fine eyes and lowering brows--blunt and sarcastic in his manners, with a kind of misanthropical frankness, which seems based upon utter contempt for his fellow-creatures and a surly truthfulness which is more rudeness than honesty. with his arrival disappears all the prestige of country innocence that had invested thornfield hall. he brings the taint of the world upon him, and none of its illusions. the queer little governess is something new to him. he talks to her at one time imperiously as to a servant, and at another recklessly as to a man. he pours into her ears disgraceful tales of his past life, connected with the birth of little adele, which any man with common respect for a woman, and that a mere girl of eighteen, would have spared her; but which eighteen in this case listens to as if it were nothing new, and certainly nothing distasteful. he is captious and turk-like--she is one day his confidant, and another his unnoticed dependant. in short, by her account, mr. rochester is a strange brute, somewhat in the squire western style of absolute and capricious eccentricity, though redeemed in him by signs of a cultivated intellect, and gleams of a certain fierce justice of heart. he has a _mind_, and when he opens it at all, he opens it freely to her. jane becomes attached to her "master," as pamela-like she calls him, and it is not difficult to see that solitude and propinquity are taking effect upon him also. an odd circumstance heightens the dawning romance. jane is awoke one night by that strange discordant laugh close to her ear-- then a noise as if hands feeling along the wall. she rises--opens her door, finds the passage full of smoke, is guided by it to her master's room, whose bed she discovers enveloped in flames, and by her timely aid saves his life. after this they meet no more for ten days, when mr. rochester returns from a visit to a neighbouring family, bringing with him a housefull of distinguished guests; at the head of whom is miss blanche ingram, a haughty beauty of high birth, and evidently the especial object of the squire's attentions--upon which tumultuous irruption miss eyre slips back into her naturally humble position. our little governess is now summoned away to attend her aunt's death-bed, who is visited by some compunctions towards her, and she is absent a month. when she returns thornfield hall is quit of all its guests, and mr. rochester and she resume their former life of captious cordiality on the one side, and diplomatic humility on the other. at the same time the bugbear of miss ingram and of mr. rochester's engagement with her is kept up, though it is easy to see that this and all concerning that lady is only a stratagem to try jane's character and affection upon the most approved griselda precedent. accordingly an opportunity for explanation ere long offers itself, where mr. rochester has only to take it. miss eyre is desired to walk with him in shady alleys, and to sit with him on the roots of an old chestnut-tree towards the close of evening, and of course she cannot disobey her "master"--whereupon there ensues a scene which, as far as we remember, is new equally in art or nature; in which miss eyre confesses her love--whereupon mr. rochester drops not only his cigar (which she seems to be in the habit of lighting for him) but his mask, and finally offers not only heart, but hand. the wedding day is soon fixed, but strange misgivings and presentiments haunt the young lady's mind. the night but one before her bed-room is entered by a horrid phantom, who tries on the wedding veil, sends jane into a swoon of terror, and defeats all the favourite refuge of a bad dream by leaving the veil in two pieces. but all is ready. the bride has no friends to assist--the couple walk to church--only the clergyman and the clerk are there--but jane's quick eye has seen two figures lingering among the tombstones, and these two follow them into church. the ceremony commences, when at the due charge which summons any man to come forward and show just cause why they should not be joined together, a voice interposes to forbid the marriage. there is an impediment, and a serious one. the bridegroom has a wife not only living, but living under the very roof of thornfield hall. hers was that discordant laugh which had so often caught jane's ear; she it was who in her malice had tried to burn mr. rochester in his bed--who had visited jane by night and torn her veil, and whose attendant was that same pretended sew-woman who had so strongly excited jane's curiosity. for mr. rochester's wife is a creature, half fiend, half maniac, whom he had married in a distant part of the world, and whom now, in self-constituted code of morality, he had thought it his right, and even his duty, to supersede by a more agreeable companion. now follow scenes of a truly tragic power. this is the grand crisis in jane's life. her whole soul is wrapt up in mr. rochester. he has broken her trust, but not diminished her love. he entreats her to accept all that he still can give, his heart and his home; he pleads with the agony not only of a man who has never known what it was to conquer a passion, but of one who, by that same self-constituted code, now burns to atone for a disappointed crime. there is no one to help her against him or against herself. jane had no friends to stand by her at the altar, and she has none to support her now she is plucked away from it. there is no one to be offended or disgraced at her following him to the sunny land of italy, as he proposes, till the maniac should die. there is no duty to any one but to herself, and this feeble reed quivers and trembles beneath the overwhelming weight of love and sophistry opposed to it. but jane triumphs; in the middle of the night she rises--glides out of her room--takes off her shoes as she passes mr. rochester's chamber;--leaves the house, and casts herself upon a world more desert than ever to her-- without a shilling and without a friend. thus the great deed of self-conquest is accomplished; jane has passed through the fire of temptation from without and from within; her character is stamped from that day; we need therefore follow her no further into wanderings and sufferings which, though not unmixed with plunder from minerva-lane, occupy some of, on the whole, the most striking chapters in the book. virtue of course finds her reward. the maniac wife sets fire to thornfield hall, and perishes herself in the flames. mr. rochester, in endeavouring to save her, loses the sight of his eyes. jane rejoins her blind master; they are married, after which of course the happy man recovers his sight. such is the outline of a tale in which, combined with great materials for power and feeling, the reader may trace gross inconsistencies and improbabilities, and chief and foremost that highest moral offence a novel writer can commit, that of making an unworthy character interesting in the eyes of the reader. mr. rochester is a man who deliberately and secretly seeks to violate the laws both of god and man, and yet we will be bound half our lady readers are enchanted with him for a model of generosity and honour. we would have thought that such a hero had had no chance, in the purer taste of the present day; but the popularity of jane eyre is a proof how deeply the love for illegitimate romance is implanted in our nature. not that the author is strictly responsible for this. mr. rochester's character is tolerably consistent. he is made as coarse and as brutal as can in all conscience be required to keep our sympathies at a distance. in point of literary consistency the hero is at all events impugnable, though we cannot say as much for the heroine. as to jane's character--there is none of that harmonious unity about it which made little becky so grateful a subject of analysis--nor are the discrepancies of that kind which have their excuse and their response in our nature. the inconsistencies of jane's character lie mainly not in her own imperfections, though of course she has her share, but in the author's. there is that confusion in the relations between cause and effect, which is not so much untrue to human nature as to human art. the error in jane eyre is, not that her character is this or that, but that she is made one thing in the eyes of her imaginary companions, and another in that of the actual reader. there is a perpetual disparity between the account she herself gives of the effect she produces, and the means shown us by which she brings that effect about. we hear nothing but self-eulogiums on the perfect tact and wondrous penetration with which she is gifted, and yet almost every word she utters offends us, not only with the absence of these qualities, but with the positive contrasts of them, in either her pedantry, stupidity, or gross vulgarity. she is one of those ladies who puts us in the unpleasant predicament of undervaluing their very virtues for dislike of the person in whom they are represented. one feels provoked as jane eyre stands before us--for in the wonderful reality of her thoughts and descriptions, she seems accountable for all done in her name--with principles you must approve in the main, and yet with language and manners that offend you in every particular. even in that _chef-d'oeuvre_ of brilliant retrospective sketching, the description of her early life, it is the childhood and not the child that interests you. the little jane, with her sharp eyes and dogmatic speeches, is a being you neither could fondle nor love. there is a hardness in her infantine earnestness, and a spiteful precocity in her reasoning, which repulses all our sympathy. one sees that she is of a nature to dwell upon and treasure up every slight and unkindness, real or fancied, and such natures we know are surer than any others to meet with plenty of this sort of thing. as the child, so also the woman--an uninteresting, sententious, pedantic thing; with no experience of the world, and yet with no simplicity or freshness in its stead. what are her first answers to mr. rochester but such as would have quenched all interest, even for a prettier woman, in any man of common knowledge of what was nature--and especially in a _blasé_ monster like him? * * * * * but the crowning scene is the offer--governesses are said to be sly on such occasions, but jane out-governesses them all--little becky would have blushed for her. they are sitting together at the foot of the old chestnut tree, as we have already mentioned, towards the close of evening, and mr. rochester is informing her, with his usual delicacy of language, that he is engaged to miss ingram--"a strapper! jane, a real strapper!"--and that as soon as he brings home his bride to thornfield, she, the governess, must "trot forthwith"--but that he shall make it his duty to look out for employment and an asylum for her--indeed, that he has already heard of a charming situation in the depths of ireland--all with a brutal jocoseness which most women of spirit, unless grievously despairing of any other lover, would have resented, and any woman of sense would have seen through. but jane, that profound reader of the human heart, and especially of mr. rochester's, does neither. she meekly hopes she may be allowed to stay where she is till she has found another shelter to betake herself to--she does not fancy going to ireland--why? "it is a long way off, sir." "no matter--a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage or the distance." "not the voyage, but the distance, sir; and then the sea is a barrier--" "from what, jane?" "from england, and from thornfield; and--" "well?" "from _you_, sir." --vol. ii, p. . and then the lady bursts into tears in the most approved fashion. although so clever in giving hints, how wonderfully slow she is in taking them! even when, tired of his cat's play, mr. rochester proceeds to rather indubitable demonstrations of affection--"enclosing me in his arms, gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips"--jane has no idea what he can mean. some ladies would have thought it high time to leave the squire alone with his chestnut tree; or, at all events, unnecessary to keep up that tone of high-souled feminine obtusity which they are quite justified in adopting if gentlemen will not speak out--but jane again does neither. not that we say she was wrong, but quite the reverse, considering the circumstances of the case-- mr. rochester was her master, and "duchess or nothing" was her first duty--only she was not quite so artless as the author would have us suppose. but if the manner in which she secures the prize be not inadmissible according to the rules of the art, that in which she manages it when caught, is quite without authority or precedent, except perhaps in the servants' hall. most lover's play is wearisome and nonsensical to the lookers on--but the part jane assumes is one which could only be efficiently sustained by the substitution of sam for her master. coarse as mr. rochester is, one winces for him under the infliction of this housemaid _beau idéal_ of the arts of coquetry. a little more, and we should have flung the book aside to lie for ever among the trumpery with which such scenes ally it; but it were a pity to have halted here, for wonderful things lie beyond--scenes of suppressed feeling, more fearful to witness than the most violent tornados of passion--struggles with such intense sorrow and suffering as it is sufficient misery to know that any one should have conceived, far less passed through; and yet with that stamp of truth which takes precedence in the human heart before actual experience. the flippant, fifth-rate, plebeian actress has vanished, and only a noble, high-souled woman, bound to us by the reality of her sorrow, and yet raised above us by the strength of her will, stands in actual life before us. if this be jane eyre, the author has done her injustice hitherto, not we. * * * * * we have said that this was the picture of a natural heart. this, to our view, is the great and crying mischief of the book. jane eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit, and more dangerous to exhibit from that prestige of principle and self-control which is liable to dazzle the eye too much for it to observe the inefficient and unsound foundation on which it rests. it is true jane does right, and exerts great moral strength, but it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself. no christian grace is perceptible upon her. she has inherited in fullest measure the worst sin of our fallen nature--the sin of pride. jane eyre is proud, and therefore she is ungrateful too. it pleased god to make her an orphan, friendless, and penniless--yet she thanks nobody, and least of all him, for the food and raiment, the friends, companions, and instructors of her helpless youth--for the care and education vouchsafed to her till she was capable in mind as fitted in years to provide for herself. on the contrary, she looks upon all that has been done for her not only as her undoubted right, but as falling far short of it. the doctrine of humility is not more foreign to her mind than it is repudiated by her heart. it is by her own talents, virtues, and courage that she is made to attain the summit of human happiness, and, as far as jane eyre's own statement is concerned, no one would think that she owed anything either to god above or to man below. she flees from mr. rochester, and has not a being to turn to. why was this? the excellence of the present institution at casterton, which succeeded that of cowan bridge near kirkby lonsdale--these being distinctly, as we hear, the original and the reformed lowoods of the book--is pretty generally known. jane had lived there for eight years with girls and fifteen teachers. why had she formed no friendships among them? other orphans have left the same and similar institutions, furnished with friends for life, and puzzled with homes to choose from. how comes it that jane had acquired neither? among that number of associates there were surely some exceptions to what she so presumptuously stigmatises as "the society of inferior minds." of course it suited the author's end to represent the heroine as utterly destitute of the common means of assistance, in order to exhibit both her trials and her powers of self-support--the whole book rests on this assumption--but it is one which, under the circumstances, is very unnatural and very unjust. altogether the auto-biography of jane eyre is pre-eminently an anti-christian composition. there is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against god's appointment--there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in god's word or in god's providence--there is that pervading tone of ungodly discontent which is at once the most prominent and the most subtle evil which the law and the pulpit, which all civilized society in fact has at the present day to contend with. we do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written jane eyre. still we say again this is a very remarkable book. we are painfully alive to the moral, religious, and literary deficiencies of the picture, and such passages of beauty and power as we have quoted cannot redeem it, but it is impossible not to be spell-bound with the freedom of the touch. it would be mere hackneyed courtesy to call it "fine writing." it bears no impress of being written at all, but is poured out rather in the heat and hurry of an instinct, which flows ungovernably on to its object, indifferent by what means it reaches it, and unconscious too. as regards the author's chief object, however, it is a failure--that, namely, of making a plain, odd woman, destitute of all the conventional features of feminine attraction, interesting in our sight. we deny that he has succeeded in this. jane eyre, in spite of some grand things about her, is a being totally uncongenial to our feelings from beginning to end. we acknowledge her firmness--we respect her determination--we feel for her struggles; but, for all that, and setting aside higher considerations, the impression she leaves on our mind is that of a decidedly vulgar-minded woman--one whom we should not care for as an acquaintance, whom we should not seek as a friend, whom we should not desire for a relation, and whom we should scrupulously avoid for a governess. there seems to have arisen in the novel-reading world some doubts as to who really wrote this book; and various rumours, more or less romantic, have been current in mayfair, the metropolis of gossip, as to the authorship. for example, jane eyre is sentimentally assumed to have proceeded from the pen of mr. thackeray's governess, whom he had himself chosen as his model of becky, and who, in mingled love and revenge, personified him in return as mr. rochester. in this case, it is evident that the author of "vanity fair," whose own pencil makes him grey-haired, has had the best of it, though his children may have had the worst, having, at all events, succeeded in hitting the vulnerable point in the becky bosom, which it is our firm belief no man born of woman, from her soho to her ostend days, had ever so much as grazed. to this ingenious rumour the coincidence of the second edition of jane eyre being dedicated to mr. thackeray has probably given rise. for our parts, we see no great interest in the question at all. the first edition of jane eyre purports to be edited by currer bell, one of a trio of brothers, or sisters, or cousins, by names currer, acton, and ellis bell, already known as the joint-authors of a volume of poems. the second edition the same--dedicated, however, "by the author," to mr. thackeray; and the dedication (itself an indubitable _chip_ of jane eyre) signed currer bell. author and editor therefore are one, and we are as much satisfied to accept this double individual under the name of "currer bell," as under any other, more or less euphonious. whoever it be, it is a person who, with great mental powers, combines a total ignorance of the habits of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion. and as these characteristics appear more or less in the writings of all three, currer, acton, and ellis alike, for their poems differ less in degree of power than in kind, we are ready to accept the fact of their identity or of their relationship with equal satisfaction. at all events there can be no interest attached to the writer of "wuthering heights "--a novel succeeding "jane eyre," and purporting to be written by ellis bell--unless it were for the sake of more individual reprobation. for though there is a decided family likeness between the two, yet the aspect of the jane and rochester animals in their native state, as catherine and heathfield [transcriber's note: sic], is too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of english readers. with all the unscrupulousness of the french school of novels it combines that repulsive vulgarity in the choice of its vice which supplies its own antidote. the question of authorship, therefore, can deserve a moment's curiosity only as far as "jane eyre" is concerned, and though we cannot pronounce that it appertains to a real mr. currer bell and to no other, yet that it appertains to a man, and not, as many assert, to a woman, we are strongly inclined to affirm. without entering into the question whether the power of the writing be above her, or the vulgarity below her, there are, we believe, minutiae of circumstantial evidence which at once acquit the feminine hand. no woman--a lady friend, whom we are always happy to consult, assures us--makes mistakes in her own _métier_-- no woman _trusses game_ and garnishes dessert-dishes with the same hands, or talks of so doing in the same breath. above all, no woman attires another in such fancy dresses as jane's ladies assume--miss ingram coming down, irresistible, "in a _morning_ robe of sky-blue crape, a gauze azure scarf twisted in her hair!!" no lady, we understand, when suddenly roused in the night, would think of hurrying on "_a frock_." they have garments more convenient for such occasions, and more becoming too. this evidence seems incontrovertible. even granting that these incongruities were purposely assumed, for the sake of disguising the female pen, there is nothing gained; for if we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex. on george eliot [from _the quarterly review_, october, ] . _scenes of clerical life_ [containing _the sad fortunes of the reverend amos barton; mr. gilfil's love story_; and _janet's repentance_]. by george eliot. second edition. vols. edinburgh and london, . . _adam bede_. by george eliot. sixth edition, vols. . . _the mill on the floss_. by george eliot. vols. . we frequently hear the remark, that in the present day everything is tending to uniformity--that all minds are taught to think alike, that the days of novelty have departed. to us, however, it appears that the age abounds in new and abnormal modes of thought--we had almost said, forms of being. what could be so new and so unlikely as that the young and irreproachable maiden daughter of a clergyman should have produced so extraordinary a work as "jane eyre,"--a work of which we were compelled to express the opinion that the unknown and mysterious "currer bell" held "a heathenish doctrine of religion"; that the ignorance which the book displayed as to the proprieties of female dress was hardly compatible with the idea of its having been written by a woman; but that, if a woman at all, the writer must be "one who had, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex." in attempting to guess at the character and circumstances of the writer, a reviewer could only choose among such types of men and women as he had known, or heard, or read of. an early european settler in australia, in conjecturing whether his garden had been ravaged by a bird or by a quadruped, would not light readily on the conception of an ornithorhynchus; and assuredly no one accustomed only to ordinary men and women could have divined the character, the training, and the position of charlotte brontë, as they have been made known to us by her biographer's unsparing revelations. it was not to be expected that any one should have imagined the life of howorth [trasncriber's note: sic] parsonage; the gifted, wayward, and unhappy sisterhood in their cheerless home; the rudeness of the only society which was within their reach; while their views of anything beyond their own immediate circle, and certain unpleasing forms of school-life which they had known, were drawn from the representations of a brother whose abilities they regarded with awe, but who in other respects appears to have been an utterly worthless debauchee; lying and slandering, bragging not only of the sins which he had committed, but of many which he had not committed; thoroughly depraved himself, and tainting the thoughts of all within his sphere. there was, therefore, in "jane eyre," as the reviewer supposed, the influence of a corrupt male mind, although this influence had been exerted through an unsuspected medium. we now know how it was that a clergyman's daughter, herself innocent, and honourably devoted to the discharge of many a painful duty, could have written such a book as "jane eyre" but without such explanations as mrs. gaskell has placed (perhaps somewhat too unreservedly) before the world, the thing would have been inconceivable. indeed there is very sufficient evidence that the quarterly reviewer was by no means alone in entertaining the opinions we have referred to: for the book was most vehemently cried up-- the society of the authoress, when she became known, was most eagerly courted--assiduous attempts were made (greatly to her annoyance) to enlist her, to exhibit her, to trade on her fame--by the very persons who would have been most ready to welcome her if she had been such as the reviewer supposed her to be. and it is clear that the gentleman who introduced himself to her acquaintance on the ground that each of them had "written a naughty book" must have drawn pretty much the same conclusions from the tone of miss brontë's first novel as the writer in this review. in like manner a great and remarkable departure from ordinary forms and conditions has caused extreme uncertainty and many mistaken guesses as to the new novelist who writes under the name of george eliot. one critic of considerable pretensions, for instance, declared his belief that "george eliot" was "a gentleman of high-church tendencies"; next came the strange mystification which ascribed the "eliot" tales to one mr. joseph liggins; and finally, the public learnt on authority that the "gentleman of high church tendencies" was a lady; and that this lady was the same who had given a remarkable proof of mastery over both the german language and her own, but had certainly not established a reputation for orthodoxy, by a translation of strauss's "life of jesus." it is now too late to claim credit for having discovered the female authorship before this disclosure of the fact. but it seems to us impossible, when once the idea has been suggested, to read through these books without finding confirmation of it in almost every page. there is, indeed, power such as is rarely given to woman (or to man either); there are traces of knowledge which is not usual among women (although some of the classical quotations might at least have been more correctly printed); there is a good deal of coarseness, which it is unpleasant to think of as the work of a woman; and, as we shall have occasion to observe more fully hereafter, the influence which these novels are likely to exercise over the public taste is not altogether such as a woman should aim at. but, with all this, the tone and atmosphere of the books are unquestionably feminine. the men are a woman's men--the women are a woman's women; the points on which the descriptions dwell in persons of each sex are those which a woman would choose. in matters of dress we are assured that "george eliot" avoids the errors of "jane eyre"; for no doubt she has had better opportunities of study than those which were afforded by the sunday finery of howorth church. the sketches of nature, of character, of life and manners, show female observation; penetrating where it alone could penetrate, and usually stopping at the boundaries beyond which it does not advance.... on looking at these very slight sketches we cannot but be struck by the uniformly melancholy ending of the tales. the first culminates in the death of the heroine (a word which in relation to these stories must be very loosely interpreted), mrs. barton; the second, in the death of the heroine, mrs. gilfil; the third, in the death of the hero, mr. tryan; the fourth, in the death of one of the heroines, hetty sorrel; the fifth, in the simultaneous death of the heroine and her brother, who is, we suppose, to be regarded as the chief hero. surely this is an exaggerated representation of the proportion which sorrow bears to happiness in human life; and the fact that a popular writer has (whether consciously or not) brought every one of the five stories which she has published to a tragical end gives a very uncomfortable idea of the tone of our present literature. and other such symptoms are only too plentiful--the announcement of a novel with the title of "why paul freeoll killed his wife" being one of the latest. with all respect for the talents of the lady who offers us the solution of this question, we must honestly profess that we would rather not know, and that we regret such an employment of her pen. and in "george eliot's" writings there is very much of this kind to regret. she delights in unpleasant subjects--in the representation of things which are repulsive, coarse, and degrading. thus, in "mr. gilfil's story," tina is only prevented from committing murder by the opportune death of her intended victim. in "janet's repentance," a drunken husband beats his beautiful but drunken wife, turns her out of doors at midnight in her night-dress, and dies of "_delirium tremens_ and _meningitis_." ... so, in "adam bede" we have all the circumstances of hetty's seduction and the birth and murder of her illegitimate child; and in the "mill on the floss" there are the almost indecent details of mere animal passion in the loves of stephen and maggie. if these are, as the writer's more thorough-going admirers would tell us, the depths of human nature, we do not see what good can be expected from raking them up,--not for the benefit of those whom the warnings may concern (for these are not likely to heed any warnings which may be presented in such a form), but for the amusement of ordinary readers in hours of idleness and relaxation. compare "adam bede" with that one of scott's novels which has something in common with it as to story--the "heart of midlothian." in each a beautiful young woman of the peasant class is tried and condemned for child-murder; but, although condemned on circumstancial evidence under a law of peculiar severity, effie deans is really innocent, whereas hetty sorrel is guilty. in the novel of the last generation we see little of effie, and our attention is chiefly drawn to the simple heroism of her sister jeanie. in the novel of the present day, everything about hetty is most elaborately described: her thoughts throughout the whole course of the seduction, her misery on discovering that there is evidence of her frailty, her sufferings on the journey to windsor and back (for it is the edie and not the jeanie of this tale that makes a long solitary journey to the south), her despairing hardness in the prison, her confession, her behaviour on the way to the gallows. that all this is represented with extraordinary force we need not say; and doubtless the partisans of "george eliot" would tell us that scott could not have written the chapters in question. we do not think it necessary to discuss that point, but we are sure that in any case he _would_ not have written them, because his healthy judgment would have rejected such matters as unfit for the novelist's art. the boldness with which george eliot chooses her subjects is very remarkable. it is not that, like other writers, she fails in the attempt to represent people as agreeable and interesting, but she knowingly forces _dis_agreeable people on us, and insists that we shall be interested in their story by the skill with which it is told. mr. amos barton, for instance, is as uninteresting a person as can well be imagined: a dull, obtuse curate, whose poverty gives him no fair claim to pity; for he has entered the ministry of the english church without any particular conviction of its superiority to other religious bodies; without any special fitness for its ministry; without anything of the ability which might reasonably entitle him to expect to rise; and without the private means which are necessary for the support of most married men in a profession which, if it is not (as it is sometimes called) a lottery, has very great inequalities of income, and to the vast majority of those who follow it gives very little indeed. mr. barton is not a gentleman--a defect which the farmers and tradespeople of his parish are not slow to discover, and for which they despise him. he is without any misgivings as to himself or suspicion of his deficiencies in any way, and his conduct is correctly described in a lisping speech of the "secondary squire" of his parish, "what an ath barton makth of himthelf!" yet for this stupid man our sympathy is bespoken, merely because he has a wife so much too good for him that we are almost inclined to be angry with her for her devotion to him. tina is an undisciplined, abnormal little creature, without good looks or any attractive quality except a talent for music, and with a temper capable of the most furious excesses. although janet is described as handsome, amiable, and cultivated, all these good properties are overwhelmed in our thoughts of her by the degrading vice of which she is to be cured; while her prophet, mr. tryan, although very zealous in his work, is avowedly a narrow calvinist, wanting in intellectual culture, very irritable, not a little bitter and uncharitable, excessively fond of applause without being very critical as to the quarter from which it comes, and strongly possessed with the love of domination. tom tulliver is hard, close, unimaginative, self-confident, repelling, with a stern rectitude of a certain kind, but with no understanding of or toleration for any character different from his own. philip wakem is a personage as little pleasant as picturesque. maggie, as a child--although in her father's opinion "too clever for a gell"--is foolish, vain, self-willed, and always in some silly scrape or other; and when grown up, her behaviour is such, even before the climax of the affair with stephen guest, that the dislike of the st. ogg's ladies for her might have been very sufficiently accounted for even if they had not had reason to envy her superior beauty. but of all the characters for whom our authoress has been pleased to bespeak our interest, hetty sorrel is the most remarkable for unamiable qualities. she is represented as "distractingly pretty," and we hear a great deal about her "kitten-like beauty," and her graceful movements, looks, and attitudes. but this is all that can be said for her. her mind has no room for anything but looks and dress; she has no feeling for anybody but her little self; and is only too truly declared by mrs. poyser to be "no better than a peacock, as 'ud strut about on the wall, and spread its tail when the sun shone, if all the folks i' the parish was dying"--"no better nor a cherry, wi' a hard stone inside it."[ ] over and over this view of hetty's character is enforced on us, from the time when, early in the first volume, we are told that hers "was a springtide beauty; it was the beauty of young frisking things, round-limbed, gambolling, circumventing you by a false air of innocence.[ ] ..." [ ] "adam bede," i. ; ii. . [ ] _ibid_., i. . her conduct throughout is such as to offend and disgust; and the authoress does not seem to be sufficiently aware that, while the descriptions of the little coquette's beauty leave that to be imagined, her follies and faults and crimes are set before us as matters of hard, unmistakeable fact, so that the reader is in no danger of being blinded by the charms which blinded adam bede, and hetty consequently appears as little else than contemptible when she is not odious. yet it is on this silly, heartless, and wicked little thing that the interest of the story is made to rest. her agonies, as we have already said, are depicted with very great power; yet, if they touch our hearts, it is merely because they _are_ agonies, and our feeling is unmixed with any regard for the sufferer herself. this habit of representing her characters without any concealment of their faults is, no doubt, connected with that faculty which enables the authoress to give them so remarkable an air of reality. there are, indeed, exceptions to this, as there are in almost every work of fiction. thus, sir christopher and lady cheverel strike us as old acquaintances whom we have known not in real life, but in books. we are not altogether sure of stately old mrs. irwine, and are sceptical as to dinah morris, notwithstanding the very great pains which the authoress has evidently bestowed on her--perhaps because she is utterly unlike such female methodists as have fallen within our own (happily, small) experience; and bob jakin is a grotesque caricature, which would have been far better done by mr. dickens, who is undeniably great in the production of grotesques, although we do not remember that throughout the whole of his voluminous works he has ever succeeded in embodying a single natural and lifelike character. but, with a very few exceptions, "george eliot's" personages have that appearance of reality in which those of mr. dickens are so conspicuously wanting. and while mr. dickens's views of english life and society are about as far from the truth as those of the french dramatists and romancers, "george eliot" is able to represent the social circumstances in which her action is laid with the strongest appearance of verisimilitude. we may not ourselves have known shepperton, or hayslope, or st. ogg's; but we feel as much at home in them as if we had.... tulliver may be cited as another well-imagined and well-executed character, with his downright impetuous honesty, his hatred of "raskills," and his disposition to see rascality everywhere; his resolution to stand on his rights, his good-natured contempt for his wife, his very justifiable dislike of her sisters, his love for his children, and his determination that they shall have a good education, cost what it may,--the benefits of education having been impressed on his mind by his own inability to "wrap up things in words as aren't actionable," and by the consequent perception that "it's an uncommon fine thing, that is, when we can let a man know what you think of him without paying for it."[ ] his love of litigation is reconciled with his belief that "the law is meant to take care o' raskills," and that "old harry made the lawyers" by the principle that the cause which has the "biggest raskill" for attorney has the best chance of success; so that honesty need not despair if it can only secure the professional assistance of accomplished roguery. and when, notwithstanding this, the law and mr. wakem have been too much for him, great skill is shown in the description of poor tulliver's latter days; his prostration and partial recovery; the concentration of his feelings on the desire to wipe out the dishonour of insolvency, and to avenge himself on the hostile attorney. indeed, we confess that, notwithstanding his somewhat unedifying end, tulliver is the only person in "the mill on the floss" for whom we can bring ourselves to care much. [ ] "the mill on the floss," i. . the reality of which we have been speaking is connected with a peculiar sort of consciousness in the authoress, as if she had actually witnessed all that she describes, and were resolved to describe it without any attempt to refine beyond the naked truth. thus, the most serious characters make their most solemn and most pathetic speeches in provincial dialect and ungrammatical constructions, although it must be allowed that the authoress has not ventured so far in this way as to play with the use and abuse of the aspirate. and her dialect appears to be very carefully studied, although we may doubt whether the staffordshire provincialisms of "clerical life" and "adam bede" are sufficiently varied when the scene is shifted in the latest book to the lincolnshire side of the humber. but where a greater variation than that between one midland dialect and another is required, "george eliot's" conscientiousness is very curiously shown. there is in "mr. gilfil's story" a gardener of the name of bates, who is described as a yorkshireman, and in "adam bede" there is another gardener, mr. craig, whose name would naturally indicate a scotchman. each of these horticulturists is introduced into the dialogue, and of course the reader would expect the one to talk yorkshire and the other to talk some variety of scotch. but the authoress, apparently, did not feel herself mistress of either scotch or yorkshire to such a degree as would have warranted her in attempting them, and therefore, before her characters are allowed to open their mouths, she, in each case, is careful to tell us that we must moderate our expectations: "mr. bates's lips were of a peculiar cut, and i fancy this had something to do with the peculiarity of his dialect, which, as we shall see, was individual rather than provincial."[ ] [ ] "scenes of clerical life," i. . "i think it was mr. craig's pedigree only that had the advantage of being scotch, and not his 'bringing up'; for, except that he had a stronger burr in his accent, his speech differed little from that of the loamshire people around him."[ ] in short, except that lucifer matches are twice introduced as familiar things in days when the tinder-box was the only resource in general use for obtaining a light,[ ] we have not observed anything in which the authoress could be "caught out." [ ] "adam bede," i. . [ ] "adam bede," i. , . but this conscientious fidelity has very serious drawbacks. it seems as if the authoress felt herself under an obligation to give everything literally as it took place; to shut out nothing which is superfluous; to suppress nothing which is unfit for a work of fiction (for not only have we a report of dinah morris's sermons, but the very words of the prayer which she put up for hetty in the prison); to abridge nothing which is tiresome. people and incidents are described at length, although they have little or nothing to do with the story. we may mention as instances the detailed history and character which are given of tom tulliver's tutor, the reverend walter stelling, and the account of mr. poyser's harvest-home, which, however good in itself, is utterly out of place between the crisis and the conclusion of the story. but most especially we complain of the fondness which the authoress shows for exhibiting uninteresting and tiresome people in all their interminable tediousness; and if the morbid tone which we have already mentioned reminds us of a french school of novelists, her passion for photographing the minutest details of dullness reminds us painfully of those american ladies who contribute so largely to the literature of our railway-stalls, by flooding their boundless prairies of dingy paper with inexhaustible masses of blotchy type. we quite admit the naturalness of the tradespeople and other small folks whom this writer has perhaps explored more deeply than any earlier novelist; but surely we have far too much of them. it has indeed been said that we are spoiled by the activity of the present day for enjoying the faithful picture of what life was in country parishes and in little country towns fifty years ago; but we really cannot admit the justice of this attempt to throw the blame on ourselves. dullness, we may be sure, has not died out within the last half century, but is yet to be found in plenty; and, if times were dull fifty or a hundred years ago, the novelists of those days--scott and fielding, and smollett, and even goldsmith in his simple tale--did not make their readers groan under their dullness.... but _are_ we likely to feel more kindly towards such people as those of whom we are now complaining, because all their triviality, and smallness, and tediousness are displayed at wearisome length on paper? if some dutch painters bestowed their skill on homely old women and boozy boors, there is no evidence that they were capable of better things, and their choice of subjects is no justification for one who certainly can do better. nor do we complain that we have an old woman or a coarse merrymaking occasionally, but that such things in their monotonous meanness fill whole rooms of "george eliot's" gallery; and, in truth, the real parallel to her is not to be found in the old dutchmen who honestly painted what was before their eyes, but rather in the perverseness of our modern "pre-raphaelites." it is of these gentlemen--who, by the way, in their reactionary affectations are the most entire opposites of the simple, unaffected, and forward-striving artists who really lived before raphael--it is of these gentlemen, with their choice of disagreeable subjects, uncomely models, and uncouth attitudes, their bestowal of superfluous labour on trifling details, and the consequent obtrusiveness of subordinate things so as to mar the general effect of the work, that "george eliot" too often reminds us. how very wearisome is the conversation of the clique of inferior women who worship mr. tryan! how dismally twaddling is that respectable old congregationalist, mr. jerome, with his tidy little garden and his "littel chacenut hoss"! we feel for mr. tryan when in the society of such people, although to him it was mitigated by the belief that he was doing good by associating with them, and that by love of incense from any quarter which is described as part of his character. but why should it be inflicted in such fearful doses on us, who have done nothing to deserve it, who have no "mission" to encounter it, and are entirely without mr. tryan's consolations under the endurance of it? adam bede's mother is another sore trial of the reader's patience--with her endless fretful chatter, and all the details of her urging her sons, one after the other, to refresh themselves with cold potatoes: nay, we are not reconciled to these vegetables even by the fact that on one occasion they are recommended as "taters wi' the gravy in 'em."[ ] but it is in "the mill on the floss" that the plague of tedious conversation reaches its height. mrs. tulliver is one of four married sisters, whose maiden name had been dodson, and in these sisters there is a studious combination of family likeness with individual varieties of character. mrs. tulliver herself--whose "blond" complexion is generally associated by our authoress with imbecility of mind and character--belongs to that class of minds of which mrs. quickly may be considered as the chief intellectual type. mrs. pullet--the wife of a gentleman farmer, whose great characteristic is a habit of sucking lozenges, and whom tom tulliver most justly sets down as a "nincompoop"--is almost sillier than mrs. tulliver. she has the gift of tears ever ready to flow, and sheds them profusely on the anticipation of imaginary and ridiculous woes. her favourite vanity consists in drawing dismal pictures of the future and in priding herself on the bodily sufferings of her neighbours; that one had "been tapped no end o' times, and the water--they say you might ha' swum in it if you'd liked"; that another's "breath was short to that degree as you could hear him two rooms off"; and her highest religion-- the loftiest exercise of her faith and self-denial--is the accumulation of superfluous clothes and linen, in the hope that they may make a creditable display after her death. mrs. deane is "a thin-lipped woman, who made small well-considered speeches on peculiar occasions, repeating them afterwards to her husband, and asking him if she had not spoken very properly"; and of her we see but little. but of the eldest of the four, mrs. glegg, we see so much that we are really made quite uncomfortable by her; for she is a very formidable person indeed,-- utterly without kindness, bullying everybody within her reach (her husband included), holding herself up as a model to everybody, and shaming all other families--especially those into which she and her sisters had married--by odious comparisons with the dodsons. all this we grant is very cleverly done. the grim mrs. glegg and the fatuous mrs. tulliver and mrs. pullet talk admirably in their respective kinds; and we can quite believe that there are people who are not unfairly represented by the dodsons--with, the narrow limitation of their thoughts to their own little circle--the extravagantly high opinion of their own vulgar family, with the corresponding depreciation of all in and about their own rank who do not belong to it--their perfect conviction that their own family traditions (such as the copious eating of salt in their broth) are the standard of all that is good--their consecration of all their most elevated feelings to the worship of furniture, and clothes, and table-linen, and silver spoons--their utter alienation from all that, in the opinion of educated people, can make life fit to be enjoyed. the humour of mrs. glegg's determination that no ill desert of a relation shall interfere with the disposal of her property by will on the most rigidly dodsonian principles of justice, according to the several degrees of dodsonship, is excellent; and so is the change in her behaviour towards maggie, whom, after having always bullied her, she takes up for the sake of dodsondom's credit when everybody else has turned against her.... [ ] "adam bede," i. . the writer does not seem to be aware that the fools and bores of a book, while they bore the other characters, ought not to bore but to amuse the reader, and that they will become seriously wearisome to him if there be too much of them. shakespeare has contented himself with showing us his dogberry and verges, his shallow and slender, and silence, to such a degree as may sufficiently display their humours; but he has not filled whole acts with them, and, even if he had, a five-act play is a small field for the display of prolix foolishness as compared with a three-volume novel. lord macaulay has been supposed to speak sarcastically in saying that he "would not advise any person who reads for amusement to venture on a certain _jeu d'esprit_ of mr. sadler's as long as he can procure a volume of the statutes at large";[ ] but we are afraid that we should not be believed if we were to mention the books to which _we_ have had recourse by way of occasional relief from the task of perusing "george eliot's" tales. [ ] "miscellaneous writings," ii. . in the case of "these emmet-like dodsons and tullivers," the authoress again defends her principle. "i share with you," she says, "the sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it acted on the lives of tom and maggie."[ ] we must confess that we care very little for tom and maggie, who, although the inscription on their tombstone and the motto on the title-page of the book tell us that "in their death they were not divided," do not strike us as having been "lovely and pleasant in their lives." we do not think the development of the brother and the sister a matter of any great interest; and, if it were, we believe that a sufficient ground might have been laid for our understanding it without so severely trying our patience by the details of the "sordid life" amid which their early years were spent. [ ] "the mill on the floss," ii. . another mistake, as it appears to us, is the too didactic strain into which the authoress occasionally falls--writing as if for the purpose of forcing lessons on children or the poor, rather than for grown-up and educated readers. the story of "janet's repentance" might, with the omission of a few passages such as the satirical flings at mr. tryan's female worshippers, be made into a very edifying little tract for some "evangelical" society. mr. tryan's opponents are all represented as brutes and monsters, drunkards and unclean, enemies of all goodness; while, with the usual unscrupulousness of party tract-writers, we are required to choose between an alliance with such infamous company and unreserved adhesion to the calvanistic curate, without being allowed any possibility of a third course. and, in addition to mr. tryan's victory, there is the conversion of mrs. dempster, not only from drunkenness to teetotalism (which might form the text for a set of illustrations by mr. cruikshank, in the moral style of his later days), but from hatred to love of the gospel according to mr. tryan. in its place we should not care to object to such a story, or to a great deal of the needless talk which it contains both of sinners and of saints; but we _do_ object to it in a book which is intended for the lighter reading of educated people, and the more so because we know that it comes from a writer who can feel nothing of the bitter but conscientious bigotry which the composition of such a story in good faith implies.... in reading of maggie's early indiscretions, we--hardened, grey-headed reviewers as we are--feel something like a renewal of the shame and mortification with which, long decades of years ago, we read of the weaknesses of frank and rosamond,--as if we ourselves were the little girl who made the mistake of choosing the big, bright-coloured bottle from the chemist's window, or the little boy who allowed himself to be deceived by the flattery of the lady in the draper's shop. in order that her hair may have no chance of appearing in curls on a great occasion (according to her mother's wish), maggie plunges her head into a basin of water. on getting an old dress and a bonnet from her unloved aunt glegg, she bastes the frock along with the roast beef on the following sunday, and souses the bonnet under the pump. in consequence of the continual remarks of her mother and aunts, about the un-dodsonlike colour of her hair, she cuts it all off. she makes the most deplorable exhibition of her literary vanity at every turn. out of spite she pushes her cousin lucy, when arrayed in the prettiest of dresses, into the "cow-trodden mud," and thereupon she runs off to a gang of gipsies, with the intention of becoming their queen,--an adventure from which we are glad that she is allowed to escape with less of suffering than miss edgeworth might perhaps have felt it a matter of duty to inflict on her. for the toms and maggies, the franks and rosamonds, of real life, such monitory anecdotes as these may be very good and useful; but it seems to us that they are out of place in a book intended for readers who have got beyond the early domestic schoolroom. we cannot praise the construction of these tales. the plots are very slight; the narrative drags painfully in some parts, and in other parts the authoress has recourse to very violent expedients, as where she brings in the "startling adelphi stage-effect" of the flood to drown tom and maggie, in order to escape from the unmanageable complication of her story. both in "adam bede" and in "the mill on the floss" the chief interest is over long before the tale comes to an end; and in looking at the whole series together we see something of repetition. thus, both tina and hetty set their hearts on a young man above their own position, and turn a deaf ear to a longer-known, more suitable, and worthier suitor. each disappears at a critical time, and each, after a disappointment in the higher quarter, falls back on a marriage with the humbler admirer; with the difference, however, that, as hetty had committed murder, and as tina had just been saved from doing so, the marriage in the first case never actually takes place, and in the second it ends after a few months. and as a smaller instance of repetition, we may compare the bedroom visit of the seraphic dinah morris to the earthly hetty with that of the pattern lucy deane to the tempestuous maggie tulliver. there is less of affectation in these books than in most of our recent novels, yet there is by far too much. among the portions which are most infected by this sin we may mention the description of scenery,--thanks, doubtless, in no small measure, to the influence of that very dangerous model mr. ruskin.... before concluding our article we must notice the authoress's views on two important subjects which enter largely into her stories--love and religion. that ladies, of their own accord and uninvited, fall in love with gentlemen is a common circumstance in novels written by ladies; and we are very much obliged to madame d'arblay, miss austen, and the other writers of the softer sex, who have let us into the knowledge of the important fact that such is the way in real life. but the peculiarity of "george eliot," among english novelists, is that in her books everybody falls in love with the wrong person. she seems to be continually on the point of showing us, with the author of "the rovers"-- how two swains one nymph her vows may give, and how two damsels with one lover live. love is represented as a passion conceived without any ground of reasonable preference, and as entirely irresistible in its sway. tina bestows her affections on captain wybrow, while the captain, without caring for anybody but himself, is paying his addresses to miss assher; and mr. gilfil is pining for tina, whom, if he had any discernment at all, he could not but see to be quite unfitted for him. adam bede is in love with the utterly undeserving hetty, while dinah morris and mary burge are both in love with adam, hetty with arthur donnithorne, and seth bede with dinah. at last, hetty is got out of the way, dinah comes to a clearer understanding of her feelings towards adam, and adam, on being made aware of this, is set on by his mother to make a successful proposal; but "quiet mary burge" subsides into a bridesmaid, and seth, the "poor wool-gatherin' methodist," is left without any other consolation than that of worshipping his sister-in-law. but it is in "the mill on the floss" that the unwholesome view which we have mentioned finds its most startling development. maggie is in love with philip, and philip with maggie; stephen guest is in love with lucy deane, and lucy with stephen, while at the same time she has an undeclared admirer in tom tulliver. but as soon as maggie and stephen become acquainted with each other, they exercise a powerful mutual attraction, and the mischief of love (as the passion is represented by our authoress) breaks loose in terrible force. the reproach which tom tulliver had coarsely thrown in philip's teeth, that he had taken advantage of maggie's inexperience to secure her affections before she had had any opportunity of comparing him with other men, turns out to be entirely just. stephen is a mere underbred coxcomb, and is intended to appear as such (for we do not think that the authoress has failed in any attempt to make him a gentleman); his only merit, in so far as we can discover, is a foolish talent for singing, and, except as to person, he is infinitely inferior to philip. but for this mere physical superiority the lofty-souled maggie prefers him to the lover whom she had before loved for his deformity; and the passion is represented as one which no considerations of moral or religious principle, no regard to the claims of others, no training derived from the hardships of her former life or from the ascetic system to which she had at one time been devoted, can withstand. here is a delicate scene, which is described as having taken place in a conservatory, to which the pair had withdrawn on the night of a ball:-- maggie bent her arm a little upward towards the large half-opened rose that had attracted her. who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm? --the unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and the varied gently-lessening curves down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness? a mad impulse seized on stephen; he darted towards the arm and showered kisses on it, clasping the wrist. but the next moment maggie snatched it from him, and glanced at him like a wounded war-goddess, quivering with rage and humiliation. "how dare you?" she spoke in a deeply-shaken, half-smothered voice: "what right have i given you to insult me?" she darted from him into the adjoining room, and threw herself on the sofa panting and trembling.[ ] [ ] iii. . we should not have blamed the young lady if, like one of mr. trollope's heroines, she had made her admirer feel not only "the beauty of a woman's arm," but its weight. but, unwarned by the grossness of his behaviour on this occasion, she is represented as admitting stephen to further intercourse; and, although she rescues herself at last, it is not until after having occasioned irreparable scandal. a good-natured ordinary novelist might have found an easy solution for the difficulties of the case at an earlier stage by marrying stephen to maggie, and handing over lucy (who is far too amiable to object to such a transfer) to her admiring cousin tom; while philip, left in celibacy, might either have been invested with a pathetic interest, or represented as justly punished for the offence of forestalling. but george eliot has higher aims than ordinary novelists, and to her the transfer which we have suggested would appear as a profanation. her characters, therefore, plunge into all manner of sacrifices of reputation and happiness; and it is not until maggie and tom have been drowned, and philip's whole life embittered, that we catch a final view of mr. stephen guest visiting the grave of the brother and sister in company with the amiable wife, _née_ lucy deane. if we are to accept the natural moral of this story, it shows how coarse and immoral a very fastidious and ultra-refined morality may become. it is with reluctance that we go on to notice the religion of these books; but since religion appears so largely in them, we must not decline the task. to us, at least, the theory of the writer's "high-church tendencies" could never have appeared plausible; for even in the "scenes of clerical life" the chief religious personage is the "evangelical" curate mr. tryan, and whatever good there is in his parish is confined to the circle of his partisans and converts; while in "adam bede" the methodess preacheress, dinah morris, is intended to shine with spotless and incomparable lustre. yet, although the highest characters, in a religious view, are drawn from "evangelicism" and methodism, we find that neither of these systems is set forth as enough to secure the perfection of everybody who may choose to profess it.... mr. parry, although agreeing with mr. tryan in opinion, is represented as no less unpopular and inefficient than mr. tryan was the reverse; and the reverend amos barton is a hopeless specimen of that variety of "evangelical" clergymen to which the late mr. conybeare gave the name of "low and slow,"--a variety which, we believe, flourishes chiefly in the midland counties. on the other hand, mr. gilfil and mr. irwine, clergymen of the "old school," are held up as objects for our respect and love; and mr. irwine is not only vindicated by adam bede in his old age, in comparison with his evangelical successor mr. ryde, but the question between high and low church, as represented by these two, is triumphantly settled by a quotation which adam brings from our old friend mrs. poyser:-- mrs. poyser used to say--you know she would have her word about everything--she said mr. irwine was like a good meal o' victual, you were the better for him without thinking on it; and mr. ryde was like a dose o' physic, he griped and worrited you, and after all he left you much the same.[ ] [ ] "adam bede," i. . in "the mill on the floss," too, the "brazen" mr. stelling is represented as "evangelical," in so far as he is anything; while dr. kenn, a very high anglican, is spoken of with all veneration; although, perhaps, "george eliot's" opinion as to the efficiency of the high anglican clergy may be gathered from the circumstance that when the doctor interferes for the benefit of maggie tulliver, he not only fails to be of any use, but exposes himself to something like the same kind of gossip which had arisen from mr. amos barton's hospitality to madame czerlaski. as to methodism, again, the reader need hardly be reminded of the sayings which we have quoted from mrs. poyser. and while the feeble and "wool-gathering" seth bede becomes a convert, the strong-minded adam holds out, even although he is so tolerant as to marry a female methodist preacher, and to let her enjoy her "liberty of prophesying" until stopped by a general order of the wesleyan conference. from all these things the natural inference would seem to be that the authoress is neither high-church nor low-church nor dissenter, but a tolerant member of what is styled the broad-church party--a party in which we are obliged to say that breadth and toleration are by no means universal. it would seem that, instead of being exclusively devoted to any one of the religious types which she has embodied in the persons of her tales (for as yet she has not presented us with a clergyman of any liberal school), she regards each of them as containing an element of pure christianity, which, although in any one of them it may be alloyed by its adjuncts and by the faults of individuals, is in itself of inestimable value, and may be held alike by persons who differ widely from each other as to the forms of religious polity and as to details of christian doctrine. but what is to be thought of the fact that the authoress of these tales is also the translator of strauss's notorious book? is the gospel which she has represented in so many attractive lights nothing better to her, after all, than "fabula ista de christo"? are the various forms under which she has exhibited it no more for her than the mahometan and hindoo systems were for the poet of thalaba and kehama? has she been carrying out in these novels the precepts of that chapter in which dr. strauss teaches his disciples how, while believing the new testament narrative to be merely mythical, they may yet discharge the functions of the christian preacher without exposing themselves by their language to any imputation of unsoundness? but, even apart from this distressing question, there is much to interfere with the hope and the interest with which we should wish to look forward to the future career of a writer so powerful and so popular as the authoress of these books--much to awaken very serious apprehensions as to the probable effect of her influence. no one who has looked at all into our late fictitious literature can have failed to be struck with the fondness of many of the writers of the day for subjects which at an earlier time would not have been thought of, or would have been carefully avoided. the idea that fiction should contain something to soothe, to elevate, or to purify seems to be extinct. in its stead there is a love for exploring what would be better left in obscurity; for portraying the wildness of passion and the harrowing miseries of mental conflict; for dark pictures of sin and remorse and punishment; for the discussion of questions which it is painful and revolting to think of. by some writers such themes are treated with a power which fascinates even those who most disapprove the manner in which it is exercised; by others with a feebleness which shows that the infection has spread even to the most incapable of the contributors to our circulating libraries. to us the influence of the "jack shepherd" school of literature is really far less alarming than that of a class of books which is more likely to find its way into the circles of cultivated readers, and, most especially, to familiarize the minds of our young women in the middle and higher ranks with matters on which their fathers and brothers would never venture to speak in their presence. it is really frightful to think of the interest which we have ourselves heard such readers express in criminals like paul ferroll, and in sensual ruffians like mr. rochester: and there is much in the writings of "george eliot" which, on like grounds, we feel ourselves bound most earnestly to condemn. let all honour be paid to those who in our time have laboured to search out and to make known such evils of our social condition as christian sympathy may in some degree relieve or cure. but we do not believe that any good end is to be effected by fictions which fill the mind with details of imaginary vice and distress and crime, or which teach it--instead of endeavouring after the fulfilment of simple and ordinary duty--to aim at the assurance of superiority by creating for itself fanciful and incomprehensible perplexities. rather we believe that the effect of such fictions must be to render those who fall under their influence unfit for practical exertion; while they most assuredly do grievous harm in many cases, by intruding on minds which ought to be guarded from impurity the unnecessary knowledge of evil. blackwood's magazine in the early days of the nineteenth century edinburgh certainly aspired to prouder eminence as a centre of light and learning than it has continued to maintain. tory energy, provoked by the arrogance of jeffrey, had found its earliest expression in london, but the northern capital evidently determined not to be left behind in the game of unprincipled vituperation. _blackwood_, unlike its rivals in infancy, was issued monthly, and its closely printed double columns add something to the impression of heaviness in its satire. john wilson ( - ) there is admittedly something incongruous in any association between the genial and laughter-loving christopher north and the reputation incurred by the periodical with which he was long so intimately associated. he had contributed--as few of his confederates would have been permitted-- to the _edinburgh_; but he was literary editor to _blackwood_ from october, , to september, . originally a disciple of the lake school, at whom he was frequently girding, he migrated to edinburgh (where he became professor of moral philosophy in ), and attracted to himself many brilliant men of letters, including de quincey. the "mountain-looking fellow," as dickens called him, the patron of "cock-fighting, wrestling, pugilistic contests, boat-racing, and horse-racing" left his mark on his generation for a unique combination of boisterous joviality and hardhitting. well known in the houses of the poor; more than one observer has said that he reminded them of the "first man, adam." he "swept away all hearts, withersoever he would." "thor and balder in one," "very goth," "a norse demigod," "hair of the true sicambrian yellow"; carlyle describes him as "fond of all stimulating things; from tragic poetry down to whiskey-punch. he snuffed and smoked cigars and drank liqueurs, and talked in the most indescribable style.... he is a broad sincere man of six feet, with long dishevelled flax-coloured hair, and two blue eyes keen as an eagle's ... a being all split into precipitous chasms and the wildest volcanic tumults ... a noble, loyal, and religious nature, not _strong_ enough to vanquish the perverse element it is born into." the foundation of wilson's criticism, unlike most of his contemporaries, was generous and wide-minded appreciation, yet he "hacked about him, distributing blows right and left, delivered sometimes for fun, though sometimes with the most extraordinary impulse of perversity, in the impetus of his career." with all a boy's love of a good fight, he shared with youth its thoughtless indifference to the consequences. his not altogether unfriendly criticisms inspired one of tennyson's lightest effusions-- you did late review my lays, crusty christopher; you did mingle blame and praise rusty christopher. when i learnt from whence it came, i forgave you all the blame, musty christopher; i could not forgive the praise fusty christopher. the _noctes ambrosianae_ is certainly a unique production. though ostensibly a dialogue mainly between himself, tickler (i.e., lockhart), and hogg the ettrick shepherd--with other occasional dramatis personae; the main bulk of them (including everything here quoted) was written by wilson himself--in this form, to produce an original effect. the conversations are, for the most part, thoroughly dramatic, and cover every conceivable subject from politics and literature to the beauty of scenery, dress, cookery, and the various sports beloved of christopher. there is much boisterous interruption for eating, drinking, and personal chaff. of the longer quotations selected we would particularly draw attention to the humorous and epigrammatic parody of wordsworth, on whom wilson elsewhere bestows generous enthusiasm; and the broad-minded outlook which can appreciate the contrasted virility of byron and dr. johnson. but it would be impossible to give an approximately fair impression of the _noctes_, without many examples of those paragraph criticisms scattered broadcast on every page, which we have presented as "crumbs" from the feast. the magnificent recantation to leigh hunt--on whom _blackwood_ had bestowed even more than its share of abuse--has passed into a proverb. anonymous as in the case of the _quarterly_ these untraced effusions may be assigned, with fair confidence, to the principal originators of the magazine: wilson himself, lockhart, and william maginn ( - ), a thriftless irishman who helped to start _fraser's magazine_ in , and stood for captain shandon in pendennis; author of _bob burke's duel with ensign brady_, "perhaps the raciest irish story ever written." they almost certainly combined in the heated attack on "the cockney school," of which leigh hunt's generous, but not always judicious, advertisement was an obvious temptation to satire, embittered by political bias. coleridge, also, provided easy material for scorn from vigorous manhood; and shelley, as wilson remarks elsewhere, was "the greatest sinner of the oracular school--because the only true poet." christopher north on pope[ ] [ ] a discussion of the edition by bowles. [from _noctes ambrosianae_, march, ] _tickler._ pope was one of the most amiable men that ever lived. fine and delicate as were the temper and temperament of his genius, he had a heart capable of the warmest human affection. he was indeed a loving creature. _north._ come, come, timothy, you know you were sorely cut an hour or two ago--so do not attempt characteristics. but, after all, bowles does not say that pope was unamiable. _tickler._ yes, he does--that is to say, no man can read, even now, all that he has written about pope, without thinking on the whole, somewhat indifferently of the man pope. it is for this i abuse our friend bowles. _shepherd._ ay, ay--i recollect now some of the havers o' boll's about the blounts,--martha and theresa, i think you call them. puir wee bit hunched-backed, windle-strae-legged, gleg-eed, clever, acute, ingenious, sateerical, weel-informed, warm-hearted, real philosophical, and maist poetical creature, wi' his sounding translation o' a' homer's works, that reads just like an original war-yepic,--his yessay on man that, in spite o' what a set o' ignoramuses o' theological critics say about bolingbroke and croussass, and heterodoxy and atheism, and like haven, is just-ane o' the best moral discourses that ever i heard in or out o' the poupit,--his yepistles about the passions, and sic like, in the whilk he goes baith deep and high, far deeper and higher baith than mony a modern poet, who must needs be either in a diving-bell or a balloon,-- his rape o' the lock o' hair, wi' a' these sylphs floating about in the machinery o' the rosicrucian philosophism, just perfectly yelegant and gracefu', and as gude, in their way, as onything o' my ain about fairies, either in the _queen's wake_ or _queen hynde_,--his louisa to abelard is, as i said before, coorse in the subject-matter, but, o sirs! powerfu' and pathetic in execution--and sic a perfect spate o' versification! his unfortunate lady, who sticked hersel for love wi' a drawn sword, and was afterwards seen as a ghost, dim-beckoning through the shade--a verra poetical thocht surely, and full both of terror and pity.... _north._ pope's poetry is full of nature, at least of what i have been in the constant habit of accounting nature for the last threescore and ten years. but (thank you, james, that snuff is really delicious) leaving nature and art, and all that sort of thing, i wish to ask a single question: what poet of this age, with the exception, perhaps, of byron, can be justly said, when put in comparison with pope, to have written the english language at all.... _tickler._ what would become of bowles himself, with all his elegance, pathos, and true feeling? oh! dear me, james, what a dull, dozing, disjointed, dawdling, dowdy of a drawe would be his muse, in her very best voice and tune, when called upon to get up and sing a solo after the sweet and strong singer of twickenham! _north._ or wordsworth--with his eternal--here we go up, and up, and up, and here we go down, down, and here we go roundabout, roundabout!--look at the nerveless laxity of his _excursion!_--what interminable prosing!-- the language is out of condition:--fat and fozy, thick-winded, purfled and plethoric. can he be compared with pope?--fie on't! no, no, no!-- pugh, pugh! _tickler._ southey--coleridge--moore? _north._ no; not one of them. they are all eloquent, diffusive, rich, lavish, generous, prodigal of their words. but so are they all deficient in sense, muscle, sinew, thews, ribs, spine. pope, as an artist, beats them hollow. catch him twaddling. _tickler._ it is a bad sign of the intellect of an age to depreciate the genius of a country's classics. but the attempt covers such critics with shame, and undying ridicule pursues them and their abettors. the lake poets began this senseless clamour against the genius of pope. on byron [from _noctes ambrosianae_, october, ] _north._ people say, james, that byron's tragedies are failures. fools! is cain, the dark, dim, disturbed, insane, hell-haunted cain, a failure? is sardanapalus, the passionate, princely, philosophical, joy-cheated, throne-wearied voluptuary, a failure? is heaven and earth, that magnificent confusion of two worlds, in which mortal beings mingle in love and hate, joy and despair, with immortal--the children of the dust claiming alliance with the radiant progeny of the skies, till man and angel seem to partake of one divine being, and to be essences eternal in bliss or bale--is heaven and earth, i ask you, james, a failure? if so, then appollo has stopt payment--promising a dividend of one shilling in the pound--and all concerned in that house are bankrupts. _tickler._ you have nobly--gloriously vindicated byron, north, and in doing so, have vindicated the moral and intellectual character of our country. miserable and pernicious creed, that holds possible the lasting and intimate union of the first, purest, highest, noblest, and most celestial powers of soul and spirit, with confirmed appetencies, foul and degrading lust, cowardice, cruelty, meanness, hypocrisy, avarice, and impiety! you,--in a strong attempt made to hold up to execration the nature of byron as deformed by all these hideous vices,--you, my friend, reverently unveiled the countenance of the mighty dead, and the lineaments struck remorse into the heart of every asperser. on dr. johnson [from _noctes ambrosianae_, april, ] _north._ i forgot old sam--a jewel rough set, yet shining like a star, and though sand-blind by nature, and bigoted by education, one of the truly great men of england, and "her men are of men the chief," alike in the dominions of the understanding, the reason, the passions, and the imagination. no prig shall ever persuade me that _rasselas_ is not a noble performance--in design and execution. never were the expenses of a mother's funeral more gloriously defrayed by son, than the funeral of samuel johnson's mother by the price of _rasselas_, written for the pious purpose of laying her head decently and honourably in the dust. _shepherd._ ay, that was pittin' literature and genius to a glorious purpose indeed; and therefore nature and religion smiled on the wark, and have stamped it with immortality. _north._ samuel was seventy years old when he wrote the _lives of the poets_. _shepherd._ what a fine old buck! no unlike yoursel'. _north._ would it were so! he had his prejudicies, and his partialities, and his bigotries, and his blindnesses,--but on the same fruit-tree you see shrivelled pears or apples on the same branch with jargonelles or golden pippins worthy of paradise. which would ye show to the horticultural society as a fair specimen of the tree? _shepherd._ good, kit, good--philosophically picturesque. (_mimicking the old man's voice and manner._) _north._ show me the critique that beats his on pope, and on dryden-- nay, even on milton; and hang me if you may not read his essay on shakespeare even after having read charles lamb, or heard coleridge, with increased admiration of the powers of all three, and of their insight, through different avenues, and as it might seem almost with different bodily and mental organs, into shakespeare's "old exhausted," and his "new imagined worlds." he was a critic and a moralist who would have been wholly wise, had he not been partly--constitutionally insane. for there is blood in the brain, james--even in the organ--the vital principle of all our "eagle-winged raptures"; and there was a taint of the black drop of melancholy in his. _shepherd._ wheesht--wheesht--let us keep aff that subject. all men ever i knew are mad; and but for that law o' natur, never, never, in this warld had there been a _noctes ambrosianae_. crumbs from the "noctes" miss mitford _north._ miss mitford has not in my opinion either the pathos or humour of washington irving; but she excels him in vigorous conception of character, and in the truth of her pictures of english life and manners. her writings breathe a sound, pure, and healthy morality, and are pervaded by a genuine rural spirit--the spirit of merry england. every line bespeaks the lady. _shepherd._ i admire miss mitford just excessively. i dinna wunner at her being able to write sae weel as she does about drawing-rooms wi' sofas and settees, and about the fine folk in them seeing themsels in lookin-glasses frae tap to tae; but what puzzles the like o' me, is her pictures o' poachers, and tinklers, and pottery-trampers, and ither neerdoweels, and o' huts and hovels without riggin' by the wayside, and the cottages o' honest puir men, and byres, and barns, and stackyards, and merry-makins at winter ingles, and courtship aneath trees, and at the gable-end of farm houses, 'tween lads and lasses as laigh in life as the servants in her father's ha'. that's the puzzle, and that's the praise. but ae word explains a'--genius--genius, wull a' the metafhizzians in the warld ever expound that mysterious monosyllable.-- _nov, ._ hazlitt _shepherd._. he had a curious power that hazlitt, as he was ca'd, o' simulatin' sowl. you could hae taen your bible oath sometimes, when you were readin him, that he had a sowl--a human sowl--a sowl to be saved-- but then, heaven preserve us! in the verra middle aiblins o' a paragraph, he grew transformed afore your verra face into something bestial,--you heard a grunt that made ye grue, and there was an ill smell in the room, as frae a pluff o' sulphur.--_april, ._ wordsworth _shepherd._ wordsworth tells the world, in ane of his prefaces, that he is a water-drinker--and its weel seen on him.--there was a sair want of speerit through the haill o' yon lang "excursion." if he had just made the paragraphs about ae half shorter, and at the end of every ane taen a caulker, like ony ither man engaged in geyan sair and heavy wark, think na ye that his "excursion" would hae been far less fatiguesome?--_april, ._ _north._ i confess that the "excursion" is the worst poem, of any character, in the english language. it contains about two hundred sonorous lines, some of which appear to be fine, even in the sense, as well as sound. the remaining seven thousand three hundred are quite ineffectual. then, what labour the builder of that lofty rhyme must have undergone! it is, in its own way, a small tower of babel, and all built by a single man.--_sept., ._ coleridge _north._ james, you don't know s.t. coleridge--do you? he writes but indifferent books, begging his pardon: witness his "friend," his "lay sermons," and, latterly, his "aids to reflection"; but he becomes inspired by the sound of his own silver voice, and pours out wisdom like a sea. had he a domestic gurney, he might publish a moral essay, or a theological discourse, or a metaphysical disquisition, or a political harangue, every morning throughout the year during his lifetime. _tickler._ mr. coleridge does not seem to be aware that he cannot write a book, but opines that he absolutely has written several, and set many questions at rest. there's a want of some kind or another in his mind; but perhaps when he awakes out of his dream, he may get rational and sober-witted, like other men, who are not always asleep. _shepherd._ the author o' "christabel," and "the ancient mariner," had better just continue to see visions, and dream dreams--for he's no fit for the wakin' world.--_april, ._ fashionable novels _north._ james, i wish you would review for maga all those fashionable novels--novels of high life; such as _pelham_--the _disowned_. _shepherd._ i've read thae twa, and they're baith gude. but the mair i think on't, the profounder is my conviction that the strength o' human nature lies either in the highest or lowest estate of life. characters in books should either be kings, and princes, and nobles, and on a level with them, like heroes; or peasants, shepherds, farmers, and the like, includin' a' orders amaist o' our ain working population. the intermediate class--that is, leddies and gentlemen in general--are no worth the muse's while; for their life is made up chiefly o' mainners,-- mainners,--mainners;--you canna see the human creters for their claes; and should ane o' them commit suicide in despair, in lookin' on the dead body, you are mair taen up wi' its dress than its decease.--_march, ._ will carleton _shepherd._ what sort o' vols., sir, are the _traits and stories of the irish peasantry_ [w. carleton], published by curry in dublin. _north._ admirable. truly, intensely irish. the whole book has the brogue--never were the outrageous whimsicalities of that strange, wild, imaginative people so characteristically displayed; nor, in the midst of all the fun, frolic, and folly, is there any dearth of poetry, pathos, and passion. the author's a jewel, and he will be reviewed next number. --_may, ._ burns _shepherd._ i shanna say ony o' mine's [songs] are as gude as some sax or aucht o' burns's--for about that number o' robbie's are o' inimitable perfection. it was heaven's wull that in them he should transcend a' the minnesingers o' this warld. but they're too perfeckly beautifu' to be envied by mortal man--therefore let his memory in them be hallowed for evermair.--_august, ._ _shepherd_. i was wrang in ever hintin ae word in disparagement o' burn's _cottar's saturday night_. but the truth is, you see, that the subjeck's sae heeped up wi' happiness, and sae charged wi' a' sort o' sanctity--sae national and sae scottish--that beautifu' as the poem is-- and really, after a', naething can be mair beautifu'--there's nae satisfying either paesant or shepherd by ony delineation o't, though drawn in lines o' licht, and shinin' equally w' genius and wi' piety.-- _nov., ._ leigh hunt _shepherd_. leigh hunt truly loved shelley. _north_. and shelley truly loved leigh hunt. their friendship was honourable to them both, for it was as disinterested as sincere; and i hope gurney will let a certain person in the city understand that i treat his offer of a reviewal of mr. hunt's _london journal_ with disdain. if he has anything to say against us or against that gentleman, either conjunctly or severally, let him out with it in some other channel, and i promise him a touch and taste of the crutch. he talks to me of maga's desertion of principle; but if he were a christian--nay, a man--his heart and head too would tell him that the animosities are mortal, but the humanities live for ever--and that leigh hunt has more talent in his little finger than the puling prig, who has taken upon himself to lecture christopher north in a scrawl crawling with forgotten falsehoods. mr. hunt's _london journal_, may dear james, is not only beyond all comparison, but out of all sight, the most entertaining and instructive of all the cheap periodicals; and when laid, as it duly is once a week, on my breakfast table, it lies there--but is not permitted to lie long--like a spot of sunshine dazzling the snow.--_aug_., . anonymous on coleridge [from _blackwood's magazine_, october, ] some observations on the "biographia literaria" of s. t. coleridge, esq., when a man looks back on his past existence, and endeavours to recall the incidents, events, thoughts, feelings, and passions of which it was composed, he sees something like a glimmering land of dreams, peopled with phantasms and realities undistinguishably confused and intermingled--here illuminated with dazzling splendour, there dim with melancholy mists,--or it may be shrouded in impenetrable darkness. to bring, visibly and distinctly before our memory, on the one hand, all our hours of mirth and joy, and hope and exultation,--and, on the other, all our perplexities, and fears and sorrows, and despair and agony,-- (and who has been so uniformly wretched as not to have been often blest?--who so uniformly blest as not to have been often wretched?)-- would be as impossible as to awaken, into separate remembrance, all the changes and varieties which the seasons brought over the material world,--every gleam of sunshine that beautified the spring,--every cloud and tempest that deformed the winter. in truth, were this power and domination over the past given unto us, and were we able to read the history of our lives all faithfully and perspicuously recorded on the tablets of the inner spirit,--those beings, whose existence had been most filled with important events and with energetic passions, would be the most averse to such overwhelming survey--would recoil from trains of thought which formerly agitated and disturbed, and led them, as it were, in triumph beneath the yoke of misery or happiness. the soul may be repelled from the contemplation of the past as much by the brightness and magnificence of scenes that shifted across the glorious drama of youth, as by the storms that scattered the fair array into disfigured fragments; and the melancholy that breathes from vanished delight is, perhaps, in its utmost intensity, as unendurable as the wretchedness left by the visitation of calamity. there are spots of sunshine sleeping on the fields of past existence too beautiful, as there are caves among its precipices too darksome to be looked on by the eyes of memory; and to carry on an image borrowed from the analogy between the moral and physical world, the soul may turn away in sickness from the untroubled silence of a resplendent lake, no less than from the haunted gloom of the thundering cataract. it is from such thoughts, and dreams, and reveries, as these, that all men feel how terrible it would be to live over again their agonies and their transports; that the happiest would fear to do so as much as the most miserable; and that to look back to our cradle seems scarcely less awful than to look forward to the grave. but if this unwillingness to bring before our souls, in distinct array, the more solemn and important events of our lives, be a natural and perhaps a wise feeling, how much more averse must every reflecting man be to the ransacking of his inmost spirit for all its hidden emotions and passions, to the tearing away that shroud which oblivion may have kindly flung over his vices and his follies, or that fine and delicate veil which christian humility draws over his virtues and acts of benevolence. to scrutinize and dissect the character of others is an idle and unprofitable task; and the most skilful anatomist will often be forced to withhold his hand when he unexpectedly meets with something he does not understand--some confirmation of the character of his patient which is not explicable on his theory of human nature. to become operators on our own shrinking spirits is something worse; for by probing the wounds of the soul, what can ensue but callousness or irritability. and it may be remarked, that those persons who have busied themselves most with inquiries into the causes, and motives, and impulses of their actions, have exhibited, in their conduct, the most lamentable contrast to their theory, and have seemed blinder in their knowledge than others in their ignorance. it will not be supposed that any thing we have now said in any way bears against the most important duty of self-examination. many causes there are existing, both in the best and the worst parts of our nature, which must render nugatory and deceitful any continued diary of what passes through the human soul; and no such confessions could, we humbly conceive, be of use either to ourselves or to the world. but there are hours of solemn inquiry in which the soul reposes on itself; the true confessional is not the bar of the public, but it is the altar of religion; there is a being before whom we may humble ourselves without being debased; and there are feelings for which human language has no expression, and which, in the silence of solitude and of nature, are known only unto the eternal. the objections, however, which might thus be urged against the writing and publishing accounts of all our feelings,--all the changes of our moral constitution,--do not seem to apply with equal force to the narration of our mere speculative opinions. their rise, progress, changes, and maturity may be pretty accurately ascertained; and as the advance to truth is generally step by step, there seems to be no great difficulty in recording the leading causes that have formed the body of our opinions, and created, modified, and coloured our intellectual character. yet this work would be alike useless to ourselves and others, unless pursued with a true magnanimity. it requires, that we should stand aloof from ourselves, and look down, as from an eminence, on our souls toiling up the hill of knowledge;--that we should faithfully record all the assistance we received from guides or brother pilgrims;-- that we should mask the limit of our utmost ascent, and, without exaggeration, state the value of our acquisitions. when we consider how many temptations there are even here to delude ourselves, and by a seeming air of truth and candour to impose upon others, it will be allowed, that, instead of composing memoirs of himself, a man of genius and talent would be far better employed in generalizing the observations and experiences of his life, and giving them to the world in the form of philosophic reflections, applicable not to himself alone, but to the universal mind of man. what good to mankind has ever flowed from the confessions of rousseau, or the autobiographical sketch of hume? from the first we rise with a confused and miserable sense of weakness and of power--of lofty aspirations and degrading appetencies--of pride swelling into blasphemy, and humiliation pitiably grovelling in the dust--of purity of spirit soaring on the wings of imagination, and grossness of instinct brutally wallowing in "epicurus' stye,"--of lofty contempt for the opinion of mankind, yet the most slavish subjection to their most fatal prejudices-- of a sublime piety towards god, and a wild violation of his holiest laws. from the other we rise with feelings of sincere compassion for the ignorance of the most enlightened. all the prominent features of hume's character were invisible to his own eyes; and in that meagre sketch which has been so much admired, what is there to instruct, to rouse, or to elevate--what light thrown over the duties of this life or the hopes of that to come? we wish to speak with tenderness of a man whose moral character was respectable, and whose talents were of the first order. but most deeply injurious to every thing lofty and high-toned in human virtue, to every thing cheering, and consoling, and sublime in that faith which sheds over this earth a reflection of the heavens, is that memoir of a worldly-wise man; in which he seems to contemplate with indifference the extinction of his own immortal soul, and jibes and jokes on the dim and awful verge of eternity. we hope that our readers will forgive these very imperfect reflections on a subject of deep interest, and accompany us now on our examination of mr. coleridge's "literary life," the very singular work which caused our ideas to run in that channel. it does not contain an account of his opinions and literary exploits alone, but lays open, not unfrequently, the character of the man as well as of the author; and we are compelled to think, that while it strengthens every argument against the composition of such memoirs, it does, without benefiting the cause either of virtue, knowledge, or religion, exhibit many mournful sacrifices of personal dignity, after which it seems impossible that mr. coleridge can be greatly respected either by the public or himself. considered merely in a literary point of view, the work is most execrable. he rambles from one subject to another in the most wayward and capricious manner; either from indolence, or ignorance, or weakness, he has never in one single instance finished a discussion; and while he darkens what was dark before into tenfold obscurity, he so treats the most ordinary common-places as to give them the air of mysteries, till we no longer know the faces of our old acquaintances beneath their cowl and hood, but witness plain flesh and blood matters of fact miraculously converted into a troop of phantoms. that he is a man of genius is certain; but he is not a man of a strong intellect nor of powerful talents. he has a great deal of fancy and imagination, but little or no real feeling, and certainly no judgment. he cannot form to himself any harmonious landscape such as it exists in nature, but beautified by the serene light of the imagination. he cannot conceive simple and majestic groupes of human figures and characters acting on the theatre of real existence. but his pictures of nature are fine only as imaging the dreaminess, and obscurity, and confusion of distempered sleep; while all his agents pass before our eyes like shadows, and only impress and affect us with a phantasmagorial splendour. it is impossible to read many pages of this work without thinking that mr. coleridge conceives himself to be a far greater man than the public is likely to admit; and we wish to waken him from what seems to us a most ludicrous delusion. he seems to believe that every tongue is wagging in his praise--that every ear is open to imbibe the oracular breathings of his inspiration. even when he would fain convince us that his soul is wholly occupied with some other illustrious character, he breaks out into laudatory exclamations concerning himself; no sound is so sweet to him as that of his own voice; the ground is hallowed on which his footsteps tread; and there seems to him something more than human in his very shadow. he will read no books that other people read; his scorn is as misplaced and extravagant as his admiration; opinions that seem to tally with his own wild ravings are holy and inspired; and unless agreeable to his creed, the wisdom of ages is folly; and wits, whom the world worship, dwarfed when they approach his venerable side. his admiration of nature or of man, we had almost said his religious feelings towards his god, are all narrowed, weakened, and corrupted, and poisoned by inveterate and diseased egotism; and instead of his mind reflecting the beauty and glory of nature, he seems to consider the mighty universe itself as nothing better than a mirror in which, with a grinning and idiot self-complacency, he may contemplate the physiognomy of samuel taylor coleridge. though he has yet done nothing in any one department of human knowledge, yet he speaks of his theories, and plans, and views, and discoveries, as if he had produced some memorable revolution in science. he at all times connects his own name in poetry with shakespeare, and spenser, and milton; in politics with burke, and fox, and pitt; in metaphysics with locke, and hartley, and berkely, and kant--feeling himself not only to be the worthy compeer of those illustrious spirits, but to unite, in his own mighty intellect, all the glorious powers and faculties by which they were separately distinguished, as if his soul were endowed with all human power, and was the depository of the aggregate, or rather the essence of all human knowledge. so deplorable a delusion as this, has only been equalled by that of joanna southcote, who mistook a complaint in the bowels for the divine afflatus; and believed herself about to give birth to the regenerator of the world, when sick unto death of an incurable and loathsome disease. the truth is that mr. coleridge is but an obscure name in english literature. in london he is well known in literary society, and justly admired for his extraordinary loquacity: he has his own little circle of devoted worshippers, and he mistakes their foolish babbling for the voice of the world. his name, too, has been often foisted into reviews, and accordingly is known to many who never saw any of his works. in scotland few know or care any thing about him; and perhaps no man who has spoken and written so much, and occasionally with so much genius and ability, ever made so little impression on the public mind. few people know how to spell or pronounce his name; and were he to drop from the clouds among any given number of well informed and intelligent men north of the tweed, he would find it impossible to make any intelligible communication respecting himself; for of him and his writings there would prevail only a perplexing dream, or the most untroubled ignorance. we cannot see in what the state of literature would have been different had he been cut off in childhood, or had he never been born; for except a few wild and fanciful ballads, he has produced nothing worthy remembrance. yet, insignificant as he assuredly is, he cannot put pen to paper without a feeling that millions of eyes are fixed upon him; and he scatters his sibylline leaves around him, with as majestical an air as if a crowd of enthusiastic admirers were rushing forward to grasp the divine promulgations, instead of their being, as in fact they are, coldly received by the accidental passenger, like a lying lottery puff or a quack advertisement. this most miserable arrogance seems, in the present age, confined almost exclusively to the original members of the lake school, and is, we think, worthy of especial notice, as one of the leading features of their character. it would be difficult to defend it either in southey or wordsworth; but in coleridge it is altogether ridiculous. southey has undoubtedly written four noble poems--thalaba, madoc, kehama, and roderick; and if the poets of this age are admitted, by the voice of posterity, to take their places by the side of the mighty of former times in the temple of immortality, he will be one of that sacred company. wordsworth, too, with all his manifold errors and defects, has, we think, won to himself a great name, and, in point of originality, will be considered as second to no man of this age. they are entitled to think highly of themselves, in comparison with their most highly gifted contemporaries; and therefore, though their arrogance may be offensive, as it often is, it is seldom or ever utterly ridiculous. but mr. coleridge stands on much lower ground, and will be known to future times only as a man who overrated and abused his talents--who saw glimpses of that glory which he could not grasp--who presumptuously came forward to officiate as high-priest at mysteries beyond his ken--and who carried himself as if he had been familiarly admitted into the penetralia of nature, when in truth he kept perpetually stumbling at the very threshold. this absurd self-elevation forms a striking contrast with the dignified deportment of all the other great living poets. throughout all the works of scott, the most original-minded man of this generation of poets, scarcely a single allusion is made to himself; and then it is with a truly delightful simplicity, as if he were not aware of his immeasurable superiority to the ordinary run of mankind. from the rude songs of our forefathers he has created a kind of poetry, which at once brought over the dull scenes of this our unimaginative life all the pomp, and glory, and magnificence of a chivalrous age. he speaks to us like some ancient bard awakened from his tomb, and singing of visions not revealed in dreams, but contemplated in all the freshness and splendour of reality. since he sung his bold, and wild, and romantic lays, a more religious solemnity breathes from our mouldering abbeys, and a sterner grandeur frowns over our time-shattered castles. he has peopled our hills with heroes, even as ossian peopled them; and, like a presiding spirit, his image haunts the magnificent cliffs of our lakes and seas. and if he be, as every heart feels, the author of those noble prose works that continue to flash upon the world, to him exclusively belongs the glory of wedding fiction and history in delighted union, and of embodying in imperishable records the manners, character, soul, and spirit of caledonia; so that, if all her annals were lost, her memory would in those tales be immortal. his truly is a name that comes to the heart of every briton with a start of exultation, whether it be heard in the hum of cities or in the solitude of nature. what has campbell ever obtruded on the public of his private history? yet his is a name that will be hallowed for ever in the souls of pure, and aspiring, and devout youth; and to those lofty contemplations in which poetry lends its aid to religion, his immortal muse will impart a more enthusiastic glow, while it blends in one majestic hymn all the noblest feelings which can spring from earth, with all the most glorious hopes that come from the silence of eternity. byron indeed speaks of himself often, but his is like the voice of an angel heard crying in the storm or the whirlwind; and we listen with a kind of mysterious dread to the tones of a being whom we scarcely believe to be kindred to ourselves, while he sounds the depths of our nature, and illuminates them with the lightnings of his genius. and finally, who more gracefully unostentatious than moore, a poet who has shed delight, and joy, and rapture, and exultation, through the spirit of an enthusiastic people, and whose name is associated in his native land with every thing noble and glorious in the cause of patriotism and liberty. we could easily add to the illustrious list; but suffice it to say, that our poets do in general bear their faculties meekly and manfully, trusting to their conscious powers, and the susceptibility of generous and enlightened natures, not yet extinct in britain, whatever mr. coleridge may think; for certain it is, that a host of worshippers will crowd into the temple, when the priest is inspired, and the flame he kindles is from heaven. such has been the character of great poets in all countries and in all times. fame is dear to them as their vital existence--but they love it not with the perplexity of fear, but the calmness of certain possession. they know that the debt which nature owes them must be paid, and they hold in surety thereof the universal passions of mankind. so milton felt and spoke of himself, with an air of grandeur, and the voice as of an archangel, distinctly hearing in his soul the music of after generations, and the thunder of his mighty name rolling through the darkness of futurity. so divine shakespeare felt and spoke; he cared not for the mere acclamations of his subjects; in all the gentleness of his heavenly spirit he felt himself to be their prophet and their king, and knew, when all the breathers of this world are dead, that he entombed in men's eyes would lie. indeed, who that knows any thing of poetry could for a moment suppose it otherwise? whatever made a great poet but the inspiration of delight and love in himself, and an empassioned desire to communicate them to the wide spirit of kindred existence? poetry, like religion, must be free from all grovelling feelings; and above all, from jealousy, envy, and uncharitableness. and the true poet, like the preacher of the true religion, will seek to win unto himself and his faith, a belief whose foundation is in the depths of love, and whose pillars are the noblest passions of humanity. it would seem that in truly great souls all feeling of self-importance, in its narrower sense, must be incompatible with the consciousness of a mighty achievement. the idea of the mere faculty or power is absorbed as it were in the idea of the work performed. that work stands out in its glory from the mind of its creator; and in the contemplation of it, he forgets that he himself was the cause of its existence, or feels only a dim but sublime association between himself and the object of his admiration; and when he does think of himself in conjunction with others, he feels towards the scoffer only a pitying sorrow for his blindness--being assured, that though at all times there will be weakness, and ignorance, and worthlessness, which can hold no communion with him or with his thoughts, so will there be at all times the pure, the noble, and the pious, whose delight it will be to love, to admire, and to imitate; and that never, at any point of time, past, present, or to come, can a true poet be defrauded of his just fame. but we need not speak of poets alone (though we have done so at present to expose the miserable pretensions of mr. coleridge), but look through all the bright ranks of men distinguished by mental power, in whatever department of human science. it is our faith, that without moral there can be no intellectual grandeur; and surely the self-conceit and arrogance which we have been exposing, are altogether incompatible with lofty feelings and majestic principles. it is the dwarf alone who endeavours to strut himself into the height of the surrounding company; but the man of princely stature seems unconscious of the strength in which nevertheless he rejoices, and only sees his superiority in the gaze of admiration which he commands. look at the most inventive spirits of this country,--those whose intellects have achieved the most memorable triumphs. take, for example, leslie in physical science, and what airs of majesty does he ever assume? what is samuel coleridge compared to such a man? what is an ingenious and fanciful versifier to him who has, like a magician, gained command over the very elements of nature,--who has realized the fictions of poetry,--and to whom frost and fire are ministering and obedient spirits? but of this enough.--it is a position that doubtless might require some modification, but in the main, it is and must be true, that real greatness, whether in intellect, genius, or virtue, is dignified and unostentatious; and that no potent spirit ever whimpered over the blindness of the age to his merits, and, like mr. coleridge, or a child blubbering for the moon, with clamorous outcries implored and imprecated reputation. the very first sentence of this literary biography shows how incompetent mr. coleridge is for the task he has undertaken. it has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation and in print, more frequently than i find it easy to explain; _whether i consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance in which i have lived, both from the literary and political world_. now, it is obvious, that if his writings be few, and unimportant, and unknown, mr. coleridge can have no reason for composing his literary biography. yet in singular contradiction to himself-- "if," says he, at p. , vol. i, "_the compositions which i have made public_, and that too in a form the most certain of an extensive circulation, though the least flattering to an author's self-love, had been published in books, they _would have filled a respectable number of volumes."_ he then adds, seldom have i written that in a day, the acquisition or investigation of which had not cost me _the precious labour of a month!_ he then bursts out into this magnificent exclamation, would that the criterion of a scholar's ability were the number and moral value of the truths which he has been the means of throwing into general circulation! and he sums up all by declaring, by what i _have_ effected am i to be judged by my fellow men. the truth is, that mr. coleridge has lived, as much as any man of his time, in literary and political society, and that he has sought every opportunity of keeping himself in the eye of the public, as restlessly as any charlatan who ever exhibited on the stage. to use his own words, "in , when i had barely passed the verge of manhood, i published a small volume of juvenile poems." these poems, by dint of puffing, reached a third edition; and though mr. coleridge pretends now to think but little of them, it is amusing to see how vehemently he defends them against criticism, and how pompously he speaks of such paltry trifles. "they were marked _by an ease and simplicity_ which i have studied, _perhaps with inferior success,_ to bestow on my latter compositions." but he afterwards repents of this sneer at his later compositions, and tells us, that they have nearly reached his standard of perfection! indeed, his vanity extends farther back than his juvenile poems; and he says, "for a school boy, i was _above par in english versification_, and had already produced two or three compositions, which i may venture to say, _without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity_." happily he has preserved one of those wonderful productions of his precocious boyhood, and our readers will judge for themselves what a clever child it was. underneath a huge oak-tree, there was of swine a huge company; that grunted as they crunch'd the mast, for that was ripe and fell full fast. then they trotted away for the wind grew high, one acorn they left and no more might you spy. it is a common remark, that wonderful children seldom perform the promises of their youth, and undoubtedly this fine effusion has not been followed in mr. coleridge's riper years by works of proportionate merit. we see, then, that our author came very early into public notice; and from that time to this, he has not allowed one year to pass without endeavouring to extend his notoriety. his poems were soon followed (they may have been preceded) by a tragedy, entitled, the "fall of robespierre," a meagre performance, but one which, from the nature of the subject, attracted considerable attention. he also wrote a whole book, utterly incomprehensible to mr. southey, we are sure, on that poet's joan of arc; and became as celebrated for his metaphysical absurdities, as his friend had become for the bright promise of genius exhibited by that unequal, but spirited poem. he next published a series of political essays, entitled, the "watchman," and "conciones ad populum." he next started up, fresh from the schools of germany, as the principal writer in the morning post, a _strong opposition paper_. he then published various outrageous political poems, some of them of a gross personal nature. he afterwards assisted mr. wordsworth in planning his lyrical ballads; and contributing several poems to that collection, he shared in the notoriety of the lake school. he next published a mysterious periodical work, "the friend," in which he declared it was his intention to settle at once, and for ever, the principles of morality, religion, taste, manners, and the fine arts, but which died of a galloping consumption in the twenty-eighth week of its age. he then published the tragedy of "remorse," which dragged out a miserable existence of twenty nights, on the boards of drury-lane, and then expired for ever, like the oil of the orchestral lamps. he then forsook the stage for the pulpit, and, by particular desire of his congregation, published two "lay sermons." he then walked in broad day-light into the shop of mr. murray, albemarle street, london, with two ladies hanging on each arm, geraldine and christabel,--a bold step for a person at all desirous of a good reputation, and most of the trade have looked shy at him since that exhibition. since that time, however, he has contrived means of giving to the world a collected edition of all his poems, and advanced to the front of the stage with a thick octavo in each hand, all about himself and other incomprehensibilities. we had forgot that he was likewise a contributor to mr. southey's omniana, where the editor of the edinburgh review is politely denominated an "ass," and then _became himself a writer in the said review_. and to sum up "the strange eventful history" of this modest, and obscure, and retired person, we must mention, that in his youth he held forth in a vast number of unitarian chapels--preached his way through bristol, and "brummagem," and manchester, in a "blue coat and white waistcoat"; and in after years, when he was not so much afraid of "the scarlet woman," did, in a full suit of sables, lecture on poesy, to "crowded, and, need i add, highly respectable audiences," at the royal institution. after this slight and imperfect outline of his poetical, oratorical, metaphysical, political, and theological exploits, our readers will judge, when they hear him talking of "his retirement and distance from the literary and political world," what are his talents for autobiography, and how far he has penetrated into the mysterious non-entities of his own character. mr. coleridge has written conspicuously on the association of ideas, but his own do not seem to be connected either by time, place, cause and effect, resemblance, or contrast, and accordingly it is no easy matter to follow him through all the vagaries of his literary life. we are told, at school _i enjoyed the inestimable advantage_ of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe master.--i learnt from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest and wildest odes, had a logic of its own as severe as that of science.--lute, harp, and lyre; muse, muses, and inspirations; pegasus, parnassus, and hippocrene; were all an abomination to him. in fancy i can almost hear him now exclaiming, _"harp? harp? lyre? pen and ink! boy you mean! muse! boy! muse! your nurse's daughter you mean! pierian spring! o aye! the cloister pump!"_--our classical knowledge was the least of the good gifts which we derived from his zealous and conscientious tutorage. with the then head-master of the grammar-school, christ hospital, we were not personally acquainted; but we cannot help thinking that he has been singularly unfortunate in his eulogist. he seems to have gone out of his province, and far out of his depth, when he attempted to teach boys the profoundest principles of poetry. but we must also add, that we cannot credit this account of him; for this doctrine of poetry being at all times logical, is that of which wordsworth and coleridge take so much credit to themselves for the discovery; and verily it is one too wilfully absurd and extravagant to have entered into the head of an honest man, whose time must have been wholly occupied with the instruction of children. indeed mr. coleridge's own poetical practices render this story incredible; for, during many years of his authorship, his diction was wholly at variance with such a rule, and the strain of his poetry as illogical as can be well imagined. when mr. bowyer prohibited his pupils from using, in their themes, the above-mentioned names, he did, we humbly submit, prohibit them from using the best means of purifying their taste and exalting their imagination. nothing could be so graceful, nothing so natural, as classical allusions, in the exercises of young minds, when first admitted to the fountains of greek and latin poetry; and the teacher who could seek to dissuade their ingenious souls from such delightful dreams, by coarse, vulgar, and indecent ribaldry, instead of deserving the name of "sensible," must have been a low-minded vulgar fellow, fitter for the porter than the master of such an establishment. but the truth probably is, that all this is a fiction of mr. coleridge, whose wit is at all times most execrable and disgusting. whatever the merits of his master were, mr. coleridge, even from his own account, seems to have derived little benefit from his instruction, and for the "inestimable advantage," of which he speaks, we look in vain through this narrative. in spite of so excellent a teacher, we find master coleridge, even before my fifteenth year, bewildered _in metaphysicks and in theological controversy_. nothing else pleased me. _history and particular facts_ lost all interest in my mind. poetry itself, yea novels and romances, became insipid to me. this preposterous pursuit was beyond doubt _injurious, both to my natural powers and to the progress of my education._ this deplorable condition of mind continued "even unto my seventeenth year." and now our readers must prepare themselves for a mighty and wonderful change, wrought, all on a sudden, on the moral and intellectual character of this metaphysical greenhorn. _"mr. bowles' sonnets, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto volume_ (a most important circumstance!) _were put into my hand!"_ to those sonnets, next to the school-master's lectures on poetry, mr. coleridge attributes the strength, vigour, and extension, of his own very original genius. by those works, year after year, i was enthusiastically delighted and inspired. my earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which i labored to make proselytes, not only _of my companions, but of all with whom i conversed, of whatever rank, and in whatever place._ as my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, i made, within less than a year and a half, _more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents i could make to those who had in any way won my regard._ my obligations to mr. bowles were indeed important, and for radical good! there must be some grievous natural defect in that mind which, even at the age of seventeen, could act so insanely; and we cannot but think, that no real and healthy sensibility could have exaggerated to itself so grossly the merits of bowles' sonnets. they are undoubtedly most beautiful, and we willingly pay our tribute of admiration to the genius of the amiable writer; but they neither did nor could produce any such effects as are here described, except upon a mind singularly weak and helpless. we must, however, take the fact as we find it; and mr. coleridge's first step, after his worship of bowles, was to see distinctly into the defects and deficiencies of pope (a writer whom bowles most especially admires, and has edited), and through all the false diction and borrowed plumage of gray! but here mr. coleridge drops the subject of poetry for the present, and proceeds to other important matters. we regret that mr. coleridge has passed over without notice all the years which he spent "in the happy quiet of ever-honoured jesus college, cambridge." that must have been the most important period of his life, and was surely more worthy of record than the metaphysical dreams or the poetical extravagancies of his boyhood. he tells us, that he was sent to the university "an excellent greek and latin scholar, and a tolerable hebraist"; and there might have been something rousing and elevating to young minds of genius and power, in his picture of himself, pursuits, visions, and attainments, during the bright and glorious morning of life, when he inhabited a dwelling of surpassing magnificence, guarded and hallowed, and sublimed by the shadows of the mighty. we should wish to know what progress he made there in his own favourite studies; what place he occupied, or supposed he occupied, among his numerous contemporaries of talent; how much he was inspired by the genius of the place; how far he "pierced the caves of old philosophy," or sounded the depths of the physical sciences. all this unfortunately is omitted, and he hurries on to details often trifling and uninfluential, sometimes low, vile, and vulgar, and, what is worse, occasionally inconsistent with any feeling of personal dignity and self-respect. after leaving college, instead of betaking himself to some respectable calling, mr. coleridge, with his characteristic modesty, determined to set on foot a periodical work called "the watchman," that through it "_all might know the truth_." the price of this very useful article was _"four-pence."_ off he set on a tour to the north to procure subscribers, "preaching in most of the great towns as a hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that not a rag of the woman of babylon might be seen on me." in preaching, his object was to show that our saviour was the real son of joseph, and that the crucifixion was a matter of small importance. mr. coleridge is now a most zealous member of the church of england--devoutly believes every iota in the thirty-nine articles, and that the christian religion is only to be found in its purity in the homilies and liturgy of that church. yet, on looking back to his unitarian zeal, he exclaims, o, never can i remember those days _with either shame or regret!_ for i was _most sincere, most disinterested! wealth, rank, life itself,_ then seem'd cheap to me, compared with the interests of truth, and the will of my maker. i cannot even accuse myself of having been actuated by _vanity!_ for in the expansion of my enthusiasm _i did not think of myself at all!_ this is delectable. what does he mean by saying that life seemed cheap? what danger could there be in the performance of his exploits, except that of being committed as a vagrant? what indeed could rank appear to a person thus voluntarily degraded? or who would expect vanity to be conscious of its own loathsomeness? during this tour he seems to have been constantly exposed to the insults of the vile and the vulgar, and to have associated with persons whose company must have been most odious to a gentleman. greasy tallow-chandlers, and pursey woollen-drapers, and grim-featured dealers in hard-ware, were his associates at manchester, derby, nottingham, and sheffield; and among them the light of truth was to be shed from its cloudy tabernacle in mr. coleridge's pericranium. at the house of a "brummagem patriot" he appears to have got dead drunk with strong ale and tobacco, and in that pitiable condition he was exposed to his disciples, lying upon a sofa, "with my face like a wall that is white-washing, _deathly_ pale, and with the cold drops of perspiration running down it from my forehead." some one having said, "have you seen a paper to-day, mr. coleridge?" the wretched man replied, with all the staring stupidity of his lamentable condition, "sir! i am far from convinced that a christian is permitted to read either newspapers, or any other works of merely political and temporary interest." this witticism quite enchanted his enlightened auditors, and they prolonged their festivities to an "early hour next morning." having returned to london with a thousand subscribers on his list, the "watchman" appeared in all his glory; but, alas! not on the day fixed for the first burst of his effulgence; which foolish delay incensed many of his subscribers. the watchman, on his second appearance, spoke blasphemously, and made indecent applications of scriptural language; then, instead of abusing government and aristocrats, as mr. coleridge had pledged himself to his constituents to do, he attacked his own party; so that in seven weeks, before the shoes were old in which he travelled to sheffield, the watchman went the way of all flesh, and his remains were scattered "through sundry old iron shops," where for one penny could be purchased each precious relic. to crown all, "his london publisher was a ----"; and mr. coleridge very narrowly escaped being thrown into jail for this his heroic attempt to shed over the manufacturing towns the illumination of knowledge. we refrain from making any comments on this deplorable story. this philosopher, and theologian, and patriot, now retired to a village in somersetshire, and, after having sought to enlighten the whole world, discovered that he himself was in utter darkness. doubts rushed in, broke upon me from the fountains of the great deep, and fell from the windows of heaven. the fontal truths of natural religion, and the book of revelation, alike contributed to the flood; and it was long ere my ark touched upon ararat, and rested. my head was with spinoza, though my heart was with paul and john.... we have no room here to expose, as it deserves to be exposed, the multitudinous political inconsistence of mr. coleridge, but we beg leave to state one single fact: he abhorred, hated, and despised mr. pitt,-- and he now loves and reveres his memory. by far the most spirited and powerful of his poetical writings, is the war eclogue, slaughter, fire, and famine; and in that composition he loads the minister with imprecations and curses, long, loud, and deep. but afterwards, when he has thought it prudent to change his principles, he denies that he ever felt any indignation towards mr. pitt; and with the most unblushing falsehood declares, that at the very moment his muse was consigning him to infamy, death, and damnation, he would "have interposed his body between him and danger." we believe that all good men, of all parties, regard mr. coleridge with pity and contempt. of the latter days of his literary life, mr. coleridge gives us no satisfactory account. the whole of the second volume is interspersed with mysterious inuendoes. he complains of the loss of all his friends, not by death, but estrangement. he tries to account for the enmity of the world to him, a harmless and humane man, who wishes well to all created things, and "of his wondering finds no end." he upbraids himself with indolence, procrastination, neglect of his worldly concerns, and all other bad habits,--and then, with incredible inconsistency, vaunts loudly of his successful efforts in the cause of literature, philosophy, morality, and religion. above all, he weeps and wails over the malignity of reviewers, who have persecuted him almost from his very cradle, and seem resolved to bark him into the grave. he is haunted by the image of a reviewer wherever he goes. they "push him from his stool," and by his bedside they cry, "sleep no more." they may abuse whomsoever they think fit, save himself and mr. wordsworth. all others are fair game--and he chuckles to see them brought down. but his sacred person must be inviolate, and rudely to touch it, is not high treason, it is impiety. yet his "ever-honoured friend, the laurel-honouring laureate," is a reviewer--his friend mr. thomas moore is a reviewer--his friend dr. middleton, bishop of calcutta, was the editor of a review--almost every friend he ever had is a reviewer;--and to crown all, he himself is a reviewer. every person who laughs at his silly poems--and his incomprehensible metaphysics, is malignant--in which case, there can be little benevolence in this world; and while mr. francis jeffrey is alive and merry, there can be no happiness here below for mr. samuel coleridge. and here we come to speak of a matter, which, though somewhat of a personal and private nature, is well deserving of mention in a review of mr. coleridge's literary life, for sincerity is the first of virtues, and without it no man can be respectable or useful. he has, in this work, accused mr. jeffrey of meanness--hypocrisy--falsehood--and breach of hospitality. that gentleman is able to defend himself--and his defence is no business of ours. but we now tell mr. coleridge, that instead of humbling his adversary, he has heaped upon his own head the ashes of disgrace--and with his own blundering hands, so stained his character as a man of honour and high principles, that the mark can never be effaced. all the most offensive attacks on the writings of wordsworth and southey, had been made by mr. jeffrey before his visit to keswick. yet, does coleridge receive him with open arms, according to his own account--listen, well-pleased, to all his compliments--talk to him for hours on his literary projects--dine with him as his guest at an inn--tell him that he knew mr. wordsworth would be most happy to see him--and in all respects behave to him with a politeness bordering on servility. and after all this, merely because his own vile verses were crumpled up like so much waste paper, by the grasp of a powerful hand in the edinburgh review, he accuses mr. jeffrey of abusing hospitality which he never received, and forgets, that instead of being the host, he himself was the smiling and obsequious guest of the man he pretends to have despised. with all this miserable forgetfulness of dignity and self-respect, he mounts the high horse, from which he instantly is tumbled into the dirt; and in his angry ravings collects together all the foul trash of literary gossip to fling at his adversary, but which is blown stifling back upon himself with odium and infamy. but let him call to mind his own conduct, and talk not of mr. jeffrey. many witnesses are yet living of his own egotism and malignity; and often has he heaped upon his "beloved friend, the laurel-honouring laureate," epithets of contempt, and pity, and disgust, though now it may suit his paltry purposes to worship and idolize. of mr. southey we at all times think, and shall speak, with respect and admiration; but his open adversaries are, like mr. jeffrey, less formidable than his unprincipled friends. when greek and trojan meet on the plain, there is an interest in the combat; but it is hateful and painful to think, that a hero should be wounded behind his back, and by a poisoned stiletto in the hand of a false friend. the concluding chapter of this biography is perhaps the most pitiful of the whole, and contains a most surprising mixture of the pathetic and the ludicrous. "strange," says he, "as the delusion may appear, yet it is most true, that three years ago i did not know or believe that i had an enemy in the world; and now even my strongest consolations of gratitude are mingled with fear, and i reproach myself for being too often disposed to ask,--have i one friend?" we are thus prepared for the narration of some grievous cruelty, or ingratitude, or malice--some violation of his peace, or robbery of his reputation; but our readers will start when they are informed, that this melancholy lament is occasioned solely by the cruel treatment which his poem of christabel received from the edinburgh review and other periodical journals! it was, he tells us, universally admired in manuscript--he recited it many hundred times to men, women, and children, and always with an electrical effect--it was bepraised by most of the great poets of the day--and for twenty years he was urged to give it to the world. but alas! no sooner had the lady christabel "come out," than all the rules of good-breeding and politeness were broken through, and the loud laugh of scorn and ridicule from every quarter assailed the ears of the fantastic hoyden. but let mr. coleridge be consoled. mr. scott and lord byron are good-natured enough to admire christabel, and the public have not forgotten that his lordship handed her ladyship upon the stage. it is indeed most strange, that mr., coleridge is not satisfied with the praise of those he admires,--but pines away for the commendation of those he contemns. having brought down his literary life to the great epoch of the publication of christabel, he there stops short; and that the world may compare him as he appears at that aera to his former self, when "he set sail from yarmouth on the morning of the th september, , in the hamburg packet," he has republished, from his periodical work the "friend," seventy pages of satyrane's letters. as a specimen of his wit in , our readers may take the following:-- we were all on the deck, but in a short time i observed marks of dismay. the lady retired to the cabin in some confusion; and many of the faces round me assumed a very doleful and frog-coloured appearance; and within an hour the number of those on deck was lessened by one half. i was giddy, but not sick; and the giddiness soon went away, but left a feverishness and want of appetite, which i attributed, in great measure, to the "_saeva mephitis_" of the bilge-water; and it was certainly not decreased by the _exportations from the cabin_. however, i was well enough to join the able-bodied passengers, one of whom observed, not inaptly, that momus might have discovered an easier _way to see a man's inside_ than by placing a window in his breast. he needed only have taken a salt-water trip in a packet boat. i am inclined to believe, that a packet is far superior to a stage-coach as a means of making men _open out to each other_! the importance of his observations during the voyage may be estimated by this one:-- at four o'clock i observed a wild duck swimming on the waves,_a single solitary wild duck!_ it is not easy to conceive how interesting a thing it looked in that round objectless desert of waters! at the house of klopstock, brother of the poet, he saw a portrait of lessing, which he thus describes to the public:--"his eyes were uncommonly _like mine_! if any thing, rather larger and more prominent! but the lower part of his face i and his nose--o what an exquisite expression of elegance and sensibility!" he then gives a long account of his interview with klopstock the poet, in which he makes that great man talk in a very silly, weak, and ignorant manner. mr. coleridge not only sets him right in all his opinions on english literature, but also is kind enough to correct, in a very authoritative and dictatorial tone, his erroneous views of the characteristic merits and defects of the most celebrated german writers. he has indeed the ball in his own hands throughout the whole game; and klopstock, who, he says, "was seventy-four years old, with legs enormously swollen," is beaten to a standstill. we are likewise presented with an account of a conversation which his friend w. held with the german poet, in which the author of the messiah makes a still more paltry figure. we can conceive nothing more odious and brutal, than two young ignorant lads from cambridge forcing themselves upon the retirement of this illustrious old man, and, instead of listening with love, admiration and reverence, to his sentiments and opinions, insolently obtruding upon him their own crude and mistaken fancies,--contradicting imperiously every thing he advances,--taking leave of him with a consciousness of their own superiority,--and, finally, talking of him and his genius in terms of indifference bordering on contempt. this mr. w. had the folly and the insolence to say to klopstock, who was enthusiastically praising the oberon of wieland, that he never could see the smallest beauty in any part of that poem. we must now conclude our account of this "unaccountable" production. it has not been in our power to enter into any discussion with mr. coleridge on the various subjects of poetry and philosophy, which he has, we think, vainly endeavoured to elucidate. but we shall, on a future occasion, meet him on his own favourite ground. no less than pages of the second volume are dedicated to the poetry of mr. wordsworth. he has endeavoured to define poetry--to explain the philosophy of metre--to settle the boundaries of poetic diction--and to show, finally, "what it is probable mr. wordsworth meant to say in his dissertation prefixed to his lyrical ballads." as mr. coleridge has not only studied the laws of poetical composition, but is a poet of considerable powers, there are, in this part of his book, many acute, ingenious, and even sensible observations and remarks; but he never knows when to have done,--explains what requires no explanation,--often leaves untouched the very difficulty he starts,--and when he has poured before us a glimpse of light upon the shapeless form of some dark conception, he seems to take a wilful pleasure in its immediate extinction, and leads "us floundering on, and quite astray," through the deepening shadows of interminable night. one instance there is of magnificent promise, and laughable non-performance, unequalled in the annals of literary history. mr. coleridge informs us, that he and mr. wordsworth (he is not certain which is entitled to the glory of the first discovery) have found out the difference between fancy and imagination. this discovery, it is prophesied, will have an incalculable influence on the progress of all the fine arts. he has written a long chapter purposely to prepare our minds for the great discussion. the audience is assembled--the curtain is drawn up--and there, in his gown, cap, and wig, is sitting professor coleridge. in comes a servant with a letter; the professor gets up, and, with a solemn voice, reads to the audience.--it is from an enlightened friend; and its object is to shew, in no very courteous terms either to the professor or his spectators, that he may lecture, but that nobody will understand him. he accordingly makes his bow, and the curtain falls; but the worst of the joke is, that the professor pockets the admittance-money,--for what reason, his outwitted audience are left, the best way they can, to "fancy or imagine." but the greatest piece of quackery in the book is his pretended account of the metaphysical system of kant, of which he knows less than nothing. he wall not allow that there is a single word of truth in any of the french expositions of that celebrated system, nor yet in any of our british reviews. we do not wish to speak of what we do not understand, and therefore say nothing of mr. coleridge's metaphysics.... we have done. we have felt it our duty to speak with severity of this book and its author--and we have given our readers ample opportunities to judge of the justice of our strictures. we have not been speaking in the cause of literature only, but, we conceive, in the cause of morality and religion. for it is not fitting that he should be held up as an example to the rising generation (but, on the contrary, it is most fitting that he should be exposed as a most dangerous model), who has alternately embraced, defended, and thrown aside all systems of philosophy--and all creeds of religion,--who seems to have no power of retaining an opinion,--no trust in the principles which he defends,--but who fluctuates from theory to theory, according as he is impelled by vanity, envy, or diseased desire of change,--and who, while he would subvert and scatter into dust those structures of knowledge, reared by the wise men of this and other generations, has nothing to erect in their room but the baseless and air-built fabrics of a dreaming imagination. on the cockney school of poetry no. i [from _blackwood's magazine_, october, ] our talk shall be (a theme we never tire on) of chaucer, spenser, shakespeare, milton, byron, (our england's dante)--wordsworth--hunt, and keats, the muses' son of promise; and of what feats he yet may do. cornelius webb. while the whole critical world is occupied with balancing the merits, whether in theory or in execution, of what is commonly called the lake school, it is strange that no one seems to think it at all necessary to say a single word about another new school of poetry which has of late sprung up among us. this school has not, i believe, as yet received any name; but if i may be permitted to have the honour of christening it, it may henceforth be referred to by the designation of the cockney school. its chief doctor and professor is mr. leigh hunt, a man certainly of some talents, of extravagant pretensions both in wit, poetry, and politics, and withal of exquisitely bad taste, and extremely vulgar modes of thinking and manners in all respects. he is a man of little education. he knows absolutely nothing of greek, almost nothing of latin, and his knowledge of italian literature is confined to a few of the most popular of petrarch's sonnets, and an imperfect acquaintance with ariosto, through the medium of mr. hoole. as to the french poets, he dismisses them in the mass as a set of prim, precise, unnatural pretenders. the truth is, he is in a state of happy ignorance about them and all that they have done. he has never read zaïre nor phèdre. to those great german poets who have illuminated the last fifty years with a splendour to which this country has, for a long time, seen nothing comparable, mr. hunt is an absolute stranger. of spanish books he has read don quixote (in the translation of motteux), and some poems of lope de vega in the imitations of my lord holland. of all the great critical writers, either of ancient or of modern times, he is utterly ignorant, excepting only mr. jeffrey among ourselves. with this stock of knowledge, mr. hunt presumes to become the founder of a new school of poetry, and throws away entirely the chance which he might have had of gaining some true poetical fame, had he been less lofty in his pretensions. the story of rimini is not wholly undeserving of praise. it possesses some tolerable passages, which are all quoted in the edinburgh reviewer's account of the poem, and not one of which is quoted in the very illiberal attack upon it in the quarterly. but such is the wretched taste in which the greater part of the work is executed, that most certainly no man who reads it once will ever be able to prevail upon himself to read it again. one feels the same disgust at the idea of opening rimini, that impresses itself on the mind of a man of fashion, when he is invited to enter, for a second time, the gilded drawing-room of a little mincing boarding school mistress, who would fain have an _at home_ in her house. every thing is pretence, affectation, finery, and gaudiness. the beaux are attorneys' apprentices, with chapeau bras and limerick gloves--fiddlers, harp teachers, and clerks of genius: the belles are faded fan-twinkling spinsters, prurient vulgar misses from school, and enormous citizens' wives. the company are entertained with lukewarm negus, and the sounds of a paltry piano forte. all the great poets of our country have been men of some rank in society, and there is no vulgarity in any of their writings; but mr. hunt cannot utter a dedication, or even a note, without betraying the _shibboleth_ of low birth and low habits. he is the ideal of a cockney poet. he raves perpetually about "greenfields," "jaunty streams," and "o'er-arching leafiness," exactly as a cheapside shop-keeper does about the beauties of his box on the camberwell road. mr. hunt is altogether unacquainted with the face of nature in her magnificent scenes; he has never seen any mountain higher than highgate-hill, nor reclined by any stream more pastoral than the serpentine river. but he is determined to be a poet eminently rural, and he rings the changes--till one is sick of him, on the beauties of the different "high views" which he has taken of god and nature, in the course of some sunday dinner parties, at which he has assisted in the neighbourhood of london. his books are indeed not known in the country; his fame as a poet (and i might almost say, as a politician too) is entirely confined to the young attorneys and embryo-barristers about town. in the opinion of these competent judges, london is the world--and hunt is a homer. mr. hunt is not disqualified by his ignorance and vulgarity alone, for being the founder of a respectable sect in poetry. he labours under the burden of a sin more deadly than either of these. the two great elements of all dignified poetry, religious feeling, and patriotic feeling, have no place in his mind. his religion is a poor tame dilution of the blasphemies of the _encyclopaedie_--his patriotism a crude, vague, ineffectual, and sour jacobinism. he is without reverence either for god or man; neither altar nor throne have any dignity in his eyes. he speaks well of nobody but two or three great dead poets, and in so speaking of them he does well; but, alas! mr. hunt is no conjurer [greek: technae ou lanthanei]. he pretends, indeed, to be an admirer of spencer and chaucer, but what he praises in them is never what is most deserving of praise--it is only that which he humbly conceives, bears some resemblance to the more perfect productions of mr. leigh hunt; and we can always discover, in the midst of his most violent ravings about the court of elizabeth, and the days of sir philip sidney, and the fairy queen--that the real objects of his admiration are the coterie of hampstead and the editor of the examiner. when he talks about chivalry and king arthur, he is always thinking of himself, and "_a small party of friends, who meet once a-week at a round table, to discuss the merits of a leg of mutton, and of the subjects upon which we are to write._"-- mr. leigh hunt's ideas concerning the sublime, and concerning his own powers, bear a considerable resemblance to those of his friend bottom, the weaver, on the same subjects; "i will roar, that it shall do any man's heart good to hear me."--"i will roar you an 'twere any nightingale." the poetry of mr. hunt is such as might be expected from the personal character and habits of its author. as a vulgar man is perpetually labouring to be genteel--in like manner, the poetry of this man is always on the stretch to be grand. he has been allowed to look for a moment from the anti-chamber into the saloon, and mistaken the waving of feathers and the painted floor for the _sine quâ non's_ of elegant society. he would fain be always tripping and waltzing, and is sorry that he cannot be allowed to walk about in the morning with yellow breeches and flesh-coloured silk stockings. he sticks an artificial rose-bud into his button hole in the midst of winter. he wears no neckcloth, and cuts his hair in imitation of the prints of petrarch. in his verses also he is always desirous of being airy, graceful, easy, courtly, and italian. if he had the smallest acquaintance with the great demigods of italian poetry, he could never fancy that the style in which he writes, bears any, even the most remote resemblance to the severe and simple manner of dante--the tender stillness of the lover of laura--or the sprightly and good-natured unconscious elegance of the inimitable ariosto. he has gone into a strange delusion about himself, and is just as absurd in supposing that he resembles the italian poets as a greater quack still (mr. coleridge) is, in imagining that he is a philosopher after the manner of kant or mendelshon--and that "the eye of lessing bears a remarkable likeness to mine," i.e., the eye of mr. samuel coleridge.[ ] [ ] mr. wordsworth (meaning, we presume, to pay mr. coleridge a compliment), makes him look very absurdly, "a noticeable man, with _large grey eyes_." the extreme moral depravity of the cockney school is another thing which is for ever thrusting itself upon the public attention, and convincing every man of sense who looks into their productions, that they who sport such sentiments can never be great poets. how could any man of high original genius ever stoop publicly, at the present day, to dip his fingers in the least of those glittering and rancid obscenities which float on the surface of mr. hunt's hippocrene? his poetry is that of a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses. he talks indelicately like a tea-sipping milliner girl. some excuse for him there might have been, had he been hurried away by imagination or passion. but with him indecency is a disease, and he speaks unclean things from perfect inanition. the very concubine of so impure a wretch as leigh hunt would be to be pitied, but alas! for the wife of such a husband! for him there is no charm in simple seduction; and he gloats over it only when accompanied with adultery and incest. the unhealthy and jaundiced medium through which the founder of the cockney school views every thing like moral truth, is apparent, not only from his obscenity, but also from his want of respect for all that numerous class of plain upright men, and unpretending women, in which the real worth and excellence of human society consists. every man is, according to mr. hunt, a dull potato-eating blockhead--of no greater value to god or man than any ox or dray-horse--who is not an admirer of voltaire's _romans_, a worshipper of lord holland and mr. haydon and a quoter of john buncle and chaucer's flower and leaf. every woman is useful only as a breeding machine, unless she is fond of reading launcelot of the lake, in an antique summer-house. how such a profligate creature as mr. hunt can pretend to be an admirer of mr. wordsworth, is to us a thing altogether inexplicable. one great charm of wordsworth's noble compositions consists in the dignified purity of thought, and the patriarchal simplicity of feeling, with which they are throughout penetrated and imbued. we can conceive a vicious man admiring with distant awe and spectacle of virtue and purity; but if he does so sincerely, he must also do so with the profoundest feeling of the error of his own ways, and the resolution to amend them. his admiration must be humble and silent, not pert and loquacious. mr. hunt praises the purity of wordsworth as if he himself were pure, his dignity as if he also were dignified. he is always like the ball of dung in the fable, pleasing himself, and amusing by-standers with his "nos poma natamus." for the person who writes _rimini_, to admire the excursion, is just as impossible as it would be for a chinese polisher of cherry-stones, or gilder of tea-cups, to burst into tears at the sight of the theseus or the torso. the founder of the cockney school would fain claim poetical kindred with lord byron and thomas moore. such a connexion would be as unsuitable for them as for william wordsworth. the days of mr. moore's follies are long since over; and, as he is a thorough gentleman, he must necessarily entertain the greatest contempt for such an under-bred person as leigh hunt. but lord byron! how must the haughty spirit of lara and harold contemn the subaltern sneaking of our modern tuft-hunter. the insult which he offered to lord byron in the dedication of rimini,--in which he, a paltry cockney newspaper scribbler, had the assurance to address one of the most nobly-born of english patricians, and one of the first geniuses whom the world ever produced, as "my dear byron," although it may have been forgotten and despised by the illustrious person whom it most nearly concerned,--excited a feeling of utter loathing and disgust in the public mind, which will always be remembered whenever the name of leigh hunt is mentioned. we dare say mr. hunt has some fine dreams about the true nobility being the nobility of talent, and flatters himself, that with those who acknowledge only that sort of rank, he himself passes for being the _peer_ of byron. he is sadly mistaken. he is as completely a plebeian in his mind as he is in his rank and station in society. to that highest and unalienated nobility which the great roman satirist styles "sola atque unica," we fear his pretensions would be equally unavailing. the shallow and impotent pretensions, tenets, and attempts, of this man,--and the success with which his influence seems to be extending itself among a pretty numerous, though certainly a very paltry and pitiful, set of readers,--have for the last two or three years been considered by us with the most sickening aversion. the very culpable manner in which his chief poem was reviewed in the edinburgh review (we believe it is no secret, at his own impatient and feverish request, by his partner in the round table), was matter of concern to more readers than ourselves. the masterly pen which inflicted such signal chastisement on the early licentiousness of moore, should not have been idle on that occasion. mr. jeffrey does ill when he delegates his important functions into such hands as mr. hazlitt. it was chiefly in consequence of that gentleman's allowing leigh hunt to pass unpunished through a scene of slaughter, which his execution might so highly have graced that we came to the resolution of laying before our readers a series of essays on _the cockney school_--of which here terminates the first. _z_. the cockney school of poetry no. iii [from _blackwood's magazine_, july, ] our hatred and contempt of leigh hunt as a writer, is not so much owing to his shameless irreverence to his aged and afflicted king--to his profligate attacks on the character of the king's sons--to his low-born insolence to that aristocracy with whom he would in vain claim the alliance of one illustrious friendship--to his paid panderism to the vilest passions of that mob of which he is himself a firebrand--to the leprous crust of self-conceit with which his whole moral being is indurated--to that loathsome vulgarity which constantly clings round him like a vermined garment from st. giles'--to that irritable temper which keeps the unhappy man, in spite even of his vanity, in a perpetual fret with himself and all the world beside, and that shews itself equally in his deadly enmities and capricious friendships,--our hatred and contempt of leigh hunt, we say, is not so much owing to these and other causes, as to the odious and unnatural harlotry of his polluted muse. we were the first to brand with a burning iron the false face of this kept-mistress of a demoralizing incendiary. we tore off her gaudy veil and transparent drapery, and exhibited the painted cheeks and writhing limbs of the prostitute. we denounced to the execration of the people of england, the man who had dared to write in the solitude of a cell, whose walls ought to have heard only the sighs of contrition and repentance, a lewd tale of incest, adultery, and murder, in which the violation of nature herself was wept over, palliated, justified, and held up to imitation, and the violators themselves worshipped as holy martyrs. the story of rimini had begun to have its admirers; but their deluded minds were startled at our charges,--and on reflecting upon the character of the poem, which they had read with a dangerous sympathy, not on account of its poetical merit, which is small indeed, but on account of those voluptuous scenes, so dangerous even to a pure imagination, when insidiously painted with the seeming colours of virtue,--they were astounded at their own folly and their own danger, and consigned the wretched volume to that ignominious oblivion, which, in a land of religion and morality, must soon be the doom of all obscene and licentious productions. the story of rimini is heard of no more. but leigh hunt will not be quiet. his hebdomadal hand [**pointing hand symbol] is held up, even on the sabbath, against every man of virtue and genius in the land; but the great defamer claims to himself an immunity from that disgrace which he knows his own wickedness has incurred,--the cockney calumniator would fain hold his own disgraced head sacred from the iron fingers of retribution. but that head shall be brought low--aye--low "as heaped up justice" ever sunk that of an offending scribbler against the laws of nature and of god. leigh hunt dared not, hazlitt dared not, to defend the character of the "story of rimini." a man may venture to say that in verse which it is perilous to utter in plain prose. even they dared not to affirm to the people of england, that a wife who had committed incest with her husband's brother, ought on her death to be buried in the same tomb with her fraticidal [transcriber's note: sic] paramour, and that tomb to be annually worshipped by the youths and virgins of their country. and therefore leigh hunt flew into a savage passion against the critic who had chastised his crime, pretended that he himself was insidiously charged with the offences which he had applauded and celebrated in others, and tried to awaken the indignation of the public against his castigator, as if he had been the secret assassin of private character, who was but the open foe of public enormity. the attempt was hopeless,-- the public voice has lifted up against hunt,--and sentence of excommunication from the poets of england has been pronounced, enrolled, and ratified. there can be no radical distinction allowed between the private and public character of a poet. if a poet sympathizes with and justifies wickedness in his poetry, he is a wicked man. it matters not that his private life may be free from wicked actions. corrupt his moral principles must be,--and if his conduct has not been flagrantly immoral, the cause must be looked for in constitution, &c., but not in conscience. it is therefore of little or no importance, whether leigh hunt be or be not a bad private character. he maintains, that he is a most excellent private character, and that he would blush to tell the world how highly he is thought of by an host of respectable friends. be it so,--and that his vanity does not delude him. but this is most sure, that, in such a case, the world will never be brought to believe even the truth. the world is not fond of ingenious distinctions between the theory and the practice of morals. the public are justified in refusing to hear a man plead in favour of his character, when they hold in their hands a work of his in which all respect to character is forgotten. we must reap the fruit of what we sow; and if evil and unjust reports have arisen against leigh hunt as a man, and unluckily for him it is so, he ought not to attribute the rise of such reports to the political animosities which his virulence has excited, but to the real and obvious cause--his voluptuous defence of crimes revolting to nature. the publication of the voluptuous story of rimini was followed, it would appear, by mysterious charges against leigh hunt in his domestic relations. the world could not understand the nature of his poetical love of incest; and instead of at once forgetting both the poem and the poet, many people set themselves to speculate, and talk, and ask questions, and pry into secrets with which they had nothing to do, till at last there was something like an identification of leigh hunt himself with paolo, the incestuous hero of leigh hunt's chief cockney poem. this was wrong, and, we believe, wholly unjust; but it was by no means unnatural; and precisely what leigh hunt is himself in the weekly practice of doing to other people without the same excuse. leigh hunt has now spoken out so freely to the public on the subject, that there can be no indelicacy in talking of it, in as far as it respects him, at least.... there is no need for us to sink down this unhappy man into deeper humiliation. never before did the abuse and prostitution of talents bring with them such prompt and memorable punishment. the pestilential air which leigh hunt breathed forth into the world to poison and corrupt, has been driven stiflingly back upon himself, and he who strove to spread the infection of loathsome licentiousness among the tender moral constitutions of the young, has been at length rewarded, as it was fitting he should be, by the accusation of being himself guilty of those crimes which it was the object of "the story of rimini" to encourage and justify in others. the world knew nothing of him but from his works; and were they blameable (even though they erred) in believing him capable of any enormities in his own person, whose imagination feasted and gloated on the disgusting details of adultery and incest? they were repelled and sickened by such odious and unnatural wickedness--he was attracted and delighted. what to them was the foulness of pollution, seemed to him the beauty of innocence. what to them was the blast from hell, to him was the air from heaven. they read and they condemned. they asked each other "what manner of man is this?" the charitable were silent. it would perhaps be hard to call them uncharitable who spoke aloud. thoughts were associated with his name which shall be nameless by us; and at last the wretched scribbler himself has had the gross and unfeeling folly to punish them all to the world, and that too in a tone of levity that could have been becoming only on our former comparatively trivial charges against him of wearing yellow breeches, and dispensing with the luxury of a neckcloth. he shakes his shoulders, according to his rather iniquitous custom, at being told that he is suspected of adultery and incest! a pleasant subject of merriment, no doubt, it is--though somewhat embittered by the intrusive remembrance of that unsparing castigator of vice, mr. gifford, and clouded over by the melancholy breathed from the shin-bone of his own poor old deceased grandmother. what a mixture of the horrible and absurd! and the man who thus writes is--not a christian, for that he denies--but, forsooth, a poet! one of the great spirits who on earth are sojourning! but leigh hunt is not guilty, in the above paragraph, of shocking levity alone,--he is guilty of falsehood. it is not true, that he learns for the first time, from that anonymous letter (so vulgar, that we could almost suspect him of having written it himself) what charges were in circulation against him. he knew it all before. has he forgotten to whom he applied for explanation when z.'s sharp essay on the cockney poetry cut him to the heart? he knows what he said upon those occasions, and let him ponder upon it. but what could induce him to suspect the amiable bill hazlitt, "him, the immaculate," of being z.? it was this,--he imagined that none but that foundered artist could know the fact of his feverish importunities to be reviewed by him in the edinburgh review. and therefore, having almost "as fine an intellectual touch" as "bill the painter" himself, he thought he saw z. lurking beneath the elegant exterior of that highly accomplished man. dear hazlitt, whose tact intellectual is such, that it seems to feel truth as one's fingers do touch. but, for the present, we have nothing more to add. leigh hunt is delivered into our hands to do with him as we will. our eyes shall be upon him, and unless he amend his ways, to wither and to blast him. the pages of the edinburgh review, we are confident, are henceforth shut against him. one wicked cockney will not again be permitted to praise another in that journal, which, up to the moment when incest and adultery were defended in its pages, had, however openly at war with religion, kept at least upon decent terms with the cause of morality. it was indeed a fatal day for mr. jeffrey, when he degraded both himself and his original coadjutors, by taking into pay such an unprincipled blunderer as hazlitt. he is not a coadjutor, he is an accomplice. the day is perhaps not far distant, when the charlatan shall be stripped to the naked skin, and made to swallow his own vile prescriptions. he and leigh hunt are arcades ambo et cantare pares-- shall we add, et respondere parati? z. on keats [from _blackwood's magazine_, august, ] cockney school of poetry no. iv ---- of keats, the muses' son of promise, and what feats he yet may do, &c. cornelius webb. of all the manias of this mad age, the most incurable, as well as the most common, seems to be no other than the _metromanie_. the just celebrity of robert burns and miss baillie has had the melancholy effect of turning the heads of we know not how many farm-servants and unmarried ladies; our very footmen compose tragedies, and there is scarcely a superannuated governess in the island that does not leave a roll of lyrics behind her in her band-box. to witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing; but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is of course ten times more afflicting. it is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the case of mr. john keats. this young man appears to have received from nature talents of an excellent, perhaps even of a superior order-- talents which, devoted to the purposes of any useful profession, must have rendered him a respectable, if not an eminent citizen. his friends, we understand, destined him to the career of medicine, and he was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town. but all has been undone by a sudden attack of the malady to which we have alluded. whether mr. john had been sent home with a diuretic or composing draught to some patient far gone in the poetical mania, we have not heard. this much is certain, that he has caught the infection, and that thoroughly. for some time we were in hopes, that he might get off with a violent fit or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible. the phrenzy of the "poems" was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of "endymion." we hope, however, that in so young a person, and with a constitution originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly incurable. time, firm treatment, and rational restraint, do much for many apparently hopeless invalids; and if mr. keats should happen, at some interval of reason, to cast his eye upon our pages, he may perhaps be convinced of the existence of his malady, which, in such cases, is often all that is necessary to put the patient in a fair way of being cured. the readers of the examiner newspaper were informed, some time ago, by a solemn paragraph, in mr. hunt's best style, of the appearance of two new stars of glorious magnitude and splendour in the poetical horizon of the land of cockaigne. one of these turned out, by and by, to be no other than mr. john keats. this precocious adulation confirmed the wavering apprentice in his desire to quit the gallipots, and at the same time excited in his too susceptible mind a fatal admiration for the character and talents of the most worthless and affected of all the versifiers of our time. one of his first productions was the following sonnet, "_written on the day when mr. leigh hunt left prison._" it will be recollected, that the cause of hunt's confinement was a series of libels against his sovereign, and that its fruit was the odious and incestuous "story of rimini." what though, for shewing truth to flattered state, _kind hunt_ was shut in prison, yet has he, in his immortal spirit been as free as the sky-searching lark, and as elate. minion of grandeur! think you he did wait? think you he nought but prison walls did see, till, so unwilling, thou unturn'dst the key? ah, no! far happier, nobler was his fate! _in spenser's halls_! he strayed, and bowers fair, culling enchanted flowers; and he flew _with daring milton_! through the fields of air; to regions of his own his genius true took happy flights. who shall his fame impair when thou art dead, and all thy wretched crew? the absurdity of the thought in this sonnet is, however, if possible, surpassed in another, "_addressed to haydon_" the painter, that clever, but most affected artist, who as little resembles raphael in genius as he does in person, notwithstanding the foppery of having his hair curled over his shoulders in the old italian fashion. in this exquisite piece it will be observed, that mr. keats classes together wordsworth, hunt, and haydon, as the three greatest spirits of the age, and that he alludes to himself, and some others of the rising brood of cockneys, as likely to attain hereafter an equally honourable elevation. wordsworth and hunt! what a juxta-position! the purest, the loftiest, and, we do not fear to say it, the most classical of living english poets, joined together in the same compliment with the meanest, the filthiest, and the most vulgar of cockney poetasters. no wonder that he who could be guilty of this should class haydon with raphael, and himself with spenser. great spirits now on earth are sojourning; he of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, who on helvellyn's summit, wide awake, catches his freshness from archangel's wing: _he of the rose, the violet, the spring, the social smile, the chain for freedom's sake_: and lo!--whose steadfastness would never take a meaner sound than raphael's whispering. and other spirits there are standing apart upon the forehead of the age to come; these, these will give the world another heart, and other pulses. _hear ye not the hum of mighty workings_?-- _listen awhile ye nations, and be dumb_. the nations are to listen and be dumb! and why, good johnny keats? because leigh hunt is editor of the examiner, and haydon has painted the judgment of solomon, and you and cornelius webb, and a few more city sparks, are pleased to look upon yourselves as so many future shakespeares and miltons! the world has really some reason to look to its foundations! here is a _tempestas in matulâ_ with a vengeance. at the period when these sonnets were published, mr. keats had no hesitation in saying, that he looked on himself as "_not yet_ a glorious denizen of the wide heaven of poetry," but he had many fine soothing visions of coming greatness, and many rare plans of study to prepare him for it.... having cooled a little from this "fine passion," our youthful poet passes very naturally into a long strain of foaming abuse against a certain class of english poets, whom, with pope at their head, it is much the fashion with the ignorant unsettled pretenders of the present time to undervalue. begging these gentlemen's pardon, although pope was not a poet of the same high order with some who are now living, yet, to deny his genius, it is just about as absurd as to dispute that of wordsworth, or to believe in that of hunt. above all things, it is most pitiably ridiculous to hear men, of whom their country will always have reason to be proud, reviled by uneducated and flimsy striplings, who are not capable of understanding either their merits, or those of any other _men of power_--fanciful dreaming tea-drinkers, who, without logic enough to analyse a single idea, or imagination enough to form one original image, or learning enough to distinguish between the written language of englishmen and the spoken jargon of cockneys, presume to talk with contempt of some of the most exquisite spirits the world ever produced, merely because they did not happen to exert their faculties in laborious affected descriptions of flowers seen in window-pots, or cascades heard at vauxhall; in short, because they chose to be wits, philosophers, patriots, and poets, rather than to found the cockney school of versification, morality, and politics, a century before its time. after blaspheming himself into a fury against boileau, &c., mr. keats comforts himself and his readers with a view of the present more promising aspect of affairs; above all, with the ripened glories of the poet of rimini. addressing the names of the departed chiefs of english poetry, he informs them, in the following clear and touching manner, of the existence of "him of the rose," &c. from a thick brake, nested and quiet in a valley mild, bubbles a pipe; fine sounds are floating wild about the earth. happy are ye and glad.... from some verses addressed to various individuals of the other sex, it appears, notwithstanding all this gossamer-work, that johnny's affectations are not entirely confined to objects purely etherial. take, by way of specimen, the following prurient and vulgar lines, evidently meant for some young lady east of temple-bar. add too, the sweetness of thy honied voice; the neatness of thine ankle lightly turn'd: with those beauties, scarce discerned, kept with such sweet privacy, that they seldom meet the eye of the little loves that fly round about with eager pry. saving when, with freshening lave, thou dipp'st them in the taintless wave; like twin water lilies, born in the coolness of the morn. o, if thou hadst breathed then, now the muses had been ten. couldst thou wish for lineage _higher_ than twin sister of _thalia_? at last for ever, evermore, will i call the graces four. who will dispute that our poet, to use his own phrase (and rhyme), can mingle music fit for the soft _ear_ of lady _cytherea_. so much for the opening bud; now for the expanded flower. it is time to pass from the juvenile "poems," to the mature and elaborate "endymion, a poetic romance." the old story of the moon falling in love with a shepherd, so prettily told by a roman classic, and so exquisitely enlarged and adorned by one of the most elegant of german poets, has been seized upon by mr. john keats, to be done with as might seem good unto the sickly fancy of one who never read a single line either of ovid or of wieland. if the quantity, not the quality, of the verses dedicated to the story is to be taken into account, there can be no doubt that mr. keats may now claim endymion entirely to himself. to say the truth, we do not suppose either the latin or the german poet would be very anxious to dispute about the property of the hero of the "poetic romance." mr. keats has thoroughly appropriated the character, if not the name. his endymion is not a greek shepherd, love of a grecian goddess; he is merely a young cockney rhymster, dreaming a phantastic dream at the full of the moon. costume, were it worth while to notice such a trifle, is violated in every page of this goodly octavo. from his prototype hunt, john keats has acquired a sort of vague idea, that the greeks were a most tasteful people, and that no mythology can be so finely adapted for the purposes of poetry as theirs. it is amusing to see what a hand the two cockneys make of this mythology; the one confesses that he never read the greek tragedians, and the other knows homer only from chapman, and both of them write about apollo, pan, nymphs, muses, and mysteries, as might be expected from persons of their education. we shall not, however, enlarge at present upon this subject, as we mean to dedicate an entire paper to the classical attainments and attempts of the cockney poets. as for mr. keats's "endymion," it has just as much to do with greece as it has with "old tartary the fierce"; no man, whose mind has ever been imbued with the smallest knowledge or feeling of classical poetry or classical history, could have stooped to profane and vulgarise every association in the manner which has been adopted by this "son of promise." before giving any extracts, we must inform our readers, that this romance is meant to be written in english heroic rhyme. to those who have read any of hunt's poems, this hint might indeed be needless. mr. keats has adopted the loose, nerveless versification, and cockney rhymes of the poet of rimini; but in fairness to that gentleman, we must add, that the defects of the system are tenfold more conspicuous in his disciples' work than in his own. mr. hunt is a small poet, but he is a clever man. mr. keats is a still smaller poet, and he is only a boy of pretty abilities, which he has done every thing in his power to spoil.... after all this, however, the "modesty," as mr. keats expresses it, of the lady diana prevented her from owning in olympus her passion for endymion. venus, as the most knowing in such matters, is the first to discover the change that has taken place in the temperament of the goddess. "an idle tale," says the laughter-loving dame, a humid eye, and steps luxurious, when these are new and strange, are ominous. the inamorata, to vary the intrigue, carries on a romantic intercourse with endymion, under the disguise of an indian damsel. at last, however, her scruples, for some reason or other, are all overcome, and the queen of heaven owns her attachment. she gave her fair hands to him, and behold, before three swiftest kisses he had told, they vanish far away!--peona went home through the gloomy wood in wonderment. and so, like many other romances, terminates the "poetic romance" of johnny keats, in a patched-up wedding. we had almost forgotten to mention, that keats belongs to the cockney school of politics, as well as the cockney school of poetry. it is fit that he who holds rimini to be the first poem, should believe the examiner to be the first politician of the day. we admire consistency, even in folly. hear how their bantling has already learned to lisp sedition. there are who lord it o'er their fellow-men with most prevailing tinsel: who unpen their baaing vanities, to browse away the comfortable green and juicy hay from human pastures; or, o torturing fact! who, through an idiot blink, will see unpack'd fire-branded foxes to sear up and singe our gold and ripe-ear'd hopes. with not one tinge of sanctuary splendour, not a sight able to face an owl's, they still are dight by the blue-eyed nations in empurpled vests, and crowns, and turbans. with unladen breasts, save of blown self-applause, they proudly mount to their spirit's perch, their being's high account, their tiptop nothings, their dull skies, their thrones-- amid the fierce intoxicating tones. of trumpets, shoutings, and belaboured drums, and sudden cannon. ah! how all this hums, in wakeful ears, like uproar past and gone-- like thunder clouds that spake to babylon, and set those old chaldeans to their tasks.-- are then regalities all gilded masks? and now, good-morrow to "the muses' son of promise"; as for "the feats he yet may do," as we do not pretend to say, like himself, "muse of my native land am i inspired," we shall adhere to the safe old rule of _pauca verba_. we venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a second time venture £ upon any thing he can write. it is a better and a wiser thing to be a starving apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop mr. john, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes, &c. but, for heaven's sake, young sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry. z. on shelley [from _blackwood's magazine_, september, ] "prometheus unbound" whatever may be the difference of men's opinions concerning the measure of mr. shelley's poetical power, there is one point in regard to which all must be agreed, and that is his audacity. in the old days of the exulting genius of greece, aeschylus dared two things which astonished all men, and which still astonish them--to exalt contemporary men into the personages of majestic tragedies--and to call down and embody into tragedy, without degradation, the elemental spirits of nature and the deeper essences of divinity. we scarcely know whether to consider the _persians_ or the _prometheus bound_ as the most extraordinary display of what has always been esteemed the most audacious spirit that ever expressed its workings in poetry. but what shall we say of the young english poet who has now attempted, not only a flight as high as the highest of aeschylus, but the very flight of that father of tragedy--who has dared once more to dramatise prometheus--and, most wonderful of all, to dramatise the _deliverance_ of prometheus--which is known to have formed the subject of a lost tragedy of aeschylus no ways inferior in mystic elevation to that of the [greek: desmotaes]. although a fragment of that perished master-piece be still extant in the latin version of attius--it is quite impossible to conjecture what were the personages introduced in the tragedy of aeschylus, or by what train of passions and events he was able to sustain himself on the height of that awful scene with which his surviving _prometheus_ terminates. it is impossible, however, after reading what is left of that famous trilogy,[ ] to suspect that the greek poet symbolized any thing whatever by the person of prometheus, except the native strength of human intellect itself--its strength of endurance above all others--its sublime power of patience. strength and force are the two agents who appear on this darkened theatre to bind the too benevolent titan--_wit_ and _treachery_, under the forms of mercury and oceanus, endeavour to prevail upon him to make himself free by giving up his dreadful secret;-- but _strength_ and _force_, and _wit_ and _treason_, are all alike powerless to overcome the resolution of that suffering divinity, or to win from him any acknowledgment of the new tyrant of the skies. such was this simple and sublime allegory in the hands of aeschylus. as to what had been the original purpose of the framers of the allegory, that is a very different question, and would carry us back into the most hidden places of the history of mythology. no one, however, who compares the mythological systems of different races and countries, can fail to observe the frequent occurrence of certain great leading ideas and leading symbolisations of ideas too--which christians are taught to contemplate with a knowledge that is the knowledge of reverence. such, among others, are unquestionably the ideas of an incarnate divinity suffering on account of mankind--conferring benefits on mankind at the expense of his own suffering;--the general idea of vicarious atonement itself--and the idea of the dignity of suffering as an exertion of intellectual might--all of which may be found, more or less obscurely shadowed forth, in the original [greek: mythos] of prometheus the titan, the enemy of the successful rebel and usurper jove. we might have also mentioned the idea of a _deliverer_, waited for patiently through ages of darkness, and at least arriving in the person of the child of io-- but, in truth, there is no pleasure, and would be little propriety, in seeking to explain all this at greater length, considering, what we cannot consider without deepest pain, the very different views which have been taken of the original allegory by mr. percy bysshe shelley. [ ] there was another and an earlier play of aeschylus, prometheus the fire-stealer, which is commonly supposed to have made part of the series; but the best critics, we think, are of opinion, that that was entirely a satirical piece. it would be highly absurd to deny, that this gentleman has manifested very extraordinary powers of language and imagination in his treatment of the allegory, however grossly and miserably he may have tried to pervert its purpose and meaning. but of this more anon. in the meantime, what can be more deserving of reprobation than the course which he is allowing his intellect to take, and that too at the very time when he ought to be laying the foundations of a lasting and honourable name. there is no occasion for going round about the bush to hint what the poet himself has so unblushingly and sinfully blazoned forth in every part of his production. with him, it is quite evident that the jupiter whose downfall has been predicted by prometheus, means nothing more than religion in general, that is, every human system of religious belief; and that, with the fall of this, he considers it perfectly necessary (as indeed we also believe, though with far different feelings) that every system of human government also should give way and perish. the patience of the contemplative spirit in prometheus is to be followed by the daring of the active demagorgon, at whose touch all "old thrones" are at once and for ever to be cast down into the dust. it appears too plainly, from the luscious pictures with which his play terminates, that mr. shelley looks forward to an unusual relaxation of all moral _rules_--or rather, indeed, to the extinction of all moral feelings, except that of a certain mysterious indefinable _kindliness_, as the natural and necessary result of the overthrow of all civil government and religious belief. it appears, still more wonderfully, that he contemplates this state of things as the ideal summum bonum. in short, it is quite impossible that there should exist a more pestiferous mixture of blasphemy, sedition, and sensuality, than is visible in the whole structure and strain of this poem--which, nevertheless, and notwithstanding all the detestation its principles excite, must and will be considered by all that read it attentively, as abounding in poetical beauties of the highest order--as presenting many specimens not easily to be surpassed, of the moral sublime of eloquence--as overflowing with pathos, and most magnificent in description. where can be found a spectacle more worthy of sorrow than such a man performing and glorying in the performance of such things? his evil ambition,--from all he has yet written, but most of all, from what he has last and best written, his _prometheus_,--appears to be no other, than that of attaining the highest place among those poets,--enemies, not friends, of their species, who, as a great and virtuous poet has well said (putting evil consequence close after evil cause). profane the god-given strength, and _mar the lofty line._ we should hold ourselves very ill employed, however, were we to enter at any length into the reprehensible parts of this remarkable production. it is sufficient to shew, that we have not been misrepresenting the purpose of the poet's mind, when we mention, that the whole tragedy ends with a mysterious sort of dance, and chorus of elemental spirits, and other indefinable beings, and that the spirit of the hour, one of the most singular of these choral personages, tells us: i wandering went among the haunts and dwellings of mankind, and first was disappointed not to see such mighty change as i had felt within expressed in other things; but soon i looked, and behold! thrones were kingless, and men walked one with the other, even as spirits do, etc. * * * * * we cannot conclude without saying a word or two in regard to an accusation which we have lately seen brought against ourselves in some one of the london magazines; we forget which at this moment. we are pretty sure we know who the author of that most false accusation is--of which more hereafter. he has the audacious insolence to say, that we praise mr. shelley, although we dislike his principles, just because we know that he is not in a situation of life to be in any danger of suffering pecuniary inconvenience from being run down by critics, and, _vice versâ_, abuse hunt, keats, and hazlitt, and so forth, because we know that they are poor men; a fouler imputation could not be thrown on any writer than this creature has dared to throw on us; nor a more utterly false one; we repeat the word again--than this is when thrown upon us. we have no personal acquaintance with any of these men, and no personal feelings in regard to any one of them, good or bad. we never even saw any one of their faces. as for mr. keats, we are informed that he is in a very bad state of health, and that his friends attribute a great deal of it to the pain he has suffered from the critical castigation his endymion drew down on him in this magazine. if it be so, we are most heartily sorry for it, and have no hesitation in saying, that had we suspected that young author, of being so delicately nerved, we should have administered our reproof in a much more lenient shape and style. the truth is, we from the beginning saw marks of feeling and power in mr. keats's verses, which made us think it very likely, he might become a real poet of england, provided he could be persuaded to give up all the tricks of cockneyism, and forswear for ever the thin potations of mr. leigh hunt. we, therefore, rated him as roundly as we decently could do, for the flagrant affectations of those early productions of his. in the last volume he has published, we find more beauties than in the former, both of language and of thought, but we are sorry to say, we find abundance of the same absurd affectations also, and superficial conceits, which first displeased us in his writings;--and which we are again very sorry to say, must in our opinion, if persisted in, utterly and entirely prevent mr. keats from ever taking his place among the pure and classical poets of his mother tongue. it is quite ridiculous to see how the vanity of these cockneys makes them overrate their own importance, even in the eyes of us, that have always expressed such plain unvarnished contempt for them, and who do feel for them all, a contempt too calm and profound, to admit of any admixture of any thing like anger or personal spleen. we should just as soon think of being wroth with vermin, independently of their coming into our apartment, as we should of having any feelings at all about any of these people, other than what are excited by seeing them in the shape of authors. many of them, considered in any other character than that of authors are, we have no doubt, entitled to be considered as very worthy people in their own way. mr. hunt is said to be a very amiable man in his own sphere, and we believe him to be so willingly. mr. keats we have often heard spoken of in terms of great kindness, and we have no doubt his manners and feelings are calculated to make his friends love him. but what has all this to do with our opinion of their poetry? what, in the name of wonder, does it concern us, whether these men sit among themselves, with mild or with sulky faces, eating their mutton steaks, and drinking their porter at highgate, hampstead, or lisson green? what is there that should prevent us, or any other person, that happens not to have been educated in the university of little britain, from expressing a simple, undisguised, and impartial opinion, concerning the merits or demerits of men that we never saw, nor thought of for one moment, otherwise than as in their capacity of authors? what should hinder us from saying, since we think so, that mr. leigh hunt is a clever wrong-headed man, whose vanities have got inwoven so deeply into him, that he has no chance of ever writing one line of classical english, or thinking one genuine english thought, either about poetry or politics? what is the spell that must seal our lips, from uttering an opinion equally plain and perspicuous concerning mr. john keats, viz., that nature possibly meant him to be a much better poet than mr. leigh hunt ever could have been, but that, if he persists in imitating the faults of that writer, he must be contented to share his fate, and be like him forgotten? last of all, what should forbid us to announce our opinion, that mr. shelley, as a man of genius, is not merely superior, either to mr. hunt, or to mr. keats, but altogether out of their sphere, and totally incapable of ever being brought into the most distant comparison with either of them. it is very possible, that mr. shelley himself might not be inclined to place himself so high above these men as we do, but that is his affair, not ours. we are afraid that he shares, (at least with one of them) in an abominable system of belief, concerning man and the world, the sympathy arising out of which common belief, may probably sway more than it ought to do on both sides. but the truth of the matter is this, and it is impossible to conceal it were we willing to do so, that mr. shelley is destined to leave a great name behind him, and that we, as lovers of true genius, are most anxious that this name should ultimately be pure as well as great. as for the principles and purposes of mr. shelley's poetry, since we must again recur to that dark part of the subject; we think they are on the whole, more undisguisedly pernicious in this volume, than even in his revolt of islam. there is an ode to liberty at the end of the volume, which contains passages of the most splendid beauty, but which, in point of meaning, is just as wicked as any thing that ever reached the world under the name of mr. hunt himself. it is not difficult to fill up the blank which has been left by the prudent bookseller, in one of the stanzas beginning: o that the free would stamp the impious name, of ----- into the dust! or write it there so that this blot upon the page of fame, were as a serpent's path, which the light air erases, etc., etc. but the next speaks still more plainly: o that the wise from their bright minds would kindle such lamps within the dome of this wide world, that the pale name of priest might shrink and dwindle into the hell from which it first was hurled! this is exactly a versification of the foulest sentence that ever issued from the lips of voltaire. let us hope that percy bysshe shelley is not destined to leave behind him, like that great genius, a name for ever detestable to the truly free and the truly wise. he talks in his preface about milton, as a "republican," and a "bold inquirer into morals and religion." could any thing make us despise mr. shelley's understanding, it would be such an instance of voluntary blindness as this! let us hope, that ere long a lamp of genuine truth may be kindled within his "bright mind"; and that he may walk in its light the path of the true demigods of english genius, having, like them, learned to "fear god and honour the king." the westminster review started in to represent radical opinions, the _westminster_ was associated, in its palmy days, with such "persons of importance" as george eliot, george henry lewes, and j.s. mill, retaining to the present moment an isolated preference for the expression of unconventional, and often _outré_ opinions. it has always been somewhat fanatical and, now that really distinguished writers seldom enter its pages, has become associated, in the general view, with the promotion of fads. john stuart mill ( - ) though mill's principle work was of a highly expert and technical nature, he had the rare power of conveying accurate expressions of sound thoughts in popular language; and he was conspicuous for the moral fervour of his opinions in practical politics. his fascinating autobiography is absolutely sincere, and very copious, in its revelations. it has been said, moreover, that he was "more at pains to conceal his originality" than "most writers are to set forth" this quality: and it was this characteristic which inspired his broad-minded conduct of the _london review_, soon incorporated with the _westminster_, which, after ten years as a contributor, he edited from , and owned from until . here he made "a noble experiment to endeavour to combine opposites, and to maintain a perpetual attitude of sympathy with hostile opinions." it was officially, the organ of utilitarianism; but articles were frequently inserted requiring the editorial _caveat_. it was the friend of liberty in every shape and form. in a philosophic writer whose style was admittedly always literary, it is of special interest to notice that he so frequently chose a volume of poetry to review himself: and no better example of this work can be found than the following critique of tennyson, which, again, may be most profitably compared with gladstone's. it proves that he loved poetry for its own sake. the notice of macaulay's lays further illustrates his interesting _theories_ of poetry. john sterling ( - ) it is the remarkable fate of sterling, leaving behind him no work of permanent distinction--to have been the subject of two biographies by persons of far greater importance than his--archdeacon hare and thomas carlyle. the editorial foot-note affixed to the following review, in which mill describes him as "one of our most valued contributors" provides further evidence of what his contemporaries expected of "poor sterling." "a loose, careless looking, thin figure," says carlyle, "in careless dim costume, sat, in a lounging posture, carelessly and copiously talking. i was struck with the kindly but restless swift-glancing eyes, which looked as if the spirits were all out coursing like a pack of merry eager beagles, beating every bush.... a smile, half of kindly impatience, half of real mirth, often sat on his face." sterling wrote poetry, essays, and stories, largely inspired by capricious enthusiasms. the son of an editor of _the times_, he was, for a short time owner of _the athenaeum_, and also a curate under hare. since carlyle's "extraordinary elegy, apology, eulogium" is itself a classic, particular interest attaches itself to sterling's generous estimate of the man destined to make him immortal. j.s. mill on tennyson [from _the westminster review_, january, ] _poems, chiefly lyrical._ by alfred tennyson. wilson, mo. . it would be a pity that poetry should be an exception to the great law of progression that obtains in human affairs; and it is not. the machinery of a poem is not less susceptible of improvement than the machinery of a cotton mill; nor is there any better reason why the one should retrograde from the days of milton, than the other from those of arkwright.... the old epics will probably never be surpassed, any more than the old coats of mail; and for the same reason; nobody wants the article; its object is accomplished by other means; they are become mere curiosities.... poetry, like charity, begins at home. poetry, like morality, is founded in the precept, know thyself. poetry, like happiness, is in the human heart. its inspiration is of that which is in man, and it will never fail because there are changes in costume and grouping. what is the vitality of the iliad? character; nothing else. all the rest is only read out of antiquarianism or of affectation. why is shakespeare the greatest of poets? because he was one of the greatest of philosophers. we reason on the conduct of his characters with as little hesitation as if they were real living human beings. extent of observation, accuracy of thought, and depth of reflection, were the qualities which won the prize of sovereignty for his imagination, and the effect of these qualities was practically to anticipate, so far as was needful for his purposes, the mental philosophy of a future age. metaphysics must be the stem of poetry for the plant to thrive; but if the stem flourishes we are not likely to be at a loss for leaves, flowers, and fruit. now, whatever theories may have come into fashion and gone out of fashion, the real science of mind advances with the progress of society like all other sciences. the poetry of the last forty years already shows symptoms of life in exact proportion as it is imbued with this science. there is least of it in the exotic legends of southey, and the feudal romances of scott. more of it, though in different ways, in byron and campbell. in shelley there would have been more still, had he not devoted himself to unsound and mystical theories. most of all in coleridge and wordsworth. they are all going or gone; but here is a little book as thoroughly and unitedly metaphysical and poetical in its spirit as any of them; and sorely shall we be disappointed in its author if it be not the precursor of a series of productions which shall beautifully illustrate our speculations, and convincingly prove their soundness. do not let our readers be alarmed. these poems are anything but heavy; anything but stiff and pedantic, except in one particular, which shall be noticed before we conclude; anything but cold and logical. they are graceful, very graceful; they are animated, touching, and impassioned. and they are so, precisely because they are philosophical; because they are not made up of metrical cant and conventional phraseology; because there is sincerity where the author writes from experience, and accuracy whether he writes from experience or observation; and he only writes from experience and observation, because he has felt and thought, and learned to analyse thought and feeling; because his own mind is rich in poetical associations, and he has wisely been content with its riches; and because, in his composition, he has not sought to construct an elaborate and artificial harmony, but only to pour forth his thoughts in those expressive and simple melodies whose meaning, truth, and power, are the soonest recognised, and the quickest felt.... mr. tennyson seems to obtain entrance into a mind as he would make his way into a landscape; he climbs the pineal gland as if it were a hill in the centre of the scene; looks around on all objects with their varieties of form, their movements, their shades of colour, and their mutual relations and influences, and forthwith produces as graphic a delineation in the one case as wilson or gainsborough could have done in the other, to the great enrichment of our gallery of intellectual scenery.... our author has the secret of the transmigration of the soul. he can cast his own spirit into any living thing, real or imaginary.... "mariana" is, we are disposed to think, although there are several poems which rise up reproachfully in our recollection as we say so, altogether, the most perfect composition in the volume. the whole of this poem, of eighty-four lines, is generated by the legitimate process of poetical creation, as that process is conducted in a philosophical mind, from a half sentence in shakespeare. there is no mere samplification; it is all production, and production from that single germ. that must be a rich intellect, in which thoughts thus take root and grow.... a considerable number of the poems are amatory; they are the expression not of heathen sensuality, nor of sickly refinement, nor of fantastic devotion, but of manly love; and they illustrate the philosophy of the passion while they exhibit the various phases of its existence and embody its power.... mr. tennyson sketches females as well as ever did sir thomas lawrence. his portraits are delicate, his likenesses (we will answer for them), perfect, and they have life, character, and individuality. they are nicely assorted also to all the different gradations of emotion and passion which are expressed in common with the descriptions of them. there is an appropriate object for every shade of feeling, from the light touch of a passing admiration, to the triumphant madness of soul and sense, or the deep and everlasting anguish of survivorship.... that these poems will have a rapid and extensive popularity we do not anticipate. their very originality will prevent their being appreciated for a time. but that time will come, we hope, to a not far distant end. they demonstrate the possession of powers, to the future direction of which we look with some anxiety. a genuine poet has deep responsibilities to his country and the world, to the present and future generations, to earth and heaven. he, of all men, should have distinct and worthy objects before him, and consecrate himself to their promotion. it is then he best consults the glory of his art, and his own lasting fame. mr. tennyson has a dangerous quality in that facility of impersonation on which we have remarked, and by which he enters so thoroughly into the most strange and wayward idiosyncracies of other men. it must not degrade him into a poetical harlequin. he has higher work to do than that of disporting himself among "mystics" and "flowing philosophers." he knows that "the poet's mind is holy ground"; he knows that the poet's portion is to be dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love; he has shown, in the lines from which we quote, his own just conception of the grandeur of the poet's destiny; and we look to him for its fulfilment. it is not for such men to sink into mere verse-makers for the amusement of themselves or others. they can influence the associations of unnumbered minds; they can command the sympathies of unnumbered hearts; they can disseminate principles; they can give those principles power over men's imaginations; they can excite in a good cause the sustained enthusiasm that is sure to conquer; they can blast the laurels of tyrants, and hallow the memories of the martyrs' patriotism; they can act with a force, the extent of which it is difficult to estimate, upon national feelings and character, and consequently upon national happiness. mill on macaulay's "lays" [from _the westminster review_. february, ] it is with the two great masters of modern ballad poetry (campbell and scott) that mr. macaulay's performances are really to be compared, and not with the real ballads or epics of an early age. the "lays," in point of form, are not in the least like the genuine productions of a primitive age or people, and it is no blame to mr. macaulay that they are not. he professes imitation of homer, but we really see no resemblance, except in the nature of some of the incidents, and the animation and vigour of the narrative; and the "iliad," after all, is not the original ballads of the trojan war, but these ballads moulded together, and wrought into the forms of a more civilised and cultivated age. it is difficult to conjecture what the form of the old roman ballad may have been, and certain, that whatever they were, they could no more satisfy the aesthetic requirements of modern culture, than an ear accustomed to the great organs of freyburg or harlem could relish orpheus's hurdy-gurdy, although the airs which orpheus played, if they could be recovered, might perhaps be executed with great effect on the more perfect instrument. the former of mr. macaulay's ballad poetry are essentially modern: they are those of the romantic and chivalrous, not the classical ages, and even in those they are a reproduction, not of the originals, but of the imitations of scott. in this we think he has done well, for scott's style is as near to that of the ancient ballad as we conceive to be at all compatible with real popular effect on the modern mind. the difference between the two may be seen by the most cursory comparison of any real old ballad, "chevy chase," for instance, with last canto of marmion, or with any of these "lays." conciseness is the characteristic of the real ballad, diffuseness of the modern adaptation. the old bard did everything by single touches; scott and mr. macaulay by repetition and accumulation of particulars. they produce all their effect by what they _say_; he by what he _suggested_; by what he stimulated the imagination to paint for itself. but then the old ballads were not written for the light reading of tired readers. to do the work in _their_ way, they required to be brooded over, or had at least the aid of tune and of impassioned recitation. stories which are to be told to children in the age of eagerness and excitability, or sung in banquet halls to assembled warriors, whose daily ideas and feelings supply a flood of comment ready to gush forth on the slightest hint of the poet, cannot fly too swift and straight to the mark. but mr. macaulay wrote to be only read, and by readers for whom it was necessary to do all. these poems, therefore, are not the worse for being un-roman in their form; and in their substance they are roman to a degree which deserves great admiration. mr. macaulay's prose writings had not prepared us for the power which he has here manifested of identifying himself easily and completely, with states of feeling and modes of life alien to modern experience. nobody could have previously doubted that he possessed fancy, but he has added to it the higher faculty of imagination. we have not been able to detect, in the four poems, one idea or feeling which was not, or might not have been roman; while the externals of roman life, and the feelings characteristic of rome and of that particular age, are reproduced with great felicity, and without being made unduly predominant over the universal features of human nature and human life. independently therefore of their value as poems, these compositions are a real service rendered to historical literature; and the author has made this service greater by his prefaces, which will do more than the work of a hundred dissertations in rendering that true conception of early roman history, the irrefragable establishment of which has made niebuhr illustrious, familiar to the minds of general readers. this is no trifling matter, even in relation to present interests, for there is no estimating the injury which the cause of popular institutions has suffered, and still suffers from misrepresentations of the early condition of the roman and plebs, and its noble struggles against its taskmasters. and the study of the manner in which the heroic legends of early rome grew up as poetry and gradually became history, has important bearings on the general laws of historical evidence, and on the many things which, as philosophy advances, are more and more seen to be therewith connected. on this subject mr. macaulay has not only presented, in an agreeable form, the results of previous speculation, but has, though in an entirely unpretending manner, thrown additional light upon it by his own remarks: as where he shows, by incontestible instances, that a similar transformation of poetic fiction into history has taken place on various occasions in modern and sceptical times.... we are more disposed to break a lance with our author on the general merits of roman literature, which, by a heresy not new with him, he sacrifices, in what appears to us a most unfair degree, on the score of its inferior originality to the grecian. it is true the romans had no aeschylus nor sophocles, and but a secondhand homer, though this last was not only the most finished but even the most original of imitators. but where was the greek model of the noble poem of lucretius? what, except the mere idea, did the georgics borrow from hesiod? and whoever thinks of comparing the two poems? where, in homer or the euripides, will be found the original of the tender and pathetic passages in the aeneid, especially the exquisitely told story of dido? there is no extraordinary merit in the "carmen secculare" as we have it, the only production of horace which challenges comparison with pindar; although we are not among those who deem pindar one of the brightest stars in the greek heaven. but from whom are the greater part of horace's _carmina_ borrowed (they should never be termed odes), any more than those of burns or béranger, the analogous authors in modern times? and by what greek minor poems are they surpassed? we say nothing of catullus, whom some competent judges prefer to horace. does the lyric, then, or even the epic poetry of the romans, deserve no better title than that of "a hot-house plant, which, in return for assiduous and skilful culture, yielded only scanty and sickly fruits?" the complete originality and eminent merit of their satiric poetry, mr. macaulay himself acknowledges. as for prose, we give up cicero as compared with demosthenes, but with no one else; and is livy less original, or less admirable, than herodotus? tacitus may have imitated, even to affectation, the condensation of thucydides, as milton imitated the greek and hebrew poets; but was the mind of the one as essentially original as that of the other? is the roman less an unapprochable master, in his peculiar line, that of sentimental history, than the grecian in his? and what greek historian has written anything similar or comparable to the sublime peroration of the _life of agricola_? the latin genius lay not in speculation, and the romans did undoubtedly borrow all their philosophical principles from the greeks. their originality _there_, as is well said by a remarkable writer in the most remarkable of his works,[ ] consisted in taking these principles _au serieux_. they _did_ what the others talked about. zeno, indeed, was not a roman; but poetus thrasea and marcus antoninus were. [ ] mr. maurice, in the essay on the history of moral speculation and culture, which forms the article "moral and metaphysical philosophy" in the _encyclopaedia metropolitana._ john sterling on carlyle [from _london and westminster review_ october, ] all countries at all times require, and england perhaps at the present not less than others, men having a faith at once distinct and large, the expression of what is best in their times, and having also the courage to proclaim it, and take their stand upon it.... but in our day such visionaries are less and less possible. the spread of shallow but clear knowledge, like the cold snow-water issuing from the glaciers, daily chills and disenchants the hearts of millions once credulous. daily, therefore, does it become more probable that millions will follow in the track of those who are called their betters. thus will they find in the world nothing but an epicurean stye, to be managed, with less dirt and better food, by patent steam-machinery; but still a place for swine, though the swine may be washed, and their victuals more equally divided. is it not then strange that in such a world, in such a country, and among those light-hearted edinburgh reviewers, a man should rise and proclaim a creed; not a new and more ingenious form of words, but a truth to be embraced with the whole heart, and in which the heart shall find as he has found, strength for all combats, and consolation, though stern not festal, under all sorrows? amid the masses of english printing sent forth every day, part designed for the most trivial entertainment, part black with the narrowest and most lifeless sectarian dogmatism, part, and perhaps the best, exhibiting only facts and theories in physical science, and part filled with the vulgarest economical projects and details, which would turn all life into a process of cookery, culinary, political, or sentimental--how few writings are there that contain like these a distinct doctrine as to the position and calling of man, capable of affording nourishment to the heart, and support to the will, and in harmony at the same time with the social state of the world, and with the most enlarged and brightened insight which human wisdom has yet attained to? we have been so little prepared to look for such an appearance that it is difficult for us to realize the conception of a genuine coherent view of life thus presented to us in a book of our day, which shall be neither a slight compendium of a few moral truisms, flavoured with a few immoral refinements and paradoxes, such as constitute the floating ethics and religion of the time; nor a fierce and gloomy distortion of some eternal idea torn from its pure sphere of celestial light to be raved about by the ignorant whom it has half-enlightened, and half made frantic. but here, in our judgment--that is, in the judgment of one man who speaks considerately what he fixedly believes--we have the thought of a wide, and above all, of a deep soul, which has expressed in fitting words, the fruits of patient reflection, of piercing observation, of knowledge many-sided and conscientious, of devoutest awe and faithfullest love.... the clearness of the eye to see whatever is permanent and substantial, and the fervour and strength of heart to love it as the sole good of life, are, in our view, mr. carlyle's pre-eminent characteristics, as those of every man entitled to the fame of the most generous order of greatness. not to paint the good which he sees and loves, or see it painted, and enjoy the sight; not to understand it, and exult in the knowledge of it; but to take his position upon it, and for it alone to breathe, to move, to fight, to mourn, and die--this is the destination which he has chosen for himself. his avowal of it and exhortation to do the like is the object of all his writings. and, reasonably considered, it is no small service to which he is thus bound. for the real, the germinal truth of nature, is not a dead series of physical phenomena into the like of which all phenomena are cunningly to be explained away. this pulseless, rigid iron frame-work, on which the soft soil of human life is placed, and above which its aërial flowers and foliage rise, does not pass with him for the essential and innermost principle of all. it is rather that which, being itself poorest, the poorest of faculties can apprehend. as physical mechanism, it is that which is most palpable, and undeniable by any, because it is that which lies nearest the nothingness whence it has been hardly rescued, and is therefore, most akin to minds in whose meanness of structure or culture, even human existence might seem scarce better than nothingness. he knows, few in our nation so well, that of a world of new machinery, the highest king and priest would be the neatest clockwork figure. and in such a world, a being feeling ever towards or somewhat beyond what he can weigh and measure, and looking up to find above himself that which is too high for him to understand, would be an anomaly as lawless and incredible as the wildest fabled monster, the minotaur or the chimera, the titan--the sphynx itself--nay a more delirious riddle than any that in dreams it proposes to us. on the other hand, neither is for him the solid, abiding, inexhaustible, that merely which is received as such by the popular acquiescence. it must needs be a truth which the spirit, cleared and strengthened by manifold knowledge and experience, and above all by steadfast endeavour, can rest in and say: this i mean; not because it is told me, were my informants all the schools of rabbins or a hierarchy of angels; but because i have looked into it, tried it, found it healthful and sufficient, and thus know that it will stand the stress of life. we may be right or wrong in our estimate of mr. carlyle, but we cannot be mistaken in supposing that on this kind of anvil have all truly great men been fashioned, and of metal thus honest and enduring. further it must be said that, true as is his devotion to the truth, so flaming and cordial is his hatred of the false, in whatever shapes and names delusions may show themselves. affectations, quackeries, tricks, frauds, swindlings, commercial or literary, baseless speculations, loud ear-catching rhetoric, melodramatic sentiment, moral drawlings and hyperboles, religious cant, clever political shifts, and conscious or half-conscious fallacies, all in his view, come under the same hangman's rubric,--proceed from the same offal heart. however plausible, popular, and successful, however dignified by golden and purple names, they are lies against ourselves, against whatever in us is not altogether reprobate and infernal. his great argument, theme of his song, spirit of his language, lies in this, that there is a work for man worth doing, which is to be done with the whole of his heart, not the half or any other fraction. therefore, if any reserve be made, any corner kept for something unconnected with this true work and sincere purpose, the whole is thereby vitiated and accurst. so far as his arm reaches he is undoing whatever in nature is holy: ruining whatever is the real creation of the great worker of all. this truth of purpose is to the soul what life is to the body of man; that which unites and organises the mass, keeping all the parts in due proportion and concord, and restraining them from sudden corruption into worthless dust.... anyone who should take up the writings themselves with no other preconception than that which we have attempted to give him, would doubtless be startled at the strangeness of the style which prevails more or less throughout them. they are not careless, headstrong, passionate, confused; but they bear a constant look of oddity which seems at first mere wilful wantonness, and which we only afterwards find to be the discriminating stamp of original and strong feeling. this-- this feeling, rooted in profound susceptibility and matured into a central vivifying power--is, we should say, the author's most extraordinary distinction. for it is not the ostentatious, impetuous sentiment, which calls, a sufficient audience being by, on heaven and earth for sympathy, and would wish for that of tartarus too, as an additional acknowledgment of its sublime sincerity. here, on the contrary, the feeling is not that which the man is proud of, and would fain exhibit. he shrinks from the profession, nay from the sense of it; even painfully labours to trifle, and be at ease, that he may hide from others, and may for himself forget, the thorny fagot load of his own emotions. yet make them known he must; for they are not those of some private personal grief or passion, from which he may escape into literature or science, and leave his pains and longings behind him; but his sensibilities are burning with a slow, immense fire, kindled by the very theme on which he writes, and compelling him to write. the greatness and weakness, the infinite hopes and unquenchable reality of human life; the aching pressure of the body and its wants on the myriads of millions in whom celestial force sleeps and dreams of hell; the sight of follies, frauds, cruelties, and lascivious luxury in the midst of a race then endowed and thus suffering; and the unconquerable will and thought with which the few work out the highest calling of all men; these it is, and not self-indulging distresses and theatrical aspirations of his own, which boil and storm within. therefore does he speak with the solid strength and energy, which gives so serious and rugged an aspect to his sentences; while, perpetually checking himself, from a wise man's shame at excessive emotion, and from the knowledge that others will but half sympathise with him, he adds to his most weighty utterances a turn of irony which relieves the excessive strain.... add to this, that mr. carlyle's resolution to convey his meaning at all hazards, makes him seize the most effectual and sudden words in spite of usage and fashionable taste; and that, therefore, when he can get a brighter tint, a more expressive form, by means of some strange--we must call it--carlylism; english, scotch, german, greek, latin, french, technical, slang, american, or lunar, or altogether superlunar, transcendental, and drawn from the eternal nowhere--he uses it with a courage which might blast an academy of lexicographers into a hades, void even of vocables.... here must end our remarks on the admirable writings of a great man. could it be hoped, that by what has been said, any readers, and especially any thinkers, will be led to give them the attention they require, but also deserve, in this there would be ample repayment, even were there not at all events a higher reward, for the labour, which is not a slight one, of forming and assorting distinct opinions on a matter so singular and so complex. for few bonds that unite human beings are purer or happier than a common understanding and reverence of what is truly wise and beautiful. this also is religion. standing at the threshold of these works, we may imitate the saying of the old philosopher to the friends who visited him on their return from the temples--let us enter, for here too are gods. fraser's magazine william makepeace thackeray ( - ) there can be no occasion to enlarge upon this generous tribute of one of the greatest of our victorian novelists to another. considering how inevitably the critic is driven to compare these two, if not to set one up against the other, we can experience no feeling but pleasure and pride in humanity, before the evidence of their mutual appreciation. _the cornhill_ "in memoriam" article of charles dickens may well stand beside this burst of glowing enthusiasm. we have retained, by way of illustrating our general subject, a paragraph from the earlier part of the article, in which thackeray falls foul of reviewers in general, for characteristics from which he himself was singularly free. charles kingsley ( - ) the brilliant versatility of kingsley's work will prepare us, in some measure, for his virile impatience, here revealed, with elements in the romantic revival of poetry among his contemporaries, which were an offence to his "muscular" morality. "there are certain qualities which may be called moral in all his work, evincing a literary faculty of the highest kind. always instructive without being exactly instructed, always argumentative without being very guarded in argument, he yet displays a marvellously contagious enthusiasm for his own creeds, and surrounds his own ideals with an atmosphere of passionate nobility. we forgive the partisanship for the sincerity of the partisan." * * * * * alexander smith ( - ) was a poet and essayist of some distinction; though a. h. clough also criticises his exclusive devotion to the "writers of his own immediate time"; and calls him "the latest disciple of the school of keats." the volume of essays entitled _dreamthorp_ "entitles him to a place among the best writers of english prose." anonymous there is a similarity, and a difference, between this summary of christmas literature and thackeray's. the personal criticism lacks his special geniality, revealing rather a tone which would have perfectly suited blackwood or the _quarterly_. lytton was a favourite subject of abuse to his contemporaries. thackeray on dickens [from "a box of novels," _fraser's magazine_, february, ] mr. titmarsh, in switzerland, to mr. yorke ...this introduction, then, will have prepared you for an exceedingly humane and laudatory notice of the packet of works which you were good enough to send me, and which, though they doubtless contain a great deal that the critic would not write (from the extreme delicacy of his taste and the vast range of his learning) also contain, between ourselves, a great deal that the critic _could_ not write if he would ever so; and this is a truth which critics are sometimes apt to forget in their judgments of works of fiction. as a rustical boy, hired at twopence a week, may fling stones at the blackbirds and drive them off and possibly hit one or two, yet if he get into the hedge and begin to sing, he will make a wretched business of the music, and labin and colin and the dullest swains of the village will laugh egregiously at his folly; so the critic employed to assault the poet.... but the rest of the simile is obvious, and will be apprehended at once by a person of your experience. the fact is, that the blackbirds of letters--the harmless, kind singing creatures who line the hedge-sides and chirp and twitter as nature bade them (they can no more help singing, these poets, than a flower can help smelling sweet), have been treated much too ruthlessly by the watch-boys of the press, who have a love for flinging stones at the little innocents, and pretend that it is their duty, and that every wren or sparrow is likely to destroy a whole field of wheat, or to turn out a monstrous bird of prey. leave we these vain sports and savage pastimes of youth, and turn we to the benevolent philosophy of maturer age. * * * * * and now there is but one book left in the box, the smallest one, but oh! how much the best of all. it is the work of the master of all the english humourists now alive; the young man who came and took his place calmly at the head of the whole tribe, and who has kept it. think of all we owe mr. dickens since these half-dozen years, the store of happy hours that he has made us pass, the kindly and pleasant companions whom he has introduced to us, the harmless laughter, the generous wit, the frank, manly, human love which he has taught us to feel! every month of these years has brought us some kind token from this delightful genius. his books may have lost in art, perhaps, but could we afford to wait? since the days when the _spectator_ was produced by a man of kindred mind and temper, what books have appeared that have taken so affectionate a hold of the english public as these? they have made millions of rich and poor happy; they might have been locked up for nine years, doubtless, and pruned here and there, and improved (which i doubt) but where would have been the reader's benefit all this time, while the author was elaborating his performance? would the communication between the writer and the public have been what it is now--something continual, confidential, something like personal affection? i do not know whether these stories are written for future ages; many sage critics doubt on this head. there are always such conjurors to tell literary fortunes; and, to my certain knowledge, boz, according to them, has been sinking regularly these six years. i doubt about that mysterious writing for futurity which certain big wigs prescribe. snarl has a chance, certainly. his works, which have not been read in this age, _may_ be read in future; but the receipt for that sort of writing has never as yet been clearly ascertained. shakespeare did not write for futurity, he wrote his plays for the same purpose which inspires the pen of alfred bunn, esquire, viz., to fill his theatre royal. and yet we read shakespeare now. le sage and fielding wrote for their public; and through the great dr. johnson put his peevish protest against the fame of the latter, and voted him "a dull dog, sir,--a low fellow," yet somehow harry fielding has survived in spite of the critic, and parson adams is at this minute as real a character, as much loved by us as the old doctor himself. what a noble, divine power of genius this is, which, passing from the poet into his reader's soul, mingles with it, and there engenders, as it were, real creatures; which is as strong as history, which creates beings that take their place besides nature's own. all that we know of don quixote or louis xiv we got to know in the same way--out of a book. i declare i love sir roger de coverley quite as much as izaak walton, and have just as clear a consciousness of the looks, voice, habit, and manner of being of the one as of the other. and so with regard to this question of futurity; if any benevolent being of the present age is imbued with a desire to know what his great-great-grandchild will think of this or that author--of mr. dickens especially, whose claims to fame have raised the question--the only way to settle it is by the ordinary historic method. did not your great-great-grandfather love and delight in don quixote and sancho panza? have they lost their vitality by their age? don't they move laughter and awaken affection now as three hundred years ago? and so with don pickwick and sancho weller, if their gentle humours and kindly wit, and hearty benevolent natures, touch us and convince us, as it were, now, why should they not exist for our children as well as for us, and make the twenty-fifth century happy, as they have the nineteenth? let snarl console himself, then, as to the future. as for the _christmas carol_, or any other book of a like nature which the public takes upon itself to criticise, the individual critic had quite best hold his peace. one remembers what buonaparte replied to some austrian critics, of much correctness and acumen, who doubted about acknowledging the french republic. i do not mean that the _christmas carol_ is quite as brilliant or self-evident as the sun at noonday; but it is so spread over england by this time, that no sceptic, no _fraser's magazine_,--no, not even the godlike and ancient _quarterly_ itself (venerable, saturnian, big-wigged dynasty!) could review it down. "unhappy people! deluded race!" one hears the cauliflowered god exclaim, mournfully shaking the powder out of his ambrosial curls, "what strange new folly is this? what new deity do you worship? know ye what ye do? know ye that your new idol hath little latin and less greek? know ye that he has never tasted the birch at eton, nor trodden the flags of carfax, nor paced the academic flats of trumpington? know ye that in mathematics, or logic, this wretched ignoramus is not fit to hold a candle to a wooden spoon? see ye not how, from describing law humours, he now, forsooth, will attempt the sublime? discern ye not his faults of taste, his deplorable propensity to write blank verse? come back to your ancient, venerable, and natural instructors. leave this new, low and intoxicating draught at which ye rush, and let us lead you back to the old wells of classic lore. come and repose with us there. we are your gods; we are the ancient oracles, and no mistake. come listen to us once more, and we will sing to you the mystic numbers of _as in presenti_ under the arches of the _pons asinorum_." but the children of the present generation hear not; for they reply, "rush to the strand, and purchase five thousand more copies of the _christmas carol_." in fact, one might as well detail the plot of the _merry wives of windsor_ or _robinson crusoe_, as recapitulate here the adventures of scrooge the miser, and his christmas conversion. i am not sure that the allegory is a very complete one, and protest, with the classics, against the use of blank verse in prose; but here all objections stop. who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this? it seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness. the last two people i heard speak of it were women; neither knew the other, or the author, and both said, by way of criticism, "god bless him!" a scotch philosopher, who nationally does not keep christmas, on reading the book, sent out for a turkey, and asked two friends to dine--this is a fact! many men were known to sit down after perusing it, and write off letters to their friends, not about business, but out of their fulness of heart, and to wish old acquaintances a happy christmas. had the book appeared a fortnight earlier, all the prize cattle would have been gobbled up in pure love and friendship, epping denuded of sausages, and not a turkey left in norfolk. his royal highness's fat stock would have fetched unheard of prices, and alderman bannister would have been tired of slaying. but there is a christmas for too; the book will be as early then as now, and so let speculators look out. as for tiny tim, there is a certain passage in the book regarding that young gentleman, about which a man should hardly venture to speak in print or in public, any more than he would of any other affections of his private heart. there is not a reader in england but that little creature will be a bond of union between the author and him; and he will say of charles dickens, as the woman just now, "god bless him!" what a feeling is this for a writer to be able to inspire, and what a reward to reap. m. a. t. charles kingsley on alexander smith and alexander pope [from _fraser's magazine_, october, ] _poems_, by alexander smith. london, bogue. on reading this little book, and considering all the exaggerated praise and exaggerated blame which have been lavished on it, we could not help falling into many thoughts about the history of english poetry for the last forty years, and about its future destiny. great poets, even true poets, are becoming more and more rare among us. there are those even who say that we have none; an assertion which, as long as mr. tennyson lives, we shall take the liberty of denying. but, were he, which heaven forbid, taken from us, whom have we to succeed him? and he, too, is rather a poet of the sunset than of the dawn--of the autumn than of the spring. his gorgeousness is that of the solemn and fading year; not of its youth, full of hope, freshness, gay and unconscious life. like some stately hollyhock or dahlia of this month's gardens, he endures while all other flowers are dying; but all around is winter--a mild one, perhaps, wherein a few annuals or pretty field weeds still linger on; but, like all mild winters, especially prolific in fungi, which, too, are not without their gaudiness, even their beauty, although bred only from the decay of higher organisms, the plagiarists of the vegetable world.... "what matter, after all?" one says to oneself in despair, re-echoing mr. carlyle. "man was not sent into this world to write poetry. what we want is truth--what we want is activity. of the latter we have enough in all conscience just now. let the former need be provided for by honest and righteous history, and as for poets, let the dead bury their dead." ... and yet, after all, man will write poetry, in spite of mr. carlyle: nay, beings who are not men, but mere forked radishes, will write it. man is a poetry-writing animal. perhaps he was meant to be one. at all events, he can no more be kept from it than from eating. it is better, with mr. carlyle's leave, to believe that the existence of poetry indicates some universal human hunger, whether after "the beautiful," or after "fame," or after the means of paying butchers' bills, and accepting it as a necessary evil which must be committed, to see that it be committed as well, or at least a little ill, as possible. in excuse of which we may quote mr. carlyle against himself, reminding him of a saying in goethe once bepraised by him in print,--"we must take care of the beautiful for the useful will take care of itself." and never, certainly, since pope wrote his _dunciad_, did the beautiful require more taking care of, or evince less capacity for taking care of itself, and never, we must add, was less capacity for taking care of it evinced by its accredited guardians of the press than at this present time, if the reception given to mr. smith's poem is to be taken as a fair expression of "the public taste." now, let it be fairly understood, mr. alexander smith is not the object of our reproaches: but mr. smith's models and flatterers. against him we have nothing whatever to say; for him, very much indeed.... what if he has often copied.... he does not more than all schools have done, copy their own masters.... we by no means agree in the modern outcry for "originality." ... as for manner, he does sometimes, in imitating his models, out-herod herod. but why not? if herod be a worthy king, let him be by all means out-heroded, if any man can do it. one cannot have too much of a good thing. if it be right to bedizen verses with metaphors and similes which have no reference, either in tone or in subject, to the matter in hand, let there be as many of them as possible. if a saddle is a proper place for jewels, then let the seat be paved with diamonds and emeralds, and runjeet singh's harness maker be considered as a lofty artist, for whose barbaric splendour mr. peat and his melton customers are to forswear pigskin and severe simplicity--not to say utility, and comfort. if poetic diction be different in species from plain english, then let us have it as poetical as possible, as unlike english: as ungrammatical, abrupt, insolved, transposed, as the clumsiness, carelessness, or caprice of man can make it. if it be correct to express human thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphyric, and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti; which bear an entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they are to illustrate, then let the metaphysic be as abstract as possible, the concetti as fanciful and far-fetched as possible. if marino and cowley be greater poets than ariosto and milton, let young poets imitate the former with might and main, and avoid spoiling their style by any perusal of the too-intelligible common sense of the latter. if byron's moral (which used to be thought execrable) be really his great excellence, his style (which used to be thought almost perfect) unworthy of this age of progress, then let us have his moral without his style, his matter without his form; or--that we may be sure of never falling for a moment into his besetting sin of terseness, grace, and completeness--without any form at all. if poetry, in order to be worthy of the nineteenth century, ought to be as unlike as possible to homer or sophocles, virgil or horace, shakespeare or spenser, dante or tasso, let those too idolised names be rased henceforth from the calendar; let the _ars poetica_, be consigned to flames by mr. calcraft, and bartinus scriblerus's _art of sinking_ placed forthwith on the list of the committee of the council for education, that not a working man in england may be ignorant that, whatsoever superstitions about art may have haunted the benighted heathens who built the parthenon, _nous avons changés tout cela_. in one word, if it be best and most fitting to write poetry in the style in which almost everyone has been trying to write it since pope and plain sense went out, and shelley and the seventh heaven came in; let it be so written: and let him who most perfectly so "sets the age to music," be presented by the assembled guild of critics, not with the obsolete and too classical laurel, but with an electro-plated brass medal, bearing the due inscription, _ars est nescire artem_. and when, in twelve months' time, he finds himself forgotten, perhaps descried, for the sake of the next aspirant, let him reconsider himself, try whether, after all, the common sense of the many will not prove a juster and a firmer standing-ground than the sentimentality and bad taste of the few, and read alexander pope. in pope's writings, whatsoever he may not find, he will find the very excellences after which our young poets strive in vain, produced by their seeming opposites, which are now despised and discarded; naturalness produced by studious art; daring sublimity by strict self-restraint; depth by clear simplicity; pathos by easy grace; and a morality infinitely more merciful, as well as more righteous, than the one now in vogue among poetasters, by honest faith in god.... yes, pope knew, as well as wordsworth and our "naturalisti," that no physical fact was so mean or coarse as to be below the dignity of poetry--when in its right place. he could draw a pathos and sublimity out of the dirty inn-chamber, such as wordsworth never elicited from tubs and daffodils--because he could use them according to the rules of art, which are the rules of sound reason and of true taste.... the real cause of the modern vagueness is rather to be found in shallow and unsound culture, and in that inability, or carelessness about seeing any object clearly, which besets our poets just now; as the cause of antique clearness lies in the nobler and healthier manhood, in the severer and more methodic habits of thought, the sounder philosophic and critical training which enabled spenser and milton to draw up a state paper, or to discourse deep metaphysics, with the same manful possession of their subject which gives grace and completeness to the _penseroso_ or the _epithalmion_. and if our poets have their doubts, they should remember, that those to whom doubt and enquiry are real and stern, are not inclined to sing about them till they can sing poems of triumph over them. there has no temptation taken our modern poets save that which is common to man--the temptation of wishing to make the laws of the universe and of art fit them, as they do not feel inclined to make themselves fit the laws, or care to find them out.... the "poetry of doubt," however pretty, would stand us in little stead if we were threatened with a second armada. it will conduce little to the valour, "virtues," manhood of any englishman to be informed by any poet, even in the most melodious verse, illustrated by the most startling and pan-cosmic metaphors, "see what a highly organised and peculiar stomach-ache i have had! does it not prove indisputably that i am not as other men are?" what gospel there can be in such a message to any honest man who has either to till the earth, plan a railroad, colonise australia, or fight the despots, is hard to discover. hard indeed to discover how this most practical, and therefore most epical of ages, is to be "set to music," when all those who talk about so doing persist obstinately in poring, with introverted eyes, over the state of their own digestion, or creed. what man wants, what art wants, perhaps what the maker of the both wants, is a poet who shall begin by confessing that he is as other men are, and sing about things which concern all men, in language which all men can understand. this is the only road to that gift of prophecy which most young poets are nowadays in such a hurry to arrogate to themselves.... there is just now as wide a divorce between poetry and the commonsense of all time, as there is between poetry and modern knowledge. our poets are not merely vague and confused, they are altogether fragmentary-- _disjecta membra poetarum_; they need some uniting idea. and what idea? our answer will probably be greeted with a laugh. nevertheless we answer simply. what our poets want is faith. there is little or no faith nowadays. and without faith there can be no real art, for art is the outward expression of firm, coherent belief.... in the meanwhile, poets write about poets, and poetry, and guiding the age, and curbing the world, and waking it, and thrilling it, and making it start, and weep, and tremble, and self-conceit only knows what else; and yet the age is not guided, or the world curbed, or thrilled, or waked, or anything else, by them. why should it be? curb and thrill the world? the world is just now a most practical world; and these men are utterly unpractical. the age is given up to physical science: these men disregard and outrage it in every page by their false analogies.... let the poets of the new school consider carefully wolfe's "sir john moore," campbell's "hohenlinden," "mariners of england," and "rule britannia," hood's "song of the shirt" and "bridge of sighs," and then ask themselves, as men who would be poets, were it not better to have written any one of these glorious lyrics than all which john keats has left behind him; and let them be sure that, howsoever they may answer the question to themselves, the sound heart of the english people has already made its choice, and that when that beautiful "hero and leander," in which hood has outrivalled the conceit-mongers at their own weapons, by virtue of that very terseness, clearness, and manliness which they neglect, has been gathered to the limbo of the crashawes and marines, his "song of the shirt" and his "bridge of sighs," will be esteemed by great new english nations far beyond the seas, for what they are--two of the most noble lyric poems ever written by an english pen. if our poetasters talk with wordsworth of the dignity and pathos of the commonest human things, they will find them there in perfection; if they talk about the cravings of the new time, they will find them there. if they want the truly sublime and awful, they will find them there also. but they will find none of their own favourite concetti; hardly even a metaphor; no taint of this new poetic diction into which we have now fallen, after all our abuse of the far more manly and sincere "poetic diction" of the eighteenth century; they will find no loitering by the way to argue and moralise, and grumble at providence, and show off the author's own genius and sensibility; they will find, in short, two real works of art, earnest, melodious, self-forgetful, knowing clearly what they want to say, saying it in the shortest, the simplest, the calmest, the most finished words. saying it--rather taught to say it. for if that "divine inspiration of poets," of which the poetasters make such rash and irreverent boastings, have, indeed, as all ages have held, any reality corresponding to it, it will rather be bestowed on such works as these, appeals from an unrighteous man to a righteous god, than on men whose only claim to celestial help seems to be that mere passionate sensibility, which our modern draco once described when speaking of poor john keats, as "an infinite hunger after all manner of pleasant things, crying to the universe, 'oh, that thou wert one great lump of sugar, that i might suck thee!'" anonymous novels for christmas, [from _fraser's magazine_, january, ] if[ ] against the inroads of the evangelical party the orthodox church has need of a defender, it hardly would wish, we should think, to be assisted _tali auxilio_. mrs. trollope has not exactly the genius which is best calculated to support the church of england, or to argue upon so grave a subject as that on which she has thought proper to write. [ ] _the vicar of wrexhill_. by mrs. trollope. london, . with a keen eye, a very sharp tongue, a firm belief, doubtless, in the high church doctrines, and a decent reputation from the authorship of half-a-dozen novels, or other light works, mrs. trollope determined on no less an undertaking than to be the champion of oppressed orthodoxy. these are feeble arms for one who would engage in such a contest, but our fair mrs. trollope trusted entirely in her own skill, and the weapon with which she proposed to combat a strong party is no more nor less than this novel of _the vicar of wrexhill_. it is a great pity that the heroine ever set forth on such a foolish errand; she has only harmed herself and her cause (as a bad advocate always will), and had much better have remained home, pudding-making or stocking-mending, than have meddled with matters which she understands so ill. in the first place (we speak it with due respect for the sex), she is guilty of a fault which is somewhat too common among them; and having very little, except prejudice, on which to found an opinion, she makes up for want of argument by a wonderful fluency of abuse. a woman's religion is chiefly that of the heart, and not of the head. she goes through, for the most part, no tedious process of reasoning, no dreadful stages of doubt, no changes of faith: she loves god as she loves her husband--by a kind of instinctive devotion. faith is a passion with her, not a calculation; so that, in the faculty of believing, though they far exceed the other sex, in the power of convincing they fall far short of them. oh! we repeat once more, that ladies would make puddings and mend stockings! that they would not meddle with religion (what is styled religion, we mean), except to pray to god, to live quietly among their families, and move lovingly among their neighbours! mrs. trollope, for instance, who sees so keenly the follies of the other party--how much vanity there is in bible meetings--how much sin even at missionary societies--how much cant and hypocrisy there is among those who desecrate the awful name of god, by mixing it with their mean interests and petty projects--mrs. trollope cannot see that there is any hypocrisy or bigotry on her part. she, who designates the rival party as false, and wicked, and vain--tracing all their actions to the basest motives, declaring their worship of god to be only one general hypocrisy, their conduct at home one fearful scene of crime, is blind to the faults on her own side. always bitter against the pharisees, she does as the pharisees do. it is vanity, very likely, which leads these people to use god's name so often, and to devote all to perdition who do not coincide in their peculiar notions. is mrs. trollope less vain than they when she declares, and merely _declares_, her own to be the real creed, and stigmatises its rival so fiercely? is mrs. trollope serving god, in making abusive licencious pictures of those who serve him in a different way? once, as mrs. trollope has read--it was a long time ago!--there was a woman taken in sin; the people brought her before a great teacher of truth, who lived in those days. shall we not kill her? said they; the laws command that all adulteresses be killed. we can fancy a mrs. trollope in the crowd, shouting, "oh, the wretch! oh, the abominable harlot! kill her, by all means--stoning is really too good for her!" but what did the divine teacher say? he was quite as anxious to prevent the crime as any mrs. trollope of them all; but he did not even make an allusion to it--he did not describe the manner in which the poor creature was caught--he made no speech to detail the indecencies which she committed, or to raise the fury of the mob against her--he said "let the man who is without sin himself throw the first stone!" whereupon the pharisees and mrs. trollope slunk away, for they knew they were no better than she. there was as great a sin in his eyes as that of the poor erring woman--it was the sin of pride. mrs. trollope may make a licentious book, of which the heroes and heroines are all of the evangelical party; and it may be true, that there are scoundrels belonging to that party as to every other; but her shameful error has been in fixing upon the evangelical _class_ as an object of satire, making them necessarily licentious and hypocritical, and charging everyone of them with the vices which belong to only a very few of all sects.... there are some books, we are told, in the libraries of roman catholic theologians, which, though written for the most devout purposes, are so ingeniously obscene as to render them quite dangerous for common eyes. the groom, in the old story, had never learned the art of greasing horses' teeth, to prevent their eating oats, until the confessor, in interrogating him as to his sins, asked him the question. the next time the groom came to confess, he _had_ greased the horses' teeth. it was the holy father who taught him, by the very fact of warning him against it. by which we mean, that there are some scenes of which it is better not to speak at all. our fair moralist, however, has no such squeamishness. she will show up these odious evangelicals; she will expose them and chastise them, wherever they be. so have we seen, in that beautiful market in thames street, whither the mariners of england bring the glittering produce of their nets--so have we seen, we say, in billingsgate, a nymph attacking another of her sisterhood. how keenly she detects and proclaims the number and enormity of her rival's faults! how eloquently she enlarges upon the gin she has drunk, the children she has confided to the parish, the watchmen whose noses she has broken, and the bridewells which she has visited in succession! no one can but admire the lady's eloquence and talent in conducting the case for the prosecution; no one will, perhaps, doubt the guilt of the hapless object on whom her wrath is vented. but, with all her rage for morality, had not that fair accused have better left the matter alone? that torrent of slang and oath, o nymph! falls ill from thy lips, which should never open but for a soft word or a smile; that accurate description of vice, sweet orator [-tress or-trix]! only shows that thou thyself art but too well acquainted with scenes which thy pure eyes should never have beheld. and when we come to the matter in dispute--a simple question of mackerel--o, mrs. trollope! why, why should you abuse other people's fish, and not content yourself with selling your _own_.... there can be little doubt as to the cleverness of this novel, but, coming from a women's pen, it is most odiously and disgustingly indecent. as a party attack, it is an entire failure; and as a representation of a very large portion of english christians, a shameful and wicked slander. bulwer's "ernest maltravers" to talk of _ernest maltravers_ now, is to rake up a dead man's ashes. the poor creature came into the world almost still-born, and, though he has hardly been before the public for a month, is forgotten as much as _rienzi_ or the _disowned_. what a pity that mr. bulwer will not learn wisdom with age, and confine his attention to subjects at once more grateful to the public and more suitable to his own powers! he excels in the _genre_ of paul de kock, and is always striving after the style of plato; he has a keen perception of the ridiculous and, like liston or cruikshank, and other comic artists, persists that his real vein is the sublime. what a number of sparkling magazine-papers, what an outpouring of fun and satire, might we have had from neddy bulwer, had he not thought fit to turn moralist, metaphysician, politician, poet, and be edward lytton, heaven--knows--what bulwer, esquire and m.p., a dandy, a philosopher, a spouter at radical meetings. we speak feelingly, for we knew the youth at trinity hall, and have a tenderness even for his tomfooleries. he has thrown away the better part of himself--his great inclination for the low, namely; if he would but leave off scents for his handkerchief, and oil for his hair; if he would but confine himself to three clean shirts a week, a couple of coats in a year, a beefsteak and onions for dinner, his beaker a pewter-pot, his carpet a sanded floor, how much might be made of him even yet! an occasional pot of porter too much--a black eye, in a tap-room fight with a carman--a night in the watch-house--or a surfeit produced by welsh-rabbit and gin and beer, might, perhaps, redden his fair face and swell his slim waist; but the _mental_ improvement which he would acquire under such treatment-- the intellectual pluck and vigour which he would attain by the stout diet--the manly sports and conversation in which he would join at the coal-hole, or the widow's, are far better for him than the feeble fribble of the reform club (not inaptly called "the hole in the wall"); the windy french dinners, which, as we take it, are his usual fare; and, above all, the unwholesome radical garbage which form the political food of himself and his clique in the house of commons. for here is the evil of his present artificial courses--the humbug required to keep up his position as dandy, politician, and philosopher (in neither of which latter characters the man is in earnest), must get into _his heart_ at last; and then his trade is ruined. a little more politics and plato, and the natural disappears altogether from mr. bulwer's writings: the individual man becomes as undistinguishable amidst the farrago of philosophy in which he has chosen to envelope himself, as a cutlet in the sauces of a french cook. the idiosyncracy of the mutton perishes under the effects of the adjuncts: even so the moralising, which may be compared to the mushrooms, of mr. bulwer's style; the poetising, which may be likened unto the flatulent turnips and carrots; and the politics, which are as the gravy, reeking of filthy garlic, greasy with rancid oil;--even so, we say, pursuing this savoury simile to its fullest extent, the natural qualities of young pelham--the wholesome and juicy _mutton of the mind_, is shrunk and stewed away. or, to continue in this charming vein of parable, the author of _pelham_ may be likened to beau tibbs. tibbs, as we all remember, would pass for a pink of fashion, and had a wife whom he presented to the world as a paragon of virtue and _ton_, and who was but the cast-off mistress of a lord. mr. bulwer's philosophy is his mrs. tibbs; he thrusts her forward into the company of her betters, as if her rank and reputation never admitted of a question. to all his literary undertakings this goddess of his accompanies him; what a cracked, battered truly she is! with a person and morals that would suit vinegar yard, and a chastity that would be hooted in drury lane. the morality which mr. bulwer has acquired in his researches, political and metaphysical, is of the most extraordinary nature. for one who is always preaching of truth of beauty, the dulness of his moral sense is perfectly ludicrous. he cannot see that the hero into whose mouth he places his favourite metaphysical gabble--his dissertations about the stars, the passions, the greek plays, and what not--his eternal whine about what he calls the good and the beautiful--is a fellow as mean and paltry as can be well imagined; a man of rant, and not of action; foolishly infirm of purpose, and strong only in desire; whose beautiful is a tawdry strumpet, and whose good would be crime in the eyes of an honest man. so much for the portrait of ernest maltravers: as for the artist, we cannot conceive a man to have failed more completely. he wishes to paint an amiable man, and he succeeds in drawing a scoundrel: he says he will give us the likeness of a genius, and it is only the picture of a _humbug_. ernest maltravers is an eccentric and enthusiastic young man, to whom we are introduced upon his return from a german university. fond of wild adventure and solitary rambles, we find him upon a heath, wandering alone, tired, and benighted. the two first chapters of the book are in mr. bulwer's very best manner; the description of the lone hut to which the lad comes--the ruffian who inhabits it--the designs which he has upon the life of his new guest, and the manner in which his daughter defeats them, are told with admirable liveliness and effect. the young man escapes, and with him the girl who had prevented his murder. both are young, interesting, and tender hearted; she loves but him, and would die of starvation without him. ernest maltravers cannot resist the claim of so unprotected a creature; he hires a cottage for her, and a writing-master. he is a young man of genius, and generous dispositions; he is a christian, and instructs the ignorant alice in the awful truth of his religion; moreover he is deep in poetry, philosophy, and the german metaphysics. how should such a christian instruct an innocent and beautiful child, his pupil? what should such a philosopher do? why seduce her, to be sure! after a deal of namby-pamby platonism, the girl, as mr. bulwer says, "goes to the deuce." the expression is as charming as the morality, and appears amidst a quantity of the very finest writing about the good and the beautiful, youth, love, passion, nature and so forth. it is curious how rapidly one turns from good to bad in this book. how clever the descriptions are! how neatly some of the minor events and personalities are hit off! and yet, how astonishingly vile and contemptible the chief part of it is!--that part, we mean, which contains the adventures of the hero, and, of course, the choice reflections of the author. the declamations about virtue are endless, as soon as maltravers appears upon the scene; and yet we find him committing the agreeable little _faux pas_ of which we have just spoken. in one place, we have him making violent love to another man's wife; in another place, raging for blood like a tiger and swearing for revenge.... it is curious and painful to read mr. bulwer's [philosophy], and to mark the easy vanity with which virtue is assumed here, self-knowledge arrogated, and a number of windy sentences, which really possess no meaning, are gravely delivered with all the emphasis of truth and the air of profound conviction. "i have learned," cries our precious philosopher, "to lean on my own soul, and not look eleswhere [transcriber's note: sic] for the reeds that a wind can break!" and what has he learned by leaning on his own soul? is it to be happier than others? or to be better? not he!--he is as wretched and wicked a dog as any unhung. he "leans on his own soul," and makes love to the countess and seduces alice darvell. a ploughboy is a better philosopher and moralist than this mouthing maltravers, with his boasted love of mankind (which reduces itself to a very coarse love of _woman_kind), and his scorn of "the false gods and miserable creeds" of the world, and his soul "lifting its crest to heaven!" a catholic whipping himself before a stone-image, a brahmin dangling on a hook, or standing on one leg for a year, has a higher notion of god than this ranting fool, who is always prating about his own perfections and his divine nature; the one is humble, at least, though blind; the other is proud of his very imperfections and glories in his folly. what does this creature know of virtue, who finds it _by leaning on his own soul_, forsooth? what does he know of god, who, in looking for him, can see but himself, steeped in sin, bloated and swollen with monstrous pride, and strutting before the world and the creator as a maker of systems, a layer down of morals, and a preacher of beauty and truth?... [some of the] characters are excellently drawn; how much better than "_their lips spake of sentiment, and their eyes applied it_!" how soon these philosophers begin ogling! how charmingly their unceasing gabble about beauty and virtue is exemplified in their actions! mr. bulwer's philosophy is like a french palace--it is tawdry, shady, splendid; but, _gare aux nez sensibles_! one is always reminded of the sewer. "their lips spoke sentiment, and their eyes applied it." o you naughty, naughty mr. bulwer! william john fox the dedicatory inscription in the volume of _the monthly repository_, in which the following review appears, will indicate--in a few words--the motives inspiring the editor, w. j. fox, in his journalistic career:-- "to the working people of great britain and ireland; who, whether they produce the means of physical support and enjoyment, or aid the progress of moral, political, and social reform and improvement, are fellow-labourers for the well-being of the entire community." * * * * * _pauline_ was published, when browning was , at his aunt's expense. it secured only _one_ favourable notice, here printed; while the author and his sister deliberately destroyed the unsold copies. w. j. fox on browning [from _the monthly repository_, ] _pauline; a fragment of a confession_. london, saunders & otley. the most deeply interesting adventures, the wildest vicissitudes, the most daring explorations, the mightiest magic, the fiercest conflicts, the brightest triumphs, and the most affecting catastrophes, are those of the spiritual world.... the knowledge of mind is the first of sciences; the records of its formation and workings are the most important of histories; and it is eminently a subject for poetical exhibition. the annals of a poet's mind are poetry. nor has there ever been a genuine bard, who was not himself more poetical than any of his productions. they are emanations of his essence. he himself is, or has been, all that he truly and touchingly, _i.e._, poetically, describes. wordsworth, indeed, never carried a pedlar's pack, nor did byron ever command a pirate ship, or coleridge shoot an albatross; but there were times and moods in which their thoughts intently realised, and identified themselves with the reflective wanderer, the impetuous corsair, and the ancient mariner. they felt _their_ feelings, thought _their_ thoughts, burned with _their_ passions, dreamed _their_ dreams, and lived their lives, or died their deaths. in relation to his creations, the poet is the omnific spirit in whom they have their being. all their vitality must exist in his life. he only, in them, displays to us fragments of himself. the poem, in which a great poet should reveal the whole of himself to mankind would be a study, a delight, and a power, for which there is yet no parallel; and around which the noblest creations of the noblest writers would range themselves as subsidiary luminaries. these thoughts have been suggested by the work before us, which, though evidently a hasty and imperfect sketch, has truth and life in it, which gave us the thrill, and laid hold of us with the power, the sensation of which has never yet failed us as a test of genius. whoever the anonymous author may be, he is a poet. a pretender to science cannot always be safely judged of by a brief publication, for the knowledge of some facts does not imply the knowledge of other facts; but the claimant of poetic honours may generally be appreciated by a few pages, often by a few lines, for if they be poetry, he is a poet. we cannot judge of the house by the brick, but we can judge of the statue of hercules by its foot. we felt certain of tennyson, before we saw the book, by a few verses which had straggled into a newspaper; we are not less certain of the author of pauline. pauline is the recipient of the confessions: the hero is as anonymous as the author, and this is no matter, for _poet_ is the title both of the one and the other. the confessions have nothing in them which needs names: the external world is only reflected in them in its faintest shades; its influences are only described after they have penetrated into the intellect. we have never read anything more purely confessional. the whole composition is of the spirit, spiritual. the scenery is in the chambers of thought: the agencies are powers and passions; the events are transitions from one state of spiritual existence to another. and yet the composition is not dreamy; there is on it a deep stamp of reality. still less is it characterised by coldness. it has visions that we love to look upon, and tones that touch the inmost heart till it responds. the poet's confessions are introduced with an analysis of his spiritual constitution, in which he is described as having an intense consciousness of individuality, combined with a sense of power, a self-supremacy, and a "principle of restlessness which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all"; of this essential self, imagination is described as the characteristic quality; an imagination, steady and unfailing in its power. a "yearning after god," or supreme and universal good, unconsciously cherished through the earlier stages of the history, keeps this mind from utterly dissipating itself; and, which seems to us the only point in which the coherence fails, there is added an unaptness for love, a mere perception of the beautiful, the perception being felt more precious than its object.... and now when he has run the whole toilsome yet giddy round and arrived at the goal, there arises, even though that goal be religion, or because it is religion, a yearning after human sympathies and affections, which would not have assorted with any state or moment of the previous experience; he could not have loved before; at one time it would have been only a fancy, a cold, and yet perhaps extravagant imagining; at another, a low and selfish passion. some souls are purified _by_ love, others are purified _for_ love. othello needed not desdemona to listen to his tale of disastrous chances; they were only external perils, rapid by elevated station; but the mind that has gone through more than his vicissitudes, been in deeper dangers, and deadlier struggles, even when it rests at last in a far higher repose and dignity, yearns for some one who will "seriously incline" to listen to the "strange eventful history," one who will sympathise and soothe, who will receive the confession, and give the absolution of heaven its best earthly ratification, that of a pure and loving heart. the poem is addressed to pauline; with her it begins, and ends; and her presence is felt throughout, as that of a second conscience, wounded by evil, but never stern, and incorporate in a form of beauty, which blends and softens the strong contrasts of different portions of the poem, so that all might be murmured by the breath of affection. the author cannot expect such a poem as this to be popular, to make a "hit," to produce a "sensation." the public are but slow in recognising the claims of tennyson whom in some respects he resembles; and the common eye scarcely yet discerns among the laurel-crowned, the form of shelley, who seems (how justly, we stop not now to discuss), to have been the god of his early idolatory. whatever inspiration may have been upon him from that deity, the mysticism of the original oracles has been happily avoided. and whatever resemblance he may bear to tennyson (a fellow worshipper probably at the same shrine) he owes nothing of the perhaps inferior melody of his verse to an employment of archaisms which it is difficult to defend from the charge of affectation. but he has not given himself the chance for popularity which tennyson did, and which it is evident that he easily might have done. his poem stands alone, with none of those light but taking accompaniments, songs that sing themselves, sketches that everybody knows, light little lyrics, floating about like humming birds, around the trunk and foliage of the poem itself; and which would attract so many eyes, and delight so many ears, that will be slow to perceive the higher beauty of that composition, and to whom a sycamore is no sycamore, unless it be "musical with bees." thomas de quincey ( - ) de quincey has been said to have "taken his place in our literature as the author of about magazine articles," and, though chiefly remembered by his _confessions of an opium eater_ and by his wonderful experiments in "impassioned prose," there can be no question that his critical work occupied much of his attention, and was nearly always original. in many respects his point of view was perverse, and towards his contemporaries occasionally spiteful; while his tendency to dwell upon disputed points was apt to obscure the general impression. * * * * * it is interesting to compare his unmeasured condemnation of pope with kingsley's eulogy: since both were, more or less, directly inspired by the contrast of eighteenth century correctness to the poetical gospel of the lake poets. from the two articles we can obtain a fair and emphatic statement of "both sides of the case." de quincey on pope [from _tait's edinburgh magazine_, may, ] whom shall we pronounce a fit writer to be laid before an auditory of working-men, as a model of what is just in composition--fit either for conciliating their regard to literature at first or afterwards for sustaining it? the qualifications for such a writer are apparently these two; first, that he should deal chiefly with the elder and elementary affections of man, and under those relations which concern man's grandest capacities; secondly, that he should treat his subject with solemnity, and not with sneer--with earnestness, as one under a prophet's burden of impassioned truth, and not with the levity of a girl hunting a chance-started caprice. i admire pope in the very highest degree; but i admire him as a pyrotechnic artist for producing brilliant and evanescent effects out of elements that have hardly a moment's life within them. there is a flash and a startling explosion, then there is a dazzling coruscation, all purple and gold; the eye aches under the suddenness of a display that, springing like a burning arrow out of darkness, rushes back into the darkness with arrowy speed, and in a moment is all over. like festal shows, or the hurrying music of such shows-- it _was_, and it is not. untruly, therefore, was it ever fancied of pope, that he belonged by his classification to the family of the drydens. dryden had within him a principle of continuity which was not satisfied without lingering upon his own thoughts, brooding over them, and oftentimes pursuing them through their unlinkings with the _sequaciousness_ (pardon a coleridgian word) that belongs to some process of creative nature, such as the unfolding of a flower. but pope was all jets and tongues of flame; all showers of scintillation and sparkle. dryden followed, genially, an impulse of his healthy nature. pope obeyed, spasmodically, an overmastering febrile paroxysm. even in these constitutional differences between the two are written and are legible the corresponding necessities of "utter falsehood in pope, and of loyalty to truth in dryden." strange it is to recall this one striking fact, that if once in his life dryden might reasonably have been suspected of falsehood, it was in the capital matter of religion. he _ratted_ from his protestant faith; and according to the literal origin of that figure he _ratted_; for he abjured it as rats abjure a ship in which their instinct of divination has deciphered a destiny of ruin, and at the very moment when popery wore the promise of a triumph that might, at any rate, have lasted his time. dryden was a papist by apostacy; and perhaps, not to speak uncharitably, upon some bias from self-interest. pope, on the other hand, was a papist by birth, and by a tie of honour; and he resisted all temptations to desert his afflicted faith, which temptations lay in bribes of great magnitude prospectively, and in persecutions for the present that were painfully humiliating. how base a time-server does dryden appear on the one side! on the other, how much of a martyr should we be disposed to pronounce pope! and yet, for all that, such is the overruling force of a nature originally sincere, the apostate dryden wore upon his brow the grace of sincerity, whilst the pseudo-martyr pope, in the midst of actual fidelity to his church, was at his heart a traitor--in the very oath of his allegiance to his spiritual mistress had a lie upon his lips, scoffed at her while kneeling in homage to her pretensions, and secretly forswore her doctrines while suffering insults in her service. the differences as to truth and falsehood lay exactly where by all the external symptoms they ought _not_ to have lain. but the reason for this anomaly was that to dryden sincerity had been a perpetual necessity of his intellectual nature, whilst pope, distracted by his own activities of mind, living in an irreligious generation, and beset by infidel friends, had early lost his anchorage of traditional belief; and yet, upon honourable scruple of fidelity to the suffering church of his fathers, he sought often to dissemble the fact of his own scepticism, which often he thirsted ostentatiously to parade. through a motive of truthfulness he became false. and in this particular instance he would, at any rate, have become false, whatever had been the native constitution of his mind. it was a mere impossibility to reconcile any real allegiance to his church with his known irreverence to religion. but upon far more subjects than this pope was habitually false to the quality of his thoughts, always insincere, never by any accident in earnest, and consequently many times caught in ruinous self-contradiction. is that the sort of writer to furnish an advantageous study for the precious leisure, precious as rubies, of the toil-worn artisan. the root and pledge of this falseness in pope lay in a disease of his mind, which he (like the roman poet horace) mistook for a feature of praeter-natural strength; and this disease was the incapacity of self-determination towards any paramount or abiding _principles_. horace, in a well-known passage, had congratulated himself upon this disease as upon a trophy of philosophical emancipation: nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri, quo me cunque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes: which words pope translates, and applies to himself in his english adaptation of this epistle-- but ask not to what doctors i apply-- sworn to no master, of no sect am i. as drives the storm, at any door i knock; and house with montaigne now, and now with locke. that is, neither one poet nor the other having, as regarded philosophy, any internal principle of gravitation or determining impulse to draw him in one direction rather than another, was left to the random control of momentary taste, accident, or caprice; and this indetermination of pure, unballasted levity both pope and horace mistook for a special privilege of philosophic strength. others, it seems, were chained and coerced by certain fixed aspects of truth, and their efforts were over-ruled accordingly in one uniform line of direction. but _they_, the two brilliant poets, fluttered on butterfly wings to the right and the left, obeying no guidance but that of some instant and fugitive sensibility to some momentary phasis of beauty. in this dream of drunken eclecticism, and in the original possibility of such an eclecticism, lay the ground of that enormous falsehood which pope practised from youth to age. an eclectic philosopher already, in the very title which he assumes, proclaims his self-complacency in the large liberty of error purchased by the renunciation of all controlling principles. having served the towing-line which connected him with any external force of guiding and compulsory truth, he is free to go astray in any one of ten thousand false radiations from the true centre of rest. by his own choice he is wandering in a forest all but pathless, --ubi passim pallantes error recto de tramite pellit; and a forest not of sixty days' journey, like that old hercynian forest of caesar's time, but a forest which sixty generations have not availed to traverse or familiarise in any one direction.... _here_ would be the most advantageous and _remunerative_ station to take for one who should undertake a formal exposure of pope's hollow-heartedness; that is, it would most commensurately reward the pains and difficulties of such an investigation. but it would be too long a task for this situation, and it would be too polemic. it would move through a jungle of controversies.... instead of this i prefer, as more amusing, as less elaborate, and as briefer, to expose a few of pope's _personal_ falsehoods, and falsehoods as to the notorieties of _fact_. truth speculative often-times, drives its roots into depth, so dark that the falsifications to which it is liable, though detected, cannot always be exposed to the light of day--the result is known, but not therefore seen. truth personal, on the other hand, may easily be made to confront its falsifier, not with reputation only, but with the visible _shame_ of refutation. such shame would settle upon _every_ page of pope's satires and moral epistles, oftentimes upon every couplet, if any censor, armed with an adequate knowledge of the facts, were to prosecute the inquest. and the general impression from such an inquest would be, that pope never delineated a character, nor uttered a sentiment, nor breathed an aspiration, which he would not willingly have recast, have retracted, have abjured or trampled underfoot with the curses assigned to heresy, if by such an act he could have added a hue of brilliancy to his colouring or a new depth to his shadows. there is nothing he would not have sacrificed, not the most solemn of his opinions, nor the most pathetic memorial from his personal experience, in return for a sufficient consideration, which consideration meant always with _him_ poetic effect. it is not, as too commonly is believed, that he was reckless of other people's feelings; so far from _that_, he had a morbid _facility_ in his kindness; and in cases where he had no reason to suspect any lurking hostility, he showed even a paralytic benignity. but, simply and constitutionally, he was incapable of a sincere thought or a sincere emotion. nothing that ever he uttered, were it even a prayer to god, but he had a fancy for reading it backwards. and he was evermore false, not as loving or preferring falsehood, but as one who could not in his heart perceive much real difference between what people affected to call falsehood, and what they affected to call truth. the end definitions essays in contemporary criticism by henry seidel canby, ph.d. editor of _the literary review_ of _the new york evening post_, and a member of the english department of yale university. new york acknowledgments the author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of _the atlantic monthly, harper's magazine, the century magazine, the literary review of the new york evening post, the bookman, the nation, and the north american review_ for permission to reprint such of these essays as have appeared in their columns. preface the unity of this book is to be sought in the point of view of the writer rather than in a sequence of chapters developing a single theme and arriving at categorical conclusions. literature in a civilization like ours, which is trying to be both sophisticated and democratic at the same moment of time, has so many sources and so many manifestations, is so much involved with our social background, and is so much a question of life as well as of art, that many doors have to be opened before one begins to approach an understanding. the method of informal definition which i have followed in all these essays is an attempt to open doors through which both writer and reader may enter into a better comprehension of what novelists, poets, and critics have done or are trying to accomplish. more than an entrance upon many a vexed controversy and hidden meaning i cannot expect to have achieved in this book; but where the door would not swing wide i have at least tried to put one foot in the crack. the sympathetic reader may find his own way further; or may be stirred by my endeavor to a deeper appreciation, interest, and insight. that is my hope. new york, april, . contents preface i. on fiction sentimental america free fiction a certain condescension toward fiction the essence of popularity ii. on the american tradition the american tradition back to nature thanks to the artists to-day in american literature: addressed to the british time's mirror the family magazine iii. the new generation the young romantics puritans all the older generation a literature of protest barbarians a la mode iv. the reviewing of books a prospectus for criticism the race of reviewers the sins of reviewing mrs. wharton's "the age of innocence" mr. hergesheimer's "cytherea" v. philistines and dilettante poetry for the unpoetical eye, ear, and mind out with the dilettante flat prose vi. men and their books conrad and melville the novelist of pity henry james the satiric rage of butler conclusion defining the indefinable i on fiction sentimental america the oriental may be inscrutable, but he is no more puzzling than the average american. we admit that we are hard, keen, practical, --the adjectives that every casual european applies to us,--and yet any book-store window or railway news-stand will show that we prefer sentimental magazines and books. why should a hard race--if we are hard--read soft books? by soft books, by sentimental books, i do not mean only the kind of literature best described by the word "squashy." i doubt whether we write or read more novels and short stories of the tear-dripped or hyper-emotional variety than other nations. germany is--or was--full of such soft stuff. it is highly popular in france, although the excellent taste of french criticism keeps it in check. italian popular literature exudes sentiment; and the sale of "squashy" fiction in england is said to be threatened only by an occasional importation of an american "best-seller." we have no bad eminence here. sentimentalists with enlarged hearts are international in habitat, although, it must be admitted, especially popular in america. when a critic, after a course in american novels and magazines, declares that life, as it appears on the printed page here, is fundamentally sentimentalized, he goes much deeper than "mushiness" with his charge. he means, i think, that there is an alarming tendency in american fiction to dodge the facts of life-- or to pervert them. he means that in most popular books only red- blooded, optimistic people are welcome. he means that material success, physical soundness, and the gratification of the emotions have the right of way. he means that men and women (except the comic figures) shall be presented, not as they are, but as we should like to have them, according to a judgment tempered by nothing more searching than our experience with an unusually comfortable, safe, and prosperous mode of living. every one succeeds in american plays and stories--if not by good thinking, why then by good looks or good luck. a curious society the research student of a later date might make of it--an upper world of the colorless successful, illustrated by chance-saved collar advertisements and magazine covers; an underworld of grotesque scamps, clowns, and hyphenates drawn from the comic supplement; and all--red-blooded hero and modern gargoyle alike--always in good humor. i am not touching in this picture merely to attack it. it has been abundantly attacked; what it needs is definition. for there is much in this bourgeois, good-humored american literature of ours which rings true, which is as honest an expression of our individuality as was the more austere product of antebellum new england. if american sentimentality does invite criticism, american sentiment deserves defense. sentiment--the response of the emotions to the appeal of human nature--is cheap, but so are many other good things. the best of the ancients were rich in it. homer's chieftains wept easily. so did shakespeare's heroes. adam and eve shed "some natural tears" when they left the paradise which milton imagined for them. a heart accessible to pathos, to natural beauty, to religion, was a chief requisite for the protagonist of victorian literature. even becky sharp was touched--once--by amelia's moving distress. americans, to be sure, do not weep easily; but if they make equivalent responses to sentiment, that should not be held against them. if we like "sweet" stories, or "strong"--which means emotional--stories, our taste is not thereby proved to be hopeless, or our national character bad. it is better to be creatures of even sentimental sentiment with the author of "the rosary," than to see the world _only_ as it is portrayed by the pens of bernard shaw and anatole france. the first is deplorable; the second is dangerous. i should deeply regret the day when a simple story of honest american manhood winning a million and a sparkling, piquant sweetheart lost all power to lull my critical faculty and warm my heart. i doubt whether any literature has ever had too much of honest sentiment. good heavens! because some among us insist that the mystic rose of the emotions shall be painted a brighter pink than nature allows, are the rest to forego glamour? or because, to view the matter differently, psychology has shown what happens in the brain when a man falls in love, and anthropology has traced marriage to a care for property rights, are we to suspect the idyllic in literature wherever we find it? life is full of the idyllic; and no anthropologist will ever persuade the reasonably romantic youth that the sweet and chivalrous passion which leads him to mingle reverence with desire for the object of his affections, is nothing but an idealized property sense. origins explain very little, after all. the bilious critics of sentiment in literature have not even honest science behind them. i have no quarrel with traffickers in simple emotion--with such writers as james lane allen and james whitcomb riley, for example. but the average american is not content with such sentiment as theirs. he wishes a more intoxicating brew, he desires to be persuaded that, once you step beyond your own experience, feeling rules the world. he wishes--i judge by what he reads--to make sentiment at least ninety per cent efficient, even if a dream- america, superficially resemblant to the real, but far different in tone, must be created by the obedient writer in order to satisfy him. his sentiment has frequently to be sentimentalized before he will pay for it. and to this fault, which he shares with other modern races, he adds the other heinous sin of sentimentalism, the refusal to face the facts. this sentimentalizing of reality is far more dangerous than the romantic sentimentalizing of the "squashy" variety. it is to be found in sex-stories which carefully observe decency of word and deed, where the conclusion is always in accord with conventional morality, yet whose characters are clearly immoral, indecent, and would so display themselves if the tale were truly told. it is to be found in stories of "big business" where trickery and rascality are made virtuous at the end by sentimental baptism. if i choose for the hero of my novel a director in an american trust; if i make him an accomplice in certain acts of ruthless economic tyranny; if i make it clear that at first he is merely subservient to a stronger will; and that the acts he approves are in complete disaccord with his private moral code--why then, if the facts should be dragged to the light, if he is made to realize the exact nature of his career, how can i end my story? it is evident that my hero possesses little insight and less firmness of character. he is not a hero; he is merely a tool. in, let us say, eight cases out of ten, his curve is already plotted. it leads downward--not necessarily along the villain's path, but toward moral insignificance. and yet, i cannot end my story that way for americans. there _must_ be a grand moral revolt. there must be resistance, triumph, and not only spiritual, but also financial recovery. and this, likewise, is sentimentality. even booth tarkington, in his excellent "turmoil," had to dodge the logical issue of his story; had to make his hero exchange a practical literary idealism for a very impractical, even though a commercial, utopianism, in order to emerge apparently successful at the end of the book. a story such as the danish nexo's "pelle the conqueror," where pathos and the idyllic, each intense, each beautiful, are made convincing by an undeviating truth to experience, would seem to be almost impossible of production just now in america. it is not enough to rail at this false fiction. the chief duty of criticism is to explain. the best corrective of bad writing is a knowledge of why it is bad. we get the fiction we deserve, precisely as we get the government we deserve--or perhaps, in each case, a little better. why are we sentimental? when that question is answered, it is easier to understand the defects and the virtues of american fiction. and the answer lies in the traditional american philosophy of life. to say that the american is an idealist is to commit a thoroughgoing platitude. like most platitudes, the statement is annoying because from one point of view it is indisputably just, while from another it does not seem to fit the facts. with regard to our tradition, it is indisputable. of the immigrants who since the seventeenth century have been pouring into this continent a proportion large in number, larger still in influence, has been possessed of motives which in part at least were idealistic. if it was not the desire for religious freedom that urged them, it was the desire for personal freedom; if not political liberty, why then economic liberty (for this too is idealism), and the opportunity to raise the standard of life. and of course all these motives were strongest in that earlier immigration which has done most to fix the state of mind and body which we call being american. i need not labor the argument. our political and social history support it; our best literature demonstrates it, for no men have been more idealistic than the american writers whom we have consented to call great. emerson, thoreau, hawthorne, whitman--was idealism ever more thoroughly incarnate than in them? and this idealism--to risk again a platitude--has been in the air of america. it has permeated our religious sects, and created several of them. it has given tone to our thinking, and even more to our feeling. i do not say that it has always, or even usually, determined our actions, although the civil war is proof of its power. again and again it has gone aground roughly when the ideal met a condition of living--a fact that will provide the explanation for which i seek. but optimism, "boosting," muck- raking (not all of its manifestations are pretty), social service, religious, municipal, democratic reform, indeed the "uplift" generally, is evidence of the vigor, the bumptiousness of the inherited american tendency to pursue the ideal. no one can doubt that in we believed, at least, in idealism. nevertheless, so far as the average individual is concerned, with just his share and no more of the race-tendency, this idealism has been suppressed, and in some measure perverted. it is this which explains, i think, american sentimentalism. consider, for example, the ethics of conventional american society. the american ethical tradition is perfectly definite and tremendously powerful. it belongs, furthermore, to a population far larger than the "old american" stock, for it has been laboriously inculcated in our schools and churches, and impressively driven home by newspaper, magazine, and book. i shall not presume to analyze it save where it touches literature. there it maintains a definite attitude toward all sex-problems: the victorian, which is not necessarily, or even probably, a bad one. man should be chaste, and proud of his chastity. woman must be so. it is the ethical duty of the american to hate, or at least to despise, all deviations, and to pretend--for the greater prestige of the law--that such sinning is exceptional, at least in america. and this is the public morality he believes in, whatever may be his private experience in actual living. in business, it is the ethical tradition of the american, inherited from a rigorous protestant morality, to be square, to play the game without trickery, to fight hard but never meanly. over-reaching is justifiable when the other fellow has equal opportunities to be "smart"; lying, tyranny--never. and though the opposites of all these laudable practices come to pass, he must frown on them in public, deny their rightness even to the last cock-crow-- especially in the public press. american political history is a long record of idealistic tendencies toward democracy working painfully through a net of graft, pettiness, sectionalism, and bravado, with constant disappointment for the idealist who believes, traditionally, in the intelligence of the crowd. american social history is a glaring instance of how the theory of equal dignity for all men can entangle itself with caste distinctions, snobbery, and the power of wealth. american economic history betrays the pioneer helping to kick down the ladder which he himself had raised toward equal opportunity for all. american literary history--especially contemporary literary history--reflects the result of all this for the american mind. the sentimental in our literature is a direct consequence. the disease is easily acquired. mr. smith, a broker, finds himself in an environment of "schemes" and "deals" in which the quality of mercy is strained, and the wind is decidedly not tempered to the shorn lamb. after all, business is business. he shrugs his shoulders and takes his part. but his unexpended fund of native idealism--if, as is most probable, he has his share--seeks its due satisfaction. he cannot use it in business; so he takes it out in a novel or a play where, quite contrary to his observed experience, ordinary people like himself act nobly, with a success that is all the more agreeable for being unexpected. his wife, a woman with strange stirrings about her heart, with motions toward beauty, and desires for a significant life and rich, satisfying experience, exists in day-long pettiness, gossips, frivols, scolds, with money enough to do what she pleases, and nothing vital to do. she also relieves her pent-up idealism in plays or books--in high-wrought, "strong" novels, not in adventures in society such as the kitchen admires, but in stories with violent moral and emotional crises, whose characters, no matter how unlifelike, have "strong" thoughts, and make vital decisions; succeed or fail significantly. her brother, the head of a wholesale dry-goods firm, listens to the stories the drummers bring home of night life on the road, laughs, says to himself regretfully that the world has to be like that; and then, in logical reaction, demands purity and nothing but aggressive purity in the books of the public library. the hard man goes in for philanthropy (never before so frequently as in america); the one-time "boss" takes to picture-collecting; the railroad wrecker gathers rare editions of the bible; and tens of thousands of humbler americans carry their inherited idealism into the necessarily sordid experiences of life in an imperfectly organized country, suppress it for fear of being thought "cranky" or "soft," and then, in their imagination and all that feeds their imagination, give it vent. you may watch the process any evening at the "movies" or the melodrama, on the trolley-car or in the easy chair at home. this philosophy of living which i have called american idealism is in its own nature sound, as is proved in a hundred directions where it has had full play. suppressed idealism, like any other suppressed desire, becomes unsound. and here lies the ultimate cause of the taste for sentimentalism in the american _bourgeoisie._ an undue insistence upon happy endings, regardless of the premises of the story, and a craving for optimism everywhere, anyhow, are sure signs of a "morbid complex," and to be compared with some justice to the craving for drugs in an alcoholic deprived of liquor. no one can doubt the effect of the suppression by the puritan discipline of that instinctive love of pleasure and liberal experience common to us all. its unhealthy reaction is visible in every old american community. no one who faces the facts can deny the result of the suppression by commercial, bourgeois, prosperous america of our native idealism. the student of society may find its dire effects in politics, in religion, and in social intercourse. the critic cannot overlook them in literature; for it is in the realm of the imagination that idealism, direct or perverted, does its best or its worst. sentiment is not perverted idealism. sentiment _is_ idealism, of a mild and not too masculine variety. if it has sins, they are sins of omission, not commission. our fondness for sentiment proves that our idealism, if a little loose in the waist-band and puffy in the cheeks, is still hearty, still capable of active mobilization, like those comfortable french husbands whose plump and smiling faces, careless of glory, careless of everything but thrift and good living, one used to see figured on a page whose superscription read, "dead on the field of honor." the novels, the plays, the short stories, of sentiment may prefer sweetness, perhaps, to truth, the feminine to the masculine virtues, but we waste ammunition in attacking them. there never was, i suppose, a great literature of sentiment, for not even "the sentimental journey" is truly great. but no one can make a diet exclusively of "noble" literature; the charming has its own cozy corner across from the tragic (and a much bigger corner at that). our uncounted amorists of tail-piece song and illustrated story provide the readiest means of escape from the somewhat uninspiring life that most men and women are living just now in america. the sentimental, however,--whether because of an excess of sentiment softening into "slush," or of a morbid optimism, or of a weak-eyed distortion of the facts of life,--is perverted. it needs to be cured, and its cure is more truth. but this cure, i very much fear, is not entirely, or even chiefly, in the power of the "regular practitioner," the honest writer. he can be honest; but if he is much more honest than his readers, they will not read him. as professor lounsbury once said, a language grows corrupt only when its speakers grow corrupt, and mends, strengthens, and becomes pure with them. so with literature. we shall have less sentimentality in american literature when our accumulated store of idealism disappears in a laxer generation; or when it finds due vent in a more responsible, less narrow, less monotonously prosperous life than is lived by the average reader of fiction in america. i would rather see our literary taste damned forever than have the first alternative become--as it has not yet--a fact. the second, in these years rests upon the knees of the gods. all this must not be taken in too absolute a sense. there are medicines, and good ones, in the hands of writers and of critics, to abate, if not to heal, this plague of sentimentalism. i have stated ultimate causes only. they are enough to keep the mass of americans reading sentimentalized fiction until some fundamental change has come, not strong enough to hold back the van of american writing, which is steadily moving toward restraint, sanity, and truth. every honest composition is a step forward in the cause; and every clear-minded criticism. but one must doubt the efficacy, and one must doubt the healthiness, of reaction into cynicism and sophisticated cleverness. there are curious signs, especially in what we may call the literature of new york, of a growing sophistication that sneers at sentiment and the sentimental alike. "magazines of cleverness" have this for their keynote, although as yet the satire is not always well aimed. there are abundant signs that the generation just coming forward will rejoice in such a pose. it is observable now in the colleges, where the young literati turn up their noses at everything american,--magazines, best-sellers, or one-hundred-night plays,--and resort for inspiration to the english school of anti-victorians: to remy de gourmont, to anatole france. their pose is not altogether to be blamed, and the men to whom they resort are models of much that is admirable; but there is little promise for american literature in exotic imitation. to see ourselves prevailingly as others see us may be good for modesty, but does not lead to a self-confident native art. and it is a dangerous way for americans to travel. we cannot afford such sophistication yet. the english wits experimented with cynicism in the court of charles ii, laughed at blundering puritan morality, laughed at country manners, and were whiffed away because the ideals they laughed at were better than their own. idealism is not funny, however censurable its excesses. as a race we have too much sentiment to be frightened out of the sentimental by a blase cynicism. at first glance the flood of moral literature now upon us--social- conscience stories, scientific plays, platitudinous "moralities" that tell us how to live--may seem to be another protest against sentimentalism. and that the french and english examples have been so warmly welcomed here may seem another indication of a reaction on our part. i refer especially to "hard" stories, full of vengeful wrath, full of warnings for the race that dodges the facts of life. h. g. wells is the great exemplar, with his sociological studies wrapped in description and tied with a plot. in a sense, such stories are certainly to be regarded as a protest against truth-dodging, against cheap optimism, against "slacking," whether in literature or in life. but it would be equally just to call them another result of suppressed idealism, and to regard their popularity in america as proof of the argument which i have advanced in this essay. excessively didactic literature is often a little unhealthy. in fresh periods, when life runs strong and both ideals and passions find ready issue into life, literature has no burdensome moral to carry. it digests its moral. homer digested his morals. they transfuse his epics. so did shakespeare. not so with the writers of the social-conscience school. they are in a rage over wicked, wasteful man. their novels are bursted notebooks--sometimes neat and orderly notebooks, like mr. galsworthy's or our own ernest poole's, sometimes haphazard ones, like those of mr. wells, but always explosive with reform. these gentlemen know very well what they are about, especially mr. wells, the lesser artist, perhaps, as compared with galsworthy, but the shrewder and possibly the greater man. the very sentimentalists, who go to novels to exercise the idealism which they cannot use in life, will read these unsentimental stories, although their lazy impulses would never spur them on toward any truth not sweetened by a tale. and yet, one feels that the social attack might have been more convincing if free from its compulsory service to fiction; that these novels and plays might have been better literature if the authors did not study life in order that they might be better able to preach. wells and galsworthy also have suffered from suppressed idealism, although it would be unfair to say that perversion was the result. so have our muck-rakers, who, very characteristically, exhibit the disorder in a more complex and a much more serious form, since to a distortion of facts they have often enough added hypocrisy and commercialism. it is part of the price we pay for being sentimental. if i am correct in my analysis, we are suffering here in america, not from a plague of bad taste merely, nor only from a lack of real education among our myriads of readers, nor from decadence-- least of all, this last. it is a disease of our own particular virtue which has infected us--idealism, suppressed and perverted. a less commercial, more responsible america, perhaps a less prosperous and more spiritual america, will hold fast to its sentiment, but be weaned from its sentimentality. free fiction what impresses me most in the contemporary short story as i find it in american magazines, is its curious sophistication. its bloom is gone. i have read through dozens of periodicals without finding one with fresh feeling and the easy touch of the writer who writes because his story urges him. and when with relief i do encounter a narrative that is not conventional in structure and mechanical in its effects, the name of the author is almost invariably that of a newcomer, or of one of our few uncorrupted masters of the art. still more remarkable, the good short stories that i meet with in my reading are the trivial ones,--the sketchy, the anecdotal, the merely adventurous or merely picturesque; as they mount toward literature they seem to increase in artificiality and constraint; when they propose to interpret life they become machines, and nothing more, for the discharge of sensation, sentiment, or romance. and this is true, so far as i can discover, of the stories which most critics and more editors believe to be successful, the stories which are most characteristic of magazine narrative and of the output of american fiction in our times. i can take my text from any magazine, from the most literary to the least. in the stories selected by all of them i find the resemblances greater than the differences, and the latter seldom amount to more than a greater or a less excellence of workmanship and style. the "literary" magazines, it is true, more frequently surprise one by a story told with original and consummate art; but then the "popular" magazines balance this merit by their more frequent escape from mere prettiness. in both kinds, the majority of the stories come from the same mill, even though the minds that shape them may differ in refinement and in taste. their range is narrow, and, what is more damning, their art seems constantly to verge upon artificiality. these made-to-order stories (and this is certainly not too strong a term for the majority of them) are not interesting to a critical reader. he sticks to the novel, or, more frequently, goes to france, to russia, or to england for his fiction, as the sales- list of any progressive publisher will show. and i do not believe that they are deeply interesting to an uncritical reader. he reads them to pass the time; and, to judge from the magazines themselves, gives his more serious attention to the "write-ups" of politics, current events, new discoveries, and men in the public eye,--to reality, in other words, written as if it were fiction, and more interesting than the fiction that accompanies it, because, in spite of its enlivening garb, it is guaranteed by writer and editor to be true. i am not impressed by the perfervid letters published by the editor in praise of somebody's story as a "soul-cure," or the greatest of the decade. they were written, i suppose, but they are not typical. they do not insult the intelligence as do the ridiculous puffs which it is now the fashion to place like a sickly limelight at the head of a story; but they do not convince me of the story's success with the public. actually, men and women, discussing these magazines, seldom speak of the stories. they have been interested,--in a measure. the "formula," as i shall show later, is bound to get that result. but they have dismissed the characters and forgotten the plots. i do not deny that this supposedly successful short story is easy to read. it is--fatally easy. and here precisely is the trouble. to borrow a term from dramatic criticism, it is "well made," and that is what makes it so thin, so bloodless, and so unprofitable to remember, in spite of its easy narrative and its "punch." its success as literature, curiously enough for a new literature and a new race like ours, is limited, not by crudity, or inexpressiveness, but by form, by the very rigidity of its carefully perfected form. like other patent medicines, it is constructed by formula. it is not difficult to construct an outline of the "formula" by which thousands of current narratives are being whipped into shape. indeed, by turning to the nearest textbook on "selling the short story," i could find one ready-made. (there could be no clearer symptom of the disease i wish to diagnose than these many "practical" textbooks, with their over-emphasis upon technique and their under-estimate of all else that makes literature.) the story _must_ begin, it appears, with action or with dialogue. a mother packs her son's trunk while she gives him unheeded advice mingled with questions about shirts and socks; a corrupt and infuriated director pounds on the mahogany table at his board meeting, and curses the honest fool (hero of the story) who has got in his way; or, "'where did mary worden get that curious gown?' inquired mrs. van deming, glancing across the sparkling glass and silver of the hotel terrace." any one of these will serve as instance of the break-neck beginning which kipling made obligatory. once started, the narrative must move, move, move furiously, each action and every speech pointing directly toward the unknown climax. a pause is a confession of weakness. this poe taught for a special kind of story; and this a later generation, with a servility which would have amazed that sturdy fighter, requires of all narrative. then the climax, which must neatly, quickly, and definitely end the action for all time, either by a solution you have been urged to hope for by the wily author in every preceding paragraph, or in a way which is logically correct but never, never suspected. o. henry is responsible for the vogue of the latter of these two alternatives,--and the strain of living up to his inventiveness has been frightful. finally comes a last suspiration, usually in the advertising pages. sometimes it is a beautiful descriptive sentence charged with sentiment, sometimes a smart epigram, according to the style of story, or the "line" expected of the author. try this, as the advertisements say, on your favorite magazine. this formula, with variations which readers can supply for themselves or draw from textbooks on the short story, is not a wholly bad method of writing fiction. it is, i venture to assert, a very good one,--if you desire merely effective story-telling. it is probably the best way of making the short story a thoroughly efficient tool for the presentation of modern life. and there lies, i believe, the whole trouble. the short story, its course plotted and its form prescribed, has become too efficient. now efficiency is all that we ask of a railroad, efficiency is half at least of what we ask of journalism; but efficiency is not the most, it is perhaps the least, important among the undoubted elements of good literature. in order to make the short story efficient, the dialogue, the setting, the plot, the character development, have been squeezed and whittled and moulded until the means of telling the story fit the ends of the story-telling as neatly as hook fits eye. as one writer on how to manufacture short stories tells us in discussing character development, the aspirant must-- "eliminate every trait or deed which does not help peculiarly to make the character's part in the particular story either intelligible or open to such sympathy as it merits; "paint in only the 'high lights,' that is...never qualify or elaborate a trait or episode, merely for the sake of preserving the effect of the character's full reality." and thus the story is to be subdued to the service of the climax as the body of man to his brain. but what these writers upon the short story do not tell us is that efficiency of this order works backward as well as forward. if means are to correspond with ends, why then ends must be adjusted to means. not only must the devices of the story- teller be directed with sincerity toward the tremendous effect he wishes to make with his climax upon you and me, his readers; but the interesting life which it is or should be his purpose to write about for our delectation must be maneuvered, or must be chosen or rejected, not according to the limitation which small space imposes, but with its suitability to the "formula" in mind. in brief, if we are to have complete efficiency, the right kind of life and no other must be put into the short-story hopper. nothing which cannot be told rapidly must be dropped in, lest it clog the smoothly spinning wheels. if it is a story of slowly developing incongruity in married life, the action must be speeded beyond probability, like a film in the moving pictures, before it is ready to be made into a short story. if it is a tale of disillusionment on a prairie farm, with the world and life flattening out together, some sharp climax must be provided nevertheless, because that is the only way in which to tell a story. indeed it is easy to see the dangers which arise from sacrificing truth to a formula in the interests of efficiency. this is the limitation by form; the limitation by subject is quite as annoying. american writers from poe down have been fertile in plots. especially since o. henry took the place of kipling as a literary master, ingenuity, inventiveness, cleverness in its american sense, have been squandered upon the short story. but plots do not make variety. themes make variety. human nature regarded in its multitudinous phases makes variety. there are only a few themes in current american short stories,--the sentimental theme from which breed ten thousand narratives; the theme of intellectual analysis and of moral psychology favored by the "literary" magazines; the "big-business" theme; the theme of american effrontery; the social-contrast theme; the theme of successful crime. add a few more, and you will have them all. read a hundred examples, and you will see how infallibly the authors-- always excepting our few masters--limit themselves to conventional aspects of even these conventional themes. reflect, and you will see how the first--the theme of sentiment--has overflowed its banks and washed over all the rest, so that, whatever else a story may be, it must somewhere, somehow, make the honest american heart beat more softly. there is an obvious cause for this in the taste of the american public, which i do not propose to neglect. but here too we are in the grip of the "formula," of the idea that there is only one way to construct a short story--a swift succession of climaxes rising precipitously to a giddy eminence. for the formula is rigid, not plastic as life is plastic. it fails to grasp innumerable stories which break the surface of american life day by day and disappear uncaught. stories of quiet homely life, events significant for themselves that never reach a burning climax, situations that end in irony, or doubt, or aspiration, it mars in the telling. the method which makes story-telling easy, itself limits our variety. nothing brings home the artificiality and the narrowness of this american fiction so clearly as a comparison, for better and for worse, with the russian short story. i have in mind the works of anton tchekoff, whose short stories have now been translated into excellent english. fresh from a reading of these books, one feels, it is true, quite as inclined to criticize as to praise. why are the characters therein depicted so persistently disagreeable, even in the lighter stories? why are the women always freckled, the men predominantly red and watery in the eye? why is the country so flat, so foggy, so desolate; and why are the peasants so lumpish and miserable? russia before the revolution could not have been so dreary as this; the prevailing grimness must be due to some mental obfuscation of her writers. i do not refer to the gloomy, powerful realism of the stories of hopeless misery. there, if one criticizes, it must be only the advisability of the choice of such subjects. one does not doubt the truth of the picture. i mean the needless dinginess of much of russian fiction, and of many of these powerful short stories. nevertheless, when one has said his worst, and particularly when he has eliminated the dingier stories of the collection, he returns with an admiration, almost passionate, to the truth, the variety, above all to the freedom of these stories. i do not know russia or the russians, and yet i am as sure of the absolute truth of that unfortunate doctor in "la cigale," who builds up his heroic life of self-sacrifice while his wife seeks selfishly elsewhere for a hero, as i am convinced of the essential unreality, except in dialect and manners, of the detectives, the "dope-fiends," the hard business men, the heroic boys and lovely girls that people most american short stories. as for variety,-- the russian does not handle numerous themes. he is obsessed with the dreariness of life, and his obsession is only occasionally lifted; he has no room to wander widely through human nature. and yet his work gives an impression of variety that the american magazine never attains. he is free to be various. when the mood of gloom is off him, he experiments at will, and often with consummate success. he seems to be sublimely unconscious that readers are supposed to like only a few kinds of stories; and as unaware of the taboo upon religious or reflective narrative as of the prohibition upon the ugly in fiction. as life in any manifestation becomes interesting in his eyes, his pen moves freely. and so he makes life interesting in many varieties, even when his russian prepossessions lead him far away from our western moods. freedom. that is the word here, and also in his method of telling these stories. no one seems to have said to tchekoff, "your stories must move, move, move." sometimes, indeed, he pauses outright, as life pauses; sometimes he seems to turn aside, as life turns aside before its progress is resumed. no one has ever made clear to him that every word from the first of the story must point unerringly toward the solution and the effect of the plot. his paragraphs spring from the characters and the situation. they are led on to the climax by the story itself. they do not drag the panting reader down a rapid action, to fling him breathless upon the "i told you so" of a conclusion prepared in advance. i have in mind especially a story of tchekoff's called "the night before easter." it is a very interesting story; it is a very admirable story, conveying in a few pages much of russian spirituality and more of universal human nature; but i believe that all, or nearly all, of our american magazines would refuse it; not because it lacks picturesqueness, or narrative suspense, or vivid characterization--all of these it has in large measure. they would reject it because it does not seem to move rapidly, or because it lacks a vigorous climax. the goltva swollen in flood lies under the easter stars. as the monk jerome ferries the traveler over to where fire and cannon-shot and rocket announce the rising of christ to the riotous monastery, he asks, "can you tell me, kind master, why it is that even in the presence of great happiness a man cannot forget his grief?" deacon nicholas is dead, who alone in the monastery could write prayers that touched the heart. and of them all, only jerome read his "akaphists." "he used to open the door of his cell and make me sit by him, and we used to read....his face was compassionate and tender--" in the monastery the countryside is crowding to hear the easter service. the choir sings "lift up thine eyes, o zion, and behold." but nicholas is dead, and there is none to penetrate the meaning of the easter canon, except jerome who toils all night on the ferry because they had forgotten him. in the morning, the traveler recrosses the goltva. jerome is still on the ferry. he rests his dim, timid eyes upon them all, and then fixes his gaze on the rosy face of a merchant's wife. there is little of the man in that long gaze. he is seeking in the woman's face the sweet and gentle features of his lost friend. the american editor refuses such a story. there is no plot here, he says, and no "punch." he is wrong, although an imperfect abstract like mine cannot convict him. for the narrative presents an unforgettable portrait of wistful hero-worship, set in the dim mists of a russian river against the barbaric splendor of an easter midnight mass. to force a climax upon this poignant story would be to spoil it. and when it appears, as it will, in reprint, in some periodical anthology of current fiction, it will not fail to impress american readers. but the american editor must have a climax which drives home what he thinks the public wants. if it is not true, so much the worse for truth. if it falsifies the story, well, a lying story with a "punch" is better than a true one that lacks a fire-spitting climax. the audience which judge a play by the effect of its "curtain," will not complain of a trifling illogicality in narrative, or a little juggling with what might happen if the story were life. of what the editor wants i find a typical example in a recent number of a popular magazine. the story is well written; it is interesting until it begins to lie; moreover it is "featured" as one of the best short stories of the year. an american girl, brought up in luxury, has fed her heart with romantic sentiment. the world is a christmas tree. if you are good and pretty and "nice," you have only to wait until you get big enough to shake it, and then down will come some present--respect from one's friends and family, perhaps a lover. and then she wakes up. her father points out that she is pinching him by her extravagance. nobody seems to want her kind of "nice-ness"; which indeed does no one much good. there is nothing that she can do that is useful in the world, for she has never learned. she begins to doubt the christmas tree. there enters a man--a young electrical engineer, highly trained, highly ambitious, but caught in the wheels of a great corporation where he is merely a cog; wanting to live, wanting to love, wanting to be married, yet condemned to labor for many years more upon a salary which perhaps would little more than pay for her clothes. by an ingenious device they are thrown together in a bit of wild country near town, and are made to exchange confidences. so far, no one can complain of the truth of this story; and furthermore it is well told. here are two products of our social machine, both true to type. suppose they want to marry? what can we do about it? the story-teller has posed his question with a force not to be denied. but i wish we had had a tchekoff to answer it. as for this author, he leads his characters to a conveniently deserted house, lights a fire on the hearth, sets water boiling for tea, and in a few pages of charming romance would persuade us that with a few economies in this rural residence, true love may have its course and a successful marriage crown the morning's adventure. thus in one dazzling sweep, the greatest and most sugary plum of all drops from the very tip of the christmas tree into the lap of the lady, who had just learned that happiness in the real world comes in no such haphazard and undeserved a fashion. really! have we degenerated from lincoln's day? is it easy now to fool all of us all of the time, so that a tale-teller dares to expose silly romance at the beginning of his story, and yet dose us with it at the end? not that one objects to romance. it is as necessary as food, and almost as valuable. but romance that pretends to be realism, realism that fizzles out into sentimental romance--is there any excuse for that? even if it provides "heart interest" and an effective climax? the truth is, of course, that the russian stories are based upon life; the typical stories of the american magazines, for all their realistic details, are too often studied, not from american life but from literary convention. even when their substance is fresh, their unfoldings and above all their solutions are second-hand. if the russian authors could write american stories i believe that their work would be more truly popular than what we are now getting. they would be free to be interesting in any direction and by any method. the writer of the american short story is not free. i should like to leave the subject here with a comparison that any reader can make for himself. but american pride recalls the past glory of our short story, and common knowledge indicates the present reality of a few authors--several of them women--who are writing fiction of which any race might be proud. the optimist cannot resist meditating on the way out for our enslaved short story. the ultimate responsibility for its present position must fall, i suppose, upon our american taste, which, when taken by and large, is unquestionably crude, easily satisfied, and not sensitive to good things. american taste does not rebel against the "formula." if interest is pricked it does not inquire too curiously into the nature of the goad. american taste is partial to sentiment, and antagonistic to themes that fail to present the american in the light of optimistic romance. but our defects in taste are slowly but certainly being remedied. the schools are at work upon them; journalism, for all its noisy vulgarity, is at work upon them. our taste in art, our taste in poetry, our taste in architecture, our taste in music go up, as our taste in magazine fiction seems to go down. but what are the writers of short stories and what are the editors and publishers doing to help taste improve itself until, as henry james says, it acquires a keener relish than ever before? it profits nothing to attack the american writer. he does, it may fairly be assumed, what he can, and i do not wish to discuss here the responsibility of the public for his deficiencies. the editor and the publisher, however, stand in a somewhat different relationship to the american short story. they may assert with much justice that they are public servants merely; nevertheless they _do_ control the organs of literary expression, and it is through them that any positive influence on the side of restriction or proscription must be exerted, whatever may be its ultimate source. if a lack of freedom in method and in choice of subject is one reason for the sophistication of our short story, then the editorial policy of american magazines is a legitimate field for speculation. i can reason only from the evidence of the product and the testimony of authors, successful and unsuccessful. yet one conclusion springs to the eye, and is enough in itself to justify investigation. the critical basis upon which the american editor professes to build his magazine is of doubtful validity. i believe that it is unsound. his policy, as stated in "editorial announcements" and confirmed by his advertisements of the material he selects, is first to find out what the public wants, and next to supply it. this is reasonable in appearance. it would seem to be good commercially, and, as a policy, i should consider it good for art, which must consult the popular taste or lose its vitality. but a pitfall lies between this theory of editorial selection and its successful practice. the editor must really know what the public wants. if he does not, he becomes a dogmatic critic of a very dangerous school. those who know the theater and its playwrights, are agreed that the dramatic manager, at least in america, is a very poor judge of what the public desires. the percentage of bad guesses in every metropolitan season is said to be very high. is the editor more competent? it would seem that he is, to judge from the stability of our popular magazines. but that he follows the public taste with any certainty of judgment is rendered unlikely, not only by inherent improbability, but also by three specific facts: the tiresome succession of like stories which follow unendingly in the wake of every popular success; the palpable fear of the editor to attempt innovation, experiment, or leadership; and the general complaint against "magazine stories." in truth, the american editor plays safe, constantly and from conviction; and playing safe in the short story means the adoption of the "formula," which is sure to be somewhat successful; it means restriction to a few safe themes. he swings from the detective story to the tale of the alien, from the "heart-interest" story to the narrative of "big business." when, as has happened recently, a magazine experimented with eroticism, and found it successful, the initiative of itseditor was felt to be worthy of general remark. if one reduces this imperfect sketch of existing conditions to terms of literary criticism, the result is interesting. there are two great schools of criticism: the judicial and the impressionistic. the judicial critic--a boileau, a matthew arnold--bases his criticism upon fundamental principles. the impressionistic critic follows the now hackneyed advice of anatole france, to let his soul adventure among masterpieces, and seeks the reaction for good or bad of a given work upon his own finely strung mind. the first group must be sure of the breadth, the soundness, and the just application of their principles. the second group must depend upon their own good taste. the american editor has flung aside as archaic the fundamental principles of criticism upon which judicial critics have based their opinions. and yet he has chosen to be dogmatic. he has transformed his guess as to what the public wants into a fundamental principle, and acted upon it with the confidence of an aristotle. he asserts freely and frankly that, in his private capacity, such and such a story pleases _him_, is _good_ (privately he is an impressionist and holds opinions far more valid than his editorial judgment, since they are founded upon taste and not upon intuition merely); but that "the public will not like it," or "in our rivalry with seventy other magazines we cannot afford to print this excellent work." he is frequently right. he is also frequently wrong. i speak not from personal experience, since other reasons in my own case have usually, though not always, led me to agree with the editor's verdict, when it has been unfavorable; but from the broader testimony of many writers, the indisputable evidence of works thus rejected which have later attained success, and the failure of american short fiction to impress permanently the reading public. based upon an intuition of the public mind, changing with the wind,--always after, never before it,--such editorial judgment, indeed, must be of doubtful validity; must lead in many instances to unwise and unprofitable restrictions upon originality in fiction. i am well aware that it is useless to consider current american literature without regard to the multitude of readers who, being, like all multitude, mediocre, demand the mediocre in literature. and i know that it is equally foolish to neglect the popular elements in the developing american genius--that genius which is so colloquial now, and yet so inventive; so vulgar sometimes, and yet, when sophistication is not forced upon it, so fresh. i have no wish to evade the necessity for consulting the wishes and the taste of the public, which good sense and commercial necessity alike impose upon the editor. i would not have the american editor less practical, less sensitive to the popular wave; i would have him more so. but i would have him less dogmatic. all forms of dogmatism are dangerous for men whose business it is to publish, not to criticize, contemporary literature. but an unsound and arbitrary dogmatism is the worst. if the editor is to give the people what they want instead of what they have wanted, he must have more confidence in himself, and more belief in their capacity for liking the good. he should be dogmatic only where he can be sure. elsewhere let him follow the method of science, and experiment. he should trust to his taste in practice as well as in private theory, and let the results of such criticism sometimes, at least, dominate his choice. in both our "popular" and our "literary" magazines, freer fiction would follow upon better criticism. the readers of the "literary" magazines are already seeking foreign-made narratives, and neglecting the american short story built for them according to the standardized model. the readers of the "popular" magazines want chiefly journalism (an utterly different thing from literature); and that they are getting in good measure in the non- fiction and part-fiction sections of the magazines. but they also seek, as all men seek, some literature. if, instead of imposing the "formula" (which is, after all, a journalistic mechanism--and a good one--adapted for speedy and evanescent effects), if, instead of imposing the "formula" upon all the subjects they propose to have turned into fiction, the editors of these magazines should also experiment, should release some subjects from the tyranny of the "formula," and admit others which its cult has kept out, the result might be surprising. it is true that the masses have no taste for literature,--as a steady diet; it is still more certain that not even the most mediocre of multitudes can be permanently hoodwinked by formula. but the magazines can take care of themselves; it is the short story in which i am chiefly interested. better criticism and greater freedom for fiction might vitalize our overabundant, unoriginal, unreal, unversatile,--everything but unformed short story. its artifice might again become art. even the more careful, the more artistic work leaves one with the impression that these stories have sought a "line," and found an acceptable formula. and when one thinks of the multitudinous situations, impressions, incidents in this fascinating whirl of modern life, incapable perhaps of presentation in a novel because of their very impermanence, admirably adapted to the short story because of their vividness and their deep if narrow significance, the voice of protest must go up against any artificial, arbitrary limitations upon the art. freedom to make his appeal to the public with any subject not morbid or indecent, is all the writer can ask. freedom to publish sometimes what the editor likes and the public may like, instead of what the editor approves because the public has liked it, is all that he needs. there is plenty of blood in the american short story yet, though i have read through whole magazines without finding a drop of it. when we give literature in america the same opportunity to invent, to experiment, that we have already given journalism, there will be more legitimate successors to irving, to hawthorne, to poe and bret harte. there will be more writers, like o. henry, who write stories to please themselves, and thus please the majority. there will be fewer writers, like o. henry, who stop short of the final touch of perfection because american taste (and the american editor) puts no premium upon artistic work. there will be fewer stories, i trust, where sentiment is no longer a part, but the whole of life. most of all, form, _the_ form, the _formula,_ will relax its grip upon the short story, will cease its endless tapping upon the door of interest, and its smug content when some underling (while the brain sleeps) answers its stereotyped appeal. and we may get more narratives like mrs. wharton's "ethan frome," to make us feel that now as much as ever there is literary genius waiting in america. a certain condescension toward fiction if only the reader of novels would say what he thinks about fiction! if only the dead hand of hereditary opinion did not grasp and distort what he feels! but he exercises a judgment that is not independent. books, like persons, he estimates as much by the traditional reputation of the families they happen to be born in as by the merits they may themselves possess, and the traditional reputation of the novel in english has been bad. poetry has a most respectable tradition. even now, when the realistic capering of free verse has emboldened the ordinary man to speak his mind freely, a reviewer hesitates to apply even to bad poetry so undignified a word as trash. the essay family is equally respectable, to be noticed, when noticed at all, with some of the reverence due to an ancient and dignified art. the sermon family, still numerous to a degree incredible to those who do not study the lists of new books, is so eminently respectable that few dare to abuse even its most futile members. but the novel was given a bad name in its youth that has overshadowed its successful maturity. our ancestors are much to blame. for centuries they held the novel suspect as a kind of bastard literature, probably immoral, and certainly dangerous to intellectual health. but they are no more deeply responsible for our suppressed contempt of fiction than weak-kneed novelists who for many generations have striven to persuade the english reader that a good story was really a sermon, or a lecture on ethics, or a tract on economics or moral psychology, in disguise. bernard shaw, in his prefaces to the fiction that he succeeds in making dramatic, is carrying on a tradition that chaucer practised before him: and ye that holden this tale a folye,-- as of a fox, or of a cok and hen,-- taketh the moralite, good men. and that was the way they went at it for centuries, always pretending, always driven to pretend, that a good story was not good enough to be worth telling for itself alone, but must convey a moral or a satire or an awful lesson, or anything that might separate it from the "just fiction" that only the immoral and the frivolous among their contemporaries read or wrote. today we pay the price. william painter, her majesty queen elizabeth's clerk of ordnance in the tower, is an excellent instance. stricken by a moral panic, he advertised that from his delectable "palace of pleasure" the young might "learne how to avoyde the ruine, overthrow, inconvenience and displeasure, that lascivious desire and wanton evil doth bring to their suters and pursuers"--a disingenuous sop to the puritans. his contemporary, geoffrey fenton, who also turned to story-making, opines that in histories "the dignitye of vertue and fowelenes of vice appereth muche more lyvelye then in any morall teachynge," although he knew that his "histories" were the sheerest, if not the purest, of fiction, with any moral purpose that might exist chiefly of his own creating. a century and more later eliza haywood, the ambiguous author of many ambiguous novels of the eighteenth century, prefaces her "life's progress through the passions" (an ambiguous title) with like hypocrisy: "i am enemy to all romances, novels, and whatever carries the air of them. . . . it is a _real_, not a _fictitious_ character i am about to present"--which is merely another instance of fiction disguising itself, this time, i regret to say, as immorality in real life. and so they all go, forever implying that fiction is frivolous or immoral or worthless, until it is not surprising that, as mr. bradsher has reminded us, the elder timothy dwight of yale college was able to assert, "between the bible and novels there is a gulf fixed which few novel-readers are willing to pass." richardson was forced to defend himself, so was sterne, so was fielding, so was goldsmith. dr. johnson was evidently making concessions when he advised romances as reading for youth. jeffrey, the critic and tyrant of the next century, summed it all up when he wrote that novels are "generally regarded as among the lower productions of our literature." and this is the reputation that the novel family has brought with it even down to our day. the nineteenth century was worse, if anything, than earlier periods, for it furthered what might be called the evangelistic slant toward novel-reading, the attitude that neatly classified this form of self-indulgence with dancing, card-playing, hard drinking, and loose living of every description. it is true that the intellectuals and worldly folk in general did not share this prejudice. walter scott had made novel-reading common among the well-read; but the narrower sectarians in england, the people of the back country and the small towns in america, learned to regard the novel as unprofitable, if not positively leading toward ungodliness, and their unnumbered descendants make up the vast army of uncritical readers for which grub street strives and sweats to-day. they no longer abstain and condemn; instead, they patronize and distrust. all this--and far more, for i have merely sketched in a long and painful history--is the background seldom remembered when we wonder at the easy condescension of the american toward his innumerable novels. the fact of his condescension is not so well recognized as it deserves to be. indeed, condescension may not seem to be an appropriate term for the passionate devouring of romance that one can see going on any day in the trolley-cars, or the tense seriousness with which some readers regard certain novelists whose pages have a message for the world. true, the term will not stretch thus far. but it is condescension that has made the trouble, as i shall try to prove; for all of us, even the tense ones, do patronize that creative instinct playing upon life as it is which in all times and everywhere is the very essence of fiction. how absurd that here in america we should condescend toward our fiction! how ridiculous in a country even yet so weak and poor and crude in the arts, which has contributed so little to the world's store of all that makes fine living for the mind! what a laughable parallel of the cock and the gem he found and left upon the dung- heap, if we could be proved not to be proud of american fiction! for if the novel and the short story should be left out of america's slender contribution to world literature, the offering would be a small one. some poetry of whitman's and of poe's, some essays of emerson, a little thoreau, and what important besides? hawthorne would be left from the count, the best exemplar of the fine art of moral narrative in any language; henry james would be left out, the master of them all in psychological character analysis; poe the story-teller would be missing, and the art of the modern short story, which in english sterns from him; cooper would be lost from our accounting, for all his crudities the best historical novelist after scott; mark twain, howells, bret harte, irving! the attempt to exalt american literature is grateful if one begins upon fiction. and how absurd to patronize, to treat with indifferent superiority just because they are members of the novel family, books such as these men have left us, books such as both men and women are writing in america to-day! is there finer workmanship in american painting or american music or american architecture than can be found in american novels by the reader willing to search and discriminate? a contemporary poet confessed that he would have rather written a certain sonnet (which accompanied the confession) than have built brooklyn bridge. one may doubt the special case, yet uphold the principle. because a novel is meant to give pleasure, because it deals with imagination rather than with facts and appeals to the generality rather than to the merely literary man or the specialist, because, in short, a novel is a novel, and a modern american novel, is no excuse for priggish reserves in our praise or blame. if there is anything worth criticizing in contemporary american literature it is our fiction. absurd as it may seem in theory, we have patronized and do patronize our novels, even the best of them, following too surely, though with a bias of our own, the anglo-saxon prejudice traditional to the race. and if the curious frame of mind that many reserve for fiction be analyzed and blame distributed, there will be a multitude of readers, learned and unlearned, proud and humble, critical and uncritical, who must admit their share. nevertheless, the righteous wrath inspired by the situation shall not draw us into that dangerous and humorless thing, a general indictment. there are readers aplenty who, to quote painter once more, find their novels "pleasant to avoyde the griefe of a winters night and length of sommers day," and are duly appreciative of that service. with such honest, if un-exacting, readers i have no quarrel; nor with many more critical who respect, while they criticize, the art of fiction. but with the scholars who slight fiction, the critics who play with it, the general reader who likes it contemptuously, and the social enthusiast who neglects its better for its worser part, the issue is direct. all are the victims of hereditary opinion; but some should know better than to be thus beguiled. the brahman among american readers of fiction is of course the college professor of english. his attitude (i speak of the type; there are individual variations of note) toward the novel is curious and interesting. it is exhibited perhaps in the title by which such courses in the novel as the college permits are usually listed. "prose fiction" seems to be the favorite description, a label designed to recall the existence of an undeniably respectable fiction in verse that may justify a study of the baser prose. by such means is so dubious a term as novel or short story kept out of the college catalogue! yet even more curious is the academic attitude toward the novel itself. whether the normal professor reads many or few is not the question, nor even how much he enjoys or dislikes them. it is what he permits himself to say that is significant. behind every assent to excellence one feels a reservation: yes, it is good enough for a novel! behind every criticism of untruth, of bad workmanship, of mediocrity (alas! so often deserved in america!) is a sneering implication: but, after all, it is only a novel. not thus does he treat the stodgy play in stodgier verse, the merits of which, after all, may amount to this, that in appearance it is literary; not thus the critical essay or investigation that too often is like the parasite whose sustaining life comes from the greater life on which it feeds. in the eyes of such a critic the author of an indifferent essay upon poe has more distinguished himself than if he had written a better than indifferent short story. fiction, he feels, is the plaything of the populace. the novel is "among the lower productions of our literature." it is plebeian, it is successful, it is multitudinous; the greeks in their best period did not practise it (but here he may be wrong); any one can read it; let us keep it down, brethren, while we may. many not professors so phrase their inmost thoughts of fiction and the novel. and in all this the college professor is profoundly justified by tradition, if not always by common sense. to him belongs that custody of the classical in literature which his profession inherited from the monasteries, and more remotely from the rhetoricians of rome. and there is small place for fiction, and none at all for the novel and the short story as we know them, in what has been preserved of classic literature. the early renaissance, with its sidney for spokesman, attacked the rising elizabethan drama because it was unclassical. the later renaissance, by the pen of addison (who would have made an admirable college professor), sneered at pure fiction, directly and by implication, because it was unclassical. to-day we have lost our veneration for latin and greek as languages, we no longer deprecate an english work because it happens to be in english; nevertheless the tradition still grips us, especially if we happen to be brahmanic. our college professors, and many less excusable, still doubt the artistic validity of work in a form never dignified by the practice of the ancients, never hallowed, like much of english literature besides, by a long line of native productions adapting classic forms to new ages and a new speech. the epic, the lyric, the pastoral, the comedy, the tragedy, the elegy, the satire, the myth, even the fable, have been classic, have usually been literature. but the novel has never been a preserve for the learned, although it came perilously near to that fate in the days of shakespeare; has ever been written for cash or for popular success rather than for scholarly reputation; has never been studied for grammar, for style, for its "beauties"; has since its genesis spawned into millions that no man can classify, and produced a hundred thousand pages of mediocrity for one masterpiece. all this (and in addition prejudices unexpressed and a residuum of hereditary bias) lies behind the failure of most professors of english to give the good modern novel its due. their obstinacy is unfortunate; for, if they praised at all, they would not, like many hurried reviewers, praise the worst best. i will not say that more harm has been done to the cause of the novel in america by feeble reviewing than by any other circumstance, for that would not be true; bad reading has been more responsible for the light estimation in which our novel is held. nevertheless it is certain that the ill effects of a doubtful literary reputation are more sadly displayed in current criticism of the novel than elsewhere. an enormous effusion of writing about novels, especially in the daily papers, most of it casual and conventional, much of it with neither discrimination nor constraint, drowns the few manful voices raised to a pitch of honest concern. the criticism of fiction, taken by and large, is not so good as the criticism of our acted drama, not so good as our musical criticism, not so good as current reviewing of poetry and of published plays. are reviewers bewildered by the coveys of novels that wing into editorial offices by every mail? is the reviewing of novels left to the novice as a mere rhetorical exercise in which, a subject being afforded, he can practise the display of words? or is it because a novel is only a novel, only so many, many novels, for which the same hurried criticism must do, whether they be bad or mediocre or best? the reviewing page of the standard newspaper fills me with unutterable depression. there seem to be so many stories about which the same things can be said. there seems to be so much fiction that is "workmanlike," that is "fascinating," that "nobly grasps contemporary america," that will "become a part of permanent literature," that "lays bare the burning heart of the race." of course the need of the journalist to make everything "strong" is behind much of this mockery; but not all. hereditary disrespect for fiction has more to do with this flood of bad criticism than appears at first sight. far more depressing, however, is the rarity of real criticism of the novel anywhere. as henry james, one of the few great critics who have been willing to take the novel seriously, remarked in a now famous essay, the most notable thing about the modern novel in english is its appearance of never having been criticized at all. a paragraph or so under "novels of the day" is all the novelist may expect until he is famous, and more in quantity, but not much more in quality, then. as for critical essays devoted to his work, discriminating studies that pick out the few good books from the many bad, how few they are (and how welcome, now that they are increasing in number), how deplorably few in comparison with the quantity of novels, in comparison with the quality of the best novels! and what of the general public, that last arbiter in a democracy, whose referendum, for a year at least, confirms or renders null and void all critical legislation good or bad? the general public is apparently on the side of the novelist; to borrow a slang term expressive here, it is "crazy" about fiction. it reads so much fiction that hundreds of magazines and dozens of publishers live by nothing else. it reads so much fiction that public libraries have to bait their serious books with novels in order to get them read. it is so avid for fiction that the trades whose business it is to cultivate public favor, journalism and advertising, use almost as much fiction as the novel itself. a news article or an interview or a sunday write-up nowadays has character, background, and a plot precisely like a short story. its climax is carefully prepared for in the best manner of edgar allan poe, and truth is rigorously subordinated (i do not say eliminated) in the interest of a vivid impression. advertising has become half narrative and half familiar dialogue. household goods are sold by anecdotes, ready-made clothes figure in episodes illustrated by short-story artists, and novelettes, distributed free, conduct us through an interesting fiction to the grand climax, where all plot complexities are untangled by the installation of an automatic water-heater. i am not criticizing the tendency--it has made the pursuit of material comfort easier and more interesting,--but what a light it throws upon our mania for reading stories! alas! the novel needs protection from its friends. this vast appetite for fiction is highly uncritical. it will swallow anything that interests, regardless of the make-up of the dish. only the inexperienced think that it is easy to write an interesting story; but it is evident that if a writer can be interesting he may lack every other virtue and yet succeed. he can be a bad workman, he can be untrue, he can be sentimental, he can be salacious, and yet succeed. no one need excite himself over this circumstance. it is inevitable in a day when whole classes that never read before begin to read. the danger lies in the attitude of these new readers, and many old ones, toward their fiction. for they, too, condescend even when most hungry for stories. they, too, share the inherited opinion that a novel is only a novel, after all, to be read, but not to be respected, to be squeezed for its juices, then dropped like a grape-skin and forgotten. perhaps the elizabethan mob felt much the same way about the plays they crowded to see; but their respect, the critics' respect, shakespeare's respect, for the language of noble poesy, for noble words and deeds enshrined in poetry, is not paralleled to-day by an appreciation of the fine art of imaginative character representation as it appears in our novel and in all good fiction. is it necessary to prove this public disrespect? the terms in which novels are described by their sponsors is proof enough in itself. seemingly, everything that is reputable must be claimed for every novel--good workmanship, vitality, moral excellence, relative superiority, absolute greatness--in order to secure for it any deference whatsoever. or, from another angle, how many readers buy novels, and buy them to keep? how many modern novels does one find well bound, and placed on the shelves devoted to "standard reading"? in these olympian fields a mediocre biography, a volume of second-rate poems, a rehash of history, will find their way before the novels that in the last decade have equaled, if not outranked, the rest of our creative literature. if more proof were needed, the curious predilections of the serious-minded among our novel-readers would supply it. for not all americans take the novel too lightly; some take it as heavily as death. to the school that tosses off and away the latest comer is opposed the school which, despising all frivolous stories written for pleasure merely, speaks in tense, devoted breath of those narratives wherein fiction is weighted with facts, and pinned by a moral to the sober side of life. it is significant that the novels most highly respected in america are studies of social conditions, reflexes of politics, or tales where the criticism of morals overshadows the narrative. here the novel is an admirable agent. its use as a purveyor of miscellaneous ideas upon things in general is no more objectionable than the cutting of young spruces to serve as christmas-trees. for such a function they were not created, but they make a good end, nevertheless. the important inference is rather that american readers who do pretend to take the novel seriously are moved not so much by the fiction in their narratives as by the sociology, philosophy, or politics imaginatively portrayed. they respect a story with such a content because it comes as near as the novel can to not being fiction at all. and this, i imagine, is an unconscious throw-back to the old days when serious-minded readers chose hannah more for the place of honor, because her stories taught the moralist how to live and die. the historically minded will probably remark upon these general conclusions that a certain condescension toward some form of literature has ever been predictable of the general reader; the practically minded may add that no lasting harm to the mind of man and the pursuit of happiness seems to have come of it. the first i freely admit; the second i gravely doubt for the present and distrust for the future. under conditions as we have them and will increasingly have them here in america, under democratic conditions, condescension toward fiction, the most democratic of literary arts, is certainly dangerous. it is dangerous because it discourages good writing. in this reading society that we have made for ourselves here and in western europe, where much inspiration, more knowledge, and a fair share of the joy of living come from the printed page, good writing is clearly more valuable than ever before in the history of the race. i do not agree with the pessimists who think that a democratic civilization is necessarily an enemy to fine writing for the public. such critics underrate the challenge which these millions of minds to be reached and souls to be touched must possess for the courageous author; they forget that writers, like actors, are inspired by a crowded house. but the thought and the labor and the pain that lie behind good writing are doubly difficult in an atmosphere of easy tolerance and good-natured condescension on the part of the readers of the completed work. the novel is the test case for democratic literature. we cannot afford to pay its practitioners with cash merely, for cash discriminates in quantity and little more. saul and david were judged by the numbers of their thousands slain; but the test was a crude one for them and cruder still for fiction. we cannot afford to patronize these novelists as our ancestors did before us. not prizes or endowments or coterie worship or, certainly, more advertising is what the american novelist requires, but a greater respect for his craft. the elizabethan playwright was frequently despised of the learned world, and, if a favorite with the vulgar, not always a respected one. strange that learned and vulgar alike should repeat the fallacy in dispraising the preeminently popular art of our own times! to sir francis bacon "hamlet" was presumably only a playactor's play. if the great american story should arrive at last, would we not call it "only a novel"? the essence of popularity you might suppose that popular literature was a modern invention. cultivated shoulders shrug at the mention of "best sellers" with that air of "the world is going to the devil" which just now is annoyingly familiar. serious minded people write of _the saturday evening post_ as if it represented some new fanaticism destined to wreck civilization. the excessive popularity of so many modern novels is felt to be a mystery. of course there are new elements in literary popularity. the wave of interest used to move more slowly. now thousands, and sometimes millions, read the popular story almost simultaneously, and see it, just a little later on the films. millions, also, of the class which never used to read at all are accessible to print and have the moving pictures to help them. but popularity has not changed its fundamental characteristics. the sweep of one man's idea or fancy through other minds, kindling them to interest, has been typical since communication began. the greek romances of heliodorus may be analyzed for their popular elements quite as readily as "if winter comes." "pilgrim's progress" and "the thousand and one nights" could serve as models for success, and the question, what makes popularity in fiction? be answered from them with close, if not complete, reference to the present. however, the results of an inquiry into popularity will be surer if we stick to modern literature, not forgetting its historical background. human nature, which changes its essence so slowly through the centuries, nevertheless shows rapid alterations of phase. the question i propose, therefore, is, what makes a novel popular in our time? i do not ask it for sordid reasons. what makes a novel sell , copies, or a short story bring $ ? may seem the same query; but it does not get the same answer, or, apparently, any answer valuable for criticism. a cloud descends upon the eyes of those who try to teach how to make money out of literature and blinds them. their books go wrong from the start, and most of them are nearly worthless. they propose to teach the sources of popularity, yet instead of dealing with those fundamental qualities of emotion and idea which (as i hope to show) make popularity, their tale is all of emphasis, suspense, beginnings and endings, the relativity of characters, dialogue, setting-- useful points for the artisan but not the secret of popularity, nor, it may be added, of greatness in literature. technique is well enough, in fact some technique is indispensable for a book that is to be popular, but it is the workaday factor in literature, of itself it accomplishes nothing. but technique can be taught. that is the explanation of the hundred books upon it, and their justification. you cannot teach observation, or sympathy, or the background of knowledge which makes possible the interpretation and selection of experience--not at least in a lesson a week for nine months. hence literary advisers who must teach something and teach it quickly are drawn, sometimes against their better judgment, to write books on technique by which criticism profits little. technical perfection becomes their equivalent for excellence and for popularity. it is not an equivalent. more than a mason is required for the making of a statue. i disclaim any attempt to teach how to be popular in this essay, although deductions may be made. i am interested in popularity as a problem for criticism. i am interested in appraising the pleasure to be got from such popular novels as "the age of innocence," "miss lulu bett," "if winter comes," or "the turmoil" --and the not infrequent disappointments from others equally popular. i am especially interested in the attempt to estimate real excellence, an attempt which requires that the momentarily popular shall be separated from the permanently good; which requires that a distinction be made between what must have some excellence because so many people like it, and what is good in a book whether many people like it or not. such discrimination may not help the young novelist to make money, but it can refine judgment and deepen appreciation. as for the popularity and its meaning, there need be no quarrel over that term. let us rule out such accidents as when a weak book becomes widely known because it is supposed to be indecent, or because it is the first to embody popular propaganda, or because its hero is identified with an important figure of real life, or for any other casual reason. if a novel, because of the intrinsic interest of its story, or on account of the contagion of the idea it contains, is widely read by many kinds of readers, and if these readers on their own initiative recommend the book they have read to others, that is popularity, and a sufficient definition. perfection of form is not enough to make a book popular. a story has to move or few will read it, but it is doubtful whether a greater technical achievement than this is required for popularity. "samson agonistes" is technically perfect, but was never popular, while, to pass from the sublime to its opposite, "this side of paradise" was most crudely put together, and yet was popular. the best-built short stories of the past decade have not been the most popular, have not even been the best. no popular writer but could have been (so i profoundly believe) more popular if he had written better. but good writing is not a specific for unpopularity. the excellent writing of howells could not give him mark twain's audience. the weak and tedious construction of shakespeare's "antony and cleopatra," the flat style of harold bell wright's narratives, has not prevented them from being liked. form is only a first step toward popularity. far more important is an appeal to the emotions, which good technique can only make more strong. but what is an appeal to the emotions? "uncle tom's cabin" appealed to the emotions, and so does "get-rich-quick wallingford." to what emotions does the popular book appeal? what makes "treasure island" popular? why did "main street" have such an unexpected and still reverberating success? "treasure island" is popular because it stirs and satisfies two instinctive cravings of mankind, the love of romantic adventure, and the desire for sudden wealth. this is not true, or rather it is not the whole, or even the important, truth, in "main street." there the chief appeal is to an idea not an instinct. we left the war nationally self-conscious as perhaps never before, acutely conscious of the contrasts between our habits, our thinking, our pleasures, our beliefs, and those of europe. when the soldiers oversea talked generalities at all it was usually of such topics. the millions that never went abroad were plucked from their main streets, and herded through great cities to the mingled companionship of the camps. "main street," when it came to be written, found an awakened consciousness of provincialism, and a detached view of the home town such as had never before been shared by many. seeing home from without was so general as to constitute, not a mere experience, but a mass emotion. and upon this new conception, this prejudice against every man's main street, the book grasped, and thrived. in like manner, "uncle tom's cabin" grew great upon its conception of slavery. "robert elsmere" swept the country because of its exploitation of freedom in religious thought. no one of these books could have been written, or would have been popular if they had been written, before their precise era; no one is likely long to survive it, except as a social document which scholars will read and historians quote. roughly then, the appeal which makes for popularity is either to the instinctive emotions permanent in all humanity, though changing shape with circumstances, or to the fixed ideas of the period, which may often and justly be called prejudice. a book may gain its popularity either way, but the results of the first are more likely to be enduring. "paradise lost," the least popular of popular poems, still stirs the instinctive craving for heroic revolt, and lives for that quite as much as for the splendors of its verse. dryden's "hind and the panther," which exploited the prejudices of its times, and was popular then, is almost dead. what are these instinctive cravings that seek satisfaction in fiction and, finding it, make both great and little books popular? let me list a few without attempting to be complete. first in importance probably is the desire to escape from reality into a more interesting life. this is a foundation, of course, of all romantic stories, and is part of the definition of the romantic, but it applies to much in literature that is not usually regarded as romance. a more interesting life than yours or mine does not mean one we should wish actually to live, otherwise it would be difficult to account for the taste for detective stories of many sedentary bank presidents; nor does it mean necessarily a beautiful, a wild, a romantic life. no, we wish to escape to any imagined life that will satisfy desires suppressed by circumstance, or incapable of development in any attainable reality. this desire to escape is eternal, the variety differs with the individual and still more with the period. while youthful love, or romantic adventure as in "treasure island," has been an acceptable mode for literature at least as far back as the papyrus tales of the egyptians, more precise means of delivery from the intolerable weight of real life appear and disappear in popular books. in the early eighteen hundreds, men and women longed to be blighted in love, to be in lonely revolt against the prosaic well-being of a world of little men. byron was popular. in the augustan age of england, classic antiquity was a refuge for the dreaming spirit; in shakespeare's day, italy; in the fifteenth century, arthurian romance. just at present, and in america, the popularity of a series of novels like "the beautiful and damned," "the wasted generation," "erik dorn," and "cytherea," seems to indicate that many middle-aged readers wish to experience vicariously the alcoholic irresponsibility of a society of "flappers," young graduates, and country club rakes, who threw the pilot overboard as soon as they left the war zone and have been cruising wildly ever since. we remember that for a brief period in the england of charles ii, james ii, and william and mary, rakishness in the plays of wycherley and congreve had a glamour of romance upon it and was popular. indeed, the novel or drama that gives to a generation the escape it desires will always be popular. test harold bell wright or zane grey, rudyard kipling or walter scott, by this maxim, and it will further define itself, and ring true. another human craving is the desire to satisfy the impulses of sex. this is much more difficult to define than the first because it spreads in one phase or another through all cravings. romance of course has its large sex element, and so have the other attributes to be spoken of later. however, there is a direct and concentrated interest in the relations between the sexes which, in its finer manifestations, seeks for a vivid contrast of personalities in love; in its cruder forms desires raw passion; in its pathological state craves the indecent. a thousand popular novels illustrate the first phase; many more, of which the cave- man story, the desert island romance, "the sheik" and its companions are examples, represent the second; the ever-surging undercurrent of pornography springs to satisfy the third. many sex stories are popular simply because they satisfy curiosity, but curiosity in a broader sense is a human craving which deserves a separate category. popular novels seldom depend upon it entirely, but they profit by it, sometimes hugely. a novel like dos passos's "three soldiers," or mrs. wharton's "age of innocence," or mrs. atherton's "sleeping fires," makes its first, though not usually its strongest, appeal to our curiosity as to how others live or were living. this was the strength of the innumerable new england, creole, mountaineer, pennsylvania dutch stories in the flourishing days of local color. it is a prop of the historical novel and a strong right arm for the picture melodrama of the underworld or the west. indeed, the pictures, by supplying a photographic background of real scenes inaccessible to the audience have gained a point upon the written story. curiosity is a changeable factor, a sure play for immediate popularity, but not to be depended upon for long life. it waxes and wanes and changes its object. just now we are curious about russia, the south sea islanders, and night life on broadway; to- morrow it may be new zealand and australia, the argentine millionaire, and quite certainly the chinese and china. books appealing to the craving for escape have a longer life, for a story that takes a generation out of itself into fairyland keeps some of its power for the next. nevertheless, the writer who guesses where curious minds are reaching and gives them what they want, puts money in his purse. a fourth craving, which is as general as fingers and toes, is for revenge. we laugh now at the plays of revenge before "hamlet," where the stage ran blood, and even the movie audience no longer enjoys a story the single motive of which is physical revenge. blood for blood means to us either crime or rowdyism. and yet revenge is just as popular in literature now as in the sixteenth century. only its aspect has changed. our fathers are not butchered in feuds, our sons are not sold into slavery, and except in war or in street robberies we are not insulted by brute physical force. nevertheless we are cheated by scoundrels, oppressed by financial tyranny, wounded by injustice, suppressed by self-sufficiency, rasped by harsh tempers, annoyed by snobbery, and often ruined by unconscious selfishness. we long to strike back at the human traits which have wronged us, and the satiric depiction of hateful characters whose seeming virtues are turned upside down to expose their impossible hearts feeds our craving for vicarious revenge. we dote upon vinegarish old maids, self- righteous men, and canting women when they are exposed by narrative art, and especially when poetic justice wrecks them. the books that contain them bid for popularity. it happens that in rapid succession we have seen three novels in which this element of popular success was strong: miss sinclair's "mr. waddington of wyck," "vera," by the author of "elizabeth in her german garden," and mr. hutchinson's "if winter comes." the first two books focus upon this quality, and their admirable unity gives them superior force; but it is noteworthy that "if winter comes," which adds other popular elements in large measure to its release of hate, has been financially the most successful of the three. to these deep cravings of the heart must be added another of major importance. i mean aspiration, the deep desire of all human without exception sometimes to be better, nobler, finer, truer. stories of daring in the face of unconquerable odds, stories of devotion, above all stories of self-sacrifice are made to gratify this emotion. they are purges for the restless soul. some critic of our short story discovered not long ago that the bulk of the narratives chosen for reprinting had self-sacrifice as theme. this is precisely what one would expect of comfortable, ease-loving peoples, like the germans before the empire and the americans of our generation. when no real sacrifice of goods, of energy, of love, or of life is necessary, then the craving for stories of men who give up all and women who efface themselves is particularly active. the hard, individualistic stories of selfish characters-- ben hecht's for example, and scott fitzgerald's--have been written after a war period of enforced self-sacrifice and by young men who were familiar with suffering for a cause. but most american readers of our generation live easily and have always lived easily, and that undoubtedly accounts for the extraordinary popularity here of aspiring books. reading of a fictitious hero who suffers for others is a tonic for our conscience, and like massage takes the place of exercise. by a twist in the same argument, it may be seen that the cheerful optimist in fiction, who pollyannawise believes all is for the best, satisfies the craving to justify our well-being. i do not, however, mean to disparage this element of popularity. it is after all the essential quality of tragedy where the soul rises above misfortune. it is a factor in noble literature as well as in popular success. so much for some of the typical and instinctive cravings which cry for satisfaction and are the causes of popularity. to them may be added others of course, notably the desire for sudden wealth, which is a factor in "treasure island" as in all treasure stories, and the prime cause of success in the most popular of all plots, the tale of cinderella, which, after passing through feudal societies with a prince's hand as reward, changed its sloven sister for a shopgirl and king cophetua into a millionaire, and swept the american stage. to this may also be added simpler stimulants of instinctive emotion, humor stirring to pleasant laughter, pathos that exercises sympathy, the happy ending that makes for joy. stories which succeed because they stir and satisfy in this fashion are like opera in a foreign tongue, which moves us even when we do not fully understand the reason for our emotion. they differ from another kind of popular story, in which a popular idea rather than an instinctive emotion is crystallized, and which now must be considered. each generation has its fixed ideas. a few are inherited intact by the generation that follows, a few are passed on with slight transformation, but most crumble or change into different versions of the old half-truths. among the most enduring of prejudices is the fallacy of the good old times. upon that formula nine-tenths of the successful historical romances are built. that american wives suffer from foreign husbands, that capital is ruthless, that youth is right and age wrong, that energy wins over intellect, that virtue is always rewarded, are american conceptions of some endurance that have given short but lofty flights to thousands of native stories. more important, however, in the history of fiction are those wide and slow moving currents of opinion, for which prejudice is perhaps too narrow a name, which flow so imperceptibly through the minds of a generation or a whole century that there is little realization of their novelty. such a slow-moving current was the humanitarianism which found such vigorous expression in dickens, the belief in industrial democracy which is being picked up as a theme by novelist after novelist to-day, or the sense of the value of personality and human experience which so intensely characterizes the literature of the early renaissance. if a novel draws up into itself one of these ideas, filling it with emotion, it gains perhaps its greatest assurance of immediate popularity. if the idea is of vast social importance, this popularity may continue. but if it is born of immediate circumstance, like the hatred of slavery in "uncle tom's cabin," or if it is still more transient, say, the novelty of a new invention, like the airplane or wireless, then the book grows stale with its theme. the like is true of a story that teaches a lesson a generation are willing to be taught--it lives as long as the lesson. what has become of charles kingsley's novels, of the apologues of maria edgeworth? "main street" is such a story; so was "mr. britling sees it through"; so probably "a doll's house." decay is already at their hearts. only the student knows how many like tales that preached fierily a text for the times have died in the past. but i am writing of popularity not of permanence. in four popular novels out of five, even in those where the appeal to the instinctive emotions is dominant, suspect some prejudice of the times embodied and usually exploited. it is the most potent of lures for that ever increasing public which has partly trained intelligence as well as emotions. perhaps it is already clear that most popular novels combine many elements of popularity, although usually one is dominant. among the stories, for instance, which i have mentioned most frequently, "main street" depends upon a popular idea, but makes use also of the revenge motive. it is not at all, as many hasty critics said, an appeal to curiosity. we know our main streets well enough already. and therefore in england, which also was not curious about main streets, and where the popular idea that sinclair lewis seized upon was not prevalent, the book has had only a moderate success. "if winter comes" combines the revenge motive with aspiration. scott fitzgerald's first novel made its strong appeal to curiosity. we had heard of the wild younger generation and were curious. his second book depends largely upon the craving for sex experience, in which it resembles mr. hergesheimer's "cytherea," but also plays heavily upon the motive of escape, and upon sheer curiosity. "miss lulu bett" was a story of revenge. booth tarkington's "alice adams"--to bring in a new title--is a good illustration of a story where for once a popular novelist slurred over the popular elements in order to concentrate upon a study of character. his book received tardy recognition but it disappointed his less critical admirers. mr. white's "andivius hedulio" depends for its popularity upon curiosity and escape. the popular story, then, the financially successful, the immediately notorious story, should appeal to the instinctive emotions and may be built upon popular prejudice. what is the moral for the writer? is he to lay out the possible fields of emotion as a surveyor prepares for his blue print? by no means. unless he follows his own instinct in the plan, or narrates because of his own excited thinking he will produce a thinly clad formula rather than a successful story. there is no moral for the writer, only some rays of light thrown upon the nature of his achievement. the way to accomplish popularity, if that is what you want, is to write for the people, and let formula, once it is understood, take care of itself. as an editor, wise in popularity, once said to me, "oppenheim and the rest are popular because they think like the people not for them." what is the moral of this discussion for the critical reader? a great one, for if he does not wish to be tricked constantly by his own emotions into supposing that what is timely is therefore fine, and what moves him is therefore great, he must distinguish between the elements of popularity and the essence of greatness. it is evident, i think, from the argument that every element of popularity described above may be made effective upon our weak human nature with only an approximation to truth. the craving for escape may be, and usually is, answered by sentimental romance, where every emotion, from patriotism to amorousness, is mawkish and unreal. every craving may be played upon in the same fashion just because it is a craving, and the result be often more popular for the exaggeration. also it is notorious that a prejudice--or a popular idea, if you prefer the term--which is seized upon for fiction, almost inevitably is strained beyond logic and beyond truth, so much so that in rapid years, like those of to which swept us into propaganda and out again, the emphatic falsity of a book's central thesis may be recognized before the first editions are exhausted. it would be interesting to run off, in the midst of a performance, some of the war films that stirred audiences of . it will be interesting to reread some of the cheaper and more popular war stories that carried even you, o judicious reader, off your even balance not five years ago to-day! we have always known, of course, that a novel can be highly popular without being truly excellent. nevertheless, it is a valuable discipline to specify the reasons. and it is good discipline also in estimating the intrinsic value of a novel to eliminate as far as is possible the temporal and the accidental; and in particular the especial appeal it may have to your own private craving--for each of us has his soft spot where the pen can pierce. on the contrary, if the highly speculative business of guessing the probable circulation of a novel ever becomes yours, then you must doubly emphasize the importance of these very qualities; search for them, analyze them out of the narrative, equate them with the tendencies of the times, the new emotions stirring, the new interests, new thoughts abroad, and then pick best sellers in advance. yet in eliminating the accidental in the search for real excellence, it would be disastrous to eliminate all causes of popularity with it. that would be to assume that the good story cannot be popular, which is nonsense. the best books are nearly always popular, if not in a year, certainly in a decade or a century. often they spread more slowly than less solid achievements for the same reason that dear things sell less rapidly than cheap. the best books cost more to read because they contain more, and to get much out the reader must always put much in. nevertheless, the good novel will always contain one or more of the elements of popularity in great intensity. i make but one exception, and that for those creations of the sheer intellect, like the delicate analyses of henry james, where the appeal is to the subtle mind, and the emotion aroused an intellectual emotion. such novels are on the heights, but they are never at the summit of literary art. they are limited by the partiality of their appeal, just as they are exalted by the perfection of their accomplishment. they cannot be popular, and are not. the "best seller" therefore may be great but does not need to be. it is usually a weak book, no matter how readable, because ordinarily it has only the elements of popularity to go on, and succeeds by their number and timeliness instead of by fineness and truth. a second-rate man can compound a best seller if his sense for the popular is first-rate. in his books the instinctive emotions are excited over a broad area, and arise rapidly to sink again. no better examples can be found than in the sword-and- buckler romance of our 'nineties which set us all for a while thinking feudal thoughts and talking shallow gallantry. now it is dead, stone dead. not even the movies can revive it. the emotions it aroused went flat over night. much the same is true of books that trade in prejudice, like the white slave stories of a decade ago. for a moment we were stirred to the depths. we swallowed the concept whole and raged with a furious indigestion of horrible fact. and then it proved to be colic only. with such a light ballast of prejudice or sentiment can the profitable ship popularity be kept upright for a little voyage, and this, prevailingly, is all her cargo. but the wise writer, if he is able, as scott, and dickens, and clemens were able, freights her more deeply. as for the good reader, he will go below to investigate before the voyage commences; or, if in midcourse he likes not his carrier, take off in his mental airplane and seek another book. ii on the american tradition the american tradition i remember a talk in dublin with an irish writer whose english prose has adorned our period. it was , and the eve of forced conscription, and his indignation with english policy was intense. "i will give up their language," he said, "all except shakespeare. i will write only gaelic." unfortunately, he could read gaelic much better than he could write it. in his heart, indeed, he knew how mad he would have been to give up the only literary tradition which, thanks to language, could be his own; and in a calmer mood since he has enriched that tradition with admirable translations from the irish. he was suffering from a mild case of anglomania. who is the real anglomaniac in america? not the now sufficiently discredited individual with a monocle and a pseudo-oxford accent, who tries to be more english than the english. not the more subtly dangerous american who refers his tastes, his enthusiasms, his culture, and the prestige of his compatriots to an english test before he dare assert them. the real anglomaniac is the american who tries to be less english than his own american tradition. he is the man who is obsessed with the fear of "anglo-saxon domination." how many anglomaniacs by this definition are at large in america each reader may judge for himself. personally, i find them extraordinarily numerous, and of so many varieties, from the mere borrower of opinions to the deeply convinced zealot, that it seems wiser to analyze anglomania than to discuss the various types that possess it. and in this analysis let us exclude from the beginning such very real, but temporary, grievances against the english as spring from irish oppressions, trade rivalries, or the provocations which always arise between allies in war. all such causes of anti-english and anti-"anglo-saxon" sentiment belong in a different category from the underlying motives which i propose to discuss. these new anglomaniacs, with their talk of anglo-saxon domination, cannot mean english domination. that would be absurd, although even absurdities are current coin in restless years like these. at least one irishman of my acquaintance _knows_ that king george cabled wilson to bring america into the war, and that until that cable came wilson dared not act. i can conceive of an english influence upon literature that is worth attacking, and also worth defending. i can conceive of a far less important english influence upon our social customs. but in neither case, domination. that england dominates our finance, our industry, our politics, is just now, especially, the suspicion of a paranoiac, or the idea of an ignoramus. "anglo-saxon domination," even in an anti-british meeting, cannot and does not mean english domination; it can mean only control of america by the so-called anglo-saxon element in our population. the quarrel is local, not international. the "anglo-saxon" three thousand miles away who cannot hit back is a scapegoat, a whipping boy for the so-called "anglo-saxon" american at home. what is an "anglo-saxon" american? presumably he is the person familiar in "want" advertisements: "american family wants boarder for the summer. references exchanged." but this does not help us much. he is certainly not english. nothing is better established than the admixture of bloods since the earliest days of our nationality. that i, myself, for example, have ancestral portions of french, german, welsh, and scotch, as well as english blood in my veins, makes me, by any historical test, characteristically more rather than less american. race, indeed, within very broad limits, is utterly different from nationality, and it is usually many, many centuries before the two become even approximately identical. the culture i have inherited, the political ideals i live by, the literature which is my own, most of all the language that i speak, are far more important than the ultimate race or races i stem from, obviously more important, since in thousands of good americans it is impossible to determine what races have gone to their making. there is no such thing as an anglo-saxon american--and so few english americans that they are nationally insignificant. an american with a strong national individuality there certainly is, and it is true that his traditions, irrespective of the race of his forbears, are mainly english; from england he drew his political and social habits, his moral ideas, his literature, and his language. this does not make him a "slave to england," as our most recent propagandists would have it; it does not put him in england's debt. we owe no debt to england. great britain, canada, australia, new zealand, south africa, and ourselves are deeply in debt to our intellectual, our spiritual, our aesthetic ancestors who were the molders of english history and english thought, the interpreters of english emotion, the masters of the developing english _mores_ that became our _mores_, and have since continued evolution with a difference. chaucer, shakespeare, spenser, and milton, wycliffe, bunyan, fox, and wesley, elizabeth, cromwell, and the great whigs, these made the only tradition that can be called anglo-saxon, and if we have an american tradition, as we assuredly have, here are its roots. this is our "anglo-saxon domination." but if the roots of this tradition are english, its trunk is thoroughly american, seasoned and developed through two centuries of specifically american history. as we know it to-day it is no longer "anglo-saxon," it is as american as our cities, our soil, our accent upon english. if we are going to discuss "domination" let us be accurate and speak of the domination of american tradition. it is against the american tradition that the new anglomaniac actually protests. dominating this american tradition is, dominating, almost tyrannical, for one reason only, but that a strong one, a fact not a convention, a factor, not a mere influence--dominating because of the english language. in our century language has become once again as powerful as in the roman empire--and its effects, thanks to printing and easy transportation, are far more quickly attained. hordes from all over europe have swarmed into the domain of english. they have come to a country where the new language was indispensable. they have learned it, or their children have learned it. english has become their means of communication with their neighbors, with business, with the state. sooner or later even the news of europe has come to them through english, and sometimes unwillingly, but more often unconsciously, they have come under the american, the real "anglo-saxon" domination. for a language, of course, is more than words. it is a body of literature, it is a method of thinking, it is a definition of emotions, it is the exponent and the symbol of a civilization. you cannot adopt english without adapting yourself in some measure to the english, or the anglo-american tradition. you cannot adopt english political words, english literary words, english religious words, the terms of sport or ethics, without in some measure remaking your mind on a new model. if you fail or refuse, your child will not. he is forcibly made an american, in ideas at least, and chiefly by language. i submit that it is impossible for an alien _thoroughly_ to absorb and understand lincoln's gettysburg speech or hawthorne's "scarlet letter" without working a slight but perceptible transformation in the brain, without making himself an heir of a measure of english tradition. and the impact of english as a spoken tongue, and the influence of its literature as the only read literature, are great beyond ordinary conception. communities where a foreign language is read or spoken only delay the process, they cannot stop it. the foreigner, it is true, has modified the english language precisely as he has modified the american tradition. continental europe is audible in the american tongue, as it is evident in the american mind; but it is like the english or the spanish touch upon the gothic style in architecture--there is modification, but not fundamental change. many a foreign-born american has been restless under this domination. the letters and memoirs of the french immigrants from revolutionary france express discomfort freely. the germans of ' , themselves the bearers of a high civilization, have often confessed an unwilling assimilation. the germans of earlier migrations herded apart like the later scandinavians, in part to avoid the tyranny of tongue. imagine a german coming here in early manhood. his tradition is not english; he owes nothing to a contemporary england that he but dimly knows. speaking english, perhaps only english, he grows impatient with a tongue every concept of which has an english coloring. the dominance of the language, and especially of its literature, irks him. he no longer wants to think as a german; he wants to think as an american; but the medium of his thought must be english. his anger often enough goes out against english history, english literature. he is easily irritated by england. but it is the american past that binds and is converting him. such consciousness of the power of environment is perhaps rare, but the fact is common. in our few centuries of history millions have been broken into english, with all that implies. millions have experienced the inevitable discomfort of a foreign tradition which makes alien their fatherlands, and strangers of their children. this is an "anglo-saxon" domination. but it is useless to struggle against it. there is a similar discomfort among certain american authors, especially just now, when, for the first time since the civil war and the materialism that succeeded it, we are finding our national self once again in literature. mr. mencken and mr. dreiser have vigorously expressed this annoyance with american tradition. they wish to break with it--at least mr. dreiser does--break with it morally, spiritually, aesthetically. let the dotards, he says, bury their dead. mr. mencken wishes to drive us out of colonialism. he says that longfellow has had his day, and that it is time to stop imitating addison, time to be ashamed of aping stevenson, kipling, or john masefield. he is right. but when it comes to disowning english literature and the past of american literature (as many a writer directly or by implication would have us) in order to become per cent american, let us first take breath long enough to reflect that, first, such a madcap career is eminently undesirable, and, second, utterly impossible. it is a literature which by general admission is now the richest and most liberal in the world of living speech. english is a tongue less sonorous than italian, less fine than french, less homely than german, but more expressive, more flexible, than these and all others. its syntax imposes no burdens, its traditions are weighty only upon the vulgar and the bizarre. without its literary history, american literature in general, and usually in particular, is not to be understood. that we have sprung from a puritanical loin, and been nourished in the past from the breast of victorianism, is obvious. in this we have been not too much, but too narrowly, english. we have read tennyson when it might have been better to have read shakespeare or chaucer. but to wish to break with english literature in order to become altogether american is like desiring to invent an entirely new kind of clothes. i shall not give up trousers because my fourth great-grandfather, who was a yorkshireman, wore them, and his pattern no longer fits my different contour. i shall make me a pair better suiting my own shanks--yet they shall still be trousers. but in any case, language binds us. indeed, in this welter of newcomers here in america, whose children learn, read, write only english, the tradition of anglo- american literature is all that holds us by a thread above chaos. if we could all be made to speak german, or italian, or spanish, there would be cause, but no excuse, for an attempted revolution. but english is dominant here and will remain so. could we hope to make an american literary language without dependence on english literature, a protective tariff on home-made writing, or an embargo against books more than a year old, or imported from across the atlantic, would be worth trying; but the attempts so far are not encouraging. this has not been the way in the past by which original literatures have been made. they have sucked nourishment where it could best be found, and grown great from the strength that good food gave them. one can sympathize with the desire to nationalize our literature at all costs; and can understand lashings out at the tyranny of literary prestige which england still exercises. but the real question is: shall the english of americans be good english or bad english; shall a good tradition safeguard change and experiment, or shall we have chaotic vulgarity like the low latin of the late roman empire? the truth is that our language is tradition, for it holds tradition in solution like iron in wine. and here lie the secret and the power of american, "anglo-saxon" domination. what is to be done about it? shall anything be done about it? the anglomaniac is helpless before the fact of language. the most he can do is to attack, and uproot if he can, the american tradition. there is nothing sacrosanct in this american tradition. like all traditions it is stiff, it will clasp, if we allow it, the future in the dead hand of precedent. it can be used by the designing to block progress. but as traditions go it is not conservative. radicalism, indeed, is its child. political and religious radicalism brought the pilgrims to new england, the quakers to pennsylvania; political and economic radicalism made the revolution against the will of american conservatives; political and social radicalism made the civil war inevitable and gave it moral earnestness. radicalism, whether you like it or not, is much more american than what some people mean by "americanism" to-day. and its bitterest opponents in our times would quite certainly have become nova scotian exiles if they had been alive and likeminded in . nor is this american tradition impeccable in the political ideas, the literary ideals, the social customs it has given us. we must admit a rampant individualism in our political practices which is in the very best anglo-american tradition, and yet by no means favorable to cooperative government. we admit also more puritanism in our standard literature than art can well digest; and more sentiment than is good for us; nor is it probable that the traditions and the conventions which govern american family life are superior to their european equivalents. we should welcome (i do not say that we do) liberalizing, broadening, enriching influences from other traditions. and whether we have welcomed them or not, they have come, and to our great benefit. but to graft upon the plant is different from trying to pull up the roots. we want better arguments than the fear of anglo-saxon domination before the root pulling begins. we wish to know what is to be planted. we desire to be convinced that the virtue has gone out of the old stock. we want examples of civilized nations that have profited by borrowing traditions wholesale, or by inventing them. we wish to know if a cultural, a literary sans-culottism is possible, except with chaos as a goal. most of all, we expect to fight for and to hold our anglo-american heritage. it is not surprising that discontent with our own ultimately english tradition has expressed itself by a kind of freudian transformation in anti-english sentiment. every vigorous nation strains and struggles with its tradition, like a growing boy with his clothes, and this is particularly true of new nations with old traditions behind them. our pains are growing pains--a malady we have suffered from since the early eighteenth century at the latest. tradition, our own tradition, pinches us; but you cannot punch tradition for pinching you, or call it names to its face, especially if it proves to be your father's tradition, or your next-door neighbor's. therefore, since that now dim day when the colonies acquired a self-consciousness of their own, many good americans have chosen england and the english to symbolize whatever irked them in their own tradition. it is from england and the english that we have felt ourselves growing away, from which we had to grow away in order to be ourselves and not a shadow-- imitators, second-bests, colonials. england and the english have had our vituperation whenever the need to be american has been greatest. and when an english government like palmerston's, or salisbury's, or lloyd george's, offends some group or race among us, a lurking need to assert our individuality, or prove that we are not colonials, leads thousands more to join in giving the lion's tail an extra twist. this may be unfortunate, but it argues curiously enough respect and affection rather than the reverse, and it is very human. it is a fact, like growing, and is likely to continue until we are fully grown. it will reassert itself vehemently until upon our english tradition we shall have built an american civilization as definitely crystallized, a literature as rich and self-sufficing, as that of france and england to-day. three-quarters of our national genius went into the creating of our political system. three-quarters of our national genius since has gone into the erecting of our economic system. here we are independent--and thick skinned. but a national civilization and a national literature take more time to complete. cool minds were prepared for a little tail-twisting after the great war, even though they could not foresee the unfortunate irish situation in which a british government seemed determined to make itself as un-english as possible. if there had not been the patriotic urge to assert our essential americanism more strongly than ever, there still would have been a reaction against all the pledging and the handshaking, the pother about blood and water, the purple patches in every newspaper asserting anglo-saxonism against the world. i remember my own nervousness when, in , after the best part of a year in england, in england's darkest days, i came back full of admiration for the pluck of all england and the enlightenment of her best minds in the great struggle, to hear men who knew little of england orating of enduring friendship, and to read writers who had merely read of england, descanting of her virtues. i felt, and many felt, that excess of ignorant laudation which spells certain reaction into ignorant dispraise. no wonder that americans whose parents happened to be germans, italians, jews, or irish grew weary of hearing of the essential virtues of the anglo-saxon race. there never was such a race. it was not even english blood, but english institutions that created america; but liberty loan orators had no time to make fine distinctions of that kind. they talked, and even while the cheers were ringing and the money rolled in dissent raised its tiny head. dissent was to be expected; antagonism against a tradition made by english minds and perpetuated in english was natural after a war in which not merely nationalism, but also every racial instinct, has been quickened and made sensitive. but _tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner_, is only partly true in this instance. we should understand, and be tolerant with, the strainings against tradition of folk to whom it is still partly alien; we should diagnose our own growing pains and not take them too seriously. nevertheless, the better more violent movements of race and national prejudice are understood, the less readily can they be pardoned, if by pardon one means easy tolerance. it is not inconceivable that we shall have to face squarely a split between those who prefer the american tradition and those who do not, although where the cleavage line would run, whether between races or classes, is past guessing. there are among us apparently men and women who would risk wars, external or internal, in order to hasten the discordant day; although just what they expect as a result, whether an irish-german state organized by german efficiency and officered by graduates of tammany hall, or a pseudo-russian communism, is not yet clear. in any case, the time is near when whoever calls himself american will have to take his stand and do more thinking, perhaps, than was necessary in . he will need to know what tradition is, what his own consists of, and what he would do without it. he will need especially to rid himself of such simple and fallacious ideas as that what was good enough for his grandfather is good enough for him; or that, as some of our more reputable newspapers profess to think, the constitution has taken the place once held by the bible, and contains the whole duty of man and all that is necessary for his welfare. he will need to think less of percent americanism, which, as it is commonly used means not to think at all, and more of how he himself is molding american tradition for the generation that is to follow. if he is not to be a pawn merely in the struggle for american unity, he must think more clearly and deeply than has been his habit in the past. but whatever happens in america (and after the sad experiences of prophets in the period of war and reconstruction, who would prophesy), let us cease abusing england whenever we have indigestion in our own body politic. it is seemingly inevitable that the writers of vindictive editorials should know little more of england as she is to-day than of russia or the chinese republic; inevitable, apparently, that for them the irish policy of the tory group in parliament, indian unrest, and lloyd george, are all that one needs to known about a country whose liberal experiments in industrial democracy since the war, and whose courage in reconstruction, may well make us hesitate in dispraise. but it is not inevitable that americans who are neither headline and editorial writers, nor impassioned orators, regardless of facts, should continue to damn the english because their ancestors and ours founded america. back to nature no one tendency in life as we live it in america to-day is more characteristic than the impulse, as recurrent as summer, to take to the woods. sometimes it disguises itself under the name of science; sometimes it is mingled with hunting and the desire to kill; often it is sentimentalized and leads strings of gaping "students" bird-hunting through the wood lot; and again it perilously resembles a desire to get back from civilization and go "on the loose." say your worst of it, still the fact remains that more americans go back to nature for one reason or another annually than any civilized men before them. and more americans, i fancy, are studying nature in clubs or public schools--or, in summer camps and the boy scouts, imitating nature's creatures, the indian and the pioneer--than even statistics could make believable. what is the cause? in life, it is perhaps some survival of the pioneering instinct, spending itself upon fishing, or bird- hunting, or trail hiking, much as the fight instinct leads us to football, or the hunt instinct sends every dog sniffing at dawn through the streets of his town. not every one is thus atavistic, if this be atavism; not every american is sensitive to spruce spires, or the hermit thrush's chant, or white water in a forest gorge, or the meadow lark across the frosted fields. naturally. the surprising fact is that in a bourgeois civilization like ours, so many are affected. and yet what a criterion nature love or nature indifference is. it seems that if i can try a man by a silent minute in the pines, the view of a jay pirating through the bushes, spring odors, or december flush on evening snow, i can classify him by his reactions. just where i do not know; for certainly i do not put him beyond the pale if his response is not as mine. and yet he will differ, i feel sure, in more significant matters. he is not altogether of my world. nor does he enter into this essay. there are enough without him, and of every class. in the west, the very day laborer pitches his camp in the mountains for his two weeks' holiday. in the east and middle west, every pond with a fringe of hemlocks, or hill view by a trolley line, or strip of ocean beach, has its cluster of bungalows where the proletariat perform their _villeggiatura_ as the italian aristocracy did in the days of the renaissance. patently the impulse exists, and counts for something here in america. it counts for something, too, in american literature. since our writing ceased being colonial english and began to reflect a race in the making, the note of woods-longing has been so insistent that one wonders whether here is not to be found at last the characteristic "trait" that we have all been patriotically seeking. i do not limit myself in this statement to the professed "nature writers" of whom we have bred far more than any other race with which i am familiar. in the list--which i shall not attempt--of the greatest american writers, one cannot fail to include emerson, hawthorne, thoreau, cooper, lowell, and whitman. and every one of these men was vitally concerned with nature, and some were obsessed by it. lowell was a scholar and man of the world, urban therefore; but his poetry is more enriched by its homely new england background than by its european polish. cooper's ladies and gentlemen are puppets merely, his plots melodrama; it is the woods he knew, and the creatures of the woods, deerslayer and chingachgook, that preserve his books. whitman made little distinction between nature and human nature, perhaps too little. but read "out of the cradle endlessly rocking" or "the song of the redwood-tree," and see how keen and how vital was his instinct for native soil. as for hawthorne, you could make a text-book on nature study from his "note-books." he was an imaginative moralist first of all; but he worked out his visions in terms of new england woods and hills. so did emerson. the day was "not wholly profane" for him when he had "given heed to some natural object." thoreau needs no proving. he is at the forefront of all field and forest lovers in all languages and times. these are the greater names. the lesser are as leaves in the forest: audubon, burroughs, muir, clarence king, lanier, robert frost, and many more--the stream broadening and shallowing through literary scientists and earnest forest lovers to romantic "nature fakers," literary sportsmen, amiable students, and tens of thousands of teachers inculcating this american tendency in another generation. the phenomenon asks for an explanation. it is more than a category of american literature that i am presenting; it _is_ an american trait. the explanation i wish to proffer in this essay may sound fantastical; most explanations that explain anything usually do-- at first. i believe that this vast rush of nature into american literature is more than a mere reflection of a liking for the woods. it represents a search for a tradition, and its capture. good books, like well-built houses, must have tradition behind them. the homers and shakespeares and goethes spring from rich soil left by dead centuries; they are like native trees that grow so well nowhere else. the little writers--hacks who sentimentalize to the latest order, and display their plot novelties like bargains on an advertising page--are just as traditional. the only difference is that their tradition goes back to books instead of life. middle-sized authors--the very good and the probably enduring--are successful largely because they have gripped a tradition and followed it through to contemporary life. this is what thackeray did in "vanity fair," howells in "the rise of silas lapham," and mrs. wharton in "the house of mirth." but the back- to-nature books--both the sound ones and those shameless exposures of the private emotions of ground hogs and turtles that call themselves nature books--are the most traditional of all. for they plunge directly into what might be called the adventures of the american sub-consciousness. it is the sub-consciousness that carries tradition into literature. that curious reservoir where forgotten experiences lie waiting in every man's mind, as vivid as on the day of first impression, is the chief concern of psychologists nowadays. but it has never yet had due recognition from literary criticism. if the sub-consciousness is well stocked, a man writes truly, his imagination is vibrant with human experience, he sets his own humble observation against a background of all he has learned and known and forgotten of civilization. if it is under-populated, if he has done little, felt little, known little of the traditional experiences of the intellect, he writes thinly. he can report what he sees, but it is hard for him to create. it was chaucer's rich sub-consciousness that turned his simple little story of chauntecleer into a comment upon humanity. other men had told that story--and made it scarcely more than trivial. it is the promptings of forgotten memories in the sub-consciousness that give to a simple statement the force of old, unhappy things, that keep thoughts true to experience, and test fancy by life. the sub- consciousness is the governor of the waking brain. tradition-- which is just man's memory of man--flows through it like an underground river from which rise the springs of every-day thinking. if there is anything remarkable about a book, look to the sub-consciousness of the writer and study the racial tradition that it bears. now, i am far from proposing to analyze the american sub- consciousness. no man can define it. but of this much i am certain. the american habit of going "back to nature" means that in our sub-consciousness nature is peculiarly active. we react to nature as does no other race. we are the descendants of pioneers-- all of us. and if we have not inherited a memory of pioneering experiences, at least we possess inherited tendencies and desires. the impulse that drove boone westward may nowadays do no more than send some young boone canoeing on temagami, or push him up marcy or shasta to inexplicable happiness on the top. but the drive is there. and furthermore, nature is still strange in america. even now the wilderness is far from no american city. birds, plants, trees, even animals have not, as in europe, been absorbed into the common knowledge of the race. there are discoveries everywhere for those who can make them. nature, indeed, is vivid in a surprising number of american brain cells, marking them with a deep and endurable impress. and our flood of nature books has served to increase her power. it was never so with the european traditions that we brought to america with us. that is why no one reads early american books. they are pallid, ill-nourished, because their traditions are pallid. they drew upon the least active portion of the american sub-consciousness, and reflect memories not of experience, contact, live thought, but of books. even washington irving, our first great author, is not free from this indictment. if, responding to some obscure drift of his race towards humor and the short story, he had not ripened his augustan inheritance upon an american hillside, he, too, would by now seem juiceless, withered, like a thousand cuttings from english stock planted in forgotten pages of his period. it was not until the end of our colonial age and the rise of democracy towards jackson's day, that the rupture with our english background became sufficiently complete to make us fortify pale memories of home by a search for fresher, more vigorous tradition. we have been searching ever since, and many eminent critics think that we have still failed to establish american literature upon american soil. the old traditions, of course, were essential. not even the most self-sufficient american hopes to establish a brand- new culture. the problem has been to domesticate europe, not to get rid of her. but the old stock needed a graft, just as an old fruit tree needs a graft. it requires a new tradition. we found a tradition in new england; and then new england was given over to the alien and her traditions became local or historical merely. we found another in border life; and then the wild west reached the pacific and vanished. time and again we have been flung back upon our english sources, and forced to imitate a literature sprung from a riper soil. of course, this criticism, as it stands, is too sweeping. it neglects mark twain and the tradition of the american boy; it neglects walt whitman and the literature of free and turbulent democracy; it neglects longfellow and poe and that romantic tradition of love and beauty common to all western races. but, at least, it makes one understand why the american writer has passionately sought anything that would put an american quality into his transplanted style. he has been very successful in local color. but then local color is _local_. it is a minor art. in the field of human nature he has fought a doubtful battle. an occasional novel has broken through into regions where it is possible to be utterly american even while writing english. poems too have followed. but here lie our great failures. i do not speak of the "great american novel," yet to come. i refer to the absence of a school of american fiction, or poetry, or drama, that has linked itself to any tradition broader than the romance of the colonies, new england of the 'forties, or the east side of new york. the men who most often write for all america are mediocre. they strike no deeper than a week-old interest in current activity. they aim to hit the minute because they are shrewd enough to see that for "all america" there is very little continuity just now between one minute and the next. the america they write for is contemptuous of tradition, although worshipping convention, which is the tradition of the ignorant. the men who write for a fit audience though few are too often local or archaic, narrow or european, by necessity if not by choice. and ever since we began to incur the condescension of foreigners by trying to be american, we have been conscious of this weak- rootedness in our literature and trying to remedy it. this is why our flood of nature books for a century is so significant. they may seem peculiar instruments for probing tradition--particularly the sentimental ones. the critic has not yet admitted some of the heartiest among them--audubon's sketches of pioneer life, for example--into literature at all. and yet, unless i am mightily mistaken, they are signs of convalescence as clearly as they are symptoms of our disease. these united states, of course, are infinitely more important than the plot of mother earth upon which they have been erected. the intellectual background that we have inherited from europe is more significant than the moving spirit of woods and soil and waters here. the graft, in truth, is less valuable than the tree upon which it is grafted. yet it determines the fruit. so with the books of our nature lovers. they represent a passionate attempt to acclimatize the breed. thoreau has been one of our most original writers. he and his multitudinous followers, wise and foolish, have helped establish us in our new soil. i may seem to exaggerate the services of a group of writers who, after all, can show but one great name, thoreau's. i do not think so, for if the heart of the nature lover is sometimes more active than his head, the earth intimacies he gives us are vital to literature in a very practical sense. thanks to the modern science of geography, we are beginning to understand the profound and powerful influence of physical environment upon men. the geographer can tell you why charleston was aristocratic, why new york is hurried and nervous, why chicago is self-confident. he can guess at least why in old communities, like hardy's wessex or the north of france, the inhabitants of villages not ten miles apart will differ in temperament and often in temper, hill town varying from lowland village beneath it sometimes more than kansas city from minneapolis. he knows that the old elemental forces--wind, water, fire, and earth--still mold men's thoughts and lives a hundred times more than they guess, even when pavements, electric lights, tight roofs, and artificial heat seem to make nature only a name. he knows that the sights and sounds and smells about us, clouds, songs, and wind murmurings, rain-washed earth, and fruit trees blossoming, enter into our sub-consciousness with a power but seldom appraised. prison life, factory service long continued, a clerk's stool, a housewife's day-long duties--these things stunt and transform the human animal as nothing else, because of all experiences they most restrict, most impoverish the natural environment. and it is the especial function of nature books to make vivid and warm and sympathetic our background of nature. they make conscious our sub-conscious dependence upon earth that bore us. they do not merely inform (there the scientist may transcend them), they enrich the subtle relationship between us and our environment. move a civilization and its literature from one hemisphere to another, and their adapting, adjusting services become most valuable. men like thoreau are worth more than we have ever guessed. no one has ever written more honest books than thoreau's "walden," his "autumn," "summer," and the rest. there is not one literary flourish in the whole of them, although they are done with consummate literary care; nothing but honest, if not always accurate, observation of the world of hill-slopes, waves, flowers, birds, and beasts, and honest, shrewd philosophizing as to what it all meant for him, an american. here is a man content to take a walk, fill his mind with observation, and then come home to think. repeat the walk, repeat or vary the observation, change or expand the thought, and you have thoreau. no wonder he brought his first edition home, not seriously depleted, and made his library of it! thoreau needs excerpting to be popular. most nature books do. but not to be valuable! for see what this queer genius was doing. lovingly, laboriously, and sometimes a little tediously, he was studying his environment. for some generations his ancestors had lived on a new soil, too busy in squeezing life from it to be practically aware of its differences. they and the rest had altered massachusetts. massachusetts had altered them. why? to what? the answer is not yet ready. but here is one descendant who will know at least what massachusetts _is_--wave, wind, soil, and the life therein and thereon. he begins humbly with the little things; but humanly, not as the out-and-out scientist goes to work, to classify or to study the narrower laws of organic development; or romantically as the sentimentalist, who intones his "ah!" at the sight of dying leaves or the cocoon becoming moth. it is all human, and yet all intensely practical with thoreau. he envies the indian not because he is "wild," or "free," or any such nonsense, but for his instinctive adaptations to his background,--because nature has become traditional, stimulative with him. and simply, almost naively, he sets down what he has discovered. the land i live in is like this or that; such and such life lives in it; and this is what it all means for me, the transplanted european, for us, americans, who have souls to shape and characters to mold in a new environment, under influences subtler than we guess. "i make it my business to extract from nature whatever nutriment she can furnish me, though at the risk of endless iteration. i milk the sky and the earth." and again: "surely it is a defect in our bible that it is not truly ours, but a hebrew bible. the most pertinent illustrations for us are to be drawn not from egypt or babylonia, but from new england. natural objects and phenomena are the original symbols or types which express our thoughts and feelings. yet american scholars, having little or no root in the soil, commonly strive with all their might to confine themselves to the imported symbols alone. all the true growth and experience, the living speech, they would fain reject as 'americanisms.' it is the old error which the church, the state, the school, ever commit, choosing darkness rather than light, holding fast to the old and to tradition. when i really know that our river pursues a serpentine course to the merrimac, shall i continue to describe it by referring to some other river, no older than itself, which is like it, and call it a meander? it is no more meandering than the meander is musketaquiding." this for thoreau was going back to nature. our historians of literature who cite him as an example of how to be american without being strenuous, as an instance of leisure nobly earned, are quite wrong. if any man has striven to make us at home in america, it is thoreau. he gave his life to it; and in some measure it is thanks to him that with most americans you reach intimacy most quickly by talking about "the woods." thoreau gave to this american tendency the touch of genius and the depth of real thought. after his day the "back-to-nature" idea became more popular and perhaps more picturesque. our literature becomes more and more aware of an american background. bobolinks and thrushes take the place of skylarks; sumach and cedar begin to be as familiar as heather and gorse; forests, prairies, a clear, high sky, a snowy winter, a summer of thunderstorms, drive out the misty england which, since the days of cynewulf, our ancestors had seen in the mind's eye while they were writing. nature literature becomes a category. men make their reputations by means of it. no one has yet catalogued--so far as i am aware--the vast collection of back-to-nature books that followed thoreau. no one has ever seriously criticized it, except mr. roosevelt, who with characteristic vigor of phrase, stamped "nature-faking" on its worser half. but every one reads in it. indeed, the popularity of such writing has been so great as to make us distrust its serious literary value. and yet, viewed internationally, there are few achievements in american literature so original. i will not say that john muir and john burroughs, upon whom thoreau's mantle fell, have written great books. probably not. certainly it is too soon to say. but when you have gathered the names of gilbert white, jeffries, fabre, maeterlinck, and in slightly different _genres_, izaak walton, hudson, and kipling from various literatures you will find few others abroad to list with ours. nor do our men owe one jot or title of their inspiration to individuals on the other side of the water. locally, too, these books are more noteworthy than may at first appear. they are curiously passionate, and passion in american literature since the civil war is rare. i do not mean sentiment, or romance, or eroticism. i mean such passion as wordsworth felt for his lakes, byron (even when most byronic) for the ocean, the author of "the song of roland" for his franks. muir loved the yosemite as a man might love a woman. every word he wrote of the sierras is touched with intensity. hear him after a day on alaskan peaks: "dancing down the mountain to camp, my mind glowing like the sunbeaten glaciers, i found the indians seated around a good fire, entirely happy now that the farthest point of the journey was safely reached and the long, dark storm was cleared away. how hopefully, peacefully bright that night were the stars in the frosty sky, and how impressive was the thunder of icebergs, rolling, swelling, reverberating through the solemn stillness! i was too happy to sleep." such passion, and often such style, is to be found in all these books when they are good books. compare a paragraph or two of the early burroughs on his birch-clad lake country, or thoreau upon concord pines, with the "natural history paragraph" that english magazines used to publish, and you will feel it. compare any of the lesser nature books of the mid-nineteenth century--clarence king's "mountaineering in the sierras," for example--with the current novel writing of the period and you will feel the greater sincerity. a passion for nature! except the new england passion for ideals, whitman's passion for democracy, and poe's lonely devotion to beauty, i sometimes think that this is the only great passion that has found its way into american literature. hence the "nature fakers." the passion of one generation becomes the sentiment of the next. and sentiment is easily capitalized. the individual can be stirred by nature as she is. a hermit thrush singing in moonlight above a catskill clove will move him. but the populace will require something more sensational. to the sparkling water of truth must be added the syrup of sentiment and the cream of romance. mr. kipling, following ancient traditions of the orient, gave personalities to his animals so that stories might be made from them. mr. long, mr. roberts, mr. london, mr. thompson- seton, and the rest, have told stories about animals so that the american interest in nature might be exploited. the difference is essential. if the "jungle books" teach anything it is the moral ideals of the british empire. but our nature romancers--a fairer term than "fakers," since they do not willingly "fake"--teach the background and tradition of our soil. in the process they inject sentiment, giving us the noble desperation of the stag, the startling wolf-longings of the dog, and the picturesque outlawry of the ground hog,--and get a hundred readers where thoreau got one. this is the same indictment as that so often brought against the stock american novel, that it prefers the gloss of easy sentiment to the rough, true fact, that it does not grapple direct with things as they are in america, but looks at them through optimist's glasses that obscure and soften the scene. nevertheless, i very much prefer the sentimentalized animal story to the sentimentalized man story. the first, as narrative, may be romantic bosh, but it does give one a loving, faithful study of background that is worth the price that it costs in illusion. it reaches my emotions as a novelist who splashed his sentiment with equal profusion never could. my share of the race mind is willing even to be tricked into sympathy with its environment. i would rather believe that the sparrow on my telephone wire is swearing at the robin on my lawn than never to notice either of them! how curiously complete and effective is the service of these nature books, when all is considered. there is no better instance, i imagine, of how literature and life act and react upon one another. the plain american takes to the woods because he wants to, he does not know why. the writing american puts the woods into his books, also because he wants to, although i suspect that sometimes he knows very well why. nevertheless, the same general tendency, the same impulse, lie behind both. but reading nature books makes us crave more nature, and every gratification of curiosity marks itself upon the sub-consciousness. thus the clear, vigorous tradition of the soil passes through us to our books, and from our books to us. it is the soundest, the sweetest, if not the greatest and deepest inspiration of american literature. in the confusion that attends the meeting here of all the races it is something to cling to; it is our own. thanks to the artists it would be a wise american town that gave up paying "boosters" and began to support its artists. a country is just so much country until it has been talked about, painted, or put into literature. a town is just so many brick and wood squares, inhabited by human animals, until some one's creative and interpretative mind has given it "atmosphere," by which we mean significance. america was not mere wild land to the early colonists: it was a country that had already been seen through the eyes of enthusiastic explorers and daring adventurers, whose airs were sweeter than europe's, whose fruits were richer, where forest and game, and even the savage inhabitant, guaranteed a more exciting life, full of chance for the future. new england was not just so much stony acre and fishing village for the men of the 'twenties and 'forties. it was a land haloed by the hopes and sufferings of forefathers, where every town had its record of struggle known to all by word of mouth or book. and when the new englanders pushed westward, it was to a wilderness which already had its literature, along trails of which they had read, and into regions familiar to them in imagination. say what you please, and it is easy to say too much, of the imitativeness of american literature as irving, cooper, hawthorne, longfellow, thoreau, twain, and howells wrote it, nevertheless, it was more than justified by the human significance it gave to mere land in america; and it is richer and more valuable than much later writing just because of this attempt. without hawthorne and thoreau, new england would have lost its past; without cooper and parkman the word "frontier" would mean no more than "boundary" to most of us. it is foolish to lay a burden on art, and to say, for example, that american novelists must accept the same obligation to cities and country to-day. but we may justly praise and thank them when they do enrich this somewhat monotonous america that has been planed over by the movies, the _saturday evening post_, quick transportation, and the newspaper with its syndicated features, until it is as repetitive as a tom-tom. after the civil war every one began to move in america, and the immigrants, moving in, moved also, so that roots were pulled up everywhere and the town one lived in became as impersonal as a hotel, the farm no more human than a seed-bed. literature of the time shows this in two ways: the rarity of books that give a local habitation and a name to the familiar, contemporary scene; and a romantic interest, as of the half-starved, in local color stories of remote districts where history and tradition still meant something in the lives of the inhabitants. it is encouraging to see how rapidly all this is changing. in poetry the middle west and new england have been made again to figure in the imagination. rural new hampshire and illinois are alive to-day for those who have read masters, lindsay, and frost. in prose chicago, new york, new haven, richmond, detroit, san francisco, and the ubiquitous main street of a hundred gopher prairies have become wayfares for the memory of the reader, as well as congeries of amusement and trade. in particular our universities, which in the 'eighties and 'nineties were darkly lit by a few flaring torches of mawkish romance, have been illumined for the imagination by a series of stories that already begin to make the undergraduate comprehend his place in one of the richest streams of history, and graduates to understand their youth. poole's "the harbor" (which served both college and city), owen johnson's "stover at yale," norris's "salt," fitzgerald's "this side of paradise," stephen benet's "the beginning of wisdom"-- these books and many others have, like the opening chapters of compton mackenzie's english "sinister street," given depth, color, and significance to the college, which may not increase its immediate and measurable efficiency but certainly strengthen its grip upon the imagination, and therefore upon life. planners, builders, laborers, schemers, executives make a city, a county, a university habitable, give them their bones and their blood. poets and novelists make us appreciate the life we live in them, give them their souls. the best "boosters" are artists, because their boosting lasts. to-day in american literature: addressed to the british [footnote: this lecture was, in fact, delivered in the summer of at cambridge university as part of a summer session devoted to the united states of america. it is reprinted in lecture form in order that the point of view may carry its own explanation.] the analysis of conditions and tendencies in contemporary american literature which i wish to present in this lecture, requires historical background, detailed criticism, and a study of development. i have time for reference to none of these, and can only summarize the end of the process. if, therefore, i seem to generalize unduly, i hope that my deficiencies may be charged against the exigencies of the occasion. but i generalize the more boldly because i am speaking, after all, of an english literature; not in a roman-greek relationship of unnaturalized borrowings (for we americans imitate less and less), but english by common cultural inheritance, by identical language, and by deeply resembling character. nevertheless, the more american literature diverges from british (and that divergence is already wide) the more truly english, the less colonial does it become. a briton should not take unkindly assertions of independence, even such ruffled independence as lowell expressed in "the biglow papers": i guess the lord druv down creation's spiles 'thout no _gret_ helpin' from the british isles, an' could contrive to keep things pooty stiff ef they withdrawed from business in a miff; i han't no patience with such swelling fellers ez think god can't forge 'thout them to blow the bellerses. i desire neither to apologize for american literature, nor to boast of it. no apology is necessary now, whatever sydney smith may have thought in earlier days: and it is decidedly not the time to boast, for so far literature has usually been a by-product in the development of american aptitudes. but it may be useful to state broadly at the beginning some of the difficulties and the closely related advantages that condition the making of literature in the united states. the critic of american literature usually begins in this fashion: america, in somewhat over a century, has built up a political and social organization admittedly great. she has not produced, however, a great literature: great writers she has produced, but not a great literature. the reason is, that so much energy has been employed in developing the resources of a great country, that little has been left to expend in creative imagination. the currents of genius have flowed toward trade, agriculture, and manufacturing, not aesthetics. this explanation is easy to understand, and is therefore plausible, but i do not believe that it is accurate. it is not true that american energy has been absorbed by business. politics, and politics of a creative character, has never lacked good blood in the united states. organization, and organization of a kind requiring the creative intellect, has drawn enormously upon our energies, especially since the civil war, and by no means all of it has been business organization. consider our systems of education and philanthropy, erected for vast needs. and i venture to guess that more varieties of religious experience have arisen in america than elsewhere in the same period. after all, why expect a century and a half of semi-independent intellectual existence to result in a great national literature? can other countries, other times, show such a phenomenon? no, if we have been slow in finding ourselves in literature, in creating a school of expression like the elizabethan or the augustan, the difficulties are to be sought elsewhere than in a lack of energy. seek them first of all in a weakening of literary tradition. the sky changes, not the mind, said horace, but this is true only of the essentials of being. the great writers of our common english tradition--chaucer, shakespeare, milton, and many others--are as good for us as they are good for you. it is even whispered that our language is more faithful to their diction than is yours. but the conditions of life in a new environment bring a multitude of minor changes with them. to begin with little things, our climate, our birds, our trees, our daily contact with nature, are all different. your mellow fluting blackbird, your wise thrush that sings each song twice over, your high-fluttering larks we do not know. our blackbird creaks discordantly, our plaintive lark sings from the meadow tussock, our thrush chimes his heavenly bell from forest dimness. and this accounts, may i suggest in passing, for the insistence upon nature in american writing, from thoreau down. our social and economic experience has been widely different also; and all this, plus the results of a break in space and time with the home country of our language, weakened that traditional influence which is so essential for the production of a national literature. it had to be; good will come of it; but for a time we vacillated, and we still vacillate, like a new satellite finding its course. again, the constant shift of location within america has been a strong delaying factor. moving-day has come at least once a generation for most american families since the days of william penn or _the mayflower_, the president of a western university, who himself, as a baby, had been carried across the alleghenies in a sling, once told me the history of his family. it settled in virginia in the seventeenth century, and moved westward regularly each generation, until his father, the sixth or seventh in line, had reached california. on the return journey he had got as far as illinois, and his son was moving to new york! the disturbing effect upon literature of this constant change of soils and environment is best proved by negatives. wherever there has been a settled community in the united states--in new england of the 'forties and again in the 'nineties, in the middle west and california to-day--one is sure to find a literature with some depth and solidity to it. the new england civilization of the early nineteenth century, now materially altered, was a definable culture, with five generations behind it, and strong roots in the old world. from it came the most mature school of american literature that so far we have possessed. still another difficulty must be added. the social. pessimists, who see in our eastern states a mere congeries of all the white races, and some not white, bewail the impossibility of a real nation in america. but the racial problem has always been with us, nor has it by any means always been unsolved. before the revolution, we were english, scottish, welsh, low german, huguenot, dutch, and swedish. before the civil war, we were the same plus the irish and the germans of ' . and now we add slavs, jews, greeks, and italians. i do not minimize the danger. but let it be understood that while our civilization has always been british (if that term is used in its broadest sense) our blood has always been mixed, even in virginia and new england. this has made it hard for us to feel entirely at home in the only literary tradition we possessed and cared to possess. we have been like the man with a ready-made suit. the cloth is right, but the cut must be altered before the clothes will fit him. and finally, america has always been decentralized intellectually. it is true that most of the books and magazines are published in new york, and have always been published there, or in boston or philadelphia. but they have been written all over a vast country by men and women who frequently never see each other in the flesh. there has been no center like london, where writers can rub elbows half-a-dozen times a year. boston was such a capital once; only, however, for new england. new york is a clearing-house of literature now; but the writing is, most of it, done elsewhere. it is curious to speculate what might have happened if the capital of the united states had been fixed at new york instead of washington! from this decentralization there results a lack of literary self- confidence that is one of the most important factors in the intellectual life of america. the writer in tucson or minneapolis or bangor is dependent upon his neighbors to a degree impossible in manchester or glasgow or york. he is marooned there, separated in space and time, if not in mind, from men and women who believe, as he may believe, in the worth of literary standards, in the necessity of making not the most easily readable book, but the best. here is one cause of the feebleness of many american "literary" books. nevertheless, this very decentralization may have, when we reach literary maturity, its great advantages. it is difficult to over- estimate the color, the variety, the _verve_ of american life. and much of this comes not from the push and "hustle" and energy of america--for energy is just energy all the world over--but is rather to be found in the new adjustments of race and environment which are multiplying infinitely all over the united states. it is true that american civilization seems to be monotonous--that one sees the same magazines and books, the same moving-picture shows, the same drug- stores, trolley cars, and hotels on a new york model, hears the same slang and much the same general conversation from new haven to los angeles. but this monotony is superficial. beneath the surface there are infinite strainings and divergences--the peasant immigrant working toward, the well-established provincial holding to, the wide-ranging mind of the intellectual working away from, this dead level of conventional standards. where we are going, it is not yet possible to say. quite certainly not toward an un-british culture. most certainly not toward a culture merely neo-english. but in any case, it is because san francisco and indianapolis and chicago and philadelphia have literary republics of their own, sovereign like our states, yet highly federalized also in a common bond of american taste and ideals which the war made stronger--it is this fact that makes it possible to record, as american writers are already recording, the multifarious, confused development of racial instincts working into a national consciousness. localization is our difficulty; it is also the only means by which literature can keep touch with life in so huge a congeries as america. if we can escape provincialism and yet remain local, all will be well. so far i have been merely defining the terms upon which literature has been written in america. let me add to these terms a classification. if one stretches the meaning of literature to cover all writing in prose or verse that is not simply informative, then four categories will include all literary writing in america that is in any way significant. we have an aristocratic and a democratic literature; we have a dilettante and a vast bourgeois literature. in using the term aristocratic literature i have in mind an intellectual rather than a social category. i mean all writing addressed to specially trained intelligence, essays that imply a rich background of knowledge and taste, stories dependent upon psychological analysis, poetry which is austere in content or complex in form. i mean henry james and sherwood anderson, mr. cabell, mr. hergesheimer, and mrs. wharton, agnes repplier, mr. crothers, mr. sherman, and mr. colby. by democratic literature i mean all honest writing, whether crude or carefully wrought, that endeavors to interpret the american scene in typical aspects for all who care to read. i mean walt whitman and edgar lee masters; i mean a hundred writers of short stories who, lacking perhaps the final touch of art, have nevertheless put a new world and a new people momentarily upon the stage. i mean the addresses of lincoln and of president wilson. with dilettante literature i come to a very different and less important classification: the vast company--how vast few even among natives suspect--of would-be writers, who in every town and county of the united states are writing, writing, writing what they hope to be literature, what is usually but a pallid imitation of worn-out literary forms. more people seem to be engaged in occasional production of poetry and fiction--and especially of poetry--in america, than in any single money-making enterprise characteristic of a great industrial nation. the flood pours through every editorial office in the land, trickles into the corners of country newspapers, makes short-lived dilettante magazines, and runs back, most of it, to its makers. it is not literature, for the bulk is bloodless, sentimental, or cheap, but it is significant of the now passionate american desire to express our nascent soul. my chief difficulty is to explain what i mean by bourgeois literature. the flood of dilettante writing is subterranean; it is bourgeois literature that makes the visible rivers and oceans of american writing. and these fluid areas are like the lakes on maps of central asia--bounds cannot be set to them. one finds magazines (and pray remember that the magazine is as great a literary force as the book in america), one finds magazines whose entire function is to be admirably bourgeois for their two million odd of readers. and in the more truly literary and "aristocratic" periodicals, in the books published for the discriminating, the bourgeois creeps in and often is dominant. the bourgeois in american literature is a special variety that must not be too quickly identified with the literary product that bears the same name in more static civilizations. it is nearly always clever. witness our short stories, which even when calculated not to puzzle the least intelligence nor to transcend the most modest limitations of taste, must be carefully constructed and told with facility or they will never see the light. and this literature is nearly always true to the superficies of life, to which, indeed, it confines itself. wild melodrama is more and more being relegated to the "movies," soft sentimentality still has its place in the novel, but is losing ground in the people's library, the magazines. life as the american believes he is living it, is the subject of bourgeois literature. but the sad limitation upon this vast output is that, whether poetry, criticism, or fiction, it does not interpret, it merely pictures; and this is the inevitable failure of pages that must be written always for a million or more of readers. it is standardized literature; and good literature, like the best airplanes, cannot be standardized. now the error made by most english critics in endeavoring to estimate the potentialities or the actualities of american literature, is to judge under the influence of this crushing weight of clever, mediocre writing. they feel, quite justly, its enormous energy and its terrible cramping power. they see that the best of our democratic writers belong on its fringe; see also that our makers of aristocratic literature and our dilettante escape its weight only when they cut themselves off from the life beat of the nation. and therefore, as a distinguished english poet recently said, america is doomed to a hopeless and ever-spreading mediocrity. with this view i wish to take immediate issue upon grounds that are both actual and theoretical. there is a fallacy here to begin with, a fallacious analogy. it is true, i believe, in great britain, and also in france, that there are two separate publics; that the readers who purchase from the news stands are often as completely unaware of literary books for literary people as if these bore the imprint of the moon. but even in england the distinction is by no means sharp; and in america it is not a question of distinctions at all, but of gradations. in our better magazines are to be found all the categories of which i have written--even the dilettante; and it is a bold critic who will assert that pages one to twenty are read only by one group, and pages twenty to forty only by another. we are the most careless readers in the world; but also the most voracious and the most catholic. and next, let us make up our minds once for all that a bourgeois literature--by which, let me repeat, i mean a literature that is good without being very good, true without being utterly true, clever without being fine--is a necessity for a vast population moving upward from generation to generation in the intellectual scale, toward a level that must be relatively low in order to be attainable. let us say that such a literature cannot be real literature. i am content with that statement. but it must exist, and good may come of it. this is the critical point toward which i have been moving in this lecture, and it is here that the hopeful influence of the american spirit, as i interpret it today, assumes its importance. that spirit is both idealistic and democratic. idealistic in the sense that there is a profound and often foolishly optimistic belief in america that every son can be better than his father, better in education, better in taste, better in the power to accomplish and understand. democratic in this sense, that with less political democracy than one finds in great britain, there is again a fundamental belief that every tendency, every taste, every capacity, like every man, should have its chance somehow, somewhere, to get a hearing, to secure its deservings, to make, to have, to learn what seems the best. a vague desire, you say, resulting in confusion and mediocrity. this is true and will be true for some time longer; but instead of arguing in generalities let me illustrate these results by the literature i have been discussing. when brought to bear upon the category of the dilettante, it is precisely this desire for "general improvement" that has encouraged such a curious outpouring from mediocre though sensitive hearts. the absence of strong literary tradition, the lack of deep literary soil, has been responsible for the insipidity of the product. the habit of reference to the taste of the majority has prevented us from taking this product too seriously. without that instinctive distrust of the merely literary common to all bourgeois communities, we might well be presenting to you as typical american literature a gentle weakling whose manners, when he has them, have been formed abroad. aristocratic literature has suffered in one respect from the restraints of democracy and the compulsions of democratic idealism. it has lacked the self-confidence and therefore the vigor of its parallels in the old world. emerson and thoreau rose above these restrictions, and so did hawthorne and poe. but in later generations especially, our intellectual poetry and intellectual prose is too frequently though by no means always less excellent than yours. nevertheless, thanks to the influence of this bourgeois spirit upon the intellects that in american towns must live with, if not share it; thanks, also, to the magazines through which our finer minds must appeal to the public rather than to a circle or a clique, the nerves of transfer between the community at large and the intellectuals are active, the tendons that unite them strong. i argue much from this. now theoretically, where you find an instinctive and therefore an honest passion for the ideals of democracy, you should find a great literature expressing and interpreting the democracy. i have given already some reasons why in practice this has not yet become an actuality in america. let me add, in discussing the bearing of this argument upon the third category of american literature, the democratic, one more. i doubt whether we yet know precisely what is meant by a great democratic literature. democracy has been in transition at least since the french revolution; it is in rapid transition now. the works which we call democratic are many of them expressive of phases merely of the popular life, just as so much american literature is expressive of localities and groups in america. and usually the works of genius that we do possess have been written by converted aristocrats, like tolstoy, and have a little of the fanaticism and over-emphasis of the convert. or they represent and share the turgidity of the minds they interpret, like some of the work of walt whitman. all this is true, and yet a careful reader of american literature must be more impressed by such prose as lincoln's, by such poems as whitman's, such fiction as mark twain's at his best, than by many more elegant works of polite literature. for these--and i could add to them dozens of later stories and poems, ephemeral perhaps but showing what may be done when we burst the bourgeois chain--for these are discoveries in the vigor, the poignancy, the color of our democratic national life. i have already hinted at what seems to me the way out and up for american literature. it will not be by fine writing that borrows or adapts foreign models, even english models which are not foreign to us. it will not come through geniuses of the backwoods, adopted by some coterie, and succeeding, when they do succeed, by their strangeness rather than the value of the life they depict. that might have happened in the romantic decades of the early nineteenth century; but our english literary tradition was a saving influence which kept us from _gaucherie_, even if it set limits upon our strength. our expectation, so i think, is in the slowly mounting level of the vast bourgeois literature that fills not excellently, but certainly not discreditably, our books and magazines. there, and not in coteries, is our school of writing. when originality wearies of stereotypes and conventions, when energy and ability force the editorial hand, and appeal to the desire of americans to know themselves, we shall begin a new era in american literature. our problem is not chiefly to expose and attack and discredit the flat conventionality of popular writing. it is rather to crack the smooth and monotonous surface and stir the fire beneath it, until the lava of new and true imaginings can pour through. and this is, historically, the probable course of evolution. it was the elizabethan fashion. the popular forms took life and fire then. the advice of the classicists, who wished to ignore the crude drama beloved of the public, was not heeded; it will not be heeded now. our task is to make a bourgeois democracy fruitful. we must work with what we have. much has been said of the advantage for us, and perhaps for the world, which has come from the separation of the american colonies from great britain. two systems of closely related political thinking, two national characters, have developed and been successful instead of one. your ancestors opened the door of departure for mine, somewhat brusquely it is true, but with the same result, if not the same reason, as with the boys they sent away to school--they made men of us. so it is with literature. american literature will never, as some critics would persuade us, be a child without a parent. in its fundamental character it is, and will remain, british, because at bottom the american character, whatever its blood mixture, is formed upon customs and ideals that have the same origin and a parallel development with yours. but this literature, like our political institutions, will not duplicate; like the seedling, it will make another tree and not another branch. in literature we are still pioneers. i think that it may be reserved for us to discover a literature for the new democracy of english-speaking peoples that is coming--a literature for the common people who do not wish to stay common. like lincoln's, it will not be vulgar; like whitman's, never tawdry; like mark twain's, not empty of penetrating thought; like shakespeare's it will be popular. if this should happen, as i believe it may, it would be a just return upon our share of a great inheritance. time's mirror what is the use of criticizing modern literature unless you are willing to criticize modern life? and how many americans are willing to criticize it with eyes wide open? the outstanding fact in mass civilization as it exists in america and western europe to-day is that it moves with confidence in only one direction. the workers, after their escape from the industrial slavery of the last century, have only one plan for the future upon which they can unite, a greater share in material benefits. the possessors of capital have only one program upon which they agree, a further exploitation of material resources, for the greater comfort of the community and themselves. the professional classes have only one professional instinct in common, to discover new methods by which man's comfort may be made secure. in this way of life, as the buddhist might have called it, all our really effective energy discharges itself. even the church is most active in social service, and philosophy is accounted most original when it accounts for behavior. theology has become a stagnant science, and, to prove the rule by contraries, the main problem of man's spiritual relation to the universe, his end in living, and the secret of real happiness is left to a sentimental idealism in which reason, as the greeks knew it, has less and less place, and primitive instinct, as the anthropologists define it, and the freudian psychologists explain it, is given more and more control. the flat truth is that, as a civilization, we are less sure of where we are going, where we want to go, how and for what we wish to live, than at any intelligent period of which we have full record. this is not pessimism. it is merely a fact, which is dependent upon our failure to digest the problems that democracy, machinery, feminism, and the destruction of our working dogmas by scientific discovery, have presented to us. all these things are more likely to be good than bad, all bear promise for the future, but all tend to confuse contemporary men. new power over nature has been given them and they are engaged in seizing it. new means of testing preconceived opinion are theirs, and they are using them. the numbers which can be called intelligent are tremendously augmented and the race to secure material comforts has become a mass movement which will not cease until the objective is won. in the meantime, there is only one road which is clear--the road of material progress, and whether its end lies in the new barbarism of a mechanistic state where the mental and physical faculties will decline in proportion to the means discovered for healing their ills, or whether it is merely a path where the privileged leaders must mark step for a while until the unprivileged masses catch up with them in material welfare, no one knows and few that are really competent care to inquire. now this obsession with material welfare is the underlying premise with which all discussion of contemporary literature, and particularly american literature, must begin. ours is a literature of an age without dogma, which is to say without a theory of living; the literature of an inductive, an experimental period, where the really vital attempt is to subdue physical environment (for the first time in history) to the needs of the common man. it is an age, therefore, interested and legitimately interested in behavior rather than character, in matter and its laws rather than in the control of matter for the purposes of fine living. therefore, our vital literature is behavioristic, naturalistic, experimental--rightly so i think--and must be so until we seek another way. that search cannot be long deferred. one expects its beginning at any moment, precisely as one expects, and with reason, a reaction against the lawless thinking and unrestrained impulses which have followed the war. one hopes that it will not be to puritanism, unless it be that stoic state of mind which lay behind puritanism, for no old solution will serve. the neo- puritans to-day abuse the rebels, young and old, because they have thrown over dogma and discipline. the rebels accuse puritanism for preserving the dogma that cramps instead of frees. it is neither return to the old nor the destruction thereof that we must seek, but a new religion, a new discipline, a new hope, and a new end which can give more significance to living than dwellers in our industrial civilization are now finding. in the meantime, those who seek literary consolation are by no means to be urged away from their own literature, which contains a perfect picture of our feverish times, and has implicit within it the medicine for our ills, if they are curable. but they may be advised to go again and more often than is now the fashion to the writings of those men who found for their own time, a real significance, who could formulate a saving doctrine, and who could give to literature what it chiefly lacks to-day, a core of ethical conviction and a view of man in his world _sub specie aeternitatis_. it is the appointed time in which to read dante and milton, shakespeare, and goethe, above all plato and the great tragedies of greece. our laughter would be sweeter if there were more depth of thought and emotion to our serious moods. the family magazine readers who like magazines will be pleased, those who do not like them perhaps distressed, to learn, if they are not already aware of it, that the magazine as we know it to-day is distinctly an american creation. they may stir, or soothe, their aroused emotions by considering that the magazine which began in england literally as a storehouse of miscellanies attained in mid- nineteenth century united states a dignity, a harmony, and a format which gave it preeminence among periodicals. _harper's_ and _the century_ in particular shared with mark twain and the sewing machine the honor of making america familiarly known abroad. i do not wish to overburden this essay with history, but one of the reasons for the appearance of such a dominating medium in a comparatively unliterary country is relevant to the discussion to follow. the magazine of those days was vigorous. it was vigorous because, unlike other american publications, it was not oppressed by competition. until the laws of international copyright were completed, the latest novels of the victorians, then at their prime, could be rushed from a steamer, and distributed in editions which were cheap because no royalties had to be paid. thackeray and dickens could be sold at a discount, where american authors of less reputation had to meet full charges. and the like was true of poetry. but the magazine, like the newspaper, was not international; it was national at least in its entirety, and for it british periodicals could not be substituted. furthermore, it could, and did, especially in its earlier years, steal unmercifully from england, so that a subscriber got both homebrew and imported for a single payment. thus the magazine flourished in the mid-century while the american novel declined. a notable instance of this vigor was the effect of the growing magazine upon the infant short story. our american magazine made the development of the american short story possible by creating a need for good short fiction. the rise of our short story, after a transitional period when the earliest periodicals and the illustrated annuals sought good short stories and could not get them, coincides with the rise of the family magazine. it was such a demand that called forth the powers in prose of the poet, poe. and as our magazine has become the best of its kind, so in the short story, and in the short story alone, does american literature rival the more fecund literatures of england and europe. that a strong and native tendency made the american magazine is indicated by the effect of our atmosphere upon the periodical which the english have always called a review. import that form, as was done for _the north american_, _the atlantic monthly_, _the forum_, or _the yale review_, and immediately the new american periodical begins to be a little more of a magazine, a little more miscellaneous in its content, a little less of a critical survey. critical articles give place to memoirs and sketches, fiction or near fiction creeps in. there is always a tendency to lose type and be absorbed into the form that the mid-century had made so successful: a periodical, handsomely illustrated, with much fiction, some description, a little serious comment on affairs written for the general reader, occasional poetry, and enough humor to guarantee diversion. this is our national medium for literary expression--an admirable medium for a nation of long-distance commuters. and it is this "family magazine" i wish to discuss in its literary aspects. the dominance of the family magazine as a purveyor of general literature in america has continued, but in our own time the species (like other strong organisms) has divided into two genres, which are more different than, on the surface, they appear. the illustrated _literary magazine_ (the family magazine _par excellence_) must now be differentiated from the illustrated _journalistic_ magazine, but both are as american in origin as the review and the critical weekly are english. it was the native vigor of the family magazine that led to the great divergence of the 'nineties, which older readers will remember well. the literary historian of that period usually gives a different explanation. he is accustomed to say that the old-time "quality" magazines, _harper's_, _scribner's_, and the rest, were growing moribund when, by an effort of editorial genius, mr. mcclure created a new and rebellious type of magazine, which was rapidly imitated. we called it, as i remember, for want of a better title, the fifteen-cent magazine. in the wake of _mcclure's_, came _collier's_, _the saturday evening post_, _the ladies home journal_, and all the long and profitable train which adapted the mcclurean discovery to special needs and circumstances. i do not believe that this is a true statement of what happened in the fruitful 'nineties. _mcclure's_ was not, speaking biologically, a new species at all; it was only a mutation in which the recessive traits of the old magazine became dominant while the invaluable type was preserved. to speak more plainly, the literary magazine, as america knew it, had always printed news, matured news, often stale news, but still journalism. read any number of _harper's_ in the 'seventies for proof. and, _pari passu_, american journalism was eagerly trying to discover some outlet for its finer products, a medium where good pictures, sober afterthoughts, and the finish that comes from careful writing were possible. _harper's weekly_ in civil war days, and later, was its creation. and now it was happily discovered that the family magazine had a potential popularity far greater than its limited circulation. with its month-long period of incubation, its elastic form, in which story, special article, poetry, picture, humor, could all be harmoniously combined, only a redistribution of emphasis was necessary in order to make broader its appeal. mr. mcclure journalized the family magazine. he introduced financial and economic news in the form of sensational investigations, he bid for stories more lively, more immediate in their interest, more journalistic than we were accustomed to read (kipling's journalistic stories for example, were first published in america in _mcclure's_). he accepted pictures in which certainty of hitting the public eye was substituted for a guarantee of art. and yet, with a month to prepare his number, and only twelve issues a year, he could pay for excellence, and insure it, as no newspaper had ever been able to do. and he was freed from the incubus of "local news" and day-by-day reports. in brief, under his midwifery, the literary magazine gave birth to a super-newspaper. needless to say, the great increase in the number of american readers and the corresponding decline in the average intelligence and discrimination of the reading public had much to do with the success of the journalistic magazine. yet it may be stated, with equal truth, that the rapid advance in the average intelligence of the american public as a whole made a market for a super-newspaper in which nothing was hurried and everything well done. the contributions to literature through this new journalism have been at least as great during the period of its existence as from the "quality" magazine, the contributions toward the support of american authors much greater. like all good journalism, it has included real literature when it could get and "get away with it." birth, however, in the literary as in the animal world, is exhausting and often leaves the parent in a debility which may lead to death. the periodical essay of the eighteenth century bore the novel of character, and died; the gothic tale of a later date perished of the short story to which it gave its heart blood. the family magazine of the literary order has been debile, so radical critics charge, since its journalistic offspring began to sweep america. shall it die? by no means. an america without the illustrated literary magazine, dignified, respectable, certain to contain something that a reader of taste can peruse with pleasure, would be an unfamiliar america. and it would be a barer america. in spite of our brood of special magazines for the _literati_ and the advanced, which mr. ford madox hueffer praises so warmly, we are not so well provided with the distributive machinery for a national culture as to flout a recognized agency with a gesture and a sneer. but the family magazine has undeniably lost its vigorous appeal, and must be reinvigorated. the malady is due to no slackening of literary virility in the country; indeed there has probably not been so much literary energy in the country since the 'forties as now--not nearly so much. nor is it due to a lack of good readers. nor, in my opinion, to the competition of the journalistic magazine. the literary magazine does not compete, or at least ought not to compete, with its offspring, for it appeals either to a different audience or to different tastes. roughly stated, the trouble is that the public for these excellent magazines has changed, and they have not. their public always was, and is, the so-called "refined" home public. homes have changed, especially "refined" homes, and a new home means a new public. the refined home nowadays has been to college. (there are a million college graduates now in the united states.) forty years ago only scattered members had gone beyond the school. i do not propose to exaggerate the influence upon intelligence of a college education. it is possible, nay, it is common, to go through college and come out in any real sense uneducated. but it is not possible to pass through college, even as a professional amateur in athletics or as an inveterate flapper, without rubbing off the insulation here and there, without knowing what thought is stirring, what emotions are poignant, what ideas are dominant among the fraction of humanity that leads us. refined homes may not be better or happier than they used to be, but if they are intellectual at all, they are more vigorously intellectual. this means at the simplest that home readers of the kind i have been describing want stimulating food, not what our grandfathers used to call "slops." sometimes they feed exclusively upon highly spiced journalism, but if they are literary in their tastes they will be less content with merely literary stories, with articles that are too solid to be good journalism, yet too popular to be profound, less content, in short, with dignity as a substitute for force. what should be done about it specifically is a question for editors to answer. but this may be said. if the old literary omnibus is to continue, as it deserves, to hold the center of the roadway, then it must be driven with some vigor of the intellect to match the vigor of news which has carried its cheaper contemporary fast and far. by definition it cannot embrace a cause or a thesis, like the weeklies, and thank heaven for that! it is clearly unsafe to stand upon mere dignity, respectability, or cost. that way lies decadence--such as overcame the old quarterlies, the annuals, and the periodical essayists. vigor it must get, of a kind naturally belonging to its species, not violent, not raucous, not premature. it must recapture its public, and this is especially the "old american" (which does _not_ mean the anglo-saxon) element in our mingled nation. these old americans are not moribund by any means, and it is ridiculous to suppose, as some recent importations in criticism do, that a merely respectable magazine will represent them. a good many of them, to be sure, regard magazines as table decorations, and for such a clientele some one some day will publish a monthly so ornamental that it will be unnecessary to read it in order to share its beneficent influences. the remainder are intellectualized, and many of them are emancipated from the conventions of the last generation, if not from those of their own. these demand a new vitality of brain, emotion, and spirit in their literary magazine, and it must be given to them. no better proof of all this could be sought than the renaissance in our own times of the reviews and the weeklies, probably the most remarkable phenomenon in the history of american publishing since the birth of yellow journalism. by the weeklies i do not mean journals like _the outlook_, _the independent_, _vanity fair_, which are merely special varieties of the typically american magazine. i refer, of course, to _the new republic_, _the nation_, _the freeman_, _the weekly review_ in its original form, periodicals formed upon an old english model, devoted to the spreading of opinion, and consecrated to the propagation of intelligence. the success of these weeklies has been out of proportion to their circulation. like the old _nation_, which in a less specialized form was their predecessor, they have distinctly affected american thinking, and may yet affect our action in politics, education, and social relations generally. they are pioneers, with the faults of intellectual pioneers, over-seriousness, over-emphasis, dogmatism, and intolerance. yet it may be said fairly that their chief duty, as with the editorial pages of newspapers, is to be consistently partisan. at least they have proved that the american will take thinking when he can get it. and by inference, one assumes that he will take strong feeling and vigorous truth in his literary magazines. the reviews also show how the wind is blowing. the review, so- called, is a periodical presenting articles of some length, and usually critical in character, upon the political, social, and literary problems of the day. the distinction of the review is that its sober form and not too frequent appearance enable it to give matured opinion with space enough to develop it. clearly a successful review must depend upon a clientele with time and inclination to be seriously interested in discussion, and that is why the review, until recently, has best flourished in england where it was the organ of a governing class. in america, an intellectual class who felt themselves politically and socially responsible, has been harder to discover. we had one in the early days of the republic, when _the north american review_ was founded. it is noteworthy that we are developing another now and have seen _the yale review_, the late lamented _unpartisan review_, and others join _the north american_, fringed, so to speak, by magazines of excerpt (of which much might be written), such as _the review of reviews_, _current opinion_, and _the literary digest_, in which the function of the review is discharged for the great community that insists upon reading hastily. the review has come to its own with the war and reconstruction; which, considering its handicaps, is another argument that the family magazine should heed the sharpening of the american intellect. but, except for the strongest members of the family, it is still struggling, and still dependent for long life upon cheapness of production rather than breadth of appeal. the difficulty is not so much with the readers as the writers. the review must largely depend upon the specialist writer (who alone has the equipment for specialist writing), and the american specialist cannot usually write well enough to command general intelligent attention. this is particularly noticeable in the minor reviews where contributions are not paid for and most of the writing is, in a sense, amateur, but it holds good in the magazines and the national reviews also. the specialist knows his politics, his biology, or his finance as well as his english or french contemporary, but he cannot digest his subject into words --he can think into it, but not out of it, and so cannot write acceptably for publication. hence in science particularly, but also in biography, in literary criticism, and less often in history, we have to depend frequently upon english pens for our illumination. the reasons for this very serious deficiency, much more serious from every point of view than the specialists realize, are well known to all but the specialists, and i do not propose to enter into them here. my point is that this very defect, which has made it so difficult to edit a valid and interesting review (and so creditable to succeed as we have in several instances succeeded), is a brake also upon the family magazine in its attempt to regain virility. the newspaper magazines have cornered the market for clever reporters who tap the reservoirs of special knowledge and then spray it acceptably upon the public. this is good as far as it goes, but does not go far. the scholars must serve us themselves--and are too often incapable. editorial embarrassments are increased, however, by the difficulty of finding these intellectualized old americans who have drifted away from the old magazines and are being painfully collected in driblets by the weeklies and the reviews. they do not, unfortunately for circulation, all live in a london, or paris. they are scattered in towns, cities, university communities, lonely plantations, all over a vast country. probably that intellectualized public upon which all good magazines as well as all good reviews must depend, has not yet become so stratified and homogeneous after the upheavals of our generation that a commercial success of journalistic magnitude is possible, but it can and must be found. the success of _the atlantic monthly_ in finding a sizable and homogeneous public through the country is interesting in just this connection. it has, so it is generally understood, been very much a question of _finding_--of going west after the departing new englander and his children, and hunting him out with the goods his soul desired. one remembers the yankee peddlers who in the old days penetrated the frontier with the more material products of new england, pans, almanacs, and soap. but an observer must also note a change in the character of _the atlantic_ itself, how it has gradually changed from a literary and political review, to a literary and social magazine, with every element of the familiar american type except illustrations and a profusion of fiction; how in the attempt to become more interesting without becoming journalistic it has extended its operations to cover a wider and wider arc of human appeal. it has both lost and gained in the transformation, but it has undoubtedly proved itself adaptable and therefore alive. this is not an argument that the reviews should become magazines and that the old-line magazine should give up specializing in pictures and in fiction. of course not. it is simply more proof that vigor, adaptability, and a keen sense of existing circumstances are the tonics they also need. the weekly lacks balance, the review, professional skill in the handling of serious subjects, the family magazine, a willingness to follow the best public taste wherever it leads. it has been very difficult in this discussion, which i fear has resembled a shot-gun charge rather than a rifle bullet, to keep the single aim i have had in mind. the history of the periodical in american literary thinking has not yet been written. the history of american literature has but just been begun. my object has been to put the spotlight for a moment upon the typical american magazine, with just enough of its environment to make a background. what is seen there can best be summarized by a comparison. the american weekly is like the serious american play of the period. it has an over-emphasis upon lesson, bias, thesis, point. the review is like much american poetry. it is worthy, and occasionally admirable, but as a type it is weakened by amateur mediocrity in the art of writing. the family magazine is like the american short story. it has conventionalized into an often successful immobility. both must move again, become flexible, vigorous, or their date will be upon them. and the family magazine, the illustrated literary magazine, is the most interesting vehicle of human expression and interpretation that we americans have created. with a new and greater success, it will draw all our other efforts with it. if it fails, hope for the interesting review, the well-balanced weekly, is precarious. if they all submerge, we who like to read with discrimination and gusto will have to take to books as an exclusive diet, or make our choice between boredom and journalism. iii the new generation the young romantics we have talked about the younger generation as if youth were a new phenomenon that had to be named and described, like a strange animal in the garden of eden. no wonder that our juniors have become self-conscious and have begun to defend themselves. nevertheless, the generation born after the 'eighties has had an experience unique in our era. it has been urged, first by men and then by events, to discredit the statements of historians, the pictures of poets and novelists, and it has accepted the challenge. the result is a literature which speaks for the younger writers better, perhaps, than they speak for themselves, and this literature no reader whose brain is still flexible can afford to neglect; for to pass by youth for maturity is sooner or later to lose step with life. in recent decades the novel especially, but also poetry, has drifted toward biography and autobiography. the older poets, who yesterday were the younger poets, such men as masters, robinson, frost, lindsay, have passed from lyric to biographic narrative; the younger poets more and more write of themselves. in the novel the trend is even more marked. an acute critic, mr. wilson follett, has recently noted that the novel of class or social consciousness, which only ten years ago those who teach literature were discussing as the latest of late developments, has already given way to a vigorous rival. it has yielded room, if not given place, to the novel of the discontented person. the young men, and in a less degree the young women, especially in america, where the youngest generation is, i believe, more vigorous than elsewhere, have taken to biographical fiction. furthermore, what began as biography, usually of a youth trying to discover how to plan his career, has drifted more and more toward autobiography--an autobiography of discontent. there is, of course, nothing particularly new about biographical fiction. there is nothing generically new about the particular kind of demi-autobiographies that the advanced are writing just now. the last two decades have been rich in stories that need only a set of notes to reveal their approximate faithfulness to things that actually happened. but there is an emphasis upon revolt and disillusion and confusion in these latest novels that is new. they are no longer on the defensive, no longer stories of boys struggling to adapt themselves to a difficult world (men of forty- odd still write such stories); their authors are on the offensive, and with a reckless desire to accomplish their objectives, they shower us with such a profusion of detail, desert the paths of use and wont in fiction so freely, and so often disregard the comfort, not to speak of the niceties, of the reader, that "the young realists" has seemed a fair, although, as i think, a misleading title, for their authors. to a critic they are most interesting, for the novel of the alleged young realist is like a fresh country boy on a football field, powerful, promising, and utterly wasteful of its strength. recent american literature has been especially rich in such novels. there was, for example, fitzgerald's ragged, but brilliant, "this side of paradise," which conducted aimless and expansive youth from childhood through college. there was the much more impressive "main street," biographic in form, but with teeth set on edge in revolt. there was the vivid and ill-controlled sex novel "erik dorn," and evelyn scott's "the narrow house," in which the miseries of a young girl caught in the squalid and the commonplace had their airing. there was stephen benet's "the beginning of wisdom," where the revolt was a poet's, and the realist's detail selected from beauty instead of from ugliness; and aikman's "zell," in which youth rubs its sore shoulders against city blocks instead of university quadrangles. there was dos passos's "three soldiers," in which the boy hero is crushed by the war machine his elders have made. these are type examples, possibly not the best, certainly not the worst, drawn from the workshops of the so-called young realists. what is the biography of this modern youth? his father, in the romantic 'nineties, usually conquered the life of his elders, seldom complained of it, never spurned it. his son-in-the-novel is born into a world of intense sensation, usually disagreeable. instead of a "peter ibbetson" boyhood, he encounters disillusion after disillusion. at the age of seven or thereabout he sees through his parents and characterizes them in a phrase. at fourteen he sees through his education and begins to dodge it. at eighteen he sees through morality and steps over it. at twenty he loses respect for his home town, and at twenty-one discovers that our social and economic system is ridiculous. at twenty-three his story ends because the author has run through society to date and does not know what to do next. life is ahead of the hero, and presumably a new society of his own making. this latter, however, does not appear in any of the books, and for good reasons. in brief, this literature of the youngest generation is a literature of revolt, which is not surprising, but also a literature characterized by a minute and painful examination of environment. youth, in the old days, when it rebelled, escaped to romantic climes or adventurous experience from a world which some one else had made for it. that is what the hacks of the movies and the grown-up children who write certain kinds of novels are still doing. but true youth is giving us this absorbed examination of all possible experiences that can come to a boy or girl who does not escape from every-day life, this unflattering picture of a world that does not fit, worked out with as much evidence as if each novel were to be part of a brief of youth against society. indeed, the implied argument is often more important than the story, when there is a story. and the argument consists chiefly of "_this_ happened to me," "i saw _this_ and did not like it," "i was driven to _this_ or _that_," until the mass of circumstantial incident and sensation reminds one of the works of zola and the scientific naturalists who half a century ago tried to put society as an organism into fiction and art. no better example has been given us than dos passos's "three soldiers," a book that would be tiresome (and is tiresome to many) in its night after night and day after day crammed with every possible unpleasant sensation and experience that three young men could have had in the a. e. f. and that the experiences recorded were unpleasant ones, forced upon youth, not chosen by its will, is thoroughly characteristic. if it had not been for the rebellious pacifism in this book, it is questionable whether readers who had not been in france, and so could not relish the vivid reality of the descriptions, would have read to the end of the story. the cause of all this is interesting, more interesting than some of the results. the full result we can scarcely judge yet, for despite signs of power and beauty and originality, only one or two of these books have reached artistic maturity; but we can prepare to comprehend it. here, roughly, is what i believe has happened, and if i confine my conclusions to fiction, it is not because i fail to realize that the effects are and will be far broader. the youths of our epoch were born and grew up in a period of criticism and disintegration. they were children when the attack upon orthodox conceptions of society succeeded the attack upon orthodox conceptions of religion. we know how "the conflict between religion and science" reverberated in nineteenth-century literature and shaped its ends. the new attack was quite different. instead of scrutinizing a set of beliefs, it scrutinized a method of living. insensibly, the intelligent youth became aware that the distribution of wealth and the means of getting it were under attack; that questions were raised as to the rights of property and the causes and necessity of war. soon moral concepts began to be shaken. he learned that prostitution might be regarded as an economic evil. he found that sex morality was regarded by some as a useful taboo; psychology taught him that repression could be as harmful as excess; the collapse of the darwinian optimists, who believed that all curves were upward, left him with the inner conviction that everything, including principle, was in a state of flux. and his intellectual guides, first shaw, and then, when shaw became _vieux jeu_, de gourmont, favored that conclusion. then came the war, which at a stroke destroyed his sense of security and with that his respect for the older generation that had guaranteed his world. propaganda first enlightened him as to the evil meanings of imperialistic politics, and afterward left him suspicious of all politics. cruelty and violent change became familiar. he had seen civilization disintegrate on the battlefield, and was prepared to find it shaky at home. then he resumed, or began, his reading and his writing. his reading of fiction and poetry, especially when it dealt with youth, irritated him. the pictures of life in dickens, in "the idylls of the king," in the henty books, in the popular romantic novels and the conventional social studies, did not correspond with his pictures. they in no sense corresponded with the descriptions of society given by the new social thinkers whose ideas had leaked through to him. they did not square with his own experience. "the charge of the light brigade" rang false to a member of the th division. quiet stories of idyllic youth in new england towns jarred upon the memories of a class-conscious youngster in modern new york. youth began to scrutinize its own past, and then to write, with a passionate desire to tell the real truth, all of it, pleasant, unpleasant, or dirty, regardless of narrative relevance. the result was this new naturalism, a propaganda of the experience of youth, where the fact that mother's face was ugly, not angelic, is supremely important, more important than the story, just because it was the truth. and as the surest way to get all the truth is to tell your own story, every potential novelist wrote his own story, enriching it, where sensation was thin, from the biographies of his intimates. rousseau was reborn without his social philosophy. defoe was reincarnated, but more anxious now to describe precisely what happened to him than to tell an effective tale. this is a very different kind of truth-telling from, let us say, mrs. wharton's in "the age of innocence" or zona gale's in "miss lulu bett." it does not spring from a desire to tell the truth about human nature. these asserters of youth are not much interested in any human nature except their own, not much, indeed, in that, but only in the friction between their ego and the world. it is passionate truth, which is very different from cool truth; it is subjective, not objective; romantic, not classical, to use the old terms which few nowadays except professor babbitt's readers understand. nor is it the truth that wells, let us say, or, to use a greater name, tolstoy was seeking. it is not didactic or even interpretative, but only the truth about the difference between the world as it is and the world as it was expected to be; an impressionistic truth; in fact, the truth about _my_ experiences, which is very different from what i may sometime think to be the truth about mankind. it will be strange if nothing very good comes from this impulse, for the purpose to "tell the world" that my vision of america is startlingly different from what i have read about america is identical with that break with the past which has again and again been prelude to a new era. i do not wish to discuss the alleged new era. like the younger generation, it has been discussed too much and is becoming evidently self-conscious. but if the autobiographical novel is to be regarded as its literary herald (and they are all prophetic declarations of independence), then we may ask what has the new generation given us so far in the way of literary art. apparently the novel and the short story, as we have known them, are to be scrapped. plot, which began to break down with the russians, has crumbled into a maze of incident. you can no longer assume that the hero's encounter with a gipsy in chapter ii is preparation for a tragedy in chapter xxix. in all probability the gipsy will never be heard from again. she is irrelevant except as a figment in the author's memory, as an incident in autobiography. setting, the old familiar background, put on the story like wall- paper on a living-room, has suffered a sea change also. it comes now by flashes, like a movie-film. what the ego remembers, that it describes, whether the drip of a faucet or the pimple on the face of a traffic policeman. as for character, there is usually but one, the hero; for the others live only as he sees them, and fade out when he looks away. if he is highly sexed, like erik dorn, the other figures appear in terms of sex, just as certain rays of light will bring out only one color in the objects they shine against. the novel, in fact, has melted and run down into a diary, with sometimes no unity except the personality whose sensations are recorded. many of us have wished to see the conventional story forms broken to bits. it was getting so that the first sentence ofa short story or the first chapter of a novel gave the whole show away. we welcomed the english stories of a decade ago that began to give the complexities of life instead of the conventions of a plot. but this complete liquidation rather appals us. the novels i have mentioned so far in this article have all together not enough plot to set up one lively victorian novel. benet, dos passos, fitzgerald--the flood-gates of each mind have been opened, and all that the years had dammed up bursts forth in a deluge of waters, carrying flotsam and jetsam and good things and mud. it is not surprising that, having given up plot, these writers escape from other restraints also. the more energetic among them revel in expression, and it seems to make little difference whether it is the exquisite chiaroscuro of chicago they are describing, or spots on a greasy apron. the less enthusiastic are content to be as full of gritty realistic facts as a fig of seeds; but with all of them everything from end to beginning, from bottom to top, must be said. and just here lies the explanation of the whole matter. as one considers the excessive naturalism of the young realists and asks just why they find it necessary to be so excessively, so effusively realistic, the conviction is inborn that they are not realists at all as hardy, howells, even james were realists; they are romanticists of a deep, if not the deepest, dye, even the heartiest lover of sordid incident among them all. i am aware, of course, that "romantic" is a dangerous word, more overworked than any other in the vocabulary of criticism, and very difficult to define. but in contrast with its opposites it can be made to mean something definite. now, the romanticism of the juniors is not the opposite of realism; it sometimes embraces realism too lovingly for the reader's comfort. but it is the opposite of classicism. it is emotional expansiveness as contrasted with the classic doctrine of measure and restraint. by this, the older meaning of romanticism, we may put a tag upon the new men that will help to identify them. their desire is to free their souls from the restraints of circumstance, to break through rule and convention, to let their hearts expand. but they do not fly into byronic melancholy or wordsworthian enthusiasm for the mysterious abstract; they are far more likely to fly away from them. byron and wordsworth do not interest them, and tennyson they hate. romantic in mood, they are realistic, never classical, in their contact with experience. in poetry they prefer free verse, in prose they eschew grand phrases and sonorous words. it has been the hard realism of an unfriendly world that has scraped them to the raw, and they retaliate by vividly describing all the unpleasant things they remember. taught by the social philosophers and war's disillusions that denmark is decaying, they do not escape to cathay or bohemia, but stay at home and passionately narrate what denmark has done to them. romantic zolas, they have stolen the weapons of realism to fight the battle of their ego. and the fact that a few pause in their naturalism to soar into idyllic description or the rapture of beauty merely proves my point, that they are fundamentally romantics seeking escape, and that autobiographical realism is merely romanticism _a la mode_. let us criticize it as such, remembering that we may be reading the first characteristic work of a new literary era. let us give over being shocked. those who were shocked by byron, the apostle of expansiveness, merely encouraged him to be more shocking. nor is it any use to sit upon the hydrant of this new expansiveness. if a youth desires to tell the world what has happened to him, he must be allowed to do so, provided he has skill and power enough to make us listen. and these juniors have power even when skill has not yet been granted them. what is needed is a hose to stop the waste of literary energy, to conserve and direct it. call for a hose, then, as much as you please, but do not try to stop the waters with your moses's rod of conservative indignation. it is no crime to be a romantic,--it is a virtue, if that is the impulse of the age,--but it is a shame to be a wasteful romantic. waste has always been the romantic vice--waste of emotion, waste of words, the waste that comes from easy profusion of sentiment and the formlessness that permits it. think of "the excursion," of southey, and of the early poems of shelley, of scott at his wordiest. and these writers also are wasteful, in proportion to their strength. they waste especially their imagination. books like "the three soldiers" spill over in all directions--spill into poetry, philosophy, into endless conversation, and into everything describable. books like "the beginning of wisdom" are still more wasteful. here is the poignant biography of a boy who loves his environment even when it slays him, plus a collection of prose idylls, plus a group of poems, plus a good piece of special reporting, plus an assortment of brilliant letters; and imbedded in the mass, like a thread of gold in a tangle of yarn, as fresh and exquisite a love-story as we have had in recent english. of course i do not mean that all these elements cannot be woven into, made relevant to, a theme, a story. stendhal, himself a romantic, as these men are romantics, could do it. but our romantics do not so weave them; they fling them out as contributions to life's evidence, they fail to relate them to a single interpretation of living, and half of the best incidents are waste, and clog the slow-rolling wheels of the story. they waste their energy also. so keenly do they love their own conception of true living that their imaginations dwell with a kind of horrid fascination upon the ugly things that thwart them. hence in a novel like "main street," the interest slackens as one begins to feel that the very vividness of the story comes from a vision strained and aslant, unable to tear eyes from the things that have cramped life instead of expanding it. the things that these writers love in life often they never reach until the last chapter, and about them they have little to say, being exhausted by earlier virulence. waste, of course, is a symptom of youth and vitality as well as of unbridled romanticism, but that is no reason for praising a book because it is disorderly. we do not praise young, vigorous states for being disorderly. life may not be orderly, but literature must be. that is a platitude which it seems necessary to repeat. it is difficult to estimate absolute achievement except across time, and the time has been too brief to judge of the merits of the young romanticists. my guess is that some of them will go far. but the diagnosis at present seems to show an inflammation of the ego. the new generation is discovering its soul by the pain of its bruises, as a baby is made aware of its body by pin-pricks and chafes. it is explaining its dissatisfactions with more violence than art. therefore at present the satirists and the educators hold the best cards, and most of them are elderly. no one of _les jeunes_ writes with the skill, with the art, of mrs. wharton, miss sinclair, tarkington, galsworthy, or wells. it should not long be so in a creative generation. in sheer emotion, in vivid protest that is not merely didactic, the advantage is all with the youngsters. but they waste it. they have learned to criticize their elders, but not themselves. they have boycotted the books of writers who were young just before themselves, but they have not learned to put a curb on their own expansiveness. we readers suffer. we do not appreciate their talents as we might, because we lose our bearings in hectic words or undigested incident. we lose by the slow realization of their art. youth is a disease that cures itself, though sometimes too late. the criticism i have made, in so far as it refers to youthful impetuosity, is merely the sort of thing that has to be said to every generation, and very loudly to the romantic ones. but if these autobiographians are, as i believe, expansive romanticists, that is of deeper significance, and my hope is that the definition may prove useful to them as well as to readers who with an amazed affection persist in following them wherever they lead. puritans all when anything goes wrong in politics the american practice is to charge it against the administration. in literature all grievances are attributed to the puritans. if a well-written book does not sell, it is because the puritans warped our sense of beauty; if an honest discussion of sex is attacked for indecency, it is the fault of the puritan inheritance; if the heroes and heroines of new narratives in prose or verse jazz their way to destruction or impotence, it is in protest against the puritans. who is this terrible puritan? apparently he is all america's ancestor, and whether you were born in delaware or in south carolina, in montana or in jugoslavia, you must adopt him as great-great-grandfather or declare yourself alien. what was he, or rather, what did he stand for, and inflict upon us, to-day? here there is some confusion. according to one set of critics he is not so much a hater of the arts as indifferent to their charms, not so much a milton scornful of easy beauty, as a philistine, deaf and blind to the aesthetic. but these writers have apparently confounded great-great-grandfather puritan with grandpa victorian, the victorian that matthew arnold scolded and shaw made fun of. he is a type as different from the real puritan as the slum dweller from the primitive barbarian. "milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour" to flay such ignorant traducers of those who knew at least the beauty of austerity and holiness. according to a less numerous but more clear-headed group of enemies the puritan is to be censured chiefly for the rigidity of his conscience. he will not let us enjoy such "natural" pleasures as mirth, love, drinking, and idleness without a bitter antidote of remorse. he keeps books dull and reticent, makes plays virtuously didactic, and irritates all but the meek and the godly into revolt. i am not an uncritical admirer of the puritan, although i believe he is more nearly on the side of the angels than is his opposite. i deprecate the smug virtuosity which his kind often favor, i dislike a vinegar morality, and am repelled by the monstrous egoism of the idea that redeeming one's soul is such a serious matter that every moment spared from contemplating the sins of others or the pieties of oneself is irretrievably wasted. but i object still more strongly to the anti-puritans. those rebels who make unconventionality their only convention, with their distrust of duty because they see no reason to be dutiful, and their philosophic nihilism, which comes to this, that all things having been proved false except their own desires, their desires become a philosophy, those anti-puritans, as one sees them, especially in plays and on the stage, are an obstreperous, denying folk that seldom know their own minds to the end of the story. in fiction, distrusting what the puritans call duty, they are left gasping in the last chapter, wondering usually what they are to do next; while the delightful lack of conscience that makes the flappers audacious and the young men so unremorsefully naughty leads to nothing at the end but a passionate desire to discover some new reason for living (which i take to mean, a new conscience) even if homes and social utility are wrecked in the attempt. why has duty become so unpopular in american literature? is it because she is, after all, just what that loftiest if not most impeccable of puritans called her, stern daughter of the voice of god? is there to be no more sternness in our morals now we understand their psychology, no voice commanding us to do this or not to do that because there is a gulf set between worth and worthlessness? is it true that because we are not to be damned for playing golf on sunday, nothing can damn us? that because the rock-ribbed vermont ancestor's idea of duty can never be ours, we have no duty to acknowledge? is it true that if we cease being puritans we can remain without principle, swayed only by impulse and events? when these questions are answered to the hilt, we shall get something more vital than anti-puritanism in modern american literature. the older generation the american academy of arts and letters says a word for the older generation now and then by choosing new academicians from its ranks. no one else for a long while now has been so poor as to do it reverence. indeed, the readers of some of our magazines must have long since concluded that there are no fathers and mothers in the modern literary world, but only self-created heralds of the future who do not bother even to be rebellious against a generation they condemn. the older generation is in a difficult situation, because, apparently, no one knows precisely who and what it is. the younger generation, of course, is made up of every one who dislikes tennyson, believes in realism, reads de gourmont, and was not responsible for the war. that is perfectly definite. we are somewhat puzzled by the uncounted hordes of the youthful in appearance who support the movies, are stolidly conservative in the colleges, never heard of de gourmont, and have forgotten the war. but perhaps that is some other younger generation which no one has taken the trouble to write about--yet. as for the older generation, what actually is it, and who in reality are they? the general impression seems to be that they are the victorians, they are howells and his contemporaries, they are the men and women who created the family magazine, invented morality, revived puritanism, and tried to impose evolution on a society that preferred devolution by international combat. but these men are all dead, or have ceased writing. they are not _our_ older generation. it is true that they are famous and so convenient for reference, but it is not accurate nor fair to drag them from their graves for purposes of argument. the true older generation, of which one seldom hears in current criticism except in terms of abuse, remains to be discovered, and we herewith announce its personnel, so that the next time the youthful writer excoriates it in the abstract all may know just whom he means. among the older generation in american literature are h. l. mencken and mrs. edith wharton, booth tarkington and stuart p. sherman, miss amy lowell and mr. frank moore colby, robert frost and edwin arlington robinson, vachel lindsay and carl sandburg, mrs. gerould and professor william lyon phelps, edgar lee masters, joseph hergesheimer, and most of the more radicaleditors of new york. here is this group of desiccated victorians, upholders of the ethics of mr. pickwick, and the artistic theories of bulwer-lytton. here are the bogies of outworn conservatism, numbered like a football team. mark their names, and know from now on that most of the books that you have supposed were solid in artistry and mature in thought, though perhaps novel in tone or in method, were written by the older generation. perhaps when the younger generation pretend to confuse their immediate predecessors with ruskin and carlyle, with browning, emerson, hawthorne, longfellow, and matthew arnold, they are merely strategic. for it is still dangerous to assault the citadels of the great victorians with no greater books than the youthful volumes of - , no matter how many breaches the war has left in the walls of their philosophy. it is far easier to assume that they are still alive in pallid survival, and to attack a hypothetic older generation, which, representing nothing real, can therefore not strike back. let the younger generation go back to its muttons, let it attend to its most pressing business, which is to create. it is vigorous, prolific, and, to my judgment, full of promise, but so far has done little or nothing not summarized in these words. it must pay its debt to time before it grows much older, or go down among expectations unrealized. it has few hours to waste upon attacking an older generation which, as it is described, does not exist except in youthful imagination, a generation actually of the middle-aged which in the meantime is bearing the burden of invention, creation, revolution in art while the youngsters are talking. i should like to see less about the younger and more of this older generation in literary criticism. it is a fresh subject, scarcely touched by writers, and full of surprises. the jaded reader should be told that, in spite of rumors to the contrary, the middle-aged still exist. a literature of protest i have pursued the discussions of the new american realism through university gatherings and literary inquests. stripped of all metaphysics and relieved of all subtlety the conclusion of the matter is inescapable. it is not the realism of the realists, or the freedom of free verse, or the radicalism of the radical that in itself offends the critics, it is the growing ugliness of american literature. the harsh and often vulgar lines of masters (so they say) seem to disdain beauty. vachel lindsay's shouted raptures are raucous. miss lowell's polyphonies have intellectual beauty, but the note is sharp, the splendors pyrotechnic. robert frost's restrained rhythms are homely in the single line. the "advanced" novelists, who win the prizes and stir up talk, are flat in style when not muddy in their english. they do not lift. an eighteenth century critic would call american literature ugly, or at least homely, if he dipped into its realities, rococo if he did not. this is the sum of a criticism so strongly felt that it raises a barrier to appreciation, almost a gate shut against knowledge between the good american readers and the progressives in our literature. sandburg and lindsay between them will cause more acrimony in a gathering of english teachers than even harold bell wright. miss lowell carries controversy with her, triumphantly riding upon it. their critics wish form as they have known form, want beauty such as they possess in riper literatures, want maturity, richness, suavity, grace, and the lift of noble thinking, nobly expressed. it may be remarked, in passing, that they also would like to live in english manors in gardened landscapes and have french cathedrals rise above their perfect towns! it ought to be clear that we shall never get beauty of this kind, or of any absolute kind, in american writing until there is more beauty in american life. amidst the vulgarities of signboards, cries of cheap newspapers, noisy hustle of trivial commercialism, and the flatness of standardized living, it is hard to feel spiritual qualities higher than optimism and reform. in general, wherever we have touched america we have made it uglier, as a necessary preliminary perhaps to making it anything at all, but uglier nevertheless. there was more hardship perhaps but also more clear beauty in colonial days than in our own. more clear beauty, we say, because the present has its own vigorous beauty, more complex than what went before, but not yet clarified from the ugly elements that are making it. the forests and the skyscrapers are beautiful in america, but pretty much everything else below and between is soiled or broken by progress and prosperity. and it is of the things in between, of america in the making, that these new writers, whose lack of pure beauty we deplore, and whose occasional gratuitous ugliness we dislike, are writing. they are protesting against its sordidness and crudity far more effectively than the cloistered reader who recites shelley, saying "why can't they write as he does." like all that is human they share the qualities of their environment, like all fighters they acquire the faults of the enemy. they hate, often enough, the ugliness which a generation of progress has implanted in their own minds. they have been educated, perhaps, by the movies, main street conversation, formalized schools, and stale methodism, and they hate their education. or like the poets mentioned above they are moved by the pathos, the injustice, the confused beauty, the promise, not of some land of the past, but of the country under their feet, and write of what stirs them in terms that fit. it is only when one understands this new american writing to be a literature of protest, that one begins to sympathize with its purposes, admire its achievements, and be tolerant of its limitations. for such a literature has very definite limitations. it is preparative rather than ultimate. the spaciousness of great imagination is seldom in it, and it lacks those grand and simple conceptions which generalize upon the human race. it is cluttered with descriptions of the enemy, it is nervous, or morbid, or excited, or over-emphatic. that it strikes out occasional sparks of vivid beauty, and has already produced masterpieces in poetry, is to be wondered at and praised. but some one had to begin to write of the united states as it is. we could not go on with sentimental novels and spineless lyrics forever. some writers had to refocus the instrument and look at reality again. and what the honest saw was not beautiful as tennyson knew beauty, not grand, not even very pleasant. it is their job to make beauty out of it, beauty of a new kind probably, because it will accompany new truth; but they must have time. surprise, shock, experiment, come first. the new literature deserves criticism, but it also deserves respect. contempt for it is misplaced, aversion is dangerous since it leads to ignorance, wholesale condemnation such as one hears from professional platforms and reads in newspaper editorials is as futile as the undiscriminating praise of those who welcome novelty just because it is new. barbarians a la mode the liberal mind, which just now is out of a job in politics, might very well have a look at the present state of literature. a task is there ready for it. our literature is being stretched and twisted or hacked and hewed by dogmatists. most of the critics are too busy gossiping about plots and the private lives of authors to devote much attention to principles. but the noble few who still can write about a book without falling into it, or criticize an author's style without dragging in his taste in summer resorts, are chiefly concerned with classifications. is our author conservative or radical? are his novels long or short skirted? does he write for _harper's_ or _the dial_? they have divided america chronologically into the old and the new and geographically into east or west of the alleghanies, or north or south of fourteenth street in new york. such creative writers as have a definite philosophy of composition are equally categorical. and both are calling upon liberal minds, who are supposed to have no principles of their own, to umpire the controversy. the liberal mind, which i believe in, though i hesitate to define it, has too much work before it to umpire in a dispute over the relative taste of the decayed and the raw. in literature, as in pretty much everything else, the central problem is not the struggle of the old with the new; it is the endless combat of civilization (which is old _and_ new) against barbarism. under which banner our writers are enlisting is the vital question. whether they are radical or conservative will always in the view of history be interesting, but may be substantially unimportant. and the function of the liberal mind, with its known power to dissolve illiberal dogmatism, is to discover the barbarian wherever he raises his head, and to convert or destroy him. the greeks had a short way of defining the barbarian which we can only envy. to them, all men not greeks were barbarians. by this they meant that only the greeks had learned to desire measure in all things, liberty safeguarded by law, and knowledge of the truth about life. men not desiring these things were barbarous, no matter how noble, how rich, and how honest. the ancient and highly conservative egyptians were barbarous; the youthful and new- fangled gauls were barbarous. an egyptian in nothing else resembled a gaul, but both in the eyes of the greek were barbarians. evolution and devolution have intervened. the gaul has become one of the standards of civilization; the egyptian has died of his conservatism; but the problem of the barbarian remains the same. there are neo-gauls to-day and neo-egyptians. these gentry do not belong to the welter of vulgar barbarism, the curse of a half educated, half democratized age. they are found among the upper classes of the intellect, and can rightly be called by such names as conservative or radical, which show that they are part of the minority that thinks. indeed, they are not barbarous at all in the harsh modern sense of the word; yet the greeks would have condemned them. the barbarism of the neo-gaul is unrestraint ("punch" is the nearest modern equivalent). the neo-gaul is an innovator and this is his vice. it is a byproduct of originality and a symptom of a restless desire for change. the realist who makes a poem, not on his lady's eyebrows but her intestines, is a good current example. the novelist who shovels undistinguished humanity, just because it is human, into his book is another. the versifier who twists and breaks his rhythm solely in order to get new sounds is a third. a fourth is the stylist who writes in disjointed phrases and expletives, intended to represent the actual processes of the mind. the realist poet, so the greeks would have said, lacks measure. he destroys the balance of his art by asking your attention for the strangeness of his subject. it is as if a sculptor should make a venus of chewing gum. the novelist lacks self-restraint. life interests him so much that he devours without digesting it. the result is like a moving picture run too fast. the versifier also lacks measure. he is more anxious to be new than to be true, and he seeks effects upon the reader rather than forms for his thought. the bizarre stylist misses truth by straining too much to achieve it. words are only symbols. they never more than roughly represent a picture of thought. a monologue like this, as the heroine goes to shop: chapel street...the old hardware shop...scissors, skates glittering, moonlight on the ice...old dr. brown's head, like a rink. rink...a queer word! pigeons in the air above the housetops--automobiles like elephants. was her nose properly powdered?... had she cared to dance with him after all? is not absolutely true: it is not the wordless images that float through the idle mind, but only a symbol of them, more awkward and less informative than the plain english of what the heroine felt and thought. all these instances are barbarous in the greek sense, and their perpetrators, no matter how cultivated, how well-meaning, how useful sometimes as pioneers and pathbreakers, are barbarians. some of them should be exposed; some chided; some labored with, according to the magnitude and the nature of their offense. the critics who uphold and approve them should be dealt with likewise. and it is the reader with the liberal mind who is called to the task. he is in sympathy, at least, with change, and knows that the history of civilization has been a struggle to break away from tradition and yet not go empty-handed; he can understand the passion to express old things in a new and better way, or he is not intellectually liberal. it takes a liberal mind to distinguish between barbarism and progress. next there is the _rigor mortis_ of the neo-egyptians, the barbarism of the dead hand, called by the unkind and the undiscriminating, academic barbarism. let us humor the menckenites by so calling it, and then add that it is by no means confined to the colleges, although it is a vice more familiar in critics than in creative artists. a ph.d. is quite unnecessary in order to be academic in this sense, just as one does not have to be a scholar in order to be pedantical. to stand pat in one's thinking (and this is the neo-egyptian fault) is to be barbarous, whatever the profession of the thinker. true, the victims of this hardening of the brain are precisely those men and women most likely to fling taunts at the moderns, just those who would rather be charged with immorality than barbarism. and yet, to be bound to the past is as barbarous in the greek sense as to be wholly immersed in the present. the egyptians for all their learning were barbarians. barbarian is not as rude a word as it sounds. most of the great romanticists had strains of the barbarous in them--the young shakespeare among them. indeed, much may be said for sound barbarian literature, until it becomes self-conscious, though not much for barbarian criticism. nevertheless, i do not intend in this sally against the slavish barbarism of the merely academic mind to hurl the epithet recklessly. lusty conservatives who attack free verse, free fiction, ultra realism, "jazzed" prose, and the socialistic drama as the diseases of the period have my respect and sympathy, when it is a disease and not change as change that they are attacking. and, often enough, these manifestations _are_ symptoms of disease, a plethoric disease arising from too high blood pressure. hard-hitting conservatives were never more needed in literature than now, when any one can print anything that is novel, and find some one to approve of it. but there are too many respectable barbarians among our american conservatives who write just what they wrote twenty years ago, and like just what they liked twenty years ago, because that is their nature. in they would have done the same for . without question men were regretting in the genius of the youthful shakespeare of the ' 's, later quenched by commercialism (see the appeals to the pit and the topical references in "hamlet"); and good conservatives were certainly regretting the sad course of the drama which, torn from the scholars and flung to the mob, had become mad clowning. what we need in the tory line is not such ice-bound derelicts but men who are passionate about the past because they find their inspiration there, men and women who belabor the present not for its existence, but because it might have been better if it had been wiser. they must, in short, be greeks, not barbarians. it is the reverse of barbarous to defend the old, but the man who can see no need, no good, no hope in change is a barbarian. he flinches from the truth physical and the truth spiritual that life is motion. i particularly refer to the literary person who sneers at novels because they are not epics, and condemns new poems or plays unread if they deal with a phase of human evolution that does not please him. i mean the critic who drags his victim back to aristotle or matthew arnold and slays him on a text whose application aristotle or arnold would have been the first to deny. i mean the teacher who by ironic thrust and visible contempt destroys the faith of youth in the literary present without imparting more than a pallid interest in the past. i mean the essayist who in described masefield as an unsound and dangerous radical in verse, and in accepts him as the standard "modern" poet by whom his degenerate successors are to be measured. all this is barbarism because it is ignorance or denial of the laws of growth. it belongs anthropologically with totemism, sacerdotalism, neo-ritualism, and every other remnant of the terrible shackles of use and wont which chained early man to his past. it is egyptian. its high priests are sometimes learned but their minds are frozen. beware of them. in england, so far as i am able to judge, this variety of barbarism shows itself usually in a rather snobbish intolerance of anything not good form in literature. the universities still protect it, but its home is in london, among the professional middle class. in america its symptom is well-disguised fear. some of us are afraid of our literary future just as many of us are afraid of democracy. poetry and criticism (we feel) which used to be written by classicists and gentlemen are now in the hands of the corn-fed multitude, educated god knows how or where. fiction, once a profession, has become a trade, and so has the drama. the line between journalism and literature is lost. grub street has become an emporium. any one, anything can get into a story or a sonnet.... the greek of to-day (as we venture to define him) views all this with some regret, and more concern. he sees that fine traditions are withering, that fine things are being marred by ignorant handling. he fears debasement, he hates vulgarity, and his realist soul admits the high probability of both in a society whose standards are broader than they are high. but he also sees new energies let loose and new resources discovered; he recognizes new forms of expression, uncouth or colloquial perhaps, but capable of vitality and truth, and not without beauty. he bends his mind toward them, knowing that if he ignores them their authors will ignore him and his kind. the egyptian is afraid. he pulls his mantle closer about him and walks by on the other side. here again is work for the liberal mind. if it is really liberal-- which means that training and disposition have made it free to move through both the past and the present--it can cope with this egyptian barbarism; for liberal-minded lovers of literature, by performing a very simple operation in psychoanalysis, can understand how love for the good old times may cause fear lest we lose their fruits, and how fear blinds the critic's eye, makes his tongue harsh, and his judgment rigid as death. liberalism in politics is sulking just now, like achilles in his tent, its aid having been invited too early, or too late. but the liberal spirit can never rest, and we solicit its help in literature. i have mentioned the gauls and the egyptians as the enemies within the camp of the intellectual, but beyond them lie the uncounted numbers of the outer barbarians, the mass of the unillumined, to whom neither tradition nor revolt, nor anything which moves and has its being in the intellect has any significance. here is the common enemy of all, who can be conquered only by converting him. when the gaul and the egyptian are liberalized, the real job begins. "if we compose well here, to parthia." iv the reviewing of books a prospectus for criticism criticism, in one respect, is like science: there is pure science, so-called, and applied science; there is pure criticism and applied criticism, which latter is reviewing. in applied science, principles established elsewhere are put to work; in reviewing, critical principles are, or should be, put to work in the analysis of books, but the books, if they are really important, often make it necessary to erect new critical principles. in fact, it is impossible to set a line where criticism ceases and reviewing begins. good criticism is generally applicable to all literature; good reviewing is good criticism applied to a new book. i see no other valid distinction. reviewing in america has had a career by no means glorious. in the early nineteenth century, at the time of our first considerable productivity in literature, it was sporadic. the great guns-- lowell, emerson--fired critical broadsides into the past; only occasionally (as in "a fable for critics") were they drawn into discussions of their contemporaries, and then, as in the emerson- whitman affair, they sometimes regretted it. reviewing was carried on in small type, in the backs of certain magazines. most of it was verbose and much of it was worthless as criticism. the belated recognition of the critical genius of poe was due to the company he kept. he was a sadly erratic reviewer, as often wrong, i suppose, as right, but the most durable literary criticism of the age came from his pen, and is to be found in a review, a review of hawthorne's short stories. after the civil war the situation did not immediately improve. we had perhaps better reviewing, certainly much better mediums of criticism, such, for example, as _the nation_, and, later, _the critic_, but not more really excellent criticism. the magazines and newspapers improved, the weekly, as a medium of reviewing, established itself, though it functioned imperfectly; the individuals of force and insight who broke through current comment into criticism were more plentiful, but not more eminent. the new era in reviewing, our era, began with two phenomena, of which the first had obscure beginnings and the second can be exactly dated. the first was modern journalism. just when journalism became personal, racy, and inclusive of all the interests of modern life, i cannot say. kipling exhibits its early effects upon literature, but kipling was an effect, not a cause. no matter when it began, we have seen, in the decade or two behind us, reviewing made journalistic, an item of news, but still more a means of entertainment. the journalistic reviewer, who is still the commonest variety, had one great merit. he was usually interesting. naturally so, since he wrote not to criticize the book that had been given him, but to interest his readers. yet by the very nature of the case he labored under a disadvantage which forever barred him from calling himself critic as well as reviewer. he was a specialist in reporting, in making a story from the most unpromising material, and also in the use of his mother tongue, but a specialist, usually, in no other field whatsoever. fiction, poetry, biography, science, history, politics, theology--whatever came to his mill was grist for the paper, and the less he knew of the subject and the less he had read and thought, the more emphatic were his opinions. the club and saber work of pope's day and christopher north's has gone--advertising has made it an expensive luxury, and here at least commercialism has been of service to literature. it was wholesale and emphatic praise that became a trademark of journalistic reviewing. first novels, or obscure novels, were sometimes handled roughly by a reviewer whose duty was to prepare a smart piece of copy. but when books by the well known came to his desk it was safer to praise than to damn, because in damning one had to give reasons, whereas indiscriminate praise needed neither knowledge nor excuse. furthermore, since the chief object was to have one's review read, excessive praise had every advantage over measured approval. who would hesitate between two articles, one headed "the best book of the year," and the other, "a new novel critically considered"! thus, journalism _per se_ has done little for the cause of american reviewing, and directly or indirectly it has done much harm, if only by encouraging publishers who found no competent discussions of their wares to set up their own critics, who poured out through the columns of an easy press commendations of the new books which were often most intelligent, but never unbiased. the newspapers, however, have rendered one great service to criticism. in spite of their attempts to make even the most serious books newsy news, they, and they alone, have kept pace with the growing swarm of published books. the literary supplement, which proposed to review all books not strictly technical or transient, was a newspaper creation. and the literary supplement, which grew from the old book page, contained much reviewing which was in no bad sense journalistic. without it the public would have had only the advertisements and the publishers' announcements to classify, analyze, and in some measure describe the regiment of books that marches in advance of our civilization. we were not to be dependent, however, upon the budding supplements and the clever, ignorant reviewing, which, in spite of notable exceptions, characterized the newspaper view of books. the technical critic of technical books had long been practising, and his ability increased with the advance in scholarship that marked the end of the nineteenth century. the problem was how to make him write for the general intelligent reader. for years the old _nation_, under the editorship of garrison and of godkin, carried on this struggle almost single-handed. for a generation it was the only american source from which an author might expect a competent review of a serious, non-technical book. but the weight of the endeavor was too much for it. fiction it largely evaded, as the london _times literary supplement_ does to-day. and with all the serious books in english awaiting attention in a few pages of a single weekly, it is no wonder that the shelves of its editorial office held one of the best modern libraries in new york! or that christmas, , was the time chosen to review a gift edition of ! the old _dial_ had a like struggle, and a resembling difficulty. it was in that _the new republic_ applied a new solution to the problem, and from its pages and from the other "intellectual weeklies" which have joined it, has come not merely some of the best reviewing that we have had, but also a distinct lift upwards in the standard of our discussion of contemporary books of general interest. after one could expect to find american reviews of certain kinds of books which were as excellent as any criticisms from england or from france. but the solution applied was of such a character as to limit definitely its application. _the new republic_, the present _nation_, _the freeman_, _the weekly review_, and, in a little different sense, _the dial_, were founded by groups held together, with the exception of _the dial_ coterie, not by any common attitude towards literature, or by any specific interest in literature itself, but rather by a common social philosophy. these journals, again with the one exception, were devoted primarily to the application of their respective social philosophies. even when in reviews or articles there was no direct social application, there was a clear irradiation from within. when _the new republic_ is humorous, it is a social-liberal humor. when _the freeman_ is ironic there is usually an indirect reference to the single tax. and _the dial_ will be modern or perish. as a result of all this the space given to books at large in the social-political journals was small. and in that space one could prophesy with some exactness the reviewing to be expected. books of social philosophy, novels with a thesis, poetry of radical emotion, documented history, and the criticism of politics or economic theory have had such expert reviewing as america has never before provided in such quantity. but there was a certain monotony in the conclusions reached. "advanced" books had "advanced" reviewers who approved of the author's ideas even if they did not like his book. conservative books were sure to be attacked in one paragraph even if they were praised in another. what was much more deplorable, good, old-fashioned books, that were neither conservative nor radical, but just human, had an excellent chance of interesting no one of these philosophical editors and so of never being reviewed at all. irving, cooper of the leatherstocking series, possibly hawthorne, and quite certainly the author of "huckleberry finn" would have turned over pages for many a day without seeing their names at all. thus the intellectual weekly gave us an upstanding, competentcriticism of books with ideas in them--when the ideas seemed important to the editors; a useful service, but not a comprehensive one; the criticism of a trend rather than a literature; of the products of a social group rather than the outspeaking of a nation. something more was needed. something more was needed; and specifically literary mediums that should be catholic in criticism, comprehensive in scope, sound, stimulating, and accurate. to be catholic in criticism does not mean to be weak and opinionless. a determination to discuss literature honestly and with insight, letting conclusions be what they must, may be regarded as a sufficient editorial stock in trade. it is fundamental, but it is not sufficient. just as there is personality behind every government, so there should be a definite set of personal convictions behind literary criticism, which is not a science, though science may aid it. sterilized, dehumanized criticism is almost a contradiction in terms, except in those rare cases where the weighing of evidential facts is all that is required. but these cases are most rare. even a study of the text of beowulf, or a history of norman law, will be influenced by the personal emotions of the investigator, and must be so criticized. men choose their philosophy according to their temperament; so do writers write; and so must critics criticize. which is by no means to say that criticism is merely an affair of temperament, but rather to assert that temperament must not be left out of account in conducting or interpreting criticism. ideally, then, the editors of a catholic review should have definite convictions, if flexible minds, established principles, if a wide latitude of application. but although a review may thus be made catholic, it cannot thus attain comprehensiveness. there are too many books; too many branches upon the luxuriant tree of modern knowledge. no editorial group, no editorial staff, can survey the field competently unless they strictly delimit it by selection, and that means not to be comprehensive. yet if the experts are to be called in, the good critics, the good scholars, the good scientists, until every book is reviewed by the writer best qualified to review it, then we must hope to attain truth by averages as the scientists do, rather than by dogmatic edict. for if it is difficult to guarantee in a few that sympathy with all earnest books which does not preclude rigid honesty in the application of firmly held principles, it is more difficult with the many. and if it is hard to exclude bias, inaccuracy, over- statement, and inadequacy from the work even of a small and chosen group, it is still harder to be certain of complete competence if the net is thrown more widely. in fact, there is no absolute insurance against bad criticism except the intelligence of the reader. he must discount where discount is necessary, he must weigh the authority of the reviewer, he must listen to the critic as the protestant to his minister, willing to be instructed, but aware of the fallibility of man. hence, a journal of comprehensive criticism must first select its reviewers with the greatest care and then print vouchers for their opinions, which will be the names of the reviewers. hence it must open its columns to rebuttals or qualifications, so that the reader may form his own conclusions as to the validity of the criticism, and, after he has read the book, judge its critics. all this is a world away from the anonymous, dogmatic reviewing of a century ago, but who shall say that in this respect our practice is retrograde? it is a great and sprawling country, this america, with all manner of men of all manners in it, and the days of patent medicines have passed, when one bottle was supposed to contain a universal cure. but in this matter of reading, which must be the chief concern of those who support a critical journal, there is one disease common to most of us that can be diagnosed with certainty, and one sure, though slow-working, remedy, that can be applied. we are uncritical readers. we like too readily, which is an amiable fault; we dislike too readily, which is a misfortune. we accept the cheap when we might have the costly book. we dislike the new, the true, the accurate, and the beautiful, because we will not seek, or cannot grasp, them. we are afflicted with that complex of democracy--a distrust of the best. nine out of ten magazines, nine out of ten libraries, nine out of ten intelligent american minds prove this accusation. and the cure is more civilization, more intellectuality, a finer and stronger emotion? one might as well say that the cure for being sick is to get well! this, indeed, is the cure; but the remedy is a vigorous criticism. call in the experts, let them name themselves and their qualifications like ancient champions, and then proceed to lay about with a will. sometimes the maiden literature, queen of the tournament, will be slain instead of the knight of error, and often the spectators will be scratched by the whir of a sword. nevertheless, the fight is in the open, we know the adversaries, and the final judgment, whether to salute a victor or condemn an impostor, is ours. thus, figuratively, one might describe the proper function in criticism of a liberal journal of catholic criticism to-day. one thing i have omitted, that its duty is not limited to criticism, for if it is to be comprehensive, it must present also vast quantities of accurate and indispensable facts, the news of literature. and one prerequisite i have felt it unnecessary to dwell upon. unless its intent is honest, and its editors independent of influence from any self-interested source, the literary tournament of criticism becomes either a parade of the virtues with banners for the favorites, or a melee where rivals seek revenge. venal criticism is the drug and dishonest criticism the poison of literature. the race of reviewers as a reviewer of books, my experience has been lengthy rather than considerable. it is, indeed, precisely twenty-two years since i wrote my first review, which ended, naturally, with the words "a good book to read of a winter evening before a roaring fire." i remember them because the publishers, who are lovers of platitudes, quoted them, to my deep gratification, and perhaps because i had seen them before. since then i have reviewed at least twice as many books as there are years in this record--about as many, i suppose, as a book-page war-horse in racing trim could do in a month, or a week. my credentials are not impressive in this category, but perhaps they will suffice. as an author, my claim to enter upon this self-contained symposium which i am about to present is somewhat stronger. authors, of course, read all the reviews of their books, even that common american variety which runs like the telegraphic alphabet: quote-- summarize--quote--quote--summarize--quote, and so on up to five dollars' worth, space rates. i have read all the reviews of my books except those which clipping bureaus seeking a subscription or kind friends wishing to chastise vicariously have neglected to send me. as an author i can speak with mingled feelings, but widely, of reviews. editorially my experience has been equally poignant. for ten years i have read reviews, revised and unrevised, in proof and out of it. i have cut reviews that needed cutting and meekly endured the curses of the reviewer. i have printed conscientiously reviews that had better been left unwritten, and held my head bloody but unbowed up to the buffets of the infuriated authors. as an editor i may say that i am at home, though not always happy, with reviewing and reviewers. and now, when in one of those rare moments of meditation which even new york permits i ask myself why does every man or woman with the least stir of literature in them wish to review books, my trinitarian self--critic, author, editor--holds high debate. for a long time i have desired to fight it out, and find, if it can be found, the answer. as an author, i have a strong distaste for reviewing. in the creative mood of composition, or in weary relaxation, reviewing seems the most ungrateful of tasks. nothing comes whole to a reviewer. half of every book must elude him, and the other half he must compress into snappy phrases. i watch him working upon that corpus, which so lately was a thing of life and movement--my book-- and see that he cannot lift it; that he must have some hand-hold to grip it by--my style or my supposed interest in the socialist party, or the fact that i am a professor or a roman catholic. unless he can get some phrase that will explain the characters of my women, the length of my sentences, and the moral i so carefully hid in the last chapter, he is helpless. sometimes i find him running for a column without finding a gate to my mind, and then giving it up in mid-paragraph. sometimes he gets inside, but dashes for the exit sign and is out before i know what he thinks. sometimes he finds an idea to his liking, wraps up in it, and goes to sleep. i recognize his usefulness. i take his hard raps meekly and even remember them when next i begin to write. i do not hate him much when he tells the public not to read me. there is always the chance that he is right for _his_ public; not, thank heavens, for mine. i am furious only when it is clear that he has not read me himself. but i cannot envy him. it is so much more agreeable to make points than to find them. it is so much easier, if you have a little talent, to build some kind of an engine that will run than to explain what precise fault prevents it from being the best. when i am writing a book i cannot understand the mania for criticism that seems to infect the majority of the literary kind. as a reviewer i must again confess, although as an editor i may bitterly regret the confession, that the passion for reviewing is almost inexplicable. reviewing has the primal curse of hard labor upon it. you must do two kinds of work at once, and be adequately rewarded for neither. first you must digest another man's conception, assimilate his ideas, absorb his imagination. it is like eating a cold dinner on a full stomach. and then when you have eaten and digested, you must tell how you feel about it-- briefly, cogently, and in words that cannot be misunderstood. furthermore, your feelings must be typical, must represent what a thousand stomachs will feel, or should feel, or could feel if they felt at all, or instead of being hailed as a critic you will be accused of dyspepsia. the mere mental labor of picking up the contents of a book as you proceed with your criticism, and tucking them in here and there where they fit, is so great that, speaking as a reviewer, i should give up reviewing if there were no more compelling reasons than requests to write criticism. there are, there must be; and still speaking as a reviewer i begin to glimpse one or two of them. revenge is not one. critics have written for revenge, quoting gleefully, "o that mine enemy would write a book!" pope is our classic example. but publishers have made that form of literary vendetta unprofitable nowadays, and i am glad they have done so. much wit, but little criticism, has been inspired by revenge. furthermore, i notice in my own case, and my editorial self confirms the belief, that the reviewer craves books to extol, not books to condemn. he is happiest when his author is sympathetic to his own temperament. antipathetic books must be forced upon him. which leads me to the further conclusion that the prime motive for reviewing is the creative instinct. we all of us have it, all of the literary folk who make up a most surprising proportion of every community in the united states. it works on us constantly. sometimes it comes to a head and then we do a story or a poem, an essay or a book; but in the meantime it is constantly alive down below, drawn toward every sympathetic manifestation without, craving self-expression and, in default of that, expression by others. if a book is in us we write; if it is not, we seize upon another man's child, adopt it as ours, talk of it, learn to understand it, let it go reluctantly with our blessing, and depart vicariously satisfied. that is the hope, the ever-renewed hope, with which the besotted reviewer takes up reviewing. the creative instinct indeed is sexed, like the human that possesses it. it seeks a mystical union with the imaginings of others. the poet, the novelist, the essayist, seek the mind of the reader; the critic seeks the mind of the writer. that we get so much bad reviewing is due to incompatibility of temperament or gross discrepancy in the mating intellects. yet reviewers (and authors), like lovers, hope ever for the perfect match. i know one critic who tore his review in pieces because it revealed the charlatanism of his beloved author. i know an author who burnt his manuscript because his friend and critic had misunderstood him. i see a thousand reviews (and have written several of them) where book and reviewer muddle along together like the partners of everyday marriages. but next time, one always hopes, it will be different. as an editor, i confess that i view all this effusion with some distrust. one plain fact stands high and dry above the discussion: books are being published daily, and some one must tell the busy and none too discriminating public what they are worth--not to mention the librarians who are so engaged in making out triple cards and bibliographies and fitting titles to vague recollections that they have no time left to read. furthermore, if reviewing is a chore at worst, and at best a desire to gratify a craving for the unappeasable, editing reviews is still more chorelike, and seeking the unobtainable--a good review for every good book--is quite as soul-exhausting as the creative instinct. and, again as an editor, the perfect marriage of well attuned minds is well enough as an ideal, but as a practicable achievement i find myself more often drawn toward what i should call the liaison function of a reviewer. the desire to be useful (since we have excluded the desire to make money as a major motive) is, i believe, an impulse which very often moves the reviewer. the instinct to teach, to reform, to explain, to improve lies close to the heart of nine out of ten of us. it is commoner than the creative instinct. when it combines with it, one gets a potential reviewer. the reviewer as a liaison officer is a homelier description than soul affinity or intellectual mate, but it is quite as honorable. books (to the editor) represent, each one of them, so much experience, so much thought, so much imagination differently compounded in a story, poem, tractate on science, history, or play. each is a man's most luminous self in words, ready for others. who wants it? who can make use of it? who will be dulled by it? who exalted? it is the reviewer's task to say. he grasps the book, estimates it, calculates its audience. then he makes the liaison. he explains, he interprets, and in so doing necessarily criticizes, abstracts, appreciates. the service is inestimable, when properly rendered. it is essential for that growing literature of knowledge which science and the work of specialists in all fields have given us. few readers can face alone and unaided a shelf of books on radio-activity, evolution, psychology, or sociology with any hope of selecting without guidance the best, or with any assurance that they dare reject as worthless what they do not understand. the house of the interpreter has become the literary journal, and its usefulness will increase. a liaison of a different kind is quite as needful in works of sheer imagination. here the content is human, the subject the heart, or life as one sees it. but reading, like writing, is a fine art that few master. only the most sensitive, whose minds are as quick as their emotions are responsive, can go to the heart of a poem or a story. they need an interpreter, a tactful interpreter, who will give them the key and let them find their own chamber. or who will wave them away from the door, or advise a brief sojourn. to an editor such an interpreter is an ideal reviewer. he will desire to be useful, and passionately attempt it. he will feel his responsibility first to art and next to the public, and then to his author, and last (as an editor i whisper it) to the publisher. reviewers forget the author and the public. their mandate comes from art (whose representative in the flesh is, or should be, the editor). but their highest service is to make a liaison between the reader and his book. and the conclusion of this debate is, i think, a simple one. reviewing is a major sport, fascinating precisely because of its difficulty, compelling precisely because it appeals to strong instincts. for most of us it satisfies that desire to work for some end which we ourselves approve, regardless of costs. the editor, sardonically aware of a world that refuses to pay much for what men do to please themselves or to reform others, sees here his salvation, and is thankful. the sins of reviewing i have known thousands of reviewers and liked most of them, except when they sneered at my friends or at me. their profession, in which i have taken a humble share, has always seemed to me a useful, and sometimes a noble one; and their contribution to the civilizing of reading man, much greater than the credit they are given for it. we divide them invidiously into hack reviewers and critics, forgetting that a hack is just a reviewer overworked, and a critic a reviewer with leisure to perform real criticism. a good hack is more useful than a poor critic, and both belong to the same profession as surely as william shakespeare and the author of a broadway "show." the trouble is that the business of reviewing has not been sufficiently recognized as a profession. trades gain in power and recognition in proportion as their members sink individuality in the mass and form a union which stands as one man against the world. professions are different. they rise by decentralization, and by specializing within the group. they gain distinction not only by the achievements of their individual members but by a curious splitting into subtypes of the species. law and medicine are admirable examples. every time they develop a new kind of specialist they gain in prestige and emolument. a reviewer, however (unless he publishes a collected edition and becomes a critic), has so far remained in the eyes of the public just a reviewer. in fiction we have been told (by the reviewers) of romancers and realists, sociologists and ethicists, naturalists and symbolists, objectivists and psychologists. are there no adjectives, no brevet titles of literary distinction for the men and women who have made it possible to talk intelligently about modern fiction without reading it? my experience with reviewers has led me to classify them by temperament rather than by the theories they possess; and this is not so unscientific as it sounds, for theories usually spring from temperaments. no man whose eliminatory processes function perfectly is ever a pessimist, except under the compulsion of hard facts. no sluggish liver ever believes that joy of living is the prime quality to be sought in literary art. and by the same eternal principle, moody temperaments embrace one theory of criticism; cold, logical minds another. i identify my classes of reviewers by their habits, not their dogmas. but in order to clear the ground let me make first a larger distinction, into mythical reviewers, bad but useful reviewers, bad and not useful reviewers, and good reviewers. like the nineteenth century preacher i will dispose of the false, dwell upon the wicked, and end (briefly) with that heaven of literary criticism where all the authors are happy and all the reviewers excellent. the reviewer i know best never, i profoundly believe, has existed, and i fear never will exist. he is the familiar figure of english novels--moderately young, a bachelor, with a just insufficient income in stocks. oxford or cambridge is his background, and his future is the death of a rich aunt or a handsome marriage. in the meantime, there is always a pile of books waiting in his chambers to be reviewed at "a guinea a page," when he has leisure, which is apparently only once or twice a week. the urban pastoral thus presented is one which americans may well be envious of--_otium cum dignitate_. but i have never encountered this reviewer in london. i fear he exists only for the novelists, who created him in order to have a literary person with enough time on his hands to pursue the adventures required by the plot. yet in so far as he is intended as a portrait of a critic, he stands as an ideal of the leisured view of books. there has been no leisured view of books in america since thoreau, or washington irving. even poe was feverish. our books are read on the subway, or after the theater, and so i fear it is in london--in london as it is. coldly, palpably real is the next critic of my acquaintance, the academic reviewer. he does not write for the newspapers, for he despises them, and they are rather scornful of his style, which is usually lumbering, and his idea that is the proper time in which to review the books of . but you will find him in the weeklies, and rampant in the technical journals. the academic reviewer is besotted by facts, or their absence. the most precious part of the review to him is the last paragraph in which he points out misspellings, bad punctuation, and inaccuracies generally. like a hound dog in a corn field, he never sees his books as a whole, but snouts and burrows along the trail he is following. if he knows the psychology of primitive man, primitive psychology he will find and criticize, even in a book on the making of gardens. if his specialty is french drama, french drama he will find, even in a footnote, and root it out and nuzzle it. i remember when a famous scholar devoted the whole of his review of a two volume _magnum opus_ upon a great historical period, to the criticism of the text of a latin hymn cited in a footnote! the academic reviewer (by which i do _not_ mean the university reviewer, since many such are not academic in the bad sense which i am giving to the word) demands an index. his reviews usually end with, "there is no index," or, "there is an excellent index." the reason is plain. the index is his sole guide to reviewing. if he finds his pet topics there he can hunt them down remorselessly. but if there is no index, he is cast adrift helpless, knowing neither where to begin nor where to end his review. i call him a bad reviewer, but useful, because, though incapable of estimating philosophies or creations of the imagination, he is our best guarantee that writers' facts are facts. my acquaintance with the next bad, but occasionally useful, reviewer is less extensive, but, by the circumstances of the case, more intimate. i shall call him the ego-frisky reviewer. the term (which i am quite aware is a barbarous compound) i am led to invent in order to describe the phenomenon of a critic whose ego frisks merrily over the corpus of his book. he is not so modern a product as he himself believes. the vituperative critics of the quarterlies and, earlier still, of grub street, used their enemies' books as a means of indulging their needs for self- expression. but it was wrath, jealousy, vindictiveness, or political enmity which they discharged while seated on the body of the foe; whereas the ego-friskish critic has no such bile in him. he is in fact a product of the new advertising psychology, which says, "be human" (by which is meant "be personal") "first of all." he regards his book (i know this, because he has often told me so) as a text merely, for a discourse which must entertain the reader. and his idea of entertainment is to write about himself, his tastes, his moods, his reactions. either he praises the book for what it does to his ego, or damns it for what it did to his ego. you will never catch him between these extremes, for moderation is not his vice. the ego-frisky reviewer is not what the biologist would call a pure form. he (or she) is usually a yellow journalist, adopting criticism as a kind of protective coloration. the highly personal critic, adventuring, or even frolicking among masterpieces, and recording his experiences, is the true type, and it is he that the ego-friskish imitate. such a critic in the jovial person of mr. chesterton, or professor phelps, or heywood broun, contributes much to the vividness of our sense for books. but their imitators, although they sometimes enliven, more often devastate reviewing. alas, i am best acquainted among them all with the dull reviewer, who is neither good nor useful. the excellent books he has poisoned as though by opiates! the dull books he has made duller! no one has cause to love him unless it be the authors of weak books, who thank their dull critics for exposing them in reviews so tedious that no one discovers what the criticism is about. the dull reviewer has two varieties: the stupid and the merely dull. it is the stupid reviewer who exasperates beyond patience the lover of good books. he is the man who gets a book wrong from the start, and then plods on after his own conception, which has no reference whatsoever to the author's. he is the man who takes irony seriously, misses the symbolism when there is any, and invariably guesses wrong as to the sources of the characters and the plot. there are not many really stupid reviewers, for the most indolent editor cleans house occasionally, and the stupid are the first to go out the back door. but merely dull reviewers are as plentiful as fountain pens. the dull reviewer, like chaucer's drunken man, knows where he wants to go but doesn't know how to get there. he (or she) has three favorite paths that lead nowhere, all equally devious. the first is by interminable narrative. "when hilda was blown into the arms of harold garth at the windy corner of the woolworth building, neither guessed at what was to follow. beginning with this amusing situation, the author of 'the yellow moon' develops a very interesting plot. garth was the nephew of miles harrison, mayor of new york. after graduating from williams, etc., etc., etc." this is what he calls summarizing the plot. unfortunately, the art of summary is seldom mastered, and a bad summary is the dullest thing in the world. yet even a bad summary of a novel or a book of essays is hard to do; so that when the dull reviewer has finished, his sweaty brow and numbed fingers persuade him that he has written a review. there is time for just a word of quasi-criticism: "this book would have been better if it had been shorter, and the plot is not always logical. nevertheless, 'the yellow moon' holds interest throughout." and then, finis. this is botchery and sometimes butchery, not reviewing. the dullest reviewers i have known, however, have been the long- winded ones. a book is talk about life, and therefore talk about a book is one remove more from the reality of experience. talk about talk must be good talk, and it must be sparing of words. a concise style is nearly always an interesting style: even though it repel by crudity it will never be dull. but conciseness is not the quality i most often detect in reviewing. it is luxurious to be concise when one is writing at space rates; and it is always harder to say a thing briefly than at length, just as it is easier for a woman to hit a nail at the third stroke than at the first. i once proposed a competition in a college class in english composition. each student was to clip a column newspaper article of comment (not facts) and condense it to the limit of safety. then editorials gave up their gaseous matter in clouds, chatty news stories boiled away to paragraphs, and articles shrank up to their headlines. but the reviews suffered most. one, i remember, came down to "it is a bad book," or to express it algebraically, it is a bad book. another disappeared entirely. on strict analysis it was discovered that the reviewer had said nothing not canceled out by something else. but most remained as a weak liquor of comment upon which floated a hard cake of undigested narrative. one student found a bit of closely reasoned criticism that argued from definite evidences to a concrete conclusion. it was irreducible; but this was a unique experience. the long-winded are the dullest of dull reviewers, but the most pernicious are the wielders of cliches and platitudes. is there somewhere a reviewer's manual, like the manual of correct social phrases which some one has recently published? i would believe it from the evidence of a hundred reviews in which the same phrases, differently arranged, are applied to fifty different books. i would believe it, except for the known capacity of man to borrow most of his thoughts and all of his phrases from his neighbor. i know too well that writers may operate like the federal reserve banks, except that in literature there is no limit to inflation. a thousand thousand may use "a novel of daring adventure," "a poem full of grace and beauty," or "shows the reaction of a thoughtful mind to the facts of the universe," without exhausting the supply. it is like the manufacture of paper money, and the effect on credit is precisely the same. so much for the various types of reviewers who, however interesting they may be critically, cannot be called good. the good reviewers, let an uncharitable world say what it will, are, thank heaven! more numerous. their divisions, temperamental and intellectual, present a curious picture of the difficulties and the rewards of this profession. yet i cannot enter upon them here, and for good reasons. the good reviewer is like the good teacher and the good preacher. he is not rare, but he is precious. he has qualities that almost escape analysis and therefore deserve more than a complimentary discussion. he must hold his book like a crystal ball in which he sees not only its proper essence in perfect clarity, but also his own mind mirrored. he must--... in other words, the good reviewer deserves an essay of his own. he is a genius in a minor art, which sometimes becomes major; a craftsman whose skill is often exceptional. i will not put him in the same apartment with reviewers who are arid, egoistic, or dull. mrs. wharton's "the age of innocence" america is the land of cherished illusions. americans prefer to believe that they are innocent, innocent of immorality after marriage, innocent of dishonesty in business, innocent of incompatibility between husbands and wives. americans do not like to admit the existence (in the family) of passion, of unscrupulousness, of temperament. they have made a code for what is to be done, and what is not to be done, and whatever differs is un-american. if their right hands offend them they cut them off rather than admit possession. they believed in international morality when none existed, and when they were made to face the disagreeable fact of war, cast off the nations of the earth, and continued to believe in national morality. in america prostitution is tolerated in practice, but forbidden in print. all homes are happy unless there is proof to the contrary, and then they are un-american. in its wilful idealism america is determined that at all costs we shall appear to be innocent. and a novel which should begin with the leaders in social conformity, who keep hard and clean the code, and should sweep through the great middle classes that may escape its rigors themselves, but exact them of others, might present the pageant, the social history, the epic of america. of course, mrs. wharton's novel does nothing of the sort. this is how tolstoy, or h. g. wells, or ernest poole would have written "the age of innocence." they would have been grandiose, epical; their stories would have been histories of culture. it would have been as easy to have called their books broad as it is to call mrs. wharton's fine novel narrow. tendencies, philosophies, irrepressible outbursts would have served as their protagonists, where hers are dwellers in fifth avenue or waverly place--a cosmopolitan astray, a dowager, a clubman yearning for intellectual sympathy. and yet in the long run it comes to much the same thing. the epic novelists prefer the panorama: she the drawing-room canvas. they deduce from vast philosophies and depict society. she gives us the mingotts, the mansons, the van der luydens--society, in its little brownstone new york of the ' 's--and lets us formulate inductively the code of america. a little canvas is enough for a great picture if the painting is good. indeed, the only objection i have ever heard urged against mrs. wharton's fine art of narrative is that it is narrow--an art of dress suit and sophistication. and this book is the answer. for, of course, her art is narrow--like jane austen's, like sheridan's, like pope's, like maupassant's, like that of all writers who prefer to study human nature in its most articulate instead of its broadest manifestations. it is narrow because it is focussed, but this does not mean that it is small. although the story of "the age of innocence" might have been set in a far broader background, it is the circumstances of the new york society which mrs. wharton knows so well that give it a piquancy, a reality that "epics" lack. they are like the accidents of voice, eye, gesture which determine individuality. yet her subject is america. this treating of large themes by highly personal symbols makes possible mrs. wharton's admirable perfection of technique. hers is the technique of sculpture rather than the technique of architecture. it permits the fine play of a humor that has an eye of irony in it, but is more human than irony. it makes possible an approach to perfection. behold mrs. manson mingott, the indomitable dowager, catherine: the immense accretions of flesh which had descended on her in middle life, like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her... into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. she had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the center of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.... around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows. her art is restrained, focussed upon those points where america, in its normality and in its eccentricity, has become articulate. therefore it is sharp and convincing. who is the central figure in this story where the leaven of intellectual and emotional unrest works in a society that has perfected its code and intends to live by it? is it newland archer, who bears the uncomfortable ferment within him? is it his wife, the lovely may, whose clear blue eyes will see only innocence? is it the countess olenska, the american who has seen reality and suffered by it, and sacrifices her love for newland in order to preserve his innocence? no one of these is the center of the story, but rather the idea of "the family," this american "family," which is moral according to its lights, provincial, narrow--but intensely determined that its world shall appear upright, faithful, courageous, in despite of facts, and regardless of how poor reality must be tortured until it conforms. and the "family" as mrs. wharton describes it is just the bourgeois puritanism of nineteenth century america. was may right when, with the might of innocence, she forced newland to give up life for mere living? was the countess right when, in spite of her love for him, she aided and abetted her, making him live up to the self-restraint that belonged to his code? the story does not answer, being concerned with the qualities of the "family," not with didacticism. it says that the insistent innocence of america had its rewards as well as its penalties. it says, in so far as it states any conclusion definitely, that a new and less trammeled generation must answer whether it was the discipline of its parents that saved the american family from anarchy, or the suppressions of its parents that made it rebellious. and the answer is not yet. "the age of innocence" is a fine novel, beautifully written, "big" in the best sense, which has nothing to do with size, a credit to american literature--for if its author is cosmopolitan, this novel, as much as her earlier "ethan frome," is a fruit of our soil. november , . mr. hergesheimer's "cytherea" mrs. wharton found the age of innocence in the 's; mr. hergesheimer discovers an age of no innocence in the 's. in "the age of innocence," the lovely may, a creature of society's conventions, loses her husband and then regains the dulled personality left from the fire of passion. in "cytherea" the less lovely, but equally moral fanny loses her lee because she cannot satisfy his longings and nags when she fails. but she does not regain him when his love chase is over, because he is burned out. athene and aphrodite, the graces of the mind, the seductions of the person of the countess olenska, together draw newland archer, husband of may; but it is aphrodite only, cytherean aphrodite, who, being sex incarnate, is more than mere temptations of the flesh, that wrecks fanny's home. in the ' 's the poor innocents of society believed their code of honor impregnable against sex. they dressed against sex, talked against sex, kept sex below the surface. the suppression froze some of them into rigidity and stiffened all. but they had their compensations. by sacrificing freedom for personal desire they gained much security. good husbands required more than a lure of the body to take them off. and when they gave up a great romance for respectability, like newland archer, at least they remained gentlemen. there was a tragedy of thwarted development, of martyred love, of waste; but at least self-respect, however misguided, remained. not so with this trivial, lawless country club set of the 's, drunk part of the time and reckless all of it, codeless, dutiless, restless. for the virtuous among them aphrodite, a vulgar, shameless aphrodite, was a nightly menace; for the weak among them (such as peyton morris), a passion to be resisted only by fear; for the wayward, like lee, she was the only illusion worth pursuing. to resist for a woman was to become "blasted and twisted out of her purpose," to be "steeped in vinegar or filled with tallow"; to resist for a man was to lose the integrity of his personality. there were no moral compensations, for there is no morality but self-development, at least in mr. hergesheimer's town of eastlake. there is no god for a man in love but cytherea. and this is one way of describing mr. hergesheimer's study of love in idleness in the 's. another way would be to call it an essay upon insecurity, although the word essay is too dry to use in a story which is fairly awash with alcohol. the war, the story seems to say, sapped our security of property and comfort and life. but insecurity is an insidious disease that spreads, like bacteria, where strength is relaxed. it infects the lives of those who have lost their certainties and become doubtful of their wills. in this relaxed society of the 's, where nothing seemed certain but the need of money and a drink, insecurity spread into married life. not even the well-mated were secure in the general decline of use and wont. a home wrecked by vague desires running wild--that is the theme of "cytherea." or take a third view of this provocative book. the triangle we have had tiresomely with us, but it is woman's love that is, perversely, always the hero. hergesheimer studies the man, studies him not as will, or energy, or desire a-struggle with duty or morality, but merely as sex. man's sex in love, man's sex dominated by cytherea, is his theme. this is new, at least in fiction, for there man is often swept away, but seldom dominated by sex. and indeed hergesheimer has to find his man in the relaxed society to which i have referred, a society wearied by unchartered freedom, where business is profitable but trivial, where duty and religion exist only as a convention, disregarded by the honest, upheld by the hypocritical, a society where cytherea marks and grips her own. even so, it is an achievement. cytherea in the story is a doll with a glamorous countenance, bought and cherished by lee randon as a symbol of what he did not find in his married life, what no man finds and keeps, because it is an illusion. cytherea is lee randon's longing for emotional satisfaction, a satisfaction that is not to be of the body merely. and when he meets savina grove, a pathological case, whose violent sex emotions have been inhibited to the bursting point, he thinks (and fears) that he has found his heart's desire. in the old, old stories their elopement would have been their grand, their tragic romance. in this cruel novel it is tragic, for she dies of it; but she is not cytherea; she is earthly merely; it is felt that she is better dead. it is a cruel story, cruel in its depiction of an almost worthless society with just enough of the charm of the restoration to save it from beastliness; cruel in its unsparing analyses of man's sex impulses (by all odds the most valuable part of the story); cruel particularly because the ruined lee randon is a good fellow, honester than most, kinder than he knows to individuals, although certain that there is no principle but selfishness, and that it is folly to limit desire for the sake of absolutes, like righteousness, or generalities, like the human race. it is a cruel study of women, for fanny, the model of the domestic virtues, has lost her innocent certainties of the triumph of the right and at the first conflict with cytherea becomes a common scold; cruel to savina grove, who, in spite of her exquisiteness, is only a psychoanalyst's problem; cruel to us all in exposing so ruthlessly how distressing it is to live by stale morality, yet how devastating to act with no guide but illusory desire. all this is not new in outline. one can find the essence of this story in monkish manuals. there the menace of cytherea was not evaded. there the weaknesses of man's sex were categoried with less psychology but more force. what is new in hergesheimer's book is merely the environment in which his characters so disastrously move and an insight into the mechanism of their psychology which earlier writers lacked. i have called it a story of the age of no innocence, but that would be the author's term, not mine; for indeed his characters seem to display as naive an innocence as mrs. wharton's of the laws of blood and will, and they know far less of practical morality. the "age of moral innocence" i should rechristen hergesheimer's book. critics will raise, and properly, a question as to the worth of his materials. he is not studying a "ripe" society, as was mrs. wharton, but the froth of the war, the spume of country clubs, the trivialities of the strenuous but unproductive rich. this is a just criticism as far as it goes, and it lessens the solidity, the enduring interest, of his achievement. true, it was in such a society that he could best pursue the wiles of cytherea. he has a right to pitch his laboratory where he pleases, and out of some very sordid earth he has contrived some beauty. nevertheless, you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, skilled though you may be. i should be more inclined, however, in a comparison with mrs. wharton, to criticize his lack of detachment. that able novelist, who is bounded so exclusively in her little social world, nevertheless stands apart from it and sees it whole. mr. hergesheimer has his feet still deep in the soil. he is too much a part of his country club life. he means, perhaps, to be ironical, but in truth he is too sympathetic with the desires, emotional and aesthetic, that he expresses to be ironical until the close. there is a surprise, too sharp a surprise, at the end of his novel, when one discovers that the moral is not "do and dare," but "all is vanity." he is so much and so lusciously at home with cocktails, legs, limousine parties, stair-sittings, intra-matrimonial kissings (i mention the most frequent references) that one distrusts the sudden sarcasm of his finale. it would have been better almost if he had been a count de gramont throughout, for he has a _flair_ for the surroundings of amorous adventure and is seldom gross; better still to have seen, as mrs. wharton saw, the picture in perspective from the first. his book will disgust some and annoy others because its art is muddied by a lingering naturalism and too highly colored by the predilections of the artist. it is a skilful art, nevertheless, and "cytherea" confirms a judgment long held that mr. hergesheimer is one of the most skilful craftsmen in english in our day. and this i say in spite of his obvious failure to grasp inevitably the structure of the english sentence. he is one of the most honest analysts of a situation, also; one of the most fearless seekers of motives; one of the ablest practisers of that transmutation of obscure emotion into the visible detail of dress, habit, expression, which is the real technique of the novelist. his fault is a defect in sympathy, a lack of spiritual appreciation, if i may use and leave undefined so old-fashioned a term. his virtue lies in the rich garment of experience which careful observation and skilful writing enable him to wrap about his imaginative conceptions. it is this which makes his novels so readable for the discriminating at present, and will make them useful historical records in the future. one aspect of a troublesome period when the middle generation achieved the irresponsibility without the earnestness of youth he has caught in "cytherea." it is unfortunate that it is a partial portrait of important motives in people who themselves are of little importance; and it is doubly unfortunate that he has been too much a part of his muddy world to be as good an interpreter as he is a witness of its life. january , . v philistines and dilettante poetry for the unpoetical i have looked through more essays upon poetry than i care to remember without finding anywhere a discussion of poetry for the unpoetical. a recent writer, it is true, has done much to show that the general reader daily indulges in poetry of a kind without knowing it. but the voluminous literature of poetics is well-nigh all special. it is written for students of rhythm, for instinctive lovers of poetry, for writers of verse, for critics. it does not treat of the value of poetry for the average, the unpoetical man-- it says little of his curious distaste for all that is not prose, or of the share in all good poetry that belongs to him. by the average man, let me hasten to say, i mean in this instance the average intelligent reader, who has passed through the usual formal education in literature, who reads books as well as newspapers and magazines, who, without calling himself a litterateur, would be willing to assert that he was fairly well read and reasonably fond of good reading. your doctor, your lawyer, the president of your bank, and any educated business man who has not turned his brain into a machine, will fit my case. among such excellent americans, i find that there exists a double standard as regards all literature, but especially poetry. just as the newspapers always write of clean politics with reverence-- whatever may be the private opinions and practices of their editorial writers--so intelligent, though unpoetic, readers are accustomed to speak of poetry with very considerable respect. it is not proper to say, "i hate poetry," even if one thinks it. to admit ignorance of tennyson or milton or shakespeare is bad form, even if one skimmed through them in college and has never disturbed the dust upon their covers since. i have heard a whispered, sneering remark after dinner, "i don't believe he ever _heard_ of browning," by one who had penetrated about as far into browning's inner consciousness as a fly into the hickory-nut it crawls over. i well remember seeing a lady of highly respectable culture hold up her hands in horror before a college graduate who did not know who beowulf was. neither did she, in any true sense of knowing. but her code taught her that the "beowulf," like other "good poetry," should be upon one's list of acquaintances. what these americans really think is a very different matter. the man in the trolley-car, the woman in the rocking-chair, the clerk, the doctor, the manufacturer, most lawyers, and some ministers would, if their hearts were opened, give simply a categorical negative. they do not like poetry, or they think they do not like it; in either case with the same result. the rhythm annoys them (little wonder, since they usually read it as prose), the rhyme seems needless, the inversions, the compressions perplex their minds to no valuable end. speaking honestly, they do not like poetry. and if their reason is the old one, i do not like you, dr. fell; the reason why i cannot tell, it is none the less effective. but the positive answers are no more reassuring. here in america especially, when we like poetry, we like it none too good. the "old favorites" are almost all platitudinous in thought and monotonous in rhythm. we prefer sentiment, and have a weakness for slush. pathos seems to us better than tragedy, anecdote than wit. longfellow was and is, except in metropolitan centres, our favorite "classical" poet; the poetical corner and the daily poem of the newspapers represent what most of us like when we do go in for verse. the truth is that many of the intelligent in our population skip poetry in their reading just because it _is_ poetry. they read no poetry, or they read bad poetry occasionally, or they read good poetry badly. this sorry state of affairs does not trouble the literary critic. his usual comment is that either one loves poetry or one does not, and that is all there is to be said about it. if the general reader neglects poetry, why then he belongs to the lost tribes and signifies nothing for israel. i am sure that he is wrong. his assertion is based on the theory that every man worthy of literary salvation must at all times love and desire the best literature, which is poetry--and this is a fallacy. it is as absurd as if he should ask most of us to dwell in religious exaltation incessantly, or to live exclusively upon mountain peaks, or to cultivate rapture during sixteen hours of the twenty-four. the saints, the martyrs, the seers, the seekers, and enthusiasts have profited nobly by such a regime, but not we of common clay. to assume in advocating the reading of poetry that one should substitute pope for the daily paper, francis thompson for the illustrated weekly, _the ring and the book_ for a magazine, and read "the golden treasury" through instead of a novel, needs only to be stated to be disproved. and yet this is the implication of much literary criticism. but the sin of the general reader who refuses all poetry is much more deadly, for it is due not to enthusiasm, but to ignorance. it is true that the literary diet recommended by an aesthetic critic would choke a healthy business man; but it is equally true that for all men whose emotions are still alive within them, and whose intelligence permits the reading of verse, poetry is quite as valuable as fresh air and exercise. we do not need fresh air and exercise constantly. we can get along very comfortably without them. but if they are not essential commodities, they are important ones, and so is poetry--a truth of which modern readers seem to be as ignorant as was primitive man of fire until he burned his hand in a blazing bush. i do not mean for an instant to propose that every one should read poetry. the man whose imagination has never taken fire from literature of any kind, whose brain is literal and dislikes any embroidery upon the surface of plain fact, who is deaf to music, unresponsive to ideas, and limited in his emotions--such a man in my opinion is unfortunate, although he is often an excellent citizen, lives happily, makes a good husband, and may save the state. but he should not (no danger that he will) read poetry. and for another class there is nothing in poetry. the emotionally dying or dead; the men who have sunk themselves, their personalities, their hopes, their happiness, in business or scholarship or politics or sport--they, too, are often useful citizens, and usually highly prosperous; but they would waste their time upon literature of any variety, and especially upon poetry. there are a dozen good arguments, however, to prove that the reading of poetry is good for the right kind of general reader, who is neither defective nor dead in his emotions; and this means, after all, a very large percentage of all readers. if i had space i should use them all, for i realize that the convention we have adopted for poetry makes us skip, in our magazines, as naturally from story to story over the verse between as from stone to stone across the brook. however, i choose only two, which seem to me as convincing for the unpoetical reader (the dead and defective excepted) as the ethical grandeur of poetry, let us say, for the moralist, its beauty for the aesthete, its packed knowledge for the scholar. the first has often been urged before and far more often overlooked. we everyday folk plod year after year through routine, through fairly good or fairly bad, never quite realizing what we are experiencing, never seeing life as a whole, or any part of it, perhaps, in complete unity. words, acts, sights, pass through our experience hazily, suggesting meanings which we never fully grasp. grief and love, the most intense, perhaps, of sensations, we seldom understand except by comparison with what has been said of the grief and love of others. happiness remains at best a diffused emotion--felt, but not comprehended. thought, if in some moment of intense clarity it grasps our relationship to the stream of life, in the next shreds into trivialities. is this true? test it by any experience that is still fresh in memory. see how dull, by comparison with the vivid colors of the scene itself, are even now your ideas of what it meant to you, how obscure its relations to your later life. the moment you fell in love, the hour after your child had died, the instant when you reached the peak, the quarrel that began a misunderstanding not yet ended, the subtle household strain that pulls apart untiringly though it never sunders two who love each other--all these i challenge you to define, to explain, to lift into the light above the turbid sea of complex currents which is life. and this, of course, is what good poetry does. it seizes the moment, the situation, the thought; drags it palpitating from life and flings it, quivering with its own rhythmic movement, into expression. the thing cannot be done in mere prose, for there is more than explanation to the process. the words themselves, in their color and suggestiveness, the rhythms that carry them, contribute to the sense, even as overtones help to make the music. all this may sound a little exalted to the comfortable general reader, who does not often deal in such intense commodities as death and love. and yet i have mentioned nothing that does not at one time or another, and frequently rather than the opposite, come into his life, and need, not constant, certainly, but at least occasional, interpretation. death and love, and also friendship, jealousy, courage, self-sacrifice, hate--these cannot be avoided. we must experience them. so do the animals, who gain from their experiences blind, instinctive repulsions or unreasoning likes and distrusts. there are many ways of escaping from such a bovine acquiescence, content to have felt, not desirous to grasp and know and relate. poetry, which clears and intensifies like a glass held upon a distant snowpeak, is one of the best. but there is another service that poetry, among all writing, best renders to the general reader, _when he needs it_; a service less obvious, but sometimes, i think, more important. poetry insures an extension of youth. men and women vary in their emotional susceptibility. some go through life always clouded, always dull, like a piece of glass cut in semblance of a gem, that refracts no colors and is empty of light. others are vivid, impressionable, reacting to every experience. some of us are most aroused by contact with one another. interest awakens at the sound of a voice; we are most alive when most with our kind. others, like thoreau, respond best in solitude. the very thrush singing dimly in the hemlocks at twilight moves them more powerfully than a cheer. a deep meadow awave with headed grass, a solemn hill shouldering the sky, a clear blue air washing over the pasture slopes and down among the tree-tops of the valley, thrills them more than all the men in all the streets of the world. it makes no difference. to every one, dull and vivid, social and solitary, age brings its changes. we may understand better, but the vividness is less, the emotions are tamer. they do not fully respond, as the bell in the deserted house only half tinkles to our pulling. si jeunesse savait, si vielliesse pouvait. but to be able comes before to know. we must react to experiences before it is worth while to comprehend them. and after one is well enmeshed in the routine of plodding life, after the freshness of the emotions (and this is a definition of youth) is gone, it is difficult to react. i can travel now, if i wish, to the coral islands or the spanish main, but it is too late. few willingly part with the fresh impressionability of youth. sometimes, as i have already suggested, the faculties of sensation become atrophied, if indeed they ever existed. i know no more dismal spectacle than a man talking shop on a moonlit hill in august, a woman gossipping by the rail of a steamer plunging through the sapphire of the gulf stream, or a couple perusing advertisements throughout a beethoven symphony. i will not advance as typical a drummer i once saw read a cheap magazine from cover to cover in the finest stretch of the canadian rockies. he was not a man, but a sample-fed, word-emitting machine. these people, emotionally speaking, are senile. they should not try to read poetry. but most of us--even those who are outwardly commonplace, practical, unenthusiastic, "solid," and not "sensitive"--lose our youthful keenness with regret. and that is why poetry, except for the hopelessly sodden, is a tonic worthy of a great price. for the right poetry at the right time has the indubitable power to stir the emotions that experience is no longer able to arouse. i cannot give satisfactory instances, for the reaction is highly personal. what with me stirs a brain cell long dormant to action will leave another unmoved, and vice versa. however, to make clear my meaning, let us take romance, the kind that one capitalizes, that belongs to youth, also capitalized, and dwells in granada or sicily or the spanish main. the middle-aged gentleman on a winter cruise for his jaded nerves cannot expect a thrill from sights alone. if it is not lost for him utterly, it is only because keats has kept it, in-- ... magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn, q and nashe in-- brightness falls from the air; queens have died young and fair. or consider the joy of travel renewed in kipling's-- then home, get her home, where the drunken rollers comb, and the shouting seas drive by, and the engines stamp and ring, and the wet bows reel and swing, and the southern cross rides high! yes, the old lost stars wheel back, dear lass, that blaze in the velvet blue. or the multitudinous experiences of vivid life that crowd the pages of men like shakespeare, or chaucer, who thanked god that he had known his world as in his time. even in these shopworn quotations the power still remains. somewhere in poetry, and best in poetry because there most concentrated and most penetrative, lies crystallized experience at hand for all who need it. it is not difficult to find, although no one can find it for you. it is not necessarily exalted, romantic, passionate; it may be comfortable, homely, gentle or hearty, vigorous and cheerful; it may be anything but commonplace, for no true emotion is ever commonplace. i have known men of one poet; and yet that poet gave them the satisfaction they required. i know others whose occasional dip into poetry leads to no rapture of beauty, no throbbing vision into eternity; and yet without poetry they would be less alive, their minds would be less young. as children, most of us would have flushed before the beauty of a sunrise on a tropic ocean, felt dimly if profoundly--and forgotten. the poet--like the painter--has caught, has interpreted, has preserved the experience, so that, like music, it may be renewed. and he can perform that miracle for greater things than sunrises. this, perhaps, is the best of all reasons why every one except the emotionally senile should sometimes read poetry. i know at least one honest philistine who, unlike many philistines, has traveled through the promised land--and does not like it. when his emotional friends talk sentimentalism and call it literature, or his aesthetic acquaintances erect affectations and call them art, he has the proper word of irony that brings them back to food, money, and other verities. his voice haunts me now, suggesting that, in spite of the reasons i have advanced, the general reader can scarcely be expected to read modern poetry, and that therefore his habit of skipping must continue. he would say that most modern poetry is unreadable, at least by the average man. he would say that if the infinitely complex study of emotional mind-states that lies behind the poetry of edwin arlington robinson, or the eerie otherworldliness of yeats, or the harsh virility of sandburg is to be regarded as an intensification and clarification of experience, he begs to be excused. he would say that if the lyrics of subtle and passionate emotion and the drab stories of sex experience that make up so many pages of modern anthologies represent a renewal and extension of youth, it was not _his_ youth. he prefers to be sanely old rather than erotically young. he will stick to the daily paper and flat prose. well, it is easy to answer him by ruling out modern poetry from the argument. there was more good poetry, neither complex, nor erotic, nor esoteric, written before our generation than even a maker of anthologies is likely to read. but i am not willing to dodge the issue so readily. there _is_ modern poetry for every reader who is competent to read poetry at all. if there is none too much of it, that is his own fault. if there is much that makes no appeal to him, that is as it should be. it is true that a very large proportion of contemporary poetry is well-nigh unintelligible to the gentleman whose reading, like his experience, does not often venture beyond the primitive emotions. why should it not be? the modern lyric is untroubled by the social conscience. it is highly individual, for it is written by men of intense individuality for readers whose imaginations require an intimate appeal. such minds demand poetry prevailingly, just as the average reader demands prose prevailingly. they profit by prose now and then, just as, occasionally, he profits by poetry. we talk so much of the enormous growth of the mass of average readers in recent years that we forget the corresponding growth in the number of individualities that are not average. much modern poetry is written for such readers, for men and women whose minds are sensitive to intricate emotional experience, who can and do respond to otherworldliness, to the subtly romantic, the finely aesthetic, and the intricately ideal. they deserve whatever poetry they may desire. the important point to note is that they do not get it. it is they--far more than the philistines--who complain that modern poetry is insufficient for their needs. the highly personal lyric is probably more perfected, more abundant, and more poignant in its appeal to living minds now than ever before in the history of our civilization. but it occupies only one province of poetry. a lover of poetry desires, far more keenly than the general reader, to have verse of his own day that is more shakespearian, more miltonic, more sophoclean than this. he wants poetry that lifts spacious times into spacious verse, poetry that "enlumynes," like petrarch's "rhetorike sweete," a race and a civilization. he desires, in addition to what he is already getting, precisely that poetry so universal in its subject-matter and its appeal, which the general reader thinks he would read if he found it instead of "lyrical subtleties" in his pages. well, they do not get it very abundantly to-day, let us admit the fact freely. but the fault is not altogether the poets'. the fault is in the intractable mediocrity of the age, which resists transference into poetry as stiff clay resists the hoe of the cultivator. the fault lies in the general reader himself, whose very opposition to poetry because it _is_ poetry makes him a difficult person to write for. commercialized minds, given over to convention, denying their sentiment and idealism, or wasting them upon cheap and meretricious literature, do not make a good audience. our few poets in english who have possessed some universality of appeal have had to make concessions. kipling has been the most popular among good english poets in our time; but he has had to put journalism into much of his poetry in order to succeed. and kipling is not read so much as a certain american writer who discovered that by writing verse in prose form he could make the public forget their prejudice against poetry and indulge their natural pleasure in rhythm and rime. a striking proof of all that i have been writing is to be found in so-called magazine verse. sneers at magazine poetry are unjust because they are unintelligent. it is quite true that most of it consists of the highly individualistic lyric of which i have spoken above. but in comparison with the imaginative prose of the typical popular magazine, it presents a most instructive contrast. the prose is too frequently sensational or sentimental, vulgar or smart. the verse, even though narrow in its appeal, and sometimes slight, is at least excellent in art, admirable in execution, and vigorous and unsentimental in tone. regarded as literature, it is very much more satisfactory than the bulk of magazine prose. indeed, there is less difference between the best and the worst of our magazines than between the verse and the prose in any one of them. and if this verse is too special in its subject-matter to be altogether satisfactory, if so little of it appeals to the general reader, is it not his fault? he neglects the poetry from habit rather than from conviction based on experience. because he skips it, and has skipped it until habit has become a convention, much of it has become by natural adaptation of supply to demand too literary, too narrow, too subtle and complex for him now. the vicious circle is complete. this circle may soon be broken. a ferment, which in the 'nineties stirred in journalism, and a decade later transformed our drama, is working now in verse. the poetical revival now upon us may be richer so far in promise than in great poetry, but it is very significant. for one thing, it is advertising poetry, and since poetry is precisely what shakespeare called it, caviare to the general--a special commodity for occasional use--a little advertising will be good for it. again, the verse that has sprung from the movement is much of it thoroughly interesting. some of it is as bizarre as the new art of the futurists and the vorticists; some is merely vulgar, some merely affected, some hopelessly obscure; but other poems, without convincing us of their greatness, seem as original and creative as were browning and whitman in their day. probably, like the new painting, the movement is more significant than the movers. nevertheless, if one is willing to put aside prejudice, suspend judgment, and look ahead, _vers libre_, even when more _libre_ than _vers_, is full of meaning--poetic realism, even when more real than poetry, charged with possibility. for with all its imperfections much of this new poetry is trying to mean more than ever before to the general reader. i am not sure that the democracy can be interpreted for him in noble poetry and remain the democracy he knows. and yet i think, and i believe, that, in his sub-consciousness at least, he feels an intense longing to find the everyday life in which we all live--so thrilling beneath the surface--interpreted, swung into that rhythmic significance that will make it part of the vast and flowing stream of all life. i can tolerate many short, rough words in poetry, and much that we have been accustomed to regard as prose, on the way to such a goal. for i honestly believe that it is better to read fantastic poetry, coarse poetry, prosaic poetry--anything but vulgar and sentimental poetry--than no poetry at all. to be susceptible to no revival of the vivid emotions of youth, to be touched by no thoughts more intense than our own, to be accessible to no imaginative interpretation of the life we lead--this seems to me to be a heavy misfortune. but to possess, as most of us do, our share of all these qualities, and then at no time, in no fitting mood or proffered opportunity, to read poetry--this can only be regarded as deafness by habit and blindness from choice. eye, ear, and mind our eyes are more civilized than our ears, and much more civilized than our minds; that is the flat truth, and it accounts for a good deal that puzzles worthy people who wish to reform literature. consider the musical comedy of the kind that runs for a year and costs the price of two books for a good seat. its humor is either good horseplay or vulgar farce, and its literary quality nil. its music is better, less banal than the words, and, sometimes, almost excellent. but its setting, the costumes, the scenic effects, the stage painting, and, most of all, the color schemes are always artistic and sometimes exquisite. they intrigue the most sophisticated taste, which is not surprising; yet, at the same time, the multitude likes them, pays for them, stays away if they are not right. eye is an aesthete, ear is, at least, cultivated, mind is a gross barbarian, unwilling to think, and desirous only of a tickle or a prod. or to localize the scene and change the angle a trifle, compare the new york ear for music with the new york taste for reading. the audiences who hear good concerts, good operas, good oratorios, and thoroughly appreciate them, far outrun in number the readers of equally artistic or intellectual books. ear is more cultivated than mind, musical appreciation keener than literary taste. a good stage set on a first night in this same metropolis of the arts, will get a round of applause, when not only often, but usually, perfection of lines, or poignancy of thought in the dialogue, will miss praise altogether. eye detects sheer beauty instantly, mind lags or is dull to it. this is a fact; the cause of it let psychologists explain, as they can, of course, very readily. it is a rather encouraging fact, for it seems to indicate that our members educate themselves one at a time, and yet, as parts of a single body corporate, must help each other's education. if we grow critical of the sped-up background of a movie scene, we may grow critical of its sped-up plot. eye may teach the ear, ear lift the mind to more strenuous intellectual efforts. and, of course, it explains why the literary reformers have such difficulties with the multitude. why, they say, do these women, whose dress is admirably designed and colored, whose living rooms are proportioned and furnished in taste, who know good music from bad, and enjoy the former--why do they read novels without the least distinction, without beauty or truth, barely raised above vulgarity? why, they say, does this man who cooperates with his architect in the building of a country house which would have been a credit to any period, who is a connoisseur in wine and cigars, and unerring in his judgment of pictures, why does he definitely prefer the commonplace in literature? eye, ear, and tongue are civilized; intellect remains a gross feeder still. good reading comes last among the arts of taste. this is not an essay in reform; it is content to be a question mark; but one bit of preaching may slip in at the end. why give eye and ear all the fine experiences? why not do something for poor, slovenly mind? the truth is that we are lazy. in a stage full of shimmering beauty, in a concert of chamber music, in a fine building, or an admirable sketch, others do the work, we have only to gaze or listen in order to pluck some, at least, of the fruits of art. but fine novels take fine reading; fine essays take fine thinking; fine poetry takes fine feeling. we balk at the effort, and ask, like the audience at the movies, that eye should take the easier way. and hence the american reader still faintly suggests the fiji islander, who wears a silk hat and patent leathers on a tattooed naked body. for all we can tell, that may be the direction of progress. in new yorkers may be gazing at a city beautiful, where even the subways give forth sweet sounds; and reading novelized movies in words of one syllable. eye may win the race and starve out the other members. it would be a bad future for publishers and authors; and i am against it, even as a possibility. hence my energies will be devoted to poking, thrilling, energizing, tonicking that lazy old organism, half asleep still--mind. out with the dilettante a few years ago drums and trumpets in american magazines and publishers' advertisements announced that the essay was coming to its own again. we were to vary our diet of short stories with pleasing disquisitions, to find in books of essays a substitute for the volume of sermons grown obsolete, and to titillate our finer senses by graceful prose that should teach us without didacticism, and present contemporary life without the incumbrance of a plot. the promise was welcome. american literature has been at its very best in the essay. in the essay, with few exceptions, it has more often than elsewhere attained world-wide estimation. emerson, thoreau, oliver wendell holmes were primarily essayists. hawthorne and irving were essayists as much as romancers. franklin was a common sense essayist. jonathan edwards will some day be presented (by excerpt) as a moral essayist of a high order. and there was lowell. have they had worthy successors? in the years after the civil war certainly none of equal eminence. but it is too early to say that the trumpets and drums of the last decade were false heralds. the brilliant epithets of chesterton, the perfect sophistication of pearsall smith (an american, but expatriated), the placid depth of hudson's nature studies, are not paralleled on this side of the water, yet with crothers, gerould, repplier, colby, morley, strunsky, we need not fear comparison in the critical genre, unless it be with the incomparable max beerbohm. two kinds of expository writing are natural for americans. the first is a hard-hitting statement, straight out of intense feeling or labored thought. that was emerson's way (in spite of his expansiveness), and thoreau's also. you read them by pithy sentences, not paragraphs. they assail you by ideas, not by insidious structures of thought. the second is an easy-going comment on life, often slangy or colloquial and frequently so undignified as not to seem literature. mark twain and josh billings wrote that way; ring lardner writes so to-day. when the straight-from-the-shoulder american takes time to finish his thought, to mold his sentences, to brain his reader with a perfect expression of his tense emotion, then he makes literature. and when the easy-going humorist, often nowadays a column conductor, or a contributor to _the saturday evening post_, takes time to deepen his observation and to say it with real words instead of worn symbols, he makes, and does make, literature. more are doing it than the skeptical realize. the new epoch of the american essay is well under way. but the desire to "make literature" in america is too often wasted. the would-be essayist wastes it in pretty writing about trivial things--neighbors' back yards, books i have read, the idiosyncrasies of cats, humors of the streets--the sort of dilettantish comment that older nations writing of more settled, richer civilizations can do well--that anatole france and occasional essayists of _punch_ or _the spectator_ can do well and most of us do indifferently. we are a humorous people, but not a playful one. light irony is not our forte. strength and humorous exaggeration come more readily to our pens than grace. we are better inspired by the follies of the crowd, or the errors of humanity, than by the whims of culture or aspects of pleasant leisure. and when we try to put on style in the manner of lamb or hazlitt, stevenson or beerbohm, we seldom exceed the second rate. when the newspaper and magazine humorists of democracy learn to write better; when the moralists and reformers and critics of american life learn to mature and perfect their thought until what they write is as good as their intentions--then the trumpets and drums may sound again, and with justification. many have; may others follow. and perhaps then we can scrap a mass of fine writing about nothing in particular, that calls itself the american literary essay, and yet is neither american in inspiration, native in style, nor good for anything whatsoever, except exercise in words. out with the dilettantes. we are tired of the merely literary; we want real literature in the essay as elsewhere. flat prose some time ago a writer protested against the taboo on "beautiful prose." he asserted that the usual organs of publication, especially in america, reject with deadly certainty all contributions whose style suggests that melodious rhythm which de quincey and ruskin made fashionable for their generations, and stevenson revived in the 'nineties. he complained that the writer is no longer allowed to write as well as he can; that he must abstract all unnecessary color of phrase, all warmth of connotation and grace of rhythm from his style, lest he should seem to be striving for "atmosphere," instead of going about his proper business, which is to fill the greedy stomach of the public with facts. unfortunately, this timely fighter in a good cause was too enamored of the art whose suppression he was bewailing. he so far forgot himself as to make his own style "beautiful" in the old- time fashion, and thus must have roused the prejudice of the multitude, who had to study such style in college, and knew from sad experience that it takes longer to read than the other kind. but there are other and safer ways of combating the taste for flat prose. one might be to print parallel columns of "newspaper english" (which they threaten now to teach in the schools) until the eye sickened of its deadly monotony. this is a bad way. the average reader would not see the point. paragraphs from a dozen american papers, all couched in the same utilitarian dialect,-- simple but not always clear, concise yet seldom accurate, emphatic but as ugly as the clank of an automobile chain,--why, we read thousands of such lines daily! we think in such english; we talk in it; to revolt from this style, to which the associated press has given the largest circulation on record, would be like protesting against the nitrogen in our air. books and magazines require a different reckoning. the author is still allowed to let himself go occasionally in books--especially in sentimental books. but the magazines, with few exceptions, have shut down the lid, and are keeping the stylistic afflatus under strict compression. no use to show them what they might publish if, with due exclusion of the merely pretty, the sing-song, and the weakly ornate, they were willing to let a little style escape. with complete cowardice, they will turn the general into the particular, and insist that in any case they will not publish _you_. far better, it seems to me, to warn editors and the "practical public" as to what apparently is going to happen if ambitious authors are tied down much longer to flat prose. it is not generally known, i believe, that post-impressionism has escaped from the field of pictorial art, and is running rampant in literature. at present, miss gertrude stein is the chief culprit. indeed, she may be called the founder of a coterie, if not of a school. her art has been defined recently by one of her admirers, who is also the subject, or victim, of the word-portrait from which i intend later to quote in illustration of my argument. "gertrude stein," says miss dodge, "is doing with words what picasso is doing with paint. she is impelling language to induce new states of consciousness, and in doing so language becomes with her a creative art rather than a mirror of history." this, being written in psychological and not in post-impressionist english, is fairly intelligible. but it does not touch the root of the matter. miss stein, the writer continues, uses "words that appeal to her as having the meaning they _seem_ to have [that is, if "diuturnity" suggests a tumble downstairs, it _means_ a tumble downstairs]. to present her impressions she chooses words for their inherent quality rather than their accepted meaning." let us watch the creative artist at her toil. the title of this particular word-picture is "portrait of mabel dodge at the villa curonia." as the portrait itself has a beginning, but no middle, and only a faintly indicated end, i believe--though in my ignorance of just what it all means i am not sure--that i can quote at random without offense to the impressions derivable from the text. here then are a few paragraphs where the inherent quality of the words is said to induce new states of consciousness:-- "bargaining is something and there is not that success. the intention is what if application has that accident results are reappearing. they did not darken. that was not an adulteration.... there is that particular half of directing that there is that particular whole direction that is not all the measure of any combination. gliding is not heavily moving. looking is not vanishing. laughing is not evaporation. "praying has intention and relieving that situation is not solemn. there comes that way. "there is all there is when there has all there has where there is what there is. that is what is done when there is done what is done and the union is won and the division is the explicit visit. there is not all of any visit." after a hundred lines of this i wish to scream, i wish to burn the book, i am in agony. it is not because i know that words _cannot_ be torn loose from their meanings without insulting the intellect. it is not because i see that this is a prime example of the "confusion of the arts." no, my feeling is purely physical. some one has applied an egg-beater to my brain. but having calmed myself by a sedative of flat prose from the paper, i realize that miss stein is more sinned against than sinning. she is merely a red flag waved by the _zeitgeist_. for this is the sort of thing we are bound to get if the lid is kept down on the stylists much longer. repression has always bred revolt. revolt breeds extravagance. and extravagance leads to absurdity. and yet even in the absurd, a sympathetic observer may detect a purpose which is honest and right. miss stein has indubitably written nonsense, but she began with sense. for words _have_ their sound-values as well as their sense-values, and prose rhythms _do_ convey to the mind emotions that mere denotation cannot give. rewrite the solemn glory of old testament diction in the flat colorless prose which just now is demanded, and wonder at the difference. translate "the multitudinous seas incarnadine" into "making the ocean red,"--or, for more pertinent instances, imagine a carlyle, an emerson, a lamb forced to exclude from his vocabulary every word not readily understood by the multitude, to iron out all whimseys, all melodies from his phrasing, and to plunk down his words one after the other in the order of elementary thought! i am willing to fight to the last drop of ink against any attempt to bring back "fine writing" and ornate rhetoric into prose. "expression is the dress of thought," and plain thinking and plain facts look best in simple clothing. nevertheless, if we must write our stories, our essays, our novels, and (who knows) our poems in the flat prose of the news column,--if the editors will sit on the lid,--well, the public will get what it pays for, but sooner or later the spirit of style will ferment, will work, will grow violent under restraint. there will be reaction, explosion, revolution. the public will get its flat prose, and--in addition-- not one, but a hundred gertrude steins. vi men and their books conrad and melville the appearance of the definitive edition of joseph conrad, with his interesting critical prefaces included, was a provocation to read and reread his remarkable series of books, the most remarkable contribution to english literature by an alien since the language began. but is it a reason for writing more of an author already more discussed than any english stylist of our time? for myself, i answer, yes, because i have found no adequate definition of the difference between conrad and us to whom english thinking is native, nor a definition of his place, historically considered, in the modern scheme; no definition, that is, which explains my own impressions of conrad. and therefore i shall proceed, as all readers should, to make my own. if you ask readers why they like conrad, two out of three will answer, because he is a great stylist, or because he writes of the sea. i doubt the worth of such answers. many buy books because they are written by great stylists, but few read for just that reason. they read because there is something in an author's work which attracts them to his style, and that something may be study of character, skill in narrative, or profundity in truth, of which style is the perfect expression, but not the thing itself. only connoisseurs, and few of them, read for style. and, furthermore, i very much doubt whether readers go to conrad to learn about the sea. they might learn as much from cooper or melville, but they have not gone there much of late. and many an ardent lover of conrad would rather be whipped than go from new york to liverpool on a square-rigged ship. in any case, these answers, which make up the sum of most writing about conrad, do not define him. to say that an author is a stylist is about as helpful as to say that he is a thinker. and conrad would have had his reputation if he had migrated to kansas instead of to the english sea. in point of fact, much may be said, and with justice, against conrad's style. it misses occasionally the english idiom, and sometimes english grammar, which is a trivial criticism. it offends more frequently against the literary virtues of conciseness and economy, which is not a trivial criticism. conrad, like the writers of elizabethan prose (whom he resembles in ardency and in freshness), too often wraps you in words, stupefies you with gorgeous repetition, goes about and about and about, trailing phrases after him, while the procession of narrative images halts. he can be as prolix in his brooding descriptions as meredith with his intellectual vaudeville. indeed, many give him lip service solely because they like to be intoxicated, to be carried away, by words. a slight change of taste, such as that which has come about since meredith was on every one's tongue, will make such defects manifest. meredith lives in spite of his prolixities, and so will conrad, but neither because they are perfect english stylists. i am sure also that conrad, at his very best, is not so good as melville, at his best, in nautical narrative; as melville in, say, the first day of the final chase of moby dick; i question whether he is as good in sea narrative as cooper in the famous passage of paul jones's ship through the shoals. such comparisons are, of course, rather futile. they differentiate among excellences, where taste is a factor. nevertheless, it is belittling to a man who, above almost all others in our language, has brooded upon the mysteries of the mind's action, to say that he is great because he describes so well the sea. we must seek elsewhere for a definition of the peculiar qualities of conrad. and without a definition it is easy to admire but hard to estimate and understand him. i believe, first of all, that conrad has remained much more a slav than he, or any of us, have been willing to admit. a friend of mine, married to a slav, told me of her husband, how, with his cab at the door, and dinner waiting somewhere, he would sit brooding (so he said) over the wrongs of his race. it is dangerous to generalize in racial characteristics, but no one will dispute a tendency to brood as a characteristic of the slav. the russian novels are full of characters who brood, and of brooding upon the characters and their fates. the structure of the russian story is determined not by events so much as by the results of passionate brooding upon the situation in which the imagined characters find themselves. so it is with conrad, always and everywhere. in "nostromo" he broods upon the destructive power of a fixed idea; in "the rescue" upon the result of flinging together elemental characters of the kind that life keeps separate; in "youth" upon the illusions, more real than reality, of youth. no writer of our race had ever the patience to sit like an eastern mystic over his scene, letting his eye fill with each slightest detail of it, feeling its contours around and above and beneath, separating each detail of wind and water, mood and emotion, memory and hope, and returning again and again to the task of description, until every impression was gathered, every strand of motive threaded to its source. henry james, you will say, was even more patient. yes, but james did not brood. his work was active analysis, cutting finer and finer until the atom was reached. his mind was occidental. he wished to know why the wheels went round. conrad's, in this respect, is oriental. he wants to see what things essentially are. henry james refines but seldom repeats. conrad, in such a story as "gaspar ruiz" for example, or in "chance," gives the impression of not caring to understand if only he can fully picture the mind that his brooding imagination draws further and further from its sheath. it is incredible, to one who has not counted, how many times he raises the same situation to the light--the garibaldean and nostromo, mrs. travers marveling at her knowledge of lingard's heart--turns it, opens it a little further, and puts it back while he broods on. here is the explanation of conrad's prolixity; here the reason why among all living novelists he is least a slave to incident, best able to let his story grow as slowly as life, and still hold the reader's interest. as we read conrad we also brood; we read slowly where elsewhere we read fast. turns of style, felicities of description, as of the tropic ocean, or the faces of women, have their chance. and, of course, the excellence, the charm of conrad's style is that in its nuances, its slow winding paragraphs, its pausing sentences, and constant suggestion of depths beyond depths, it is the perfect expression of the brooding mind that grasps its meaning by the repetition of images that drop like pebbles, now here, now there, in a fathomless pool. this is to define conrad in space, but not in time. in time, he may be slav or english, but certainly is modern of the moderns. the tribute of admiration and imitation from the youth of his own period alone might prove this. but it is easier to prove than to describe his modernity. to say that he takes the imagination afield into the margins of the world, where life still escapes standardization and there are fresh aspects of beauty, is to fail to differentiate him from kipling or masefield. to say that he strikes below the act and the will into realms of the sub- conscious, and studies the mechanism as well as the results of emotion, is but to place him, where indeed he belongs, among the many writers who have learned of henry james or moved in parallels beside him. to get a better perspective of conrad's essential modernity i should like to propose a more cogent comparison, and a more illuminating contrast, with a man whose achievements were in conrad's own province, who challenges and rewards comparison, herman melville. it may be that others have set "moby dick" beside the works of conrad. some one must have done it, so illuminating in both directions is the result. here are two dreamers who write of the sea and strange men, of the wild elements and the mysterious in man; two authors who, a half century apart, sail the same seas and come home to write not so much of them as what they dream when they remember their experiences. each man, as he writes, transcends the sea, sublimates it into a vapor of pure imagination, in which he clothes his idea of man, and so doing gives us not merely great literature, but sea narrative and description unsurpassed: and thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical seas, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, moby dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wretched hideousness of his jaw. melville, writer of vivid descriptions of the south seas, "typee," "omoo," which were perfect of their kind, but still only superlative travel books, distinguished in style but seldom lifting beyond autobiography, began another reminiscent narrative in "moby dick." in spite of his profound intellectual growth away from the cool and humorous youth who paddled the marquesan lake with primitive beauties beside him, he seems to have meant in "the white whale" to go back to his earlier manner, to write an accurate though highly personal account of the whaler's life, and to that end had assembled a mass of information upon the sperm whale to add to his own memories. very literally the story begins as an autobiography; even the elemental figure of the cannibal, queequeg, with his incongruous idol and harpoon in a new bedford lodging house, does not warn of what is to come. but even before the _pequod_ leaves sane nantucket an undercurrent begins to sweep through the narrative. this brooding captain, ahab (for melville also broods, though with characteristic difference), and his ivory leg, those warning voices in the mist, the strange crew of all races and temperaments--the civilized, the barbarous, and the savage--in their ship, which is a microcosm, hints that creep in of the white whale whose nature is inimical to man and arouses passions deeper than gain or revenge--all this prepares the reader for something more than incident. from the mood of defoe one passes, by jerks and reversions, to the atmosphere of "the ancient mariner" and of "manfred." when conrad could not manage his story he laid it aside, sometimes for twenty years, as with "the rescue." but melville was a wilder soul, a greater man, and probably a greater artist, but a lesser craftsman. he lost control of his book. he loaded his whaling story with casks of natural history, deck loaded it with essays on the moral nature of man, lashed to its sides dramatic dialogues on the soul, built up a superstructure of symbolism and allegory, until the tale foundered and went down, like the _pequod_. and then it emerged again a dream ship searching for a dream whale, manned by fantastic and terrible dreams; and every now and then, as dreams will, it takes on an appearance of reality more vivid than anything in life, more real than anything in conrad-- the meeting with the _rachel_ and her captain seeking his drowned son, the rising of moby dick with the dead parsee bound to his terrible flank, the grim dialogues of ahab.... in this bursting of bounds, in these epic grandeurs in the midst of confusion, and vivid realities mingled with untrammeled speculation, lies the secret of melville's purpose, and, by contrast, the explanation of conrad's modern effect beside him. melville, friend of hawthorne and transcendentalist philosopher on his own account, sees nature as greater and more terrible than man. he sees the will of man trying to control the universe, but failing; crushed if uncowed by the unmeasured power of an evil nature, which his little spirit, once it loses touch with the will of god, vainly encounters. give man eyes only in the top of his head, looking heavenward, says ahab, urging the blacksmith, who makes him a new leg buckle, to forge a new creature complete. he writes of man at the beginning of the age of science, aware of the vast powers of material nature, fretting that his own body is part of them, desirous to control them by mere will, fighting his own moral nature as did ahab in his insensate pursuit of moby dick, and destroyed by his own ambitions, even as ahab, the _pequod_, and all her crew went down before the lashings and charges of the white whale. "oh, life," says ahab, "here i am, proud as a greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead [the carpenter] for a bone to stand on!... i owe for the flesh in the tongue i brag with." and yet as they approach the final waters "the old man's purpose intensified itself. his firm lips met like the lips of a vise; the delta of his forehead's veins swelled like overladen brooks; in his very sleep his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull: 'stern all! the white whale spouts thick blood!'" conrad comes at the height of the age of science. the seas for him are full of dark mysteries, but these mysteries are only the reflections of man. man dominates the earth and sea, man conquers the typhoon, intelligent man subdues the savage wills of the barbarians of the shallows, man has learned to master all but his own heart. the center of gravity shifts from without to within. the philosopher, reasoning of god and of nature, gives place to the psychologist brooding over an organism that is seat of god and master of the elements. melville is centrifugal, conrad centripetal. melville's theme is too great for him; it breaks his story, but the fragments are magnificent. conrad's task is easier because it is more limited; his theme is always in control. he broods over man in a world where nature has been conquered, although the mind still remains inexplicable. the emphasis shifts from external symbols of the immensities of good and evil to the behavior of personality under stress. melville is a moral philosopher, conrad a speculative psychologist. the essentially modern quality of conrad lies in this transference of wonder from nature to the behavior of man, the modern man for whom lightning is only electricity and wind the relief of pressure from hemisphere to hemisphere. mystery lies in the personality now, not in the blind forces that shape and are shaped by it. it is the difference, in a sense, between hawthorne, who saw the world as shadow and illusion, symbolizing forces inimical to humanity, and hardy, who sees in external nature the grim scientific fact of environment. it is a difference between eras more marked in conrad than in many of his contemporaries, because, like melville, hawthorne, and poe, he avoids the plain prose of realism and sets his romantic heroes against the great powers of nature--tempests, the earthquake, solitude, and grandeur. thus the contrast is marked by the very resemblance of romantic setting. for conrad's tempests blow only to beat upon the mind whose behavior he is studying; his moral problems are raised only that he may study their effect upon man. if, then, we are to estimate conrad's work, let us begin by defining him in these terms. he is a slav who broods by racial habit as well as by necessity of his theme. he is a modern who accepts the growing control of physical forces by the intellect and turns from the mystery of nature to brood upon personality. from this personality he makes his stories. external nature bulks large in them, because it is when beat upon by adversity, brought face to face with the elemental powers, and driven into strange efforts of will by the storms without that man's personality reaches the tensest pitch. plot of itself means little to conrad and that is why so few can tell with accuracy the stories of his longer novels. his characters are concrete. they are not symbols of the moral nature, like melville's men, but they are nevertheless phases of personality and therefore they shift and dim from story to story, like lanterns in a wood. knowing their hearts to the uttermost, and even their gestures, one nevertheless forgets sometimes their names, the ends to which they come, the tales in which they appear. the same phase, indeed, appears under different names in several stories. melville crossed the shadow line in his pursuit of the secret of man's relation to the universe; only magnificent fragments of his imagination were salvaged for his books. conrad sails on an open sea, tamed by wireless and conquered by steel. mystery for him lies not beyond the horizon, but in his fellow passengers. on them he broods. his achievement is more complete than melville's; his scope is less. when the physicists have resolved, as apparently they soon will do, this earthy matter where now with our implements and our machinery we are so much at home, into mysterious force as intangible as will and moral desire, some new transcendental novelist will assume melville's task. the sea, earth, and sky, and the creatures moving therein again will become symbols, and the pursuit of moby dick be renewed. but now, for a while, science has pushed back the unknown to the horizon and given us a little space of light in the darkness of the universe. there the ego is for a time the greatest mystery. it is an opportunity for the psychologists and, while we are thinking less of the soul, they have rushed to study the mechanics of the brain. it was conrad's opportunity also to brood upon the romance of personality at the moment of man's greatest victory over dark external force. the novelist of pity to those interested in the meaning of the generation that has now left us quivering on the beach of after war, thomas hardy's books are so engrossing that to write of them needs no pretext; yet the recent publication of an anniversary edition with all his prefaces included is a welcome excuse for what i propose to make, not so much an essay as a record of a sudden understanding. long familiarity with hardy's novels had led to an afternoon of conversation with the author himself in the mildness of old age. but he remained for me a still inexplicable figure, belonging to an earlier century, yet in other respects so clearly abreast, if not ahead, of the emotions of our own times, that at eighty he saw the young men beginning to follow him. it was a reading of "the dynasts," in the tall, red volumes of the new edition, that suddenly and unexpectedly seemed to give me a key. the danger, so i had thought and think, is that hardy bids fair to become a legendary figure with an attribute, as is the way with such figures, better known than the man himself. "hardy, oh, yes, the pessimist" threatens to become all the schoolboy knows and all he needs to know of him, and his alleged philosophy of gloom is already overshadowing the man's intense interest in strong and appealing life. it has been the fate of many a great artist to get a nickname, like a boy, and never be rid of it. i do not wish by any ingenious fabrication to prove that hardy was not a pessimist. he is the father of the english school that refuse to be either deists or moralists, and, like them, pushes his stories to an end that is often bitter. his temperament is cast in that brooding, reflective mood that concerns itself less readily with jollity than with grief, and is therefore ever slanting toward pessimism. this, even his style indicates. like the somber hawthorne's, his style is brooding, adumbrative, rather than incisive or brilliant, and it often limps among the facts of his story like a man in pain. indeed, hardy is seldom a stylist, except when his mood is somber; therefore it is by his sadder passages that we remember him. yet the most important fact about hardy is not that he is pessimistic. his manner of telling a story, however, helps to confirm the popular impression. hardy's plots are a series of accidents, by which the doom of some lovely or aspiring spirit comes upon it by the slow drift of misfortune. tess, grace, eustacia, jude--it is clear enough to what joys and sorrows their natures make them liable. but the master prepares for them trivial error, unhappy coincidence, unnecessary misfortune, until it is not surprising if the analytic mind insists that he is laboring some thesis of pessimism to be worked out by concrete example. nevertheless, this is incomplete definition, and it is annoying that the dean of letters in our tongue should be subjected to a sophomoric formula in which the emphasis is wrongly placed. the critics, in general, have defined this pessimism, stopped there, and said, this is hardy. but youth that does not like pessimism reads hardy avidly. more light is needed. mr. hardy himself does not suggest the simple and melancholy pessimist. a mild old man, gentleness is the first quality one feels in him, but at eighty he still waxed his mustache tips, and his eyes lit eagerly. i remember how earnestly he denied knowledge of science, piqued, i suppose, by the omniscient who had declared that his art consisted of applying the results of scientific inquiry to the study of simple human nature. if his treatment of nature was scientific, as i affirmed, his wife agreed, and he did not deny, then, he implied, his knowledge came by intuition, not by theory. the war was still on when i talked with him. it had lifted him to poetry at first, but by no longer interested him vitally. "it is too mechanical," he said. his novels, where fate seems to operate mechanically sometimes, he was willing that day to set aside as nil. poetry, he thought, was the only proper form of expression. the novel was too indirect; too wasteful of time and space in its attempt to come at real issues. yet these real issues, it appeared as we talked, were not theories. ideas, he said, if emphasized, destroy art. writers, he thought, in the future would give up pure fiction (serious writers, i suppose he meant). poetry would be their shorthand; they would by intenser language cut short to their end. what was _his_ end? not mechanical, scientific theories, that was clear. not mere realistic description of life. he told me he had little faith in mere observation, except for comic or quaint characterization. he had seldom if ever studied a serious character from a model. one woman he invented entirely (was it tess?) and she was thought to be his best. what, then, was this essence which the novelist, growing old, would convey now in concentrated form by poetry which to him, so he said, was story- telling in verse. it is easier to understand what he meant if one thinks how definitely hardy belongs to his age, the latter nineteenth century, in spite of his reachings forward. on the one hand, his very gentleness is characteristic of a period that was above all others humane, on the other, his somber moods sprang from a generation that was the first to understand the implications of the struggle for life in the animal world all about them. they, to be sure, deduced from what they saw a vague theory of evolution in which the best (who were themselves) somehow were to come out best in the end. he, though gentle as they were, deduced nothing so cheerful, saw rather the terrible discrepancies between fact and theory, so that his very gentleness made him pessimistic, where browning was optimistic. then, like hawthorne in the generation before him, hardy went back to an earlier, simpler life than his own, and there made his inquiries. hawthorne, who did not accept the theology of puritanism, was yet strangely troubled by the problem of sin. hardy, accepting the implacability of evolution without its easy optimism, was intensely moved to pity. this is his open secret. the clearest statement is in his poetry, where again and again, in our conversation that day, he seemed to be placing it--most of all, i think, in "the dynasts." "the dynasts" was published too soon. we english speakers, in - , were beginning to read plays again, under the stimulus of a dramatic revival, and the plays we read were successful on the stage. as i recollect the criticism of "the dynasts," much of it at least was busied with the form of the drama, its great length and unwieldiness. we thought of it not as a dramatic epic, but as a dramatized novel--a mistake. we thought that hardy was taking the long way around, when in truth he had found a short cut to his issues. that "the dynasts," considering the vastness of its napoleonic subject, was far more concise, more direct, clearer than his novels, did not become manifest, although the sharper- eyed may have seen it. in "the dynasts" i find all of hardy. the immanent will is god, as hardy conceives him, neither rational nor entirely conscious, frustrating his own seeming ends, without irony and without compassion, and yet perhaps evolving like his world, clearing like men's visions, moving towards consistency. the sinister angel and the ironic angel are moods well known to hardy, but not loved by him. the spirit of the years that sees how poor human nature collides with accident, or the inevitable, and is bruised, is hardy's reasoned philosophy. the spirit of pities (not always, as he says, logical or consistent) is hardy's own desire, his will, his faint but deep-felt hope. i quote, from the very end of the great spectacle, some lines in which the spirits, who have watched the confused tragedy of the napoleonic age, sum up their thoughts: after scene spirit of the years thus doth the great foresightless mechanize its blank entrancement now as evermore its ceaseless artistries in circumstance.... yet seems this vast and singular confection wherein our scenery glints of scantest size, inutile all--so far as reasonings tell. spirit of pities thou arguest still the inadvertent mind. but, even so, shall blankness be for aye?... spirit of the years what wouldst have hoped and had the will to be?... semi-chorus i of the pities nay;--shall not its blindness break? yea, must not its heart awake, promptly tending to its mending in a genial germing purpose, and for loving-kindness' sake? semi-chorus ii should it never curb or cure aught whatever those endure whom it quickens, let them darkle to extinction swift and sure, chorus but--a stirring thrills the air like to sounds of joyance there that the rages of the ages shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that were, consciousness the will informing, till it fashions all things fair! the spirit of the years (which is another name for hardy's reflections upon life and history) planned in sad conviction of the "blank entrancement" of the great foresightless will, those sad narratives in which innocence, as in "tess of the d'ubervilles," is crushed, or vivid personality frustrated, as in "the return of the native." it is the spirit of pities in hardy which wrote the stories. philosophy constructed them, but pity worked them out. the characters that hardy loved--grace, marty south, jude, tess-- are life, brooding, intense, potential, and lovely, struggling against a fate which they help to draw upon themselves, but which is, nevertheless, not necessary, not rational. the cruelty of this fate he assumes and depicts, but the stories are not told to describe it. it is his creatures that get the color, the interest; they are valuable to us, and would be to him, whatever the truth of his philosophy. but because he loves life, the living thing, even the lizard in the woods, he broods upon their frustrations. pessimistic hardy is, as any gentle heart would be who chose to study misfortune; yet pessimist is not the right term for him. realist he is clearly, in the philosophic sense of one who is willing to view things as they are without prejudice. i seek a term for a mild spirit who sees clearly that the sufferer is more intelligible than his fate, and so is pitiful even when most ruthless in the depiction of misfortune. pity for the individual, not despair of the race, is his motive. and pity makes his gentle style, pity makes him regardless of artifice, and gives his often clumsy novels an undercurrent which sweeps them beyond technical masterpieces whose only merit is sharpness of thought. it is instructive to compare the relative fortunes of hardy and meredith, once always bracketed--the apostle of pity in comparison with the most subtle and brilliant mind of his time. hardy has outranked him. already it begins to appear that the inconsistent, half-conscious will that was the sum and substance of hardy's pessimism was given certain attributes of gloom that scarcely belonged to it. the ruthless struggle for life by which the fittest for the circumstances of the moment, and by no means the best, survive at the expense of the others is no longer conceived as the clear law of human life. science, with the rediscovery of mendelism and its insistence upon psychological factors has submitted important qualifications to this deduction which hardy, in common with others intellectually honest of his age, was forced to make. but it is not hardy's philosophy, sound or unsound, that counts in his art? except in so far as it casts the plan of his stories, or sometimes, as in "tess," or "the woodlanders," gives too much play to cruel accident, and therefore an air of unreality to the tenser moments of the plots. our critical emphasis in the past has been wrong. it should, to follow hardy's own words, be set not upon the idea, the suggested explanation of misfortune, but upon the living creatures in his novels and poems alike. it is the characters he wrought in pity, and, it would appear, in hope, that make him a great man in our modern world, although only once did he pass beyond the bounds of his primitive wessex. the novelist of pity and its poet, not the spokesman for pessimism, is the title i solicit for him. henry james it has always surprised europeans that henry james, the most intellectual of modern novelists, should have been an american; for most europeans believe, as does lowes dickinson, that we are an intelligent but an unintellectual race. was the fact so surprising after all? the most thoroughgoing pessimists come from optimistic communities. henry james, considered as a literary phenomenon, represented a sensitive mind's reaction against the obviousness of the life that one finds in most american "best sellers." i suppose that he reacted too far. i feel sure of it when he is so unobvious that i cannot understand him. and yet every american writer must feel a little proud that there was one of our race who could make the great refusal of popularity, sever, with those intricate pen strokes of his, the bonds of interest that might have held the "general reader," and write just as well as he knew how. whether his novels and short stories gained by this heroic "highbrowism," is another question. certainly they did not always do so. to get a million of readers is no sure sign of greatness; but to find only thousands, as did henry james in his later books, is to be deplored. in "daisy miller" and "the bostonians" he was a popular novelist of the best kind, a novelist who drew the best people to be his readers. but men read "the golden bowl" and "the wings of the dove" because they were skilful rather than because they were interesting. they were novelists' novels, like the professional matinees that "stars" give on tuesday afternoons for the benefit of rivals and imitators in art. but to stop here would be to misunderstand totally the greatest craftsman that has come out of america. the flat truth is that henry james was not a novelist at all, at least in the good, old- fashioned sense that we usually give to the word. he was primarily a critic; the greatest american critic since poe. sometimes he criticized literature with supreme success, as in his "notes on novelists" of ; but ordinarily he criticized life. his later novels are one-fifth story, one-fifth character creation, and the rest pure criticism of life. there is a curious passage in his "a small boy and others"-the biography of the youth of william james and himself-telling how as a child in the hotels and resorts of europe he spent his time in looking on at what was happening about him. he never got into the game very far, because he preferred to think about it. that is what henry james did all his life long. he looked on, thought about life with that wonderfully keen, and subtle, and humorous mind of his, turned it into criticism; then fitted the results with enough plot to make them move,--and there was a so-called novel. every one knows how in his last edition he rewrote some of his early stories to make them more subtle. it would have been amusing if he had seen fit to rewrite them altogether as critical essays upon international life! i wonder how much they would have suffered by the change. this is why so many readers have been very proud of henry james, and yet unable to defend him successfully against critics who pulled out handfuls of serpentine sentences from his latest novel, asking, "do you call this fiction?" it was not fiction, not fiction at least as she used to be written; it was subtle, graceful, cunning analysis of life. fiction is synthesis-- building up, making a becky sharp, inventing a meg merrilies, constructing a plot. criticism is analysis--taking down, henry james was not so good at putting together as at taking to pieces. he was able in one art, but in the other he was great. the current tendency to make every new figure in world literature conform to greatness of a recognized variety or be dismissed, is unfortunate and misleading. we are to be congratulated that the greatness of henry james was of a peculiar and irregular kind, a keen, inventing greatness, american in this if in nothing else. unnumbered writers of the day, of whom mr. kipling is not the least eminent, have profited by his influence, and learned from him to give the final, subtle thought its final form. if that form in his own case was tortuous, intricate, difficult, why so was the thought. if it makes hard reading, his subject at least got hard thinking. before you condemn that curious style of his-so easy to parody, so hard to imitate--ask whether such refinement of thought as his could be much more simply expressed. sometimes he could have been simpler, undoubtedly; it was his fault that he did not care to be; but that "plain american" would usually have served his purpose, is certainly false. henry james must yield first honors as a novelist, it may be, to others of his century if not of his generation. as a writer, above all as a writer of fine, imaginative criticism of the intellect as it moves through the complexities of modern civilization, he yields to no one of our time. whether he has earned his distinction as an american writer i do not know, although i am inclined to believe that he is more american than the critics suspect; but as a master of english, and as a great figure in the broad sweep of international english literature, his place is secure. samuel butler's "erewhon" has passed safely into the earthly paradise of the so-called classics. it has been recommended by distinguished men of letters, reprinted and far more widely read than on its first appearance; it has passed, by quotation and reference, into contemporary literature, and been taught in college classes. "erewhon revisited," written thirty years after "erewhon," is less well known. mr. moreby acklom (whose name, let me assure the suspicious reader, is his own and not an erewhonian inversion), in a most informing preface to a new edition, makes two assertions which may serve as my excuse for again endeavoring to explain the fascination for our generation of the work of samuel butler. college professors, he avers, have an antipathy for samuel butler; the chief interest of butler, he further states, was in theology. now i am a college professor without antipathy to samuel butler, with, on the contrary, the warmest admiration for his sardonic genius. and furthermore butler's antipathy for college professors, which is supposed to have drawn their fire in return, is based upon a ruling passion far deeper than his accidental interest in theology, a passion that gives the tone and also the key to the best of his writings and which brought him into conflict with the "vested interests" of his times. it is his passion for honest thinking. if butler's mark had been theology merely, his books would have passed with the interest in his target. he would be as difficult reading to-day as swift in his "tale of a tub." like most of the great satirists of the world, butler's saeva indignatio was aroused by the daily conflicts between reason and stupidity, between candor and disingenuousness, with all their mutations of hypocrisy, guile, deceit, and sham. in "erewhon" it was human unreason, as a clever youth sees it, that he was attacking. we remember vividly the beautiful erewhonians, who knew disease to be sin, but believed vice to be only disease. we remember the "straighteners" who gave moral medicine to the ethically unwell, the musical banks, the hypothetical language, the machines that threatened to master men, as in the war of - and in the industrial system of to-day they have mastered men and made them their slaves. there was a youthful vigor in "erewhon," a joyous negligence as to where the blow should fall, a sense of not being responsible for the world the author flicked with his lash, which saved the book from the condemnation that would have been its fate had the victorians taken it seriously. it was an uneven book, beginning with vivid narrative in the best tradition of defoe, losing itself finally in difficult argument, and cut short in mid-career. "erewhon revisited" is much better constructed. the old craftsman has profited by his years of labor in the british museum. he has a story to tell, and tells it, weighting it with satire judiciously, as a fisherman weights his set line. if his tale becomes unreal it is only when he knows the author is ready to hear the author in person. if the erewhon of his first visit does not fit his new conception he ruthlessly changes it. one misses the satiric _tours de force_ of the first "erewhon." there is nothing so brilliant as the chapters on disease and machines which for fifty years since life has been illustrating. but "erewhon revisited" is a finished book; it has artistic unity. and why does butler revisit erewhon? not because he was trained as a priest and must have an excuse to rediscuss theology, although the story of the book suggests this explanation. higgs, the mysterious stranger of "erewhon," who escaped by a balloon, has become a subject for myth. in erewhon he is declared the child of the sun. miracles gather about the supreme miracle of his air-born departure. his "sayings," a mixture of biblical quotation and homely philosophy, strained through erewhonian intellects, become a new ethics and a new theology. his clothes are adopted for national wear (although through uncertainty as to how to put them on one part of the kingdom goes with buttons and pockets behind). sunchildism becomes the state religion. the musical banks, which had been trading in stale idealism, take it over and get new life; and the professors of bridgeford, the intellectuals of the kingdom, capitalize it, as we say to-day, and thus tighten their grip on the public's mind and purse. butler's purpose is transparent. it is not, as longmans, who refused the work, believed, to attack christianity. it is rather to expose the ease with which a good man and his message (higgs brought with him to erewhon evangelical christianity) can become miraculous, can become an instrument for politics and a cause of sham. indeed, butler says in so many words to the anglicans of his day: "hold fast to your christianity, for false as it is it is better than what its enemies would substitute; but go easy with the miraculous, the mythical, the ritualistic. these 'tamper with the one sure and everlasting word of god revealed to us by human experience.'" all this is permanent enough, but i cannot believe, as most commentators do, that it is the heart of the book; or if it is the heart of the book, it is not its fire. the satiric rage of butler, who in the person of higgs returns to erewhon to find himself deified, does not fall upon the fanatic worshipers of the sunchild, nor even upon the musical banks who have grown strong through his cult. it kindles for the ridiculous hanky and panky, professors respectively of worldly wisdom and worldly unwisdom at bridgeford, and hence, according to mr. acklom, the antipathy toward butler of all college professors. but it is not because they are professors that butler hates hanky and panky; it is because they represent that guaranteed authority which in every civilization can and does exploit the passions and the weaknesses of human nature for its own material welfare. butler had been conducting a lifelong warfare against scholars who defended the _status quo_ of the church and against scientists who were consolidating a strategic (and remunerative) position for themselves in the universities. he saw, or thought he saw, english religion milked for the benefit of oxford and cambridge graduates needful of "livings"; and darwinism and the new sciences generally being swept into the maw of the same professionally intellectual class. a free lance himself, with a table in the british museum, some books and a deficit instead of an income from his intellectual labors, he attacked the vested interests of his world. he exposed the dangers which wait upon all miraculous religions, the shams which they give birth to. but not because he was obsessed with theology. if he had lived in the nineteen hundreds he would have studied, i think, sociology and economics instead of theology and biology. he would have attacked, in england, the house of lords instead of oxford, and had an eye for the intellectuals who are beginning to sway the mighty power of the labor unions. he would have been a radical-conservative and voted against both the british labor party and the coalition. in america he would have lashed the trusts, execrated the anti-saloon league, admired and been exasperated by mr. wilson, hated the republican party, and probably have voted for it lest worse follow its defeat. he would have been, in short, a liberal of a species very much needed just now in america, a bad party man, destructive rather than constructive, no leader, but a satirist when, god knows, we need one for the clearing of our mental atmosphere. and unless i am wrong throughout this brief analysis, samuel butler, who mentally and spiritually is essentially our contemporary, would not, if he were writing now, concern himself with theology at all, but with the shams and unreasons which are the vested tyrannies set over us to-day. erewhon, when we last hear of it, is about to become a modern colonial state. its concern is with an army and with economics. chow-bok, the savage, now become a missionary bishop, is about to administer its ecclesiastical system. its spiritual problems no longer center upon the validity of miraculous tradition and the logic of a theological code. but the vested interests (represented by pocus, the son of hanky) remain. these butler would attack in the needed fashion. these remain the enemy. vii conclusion defining the indefinable i am well aware that literature or even such an inconsiderable part of literature as this gay book on my desk or the poem on the printed page, as a whole is indefinable. every critic of literature from aristotle down has let some of it slip between his fingers. if he describes the cunning form of a play or a story, then the passion in it, or the mood behind it, eludes him. if he defines the personality of the writer, the art which makes all the difference between feeling and expression escapes definition. no ten philosophers yet agree as to whether beauty is an absolute quality, or simply an attribute of form, whether a poem is beautiful because it suggests and approaches an archetype, or whether it is beautiful because it perfectly expresses its subject. and yet when the ambition to explain and describe and define everything is humbly set aside there remains a good honest job for the maker of definitions, and it is a job that can be done. i may not be able to tell what art is, but i can tell what it isn't. i may fail to make a formula for literature, but i can try at least to tell what thomas hardy has chiefly accomplished, define conrad's essential quality, point out the nature of romantic naturalism, and distinguish between sentiment and sentimentality. and if such things were ever worth doing they are worth doing now. only a prophet dares say that we are at the beginning of a great creative period in the united states, but any open-eyed observer can see that an era of american literary criticism is well under way. the war, which confused and afterward dulled our thinking, stirred innumerable critical impulses, which are coming to the surface, some like bubbles and others like boils, but some as new creations of the american intellect. the new generation has shown itself acrimoniously critical. it slaps tradition and names its novels and poetry as adam named the animals in the garden, out of its own imagination. the war shook it loose from convention, and like a boy sent away to college, its first impulse is to disown the main street that bore it. youth of the 's admired its elders and imitated them unsuccessfully. youth of the nineteen twenties imitates france and russia of the 's, and contemporary england. it may eventually do more than the 's did with america; in the meantime, while it flounders in the attempt to create, it is at least highly critical. furthermore, the social unrest, beginning before the war and likely to outlast our time, has made us all more critical of literature. mark twain's "yankee in king arthur's court" turned the milk of tennyson's aristocratic "idylls" sour. the deep drawn undercurrent of socialistic thinking urges us toward a new consideration of all earlier writing, to see what may be its social significance. the "churl," the "hind," the "peasant," the "first servant" and "second countryman," who were the mere transitions of earlier stories now are central in literature. they come with a challenge, and when we read galsworthy, wells, sinclair, dreiser, hardy's "the dynasts," bennett--we are conscious of criticizing life as we read. the pale cast of thought has sicklied modern pages. the more serious works of art are also literary criticism. again, there is the mingling of the peoples, greatest of course in america. our aliens used to be subservient to the national tradition. they went about becoming rich americans and regarded the anglo-american culture as a natural phenomenon, like the climate, to which after a while they would accustom themselves. their children were born in it. but now it is different. the jews particularly, who keep an oriental insistence upon logic even longer than a racial appearance, have passed the acquisitive stage and begin to throw off numerous intellectuals, as much at home in english as their fellow americans, but critical of the american emotions, and the american way of thinking, as only a brain formed by different traditions can be. soon the mediterranean races domiciled here will pass into literary expressiveness. it is as impossible that we should not have criticism of the national tradition expressed in our literature as that an international congress should agree upon questions of ethics or religion. and of course the new internationalism, which is far more vigorous than appears on the surface, favors such criticism. the war brought america and europe two thousand miles closer, and the habit of interest in what europeans are thinking, once acquired, is not likely to be lost. no american writer of promise can hope now to escape comparison with the literatures of western europe, and comparison means a new impulse to criticism. fundamental, creative criticism--like sainte-beuve's, matthew arnold's, walter pater's, like dryden's, brunetiere's, de gourmont's, or croce's--will presumably come. the conditions, both of publication and of audience, are ripe for it now in the united states. but there is a good deal of spade work in the study of literature to be done first, and still more education of the reading american mind. one reason why lowell was not a great critic was because his scholarship was defective, or, to put it more fairly, because the scholarship of his contemporaries, with whose knowledge he might have buttressed his own, was incomplete. and if a twentieth century sainte-beuve should begin to write for general american readers, it is doubtful whether they would accept his premises. says the intellectual, why _should_ he write for the general public? i answer that if he writes for coteries only, if he is disdainful of the intelligent multitude, he will never understand _them,_ and so will not comprehend the national literature which it is his function to stimulate, interpret, and guide. the spade work of criticism is research, investigation into the facts of literature and into its social background. the scholar is sometimes, but not often, a critic. he finds out what happened, and often why it happened. he analyzes, but he does not usually make a synthesis. he writes history, but he cannot prophesy, and criticism is prophecy implied or direct. few outside the universities realize the magnitude of american research into literature, even into american literature, which has been relatively neglected. a thousand spades have been at work for a generation. we are getting the facts, or we are learning how to get them. but before we may expect great criticism we must educate our public, and ourselves, in that clear vision of what is and what is not, which from aristotle down has been the preliminary to criticism. a humble, but a useful, way to begin is by definition. i use definition in no pedantic sense. i mean, in general, logical definition where the class or _genus_ of the thing to be described--whether best-selling novel or sentimental tendency--is first made clear, and then its _differentia,_ its differences from the type analyzed out and assorted. but this process in literature cannot be as formal as logic. good literature cannot be bound by formulas. yet when a poem charged with hot emotion, or a story that strays into new margins of experience, is caught and held until one can compare it with others, see the curve on which it is moving, guess its origin and its aim, forever after it becomes easier to understand, more capable of being thought about and appreciated. and when the current of taste of some new generation that overflows conventions and washes forward, or backward, into regions long unlaved, is viewed as a current, its direction plotted, its force estimated, its quality compared, why that is definition, and some good will come of it. some general definition of that intellectual emotion which we call good reading is especially needed in america. most of us, if we are native born, have been educated by a set of literary conventions arranged in convenient categories. that is more or less true of all literary education, but it is particularly true in the united states, where the formal teaching of english literature _per se_ began, where, as nowhere else in the world, there was a great and growing population eager to become literate and with no literary traditions behind it. the student from a bookless home learned to think of his literature as primarily something to be studied; the teacher who had to teach thousands like him was forced to reduce living literature to dead categories in order that a little of it at least should be taught. thousands of americans, therefore, of our generation emerged from their training with a set of literary definitions which they assumed to be true and supposed to be culture. only true definitions of what literature really is can break up such fossilized defining. on the other hand, that large proportion of our best reading population which is not native in its traditions offers a different but equally important problem. how can the son of a russian jew, whose father lived in a russian town, who himself has been brought up in clamorous new york, understand thoreau, let us say, or john muir, or burroughs, or willa cather, without some defining of the nature of the american environment and the relation between thought and the soil? how is an intelligent german-american, whose cultural tradition has been thoroughly teutonic, to make himself at home in a literature whose general character, like its language, is english, without some defining of the anglo-american tradition? lincoln must be defined for him; milton must be defined for him; most of all perhaps franklin must be defined for him. i have chosen elementary examples, but my meaning should be sufficiently clear. and the american critic--by which i mean you, o discriminating reader, as well as the professional who puts pen to paper--is equally in need of the art of definition. the books we read and write are on different planes of absolute excellence or unworthiness. there is--to take the novel--the story well calculated to pass a pleasant hour but able to pass nothing else; there is the story with a good idea in it and worth reading for the idea only; there is the story worthless as art but usefully catching some current phase of experience; and there is the fine novel which will stand any test for insight, skill, and truth. now it is folly to apply a single standard to all these types of story. it can be done, naturally, but it accomplishes nothing except to eliminate all but the shining best. that is a task for history. in the year in which we live--and it is sometimes necessary to remind the austerer critic that we always live in the present--there are a hundred books, of poetry, of essays, of biography, of fiction, which are by no means of the first rank and yet are highly important, if only as news of what the world, in our present, is thinking and feeling. they cannot be judged, all of them, on the top plane of perfect excellence; and if we judge them all on any other plane, good, better, best get inextricably mixed. for example, consider once more a novel which at the moment of this writing is a best-seller, and which with reference to its popularity i have discussed in an earlier essay. i mean mr. hutchinson's "if winter comes." this book is essentially the tragedy of a good and honest soul thrown by harsh circumstance into an environment which is bound to crush him. he has the wrong wife, he has the wrong business associates, the girl he loves is separated from him by moral barriers. if he breaks through these he injures irreparably his own sense of what is due to his god and his fellow man. his instincts of charity, humor, and love rebound upon him. he is too christian for england, and too guileless for life. this is a worthy theme, and yet if we judge this novel on the highest plane it fails miserably. for mr. hutchinson stacks the cards. he gives his hero his way and his salvation, after much suffering, by a series of lucky accidents. he destroys the problem he creates, by forging an answer. but this novel should not be finally judged on the highest plane. it is not a tragedy, it is a romance. it belongs on the plane below, the plane of stories told to meet the secret desires of humanity, which have little to do with reality, and are quite oblivious to fact. on this plane "if winter comes" ranks highly, for it is poignantly told, there is life in its characters, and truth in the best of its scenes. definition saves us from calling a good novel great; it spares us the unnecessary error of calling a good and readable story bad because it is not a triumph of consistent art. it is hard enough in all conscience to see that a given book is good for _this_ but not good for _that;_ may be praised for its plot, but certainly has not character enough to get long life. but when the difficulty of adjusting standards is increased by the irresponsible hullabaloo of commercial appreciation, no wonder that sensible people estimate foolishly, and critics of standing are induced to write for publication remarks that some day will (or should) make them sick. for the publishers' "blurb" confuses all standards. every book is superlative in everything. and the hack reviewer, when he likes a book, likes everything and applies shakespearian adjectives and tolstoyan attributes to creatures of dust and tinsel, or blunders helplessly into dispraise of scholarship, restraint, subtlety, taste, originality--anything that he does not understand. there is no help except to set books upon their planes and assort them into their categories--which is merely to define them before beginning to criticize. this is elementary work as i have said, which may lead the critic only so far as the threshold, and cannot always give the reader that complete and sympathetic comprehension of what he has read which is the final object of literary criticism. however, in an age when overemphasis has been commercialized, and where the powerful forces of print can be mobilized and sent charging everywhere to bowl down contrary opinions, it is indispensable. scholarly books have been dispraised because they were not exciting; fine novels have been sneered at because they were hard to read; cheap stories have been proclaimed great because they wore a pretense of seriousness; sentimentality has been welcomed because it was warm hearted; indecency has been condemned for immorality; immorality has slipped through as romance; daring has been mistaken for novelty; painstaking dulness, for careful art; self-revelation, for world knowledge; pretty writing, for literature; violence, for strength; and warped and unhealthy egoism for the wise sincerity which is the soul of literature. in all such instances definition is the prophylactic, and often the cure. writers, most of all, need to define their tasks. i do not mean their technical problems merely, although i cannot conceive that a dramatist or playwright, who has his subject well in mind, can possibly be hurt by thinking out his methods with the most scrupulous care. lubbock's recent book on "the craft of fiction" has emphasized an art of approach and point of view in the great novelists which was thoroughly conscious, even though they may never have tried to formulate it in words. i mean particularly the defining of their themes, their objectives. many modern novels of the better class, and a great many modern poems, seem to me awash and wallowing like derelicts on the high seas. they are successful enough in this, excellent in that, but they get nowhere, because the writers had felt the emotion that made them, or suffered the experience, but never defined it in terms of all emotion, all experience, never considered its end. the three dots...of modern literature are significant. we break off our efforts, partly no doubt because we seek effects of impressionism, more often because imagination went no further. near things are sharp and expressed with remarkable vividness, ultimate objectives are blurred, which is to say, they lack definition. may the shades of dr. johnson, charles lamb, emerson, and all great individualists protect us from bad definitions, and especially from rigid or formal ones! bad definitions destroy themselves, for if they are thoroughly bad no one believes them, and if they contain those pleasing half truths which a generation loves to suckle upon, why then after their vogue they will wither into nothingness. such definitions are of the letter, and die by it, but stiff, clumsy definitions kill the spirit. to define a great man by a rigid formula is to sink to the lowest practice of the worst class rooms. to define a tendency so sharply that it cannot flow without breaking the definition, is a lecturer's trick for which audiences should stone him. solemn generalizations which squat upon a book like an ostrich on a goose egg and hatch out vast moral philosophies are to be dreaded like the devil, as are, equally, the critics with pet theories, who, having defined them, make everything from a squib to an epic fit their definition. definitions which classify without margins are a special evil: the division into literature and journalism for example, with no allowance for interlocking; or the confident separation of all books into categories of good or bad. wholesale definitions are also objectionable, where having defined a poem as magazine verse, or a collection of articles as a magazine, or a book as a sex story, or a man as a journalist, or a tendency as erratic or erotic, you think you have said something. may the muse of clear thinking, and the little humorous gods who keep the sense of proportion balancing, protect us from these also. it occurs to me that i have made but a lame attempt to define definition. this, however, is as it should be. for definition, in the sense in which i am using it, like literature, has much of the indefinable. it is a tool merely, or better still, because broader, a device by which the things we enjoy and that profit us may be placed in perspective, ranged, compared, sorted, and distinguished. it is what arnold meant by seeing steadily and seeing whole. it is the scientist's microscope that defines relationship, and equally the painter's brush that by a touch reveals the hidden shapes of nature and the blend of colors. it is, like these instruments, a _means_ and not an _end._ may pedants, scholiasters, formalists, and dilettantes take to heart this final description of literary definition! quite unconsciously for the most part, but occasionally with purpose aforethought, the essays in this book have been written as literary definitions. its unity lies in the attempt, which at least has been sincere, to grasp, turn, study in a serious, humorous, ironical, anything but a flippant mood, the living forms of literature as they have risen into consciousness and challenged definition. the end. english literary criticism c. e. vaughan edited by c h. herford, litt. d with an introduction by c. e. vaughan preface. in the following pages my aim has been to sketch the development of criticism, and particularly of critical method, in england; and to illustrate each phase of its growth by one or two samples taken from the most typical writers. i have in no way attempted to make a full collection of what might be thought the most striking pieces of criticism to be found in our literature. owing to the great wealth of such writing produced during the last sixty years, it is clearly impossible to give so complete a picture of what has been done in this period as in others. i am obliged to content myself with one specimen of one writer. but that is the writer who, in the opinion of many, is the most remarkable of all english critics. for the permission, so kindly granted, to include the essay on sandro botticelli i desire to offer my sincerest thanks to messrs. macmillan and to the other representatives of the late mr. pater. it may seem strange to close a volume of literary criticism with a study on the work and temperament of a painter. i have been led to do so for more than one reason. a noticeable tendency of modern criticism, from the time of burke and lessing, has been to break down the barrier between poetry and the kindred arts; and it is perhaps well that this tendency should find expression in the following selection. but a further reason is that mr. pater was never so much himself, was never so entirely master of his craft, as when interpreting the secrets of form and colour. most of all was this the case when he had chosen for his theme one who, like botticelli, "is before all things a poetical painter". c. e. vaughan. contents. introduction sir philip sidney-- i. an apology for poetry john dryden-- ii. preface to the fables samuel johnson-- iii. on the metaphysical poets samuel taylor coleridge-- iv. on poetic genius and poetic diction william hazlitt-- v. on poetry in general charles lamb-- vi. on the artificial comedy of the last century vii. on webster's _duchess of malfi_ viii. on ford's _broken heart_ percy bysshe shelley-- ix. a defence of poetry thomas carlyle-- x. goethe walter pater-- xi. sandro botticelli introduction. in england, as elsewhere, criticism was a late birth of the literary spirit. english poets had sung and literary prose been written for centuries before it struck men to ask themselves, what is the secret of the power that these things have on our mind, and by what principles are they to be judged? and it could hardly have been otherwise. criticism is a self-conscious art, and could not have arisen in an age of intellectual childhood. it is a derivative art, and could scarcely have come into being without a large body of literature to suggest canons of judgment, and to furnish instances of their application. the age of chaucer might have been expected to bring with it a new departure. it was an age of self-scrutiny and of bold experiment. a new world of thought and imagination had dawned upon it; and a new literature, that of italy, was spread before it. yet who shall say that the facts answer to these expectations? in the writings of chaucer himself a keen eye, it is true, may discern the faint beginnings of the critical spirit. no poet has written with more nicely calculated art; none has passed a cooler judgment upon the popular taste of his generation. we know that chaucer despised the "false gallop" of chivalrous verse; we know that he had small respect for the marvels of arthurian romance. and his admiration is at least as frank as his contempt. what poet has felt and avowed a deeper reverence for the great latins? what poet has been so alert to recognize the master-spirits of his own time and his father's? de meung and granson among the french--dante, petrarch and boccaccio of the italians--each comes in for his share of praise from chaucer, or of the princely borrowings which are still more eloquent than praise. yet, for all this, chaucer is far indeed from founding the art of criticism. his business was to create, and not to criticise. and, had he set himself to do so, there is no warrant that his success would have been great. in many ways he was still in bondage to the mediaval, and wholly uncritical, tradition. one classic, we may almost say, was as good to him as another. he seems to have placed ovid on a line with virgil; and the company in his house of fame is undeniably mixed. his judgments have the healthy instinct of the consummate artist. they do not show, as those of his master, petrarch, unquestionably do, the discrimination and the tact of the born critic. for this, or for any approach to it, english literature had to wait for yet two centuries more. in the strict sense, criticism did not begin till the age of elizabeth; and, like much else in our literature, it was largely due to the passion for classical study, so strongly marked in the poets and dramatists of shakespeare's youth, and inaugurated by surrey and others in the previous generation. these conditions are in themselves significant. they serve to explain much both of the strength and the weakness of criticism, as it has grown up on english soil. from the elizabethans to milton, from milton to johnson, english criticism was dominated by constant reference to classical models. in the latter half of this period the influence of these models, on the whole, was harmful. it acted as a curb rather than as a spur to the imagination of poets; it tended to cripple rather than give energy to the judgment of critics. but in earlier days it was not so. for nearly a century the influence of classical masterpieces was altogether for good. it was not the regularity but the richness, not the self-restraint but the freedom, of the ancients that came home to poets such as marlowe, or even to critics such as meres. and if adventurous spirits, like spenser and sidney, were for a time misled into the vain attempt to graft exotic forms upon the homely growths of native poetry, they soon saw their mistake and revolted in silence against the ridiculous pedant who preferred the limping hexameters of the _arcadia_ to sidney's sonnets, and the spavined iambics of spenser to the _faerie queene_. in the main, the worship of the classics seems to have counted at this time rather for freedom than restraint. and it is well that it was so. yet restraint too was necessary; and, like freedom, it was found-- though in less ample measure--through devotion to the classics. there can be little doubt that, consciously or no, the elizabethans, with their quick eye for beauty of every kind, were swayed, as men in all ages have been swayed, by the finely chiselled forms of classical art. the besetting sin of their imagination was the tendency to run riot; and it may well be that, save for the restraining influence of ancient poetry, they would have sinned in this matter still more boldly than they did. yet the chastening power of classical models may be easily overrated. and we cannot but notice that it was precisely where the classical influence was strongest that the force of imagination was the least under control. jonson apart, there were no more ardent disciples of the ancients than marlowe and chapman. and no poets of that age are so open to the charge of extravagance as they. it is with milton that the chastening influence of the ancients first makes itself definitely felt. but milton was no less alive to the fervour than to the self-mastery of his classical models. and it was not till the restoration that "correctness" was recognized as the highest, if not the only, quality of the ancients, or accepted as the one worthy object of poetic effort. for more than a century correctness remained the idol both of poetry and of criticism in england; and nothing less than the furious onslaught of the lyrical ballads was needed to overthrow it. then the floodgates were opened. a new era both of poetic and critical energy had dawned. thus the history of english criticism, like that of english literature, divides itself roughly into three periods. the first is the period of the elizabethans and of milton; the second is from the restoration to the french revolution; the third from the revolution to the present day. the typical critic of the first period is sidney; dryden opens and johnson closes the second; the third, a period of far more varied tendencies than either of the others, is perhaps most fitly represented by lamb, hazlitt, and carlyle. it will be the aim of the following pages to sketch the broader outlines of the course that critical inquiry has taken in each. i. the first thing that strikes us in the early attempts of criticism is that its problems are to a large extent remote from those which have engrossed critics of more recent times. there is little attempt to appraise accurately the worth of individual authors; still less, to find out the secret of their power, or to lay bare the hidden lines of thought on which their imagination had set itself to work. the first aim both of puttenham and of webbe, the pioneers of elizabethan criticism, was either to classify writers according to the subjects they treated and the literary form that each had made his own, or to analyse the metre and other more technical elements of their poetry. but this, after all, was the natural course in the infancy of the study. all science begins with classification; and all classification with the external and the obvious. the greek critics could take no step forward until they had classified all poems as either lyric, epic, or dramatic. and how necessary that division was may be seen from the length at which plato discusses the nature of the distinction in the second book of the republic. even aristotle, in this as in other things the 'master of those who know', devotes no inconsiderable space of the poetics to technical matters such as the analysis of vocal sounds, and the aptness of different metres to different forms of poetic thought. there is another matter in which the methods of elizabethan critics run side by side with those of the early greeks. in plato and aristotle we are not seldom startled by the sudden transition from questions of form to the deepest problems suggested by imaginative art. the same is true of the elizabethan critics. it is doubtless true that the latter give a proportionally larger space to the more technical sides of the subject than their greek forerunners. they could not reasonably be expected to write with the width of view that all the world has admired in aristotle and plato. moreover, they were from the first confronted with a practical difficulty from which the greek critics were so fortunate as to be free. was rhyme a "brutish" form of verse? and, if so, was its place to be taken by the alliterative rhythm, so dear to the older poets, or by an importation of classical metres, such as was attempted by sidney and spenser, and enforced by the unwearied lectures of harvey and of webbe? this, however technical, was a fundamental question; and, until it was settled, there was but little use in debating the weightier matters of the law. the discussion, which might have raged for ever among the critics, was happily cut short by the healthy instinct of the poets. against alliteration the question had already been given by default. revived, after long disuse, by langland and other poets of the west midlands in the fourteenth century, it had soon again been swept out of fashion by the irresistible charm of the genius of chaucer. the _tale of gamelyn_, dating apparently from the first quarter of the fifteenth century, is probably the last poem of note in which the once universal metre is even partially employed. and what could prove more clearly that the old metrical form was dead? the rough rhythm of early english poetry, it is true, is kept; but alliteration is dropped, and its place is taken by rhyme. nor were the efforts to impose classical measures on english poetry more blest in their results. the very men on whom the literary romanizers had fixed their hopes were the first to abandon the enterprise in despair. if any genius was equal to the task of naturalizing hexameters in a language where strict quantity is unknown, it was the genius of spenser. but spenser soon ranged himself heart and soul with the champions of rhyme; his very name has passed down to us as a synonym for the most elaborate of all rhyming stanzas that have taken root in our verse. for the moment, rhyme had fairly driven all rivals from the field. over the lyric its sway was undisputed. in narrative poetry, where its fitness was far more disputable, it maintained its hold till the closing years of milton. in the drama itself, where its triumph would have been fatal, it disputed the ground inch by inch against the magnificent instrument devised by surrey and perfected by marlowe. it was during the ten years preceding the publication of webbe's _discourse_ ( ) that this controversy seems to have been hottest. from the first, perhaps, it bulked more largely with the critics than with the poets themselves. certainly it allowed both poets and critics sufficient leisure for the far more important controversy which has left an enduring monument in sidney's _apologie for poetrie_. [footnote: the most important pieces of elizabethan criticism are:-- gosson's _school of abuse_, . lodge's _defence of poetry, musick, and stage plays_, (?). sidney's _apologie for poetrie_, (?). webbe's _discourse of english poetrie_, . puttenham's _arte of english poesie_, . harington's _apologie of poetrie_, . meres' _palladis tamia_, . campion's _observations in the arte of english poesie_, . daniel's _defence of ryme_, .] the historical bearing of sidney's treatise has been too commonly overlooked. it forms, in truth, one move in the long struggle which ended only with the restoration of charles ii.; or, to speak more accurately, which has lasted, in a milder form, to the present day. in its immediate object it was a reply to the puritan assaults upon the theatre; in its ultimate scope, a defence of imaginative art against the suspicions with which men of high but narrow purpose have always, consciously or unconsciously, tended to regard it. it is a noble plea for liberty, directed no less against the unwilling scruples of idealists, such as plato or rousseau, than against the ruthless bigotry of practical moralists and religious partisans. from the first dawn of the elizabethan drama, the stricter protestants had declared war upon the stage. intrenched within the city they were at once able to drive the theatres beyond the walls ( ); just as seventy years later, when it had seized the reins of central government, the same party, embittered by a thousand insults and brutalities, hastened to close the theatres altogether. it would be an evident mistake to suppose that this was merely a municipal prejudice, or to forget that the city council was backed by a large body of serious opinion throughout the country. a proof of this, if proof were needed, is to be found in the circumstances that gave rise to the _apologie_ of sidney. the attack on the stage had been opened by the corporation and the clergy. it was soon joined by the men of letters. and the essay of sidney was an answer neither to a town councillor, nor to a preacher, but to a former dramatist and actor. this was stephen gosson, author of the _school of abuse_. the style of gosson's pamphlet is nothing if not literary. it is full of the glittering conceits and the fluent rhetoric which the ready talent of lyly had just brought into currency. it is euphuism of the purest water, with all the merits and all the drawbacks of the euphuistic manner. for that very reason the blow was felt the more keenly. it was violently resented as treason by the playwrights and journalists who still professed to reckon gosson among their ranks. [footnote: lodge writes, "i should blush from a player to become an enviouse preacher".--_ancient critical essays_, ed. haslewood, ii. .] a war of pamphlets followed, conducted with the usual fury of literary men. gosson on the one side, lodge, the dramatist, upon the other, exchanged compliments with an energy which showed that one at least of them had not in vain graduated in "the school of abuse". "raw devises", "hudder mudder", "guts and garbage", such are the phrases hurled by gosson at the arguments and style of his opponents; "bawdy charms", "the very butchery of christian souls", are samples of the names fastened by him upon the cause which they defended. [footnote: lodge, in his _defence of poetry, musick, and stage plays_ ( or ), is hardly less scurrilous. "there came into my hand lately a little (would god a wittye) pamphelet.... being by me advisedly wayed, i find it the oftscome of imperfections, the writer fuller of words than judgement, the matter certainely as ridiculus as serius."--in _ancient critical essays_, ii. .] from this war of words sidney turned loftily aside. pointedly challenged at the outset--for the first and second pamphlets of gosson had, without permission, been dedicated to "the right noble gentleman, maister philip sidney"--he seldom alludes to the arguments, and never once mentions the name of gosson. he wrote to satisfy his own mind, and not to win glory in the world of letters. and thus his _apologie_, though it seems to have been composed while the controversy was still fresh in men's memory, was not published until nearly ten years after his death ( ). it was not written for controversy, but for truth. from the first page it rises into the atmosphere of calm, in which alone great questions can be profitably discussed. the _apologie_ of sidney is, in truth, what would now be called a philosophy of poetry. it is philosophy taken from the side of the moralist; for that was the side to which the disputants had confined themselves, and in which--altogether apart from the example of others--the interest of sidney, as man of action, inevitably lay. it is philosophy as conceived by the mind of a poet. but, none the less, it pierces to the eternal problems which underlie the workings of all creative art, and presents them with a force, for the like of which we must go back to plato and aristotle, or look forward to the philosophers and inspired critics of a time nearer our own. it recalls the _phadrus_ and the _ion_; it anticipates the utterance of a still more kindred spirit, the _defence of poetry_ by shelley. philosopher as he was, sidney arranges his thoughts in the loose order of the poet or the orator. it may be well, therefore, to give a brief sketch of his argument; and to do so without much regard to the arrangement of the _apologie_ itself. the main argument of the _apologie_ may indeed be called a commentary on the saying of aristotle, cited by sidney himself, that "poetry is more philosophical and more studiously serious than history"--that is, as sidney interprets it, than the scientific fact of any kind; or again, on that yet more pregnant saying of shelley, that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". gosson had denounced poetry as "the vizard of vanity, wantonness, and folly"; or, in sidney's paraphrase, as "the mother of lies and the nurse of abuse". sidney replies by urging that of all arts poetry is the most true and the most necessary to men. all learning, he pleads, and all culture begin with poetry. philosophy, religion, and history herself, speak through the lips of poetry. there is indeed a sense in which poetry stands on higher ground than any science. there is no science, not even metaphysics, the queen of all sciences, that does not "build upon nature", and that is not, so far, limited by the facts of nature. the poet alone is "not tied to any such subjection"; he alone "freely ranges within the zodiac of his own wit". this, no doubt, is dangerous ground, and it is enforced by still more dangerous illustrations. but sidney at once guards himself by insisting, as plato had done before him, that the poet too is bound by laws which he finds but does not make; they are, however, laws not of fact but of thought, the laws of the idea--that is, of the inmost truth of things, and of god. hence it is that the works of the poet seem to come from god, rather than from man. they stand rather on a level with nature, the material of all sciences, than with the sciences themselves, which are nothing more than man's interpretation of nature. in some sense, indeed, they are above nature; they stand midway between nature and him who created nature. they are a first nature, "beyond and over the works of that second nature". for they are the self-revelation of that which is the noblest work of god, and which in them finds utterance at its best and brightest. thus, so far from being the "mother of lies", poetry is the highest form of truth. avowedly so, in what men have always recognized to be the noblest poetry, the psalms and parables and other writings that "do imitate the inconceivable excellences of god". to a less degree, but still avowedly, in that poetry whose theme is philosophy or history. and so essentially, however men may overlook it, in that poetry which, professedly dealing with human life as we know it, does not content itself with reproducing the character of this man or that, but "reined only with learned discretion, ranges into the divine consideration of what may be and should be"--of the universal and complete rather than the individual and imperfect. but, if truth be the essence of the poet's work, "the right describing note to know a poet by", it would seem that the outward form of it, the metre and the ornament, are of little moment. "there have been many most excellent poets that never versified." and verse is nothing more than a means, and not the only means, of securing a "fitting raiment" for their matter and suiting their manner "according to the dignity of their subject". in this suggestion--that harmonious prose may, for certain forms of poetic thought, be hardly less suitable than verse--sidney is at one with shelley. and neither critic must be taken to disparage verse, or to mean more than that the matter, the conception, is the soul of poetry, and that the form is only of moment so far as it aids--as undoubtedly it does aid--to "reveal the soul within". it is rather as a witness to the whole scope of their argument than as a particular doctrine, to be left or taken, that the suggestion is most profitably regarded. having settled the speculative base of poetry, sidney turns to a yet more cherished theme, its influence upon character and action. the "highest end" of all knowledge, he urges, is "the knowledge of a man's self, with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only". now by no artist is this end served so perfectly as by the poet. his only serious rivals are the moral philosopher and the historian. but neither of these flies so straight to his mark as the poet. the one gives precepts that fire no heart to action; the other gives examples without the precepts that should interpret and control them. the one lives in the world of ideas, the other in the world of hard and literal fact. neither, therefore, has power to bridge the gulf that parts thought from action; neither can hope to take hold of beings in whose life, by its very nature, thought and action are indissolubly interwoven. "now doth the peerless poet perform both. for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done. so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example .... therein of all sciences is our poet the monarch." once more we feel that sidney is treading upon dangerous ground. but once more he saves himself by giving a wider definition both to thought and action, both to "well knowing and to well doing", than is common with moralists. by the former most moralists are apt to understand the bare "precept", thought as crystallized in its immediate bearing upon action. by the latter they commonly mean the passive rather than the active virtues, temperance and self-restraint rather than energy and resolve. from both these limitations sidney, on the whole, is nobly free. to him the "delight which is all the good fellow poet seemeth to promise", "the words set in delightful proportion and prepared for the well enchanting skill of music", "the tale which holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney corner"--all these, its indefinable and purely artistic elements, are an inseparable part of the "wisdom" which poetry has to offer. in other words, it is the frame of mind produced by poetry, the "thought hardly to be packed into the narrow act", no less than the prompting to this action or to that, which sidney values in the work of the poet. and if this be true, none but the most fanatical champion of "art for art's sake" will dispute the justice of his demands on poetry. none but such will deny that, whether by attuning the mind to beauty and nobleness, or by means yet more direct and obvious, art must have some bearing upon the life of man and on the habitual temper of his soul. no doubt, we might have wished that, in widening the scope of poetry as a moral influence, sidney had been yet more explicit than in fact he is. we cannot but regret that, however unjustly, he should have laid himself open to the charge of desiring to turn poetry into sermons. but it is bare justice to point out that such a charge cannot fairly be brought against him; or that it can only be brought with such qualifications as rob it of its sting. on the other matter the record of sidney is yet clearer. by "well doing" he does not mean, as is too often meant, mere abstinence from evil, but the active pursuit of whatsoever things are manly, noble, and of good report. it is not only the "temperance of diomedes"-- though temperance too may be conceived as an active virtue--but the wisdom of ulysses, the patriotism of aneas, "the soon repenting pride of agamemnon", the valour of achilles--it is courage, above all courage, that stirs his soul in the great works of ancient poetry. it is the same quality that moves him in the ballads and romances of the moderns. "certainly i must confess my own barbarousness; i never heard the old song of percy and douglas that i found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." and again: "truly i have known men that, even with reading _amadis de gaule_ (which, god knoweth, wanteth much of a perfect poesy), have found their hearts moved to the exercise of courtesy, liberality, and especially courage." the man who wrote these words had no starved conception of what poetry should be. once again. sidney has small patience with those who would limit art by the banishment of all that recalls the baser side of life. "now, as in geometry, the oblique must be known as well as the right. so in the actions of our life, who seeth not the filthiness of evil, wanteth a great foil to perceive the beauty of virtue. this doth the comedy handle so ... as with hearing it we get, as it were, an experience.... so that the right use of comedy will, i think, by no body be blamed." no doubt, the moral aspect of comedy is here marked with what must be called immoderate stress. here, too, as when he deals with the kindred side of tragedy, sidney demands that the poet shall, in his villains, "show you nothing that is not to be shunned"; in other words, that, so far as it paints evil, comedy shall take the form of satire. but, even with this restriction, it must be allowed that sidney takes a wider view than might appear at a hasty reading; wider, it is probable, than was at all common among the men of his generation. no shakespeare had yet arisen to touch the baser qualities of men with a gleam of heroism or to humanize the most stoical endurance with a strain of weakness. and even shakespeare, in turning from the practice to the theory of his art, could find no words very different from those of sidney. to him, as to sidney, the aim of the drama is "to show virtue her own image and scorn her own feature"; though by a saving clause, which sidney perhaps would hardly have accepted, it is further defined as being to show "the very age and body of the time his form and pressure". yet it must be remembered that sidney is loud in praise of so unflinching a portraiture of life, base and noble, as chaucer's _troilus and cressida_. and on the whole it remains true that the limitations of sidney are the limitations of his age, while his generosity is his own. the remainder of the _apologie_ is necessarily of slighter texture. apart from the examination of plato's banishment of the poets--a theme on which harington also discourses, though with less weight than sidney--it is concerned mainly with two subjects: an assertion that each form of poetry has its peculiar moral import, and a lament over the decay into which english poetry had fallen in the sixteenth century. such a lament sounds strangely to us, accustomed as we are to regard the age of elizabeth, already half ended when sidney wrote, as the most fruitful period of our literature. but, when the _apologie_ was composed, no one of the authors by whose fame the elizabethan age is now commonly known--sidney himself and spenser alone excepted--had begun to write. english poetry was about to wake from the long night that lies between the age of chaucer and the age of shakespeare. but it was not yet fully awakened. and the want of a full and free life in creative art goes far to account for the shortcomings of elizabethan criticism. vague the elizabethan critics undeniably are; they tend to lose themselves either in far-fetched analogies or in generalities that have but a slight bearing upon the distinctive problems of literary appreciation. when not vague, they are apt to fritter their strength on technical details which, important to them, have long lost their significance for the student of literature. but both technicalities and vagueness may be largely traced to the uncertain practice of the poets upon whom, in the first instance, their criticism was based. the work of surrey and of sackville was tentative; that of webbe and puttenham was necessarily the same. it is the more honour to sidney that, shackled as he was by conditions from which no man could escape altogether, he should have struck a note at once so deep and so strong as is sounded in the _apologie_. ii. in turning from sidney to dryden we pass into a different world. the philosophy, the moral fervour, the prophetic strain of the elizabethan critic have vanished. their place is taken by qualities less stirring in themselves, but more akin to those that modern times have been apt to associate with criticism. in fact, whatever qualities we now demand from a critic may be found at least foreshadowed, and commonly much more than foreshadowed, in dryden. dryden is master of comparative criticism: he has something of the historical method; he is unrivalled in the art of seizing the distinctive qualities of his author and of setting them before us with the lightest touch. his very style, so pointed yet so easy, is enough in itself to mark the gulf that lies between the age of elizabeth and the age of the restoration. all the elizabethan critics, sidney himself hardly excepted, bore some trace of the schoolmaster. dryden was the first to meet his readers entirely as an equal, and talk to them as a friend with friends. it is dryden, and not sainte-beuve, who is the true father of the literary _causerie_; and he still remains its unequalled master. there may be other methods of striking the right note in literary criticism. lamb showed that there may be; so did mr. pater. but few indeed are the critics who have known how to attune the mind of the reader to a subject, which beyond all others cries out for harmonious treatment, so skilfully as dryden. that the first great critic should come with the restoration, was only to be expected. the age of elizabeth was essentially a creative age. the imagination of men was too busy to leave room for self-scrutiny. their thoughts took shape so rapidly that there was no time to think about the manner of their coming. not indeed that there is, as has sometimes been urged, any inherent strife between the creative and the critical spirit. a great poet, we can learn from goethe and coleridge, may also be a great critic. more than that: without some touch of poetry in himself, no man can hope to do more than hack-work as a critic of others. yet it may safely be said that, if no critical tradition exists in a nation, it is not an age of passionate creation, such as was that of marlowe and shakespeare, that will found it. with all their alertness, with all their wide outlook, with all their zeal for classical models, the men of that time were too much of children, too much beneath the spell of their own genius, to be critics. compare them with the great writers of other ages; and we feel instinctively that, in spite of their surroundings, they have far more of vital kindred with homer or the creators of the mediaval epic, than with the greek dramatists--aschylus excepted--or with dante or with goethe. the "freshness of the early world" is still upon them; neither they nor their contemporaries were born to the task of weighing and pondering, which is the birthright of the critic. it was far otherwise with the men of the restoration. the creative impulse of a century had at length spent its force. for the first time since wyatt and surrey, england deserted the great themes of literature, the heroic passions of tamburlaine and faustus, of lear and othello, for the trivial round of social portraiture and didactic discourse; for _essays on satire_ and _on translated verse_, for the tea-table of the _spectator_, for dreary exercises on the _pleasures of the imagination_ and the _art of preserving health_. a new era had opened. it was the day of small things. yet it would be wrong to regard the new movement as merely negative. had that been all, it would be impossible to account for the passionate enthusiasm it aroused in those who came beneath its spell; an enthusiasm which lived long after the movement itself was spent, and which--except in so far as it led to absurd comparisons with the elizabethans--was abundantly justified by the genius of butler and dryden, of congreve and swift and pope. negative, on one side, the ideal of restoration and augustan poetry undoubtedly was. it was a reaction against the "unchartered freedom", the real or fancied extravagances, of the elizabethan poets. but, on the higher side, it was no less positive, though doubtless far less noble, than the ideal it displaced. the great writers of the eighty years following the restoration were consumed by a passion for observation--observation of the men and things that lay immediately around them. they may have seen but little; but what they did see, they grasped with surprising force and clearness. they may not have gone far beneath the surface; but, so far as they went, their work was a model of acuteness and precision. this was the secret of their power. to this may be traced their victory in the various tasks that they undertook. hence, on the one hand, their success in painting the manners of their own day--a task from which, with some notable exceptions, the greatest of the elizabethans had been apt to shrink, as from something alien to their genius; and, on the other hand, the range and keenness of their satire. hence, finally, the originality of their work in criticism, and their new departure in philosophy. the energies of these men were diverse: but all sprang from the same root--from their invincible resolve to see and understand their world; to probe life, as they knew it, to the bottom. thus the new turn given to criticism by dryden was part of a far- reaching intellectual movement; a movement no less positive and self- contained than, in another aspect, it was negative and reactionary. and it is only when taken as part of that movement, as side by side with the philosophy of locke and the satire of swift or pope, that its true meaning can be understood. nor is it the least important or the least attractive of dryden's qualities, as a critic, that both the positive and the negative elements of the prevailing tendency--both the determination to understand and the wish to bring all things under rule--should make themselves felt so strongly and, on the whole, so harmoniously in his essays. no man could have felt more keenly the shortcomings of the elizabethan writers. no man could have set greater store by that "art of writing easily" which was the chief pride of the restoration poets. yet no man has ever felt a juster admiration for the great writers of the opposite school; and no man has expressed his reverence for them in more glowing words. the highest eulogy that has yet been passed on milton, the most discriminating but at the same time the most generous tribute that has ever been offered to shakespeare--both these are to be found in dryden. and they are to be found in company with a perception, at once reasoned and instinctive, of what criticism means, that was altogether new to english literature. the finest and most characteristic of dryden's critical writings--but it is unfortunately also the longest--is without doubt the _essay of dramatic poesy_. the subject was one peculiarly well suited to dryden's genius. it touched a burning question of the day, and it opened the door for a discussion of the deeper principles of the drama. the _essay_ itself forms part of a long controversy between dryden and his brother-in-law, sir robert howard. the dispute was opened by dryden's preface to his tragi-comedy, _the rival ladies_, published probably, as it was certainly first acted, in ; and in the beginning dryden, then first rising [footnote: "to a play at the king's house, _the rival ladies_, a very innocent and most pretty witty play"--is pepys' entry for august , : _diary_, ii. . contrast his contemptuous description of dryden's first comedy, _the wild gallant_, in the preceding year (feb. )--"so poor a thing as i never saw in my life almost".--_ib_., i. .] into fame as a dramatist, confines himself to pleading the cause of rhyme against blank verse in dramatic writing. [footnote: tragedy alone is mentioned by name [_english garner_, in. , ]. but, from the general drift of the argument, it seems probable that dryden was speaking of the drama in general. at a later stage of the dispute, however, he distinguishes between tragedy and comedy, and allows that the arguments in favour of rhyme apply only to the former--a curious inversion of the truth, as it would appear to the modern mind.--_ib_., pp. , .] howard--who, it may reasonably be guessed, had had some brushes with dryden over their joint tragedy, _the indian queen_--at once took up the cudgels. he had written rhymed plays himself, it is true; the four plays, to which his attack on rhyme was prefixed, were such; but he saw a chance of paying off old scores against his brother-in-law, and he could not resist it. dryden began his reply at once; but three years passed before it was published. and the world has no reason to regret his tardiness. there are few writings of which we can say with greater certainty, as dryden himself said of a more questionable achievement, 't is not the hasty product of a day, but the well-ripened fruit of wise delay. the very form of the _essay_ bears witness to the spirit in which it is written. it is cast as a dialogue, "related"--as dryden truly says--"without passion or interest, and leaving the reader to decide in favour of which part he shall judge most reasonable". the balance between opposing views is held as evenly as may be. it is a search for truth, carried out in the "rude and undigested manner" of a friendly conversation. roughly speaking, the subjects of the _essay_ are two. the first, and the more slightly treated, is the quarrel of rhyme against blank verse. the second is the far more important question, how far is the dramatist bound by conventional restrictions? the former--a revival under a new form of a dispute already waged by the elizabethans--leads dryden to sift the claims of the "heroic drama"; and his treatment of it has the special charm belonging to an author's defence of his artistic hearth and home. the latter is a theme which, under some shape or other, will be with us wherever the stage itself has a place in our life. this is not the place to discuss at length the origin or the historical justification of the heroic drama. there is perhaps no form of art that so clearly marks the transition from the elizabethan age to that of the restoration. transitional it must certainly be called; for, in all vital points, it stands curiously apart from the other forms of restoration literature. it has nothing either of the negative or the positive qualities, nothing of the close observation and nothing of the measure and self-restraint, that all feel to be the distinctive marks of the restoration temper. on the other hand the heroic drama, of which dryden's _conquest of granada_ and _tyrannic love_ may be taken as fair samples, has obvious affinities with the more questionable side of the elizabethan stage. it may be defined as wanting in all the virtues and as exaggerating all the vices of the elizabethan dramatists. whatever was most wild in the wildest of the elizabethan plays--the involved plots, the extravagant incidents, the swelling metaphors and similes--all this reappears in the heroic drama. and it reappears without any of the dramatic force or of the splendid poetry which are seldom entirely absent from the work of the elizabethan and jacobean dramatists. the term "heroic drama" is, in fact, a fraud. the plays of dryden and his school are at best but moc-heroic; and they are essentially undramatic. the truth is that these plays take something of the same place in the history of the english drama that is held by the verse of donne and cowley in the history of the english lyric. the extravagant incidents correspond to the far-fetched conceits which, unjustly enough, made the name of donne a by-word with the critics of the last century. the metaphors and similes are as abundant and overcharged, though assuredly not so rich in imagination, as those of the "metaphysical" poets. and dryden, if we may accept the admission of bayes, "loved argument in verse"; a confession that donne and cowley would heartily have echoed. the exaggerations of the heroic drama are the exaggerations of the metaphysical poets transferred from the study to the stage; with the extravagance deepened, as was natural, by the glare of their new surroundings. and, just as the extravagance of the "metaphysicians" led to the reaction that for a hundred years stifled the lyric note in english song, so the extravagance of the heroic drama gave the death-blow to english tragedy. against this parallel the objection may be raised that it takes no reckoning of the enormous gulf that, when all is said, separates even the weakest of the elizabethan plays from the rant and fustian of dryden: a gulf wider, it must be admitted, than that which parts the metaphysical poets from the "singing birds" of the elizabethan era. and, so far as we have yet gone, the objection undoubtedly has force. it is only to be met if we can find some connecting link; if we can point to some author who, on the one hand, retains something of the dramatic instinct, the grace and flexibility of the elizabethans; and, on the other hand, anticipates the metallic ring, the declamation and the theatrical conventions of dryden. such an author is to be found in shirley; in shirley, as he became in his later years; at the time, for instance, when he wrote _the cardinal_ ( ). _the cardinal_ is, in many respects, a powerful play. it is unmistakably written under the influence of webster; and of webster at his most sombre and his best--the webster of the _duchess of malfi_. but it is no less unmistakably wanting in the subtle strength, the dramatic grip and profound poetry, of its model. the villainy of the cardinal is mere mechanism beside the satanic, yet horribly human, iniquity of ferdinand and bosolo. and, at least in one scene, shirley sinks--it is true, in the person of a subordinate character--to a foul-mouthed vulgarity which recalls the shameless bombast of the heroes and heroines of dryden. [footnote: i would this soldier had the cardinal upon a promontory; with what a spring the churchman would leap down! it were a spectacle most rare to see him topple from the precipice, and souse in the salt water with a noise to stun the fishes. and if he fell into a net, what wonder would the simple sea-gulls have to draw up the o'ergrown lobster, so ready boiled! he shall have my good wishes. --_the cardinal_, act v. sc, .] yet, with all his shortcomings, shirley preserves in the main the great tradition of the elizabethans. a further step downwards, a more deadly stage in the history of decadence, is marked by sir william davenant. that arch-impostor, as is well known, had the effrontery to call himself the "son of shakespeare": a phrase which the unwary have taken in the physical sense, but which was undoubtedly intended to mark his literary kinship with the elizabethans in general and with the greatest of elizabethan dramatists in particular. so far as dates go, indeed, the work of davenant may be admitted to fall within what we loosely call the elizabethan period; or, more strictly, within the last stage of the period that began with elizabeth and continued throughout the reigns of her two successors. his first tragedy, _albovine, king of the lombards_, was brought out in ; and his earlier work was therefore contemporary with that of massinger and ford. but much beyond this his relation to the elizabethans can hardly claim to go. charity may allow him some faint and occasional traces of the dramatic power which is their peculiar glory; and this is perhaps more strongly marked in his earliest play than in any of its successors. what strikes us most forcibly, however--and that, even in his more youthful work--is the obvious anticipation of much that we associate only with the restoration period. the historical plot, the metallic ring of the verse, [footnote: i take two instances from _albovine_.-- ( ) let all glad hymns in one mix'd concord sound, and make the echoing heavens your mirth rebound.--act i. ( ) i am the broom of heaven; when the world grows foul, i'll sweep the nations into the sea, like dust.--act ii. it is noticeable that both passages are spoken by albovine himself, a very creditable elder brother of dryden's maximin and almanzor. one more passage may be quoted, from the _just italian_ ( ):-- the sacred noise attend that, whilst we hear, our souls may dance into each others' ear.--act v. it will be observed that two out of the above passages, coming at the end of scenes, are actually in rhyme, and rhyme which is hardly distinguishable from that of dryden.] the fustian and the bombast-- we have here every mark, save one, of what afterwards came to be known as the heroic drama. the rhymed couplet alone is wanting. and that was added by davenant himself at a later stage of his career. it was in _the siege of rhodes_, of which the first part was published in , that the heroic couplet, after an interval of about sixty years, made its first reappearance on the english stage. it was garnished, no doubt, with much of what then passed for pindaric lyric; it was eked out with music. but the fashion was set; and within ten years the heroic couplet and the heroic drama had swept everything before them. [footnote: a few lines may be quoted to make good the above description of _the siege of rhodes_:-- what various voices do mine ears invade and have a concert of confusion made? the shriller trumpet and tempestuous drum, the deafening clamour from the cannon's womb. --part i. first _entry_. the following lines from part ii. (published in ) might have been signed by dryden:-- no arguments by forms of senate made can magisterial jealousy persuade; it takes no counsel, nor will be in awe of reason's force, necessity, or law. or, again, honour's the soul which nought but guilt can wound, fame is the trumpet which the people sound.] the above dates are enough to disprove the common belief that the heroic drama, rhymed couplet and all, was imported from france. _albovine_, as we have seen, has every mark of the heroic drama, except the couplet; and _albovine_ was written seven years before the first masterpiece of corneille, one year before his first attempt at tragedy. a superficial likeness to the drama of corneille and, subsequently, of racine may doubtless have given wings to the popularity of the new style both with davenant and his admirers. but the heroic drama is, in truth, a native growth: for good or for evil, to england alone must be given the credit of its birth. dryden, no doubt, more than once claims french descent for the literary form with which his fame was then bound up. [footnote: he is, however, as explicit as could be wished in tracing the descent _through_ davenant. "for heroick plays ... the first light we had of them on the english theatre was from the late sir w. davenant. he heightened his characters, as i may probably imagine, from the example of corneille and some french poets."--_of heroic plays_, printed as preface to _the conquest of granada, dramatic works_ (fol.), i. . it was for this reason that davenant was taken as the original hero of that burlesque masterpiece, _the rehearsal_ ( ); and even when the part of bayes was transferred to dryden, the make-up still remained largely that of davenant.] in a well-known prologue he describes his tragic-comedy, _the maiden queen_, as a mingled chime of jonson's humour and corneille's rhyme. [footnote: the greater part of _the maiden queen_, however, is written either in prose or in blank verse.] but the fact is that of corneille there is no more trace in dryden's tragedy than there is of jonson in his comedy; that is, just none at all. the heroic temper, which was at once the essence of corneille's plays and true to the very soul of the man, was mere affectation and _mise-en-scene_ with dryden. the heroes of corneille reflect that nobility of spirit which never entirely forsook france till the days of the regency; those of dryden give utterance to nothing better than the insolent swagger of the restoration. to the peculiar spirit of the heroic drama--to its strength as well as to its weakness--no metrical form could have been more closely adapted than the heroic couplet. it was neither flexible nor delicate; but in the hands of dryden, even more than in those of davenant, it became an incomparably vigorous and effective weapon of declamation. as the most unmistakable and the most glaring mark of the new method it was naturally placed in the forefront of the battle waged by dryden in defence of the heroic drama. it seems, indeed, to have struck him as the strongest advantage possessed by the restoration drama over the elizabethan, and as that which alone was wanting to place the elizabethan drama far ahead both of the greek and of the french. the claims of rhyme to dryden's regard would seem to have been twofold. on the one hand, he thought that it served to "bound and circumscribe" the luxuriance of the poet's fancy. [footnote: dedication to _the rival ladies_: _english garner_, iii. .] on the other hand, it went to "heighten" the purely dramatic element and to "move that admiration which is the delight of serious plays" and to which "a bare imitation" will not suffice. [footnote: _essay of dramatic poesy_: ib. ] both grounds of defence will seem to the modern reader questionable enough. howard at once laid his finger upon the weak spot of the first. "it is", he said, "no argument for the matter in hand. for the dispute is not what way a man may write best in; but which is most proper for the subject he writes upon. and, if this were let pass, the argument is yet unsolved in itself; for he that wants judgment in the liberty of his fancy may as well shew the want of it in its confinement." [footnote: _preface to four new plays_: ib. .] besides, he adds in effect on the next page, so far from "confining the fancy" rhyme is apt to lead to turgid and stilted writing. the second argument stands on higher ground. it amounts to a plea for the need of idealization; and, so far, may serve to remind us that the extravagances of the heroic drama had their stronger, as well as their weaker, side. no one, however, will now be willing to admit that the cause of dramatic idealization is indeed bound up with the heroic couplet; and a moment's thought will show the fallacy of dryden's assumption that it is. in the first place, he takes for granted that, the further the language of the drama is removed from that of actual life, the nearer the spirit of it will approach to the ideal. an unwarrantable assumption, if there ever was one; and an assumption, as will be seen, that contains the seeds of the whole eighteenth-century theory of poetic diction. in the second place--but this is, in truth, only the deeper aspect of the former plea--dryden comes perilously near to an acceptance of the doctrine that idealization in a work of art depends purely on the outward form and has little or nothing to do with the conception or the spirit. the bond between form and matter would, according to this view, be purely arbitrary. by a mere turn of the hand, by the substitution of rhyme for prose--or for blank verse, which is on more than "measured" or harmonious prose--the baldest presentment of life could be converted into a dramatic poem. from the grosser forms of this fallacy dryden's fine sense was enough to save him. indeed, in the remarks on jonson's comedies that immediately follow, he expressly rejects them; and seldom does he show a more nicely balanced judgment than in what he there says on the limits of imitation in the field of art. but in the passage before us--in his assertion that "the converse must be heightened with all the arts and ornaments of poetry"--it is hard to resist a vision of the dramatist first writing his dialogue in bald and skimble-skamble prose, and then wringing his brains to adorn it "with all the arts" of the dramatic _gradus_. here again we have the seeds of the fatal theory which dominated the criticism and perverted the art of the eighteenth century; the theory which, finding in outward form the only distinction between prose and poetry, was logically led to look for the special themes of poetic art in the dissecting-room or the pulpit, and was driven to mark the difference by an outrageous diction that could only be called poetry on the principle that it certainly was not prose; the theory which at length received its death-blow from the joint attack of wordsworth and coleridge. it remains only to note the practical issue of the battle of the metres. in the drama the triumph of the heroic couplet was for the moment complete; but it was short-lived. by , the date of _aurungzebe_, dryden proclaimed himself already about to "weary of his long-loved mistress, rhyme"; and his subsequent plays were all written in blank verse or prose. but the desertion of "his mistress" brought him little luck; and the rest of his tragedies show a marked falling off in that splendid vigour which went far to redeem even the grossest absurdities of his heroic plays. a more sensitive, though a weaker, genius joined him in the rejection of rhyme; and the example of otway--whose two crucial plays belong to and --did perhaps more than that of dryden himself, more even than the assaults of _the rehearsal_, to discredit the heroic drama. with the appearance of _venice preserved_, rhyme ceased to play any part in english tragedy. but at the same time, it must be noted, tragedy itself began to drop from the place which for the last century it had held in english life. from that day to this no acting tragedy, worth serious attention, has been written for the english stage. the reaction against rhyme was not confined to the drama. the epic, indeed--or what in those days passed for such--can hardly be said to have come within its scope. in the _essay of dramatic poesy_ dryden--and this is one of the few judgments in which howard heartily agrees with him--had denounced rhyme as "too low for a poem"; [footnote: _english garner_, iii. p. .] by which, as the context shows, is meant an epic. this was written the very year in which _paradise lost_, with its laconic sneer at rhyme as a device "to set off wretched matter and lame metre", was given to the world. that, however, did not prevent dryden from asking, and obtaining, leave to "tag its verses" into an opera; [footnote: the following will serve as a sample of dryden's improvements on his model:-- seraph and cherub, careless of their charge and wanton in full ease, now live at large, unguarded leave the passes of the sky, and all dissolved in hallelujahs lie. --_dramatic works_, i. p. .] nor did it deter blackmore--and, at a much later time, wilkie [footnote: blackmore's _king arthur_ was published in ; wilkie's _epigoniad_--the subject of a patriotic puff from hume--in .]--from reverting to the metre that milton had scorned to touch. it is not till the present century that blank verse can be said to have fairly taken seisin of the epic; one of the many services that english poetry owes to the genius of keats. in the more nondescript kinds of poetry, however, the revolt against rhyme spread faster than in the epic. in descriptive and didactic poetry, if anywhere, rhyme might reasonably claim to hold its place. there is much to be said for the opinion that, in such subjects, rhyme is necessary to fix the wandering attention of the reader. yet, for all that, the great efforts of the reflective muse during the next century were, with hardly an exception, in blank verse. it is enough to recall the _seasons_ of thomson, the discourses of akenside and armstrong, and the _night thoughts_ of the arch-moralist young. [footnote: it may be noted that young's blank verse has constantly the run of the heroic couplet.] in the case of young--as later in that of cowper--this is the more remarkable, because his satires show him to have had complete command of the mechanism of the heroic couplet. that he should have deliberately chosen the rival metre is proof--a proof which even the exquisite work of goldsmith is not sufficient to gainsay--that, by the middle of the eighteenth century the heroic couplet had been virtually driven from every field of poetry, save that of satire. we may now turn to the second of the two themes with which dryden is mainly occupied in the _essay of dramatic poesy_. what are the conventional restrictions that surround the dramatist, and how far are they of binding force? that the drama is by nature a convention--more than this, a convention accepted largely with a view to the need of idealization--the men of dryden's day were in no danger of forgetting. the peril with them was all the other way. the fashion of that age was to treat the arbitrary usages of the classical theatre as though they were binding for all time. thus, of the four men who take part in the dialogue of the _essay_, three are emphatically agreed in bowing down before the three unities as laws of nature. dryden himself (neander) is alone in questioning their divinity: a memorable proof of his critical independence; but one in which, as he maliciously points out, he was supported by the greatest of living dramatists. corneille could not be suspected of any personal motive for undertaking the defence of dramatic license. yet he closed his _discourse of the three unities_ with the admission that he had "learnt by experience how much the french stage was constrained and bound up by the observance of these rules, and how many beauties it had sacrificed". [footnote: il est facile aux speculatifs d'etre severes; mais, s'ils voulaient donner dix ou douze poemes de cette nature au public, ils elargiraient peut-etre les regles encore plus que je ne sais, si tot qu'ils auraient reconnu par l'experience quelle contrainte apporte leur exactitude et combien de belles choses elle bannit de notre theatre--_troisieme discours euvres_, xii. . see dryden's essay _english garner_, iii . on the next page is a happy hit at the shifts to which dramatists were driven in their efforts to keep up the appearance of obedience to the unity of place: "the street, the window, the two houses and the closet are made to walk about, and the persons to stand still."] when the two leading masters of the 'classical drama', the french and the english, joined hands to cast doubt upon the sacred unities, its opponents might well feel easy as to the ultimate issue of the dispute. dryden was not the man to bound his argument by any technical question, even when it touched a point so fundamental as the unities. nothing is more remarkable in the _essay_, as indeed in all his critical work, than the wide range which he gives to the discussion. and never has the case against--we can hardly add, for--the french drama been stated more pointedly than by him. his main charge, as was to be expected, is against its monotony, and, in close connection with that, against its neglect of action and its preference for declamation. having defined the drama as "a just and lively image of human nature, in its actions, passions and traverses of fortune", [footnote: _english garner_, iii , ib. ] he proceeds to test the claims of the french stage by that standard. its characters, he finds, are wanting in variety and nature. its range of passion and humour is lamentably narrow. [footnote: ib. - .] its declamations "tire us with their length; so that, instead of grieving for their imaginary heroes, we are concerned for our own trouble, as we are in the tedious visits of bad company; we are in pain till they are gone". [footnote: english garner, iil .] the best tragedies of the french--_cinna and pompey_--"are not so properly to be called plays as long discourses of reason of state". [footnote: ib. .] upon their avoidance of action he is hardly less severe. "if we are to be blamed for showing too much of the action"--one is involuntarily reminded of the closing scene of _tyrannic love_ and of the gibes in _the rehearsal_--"the french are as faulty for discovering too little of it ". [footnote: ib. .] finally, on a comparison between the french dramatists and the elizabethans, dryden concludes that "in most of the irregular plays of shakespeare or fletcher ... there is a more masculine fancy, and greater spirit in all the writing, than there is in any of the french". [footnote: ib. .] given the definition with which he starts--but it is a definition that no frenchman of the seventeenth or eighteenth century would have admitted--it is hard to see how dryden could have reached a substantially different result. nor, if comparisons of this sort are to be made at all, is there much--so far, at least, as shakespeare is concerned--to find fault with in the verdict with which he closes. yet it is impossible not to regret that dryden should have failed to recognize the finer spirit and essence of french tragedy, as conceived by corneille: the strong-tempered heroism of soul, the keen sense of honour, the consuming fire of religion, to which it gives utterance. the truth is that dryden stood at once too near, and too far from, the ideals of corneille to appreciate them altogether at their just value. too near because he instinctively associated them with the heroic drama, which at the bottom of his heart he knew to be no better than an organized trick, done daily with a view to "elevate and surprise". too far, because, in spite of his own candid and generous temper, it was well-nigh impossible for the laureate of the restoration to comprehend the highly strung nature of a man like corneille, and his intense realization of the ideal. but, if dryden is blind to the essential qualities of corneille, he is at least keenly alive to those of shakespeare. it is a memorable thing that the most splendid tribute ever offered to the prince of elizabethans should have come from the leading spirit of the restoration. it has often been quoted, but it will bear quoting once again. "shakespeare was the man who, of all modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. all the images of nature were still present to him; and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily. when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. those who accuse him to have wanted learning give him the great commendation. he was naturally learned. he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her there. i cannot say he is everywhere alike. were he so, i should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. he is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. but he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him. no man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets, quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi." [footnote: _essay of dramatic poesy_. _english garner_, iii. .] the same keenness of appreciation is found in dryden's estimate of other writers who might have seemed to lie beyond the field of his immediate vision. of milton he is recorded to have said: "he cuts us all out, and the ancients too". [footnote: the anecdote is recorded by richardson, who says the above words were written on the copy of _paradise lost_ sent by dorset to milton. dryden, _poetic works_, p. . comp. _dramatic works_, i. ; _discourse on satire_, p. .] on chaucer he is yet more explicit. "as he is the father of english poetry, so i hold him in the same degree of veneration as the grecians held homer, or the romans virgil. he is a perpetual fountain of good sense; learned in all sciences, and therefore speaks properly on all subjects. as he knew what to say, so he knows also when to leave off, a continence which is practised by few writers, and scarcely by any of the ancients, excepting virgil and horace ... chaucer followed nature everywhere, but was never so bold to go beyond her." [footnote: see _preface to fables_, below.] this points to what was undoubtedly the most shining quality of dryden, as a critic: his absolute freedom from preconceived notions, his readiness to "follow nature" and to welcome nature in whatever form she might appear. that was the more remarkable because it ran directly counter both to the general spirit of the period to which he belonged and to the prevailing practice of the critics who surrounded him. the spirit of the restoration age was critical in the invidious, no less than in the nobler, sense of the word. it was an age of narrow ideals and of little ability to look beyond them. in particular, it was an age of carping and of fault-finding; an age within measurable distance of the pedantic system perfected in france by boileau, [footnote: boileau's _art poetique_ was published in . a translation made by soame, with the aid of dryden, was published in .] and warmly adopted by a long line of english critics from roscoromon and buckinghamshire to the monthly reviewers and to johnson. such writers might always have "nature" on their lips; but it was nature seen through the windows of the lecture room or down the vista of a street. with dryden it was not so. with him we never fail to get an unbiassed judgment; the judgment of one who did not crave for nature "to advantage dressed", but trusted to the instinctive freshness of a mind, one of the most alert and open that ever gave themselves to literature. it is this that puts an impassable barrier between dryden and the men of his own day, or for a century to come. it is this that gives him a place among the great critics of modern literature, and makes the passage from him to the schoolmen of the next century so dreary a descent. dryden's openness of mind was his own secret. the comparative method was, in some measure, the common property of his generation. this, in fact, was the chief conquest of the restoration and augustan critics. it is the mark that serves to distinguish them most clearly from those of the elizabethan age. not that the elizabethans are without comparisons; but that the parallels they saw were commonly of the simplest, not to say of the most childish, cast. every sentence of meres' critical effort--or, to be rigorously exact, every sentence but one--is built on "as" and "so"; but it reads like a parody--a schoolmaster's parody--of touchstone's improvement on orlando's verses in praise of rosalind. shakespeare is brought into line with ovid, elizabeth with achilles, and homer with william warner. this, no doubt, is an extreme instance; but it is typical of the artless methods dear to the infancy of criticism. in jonson's _discoveries_, such comparisons as there are have indisputable point; but they are few, and, for the most part, they are limited to the minuter matters of style. it is with the restoration that the comparative method first made its way into english criticism; and that both in its lawful and less lawful use. the distinction must be jealously made; for there are few matters that lend themselves so readily to confusion and misapprehension as this. between two men, or two forms of art, a comparison may be run either for the sake of placing the one above the head of the other, or for the sake of drawing out the essential differences between the one and the other. the latter method is indispensable to the work of the critic. without reference, express or implied, to other types of genius or to other ways of treatment it is impossible for criticism to take a single step in definition either of an author, or a movement, or a form of art. in a vague and haphazard fashion, even the elizabethans were comparative. meres was so in his endless stream of classical parallels; sidney, after a loftier strain, in his defence of harmonious prose as a form of poetry. and it is the highest achievement of modern criticism to have brought science and order into the comparative method, and largely to have widened its scope. in this sense, comparison _is_ criticism; and to compare with increased intelligence, with a clearer consciousness of the end in view, is to reform criticism itself, to make it a keener weapon and more effective for its purpose. a comparison of qualities, however, is one thing, and a comparison between different degrees of merit is quite another. the former is the essence of criticism; the latter, one of the most futile pastimes that can readily be imagined. that each man should have his own preferences is right enough. it would be a nerveless and unprofitable mind to which such preferences were unknown. more than that, some rough classification, some understanding with oneself as to what authors are to be reckoned supreme masters of their craft, is hardly to be avoided. the mere fact that the critic lays stress on certain writers and dismisses others with scant notice or none at all, implies that in some sense he has formed an estimate of their relative merits. but to drag this process from the background--if we ought not rather to say, from behind the scenes--to the very foot-lights, to publish it, to insist upon it, is as irrelevant as it would be for the historian-- and he, too, must make his own perspective--to explain why he has recorded some events and left others altogether unnoticed. all this is work for the dark room; it should leave no trace, or as little as may be, upon the finished picture. criticism has suffered from few things so much as from its incurable habit of granting degrees in poetry with honours. "the highest art", it has been well said, "is the region of equals." it must be admitted that the restoration critics had an immoderate passion for classing authors according to their supposed rank in the scale of literary desert. a glance at _the battle of the books_--a faint reflection of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns--is enough to place this beyond dispute. dryden himself is probably as guilty as any in this matter. his parallel between juvenal and horace, his comparison of homer with virgil, are largely of the nature of an attempt to show each poet to his proper place, to determine their due order of precedence in the house of fame. in the early days of criticism this was perhaps to be expected. men were feeling their way to the principles; and the shortest road might naturally seem to lie through a comparative table of the men. they were right in thinking that the first step was to ascertain what qualities, and what modes of treatment, give lasting pleasure in poetry; and, to do this, they could not but turn to compare the works of individual poets. but they were wrong in supposing that they could learn anything by striking the balance between the merits of one poet, as a sum total, and the merits of another. the fault was, no doubt, largely in the restoration critics themselves; and it is a fault which, so long as the competitive instinct holds sway with men, will never be entirely unknown. but its hold on the men of dryden's day was in great measure due to the influence of the french critics, and to the narrow lines which criticism had taken in france. no one can read boileau's _art poetique_, no one can compare it with the corresponding _essay_ of pope, without feeling that the purely personal element had eaten into the heart of french criticism to a degree which could never have been natural in england, and which, even in the darkest days of english literature, has seldom been approached. but at the same time it will be felt that never has england come nearer to a merely personal treatment of artistic questions than in the century between dryden and johnson; and that it was here, rather than in the adoption of any specific form of literature--rather, for instance, than in the growth of the heroic drama--that the influence of france is to be traced. side by side, however, with the baser sort of comparisons, we find in the restoration critics no small use of the kind that profits and delights. rymer's _remarks on the tragedies of the former age_ are an instance of the comparative method, in its just sense, as employed by a man of talent. the essays of dryden abound in passages of this nature, that could only have been written by a man of genius. they may have a touch of the desire to set one form of art, or one particular poet, in array against another. but, when all abatements have been made, they remain unrivalled samples of the manner in which the comparative vein can be worked by a master spirit. to the student of english literature they have a further interest--notably, perhaps, the comparison between juvenal and horace and the eulogy of shakespeare--as being among the most striking examples of that change from the latinized style of the early stuart writers to the short, pointed sentence commonly associated with french; the change that was inaugurated by hobbes, but only brought to completion by dryden. once again. as dryden was among the earliest to give the comparative method its due place in english criticism, so he was the first to make systematic use of the historical method. daniel, indeed, in a remarkable essay belonging to the early years of the century, had employed that method in a vague and partial manner. [footnote: _a defence of ryme_ ( ). it was written in answer to a pamphlet by campion ( ), of which the second chapter "declares the unaptness of rime in poesie".--ancient critical essays, ii. t , &c.] he had defended rhyme on the score of its popularity with all ages and all nations. celts, slavs, and huns--parthians and medes and elamites--are all pressed into the service. [footnote: "the turks, slavonians, arabians, muscovites, polacks, hungarians ... use no other harmony of words. the irish, britons, scots, danes, saxons, english, and all the inhabiters of this island either have hither brought, or here found the same in use."--ib. p. .] that is, perhaps, the first instance in which english criticism can be said to have attempted tracing a literary form through the various stages of its growth. but daniel wrote without system and without accuracy. it was reserved for dryden--avowedly following in the steps of the french critic dacier--to introduce the order and the fulness of knowledge--in dryden's case, it must be admitted, a knowledge at second hand--which are indispensable to a fruitful use of the historical method. in this sense, too--as in his use of the comparative method, as in the singular grace and aptness of his style--dryden was a pioneer in the field of english criticism. iii. over the century that parts dryden from johnson it is not well to linger. during that time criticism must be said, on the whole, to have gone back rather than to have advanced. with some reservations to be noticed later, the critics of the eighteenth century are a depressing study. their conception of the art they professed was barren; their judgments of men and things were lamentably narrow. the more valuable elements traceable in the work of dryden--the comparative and the historical treatment--disappear or fall into the background. we are left with little but the futile exaltation of one poet at the expense of his rivals, or the still more futile insistence upon faults, shortcomings, and absurdities. the _dunciad_, the most marked critical work of the period, may be defended on the ground that it _is_ the dunciad; a war waged by genius upon the fool, the pedant, and the fribble. but, none the less, it had a disastrous influence upon english criticism and english taste. it gave sanction to the habit of indiscriminate abuse; it encouraged the purely personal treatment of critical discussions. its effects may be traced on writers even of such force as smollett; of such genius and natural kindliness as goldsmith. but it was on johnson that pope's influence made itself most keenly felt. and _the lives of the poets_, though not written till the movement that gave it birth had spent its force, is the most complete and the most typical record of the tendencies that shaped english literature and gave the law to english taste from the restoration to the french revolution: a notable instance of the fact so often observed, and by some raised to the dignity of a general law, that both in philosophy and in art, the work of the critic does not commonly begin till the creative impulse of a given period is exhausted. what, then, was johnson's method? and what its practical application? the method is nothing if not magisterial. it takes for granted certain fixed laws--whether the laws formulated by aristotle, or by horace, or the french critics, is for the moment beside the question--and passes sentence on every work of art according as it conforms to the critical decalogue or transgresses it. the fault of this method is not, as is sometimes supposed, that it assumes principles in a subject where none are to be sought; but that its principles are built on a miserably narrow and perverted basis. that there are principles of criticism, that the artist's search for beauty must be guided by some idea, is obvious enough. it can be questioned only by those who are prepared to deny the very possibility of criticism; who would reduce the task both of critic and of artist to a mere record of individual impressions. it need hardly be said that the very men who are most ready to profess such a doctrine with their lips, persistently, and rightly, give the lie to it in their deeds. no creative work, no critical judgment, either is or can be put forward as a mere impression; it is the impression of a trained mind--that is, of a mind which, instinctively or as a conscious process, is guided by principles or ideas. so far, then, as he may be held to have borne witness to the need of ideas, johnson was clearly in the right. it was when he came to ask, what is the nature of those ideas, and how does the artist or the critic arrive at them? that he began to go astray. throughout he assumes that the principles of art--and that, not only in their general bearing (proportion, harmony, and the like), but in their minuter details-are fixed and invariable. to him they form a kind of case-law, which is to be extracted by the learned from the works of a certain number of "correct writers", ancient and modern; and which, once established, is binding for all time both on the critic and on those he summons to his bar. in effect, this was to declare that beauty can be conceived in no other way than as it presented itself, say, to virgil or to pope. it was to lay the dead hand of the past upon the present and the future. more than this. the models that lent themselves to be models, after the kind desired by johnson, were inevitably just those it was most cramping and least inspiring to follow. they were the men who themselves wrote, to some degree, by rule; in whom "correctness" was stronger than inspiration; who, however admirable in their own achievement, were lacking in the nobler and subtler qualities of the poet. they were not the greeks; not even, at first hand, the latins; though the names both of greek and latin were often on johnson's lips. they were rather the latins as filtered through the english poets of the preceding century; the latins in so far as they had appealed to the writers of the "augustan age", but no further; the latins, as masters of satire, of declamation, and of the lighter kinds of verse. it was latin poetry without lucretius and catullus, without the odes of horace, without the higher strain of the genius of virgil. in other words, it was poetry as conceived by boileau or addison-or mr. smith. [footnote: see johnson's extravagant eulogy of this obscure writer in the lives of the poets. works, x. i.] yet again. in the hands of johnson--and it was a necessary consequence of his critical method--poetry becomes more and more a mere matter of mechanism. once admit that the greatness of a poet depends upon his success in following certain models, and it is but a short step--if indeed it be a step--further to say that he must attempt no task that has not been set him by the example of his forerunners. it is doubtless true that johnson did not, in so many words, commit himself to this absurdity. but it is equally true that any poet, who overstepped the bounds laid down by previous writers, was likely to meet with but little mercy at his hands. milton, cowley, gray--for all had the audacity to take an untrodden path in poetry-one after another are dragged up for execution. it is clear that by example, if not by precept, johnson was prepared to "make poetry a mere mechanic art"; and cowper was right in saying that it had become so with pope's successors. indeed john--son himself, in closing his estimate of pope, seems half regretfully to anticipate cowper's verdict. "by perusing the works of dryden, he discovered the most perfect fabrick of english verse, and habituated himself to that only which he found the best. ... new sentiments and new images others may produce; but to attempt any further improvement of versification will be dangerous. art and diligence have now done their best, and what shall be added will be the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity". [footnote: _life of pope_. johnson's works, xi. pp , .] but johnson failed to see that his own view of poetry led inevitably to this lame and impotent conclusion. to adopt johnson's method is, in truth, to misconceive the whole nature of poetry and of poetic imagination. the ideas that have shaped the work of one poet may act as guide and spur, but can never be a rule--far less a law--to the imagination of another. the idea, as it comes to an artist, is not a law imposing itself from without; it is a seed of life and energy springing from within. this, however, was a truth entirely hidden from the eyes of johnson and the augustan critics. to assert it both by word and deed, both as critics and as poets, was the task of coleridge, and of those who joined hands with coleridge, in the succeeding generation. apart from the undying beauty of their work as artists, this was the memorable service they rendered to poetry in england. it remains to illustrate the method of johnson by its practical application. as has already been said, johnson is nothing if not a hanging judge; and it is just where originality is most striking that his sentences are the most severe. if there was one writer who might have been expected to win his favour, it was pope; and if there is any work that bears witness to the originality of pope's genius, it is the imitations of horace. these are dismissed in a disparaging sentence. there is no adequate recognition of congreve's brilliance as a dramatist; none of swift's amazing powers as a satirist. yet all these were men who lived more or less within the range of ideas and tendencies by which johnson's own mind was moulded and inspired. the case is still worse when we turn to writers of a different school. take the poets from the restoration to the closing years of the american war; and it is not too much to say that, with the exception of thomson--saved perhaps by his "glossy, unfeeling diction"--there is not one of them who overstepped the bounds marked out for literary effort by the prevailing taste of the augustan age, in its narrowest sense, without paying the price for his temerity in the sneers or reprobation of johnson. collins, it is true, escapes more lightly than the rest; but that is probably due to the affection and pity of his critic. yet even collins, perhaps the most truly poetic spirit of the century between milton and burns, is blamed for a "diction often harsh, unskillfully laboured, and injudiciously selected"; for "lines commonly of slow motion"; for "poetry that may sometimes extort praise, when it gives little pleasure". [footnote: johnson's works, xi. .]the poems of gray--an exception must be made, to johnson's honour, in favour of the _elegy_ [footnote: in the bosom of "the club" the exception dwindled to two stanzas (boswell's life, ii. ).] are slaughtered in detail; [footnote: johnson's works, xi. - . johnson is peculiarly sarcastic on the _bard_ and the _progress of poetry_.] the man himself is given dog's burial with the compendious epitaph: "a dull fellow, sir; dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere". [footnote: boswell's _life_, ii. . comp. in. .] but most astonishing of all, as is well known, is the treatment bestowed on milton. of all milton's works, _paradise lost_ seems to have been the only one that johnson genuinely admired. that he praises with as little of reservation as was in the nature of so stern a critic. on _paradise regained_ he is more guarded; on _samson_, more guarded yet. [footnote: the two papers devoted to _samson_ in the _rambler_ are "not entitled even to this slender commendation". "this is the tragedy that ignorance has admired and bigotry applauded" (johnson's works, v. ).] but it is in speaking of the earlier poems that johnson shows his hand most plainly. _comus_ "is a drama in the epic style, inelegantly splendid and tediously instructive". [footnote: johnson's works, ix. .] of _lycidas_ "the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers un-pleasing" [footnote: ib. .] as for the sonnets, "they deserve not any particular criticism. for of the best it can only be said that they are not bad; and perhaps only the eighth and twenty-first are truly entitled to this slender commendation.... these little pieces may be dismissed without much anxiety". [footnote: ib. . the two sonnets are those written _when the assault was intended to the city_, and _on his blindness_.] it would be hardly worth while to record these ill-tempered judgments if they were not the natural outcome of a method which held unquestioned sway over english taste for a full century--in france for nearly two--and which, during that time, if we except gray and his friends, was not seriously disputed by a single man of mark. the one author in whose favour the rules of "correct writing" were commonly set aside was shakespeare; and perhaps there is no testimony to his greatness so convincing as the unwilling homage it extorted from the contemporaries of pope, of johnson, and of hume. johnson's own notes and introductions to the separate plays are at times trifling enough; [footnote: compare the assault on the "mean expressions" of shakespeare (rambler, no. ).] but his general preface is a solid and manly piece of work. it contrasts strangely not only with the verdicts given above, but with his jeers at _chevy chase_ [footnote: ib. x. .]--a "dull and lifeless imbecility"--at the _nonne prestes tale_, and at the _knightes tale_ [footnote: ib. ix. .] one more instance, and we may leave this depressing study in critical perversity. among the great writers of johnson's day there was none who showed a truer originality than fielding; no man who broke more markedly with the literary superstitions of the time; none who took his own road with more sturdiness and self-reliance. this was enough for johnson, who persistently depreciated both the man and his work. something of this should doubtless be set down to disapproval of the free speech and readiness to allow for human frailty, which could not but give offence to a moralist so unbending as johnson. but that will hardly account for the assertion that "harry fielding knew nothing but the outer shell of life"; still less for the petulant ruling that he "was a barren rascal". [footnote: boswell's _life_, ii. . diary and letters of madame d'arblay, i. ] the truth is--and johnson felt it instinctively--that the novel, as conceived by fielding--the novel that gloried in painting all sides of life, and above all in drawing out the humour of its "lower spheres"--dealt a fatal blow not only at the pompous canons which the _rambler_ was pleased to call "the indispensable laws of aristotelian criticism", [footnote: johnson's works, v. .] but also at the view which found "human life to be a state where much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed". it would be hard to say whether johnson found more in fielding to affront him, as pessimist or as critic. and it would be equally hard to say in which of the two characters lay the greater barrier to literary insight. even richardson--no less revolutionary, though in a different way, than fielding--was only saved so as by fire; by the undying hatred which he shared with johnson for his terrible rival. it was rather as moralist than as artist, rather for "the sentiment" than for the tragic force of his work, that richardson seems to have won his way to johnson's heart. [footnote: see the passage referred to in the preceding note.] is not the evidence conclusive? is it a harsh judgment to say that no critic so narrow, so mechanical, so hostile to originality as johnson has ever achieved the dictatorship of english letters? the supremacy of johnson would have been impossible, had not the way been smoothed for it by a long succession of critics like-minded with himself. such a succession may be traced from swift to addison, from addison to pope, and--with marked reservations--from pope to goldsmith. it would be unjust to charge all, or indeed any, of these with the narrowness of view betrayed in johnson's verdicts on individual writers. to arrive at this perfection of sourness was a work of time; and the nature of addison and goldsmith at least was too genial to allow of any approach to it. but, with all their difference of temperament, the method of the earlier critics is hardly to be distinguished from that of johnson. there is the same orderliness of treatment--first the fable, then the characters, lastly the sentiment and the diction; the same persistency in applying general rules to a matter which, above all others, is a law to itself; the same invincible faith in "the indispensable laws of aristotelian criticism". it is this that, in spite of its readiness to admire, makes addison's criticism of _paradise lost_ so dreary a study; and this that, in an evil hour, prompted goldsmith to treat the soliloquy of hamlet as though it were a schoolboy's exercise in rhetoric and logic. [footnote: goldsmith, essay xvi. the next essay contains a like attack on mercutio's description of queen mab.] and yet it is with goldsmith that we come to the first dawn of better things. the carping strain and the stiffness of method, that we cannot overlook in him, were the note of his generation. the openness to new ideas, the sense of nature, the fruitful use of the historical method, are entirely his own. there had been nothing like them in our literature since dryden. in criticism, as in creative work, goldsmith marks the transition from the old order to the new. perhaps the clearest indication of this is to be found in his constant appeal to nature. in itself, as we have seen, this may mean much or little. "nature" is a vague word; it was the battle-cry of wordsworth, but it was also the battle-cry of boileau. and, at first sight, it might seem to be used by goldsmith in the narrower rather than in the wider sense. "it is the business of art", he writes, "to imitate nature, but not with a servile pencil; and to choose those attitudes and dispositions only which are beautiful and engaging." [footnote: goldsmith, essay xiii.] but a glance at the context will show that what goldsmith had in mind was not "nature to advantage dressed", not nature with any adornments added by man; but nature stripped of all that to man has degrading associations; nature, to adopt the words used by wordsworth on a kindred subject, "purified from all lasting or rational causes of dislike or disgust". it may well be that goldsmith gave undue weight to this reservation. it may well be that he did not throw himself on nature with the unwavering constancy of wordsworth. but, none the less, we have here--and we have it worked out in detail [footnote: as to oratory, poetry, the drama, and acting, ib., essays iv., xii., xiii.; _the bee_, no. ii.]--the germ of the principle which, in bolder hands, gave england the lyrical ballads and the essays of lamb. in an essay not commonly reprinted, goldsmith, laying his finger on the one weak spot in the genius of gray, gives the poet the memorable advice--to "study the people". and throughout his own critical work, as in his novel, his comedies, and his poems, there is an abiding sense that, without this, there is no salvation for poetry. that in itself is enough to fix an impassable barrier between goldsmith and the official criticism of his day. the other main service rendered by goldsmith was his return to the historical method. it is true that his knowledge is no more at first hand, and is set out with still less system than that of dryden a century before. but it is also true that he has a far keener sense of the strength which art may draw from history than his great forerunner. dryden confines himself to the history of certain forms of art; goldsmith includes the history of nations also in his view. with dryden the past is little more than an antiquarian study; with goldsmith it is a living fountain of inspiration for the present. the art of the past--the poetry, say, of teutonic or celtic antiquity--is to him an undying record of the days when man still walked hand in hand with nature. the history of the past is at once a storehouse of stirring themes ready to the hand of the artist, and the surest safeguard against both flatness and exaggeration in his work. [footnote: see essays xiii., xiv., xx.; _present state of polite learning_, in particular, chap. xi.] it offers, moreover, the truest schooling of the heart, and insensibly "enlists the passions on the side of humanity". "poetry", byron said, "is the feeling of a former world, and future"; [footnote: moore's _life_, p. ] and to the first half of the statement goldsmith would have heartily subscribed. for the historical method in his hands is but another aspect of the counsel he gave to gray: "study the people". it is an anticipation--vague, no doubt, but still unmistakable--of the spirit which, both in france and england, gave birth to the romantic movement a generation or two later. that zeal for the literature of the past was in the air when goldsmith wrote is proved by works so different as those of gray and percy, of chatterton and macpherson, of mallet and warton. [footnote: percy's reliques were published in ; chatterton's _rowley poems_ written in ; macpherson's _ossian_ (first instalment) in ; mallet's _northern antiquities_ in ; and warton's _history of english poetry_--a book to the learning and importance of which scant justice has been done--from to . to these should be added a work, whose fine scholarship and profound learning is now universally admitted, tyrwhitt's _chaucer_ ( - ). it will be noticed that all these works fall within the space of twenty years, - ] but it may be doubted whether any one of them, gray excepted, saw the true bearing of the movement more clearly than goldsmith, or did more to open fresh springs of thought and beauty for the poetry of the next age, if not of his own. it would be unpardonable to turn from the writers of the eighteenth century with no notice of a book which, seldom now read, is nevertheless perhaps the most solid piece of work that modern europe had as yet to show in any branch of literary criticism. this is burke's treatise _on the sublime and the beautiful_. few will now be prepared to accept the material basis which burke finds for the ideas of the imagination. [footnote: burke traces our ideas of the sublime to the sense of physical pain; our ideas of the beautiful to that of physical pleasure; identifying the former with a contraction or tension, and the latter with a relaxation of the muscles. against this theory two main objections may be urged: ( ) as, on burke's own showing, the objects of the imagination, at least as far as poetry is concerned, are, and must be, presented first to the _mind_, it is (in the strictest sense of the term) preposterous to attribute their power over us to a purely muscular operation ( ) the argument, taken by itself, is barely relevant to the matter in hand. even where a physical basis can be proved--as it can in the case of music, painting, and sculpture (and of poetry, so far as rhythm and harmony are an essential element of it) it is extravagant to maintain that the physiologist or the "psycho physicist" can explain the whole, or even the greater part, of what has to be explained beyond the fraction of information that purely physical facts can give us, a vast field must be left to intellectual and imaginative association. and that is the province not of physiology but of psychology, and of what the germans call _aesthetik_ this province, however, is but seldom entered by burke. what, then, was it that drove burke to a position so markedly at variance with the idealism of his later years? in all probability it was his rooted suspicion of reasoning as a deliberate and conscious process. other writers of the century--addison, for instance--had spoken as if men reasoned from certain abstract ideas (proportion, fitness, and the like) to individual instances of beauty, deciding a thing to have beauty or no, according as it squared or failed to square with the general notion this, as burke points out, is more than questionable in itself, and it was certain to affront a man who, even thus early, had shown an almost morbid hatred of abstractions. in his later years, as is well known, he sought refuge from them in instinct, in "prejudice", in the unconscious working of the "permanent reason of man". in earlier days--he was still well under thirty--he found escape by the grosser aid of a materialist explanation (burke's treatise was published in the _laocoon_ of lessing, a work which may be compared with that of burke and which was very probably suggested by it, appeared in .)] but none can deny the skill with which he works out his theory, nor the easy mastery with which each part is fitted into its place. the speculative power of the book and the light it throws on the deeper springs of the imagination are alike memorable. the first is not unworthy of the _reflections_ or the _appeal from the new to the old whigs_; the second shows that fruitful study of the bible and the poets, english and classical, to which his later writings and speeches bear witness on every page. if the originality and depth of burke's treatise is to be justly measured, it should be set side by side with those papers of addison which akenside expanded in his dismal _pleasures of the imagination_. the performance of addison, grateful though one must be to him for attempting it, is thin and lifeless. that of burke is massive and full of suggestion. at every turn it betrays the hand of the craftsman who works with his eye upon his tools. the speculative side of criticism has never been a popular study with englishmen, and it is no accident that one of the few attempts to deal seriously with it should have been made at the only time when philosophy was a living power among us, and when the desire to get behind the outward shows of things was keener than it has ever been before or since. but for burke's treatise, a wide gap would have been left both in the philosophy and the criticism of the eighteenth century; and it is to be wished that later times had done more to work the vein which he so skilfully explored. as it is, the writers both of france and germany--above all, hegel in his _aesthetik_--have laboured with incomparably more effect than his own countrymen, mr. ruskin excepted, upon the foundations that he laid. iv. johnson's _lives of the poets_ was the last word of the school which the restoration had enthroned; the final verdict of the supreme court which gave the law to english letters from the accession of anne to the french revolution. save in the splenetic outbursts of byron--and they are not to be taken too seriously--the indispensable laws of aristotelian criticism fell silent at johnson's death. a time of anarchy followed; anarchy _plus_ the policeman's truncheon of the _edinburgh_ and the _quarterly_. [footnote: the first number of the _edinburgh_ appeared in ; the _quarterly_ was started in a counterblast in .] the ill-fame of these reviews, as they were in their pride of youth, is now so great that doubts may sometimes suggest themselves whether it can possibly be deserved. no one who feels such doubts can do better than turn to the earlier numbers; he will be forced to the conclusion that, whatever their services as the journeymen of letters and of party politics, few critics could have been so incompetent to judge of genius as the men who enlisted under the standard of jeffrey or of gifford. there is not, doubtless, in either review the same iron wall of reasoned prejudice that has been noted in johnson, but there is a plentiful lack of the clear vision and the openness to new impressions which are the first necessity of the critic. what carlyle says of jeffrey and the _edinburgh_ may be taken as the substantial truth also about gifford and the _quarterly_, and it is the most pregnant judgment that has yet been passed upon them. "jeffrey may be said to have begun the rash, reckless style of criticising everything in heaven and earth by appeal to moliere's maid: 'do _you_ like it?' '_don't_ you like it?' a style which, in hands more and more inferior to that sound-hearted old lady and him, has since grown gradually to such immeasurable length among us; and he himself is one of the first that suffers by it. if praise and blame are to be perfected, not in the mouth of moliere's maid only but in that of mischievous, precocious babes and sucklings, you will arrive at singular judgments by degrees." [footnote: carlyle, _reminiscences_ n , ] carlyle has much here to say of jeffrey's "recklessness", his defiance of all rules, his appeal to the chance taste of the man in the crowd. he has much also to say of his acuteness, and the unrivalled authority of his decrees. [footnote: "jeffrey was by no means the supreme in criticism or in anything else, but it is certain there has no critic appeared among us since who was worth naming beside him and his influence for good and for evil in literature and otherwise has been very great. nothing in my time has so forwarded all this--the 'gradual uprise and rule in all things of roaring, million headed &c demos'-- "as jeffrey and his once famous _edinburgh review_'--ib ] but he is discreetly silent on their severity and short-sightedness. [footnote: "you know", byron wrote in "the system of the edinburgh gentlemen is universal attack. they praise none, and neither the public nor the author expects praise from them."--moore's _life_, p .] yet this is the unpardonable sin of both reviews: that mediocrity was applauded, but that, whenever a man of genius came before them, the chances were ten to one that he would be held up to ridicule and contempt. the very first number of the _edinburgh_ lays this down as an article of faith. taking post on the recent appearance of _thalaba_, the reviewer opens fire by a laboured parallel between poetry and religion. [footnote: _edinburgh review_, no. , pp , &c ] with an alteration of names it might have been written by a member of the english church union, or of the holy inquisition. "the standards of poetry have been fixed long ago by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question. many profess to be entirely devoted to poetry, who have no _good works_ to produce in support of their pretensions. the catholic poetical church too . . . has given birth to an infinite variety of heresies and errors, the followers of which have hated and persecuted each other as heartily as other bigots." then, turning to business, the writer proceeds to apply his creed to southey and all his works, not forgetting the works also of his friends. "the author belongs to a sect of poets that has established itself in this country within these ten or twelve years"--it would be hard to say for whose benefit in particular this date was taken--"and is looked upon as one of its chief champions and apostles". "the doctrines of this sect"--the reviewer continues, with an eye upon the alien act--"are of german origin, or borrowed from the great apostle of geneva". rousseau is then "named" for expulsion, together with a miscellaneous selection of his following: schiller and kotzebue (the next number includes kant under the anathema), quarles and donne, ambrose phillips and cowper--perhaps the most motley crew that was ever brought together for excommunication. it is not, however, till the end of the essay that the true root of bitterness between the critic and his victims is suffered fully to appear. "a splenetic and idle discontent with the existing institutions of society seems to be at the bottom of all their serious and peculiar sentiments." in other words, the _edinburgh_ takes up the work of the _anti-jacobin_; with no very good grace jeffrey affects to sit in the seat of canning and of frere. so much for the "principles" of the new venture; principles, it will be seen, which appear to rest rather upon a hatred of innovation in general than upon any reasoned code, such as that of johnson or the "aristotelian laws", in particular. on that point, it must be clearly realized, carlyle was in the right. it is that which marks the essential difference of the reviewers--we can hardly say their advance--as against johnson. we may now turn to watch the reviewers, knife in hand, at the dissecting-table. for the twenty-five years that followed the foundation of the _edinburgh_, england was more full of literary genius than it had been at any time since the age of elizabeth. and it is not too much to say that during that period there was not one of the men, now accepted as among the chief glories of english literature, who did not fall under the lash of one, or both, of the reviews. the leading cases will suffice. and first, the famous attack--not altogether undeserved, it must be allowed--of the _edinburgh_ upon byron. "the poetry of this young lord belongs to the class which neither gods nor men are said to permit", and so on for two or three pages of rather vulgar and heartless merriment at the young lord's expense. [footnote: _edinburgh review_, xi. . it is uncommonly hard to find any trace of poetic power, even of the imitative kind, in the _hours of idleness_. it is significant that the best pieces are those in the heroic couplet; an indication--to be confirmed by _english bards_--of byron's leaning towards the past.] the answer to the sneer, as all the world knows, was _english bards and scotch reviewers_. the author of the article had reason to be proud of his feat. never before did pertness succeed in striking such unexpected fire from genius. and it is only fair to say that the review took its beating like a gentleman. a few years later, and the _edinburgh_ was among the warmest champions of the "english bard". [footnote: see the article on _the corsair_ and _bride of abydos_, ib. xxiii. . after speaking of the "beauty of his diction and versification, and the splendour of his description", the reviewer continues: "but it is to his pictures of the stronger passions that he is indebted for the fulness of his fame. he has delineated with unequalled force and fidelity the workings of those deep and powerful emotions.... we would humbly suggest to him to do away with the reproach of the age by producing a tragic drama of the old english school of poetry and pathos." the _amende honorable_ with a vengeance. the review of _the giaour_, byron thought, was "so very mild and sentimental that it must be written by jeffrey in _love_".--moore's _life_, p. .] it was reserved for southey, a pillar of the _quarterly_, to rank him as the "goliath" of the "satanic school". let us now turn to the _quarterly_ upon keats. _endymion_, in spite of the noble self-criticism of its preface, is denounced as "cockney poetry" [footnote: the phrase was also employed by _blackwood_, vol. iii. - .]--a stupid and pointless vulgarism--and is branded as clothing "the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language". the author is dismissed with the following amenities: "being bitten by leigh hunt's insane criticism, he more than rivals the insanity of his poetry"; and we are half-surprised not to find him told, as he was by _blackwood_, to "go back to the shop, mr. john; back to the plasters, pills, and ointment-boxes". [footnote: _quarterly review_, xix. . see _blackwood_, vol. iii. ; where the reviewer sneers at "the calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of _endymion_".] with this insolence it is satisfactory to contrast the verdict of the _edinburgh_: "we have been exceedingly struck with the genius these poems--_endymion_, _lamia_, _isabella_, _the eve of st. agnes_, &c.--display, and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their extravagance. . . . they are at least as full of genius as absurdity." of _hyperion_ the reviewer says: "an original character and distinct individuality is bestowed upon the poet's mythological persons. . . . we cannot advise its completion. for, though there are passages of some force and grandeur, it is sufficiently obvious that the subject is too far removed from all the sources of human interest to be successfully treated by any modern author". [footnote: edinburgh review, xxxiv. .] a blundering criticism, which, however, may be pardoned in virtue of the discernment, not to say the generosity, of the foregoing estimate. it would have been well had the _edinburgh_ always written in this vein. but wordsworth was a sure stumbling-block to the sagacity of his critics, and he certainly never failed to call forth the insolence and flippancy of jeffrey. two articles upon him remain as monuments to the incompetence of the _edinburgh_; the first prompted by the poems of , the second by the _excursion_. the former pronounces sentence roundly at the very start: "mr. wordsworth's diction has nowhere any pretence to elegance or dignity, and he has scarcely ever condescended to give the grace of correctness or dignity to his versification". from this sweeping condemnation four poems--_brougham castle_, and the sonnets on venice, milton, and bonaparte--are generously excepted. but, as though astonished at his own moderation, the reviewer quickly proceeds to deal slaughter among the rest. of the closing lines of _resolution and independence_ he writes: "we defy mr. wordsworth's bitterest enemy to produce anything at all parallel to this from any collection of english poetry, or even from the specimens of his friend, mr. southey". of the stanzas to the sons of burns, "never was anything more miserable". _alice fell_ is "trash"; _yarrow unvisited_, "tedious and affected". the lines from the _ode to duty_. "thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, and the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong," are "utterly without meaning". the poem on the _cuckoo_ is "absurd". the _ode on immortality_ is "the most illegible and unintelligible part of the whole publication". "we venture to hope that there is now an end of this folly." [footnote: _edinburgh review_, xi. , &c.] but the hope is doomed to disappointment. the publication of the _excursion_ a few years later finds the reviewer still equal to his task. "this will never do", he begins in a fury; "the case of mr. wordsworth is now manifestly hopeless. we give him up as altogether incurable and beyond the power of criticism." the story of margaret, indeed, though "it abounds, of course, with mawkish sentiment and details of preposterous minuteness, has considerable pathos". but the other passage which one would have thought must have gone home to every heart--that which describes the communing of the wanderer with nature [footnote: _excursion_, book i.]--is singled out for ridicule; while the whole poem is judged to display "a puerile ambition of singularity, grafted on an unlucky predilection for truisms". [footnote: _edinburgh review_, xxiv. i, &c. it is but just to add that in the remainder of the essay the reviewer takes back--so far as such things can ever be taken back--a considerable part of his abuse.] it would be idle to maintain that in some of these slashing verdicts-- criticisms they cannot be called--the reviewer does not fairly hit the mark. but these are chance strokes; and they are dealt, as the whole attack is conceived, in the worst style of the professional swash- buckler. yet, low as is the deep they sound, a lower deep is opened by the _quarterly_ in its article on shelley; an article which bears unmistakable marks of having been written under the inspiration, if not by the hand, of southey. it is impossible to know anything about southey without feeling that, both in character and in intellect, he had many of the qualities that go to make an enlightened critic. but his fine nature was warped by a strain of bigotry; and he had what, even in a man who otherwise gave conclusive proof of sincerity and whole-heartedness, must be set down as a strong touch of the pharisee. after every allowance has been made, no feeling other than indignation is possible at the tone which he thought fit to adopt towards shelley. he opens the assault, and it is well that he does so, by an acknowledgment that the versification of the _revolt of islam_, the _corpus delicti_ at that moment under the scalpel, is "smooth and harmonious", and that the poem is "not without beautiful passages, free from errors of taste". but the "voice of warning", as he himself would too generously have called it, is not long in making itself heard. "mr. shelley, with perfect deliberation and the steadiest perseverance, perverts all the gifts of his nature, and does all the injury, both public and private, which his faculties enable him to perpetrate. . . .he draws largely on the rich stores of another mountain poet, to whose religious mind it must be matter of perpetual sorrow to see the philosophy, which comes pure and holy from his pen, degraded and perverted by this miserable crew of atheists and pantheists." so far, perhaps, the writer may claim not to have outstepped the traditional limits of theological hatred. for what follows there is not even that poor excuse. "if we might withdraw the veil of his private life and tell what we now know about him, it would be indeed a disgusting picture that we should exhibit, but it would be an unanswerable comment on our text. . .mr. shelley is too young, too ignorant, too inexperienced, and too vicious to undertake the task of reforming any world but the little world within his own breast." [footnote: quarterly review, xxi. , &c.] for the credit of both reviews it must be said that it would be difficult to find another instance of so foul a blow as this: [footnote: except in the infamous insinuations, also a crime of the _quarterly_,] non ragioniam di _lui_, ma guarda e passa. [footnote: against the character of currer bell. see also the scurrilous attack on the character of leigh hunt in _blackwood_, vol iii ] apart from their truculence, the early numbers of the _edinburgh_ and _quarterly_ are memorable for two reasons in the history of english literature. they mark the downfall of the absolute standard assumed by johnson and others to hold good in criticism. and they led the way, slowly indeed but surely, to the formation of a general interest in literature, which, sooner or later, could not but be fatal to their own haphazard dogmatism. by their very nature they were an appeal to the people; and, like other appeals of the kind, they ended in a revolution. of the men who fixed the lines on which this revolution was to run, four stand out taller from the shoulders upwards than their fellows. these are coleridge, lamb, hazlitt, and carlyle. the critical work of all four belongs to the first thirty years or so of the present century; [footnote: some of the dates are as follows lamb's _specimens of english dramatic poets_ was published in , his _essays of elia_ began to appear in the _london magazine_, , coleridge's first course of lectures (on english poets) was delivered in , his second course, in - , his _biographia literana_ in hazlitt's _characters of shakespeare's plays_ was published in , his _lectures on the english poets_ in , and on _the english comic writers_ in carlyle's essays began to appear (in the _edinburgh_ and other reviews) in , that on diderot--the last notable essay of a literary cast--in hazlitt died in , coleridge and lamb in by that time carlyle had turned to history and kindred subjects] and of the four it is probable that carlyle, by nature certainly the least critical, had the greatest influence in changing the current of critical ideas. space forbids any attempt to treat their work in detail. all that can be done is to indicate what were the shortcomings of english criticism as it came into their hands, and how far and in what manner they modified its methods and its aims. till the beginning of the present century, criticism in england had remained a very simple thing. when judgment had once been passed, for good or evil, on an individual work or an individual writer, the critic was apt to suppose that nothing further could reasonably be expected of him. the comparative method, foreshadowed but only foreshadowed by dryden, had not been carried perceptibly further by dryden's successors. the historical method was still more clearly in its infancy. the connection between the two, the unity of purpose which alone gives significance to either, was hardly as yet suspected. it may be said--an english critic of the eighteenth century would undoubtedly have said--that these, after all, are but methods; better, possibly, than other methods; but still no more than means to an end-- the eternal end of criticism, which is to appraise and to classify. the view is disputable enough. it leaves out of sight all that criticism--the criticism of literature and art--has done to throw light upon the dark places of human thought and history, upon the growth and subtle transformations of spiritual belief, upon the power of reason and imagination to mould the shape of outward institutions. all these things are included in the scope of the historical and comparative methods; and all of them stand entirely apart from the need to judge or classify the works of individual poets. but, for the moment, such wider considerations may be put aside, and the objection weighed on its own merits. it must then be answered that, without comparison and without the appeal to history, even to judge and classify reasonably would be impossible; and hence that, however much we narrow the scope of criticism, these two methods--or rather, two aspects of the same method--must still find place within its range. for, failing them, the critic in search of a standard--and without some standard or criterion there can be no such thing as criticism--is left with but two possible alternatives. he must either appeal to some absolute standard--the rules drawn from the "classical writers", in a sense wider or narrower, as the case may be; or he must decide everything by his own impression of the moment, eked out by the "appeal to moliere's maid". the latter is the negation of all criticism. the former, spite of itself, is the historical method, but the historical method applied in an utterly arbitrary and irrational way. the former was the method of johnson; the latter, of the _edinburgh_ and the _quarterly_. each in turn, as we have seen, had ludicrously broken down. in the light of recent inventions, it might have been expected that some attempt would be made to limit the task of the critic to a mere record of his individual impressions. this, in fact, would only have been to avow, and to give the theory of what the _edinburgh_ and the _quarterly_ had already reduced to practice. but the truth is that the men of that day were not strong in such fine-spun speculations. it was a refinement from which even lamb, who loved a paradox as well as any man, would have shrunk with playful indignation. it was in another direction that coleridge and his contemporaries sought escape from the discredit with which criticism was threatened. this was by changing the issue on which the discussion was to be fought. in its most general form, the problem of criticism amounts to this: what is the nature of the standard to be employed in literary judgments? hitherto--at least to the reviewers--the question may be said to have presented itself in the following shape: is the standard to be sought within or without the mind of the critic? is it by his own impression, or by the code handed down from previous critics, that in the last resort the critic should be guided? in the hands of coleridge and others, this was replaced by the question: is the touchstone of excellence to be found within the work of the poet, or outside of it? are we to judge of a given work merely by asking: is it clearly conceived and consistently carried out? or are we bound to consider the further question: is the original conception just, and capable of artistic treatment; and is the workmanship true to the vital principles of poetry? the change is significant. it makes the poet, not the critic, master of the situation. it implies that the critic is no longer to give the law to the poet; but that, in some sense more or less complete, he must begin, if not by putting himself in the place of the individual writer as he was when at work on the individual poem, at least by taking upon himself--by making his own, as far as may be--what he may conceive to be the essential temperament of the poet. this, indeed, is one of the first things to strike us in passing from the old criticism to the new. the _edinburgh_ and _quarterly_ plunge straight into the business of the moment. from the first instant--with "this will never do"--the reviewer poses as the critic, or rather as the accuser. not so coleridge and hazlitt. like the _edinburgh_ and _quarterly_, they undertake to discourse on individual poets. unlike them, each opens his enquiry with the previous question-a question that seems to have found no lodgment in the mind of the reviewers--what is poetry? further than this. hazlitt, in a passage of incomparably greater force than any recorded utterance of coleridge, makes it his task to trace poetry to the deepest and most universal springs of human nature; asserts boldly that it is poetry which, in the strictest sense, is "the life of all of us"; and calls on each one of us to assert his birthright by enjoying it. it is in virtue of the poet latent in him, that the plain man has the power to become a critic. starting then from the question as just stated: is it within the mind of the individual poet, or without it, that the standard of judgment should be sought?--neither coleridge nor hazlitt could have any doubt as to the answer. it is not, they would tell us, in the individual work but in the nature of poetry--of poetry as written large in the common instincts of all men no less than in the particular achievement of exceptional artists--that the test of poetic beauty must be discovered. the opposite view, doubtless, finds some countenance in the precepts, if not the example, of goethe. but, when pressed to extremes, it is neither more nor less than the impressionist conception of criticism transferred to the creative faculty; and, like its counterpart, is liable to the objection that the impression of one poet, so long as it is sincerely rendered, is as good as the impression of another. it is the abdication of art, as the other is the abdication of criticism. yet hazlitt also--for, leaving coleridge, we may now confine ourselves to him--is open to attack. his fine critical powers were marred by the strain of bitterness in his nature. and the result is that his judgment on many poets, and notably the poets of his own day, too often sounds like an intelligent version of the _edinburgh_ or the _quarterly_. or, to speak more accurately, he betrays some tendency to return to principles which, though assuredly applied in a more generous spirit, are at bottom hardly to be distinguished from the principles of johnson. he too has his "indispensable laws", or something very like them. he too has his bills of exclusion and his list of proscriptions. the poetry of earth, he more than suspects, is for ever dead; after milton, no claimant is admitted to anything more substantial than a courtesy title. this, no doubt, was in part due to his morose temper; but it was partly also the result of the imperfect method with which he started. the fault of his conception--and it was that which determined his method--is to be too absolute. it allows too much room to poetry in the abstract; too little to the ever-varying temperament of the individual poet. and even that is perhaps too favourable a statement of the case. his idea of poetry may in part be drawn--and its strength is to have been partly drawn--direct from life and nature. but it is also taken, as from the nature of the case it must be with all of us, from the works of particular poets. and, in spite of his appeal to dante and the bible, it is clear that, in framing it, he was guided too exclusively by his loving study of the earlier english writers, from chaucer to milton. the model, so framed, is laid with heavy hand upon all other writers, who naturally fare ill in the comparison. is it possible to account otherwise for his disparagement of moliere, or his grudging praise of wordsworth and of coleridge? it was here that carlyle came in to redress the balance. from interests, in their origin perhaps less purely literary than have moved any man who has exercised a profound influence on literature, carlyle was led to quicken the sense of poetic beauty, and by consequence to widen the scope of criticism, more than any writer of his day. he may have sought german literature more for its matter than for its artistic beauty--here, too, he brought a new, if in some ways a dangerous, element into criticism--but neither he nor his readers could study it, least of all could they study the work of goethe, without awakening to a whole world of imagination and beauty, to which england had hitherto been dead. with all its shortcomings, the discovery of german literature was a greater revelation than any made to europe since the classical renaissance. the shock--for it was nothing less--came at a singularly happy moment. the blow, given by carlyle as critic, was closely followed up by the french _romantiques_, as creative artists. nothing could well have been more alien to english taste, as understood by the _edinburgh_ and _quarterly_, than the early works, or indeed any works, of hugo and those who owned him for chief--if it were not the works of goethe and the countrymen of goethe. different as these were from each other, they held common ground in uniting the most opposite prejudices of englishmen against them. the sarcasms of thackeray on the french writers speak to this no less eloquently than the fluent flippancies of de quincey upon the germans. [footnote: see thackeray's _paris sketch book_, especially the chapters on _madame sand and the new apocalypse_ and _french dramas and melodramas_. see also de quincey's review of carlyle's translation of _wilhelm meister_. works, vol. xii.] yet, in the one case as in the other--thanks, in no small measure, to matthew arnold and mr. swinburne--genius, in the long run, carried the day. and the same history has been repeated, as the literatures of russia and of scandinavia have each in turn been brought within our ken. these discoveries have all fallen within little more than half a century since carlyle, by the irony of fate, reviewed richter and the _state of german literature_ in the pages of the _edinburgh_. and their result has been to modify the standards of taste and criticism in a thousand ways. they have opened our eyes to aspects of poetry that we should never otherwise have suspected, and unveiled to us fields of thought, as well as methods of artistic treatment which, save by our own fault, must both have widened and deepened our conception of poetry. that is the true meaning of the historical method. the more we broaden our vision, the less is our danger of confounding poetry, which is the divine genius of the whole world, with the imperfect, if not misshapen idols of the tribe, the market-place and the cave. of this conquest carlyle must in justice be reckoned as the pioneer. for many years he stood almost single-handed as the champion of german thought and german art against the scorn or neglect of his countrymen. but he knew that he was right, and was fully conscious whither the path he had chosen was to lead. aware that much in the work of goethe would seem "faulty" to many, he forestalls the objection at the outset. "to see rightly into this matter, to determine with any infallibility whether what we call a fault _is_ in very deed a fault, we must previously have settled two points, neither of which may be so readily settled. first, we must have made plain to ourselves what the poet's aim really and truly was, how the task he had to do stood before his own eye, and how far, with such means as it afforded him, he has fulfilled it. secondly, we must have decided whether and how far this aim, this task of his accorded--not with _us_ and our individual crotchets, and the crotchets of our little senate where we give or take the law--but with human nature and the nature of things at large; with the universal principles of poetic beauty, not as they stand written in our text-books, but in the hearts and imaginations of all men. does the answer in either case come out unfavourable; was there an inconsistency between the means and the end, a discordance between the end and the truth, there is a fault; was there not, there is no fault." [footnote: carlyle on goethe: _miscellanies_, i. ] nothing could ring clearer than this. no man could draw the line more accurately between the tendency to dispense with principles and the tendency to stereotype them, which are the twin dangers of the critic. but it is specially important to note carlyle's relation, in this matter, to hazlitt he insists with as much force as hazlitt upon the need of basing all poetry on "human nature and the nature of things at large"; upon the fact that its principles are written "in the hearts and imaginations of all men". but, unlike hazlitt, he bids us also consider what the aim of the individual poet was, and how far he has taken the most fitting means to reach it. in other words, he allows, as hazlitt did not allow, for the many-sidedness of poetry, and the infinite variety of poetic genius. and, just because he does so, he is able to give a deeper meaning to "nature" and the universal principles of imagination than hazlitt, with all his critical and reflective brilliance, was in a position to do. hazlitt is too apt to confine "nature" to the nature of englishmen in general and, in his weaker moments, of hazlitt in particular. carlyle makes an honest attempt to bound it only by the universal instincts of man, and the "everlasting reason" of the world. thus, in carlyle's conception, "it is the essence of the poet to be new"; it is his mission "to wrench us from our old fixtures"; [footnote: carlyle on goethe: _miscellanies_, i. .] for it is only by so doing that he can show us some aspect of nature or of man's heart that was hidden from us before. the originality of the poet, the impossibility of binding him by the example of his forerunners, is the necessary consequence of the infinity of truth. that carlyle saw this, and saw it so clearly, is no doubt partly due to a cause, of which more must be said directly; to his craving for ideas. [footnote: see p. xciv.] but it was in part owing to his hearty acceptance of the historical method. both as critic and as historian, he knew--at that time, no man so well--that each nation has its own genius; and justly pronounced the conduct of that nation which "isolates itself from foreign influence, regards its own modes as so many laws of nature, and rejects all that is different as unworthy even of examination", to be "pedantry". [footnote: _miscellanies_, i. , .] this was the first, and perhaps the most fruitful consequence that he drew from the application of historical ideas to literature. they enlarged his field of comparison; and, by so doing, they gave both width and precision to his definition of criticism. but there is another--and a more usual, if a narrower--sense of the historical method; and here, too, carlyle was a pioneer. he was among the first in our country to grasp the importance of studying the literature of a nation, as a whole, and from its earliest monuments, its mythological and heroic legends, downwards to the present. the year --a turning-point in the mental history of carlyle, for it was also the year in which _sartor resartus_ took shape "among the mountain solitudes"--was largely devoted to essays on the history of german literature, of which one, that on the _nibelungenlied_, is specially memorable. and some ten years later ( ) he again took up the theme in the first of his lectures on heroes, which still remains the most enlightening, because the most poetic, account of the primitive norse faith, or rather successive layers of faith, in our language. [footnote: see _lectures on heroes_, p. ; compare _corpus poeticum borealt_, i. p. ci. ] but what mainly concerns us here is that carlyle, in this matter as in others, had clearly realized and as clearly defines the goal which the student, in this case the student of literary history, should set before his eyes. "a history ... of any national poetry would form, taken in its complete sense, one of the most arduous enterprises any writer could engage in. poetry, were it the rudest, so it be sincere, is the attempt which man makes to render his existence harmonious, the utmost he can do for that end; it springs, therefore, from his whole feelings, opinions, activity, and takes its character from these. it may be called the music of his whole manner of being; and, historically considered, is the test how far music, or freedom, existed therein; how the feeling of love, of beauty, and dignity, could be elicited from that peculiar situation of his, and from the views he there had of life and nature, of the universe, internal and external. hence, in any measure to understand the poetry, to estimate its worth and historical meaning, we ask, as a quite fundamental inquiry: what that situation was? thus the history of a nation's poetry is the essence of its history, political, economic, scientific, religious. with all these the complete historian of a national poetry will be familiar; the national physiognomy, in its finest traits and through its successive stages of growth, will be dear to him: he will discern the grand spiritual tendency of each period, what was the highest aim and enthusiasm of mankind in each, and how one epoch naturally evolved itself from the other. he has to record the highest aim of a nation, in its successive directions and developments; for by this the poetry of the nation modulates itself; this _is_ the poetry of the nation." [footnote: carlyle, _miscellanies_, iii. , .] never has the task of the literary historian been more accurately defined than in this passage; and never do we feel so bitterly the gulf between the ideal and the actual performance, at which more than one man of talent has since tried his hand, as when we read it. it strikes perhaps the first note of carlyle's lifelong war against "dryasdust". but it contains at least two other points on which it is well for us to pause. the first is the inseparable bond which carlyle saw to exist between the poetry of a nation and its history; the connection which inevitably follows from the fact that both one and the other are the expression of its character. this is a vein of thought that was first struck by vico and by montesquieu; but it was left for the german philosophers, in particular fichte and hegel, to see its full significance; and carlyle was the earliest writer in this country to make it his own. it is manifest that the connection between the literature and the history of a nation may be taken from either side. we may illustrate its literature from its history, or its history from its literature. it is on the necessity of the former study that carlyle dwells in the above. and in the light of later exaggerations, notably those of taine, it is well to remember, what carlyle himself would have been the last man to forget, that no man of genius is the creature of his time or his surroundings; and, consequently, that when we have mastered all the circumstances, in carlyle's phrase the whole "situation", of the poet, we are still only at the beginning of our task. we have still to learn what his genius made out of its surroundings, and what the eye of the poet discovered in the world of traditional belief; in other words, what it was that made him a poet, what it was that he saw and to which all the rest were blind. we have studied the soil; we have yet to study the tree that grew from it and overshadows it. [footnote: perhaps the most striking instances of this kind of criticism, both on its strong and its weak side, are to be found in the writings of mazzini. see _opere_, ii. and iv.] in reversing the relation, in reading history by the light of literature, the danger is not so great. the man of genius may, and does, see deeper than his contemporaries; but, for that very reason, he is a surer guide to the tendencies of his time than they. he is above and beyond his time; but, just in so far as he is so, he sees over it and through it. as shakespeare defined it, his "end, both at the first and now, was and is... to show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure". some allowance must doubtless be made for the individuality of the poet; for the qualities in which he stands aloof from his time, and in which, therefore, he must not be taken to reflect it. but to make such allowance is a task not beyond the skill of the practised critic; and many instances suggest themselves in which it has, more or less successfully, been done. witness not a few passages in michelet's _histoire de france_, and some to be found in the various works of ranke. [footnote: as instances may be cited, michelet's remarks on rabelais (tome viii. - ) and on moliere (tome xiii. - ): or again ranke's _papste_, i. - (on tasso and the artistic tendencies of the middle of the sixteenth century): _franzosische geschichte_, iii. - (the age of louis xiv.).] witness, again, hegel's illustration of the greek conception of the family from the _antigone_ and the _oedipus_ of sophocles; or, if we may pass to a somewhat different field, his "construction" of the french revolution from the religious and metaphysical ideas of rousseau. [footnote: hegel, _phanomenologie des geistes_, pp. - , and pp. - .] so far as it employs literature to give the key to the outward history of a nation or to the growth of its spiritual faith, it is clear that the historical method ceases to be, in the strict sense of the word, a literary instrument. it implies certainly that a literary judgment has been passed; but, once passed, that judgment is used for ends that lie altogether apart from the interests of literature. but it is idle to consider that literature loses caste by lending itself to such a purpose. it would be wiser to say that it gains by anything that may add to its fruitfulness and instructiveness. in any case, and whether it pleases us or no, this is one of the things that the historical method has done for literature; and neither carlyle, nor any other thinker of the century, would have been minded to disavow it. this brings us to the second point that calls for remark in the foregoing quotation from carlyle. throughout he assumes that the matter of the poet is no less important than his manner. and here again he dwells on an aspect of literature that previous, and later, critics have tended to throw into the shade. that carlyle should have been led to assert, and even at times to exaggerate, the claims of thought in imaginative work was inevitable; and that, not only from his temperament, but from those principles of his teaching that we have already noticed. if the poetry of a nation be indeed the expression of its spiritual aims, then it is clear that among those aims must be numbered its craving to make the world intelligible to itself, and to comprehend the working of god both within man and around him. not that carlyle shows any disposition to limit "thought" to its more abstract forms; on the contrary, it is on the sense of "music, love, and beauty" that he specially insists. what he does demand is that these shall be not merely outward adornments, but the instinctive utterance of a deeper harmony within; that they shall be such as not merely to "furnish a languid mind with fantastic shows and indolent emotions, but to incorporate the everlasting reason of man in forms visible to his sense, and suitable to it". [footnote: miscellanies, i. .] the "reason" is no less necessary to poetry than its sensible form; and whether its utterance be direct or indirect, that is a matter for the genius of the individual poet to decide. _gott und welt_, we may be sure carlyle would have said, is poetry as legitimate as _der erlkonig_ or the songs of mignon. in this connection he more than once appeals to the doctrine of fichte, one of the few writers whom he was willing to recognize as his teachers. "according to fichte, there is a 'divine idea' pervading the visible universe; which visible universe is indeed but its symbol and sensible manifestation, having in itself no meaning, or even true existence independent of it. to the mass of men this divine idea of the world lies hidden; yet to discern it, to seize it, and live wholly in it, is the condition of all genuine virtue, knowledge, freedom; and the end, therefore, of all spiritual effort in every age. literary men are the appointed interpreters of this divine idea; a perpetual priesthood, we might say, standing forth, generation after generation, as the dispensers and living types of god's everlasting wisdom, to show it in their writings and actions, in such particular form as their own particular times require it in. for each age, by the law of its nature, is different from every other age, and demands a different representation of the divine idea, the essence of which is the same in all; so that the literary man of one century is only by mediation and reinterpretation applicable to the wants of another." [footnote: ib., p. . there is a similar passage in the _lectures on heroes_ (lec. v.), p. . in each case the reference is to fichte's lectures _ueber das wesen des gelehrten_ ( ), especially to lectures i., ii., and x,; fichte's werke, vi. - , - .] the particular form of fichte's teaching may still sound unfamiliar enough. but in substance it has had the deepest influence on the aims and methods of criticism; and, so far as england is concerned, this is mainly due to the genius of carlyle. compare the criticism of the last century with that of the present, and we at once see the change that has come over the temper and instincts of englishmen in this matter. when johnson, or the reviewers of the next generation, quitted--as they seldom did quit--the ground of external form and regularity and logical coherence, it was only to ask: is this work, this poem or this novel, in conformity with the traditional conventions of respectability, is it such as can be put into the hands of boys and girls? to them this was the one ground on which the matter of literature, as apart from the beggarly elements of its form, could come under the cognizance of the critic. and this narrowness, a narrowness which belonged at least in equal measure to the official criticism of the french, naturally begot a reaction almost as narrow as itself. the cry of "art for art's sake", a cry raised in france at the moment when carlyle was beginning his work in england, must be regarded as a protest against the moralizing bigotry of the classical school no less than against its antiquated formalities. the men who raised it were themselves not free from the charge of formalism; but the forms they worshipped were at least those inspired by the spontaneous genius of the artist, not the mechanical rules inherited from the traditions of the past. nor, whatever may be the case with those who have taken it up in our own day, must the cry be pressed too rigorously against the men of . the very man, on whom it was commonly fathered, was known to disavow it; and certainly in his own works, in their burning humanity and their "passion for reforming the world", was the first to set it at defiance. [footnote: see hugo's _william shakespeare_, p. .] the moralist and the formalist still make their voice heard, and will always do so. but since carlyle wrote, it is certain that a wider, a more fruitful, view of criticism has gained ground among us. and, if it be asked where lies the precise difference between such a view and that which satisfied the critics of an earlier day, the answer must be, that we are no longer contented to rest upon the outward form of a work of art, still less upon its conventional morality. we demand to learn what is the idea, of which the outward form is the harmonious utterance; and which, just because the form is individual, must itself too have more or less of originality and power. we are resolved to know what is the artist's peculiar fashion of conceiving life, what is his insight, that which he has to teach us of god and man and nature. "poetry", said wordsworth, "is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." [footnote: preface to _lyrical ballads_ by wordsworth: works, vi. .] and wordsworth is echoed by shelley. [footnote: "poetry is indeed something divine. it is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred."--shelley, _defence of poetry_, p. .] but it is again to carlyle that we must turn for the explicit application of these ideas to criticism:-- "criticism has assumed a new form...; it proceeds on other principles, and proposes to itself a higher aim. the grand question is not now a question concerning the qualities of diction, the coherence of metaphors, the fitness of sentiments, the general logical truth, in a work of art, as it was some half-century ago among most critics; neither is it a question mainly of a psychological sort, to be answered by discovering and delineating the peculiar nature of the poet from his poetry, as is usual with the best of our own critics at present: [footnote: a striking example of this method, the blending of criticism with biography, is to be found in carlyle's own essay on burns. the significance of the method, in such hands as those of carlyle, is that it lays stress on the reality, the living force, of the poetry with which it deals. it was the characteristic method of sainte-beuve; and it may be questioned whether it did not often lead him far enough from what can properly be called criticism;--into psychological studies, spiced with scandal, or what a distinguished admirer is kind enough to call "indiscretions". see m. brunetiere, _l'evolution des genres_, i. . this book is a sketch of the history of criticism in france, and cannot be too warmly recommended to all who are interested in such subjects,] but it is--not indeed exclusively, but inclusively of those two other questions--properly and ultimately a question on the essence and peculiar life of the poetry itself. the first of these questions, as we see it answered, for instance, in the criticisms of johnson and kames, relates, strictly speaking, to the _garment_ of poetry: the second, indeed, to its _body_ and material existence, a much higher point; but only the last to its _soul_ and spiritual existence, by which alone can the body... be _informed_ with significance and rational life. the problem is not now to determine by what mechanism addison composed sentences and struck out similitudes; but by what far finer and more mysterious mechanism shakespeare organized his dramas, and gave life and individuality to his ariel and his hamlet? wherein lies that life; how have they attained that shape and individuality? whence comes that empyrean fire, which irradiates their whole being, and pierces, at least in starry gleams, like a diviner thing, into all hearts? are these dramas of his not verisimilar only, but true; nay, truer than reality itself, since the essence of unmixed reality is bodied forth in them under more expressive symbols? what is this unity of theirs; and can our deeper inspection discern it to be indivisible, and existing by necessity, because each work springs, as it were, from the general elements of all thought, and grows up therefrom into form and expansion by its own growth? not only who was the poet, and how did he compose; but what and how was the poem, and why was it a poem and not rhymed eloquence, creation and not figured passion? these are the questions for the critic." [footnote: miscellanies, i. , ( ).] and, a few pages later: "as an instance we might refer to goethe's criticism of hamlet.... this truly is what may be called the poetry of criticism: for it is in some sort also a creative art; aiming, at least, to reproduce under a different shape the existing product of the poet; painting to the intellect what already lay painted to the heart and the imagination." [footnote: ib. p. .] instances of criticism, conceived in this spirit, are unhappily still rare. but some of coleridge's on shakespeare, and some of lamb's on the plays of the elizabethan dramatists--in particular _the duchess of malfi_ and _the broken heart_--may fairly be ranked among them. so, and with still less of hesitation, may mr. ruskin's rendering of the _last judgment_ of tintoret, and mr. pater's studies on lionardo, michaelangelo, and giorgione. of these, mr. pater's achievement is probably the most memorable; for it is an attempt, and an attempt of surprising power and subtlety, to reproduce not merely the effect of a single poem or picture, but the imaginative atmosphere, the spiritual individuality, of the artist. in a sense still higher than would be true even of the work done by lamb and ruskin, it deserves the praise justly given by carlyle to the masterpiece of goethe; it is "the very poetry of criticism". we have now reviewed the whole circle traversed by criticism during the present century, and are in a position to define its limits and extent. we have seen that a change of method was at once the cause and indication of a change in spirit and in aim. the narrow range of the eighteenth century was enlarged on the one hand by the study of new literatures, and on the other hand by that appeal to history, and that idea of development which has so profoundly modified every field of thought and knowledge. in that lay the change of method. and this, in itself, was enough to suggest a wider tolerance, a greater readiness to make allowance for differences of taste, whether as between nation and nation or as between period and period, than had been possible for men whose view was practically limited to latin literature and to such modern literatures as were professedly moulded upon the latin. with such diversity of material, the absolute standard, absurd enough in any case, became altogether impossible to maintain. it was replaced by the conception of a common instinct for beauty, modified in each nation by the special circumstances of its temperament and history. but even this does not cover the whole extent of the revolution in critical ideas. side by side with a more tolerant--and, it may be added, a keener--judgment of artistic form, came a clearer sense of the inseparable connection between form and matter, and the impossibility of comprehending the form, if it be taken apart from the matter, of a work of art. this, too, was in part the natural effect of the historical method, one result of which was to establish a closer correspondence between the thought of a nation and its art than had hitherto been suspected. but it was in part also a consequence of the intellectual and spiritual revolution of which rousseau was the herald and which, during fifty years, found in german philosophy at once its strongest inspiration and its most articulate expression. men were no longer satisfied to explain to themselves what carlyle calls the "garment" and the "body" of art; they set themselves to pierce through these to the soul and spirit within. they instinctively felt that the art which lives is the art that gives man something to live by; and that, just because its form is more significant than other of man's utterances, it must have a deeper significance also in substance and in purport. of this purport _criticism of life_--the phrase suggested by one who was at once a poet and a critic--is doubtless an unhappy, because a pedantic definition; and it is rather creation of life, than the criticism of it, that art has to offer. but it must be life in all its fulness and variety; as thought, no less than as action; as energy, no less than as beauty-- as power, as love, as influencing soul. this is the mission of art; and to unfold its working in the art of all times and of all nations, to set it forth by intuition, by patient reason, by every means at his command, is the function of the critic. to have seen this, and to have marked out the way for its performance, is not the least among the services rendered by carlyle to his own generation and to ours. later critics can hardly be said to have yet filled out the design that he laid. they have certainly not gone beyond it. english literary criticism. sir philip sidney. ( - .) i. an apologie for poetrie. the _apologie_ was probably written about ; gosson's pamphlet, which clearly suggested it, having appeared in . nothing need here be added to what has been said in the introduction. when the right virtuous edward wotton and i were at the emperor's court together, we gave ourselves to learn horsemanship of john pietro pugliano: one that with great commendation had the place of an esquire in his stable. and he, according to the fertileness of the italian wit, did not only afford us the demonstration of his practice, but sought to enrich our minds with the contemplations therein, which he thought most precious. but with none i remember mine ears were at any time more laden, than when (either angered with slow payment, or moved with our learner-like admiration) he exercised his speech in the praise of his faculty. he said, soldiers were the noblest estate of mankind, and horsemen, the noblest of soldiers. he said, they were the masters of war, and ornaments of peace: speedy goers, and strong abiders, triumphers both in camps and courts. nay, to so unbelieved a point he proceeded, as that no earthly thing bred such wonder to a prince, as to be a good horseman. skill of government was but a pedanteria in comparison: then would he add certain praises, by telling what a peerless beast a horse was. the only serviceable courtier without flattery, the beast of most beauty, faithfulness, courage, and such more, that, if i had not been a piece of a logician before i came to him, i think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse. but thus much at least with his no few words he drove into me, that self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous, wherein ourselves are parties. wherein, if pugliano his strong affection and weak arguments will not satisfy you, i will give you a nearer example of myself, who (i know not by what mischance) in these my not old years and idlest times, having slipped into the title of a poet, am provoked to say something unto you in the defence of that my unelected vocation; which if i handle with more good will than good reasons, bear with me, sith the scholar is to be pardoned that followeth the steps of his master. and yet i must say that, as i have just cause to make a pitiful defence of poor poetry, which from almost the highest estimation of learning is fallen to be the laughing-stock of children, so have i need to bring some more available proofs: sith the former is by no man barred of his deserved credit, the silly latter hath had even the names of philosophers used to the defacing of it, with great danger of civil war among the muses. and first, truly to all them that professing learning inveigh against poetry may justly be objected, that they go very near to ungratefulness, to seek to deface that which, in the noblest nations and languages that are known, hath been the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges: and will they now play the hedgehog that, being received into the den, drove out his host? or rather the vipers, that with their birth kill their parents? let learned greece in any of her manifold sciences, be able to show me one book, before musaeus, homer, and hesiodus, all three nothing else but poets. nay, let any history be brought, that can say any writers were there before them, if they were not men of the same skill, as orpheus, linus, and some other are named: who having been the first of that country, that made pens deliverers of their knowledge to their posterity, may justly challenge to be called their fathers in learning: for not only in time they had this priority (although in itself antiquity be venerable) but went before them, as causes to draw with their charming sweetness the wild untamed wits to an admiration of knowledge. so as amphion was said to move stone with his poetry, to build thebes. and orpheus to be listened to by beasts indeed, stony and beastly people. so among the romans were livius andronicus, and ennius. so in the italian language, the first that made it aspire to be a treasure-house of science were the poets dante, boccace, and petrarch. so in our english were gower and chaucer. after whom, encouraged and delighted with their excellent foregoing, others have followed, to beautify our mother tongue, as well in the same kind as in other arts. this did so notably show itself, that the philosophers of greece durst not a long time appear to the world but under the masks of poets. so thales, empedocles, and parmenides sang their natural philosophy in verses: so did pythagoras and phocylides their moral counsels: so did tyrtaus in war matters, and solon in matters of policy: or rather, they being poets, did exercise their delightful vein in those points of highest knowledge, which before them lay hid to the world. for that wise solon was directly a poet, it is manifest, having written in verse the notable fable of the atlantic island, which was continued by plato. and truly, even plato, whosoever well considereth, shall find, that in the body of his work, though the inside and strength were philosophy, the skin as it were and beauty depended most of poetry: for all standeth upon dialogues, wherein he feigneth many honest burgesses of athens to speak of such matters, that if they had been set on the rack, they would never have confessed them. besides, his poetical describing the circumstances of their meetings, as the well ordering of a banquet, the delicacy of a walk, with interlacing mere tales, as gyges' ring, and others, which who knows not to be the flowers of poetry, did never walk into apollo's garden. and even historiographers (although their lips sound of things done, and verity be written in their foreheads) have been glad to borrow both fashion, and perchance weight, of poets. so herodotus entitled his history by the name of the nine muses: and both he, and all the rest that followed him, either stole or usurped of poetry their passionate describing of passions, the many particularities of battles, which no man could affirm: or if that be denied me, long orations put in the mouths of great kings and captains, which it is certain they never pronounced. so that truly, neither philosopher nor historiographer could at the first have entered into the gates of popular judgments, if they had not taken a great passport of poetry, which, in all nations at this day where learning flourisheth not, is plain to be seen: in all which they have some feeling of poetry. in turkey, besides their law-giving divines, they have no other writers but poets. in our neighbour country ireland, where truly learning goeth very bare, yet are their poets held in a devout reverence. even among the most barbarous and simple indians where no writing is, yet have they their poets, who make and sing songs which they call areytos, both of their ancestors' deeds, and praises of their gods. a sufficient probability, that, if ever learning come among them, it must be by having their hard dull wits softened and sharpened with the sweet delights of poetry. for until they find a pleasure in the exercises of the mind, great promises of much knowledge will little persuade them, that know not the fruits of knowledge. in wales, the true remnant of the ancient britons, as there are good authorities to show the long time they had poets, which they called bards: so through all the conquests of romans, saxons, danes, and normans, some of whom did seek to ruin all memory of learning from among them, yet do their poets, even to this day, last; so as it is not more notable in soon beginning than in long continuing. but since the authors of most of our sciences were the romans, and before them the greeks, let us a little stand upon their authorities, but even so far as to see what names they have given unto this now scorned skill. among the romans a poet was called _vates_, which is as much as a diviner, fore-seer, or prophet, as by his conjoined words _vaticinium_ and _vaticinari_ is manifest: so heavenly a title did that excellent people bestow upon this heart-ravishing knowledge. and so far were they carried into the admiration thereof, that they thought in the chanceable hitting upon any such verses great foretokens of their following fortunes were placed. whereupon grew the word of _sortes virgilianae_, when, by sudden opening virgil's book, they lighted upon any verse of his making, whereof the histories of the emperors' lives are full: as of albinus the governor of our island, who in his childhood met with this verse _arma amens capio nee sat rationis in armis:_ and in his age performed it; which although it were a very vain and godless superstition, as also it was to think that spirits were commanded by such verses (whereupon this word charms, derived of _carmina_, cometh), so yet serveth it to show the great reverence those wits were held in. and altogether not without ground, since both the oracles of delphos and sibylla's prophecies were wholly delivered in verses. for that same exquisite observing of number and measure in words, and that high-flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet, did seem to have some divine force in it. and may not i presume a little further, to show the reasonableness of this word _vates_? and say that the holy david's psalms are a divine poem? if i do, i shall not do it without the testimony of great learned men, both ancient and modern: but even the name psalms will speak for me; which being interpreted is nothing but songs. then that it is fully written in metre, as all learned hebricians agree, although the rules be not yet fully found. lastly and principally, his handling his prophecy, which is merely poetical. for what else is the awaking his musical instruments? the often and free changing of persons? his notable prosopopeias, when he maketh you, as it were, see god coming in his majesty? his telling of the beasts' joyfulness, and hills leaping, but a heavenly poesy: wherein almost he showeth himself a passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith? but truly now having named him, i fear me i seem to profane that holy name, applying it to poetry, which is among us thrown down to so ridiculous an estimation: but they that with quiet judgments will look a little deeper into it, shall find the end and working of it such as, being rightly applied, deserveth not to be scourged out of the church of god. but now, let us see how the greeks named it, and how they deemed of it. the greeks called him a poet, which name hath, as the most excellent, gone through other languages. it cometh of this word _poiein_, which is, to make: wherein i know not, whether by luck or wisdom, we englishmen have met with the greeks, in calling him a maker: which name, how high and incomparable a title it is, i had rather were known by marking the scope of other sciences, than by my partial allegation. there is no art delivered to mankind, that hath not the works of nature for his principal object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend, as they become actors and players, as it were, of what nature will have set forth. so doth the astronomer look upon the stars, and by that he seeth, setteth down what order nature hath taken therein. so do the geometrician, and arithmetician, in their diverse sorts of quantities. so doth the musician, in times, tell you which by nature agree, which not. the natural philosopher thereon hath his name, and the moral philosopher standeth upon the natural virtues, vices, and passions of man; and follow nature (saith he) therein, and thou shalt not err. the lawyer saith what men have determined. the historian what men have done. the grammarian speaketh only of the rules of speech; and the rhetorician, and logician, considering what in nature will soonest prove and persuade, thereon give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, according to the proposed matter. the physician weigheth the nature of a man's body, and the nature of things helpful, or hurtful unto it. and the metaphysic, though it be in the second and abstract notions, and therefore be counted supernatural, yet doth he indeed build upon the depth of nature: only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or quite anew forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demigods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry, as divers poets have done, neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers: nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden: but let those things alone and go to man, for whom as the other things are, so it seemeth in him her uttermost cunning is employed, and know whether she have brought forth so true a lover as theagenes, so constant a friend as pylades, so valiant a man as orlando, so right a prince as xenophon's cyrus: so excellent a man every way, as virgil's aneas. neither let this be jestingly conceived, because the works of the one be essential, the other, in imitation or fiction; for any understanding knoweth the skill of the artificer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. and that the poet hath that idea, is manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as he hath imagined them. which delivering forth also is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air: but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency, as nature might have done, but to bestow a cyrus upon the world, to make many cyruses, if they will learn aright, why and how that maker made him. neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man's wit with the efficacy of nature: but rather give right honour to the heavenly maker of that maker: who, having made man to his own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature, which in nothing he showeth so much as in poetry: when, with the force of a divine breath, he bringeth things forth far surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of adam; sith our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it. but these arguments will by few be understood, and by fewer granted. thus much (i hope) will be given me, that the greeks, with some probability of reason, gave him the name above all names of learning. now let us go to a more ordinary opening of him, that the truth may be more palpable: and so i hope, though we get not so unmatched a praise as the etymology of his names will grant, yet his very description, which no man will deny, shall not justly be barred from a principal commendation. poesy, therefore, is an art of imitation, for so aristotle termeth it in his word _mimesis_, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth: to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture: with this end, to teach and delight; of this have been three several kinds. the chief both in antiquity and excellency, were they that did imitate the inconceivable excellencies of god. such were david in his psalms, solomon in his song of songs, in his ecclesiastes, and proverbs: moses and deborah, in their hymns, and the writer of job; which, beside other, the learned emanuel tremilius and franciscus junius do entitle the poetical part of scripture. against these none will speak that hath the holy ghost in due holy reverence. in this kind, though in a full wrong divinity, were orpheus, amphion, homer in his hymns, and many other, both greeks and romans: and this poesy must be used by whosoever will follow st. james his counsel, in singing psalms when they are merry: and i know is used with the fruit of comfort by some, when, in sorrowful pangs of their death-bringing sins, they find the consolation of the never-leaving goodness. the second kind, is of them that deal with matters philosophical; either moral, as tyrtaus, phocylides, and cato: or natural, as lucretius and virgil's _georgics_; or astronomical, as manilius, and pontanus; or historical, as lucan; which who mislike, the fault is in their judgments quite out of taste, and not in the sweet food of sweetly-uttered knowledge. but because this second sort is wrapped within the fold of the proposed subject, and takes not the course of his own invention, whether they properly be poets or no, let grammarians dispute; and go to the third, indeed right poets, of whom chiefly this question ariseth; betwixt whom and these second is such a kind of difference, as betwixt the meaner sort of painters (who counterfeit only such faces as are set before them) and the more excellent; who, having no law but wit, bestow that in colours upon you which is fittest for the eye to see; as the constant, though lamenting look of lucretia, when she punished in herself another's fault. wherein he painteth not lucretia whom he never saw, but painteth the outward beauty of such a virtue: for these third be they which most properly do imitate to teach and delight; and, to imitate, borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be: but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be, and should be. these be they that, as the first and most noble sort may justly be termed vates, so these are waited on in the excellentest languages and best understandings, with the fore-described name of poets: for these indeed do merely make to imitate: and imitate both to delight and teach: and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger: and teach, to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved, which being the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed, yet want there not idle tongues to bark at them. these be subdivided into sundry more special denominations. the most notable be the heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satiric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral, and certain others. some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with, some by the sorts of verses they liked best to write in, for indeed the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions in that numbrous kind of writing which is called verse: indeed but apparelled, verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry: sith there have been many most excellent poets that never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets. for xenophon, who did imitate so excellently, as to give us _effigiem justi imperii_ the portraiture of a just empire under the name of cyrus (as cicero says of him), made therein an absolute heroical poem. so did heliodorus in his sugared invention of that picture of love in theagenes and chariclea, and yet both these wrote in prose: which i speak to show, that it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet, no more than a long gown maketh an advocate: who, though he pleaded in armour, should be an advocate and no soldier. but it is that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching which must be the right describing note to know a poet by: although, indeed, the senate of poets hath chosen verse as their fittest raiment, meaning, as in matter they passed all in all, so in manner to go beyond them: not speaking (table-talk fashion, or like men in a dream) words as they chanceably fall from the mouth, but peyzing [footnote: weighing.] each syllable of each word by just proportion according to the dignity of the subject. now, therefore, it shall not be amiss first to weigh this latter sort of poetry by his works, and then by his parts; and if in neither of these anatomies he be condemnable, i hope we shall obtain a more favourable sentence. this purifying of wit, this enriching of memory, enabling of judgment, and enlarging of conceit, which commonly we call learning, under what name soever it come forth, or to what immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is, to lead and draw us to as high a perfection, as our degenerate souls made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of. this, according to the inclination of the man, bred many formed impressions; for some that thought this felicity principally to be gotten by knowledge, and no knowledge to be so high and heavenly as acquaintance with the stars, gave themselves to astronomy; others, persuading themselves to be demigods if they knew the causes of things, became natural and supernatural philosophers; some an admirable delight drew to music; and some the certainty of demonstration, to the mathematics. but all, one and other, having this scope to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body, to the enjoying his own divine essence. but when by the balance of experience it was found, that the astronomer looking to the stars might fall into a ditch, that the inquiring philosopher might be blind in himself, and the mathematician might draw forth a straight line with a crooked heart: then lo, did proof the overruler of opinions make manifest that all these are but serving sciences, which, as they have each a private end in themselves, so yet are they all directed to the highest end of the mistress knowledge, by the greeks called _arkitektonike_, which stands (as i think) in the knowledge of a man's self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well-doing, and not of well-knowing only; even as the saddler's next end is to make a good saddle: but his farther end, to serve a nobler faculty, which is horsemanship: so the horseman's to soldiery, and the soldier not only to have the skill, but to perform the practice of a soldier: so that the ending end of all earthly learning, being virtuous action, those skills that most serve to bring forth that, have a most just title to be princes over all the rest. wherein if we can show the poet's nobleness, by setting him before his other competitors, among whom as principal challengers step forth the moral philosophers, whom methinketh i see coming towards me with a sullen gravity, as though they could not abide vice by daylight, rudely clothed for to witness outwardly their contempt of outward things, with books in their hands against glory, whereto they set their names, sophistically speaking against subtlety, and angry with any man in whom they see the foul fault of anger; these men casting largess as they go, of definitions, divisions, and distinctions, with a scornful interrogative, do soberly ask, whether it be possible to find any path, so ready to lead a man to virtue, as that which teacheth what virtue is? and teacheth it not only by delivering forth his very being, his causes, and effects: but also, by making known his enemy vice, which must be destroyed, and his cumbersome servant passion, which must be mastered, by showing the generalities that contain it, and the specialities that are derived from it: lastly, by plain setting down, how it extendeth itself out of the limits of a man's own little world, to the government of families and maintaining of public societies. [footnote: a principal clause--_it will be well_, or some equivalent--is unhappily lacking to this long sentence.] the historian scarcely giveth leisure to the moralist, to say so much, but that he, laden with old mouse-eaten records, authorizing himself (for the most part) upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundation of hearsay, having much ado to accord differing writers, and to pick truth out of partiality, better acquainted with a thousand years ago than with the present age, and yet better knowing how this world goeth than how his own wit runneth, curious for antiquities and inquisitive of novelties, a wonder to young folks, and a tyrant in table-talk, denieth in a great chafe that any man, for teaching of virtue and virtuous actions, is comparable to him. i am _lux vitae_, _temporum magistra_, _vita memoriae_, _nuncia vetustatis_, &c. the philosopher (saith he) teacheth a disputative virtue, but i do an active: his virtue is excellent in the dangerless academy of plato, but mine showeth forth her honourable face in the battles of marathon, pharsalia, poitiers, and agincourt. he teacheth virtue by certain abstract considerations, but i only bid you follow the footing of them that have gone before you. old-aged experience goeth beyond the fine- witted philosopher, but i give the experience of many ages. lastly, if he make the songbook, i put the learner's hand to the lute; and if he be the guide, i am the light. then would he allege you innumerable examples, conferring story by story, how much the wisest senators and princes have been directed by the credit of history, as brutus, alphonsus of aragon, and who not, if need be? at length the long line of their disputation maketh a point in this, that the one giveth the precept, and the other the example. now, whom shall we find (sith the question standeth for the highest form in the school of learning) to be moderator? truly, as me seemeth, the poet; and if not a moderator, even the man that ought to carry the title from them both, and much more from all other serving sciences. therefore compare we the poet with the historian and with the moral philosopher, and, if he go beyond them both, no other human skill can match him. for as for the divine, with all reverence it is ever to be excepted, not only for having his scope as far beyond any of these, as eternity exceedeth a moment, but even for passing each of these in themselves. and for the lawyer, though _jus_ be the daughter of justice, and justice the chief of virtues, yet because he seeketh to make men good, rather _formidine poenae_ than _virtutis amore_ or to say righter, doth not endeavour to make men good, but that their evil hurt not others: having no care, so he be a good citizen, how bad a man he be. therefore, as our wickedness maketh him necessary, and necessity maketh him honourable, so is he not in the deepest truth to stand in rank with these, who all endeavour to take naughtiness away, and plant goodness even in the secretest cabinet of our souls. and these four are all that any way deal in that consideration of men's manners, which being the supreme knowledge, they that best breed it deserve the best commendation. the philosopher therefore and the historian are they which would win the goal: the one by precept, the other by example. but both not having both, do both halt. for the philosopher, setting down with thorny argument the bare rule, is so hard of utterance, and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him till he be old before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest; for his knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and general, that happy is that man who may understand him, and more happy that can apply what he doth understand. on the other side, the historian wanting the precept is so tied, not to what should be, but to what is, to the particular truth of things, and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine. now doth the peerless poet perform both: for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done. so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example. a perfect picture, i say; for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description: which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth. for as in outward things, to a man that had never seen an elephant or a rhinoceros, who should tell him most exquisitely all their shapes, colour, bigness, and particular marks; or of a gorgeous palace, the architecture; with declaring the full beauties, might well make the hearer able to repeat, as it were by rote, all he had heard, yet should never satisfy his inward conceits, with being witness to itself of a true lively knowledge: but the same man, as soon as he might see those beasts well painted, or the house well in model, should straightway grow without need of any description, to a judicial comprehending of them: so no doubt the philosopher with his learned definition, be it of virtue, vices, matters of public policy or private government, replenisheth the memory with many infallible grounds of wisdom: which, notwithstanding, lie dark before the imaginative and judging power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of poesy. tully taketh much pains and many times not without poetical helps, to make us know the force love of our country hath in us. let us but hear old anchises speaking in the midst of troy's flames, or see ulysses, in the fulness of all calypso's delights, bewail his absence from barren and beggarly ithaca. anger, the stoics say, was a short madness; let but sophocles bring you ajax on a stage, killing and whipping sheep and oxen, thinking them the army of greeks, with their chieftains agamemnon and menelaus, and tell me if you have not a more familiar insight into anger, than finding in the schoolmen his genus and difference. see whether wisdom and temperance in ulysses and diomedes, valour in achilles, friendship in nisus and euryalus, even to an ignorant man, carry not an apparent shining: and contrarily, the remorse of conscience in odipus, the soon repenting pride of agamemnon, the self-devouring cruelty in his father atreus, the violence of ambition in the two theban brothers, the sour-sweetness of revenge in medea, and to fall lower, the terentian gnatho and our chaucer's pandar, so expressed, that we now use their names to signify their trades. and finally, all virtues, vices, and passions so in their own natural seats laid to the view, that we seem not to hear of them, but clearly to see through them. but even in the most excellent determination of goodness, what philosopher's counsel can so readily detect a prince, as the feigned cyrus in xenophon? or a virtuous man in all fortunes, as aneas in virgil? or a whole commonwealth, as the way of sir thomas more's utopia? i say the way; because where sir thomas more erred, it was the fault of the man and not of the poet; for that way of patterning a commonwealth was most absolute, though he perchance hath not so absolutely performed it: for the question is, whether the feigned image of poesy, or the regular instruction of philosophy, hath the more force in teaching; wherein if the philosophers have more rightly showed themselves philosophers than the poets have obtained to the high top of their profession, as in truth _mediocribus esse poetis, non di, non homines, non concessere columna:_ it is i say again, not the fault of the art, but that by few men that art can be accomplished. certainly, even our saviour christ could as well have given the moral commonplaces of uncharitableness and humbleness, as the divine narration of dives and lazarus: or of disobedience and mercy, as that heavenly discourse of the lost child and the gracious father; but that his through-searching wisdom knew the estate of dives burning in hell, and of lazarus being in abraham's bosom, would more constantly (as it were) inhabit both the memory and judgment. truly, for myself, meseems i see before my eyes the lost child's disdainful prodigality, turned to envy a swine's dinner: which by the learned divines are thought not historical acts, but instructing parables. for conclusion, i say the philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only can understand him: that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught, but the poet is the food for the tenderest stomachs, the poet is indeed the right popular philosopher, whereof asop's tales give good proof: whose pretty allegories, stealing under the formal tales of beasts, make many, more beastly than beasts, begin to hear the sound of virtue from these dumb speakers. but now may it be alleged that, if this imagining of matters be so fit for the imagination, then must the historian needs surpass, who bringeth you images of true matters, such as indeed were done, and not such as fantastically or falsely may be suggested to have been done. truly aristotle himself in his discourse of poesy, plainly determineth this question, saying that poetry is _philosophoteron_ and _spoudaioteron_, that is to say, it is more philosophical, and more studiously serious, than history. his reason is, because poesy dealeth with _katholou,_ that is to say, with the universal consideration; and the history with _kathekaston,_ the particular; now saith he, the universal weighs what is fit to be said or done, either in likelihood or necessity (which the poesy considereth in his imposed names), and the particular only marks, whether alcibiades did, or suffered, this or that. thus far aristotle: which reason of his (as all his) is most full of reason. for indeed, if the question were whether it were better to have a particular act truly or falsely set down, there is no doubt which is to be chosen, no more than whether you had rather have vespasian's picture right as he was, or at the painter's pleasure nothing resembling. but if the question be for your own use and learning, whether it be better to have it set down as it should be, or as it was: then certainly is more doctrinable the feigned cyrus of xenophon than the true cyrus in justin: and the feigned aeneas in virgil, than the right aeneas in dares phrygius. as to a lady that desired to fashion her countenance to the best grace, a painter should more benefit her to portrait a most sweet face, writing canidia upon it, than to paint canidia as she was, who, horace sweareth, was foul and ill-favoured. if the poet do his part aright, he will show you in tantalus, atreus, and such like, nothing that is not to be shunned. in cyrus, aeneas, ulysses, each thing to be followed; where the historian, bound to tell things as things were, cannot be liberal (without he will be poetical) of a perfect pattern: but as in alexander or scipio himself, show doings, some to be liked, some to be misliked. and then how will you discern what to follow but by your own discretion, which you had without reading quintus curtius? and whereas a man may say, though in universal consideration of doctrine the poet prevaileth, yet that the history, in his saying such a thing was done, doth warrant a man more in that he shall follow; the answer is manifest: that if he stand upon that was; as if he should argue, because it rained yesterday, therefore it should rain to-day; then indeed it hath some advantage to a gross conceit: but if he know an example only informs a conjectured likelihood, and so go by reason, the poet doth so far exceed him, as he is to frame his example to that which is most reasonable: be it in warlike, politic, or private matters; where the historian in his bare was, hath many times that which we call fortune, to overrule the best wisdom. many times he must tell events, whereof he can yield no cause: or if he do, it must be poetical; for that a feigned example hath as much force to teach, as a true example (for as for to move, it is clear, sith the feigned may be tuned to the highest key of passion), let us take one example, wherein a poet and a historian do concur. herodotus and justin do both testify that zopyrus, king darius' faithful servant, seeing his master long resisted by the rebellious babylonians, feigned himself in extreme disgrace of his king: for verifying of which, he caused his own nose and ears to be cut off: and so flying to the babylonians, was received: and for his known valour so far credited, that he did find means to deliver them over to darius. much like matter doth livy record of tarquinius and his son. xenophon excellently feigneth such another stratagem, performed by abradates in cyrus' behalf. now would i fain know, if occasion be presented unto you, to serve your prince by such an honest dissimulation, why you do not as well learn it of xenophon's fiction, as of the others' verity: and truly so much the better, as you shall save your nose by the bargain: for abradates did not counterfeit so far. so then the best of the historian is subject to the poet; for whatsoever action or faction, whatsoever counsel, policy or war stratagem, the historian is bound to recite, that may the poet (if he list) with his imitation make his own; beautifying it both for further teaching, and more delighting, as it pleaseth him: having all, from dante his heaven, to his hell, under the authority of his pen. which if i be asked what poets have done so, as i might well name some, yet say i, and say again, i speak of the art, and not of the artificer. now to that which commonly is attributed to the praise of histories, in respect of the notable learning is gotten by marking the success, as though therein a man should see virtue exalted, and vice punished; truly that commendation is peculiar to poetry, and far off from history. for indeed poetry ever setteth virtue so out in her best colours, making fortune her well-waiting handmaid, that one must needs be enamoured of her. well may you see ulysses in a storm and in other hard plights; but they are but exercises of patience and magnanimity, to make them shine the more in the near-following prosperity. and of the contrary part, if evil men come to the stage, they ever go out (as the tragedy writer answered, to one that misliked the show of such persons) so manacled, as they little animate folks to follow them. but the historian, being captived to the truth of a foolish world, is many times a terror from well-doing, and an encouragement to unbridled wickedness. for see we not valiant miltiades rot in his fetters? the just phocion, and the accomplished socrates, put to death like traitors? the cruel severus live prosperously? the excellent severus miserably murdered? [footnote: of the two severi, the earlier, who persecuted the christians, was emperor - ; the later (alexander), who favoured them, - .] sulla and marius dying in their beds? pompey and cicero slain then, when they would have thought exile a happiness? see we not virtuous cato driven to kill himself? and rebel caesar so advanced, that his name yet after years, lasteth in the highest honour? and mark but even caesar's own words of the fore-named sulla, (who in that only did honestly, to put down his dishonest tyranny,) _literas nescivit_, as if want of learning caused him to do well. he meant it not by poetry, which not content with earthly plagues deviseth new punishments in hell for tyrants: nor yet by philosophy, which teacheth _occidendos esse_: but no doubt by skill in history: for that indeed can afford your cypselus, periander, phalaris, dionysius, and i know not how many more of the same kennel, that speed well enough in their abominable unjustice or usurpation. i conclude therefore that he excelleth history, not only in furnishing the mind with knowledge, but in setting it forward, to that which deserveth to be called and accounted good: which setting forward, and moving to well-doing, indeed setteth the laurel crown upon the poet as victorious, not only of the historian, but over the philosopher: howsoever in teaching it may be questionable. for suppose it be granted (that which i suppose with great reason may be denied) that the philosopher, in respect of his methodical proceeding, doth teach more perfectly than the poet; yet do i think that no man is so much _philophilosophos_, [footnote: in love with philosophy.] as to compare the philosopher, in moving, with the poet. and that moving is of a higher degree than teaching, it may by this appear: that it is well-nigh the cause and the effect of teaching. for who will be taught, if he be not moved with desire to be taught? and what so much good doth that teaching bring forth (i speak still of moral doctrine) as that it moveth one to do that which it doth teach? for as aristotle saith, it is not _gnosis_ but _praxis_ [footnote: not knowledge but action.] must be the fruit. and how _praxis_ cannot be, without being moved to practice, it is no hard matter to consider. the philosopher showeth you the way, he informeth you of the particularities; as well of the tediousness of the way, as of the pleasant lodging you shall have when your journey is ended, as of the many by-turnings that may divert you from your way. but this is to no man but to him that will read him, and read him with attentive studious painfulness. which constant desire, whosoever hath in him, hath already passed half the hardness of the way, and therefore is beholding to the philosopher but for the other half. nay truly, learned men have learnedly thought, that where once reason hath so much overmastered passion, as that the mind hath a free desire to do well, the inward light each mind hath in itself is as good as a philosopher's book; seeing in nature we know it is well to do well, and what is well, and what is evil, although not in the words of art, which philosophers bestow upon us. for out of natural conceit, the philosophers drew it; but to be moved to do that which we know, or to be moved with desire to know, _hoc opus, hic labor est_. now therein of all sciences (i speak still of human, and according to the human conceits), is our poet the monarch. for he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to enter into it. nay, he doth as if your journey should lie through a fair vineyard, at the first give you a cluster of grapes: that, full of that taste, you may long to pass further. he beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness: but he cometh to you with words sent in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for the well enchanting skill of music; and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you: with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner. and pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue: even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things, by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste: which, if one should begin to tell them the nature of aloes or rhubarb they should receive, would sooner take their physic at their ears than at their mouth. so it is in men (most of which are childish in the best things, till they be cradled in their graves), glad they will be to hear the tales of hercules, achilles, cyrus, and aneas; and hearing them, must needs hear the right description of wisdom, valour, and justice; which, if they had been barely, that is to say philosophically, set out, they would swear they be brought to school again. that imitation, whereof poetry is, hath the most conveniency to nature of all other, insomuch, that as aristotle saith, those things which in themselves are horrible, as cruel battles, unnatural monsters, are made in poetical imitation delightful. truly i have known men that, even with reading _amadis de gaule_ (which god knoweth wanteth much of a perfect poesy), have found their hearts moved to the exercise of courtesy, liberality, and especially courage. who readeth aneas carrying old anchises on his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so excellent an act? whom do not the words of turnus move? (the tale of turnus having planted his image in the imagination)-- _fugientem hoec terra videbit; usque adeone mori miserum est?_ where the philosophers, as they scorn to delight, so must they be content little to move: saving wrangling, whether virtue be the chief, or the only good: whether the contemplative, or the active life do excel: which plato and boethius well knew, and therefore made mistress philosophy very often borrow the masking raiment of poesy. for even those hard-hearted evil men, who think virtue a school name, and know no other good but _indulgere genio_, and therefore despise the austere admonitions of the philosopher, and feel not the inward reason they stand upon, yet will be content to be delighted: which is all the good fellow poet seemeth to promise: and so steal to see the form of goodness (which seen they cannot but love) ere themselves be aware, as if they took a medicine of cherries. infinite proofs of the strange effects of this poetical invention might be alleged; only two shall serve, which are so often remembered, as i think all men know them. the one of menenius agrippa, who when the whole people of rome had resolutely divided themselves from the senate, with apparent show of utter ruin: though he were (for that time) an excellent orator, came not among them upon trust of figurative speeches, or cunning insinuations: and much less, with far-fetched maxims of philosophy, which (especially if they were platonic [footnote: alluding to the inscription over the door of plato's academy: _no entrance here without geometry._)], they must have learned geometry before they could well have conceived: but forsooth he behaves himself, like a homely, and familiar poet. he telleth them a tale, that there was a time, when all the parts of the body made a mutinous conspiracy against the belly, which they thought devoured the fruits of each other's labour; they concluded they would let so unprofitable a spender starve. in the end, to be short (for the tale is notorious, and as notorious that it was a tale), with punishing the belly, they plagued themselves. this, applied by him, wrought such effect in the people, as i never read that ever words brought forth but then, so sudden and so good an alteration; for upon reasonable conditions, a perfect reconcilement ensued. the other is of nathan the prophet, who when the holy david had so far forsaken god, as to confirm adultery with murder: when he was to do the tenderest office of a friend, in laying his own shame before his eyes, sent by god to call again so chosen a servant: how doth he it but by telling of a man, whose beloved lamb was ungratefully taken from his bosom? the application most divinely true, but the discourse itself feigned: which made david (i speak of the second and instrumental cause), as in a glass, to see his own filthiness, as that heavenly psalm of mercy well testifieth. by these therefore examples and reasons, i think it may be manifest, that the poet, with that same hand of delight, doth draw the mind more effectually than any other art doth; and so a conclusion not unfitly ensueth: that, as virtue is the most excellent resting-place for all worldly learning to make his end of, so poetry, being the most familiar to teach it, and most princely to move towards it, in the most excellent work is the most excellent workman. but i am content not only to decipher him by his works (although works in commendation or dispraise must ever hold an high authority), but more narrowly will examine his parts: so that (as in a man) though altogether he may carry a presence full of majesty and beauty, perchance in some one defectious piece we may find a blemish: now in his parts, kinds, or species (as you list to term them), it is to be noted, that some poesies have coupled together two or three kinds, as tragical and comical, whereupon is risen the tragi-comical. some in the like manner have mingled prose and verse, as sanazzar and boethius. some have mingled matters heroical and pastoral. but that cometh all to one in this question; for if severed they be good, the conjunction cannot be hurtful. therefore perchance forgetting some, and leaving some as needless to be remembered, it shall not be amiss in a word to cite the special kinds, to see what faults may be found in the right use of them. is it then the pastoral poem which is misliked? for perchance, where the hedge is lowest, they will soonest leap over. is the poor pipe disdained, which sometime out of melibeus's mouth, can show the misery of people under hard lords, or ravening soldiers? and again, by tityrus, what blessedness is derived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them that sit highest? sometimes, under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep, it can include the whole considerations of wrong-doing and patience. sometimes show, that contention for trifles can get but a trifling victory. where perchance a man may see that even alexander and darius, when they strave who should be cock of this world's dunghill, the benefit they got, was that the after-livers may say, _hac memini et victum frustra contendere thyrsin; ex illo corydon, corydon est tempore nobis._ [footnote: all these instances are taken from virgil's _eclogues_.] or is it the lamenting elegiac, which in a kind heart would move rather pity than blame, who bewails with the great philosopher heraclitus the weakness of mankind, and the wretchedness of the world: who surely is to be praised, either for compassionate accompanying just causes of lamentation, or for rightly painting out how weak be the passions of woefulness. is it the bitter, but wholesome iambic [footnote: originally used by the greeks for satire], which rubs the galled mind, in making shame the trumpet of villany, with bold and open crying out against naughtiness; or the satirist, who _omne vafer vitium ridenti tangit amico?_ who sportingly never leaveth, until he make a man laugh at folly, and at length ashamed, to laugh at himself: which he cannot avoid, without avoiding the folly. who while _circum pracordia ludit_, giveth us to feel, how many headaches a passionate life bringeth us to. how when all is done, _est ulubris, animus si nos non deficit aquus_ [footnote: _i.e._ the wise can find happiness even in a village.]_?_ no perchance it is the comic, whom naughty play-makers and stage- keepers have justly made odious. to the argument of abuse [footnote: to the argument that, because comedy is liable to abuse, it should therefore be prohibited altogether.], i will answer after. only thus much now is to be said, that the comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be. so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one. now, as in geometry, the oblique must be known as well as the right: and in arithmetic, the odd as well as the even, so in the actions of our life, who seeth not the filthiness of evil, wanteth a great foil to perceive the beauty of virtue. this doth the comedy handle so in our private and domestical matters, as with hearing it we get as it were an experience, what is to be looked for of a niggardly demea: of a crafty davus: of a flattering gnatho: of a vainglorious thraso [footnote: all characters in the plays of terence.]: and not only to know what effects are to be expected, but to know who be such, by the signifying badge given them by the comedian. and little reason hath any man to say that men learn evil by seeing it so set out: sith, as i said before, there is no man living but, by the force truth hath in nature, no sooner seeth these men play their parts, but wisheth them in pistrinum [footnote: the tread-mill.]: although perchance the sack of his own faults lie so behind his back, that he seeth not himself dance the same measure: whereto yet nothing can more open his eyes, than to find his own actions contemptibly set forth. so that the right use of comedy will (i think) by nobody be blamed, and much less of the high and excellent tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the vicers [footnote: sinners.], that are covered with tissue: that maketh kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours: that, with stirring the effects of admiration and commiseration, teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations golden roofs are builded. that maketh us know, _qui sceptra scevus duro imperio regit, timet timentes, metus in auctorem redit._ but how much it can move, plutarch yieldeth a notable testimony, of the abominable tyrant, alexander pheraus; from whose eyes, a tragedy well made and represented drew abundance of tears: who, without all pity, had murdered infinite numbers, and some of his own blood. so as he, that was not ashamed to make matters for tragedies, yet could not resist the sweet violence of a tragedy. and if it wrought no further good in him, it was, that he in despite of himself withdrew himself from hearkening to that, which might mollify his hardened heart. but it is not the tragedy they do mislike: for it were too absurd to cast out so excellent a representation of whatsoever is most worthy to be learned. is it the lyric that most displeaseth, who with his tuned lyre, and well accorded voice, giveth praise, the reward of virtue, to virtuous acts? who gives moral precepts and natural problems, who sometimes raiseth up his voice to the height of the heavens, in singing the lauds of the immortal god. certainly i must confess my own barbarousness, i never heard the old song of percy and douglas, that i found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet: and yet is it sung but by some blind crouder [footnote: fiddler.], with no rougher voice than rude style: which being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it work trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of pindar? in hungary i have seen it the manner at all feasts and other such meetings, to have songs of their ancestors' valour; which that right soldier-like nation think the chiefest kindlers of brave courage. the incomparable lacedemonians did not only carry that kind of music ever with them to the field, but even at home, as such songs were made, so were they all content to be the singers of them, when the lusty men were to tell what they did, the old men what they had done, and the young men what they would do. and where a man may say that pindar many times praiseth highly victories of small moment, matters rather of sport than virtue: as it may be answered, it was the fault of the poet, and not of the poetry; so indeed, the chief fault was in the time and custom of the greeks, who set those toys at so high a price, that philip of macedon reckoned a horse-race won at olympus, among his three fearful felicities. but as the inimitable pindar often did, so is that kind most capable and most fit to awake the thoughts from the sleep of idleness, to embrace honourable enterprises. there rests the heroical, whose very name (i think) should daunt all backbiters; for by what conceit can a tongue be directed to speak evil of that which draweth with it no less champions than achilles, cyrus, aneas, turnus, tydeus, and rinaldo? who doth not only teach and move to a truth, but teacheth and moveth to the most high and excellent truth? who maketh magnanimity and justice shine, throughout all misty fearfulness and foggy desires? who, if the saying of plato and tully be true, that who could see virtue, would be wonderfully ravished with the love of her beauty, this man sets her out to make her more lovely in her holiday apparel, to the eye of any that will deign, not to disdain, until they understand. but if anything be already said in the defence of sweet poetry, all concurreth to the maintaining the heroical, which is not only a kind, but the best, and most accomplished kind of poetry. for as the image of each action stirreth and instructeth the mind, so the lofty image of such worthies most inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy, and informs with counsel how to be worthy. only let aneas be worn in the tablet of your memory, how he governeth himself in the ruin of his country, in the preserving his old father, and carrying away his religious ceremonies [footnote: sacred vessels and household gods.]: in obeying the god's commandment to leave dido, though not only all passionate kindness, but even the humane consideration of virtuous gratefulness, would have craved other of him. how in storms, how in sports, how in war, how in peace, how a fugitive, how victorious, how besieged, how besieging, how to strangers, how to allies, how to his enemies, how to his own: lastly, how in his inward self, and how in his outward government. and i think, in a mind not prejudiced with a prejudicating humour, he will be found in excellency fruitful: yea, even as horace saith: _melius chrysippo et crantore_ [footnote: a better teacher than the philosophers.]. but truly i imagine, it falleth out with these poet-whippers, as with some good women, who often are sick, but in faith they cannot tell where. so the name of poetry is odious to them; but neither his cause, nor effects, neither the sum that contains him, nor the particularities descending from him, give any fast handle to their carping dispraise. sith then poetry is of all human learning the most ancient, and of most fatherly antiquity, as from whence other learnings have taken their beginnings: sith it is so universal, that no learned nation doth despise it, nor no barbarous nation is without it: sith both roman and greek gave divine names unto it, the one of prophesying, the other of making: and that indeed that name of making is fit for him; considering, that whereas other arts retain themselves within their subject, and receive, as it were, their being from it, the poet only bringeth his own stuff, and doth not learn a conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter for a conceit: sith neither his description, nor his end, containeth any evil, the thing described cannot be evil: sith his effects be so good as to teach goodness and to delight the learners: sith therein (namely, in moral doctrine, the chief of all knowledges), he doth not only far pass the historian, but for instructing is well- nigh comparable to the philosopher: and for moving, leaves him behind him: sith the holy scripture (wherein there is no uncleanness) hath whole parts in it poetical: and that even our saviour christ vouchsafed to use the flowers of it: sith all his kinds are not only in their united forms, but in their severed dissections fully commendable, i think (and think i think rightly), the laurel crown, appointed for triumphing captains, doth worthily (of all other learnings) honour the poet's triumph. but because we have ears as well as tongues, and that the lightest reasons that may be, will seem to weigh greatly, if nothing be put in the counter-balance: let us hear, and as well as we can ponder, what objections may be made against this art, which may be worthy, either of yielding or answering. first truly i note, not only in these _mysomousoi_ poet-haters, but in all that kind of people, who seek a praise by dispraising others, that they do prodigally spend a great many wandering words, in quips, and scoffs; carping and taunting at each thing, which, by stirring the spleen, may stay the brain from a through beholding the worthiness of the subject. those kind of objections, as they are full of very idle easiness, sith there is nothing of so sacred a majesty, but that an itching tongue may rub itself upon it: so deserve they no other answer, but instead of laughing at the jest, to laugh at the jester. we know a playing wit can praise the discretion of an ass; the comfortableness of being in debt, and the jolly commodity of being sick of the plague. so of the contrary side, if we will turn ovid's verse: _ut lateat virtus proximitate mali,_ that good lie hid in nearness of the evil: agrippa will be as merry in showingthe vanity of science, as erasmus was in commending of folly. neither shall any man or matter escape some touch of these smiling railers. but for erasmus and agrippa, they had another foundation than the superficial part would promise. marry, these other pleasant fault-finders, who will correct the verb, before they understand the noun, and confute others' knowledge before they confirm their own: i would have them only remember, that scoffing cometh not of wisdom. so as the best title in true english they get with their merriments is to be called good fools: for so have our grave forefathers ever termed that humorous kind of jesters: but that which giveth greatest scope to their scorning humours is rhyming and versing. it is already said (and as i think, truly said) it is not rhyming and versing that maketh poesy. one may be a poet without versing, and a versifier without poetry. but yet, presuppose it were inseparable (as indeed it seemeth scaliger judgeth) truly it were an inseparable commendation. for if _oratio_ next to _ratio_, speech next to reason, be the greatest gift bestowed upon mortality: that cannot be praiseless, which doth most polish that blessing of speech, which considers each word, not only (as a man may say) by his forcible quality, but by his best measured quantity, carrying even in themselves, a harmony: without (perchance) number, measure, order, proportion, be in our time grown odious. but lay aside the just praise it hath, by being the only fit speech for music (music, i say, the most divine striker of the senses): thus much is undoubtedly true, that if reading be foolish, without remembering, memory being the only treasurer of knowledge, those words which are fittest for memory, are likewise most convenient for knowledge. now, that verse far exceedeth prose in the knitting up of the memory, the reason is manifest. the words (besides their delight, which hath a great affinity to memory), being so set, as one word cannot be lost, but the whole work fails: which accuseth itself, calleth the remembrance back to itself, and so most strongly confirmeth it. besides, one word so as it were begetting another, as be it in rhyme or measured verse, by the former a man shall have a near guess to the follower. lastly, even they that have taught the art of memory have showed nothing so apt for it, as a certain room divided into many places well and thoroughly known. now, that hath the verse in effect perfectly: every word having his natural seat, which seat must needs make the words remembered. but what needeth more in a thing so known to all men? who is it that ever was a scholar, that doth not carry away some verses of virgil, horace, or cato [footnote: the moralist. his elegiacs are constantly quoted by medieval writers, _e.g._ in _piers plowman_.], which in his youth he learned, and even to his old age serve him for hourly lessons? but the fitness it hath for memory is notably proved by all delivery of arts: wherein for the most part, from grammar to logic, mathematic, physic, and the rest, the rules chiefly necessary to be borne away are compiled in verses. so that, verse being in itself sweet and orderly, and being best for memory, the only handle of knowledge, it must be in jest that any man can speak against it. now then go we to the most important imputations laid to the poor poets; for aught i can yet learn, they are these: first, that there being many other more fruitful knowledges, a man might better spend his time in them, than in this. secondly, that it is the mother of lies. thirdly, that it is the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires: with a siren's sweetness, drawing the mind to the serpent's tail of sinful fancy. and herein especially, comedies give the largest field to err, as chaucer saith: how both in other nations and in ours, before poets did soften us, we were full of courage, given to martial exercises; the pillars of man-like liberty, and not lulled asleep in shady idleness with poets' pastimes. and lastly, and chiefly, they cry out with an open mouth, as if they outshot robin hood, that plato banished them out of his commonwealth. truly, this is much, if there be much truth in it. first to the first: that a man might better spend his time, is a reason indeed: but it doth (as they say) but _petere principium_. for if it be as i affirm, that no learning is so good as that which teacheth and moveth to virtue; and that none can both teach and move thereto so much as poetry: then is the conclusion manifest, that ink and paper cannot be to a more profitable purpose employed. and certainly, though a man should grant their first assumption, it should follow (methinks) very unwillingly, that good is not good, because better is better. but i still and utterly deny that there is sprung out of earth a more fruitful knowledge. to the second, therefore, that they should be the principal liars; i answer paradoxically, but truly i think, truly; that of all writers under the sun, the poet is the least liar: and though he would, as a poet can scarcely be a liar, the astronomer, with his cousin the geometrician, can hardly escape, when they take upon them to measure the height of the stars. how often, think you, do the physicians lie, when they aver things good for sicknesses, which afterwards send charon a great number of souls drowned in a potion before they come to his ferry? and no less of the rest, which take upon them to affirm. now, for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth. for, as i take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false. so as the other artists, and especially the historian, affirming many things, can in the cloudy knowledge of mankind hardly escape from many lies. but the poet (as i said before) never affirmeth. the poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes. he citeth not authorities of other histories, but even for his entry calleth the sweet muses to inspire into him a good invention: in truth, not labouring to tell you what is or is not, but what should or should not be: and therefore, though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true, he lieth not, without we will say that nathan lied in his speech, before alleged, to david. which as a wicked man durst scarce say, so think i, none so simple would say, that asop lied in the tales of his beasts: for who thinks that asop wrote it for actually true, were well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of. what child is there, that coming to a play, and seeing thebes written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is thebes? if then a man can arrive, at that child's age, to know that the poet's persons and doings are but pictures what should be, and not stories what have been, they will never give the lie to things not affirmatively, but allegorically and figuratively, written. and therefore as in history, looking for truth, they go away full fraught with falsehood: so in poesy, looking for fiction, they shall use the narration but as an imaginative groundplot of a profitable invention. but hereto is replied that the poets give names to men they write of, which argueth a conceit of an actual truth, and so, not being true, proves a falsehood. and doth the lawyer lie, then, when under the names of john a stile and john a noakes, he puts his case? but that is easily answered. their naming of men is but to make their picture the more lively, and not to build any history: painting men, they cannot leave men nameless. we see we cannot play at chess, but that we must give names to our chessmen; and yet methinks he were a very partial champion of truth that would say we lied for giving a piece of wood the reverend title of a bishop. the poet nameth cyrus or aneas no other way than to show what men of their fames, fortunes, and estates should do. their third is, how much it abuseth men's wit, training it to wanton sinfulness and lustful love; for indeed that is the principal, if not the only abuse i can hear alleged. they say the comedies rather teach than reprehend amorous conceits. they say the lyric is larded with passionate sonnets. the elegiac weeps the want of his mistress. and that even to the heroical, cupid hath ambitiously climbed. alas, love! i would thou couldst as well defend thyself as thou canst offend others. i would those on whom thou dost attend could either put thee away or yield good reason why they keep thee. but grant love of beauty to be a beastly fault, although it be very hard, sith only man and no beast hath that gift, to discern beauty. grant that lovely name of love to deserve all hateful reproaches: although even some of my masters the philosophers spent a good deal of their lamp-oil in setting forth the excellency of it. grant, i say, whatsoever they will have granted; that not only love, but lust, but vanity, but (if they list) scurrility, possesseth many leaves of the poet's books: yet think i, when this is granted, they will find their sentence may with good manners put the last words foremost; and not say that poetry abuseth man's wit, but that man's wit abuseth poetry. for i will not deny but that man's wit may make poesy (which should be _eikastike_, which some learned have defined, figuring forth good things) to be fantastic: which doth contrariwise infect the fancy with unworthy objects. as the painter, that should give to the eye either some excellent perspective or some fine picture fit for building or fortification, or containing in it some notable example, as abraham sacrificing his son isaac, judith killing holofernes, david fighting with goliath, may leave those and please an ill-pleased eye with wanton shows of better hidden matters. but what, shall the abuse of a thing make the right use odious? nay, truly, though i yield that poesy may not only be abused, but that, being abused by the reason of his sweet charming force, it can do more hurt than any other army of words: yet shall it be so far from concluding that the abuse should give reproach to the abused, that contrariwise it is a good reason that whatsoever being abused, doth most harm, being rightly used (and upon the right use each thing conceiveth his title) doth most good. do we not see the skill of physic (the best rampire to our often- assaulted bodies), being abused, teach poison the most violent destroyer? doth not knowledge of law, whose end is to even and right all things, being abused, grow the crooked fosterer of horrible injuries? doth not (to go to the highest) god's word, abused, breed heresy? and his name abused, become blasphemy? truly a needle cannot do much hurt, and as truly (with leave of ladies be it spoken) it cannot do much good. with a sword thou mayest kill thy father, and with a sword thou mayest defend thy prince and country. so that, as in their calling poets the fathers of lies they say nothing: so in this their argument of abuse they prove the commendation. they allege herewith that, before poets began to be in price, our nation hath set their hearts' delight upon action and not upon imagination: rather doing things worthy to be written than writing things fit to be done. what that before time was, i think scarcely sphinx can tell: sith no memory is so ancient that hath the precedence of poetry. and certain it is that, in our plainest homeliness, yet never was the albion nation without poetry. marry, this argument, though it be levelled against poetry, yet is it indeed a chain-shot against all learning, or bookishness, as they commonly term it. of such mind were certain goths, of whom it is written that, having in the spoils of a famous city taken a fair library, one hangman (belike fit to execute the fruits of their wits) who had murdered a great number of bodies, would have set fire on it. "no", said another very gravely, "take heed what you do, for while they are busy about these toys, we shall with more leisure conquer their countries." this indeed is the ordinary doctrine of ignorance, and many words sometimes i have heard spent in it; but because this reason is generally against all learning, as well as poetry; or rather, all learning but poetry: because it were too large a digression to handle, or at least too superfluous: (sith it is manifest that all government of action is to be gotten by knowledge, and knowledge best by gathering many knowledges, which is, reading), i only with horace, to him that is of that opinion, _jubeo stultum esse libenter:_ for as for poetry itself, it is the freest from this objection. for poetry is the companion of the camps. i dare undertake, orlando furioso or honest king arthur will never displease a soldier; but the quiddity of _ens_ and _prima materia_ will hardly agree with a corslet; and therefore, as i said in the beginning, even turks and tartars are delighted with poets. homer, a greek, flourished before greece flourished. and if to a slight conjecture a conjecture may be opposed, truly it may seem that, as by him their learned men took almost their first light of knowledge, so their active men received their first motions of courage. only alexander's example may serve, who by plutarch is accounted of such virtue that fortune was not his guide but his footstool; whose acts speak for him, though plutarch did not: indeed, the phoenix of warlike princes. this alexander left his schoolmaster, living aristotle, behind him, but took dead homer with him; he put the philosopher calisthenes to death for his seeming philosophical, indeed mutinous stubbornness. but the chief thing he ever was heard to wish for was that homer had been alive. he well found he received more bravery of mind by the pattern of achilles than by hearing the definition of fortitude; and therefore, if cato misliked fulvius for carrying ennius with him to the field, it may be answered that, if cato misliked it, the noble fulvius liked it, or else he had not done it. for it was not the excellent cato uticensis (whose authority i would much more have reverenced), but it was the former [footnote: cato the censor]: in truth, a bitter punisher of faults, but else a man that had never well sacrificed to the graces. he misliked and cried out upon all greek learning, and yet, being years old, began to learn it. belike, fearing that pluto understood not latin. indeed, the roman laws allowed no person to be carried to the wars but he that was in the soldiers' roll; and therefore, though cato misliked his unmustered person, he misliked not his work. and if he had, scipio nasica, judged by common consent the best roman, loved him. both the other scipio brothers, who had by their virtues no less surnames than of asia and affrick, so loved him that they caused his body to be buried in their sepulchre. so as cato, his authority being but against his person, and that answered with so far greater than himself, is herein of no validity. but now, indeed, my burden is great; now plato his name is laid upon me, whom i must confess, of all philosophers, i have ever esteemed most worthy of reverence, and with great reason, sith of all philosophers he is the most poetical. yet if he will defile the fountain, out of which his flowing streams have proceeded, let us boldly examine with what reasons he did it. first, truly, a man might maliciously object that plato, being a philosopher, was a natural enemy of poets; for, indeed, after the philosophers had picked out of the sweet mysteries of poetry the right discerning true points of knowledge, they forthwith putting it in method, and making a school-art of that which the poets did only teach by a divine delightfulness, beginning to spurn at their guides like ungrateful 'prentices, were not content to set up shops for themselves, but sought by all means to discredit their masters. which by the force of delight being barred them, the less they could overthrow them, the more they hated them. for, indeed, they found for homer seven cities strove who should have him for their citizen: where many cities banished philosophers, as not fit members to live among them. for only repeating certain of euripides' verses, many athenians had their lives saved of the syracusians: [footnote: the story is told in _balaustion's adventure_.] when the athenians themselves thought many philosophers unworthy to live. certain poets, as simonides and pindarus had so prevailed with hiero the first, that of a tyrant they made him a just king, where plato could do so little with dionysius, that he himself, of a philosopher, was made a slave. but who should do thus, i confess, should requite the objections made against poets, with like cavillation against philosophers; as likewise one should do, that should bid one read _phaedrus_ or _symposium_ in plato, or the discourse of love in plutarch, and see whether any poet do authorize abominable filthiness, as they do. again, a man might ask out of what commonwealth plato did banish them? in sooth, thence where he himself alloweth community of women: so as, belike, this banishment grew not for effeminate wantonness, sith little should poetical sonnets be hurtful, when a man might have what woman he listed. but i honour philosophical instructions, and bless the wits which bred them: so as they be not abused, which is likewise stretched to poetry. st. paul himself, who yet (for the credit of poets) allegeth twice two poets, and one of them by the name of a prophet, setteth a watch-word upon philosophy, indeed upon the abuse. so doth plato, upon the abuse, not upon poetry. plato found fault, that the poets of his time filled the world with wrong opinions of the gods, making light tales of that unspotted essence; and therefore, would not have the youth depraved with such opinions. herein may much be said, let this suffice: the poets did not induce such opinions, but did imitate those opinions already induced. for all the greek stories can well testify, that the very religion of that time stood upon many and many-fashioned gods, not taught so by the poets, but followed, according to their nature of imitation. who list, may read in plutarch, the discourses of isis, and osiris, of the cause why oracles ceased, of the divine providence: and see, whether the theology of that nation stood not upon such dreams, which the poets superstitiously observed, and truly, (sith they had not the light of christ,) did much better in it than the philosophers, who, shaking off superstition, brought in atheism. plato therefore, (whose authority i had much rather justly construe, than unjustly resist,) meant not in general of poets, in those words of which julius scaliger saith _qua auctoritate barbari quidam atque hispidi abuti velint, ad poetas e republica exigendos_: but only meant, to drive out those wrong opinions of the deity (whereof now, without further law, christianity hath taken away all the hurtful belief) perchance (as he thought) nourished by the then esteemed poets. and a man need go no further than to plato himself, to know his meaning: who in his dialogue called _ion_, giveth high, and rightly divine commendation to poetry. so as plato, banishing the abuse, not the thing, not banishing it but giving due honour unto it, shall be our patron, and not our adversary. for indeed i had much rather (sith truly i may do it) show their mistaking of plato, (under whose lion's skin they would make an ass-like braying against poesy,) than go about to overthrow his authority, whom the wiser a man is, the more just cause he shall find to have in admiration: especially, sith he attributeth unto poesy more than myself do; namely to be a very inspiring of a divine force, far above man's wit; as in the aforenamed dialogue is apparent. of the other side, who would show the honours have been by the best sort of judgments granted them, a whole sea of examples would present themselves. alexanders, caesars, scipios, all favourers of poets. lalius, called the roman socrates, himself a poet: so as part of _heautontimorumenos_ in terence was supposed to be made by him. and even the greek socrates, whom apollo confirmed to be the only wise man, is said to have spent part of his old time in putting asop's fables into verses. and therefore, full evil should it become his scholar plato to put such words in his master's mouth against poets. but what need more? aristotle writes the art of poesy: and why if it should not be written? plutarch teacheth the use to be gathered of them, and how if they should not be read? and who reads plutarch's either history or philosophy, shall find he trimmeth both their garments with guards of poesy. but i list not to defend poesy, with the help of her underling, historiography. let it suffice, that it is a fit soil for praise to dwell upon: and what dispraise may set upon it is either easily overcome, or transformed into just commendation. so that, sith the excellencies of it may be so easily and so justly confirmed, and the low-creeping objections, so soon trodden down; it not being an art of lies, but of true doctrine: not of effeminateness, but of notable stirring of courage: not of abusing man's wit, but of strengthening man's wit: not banished, but honoured by plato: let us rather plant more laurels, for to engarland our poets' heads, (which honour of being laureat, as besides them, only triumphant captains wear, is a sufficient authority, to show the price they ought to be had in,) than suffer the ill-favouring breath of such wrong-speakers, once to blow upon the clear springs of poesy. but sith i have run so long a career in this matter, methinks, before i give my pen a full stop, it shall be but a little more lost time, to inquire, why england, (the mother of excellent minds,) should be grown so hard a step-mother to poets, who certainly in wit ought to pass all other: sith all only proceedeth from their wit, being indeed makers of themselves, not takers of others. how can i but exclaim, _musa mihi causas memora, quo numine laso,_ sweet poesy, that hath anciently had kings, emperors, senators, great captains, such as, besides a thousand others, david, adrian, sophocles, germanicus, not only to favour poets, but to be poets; and of our nearer times, can present for her patrons, a robert, king of sicily, the great king francis of france, king james of scotland; such cardinals as bembus, and bibiena; such famous preachers and teachers, as beza and melancthon; so learned philosophers, as fracastorius and scaliger; so great orators, as pontanus and muretus; so piercing wits as george buchanan; so grave counsellors, as besides many, but before all, that hospital [footnote: michel de l'hospital, chancellor of france - , and the noble champion of tolerance in the evil days of charles ix. he narrowly escaped with his life at the massacre of s. bartholomew, and died a few months later] of france: than whom (i think) that realme never brought forth a more accomplished judgment: more firmly builded upon virtue; i say these, with numbers of others, not only to read others' poesies, but to poetise for others' reading: that poesy thus embraced in all other places, should only find, in our time, a hard welcome in england, i think the very earth lamenteth it, and therefore decketh our soil with fewer laurels than it was accustomed; for heretofore, poets have in england also flourished; and which is to be noted, even in those times, when the trumpet of mars did sound loudest. and now, that an over-faint quietness should seem to strew the house [footnote: pave the way.] for poets, they are almost in as good reputation as the mountebanks at venice. truly even that, as of the one side it giveth great praise to poesy, which like venus (but to better purpose) hath rather be troubled in the net with mars, than enjoy the homely quiet of vulcan: so serves it for a piece of a reason, why they are less grateful to idle england, which now can scarce endure the pain of a pen. upon this necessarily followeth, that base men with servile wits undertake it: who think it enough, if they can be rewarded of the printer. and so as epaminondas is said, with the honour of his virtue, to have made an office, by his exercising it, which before was contemptible, to become highly respected: so these, no more but setting their names to it, by their own disgracefulness, disgrace the most graceful poesy. for now, as if all the muses were got with child, to bring forth bastard poets, without any commission, they do post over the banks of helicon, till they make the readers more weary than post-horses: while in the mean time, they _queis meliore luto finxit procordia titan_, are better content, to suppress the outflowing of their wit, than by publishing them to be accounted knights of the same order. but i, that before ever i durst aspire unto the dignity am admitted into the company of the paper-blurrers, do find the very true cause of our wanting estimation, is want of desert: taking upon us to be poets, in despite of pallas. now, wherein we want desert were a thank-worthy labour to express: but if i knew, i should have mended myself. but i, as i never desired the title, so have neglected the means to come by it. only overmastered by some thoughts, i yielded an inky tribute unto them. marry, they that delight in poesy itself should seek to know what they do, and how they do; and especially, look themselves in an unflattering glass of reason, if they be inclinable unto it. for poesy must not be drawn by the ears, it must be gently led, or rather, it must lead. which was partly the cause, that made the ancient-learned affirm, it was a divine gift, and no human skill: sith all other knowledges lie ready for any that hath strength of wit: a poet no industry can make, if his own genius be not carried unto it: and therefore is it an old proverb, _orator fit; poeta nascitur_. yet confess i always, that as the fertilest ground must be manured, so must the highest-flying wit have a dadalus to guide him. that dadalus, they say, both in this and in other, hath three wings, to bear itself up into the air of due commendation: that is, art, imitation, and exercise. but these, neither artificial rules, nor imitative patterns, we much cumber ourselves withal. exercise indeed we do, but that, very fore-backwardly: for where we should exercise to know, we exercise as having known: and so is our brain delivered of much matter, which never was begotten by knowledge. for, there being two principal parts, matter to be expressed by words, and words to express the matter, in neither, we use art, or imitation, rightly. our matter is _quodlibet_ indeed, though wrongly performing ovid's verse, _quicquid conabar dicere versus erat:_ never marshalling it into an assured rank, that almost the readers cannot tell where to find themselves. chaucer undoubtedly did excellently in his _troilus and cresseid_; of whom, truly i know not whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time, could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age walk so stumblingly after him. yet had he great wants, fit to be forgiven, in so reverent antiquity. i account the _mirror of magistrates_ [footnote: a long series of poems, published in the early part of elizabeth's reign. the two first, and best, pieces in it--the _induction_ and _complaint of the duke of buckingham_--were by sackville, joint-author of the earliest english tragedy, _gorboduc_.] meetly furnished of beautiful parts; and in the earl of surrey's _lyrics_, many things tasting of a noble birth, and worthy of a noble mind. the _shepherd's calendar_ hath much poetry in his eclogues: indeed worthy the reading, if i be not deceived. that same framing of his style to an old rustic language i dare not allow, sith neither theocritus in greek, virgil in latin, nor sannazar in italian, did affect it. besides these, do i not remember to have seen but few (to speak boldly) printed, that have poetical sinews in them: for proof whereof, let but most of the verses be put in prose, and then ask the meaning; and it will be found that one verse did but beget another, without ordering at the first, what should be at the last: which becomes a confused mass of words, with a tingling sound of rhyme, barely accompanied with reason. our tragedies and comedies, (not without cause cried out against,) observing rules neither of honest civility nor of skilful poetry, excepting _gorboduc_, (again, i say, of those that i have seen,) which notwithstanding as it is full of stately speeches, and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of seneca his style, and as full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so obtain the very end of poesy: yet in truth it is very defectious in the circumstances; which grieveth me, because it might not remain as an exact model of all tragedies. for it is faulty both in place and time, the two necessary companions of all corporal actions. for where the stage should always represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by aristotle's precept and common reason, but one day: there is both many days, and many places, inartificially imagined. but if it be so in _gorboduc_, how much more in all the rest? where you shall have asia of the one side, and africa of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is: or else, the tale will not be conceived. now ye shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. by and by, we hear news of shipwreck in the same place, and then we are to blame, if we accept it not for a rock. upon the back of that, comes out a hideous monster, with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave. while in the meantime, two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field? now, of time they are much more liberal, for ordinary it is that two young princes fall in love. after many traverses, she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy, he is lost, groweth a man, falls in love, and is ready to get another child, and all this in two hours' space: which how absurd it is in sense, even sense may imagine, and art hath taught, and all ancient examples justified: and at this day the ordinary players in italy will not err in. yet will some bring in an example of _eunuchus_ in terence, that containeth matter of two days, yet far short of twenty years. true it is, and so was it to be played in two days, and so fitted to the time it set forth. and though plautus hath in one place done amiss, let us hit with him, and not miss with him. but they will say, how then shall we set forth a story, which containeth both many places, and many times? and do they not know that a tragedy is tied to the laws of poesy, and not of history? not bound to follow the story, but having liberty, either to feign a quite new matter, or to frame the history to the most tragical convenience. again, many things may be told, which cannot be showed, if they know the difference betwixt reporting and representing. as for example, i may speak (though i am here) of peru, and in speech digress from that, to the description of calicut: but in action, i cannot represent it without pacolet's horse: and so was the manner the ancients took, by some _nuncius_ to recount things done in former time, or other place. lastly, if they will represent a history, they must not (as horace saith) begin _ab ovo_: but they must come to the principal point of that one action, which they will represent. by example this will be best expressed. i have a story of young polydorus, delivered for safety's sake, with great riches, by his father priamus to polymnestor, king of thrace, in the trojan war time: he after some years, hearing the overthrow of priamus, for to make the treasure his own, murdereth the child: the body is taken up by hecuba: she the same day findeth a slight to be revenged most cruelly of the tyrant: where now would one of our tragedy writers begin, but with the delivery of the child? then should he sail over into thrace, and so spend i know not how many years, and travel numbers of places. but where doth euripides? [footnote: in his _hecuba_.] even with the finding of the body, leaving the rest to be told by the spirit of polydorus. this need no further to be enlarged, the dullest wit may conceive it. but besides these gross absurdities, how all their plays be neither right tragedies, nor right comedies: mingling kings and clowns, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in clowns by head and shoulders, to play a part in majestical matters, with neither decency nor discretion. so as neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right sportfulness, is by their mongrel tragi-comedy obtained. i know apuleius [footnote: in his latin romance, the _metamorphoses_, or the _golden ass_.] did somewhat so, but that is a thing recounted with space of time, not represented in one moment: and i know, the ancients have one or two examples of tragi-comedies, as plautus hath _amphitryo_: but if we mark them well, we shall find, that they never, or very daintily, match hornpipes and funerals. so falleth it out, that having indeed no right comedy, in that comical part of our tragedy, we have nothing but scurrility, unworthy of any chaste ears: or some extreme show of doltishness, indeed fit to lift up a loud laughter, and nothing else: where the whole tract of a comedy should be full of delight, as the tragedy should be still maintained in a well-raised admiration. but our comedians think there is no delight without laughter, which is very wrong; for though laughter may come with delight, yet cometh it not of delight, as though delight should be the cause of laughter; but well may one thing breed both together: nay, rather in themselves, they have as it were a kind of contrariety: for delight we scarcely do, but in things that have a convenience to ourselves, or to the general nature: laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature. delight hath a joy in it, either permanent, or present. laughter hath only a scornful tickling. for example, we are ravished with delight to see a fair woman, and yet are far from being moved to laughter. we laugh at deformed creatures, wherein certainly we cannot delight. we delight in good chances, we laugh at mischances; we delight to hear the happiness of our friends, or country; at which he were worthy to be laughed at, that would laugh; we shall contrarily laugh sometimes, to find a matter quite mistaken, and go down the hill against the bias, in the mouth of some such men, as for the respect of them one shall be heartily sorry, yet he cannot choose but laugh; and so is rather pained, than delighted, with laughter. yet deny i not, but that they may go well together; for as in alexander's picture well set out we delight without laughter, and in twenty mad antics we laugh without delight: so in hercules, painted with his great beard, and furious countenance, in woman's attire, spinning at omphale's commandment, it breedeth both delight and laughter. for the representing of so strange a power in love, procureth delight: and the scornfulness of the action stirreth laughter. but i speak to this purpose, that all the end of the comical part be not upon such scornful matters as stir laughter only: but mixed with it, that delightful teaching which is the end of poesy. and the great fault even in that point of laughter, and forbidden plainly by aristotle, is that they stir laughter in sinful things; which are rather execrable than ridiculous: or in miserable, which are rather to be pitied than scorned. for what is it to make folks gape at a wretched beggar, or a beggarly clown? or, against law of hospitality, to jest at strangers, because they speak not english so well as we do? what do we learn, sith it is certain _nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se, quam quod ridiculos homines facit:_ but rather a busy-loving courtier; a heartless threatening thraso; a self-wise-seeming schoolmaster; an awry-transformed traveller? these if we saw walk in stage names, which we play naturally, therein were delightful laughter, and teaching delightfulness: as in the other, the tragedies of buchanan do justly bring forth a divine admiration. but i have lavished out too many words of this play-matter. i do it because, as they are excelling parts of poesy, so is there none so much used in england, and none can be more pitifully abused. which like an unmannerly daughter, showing a bad education, causeth her mother poesy's honesty to be called in question. other sorts of poetry almost have we none, but that lyrical kind of songs and sonnets: which lord, if he gave us so good minds, how well it might be employed, and with how heavenly fruit, both private and public, in singing the praises of the immortal beauty, the immortal goodness of that god, who giveth us hands to write, and wits to conceive, of which we might well want words, but never matter, of which we could turn our eyes to nothing, but we should ever have new budding occasions. but truly many of such writings, as come under the banner of un-resistible love, if i were a mistress, would never persuade me they were in love: so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers' writings, and so caught up certain swelling phrases, which hang together, like a man which once told me, the wind was at north, west, and by south, because he would be sure to name winds enough, than that in truth they feel those passions, which easily (as i think) may be betrayed by that same forcibleness, or _energeia_ (as the greeks call it) of the writer. but let this be a sufficient, though short note, that we miss the right use of the material point of poesy. now, for the outside of it, which is words, or (as i may term it) diction, it is even well worse. so is that honey-flowing matron eloquence apparelled, or rather disguised, in a courtezan-like painted affectation: one time with so far-fetched words, they may seem monsters, but must seem strangers to any poor englishman; another time, with coursing of a letter, as if they were bound to follow the method of a dictionary: another time, with figures and flowers, extremely winter-starved. but i would this fault were only peculiar to versifiers, and had not as large possession among prose-printers; and (which is to be marvelled) among many scholars; and (which is to be pitied) among some preachers. truly i could wish, if at least i might be so bold to wish in a thing beyond the reach of my capacity, the diligent imitators of tully and demosthenes (most worthy to be imitated) did not so much keep _nizolian_ [footnote: nizolius, the compiler of a lexicon to the works of cicero.] paper-books of their figures and phrases, as by attentive translation (as it were) devour them whole, and make them wholly theirs: for now they cast sugar and spice upon every dish that is served to the table; like those indians, not content to wear earrings at the fit and natural place of the ears, but they will thrust jewels through their nose and lips because they will be sure to be fine. tully, when he was to drive out catiline, as it were with a thunderbolt of eloquence, often used that figure of repetition, _vivit? vivit; immo in senatum venit_, &c. indeed, inflamed with a well-grounded rage, he would have his words (as it were) double out of his mouth: and so do that artificially, which we see men do in choler naturally. and we, having noted the grace of those words, hale them in sometime to a familiar epistle, when it were to too much choler to be choleric. now for similitudes, in certain printed discourses, i think all herbarists, all stories of beasts, fowls, and fishes, are rifled up, that they come in multitudes, to wait upon any of our conceits: [footnote: an allusion to the style of lyly and the euphuists.] which certainly is as absurd a surfeit to the ears as is possible: for the force of a similitude, not being to prove anything to a contrary disputer, but only to explain to a willing hearer, when that is done, the rest is a most tedious prattling: rather over-swaying the memory from the purpose whereto they were applied, than any whit informing the judgment, already either satisfied, or by similitudes not to be satisfied. for my part, i do not doubt, when antonius and crassus, the great forefathers of cicero in eloquence, the one (as cicero testifieth of them) pretended not to know art, the other, not to set by it: because with a plain sensibleness they might win credit of popular ears; which credit is the nearest step to persuasion: which persuasion is the chief mark of oratory; i do not doubt (i say) but that they used these tracks very sparingly, which who doth generally use, any man may see doth dance to his own music: and so be noted by the audience more careful to speak curiously, than to speak truly. undoubtedly (at least to my opinion undoubtedly), i have found in divers smally learned courtiers a more sound style, than in some professors of learning: of which i can guess no other cause, but that the courtier, following that which by practice he findeth fittest to nature, therein (though he know it not) doth according to art, though not by art: where the other, using art to show art, and not to hide art (as in these cases he should do), flyeth from nature, and indeed abuseth art. but what? methinks i deserve to be pounded, for straying from poetry to oratory: but both have such an affinity in this wordish consideration, that i think this digression will make my meaning receive the fuller understanding: which is not to take upon me to teach poets how they should do, but only finding myself sick among the rest, to show some one or two spots of the common infection, grown among the most part of writers: that, acknowledging ourselves somewhat awry, we may bend to the right use both of matter and manner; whereto our language giveth us great occasion, being indeed capable of any excellent exercising of it. i know, some will say it is a mingled language. and why not so much the better, taking the best of both the other? [footnote: both the teutonic and the romance elements.] another will say it wanteth grammar. nay, truly, it hath that praise, that it wanteth not grammar; for grammar it might have, but it needs it not; being so easy of itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which i think was a piece of the tower of babylon's curse, that a man should be put to school to learn his mother-tongue. but for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the mind, which is the end of speech, that hath it equally with any other tongue in the world: and is particularly happy, in compositions of two or three words together, near the greek, far beyond the latin: which is one of the greatest beauties can be in a language. now, of versifying there are two sorts, the one ancient, the other modern: the ancient marked the quantity of each syllable, and according to that framed his verse: the modern, observing only number (with some regard of the accent), the chief life of it standeth in that like sounding of the words, which we call rhyme. whether of these be the most excellent, would bear many speeches. the ancient (no doubt) more fit for music, both words and tune observing quantity, and more fit lively to express divers passions, by the low and lofty sound of the well-weighed syllable. the latter likewise, with his rhyme, striketh a certain music to the ear: and in fine, sith it doth delight, though by another way, it obtains the same purpose: there being in either sweetness, and wanting in neither majesty. truly the english, before any other vulgar language i know, is fit for both sorts: for, for the ancient, the italian is so full of vowels, that it must ever be cumbered with elisions. the dutch, [footnote: sidney probably means what we should call german.] so of the other side with consonants, that they cannot yield the sweet sliding fit for a verse. the french, in his whole language, hath not one word, that hath his accent in the last syllable saving two, called _antepenultima_, and little more hath the spanish: and therefore, very gracelessly may they use _dactyls_. the english is subject to none of these defects. now, for the rhyme, though we do not observe quantity, yet we observe the accent very precisely: which other languages either cannot do, or will not do so absolutely. that _caesura_, or breathing place in the midst of the verse, neither italian nor spanish have; the french, and we, never almost fail of. lastly, even the very rhyme itself, the italian cannot put in the last syllable, by the french named the masculine rhyme, but still in the next to the last, which the french call the female, or the next before that, which the italians termed _sdrucciola_. [footnote: hence the italian verse is always of eleven, not ten, syllables.] the example of the former, is _buono_, _suono_; of the _sdrucciola_, _femina_, _semina_. the french, on the other side, hath both the male, as _bon_, _son_, and the female, as _plaise_, _taise_. but the _sdrucciola_ he hath not: where english hath all three, as _due_, _true_, _father_, _rather_, _motion_, _potion_ with much more which might be said, but that i find already, the triflingness of this discourse is much too much enlarged. so that sith the ever-praiseworthy poesy is full of virtue-breeding delightfulness, and void of no gift, that ought to be in the noble name of learning: sith the blames laid against it are either false, or feeble: sith the cause why it is not esteemed in england, is the fault of poet-apes, not poets: sith lastly, our tongue is most fit to honour poesy, and to be honoured by poesy, i conjure you all, that have had the evil luck to read this ink-wasting toy of mine, even in the name of the nine muses, no more to scorn the sacred mysteries of poesy: no more to laugh at the name of poets, as though they were next inheritors to fools: no more to jest at the reverend title of a rhymer: but to believe with aristotle, that they were the ancient treasurers of the grecians' divinity. to believe with bembus, that they were first bringers in of all civility. to believe with scaliger, that no philosopher's precepts can sooner make you an honest man, than the reading of virgil. to believe with clauserus, the translator of cornutus, that it pleased the heavenly deity, by hesiod and homer, under the veil of fables, to give us all knowledge, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, natural and moral, and _quid non?_ to believe with me, that there are many mysteries contained in poetry, which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused. to believe with landin, that they are so beloved of the gods, that whatsoever they write proceeds of a divine fury. lastly, to believe themselves, when they tell you they will make you immortal, by their verses. thus doing, your name shall flourish in the printers' shops; thus doing, you shall be of kin to many a poetical preface; thus doing, you shall be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all, you shall dwell upon superlatives. thus doing, though you be _libertino patre natus_, you shall suddenly grow _herculis proles_: _si quid mea carmina possunt._ thus doing, your soul shall be placed with dante's beatrix, or virgil's anchises. but if (fie of such a but) you be born so near the dull making cataphract of nilus, that you cannot hear the planet-like music of poetry, if you have so earth-creeping a mind, that it cannot lift itself up, to look to the sky of poetry: or rather, by a certain rustical disdain, will become such a mome [footnote: scorner.], as to be a _momus_ of poetry: then, though i will not wish unto you the ass's ears of midas, nor to be driven by a poet's verses (as bubonax was) to hang himself, nor to be rhymed to death, as is said to be done in ireland: yet thus much curse i must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that, while you live, you live in love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of a sonnet: and when you die, your memory die from the earth, for want of an epitaph. john dryden. ( - ) ii. preface to the fables. the following _preface_ belongs to the last few months of dryden's life ( ), and introduces the collection, mainly of translations and adaptations, to which he gave the title of _fables_ apart from _alexander's feast_ (written in ), the most notable pieces in this collection were the versions of chaucer's _knightes tale_ and _nonne prestes tale_, and of three stories to be found in boccaccio _sigismunda and guiscardo_, _cymon and iphigenia_, _theodore and honoria_. the preface is memorable for its critical judgments on homer, virgil, and ovid, still more memorable for its glowing praise of chaucer. it closes as it was fitting that the last work of dryden should close, with an apology, full of manliness and dignity, for the licentiousness of his comedies. for his short-comings in this matter he had lately been attacked by collier, and in his reply he more than wins back any esteem that he may have lost by his transgression. it is with a poet, as with a man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he supposes, in casting up the cost beforehand; but, generally speaking, he is mistaken in his account, and reckons short in the expense he first intended. he alters his mind as the work proceeds, and will have this or that convenience more, of which he had not thought when he began. so has it happened to me. i have built a house, where i intended but a lodge; yet with better success than a certain nobleman, who, beginning with a dog-kennel, never lived to finish the palace he had contrived. from translating the first of homer's _iliads_ (which i intended as an essay to the whole work) i proceeded to the translation of the twelfth book of ovid's _metamorphoses_, because it contains, among other things, the causes, the beginning, and ending, of the trojan war. here i ought in reason to have stopped; but the speeches of ajax and ulysses lying next in my way, i could not baulk them. when i had compassed them, i was so taken with the former part of the fifteenth book (which is the masterpiece of the whole _metamorphoses_), that i enjoined myself the pleasing task of rendering it into english. and now i found, by the number of my verses, that they began to swell into a little volume; which gave me an occasion of looking backward on some beauties of my author, in his former books: there occurred to me the _hunting of the boar_, _cinyras and myrrha_, the good-natured story of _baucis and philemon_, with the rest, which i hope i have translated closely enough, and given them the same turn of verse which they had in the original; and this, i may say without vanity, is not the talent of every poet. he who has arrived the nearest to it, is the ingenious and learned sandys, the best versifier of the former age, if i may properly call it by that name, which was the former part of this concluding century. for spenser and fairfax both flourished in the reign of queen elizabeth; great masters in our language, and who saw much farther into the beauties of our numbers than those who immediately followed them. milton was the poetical son of spenser, and mr. waller of fairfax, for we have our lineal descents and clans as well as other families. spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of chaucer was transfused into his body, and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease. milton has acknowledged to me that spenser was his original, and many besides myself have heard our famous waller [footnote: "he first made writing easily an art"--was dryden's verdict on waller.--_english garner_, iii. .] own that he derived the harmony of his numbers from the _godfrey of bulloigne_, which was turned into english by mr. fairfax. but to return. having done with ovid for this time, it came into my mind that our old english poet, chaucer, in many things resembled him, and that with no disadvantage on the side of the modern author, as i shall endeavour to prove when i compare them; and as i am, and always have been, studious to promote the honour of my native country, so i soon resolved to put their merits to the trial, by turning some of the canterbury tales into our language, as it is now refined; for by this means, both the poets being set in the same light, and dressed in the same english habit, story to be compared with story, a certain judgment may be made betwixt them by the reader, without obtruding my opinion on him. or if i seem partial to my countryman, and predecessor in the laurel, the friends of antiquity are not few; and besides many of the learned, ovid has almost all the beaux, and the whole fair sex, his declared patrons. perhaps i have assumed somewhat more to myself than they allow me, because i have adventured to sum up the evidence; but the readers are the jury, and their privilege remains entire, to decide according to the merits of the cause, or, if they please, to bring it to another hearing before some other court. in the meantime, to follow the thread of my discourse (as thoughts, according to mr. hobbes, have always some connection), so from chaucer i was led to think on boccace, who was not only his contemporary, but also pursued the same studies; wrote novels in prose, and many works in verse; particularly is said to have invented the octave rhyme, or stanza of eight lines, which ever since has been maintained by the practice of all italian writers, who are, or at least assume the title of heroic poets; he and chaucer, among other things, had this in common, that they refined their mother tongue; but with this difference, that dante had began to file their language, at least in verse, before the time of boccace, who likewise received no little help from his master petrarch. but the reformation of their prose was wholly owing to boccace himself, who is yet the standard of purity in the italian tongue, though many of his phrases are become obsolete, as in process of time it must needs happen. chaucer (as you have formerly been told by our learned mr. rymer) first adorned and amplified our barren tongue from the provencal, [footnote: no one now believes this. an excellent discussion of the subject will be found in professor lounsbury's _studies in chaucer_, ii. - .] which was then the most polished of all the modern languages; but this subject has been copiously treated by that great critic, who deserves no little commendation from us, his countrymen. for these reasons of time, and resemblance of genius in chaucer and boccace, i resolved to join them in my present work, to which i have added some original papers of my own, which, whether they are equal or inferior to my other poems, an author is the most improper judge, and therefore i leave them wholly to the mercy of the reader. i will hope the best, that they will not be condemned; but if they should, i have the excuse of an old gentleman, who, mounting on horseback before some ladies, when i was present, got up somewhat heavily, but desired of the fair spectators that they would count four-score-and-eight before they judged him. by the mercy of god, i am already come within twenty years of his number, a cripple in my limbs; but what decays are in my mind, the reader must determine. i think myself as vigorous as ever in the faculties of my soul, excepting only my memory, which is not impaired to any great degree; and if i lose not more of it, i have no great reason to complain. what judgment i had, increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject; to run them into verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose. i have so long studied and practised both, that they are grown into a habit, and become familiar to me. in short, though i may lawfully plead some part of the old gentleman's excuse, yet i will reserve it till i think i have greater need, and ask no grains of allowance for the faults of this my present work, but those which are given of course to human frailty. i will not trouble my reader with the shortness of time in which i writ it, or the several intervals of sickness: they who think too well of their own performances, are apt to boast in their prefaces how little time their works have cost them, and what other business of more importance interfered; but the reader will be as apt to ask the question, why they allowed not a longer time to make their works more perfect, and why they had so despicable an opinion of their judges, as to thrust their indigested stuff upon them, as if they deserved no better. with this account of my present undertaking, i conclude the first part of this discourse: in the second part, as at a second sitting, though i alter not the draught, i must touch the same features over again, and change the dead colouring of the whole. in general, i will only say, that i have written nothing which savours of immorality or profaneness; at least, i am not conscious to myself of any such intention. if there happen to be found an irreverent expression, or a thought too wanton, they are crept into my verses through my inadvertency; if the searchers find any in the cargo, let them be staved or forfeited, like contrabanded goods; at least, let their authors be answerable for them, as being but imported merchandise, and not of my own manufacture. on the other side, i have endeavoured to choose such fables, both ancient and modern, as contain in each of them some instructive moral, which i could prove by induction, but the way is tedious; and they leap foremost into sight, without the reader's trouble of looking after them. i wish i could affirm, with a safe conscience, that i had taken the same care in all my former writings; for it must be owned, that supposing verses are never so beautiful or pleasing, yet if they contain anything which shocks religion, or good manners, they are at best what horace says of good numbers without good sense: _versus inopes rerum, nugaeque canorae._ thus far, i hope, i am right in court, without renouncing my other right of self-defence, where i have been wrongfully accused, and my sense wire-drawn into blasphemy or bawdry, as it has often been by a religious lawyer, [footnote: jeremy collier. see conclusion of the _preface_.] in a late pleading against the stage; in which he mixes truth with falsehood, and has not forgotten the old rule of calumniating strongly, that something may remain. i resume the thread of my discourse with the first of my translation, which was the first iliad of homer. if it shall please god to give me longer life, and moderate health, my intentions are to translate the whole _ilias_; provided still that i meet with those encouragements from the public, which may enable me to proceed in my undertaking with some cheerfulness. and this i dare assure the world beforehand, that i have found, by trial, homer a more pleasing task than virgil (though i say not the translation will be less laborious). for the grecian is more according to my genius than the latin poet. in the works of the two authors we may read their manners and inclinations, which are wholly different. virgil was of a quiet, sedate temper; homer was violent, impetuous, and full of fire. the chief talent of virgil was propriety of thoughts, and ornament of words; homer was rapid in his thoughts, and took all the liberties, both of numbers and of expressions, which his language, and the age in which he lived, allowed him: homer's invention was more copious, virgil's more confined; so that if homer had not led the way, it was not in virgil to have begun heroic poetry; for nothing can be more evident, than that the roman poem is but the second part of the _ilias_; a continuation of the same story, and the persons already formed; the manners of aeneas are those of hector superadded to those which homer gave him. the adventures of ulysses in the _odysseis_ are imitated in the first six books of virgil's _aeneis_; and though the accidents are not the same (which would have argued him of a servile copying, and total barrenness of invention), yet the seas were the same in which both the heroes wandered; and dido cannot be denied to be the poetical daughter of calypso. the six latter books of virgil's poem are the four and twenty iliads contracted; a quarrel occasioned by a lady, a single combat, battles fought, and a town besieged. i say not this in derogation to virgil, neither do i contradict anything which i have formerly said in his just praise: for his episodes are almost wholly of his own invention; and the form which he has given to the telling, makes the tale his own, even though the original story had been the same. but this proves, however, that homer taught virgil to design; and if invention be the first virtue of an epic poet, then the latin poem can only be allowed the second place. mr. hobbes, in the preface to his own bald translation of the _ilias_ (studying poetry as he did mathematics, when it was too late), mr. hobbes, i say, begins the praise of homer where he should have ended it. he tells us that the first beauty of an epic poem consists in diction, that is, in the choice of words, and harmony of numbers; now the words are the colouring of the work, which in the order of nature is the last to be considered. the design, the disposition, the manners, and the thoughts are all before it; where any of those are wanting or imperfect, so much wants or is imperfect in the imitation of human life; which is in the very definition of a poem. words, indeed, like glaring colours, are the first beauties that arise, and strike the sight: but if the draught be false or lame, the figures ill-disposed, the manners obscure or inconsistent, or the thoughts unnatural, then the finest colours are but daubing, and the piece is a beautiful monster at the best. neither virgil nor homer were deficient in any of the former beauties; but in this last, which is expression, the roman poet is at least equal to the grecian, as i have said elsewhere; supplying the poverty of his language by his musical ear, and by his diligence. but to return: our two great poets, being so different in their tempers, one choleric and sanguine, the other phlegmatic and melancholic; that which makes them excel in their several ways is, that each of them has followed his own natural inclination, as well in forming the design, as in the execution of it. the very heroes show their authors; achilles is hot, impatient, revengeful, _impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer,_ &c. aeneas patient, considerate, careful of his people, and merciful to his enemies; ever submissive to the will of heaven, _quo fata trahunt, retrahuntque, sequamur_. i could please myself with enlarging on this subject, but am forced to defer it to a fitter time. from all i have said i will only draw this inference, that the action of homer being more full of vigour than that of virgil, according to the temper of the writer, is of consequence more pleasing to the reader. one warms you by degrees; the other sets you on fire all at once, and never intermits his heat. 't is the same difference which longinus makes betwixt the effects of eloquence in demosthenes and tully. one persuades, the other commands. you never cool while you read homer, even not in the second book (a graceful flattery to his countrymen); but he hastens from the ships, and concludes not that book till he has made you an amends by the violent playing of a new machine. from thence he hurries on his action with variety of events, and ends it in less compass than two months. this vehemence of his, i confess, is more suitable to my temper; and therefore i have translated his first book with greater pleasure than any part of virgil; but it was not a pleasure without pains: the continual agitations of the spirits must needs be a weakening of any constitution, especially in age; and many pauses are required for refreshment betwixt the heats; the _iliad_ of itself being a third part longer than all virgil's works together. this is what i thought needful in this place to say of homer. i proceed to ovid and chaucer, considering the former only in relation to the latter. with ovid ended the golden age of the roman tongue; from chaucer the purity of the english tongue began. the manners of the poets were not unlike: both of them were well-bred, well-natured, amorous, and libertine, at least in their writings, it may be also in their lives. their studies were the same, philosophy and philology. both of them were known in astronomy, of which ovid's books of the roman feasts, and chaucer's treatise of the astrolabe, are sufficient witnesses. but chaucer was likewise an astrologer, as were virgil, horace, persius, and manilius. both writ with wonderful facility and clearness: neither were great inventors; for ovid only copied the grecian fables; and most of chaucer's stories were taken from his italian contemporaries, or their predecessors. boccace's _decameron_ was first published, and from thence our englishman has borrowed many of his canterbury tales; [footnote: it is doubtful whether chaucer had any knowledge of the _decameron_.] yet that of palamon and arcite was written in all probability by some italian wit in a former age, as i shall prove hereafter. the tale of grizild was the invention of petrarch; by him sent to boccace, from whom it came to chaucer. troilus and cressida was also written by a lombard author [footnote: boccaccio himself.], but much amplified by our english translator, as well as beautified; the genius of our countrymen in general being rather to improve an invention than to invent themselves, as is evident not only in our poetry, but in many of our manufactures. i find i have anticipated already, and taken up from boccace before i come to him; but there is so much less behind; and i am of the temper of most kings, who love to be in debt, are all for present money, no matter how they pay it afterwards; besides, the nature of a preface is rambling, never wholly out of the way, nor in it. this i have learned from the practice of honest montaigne, and return at my pleasure to ovid and chaucer, of whom i have little more to say. both of them built on the inventions of other men; yet since chaucer had something of his own, as the _wife of bath's tale, the cock and the fox_, which i have translated, and some others, i may justly give our countryman the precedence in that part, since i can remember nothing of ovid which was wholly his. both of them understood the manners, under which name i comprehend the passions, and, in a larger sense, the descriptions of persons, and their very habits; for an example, i see baucis and philemon as perfectly before me, as if some ancient painter had drawn them; and all the pilgrims in the canterbury tales, their humours, their features, and the very dress, as distinctly as if i had supped with them at the tabard in southwark; yet even there too the figures in chaucer are much more lively, and set in a better light: which though i have not time to prove, yet i appeal to the reader, and am sure he will clear me from partiality. the thoughts and words remain to be considered in the comparison of the two poets; and i have saved myself one half of that labour, by owning that ovid lived when the roman tongue was in its meridian, chaucer in the dawning of our language; therefore that part of the comparison stands not on an equal foot, any more than the diction of ennius and ovid, or of chaucer and our present english. the words are given up as a post not to be defended in our poet, because he wanted the modern art of fortifying. the thoughts remain to be considered, and they are to be measured only by their propriety, that is, as they flow more or less naturally from the persons described, on such and such occasions. the vulgar judges, which are nine parts in ten of all nations, who call conceits and jingles wit, who see ovid full of them, and chaucer altogether without them, will think me little less than mad, for preferring the englishman to the roman; yet, with their leave, i must presume to say, that the things they admire are only glittering trifles, and so far from being witty, that in a serious poem they are nauseous, because they are unnatural. would any man, who is ready to die for love, describe his passion like narcissus? would he think of _inopem me copia fecit_, and a dozen more of such expressions, poured on the neck of one another, and signifying all the same thing? if this were wit, was this a time to be witty, when the poor wretch was in the agony of death? this is just john littlewit in _bartholomew fair_, [footnote: jonson's play of that name, act i. sc. i.] who had a conceit (as he tells you) left him in his misery; a miserable conceit. on these occasions the poet should endeavour to raise pity; but instead of this, ovid is tickling you to laugh. virgil never made use of such machines, when he was moving you to commiserate the death of dido: he would not destroy what he was building. chaucer makes arcite violent in his love, and unjust in the pursuit of it; yet when he came to die, he made him think more reasonably: he repents not of his love, for that had altered his character, but acknowledges the injustice of his proceedings, and resigns emilia to palamon. what would ovid have done on this occasion? he would certainly have made arcite witty on his death-bed. he had complained he was farther off from possession by being so near, and a thousand such boyisms, which chaucer rejected as below the dignity of the subject. they, who think otherwise, would by the same reason prefer lucan and ovid to homer and virgil, and martial to all four of them. as for the turn of words, in which ovid particularly excels all poets, they are sometimes a fault, and sometimes a beauty, as they are used properly or improperly; but in strong passions always to be shunned, because passions are serious, and will admit no playing. the french have a high value for them; and i confess, they are often what they call delicate, when they are introduced with judgment; but chaucer writ with more simplicity, and followed nature more closely, than to use them. i have thus far, to the best of my knowledge, been an upright judge betwixt the parties in competition, not meddling with the design nor the disposition of it, because the design was not their own, and in the disposing of it they were equal. it remains that i say somewhat of chaucer in particular. in the first place, as he is the father of english poetry, so i hold him in the same degree of veneration as the grecians held homer or the romans virgil: he is a perpetual fountain of good sense, learned in all sciences, and therefore speaks properly on all subjects; as he knew what to say, so he knows also when to leave off, a continence which is practised by few writers, and scarcely by any of the ancients, excepting virgil and horace. one of our late great poets is sunk in his reputation, because he could never forgive any conceit which came in his way, but swept like a drag net great and small. [footnote: cowley. see johnson's criticism of the metaphysical poets.] there was plenty enough, but the dishes were ill-sorted; whole pyramids of sweetmeats for boys and women, but little of solid meat for men: all this proceeded not from any want of knowledge, but of judgment; neither did he want that in discerning the beauties and faults of other poets, but only indulged himself in the luxury of writing, and perhaps knew it was a fault, but hoped the reader would not find it. for this reason, though he must always be thought a great poet, he is no longer esteemed a good writer; and for ten impressions, which his works have had in so many successive years, yet at present a hundred books are scarcely purchased once a twelvemonth; for as my last lord rochester said, though somewhat profanely, "not being of god, he could not stand". chaucer followed nature everywhere, but was never so bold to go beyond her; and there is a great difference of being _poeta_ and _nimis poeta_ if we believe catullus, as much as betwixt a modest behaviour and affectation. the verse of chaucer, i confess, is not harmonious to us, but it is like the eloquence of one whom tacitus commends, it was _auribus istius temporis accommodata_: they who lived with him, and some time after him, thought it musical; and it continues so even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of lydgate and gower, his contemporaries; there is the rude sweetness of a scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect. it is true i cannot go so far as he who published the last edition of him; [footnote: that of , which was little more than a reprint of speght's editions ( , ).] for he would make us believe the fault is in our ears, and that there were really ten syllables in a verse where we find but nine, but this opinion is not worth confuting, it is so gross and obvious an error that common sense (which is a rule in everything but matters of faith and revelation) must convince the reader that equality of numbers in every verse, which we call heroic, was either not known, or not always practised in chaucer's age. it were an easy matter to produce some thousands of his verses, which are lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole one, and which no pronunciation can make otherwise. we can only say that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at the first. we must be children before we grow men. there was an ennius, and in process of time a lucilius and a lucretius, before virgil and horace; even after chaucer there was a spenser, a harrington, a fairfax, before waller and denham were in being; and our numbers were in their nonage till these last appeared. i need say little of his parentage, life, and fortunes: they are to be found at large in all the editions of his works. he was employed abroad, and favoured by edward the third, richard the second, and henry the fourth, and was poet, as i suppose, to all three of them. in richard's time, i doubt, he was a little dipt in the rebellion of the commons, [footnote: there is no evidence for this 'doubt', though in his balade, _lak of stedfastnesse_, chaucer speaks plainly both to richard and his subjects.] and being brother-in-law to john of gaunt, it was no wonder if he followed the fortunes of that family, and was well with henry the fourth when he had deposed his predecessor. neither is it to be admired that henry, who was a wise as well as a valiant prince, who claimed by succession, and was sensible that his title was not sound, but was rightfully in mortimer, who had married the heir of york; it was not to be admired, i say, if that great politician should be pleased to have the greatest wit of those times in his interests, and to be the trumpet of his praises. augustus had given him the example, by the advice of maecenas, who recommended virgil and horace to him, whose praises helped to make him popular while he was alive, and after his death have made him precious to posterity. as for the religion of our poet, he seems to have some little bias towards the opinions of wickliff, after john of gaunt his patron; somewhat of which appears in the tale of piers plowman: [footnote: the plowman's tale, which was printed as one of the canterbury tales in speght's editions. it is now rejected by all authorities.] yet i cannot blame him for inveighing so sharply against the vices of the clergy in his age; their pride, their ambition, their pomp, their avarice, their worldly interest deserved the lashes which he gave them, both in that and in most of his canterbury tales: neither has his contemporary boccace spared them. yet both these poets lived in much esteem with good and holy men in orders; for the scandal which is given by particular priests, reflects not on the sacred function. chaucer's monk, his canon, and his friar took not from the character of his good parson. a satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests. we are only to take care that we involve not the innocent with the guilty in the same condemnation. the good cannot be too much honoured, nor the bad too coarsely used; for the corruption of the best becomes the worst. when a clergyman is whipped his gown is first taken off, by which the dignity of his order is secured; if he be wrongfully accused, he has his action of slander; and it is at the poet's peril if he transgress the law. but they will tell us that all kinds of satire, though never so well-deserved by particular priests, yet brings the whole order into contempt. is, then, the peerage of england anything dishonoured when a peer suffers for his treason? if he be libelled, or any way defamed, he has his _scandalum magnatum_ to punish the offender. they who use this kind of argument seem to be conscious to themselves of somewhat which has deserved the poet's lash, and are less concerned for their public capacity than for their private; at least there is pride at the bottom of their reasoning. if the faults of men in orders are only to be judged among themselves, they are all in some sort parties; for, since they say the honour of their order is concerned in every member of it, how can we be sure that they will be impartial judges? how far i may be allowed [footnote: as a catholic.] to speak my opinion in this case i know not, but i am sure a dispute of this nature caused mischief in abundance betwixt a king of england and an archbishop of canterbury, one standing up for the laws of his land, and the other for the honour (as he called it) of god's church, which ended in the murder of the prelate, and in the whipping of his majesty from post to pillar for his penance. the learned and ingenious dr. drake has saved me the labour of inquiring into the esteem and reverence which the priests have had of old; and i would rather extend than diminish any part of it: yet i must needs say, that when a priest provokes me without any occasion given him, i have no reason, unless it be the charity of a christian, to forgive him. _prior laesit_ is justification sufficient in the civil law. if i answer him in his own language, self-defence, i am sure, must be allowed me; and if i carry it farther, even to a sharp recrimination, somewhat may be indulged to human frailty. yet my resentment has not wrought so far, but that i have followed chaucer in his character of a holy man, and have enlarged on that subject with some pleasure, reserving to myself the right, if i shall think fit hereafter, to describe another sort of priests, such as are more easily to be found than the good parson; such as have given the last blow to christianity in this age, by a practice so contrary to their doctrine. but this will keep cold till another time. in the meanwhile, i take up chaucer where i left him. he must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive nature, because, as it has been truly observed of him, he has taken into the compass of his canterbury tales the various manners and humours (as we now call them) of the whole english nation, in his age. not a single character has escaped him. all his pilgrims are severally distinguished from each other; and not only in their inclinations, but in their very physiognomies and persons. baptista porta could not have described their natures better than by the marks which the poet gives them. the matter and manner of their tales, and of their telling, are so suited to their different educations, humours, and callings that each of them would be improper in any other mouth. even the grave and serious characters are distinguished by their several sorts of gravity: their discourses are such as belong to their age, their calling, and their breeding; such as are becoming of them, and of them only. some of his persons are vicious, and some virtuous; some are unlearned, or (as chaucer calls them) lewd, and some are learned. even the ribaldry of the low characters is different: the reeve, the miller, and the cook are several men, and distinguished from each other, as much as the mincing lady prioress, and the broad-speaking gap-toothed wife of bath. but enough of this: there is such a variety of game springing up before me, that i am distracted in my choice, and know not which to follow. 'tis sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is god's plenty. we have our forefathers and great-grand-dames all before us, as they were in chaucer's days; their general characters are still remaining in mankind, and even in england, though they are called by other names than those of monks and friars and canons, and lady abbesses and nuns; for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, though everything is altered. may i have leave to do myself the justice (since my enemies will do me none, and are so far from granting me to be a good poet that they will not allow me so much as to be a christian, or a moral man), may i have leave, i say, to inform my reader that i have confined my choice to such tales of chaucer as savour nothing of immodesty? if i had desired more to please than to instruct, the reeve, the miller, the shipman, the merchant, the summoner, and, above all, the wife of bath, in the prologue to her tale, would have procured me as many friends and readers as there are beaux and ladies of pleasure in the town. but i will no more offend against good manners; i am sensible, as i ought to be, of the scandal i have given by my loose writings, and make what reparation i am able by this public acknowledgment. if anything of this nature, or of profaneness, be crept into these poems, i am so far from defending it that i disown it. _totum hoc indictum volo_. chaucer makes another manner of apology for his broad speaking, and boccace makes the like; but i will follow neither of them. our countryman, in the end of his characters, before the canterbury tales, thus excuses the ribaldry, which is very gross in many of his novels. but first, i pray you of your courtesie, that ye ne arrette it nought my villanie, though that i plainly speak in this matere to tellen yon her words, and eke her chere: ne though i speak her wordes properly, for this ye knowen al so well as i, who-so shall tell a tale after a man, he mote rehearse as nye as ever he can everich a word, if it be in his charge, all speke he never so rudely and large. or elles he mot telle his tale untrue. or feine things, or finde wordes new: he may not spare, although he were his brother, he mot as well say o word as another, christ spake himself full broad in holy writ, and well ye wot no villany is it. eke plato saith, who so that can him rede, the wordes mote be cousin to the dede. yet if a man should have inquired of boccace or of chaucer, what need they had of introducing such characters where obscene words were proper in their mouths, but very indecent to be heard; i know not what answer they could have made; for that reason, such tale shall be left untold by me. you have here a specimen of chaucer's language, which is so obsolete, that his sense is scarce to be understood; and you have likewise more than one example of his unequal numbers, [footnote: the lines have been corrected in the text, and may easily be seen to be perfectly metrical.] which were mentioned before. yet many of his verses consist of ten syllables, and the words not much behind our present english: as, for example, these two lines, in the description of the carpenter's young wife:-- wincing she was, as is a jolly colt, long as a mast, and upright as a bolt. i have almost done with chaucer, when i have answered some objections relating to my present work. i find some people are offended that i have turned these tales into modern english; because they think them unworthy of my pains, and look on chaucer as a dry, old-fashioned wit, not worth reviving. i have often heard the late earl of leicester say, that mr. cowley himself was of that opinion; who, having read him over at my lord's request, declared he had no taste of him. i dare not advance my opinion against the judgment of so great an author: but i think it fair, however, to leave the decision to the public. mr. cowley was too modest to set up for a dictator; and being shocked perhaps with his old style, never examined into the depth of his good sense. chaucer, i confess, is a rough diamond, and must first be polished ere he shines. i deny not, likewise, that, living in our early times he writes not always of a piece, but sometimes mingles trivial things with those of greater moment. sometimes also, though not often, he runs riot, like ovid, and knows not when he has said enough. but there are more great wits besides chaucer, whose fault is their excess of conceits, and those ill sorted. an author is not to write all he can, but only all he ought. having observed this redundancy in chaucer (as it is an easy matter for a man of ordinary parts to find a fault in one of greater), i have not tied myself to a literal translation; but have often omitted what i judged unnecessary, or not of dignity enough to appear in the company of better thoughts. i have presumed farther, in some places, and added somewhat of my own where i thought my author was deficient, and had not given his thoughts their true lustre, for want of words in the beginning of our language. and to this i was the more emboldened, because (if i may be permitted to say it of myself) i found i had a soul congenial to his, and that i had been conversant in the same studies. another poet, in another age, may take the same liberty with my writings; if at least they live long enough to deserve correction. it was also necessary sometimes to restore the sense of chaucer, which was lost or mangled in the errors of the press: let this example suffice at present; in the story of palamon and arcite, where the temple of diana is described, you find these verses, in all the editions of our author: there saw i dane turned into a tree, i mean not the goddess diane, but venus daughter, which that hight dane: which, after a little consideration, i knew was to be reformed into this sense, that daphne, the daughter of peneus, was turned into a tree. i durst not make thus bold with ovid, lest some future milbourn should arise, and say, i varied from my author, because i understood him not. but there are other judges who think i ought not to have translated chaucer into english, out of a quite contrary notion: they suppose there is a certain veneration due to his old language; and that it is a little less than profanation and sacrilege to alter it. they are farther of opinion, that somewhat of his good sense will suffer in this transfusion, and much of the beauty of his thoughts will infallibly be lost, which appear with more grace in their old habit. of this opinion was that excellent person, whom i mentioned, the late earl of leicester, who valued chaucer as much as mr. cowley despised him. my lord dissuaded me from this attempt (for i was thinking of it some years before his death), and his authority prevailed so far with me, as to defer my undertaking while he lived, in deference to him: yet my reason was not convinced with what he urged against it. if the first end of a writer be to be understood, then as his language grows obsolete, his thoughts must grow obscure: _multa renascentur quae nunc cecidere; cadentque, quae nunc sunt in honore vocabula, si volet usus, quem penes arbitrium est et jus et norma loquendi_. when an ancient word for its sound and significancy deserves to be revived, i have that reasonable veneration for antiquity, to restore it. all beyond this is superstition. words are not like landmarks, so sacred as never to be removed; customs are changed, and even statutes are silently repealed, when the reason ceases for which they were enacted. as for the other part of the argument, that his thoughts will lose of their original beauty, by the innovation of words; in the first place, not only their beauty but their being is lost where they are no longer understood, which is the present case. i grant that something must be lost in all transfusion, that is, in all translations; but the sense will remain, which would otherwise be lost, or at least be maimed, when it is scarce intelligible; and that but to a few. how few are there who can read chaucer, so as to understand him perfectly! and if imperfectly, then with less profit and no pleasure. 'tis not for the use of some old saxon friends that i have taken these pains with him: let them neglect my version because they have no need of it. i made it for their sakes who understand sense and poetry as well as they, when that poetry and sense is put into words which they understand. i will go farther, and dare to add, that what beauties i lose in some places, i give to others which had them not originally; but in this i may be partial to myself; let the reader judge, and i submit to his decision. yet i think i have just occasion to complain of them, who, because they understand chaucer, would deprive the greater part of their countrymen of the same advantage, and hoard him up, as misers do their grandam gold, only to look on it themselves, and hinder others from making use of it. in some i seriously protest, that no man ever had, or can have, a greater veneration for chaucer, than myself. i have translated some part of his works, only that i might perpetuate his memory, or at least refresh it, amongst my countrymen. if i have altered him anywhere for the better, i must at the same time acknowledge that i could have done nothing without him: _facile est inventis addere_, is no great commendation; and i am not so vain to think i have deserved a greater. i will conclude what i have to say of him singly, with this one remark: a lady of my acquaintance, who keeps a kind of correspondence with some authors of the fair sex in france, has been informed by them that mademoiselle de scudery, who is as old as sibyl, and inspired like her by the same god of poetry, is at this time translating chaucer into modern french. from which i gather that he has been formerly translated into the old provencal (for how she should come to understand old english i know not). but the matter of fact being true, it makes me think that there is something in it like fatality; that, after certain periods of time, the fame and memory of great wits should be renewed, as chaucer is both in france and england. if this be wholly chance, 'tis extraordinary, and i dare not call it more for fear of being taxed with superstition. boccace comes last to be considered, who, living in the same age with chaucer, had the same genius, and followed the same studies; both writ novels, and each of them cultivated his mother tongue. but the greatest resemblance of our two modern authors being in their familiar style, and pleasing way of relating comical adventures, i may pass it over, because i have translated nothing from boccace of that nature. in the serious part of poetry, the advantage is wholly on chaucer's side; for though the englishman has borrowed many tales from the italian, yet it appears that those of boccace were not generally of his own making, but taken from authors of former ages, and by him only modelled; so that what there was of invention in either of them may be judged equal. but chaucer has refined on boccace, and has mended the stories which he has borrowed in his way of telling, though prose allows more liberty of thought, and the expression is more easy when unconfined by numbers. our countryman carries weight, and yet wins the race at disadvantage. i desire not the reader should take my word, and therefore i will set two of their discourses on the same subject, in the same light, for every man to judge betwixt them. i translated chaucer first, and amongst the rest pitched on the wife of bath's tale--not daring, as i have said, to adventure on her prologue, because it is too licentious. there chaucer introduces an old woman of mean parentage, whom a youthful knight of noble blood was forced to marry, and consequently loathed her. the crone being in bed with him on the wedding-night, and finding his aversion, endeavours to win his affection by reason, and speaks a good word for herself (as who could blame her?) in hope to mollify the sullen bridegroom. she takes her topics from the benefits of poverty, the advantages of old age and ugliness, the vanity of youth, and the silly pride of ancestry and titles without inherent virtue, which is the true nobility. when i had closed chaucer i returned to ovid, and translated some more of his fables; and by this time had so far forgotten the wife of bath's tale that, when i took up boccace unawares, i fell on the same argument of preferring virtue to nobility of blood, and titles, in the story of sigismunda, which i had certainly avoided for the resemblance of the two discourses, if my memory had not failed me. let the reader weigh them both, and if he thinks me partial to chaucer, it is in him to right boccace. i prefer in our countryman, far above all his other stories, the noble poem of _palamon and arcite_, which is of the epic kind, and perhaps not much inferior to the _ilias_ or the _aeneis_. the story is more pleasing than either of them--the manners as perfect, the diction as poetical, the learning as deep and various, and the disposition full as artful--only it includes a greater length of time, as taking up seven years at least; but aristotle has left undecided the duration of the action, which yet is easily reduced into the compass of a year by a narration of what preceded the return of palamon to athens. i had thought for the honour of our nation, and more particularly for his whose laurel, though unworthy, i have worn after him, that this story was of english growth and chaucer's own; but i was undeceived by boccace, for casually looking on the end of his seventh giornata, i found dioneo (under which name he shadows himself) and fiametta (who represents his mistress the natural daughter of robert, king of naples), of whom these words are spoken, _dioneo e la fiametta granpezza contarono insieme d'arcita, e di palamone_, by which it appears that this story was written before the time of boccace; [footnote: it was really written by boccaccio himself, but, as dryden himself says, chaucer has greatly improved upon his original (_la teseide_).] but the name of its author being wholly lost, chaucer is now become an original, and i question not but the poem has received many beauties by passing through his noble hands. besides this tale, there is another of his own invention, after the manner of the provencals, called the flower and the leaf, with which i was so particularly pleased, both for the invention and the moral, that i cannot hinder myself from recommending it to the reader. as a corollary to this preface, in which i have done justice to others, i owe somewhat to myself; not that i think it worth my time to enter the lists with one milbourn and one blackmore, but barely to take notice that such men there are who have written scurrilously against me without any provocation. milbourn, who is in orders, pretends amongst the rest this quarrel to me, that i have fallen foul on priesthood; if i have, i am only to ask pardon of good priests, and am afraid his part of the reparation will come to little. let him be satisfied that he shall not be able to force himself upon me for an adversary. i contemn him too much to enter into competition with him. his own translations of virgil have answered his criticisms on mine. if (as they say he has declared in print) he prefers the version of ogilby to mine, the world has made him the same compliment, for it is agreed on all hands that he writes even below ogilby. that, you will say. is not easily to be done; but what cannot milbourn bring about? i am satisfied, however, that while he and i live together, i shall not be thought the worst poet of the age. it looks as if i had desired him underhand to write so ill against me; but upon my honest word, i have not bribed him to do me this service, and am wholly guiltless of his pamphlet. 'tis true, i should be glad if i could persuade him to continue his good offices, and write such another critique on anything of mine; for i find by experience he has a great stroke with the reader, when he condemns any of my poems, to make the world have a better opinion of them. he has taken some pains with my poetry, but nobody will be persuaded to take the same with his. if i had taken to the church (as he affirms, but which was never in my thoughts), i should have had more sense, if not more grace, than to have turned myself out of my benefice by writing libels on my parishioners. but his account of my manners and my principles are of a piece with his cavils and his poetry; and so i have done with him for ever. as for the city bard, or knight physician, i hear his quarrel to me is, that i was the author of _absalom and achitophel_, which he thinks was a little hard on his fanatic patrons in london. but i will deal the more civilly with his two poems, because nothing ill is to be spoken of the dead, and therefore peace be to the manes of his arthurs. i will only say that it was not for this noble knight that i drew the plan of an epic poem on king arthur in my preface to the translation of juvenal. the guardian angels of kingdoms were machines too ponderous for him to manage; and therefore he rejected them, as dares did the whirlbats of eryx, when they were thrown before him by entellus. yet from that preface he plainly took his hint; for he began immediately upon his story, though he had the baseness not to acknowledge his benefactor; but instead of it, to traduce me in a libel. i shall say the less of mr. collier, [footnote: his _short view of the immorality and profaneness of the english stage_ ( ) was largely directed against dryden. see the account of it given in macaulay's _comic dramatists of the restoration_.] because in many things he has taxed me justly, and i have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine which can be truly argued of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them. if he be my enemy, let him triumph; if he be my friend, as i have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance. it becomes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause when i have so often drawn it for a good one. yet it were not difficult to prove that in many places he has perverted my meaning by his glosses, and interpreted my words into blasphemy and bawdry, of which they were not guilty--besides that he is too much given to horseplay in his raillery, and comes to battle like a dictator from the plough. i will not say the zeal of god's house has eaten him up, but i am sure it has devoured some part of his good manners and civility. it might also be doubted whether it were altogether zeal which prompted him to this rough manner of proceeding; perhaps it became not one of his function to rake into the rubbish of ancient and modern plays. a divine might have employed his pains to better purpose than in the nastiness of plautus and aristophanes, whose examples, as they excuse not me, so it might be possibly supposed that he read them not without some pleasure. they who have written commentaries on those poets, or on horace, juvenal, and martial, have explained some vices which, without their interpretation, had been unknown to modern times. neither has he judged impartially betwixt the former age and us. there is more bawdry in one play of fletcher's, called the _custom of the country_, than in all ours together. yet this has been often acted on the stage in my remembrance. are the times so much more reformed now than they were five and twenty years ago? if they are, i congratulate the amendment of our morals. but i am not to prejudice the cause of my fellow-poets, though i abandon my own defence; they have some of them answered for themselves, and neither they nor i can think mr. collier so formidable an enemy that we should shun him. he has lost ground at the latter end of the day by pursuing his point too far, like the prince of conde at the battle of senneffe: from immoral plays to no plays--_ab abusu ad usum, non valet consequentia_. [footnote: from the fact that there are immoral plays to the inference that there should be no plays the argument does not follow.] but being a party, i am not to erect myself into a judge. as for the rest of those who have written against me, they are such scoundrels that they deserve not the least notice to be taken of them. blackmore and milbourn are only distinguished from the crowd by being remembered to their infamy. ----demetri teque, tigelli, discipulorum inter jubeo plorare cathedras. samuel johnson. ( - .) iii. on the metaphysical poets. the criticism of the 'metaphysical poets' occurs in the life of cowley, published as one of the _lives of the poets_ in . the name 'metaphysical poetry' was first devised by dryden, in his _essay of dramatic poesy_. it was revived by johnson, and is now generally accepted by historians of english literature. it is used by johnson, as it was used by dryden, to express the love of remote analogies, which was a mark of the poetry of donne and those who wrote more or less after the manner of donne. but it has a deeper meaning than was probably intended by its inventors. it is no unapt term to indicate the vein of weighty thought and brooding imagination which runs like a thread of gold through all the finer work of these poets. johnson did no harm in calling attention to the extravagance of much of the imagery beloved by the lyric poets of the stuart period. but it is unpardonable that he should have had no eye for the nobler and subtler qualities of their genius, and equally unpardonable that he should have drawn no distinction between three men so incomparable in degree and kind of power as cleveland, cowley, and donne. some remarks on the place of the metaphysical poets in english literature will be found in the introduction. cowley, like other poets who have written with narrow views, and, instead of tracing intellectual pleasure to its natural sources in the mind of man, paid their court to temporary prejudices, has been at one time too much praised, and too much neglected at another. wit, like all other things subject by their nature to the choice of man, has its changes and fashions, and at different times takes different forms. about the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets; of whom, in a criticism on the works of cowley, it is not improper to give some account. the metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables. if the father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry, _an imitative art_, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets; for they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect. those, however, who deny them to be poets, allow them to be wits. dryden confesses of himself and his contemporaries that they fall below donne in wit, but maintains that they surpass him in poetry. if wit be well described by pope, as being "that which has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed", they certainly never attained, nor ever sought it; for they endeavoured to be singular in their thoughts, and were careless of their diction. but pope's account of wit is undoubtedly erroneous: he depresses it below its natural dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of language. if by a more noble and more adequate conception that be considered as wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that which he that never found it wonders how he missed; to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen. their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found. but wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of _discordia concors_; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough. the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased. from this account of their compositions it will be readily inferred that they were not successful in representing or moving the affections. as they were wholly employed on something unexpected and surprising, they had no regard to that uniformity of sentiment which enables us to conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasure of other minds: they never inquired what, on any occasion, they should have said or done; but wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature; as beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure; as epicurean deities making remarks on the actions of men and the vicissitudes of life without interest and without emotion. their courtship was void of fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow. their wish was only to say what they hoped had never been said before. nor was the sublime more within their reach than the pathetic; for they never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration. sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. great thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness. it is with great propriety that subtlety, which in its original import means exility of particles, is taken in its metaphorical meaning for nicety of distinction. those writers who lay on the watch for novelty could have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation. their attempts were always analytic; they broke every image into fragments: and could no more represent, by their slender conceits and laboured particularities, the prospects of nature or the scenes of life, than he who dissects a sunbeam with a prism can exhibit the wide effulgence of a summer noon. what they wanted, however, of the sublime, they endeavoured to supply by hyperbole; their amplification had no limits; they left not only reason but fancy behind them; and produced combinations of confused magnificence that not only could not be credited, but could not be imagined. yet great labour, directed by great abilities, is never wholly lost: if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth: if their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage. to write on their plan, it was at least necessary to read and think. no man could be born a metaphysical poet, nor assume the dignity of a writer, by descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations borrowed from imitations, by traditional imagery and hereditary similes, by readiness of rhyme and volubility of syllables. in perusing the works of this race of authors, the mind is exercised either by recollection or inquiry; either something already learned is to be retrieved, or something new is to be examined. if their greatness seldom elevates, their acuteness often surprises; if the imagination is not always gratified, at least the powers of reflection and comparison are employed; and in the mass of materials which ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes found, buried perhaps in grossness of expression, but useful to those who know their value; and such as, when they are expanded to perspicuity and polished to elegance, may give lustre to works which have more propriety though less copiousness of sentiment. this kind of writing, which was, i believe, borrowed from marino [footnote: as marino's chief poem, _l'adone_, was not published till , and as most of donne's poems must have been written earlier, this is very unlikely. besides, the resemblance is more apparent than real. metaphysical poetry was a native product. see introduction.] and his followers, had been recommended by the example of donne, a man of very extensive and various knowledge; and by jonson, whose manner resembled that of donne more in the ruggedness of his lines than in the cast of his sentiments. when their reputation was high, they had undoubtedly more imitators than time has left behind. their immediate successors, of whom any remembrance can be said to remain, were suckling, waller, denham, cowley, cleveland, and milton. denham and waller sought another way to fame, by improving the harmony of our numbers. milton tried the metaphysic style only in his lines upon hobson the carrier. cowley adopted it, and excelled his predecessors, having as much sentiment and more music. suckling neither improved versification, nor abounded in conceits. the fashionable style remained chiefly with cowley; suckling could not reach it, and milton disdained it. critical remarks are not easily understood without examples, and i have therefore collected instances of the modes of writing by which this species of poets, for poets they were called by themselves and their admirers, was eminently distinguished. as the authors of this race were perhaps more desirous of being admired than understood, they sometimes drew their conceits from recesses of learning not very much frequented by common readers of poetry. thus cowley on _knowledge_: the sacred tree midst the fair orchard grew; the phoenix truth did on it rest. and built his perfum'd nest, that right porphyrian tree which did true logick shew. each leaf did learned notions give, and th' apples were demonstrative: so clear their colour and divine, the very shade they cast did other lights outshine. on anacreon continuing a lover in his old age: love was with thy life entwin'd, close as heat with fire is join'd, a powerful brand prescrib'd the date of thine, like meleager's fate. the antiperistasis of age more enflam'd thy amorous rage. in the following verses we have an allusion to a rabbinical opinion concerning manna: variety i ask not: give me one to live perpetually upon. the person love does to us fit, like manna, has the taste of all in it. thus donne shows his medicinal knowledge in some encomiastic verses: in everything there naturally grows a balsamum to keep it fresh and new, if't were not injur'd by extrinsique blows; your youth and beauty are this balm in you. but you, of learning and religion, and virtue and such ingredients, have made a mithridate, whose operation keeps off, or cures what can be done or said. though the following lines of donne, on the last night of the year, have something in them too scholastic, they are not inelegant: this twilight of two years, not past nor next, some emblem is of me, or i of this, who, meteor-like, of stuff and form perplext, whose what and where, in disputation is, if i should call me any thing, should miss. i sum the years and me, and find me not debtor to th' old, nor creditor to th' new, that cannot say, my thanks i have forgot, nor trust i this with hopes: and yet scarce true this bravery is, since these times shew'd me you. --_donne_. yet more abstruse and profound is donne's reflection upon man as a microcosm: if men be worlds, there is in every one something to answer in some proportion all the world's riches: and in good men, this virtue, our form's form, and our soul's soul is. of thoughts so far-fetched as to be not only unexpected but unnatural, all their books are full. to a lady, who wrote poesies for rings. they, who above do various circles find, say, like a ring th' aquator heaven does bind. when heaven shall be adorn'd by thee, (which then more heaven than 't is, will be) 't is thou must write the poesy there, for it wanteth one as yet, though the sun pass through 't twice a year, the sun, which is esteem'd the god of wit. --_cowley_. the difficulties which have been raised about identity in philosophy are by cowley, with still more perplexity, applied to love: five years ago (says story) i lov'd you, for which you call me most inconstant now; pardon me, madam, you mistake the man; for i am not the same that i was then; no flesh is now the same't was then in me, and that my mind is chang'd yourself may see. the same thoughts to retain still, and intents, were more inconstant far; for accidents must of all things most strangely inconstant prove, if from one subject they t' another move: my members then, the father members were from whence these take their birth, which now are here. if then this body love what th' other did, 't were incest, which by nature is forbid. the love of different women is, in geographical poetry, compared to travels, through different countries: hast thou not found each woman's breast (the land where thou hast travelled) either by savages possest, or wild, and uninhabited? what joy could'st take, or what repose, in countries so unciviliz'd as those? lust, the scorching dog-star, here rages with immoderate heat; whilst pride, the rugged northern bear, in others makes the cold too great. and when these are temperate known, the soil's all barren sand, or rocky stone. --_cowley_. a lover, burnt up by his affections, is compared to egypt: the fate of egypt i sustain, and never feel the dew of rain. from clouds which in the head appear; but all my too much moisture owe to overflowings of the heart below. --_cowley_. the lover supposes his lady acquainted with the ancient laws of augury and rites of sacrifice: and yet this death of mine, i fear, will ominous to her appear: when found in every other part, her sacrifice is found without an heart. for the last tempest of my death shall sigh out that too, with my breath. that the chaos was harmonized, has been recited of old; but whence the different sounds arose remained for a modern to discover: th' ungovern'd parts no correspondence knew, and artless war from thwarting motions grew; till they to number and fixt rules were brought. water and air he for the tenor chose. earth made the base, the treble flame arose. --_cowley._ the tears of lovers are always of great poetical account, but donne has extended them into worlds. if the lines are not easily understood, they may be read again: on a round ball a workman, that hath copies by, can lay an europe, afric, and an asia, and quickly make that, which was nothing, all. so doth each tear, which thee doth wear, a globe, yea world, by that impression grow, till thy tears mixt with mine do overflow this world, by waters sent from thee my heaven dissolved so. on reading the following lines, the reader may perhaps cry out, "confusion worse confounded": here lies a she sun, and a he moon here, she gives the best light to his sphere, or each is both, and all, and so they unto one another nothing owe. --_donne._ who but donne would have thought that a good man is a telescope? though god be our true glass, through which we see all, since the being of all things is he, yet are the trunks, which do to us derive things, in proportion fit, by perspective deeds of good men; for by their living here, virtues, indeed remote, seem to be near. who would imagine it possible that in a very few lines so many remote ideas could be brought together? since't is my doom, love's undershrieve, why this reprieve? why doth my she advowson fly incumbency? to sell thyself dost thou intend by candle's end, and hold the contrast thus in doubt, life's taper out? think but how soon the market fails, your sex lives faster than the males; as if to measure age's span, the sober julian were th' account of man, whilst you live by the fleet gregorian. --_cleveland_. of enormous and disgusting hyperboles, these may be examples: by every wind, that comes this way, send me at least a sigh or two, such and so many i'll repay as shall themselves make winds to get to you. --_cowley_. in tears i'll waste these eyes, by love so vainly fed; so lust of old the deluge punished. --_cowley_. all arm'd in brass the richest dress of war, (a dismal glorious sight) he shone afar. the sun himself started with sudden fright, to see his beams return so dismal bright. --_cowley_. an universal consternation: his bloody eyes he hurls round, his sharp paws tear up the ground; then runs he wild about, lashing his angry tail and roaring out. beasts creep into their dens, and tremble there; trees, though no wind is stirring, shake with fear; silence and horror fill the place around: echo itself dares scarce repeat the sound. --_cowley_. their fictions were often violent and unnatural. of his mistress bathing. the fish around her crowded, as they do to the false light that treacherous fishers shew, and all with as much ease might taken be, as she at first took me: for ne'er did light so clear among the waves appear, though every night the sun himself set there. --_cowley_. the poetical effect of a lover's name upon glass: my name engrav'd herein doth contribute my firmness to this glass; which, ever since that charm, hath been as hard as that which grav'd it was. --_donne_. their conceits were sometimes slight and trifling. on an inconstant woman. he enjoys thy calmy sunshine now, and no breath stirring hears, in the clear heaven of thy brow, no smallest cloud appears. he sees thee gentle, fair and gay, and trusts the faithless april of thy may. --_cowley_. upon a paper written with the juice of lemon, and read by the fire: nothing yet in thee is seen: but when a genial heat warms thee within, a new-born wood of various lines there grows; here buds an l, and there a b, here sprouts a v, and there a t, and all the flourishing letters stand in rows. --_cowley_ as they sought only for novelty, they did not much inquire whether their allusions were to things high or low, elegant or gross; whether they compared the little to the great, or the great to the little. physick and chirurgery for a lover. gently, ah gently, madam, touch the wound, which you yourself have made; that pain must needs be very much, which makes me of your hand afraid. cordials of pity give me now, for i too weak for purgings grow. --_cowley_. the world and a clock. mahol, th' inferior world's fantastic face, through all the turns of matter's maze did trace; great nature's well-set clock in pieces took; on all the springs and smallest wheels did look of life and motion; and with equal art made up again the whole of every part. --_cowley_. a coal-pit has not often found its poet; but, that it may not want its due honour, cleveland has paralleled it with the sun: the moderate value of our guiltless ore makes no man atheist, and no woman whore; yet why should hallow'd vestals' sacred shrine deserve more honour than a flaming mine? these pregnant wombs of heat would fitter be than a few embers, for a deity. had he our pits, the persian would admire no sun, but warm's devotion at our fire: he'd leave the trotting whipster, and prefer our profound vulcan 'bove that waggoner. for wants he heat or light? or would have store of both? 'tis here: and what can suns give more? nay, what's the sun but, in a different name, a coal-pit rampant, or a mine on flame! then let this truth reciprocally run the sun's heaven's coalery, and coals our sun. death, a voyage. no family e'er rigg'd a soul for heaven's discovery, with whom more venturers might boldly dare venture their stakes, with him in joy to share. --_donne_. their thoughts and expressions were sometimes grossly absurd, and such as no figures or licence can reconcile to the understanding. a lover neither dead nor alive. then down i laid my head, down on cold earth; and for a while was dead, and my freed soul to a strange somewhere fled: ah, sottish soul, said i, when back to its cage again i saw it fly: fool to resume her broken chain! and row her galley here again! fool, to that body to return where it condemn'd and destin'd is to burn! once dead, how can it be, death should a thing so pleasant seem to thee, that thou should'st come to live it o'er again in me? --_cowley_. a lover's heart a hand grenado. wo to her stubborn heart, if once mine come into the self-same room, 't will tear and blow up all within, like a grenado shot into a magazin. then shall love keep the ashes, and torn parts, of both our broken hearts: shall out of both one new one make; from hers th' allay; from mine, the metal take. --_cowley_. the poetical propagation of light. the prince's favour is diffus'd o'er all, from which all fortunes, names, and natures fall; then from those wombs of stars, the bride's bright eyes, at every glance a constellation flies, and sows the court with stars, and doth prevent in light and power, the all-ey'd firmament: first her eye kindles other ladies' eyes, then from their beams their jewels' lustres rise; and from their jewels torches do take fire, and all is warmth, and light, and good desire. --_donne_. they were in very little care to clothe their notions with elegance of dress, and therefore miss the notice and the praise which are often gained by those who think less, but are more diligent to adorn their thoughts. that a mistress beloved is fairer in idea than in reality is by cowley thus expressed: thou in my fancy dost much higher stand, than woman can be plac'd by nature's hand; and i must needs, i'm sure, a loser be, to change thee, as thou 'rt there, for very thee. that prayer and labour should co-operate are thus taught by donne: in none but us, are such mixt engines found, as hands of double office: for the ground we till with them; and them to heaven we raise; who prayerless labours, or without this, prays, doth but one half, that's none. by the same author, a common topic, the danger of procrastination, is thus illustrated: --that which i should have begun in my youth's morning, now late must be done; and i, as giddy travellers must do, which stray or sleep all day, and having lost light and strength, dark and tir'd must then ride post. all that man has to do is to live and die; the sum of humanity is comprehended by donne in the following lines: think in how poor a prison thou didst lie; after, enabled but to suck and cry. think, when't was grown to most, 't was a poor inn, a province pack'd up in two yards of skin, and that usurp'd, or threaten'd with a rage of sicknesses, or their true mother, age. but think that death hath now enfranchis'd thee; thou hast thy expansion now, and liberty; think, that a rusty piece discharg'd is flown in pieces, and the bullet is his own, and freely flies; this to thy soul allow, think thy shell broke, think thy soul hatched but now. they were sometimes indelicate and disgusting. cowley thus apostrophizes beauty: --thou tyrant, which leav'st no man free! thou subtle thief, from whom nought safe can be! thou murderer, which hast kill'd, and devil, which would'st damn me. thus he addresses his mistress: thou who, in many a propriety, so truly art the sun to me. add one more likeness, which i'm sure you can, and let me and my sun beget a man. thus he represents the meditations of a lover: though in thy thoughts scarce any tracts have been so much as of original sin, such charms thy beauty wears as might desires in dying confest saints excite. thou with strange adultery dost in each breast a brothel keep; awake, all men do lust for thee, and some enjoy thee when they sleep. the true taste of tears: hither with crystal vials, lovers, come, and take my tears, which are love's wine, and try your mistress' tears at home; for all are false, that taste not just like mine. --_donne_. this is yet more indelicate: as the sweet sweat of roses in a still as that which from chaf'd musk-cat's pores doth trill, as th' almighty balm of th' early east, such are the sweet drops of my mistress' breast. and on her neck her skin such lustre sets, they seem no sweat-drops, but pearl coronets: rank sweaty froth thy mistress' brow defiles. --_donne_. their expressions sometimes raise horror, when they intend perhaps to be pathetic: as men in hell are from diseases free, so from all other ills am i. free from their known formality: but all pains eminently lie in thee. --_cowley_. they were not always strictly curious, whether the opinions from which they drew their illustrations were true; it was enough that they were popular. bacon remarks that some falsehoods are continued by tradition, because they supply commodious allusions. it gave a piteous groan, and so it broke; in vain it something would have spoke: the love within too strong for't was, like poison put into a venice-glass. --_cowley_. in forming descriptions, they looked out, not for images, but for conceits. night has been a common subject, which poets have contended to adorn. dryden's night is well known; donne's is as follows: thou seest me here at midnight, now all rest: time's dead low-water; when all minds divest to-morrow's business, when the labourers have such rest in bed, that their last church-yard grave, subject to change, will scarce be a type of this; now when the client, whose last hearing is to-morrow, sleeps; when the condemned man, who when he opens his eyes, must shut them then again by death, although sad watch he keep, doth practise dying by a little sleep, thou at this midnight seest me. it must be, however, confessed of these writers that if they are upon common subjects often unnecessarily and unpoetically subtle, yet where scholastic speculation can be properly admitted, their copiousness and acuteness may justly be admired. what cowley has written upon hope shows an unequalled fertility of invention: hope, whose weak being ruin'd is, alike if it succeed, and if it miss; whom good or ill does equally confound, and both the horns of fate's dilemma wound. vain shadow, which dost vanish quite, both at full noon and perfect night! the stars have not a possibility of blessing thee; if things then from their end we happy call, 't is hope is the most hopeless thing of all. hope, thou bold taster of delight, who, whilst thou shouldst but taste, devour'st it quite! thou bring'st us an estate, yet leav'st us poor, by clogging it with legacies before! the joys, which we entire should wed, come deflower'd virgins to our bed; good fortune without gain imported be, such mighty customs paid to thee: for joy, like wine, kept close does better taste; if it take air before, its spirits waste. to the following comparison of a man that travels and his wife that stays at home, with a pair of compasses, it may be doubted whether absurdity or ingenuity has the better claim: our two souls therefore, which are one, though i must go, endure not yet a breach, but an expansion, like gold to airy thinness beat. if they be two, they are two so as stiff twin-compasses are two, thy soul, the fixt foot, makes no show to move, but doth, if th' other do. and though it in the centre sit, yet when the other far doth roam, it leans, and hearkens after it, and grows erect, as that comes home. such wilt thou be to me, who must like th' other foot, obliquely run. thy firmness makes my circle just, and makes me end where i begun._ --donne._ in all these examples it is apparent that whatever is improper or vicious is produced by a voluntary deviation from nature in pursuit of something new and strange, and that the writers fail to give delight by their desire of exciting admiration. samuel taylor coleridge. ( - ) iv. on poetic genius and poetic diction. the following passage forms chapters xiv and xv of coleridge's _biographia literaria_, published in it has been selected as giving a less imperfect impression of his powers as a critic than any other piece that could have been chosen the truth is that, great in talk and supreme in poetry, coleridge was lost directly he sat down to express himself in prose his style is apt to be cumbrous, and his matter involved. we feel that the critic himself was greater than any criticism recorded either in his writings or his lectures the present extract may be defined as an attempt, and an attempt less inadequate than was common with coleridge, to state his poetic creed, and to illustrate it by reference to his own poetry and to that of wordsworth and of shakespeare. in what he says of shakespeare he is at his best. he forgets himself, and writes with a single eye to a theme which was thoroughly worthy of his powers. in the earlier part of the piece, and indeed indirectly throughout, he has in mind wordsworth's famous preface to the _lyrical ballads_, which is to be found in any complete edition of wordsworth's poems, or in his poise writings, as edited by dr. grosart. during the first year that mr. wordsworth and i were neighbours, our conversation turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. the sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset, diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. these are the poetry of nature. the thought suggested itself (to which of us i do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. in the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. and real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. for the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves. in this idea originated the plan of the _lyrical ballads;_ [footnote: published in . it opened with the _ancient mariner_ and closed with wordsworth's lines on _tintern abbey._ among other poems written in wordsworth's simplest style were _the idiot boy, the thorn,_ and _we are seven._] in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. mr. wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. with this view i wrote the _ancient mariner,_ and was preparing, among other poems, the _dark ladie,_ and the _christabel,_ in which i should have more nearly realized my ideal than i had done in my first attempt. but mr. wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. mr. wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction which is characteristic of his genius. in this form the _lyrical ballads_ were published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. to the second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which, notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms of style that were not included in what he (unfortunately, i think, adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life. from this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long-continued controversy. for from the conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy i explain the inveteracy, and in some instances, i grieve to say, the acrimonious passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the assailants. had mr. wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things which they were for a long time described as being; had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged the preface along with them. but year after year increased the number of mr. wordsworth's admirers. they were found, too, not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their admiration (inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its intensity, i might almost say, by its religious fervour. these facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would of itself have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled them round and round. with many parts of this preface, in the sense attributed to them, and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, i never concurred; but, on the contrary, objected to them as erroneous in principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface and to the author's own practice in the greater number of the poems themselves. mr. wordsworth, in his recent collection, has, i find, degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end of his second volume, to be read or not at the reader's choice. but he has not, as far as i can discover, announced any change in his poetic creed. at all events, considering it as the source of a controversy, in which i have been honoured more than i deserve by the frequent conjunction of my name with his, i think it expedient to declare, once for all, in what points i coincide with his opinions, and in what points i altogether differ. but in order to render myself intelligible, i must previously, in as few words as possible, explain my ideas, first, of a poem; and secondly, of poetry itself, in kind and in essence. the office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware that distinction is not division. in order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. but having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy. a poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference, therefore, must consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object proposed. according to the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination. it is possible that the object may be merely to facilitate the recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial arrangement; and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is distinguished from prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly. in this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to the well-known enumeration of the days in the several months: thirty days hath september, april, june, and november, &c. and others of the same class and purpose. and as a particular pleasure is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities, all compositions that have this charm superadded, whatever be their contents, _may_ be entitled poems. so much for the superficial form. a difference of object and contents supplies an additional ground of distinction. the immediate purpose may be the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and demonstrable, as in works of science; or of facts experienced and recorded, as in history. pleasure, and that of the highest and most permanent kind, may result from the attainment of the end; but it is not itself the immediate end. in other works the communication of pleasure may be the immediate purpose; and though truth, either moral or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will distinguish the character of the author, not the class to which the work belongs. blest indeed is that state of society, in which the immediate purpose would be baffled by the perversion of the proper ultimate end; in which no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the bathyllus even of an anacreon, or the alexis of virgil, from disgust and aversion! but the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree attained, as in novels and romances. would then the mere superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? the answer is, that nothing can permanently please which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. if metre be superadded, all other parts must be made consonant with it. they must be such as to justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each part, which an exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to excite. the final definition then, so deduced, may be thus worded. a poem is that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part. controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few instances has this been more striking than in disputes concerning the present subject. if a man chooses to call every composition a poem which is rhyme, or measure, or both, i must leave his opinion uncontroverted. the distinction is at least competent to characterize the writer's intention. if it were subjoined that the whole is likewise entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a series of interesting reflections, i of course admit this as another fit ingredient of a poem, and an additional merit. but if the definition sought for be that of a legitimate poem, i answer, it must be one the parts of which mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement. the philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand to a series of striking lines or distichs, each of which, absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself, disjoins it from its context, and makes it a separate whole, instead of a harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the component parts. the reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. like the motion of a serpent, which the egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air, at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward. _praecipitandus est liber spiritus_, says petronius arbiter most happily. the epithet, _liber_, here balances the preceding verb, and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer words. but if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem, we have still to seek for a definition of poetry. the writings of plato and bishop taylor, and the _theoria sacra_ of burnet, furnish undeniable proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even without the contradistinguishing objects of a poem. the first chapter of isaiah (indeed a very large proportion of the whole book) is poetry in the most emphatic sense; yet it would be not less irrational than strange to assert that pleasure, and not truth, was the immediate object of the prophet. in short, whatever specific import we attach to the word poetry, there will be found involved in it, as a necessary consequence, that a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry. yet if a harmonious whole is to be produced, the remaining parts must be preserved in keeping with the poetry; and this can be no otherwise effected than by such a studied selection and artificial arrangement as will partake of one, though not a peculiar, property of poetry. and this again can be no other than the property of exciting a more continuous and equal attention than the language of prose aims at, whether colloquial or written. my own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the word, have been in part anticipated in the preceding disquisition on the fancy and imagination. what is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. for it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind. the poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. he diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. this power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control (_laxis effertur habenis_), reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature, the manner to the matter, and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. doubtless, as sir john davies observes of the soul (and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately, to the poetic imagination),-- doubtless this could not be, but that she turns bodies to spirit by sublimation strange, as fire converts to fire the things it burns, as we our food into our nature change. from their gross matter she abstracts their forms, and draws a kind of quintessence from things; which to her proper nature she transforms to bear them light on her celestial wings. thus does she, when from individual states she doth abstract the universal kinds; which then re-clothed in divers names and fates steal access through our senses to our minds. finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole. in the application of these principles to purposes of practical criticism as employed in the appraisal of works more or less imperfect, i have endeavoured to discover what the qualities in a poem are, which may be deemed promises and specific symptoms of poetic power, as distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition by accidental motives, by an act of the will, rather than by the inspiration of a genial and productive nature. in this investigation, i could not, i thought, do better than keep before me the earliest work of the greatest genius that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded shakespeare. i mean the _venus and adonis_, and the _lucrece_; works which give at once strong promises of the strength, and yet obvious proofs of the immaturity, of his genius. from these i abstracted the following marks, as characteristics of original poetic genius in general. i. in the _venus and adonis_ the first and obvious excellence is the perfect sweetness of the versification, its adaptation to the subject, and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant. the delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently original, and not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, i regard as a highly favourable promise in the compositions of a young man. "the man that hath not music in his soul" can indeed never be a genuine poet. imagery (even taken from nature, much more when transplanted from books, as travels, voyages, and works of natural history), affecting incidents, just thoughts, interesting personal or domestic feelings, and with these the art of their combination or intertexture in the form of a poem, may all by incessant effort be acquired as a trade, by a man of talents and much reading, who, as i once before observed, has mistaken an intense desire of poetic reputation for a natural poetic genius; the love of the arbitrary end for a possession of the peculiar means. but the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination; and this, together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learnt. it is in these that _poeta nascitur non fit_. . a second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. at least i have found that where the subject is taken immediately from the author's personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic power. we may perhaps remember the tale of the statuary, who had acquired considerable reputation for the legs of his goddesses, though the rest of the statue accorded but indifferently with ideal beauty; till his wife, elated by her husband's praises, modestly acknowledged that she herself had been his constant model. in the _venus and adonis_ this proof of poetic power exists even to excess. it is throughout as if a superior spirit, more intuitive, more intimately conscious even than the characters themselves, not only of every outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excitement which had resulted from the energetic fervour of his own spirit, in so vividly exhibiting what it had so accurately and profoundly contemplated. i think i should have conjectured from these poems that even then the great instinct which impelled the poet to the drama was secretly working in him, prompting him by a series and never-broken chain of imagery, always vivid, and because unbroken, often minute; by the highest effort of the picturesque in words, of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, even dante not excepted; to provide a substitute for that visual language, that constant intervention and running comment by tone, look, and gesture, which, in his dramatic works, he was entitled to expect from the players. his venus and adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those characters by the most consummate actors. you seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything. hence it is that from the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader; from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images; and, above all, from the alienation, and, if i may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst; that, though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account. instead of doing as ariosto, and as, still more offensively, wieland has done; instead of degrading and deforming passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of concupiscence, shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse itself so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful, now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery; or by diverting our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty or profound reflections which the poet's ever active mind has deduced from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents. the reader is forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely passive of our nature. as little can a mind thus roused and awakened be brooded on by mean and instinct emotion, as the low, lazy mist can creep upon the surface of a lake while a strong gale is driving it onward in waves and billows. . it has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. they become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or, lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit, which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air. in the two following lines, for instance, there is nothing objectionable, nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their proper place, part of a descriptive poem: behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow'd bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve. but with the small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. the same image will rise into a semblance of poetry if thus conveyed: yon row of bleak and visionary pines, by twilight-glimpse discerned, mark! how they flee from the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild streaming before them. i have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, of that particular excellence which i had in view, and in which shakespeare, even in his earliest as in his latest works, surpasses all other poets. it is by this that he still gives a dignity and a passion to the objects which he presents. unaided by any previous excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and in power. full many a glorious morning have i seen _flatter_ the mountain-tops with sovereign eye. --_sonnet_ . not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come, can yet the lease of my true love control, supposed as forfeit to a confined doom. the mortal moon hath her eclipse endured, and the sad augurs mock their own presage: incertainties now crown themselves assured, and peace proclaims olives of endless age. now with the drops of this most balmy time my love looks fresh: and death to me subscribes, since, spite of him, i'll live in this poor rhyme, while he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes. and thou in this shalt find thy monument, when tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent. --_sonnet_ . as of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and colours itself to the circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost in the mind. for unrivalled instances of this excellence the reader's own memory will refer him to the _lear, othello,_ in short, to which not of the _'great, ever living, dead man's'_ dramatic works? _inopem me copia fecit_. how true it is to nature, he has himself finely expressed in the instance of love in _sonnet_ : from you have i been absent in the spring, when proud-pied april drest in all his trim hath put a spirit of youth in every thing, that heavy saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him. yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell of different flowers in odour and in hue, could make me any summer's story tell, or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew nor did i wonder at the lily's white, nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose; they were, but sweet, but figures of delight, drawn after you, you pattern of all those. yet seem'd it winter still and, you away, _as with your shadow i with these did play!_ scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable mark [greek text, transliterated] gonzmou men poihtou---------- ----------ostis rhma gennaion lakoi, will the imagery supply when, with more than the power of the painter, the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of simultaneousness! with this he breaketh from the sweet embrace of those fair arms, that bound him to her breast, and homeward through the dark laund runs apace: _look how a bright star shooteth from the sky! so glides he in the night from venus' eye._ --_venus and adonis_, . . . the last character i shall mention, which would prove indeed but little, except as taken conjointly with the former; yet without which the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were possible) would give promises only of transitory flashes and a meteoric power;--its depth and energy of thought. no man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher. for poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. in shakespeare's poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. at length, in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. or like two rapid streams that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly and in tumult, but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice. the _venus and adonis_ did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. but the story of lucretia seems to favour, and even demand, their intensest workings. and yet we find in shakespeare's management of the tale neither pathos nor any other dramatic quality. there is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspirited by the same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language. what, then, shall we say? even this, that shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with milton as his compeer, not rival. while the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. all things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of milton; while shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself. o what great men hast thou not produced, england, my country! truly, indeed, must we be free or die, who speak the tongue, which shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold, which milton held. in every thing we are sprung of earth's first blood, have titles manifold. william hazlitt. ( - .) v. on poetry in general. this was the first of a series of lectures on english poets, delivered in , and published in the same year. it has been reprinted in the collected edition of hazlitt's works (bohn). it is a striking sample of hazlitt's brilliance as a writer; and it is free from the faults of temper, and consequent errors of judgment, which, especially when he is dealing with modern authors, must be held in some degree to mar his greatness as a critic. it has been chosen partly for these reasons; partly also for those assigned in the introduction. there is perhaps no other passage in the long roll of his writings that so clearly marks his place in the development of english criticism. the best general notion which i can give of poetry is, that it is the natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it. in treating of poetry, i shall speak first of the subject-matter of it, next of the forms of expression to which it gives birth, and afterwards of its connection with harmony of sound. poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. it relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind. it comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but what so comes home to them in the most general and intelligible shape can be a subject for poetry. poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. he who has a contempt for poetry cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else. it is not a mere frivolous accomplishment (as some persons have been led to imagine), the trifling amusement of a few idle readers or leisure hours: it has been the study and delight of mankind in all ages. many people suppose that poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten syllables with like endings: but wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower that "spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and dedicates its beauty to the sun",--_there_ is poetry, in its birth. if history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its materials lie deeper, and are spread wider. history treats, for the most part, of the cumbrous and unwieldy masses of things, the empty cases in which the affairs of the world are packed, under the heads of intrigue or war, in different states, and from century to century: but there is no thought or feeling that can have entered into the mind of man, which he would be eager to communicate to others, or which they would listen to with delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry. it is not a branch of authorship: it is "the stuff of which our life is made". the rest is "mere oblivion", a dead letter: for all that is worth remembering in life is the poetry of it. fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry. poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our whole being: without it "man's life is poor as beast's". man is a poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the principles of poetry, act upon them all our lives, like moliere's _bourgeois gentilhomme_, who had always spoken prose without knowing it. the child is a poet, in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of jack the giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a poet when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman, when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city apprentice, when he gazes after the lord mayor's show; the miser, when he hugs his gold; the courtier, who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who paints his idol with blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant; or the tyrant, who fancies himself a god; the vain, the ambitious, the proud, the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others think and act. if his art is folly and madness, it is folly and madness at second hand. "there is warrant for it." poets alone have not "such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cooler reason" can. the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact. one sees more devils than vast hell can hold, that is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, sees helen's beauty in a brow of egypt. the poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heav'n to earth, from earth to heav'n; and, as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. such tricks hath strong imagination. if poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same. if it is a fiction, made up of what we wish things to be, and fancy that they are, because we wish them so, there is no other nor better reality. ariosto has described the loves of angelica and medoro: but was not medoro, who carved the name of his mistress on the barks of trees, as much enamoured of her charms as he? homer has celebrated the anger of achilles: but was not the hero as mad as the poet? plato banished the poets from his commonwealth, lest their descriptions of the natural man should spoil his mathematical man, who was to be without passions and affections--who was neither to laugh nor weep, to feel sorrow nor anger, to be cast down nor elated by anything. this was a chimera, however, which never existed but in the brain of the inventor; and homer's poetical world has outlived plato's philosophical republic. poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the passions are a part of man's nature. we shape things according to our wishes and fancies, without poetry; but poetry is the most emphatical language that can be found for those creations of the mind "which ecstasy is very cunning in". neither a mere description of natural objects, nor a mere delineation of natural feelings, however distinct or forcible, constitutes the ultimate end and aim of poetry, without the heightenings of the imagination. the light of poetry is not only a direct but also a reflected light, that while it shows us the object, throws a sparkling radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions, communicated to the imagination, reveals to us, as with a flash of lightning, the inmost recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole being. poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms: feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. it describes the flowing, not the fixed. it does not define the limits of sense, or analyse the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling. the poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself, that is impatient of all limit, that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur, to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner, and by the most striking examples of the same quality in other instances. poetry, according to lord bacon, for this reason "has something divine in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things, as reason and history do". it is strictly the language of the imagination; and the imagination is that faculty which represents objects, not as they are in themselves, but as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite variety of shapes and combinations of power. this language is not the less true to nature, because it is false in point of fact; but so much the more true and natural, if it conveys the impression which the object under the influence of passion makes on the mind. let an object, for instance, be presented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear, and the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. "our eyes are made the fools" of our other faculties. this is the universal law of the imagination: that if it would but apprehend some joy, it comprehends some bringer of that joy: or in the night imagining some fear, how easy is each bush suppos'd a bear! when iachimo says of imogen: ---the flame o' th' taper bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids to see the enclosed lights-- this passionate interpretation of the motion of the flame, to accord with the speaker's own feelings, is true poetry. the lover, equally with the poet, speaks of the auburn tresses of his mistress as locks of shining gold, because the least tinge of yellow in the hair has, from novelty and a sense of personal beauty, a more lustrous effect to the imagination than the purest gold. we compare a man of gigantic stature to a tower: not that he is anything like so large, but because the excess of his size beyond what we are accustomed to expect, or the usual size of things of the same class, produces by contrast a greater feeling of magnitude and ponderous strength than another object of ten times the same dimensions. the intensity of the feeling makes up for the disproportion of the objects. things are equal to the imagination, which have the power of affecting the mind with an equal degree of terror, admiration, delight, or love. when lear calls upon the heavens to avenge his cause, "for they are old like him", there is nothing extravagant or impious in this sublime identification of his age with theirs; for there is no other image which could do justice to the agonizing sense of his wrongs and his despair! poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. as in describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with the forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain, by blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the most striking forms of nature. tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or contrast: loses the sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it: exhausts the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it: grapples with impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint: throws us back upon the past, forward into the future: brings every moment of our being or object of nature in startling review before us: and in the rapid whirl of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest contemplations on human life. when lear says of edgar, "nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this", what a bewildered amazement, what a wrench of the imagination, that cannot be brought to conceive of any other cause of misery than that which has bowed it down, and absorbs all other sorrow in its own! his sorrow, like a flood, supplies the sources of all other sorrow. again, when he exclaims in the mad scene, "the little dogs and all, tray, blanche, and sweetheart, see, they bark at me!" it is passion lending occasion to imagination to make every creature in league against him, conjuring up ingratitude and insult in their least looked-for and most galling shapes, searching every thread and fibre of his heart, and finding out the last remaining image of respect or attachment in the bottom of his breast, only to torture and kill it! in like manner, the "so i am" of cordelia gushes from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it of a weight of love and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed upon it for years. what a fine return of the passion upon itself is that in othello--with what a mingled agony of regret and despair he clings to the last traces of departed happiness, when he exclaims: ---o now, for ever, farewell the tranquil mind: farewell content! farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars, that make ambition virtue! o, farewell! farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump, the spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, the royal banner; and all quality, pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war! and o you mortal engines, whose rude throats th' immortal jove's dread clamours counterfeit, farewell! othello's occupation's gone! how his passion lashes itself up and swells and rages like a tide in its sounding course, when, in answer to the doubts expressed of his returning love, he says: never, iago. like to the pontic sea, whose icy current and compulsive course ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on to the propontic and the hellespont: even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love, till that a capable and wide revenge swallow them up. the climax of his expostulation afterwards with desdemona is at that passage: but there where i have garner'd up my heart ... to be discarded thence! one mode in which the dramatic exhibition of passion excites our sympathy without raising our disgust is that, in proportion as it sharpens the edge of calamity and disappointment, it strengthens the desire of good. it enhances our consciousness of the blessing, by making us sensible of the magnitude of the loss. the storm of passion lays bare and shows us the rich depths of the human soul: the whole of our existence, the sum total of our passions and pursuits, of that which we desire and that which we dread, is brought before us by contrast; the action and reaction are equal; the keenness of immediate suffering only gives us a more intense aspiration after, and a more intimate participation with the antagonist world of good: makes us drink deeper of the cup of human life: tugs at the heart-strings: loosens the pressure about them, and calls the springs of thought and feeling into play with tenfold force. impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part of our nature, as well as of the sensitive--of the desire to know, the will to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to these different parts of our constitution, in order to be perfect. the domestic or prose tragedy, which is thought to be the most natural, is in this sense the least so, because it appeals almost exclusively to one of these faculties, our sensibility. the tragedies of moore and lillo, [footnote: for instance, _the gamester_ and _george barnwell_ they are to be found respectively in vols. xiv. and xi. of the _british theatre_.] for this reason, however affecting at the time, oppress and lie like a dead weight upon the mind, a load of misery which it is unable to throw off; the tragedy of shakespeare, which is true poetry, stirs our inmost affections; abstracts evil from itself by combining it with all the forms of imagination, and with the deepest workings of the heart; and rouses the whole man within us. the pleasure, however, derived from tragic poetry is not anything peculiar to it as poetry, as a fictitious and fanciful thing. it is not an anomaly of the imagination. it has its source and ground-work in the common love of strong excitement. as mr. burke observes, people flock to see a tragedy; but if there were a public execution in the next street, the theatre would very soon be empty. it is not then the difference between fiction and reality that solves the difficulty. children are satisfied with the stories of ghosts and witches in plain prose: nor do the hawkers of full, true, and particular accounts of murders and executions about the streets find it necessary to have them turned into penny ballads, before they can dispose of these interesting and authentic documents. the grave politician drives a thriving trade of abuse and calumnies poured out against those whom he makes his enemies for no other end than that he may live by them. the popular preacher makes less frequent mention of heaven than of hell. oaths and nicknames are only a more vulgar sort of poetry or rhetoric. we are as fond of indulging our violent passions as of reading a description of those of others. we are as prone to make a torment of our fears, as to luxuriate in our hopes of good. if it be asked, why we do so, the best answer will be, because we cannot help it. the sense of power is as strong a principle in the mind as the love of pleasure. objects of terror and pity exercise the same despotic control over it as those of love or beauty. it is as natural to hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to express our hatred or contempt, as our love or admiration: masterless passion sways us to the mood of what it likes or loathes. not that we like what we loathe: but we like to indulge our hatred and scorn of it, to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration, to make it a bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour of deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatize it by name, to grapple with it in thought--in action, to sharpen our intellect, to arm our will against it, to know the worst we have to contend with, and to contend with it to the utmost. poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. it is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought". this is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic. when pope says of the lord mayor's show-- now night descending, the proud scene is o'er, but lives in settle's numbers one day more! when collins makes danger, "with limbs of giant mould". ----throw him on the steep of some loose hanging rock asleep: when lear calls out in extreme anguish-- ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, more hideous, when thou shew'st thee in a child, than the sea-monster! the passion of contempt in the one case, of terror in the other, and of indignation in the last, is perfectly satisfied. we see the thing ourselves, and show it to others as we feel it to exist, and as, in spite of ourselves, we are compelled to think of it. the imagination, by thus embodying and turning them to shape, gives an obvious relief to the indistinct and importunate cravings of the will. we do not wish the thing to be so; but we wish it to appear such as it is. for knowledge is conscious power; and the mind is no longer in this case the dupe, though it may be the victim, of vice or folly. poetry is in all its shapes the language of the imagination and the passions, of fancy and will. nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic critics for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common sense and reason; for the end and use of poetry, "both at the first and now, was and is to hold the mirror up to nature", seen through the medium of passion and imagination, not divested of that medium by means of literal truth or abstract reason. the painter of history might as well be required to represent the face of a person who has just trod upon a serpent with the still-life expression of a common portrait, as the poet to describe the most striking and vivid impressions which things can be supposed to make upon the mind, in the language of common conversation. let who will strip nature of the colours and the shapes of fancy, the poet is not bound to do so; the impressions of common sense and strong imagination, that is, of passion and indifference, cannot be the same, and they must have a separate language to do justice to either. objects must strike differently upon the mind, independently of what they are in themselves, as long as we have a different interest in them, as we see them in a different point of view, nearer or at a greater distance (morally or physically speaking) from novelty, from old acquaintance, from our ignorance of them, from our fear of their consequences, from contrast, from unexpected likeness. we can no more take away the faculty of the imagination, than we can see all objects without light or shade. some things must dazzle us by their preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our curiosity to explore their obscurity. those who would dispel these various illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their stead, are not very wise. let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning nothing but a little gray worm: let the poet or the lover of poetry visit it at evening, when beneath the scented hawthorn and the crescent moon it has built itself a palace of emerald light. this is also one part of nature, one appearance which the glow-worm presents, and that not the least interesting; so poetry is one part of the history of the human mind, though it is neither science nor philosophy. it cannot be concealed, however, that the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry. the province of the imagination is principally visionary, the unknown and undefined: the understanding restores things to their natural boundaries, and strips them of their fanciful pretensions. hence the history of religious and poetical enthusiasm is much the same; and both have received a sensible shock from the progress of experimental philosophy. it is the undefined and uncommon that gives birth and scope to the imagination; we can only fancy what we do not know. as in looking into the mazes of a tangled wood we fill them with what shapes we please--with ravenous beasts, with caverns vast, and drear enchantments--so in our ignorance of the world about us, we make gods or devils of the first object we see, and set no bounds to the wilful suggestions of our hopes and fears: and visions, as poetic eyes avow, hang on each leaf and cling to every bough. there can never be another jacob's dream. since that time, the heavens have gone farther off, and grown astronomical. they have become averse to the imagination; nor will they return to us on the squares of the distances, or on doctor chalmers's discourses. rembrandt's picture brings the matter nearer to us. it is not only the progress of mechanical knowledge, but the necessary advances of civilization, that are unfavourable to the spirit of poetry. we not only stand in less awe of the preternatural world, but we can calculate more surely, and look with more indifference, upon the regular routine of this. the heroes of the fabulous ages rid the world of monsters and giants. at present we are less exposed to the vicissitudes of good or evil, to the incursions of wild beasts or "bandit fierce", or to the unmitigated fury of the elements. the time has been that "our fell of hair would at a dismal treatise rouse, and stir as life were in it". but the police spoils all; and we now hardly so much as dream of a midnight murder. _macbeth_ is only tolerated in this country for the sake of the music; and in the united states of america, where the philosophical principles of government are carried still further in theory and practice, we find that the _beggar's opera_ is hooted from the stage. society, by degrees, is constructed into a machine that carries us safely and insipidly from one end of life to the other, in a very comfortable prose style: obscurity her curtain round them drew, and siren sloth a dull quietus sung. the remarks which have been here made, would, in some measure, lead to a solution of the question of the comparative merits of painting and poetry. i do not mean to give any preference, but it should seem that the argument which has been sometimes set up, that painting must affect the imagination more strongly, because it represents the image more distinctly, is not well founded. we may assume without much temerity that poetry is more poetical than painting. when artists or connoisseurs talk on stilts about the poetry of painting, they show that they know little about poetry, and have little love for the art. painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it. but this last is the proper province of the imagination. again, as it relates to passion, painting gives the event, poetry the progress of events; but it is during the progress, in the interval of expectation and suspense, while our hopes and fears are strained to the highest pitch of breathless agony, that the pinch of the interest lies: between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma, or a hideous dream the mortal instruments are then in council; and the state of man, like to a little kingdom, suffers then the nature of an insurrection. but by the time that the picture is painted, all is over. faces are the best part of a picture; but even faces are not what we chiefly remember in what interests us most. but it may be asked then, is there anything better than claude lorraine's landscapes, than titian's portraits, than raphael's cartoons, or the greek statues? of the two first i shall say nothing, as they are evidently picturesque rather than imaginative. raphael's cartoons are certainly the finest comments that ever were made on the scriptures. would their effect be the same if we were not acquainted with the text? but the new testament existed before the cartoons. there is one subject of which there is no cartoon: christ washing the feet of the disciples the night before his death. but that chapter does not need a commentary. it is for want of some such resting-place for the imagination that the greek statues are little else than specious forms. they are marble to the touch and to the heart. they have not an informing principle within them. in their faultless excellence they appear sufficient to themselves. by their beauty they are raised above the frailties of passion or suffering. by their beauty they are deified. but they are not objects of religious faith to us, and their forms are a reproach to common humanity. they seem to have no sympathy with us, and not to want our admiration. poetry in its matter and form is natural imagery or feeling, combined with passion and fancy. in its mode of conveyance, it combines the ordinary use of language with musical expression. there is a question of long standing in what the essence of poetry consists, or what it is that determines why one set of ideas should be expressed in prose, another in verse. milton has told us his idea of poetry in a single line: thoughts that voluntary move harmonious numbers. as there are certain sounds that excite certain movements, and the song and dance go together, so there are, no doubt, certain thoughts that lead to certain tones of voice, or modulations of sound, and change "the words of mercury into the songs of apollo". there is a striking instance of this adaptation of the movement of sound and rhythm to the subject, in spenser's description of the satyrs accompanying una to the cave of sylvanus: so from the ground she fearless doth arise, and walketh forth without suspect of crime. they, all as glad as birds of joyous prime, thence lead her forth, about her dancing round, shouting and singing all a shepherd's rhyme; and with green branches strewing all the ground, do worship her as queen with olive garland crown'd. and all the way their merry pipes they sound, that all the woods and doubled echoes ring; and with their horned feet do wear the ground, leaping like wanton kids in pleasant spring; so towards old sylvanus they her bring, who with the noise awaked, cometh out. on the contrary, there is nothing either musical or natural in the ordinary construction of language. it is a thing altogether arbitrary and conventional. neither in the sounds themselves, which are the voluntary signs of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrangements in common speech, is there any principle of natural imitation, or correspondence to the individual ideas or to the tone of feeling with which they are conveyed to others. the jerks, the breaks, the inequalities and harshnesses of prose are fatal to the flow of a poetical imagination, as a jolting road or a stumbling horse disturbs the reverie of an absent man. but poetry "makes these odds all even". it is the music of language, answering to the music of the mind, untying, as it were, "the secret soul of harmony". wherever any object takes such a hold of the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting the heart in tenderness, or kindling it to a sentiment of enthusiasm; wherever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, to bring all other objects into accord with it, and to give the same movement of harmony, sustained and continuous, or gradually varied, according to the occasion, to the sounds that express it--this is poetry. the musical in sound is the sustained and continuous; the musical in thought is the sustained and continuous also. there is a near connection between music and deep-rooted passion. mad people sing. as often as articulation passes naturally into intonation, there poetry begins. where one idea gives a tone and colour to others, where one feeling melts others into it, there can be no reason why the same principle should not be extended to the sounds by which the voice utters these emotions of the soul, and blends syllables and lines into each other. it is to supply the inherent defect of harmony in the customary mechanism of language, to make the sound an echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself--to mingle the tide of verse, "the golden cadences of poetry", with the tide of feeling, flowing and murmuring as it flows--in short, to take the language of the imagination from off the ground, and enable it to spread its wings where it may indulge its own impulses: sailing with supreme dominion through the azure deep of air-- without being stopped, or fretted, or diverted with the abruptnesses and petty obstacles, and discordant flats and sharps of prose, that poetry was invented. it is to common language what springs are to a carriage, or wings to feet. in ordinary speech we arrive at a certain harmony by the modulations of the voice: in poetry the same thing is done systematically by a regular collocation of syllables. it has been well observed, that every one who declaims warmly, or grows intent upon a subject, rises into a sort of blank verse or measured prose. the merchant, as described in chaucer, went on his way "sounding always the increase of his winning". every prose writer has more or less of rhythmical adaptation, except poets who, when deprived of the regular mechanism of verse, seem to have no principle of modulation left in their writings. an excuse might be made for rhyme in the same manner. it is but fair that the ear should linger on the sounds that delight it, or avail itself of the same brilliant coincidence and unexpected recurrence of syllables, that have been displayed in the invention and collocation of images. it is allowed that rhyme assists the memory; and a man of wit and shrewdness has been heard to say, that the only four good lines of poetry are the well-known ones which tell the number of days in the months of the year: thirty days hath september, &c. but if the jingle of names assists the memory, may it not also quicken the fancy? and there are other things worth having at our fingers' ends, besides the contents of the almanac. pope's versification is tiresome from its excessive sweetness and uniformity. shakespeare's blank verse is the perfection of dramatic dialogue. all is not poetry that passes for such: nor does verse make the whole difference between poetry and prose. the _iliad_ does not cease to be poetry in a literal translation; and addison's _campaign_ has been very properly denominated a gazette in rhyme. common prose differs from poetry, as treating for the most part either of such trite, familiar, and irksome matters of fact, as convey no extraordinary impulse to the imagination, or else of such difficult and laborious processes of the understanding, as do not admit of the wayward or violent movements either of the imagination or the passions. i will mention three works which come as near to poetry as possible without absolutely being so; namely, the _pilgrim's progress_, _robinson crusoe_, and the tales of boccaccio. chaucer and dryden have translated some of the last into english rhyme, but the essence and the power of poetry was there before. that which lifts the spirit above the earth, which draws the soul out of itself with indescribable longings, is poetry in kind, and generally fit to become so in name, by being "married to immortal verse". if it is of the essence of poetry to strike and fix the imagination, whether we will or no, to make the eye of childhood glisten with the starting tear, to be never thought of afterwards with indifference, john bunyan and daniel defoe may be permitted to pass for poets in their way. the mixture of fancy and reality in the _pilgrim's progress_ was never equalled in any allegory. his pilgrims walk above the earth, and yet are on it. what zeal, what beauty, what truth of fiction! what deep feeling in the description of christian's swimming across the water at last, and in the picture of the shining ones within the gates, with wings at their backs and garlands on their heads, who are to wipe all tears from his eyes! the writer's genius, though not "dipped in dews of castalie", was baptized with the holy spirit and with fire. the prints in this book are no small part of it. if the confinement of philoctetes in the island of lemnos was a subject for the most beautiful of all the greek tragedies, what shall we say to robinson crusoe in his? take the speech of the greek hero on leaving his cave, beautiful as it is, and compare it with the reflections of the english adventurer in his solitary place of confinement. the thoughts of home, and of all from which he is for ever cut off, swell and press against his bosom, as the heaving ocean rolls its ceaseless tide against the rocky shore, and the very beatings of his heart become audible in the eternal silence that surrounds him. thus he says: as i walked about, either in my hunting, or for viewing the country, the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me to think of the woods, the mountains, and deserts i was in; and how i was a prisoner, locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness, without redemption. in the midst of the greatest composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm, and make me wring my hands, and weep like a child. sometimes it would take me in the middle of my work, and i would immediately sit down and sigh, and look upon the ground for an hour or two together, and this was still worse to me, for if i could burst into tears or vent myself in words, it would go off, and the grief having exhausted itself would abate. the story of his adventures would not make a poem like the _odyssey_, it is true; but the relater had the true genius of a poet. it has been made a question whether richardson's romances are poetry; and the answer perhaps is, that they are not poetry, because they are not romance. the interest is worked up to an inconceivable height; but it is by an infinite number of little things, by incessant labour and calls upon the attention, by a repetition of blows that have no rebound in them. the sympathy excited is not a voluntary contribution, but a tax. nothing is unforced and spontaneous. there is a want of elasticity and motion. the story does not "give an echo to the seat where love is throned". the heart does not answer of itself like a chord in music. the fancy does not run on before the writer with breathless expectation, but is dragged along with an infinite number of pins and wheels, like those with which the liliputians dragged gulliver pinioned to the royal palace. sir charles grandison is a coxcomb. what sort of a figure would he cut, translated into an epic poem, by the side of achilles? clarissa, the divine clarissa, is too interesting by half. she is interesting in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles--she is interesting in all that is uninteresting. such things, however intensely they may be brought home to us, are not conductors to the imagination. there is infinite truth and feeling in richardson; but it is extracted from a _caput mortuum_ of circumstances: it does not evaporate of itself. his poetical genius is like ariel confined in a pine-tree, and requires an artificial process to let it out. shakespeare says: our poesy is as a gum, which oozes from whence 'tis nourished... our gentle flame provokes itself, and, like the current, flies each bound it chafes. i shall conclude this general account with some remarks on four of the principal works of poetry in the world, at different periods of history--homer, the bible, dante, and, let me add, ossian. in homer, the principle of action or life is predominant: in the bible, the principle of faith and the idea of providence; dante is a personification of blind will; and in ossian we see the decay of life and the lag end of the world. homer's poetry is the heroic: it is full of life and action: it is bright as the day, strong as a river. in the vigour of his intellect, he grapples with all the objects of nature, and enters into all the relations of social life. he saw many countries, and the manners of many men; and he has brought them all together in his poem. he describes his heroes going to battle with a prodigality of life, arising from an exuberance of animal spirits: we see them before us, their number and their order of battle, poured out upon the plain "all plumed like ostriches, like eagles newly bathed, wanton as goats, wild as young bulls, youthful as may, and gorgeous as the sun at midsummer", covered with glittering armour, with dust and blood; while the gods quaff their nectar in golden cups, or mingle in the fray; and the old men assembled on the walls of troy rise up with reverence as helen passes by them. the multitude of things in homer is wonderful; their splendour, their truth, their force and variety. his poetry is, like his religion, the poetry of number and form: he describes the bodies as well as the souls of men. the poetry of the bible is that of imagination and of faith: it is abstract and disembodied: it is not the poetry of form, but of power; not of multitude, but of immensity. it does not divide into many, but aggrandizes into one. its ideas of nature are like its ideas of god. it is not the poetry of social life, but of solitude: each man seems alone in the world, with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the earth, and the sky. it is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of faith in a supreme providence, and resignation to the power that governs the universe. as the idea of god was removed farther from humanity and a scattered polytheism, it became more profound and intense, as it became more universal, for the infinite is present to everything: "if we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also; if we turn to the east or the west, we cannot escape from it". man is thus aggrandized in the image of his maker. the history of the patriarchs is of this kind; they are founders of a chosen race of people, the inheritors of the earth; they exist in the generations which are to come after them. their poetry, like their religious creed, is vast, unformed, obscure, and infinite; a vision is upon it; an invisible hand is suspended over it. the spirit of the christian religion consists in the glory hereafter to be revealed; but in the hebrew dispensation providence took an immediate share in the affairs of this life. jacob's dream arose out of this intimate communion between heaven and earth: it was this that let down, in the sight of the youthful patriarch, a golden ladder from the sky to the earth, with angels ascending and descending upon it, and shed a light upon the lonely place, which can never pass away. the story of ruth, again, is as if all the depth of natural affection in the human race was involved in her breast. there are descriptions in the book of job more prodigal of imagery, more intense in passion, than anything in homer; as that of the state of his prosperity, and of the vision that came upon him by night. the metaphors in the old testament are more boldly figurative. things were collected more into masses, and gave a greater _momentum_ to the imagination. dante was the father of modern poetry, and he may therefore claim a place in this connection. his poem is the first great step from gothic darkness and barbarism; and the struggle of thought in it, to burst the thraldom in which the human mind had been so long held, is felt in every page. he stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which separates the ancient and the modern world; and saw the glories of antiquity dawning through the abyss of time, while revelation opened its passage to the other world. he was lost in wonder at what had been done before him, and he dared to emulate it. dante seems to have been indebted to the bible for the gloomy tone of his mind, as well as for the prophetic fury which exalts and kindles his poetry; but he is utterly unlike homer. his genius is not a sparkling flame, but the sullen heat of a furnace. he is power, passion, self-will personified. in all that relates to the descriptive or fanciful part of poetry, he bears no comparison to many who had gone before, or who have come after him; but there is a gloomy abstraction in his conceptions, which lies like a dead weight upon the mind--a benumbing stupor, a breathless awe, from the intensity of the impression--a terrible obscurity, like that which oppresses us in dreams--an identity of interest, which moulds every object to its own purposes, and clothes all things with the passions and imaginations of the human soul--that make amends for all other deficiencies. the immediate objects he presents to the mind are not much in themselves; they want grandeur, beauty, and order; but they become everything by the force of the character he impresses upon them. his mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates, instead of borrowing it from them. he takes advantage even of the nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject. his imagination peoples the shades of death, and broods over the silent air. he is the severest of all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the most opposite to the flowery and glittering; the writer who relies most on his own power, and the sense of it in others, and who leaves most room to the imagination of his readers. dante's only endeavour is to interest; and he interests by exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed. he does not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been created; but he seizes on the attention, by showing us the effect they produce on his feelings; and his poetry accordingly gives the same thrilling and overwhelming sensation which is caught by gazing on the face of a person who has seen some object of horror. the improbability of the events, the abruptness and monotony in the _inferno_, are excessive: but the interest never flags, from the continued earnestness of the author's mind. dante's great power is in combining internal feelings with external objects. thus the gate of hell, on which that withering inscription is written, seems to be endowed with speech and consciousness, and to utter its dread warning, not without a sense of mortal woes. this author habitually unites the absolutely local and individual with the greatest wildness and mysticism. in the midst of the obscure and shadowy regions of the lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up with the inscription, "i am the tomb of pope anastasius the sixth": and half the personages whom he has crowded into the _inferno_ are his own acquaintance. all this, perhaps, tends to heighten the effect by the bold intermixture of realities, and by an appeal, as it were, to the individual knowledge and experience of the reader. he affords few subjects for picture. there is, indeed, one gigantic one, that of count ugolino, of which michael angelo made a basrelief, and which sir joshua reynolds ought not to have painted. another writer whom i shall mention last, and whom i cannot persuade myself to think a mere modern in the groundwork, is ossian. he is a feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the minds of his readers. as homer is the first vigour and lustihead, ossian is the decay and old age of poetry. he lives only in the recollection and regret of the past. there is one impression which he conveys more entirely than all other poets; namely, the sense of privation, the loss of all things, of friends, of good name, of country; he is even without god in the world. he converses only with the spirits of the departed; with the motionless and silent clouds. the cold moonlight sheds its faint lustre on his head; the fox peeps out of the ruined tower; the thistle waves its beard to the wandering gale; and the strings of his harp seem, as the hand of age, as the tale of other times, passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind! the feeling of cheerless desolation, of the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of the annihilation of the substance, and the clinging to the shadow of all things, as in a mock-embrace, is here perfect. in this way, the lamentation of selma for the loss of salgar is the finest of all. if it were indeed possible to show that this writer was nothing, it would only be another instance of mutability, another blank made, another void left in the heart, another confirmation of that feeling which makes him so often complain, "roll on, ye dark brown years, ye bring no joy on your wing to ossian!" charles lamb. ( - ) vi. on the artificial comedy of the last century. the essay on the _artificial comedy of the last century_ is one of the _essays of elia_, published in the _london magazine_ between and . the paradox started by lamb was taken up by leigh hunt in his edition of the _comic dramatists of the restoration_, and was attacked by macaulay in his well-known review of hunt's work. it is characteristic of lamb to have bound up his defence of these writers with an account of kemble and other actors of the day. his peculiar strength lay in his power of throwing himself into the very mood and temper of the writers he admired, and no critic has more completely possessed the secret of living over again the life of a literary masterpiece. his genius was, in fact, akin to the genius of an actor, an actor who, not for the moment but permanently, becomes the part that he seeks to represent. and he was never so much at home as when he was illustrating his own reading of a drama from the tones and gestures of the stage. it may be doubted whether, under stress of this impulse, he was not led to force the analogy between sheridan and the dramatists of the restoration. the analogy doubtless exists, but in his wish to bring home to his readers the inner meaning of plays, then no longer acted, he was perhaps tempted to press a resemblance to works, familiar to every play-goer, further than it could fairly be made to go. the mistake, if mistake it were, is pardonable. and it serves to illustrate the essential nature of lamb's genius as a critic, and of the new element that he brought into criticism. this was the invincible belief that poetry is not merely an art for the few, but something that finds an echo in the common instincts of all men, something that, coming from the heart, naturally clothes itself in fitting words and gives individual colour to each tone, gesture, and expression. these, therefore, we must study if we would penetrate to the open secret of the artist, if we would seize the vital spirit of his utterance and make it our own. lamb's sense of poetic form, his instinct for subtle shades of difference, was far keener than hazlitt's. and for that very reason he may be said to have seen yet more clearly than hazlitt saw, how inseparable is the tie that binds poetry to life. it is not only in its deeper undertones, lamb seems to remind us, but in its finest shades of voice and phrasing, that poetry is the echo of some mood or temper of the soul. this is the vein that he opened, and which, with wider scope and a touch still more delicate, has since been explored by mr. pater. the two shorter pieces speak for themselves. they are taken from the _specimens of english dramatic poets_ ( ). the artificial comedy, or comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our stage. congreve and farquhar show their heads once in seven years only, to be exploded and put down instantly. the times cannot bear this. is it for a few wild speeches, an occasional licence of dialogue? i think not altogether. the business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. we screw everything up to that. idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. we have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. we see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. we are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not reducible in life to the point of strict morality), and take it all for truth. we substitute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly. we try him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the _dramatis persona_, his peers. we have been spoiled with--not sentimental comedy--but a tyrant far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all-devouring drama of common life; where the moral point is everything; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy), we recognize ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies,--the same as in life,--with an interest in what is going on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for a moment. what is there transacting, by no modification is made to affect us in any other manner than the same events or characters would do in our relationships of life. we carry our fireside concerns to the theatre with us. we do not go thither like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. we must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of ulysses to descend twice to the shades. all that neutral ground of character, which stood between vice and virtue; or which in fact was indifferent to neither, where neither properly was called in question; that happy breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning--the sanctuary and quiet alsatia of hunted casuistry--is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. the privileges of the place are taken away by law. we dare not dally with images, or names, of wrong. we bark like foolish dogs at shadows. we dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder, and fear a painted pustule. in our anxiety that our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket surtout of precaution against the breeze and sunshine. i confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) i am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience,--not to live always in the precincts of the law- courts,--but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions--to get into recesses, whither the hunter cannot follow me-- secret shades of woody ida's inmost grove, while yet there was no fear of jove. i come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. i wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. i do not know how it is with others, but i feel the better always for the perusal of one of congreve's-- nay, why should i not add even of wycherley's--comedies. i am the gayer at least for it; and i could never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. they are a world of themselves almost as much as fairy-land. take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the catos of the pit could desire; because in a modern play i am to judge of the right and the wrong. the standard of police is the measure of political justice. the atmosphere will blight it; it cannot live here. it has got into a moral world, where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong; as dizzy, and incapable of making a stand, as a sweden-borgian bad spirit that has wandered unawares into the sphere of one of his good men, or angels. but in its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad?--the fainalls and the mirabels, the dorimants and the lady touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not offend my moral sense; in fact, they do not appeal to it at all. they seem engaged in their proper element. they break through no laws or conscientious restraints. they know of none. they have got out of christendom into the land--what shall i call it?-of cuckoldry--the utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. it is altogether a speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is. no good person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person suffers on the stage. judged morally, every character in these plays--the few exceptions only are mistakes--is alike essentially vain and worthless. the great art of congreve is specially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his scenes--some little generosities in the part of angelica [footnote: in _love for love_] perhaps excepted--not only anything like a faultless character, but any pretensions to goodness or good feelings whatsoever. whether he did this designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as happy as the design (if design) was bold. i used to wonder at the strange power which his _way of the world_ in particular possesses of interesting you all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing--for you neither hate nor love his personages--and i think it is owing to this very indifference for any, that you endure the whole. he has spread a privation of moral light, i will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over his creations; and his shadows flit before you without distinction or preference. had he introduced a good character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties, the impertinent goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of deformities, which now are none, because we think them none. translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets,--the business of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. no other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognized; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. but we do them wrong in so translating them. no such effects are produced, in their world. when we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. we are not to judge them by our usages. no reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings--for they have none among them. no peace of families is violated--for no family ties exist among them. no purity of the marriage bed is stained--for none is supposed to have a being. no deep affections are disquieted, no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder--for affection's depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. there is neither right nor wrong,--gratitude or its opposite,--claim or duty,--paternity or sonship. of what consequence is it to virtue, or how is she at all concerned about it, whether sir simon or dapperwit steal away miss martha; or who is the father of lord froth's or sir paul pliant's children? the whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as unconcerned at the issues, for life or death, as at the battle of the frogs and mice. but, like don quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently. we dare not contemplate an atlantis, a scheme out of which our coxcombical moral sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. we have not the courage to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. we cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. we would indict our very dreams. amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen the _school for scandal_ in its glory. this comedy grew out of congreve and wycherley, but gathered some allays of the sentimental comedy which followed theirs. it is impossible that it should be now _acted_, though it continues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. its hero, when palmer played it at least, was joseph surface. when i remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice--to express it in a word--the downright _acted_ villany of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness,--the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy,--which made jack so deservedly a favourite in that character, i must needs conclude the present generation of playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. i freely confess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother; that, in fact, i liked him quite as well. not but there are passages,--like that, for instance, where joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a poor relation,--incongruities which sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental comedy, either of which must destroy the other--but over these obstructions jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more shocked you, than the easy compliance of charles gave you in reality any pleasure; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. the highly artificial manner of palmer in this character counteracted every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them real, between the two brothers. you did not believe in joseph with the same faith with which you believed in charles. the latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. the comedy, i have said, is incongruous; a mixture of congreve with sentimental incompatibilities; the gaiety upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of palmer to reconcile the discordant elements. a player with jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the part in the same manner. he would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend to unrealize, and so to make the character fascinating. he must take his cue from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the deathbeds of those geniuses are contrasted in the prints, which i am sorry to say have disappeared from the windows of my old friend carrington bowles, of st. paul's churchyard memory--(an exhibition as venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at the hour of death; where the ghastly apprehensions of the former,--and truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting-fork is not to be despised,--so finely contrast with the meek complacent kissing of the rod,--taking it in like honey and butter,--with which the latter submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, time, who wields his lancet with the apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies' surgeon. what flesh, like loving grass, would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate mower? john palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. he was playing to you all the while that he was playing upon sir peter and his lady. you had the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips. his altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it. what was it to you if that half reality, the husband, was overreached by the puppetry--or the thin thing (lady teazle's reputation) was persuaded it was dying of a plethory? the fortunes of othello and desdemona were not concerned in it. poor jack has passed from the stage in good time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness. the pleasant old teazle _king_, too, is gone in good time. his manner would scarce have passed current in our day. we must love or hate--acquit or condemn--censure or pity--exert our detestable coxcombry of moral judgment upon everything. joseph surface, to go down now, must be a downright revolting villain--no compromise--his first appearance must shock and give horror--his specious plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties of our fathers welcomed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic harm even) could come, or was meant to come, of them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion. charles (the real canting person of the scene--for the hypocrisy of joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends, but his brother's professions of a good heart centre in down right self-satisfaction) must be _loved_ and joseph _hated_. to balance one disagreeable reality with another, sir peter teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings (while king acted it) were evidently as much played off at you, as they were meant to concern anybody on the stage,--he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury--a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged--the genuine crim. con. antagonist of the villainous seducer joseph. to realize him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life--must (or should) make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a neighbour or old friend. the delicious scenes which give the play its name and zest, must affect you in the same serious manner as if you heard the reputation of a dear female friend attacked in your real presence. crabtree and sir benjamin--those poor snakes that live but in the sunshine of your mirth--must be ripened by this hot-bed process of realization into asps or amphisbaenas; and mrs. candour--o! frightful!--become a hooded serpent. oh! who that remembers parsons and dodd--the wasp and butterfly of the _school for scandal_--in those two characters; and charming natural miss pope, the perfect gentle woman as distinguished from the fine lady of comedy, in the latter part--would forego the true scenic delight--the escape from life--the oblivion of consequences--the holiday barring out of the pedant reflection--those saturnalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the world--to sit instead at one of our modern plays--to have his coward conscience (that forsooth must not be left for a moment) stimulated with perpetual appeals--dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty without repose must be--and his moral vanity pampered with images of notional justice, notional beneficence, lives saved without the spectator's risk, and fortunes given away that cost the author nothing? no piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as this _manager's comedy_. miss farren had succeeded to mrs. abington in lady teazle; and smith, the original charles, had retired when i first saw it. the rest of the characters, with very slight exceptions, remained. i remember it was then the fashion to cry down john kemble, who took the part of charles after smith; but, i thought, very unjustly. smith, i fancy, was more airy, and took the eye with a certain gaiety of person. he brought with him no sombre recollections of tragedy. he had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in lofty declamation. he had no sins of hamlet or of richard to atone for. his failure in these parts was a passport to success in one of so opposite a tendency. but, as far as i could judge, the weighty sense of kemble made up for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. his harshest tones in this part came steeped and dulcified in good-humour. he made his defects a grace. his exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served to convey the points of his dialogue with more precision. it seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. i remember minutely how he delivered each in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine how any of them could be altered for the better. no man could deliver brilliant dialogue-the dialogue of congreve or of wycherley-because none understood it-half so well as john kemble. his valentine, in _love for love_, was, to my recollection, faultless. he flagged sometimes in the intervals of tragic passion. he would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character. his macbeth has been known to nod. but he always seemed to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. the relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since him--the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in hamlet--the sportive relief which he threw into the darker shades of richard--disappeared with him. he had his sluggish moods, his torpors--but they were the halting-stones and resting-place of his tragedy--politic savings, and fetches of the breath--husbandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist--rather, i think, than errors of the judgment. they were, at worst, less painful than the eternal, tormenting, unappeasable vigilance,--the "lidless dragon eyes", of present fashionable tragedy. vii.--on webster's _duchess of malfi_. all the several parts of the dreadful apparatus with which the duchess's death is ushered in, are not more remote from the conceptions of ordinary vengeance, than the strange character of suffering which they seem to bring upon their victims is beyond the imagination of ordinary poets. as they are not like inflictions _of this life_, so her language seems _not of this world_. she has lived among horrors till she is become "native and endowed unto that element". she speaks the dialect of despair, her tongue has a snatch of tartarus and the souls in bale.--what are "luke's iron crown", the brazen bull of perillus, procrustes' bed, to the waxen images which counterfeit death, to the wild masque of madmen, the tomb-maker, the bellman, the living person's dirge, the mortification by degrees! to move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit--this only a webster can do. writers of an inferior genius may "upon horror's head horrors accumulate", but they cannot do this. they mistake quantity for quality, they "terrify babes with painted devils", but they know not how a soul is capable of being moved; their terrors want dignity, their affrightments are without decorum. viii.--on ford's _broken heart_. i do not know where to find in any play a catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so surprising as this. this is indeed, according to milton, to "describe high passions and high actions". the fortitude of the spartan boy who let a beast gnaw out his bowels till he died without expressing a groan, is a faint bodily image of this dilaceration of the spirit and exenteration of the inmost mind, which calantha with a holy violence against her nature keeps closely covered, till the last duties of a wife and a queen are fulfilled. stories of martyrdom are but of chains and the stake; a little bodily suffering; these torments on the purest spirits prey as on entrails, joints, and limbs, with answerable pains, but more intense. what a noble thing is the soul in its strengths and in its weaknesses! who would be less weak than calantha? who can be so strong? the expression of this transcendent scene almost bears me in imagination to calvary and the cross; and i seem to perceive some analogy between the scenical sufferings which i am here contemplating, and the real agonies of that final completion to which i dare no more than hint a reference. ford was of the first order of poets. he sought for sublimity, not by parcels in metaphors or visible images, but directly where she has her full residence in the heart of man; in the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds. there is a grandeur of the soul above mountains, seas, and the elements. even in the poor perverted reason of giovanni and annabella (in the play which precedes this) we discern traces of that fiery particle, which in the irregular starting out of the road of beaten action, discovers something of a right line even in obliquity and shows hints of an improvable greatness in the lowest descents and degradations of our nature. percy bysshe shelley. ( - ) ix. a defence of poetry. _the defence of poetry_ was written in the early months of , the year before shelley's death. its immediate occasion was an essay on _the four ages of poetry_ by t l peacock. but all allusions to peacock's work were cut out by john hunt when he prepared it--in vain, as things proved--for publication in _the liberal_, and it remains, as peacock said, "a defence without an attack". for all essential purposes, the _defence_ can only be said to have gained by shaking off its local and temporary reference. it expresses shelley's deepest thoughts about poetry, and marks, as clearly as any writing of the last hundred years, the width of the gulf that separates the ideals of recent poetry from those of the century preceding the french revolution. it may be compared with sidney's _apologie_ on the one hand, and with wordsworth's preface to the _lyrical ballads_, or the more abstract parts of carlyle's critical writings upon the other. the fundamental conceptions of shelley are the same as those of the elizabethan critic and of his own great contemporaries. but he differs from sidney and wordsworth, and perhaps from carlyle also, in laying more stress upon the outward form, and particularly the musical element, of poetry, and from sidney in laying less stress upon its directly moral associations. he thus attains to a wider and truer view of his subject, and, while insisting as strongly as wordsworth insists upon the kinship between the matter of poetry and that of truth or science, he also recognizes, as wordsworth commonly did not, that there is a harmony between the imaginative conception of that matter and its outward expression, and that beautiful thought must necessarily clothe itself in beauty of language and of sound. there is not in our literature any clearer presentment of the inseparable connection between the matter and form of poetry, nor of the ideal element which, under different shapes, is the life and soul of both. [see shelley's letters to peacock and other of february and , and of march and , ] according to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity. the one is the [greek transliterated: to poiein], or the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the [greek transliterated: to logizein], or principle of analysis, and its action regards the relations of things simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results. reason is the enumeration of qualities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance. poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of the imagination": and poetry is connate with the origin of man. man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an aolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. but there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. it is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. a child at play by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions; and every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression; and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. in relation to the objects which delight a child, these expressions are what poetry is to higher objects. the savage (for the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those objects, and of his apprehension of them. man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative arts become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony. the social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained within the present, as the plant within the seed: and equality, diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles alone capable of affording the motives according to which the will of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind. hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. but let us dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an inquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its forms. in the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order. and, although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in the series of their imitations of natural objects. for there is a certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other: the sense of an approximation to this order has been called taste by modern writers. every man in the infancy of art observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which this highest delight results; but the diversity is not sufficiently marked, as that its gradations should be sensible, except in those instances where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community. their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then, if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. these similitudes or relations are finely said by lord bacon to be "the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world" [footnote: _de augment. scient._, cap. i, lib. iii.]--and he considers the faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. in the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful; in a word, the good which exists in the relation subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry. but poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like janus, have a double face of false and true. poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. for he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. not that i assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. a poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. the grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of aschylus, and the book of job, and dante's paradise, would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. the creations of sculpture, painting, and music are illustrations still more decisive. language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action are all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of the cause. but poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man. and this springs from the nature itself of language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate combinations than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation. for language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments, and conditions of art have relations among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and expression. the former is as a mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of communication. hence the fame of sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the term; as two performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp. the fame of legislators and founders of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets, any excess will remain. we have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the faculty itself. it is necessary, however, to make the circle still narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy. sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. hence the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence than the words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. the plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower--and this is the burthen of the curse of babel. an observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music, produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony and language. yet it is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. the practice is indeed convenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such composition as includes much action: but every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification. the distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error. the distinction between philosophers and poets has been anticipated. plato was essentially a poet--the truth and splendour of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive. he rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style. cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his periods, but with little success. lord bacon was a poet. [footnote: see the filum labyrinthi, and the essay on death particularly.] his language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. all the authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth; but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. nor are those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who have omitted that form. shakespeare, dante, and milton (to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest power. a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. there is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. the one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature. time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of poetry, and for ever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. a story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. the parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as a whole being a poem. a single sentence may be considered as a whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated portions; a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought. and thus all the great historians, herodotus, plutarch, livy, were poets; and although the plan of these writers, especially that of livy, restrained them from developing this faculty in its highest degree, they made copious and ample amends for their subjection by filling all the interstices of their subjects with living images. having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed to estimate its effects upon society. poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight. in the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the strength and splendour of their union. even in modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by time from the selectest of the wise of many generations. a poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. the poems of homer and his contemporaries were the delight of infant greece; they were the elements of that social system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has reposed. homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to achilles, hector, and ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation they identified themselves with the objects of their admiration. nor let it be objected that these characters are remote from moral perfection, and that they can by no means be considered as edifying patterns for general imitation. every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors; revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age; and self-deceit is the veiled image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. but a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. an epic or dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he may the ancient armour or the modern uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either. the beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. a majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit, &c., be not necessary to temper this planetary music for mortal ears. the whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. but poetry acts in another and diviner manner. it awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. the great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. a man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. the great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. a poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. by this assumption of the inferior office of interpreting the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would resign a glory in a participation in the cause. there was little danger that homer, or any of the eternal poets, should have so far misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as euripides, lucan, tasso, spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose. homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the dramatic and lyrical poets of athens, who flourished contemporaneously with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the poetical faculty; architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture, philosophy, and we may add, the forms of civil life. for although the scheme of athenian society was deformed by many imperfections which the poetry existing in chivalry and christianity has erased from the habits and institutions of modern europe; yet never at any other period has so much energy, beauty, and virtue been developed; never was blind strength and stubborn form so disciplined and rendered subject to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to the dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during the century which preceded the death of socrates. of no other epoch in the history of our species have we records and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity in man. but it is poetry alone, in form, in action, or in language, which has rendered this epoch memorable above all others, and the storehouse of examples to everlasting time. for written poetry existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and it is an idle inquiry to demand which gave and which received the light, which all, as from a common focus, have scattered over the darkest periods of succeeding time. we know no more of cause and effect than a constant conjunction of events: poetry is ever found to coexist with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection of man. i appeal to what has already been established to distinguish between the cause and the effect. it was at the period here adverted to that the drama had its birth; and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those few great specimens of the athenian drama which have been preserved to us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was understood or practised according to the true philosophy of it, as at athens. for the athenians employed language, action, music, painting, the dance, and religious institutions to produce a common effect in the representation of the highest idealisms of passion and of power; each division in the art was made perfect in its kind by artists of the most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a beautiful proportion and unity one towards the other. on the modern stage a few only of the elements capable of expressing the image of the poet's conception are employed at once. we have tragedy without music and dancing; and music and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they are the fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. religious institution has indeed been usually banished from the stage. our system of divesting the actor's face of a mask, on which the many expressions appropriate to his dramatic character might be moulded into one permanent and unchanging expression, is favourable only to a partial and inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a monologue, where all the attention may be directed to some great master of ideal mimicry. the modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be, as in _king lear_, universal, ideal, and sublime. it is perhaps the intervention of this principle which determines the balance in favour of _king lear_ against the _oedipus tyrannus_ or the _agamemnon_, or, if you will, the trilogies with which they are connected; unless the intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the latter, should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. _king lear_, if it can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world; in spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected by the ignorance of the philosophy of the drama which has prevailed in modern europe. calderon, in his religious _autos_, has attempted to fulfill some of the high conditions of dramatic representation neglected by shakespeare; such as the establishing a relation between the drama and religion, and the accommodating them to music and dancing; but he omits the observation of conditions still more important, and more is lost than gained by the substitution of the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of human passion. but i digress.--the connection of scenic exhibitions with the improvement or corruption of the manners of men has been universally recognized; in other words, the presence or absence of poetry in its most perfect and universal form has been found to be connected with good and evil in conduct or habit. the corruption which has been imputed to the drama as an effect, begins when the poetry employed in its constitution ends: i appeal to the history of manners whether the periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the other have not corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral cause and effect. the drama at athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its perfection, ever coexisted with the moral and intellectual greatness of the age. the tragedies of the athenian poets are as mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would become. the imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its willfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. in a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles. the drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall. but in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with that decay. tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of the kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood, or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as moral truths; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness with which the author, in common with his auditors, are infected. hence what has been called the classical and domestic drama. addison's _cato_ is a specimen of the one; and would it were not superfluous to cite examples of the other! to such purposes poetry cannot be made subservient. poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. and thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this nature are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and passion, which, divested of imagination, are other names for caprice and appetite. the period in our own history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of charles ii., when all forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue. milton stood alone illuminating an age unworthy of him. at such periods the calculating principle pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to be expressed upon them. comedy loses its ideal universality: wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph, instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt succeed to sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret. the drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other, the connection of poetry and social good is more observable in the drama than in whatever other form. and it is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life. but, as machiavelli says of political institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. and this is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all language, institution and form, require not only to be produced, but to be sustained: the office and character of a poet participates in the divine nature as regards providence, no less than as regards creation. civil war, the spoils of asia, and the fatal predominance, first of the macedonian, and then of the roman arms, were so many symbols of the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in greece. the bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of sicily and egypt, were the latest representatives of its most glorious reign. their poetry is intensely melodious; like the odour of the tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a meadow-gale of june, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field, and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own which endows the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. the bucolic and erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness in statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners and institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which i now refer. nor is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to which this want of harmony is to be imputed. an equal sensibility to the influence of the senses and the affections is to be found in the writings of homer and sophocles: the former, especially, has clothed sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions. their superiority over these succeeding writers consists in the presence of those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not in the absence of those which are connected with the external: their incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. it is not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which their imperfection consists. it is not inasmuch as they were poets, but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. had that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved. for the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. it begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a paralysing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives. at the approach of such a period, poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, like the footsteps of astraa, departing from the world. poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil time. it will readily be confessed that those among the luxurious citizens of syracuse and alexandria, who were delighted with the poems of theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and sensual than the remnant of their tribe. but corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can ever cease. the sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjointed, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life of all. it is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of social renovation. and let us not circumscribe the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of those to whom it was addressed. they may have perceived the beauty of those immortal compositions, simply as fragments and isolated portions: those who are more finely organized, or, born in a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world. the same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancient rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. the romans appear to have considered the greeks as the selectest treasuries of the selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to have abstained from creating in measured language, sculpture, music, or architecture anything which might bear a particular relation to their own condition, whilst it should bear a general one to the universal constitution of the world. but we judge from partial evidence, and we judge perhaps partially. ennius, varro, pacuvius, and accius, all great poets, have been lost. lucretius is in the highest, and virgil in a very high sense, a creator. the chosen delicacy of expressions of the latter are as a mist of light which conceal from us the intense and exceeding truth of his conceptions of nature. livy is instinct with poetry. yet horace, catullus, ovid, and generally the other great writers of the virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of greece. the institutions also, and the religion of rome, were less poetical than those of greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the substance. hence poetry in rome seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the perfection of political and domestic society. the true poetry of rome lived in its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true, and majestic they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates the order in which they consist. the life of camillus, the death of regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state, of the victorious gauls; the refusal of the republic to make peace with hannibal after the battle of cannae, were not the consequences of a refined calculation of the probable personal advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas. the imagination, beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire, and the reward ever-living fame. these things are not the less poetry, _quia carent vate sacro_. they are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of men. the past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with their harmony. at length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the circle of its revolutions. and the world would have fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the authors of the christian and chivalric systems of manners and religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, became as generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. it is foreign to the present purpose to touch upon the evil produced by these systems: except that we protest, on the ground of the principles already established, that no portion of it can be attributed to the poetry they contain. it is probable that the poetry of moses, job, david, solomon, and isaiah had produced a great effect upon the mind of jesus and his disciples. the scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers of this extraordinary person are all instinct with the most vivid poetry. but his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. at a certain period after the prevalence of a system of opinions founded upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into which plato had distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of apotheosis, and became the object of the worship of the civilized world. here it is to be confessed that "light seems to thicken", and "the crow makes wing to the rooky wood, good things of day begin to droop and drowse, and night's black agents to their preys do rouse". but mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. listen to the music, unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind, nourishing its everlasting course with strength and swiftness. the poetry in the doctrines of jesus christ, and the mythology and institutions of the celtic [footnote: the confusion between celtic and teutonic is constant in the writers of the eighteenth century and the early part of this.] conquerors of the roman empire, outlived the darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and opinion. it is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the christian doctrines or the predominance of the celtic nations. whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress of despotism and superstition. men, from causes too intricate to be here discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own will had become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of the will of others: lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud characterized a race amongst whom no one was to be found capable of creating in form, language, or institution. the moral anomalies of such a state of society are not justly to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected with them, and those events are most entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it most expeditiously. it is unfortunate for those who cannot distinguish words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies have been incorporated into our popular religion. it was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry of the christian and chivalric systems began to manifest themselves. the principle of equality had been discovered and applied by plato in his republic, as the theoretical rule of the mode in which the materials of pleasure and of power produced by the common skill and labour of human beings ought to be distributed among them. the limitations of this rule were asserted by him to be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the utility to result to all. plato, following the doctrines of timaeus and pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at once the past, the present, and the future condition of man. jesus christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and christianity, in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. the incorporation of the celtic nations with the exhausted population of the south, impressed upon it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and institutions. the result was a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any other without incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. the abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among the consequences of these events. the abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. the freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. love became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. it was as if the statues of apollo and the muses had been endowed with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers; so that earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world. the familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of eden. and as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art: _galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse_. the provencal trouveurs, or inventors, preceded petrarch, whose verses are as spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love. it is impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous to explain how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self. dante understood the secret things of love even more than petrarch. his _vita nuova_ is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language: it is the idealized history of that period, and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. his apotheosis of beatrice in paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne of the supreme cause, is the most glorious imagination of modern poetry. the acutest critics have justly reversed the judgment of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the _divine drama_, in the measure of the admiration which they accord to the hell, purgatory, and paradise. the latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting love. love, which found a worthy poet in plato alone of all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and superstition. at successive intervals, ariosto, tasso, shakespeare, spenser, calderon, rousseau, and the great writers of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting, as it were, trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force. the true relation borne to each other by the sexes into which human kind is distributed has become less misunderstood; and if the error which confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two sexes has been partially recognized in the opinions and institutions of modern europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets. the poetry of dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world. the distorted notions of invisible things which dante and his rival milton have idealized are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. it is a difficult question to determine how far they were conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted in their minds between their own creeds and that of the people. dante at least appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by placing rhipaus, whom virgil calls _justissimus unus_, in paradise, [footnote: _paradiso, xx_. .] and observing a most heretical caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. and milton's poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system, of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular support. nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of satan as expressed in _paradise lost_. it is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his conquest in the victor. milton's devil as a moral being is as far superior to his god as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a violation) as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his god over his devil. and this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the supremacy of milton's genius. he mingled, as it were, the elements of human nature as colours upon a single pallet, and arranged them in the composition of his great picture according to the laws of epic truth; that is, according to the laws of that principle by which a series of actions of the external universe and of intelligent and ethical beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of succeeding generations of mankind. the _divina commedia_ and _paradise lost_ have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of genius. homer was the first and dante the second epic poet: that is, the second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it, developing itself in correspondence with their development. for lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world; and virgil, with a modesty that ill became his genius, had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all that he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds, though their notes were sweet, apollonius rhodius, quintus calaber, nonnus, lucan, statius, or claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single condition of epic truth. milton was the third epic poet. for if the title of epic in its highest sense be refused to the _aneid_ still less can it be conceded to the _orlando furioso_, the _gerusalemme liberata_, the _lusiad, or the _fairy queen_. dante and milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient religion of the civilized world; and its spirit exists in their poetry probably in the same proportion as its forms survived in the unreformed worship of modern europe. the one preceded and the other followed the reformation at almost equal intervals. dante was the first religious reformer, and luther surpassed him rather in the rudeness and acrimony than in the boldness of his censures of papal usurpation. dante was the first awakener of entranced europe; he created a language, in itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. he was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the resurrection of learning; the lucifer of that starry flock which in the thirteenth century shone forth from republican italy, as from a heaven, into the darkness of the benighted world. his very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with the lightning which has yet found no conductor. all high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. a great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight. the age immediately succeeding to that of dante, petrarch, and boccaccio was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture, and architecture. chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the superstructure of english literature is based upon the materials of italian invention. but let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history of poetry and its influence on society. be it enough to have pointed out the effects of poets, in the large and true sense of the word, upon their own and all succeeding times. but poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners and mechanists on another plea. it is admitted that the exercise of the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged that that of reason is more useful. let us examine, as the grounds of this distinction, what is here meant by utility. pleasure or good, in a general sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive and intelligent being seeks, and in which, when found, it acquiesces. there are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal, and permanent; the other transitory and particular. utility may either express the means of producing the former or the latter. in the former sense, whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. but a narrower meaning may be assigned to the word utility, confining it to express that which banishes the importunity of the wants of our animal nature, the surrounding men with security of life, the dispersing the grosser delusions of superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of personal advantage. undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have their appointed office in society. they follow the footsteps of poets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of common life. they make space, and give time. their exertions are of the highest value, so long as they confine their administration of the concerns of the inferior powers of our nature within the limits due to the superior ones. but whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the french writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men. whilst the mechanist abridges, and the political economist combines labour, let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in modern england, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and want. they have exemplified the saying, "to him that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be taken away". the rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the scylla and charybdis of anarchy and despotism. such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty. it is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. for, from an inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior portions of our being. sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. this is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. and hence the saying, "it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of mirth". not that this highest species of pleasure is necessarily linked with pain. the delight of love and friendship, the ecstasy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the perception, and still more of the creation of poetry, is often wholly unalloyed. the production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true utility. those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or poetical philosophers. the exertions of locke, hume, gibbon, voltaire, rousseau [footnote: although rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a poet. the others, even voltaire, were mere reasoners.], and their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited had they never lived. a little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children burnt as heretics. we might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the inquisition in spain. but it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither dante, petrarch, boccaccio, chaucer, shakespeare, calderon, lord bacon, nor milton had ever existed; if raphael and michael angelo had never been born; if the hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. the human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself. we have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. the poetry in these systems of thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. there is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government, and political economy, or, at least, what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. but we let "_i dare not_ wait upon _i would_, like the poor cat in the adage". we want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. the cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. to what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining labour, to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind? from what other cause has it arisen that the discoveries which should have lightened have added a weight to the curse imposed on adam? poetry, and the principle of self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the god and mammon of the world. the functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. the cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceeds the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. the body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it. poetry is indeed something divine. it is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. it is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. it is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendour of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. what were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship--what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave--and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. a man cannot say, "i will compose poetry". the greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. i appeal to the greatest poets of the present day whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study. the toil and the delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connection of the spaces between their suggestions by the intermixture of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself: for milton conceived the _paradise lost_ as a whole before he executed it in portions. we have his own authority also for the muse having "dictated" to him the "unpremeditated song". and let this be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the _orlando furioso_. compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. this instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process. poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. we are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. it is, as it were, the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sands which paves it. these and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. the enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. it transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms. all things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. "the mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." but poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. and whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. it makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. it reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. it compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. it creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. it justifies the bold and true words of tasso _--non merita nome di creatore, se non iddio ed il poeta._ a poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. as to his glory, let time be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor of human life be comparable to that of a poet. that he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men: and the exceptions, as they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet inferior degree, will be found on consideration to confine rather than destroy the rule. let us for a moment stoop to the arbitration of popular breath, and usurping and uniting in our own persons the incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge, and executioner, let us decide, without trial, testimony, or form, that certain motives of those who are "there sitting where we dare not soar", are reprehensible. let us assume that homer was a drunkard, that virgil was a flatterer, that horace was a coward, that tasso was a madman, that lord bacon was a peculator, that raphael was a libertine, that spenser was a poet-laureate. it is inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living poets, but posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins "were as scarlet, they are now white as snow"; they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, time. observe in what a ludicrous chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime have been confused in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets; consider how little is, as it appears--or appears, as it is; look to your own motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged. poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that it is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection with the consciousness or will. it is presumptuous to determine that these are the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when mental effects are experienced unsusceptible of being referred to them. the frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce in the mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its own nature and with its effects upon other minds. but in the intervals of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually live. but as he is more delicately organized than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure, both his own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the one and pursue the other with an ardour proportioned to this difference. and he renders himself obnoxious to calumny when he neglects to observe the circumstances under which these objects of universal pursuit and flight have disguised themselves in one another's garments. but there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil have never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives of poets. i have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set down these remarks according to the order in which they were suggested to my mind by a consideration of the subject itself, instead of observing the formality of a polemical reply; but if the view which they contain be just, they will be found to involve a refutation of the arguers against poetry, so far at least as regards the first division of the subject. i can readily conjecture what should have moved the gall of some learned and intelligent writers who quarrel with certain versifiers; i confess myself, like them, unwilling to be stunned by the theseids of the hoarse codri of the day. bavius and maevius undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferable persons. but it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than confound. the first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its elements and principles; and it has been shown, as well as the narrow limits assigned them would permit, that what is called poetry, in a restricted sense, has a common source with all other forms of order and of beauty, according to which the materials of human life are susceptible of being arranged, and which is poetry in an universal sense. the second part [footnote: it was never written.] will have for its object an application of these principles to the present state of the cultivation of poetry, and a defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners and opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative and creative faculty. for the literature of england, an energetic development of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free development of the national will, has arisen, as it were, from a new birth. in spite of the low- thoughted envy which would undervalue contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual achievements, and we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty. the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution is poetry. at such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting men and nature. the persons in whom this power resides may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. but even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. it is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. they measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. thomas carlyle. ( - .) x. goethe. the brief account here given of the work of goethe was originally published as part of the introduction to the volume of translations called _german romance_, which was published in . it is now commonly printed as an appendix to the first volume of carlyle's _miscellanies_. carlyle was probably never at his best when he gave himself to the study of a particular author. his genius rather lay in the more general aspects of his work, and in the force with which he gave an entirely new turn to the currents of english criticism. of his studies upon particular authors, the essay on burns is perhaps the most complete and the most penetrating. but it is too long for the purposes of this selection. nor is it amiss that he should here be represented by a work which may remind us that, among his services to english letters, to have opened the stores of german poetry and thought was by no means the least memorable. of a nature so rare and complex as goethe's it is difficult to form a true comprehension; difficult even to express what comprehension one has formed. in goethe's mind, the first aspect that strikes us is its calmness, then its beauty; a deeper inspection reveals to us its vastness and unmeasured strength. this man rules, and is not ruled. the stern and fiery energies of a most passionate soul lie silent in the centre of his being; a trembling sensibility has been inured to stand, without flinching or murmur, the sharpest trials. nothing outward, nothing inward, shall agitate or control him. the brightest and most capricious fancy, the most piercing and inquisitive intellect, the wildest and deepest imagination; the highest thrills of joy, the bitterest pangs of sorrow: all these are his, he is not theirs. while he moves every heart from its steadfastness, his own is firm and still: the words that search into the inmost recesses of our nature, he pronounces with a tone of coldness and equanimity; in the deepest pathos he weeps not, or his tears are like water trickling from a rock of adamant. he is king of himself and of his world; nor does he rule it like a vulgar great man, like a napoleon or charles twelfth, by the mere brute exertion of his will, grounded on no principle, or on a false one: his faculties and feelings are not fettered or prostrated under the iron sway of passion, but led and guided in kindly union under the mild sway of reason; as the fierce primeval elements of nature were stilled at the coming of light, and bound together, under its soft vesture, into a glorious and beneficent creation. this is the true rest of man; no stunted unbelieving callousness, no reckless surrender to blind force, no opiate delusion; but the harmonious adjustment of necessity and accident, of what is changeable and what is unchangeable in our destiny; the calm supremacy of the spirit over its circumstances; the dim aim of every human soul, the full attainment of only a chosen few. it comes not unsought to any; but the wise are wise because they think no price too high for it. goethe's inward home has been reared by slow and laborious efforts; but it stands on no hollow or deceitful basis: for his peace is not from blindness, but from clear vision; not from uncertain hope of alteration, but from sure insight into what cannot alter. his world seems once to have been desolate and baleful as that of the darkest sceptic: but he has covered it anew with beauty and solemnity, derived from deeper sources, over which doubt can have no sway. he has inquired fearlessly, and fearlessly searched out and denied the false; but he has not forgotten, what is equally essential and infinitely harder, to search out and admit the true. his heart is still full of warmth, though his head is clear and cold; the world for him is still full of grandeur, though he clothes it with no false colours; his fellow-creatures are still objects of reverence and love, though their basenesses are plainer to no eye than to his. to reconcile these contradictions is the task of all good men, each for himself, in his own way and manner; a task which, in our age, is encompassed with difficulties peculiar to the time; and which goethe seems to have accomplished with a success that few can rival. a mind so in unity with itself, even though it were a poor and small one, would arrest our attention, and win some kind regard from us; but when this mind ranks among the strongest and most complicated of the species, it becomes a sight full of interest, a study full of deep instruction. such a mind as goethe's is the fruit not only of a royal endowment by nature, but also of a culture proportionate to her bounty. in goethe's original form of spirit we discern the highest gifts of manhood, without any deficiency of the lower: he has an eye and a heart equally for the sublime, the common, and the ridiculous; the elements at once of a poet, a thinker, and a wit. of his culture we have often spoken already; and it deserves again to be held up to praise and imitation. this, as he himself unostentatiously confesses, has been the soul of all his conduct, the great enterprise of his life; and few that understand him will be apt to deny that he has prospered. as a writer, his resources have been accumulated from nearly all the provinces of human intellect and activity; and he has trained himself to use these complicated instruments with a light expertness which we might have admired in the professor of a solitary department. freedom, and grace, and smiling earnestness are the characteristics of his works: the matter of them flows along in chaste abundance, in the softest combination; and their style is referred to by native critics as the highest specimen of the german tongue. on this latter point the vote of a stranger may well be deemed unavailing; but the charms of goethe's style lie deeper than the mere words; for language, in the hands of a master, is the express image of thought, or rather it is the body of which thought is the soul; the former rises into being together with the latter, and the graces of the one are shadowed forth in the movements of the other. goethe's language, even to a foreigner, is full of character and secondary meanings; polished, yet vernacular and cordial, it sounds like the dialect of wise, ancient, and true-hearted men: in poetry, brief, sharp, simple, and expressive; in prose, perhaps still more pleasing; for it is at once concise and full, rich, clear, unpretending and melodious; and the sense, not presented in alternating flashes, piece after piece revealed and withdrawn, rises before us as in continuous dawning, and stands at last simultaneously complete, and bathed in the mellowest and ruddiest sunshine. it brings to mind what the prose of hooker, bacon, milton, browne, would have been, had they written under the good, without the bad influences, of that french precision, which has polished and attenuated, trimmed and impoverished, all modern languages; made our meaning clear, and too often shallow as well as clear. but goethe's culture as a writer is perhaps less remarkable than his culture as a man. he has learned not in head only, but also in heart: not from art and literature, but also by action and passion, in the rugged school of experience. if asked what was the grand characteristic of his writings, we should not say knowledge, but wisdom. a mind that has seen, and suffered, and done, speaks to us of what it has tried and conquered. a gay delineation will give us notice of dark and toilsome experiences, of business done in the great deep of the spirit; a maxim, trivial to the careless eye, will rise with light and solution over long perplexed periods of our own history. it is thus that heart speaks to heart, that the life of one man becomes a possession to all. here is a mind of the most subtle and tumultuous elements; but it is governed in peaceful diligence, and its impetuous and ethereal faculties work softly together for good and noble ends. goethe may be called a philosopher; for he loves and has practised as a man the wisdom which, as a poet, he inculcates. composure and cheerful seriousness seem to breathe over all his character. there is no whining over human woes: it is understood that we must simply all strive to alleviate or remove them. there is no noisy battling for opinions; but a persevering effort to make truth lovely, and recommend her, by a thousand avenues, to the hearts of all men. of his personal manners we can easily believe the universal report, as often given in the way of censure as of praise, that he is a man of consummate breeding and the stateliest presence: for an air of polished tolerance, of courtly, we might almost say majestic repose, and serene humanity, is visible throughout his works. in no line of them does he speak with asperity of any man; scarcely ever even of a thing. he knows the good, and loves it; he knows the bad and hateful, and rejects it; but in neither case with violence: his love is calm and active; his rejection is implied, rather than pronounced; meek and gentle, though we see that it is thorough, and never to be revoked. the noblest and the basest he not only seems to comprehend, but to personate and body forth in their most secret lineaments: hence actions and opinions appear to him as they are, with all the circumstances which extenuate or endear them to the hearts where they originated and are entertained. this also is the spirit of our shakespeare, and perhaps of every great dramatic poet. shakespeare is no sectarian; to all he deals with equity and mercy; because he knows all, and his heart is wide enough for all. in his mind the world is a whole; he figures it as providence governs it; and to him it is not strange that the sun should be caused to shine on the evil and the good, and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. goethe has been called the german voltaire; but it is a name which does him wrong, and describes him ill. except in the corresponding variety of their pursuits and knowledge, in which, perhaps, it does voltaire wrong, the two cannot be compared. goethe is all, or the best of all, that voltaire was, and he is much that voltaire did not dream of. to say nothing of his dignified and truthful character as a man, he belongs, as a thinker and a writer, to a far higher class than this _enfant gate du monde qu'il gata_. he is not a questioner and a despiser, but a teacher and a reverencer; not a destroyer, but a builder-up; not a wit only, but a wise man. of him montesquieu could not have said, with even epigrammatic truth: _il a plus que personne l'esprit que tout le monde a_. voltaire was the _cleverest_ of all past and present men; but a great man is something more, and this he surely was not. as poets, the two live not in the same hemisphere, not in the same world. of voltaire's poetry, it were blindness to deny the polished intellectual vigour, the logical symmetry, the flashes that from time to time give it the colour, if not the warmth, of fire: but it is in a far other sense than this that goethe is a poet; in a sense of which the french literature has never afforded any example. we may venture to say of him, that his province is high and peculiar; higher than any poet but himself, for several generations, has so far succeeded in, perhaps even has steadfastly attempted. in reading goethe's poetry, it perpetually strikes us that we are reading the poetry of our own day and generation. no demands are made on our credulity; the light, the science, the scepticism of the age, are not hid from us. he does not deal in antiquated mythologies, or ring changes on traditionary poetic forms; there are no supernal, no infernal influences, for _faust_ is an apparent rather than a real exception: but there is the barren prose of the nineteenth century, the vulgar life which we are all leading; and it starts into strange beauty in his hands; and we pause in delighted wonder to behold the flower of poesy blooming in that parched and rugged soil. this is the end of his _mignons_ and _harpers_, of his _tassos_ and _meisters_. poetry, as he views it, exists not in time or place, but in the spirit of man; and art, with nature, is now to perform for the poet, what nature alone performed of old. the divinities and demons, the witches, spectres, and fairies, are vanished from the world, never again to be recalled: but the imagination which created these still lives, and will forever live in man's soul; and can again pour its wizard light over the universe, and summon forth enchantments as lovely or impressive, and which its sister faculties will not contradict. to say that goethe has accomplished all this, would be to say that his genius is greater than was ever given to any man: for if it was a high and glorious mind, or rather series of minds, that peopled the first ages with their peculiar forms of poetry, it must be a series of minds much higher and more glorious that shall so people the present. the angels and demons that can lay prostrate our hearts in the nineteenth century must be of another and more cunning fashion than those that subdued us in the ninth. to have attempted, to have begun this enterprise, may be accounted the greatest praise. that goethe ever meditated it, in the form here set forth, we have no direct evidence: but indeed such is the end and aim of high poetry at all times and seasons; for the fiction of the poet is not falsehood, but the purest truth; and if he would lead captive our whole being, not rest satisfied with a part of it, he must address us on interests that _are_, not that _were_, ours; and in a dialect which finds a response, and not a contradiction, within our bosoms. how goethe has fulfilled these conditions in addressing us, an inspection of his works, but no description, can inform us. let me advise the reader to study them, and see. if he come to the task with an opinion that poetry is an amusement, a passive recreation; that its highest object is to supply a languid mind with fantastic shows and indolent emotions, his measure of enjoyment is likely to be scanty, and his criticisms will be loud, angry, and manifold. but if he know and believe that poetry is the essence of all science, and requires the purest of all studies; if he recollect that the new may not always be the false; that the excellence which can be seen in a moment is not usually a very deep one; above all, if his own heart be full of feelings and experiences, for which he finds no name and no solution, but which lie in pain imprisoned and unuttered in his breast, till the word be spoken, the spell that is to unbind them, and bring them forth to liberty and light; then, if i mistake not, he will find that in this goethe there is a new world set before his eyes; a world of earnestness and sport, of solemn cliff and gay plain; some such temple--far inferior, as it may well be, in magnificence and beauty, but a temple of the same architecture--some such temple for the spirit of our age, as the shakespeares and spensers have raised for the spirit of theirs. this seems a bold assertion: but it is not made without deliberation, and such conviction as it has stood within my means to obtain. if it invite discussion, and forward the discovery of the truth in this matter, its best purpose will be answered. goethe's genius is a study for other minds than have yet seriously engaged with it among us. by and by, apparently ere long, he will be tried and judged righteously; he himself, and no cloud instead of him; for he comes to us in such a questionable shape, that silence and neglect will not always serve our purpose. england, the chosen home of justice in all its senses, where the humblest merit has been acknowledged, and the highest fault not unduly punished, will do no injustice to this extraordinary man. and if, when her impartial sentence has been pronounced and sanctioned, it shall appear that goethe's earliest admirers have wandered too far into the language of panegyric, i hope it may be reckoned no unpardonable sin. it is spirit-stirring rather than spirit-sharpening, to consider that there is one of the prophets here with us in our own day: that a man who is to be numbered with the sages and _sacri vates_, the shakespeares, the tassos, the cervanteses of the world, is looking on the things which we look on, has dealt with the very thoughts which we have to deal with, is reigning in serene dominion over the perplexities and contradictions in which we are still painfully entangled. that goethe's mind is full of inconsistencies and shortcomings, can be a secret to no one who has heard of the fall of adam. nor would it be difficult, in this place, to muster a long catalogue of darknesses defacing our perception of this brightness: but it might be still less profitable than it is difficult; for in goethe's writings, as in those of all true masters, an apparent blemish is apt, after maturer study, to pass into a beauty. his works cannot be judged in fractions, for each of them is conceived and written as a whole; the humble and common may be no less essential there than the high and splendid: it is only chinese pictures that have no shade. there is a maxim, far better known than practised, that to detect faults is a much lower occupation than to recognize merits. we may add also, that though far easier in the execution, it is not a whit more certain in the result. what is the detecting of a fault, but the feeling of an incongruity, of a contradiction, which may exist in ourselves as well as in the object? who shall say in which? none but he who sees this object as it is, and himself as he is. we have all heard of the critic fly; but none of us doubts the compass of his own vision. it is thus that a high work of art, still more that a high and original mind, may at all times calculate on much sorriest criticism. in looking at an extraordinary man, it were good for an ordinary man to be sure of _seeing_ him, before attempting to _oversee_ him. having ascertained that goethe is an object deserving study, it will be time to censure his faults when we have clearly estimated his merits; and if we are wise judges, not till then. walter pater. ( - ) xi.--sandro botticelli. of the critics who have written during the last sixty years, mr. pater is probably the most remarkable. his work is always weighted with thought, and his thought is always fused with imagination. he unites, in a singular degree of intensity, the two crucial qualities of the critic, on the one hand a sense of form and colour and artistic utterance, on the other hand a speculative instinct which pierces behind these to the various types of idea and mood and character that underlie them. he is equally alive to subtle resemblances and to subtle differences, and art is to him not merely an intellectual enjoyment, but something which is to be taken into the spirit of a man and to become part of his life. of the _history_ of literature, and the problems that rise out of it, he takes but small account. but for the other function assigned by carlyle to criticism, for criticism as a "creative art, aiming to reproduce under a different shape the existing product of the artist, and painting to the intellect what already lay painted to the heart and the imagination"--for this no man has done more than mr. pater. with wider knowledge and a clearer consciousness of the deeper issues involved, he may be said to have taken up the work of lamb and to have carried it forward in a spirit which those who best love lamb will be the most ready to admire. of mr. pater's literary criticisms, those on wordsworth and coleridge are perhaps the most striking. but he was probably still more at home in interpreting the work of the great painters. and of his "appreciations" of painters none is more characteristic than his study of botticelli. it was written in , and published in _the renaissance_ in . in leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned by name--sandro botticelli. this pre-eminence may be due to chance only, but to some it will appear a result of deliberate judgment; for people have begun to find out the charm of botticelli's work, and his name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important. in the middle of the fifteenth century he had already anticipated much of that meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the great imaginative workmen of its close. leaving the simple religion which had occupied the followers of giotto for a century, and the simple naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only, he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the modern world, the writings of dante and boccaccio, and in new readings of his own of classical stories: or, if he painted religious incidents, painted them with an undercurrent of original sentiment, which touches you as the real matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible subject. what is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality of pleasure, which his work has the property of exciting in us, and which we cannot get elsewhere? for this, especially when he has to speak of a comparatively unknown artist, is always the chief question which a critic has to answer. in an age when the lives of artists were full of adventure, his life is almost colourless. criticism, indeed, has cleared away much of the gossip which vasari accumulated, has touched the legend of lippo and lucrezia, and rehabilitated the character of andrea del castagno. but in botticelli's case there is no legend to dissipate. he did not even go by his true name: sandro is a nickname, and his true name is filipepi, botticelli being only the name of the goldsmith who first taught him art. only two things happened to him--two things which he shared with other artists: he was invited to rome to paint in the sistine chapel, and he fell in later life under the influence of savonarola, passing apparently almost out of men's sight in a sort of religious melancholy, which lasted till his death in , according to the received date. vasari says that he plunged into the study of dante, and even wrote a comment on the _divine comedy_. but it seems strange that he should have lived on inactive so long; and one almost wishes that some document might come to light, which, fixing the date of his death earlier, might relieve one, in thinking of him, of his dejected old age. he is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of story and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line and colour, the medium of abstract painting. so he becomes the illustrator of dante. in a few rare examples of the edition of , the blank spaces left at the beginning of every canto, for the hand of the illuminator, have been filled, as far as the nineteenth canto of the _inferno_, with impressions of engraved plates, seemingly by way of experiment, for in the copy in the bodleian library, one of the three impressions it contains has been printed upside down, and much awry, in the midst of the luxurious printed page. giotto, and the followers of giotto, with their almost childish religious aim, had not learned to put that weight of meaning into outward things--light, colour, everyday gesture, which the poetry of the _divine comedy_ involves, and before the fifteenth century dante could hardly have found an illustrator. botticelli's illustrations are crowded with incident, blending, with a naive carelessness of pictorial propriety, three phases of the same scene into one plate. the grotesques, so often a stumbling-block to painters, who forget that the words of a poet, which only feebly present an image to the mind, must be lowered in key when translated into visible form, make one regret that he has not rather chosen for illustration the more subdued imagery of the _purgatorio_. yet in the scene of those who "go down quick into hell", there is an inventive force about the fire taking hold on the upturned soles of the feet, which proves that the design is no mere translation of dante's words, but a true painter's vision; while the scene of the centaurs wins one at once, for, forgetful of the actual circumstances of their appearance, botticelli has gone off with delight on the thought of the centaurs themselves, bright, small creatures of the woodland, with arch baby faces and _mignon_ forms, drawing their tiny bows. botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he might have been a mere naturalist among them. there are traces enough in his work of that alert sense of outward things, which, in the pictures of that period, fills the lawns with delicate living creatures, and the hillsides with pools of water, and the pools of water with flowering reeds. but this was not enough for him; he is a visionary painter, and in his visionariness he resembles dante. giotto, the tried companion of dante, masaccio, ghirlandajo even, do but transcribe, with more or less refining, the outward image; they are dramatic, not visionary painters; they are almost impassive spectators of the action before them. but the genius of which botticelli is the type usurps the data before it as the exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own; in this interest it plays fast and loose with those data, rejecting some and isolating others, and always combining them anew. to him, as to dante, the scene, the colour, the outward image or gesture, comes with all its incisive and importunate reality; but awakes in him, moreover, by some subtle law of his own structure, a mood which it awakes in no one else, of which it is the double or repetition, and which it clothes, that all may share it, with visible circumstance. but he is far enough from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of dante which, referring all human action to the simple formula of purgatory, heaven, and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths of dante's poetry. one picture of his, with the portrait of the donor, matteo palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting some shadow of ecclesiastical censure. this matteo palmieri (two dim figures move under that name in contemporary history) was the reputed author of a poem, still unedited, _la citta divina_, which represented the human race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of lucifer, were neither for jehovah nor for his enemies, a fantasy of that earlier alexandrian philosophy about which the florentine intellect in that century was so curious. botticelli's picture may have been only one of those familiar compositions in which religious reverie has recorded its impressions of the various forms of beatified existence--_glorias_, as they were called, like that in which giotto painted the portrait of dante; but somehow it was suspected of embodying in a picture the wayward dream of palmieri, and the chapel where it hung was closed. artists so entire as botticelli are usually careless about philosophical theories, even when the philosopher is a florentine of the fifteenth century, and his work a poem in _terza rima_. but botticelli, who wrote a commentary on dante, and became the disciple of savonarola, may well have let such theories come and go across him. true or false, the story interprets much of the peculiar sentiment with which he infuses his profane and sacred persons, comely, and in a certain sense like angels, but with a sense of displacement or loss about them--the wistfulness of exiles, conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known issue of them explains, which runs through all his varied work with a sentiment of ineffable melancholy. so just what dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell, botticelli accepts: that middle world in which men take no side in great conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals. he thus sets for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest work. his interest is neither in the untempered goodness of angelico's saints, nor the untempered evil of orcagna's _inferno_; but with men and women, in their mixed and uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink. his morality is all sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist. it is this which gives to his madonnas their unique expression and charm. he has worked out in them a distinct and peculiar type, definite enough in his own mind, for he has painted it over and over again, sometimes one might think almost mechanically, as a pastime during that dark period when his thoughts were so heavy upon him. hardly any collection of note is without one of these circular pictures, into which the attendant angels depress their heads so naively. perhaps you have sometimes wondered why those peevish-looking madonnas, conformed to no acknowledged or obvious type of beauty, attract you more and more, and often come back to you when the sistine madonna and the virgins of fra angelico are forgotten. at first, contrasting them with those, you may have thought that there was something in them mean or abject even, for the abstract lines of the face have little nobleness, and the colour is wan. for with botticelli she too, though she holds in her hands the "desire of all nations", is one of those who are neither for jehovah nor for his enemies; and her choice is on her face. the white light on it is cast up hard and cheerless from below, as when snow lies upon the ground, and the children look up with surprise at the strange whiteness of the ceiling. her trouble is in the very caress of the mysterious child, whose gaze is always far from her, and who has already that sweet look of devotion which men have never been able altogether to love, and which still makes the born saint an object almost of suspicion to his earthly brethren. once, indeed, he guides her hand to transcribe in a book the words of her exaltation, the _ave_, and the _magnificat_, and the _gaude maria_, and the young angels, glad to rouse her for a moment from her dejection, are eager to hold the inkhorn and to support the book. but the pen almost drops from her hand, and the high cold words have no meaning for her, and her true children are those others, among whom, in her rude home, the intolerable honour came to her, with that look of wistful inquiry on their irregular faces which you see in startled animals--gipsy children, such as those who, in apennine villages, still hold out their long brown arms to beg of you, but on sundays become _enfants du choeur_, with their thick black hair nicely combed, and fair white linen on their sunburnt throats. what is strangest is that he carries this sentiment into classical subjects, its most complete expression being a picture in the _uffizii_, of venus rising from the sea, in which the grotesque emblems of the middle age, and a landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its strange draperies, powdered all over in the gothic manner with a quaint conceit of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless nude studies of ingres. at first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a quaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever you have read of florence in the fifteenth century; afterwards you may think that this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and the colour is cadaverous or at least cold. and yet, the more you come to understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is no mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you will like this peculiar quality of colour; and you will find that quaint design of botticelli's a more direct inlet into the greek temper than the works of the greeks themselves even of the finest period. of the greeks as they really were, of their difference from ourselves, of the aspects of their outward life, we know far more than botticelli, or his most learned contemporaries; but for us long familiarity has taken off the edge of the lesson, and we are hardly conscious of what we owe to the hellenic spirit. but in pictures like this of botticelli's you have a record of the first impression made by it on minds turned back towards it, in almost painful aspiration, from a world in which it had been ignored so long; and in the passion, the energy, the industry of realization, with which botticelli carries out his intention, is the exact measure of the legitimate influence over the human mind of the imaginative system of which this is perhaps the central subject. the light is indeed cold--mere sunless dawn; but a later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine; and you can see the better for that quietness in the morning air each long promontory, as it slopes down to the water's edge. men go forth to their labours until the evening; but she is awake before them, and you might think that the sorrow in her face was at the thought of the whole long day of love yet to come. an emblematical figure of the wind blows hard across the gray water, moving forward the dainty-lipped shell on which she sails, the sea "showing his teeth", as it moves, in thin lines of foam, and sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe in outline, plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little, as botticelli's flowers always are. botticelli meant all this imagery to be altogether pleasurable, and it was partly an incompleteness of resources, inseparable from the art of that time, that subdued and chilled it. but his predilection for minor tones counts also; and what is unmistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived the goddess of pleasure, as the depository of a great power over the lives of men. i have said that the peculiar character of botticelli is the result of a blending in him of a sympathy for humanity in its uncertain condition, its attractiveness, its investiture at rarer moments in a character of loveliness and energy, with his consciousness of the shadow upon it of the great things from which it shrinks, and that this conveys into his work somewhat more than painting usually attains of the true complexion of humanity. he paints the story of the goddess of pleasure in other episodes besides that of her birth from the sea, but never without some shadow of death in the gray flesh and wan flowers. he paints madonnas, but they shrink from the pressure of the divine child, and plead in unmistakable undertones for a warmer, lower humanity. the same figure--tradition connects it with simonetta, the mistress of giuliano de' medici-appears again as judith, returning home across the hill country, when the great deed is over, and the moment of revulsion come, when the olive branch in her hand is becoming a burthen; as _justice_, sitting on a throne, but with a fixed look of self-hatred which makes the sword in her hand seem that of a suicide; and again as _veritas_, in the allegorical picture of _calumnia_, where one may note in passing the suggestiveness of an accident which identifies the image of truth with the person of venus. we might trace the same sentiment through his engravings; but his share in them is doubtful, and the object of this brief study has been attained if i have defined aright the temper in which he worked. but, after all, it may be asked, is a painter like botticelli--a secondary painter--a proper subject for general criticism? there are a few great painters, like michelangelo or leonardo, whose work has become a force in general culture, partly for this very reason that they have absorbed into themselves all such workmen as sandro botticelli; and, over and above mere technical or antiquarian criticism, general criticism may be very well employed in that sort of interpretation which adjusts the position of these men to general culture, whereas smaller men can be the proper subjects only of technical or antiquarian treatment. but, besides those great men, there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and these, too, have their place in general culture, and must be interpreted to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and are often the object of a special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them the stress of a great name and authority. of this select number botticelli is one. he has the freshness, the uncertain and diffident promise, which belong to the earlier renaissance itself, and make it perhaps the most interesting period in the history of the mind. in studying his work one begins to understand to how great a place in human culture the art of italy had been called. the end. transcriber's notes: minor spelling inconsistencies have been silently corrected. apart from a few corrections listed at the end of the book, original spelling was retained. footnotes were sequentially numbered and placed at the end of each chapter. p. : in the words carpenter, majesty and merchaundise letters [e macron] and [u with breve] are encoded as plain [e and u] respectively. p. : in the words mournfully, mournfuly, royalty letters [u with breve], [u, a macron] are encoded as plain [u and a] respectively. p. : in the words trumpington, love-sik and dangerus letters [i macron] and [i, u with breve] are encoded as plain [i and u] respectively. p. - : superscripts are preceded by the [^] sign and enclosed in braces if more than one letter is in superscript. p. : in the word pusan letters [u macron] and [s with cedilla] are encoded as plain [u and s] respectively. ligature [oe] is encoded as oe. mark up: _italics_ =bold= *font change* *columbia university* _studies in literature_ |===============================================================| |*columbia university* | | | |studies in literature | | | | | | | |=a history of literary criticism in | | the renaissance=: with special reference | | to the influence of italy in the formation and | | development of modern classicism. by joel | | elias spingarn. | | | | | |_in press:_ | | | | | |=romances of roguery=: an episode in the | | development of the modern novel, part i. | | the picaresque novel in spain. by frank | | wadleigh chandler. | | | |=spanish literature in england under | | the tudors=. by john garrett | | underhill. | | | | | | * * * * * | | | |***_other numbers of this series will be issued from | |time to time, containing the results of literary research, | |or criticism by the students or officers of | |columbia university, or others associated with them | |in study, under the authorization of the department | |of literature_, george edward woodberry _and_ | |brander matthews, _professors_. | |===============================================================| a history of literary criticism in the renaissance with special reference to the influence of italy in the formation and development of modern classicism by joel elias spingarn [illustration] *new york* published for the columbia university press by the macmillan company london: macmillan & co., ltd. _all rights reserved_ _copyright_, , by the macmillan company. *norwood press* j. s. cushing & co.--berwick & smith norwood mass. u.s.a. preface this essay undertakes to treat the history of literary criticism in the renaissance. the three sections into which the essay is divided are devoted, respectively, to italian criticism from dante to tasso, to french criticism from du bellay to boileau, and to english criticism from ascham to milton; but the critical activity of the sixteenth century has been the main theme, and the earlier or later literature has received treatment only in so far as it serves to explain the causes or consequences of the critical development of this central period. it was at this epoch that modern criticism began, and that the ancient ideals of art seemed once more to sway the minds of men; so that the history of sixteenth-century criticism must of necessity include a study of the beginnings of critical activity in modern europe and of the gradual introduction of the aristotelian canons into modern literature. this study has been made subservient, more particularly, to two specific purposes. while the critical activity of the period is important and even interesting in itself, it has been here studied primarily for the purpose of tracing the origin and causes of the classic spirit in modern letters and of discovering the sources of the rules and theories embodied in the neo-classic literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. how did the classic spirit arise? whence did it come, and how did it develop? what was the origin of the principles and precepts of neo-classicism? these are some of the questions i have attempted to answer in this essay; and, in answering them, i have tried to remember that this is a history, not of critical literature, but of literary criticism. for this reason i have given to individual books and authors less prominence than some of them perhaps deserved, and have confined myself almost exclusively to the origin of principles, theories, and rules, and to the general temper of classicism. for a similar reason i have been obliged to say little or nothing of the methods and results of applied, or concrete, criticism. this, then, has been the main design of the essay; but furthermore, as is indicated in the title, i have attempted to point out the part played by italy in the growth of this neo-classic spirit and in the formulation of these neo-classic principles. the influence of the italian renaissance in the development of modern science, philosophy, art, and creative literature has been for a long time the subject of much study. it has been my more modest task to trace the indebtedness of the modern world to italy in the domain of literary criticism; and i trust that i have shown the renaissance influence to be as great in this as in the other realms of study. the birth of modern criticism was due to the critical activity of italian humanism; and it is in sixteenth-century italy that we shall find, more or less matured, the general spirit and even the specific principles of french classicism. the second half of the design, then, is the history of the italian influence in literary criticism; and with milton, the last of the humanists in england, the essay naturally closes. but we shall find, i think, that the influence of the italian renaissance in the domain of literary criticism was not even then all decayed, and that lessing and shelley, to mention no others, were the legitimate inheritors of the italian tradition. this essay was submitted to the faculty of philosophy, columbia university, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of doctor of philosophy. the bibliography at the end of the essay indicates sufficiently my obligations to preceding writers. it has been prepared chiefly for the purpose of facilitating reference to works cited in the text and in the foot-notes, and should be consulted for the full titles of books therein mentioned; it makes no pretence of being a complete bibliography of the subject. it will be seen that the history of italian criticism in the sixteenth century has received scarcely any attention from modern scholars. in regard to aristotle's _poetics_, i have used the text, and in general followed the interpretation, given in professor s. h. butcher's _aristotle's theory of poetry and fine art_, a noble monument of scholarship vivified by literary feeling. i desire also to express my obligations to professor butcher for an abstract of zabarella, to mr. p. o. skinner of harvard for an analysis of capriano, to my friend, mr. f. w. chandler, for summaries of several early english rhetorical treatises, and to professor cavalier speranza for a few corrections; also to my friends, mr. j. g. underhill, mr. lewis einstein, and mr. h. a. uterhart, and to my brother, mr. a. b. spingarn, for incidental assistance of some importance. but, above all, i desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to professor george e. woodberry. this book is the fruit of his instruction; and in writing it, also, i have had recourse to him for assistance and criticism. without the aid so kindly accorded by him, the book could hardly have been written, and certainly would never have assumed its present form. but my obligations to him are not limited to the subject or contents of the present essay. through a period of five years the inspiration derived from his instruction and encouragement has been so great as to preclude the possibility of its expression in a preface. _quare habe tibi quidquid hoc libelli._ new york, march, . contents part first _literary criticism in italy_ page i. the fundamental problem of renaissance criticism i. mediæval conceptions of poetry. ii. the moral justification of poetry. iii. the final justification of poetry. ii. the general theory of poetry in the italian renaissance i. poetry as a form of scholastic philosophy. ii. poetry as an imitation of life. iii. the function of poetry. iii. the theory of the drama i. the subject of tragedy. ii. the function of tragedy. iii. the characters of tragedy. iv. the dramatic unities. v. comedy. iv. the theory of epic poetry i. the theory of the epic poem. ii. epic and romance. v. the growth of the classic spirit in italian criticism i. humanism. ii. aristotelianism. iii. rationalism. vi. romantic elements in italian criticism i. the ancient romantic element. ii. mediæval elements. iii. modern elements. part second _literary criticism in france_ i. the character and development of french criticism in the sixteenth century i. character. ii. development. ii. the theory of poetry in the french renaissance i. the poetic art. ii. the drama. iii. heroic poetry. iii. classic and romantic elements in french criticism during the sixteenth century i. classical elements. ii. romantic elements. iv. the formation of the classic ideal in the seventeenth century i. the romantic revolt. ii. the reaction against the pléiade. iii. the second influx of italian ideas. iv. the influence of rationalistic philosophy. part third _literary criticism in england_ i. the evolution of english criticism from ascham to milton ii. the general theory of poetry in the elizabethan age iii. the theory of dramatic and heroic poetry i. tragedy. ii. comedy. iii. the dramatic unities. iv. epic poetry. iv. classical elements in elizabethan criticism i. introductory: romantic elements. ii. classical metres. iii. other evidences of classicism. appendices a. chronological table of the chief critical works of the sixteenth century. b. salviati's account of the commentators on aristotle's _poetics_. bibliography index part first _literary criticism in italy_ literary criticism in italy chapter i the fundamental problem of renaissance criticism the first problem of renaissance criticism was the justification of imaginative literature. the existence and continuity of the æsthetic consciousness, and perhaps, in a less degree, of the critical faculty, throughout the middle ages, can hardly be denied; yet distrust of literature was keenest among the very class of men in whom the critical faculty might be presupposed, and it was as the handmaid of philosophy, and most of all as the vassal of theology, that poetry was chiefly valued. in other words, the criteria by which imaginative literature was judged during the middle ages were not literary criteria. poetry was disregarded or contemned, or was valued if at all for virtues that least belong to it. the renaissance was thus confronted with the necessity of justifying its appreciation of the vast body of literature which the revival of learning had recovered for the modern world; and the function of renaissance criticism was to reëstablish the æsthetic foundations of literature, to reaffirm the eternal lesson of hellenic culture, and to restore once and for all the element of beauty to its rightful place in human life and in the world of art. i. _mediæval conceptions of poetry_ the mediæval distrust of literature was the result of several coöperating causes. popular literature had fallen into decay, and in its contemporary form was beneath serious consideration. classical literature was unfortunately pagan, and was moreover but imperfectly known. the mediæval church from its earliest stages had regarded pagan culture with suspicion, and had come to look upon the development of popular literature as antagonistic to its own supremacy. but beyond this, the distrust of literature went deeper, and was grounded upon certain theoretical and fundamental objections to all the works of the imagination. these theoretical objections were in nowise new to the middle ages. they had been stated in antiquity with much more directness and philosophical efficacy than was possible in the mediæval period. plato had tried imaginative literature by the criteria of reality and morality, both of which are unæsthetic criteria, although fundamentally applicable to poetry. in respect to reality, he had shown that poetry is three removes from the truth, being but the imitation, by the artist, of the imitation, in life, of an idea in the mind of god. in respect to morality, he had discovered in homer, the greatest of poets, deviations from truth, blasphemy against the gods, and obscenity of various sorts. furthermore, he had found that creative literature excites the emotions more than does actual life, and stirs up ignoble passions which were better restrained. these ideas ran throughout the middle ages, and indeed persisted even beyond the renaissance. poetry was judged by these same criteria, but it was natural that mediæval writers should substitute more practical reasons for the metaphysical arguments of plato. according to the criterion of reality, it was urged that poetry in its very essence is untrue, that at bottom it is fiction, and therefore false. thus tertullian said that "the author of truth hates all the false; he regards as adultery all that is unreal.... he never will approve pretended loves, and wraths, and groans, and tears;"[ ] and he affirmed that in place of these pagan works there was in the bible and the fathers, a vast body of christian literature and that this is "not fabulous, but true, not tricks of art, but plain realities."[ ] according to the criterion of morality, it was urged that as few works of the imagination were entirely free from obscenity and blasphemy, such blemishes are inseparable from the poetic art; and accordingly, isidore of seville says that a christian is forbidden to read the figments of the poets, "quia per oblectamenta inanium fabularum mentem excitant ad incentiva libidinum."[ ] the third, or psychological objection, made by plato, was similarly emphasized. thus tertullian pointed out that while god has enjoined us to deal calmly and gently and quietly with the holy spirit, literature, and especially dramatic literature, leads to spiritual agitation.[ ] this point seemed to the mediæval mind fundamental, for in real beauty, as thomas aquinas insisted, desire is quieted.[ ] furthermore, it was shown that the only body of literary work worthy of serious study dealt with pagan divinities and with religious practices which were in direct antagonism to christianity. other objections, also, were incidentally alluded to by mediæval writers. for example, it was said, the supreme question in all matters of life is the question of conduct, and it was not apparent in what manner poetry conduces to action. poetry has no practical use; it rather enervates men than urges them to the call of duty; and above all, there are more profitable occupations in which the righteous man may be engaged. these objections to literature are not characteristically mediæval. they have sprung up in every period of the world's history, and especially recur in all ages in which ascetic or theological conceptions of life are dominant. they were stock questions of the greek schools, and there are extant treatises by maximus of tyre and others on the problem whether or not plato was justified in expelling homer from his ideal commonwealth. the same objections prevailed beyond the renaissance; and they were urged in italy by savonarola, in germany by cornelius agrippa, in england by gosson and prynne, and in france by bossuet and other ecclesiastics. ii. _the moral justification of poetry_ the allegorical method of interpreting literature was the result of the mediæval attempt to answer the objections just stated. this method owed its origin to the mode of interpreting the popular mythology first employed by the sophists and more thoroughly by the later stoics. such heroes as hercules and theseus, instead of being mere brute conquerors of monsters and giants, were regarded by the stoic philosophers as symbols of the early sages who had combated the vices and passions of mankind, and they became in the course of time types of pagan saints. the same mode of interpretation was later applied to the stories of the old testament by philo judæus, and was first introduced into occidental europe by hilary of poitiers and ambrose, bishop of milan.[ ] abraham, adam, eve, jacob, became types of various virtues, and the biblical stories were considered as symbolical of the various moral struggles in the soul of man. the first instance of the systematic application of the method to the pagan myths occurs in the _mythologicon_ of fulgentius, who probably flourished in the first half of the sixth century; and in his _virgiliana continentia_, the _Æneid_ is treated as an image of life, and the travels of Æneas as the symbol of the progress of the human soul, from nature, through wisdom, to final happiness. from this period, the allegorical method became the recognized mode of interpreting literature, whether sacred or profane. petrarch, in his letter, _de quibusdam fictionibus virgilij_,[ ] treats the _Æneid_ after the manner of fulgentius; and even at the very end of the renaissance tasso interpreted his own romantic epics in the same way. after the acceptance of the method, its application was further complicated. gregory the great ascribes three meanings to the bible,--the literal, the typical or allegorical, and the moral. still later, a fourth meaning was added; and dante distinctly claims all four, the literal, the allegorical, the moral or philosophical, and the anagogical or mystical, for his _divine comedy_.[ ] this method, while perhaps justifying poetry from the standpoint of ethics and divinity, gives it no place as an independent art; thus considered, poetry becomes merely a popularized form of theology. both petrarch and boccaccio regarded allegory as the warp and woof of poetry; but they modified the mediæval point of view by arguing conversely that theology itself is a form of poetry,--the poetry of god. both of them insist that the bible is essentially poetical, and that christ himself spoke largely in poetical images. this point was so emphasized by renaissance critics that berni, in his _dialogo contra i poeti_ ( ), condemns the poets for speaking of god as jupiter and of the saints as mercury, hercules, bacchus, and for even having the audacity to call the prophets and the writers of the scriptures poets and makers of verses.[ ] the fourteenth and fifteenth books of boccaccio's treatise, _de genealogia deorum_, have been called "the first defence of poesy in honor of his own art by a poet of the modern world;" but boccaccio's justification of imaginative literature is still primarily based on the usual mediæval grounds. the reality of poetry is dependent on its allegorical foundations; its moral teachings are to be sought in the hidden meanings discoverable beneath the literal expression; pagan poetry is defended for christianity on the ground that the references to greek and roman gods and rituals are to be regarded only as symbolical truths. the poet's function, for boccaccio, as for dante and petrarch, was to hide and obscure the actual truth behind a veil of beautiful fictions--_veritatem rerum pulchris velaminibus adornare._[ ] the humanistic point of view, in regard to poetry, was of a more practical and far-reaching nature than that of the middle ages. the allegorical interpretation did indeed continue throughout the renaissance, and mantuan, for example, can only define a poem as a literary form which is bound by the stricter laws of metre, and which has its fundamental truths hidden under the literal expressions of the fable. for still later writers, this mode of regarding literature seemed to present the only loophole of escape from the moral objections to poetry. but in employing the old method, the humanists carried it far beyond its original application. thus, lionardo bruni, in his _de studiis et literis_ (_c._ ), after dwelling on the allegorical interpretation of the pagan myths, argues that when one reads the story of Æneas and dido, he pays his tribute of admiration to the genius of the poet, but the matter itself is known to be fiction, and so leaves no moral impression.[ ] by this bruni means that fiction as such, when known to be fiction, can leave no moral impression, and secondly, that poetry is to be judged by the success of the artist, and not by the efficacy of the moralist. similarly, battista guarino, in his _de ordine docendi et studendi_ ( ), says that we are not disturbed by the impieties, cruelties, horrors, which we find in poetry; we judge these things simply by their congruity with the characters and incidents described. in other words, "we criticise the artist, not the moralist."[ ] this is a distinct attempt at the æsthetic appreciation of literature, but while such ideas are not uncommon about this time, they express isolated sentiments, rather than a doctrine strictly coördinated with an æsthetic theory of poetry. the more strict defence of poetry was attempted for the most part on the grounds set forth by horace in his _ars poetica_. at no period from the augustan age to the renaissance does the _ars poetica_ seem to have been entirely lost. it is mentioned or quoted, for example, by isidore of seville[ ] in the sixth century, by john of salisbury[ ] in the twelfth century, and by dante[ ] in the fourteenth. horace insists on the mingled instructiveness and pleasurableness of poetry; and beyond this, he points out the value of poetry as a civilizing factor in history, regarding the early poets as sages and prophets, and the inventors of arts and sciences:-- "orpheus, inspired by more than human power, did not, as poets feigned, tame savage beasts, but men as lawless and as wild as they, and first dissuaded them from rage and blood. thus when amphion built the theban wall, they feigned the stones obeyed his magic lute; poets, the first instructors of mankind, brought all things to their proper native use; some they appropriated to the gods, and some to public, some to private ends: promiscuous love by marriage was restrained, cities were built, and useful laws were made; so ancient is the pedigree of verse, and so divine the poet's function."[ ] this conception of the early poet's function was an old one. it is to be found in aristophanes;[ ] it runs through renaissance criticism; and even in this very century, shelley[ ] speaks of poets as "the authors of language, and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting," as "the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life." to-day the idealist takes refuge in the same faith: "the tree of knowledge is of equal date with the tree of life; nor were even the tamer of horses, the worker in metals, or the sower, elder than those twin guardians of the soul,--the poet and the priest. conscience and imagination were the pioneers who made earth habitable for the human spirit."[ ] it was this ethical and civilizing function of poetry which was first in the minds of the humanists. action being the test of all studies,[ ] poetry must stand or fall in proportion as it conduces to righteous action. thus, lionardo bruni[ ] speaks of poetry as "so valuable an aid to knowledge, and so ennobling a source of pleasure"; and Æneas sylvius piccolomini, in his treatise _de liberorum educatione_ ( ), declares that the crucial question is not, is poetry to be contemned? but, how are the poets to be used? and he solves his own question by asserting that we are to welcome all that poets can render in praise of integrity and in condemnation of vice, and that all else is to be left unheeded.[ ] beyond this, the humanists urged in favor of poetry the fact of its antiquity and divine origin, and the further fact that it had been praised by great men of all professions, and its creators patronized by kings and emperors from time immemorial. there were then at the end of the middle ages, and the beginning of the renaissance, two opposing tendencies in regard to the poetic art, one representing the humanistic reverence for ancient culture, and for poetry as one of the phases of that culture, and the other representing not only the mediæval tradition, but a purism allied to that of early christianity, and akin to the ascetic conceptions of life found in almost every period. these two tendencies are expressed specifically in their noblest forms by the great humanist poliziano, and the great moral reformer savonarola. in the _sylvæ_, written toward the close of the fifteenth century, poliziano dwells on the divine origin of poetry, as boccaccio had done in his _vita di dante_; and then, after the manner of horace, he describes its ennobling influence on man, and its general influence on the progress of civilization.[ ] he then proceeds to survey the progress of poetry from the most ancient times, and in so doing may be said to have written the first modern history of literature. the second section of the _sylvæ_ discusses the bucolic poets; the third contains that glorification of virgil which began during the middle ages, and, continued by vida and others, became in scaliger literary deification; and the last section is devoted to homer, who is considered as the great teacher of wisdom, and the wisest of the ancients. nowhere does poliziano exhibit any appreciation of the æsthetic value of poetry, but his enthusiasm for the great poets, and indeed for all forms of ancient culture, is unmistakable, and combined with his immense erudition marks him as a representative poet of humanism.[ ] on the other hand, the puristic conception of art is elaborated at great length by savonarola in an apology for poetry contained in his tractate, _de divisione ac utilitate omnium scientarum_,[ ] written about . after classifying the sciences in true scholastic fashion, and arranging them according to their relative importance and their respective utility for christianity, he attacks all learning as superfluous and dangerous, unless restricted to a chosen few. poetry, according to the scholastic arrangement, is grouped with logic and grammar; and this mediæval classification fixes savonarola's conception of the theory of poetic art. he expressly says that he attacks the abuse of poetry and not poetry itself, but there can be no doubt that, at bottom, he was intolerant of creative literature. like plato, like moral reformers of all ages, he feared the free play of the imaginative faculty; and in connecting poetry with logic he was tending toward the elimination of the imagination in art. the basis of his æsthetic system, such as it is, rests wholly on that of thomas aquinas;[ ] but he is in closer accord with aristotle when he points out that versification, a merely conventional accompaniment of poetry, is not to be confounded with the essence of poetry itself. this distinction is urged to defend the scriptures, which he regards as the highest and holiest form of poetry. for him poetry is coördinate with philosophy and with thought; but in his intolerance of poetry in its lower forms, he would follow plato in banishing poets from an ideal state. the imitation of the ancient poets especially falls under his suspicion, and in an age given up to their worship he denies both their supremacy and their utility. in fine, as a reformer, he represents for us the religious reaction against the paganization of culture by the humanists. but the forces against him were too strong. even the christianization of culture effected during the next century by the council of trent was hardly more than temporary. humanism, which represents the revival of ancient pagan culture, and rationalism, which represents the growth of the modern spirit in science and art, were currents too powerful to be impeded by any reformer, however great, and, when combined in classicism, were to reign supreme in literature for centuries to come. but savonarola and poliziano serve to indicate that modern literary criticism had not yet begun. for until some rational answer to the objections urged against poetry in antiquity and in the middle ages was forthcoming, literary criticism in any true sense was fundamentally impossible; and that answer came only with the recovery of aristotle's _poetics_. iii. _the final justification of poetry_ the influence of aristotle's _poetics_ in classical antiquity, so far as it is possible to judge, was very slight; there is no apparent reference to the _poetics_ in horace, cicero, or quintilian,[ ] and it was entirely lost sight of during the middle ages. its modern transmission was due almost exclusively to orientals.[ ] the first oriental version of aristotle's treatise appears to have been that made by abu-baschar, a nestorian christian, from the syriac into arabic, about the year . two centuries later, the moslem philosopher averroës made an abridged version of the _poetics_, which was translated into latin in the thirteenth century, by a certain german, named hermann, and again, by mantinus of tortosa in spain, in the fourteenth century. hermann's version seems to have circulated considerably in the middle ages, but it had no traceable influence on critical literature whatsoever. it is mentioned and censured by roger bacon, but the _poetics_ in any form was probably unknown to dante, to boccaccio, and beyond a single obscure reference, to petrarch. there is no question that for a long time before the beginning of the sixteenth century the _poetics_ had been entirely neglected. not only do the critical ideas of this period show no indication of aristotelian influence, but during the sixteenth century itself there seems to have been a well-defined impression that the _poetics_ had been recovered only after centuries of oblivion. thus, bernardo segni, who translated the _poetics_ into italian in , speaks of it as "abandoned and neglected for a long time";[ ] and bernardo tasso, some ten years later, refers to it as "buried for so long a time in the obscure shadows of ignorance."[ ] it was then as a new work of aristotle that the latin translation by giorgio valla, published at venice in , must have appeared to valla's contemporaries. though hardly successful as a work of scholarship, this translation, and the greek text of the _poetics_ published in the aldine _rhetores græci_ in , had considerable influence on dramatic literature, but scarcely any immediate influence on literary criticism. somewhat later, in , alessandro de' pazzi published a revised latin version, accompanied by the original; and from this time, the influence of the aristotelian canons becomes manifest in critical literature. in , robortelli produced the first critical edition of the _poetics_, with a latin translation and a learned commentary, and in the very next year the first italian translation was given to the world by bernardo segni. from that day to this the editions and translations of the _poetics_ have increased beyond number, and there is hardly a single passage in aristotle's treatise which has not been discussed by innumerable commentators and critics. it was in aristotle's _poetics_ that the renaissance was to find, if not a complete, at least a rational justification of poetry, and an answer to every one of the platonic and mediæval objections to imaginative literature. as to the assertion that poetry diverges from actual reality, aristotle[ ] contended that there is to be found in poetry a higher reality than that of mere commonplace fact, that poetry deals not with particulars, but with universals, and that it aims at describing not what has been, but what might have been or ought to be. in other words, poetry has little regard for the actuality of the specific event, but aims at the reality of an eternal probability. it matters not whether achilles or Æneas did this thing, or that thing, which homer or virgil ascribes to either, but if achilles or Æneas was such a man as the poet describes, he must necessarily act as homer or virgil has made him do. it is needless to say that aristotle is here simply distinguishing between ideal truth and actual fact, and in asserting that it is the function of poetry to imitate only ideal truth he laid the foundations, not only of an answer to mediæval objections, but also of modern æsthetic criticism. beyond this, poetry is justified on the grounds of morality, for while not having a distinctly moral aim, it is essentially moral, because it is this ideal representation of life, and an idealized version of human life must necessarily present it in its moral aspects. aristotle distinctly combats the traditional greek conception of the didactic function of poetry; but it is evident that he insists fundamentally that literature must be moral, for he sternly rebukes euripides several times on grounds that are moral, rather than purely æsthetic. in answer to the objection that poetry, instead of calming, stirs and excites our meanest passions, that it "waters and cherishes those emotions which ought to wither with drought, and constitutes them our rulers, when they ought to be our subjects,"[ ] aristotle taught those in the renaissance who were able to understand him, that poetry, and especially dramatic poetry, does not indeed starve the emotions, but excites them only to allay and to regulate them, and in this æsthetic process purifies and ennobles them.[ ] in pointing out these things he has justified the utility of poetry, regarding it as more serious and philosophic than history, because it universalizes mere fact, and imitates life in its noblest aspects. these arguments were incorporated into renaissance criticism; they were emphasized, as we shall see, over and over again, and they formed the basis of the justification of poetry in modern critical literature. at the same time, this purely æsthetic conception of art did not prevail by itself in the sixteenth century, even in those for whom aristotle meant most, and who best understood his meaning; the horatian elements, also, as found in the early humanists, were elaborated and discussed. in the _poetica_ of daniello ( ), these horatian elements form the basis for a defence of poetry[ ] that has many marked resemblances to various passages in sir philip sidney's _defence of poesy_. after referring to the antiquity and nobility of poetry, and affirming that no other art is nobler or more ancient, daniello shows that all things known to man, all the secrets of god and nature, are described by the poets in musical numbers and with exquisite ornament. he furthermore asserts, in the manner of horace, that the poets were the inventors of the arts of life; and in answer to the objection that it was the philosophers who in reality did these things, he shows that while instruction is more proper to the philosopher than to the poet, poets teach too, in many more ways, and far more pleasantly, than any philosopher can. they hide their useful teachings under various fictions and fabulous veils, as the physician covers bitter medicine with a sweet coating. the style of the philosopher is dry and obscure, without any force or beauty by itself; and the delightful instruction of poetry is far more effective than the abstract and harsh teachings of philosophy. poetry, indeed, was the only form of philosophy that primitive men had, and plato, while regarding himself as an enemy of poets, was really a great poet himself, for he expresses all his ideas in a wondrously harmonious rhythm, and with great splendor of words and images. this defence of daniello's is interesting, as anticipating the general form of such apologies throughout the sixteenth century. similarly, minturno in his _de poeta_ ( ), elaborates the horatian suggestions for a defence of poetry. he begins by pointing out the broad inclusiveness of poetry, which may be said to comprehend in itself every form of human learning, and by showing that no form of learning can be found before the first poets, and that no nation, however barbarous, has ever been averse to poetry. the hebrews praised god in verse; the greeks, italians, germans, and british have all honored poetry; the persians have had their magi and the gauls their bards. verse, while not essential to poetry, gives the latter much of its delightful effectiveness, and if the gods ever speak, they certainly speak in verse; indeed, in primitive times it was in verse that all sciences, history, and philosophy were written.[ ] to answer the traditional objections against imaginative literature which had survived beyond the middle ages seemed to the renaissance a simpler task, however, than to answer the more philosophical objections urged in the platonic dialogues. the authority of plato during the renaissance made it impossible to slight the arguments stated by him in the _republic_, and elsewhere. the writers of this period were particularly anxious to refute, or at least to explain away, the reasons for which plato had banished poets from his ideal commonwealth. some critics, like bernardo tasso[ ] and daniello,[ ] asserted that plato had not argued against poetry itself, but only against the abuse of poetry. thus, according to tasso, only impure and effeminate poets were to be excluded from the ideal state, and according to daniello, only the more immoral tragic poets, and especially the authors of obscene and lampooning comedies. other renaissance writers, like minturno[ ] and fracastoro,[ ] answered the platonic objections on more philosophical grounds. thus fracastoro answers plato's charge that, since poetry is three removes from ideal truth, poets are fundamentally ignorant of the realities they attempt to imitate, by pointing out that the poet is indeed ignorant of what he is speaking of, in so far as he is a versifier and skilled in language, just as the philosopher or historian is ignorant of natural or historical facts in so far as he, too, is merely skilled in language, but knows these facts in so far as he is learned, and has thought out the problems of nature and history. the poet, as well as the philosopher and the historian, must possess knowledge, if he is to teach anything; he, too, must learn the things he is going to write about, and must solve the problems of life and thought; he, too, must have a philosophical and an historical training. plato's objection, indeed, applies to the philosopher, to the orator, to the historian, quite as much as to the poet. as to plato's second charge, that imagination naturally tends toward the worst things, and accordingly that poets write obscenely and blasphemously, fracastoro points out that this is not the fault of the art, but of those who abuse it; there are, indeed, immoral and enervating poets, and they ought to be excluded, not only from plato's, but from every commonwealth. thus various aristotelian and horatian elements were combined to form a definite body of renaissance criticism. foot-notes: [ ] _de spectac._ xxiii. [ ] _ibid._ xxii. [ ] _differentiæ_, iii. , . [ ] _de spectac._ xv. _cf._ cyprian, _epist. ad donat._ viii. [ ] _cf._ bosanquet, _hist. of Æsthetic_, p. . [ ] _cf._ st. augustine, _confess._ v. , vi. ; clemens alex. _stromata_, v. . [ ] _opera_, p. . [ ] _cf._ dante, _epist._ xi. ; _convito_, ii. , . [ ] berni, p. _sq._ [ ] petrarch, _opera_, p. ; _cf._ boccaccio, _gen. degli dei_, p. , v. [ ] woodward, _vittorino da feltre_, p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] _etymologiæ_, viii. , . [ ] _policraticus_, i. . [ ] moore, _dante and his early biographers_, london, , pp. , . [ ] _ars poet._ (roscommon). [ ] _frogs_, _sq._ [ ] _defence of poetry_, ed. cook, p. . [ ] woodberry, "a new defence of poetry," in _heart of man_, new york, , p. . [ ] woodward, p. _sq._ [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] pope, _selecta poemata_, ii. ; _cf._ _ars poet._ . [ ] _cf._ gaspary, ii. . [ ] villari, p. _sq._, and perrens, ii. _sq._ [ ] _cf._ cartier, _l'esthétique de savonarole_, in didron's _annales archéologiques_, , vii. _sq._ [ ] egger, _sq._ [ ] _ibid._ _sq._ [ ] segni, p. . [ ] b. tasso, _lettere_, ii. . so also, robortelli, , "jacuit liber hic neglectus, ad nostra fere haec usque tempora." [ ] _poet._ ix. [ ] plato, _rep._ x. . [ ] _poet._ vi. ; _pol._ viii. . [ ] daniello, p. _sq._ [ ] _de poeta_, p. _sq._ [ ] _lettere_, ii. . [ ] _poetica_, p. _sq._ [ ] _de poeta_, p. _sq._ [ ] _opera_, i. _sq._ chapter ii the general theory of poetry in the italian renaissance in the first book of his _geography_ strabo defines poetry as "a kind of elementary philosophy, which introduces us early to life, and gives us pleasurable instruction in reference to character, emotion, action." this passage sounds the keynote of the renaissance theory of poetry. poetry is therein stated to be a form of philosophy, and, moreover, a philosophy whose subject is life, and its object is said to be pleasurable instruction. i. _poetry as a form of scholastic philosophy_ in the first place, poetry is a form of philosophy. savonarola had classed poetry with logic and grammar, and had asserted that a knowledge of logic is essential to the composing of poetry. the division of the sciences and the relative importance of each were a source of infinite scholastic discussion during the middle ages. aristotle had first placed dialectic or logic, rhetoric, and poetics in the same category of efficient philosophy. but averroës was probably the first to confuse the function of poetics with that of logic, and to make the former a subdivision, or form, of the latter; and this classification appears to have been accepted by the scholastic philosophers of the middle ages. this conception of the position of poetry in the body of human knowledge may be found, however, throughout the renaissance. thus, robortelli, in his commentary on aristotle's _poetics_ ( ), gives the usual scholastic distinctions between the various forms of the written or spoken word (_oratio_): the demonstrative, which deals with the true; the dialectic, which deals with the probable; the rhetorical, with the persuasive; and the poetic, with the false or fabulous.[ ] by the term "false" or "fabulous" is meant merely that the subject of poetry is not actual fact, but that it deals with things as they ought to be, rather than as they are. varchi, in his public lectures on poetry ( ), divides philosophy into two forms, real and rational. real philosophy deals with things, and includes metaphysics, ethics, physics, geometry, and the like; while rational philosophy, which includes logic, dialectic, rhetoric, history, poetry, and grammar, deals not with things, but with words, and is not philosophy proper, but the instrument of philosophy. poetry is therefore, strictly speaking, neither an art nor a science, but an instrument or faculty; and it is only an art in the sense that it has been reduced to rules and precepts. it is, in fact, a form of logic, and no man, according to varchi, can be a poet unless he is a logician; the better logician he is, the better poet he will be. logic and poetry differ, however, in their matter and their instruments; for the subject of logic is truth, arrived at by means of the demonstrative syllogism, while the subject of poetry is fiction or invention, arrived at by means of that form of the syllogism known as the example. here the enthymeme, or example, which aristotle has made the instrument of rhetoric, becomes the instrument of poetry. this classification survived in the aristotelian schools at padua and elsewhere as late as zabarella and campanella. zabarella, a professor of logic and later of philosophy at padua from to , explains at length averroës's theory that poetics is a form of logic, in a treatise on the nature of logic, published in .[ ] he concludes that the two faculties, logic and poetics, are not instruments of philosophy in general, but only of a part of it, for they refer rather to action than to knowledge; that is, they come under aristotle's category of efficient philosophy. they are not the instruments of useful art or of moral philosophy, the end of which is to make one's self good; but of civil philosophy, the end of which is to make others good. if it be objected that they are [greek: tôn enantiôn], that is, of both good and evil, it may be answered that their proper end is good. thus, in the _symposium_, the true poet is praised; while in the _republic_ the poets who aim at pleasure and who corrupt their audiences are censured; and aristotle in his definition of tragedy says that the end of tragedy is to purge the passions and to correct the morals of men (_affectiones animi purgare et mores corrigere_). even later than zabarella, we find in the _poetica_ of campanella a division of the sciences very similar to that of savonarola and varchi. theology is there placed at the head of all knowledge, in accordance with the mediæval tradition, while poetics, with dialectic, grammar, and rhetoric, is placed among the logical sciences. considering _poetica_ as a form of philosophy, another commentator on aristotle, maggi ( ), takes great pains to distinguish its various manifestations. _poetica_ is the art of composing poetry, _poesis_, the poetry composed according to this art, _poeta_, the composer of poetry, and _poema_, a single specimen of poetry.[ ] this distinction is an elaboration of two passages in plutarch and aphthonius. ii. _poetry as an imitation of life_ in the second place, according to the passage from strabo cited at the beginning of this chapter, poetry introduces us early to life, or, in other words, its subject is human action, and it is what aristotle calls it, an imitation of human life. this raises two distinct problems. first, what is the meaning of imitation? and what in life is the subject-matter of this imitation? the conception of imitation held by the critics of the renaissance was that expressed by aristotle in the ninth chapter of the _poetics_. the passage is as follows:-- "it is evident from what has been said that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen,--what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. the poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. the work of herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with metre no less than without it. the true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history; for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. the universal tells us how a person of given character will on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims in giving expressive names to the characters." in this passage aristotle has briefly formulated a conception of ideal imitation which may be regarded as universally valid, and which, repeated over and over again, became the basis of renaissance criticism. in the _poetica_ of daniello ( ), occurs the first allusion in modern literary criticism to the aristotelian notion of ideal imitation. according to daniello, the poet, unlike the historian, can mingle fictions with facts, because he is not obliged, as is the historian, to describe things as they actually are or have been, but rather as they ought to be; and it is in this that the poet most differs from the historian, and not in the writing of verses; for even if livy's works were versified, they would still be histories as before.[ ] this is of course almost a paraphrase of the passage in aristotle; but that daniello did not completely understand the ideal element in aristotle's conception is shown by the further distinction which he draws between the historian and the poet. for he adds that the poet and the historian have much in common; in both there are descriptions of places, peoples, laws; both contain the representation of vices and virtues; in both, amplification, variety, and digressions are proper; and both teach, delight, and profit at the same time. they differ, however, in that the historian, in telling his story, recounts it exactly as it happened, and adds nothing; whereas the poet is permitted to add whatever he desires, so long as the fictitious events have all the appearance of truth. somewhat later, robortelli treats the question of æsthetic imitation from another point of view. the poet deals with things as they ought to be, but he can either appropriate actual fact, or he can invent his material. if he does the former, he narrates the truth not as it really happened, but as it might or ought to happen; while if he invents his material, he must do so in accordance with the law of possibility, or necessity, or probability and verisimilitude.[ ] thus xenophon, in describing cyrus, does not depict him as he actually was, but as the best and noblest king can be and ought to be; and cicero, in describing the orator, follows the same method. from this it is evident that the poet can invent things transcending the order of nature; but if he does so, he should describe what might or ought to have been. here robortelli answers a possible objection to aristotle's statement that poets deal only with what is possible and verisimilar. is it possible and verisimilar that the gods should eat ambrosia and drink nectar, as homer describes, and that such a being as cerberus should have several heads, as we find in virgil, not to mention various improbable things that occur in many other poets? the answer to such an objection is that poets can invent in two ways. they can invent either things according to nature or things transcending nature. in the former case, these things must be in keeping with the laws of probability and necessity; but in the latter case, the things are treated according to a process described by aristotle himself, and called paralogism, which means, not necessarily false reasoning, but the natural, if quite inconclusive, logical inference that the things we know not of are subject to the same laws as the things we know. the poets accept the existence of the gods from the common notion of men, and then treat all that relates to these deities in accordance with this system of paralogism. in tragedy and comedy men are described as acting in accordance with the ordinary occurrences of nature; but in epic poetry this is not entirely the case, and the marvellous is therefore admitted. accordingly, this marvellous element has the widest scope in epic poetry; while in comedy, which treats of things nearest to our own time, it ought not to be admitted at all. but there is another problem suggested by the passage from the _poetics_ which has been cited. aristotle says that imitation, and not metre, is the test of poetry; that even if a history were versified, it would still remain history. the question then arises whether a writer who imitates in prose, that is, without verse, would be worthy of the title of poet. robortelli answers this question by pointing out that metre does not constitute the nature, force, or essence of poetry, which depends entirely on the fact of imitation; but at the same time, while one who imitates without verse is a poet, in the best and truest poetry imitation and metre are combined.[ ] in fracastoro's _naugerius, sive de poetica dialogus_ ( ), there is the completest explanation of the ideal element in the aristotelian conception of imitation. the poet, according to aristotle, differs from other writers in that the latter consider merely the particular, while the poet aims at the universal. he is, in other words, attempting to describe the simple and essential truth of things, not by depicting the nude thing as it is, but the idea of things clothed in all their beauties.[ ] here fracastoro attempts to explain the aristotelian conception of the type with the aid of the platonic notion of beauty. there were, in fact, in the renaissance, three conceptions of beauty in general vogue. first, the purely objective conception that poetry is fixed or formal, that it consists in approximating to a certain mechanical or geometrical form, such as roundness, squareness, or straightness; secondly, the platonic conception, ethical rather than æsthetic, connecting the beautiful with the good, and regarding both as the manifestation of divine power; and, thirdly, a more purely æsthetic conception of beauty, connecting it either with grace or conformity, or in a higher sense with whatever is proper or fitting to an object. this last idea, which at times approaches the modern conception that beauty consists in the realization of the objective character of any particular thing and in the fulfilment of the law of its own being, seems to have been derived from the _idea_ of the greek rhetorician hermogenes, whose influence during the sixteenth century was considerable, even as early as the time of filelfo. it was the celebrated rhetorician giulio cammillo, however, who appears to have popularized hermogenes in the sixteenth century, by translating the _idea_ into italian, and by expounding it in a discourse published posthumously in . as will be seen, fracastoro's conception of beauty approximates both to the platonic and to the more purely æsthetic doctrines which we have mentioned; and he expounds and elaborates this æsthetic notion in the following manner. each art has its own rules of proper expression. the historian or the philosopher does not aim at all the beauties or elegancies of expression, but only such as are proper to history or philosophy. but to the poet no grace, no embellishment, no ornament, is ever alien; he does not consider the particular beauty of any one field,--that is, the singular, or particular, of aristotle,--but all that pertains to the simple idea of beauty and of beautiful speech. yet this universalized beauty is no extraneous thing; it cannot be added to objects in which it has no place, as a golden coat on a rustic; all the essential beauty of each species is to be the especial regard of the poet. for in imitating persons and things, he neglects no beauty or elegance which he can attribute to them; he strives only after the most beautiful and most excellent, and in this way affects the minds of men in the direction of excellence and beauty. this suggests a problem which is at the very root of aristotle's conception of ideal imitation; and it is fracastoro's high merit that he was one of the first writers of the renaissance to explain away the objection, and to formulate in the most perfect manner what aristotle really meant. for, even granting that the poet teaches more than others, may it not be urged that it is not what pertains to the thing itself, but the beauties which he adds to them,--that it is ornament, extraneous to the thing itself (_extra rem_), and not the thing itself,--which seems to be the chief regard of the poet? but after all, what is _extra rem_? are beautiful columns, domes, peristyles _extra rem_, because a thatched roof will protect us from rain and frost; or is noble raiment _extra rem_, because a rustic garment would suffice? the poet, so far from adding anything extraneous to the things he imitates, depicts them in their very essence; and it is because he alone finds the true beauty in things, because he attributes to them their true nobility and perfection, that he is more useful than any other writer. the poet does not, as some think, deal with the false and the unreal.[ ] he assumes nothing openly alien to truth, though he may permit himself to treat of old and obscure legends which cannot be verified, or of things which are regarded as true on account of their appearance, their allegorical signification (such as the ancient myths and fables), or their common acceptance by men. so we may conclude that not every one who uses verse is a poet, but only he who is moved by the true beauty of things--by their simple and essential beauties, not merely apparent ones. this is fracastoro's conclusion, and it contains that mingling of platonism and aristotelianism which may be found somewhat later in tasso and sir philip sidney. it is the chief merit of fracastoro's dialogue, that even while emphasizing this platonic element, he clearly distinguishes and defines the ideal element in æsthetic imitation. about the same time, in the public lectures of varchi ( ), there was an attempt to formulate a more explicit definition of poetry on the basis of aristotle's definition[ ] of tragedy. poetry, according to varchi, is an imitation of certain actions, passions, habits of mind, with song, diction, and harmony, together or separately, for the purpose of removing the vices of men and inciting them to virtue, in order that they may attain their true happiness and beatitude.[ ] in the first place, poetry is an imitation. every poet imitates, and any one who does not imitate cannot be called a poet. accordingly, varchi follows maggi in distinguishing three classes of poets,--the poets _par excellence_, who imitate in verse; the poets who imitate without using verse, such as lucian, boccaccio in the _decameron_, and sannazaro in the _arcadia_; and the poets, commonly but less properly so called, who use verse, but who do not imitate. verse, while not an essential attribute of poetry, is generally required; for men's innate love of harmony, according to aristotle, was one of the causes that gave rise to poetic composition. certain forms of poetry however, such as tragedy, cannot be written without verse; for "embellished language," that is, verse, is included in the very definition of tragedy as given by aristotle. the question whether poetry could be written in prose was a source of much discussion in the renaissance; but the consensus of opinion was overwhelmingly against the prose drama. comedy in prose was the usual italian practice of this period, and various scholars[ ] even sanction the practice on theoretical grounds. but the controversy was not brought to a head until the publication of agostino michele's _discorso in cui si dimostra come si possono scrivere le commedie e le tragedie in prosa_ in ; and eight years later, in , paolo beni published his latin dissertation, _disputatio in qua ostenditur præstare comoediam atque tragoediam metrorum vinculis solvere_.[ ] the language of beni's treatise was strong--its very title speaks of liberating the drama from the shackles of verse; and for a heresy of this sort, couched as it was in language that might even have been revolutionary enough for the french romanticists of , the sixteenth century was not yet fully prepared. faustino summo, answering beni in the same year, asserts that not only is it improper for tragedy and comedy to be written in prose, but that no form of poetry whatever can properly be composed without the accompaniment of verse.[ ] the result of the whole controversy was to fix the metrical form of the drama throughout the period of classicism. but it need not be said that the same conclusion was not accepted by all for every form of poetry. the remark of cervantes in _don quixote_, that epics can be written in prose as well as in verse, is well known; and julius cæsar scaliger[ ] speaks of heliodorus's romance as a model epic. scaliger, however, regards verse as a fundamental part of poetry. for him, poetry and history have the forms of narration and ornament in common, but differ in that poetry adds fictions to the things that are true, or imitates actual things with fictitious ones,--_majore sane apparatu_, that is, among other things, with verse. as a result of this notion, scaliger asserts that if the history of herodotus were versified, it would no longer be history, but historical poetry. under no circumstances, theoretically, will he permit the separation of poetry from mere versification. he accordingly dismisses with contempt the usual argument of the period that lucan was an historian rather than a poet. "take an actual history," says scaliger; "how does lucan differ, for example, from livy? he differs in using verse. well, then he is a poet." poetry, then, is imitation in verse;[ ] but in imitating what ought to be rather than what is, the poet creates another nature and other fortunes, as if he were another god.[ ] it will be seen from these discussions that the renaissance always conceived of æsthetic imitation in this ideal sense. there are scarcely any traces of realism, in anything like its modern sense, in the literary criticism of this period. torquato tasso does indeed say that art becomes most perfect as it approaches most closely to nature;[ ] and scaliger declares that the dramatic poet must beyond all things aim at reproducing the actual conditions of life.[ ] but it is the appearance of reality, and not the mere actuality itself, that the critics are speaking of here. with the vast body of mediæval literature before them, in which impossibilities follow upon impossibilities, and the sense of reality is continually obscured, the critical writers of the renaissance were forced to lay particular stress on the element of probability, the element of close approach to the seeming realities of life; but the imitation of life is for them, nevertheless, an imitation of things as they ought to be--in other words, the imitation is ideal. muzio says that nature is adorned by art:-- "suol far l' opere sue roze, e tra le mani lasciarle a l' arte, che le adorni e limi;"[ ] and he distinctly affirms that the poet cannot remain content with exact portraiture, with the mere actuality of life:-- "lascia 'l vero a l' historia, e ne' tuoi versi sotto i nomi privati a l' universo mostra che fare e che non far si debbia." in keeping with this idealized conception of art, muzio asserts that everything obscene or immoral must be excluded from poetry; and this puristic notion of art is everywhere emphasized in renaissance criticism. it was the _verisimile_, as has been said, that the writers of this period especially insisted upon. poetry must have the appearance of truth, that is, it must be probable; for unless the reader believes what he reads, his spirit cannot be moved by the poem.[ ] this anticipates boileau's famous line:-- "l'esprit n'est point ému de ce qu'il ne croit pas."[ ] but beyond and above the _verisimile_, the poet must pay special regard to the ethical element (_il lodevole e l' onesto_). a poet of the sixteenth century, palingenius, says that there are three qualities required of every poem:-- "atqui scire opus est, triplex genus esse bonorum, utile, delectans, majusque ambobus honestum."[ ] poetry, then, is an ideal representation of life; but should it be still further limited, and made an imitation of only human life? in other words, are the actions of men the only possible themes of poetry, or may it deal, as in the _georgics_ and the _de rerum natura_, with the various facts of external nature and of science, which are only indirectly connected with human life? may poetry treat of the life of the world as well as of the life of men; and if only of the latter, is it to be restricted to the actions of men, or may it also depict their passions, emotions, and character? in short, how far may external nature on the one hand, and the internal working of the human soul on the other hand, be regarded as the subject-matter of poetry? aristotle says that poetry deals with the actions of men, but he uses the word "actions" in a larger sense than many of the renaissance critics appear to have believed. his real meaning is thus explained by a modern writer:-- "everything that expresses the mental life, that reveals a rational personality, will fall within this larger sense of action.... the phrase is virtually an equivalent for [greek: êthê] (character), [greek: pathê] (emotion), [greek: praxeis] (action).... the common original from which all the arts draw is human life,--its mental processes, its spiritual movements, its outward acts issuing from deeper sources; in a word, all that constitutes the inward and essential activity of the soul. on this principle landscape and animals are not ranked among the objects of æsthetic imitation. the whole universe is not conceived of as the raw material of art. aristotle's theory is in agreement with the practice of the greek poets and artists of the classical period, who introduce the external world only so far as it forms a background of action, and enters as an emotional element into man's life and heightens the human interest."[ ] aristotle distinctly says that "even if a treatise on medicine or natural philosophy be brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; and yet homer and empedocles have nothing in common except the material; the former, therefore, is properly styled poet, the latter, physicist rather than poet."[ ] the aristotelian doctrine was variously conceived during the renaissance. fracastoro, for example, asserts that the imitation of human life alone is not of itself a test of poetry, for such a test would exclude empedocles and lucretius; it would make virgil a poet in the _Æneid_, and not a poet in the _georgics_. all matters are proper material for the poet, as horace says, if they are treated poetically; and although the imitation of men and women may seem to be of higher importance for us who are men and women, the imitation of human life is no more the poet's end than the imitation of anything else.[ ] this portion of fracastoro's argument may be called apologetic, for the imitation of human actions as a test of poetry would exclude most of his own poems,[ ] such as his famous _de morbo gallico_ ( ), written before the influence of aristotle was felt in anything but the mere external forms of creative literature. for fracastoro, all things poetically treated become poetry, and aristotle himself[ ] says that everything becomes pleasant when correctly imitated. so that not the mere composition of verse, but the platonic rapture, the delight in the true and essential beauty of things, is for fracastoro the test of poetic power. varchi, on the other hand, is more in accord with aristotle, in conceiving of "action," the subject-matter of poetry, as including the passions and habits of mind as well as the merely external actions of mankind. by passions varchi means those mental perturbations which impel us to an action at any particular time ([greek: pathê]); while by manners, or habits of mind, he means those mental qualities which distinguish one man or one class of men from another ([greek: êthê]). the exclusion of the emotional or introspective side of human life would leave all lyric and, in fact, all subjective verse out of the realms of poetry; and it was therefore essential, in an age in which petrarch was worshipped, that the subjective side of poetry should receive its justification.[ ] there is also in varchi a most interesting comparison between the arts of poetry and painting.[ ] the basis of his distinction is horace's _ut pictura poesis_, doubtless founded on the parallel of simonides preserved for us by plutarch; and this distinction, which regarded painting as silent poetry, and poetry as painting in language, may be considered almost the keynote of renaissance criticism, continuing even up to the time of lessing. in capriano's _della vera poetica_ ( ) poetry is given a preëminent place among all the arts, because it does not merely deal with actions or with the objects of any single sense. for capriano, poetry is an ideal representation of life, and as such "vere nutrice e amatrice del nostro bene."[ ] all sensuous or comprehensible objects are capable of being imitated by various arts. the nobler of the imitative arts are concerned with the objects of the nobler senses, while the ignobler arts are concerned with the objects of the senses of taste, touch, and smell. poetry is the finest of all the arts, because it comprehends in itself all the faculties and powers of the other arts, and can in fact imitate anything, as, for example, the form of a lion, its color, its ferocity, its roar, and the like. it is also the highest form of art because it makes use of the most efficacious means of imitation, namely, words, and especially since these receive the additional beauty and power of rhythm. accordingly, capriano divides poets into two classes: natural poets, who describe the things of nature, and moral poets (such as epic and tragic poets), who aim at presenting moral lessons and indicating the uses of life; and of these two classes the moral poets are to be rated above the natural poets. but if all things are the objects of poetic imitation, the poet must know everything; he must have studied nature as well as life; and, accordingly, lionardi, in his dialogues on poetic imitation ( ), says that to be a good poet, one must be a good historian, a good orator, and a good natural and moral philosopher as well;[ ] and bernardo tasso asserts that a thorough acquaintance with the art of poetry is only to be gained from the study of aristotle's _poetics_, combined with a knowledge of philosophy and the various arts and sciences, and vast experience of the world.[ ] the renaissance, with its humanistic tendencies, never quite succeeded in discriminating between erudition and genius. scaliger says that nothing which proceeds from solid learning can ever be out of place in poetry, and fracastoro ( ) and tomitano ( ) both affirm that the good poet and the good orator must essentially be learned scholars and philosophers. scaliger therefore distinguishes three classes of poets,--first, the theological poets, such as orpheus and amphion; secondly, the philosophical poets, of two sorts, natural poets, such as empedocles and lucretius, and moral poets, who again are either political, as solon and tyrtæus, economic, as hesiod, or common, as phocyllides; and, thirdly, the ordinary poets who imitate human life.[ ] the last are divided according to the usual renaissance classification into dramatic, narrative, and common or mixed. scaliger's classification is employed by sir philip sidney;[ ] and a very similar subdivision is given by minturno.[ ] the treatment of castelvetro, in his commentary on the _poetics_ ( ), is at times much more in accord with the true aristotelian conception than most of the other renaissance writers. while following aristotle in asserting that verse is not of the essence of poetry, he shows that aristotle himself by no means intended to class as poetry works that imitated in prose, for this was not the custom of hellenic art. prose is not suited to imitative or imaginative subjects, for we expect themes treated in prose to be actual facts.[ ] "verse does not distinguish poetry," says castelvetro, "but clothes and adorns it; and it is as improper for poetry to be written in prose, or history in verse, as it is for women to use the garments of men, and for men to wear the garments of women."[ ] the test of poetry therefore is not the metre but the material. this approximates to aristotle's own view; since while imitation is what distinguishes the poetic art, aristotle, by limiting it to the imitation of human life, was, after all, making the matter the test of poetry. castelvetro, however, arrives at this conclusion on different grounds. science he regards as not suitable material for poetry, and accordingly such writers as lucretius and fracastoro are not poets. they are good artists, perhaps, or good philosophers, but not poets; for the poet does not attempt to discover the truth of nature, but to imitate the deeds of men, and to bring delight to his audience by means of this imitation. moreover, poetry, as will be seen later, is intended to give delight to the populace, the untrained multitude, to whom the sciences and the arts are dead letters;[ ] if we concede these to be fit themes for poetry, then poetry is either not meant to delight, or not meant for the ordinary people, but is intended for instruction and for those only who are versed in sciences and arts. moreover, comparing poetry with history, castelvetro finds that they resemble each other in many points, but are not identical. poetry follows, as it were, in the footsteps of history, but differs from it in that history deals with what has happened, poetry with what is probable; and things that have happened, though probable, are never considered in poetry as probable, but always as things that have happened. history, accordingly, does not regard verisimilitude or necessity, but only truth; poetry must take care to establish the probability of its subject in verisimilitude and necessity, since it cannot regard truth. castelvetro in common with most of the critics of the renaissance seems to misconceive the full meaning of ideal truth; for to the renaissance--nay, even to shakespeare, if we are to consider as his own various phrases which he has put into the mouths of his dramatic characters--truth was regarded as coincident with fact; and nothing that was not actual fact, however subordinated to the laws of probability and necessity, was ever called truth. it is in keeping with this conception of the relations between history and poetry, that castelvetro should differ not only from aristotle, but from most of the critics of his own time, in asserting that the order of the poetic narrative may be the same as that of historical narrative. "in telling a story," he says, "we need not trouble ourselves whether it has beginning, middle, and end, but only whether it is fitted to its true purpose, that is, to delight its auditors by the narration of certain circumstances which could possibly happen but have not actually happened."[ ] here the only vital distinction between history and poetry is that the incidents recounted in history have once happened, while those recounted in poetry have never actually happened, or the matter will not be regarded as poetry. aristotle's fundamental requirement of the unity of the fable is regarded as unessential, and is simply observed in order to show the poet's ingenuity. this notion of poetic ingenuity is constant throughout castelvetro's commentary. thus he explains aristotle's statement that poetry is more philosophic than history--more philosophic, according to castelvetro, in the sense of requiring more thought, more speculation in its composition--by showing that it is a more difficult and more ingenious labor to invent things that could possibly happen, than merely to repeat things that have actually happened.[ ] iii. _the function of poetry_ according to strabo, it will be remembered, the object or function of poetry is pleasurable instruction in reference to character, emotion, action. this occasions the inquiry as to what is the function of the poetic art, and, furthermore, what are its relations to morality. the starting-point of all discussions on this subject in the renaissance was the famous verse of horace:-- "aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetæ."[ ] this line suggests that the function of poetry may be to please, or to instruct, or both to please and instruct; and every one of the writers of the renaissance takes one or other of these three positions. aristotle, as we know, regarded poetry as an imitation of human life, for the purpose of giving a certain refined pleasure to the reader or hearer. "the end of the fine arts is to give pleasure ([greek: pros hêdonên]), or rational enjoyment ([greek: pros diagôgên])."[ ] it has already been said that poetry, in so far as it is an imitation of human life, and attempts to be true to human life in its ideal aspects, must fundamentally be moral; but to give moral or scientific instruction is in no way the end or function of poetry. it will be seen that the renaissance was in closer accord with horace than with aristotle, in requiring for the most part the _utile_ as well as the _dulce_ in poetry. for daniello, one of the earliest critical writers of the century, the function of the poet is to teach and delight. as the aim of the orator is to persuade, and the aim of the physician to cure, so the aim of the poet is equally to teach and delight; and unless he teaches and delights he cannot be called a poet, even as one who does not persuade cannot be called an orator, or one who does not cure, a physician.[ ] but beyond profitableness and beauty, the poet must carry with him a certain persuasion, which is one of the highest functions of poetry, and which consists in moving and affecting the reader or hearer with the very passions depicted; but the poet must be moved first, before he can move others.[ ] here daniello is renewing horace's "si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi,"-- a sentiment echoed by poets as different as vauquelin, boileau, and lamartine. fracastoro, however, attempts a deeper analysis of the proper function of the poetic art. what is the aim of the poet? not merely to give delight, for the fields, the stars, men and women, the objects of poetic imitation themselves do that; and poetry, if it did no more, could not be said to have any reason for existing. nor is it merely to teach and delight, as horace says; for the descriptions of countries, peoples, and armies, the scientific digressions and the historical events, which constitute the instructive side of poetry, are derived from cosmographers, scientists, and historians, who teach and delight as much as poets do. what, then, is the function of the poet? it is, as has already been pointed out, to describe the essential beauty of things, to aim at the universal and ideal, and to perform this function with every possible accompaniment of beautiful speech, thus affecting the minds of men in the direction of excellence and beauty. portions of fracastoro's argument have been alluded to before, and it will suffice here to state his own summing up of the aim of the poet, which is this, "delectare et prodesse imitando in unoquoque maxima et pulcherrima per genus dicendi simpliciter pulchrum ex convenientibus."[ ] this is a mingling of the horatian and platonic conceptions of poetic art. by other critics a more practical function was given to poetry. giraldi cintio asserts that it is the poet's aim to condemn vice and to praise virtue, and maggi says that poets aim almost exclusively at benefiting the mind. poets who, on the contrary, treat of obscene matters for the corruption of youth, may be compared with infamous physicians who give their patients deadly poison in the guise of wholesome medicine. horace and aristotle, according to maggi, are at one on this point, for in the definition of tragedy aristotle ascribes to it a distinctly useful purpose, and whatever delight is obtainable is to be regarded as a result of this moral function; for maggi and the renaissance critics in general would follow the elizabethan poet who speaks of "delight, the fruit of virtue dearly loved." muzio, in his versified _arte poetica_ ( ), regards the end of poetry as pleasure and profit, and the pleasurable aim of poetry as attained by variety, for the greatest poems contain every phase of life and art. it has been seen that varchi classed poetry with rational philosophy. the end of all arts and sciences is to make human life perfect and happy; but they differ in their modes of producing this result. philosophy attains its end by teaching; rhetoric, by persuasion; history, by narration; poetry, by imitation or representation. the aim of the poet, therefore, is to make the human soul perfect and happy, and it is his office to imitate, that is, to invent and represent, things which render men virtuous, and consequently happy. poetry attains this end more perfectly than any of the other arts or sciences, because it does so, not by means of precept, but by means of example. there are various ways of making men virtuous,--by teaching them what vice is and what virtue is, which is the province of ethics; by actually chastising vices and rewarding virtues, which is the province of law; or by example, that is, by the representation of virtuous men receiving suitable rewards for their virtue, and of vicious men receiving suitable punishments, which is the province of poetry. this last method is the most efficacious, because it is accompanied by delight. for men either can not or will not take the trouble to study sciences and virtues--nay, do not even like to be told what they should or should not do; but in hearing or reading poetic examples, not only is there no trouble, but there is the greatest delight, and no one can help being moved by the representation of characters who are rewarded or punished according to an ideal justice. for varchi, then, as for sir philip sidney later, the high importance of poetry is to be found in the fact that it teaches morality better than any other art, and the reason is that its instrument is not precept but example, which is the most delightful and hence the most efficacious of all means. the function of poetry is, therefore, a moral one, and it consists in removing the vices of men and inciting them to virtue. this twofold moral object of poetry--the removal of vices, which is passive, and the incitement to virtue, which is active--is admirably attained, for example, by dante in his _divina commedia_; for in the _inferno_ evil men are so fearfully punished that we resolve to flee from every form of vice, and in the _paradiso_ virtuous men are so gloriously rewarded that we resolve to imitate every one of their perfections. this is the expression of the extreme view of poetic justice; and while it is in keeping with the common sentiment of the renaissance, it is of course entirely un-aristotelian. scaliger's point of view is in accord with the common renaissance tradition. poetry is imitation, but imitation is not the end of poetry. imitation for its own sake--that is, art for art's sake--receives no encouragement from scaliger. the purpose of poetry is to teach delightfully (_docere cum delectatione_); and, therefore, not imitation, as aristotle says, but delightful instruction, is the test of poetry.[ ] minturno ( ) adds a third element to that of instruction and of delight.[ ] the function of poetry is not only to teach and delight, but also to move, that is, beyond instruction and delight the poet must impel certain passions in the reader or hearer, and incite the mind to admiration of what is described.[ ] an ideal hero may be represented in a poem, but the poem is futile unless it excites the reader to admiration of the hero depicted. accordingly, it is the peculiar office of the poet to move admiration for great men; for the orator, the philosopher, and the historian need not necessarily do so, but no one who does not incite this admiration can really be called a poet. this new element of admiration is the logical consequence of the renaissance position that philosophy teaches by precept, but poetry by example, and that in this consists its superior ethical efficacy. in seneca's phrase, "longum iter per præcepta, breve per exempla." if poetry, therefore, attains its end by means of example, it follows that to arrive at this end the poet must incite in the reader an admiration of the example, or the ethical aim of poetry will not be accomplished. poetry is more than a mere passive expression of truth in the most pleasurable manner; it becomes like oratory an active exhortation to virtue, by attempting to create in the reader's mind a strong desire to be like the heroes he is reading about. the poet does not tell what vices are to be avoided and what virtues are to be imitated, but sets before the reader or hearer the most perfect types of the various virtues and vices. it is, in sidney's phrase (a phrase apparently borrowed from minturno), "that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful instruction, which must be the right describing note to know a poet by." dryden, a century later, seems to be insisting upon this same principle of admiration when he says that it is the work of the poet "to affect the soul, and excite the passions, and above all to move admiration, which is the delight of serious plays."[ ] but minturno goes even further than this. if the poet is fundamentally a teacher of virtue, it follows that he must be a virtuous man himself; and in pointing this out, minturno has given the first complete expression in modern times of the consecrated conception of the poet's office. as no form of knowledge and no moral excellence is foreign to the poet, so at bottom he is the truly wise and good man. the poet may, in fact, be defined as a good man skilled in language and imitation; not only ought he to be a good man, but no one will be a good poet unless he is so.[ ] this conception of the moral nature of the poet may be traced henceforth throughout modern times. it is to be found in ronsard[ ] and other french and italian writers; it is especially noticeable in english literature, and is insisted on by ben jonson,[ ] milton,[ ] shaftesbury,[ ] coleridge,[ ] and shelley.[ ] in this idea plato's praise of the philosopher, as well as cicero's and quintilian's praise of the orator, was by the renaissance transferred to the poet;[ ] but the conception itself goes back to a passage in strabo's _geography_, a work well known to sixteenth-century scholars. this passage is as follows:-- "can we possibly imagine that the genius, power, and excellence of a real poet consist in aught else than the just imitation of life in formed discourse and numbers? but how should he be that just imitator of life, whilst he himself knows not its measures, nor how to guide himself by judgment and understanding? for we have not surely the same notion of the poet's excellence as of the ordinary craftsman's, the subject of whose art is senseless stone or timber, without life, dignity, or beauty; whilst the poet's art turning principally on men and manners, he has his virtues and excellence as poet naturally annexed to human excellence, and to the worth and dignity of man, insomuch that it is impossible he should be a great and worthy poet who is not first a worthy and good man."[ ] another writer of the sixteenth century, bernardo tasso, tells us that in his poem of the _amadigi_ he has aimed at delight rather than profitable instruction.[ ] "i have spent most of my efforts," he says, "in attempting to please, as it seems to me that this is more necessary, and also more difficult to attain; for we find by experience that many poets may instruct and benefit us very much, but certainly give us very little delight." this agrees with what one of the sanest of english critics, john dryden ( ), has said of verse, "i am satisfied if it caused delight, for delight is the chief if not the only end of poesie; instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesie only instructs as it delights."[ ] it is this same end which castelvetro ( ) ascribes to poetic art. for castelvetro, as in a lesser degree for robortelli also, the end of poetry is delight, and delight alone.[ ] this, he asserts, is the position of aristotle, and if utility is to be conceded to poetry at all, it is merely as an accident, as in the tragic purgation of terror and compassion.[ ] but he goes further than aristotle would have been willing to go; for poetry, according to castelvetro, is intended not merely to please, but to please the populace, in fact everybody, even the vulgar mob.[ ] on this he insists throughout his commentary; indeed, as will be seen later, it is on this conception that his theory of the drama is primarily based. but it may be confidently asserted that aristotle would have willingly echoed the conclusion of shakespeare, as expressed in _hamlet_, that the censure of one of the judicious must o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. at the same time, castelvetro's conception is in keeping with a certain modern feeling in regard to the meaning of poetic art. thus a recent writer regards literature as aiming "at the pleasure of the greatest possible number of the nation rather than instruction and practical effects," and as applying "to general rather than specialized knowledge."[ ] there is, then, in castelvetro's argument this modicum of truth, that poetry appeals to no specialized knowledge, but that its function is, as coleridge says, to give a definite and immediate pleasure. torquato tasso, as might be expected, regards poetry in a more highly ideal sense. his conception of the function of poets and of the poetic art may be explained as follows: the universe is beautiful in itself, because beauty is a ray from the divine splendor; and hence art should seek to approach as closely as possible to nature, and to catch and express this natural beauty of the world.[ ] real beauty, however, is not so called because of any usefulness it may possess, but is primarily beautiful in itself; for the beautiful is what pleases every one, just as the good is what every one desires.[ ] beauty is therefore the flower of the good (_quasi un fiore del buono_); it is the circumference of the circle of which the good is the centre, and accordingly, poetry, as an expression of this beauty, imitates the outward show of life in its general aspects. poetry is therefore an imitation of human actions, made for the guidance of life; and its end is delight, _ordinato al giovamento_.[ ] it must essentially delight, either because delight is its aim, or because delight is the necessary means of effecting the ethical end of art.[ ] thus, for example, heroic poetry consists of imitation and allegory, the function of the former being to cause delight, and that of the latter to give instruction and guidance in life. but since difficult or obscure conceits rarely delight, and since the poet does not appeal to the learned only, but to the people, just as the orator does, the poet's idea must be, if not popular in the ordinary sense of the word, at least intelligible to the people. now the people will not study difficult problems; but poetry, by appealing to them on the side of pleasure, teaches them whether they will or no; and this constitutes the true effectiveness of poetry, for it is the most delightful, and hence the most valuable, of teachers.[ ] such, then, are the various conceptions of the function of poetry, as held by the critics of the renaissance. on the whole, it may be said that at bottom the conception was an ethical one, for, with the exception of such a revolutionary spirit as castelvetro, by most theorists it was as an effective guide to life that poetry was chiefly valued. even when delight was admitted as an end, it was simply because of its usefulness in effecting the ethical aim. in concluding this chapter, it may be well to say a few words, and only a few, upon the classification of poetic forms. there were during the renaissance numerous attempts at distinguishing these forms, but on the whole all of them are fundamentally equivalent to that of minturno, who recognizes three _genres_,--the lyric or melic, the dramatic or scenic, and the epic or narrative. this classification is essentially that of the greeks, and it has lasted down to this very day. with lyric poetry this essay is scarcely concerned, for during the renaissance there was no systematic lyric theory. those who discussed it at all gave most of their attention to its formal structure, its style, and especially the conceit it contained. the model of all lyrical poetry was petrarch, and it was in accordance with the lyrical poet's agreement or disagreement with the petrarchan method that he was regarded as a success or a failure. muzio's critical poem ( ) deals almost entirely with lyrical verse, and there are discussions on this subject in the works of trissino, equicola, ruscelli, scaliger, and minturno. but the real question at issue in all these discussions is merely that of external form, and it is with the question of principles, in so far as they regard literary criticism, that this essay is primarily concerned. the theory of dramatic and epic poetry, being fundamental, will therefore receive almost exclusive attention. foot-notes: [ ] robortelli, p. _sq._ [ ] this analysis of zabarella, _opera logica, de natura logicæ_, ii. - , i owe to the kindness of professor butcher of edinburgh. zabarella probably derived his knowledge of aristotle's _poetics_ from robortelli, under whom he studied greek. _cf._ bayle, _dict._ s. v. zabarella. [ ] maggi, p. _sq._ _cf._ b. tasso, _lettere_, ii. ; scaliger, _poet._ i. ; castelvetro, _poetica_, p. ; salviati, cod. magliabech. ii. ii. , fol. v.; b. jonson, _timber_, p. . [ ] daniello, p. _sq._ [ ] robortelli, p. _sq._ [ ] robortelli, p. _sq._ [ ] fracastoro, i. . [ ] fracastoro, i. _sq._ [ ] _poet._ vi. . [ ] varchi, p. . [ ] _e.g._ piccolomini, p. _sq._ [ ] tiraboschi, vii. . [ ] summo, pp. - . [ ] _poet._ iii. . [ ] _poet._ i. . [ ] another critic of the time, vettori, , pp. , , attacks poetic prose on the ground that in aristotle's definition of the various poetic forms, verse is always spoken of as an essential part. it is interesting to note that the phrase "poetic prose" is used, perhaps for the first time, in minturno, _arte poetica_, , p. , etc. [ ] _opere_, x. . _cf._ minturno, _arte poetica_, p. . [ ] _poet._ iii. . [ ] muzio, p. . [ ] giraldi cintio, i. . [ ] _art poét._ iii. . _cf._ horace, _ars poet._ . [ ] _zodiac. vitæ_, i. . [ ] butcher, pp. , . [ ] _poet._ i. . [ ] fracastoro, i. _sq._ [ ] _cf._ castelvetro, _poetica_, p. _sq._ [ ] _rhet._ i. . [ ] _cf._ a. segni, , cap. i. [ ] varchi, p. _sq._ [ ] capriano, cap. ii. [ ] lionardi, p. _sq._ [ ] _lettere_, ii. . [ ] scaliger, _poet._ i. . [ ] _defense_, pp. , . [ ] _de poeta_, p. _sq._ [ ] castelvetro, _poetica_, p. _sq._ [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] _cf._ t. tasso, xi. . [ ] _poetica_, p. . [ ] _poetica_, p. . [ ] _ars poet._ . [ ] butcher, p. . [ ] daniello, p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] fracastoro, i. . [ ] scaliger, _poet._ vi. ii. . [ ] _de poeta_, p. . _cf._ scaliger, _poet._ iii. . [ ] _de poeta_, p. . [ ] _essay of dramatic poesy_, p. . [ ] _de poeta_, p. . [ ] _oeuvres_, vii. . [ ] _works_, i. . [ ] _prose works_, iii. . [ ] _characteristicks_, , i. . [ ] h. c. robinson, _diary_, may , , "coleridge talked of the impossibility of being a good poet without being a good man." [ ] _defence of poetry_, p. . [ ] minturno plainly says as much, _de poeta_, p. . [ ] _geog._ i. ii. , as cited by shaftesbury. [ ] _lettere_, ii. . [ ] _essay of dramatic poesy_, p. . [ ] _cf._ piccolomini, p. . [ ] castelvetro, _poetica_, p. . _cf._ twining, ii. , . [ ] _poetica_, p. . [ ] posnett, cited by cook, p. . [ ] _opere_, viii. _sq._ [ ] _ibid._ ix. . [ ] _ibid._ xii. . [ ] _ibid._ xi. . [ ] _ibid._ xii. . chapter iii the theory of the drama aristotle's definition of tragedy is the basis of the renaissance theory of tragedy. that definition is as follows: "tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narration; through pity and fear effecting the proper _katharsis_ or purgation of these emotions."[ ] to expand this definition, tragedy, in common with all other forms of poetry, is the imitation of an action; but the action of tragedy is distinguished from that of comedy in being grave and serious. the action is complete, in so far as it possesses perfect unity; and in length it must be of the proper magnitude. by embellished language, aristotle means language into which rhythm, harmony, and song enter; and by the remark that the several kinds are to be found in separate parts of the play, he means that some parts of tragedy are rendered through the medium of verse alone, while others receive the aid of song. moreover, tragedy is distinguished from epic poetry by being in the form of action instead of that of narration. the last portion of aristotle's definition describes the peculiar function of tragic performance. i. _the subject of tragedy_ tragedy is the imitation of a _serious_ action, that is, an action both grave and great, or, as the sixteenth century translated the word, illustrious. now, what constitutes a serious action, and what actions are not suited to the dignified character of tragedy? daniello ( ) distinguishes tragedy from comedy in that the comic poets "deal with the most familiar and domestic, not to say base and vile operations; the tragic poets, with the deaths of high kings and the ruins of great empires."[ ] whichever of these matters the poet selects should be treated without admixture of any other form; if he resolves to treat of grave matters, mere loveliness should be excluded; if of themes of loveliness, he should exclude all grave themes. here, at the very beginning of dramatic discussion, the strict separation of themes or _genres_ is advocated in as formal a manner as ever during the period of classicism; and this was never deviated from, at least in theory, by any of the writers of the sixteenth century. moreover, according to daniello, the dignified character of tragedy demands that all unseemly, cruel, impossible, or ignoble incidents should be excluded from the stage; while even comedy should not attempt to represent any lascivious act.[ ] this was merely a deduction from senecan tragedy and the general practice of the classics. there is, in daniello's theory of tragedy, no single aristotelian element, and it was not until about a decade later that aristotle's theory of tragedy played any considerable part in the literary criticism of the sixteenth century. in , however, the _poetics_ had already become a part of university study, for giraldi cintio, in his _discorso sulle comedie e sulle tragedie_, written in that year, says that it was a regular academic exercise to compare some greek tragedy, such as the _oedipus_ of sophocles, with a tragedy of seneca on the same subject, using the _poetics_ of aristotle as a dramatic text-book.[ ] giraldi distinguishes tragedy from comedy on somewhat the same grounds as daniello. "tragedy and comedy," he says, "agree in that they are both imitations of an action, but they differ in that the former imitates the illustrious and royal, the latter the popular and civil. hence aristotle says that comedy imitates the worse sort of actions, not that they are vicious and criminal, but that, as regards nobility, they are worse when compared with royal actions." giraldi's position is made clear by his further statement that the actions of tragedy are called illustrious, not because they are virtuous or vicious, but merely because they are the actions of people of the highest rank.[ ] this conception of the serious action of tragedy, which makes its dignity the result of the rank of those who are its actors, and thus regards rank as the real distinguishing mark between comedy and tragedy, was not only common throughout the renaissance, but even throughout the whole period of classicism, and had an extraordinary effect on the modern drama, especially in france. thus dacier ( ) says that it is not necessary that the action be illustrious and important in itself: "on the contrary, it may be very ordinary or common; but it must be so by the quality of the persons who act.... the greatness of these eminent men renders the action great, and their reputation makes it credible and possible."[ ] again, robortelli ( ) maintains that tragedy deals only with the greater sort of men (_præstantiores_), because the fall of men of such rank into misery and disgrace produces greater commiseration (which is, as will be seen, one of the functions of tragedy) than the fall of men of merely ordinary rank. another commentator on the _poetics_, maggi ( ), gives a slightly different explanation of aristotle's meaning. maggi asserts that aristotle,[ ] in saying that comedy deals with the worse and tragedy with the better sort of men, means to distinguish between those whose rank is lower or higher than that of ordinary men; comedy dealing with slaves, tradesmen, maidservants, buffoons, and other low people, tragedy with kings and heroes.[ ] this explanation is defended on grounds similar to those given by robortelli, that is, the change from felicity to infelicity is greater and more noticeable in the greatest men.[ ] this conception of the rank of the characters as the distinguishing mark between tragedy and comedy is, it need not be said, entirely un-aristotelian. "aristotle does undoubtedly hold," says professor butcher, "that actors in tragedy ought to be illustrious by birth and position. the narrow and trivial life of obscure persons cannot give scope for a great and significant action, one of tragic consequence. but nowhere does he make outward rank the distinguishing feature of tragic as opposed to comic representation. moral nobility is what he demands; and this--on the french stage, or at least with french critics--is transformed into an inflated dignity, a courtly etiquette and decorum, which seemed proper to high rank. the instance is one of many in which literary critics have wholly confounded the teaching of aristotle."[ ] this distinction, then, though common up to the end of the eighteenth century, is not to be found in aristotle; but the fact is, that a similar distinction can be traced, throughout the middle ages, throughout classical antiquity, back almost to the time of aristotle himself. the grammarian, diomedes, has preserved the definition of tragedy formulated by theophrastus, aristotle's successor as head of the peripatetic school. according to this definition, tragedy is "a change in the fortune of a hero."[ ] a greek definition of comedy preserved by diomedes, and ascribed to theophrastus also,[ ] speaks of comedy as dealing with private and civil fortunes, without the element of danger. this seems to have been the accepted roman notion of comedy. in the treatise of euanthius-donatus, comedy is said to deal with the common fortunes of men, to begin turbulently, but to end tranquilly and happily; tragedy, on the other hand, has only mighty personages, and ends terribly; its subject is often historical, while that of comedy is always invented by the poet.[ ] the third book of diomedes's _ars grammatica_, based on suetonius's tractate _de poetis_ (written in the second century a.d.), distinguishes tragedy from comedy in that only heroes, great leaders, and kings are introduced in tragedy, while in comedy the characters are humble and private persons; in the former, lamentations, exiles, bloodshed predominate, in the latter, love affairs and seductions.[ ] isidore of seville, in the seventh century, says very much the same thing: "comic poets treat of the acts of private men, while tragic poets treat of public matters and the histories of kings; tragic themes are based on sorrowful affairs, comic themes on joyful ones."[ ] in another place he speaks of tragedy as dealing with the ancient deeds and misdeeds of infamous kings, and of comedy as dealing with the actions of private men, and with the defilement of maidens and the love affairs of strumpets.[ ] in the _catholicon_ of johannes januensis de balbis ( ) tragedy and comedy are distinguished on similar grounds: tragedy deals only with kings and princes, comedy with private citizens; the style of the former is elevated, that of the latter humble; comedy begins sorrowfully and ends joyfully, tragedy begins joyfully and ends miserably and terribly.[ ] for dante, any poem written in an elevated and sublime style, beginning happily and ending in misery and terror, is a tragedy; his own great vision, written as it is in the vernacular, and beginning in hell and ending gloriously in paradise, he calls a comedy.[ ] it appears, therefore, that during the post-classic period and throughout the middle ages, comedy and tragedy were distinguished on any or all of the following grounds:-- i. the characters in tragedy are kings, princes, or great leaders; those in comedy, humble persons and private citizens. ii. tragedy deals with great and terrible actions; comedy with familiar and domestic actions. iii. tragedy begins happily and ends terribly; comedy begins rather turbulently and ends joyfully. iv. the style and diction of tragedy are elevated and sublime; while those of comedy are humble and colloquial. v. the subjects of tragedy are generally historical; those of comedy are always invented by the poet. vi. comedy deals largely with love and seduction; tragedy with exile and bloodshed. this, then, was the tradition that shaped the un-aristotelian conception of the distinctions between comedy and tragedy, which persisted throughout and even beyond the renaissance. giraldi cintio has followed most of these traditional distinctions, but he is in closer accord with aristotle[ ] when he asserts that the tragic as well as the comic plot may be purely imaginary and invented by the poet.[ ] he explains the traditional conception that the tragic fable should be historical, on the ground that as tragedy deals with the deeds of kings and illustrious men, it would not be probable that remarkable actions of such great personages should be left unrecorded in history, whereas the private events treated in comedy could hardly be known to all. giraldi, however, asserts that it does not matter whether the tragic poet invents his story or not, so long as it follows the law of probability. the poet should choose an action that is probable and dignified, that does not need the intervention of a god in the unravelling of the plot, that does not occupy much more than the space of a day, and that can be represented on the stage in three or four hours.[ ] in respect to the dénouement of tragedy, it may be happy or unhappy, but in either case it must arouse pity and terror; and as for the classic notion that no deaths should be represented on the stage, giraldi declares that those which are not excessively painful may be represented, for they are represented not for the sake of commiseration but of justice. the argument here centres about aristotle's phrase [greek: en tô phanerô thanatoi],[ ] but the common practice of classicism was based on horace's express prohibition:-- "ne pueros coram populo medea trucidet."[ ] giraldi gives it as a universal rule of the drama that nothing should be represented on the stage which could not with propriety be done in one's own house.[ ] scaliger's treatment of the dramatic forms is particularly interesting because of its great influence on the neo-classical drama. he defines tragedy as an imitation of an illustrious event, ending unhappily, written in a grave and weighty style, and in verse.[ ] here he has discarded, or at least disregarded, the aristotelian definition of tragedy, in favor of the traditional conception which had come down through the middle ages. real tragedy, according to scaliger, is entirely serious; and although there are a few happy endings in ancient tragedy, the unhappy ending is most proper to the spirit of tragedy itself. _mortes aut exilia_--these are the fit accompaniments of the tragic catastrophe.[ ] the action begins tranquilly, but ends horribly; the characters are kings and princes, from cities, castles, and camps; the language is grave, polished, and entirely opposed to colloquial speech; the aspect of things is troubled, with terrors, menaces, exiles, and deaths on every hand. taking as his model seneca, whom he rates above all the greeks in majesty,[ ] he gives as the typical themes of tragedy "the mandates of kings, slaughters, despairs, executions, exiles, loss of parents, parricides, incests, conflagrations, battles, loss of sight, tears, shrieks, lamentations, burials, epitaphs, and funeral songs."[ ] tragedy is further distinguished from comedy on the ground that the latter derives its argument and its chief characters from history, inventing merely the minor characters; while comedy invents its arguments and all its characters, and gives them names of their own. scaliger distinguishes men, for the purposes of dramatic poetry, according to character and rank;[ ] but it would seem that he regarded rank alone as the distinguishing mark between tragedy and comedy. thus tragedy is made to differ from comedy in three things: in the rank of the characters, in the quality of the actions, and in their different endings; and as a result of these differences, in style also. the definition of tragedy given by minturno, in his treatise _de poeta_ ( ), is merely a paraphrase of aristotle's. he conceives of tragedy as describing _casus heroum cuius sibi quisque fortunæ fuerit faber_, and it thus acts as a warning to men against pride of rank, insolence, avarice, lust, and similar passions.[ ] it is grave and illustrious because its characters are illustrious; and no variety of persons or events should be introduced that are not in keeping with the calamitous ending. the language throughout must be grave and severe; and minturno has expressed his censure in such matters by the phrase, _poema amatorio mollique sermone effoeminat_,[ ] a censure which would doubtless apply to a large portion of classic french tragedy. in castelvetro ( ) we find a far more complete theory of the drama than had been attempted by any of his predecessors. his work is by no means a model of what a commentary on aristotle's _poetics_ should be. in the next century, dacier, whose subservience to aristotle was even greater than that of any of the italians, accuses castelvetro of lacking every quality necessary to a good interpreter of aristotle. "he knew nothing," says dacier, "of the theatre, or of character, or of the passions; he understood neither the reasons nor the method of aristotle; and he sought rather to contradict aristotle than to explain him."[ ] the fact is that castelvetro, despite considerable veneration for aristotle's authority, often shows remarkable independence of thought; and so far from resting content, in his commentary, with the mere explanation of the details of the _poetics_, he has attempted to deduce from it a more or less complete theory of poetic art. accordingly, though diverging from many of the details, and still more from the spirit of the _poetics_, he has, as it were, built up a dramatic system of his own, founded upon certain modifications and misconceptions of the aristotelian canons. the fundamental idea of this system is quite modern; and it is especially interesting because it indicates that by this time the drama had become more than a mere academic exercise, and was actually regarded as intended primarily for representation on the stage. castelvetro examines the physical conditions of stage representation, and on this bases the requirements of dramatic literature. the fact that the drama is intended for the stage, that it is to be acted, is at the bottom of his theory of tragedy, and it was to this notion, as will be seen later, that we are to attribute the origin of the unities of time and place. but castelvetro's method brings with it its own _reductio ad absurdum_. for after all, stage representation, while essential to the production of dramatic literature, can never circumscribe the poetic power or establish its conditions. the conditions of stage representation change, and must change, with the varying conditions of dramatic literature and the inventive faculty of poets, for truly great art makes, or at least fixes, its own conditions. besides, it is with what is permanent and universal that the artist--the dramatic artist as well as the rest--is concerned; and it is the poetic, and not the dramaturgic, element that is permanent and universal. "the power of tragedy, we may be sure," says aristotle, "is felt even apart from representation and actors;"[ ] and again: "the plot [of a tragedy] ought to be so constructed that even without the aid of the eye any one who is told the incidents will thrill with horror and pity at the turn of events."[ ] but what, according to castelvetro, are the conditions of stage representation? the theatre is a public place, in which a play is presented before a motley crowd,--_la moltitudine rozza_,--upon a circumscribed platform or stage, within a limited space of time. to this idea the whole of castelvetro's dramatic system is conformed. in the first place, since the audience may be great in number, the theatre must be large, and yet the audience must be able to hear the play; accordingly, verse is added, not merely as a delightful accompaniment, but also in order that the actors may raise their voices without inconvenience and without loss of dignity.[ ] in the second place, the audience is not a select gathering of choice spirits, but a motley crowd of people, drawn to the theatre for the purpose of pleasure or recreation; accordingly, abstruse themes, and in fact all technical discussions, must be eschewed by the playwright, who is thus limited, as we should say to-day, to the elemental passions and interests of man.[ ] in the third place, the actors are required to move about on a raised and narrow platform; and this is the reason why deaths or deeds of violence, and many other things which cannot be acted on such a platform with convenience and dignity, should not be represented in the drama.[ ] furthermore, as will be seen later, it is on this conception of the circumscribed platform and the physical necessities of the audience and the actors, that castelvetro bases his theory of the unities of time and place. in distinguishing the different _genres_, castelvetro openly differs with aristotle. in the _poetics_, aristotle distinguishes men according as they are better than we are, or worse, or the same as we are; and from this difference the various species of poetry, tragic, comic, and epic, are derived. castelvetro thinks this mode of distinction not only untrue, but even inconsistent with what aristotle says later of tragedy. goodness and badness are to be taken account of, according to castelvetro, not to distinguish one form of poetry from another, but merely in the special case of tragedy, in so far as a moderate virtue, as aristotle says, is best able to produce terror and pity. poetry, as indeed aristotle himself acknowledges, is not an imitation of character, or of goodness and badness, but of men acting; and the different kinds of poetry are distinguished, not by the goodness and badness, or the character, of the persons selected for imitation, but by their rank or condition alone. the great and all-pervading difference between royal and private persons is what distinguishes tragedy and epic poetry on the one hand from comedy and similar forms of poetry on the other. it is rank, then, and not intellect, character, action,--for these vary in men according to their condition,--that differentiates one poetic form from another; and the distinguishing mark of rank on the stage, and in literature generally, is the bearing of the characters, royal persons acting with propriety, and meaner persons with impropriety.[ ] castelvetro has here escaped one pitfall, only to fall into another; for while goodness and badness cannot, from any æsthetic standpoint, be made to distinguish the characters of tragedy from those of comedy,--leaving out of consideration here the question whether this was or was not the actual opinion of aristotle,--it is no less improper to make mere outward rank or condition the distinguishing feature. whether it be regarded as an interpretation of aristotle or as a poetic theory by itself, castelvetro's contention is, in either case, equally untenable. ii. _the function of tragedy_ no passage in aristotle's _poetics_ has been subjected to more discussion, and certainly no passage has been more misunderstood, than that in which, at the close of his definition of tragedy, he states its peculiar function to be that of effecting through pity and fear the proper purgation ([greek: katharsis]) of these emotions. the more probable of the explanations of this passage are, as twining says,[ ] reducible to two. the first of these gives to aristotle's _katharsis_ an ethical meaning, attributing the effect of the tragedy to its moral lesson and example. this interpretation was a literary tradition of centuries, and may be found in such diverse writers as corneille and lessing, racine and dryden, dacier and rapin. according to the second interpretation, the purgation of the emotions produced by tragedy is an emotional relief gained by the excitement of these emotions. plato had insisted that the drama excites passions, such as pity and fear, which debase men's spirits; aristotle in this passage answers that by the very exaltation of these emotions they are given a pleasurable outlet, and beyond this there is effected a purification of the emotions so relieved. that is, the emotions are clarified and purified by being passed through the medium of art, and by being, as professor butcher points out, ennobled by objects worthy of an ideal emotion.[ ] this explanation gives no direct moral purpose or influence to the _katharsis_, for tragedy acts on the feelings and not on the will. while the ethical conception, of course, predominates in italian criticism, as it does throughout europe up to the very end of the eighteenth century, a number of renaissance critics, among them minturno and speroni, even if they failed to elaborate the further æsthetic meaning of aristotle's definition, at least perceived that aristotle ascribed to tragedy an emotional and not an ethical purpose. it is unnecessary to give a detailed statement of the opinions of the various italian critics on this point; but it is essential that the interpretations of the more important writers should be alluded to, since otherwise the renaissance conception of the function of the drama could not be understood. giraldi cintio points out that the aim of comedy and of tragedy is identical, viz. to conduce to virtue; but they reach this result in different ways; for comedy attains its end by means of pleasure and comic jests, while tragedy, whether it ends happily or unhappily, purges the mind of vice through the medium of misery and terror, and thus attains its moral end.[ ] elsewhere,[ ] he affirms that the tragic poet condemns vicious actions, and by combining them with the terrible and the miserable makes us fear and hate them. in other words, men who are bad are placed in such pitiable and terrible positions that we fear to imitate their vices; and it is not a purgation of pity and fear, as aristotle says, but an eradication of all vice and vicious desire that is effected by the tragic _katharsis_. trissino, in the fifth section of his _poetica_ ( ), cites aristotle's definition of tragedy; but makes no attempt to elucidate the doctrine of _katharsis_. his conception of the function of the drama is much the same as giraldi's. it is the office of the tragic poet, through the medium of imitation, to praise and admire the good, while that of the comic poet is to mock and vituperate the bad; for tragedy, as aristotle says, deals with the better sort of actions, and comedy with the worse.[ ] robortelli ( ), however, ascribes a more æsthetic function to tragedy. by the representation of sad and atrocious deeds, tragedy produces terror and commiseration in the spectator's mind. the exercise of terror and commiseration purges the mind of these very passions; for the spectator, seeing things performed which are very similar to the actual facts of life, becomes accustomed to sorrow and pity, and these emotions are gradually diminished.[ ] moreover, by seeing the sufferings of others, men sorrow less at their own, recognizing such things as common to human nature. robortelli's conception of the function of tragedy is, therefore, not an ethical one; the effect of tragedy is understood primarily as diminishing pity and fear in our minds by accustoming us to the sight of deeds that produce these emotions. a similar interpretation of the _katharsis_ is given by vettori ( ) and castelvetro ( ).[ ] the latter compares the process of purgation with the emotions which are excited by a pestilence. at first the infected populace is crazed by excitement, but gradually becomes accustomed to the sight of the disease, and the emotions of the people are thus tempered and allayed. a somewhat different conception of _katharsis_ is that of maggi. according to him, we are to understand by purgation the liberation through pity and fear of passions similar to these, but not pity and fear themselves; for maggi cannot understand how tragedy, which induces pity and fear in the hearer, should at the same time remove these perturbations.[ ] moreover, pity and fear are useful emotions, while such passions as avarice, lust, anger, are certainly not. in another place, maggi, relying on citations from plato, aristotle, and alexander of aphrodisias, explains the pleasure we receive from tragedy, by pointing out that we feel sorrow by reason of the human heart within us, which is carried out of itself by the sight of misery; while we feel pleasure because it is human and natural to feel pity. pleasure and pain are thus fundamentally the same.[ ] varchi[ ] is at one with maggi in interpreting the _katharsis_ as a purgation, not of pity and fear themselves, but of emotions similar to them. for scaliger ( ) the aim of tragedy, like that of all poetry, is a purely ethical one. it is not enough to move the spectators to admiration and dismay, as some critics say Æschylus does; it is also the poet's function to teach, to move, and to delight. the poet teaches character through actions, in order that we should embrace and imitate the good, and abstain from the bad. the joy of evil men is turned in tragedy to bitterness, and the sorrow of good men to joy.[ ] scaliger is here following the extreme view of poetic justice which we have found expressed in so many of the renaissance writers. in the last century, dr. johnson, in censuring shakespeare for the tragic fate meted out to cordelia and other blameless characters, showed himself an inheritor of this renaissance tradition, just as we shall see that lessing was in other matters. for scaliger the moral aim of the drama is attained both indirectly, by the representation of wickedness ultimately punished and virtue ultimately rewarded, and more directly by the enunciation of moral precepts throughout the play. with the senecan model before him, such precepts (_sententiæ_) became the very props of tragedy,--_sunt enim quasi columnæ aut pilæ quædam universæ fabricæ illius_,--and so they remained in modern classical tragedy. minturno points out that these _sententiæ_ are to be used most in tragedy and least in epic poetry.[ ] minturno also follows scaliger in conceiving that the purpose of tragedy is to teach, to delight, and to move. it teaches by setting before us an example of the life and manners of superior men, who by reason of human error have fallen into extreme unhappiness. it delights us by the beauty of its verse, its diction, its song, and the like. lastly, it moves us to wonder, by terrifying us and exciting our pity, thus purging our minds of such matters. this process of purgation is likened by minturno to the method of a physician: "as a physician eradicates, by means of poisonous medicine, the perfervid poison of disease which affects the body, so tragedy purges the mind of its impetuous perturbations by the force of these emotions beautifully expressed in verse."[ ] according to this interpretation of the _katharsis_, tragedy is a mode of homoeopathic treatment, effecting the cure of one emotion by means of a similar one; and we find milton, in the preface to _samson agonistes_, explaining the _katharsis_ in much the same manner:-- "tragedy, as it was anciently composed, hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other poems; therefore said by aristotle to be of power, by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions; that is, to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated. nor is nature wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion; for so in physic, things of melancholic hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humours." this passage has been regarded by twining, bernays, and other modern scholars as a remarkable indication of milton's scholarship and critical insight;[ ] but after all, it need hardly be said, he was merely following the interpretation of the italian commentators on the _poetics_. their writings he had studied and knew thoroughly, had imbibed all the critical ideas of the italian renaissance, and in the very preface from which we have just quoted, filled as it is with ideas that may be traced back to italian sources, he acknowledges following "the ancients and italians," as of great "authority and fame." like milton, minturno conceived of tragedy as having an ethical aim; but both milton and minturno clearly perceived that by _katharsis_ aristotle had reference not to a moral, but to an emotional, effect. one of the most interesting discussions on the meaning of the _katharsis_ is to be found in a letter of sperone speroni[ ] written in . his explanation of the passage itself is quite an impossible one, if only on philological grounds; but his argument is very interesting and very modern. he points out that pity and fear may be conceived of as keeping the spirit of men in bondage, and hence it is proper that we should be purged of these emotions. but he insists that aristotle cannot refer to the complete eradication of pity and fear--a conception which is stoic rather than peripatetic, for aristotle does not require us to free ourselves from emotions, but to regulate them, since in themselves they are not bad. iii. _the characters of tragedy_ aristotle's conception of the ideal tragic hero is based on the assumption that the function of tragedy is to produce the _katharsis_, or purgation, of pity and fear,--"pity being felt for a person who, if not wholly innocent, meets with suffering beyond his deserts; fear being awakened when the sufferer is a man of like nature with ourselves."[ ] from this it follows that if tragedy represents the fall of an entirely good man from prosperity to adversity, neither pity nor fear is produced, and the result merely shocks and repels us. if an entirely bad man is represented as undergoing a change from distress to prosperity, not only do we feel no pity and no fear, but even the sense of justice is left unsatisfied. if, on the contrary, such a man entirely bad falls from prosperity into adversity and distress, the moral sense is indeed satisfied, but without the tragic emotions of pity and fear. the ideal hero is therefore morally between the two extremes, neither eminently good nor entirely bad, though leaning to the side of goodness; and the misfortune which falls upon him is the result of some great flaw of character or fatal error of conduct.[ ] this conception of the tragic hero was the subject of considerable discussion in the renaissance; in fact, the first instance in italian criticism of the application of aristotelian ideas to the theory of tragedy is perhaps to be found in the reference of daniello ( ) to the tragic hero's fate. daniello, however, understood aristotle's meaning very incompletely, for he points out that tragedy, in order to imitate most perfectly the miserable and the terrible, should not introduce just and virtuous men fallen into vice and injustice through the adversity of fortune, for this is more wicked than it is miserable and terrible, nor should evil men, on the contrary, be introduced as changed by prosperity into good and just men.[ ] here daniello conceives of tragedy as representing the change of a man from vice to virtue, or from virtue to vice, through the medium of prosperity or misfortune. this is a curious misconception of aristotle's meaning. aristotle refers, not to the ethical effect of tragedy, but to the effect of the emotions of pity and terror upon the mind of the spectator, although of course he does not wish the catastrophe to shock the moral sense or the sense of justice. giraldi cintio, some years after daniello, follows aristotle more closely in the conception of the tragic hero; and he affirms, moreover, that tragedy may end happily or unhappily so long as it inspires pity and terror. now, aristotle has expressly stated his disapprobation of the happy ending of tragedy, for in speaking of tragedies with a double thread and a double catastrophe, that is, tragedies in which the good are ultimately rewarded and the bad punished, he shows that such a conclusion is decidedly against the general tragic effect.[ ] scaliger's conception of the moral function of the tragic poet as rewarding virtue and punishing vice is therefore inconsistent with the aristotelian conception; for, as scaliger insists that every tragedy should end unhappily, it follows that only the good must survive and only the bad suffer. another critic of this time, capriano ( ), points out that the fatal ending of tragedy is due to the inability of certain illustrious men to conduct themselves with prudence; and this is more in keeping with aristotle's true meaning.[ ] it has been seen that aristotle regarded a perfectly good man as not fitted to be the ideal hero of tragedy. minturno, however, asserts that tragedy is grave and illustrious because its characters are illustrious, and that therefore he can see no reason, despite aristotle, why the lives of perfect men or christian saints should not be represented on the stage, and why even the life of christ would not be a fit subject for tragedy.[ ] this is, indeed, corneille's opinion, and in the _examen_ of his _polyeucte_ he cites minturno in justification of his own case. as regards the other characters of tragedy, minturno states a curious distinction between characters fit for tragedy and those fit for comedy.[ ] in the first place, he points out that no young girls, with the exception of female slaves, should appear in comedy, for the reason that the women of the people do not appear in public until marriage, and would be sullied by the company of the low characters of comedy, whereas the maidens of tragedy are princesses, accustomed to meet and converse with noblemen from girlhood. secondly, married women are always represented in comedy as faithful, in tragedy as unfaithful to their husbands, for the reason that comedy concludes with friendship and tranquillity, and unfaithful relations could never end happily, while the love depicted in tragedy serves to bring about the tragic ruin of great houses. thirdly, in comedy old men are often represented as in love, but never in tragedy, for an amorous old man is conducive to laughter, which comedy aims at producing, but which would be wholly out of keeping with the gravity required in tragedy. these distinctions are of course deduced from the practice of the latin drama--the tragedies of seneca on the one hand, and the comedies of plautus and terence on the other. in a certain passage of aristotle's _poetics_ there is a formulation of the requirements of character-drawing in the drama.[ ] in this passage aristotle says that the characters must be good; that they must be drawn with propriety, that is, in keeping with the type to which they belong; that they must be true to life, something quite distinct either from goodness or propriety; and that the characters must be self-consistent. this passage gave rise to a curious conception of character in the renaissance and throughout the period of classicism. according to this, the conception of _decorum_, it was insisted that every old man should have such and such characteristics, every young man certain others, and so on for the soldier, the merchant, the florentine or parisian, and the like. this fixed and formal mode of regarding character was connected with the distinction of rank as the fundamental difference between the characters of tragedy and comedy, and it was really founded on a passage in horace's _ars poetica_,-- "Ætatis cujusque notandi sunt tibi mores,"[ ] and on the rhetorical descriptions of the various characteristics of men in the second book of aristotle's _rhetoric_. the explanation of the renaissance conception of _decorum_ may start from either of two points of view. in the first place, it is to be noted that horace, and after him the critics of the renaissance, set about to transpose to the domain of poetry the tentative distinctions of character formulated by aristotle, in the _rhetoric_, simply for the purposes of rhetorical exposition. these distinctions, it must be repeated, were rhetorical and not æsthetic, and they are therefore not alluded to by aristotle in the _poetics_. the result of the attempt to transpose them to the domain of poetry led to a hardening and crystallization of character in the classic drama. but the æsthetic misconception implied by such an attempt is only too obvious. in such a system poetry is held accountable, not to the ideal truth of human life, but to certain arbitrary, or at best merely empirical, formulæ of rhetorical theory. the renaissance was in this merely doing for character what was being done for all the other elements of art. every such element, when once discriminated and definitely formulated, became fixed as a necessary and inviolable substitute for the reality which had thus been analyzed. but we may look at the principle of _decorum_ from another point of view. a much deeper question--the question of social distinctions--is here involved. the observance of _decorum_ necessitated the maintenance of the social distinctions which formed the basis of renaissance life and of renaissance literature. it was this same tendency which caused the tragedy of classicism to exclude all but characters of the highest rank. speaking of narrative poetry, muzio ( ), while allowing kings to mingle with the masses, considers it absolutely improper for one of the people, even for a moment, to assume the sceptre.[ ] accordingly, men as distinguished by the accidents of rank, profession, country, and not as distinguished by that only which art should take cognizance of, character, became the subjects of the literature of classicism; and in so far as this is true, that literature loses something of the profundity and the universality of the highest art. this element of _decorum_ is to be found in all the critics of the renaissance from the time of vida[ ] and daniello.[ ] so essential became the observance of _decorum_ that muzio and capriano both considered it the most serious charge to be made against homer, that he was not always observant of it. capriano, comparing virgil with homer, asserts that the latin poet surpasses the greek in eloquence, in dignity, in grandeur of style, but beyond everything in _decorum_.[ ] the seeming vulgarity of some of homer's similes, and even of the actions of some of his characters, appeared to the renaissance a most serious blemish; and it was this that led scaliger to rate homer not only below virgil, but even below musæus. in minturno and scaliger we find every detail of character minutely analyzed. the poet is told how young men and old men should act, should talk, and should dress; and no deviations from these fixed formulæ were allowed under any circumstances. as a result of this, even when the poet liberated himself from these conceptions, and aimed at depicting character in its true sense, we find character, but never the development of character, portrayed in the neo-classic drama. the character was fixed from the beginning of the play to the end; and it is here that we may find the origin of ben jonson's conception of "humours." in one of salviati's lectures, _del trattato della poetica_,[ ] salviati defines a humour as "a peculiar quality of nature according to which every one is inclined to some special thing more than to any other." this would apply very distinctly to the sense in which the elizabethans used the word. thus jonson himself, in the induction of _every man out of his humour_, after expounding the medical notion of a humour, says:-- "it may, by metaphor, apply itself unto the general disposition: as when some one peculiar quality doth so possess a man, that it doth draw all his effects, his spirits, and his powers, in their confluctions, all to run one way, this may be truly said to be a humour." the origin of the term "humour," in jonson's sense, has never been carefully studied. jonson's editors speak of it as peculiar to the english language, and as first used in this sense about jonson's period. it is not our purpose to go further into this question; but salviati's definition is close enough to jonson's to indicate that the origin of this term, as of all other critical terms and critical ideas throughout sixteenth-century europe, must be looked for in the æsthetic literature of italy.[ ] iv. _the dramatic unities_ in his definition of tragedy aristotle says that the play must be complete or perfect, that is, it must have unity. by unity of plot he does not mean merely the unity given by a single hero, for, as he says, "infinitely various are the incidents in one man's life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action. hence the error, as it appears, of all poets who have composed a heracleid, a theseid, or other poems of the kind. they imagine that as heracles was one man, the story of heracles ought also to be a unity."[ ] this is aristotle's statement of the unity of action. but what is the origin of the two other unities,--the unities of time and place? there is in the _poetics_ but a single reference to the time-limit of the tragic action and none whatsoever to the so-called unity of place. aristotle says that the action of tragedy and that of epic poetry differ in length, "for tragedy endeavors, so far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit; whereas the epic action has no limits of time."[ ] this passage is the incidental statement of an historical fact; it is merely a tentative deduction from the usual practice of greek tragedy, and aristotle never conceived of it as an inviolable law of the drama. of the three unities which play so prominent a part in modern classical drama, the unity of action was the main, and, in fact, the only unity which aristotle knew or insisted on. but from his incidental reference to the general time-limits of greek tragedy, the renaissance formulated the unity of time, and deduced from it also the unity of place, to which there is absolutely no reference either in aristotle or in any other ancient writer whatever. it is to the italians of the renaissance, and not to the french critics of the seventeenth century, that the world owes the formulation of the three unities. the attention of scholars was first called to this fact about twenty years ago, by the brochure of a swiss scholar, h. breitinger, on the unities of aristotle before corneille's _cid_; but the gradual development and formulation of the three unities have never been systematically worked out. we shall endeavor here to trace their history during the sixteenth century, and to explain the processes by which they developed. the first reference in modern literature to the doctrine of the unity of time is to be found in giraldi cintio's _discorso sulle comedie e sulle tragedie_. he says that comedy and tragedy agree, among other things, in the limitation of the action to one day or but little more;[ ] and he has thus for the first time converted aristotle's statement of an historical fact into a dramatic law. moreover, he has changed aristotle's phrase, that tragedy limits itself "to a single revolution of the sun," into the more definite expression of "a single day." he points out that euripides, in the _heraclidæ_, on account of the long distance between the places in the action, had been unable to limit the action to one day. now, as aristotle must have known many of the best greek dramas which are now lost, it was probably in keeping with the practice of such dramas that their actions were not strictly confined within the limits of one day. aristotle, therefore, intentionally allowed the drama a slightly longer space of time than a single day. the unity of time, accordingly, becomes a part of the theory of the drama between and , but it was not until almost exactly a century later that it became an invariable rule of the dramatic literature of france and of the world. in robortelli ( ) we find aristotle's phrase, "a single revolution of the sun," restricted to the artificial day of twelve hours; for as tragedy can contain only one single and continuous action, and as people are accustomed to sleep in the night, it follows that the tragic action cannot be continued beyond one artificial day. this holds good of comedy as well as tragedy, for the length of the fable in each is the same.[ ] segni ( ) differs from robortelli, however, in regarding a single revolution of the sun as referring not to the artificial day of twelve hours, but to the natural day of twenty-four hours, because various matters treated in tragedy, and even in comedy, are such as are more likely to happen in the night (adulteries, murders, and the like); and if it be said that night is naturally the time for repose, segni answers that unjust people act contrary to the laws of nature.[ ] it was about this time, then, that there commenced the historic controversy as to what aristotle meant by limiting tragedy to one day; and three-quarters of a century later, in , beni could cite thirteen different opinions of scholars on this question. trissino, in his _poetica_ ( ), paraphrases as follows the passage in aristotle which refers to the unity of time: "they also differ in length, for tragedy terminates in one day, that is, one period of the sun, or but little more, while there is no time determined for epic poetry, as indeed was the custom with tragedy and comedy at their beginning, and is even to-day among ignorant poets."[ ] here for the first time, as a french critic remarks, the observance of the unity of time is made a distinction between the learned and the ignorant poet.[ ] it is evident that trissino conceives of the unity of time as an artistic principle which has helped to save dramatic poetry from the formlessness and chaotic condition of the mediæval drama. so that the unity of time became not only a dramatic law, but one the observation of which distinguished the dramatic artist from the mere ignorant compiler of popular plays. there is in none of the writers we have mentioned so far any reference to the unity of place, for the simple reason that there is no allusion to such a requirement for the drama in aristotle's _poetics_. maggi's discussion of the unity of time, in his commentary on the _poetics_ ( ), is of particular interest as preparing the way for the third unity. maggi attempts to explain logically the reason for the unity of time.[ ] why should tragedy be limited as to time, and not epic poetry? according to him, this difference is to be explained by the fact that the drama is represented on the stage before our eyes, and if we should see the actions of a whole month performed in about the time it takes to perform the play, that is, two or three hours, the performance would be absolutely incredible. for example, says maggi, if in a tragedy we should send a messenger to egypt, and he would return in an hour, would not the spectator regard this as ridiculous? in the epic, on the contrary, we do not see the actions performed, and so do not feel the need of limiting them to any particular time. now, it is to be noted here that this limitation of time is based on the idea of representation. the duration of the action of the drama itself must fairly coincide with the duration of its representation on the stage. this is the principle which led to the acceptance of the unity of place, and upon which it is based. limit the time of the action to the time of representation, and it follows that the place of the action must be limited to the place of representation. such a limitation is of course a piece of realism wholly out of keeping with the true dramatic illusion; but it was almost exclusively in the drama that classicism tended toward a minuter realism than could be justified by the aristotelian canons. in maggi the beginnings of the unity of place are evident, inasmuch as he finds that the requirements of the representation do not permit a messenger or any character in the drama to be sent very far from the place where the action is being performed. the closer action and representation coincide, the clearer becomes the necessity of a limitation in place as well as in time; and it was on this principle that scaliger and castelvetro, somewhat later, formulated the three unities. there is, indeed, in scaliger ( ) no direct statement of the unity of time; but the reference to it is nevertheless unmistakable. first of all, scaliger requires that the events be so arranged and disposed that they approach nearest to actual truth (_ut quam proxime accedant ad veritatem_).[ ] this is equivalent to saying that the duration of the action, its place, its mode of procedure, must correspond more or less exactly with the representation itself. the dramatic poet must aim, beyond all things, at reproducing the actual conditions of life. the _verisimile_, the _vraisemblable_, in the etymological sense of these words, must be the final criterion of dramatic composition. it is not sufficient that the spectator should be satisfied with the action as typical of similar actions in life. an absolutely perfect illusion must prevail; the spectator must be moved by the actions of the play exactly as if they were those of real life. this notion of the _verisimile_, and of its effect of perfect illusion on the spectator's mind, prevailed throughout the period of classicism, and was vigorously defended by no less a critic than voltaire himself. accordingly, as maggi first pointed out, if the playwright, in the few hours it takes to represent the whole play, requires one of his characters to perform an action that cannot be done in less than a month, this impression of actual truth and perfect illusion will not be left on the spectator's mind. "therefore," says scaliger, "those battles and assaults which take place about thebes in the space of two hours do not please me; no sensible poet should make any one move from delphi to thebes, or from thebes to athens, in a moment's time. agamemnon is buried by Æschylus after being killed, and lichas is hurled into the sea by hercules; but this cannot be represented without violence to truth. accordingly, the poet should choose the briefest possible argument, and should enliven it by means of episodes and details.... since the whole play is represented on the stage in six or eight hours, it is not in accordance with the exact appearance of truth (_haud verisimile est_) that within that brief space of time a tempest should arise and a shipwreck occur, out of sight of land." the observance of the unity of time could not be demanded in clearer or more forcible terms than this. but it is a mistake to construe this passage into a statement of the unity of place.[ ] when scaliger says that the poet should not move any one of the characters from delphi to thebes, or from thebes to athens, in a moment's time, he is referring to the exigencies, not of place, but of time. in this, as in many other things, he is merely following maggi, who, as we have seen, says that it is ridiculous for a dramatist to have a messenger go to egypt with a message and return in an hour. the characters, according to scaliger, should not move from delphi to thebes in a moment, not because the action need necessarily occur in one single place, but because the characters cannot with any appearance of truth go a great distance in a short space of time. this is an approach to the unity of place, and had scaliger followed his contention to its logical conclusion, he must certainly have formulated the three unities. but by requiring the action to be disposed with the greatest possible approach to the actual truth, or, in other words, by insisting that the action must coincide with the representation, scaliger helped more than any of his predecessors to the final recognition of the unity of place. in minturno[ ] and in vettori[ ] we find a tendency to restrict the duration of the epic as well as the tragic action. it has been seen that aristotle distinctly says that while the action of tragedy generally endeavors to confine itself within a period of about one day, that of epic poetry has no determined time. minturno, however, alludes to the unity of time in the following words: "whoever examines well the works of the most esteemed ancient writers, will find that the action represented on the stage is terminated in one day, or does not pass beyond the space of two days; while the epic has a longer period of time, except that its action cannot exceed one year in duration."[ ] this limitation minturno deduces from the practice of homer and virgil.[ ] the action of the _iliad_ begins in the tenth year of the trojan war, and lasts one year; the action of the _Æneid_ begins in the seventh year after the departure of Æneas from troy, and also lasts one year. castelvetro, however, was the first theorist to formulate the unity of place, and thus to give the three unities their final form. we have seen that castelvetro's theory of the drama was based entirely upon the notion of stage representation. all the essentials of dramatic literature are thus fixed by the exigencies of the stage. the stage is a circumscribed space, and the play must be performed upon it within a period of time limited by the physical necessities of the spectators. it is from these two facts that castelvetro deduces the unities of time and place. while asserting that aristotle held it as _cosa fermissima e verissima_ that the tragic action cannot exceed the length of an artificial day of twelve hours, he does not think that aristotle himself understood the real reason of this limitation.[ ] in the seventh chapter of the _poetics_ aristotle says that the length of the plot is limited by the possibility of its being carried in the memory of the spectator conveniently at one time. but this, it is urged, would restrict the epic as well as the tragic fable to one day. the difference between epic and dramatic poetry in this respect is to be found in the essential difference between the conditions of narrative and scenic poetry.[ ] narrative poetry can in a short time narrate things that happen in many days or months or even years; but scenic poetry, which spends as many hours in representing things as it actually takes to do them in life, does quite otherwise. in epic poetry words can present to our intellect things distant in space and time; but in dramatic poetry the whole action occurs before our eyes, and is accordingly limited to what we can actually see with our own senses, that is, to that brief duration of time and to that small amount of space in which the actors are occupied in acting, and not any other time or place. but as the restricted place is the stage, so the restricted time is that in which the spectators can at their ease remain sitting through a continuous performance; and this time, on account of the physical necessities of the spectators, such as eating, drinking, and sleeping, cannot well go beyond the duration of one revolution of the sun. so that not only is the unity of time an essential dramatic requirement, but it is in fact impossible for the dramatist to do otherwise even should he desire to do so--a conclusion which is of course the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the whole argument. in another place castelvetro more briefly formulates the law of the unities in the definitive form in which it was to remain throughout the period of classicism: "la mutatione tragica non può tirar con esso seco se non una giornata e un luogo."[ ] the unities of time and place are for castelvetro so very important that the unity of action, which is for aristotle the only essential of the drama, is entirely subordinated to them. in fact, castelvetro specifically says that the unity of action is not essential to the drama, but is merely made expedient by the requirements of time and place. "in comedy and tragedy," he says, "there is usually one action, not because the fable is unfitted to contain more than one action, but because the restricted space in which the action is represented, and the limited time, twelve hours at the very most, do not permit of a multitude of actions."[ ] in a similar manner castelvetro applies the law of the unities to epic poetry. although the epic action can be accomplished in many places and at diverse times, yet as it is more commendable and pleasurable to have a single action, so it is better for the action to confine itself to a short time and to but few places. in other words, the more the epic attempts to restrict itself to the unities of place and time, the better, according to castelvetro, it will be.[ ] moreover, castelvetro was not merely the first one to formulate the unities in their definitive form, but he was also the first to insist upon them as inviolable laws of the drama; and he refers to them over and over again in the pages of his commentary on the _poetics_.[ ] this then is the origin of the unities. our discussion must have made it clear how little they deserve the traditional title of aristotelian unities, or as a recent critic with equal inaccuracy calls them, the scaligerian unities (_unités scaligériennes_).[ ] nor were they, as we have seen, first formulated in france, though this was the opinion of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. thus dryden says that "the unity of place, however it might be practised by the ancients, was never one of their rules: we neither find it in aristotle, horace, or any who have written of it, till in our age the french poets first made it a precept of the stage."[ ] it may be said, therefore, that just as the unity of action is _par excellence_ the aristotelian unity, so the unities of time and place are beyond a doubt the italian unities. they enter the critical literature of europe from the time of castelvetro, and may almost be said to be the last contributions of italy to literary criticism. two years after their formulation by castelvetro they were introduced into france, and a dozen years after this formulation, into england. it was not until , however, that they became fixed in modern dramatic literature, as a result of the _cid_ controversy. this is approximately a hundred years after the first mention of the unity of time in italian criticism. v. _comedy_ the treatment of comedy in the literary criticism of this period is entirely confined to a discussion and elaboration of the little that aristotle says on the subject of comedy in the _poetics_. aristotle, it will be remembered, had distinguished tragedy from comedy in that the former deals with the nobler, the latter with the baser, sort of actions. comedy is an imitation of characters of a lower type than those of tragedy,--characters of a lower type indeed, but not in the full sense of the word bad. "the ludicrous is merely a subdivision of the ugly. it may be defined as a defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. thus, for example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not cause pain."[ ] from these few hints the italian theorists constructed a body of comic doctrine. there is, however, in the critical literature of this period no attempt to explain the theory of the indigenous italian comedy, the _commedia dell' arte_. the classical comedies of plautus and terence were the models, and aristotle's _poetics_ the guide, of all the discussions on comedy during the renaissance. the distinction between the characters of comedy and tragedy has already been explained in sufficient detail. all that remains to be done in treating of comedy is to indicate as briefly as possible such definitions of it as were formulated by the renaissance, and the special function which the renaissance understood comedy to possess. according to trissino ( ), the comic poet deals only with base things, and for the single purpose of chastising them. as tragedy attains its moral end through the medium of pity and fear, comedy does so by means of the chastisement and vituperation of things that are base and evil.[ ] the comic poet, however, is not to deal with all sorts of vices, but only such as give rise to ridicule, that is, the jocose actions of humble and unknown persons. laughter proceeds from a certain delight or pleasure arising from the sight of objects of ugliness. we do not laugh at a beautiful woman, a gorgeous jewel, or beautiful music; but a distortion or deformity, such as a silly speech, an ugly face, or a clumsy movement, makes us laugh. we do not laugh at the benefits of others; the finder of a purse, for example, arouses not laughter but envy. but we do laugh at some one who has fallen into the mud, because, as lucretius says, it is sweet to find in others some evil not to be found in ourselves. yet great evils, so far from causing us to laugh, arouse pity and fear, because we are apprehensive lest such things should happen to us. hence we may conclude that a slight evil which is neither sad nor destructive, and which we perceive in others but do not believe to be in ourselves, is the primary cause of the ludicrous.[ ] in maggi's treatise, _de ridiculis_, appended to his commentary on the _poetics_, the aristotelian conception of the ridiculous is accepted, with the addition of the element of _admiratio_. maggi insists on the idea of suddenness or novelty; for we do not laugh at painless ugliness if it be very familiar or long continued.[ ] according to robortelli ( ), comedy, like all other forms of poetry, imitates the manners and actions of men, and aims at producing laughter and light-heartedness. but what produces laughter? the evil and obscene merely disgust good men; the sad and miserable cause pity and fear. the basis of laughter is therefore to be found in what is only slightly mean or ugly (_subturpiculum_). the object of comedy, according to the consensus of renaissance opinion, is therefore to produce laughter for the purpose of rendering the minor vices ridiculous. muzio ( ) indeed complains, as both sidney and ben jonson do later, that the comic writers of his day were more intent on producing laughter than on depicting character or manners:-- "intenta al riso più ch' a i costumi." but minturno points out that comedy is not to be contemned because it excites laughter; for by comic hilarity the spectators are kept from becoming buffoons themselves, and by the ridiculous light in which amours are placed, are made to avoid such things in future. comedy is the best corrective of men's morals; it is indeed what cicero calls it, _imitatio vitæ, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis_. this phrase, ascribed by donatus to cicero, runs through all the dramatic discussions of the renaissance,[ ] and finds its echo in a famous passage in _hamlet_. cervantes cites the phrase in _don quixote_;[ ] and il lasca, in the prologue to _l'arzigoglio_, berates the comic writers of his day after this fashion: "they take no account of the absurdities, the contradictions, the inequalities, and the discrepancies of their pieces; for they do not seem to know that comedy should be truth's image, the ensample of manners, and the mirror of life." this is exactly what shakespeare is contending for when he makes hamlet caution the players not to "o'erstep the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."[ ] the high importance which scaliger ( ) gives to comedy, and in fact to satiric and didactic poetry in general, is one of many indications of the incipient formation of neo-classical ideals during the renaissance. he regards as absurd the statement which he conceives horace to have made, that comedy is not really poetry; on the contrary, it is the true form of poetry, and the first and highest of all, for its matter is entirely invented by the poet.[ ] he defines comedy as a dramatic poem filled with intrigue (_negotiosum_), written in popular style, and ending happily.[ ] the characters in comedy are chiefly old men, slaves, courtesans, all in humble station or from small villages. the action begins rather turbulently, but ends happily, and the style is neither high nor low. the typical themes of comedy are "sports, banquets, nuptials, drunken carousals, the crafty wiles of slaves, and the deception of old men."[ ] the theory of comedy in sixteenth-century italy was entirely classical, and the practice of the time agrees with its theory. there are indeed to be heard occasional notes of dissatisfaction and revolt, especially in the prologues of popular plays. il lasca, in the prologue to the _strega_, defiantly protests against the inviolable authority of aristotle and horace, and in the prologue to his _gelosia_ reserves the right to copy the manner of his own time, and not those of plautus and terence. cecchi, aretino, gelli, and other comic writers give expression to similar sentiments.[ ] but on the whole these protests availed nothing. the authors of comedy, and more especially the literary critics, were guided by classical practice and classical theory. dramatic forms like the improvised _commedia dell' arte_ had marked influence on the practice of european comedy in general, especially in france, but left no traces of their influence on the literary criticism of the italian renaissance. foot-notes: [ ] _poet._ vi. . [ ] daniello, p. . [ ] _cf._ horace, _ars poet._ _sq._ [ ] giraldi cintio, ii. . [ ] _ibid._ ii. . [ ] cited by butcher, p. . [ ] _poet._ iv. . [ ] maggi, p. . [ ] maggi, p. . [ ] butcher, p. _sq._ [ ] butcher, p. , n. .--müller, ii. , attempts to harmonize the definition of theophrastus with that of aristotle. [ ] egger, _hist. de la critique_, p. , n. . [ ] cloetta, i. . _cf._ antiphanes, cited by egger, p. . [ ] cloetta, p. . [ ] _etymol._ viii. , . [ ] _etymol._ xviii. and . [ ] cloetta, p. , and p. _sq._ [ ] _epist._ xi. . _cf._ gelli's lectures on the divine comedy, ed. negroni, , i. _sq._ [ ] _poet._ ix. - . [ ] giraldi cintio, ii. . [ ] giraldi cintio, ii. . [ ] _poet._ xi. . [ ] _ars poet._ - . [ ] giraldi cintio, ii. . [ ] scaliger, _poet._ i. . [ ] scaliger, i. ; iii. . [ ] _ibid._ vi. . [ ] _ibid._ iii. . [ ] _ibid._ i. . [ ] _de poeta_, p. _sq._ [ ] _ibid._ p. . _cf._ milton's phrase, "vain and amatorious poem." [ ] dacier, , p. xvii. [ ] _poet._ vi. . [ ] _poet._ xiv. . [ ] castelvetro, _poetica_, p. . [ ] castelvetro, _poetica_, pp. , . [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] castelvetro, _poetica_, pp. , . [ ] twining, ii. . [ ] butcher, ch. vi. [ ] giraldi cintio, ii. . [ ] _ibid._ i. _sq._ [ ] trissino, ii. _sq._ [ ] robortelli, p. _sq._ [ ] vettori, p. _sq._, and castelvetro, _poetica_, p. _sq._ [ ] maggi, p. _sq._ [ ] _cf._ shelley, _defence of poetry_, p. , "tragedy delights by affording a shadow of that pleasure which exists in pain," etc. [ ] _lezzioni_, p. . [ ] scaliger, _poet._ vii. i. ; iii. . [ ] _arte poetica_, p. . [ ] _arte poetica_, p. . [ ] butcher, pp. , . [ ] _opere_, v. . [ ] butcher, p. _sq._ [ ] _poet._ xiii. , . [ ] daniello, p. . [ ] _poet._ xiii. . [ ] _della vera poetica_, cap. iii. [ ] _de poeta_, p. _sq._ [ ] _arte poetica_, p. _sq._; also in scaliger and giraldi cintio. [ ] _poet._ xv. - . [ ] _ars poet._ _sq._ [ ] muzio, p. . [ ] pope, i. . [ ] _poetica_, p. _sq._ [ ] capriano, _op. cit._, cap. v. [ ] cod. magliabechiano, vii. , . [ ] another expression of jonson's, "small latin and less greek," may perhaps be traced to minturno's "poco del latino e pochissimo del greco," _arte poetica_, p. . [ ] _poet._ viii. - . [ ] _poet._ v. . [ ] giraldi cintio, ii. _sq._ [ ] robortelli, pp. , , and appendix, p. . _cf._ luisino's commentary on horace's _ars poetica_, , p. . [ ] b. segni, p. v. [ ] trissino, ii. . [ ] brunetière, i. . [ ] maggi, p. . [ ] scaliger, iii. . so robortelli, p. , speaks of tragedy as representing things _quæ multum accedunt ad veritatem ipsam_. [ ] _e.g._ lintilhac, _de scal. poet._ p. . [ ] _de poeta_, pp. , . [ ] vettori, p. . [ ] _arte poet._ pp. , . [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] castelvetro, _poetica_, pp. , . [ ] _ibid._ pp. , . [ ] castelvetro, _poetica_, p. . _cf._ boileau, _art poét._ iii. . [ ] castelvetro, _poetica_, p. . [ ] _ibid._ pp. , . [ ] other allusions to the unities, besides those already mentioned, will be found in castelvetro, _poetica_, pp. - , - , , , , , - , , , etc. [ ] lintilhac, in the _nouvelle revue_, lxiv. . [ ] _essay of dramatic poesy_, p. . [ ] _poet._ v. . _cf._ _rhet._ iii. . [ ] trissino, ii. . _cf._ butcher, p. _sq._ [ ] trissino, ii. - . trissino seems to follow cicero, _de orat._ ii. _sq._ it is to these italian discussions of the ludicrous that the theory of laughter formulated by hobbes, and after him by addison, owes its origin. for renaissance discussions of wit and humor before the introduction of aristotle's _poetics_, _cf._ the third and fourth books of pontano's _de sermone_, and the second book of castiglione's _cortigiano_. [ ] maggi, p. . _cf._ hobbes, _human nature_, , ix. . [ ] _cf._ b. tasso, ii. ; robortelli, p. ; etc. [ ] _don quix._ iv. . [ ] _hamlet_, iii. . [ ] scaliger, _poet._ i. . castiglione, in the second book of the _cortigiano_, says that the comic writer, more than any other, expresses the true image of human life. [ ] _poet._ i. . [ ] _poet._ iii. . [ ] symonds, _ren. in italy_, v. _sq._, _sq._ chapter iv the theory of epic poetry epic poetry was held in the highest esteem during the renaissance and indeed throughout the period of classicism. it was regarded by vida as the highest form of poetry,[ ] and a century later, despite the success of tragedy in france, rapin still held the same opinion.[ ] the reverence for the epic throughout the renaissance may be ascribed in part to the mediæval veneration of virgil as a poet, and his popular apotheosis as prophet and magician, and also in part to the decay into which dramatic literature had fallen during the middle ages in the hands of the wandering players, the _histriones_ and the _vagantes_. aristotle[ ] indeed had regarded tragedy as the highest form of poetry; and as a result, the traditional reverence for virgil and homer, and the renaissance subservience to aristotle, were distinctly at variance. trissino ( ) paraphrases aristotle's argument in favor of tragedy, but points out, notwithstanding this, that the whole world is unanimous in considering virgil and homer greater than any tragic poet before or after them.[ ] placed in this quandary, he concludes by leaving the reader to judge for himself whether epic or tragedy be the nobler form. i. _the theory of the epic poem_ vida's _ars poetica_, written before , although no edition prior to that of is extant, is the earliest example in modern times of that class of critical poems to which belong horace's _ars poetica_, boileau's _art poétique_, and pope's _essay on criticism_. vida's poem is entirely based on that of horace; but he substitutes epic for horace's dramatic studies, and employs the _Æneid_ as the model of an epic poem. the incompleteness of the treatment accorded to epic poetry in aristotle's _poetics_ led the renaissance to deduce the laws of heroic poetry and of poetic artifice in general from the practice of virgil; and it is to this point of view that the critical works on the _Æneid_ by regolo ( ), maranta ( ), and toscanella ( ) owe their origin. the obvious and even accidental qualities of virgil's poem are enunciated by vida as fundamental laws of epic poetry. the precepts thus given are purely rhetorical and pedagogic in character, and deal almost exclusively with questions of poetic invention, disposition, polish, and style. beyond this vida does not attempt to go. there is in his poem no definition of the epic, no theory of its function, no analysis of the essentials of narrative structure. in fact, no theory of poetry in any real sense is to be found in vida's treatise. daniello( ) deals only very cursorily with epic poetry, but his definition of it strikes the keynote of the renaissance conception. heroic poetry is for him an imitation of the illustrious deeds of emperors and other men magnanimous and valorous in arms,[ ]--a conception that goes back to horace's "res gestae regumque ducumque et tristia bella."[ ] trissino ( ) first introduced the aristotelian theory of the epic into modern literary criticism; and the sixth section of his _poetica_ is given up almost exclusively to the treatment of heroic poetry. the epic agrees with tragedy in dealing with illustrious men and illustrious actions. like tragedy it must have a single action, but it differs from tragedy in not having the time of the action limited or determined. while unity of action is essential to the epic, and is indeed what distinguishes it from narrative poems that are not really epics, the renaissance conceived of vastness of design and largeness of detail as necessary to the grandiose character of the epic poem.[ ] thus muzio says:-- "il poema sovrano è una pittura de l' universo, e però in sè comprende ogni stilo, ogni forma, ogni ritratto." trissino regards _versi sciolti_ as the proper metre for an heroic poem, since the stanzaic form impedes the continuity of the narrative. in this point he finds fault with boccaccio, boiardo, and ariosto, whose romantic poems, moreover, he does not regard as epics, because they do not obey aristotle's inviolable law of the single action. he also finds fault with the romantic poets for describing the improbable, since aristotle expressly prefers an impossible probability to an improbable possibility. minturno's definition of epic poetry is merely a modification or paraphrase of aristotle's definition of tragedy. epic poetry is an imitation of a grave and noble deed, perfect, complete, and of proper magnitude, with embellished language, but without music or dancing; at times simply narrating and at other times introducing persons in words and actions; in order that, through pity and fear of the things imitated, such passions may be purged from the mind with both pleasure and profit.[ ] here minturno, like giraldi cintio, ascribes to epic poetry the same purgation of pity and fear effected by tragedy. epic poetry he rates above tragedy, since the epic poet, more than any other, arouses that admiration of great heroes which it is the peculiar function of the poet to excite, and therefore attains the end of poetry more completely than any other poet. this, however, is true only in the highest form of narrative poetry; for minturno distinguishes three classes of narrative poets, the lowest, or _bucolici_, the mediocre, or _epici_, who have nothing beyond verse, and the highest, or _heroici_, who imitate the life of a single hero in noble verse.[ ] minturno insists fundamentally on the unity of the epic action; and directly against aristotle's statement, as we have seen, he restricts the duration of the action to one year. the license and prolixity of the _romanzi_ led the defenders of the classical epic to this extreme of rigid circumspection. according to scaliger, the epic, which is the norm by which all other poems may be judged and the chief of all poems, describes _heroum genus_, _vita_, gesta_.[ ] this is the horatian conception of the epic, and there is in scaliger little or no trace of the aristotelian doctrine. he also follows horace closely in forbidding the narrative poet to begin his poem from the very beginning of his story (_ab ovo_), and in various other details. castelvetro ( ) differs from aristotle in regard to the unity of the epic fable, on the ground that poetry is merely imaginative history, and can therefore do anything that history can do. poetry follows the footsteps of history, differing merely in that history narrates what has happened, while poetry narrates what has never happened but yet may possibly happen; and therefore, since history recounts the whole life of a single hero, without regard to its unity, there is no reason why poetry should not do likewise. the epic may in fact deal with many actions of one person, one action of a whole race, or many actions of many people; it need not necessarily deal with one action of one person, as aristotle enjoins, but if it does so it is simply to show the ingenuity and excellence of the poet.[ ] ii. _epic and romance_ this discussion of epic unity leads to one of the most important critical questions of the sixteenth century,--the question of the unity of romance. ariosto's _orlando furioso_ and boiardo's _orlando innamorato_ were written before the aristotelian canons had become a part of the critical literature of italy. when it became clear that these poems diverged from the fundamental requirements of the epic as expounded in the _poetics_, trissino set out to compose an heroic poem which would be in perfect accord with the precepts of aristotle. his _italia liberata_, which was completed by , was the result of twenty years of study, and it is the first modern epic in the strict aristotelian sense. with aristotle as his guide, and homer as his model, he had studiously and mechanically constructed an epic of a single action; and in the dedication of his poem to the emperor charles v. he charges all poems which violate this primary law of the single action with being merely bastard forms. the _romanzi_, and among them the _orlando furioso_, in seemingly disregarding this fundamental requirement, came under trissino's censure; and this started a controversy which was not to end until the commencement of the next century, and in a certain sense may be said to remain undecided even to this day. the first to take up the cudgels in defence of the writers of the _romanzi_ was giraldi cintio, who in his youth had known ariosto personally, and who wrote his _discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi_, in april, . the grounds of his defence are twofold. in the first place, giraldi maintains that the romance is a poetic form of which aristotle did not know, and to which his rules therefore do not apply; and in the second place, tuscan literature, differing as it does from the literature of greece in language, in spirit, and in religious feeling, need not and indeed ought not to follow the rules of greek literature, but rather the laws of its own development and its own traditions. with ariosto and boiardo as models, giraldi sets out to formulate the laws of the _romanzi_. the _romanzi_ aim at imitating illustrious actions in verse, with the purpose of teaching good morals and honest living, since this ought to be the aim of every poet, as giraldi conceives aristotle himself to have said.[ ] all heroic poetry is an imitation of illustrious actions, but giraldi, like castelvetro twenty years later, recognizes several distinct forms of heroic poetry, according as to whether it imitates one action of one man, many actions of many men, or many actions of one man. the first of these is the epic poem, the rules of which are given in aristotle's _poetics_. the second is the romantic poem, after the manner of boiardo and ariosto. the third is the biographical poem, after the manner of the _theseid_ and similar works dealing with the whole life of a single hero. these forms are therefore to be regarded as three distinct and legitimate species of heroic poetry, the first of them being an epic poem in the strict aristotelian sense, and the two others coming under the general head of _romanzi_. of the two forms of _romanzi_, the biographical deals preferably with an historical subject, whereas the noblest writers of the more purely romantic form, dealing with many actions of many men, have invented their subject-matter. horace says that an heroic poem should not commence at the very beginning of the hero's life; but it is difficult to understand, says giraldi, why the whole life of a distinguished man, which gives us so great and refined a pleasure in the works of plutarch and other biographers, should not please us all the more when described in beautiful verse by a good poet.[ ] accordingly, the poet who is composing an epic in the strict sense should, in handling the events of his narrative, plunge immediately _in medias res_. the poet dealing with many actions of many men should begin with the most important event, and the one upon which all the others may be said to hinge; whereas the poet describing the life of a single hero should begin at the very beginning, if the hero spent a really heroic youth, as hercules for example did. the poem dealing with the life of a hero is thus a separate _genre_, and one for which aristotle does not attempt to lay down any laws. giraldi even goes so far as to say that aristotle[ ] censured those who write the life of theseus or hercules in a single poem, not because they dealt with many actions of one man, but because they treated such a poem in exactly the same manner as those who dealt with a single action of a single hero,--an assertion which is of course utterly absurd. giraldi then proceeds to deal in detail with the disposition and composition of the _romanzi_, which he rates above the classical epics in the efficacy of ethical teaching. it is the office of the poet to praise virtuous actions and to condemn vicious actions; and in this the writers of the _romanzi_ are far superior to the writers of the ancient heroic poems.[ ] giraldi's discourse on the _romanzi_ gave rise to a curious dispute with his own pupil, giambattista pigna, who published a similar work, entitled _i romanzi_, in the same year ( ). pigna asserted that he had suggested to giraldi the main argument of the discourse, and that giraldi had adopted it as his own. without entering into the details of this controversy, it would seem that the priority of giraldi cannot fairly be contested.[ ] at all events, there is a very great resemblance between the works of giraldi and pigna. pigna's treatise, however, is more detailed than giraldi's. in the first book, pigna deals with the general subject of the _romanzi_; in the second he gives a life of ariosto, and discusses the _furioso_, point by point; in the third he demonstrates the good taste and critical acumen of ariosto by comparing the first version of the _furioso_ with the completed and perfected copy.[ ] both pigna and giraldi consider the _romanzi_ to constitute a new _genre_, unknown to the ancients, and therefore not subject to aristotle's rules. giraldi's sympathies were in favor of the biographical form of the _romanzi_, and his poem, the _ercole_ ( ), recounts the whole life of a single hero. pigna, who keeps closer to the tradition of ariosto, regards the biographical form as not proper to poetry, because too much like history. these arguments, presented by giraldi and pigna, were answered by speroni, minturno, and others. speroni pointed out that while it is not necessary for the romantic poets to follow the rules prescribed by the ancients, they cannot disobey the fundamental laws of poetry. "the _romanzi_," says speroni, "are epics, which are poems, or they are histories in verse, and not poems."[ ] that is, how does a poem differ from a well-written historical narrative, if the former be without organic unity?[ ] as to the whole discussion, it may be said here, without attempting to pass judgment on ariosto, or any other writer of _romanzi_, that unity of some sort every true poem must necessarily have; and, flawless as the _orlando furioso_ is in its details, the unity of the poem certainly has not the obviousness of perfect, and especially classical, art. a work of art without organic unity may be compared with an unsymmetrical circle; and, while the _furioso_ is not to be judged by any arbitrary or mechanical rules of unity, yet if it has not that internal unity which transcends all mere external form, it may be considered, as a work of art, hardly less than a failure; and the farther it is removed from perfect unity, the more imperfect is the art. "poetry adapts itself to its times, but cannot depart from its own fundamental laws."[ ] minturno's answer to the defenders of the _romanzi_ is more detailed and explicit than speroni's, and it is of considerable importance because of its influence on torquato tasso's conception of epic poetry. minturno does not deny--and in this his point of view is identical with tasso's--that it is possible to employ the matter of the _romanzi_ in the composition of a perfect poem. the actions they describe are great and illustrious, their knights and ladies are noble and illustrious, too, and they contain in a most excellent manner that element of the marvellous which is so important an element in the epic action. it is the structure of the _romanzi_ with which minturno finds fault. they lack the first essential of every form of poetry,--unity. in fact, they are little more than versified history or legend; and, while expressing admiration for the genius of ariosto, minturno cannot but regret that he so far yielded to the popular taste of his time as to employ the method of the _romanzi_. he approves of the suggestion of bembo, who had tried to persuade ariosto to write an epic instead of a romantic poem,[ ] just as later, and for similar reasons, gabriel harvey attempted to dissuade spenser from continuing the _faerie queene_. minturno denies that the tuscan tongue is not well adapted to the composition of heroic poetry; on the contrary, there is no form of poetry to which it is not admirably fitted. he denies that the romantic poem can be distinguished from the epic on the ground that the actions of knights-errant require a different and broader form of narrative than do those of the classical heroes. the celestial and infernal gods and demi-gods of the ancients correspond with the angels, saints, anchorites, and the one god of christianity; the ancient sibyls, oracles, enchantresses, and divine messengers correspond with the modern necromancers, fates, magicians, and celestial angels. to the claim of the romantic poets that their poems approximate closer to that magnitude which aristotle enjoins as necessary for all poetry, minturno answers that magnitude is of no avail without proportion; there is no beauty in the giant whose limbs and frame are distorted. finally, the _romanzi_ are said to be a new form of poetry unknown to aristotle and horace, and hence not amenable to their laws. but time, says minturno, cannot change the truth; in every age a poem must have unity, proportion, magnitude. everything in nature is governed by some specific law which directs its operation; and as it is in nature so it is in art, for art tries to imitate nature, and the nearer it approaches nature in her essential laws, the better it does its work. in other words, as has already been pointed out, poetry adapts itself to its times, but cannot depart from its own laws. bernardo tasso, the father of torquato, had originally been one of the defenders of the classical epic; but he seems to have been converted to the opposite view by giraldi cintio, and in his poem of the _amadigi_ he follows romantic models. his son torquato, in his _discorsi dell' arte poetica_, originally written one or two years after the appearance of minturno's _arte poetica_, although not published until , was the first to attempt a reconciliation of the epic and romantic forms; and he may be said to have effected a solution of the problem by the formulation of the theory of a narrative poem which would have the romantic subject-matter, with its delightful variety, and the epic form, with its essential unity. the question at issue, as we have seen, is that of unity; that is, does the heroic poem need unity? tasso denies that there is any difference between the epic poem and the romantic poem as poems. the reason why the latter is more pleasing, is to be found in the fact of the greater delightfulness of the themes treated.[ ] variety in itself is not pleasing, for a variety of disagreeable things would not please at all. hence the perfect and at the same time most pleasing form of heroic poem would deal with the chivalrous themes of the _romanzi_, but would possess that unity of structure which, according to the precepts of aristotle and the practice of homer and virgil, is essential to every epic. there are two sorts of unity possible in art as in nature,--the simple unity of a chemical element, and the complex unity of an organism like an animal or plant,--and of these the latter is the sort of unity that the heroic poet should aim at.[ ] capriano ( ) had referred to this same distinction, when he pointed out that poetry ought not to be the imitation of a single act, such as a single act of weeping in the elegy, or a single act of pastoral life in the eclogue, for such a sporadic imitation is to be compared to a picture of a single hand without the rest of the body; on the contrary, poetry ought to be the representation of a number of attendant or dependent acts, leading from a given beginning to a suitable end.[ ] having settled the general fact that the attractive themes of the _romanzi_ should be employed in a perfect heroic poem, we may inquire what particular themes are most fitted to the epic, and what must be the essential qualities of the epic material.[ ] in the first place, the subject of the heroic poem must be historical, for it is not probable that illustrious actions such as are dealt with in the epic should be unknown to history. the authority of history gains for the poet that semblance of truth necessary to deceive the reader and make him believe that what the poet writes is true. secondly, the heroic poem, according to tasso, must deal with the history, not of a false religion, but of the true one, christianity. the religion of the pagans is absolutely unfit for epic material; for if the pagan deities are not introduced, the poem will lack the element of the marvellous, and if they are introduced it will lack the element of probability. both the marvellous and the _verisimile_ must exist together in a perfect epic, and difficult as the task may seem, they must be reconciled. another reason why paganism is unfit for the epic is to be found in the fact that the perfect knight must have piety as well as other virtues. in the third place, the poem must not deal with themes connected with the articles of christian faith, for such themes would be unalterable, and would allow no scope to the free play of the poet's inventive fancy. fourthly, the material must be neither too ancient nor too modern, for the latter is too well known to admit of fanciful changes with probability, and the former not only lacks interest but requires the introduction of strange and alien manners and customs. the times of charlemagne and arthur are accordingly best fitted for heroic treatment. finally, the events themselves must possess nobility and grandeur. hence an epic should be a story derived from some event in the history of christian peoples, intrinsically noble and illustrious, but not of so sacred a character as to be fixed and immutable, and neither contemporary nor very remote. by the selection of such material the poem gains the authority of history, the truth of religion, the license of fiction, the proper atmosphere in point of time, and the grandeur of the events themselves.[ ] aristotle says that both epic and tragedy deal with illustrious actions. tasso points out that if the actions of tragedy and of epic poetry were both illustrious in the same way, they would both produce the same results; but tragic actions move horror and compassion, while epic actions as a rule do not and need not arouse these emotions. the tragic action consists in the unexpected change of fortune, and in the grandeur of the events carrying with them horror and pity; but the epic action is founded upon undertakings of lofty martial virtue, upon deeds of courtesy, piety, generosity, none of which is proper to tragedy. hence the characters in epic poetry and in tragedy, though both of the same regal and supreme rank, differ in that the tragic hero is neither perfectly good nor entirely bad, as aristotle says, while the epic hero must have the very height of virtue, such as Æneas, the type of piety, amadis, the type of loyalty, achilles, of martial virtue, and ulysses, of prudence. having formulated these theories of heroic poetry in his youth, tasso set out to carry them into practice, and his famous _gerusalemme liberata_ was the result. this poem, almost immediately after its publication, started a violent controversy, which raged for many years, and which may be regarded as the legitimate outcome of the earlier dispute in connection with the _romanzi_.[ ] the _gerusalemme_ was in fact the centre of critical activity during the latter part of the century. shortly after its publication, camillo pellegrino published a dialogue, entitled _il caraffa_ ( ), in which the _gerusalemme_ is compared with the _orlando furioso_, much to the advantage of the former. pellegrino finds fault with ariosto on account of the lack of unity of his poem, the immoral manners imitated, and various imperfections of style and language; and in all of these things, unity, morality, and style, he finds tasso's poem perfect. this was naturally the signal for a heated and long-continued controversy. the accademia della crusca had been founded at florence, in , and it seems that the members of the new society felt hurt at some sarcastic remarks regarding florence in one of tasso's dialogues. accordingly, the head of the academy, lionardo salviati, in a dialogue entitled _l' infarinato_, wrote an ardent defence of ariosto; and an acrid and undignified dispute between tasso and salviati was begun.[ ] tasso answered the accademia della crusca in his _apologia_; and at the beginning of the next century, paolo beni, the commentator on aristotle's _poetics_, published his _comparazione di omero, virgilio, e torquato_, in which tasso is rated above homer, virgil, and ariosto, not only in dignity, in beauty of style, and in unity of fable, but in every other quality that may be said to constitute perfection in poetry. before dismissing this whole matter, it should be pointed out that the defenders of aristotle had absolutely abandoned the position of giraldi and pigna, that the _romanzi_ constitute a _genre_ by themselves, and are therefore not subject to aristotle's law of unity. the question as giraldi had stated it was this: does every poem need to have unity? the question as discussed in the tasso controversy had changed to this form: what is unity? it was taken for granted by both sides in the controversy that every poem must have organic unity; and the authority of aristotle, in epic as in dramatic poetry, was henceforth supreme. it was to the authority of aristotle that tasso's opponents appealed; and salviati, merely for the purpose of undermining tasso's pretensions, wrote an extended commentary on the _poetics_, which still lies in ms. at florence, and which has been made use of in the present essay.[ ] foot-notes: [ ] pope, i. . [ ] rapin, , ii. . [ ] _poet._ xxvi. [ ] trissino, ii. _sq._ [ ] daniello, p. . [ ] _ars poet._ . [ ] trissino, ii. _sq._ [ ] _arte poetica_, p. . [ ] _de poeta_, pp. , . [ ] _poet._ iii. . [ ] castelvetro, _poetica_, p. _sq._ [ ] giraldi cintio, i. , . [ ] giraldi cintio, i. . [ ] _poet._ viii. . [ ] giraldi, i. _sq._ [ ] _cf._ tiraboschi, vii. _sq._, and giraldi, ii. _sq._ pigna's own words are cited in giraldi, i. p. xxiii. [ ] canello, p. _sq._ [ ] speroni, v. . [ ] _cf._ minturno, _de poeta_, p. . [ ] minturno, _arte poetica_, p. . for various opinions on the unity of the _orlando furioso_, _cf._ canello, p. , and foffano, p. _sq._ [ ] _arte poetica_, p. . [ ] t. tasso, xii. _sq._ [ ] t. tasso, xii. . [ ] _della vera poetica_, cap. iii. [ ] t. tasso, xii. _sq._ [ ] t. tasso, xii. . [ ] accounts of this famous controversy will be found in tiraboschi, canello, serassi, etc.; but the latest and most complete is that given in the twentieth chapter of solerti's monumental _vita di torquato tasso_, torino, . [ ] nearly all the important documents of the tasso controversy are reprinted in rosini's edition of tasso, _opere_, vols. xviii.-xxiii. [ ] the question of unity was also raised in another controversy of the second half of the sixteenth century. a passage in varchi's _ercolano_ ( ), rating dante above homer, started a controversy on the _divine comedy_. the most important outcome of this dispute was mazzoni's _difesa di dante_ ( ), in which a whole new theory of poetry is expounded in order to defend the great tuscan poet. chapter v the growth of the classic spirit in italian criticism the growth of classicism in renaissance criticism was due to three causes,--humanism, or the imitation of the classics, aristotelianism, or the influence of aristotle's _poetics_, and rationalism, or the authority of the reason, the result of the growth of the modern spirit in the arts and sciences. these three causes are at the bottom of italian classicism, as well as of french classicism during the seventeenth century. i. _humanism_ the progress of humanism may be distinguished by an arbitrary but more or less practical division into four periods. the first period was characterized by the discovery and accumulation of classical literature, and the second period was given up to the arrangement and translation of the works thus discovered. the third period is marked by the formation of academies, in which the classics were studied and humanized, and which as a result produced a special cult of learning. the fourth and last period is marked by the decline of pure erudition, and the beginning of æsthetic and stylistic scholarship.[ ] the practical result of the revival of learning and the progress of humanism was thus the study and imitation of the classics. to this imitation of classical literature all that humanism gave to the modern world may be ultimately traced. the problem before us, then, is this: what was the result of this imitation of the classics, in so far as it regards the literary criticism of the renaissance? in the first place, the imitation of the classics resulted in the study and cult of external form. elegance, polish, clearness of design, became objects of study for themselves; and as a result we have the formation of æsthetic taste, and the growth of a classic purism, to which many of the literary tendencies of the renaissance may be traced.[ ] under leo x. and throughout the first half of the sixteenth century, the intricacies of style and versification were carefully studied. vida was the first to lay down laws of imitative harmony;[ ] bembo, and after him dolce and others, studied the poetic effect of different sounds, and the onomatopoeic value of the various vowels and consonants;[ ] claudio tolomei attempted to introduce classical metres into the vernacular;[ ] trissino published subtle and systematic researches in tuscan language and versification.[ ] later, the rhetorical treatises of cavalcanti ( ), lionardi ( ), and partenio ( ), and the more practical manuals of fanucci ( ), equicola ( ), and ruscelli ( ), all testify to the tremendous impulse which the imitation of the classics had given to the study of form both in classical and vernacular literatures. in vida's _ars poetica_ there are abundant evidences of the rhetorical and especially the puristic tendencies of modern classicism. the mechanical conception of poetic expression, in which imagination, sensibility, and passion are subjected to the elaborate and intricate precepts of art, is everywhere found in vida's poem. like horace, vida insists on long preparation for the composition of poetry, and warns the poet against the indulgence of his first impulses. he suggests as a preparation for the composition of poetry, that the poet should prepare a list of phrases and images for use whenever occasion may demand.[ ] he impresses upon the poet the necessity of euphemistic expressions in introducing the subject of his poem; for example, the name of ulysses should not be mentioned, but he should be referred to as one who has seen many men and many cities, who has suffered shipwreck on the return from troy, and the like.[ ] in such mechanical precepts as these, the rhetoric of seventeenth-century classicism is anticipated. its restraint, its purity, its mechanical side, are everywhere visible in vida. a little later, in daniello, we find similar puristic tendencies. he requires the severe separation of _genres_, decorum and propriety of characterization, and the exclusion of everything disagreeable from the stage. in partenio's _della imitatione poetica_ ( ), the poet is expressly forbidden the employment of the ordinary words in daily use,[ ] and elegance of form is especially demanded. partenio regards form as of superior importance to subject or idea; for those who hear or read poetry care more for beauty of diction than for character or even thought.[ ] it is on merely rhetorical grounds that partenio distinguishes excellent from mediocre poetry. the good poet, unlike the bad one, is able to give splendor and dignity to the most trivial idea by means of adornments of diction and disposition. this conception seems to have particularly appealed to the renaissance; and tasso gives expression to a similar notion when he calls it the poet's noblest function "to make of old concepts new ones, to make of vulgar concepts noble ones, and to make common concepts his own."[ ] in a higher and more ideal sense, poetry, according to shelley, "makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar."[ ] it is in keeping with this rhetorical ideal of classicism that scaliger makes _electio et sui fastidium_ the highest virtues of the poet.[ ] all that is merely popular (_plebeium_) in thought and expression is to be minutely avoided; for only that which proceeds from solid erudition is proper to art. the basis of artistic creation is imitation and judgment; for every artist is at bottom somewhat of an echo.[ ] grace, decorum, elegance, splendor are the chief excellences of poetry and the life of all excellence lies in measure, that is, moderation and proportion. it is in the spirit of this classical purism that scaliger minutely distinguishes the various rhetorical and grammatical figures, and carefully estimates their proper place and function in poetry. his analysis and systematization of the figures were immediately accepted by the scholars and grammarians of his time, and have played a large part in french education ever since. another consequence of scaliger's dogmatic teaching, the latinization of culture, can only be referred to here in passing.[ ] a second result of the imitation of the classics was the paganization of renaissance culture. classic art is at bottom pagan, and the renaissance sacrificed everything in order to appear classical.[ ] not only did christian literature seem contemptible when compared with classic literature, but the mere treatment of christian themes offered numerous difficulties in itself. thus muzio declares that the ancient fables are the best poetic materials, since they permit the introduction of the deities into poetry, and a poem, being something divine, should not dispense with the association of divinity.[ ] to bring the god of israel into poetry, to represent him, as it were, in the flesh, discoursing and arguing with men, was sacrilege; and to give the events of poetic narrative divine authoritativeness, the pagan deities became necessities of renaissance poetry. savonarola, in the fifteenth century, and the council of trent, in the sixteenth, reacted against the paganization of literature, but in vain. despite the council of trent, despite tasso and du bartas, the pagan gods held sway over parnassus until the very end of the classical period; and in the seventeenth century, as will be seen, boileau expressly discourages the treatment of christian themes, and insists that the ancient pagan fables alone must form the basis of neo-classical art. a third result of the imitation of the classics was the development of applied, or concrete, criticism. if the foundations of literature, if the formation of style, can result only from a close and judicious imitation of classical literature, this problem confronts us: which classical authors are we to imitate? an answer to this question involves the application of concrete criticism. a reason must be given for one's preferences; in other words, they must be justified on principle. the literary controversies of the humanists, the disputes on the subject of imitation, of ciceronianism, and what not, all tended in this direction. the judgment of authors was dependent more or less on individual impressions. but the longer these controversies continued, the nearer was the approach to a literary criticism, justified by appeals to general principles, which became more and more fixed and determined; so that the growth of principles, or criteria of judgment in matters of literature, is in reality coterminous with the history of the growth of classicism.[ ] but one of the most important consequences of the imitation of the classics was that this imitation became a dogma of criticism, and radically changed the relations of art and nature in so far as they touch letters and literary criticism. the imitation of the classics became, in a word, the basis of literary creation. vida, for example, affirms that the poet must imitate classical literature, for only by such imitation is perfection attainable in modern poetry. in fact, this notion is carried to such an extreme that the highest originality becomes for vida merely the ingenious translation of passages from the classic poets:-- "haud minor est adeo virtus, si te audit apollo, inventa argivûm in patriam convertere vocem, quam si tute aliquid intactum inveneris ante."[ ] muzio, echoing horace, urges the poet to study the classics by day and by night; and scaliger, as has been seen, makes all literary creation depend ultimately on judicious imitation: "nemo est qui non aliquid de echo." as a result, imitation gradually acquired a specialized and almost esoteric meaning, and became in this sense the starting-point of all the educational theories of the later humanists. the doctrine of imitation set forth by john sturm, the strasburg humanist, was particularly influential.[ ] according to sturm, imitation is not the servile copying of words and phrases; it is "a vehement and artistic application of mind," which judiciously uses and transfigures all that it imitates. sturm's theory of imitation is not entirely original, but comes through agricola and melanchthon from quintilian.[ ] quintilian had said that the greater part of art consists in imitation; but for the humanists imitation became the chief and almost the only element of literary creation, since the literature of their own time seemed so vastly inferior to that of the ancients. the imitation of the classics having thus become essential to literary creation, what was to be its relation to the imitation of nature? the ancient poets seemed to insist that every writer is at bottom an imitator of nature, and that he who does not imitate nature diverges from the purpose and principle of art. a lesson coming from a source so authoritative as this could not be left unheeded by the writers of the renaissance, and the evolution of classicism may be distinguished by the changing point of view of the critics in regard to the relations between nature and art. this evolution may be traced in the neo-classical period through three distinct stages, and these three stages may be indicated by the doctrines respectively of vida, scaliger, and boileau. vida says that it is the first essential of literary art to imitate the classics. this, however, does not prevent him from warning the poet that it is his first duty to observe and copy nature:-- "præterea haud lateat te, nil conarier artem, naturam nisi ut assimulet, propiusque sequatur." for vida, however, as for the later classicists, nature is synonymous with civilized men, perhaps even further restricted to the men of the city and the court; and the study of nature was hardly more for him than close observation of the differences of human character, more especially of the external differences which result from diversity of age, rank, sex, race, profession, and which may be designated by the term _decorum_.[ ] the imitation of nature even in this restricted sense vida requires on the authority of the ancients. the modern poet should imitate nature because the great classical poets have always acknowledged her sway:-- "hanc unam vates sibi proposuere magistram." nature has no particular interest for vida in itself. he accepts the classics as we accept the scriptures; and nature is to be imitated and followed because the ancients seem to require it. in scaliger this principle is carried one stage farther. the poet creates another nature and other fortunes as if he were another god.[ ] virgil especially has created another nature of such beauty and perfection that the poet need not concern himself with the realities of life, but can go to the second nature created by virgil for the subject-matter of his imitation. "all the things which you have to imitate, you have according to another nature, that is, virgil."[ ] in virgil, as in nature, there are the most minute details of the foundation and government of cities, the management of armies, the building and handling of ships, and in fact all the secrets of the arts and sciences. what more can the poet desire, and indeed what more can he find in life, and find there with the same certainty and accuracy? virgil has created a nature far more perfect than that of reality, and one compared with which the actual world and life itself seem but pale and without beauty. what scaliger stands for, then, is the substitution of the world of art instead of life as the object of poetic imitation. this point of view finds expression in many of the theorists of his time. partenio, for example, asserts that art is a firmer and safer guide than nature; with nature we can err, but scarcely with art, for art eradicates from nature all that is bad, while nature mingles weeds with flowers, and does not distinguish vices from virtues.[ ] boileau carries the neo-classical ideal of nature and art to its ultimate perfection. according to him, nothing is beautiful that is not true, and nothing is true that is not in nature. truth, for classicism, is the final test of everything, including beauty; and hence to be beautiful poetry must be founded on nature. nature should therefore be the poet's sole study, although for boileau, as for vida, nature is one with the court and the city. now, in what way can we discover exactly how to imitate nature, and perceive whether or not we have imitated it correctly? boileau finds the guide to the correct imitation of nature, and the very test of its correctness, in the imitation of the classics. the ancients are great, not because they are old, but because they are true, because they knew how to see and to imitate nature; and to imitate antiquity is therefore to use the best means the human spirit has ever found for expressing nature in its perfection.[ ] the advance of boileau's theory on that of vida and scaliger is therefore that he founded the rules and literary practice of classical literature on reason and nature, and showed that there is nothing arbitrary in the authority of the ancients. for vida, nature is to be followed on the authority of the classics; for boileau, the classics are to be followed on the authority of nature and reason. scaliger had shown that such a poet as virgil had created another nature more perfect than that of reality, and that therefore we should imitate this more beautiful nature of the poet. boileau, on the contrary, showed that the ancients were simply imitating nature itself in the closest and keenest manner, and that by imitating the classics the poet was not imitating a second and different nature, but was being shown in the surest way how to imitate the real and only nature. this final reconciliation of the imitation of nature and the imitation of the classics was boileau's highest contribution to the literary criticism of the neo-classical period. ii. _aristotelianism_ the influence of aristotle's _poetics_ is first visible in the dramatic literature of the early sixteenth century. trissino's _sofonisba_ ( ), usually accounted the first regular modern tragedy, rucellai's _rosmunda_ ( ), and innumerable other tragedies of this period, were in reality little more than mere attempts at putting the aristotelian theory of tragedy into practice. the aristotelian influence is evident in many of the prefaces of these plays, and in a few contemporary works of scholarship, such as the _antiquæ lectiones_ ( ) of cælius rhodiginus, whom scaliger called _omnium doctissimus præceptor noster_. at the same time, the _poetics_ did not immediately play an important part in the critical literature of italy. from the time of petrarch, aristotle, identified in the minds of the humanists with the mediæval scholasticism so obnoxious to them, had lost somewhat of his supremacy; and the strong platonic tendencies of the renaissance had further contributed to lower the prestige of aristotelianism among the humanists. at no time of the renaissance, however, did aristotle lack ardent defenders, and filelfo, for example, wrote in , "to defend aristotle and the truth seems to me one and the same thing."[ ] in the domain of philosophy the influence of aristotle was temporarily sustained by the liberal peripateticism of pomponazzi; and numerous others, among them scaliger himself, continued the traditions of a modernized aristotelianism. from this time, however, aristotle's position as the supreme philosopher was challenged more and more; and he was regarded by the advanced thinkers of the renaissance as the representative of the mediæval obscurantism that opposed the progress of modern scientific investigation. but whatever of aristotle's authority was lost in the domain of philosophy was more than regained in the domain of literature. the beginning of the aristotelian influence on modern literary theory may be said to date from the year , in which year trincaveli published a greek text of the _poetics_, pazzi his edition and latin version, and daniello his own _poetica_. pazzi's son, in dedicating his father's posthumous work, said that in the _poetics_ "the precepts of poetic art are treated by aristotle as divinely as he has treated every other form of knowledge." in the very year that this was said, ramus gained his master's degree at the university of paris by defending victoriously the thesis that aristotle's doctrines without exception are all false.[ ] the year may therefore be regarded as a turning-point in the history of aristotle's influence. it marks the beginning of his supremacy in literature, and the decline of his dictatorial authority in philosophy. between the year and the middle of the century the lessons of aristotle's _poetics_ were being gradually learned by the italian critics and poets. by the whole of the _poetics_ had been incorporated in the critical literature of italy, and fracastoro could say that "aristotle has received no less fame from the survival of his _poetics_ than from his philosophical remains."[ ] according to bartolommeo ricci, in a letter to prince alfonso, son of hercules ii., duke of ferrara, maggi was the first person to interpret aristotle's _poetics_ in public.[ ] these lectures were delivered some time before april, . as early as , bartolommeo lombardi, the collaborator of maggi in his commentary on the _poetics_, had intended to deliver public lectures on the _poetics_ before a paduan academy, but died before accomplishing his purpose.[ ] numerous public readings on the subject of aristotle and horace followed those of maggi,--among them those by varchi, giraldi cintio, luisino, and trifone gabrielli; and the number of public readings on topics connected with literary criticism, and on the poetry of dante and petrarch, increased greatly from this time. the number of commentaries on the _poetics_ itself, published during the sixteenth century, is really remarkable. the value of these commentaries in general is not so much that they add anything to the literary criticism of the renaissance, but that their explanations of aristotle's meaning were accepted by contemporary critics, and became in a way the source of all the literary arguments of the sixteenth century. nor was their influence restricted merely to this particular period. they were, one might almost say, living things to the critics and poets of the classical period in france. racine, corneille, and other distinguished writers possessed copies of these commentaries, studied them carefully, cited them in their prefaces and critical writings, and even annotated their own copies of the commentaries with marginal notes, of which some may be seen in the modern editions of their works. in the preface to rapin's _réflexions sur l'art poétique_ ( ) there is a history of literary criticism, which is almost entirely devoted to these italian commentators; and writers like chapelain and balzac eagerly argued and discussed their relative merits. several of these italian commentators have been alluded to already.[ ] the first critical edition of the _poetics_ was that of robortelli ( ), and this was followed by those of maggi ( ) and vettori ( ), both written in latin, and both exhibiting great learning and acumen. the first translation of the _poetics_ into the vernacular was that by segni ( ), and this was followed by the italian commentaries of castelvetro ( ) and piccolomini ( ). tasso, after comparing the works of these two commentators, concluded that while castelvetro had greater erudition and invention, piccolomini had greater maturity of judgment, more learning, perhaps, with less erudition, and certainly learning more aristotelian and more suited to the interpretation of the _poetics_.[ ] the two last sections of trissino's _poetica_, published in , are little more than a paraphrase and transposition of aristotle's treatise. but the curious excesses into which admiration of aristotle led the italian scholars may be gathered from a work published at milan in , an edition of the _poetics_ expounded in verse, baldini's _ars poetica aristotelis versibus exposita_. the _poetics_ was also adapted for use as a practical manual for poets and playwrights in such works as riccoboni's brief _compendium artis poeticæ aristotelis ad usum conficiendorum poematum_ ( ). the last of the great italian commentaries on the _poetics_ to have a general european influence was perhaps beni's, published in ; but this carries us beyond the confines of the century. besides the published editions, translations, and commentaries, many others were written which may still be found in ms. in the libraries of italy. reference has already been made to salviati's ( ). there are also two anonymous commentaries dating from this period in ms. at florence,--one in the magliabechiana and the other in the riccardiana. the last work which may be mentioned here is buonamici's _discorsi poetici in difesa d' aristotele_, in which aristotle is ardently defended against the attacks of his detractors. it was in italy during this period that the literary dictatorship of aristotle first developed, and it was scaliger to whom the modern world owes the formulation of the supreme authority of aristotle as a critical theorist. fracastoro had likened the importance of aristotle's _poetics_ to that of his philosophical treatises. trissino had followed aristotle verbally and almost literally. varchi had spoken of years of aristotelian study as an essential prerequisite for every one who entered the field of literary criticism. partenio, a year before the publication of scaliger's _poetics_, had asserted that everything relating to tragedy and epic poetry had been settled by aristotle and horace. but scaliger went farther still. he was the first to regard aristotle as the perpetual lawgiver of poetry. he was the first to assume that the duty of the poet is first to find out what aristotle says, and then to obey these precepts without question. he distinctly calls aristotle the perpetual dictator of all the arts: "aristoteles imperator noster, omnium bonarum artium dictator perpetuus."[ ] this is perhaps the first occasion in modern literature in which aristotle is definitely regarded as a literary dictator, and the dictatorship of aristotle in literature may, therefore, be dated from the year . but scaliger did more than this. he was the first apparently to attempt to reconcile aristotle's _poetics_, not only with the precepts of horace and the definitions of the latin grammarians, but with the whole practice of latin tragedy, comedy, and epic poetry. it was in the light of this reconciliation, or concord of aristotelianism with the latin spirit, that aristotle became for scaliger a literary dictator. it was not aristotle that primarily interested him, but an ideal created by himself, and founded on such parts of the doctrine of aristotle as received confirmation from the theory or practice of roman literature; and this new ideal, harmonizing with the latin spirit of the renaissance, became in the course of time one of the foundations of classicism. the influence of aristotelianism was further augmented by the council of trent, which gave to aristotle's doctrine the same degree of authority as catholic dogma. all these circumstances tended to favor the importance of aristotle in italy during the sixteenth century, and as a result the literary dictatorship of aristotle was by the italians foisted on europe for two centuries to come. from to aristotle was regarded as the supreme authority in letters throughout europe. at no time, even in england, during and after that period, was there a break in the aristotelian tradition, and the influence of the _poetics_ may be found in sidney and ben jonson, in milton and dryden, as well as in shelley and coleridge. lessing, even in breaking away from the classical practice of the french stage, defended his innovations on the authority of aristotle, and said of the _poetics_, "i do not hesitate to acknowledge, even if i should therefore be held up to scorn in these enlightened times, that i consider the work as infallible as the elements of euclid."[ ] in , a dozen years before lessing, one of the precursors of the romantic movement in england, joseph warton, had also said of the _poetics_, "to attempt to understand poetry without having diligently digested this treatise would be as absurd and impossible as to pretend to a skill in geometry without having studied euclid."[ ] one of the first results of the dictatorship of aristotle was to give modern literature a body of inviolable rules for the drama and the epic; that is, the dramatic and heroic poets were restricted to a certain fixed form, and to certain fixed characters. classical poetry was of course the ideal of the renaissance, and aristotle had analyzed the methods which these works had employed. the inference seems to have been that by following these rules a literature of equal importance could be created. these formulæ were at the bottom of classical literature, and rules which had created such literatures as those of greece and rome could hardly be disregarded. as a result, these rules came to be considered more and more as essentials, and finally, almost as the very tests of literature; and it was in consequence of their acceptance as poetic laws that the modern classical drama and epic arose. the first modern tragedies and the first modern epics were hardly more than such attempts at putting the aristotelian rules into practice. the cult of form during the renaissance had produced a reaction against the formlessness and invertebrate character of mediæval literature. the literature of the middle ages was infinitely inferior to that of the ancients; mediæval literature lacked form and structure, classical literature had a regular and definite form. form then came to be regarded as the essential difference between the perfect literatures of greece and rome, and the imperfect and vulgar literature of the middle ages; and the deduction from this was that, to be classical, the poet must observe the form and structure of the classics. minturno indeed says that "the precepts given of old by the ancient masters, and now repeated by me here, are to be regarded merely as common usage, and not as inviolable laws which must serve under all circumstances."[ ] but this was not the general conception of the renaissance. muzio, for example, specifically says:-- "queste legge ch' io scrivo e questi esempi sian, lettore, al tuo dir perpetua norma;" and in another place he speaks of a precept he has given, as "vera, ferma, e inevitabil legge."[ ] scaliger goes still further than this; for, according to him, even the classics themselves are to be judged by these standards and rules. "it seems to me," says scaliger, "that we ought not to refer everything back to homer, just as though he were the norm, but homer himself should be referred to the norm."[ ] in the modern classical period somewhat later, these rules were found to be based on reason:-- "these rules of old, discovered not devised, are nature still, but nature methodized."[ ] but during the renaissance they were accepted _ex cathedra_ from classical literature. the formulation of a fixed body of critical rules was not the only result of the aristotelian influence. one of the most important of these results, as has appeared, was the rational justification of imaginative literature. with the introduction of aristotle's _poetics_ into modern europe the renaissance was first able to formulate a systematic theory of poetry; and it is therefore to the rediscovery of the _poetics_ that we may be said to owe the foundation of modern criticism. it was on the side of aristotelianism that italian criticism had its influence on european letters; and that this influence was deep and widespread, our study of the critical literatures of france and england will in part show. the critics with whom we have been dealing are not merely dead provincial names; they influenced, for two whole centuries, not only france and england, but spain, portugal, and germany as well. literary criticism, in any real sense, did not begin in spain until the very end of the sixteenth century, and the critical works that then appeared were wholly based on those of the italians. rengifo's _arte poética española_ ( ), in so far as it deals with the theory of poetry, is based on aristotle, scaliger, and various italian authorities, according to the author's own acknowledgment. pinciano's _philosophia antigua poética_ ( ) is based on the same authorities. similarly, cascales, in his _tablas poéticas_ ( ), gives as his authorities minturno, giraldi cintio, maggi, riccoboni, castelvetro, robortelli, and his own countryman pinciano. the sources of these and all other works written at this period are italian; and the following passage from the _egemplar poético_, written about by the spanish poet juan de la cueva, is a good illustration, not only of the general influence of the italians on spanish criticism, but of the high reverence in which the individual italian critics were held by spanish men of letters:-- "de los primeros tiene horacio el puesto, en numeros y estilo soberano, qual en su arte al mundo es manifesto. escaligero [_i.e._ scaliger] hace el paso llano con general enseñamiento y guia, lo mismo el docto cintio [_i.e._ giraldi cintio] y biperano.[ ] maranta[ ] es egemplar de la poesia, vida el norte, pontano[ ] el ornamento, la luz minturno qual el sol del dia.... acuden todos a colmar sus vasos al oceano sacro de stagira [_i.e._ aristotle], donde se afirman los dudosos pasos, se eterniza la trompa y tierna lira."[ ] the influence of the italians was equally great in germany. from fabricius to opitz, the critical ideas of germany were almost all borrowed, directly or indirectly, from italian sources. fabricius in his _de re poetica_ ( ) acknowledges his indebtedness to minturno, partenio, pontanus, and others, but above all to scaliger; and most of the critical ideas by which opitz renovated modern german literature go back to italian sources, through scaliger, ronsard, and daniel heinsius. no better illustration of the influence of the italian critics upon european letters could be afforded than that given by opitz's _buch von der deutschen poeterei_.[ ] the influence of italian criticism on the critical literature of france and england will be more or less treated in the remaining portions of this essay. it may be noted here, however, that in the critical writings of lessing there is represented the climax of the italian tradition in european letters, especially on the side of aristotelianism. shelley represents a similar culmination of the italian tradition in england. his indebtedness to sidney and milton, who represent the italian influence in the elizabethan age, and especially to tasso, whom he continually cites, is very marked. the debt of modern literature to italian criticism is therefore not slight. in the half century between vida and castelvetro, italian criticism formulated three things: a theory of poetry, a rigid form for the epic, and a rigid form for the drama. these rigid forms for drama and epic governed the creative imagination of europe for two centuries, and then passed away. but while modern æsthetics for over a century has studied the processes of art, the theory of poetry, as enunciated by the italians of the sixteenth century, has not diminished in value, but has continued to pervade the finer minds of men from that time to this. iii. _rationalism_ the rationalistic temper may be observed in critical literature almost at the very beginning of the sixteenth century. this spirit of rationalism is observable throughout the renaissance; and its general causes may be looked for in the liberation of the human reason by the renaissance, in the growth of the sciences and arts, and in the reaction against mediæval sacerdotalism and dogma. the causes of its development in literary criticism may be found not only in these but in several other influences of the period. the paganization of culture, the growth of rationalistic philosophies, with their all-pervading influence on arts and letters, and moreover the influence of horace's _ars poetica_, with its ideal of "good sense," all tended to make the element of reason predominate in literature and in literary criticism. in vida the three elements which are at the bottom of classicism, the imitation of the classics, the imitation of nature, and the authority of reason, may all be found. reason is for him the final test of all things:-- "semper nutu rationis eant res."[ ] the function of the reason in art is, first, to serve as a standard in the choice and carrying out of the design, a bulwark against the operation of mere chance,[ ] and secondly, to moderate the expression of the poet's own personality and passion, a bulwark against the morbid subjectivity which is the horror of the classical temperament.[ ] it has been said of scaliger that he was the first modern to establish in a body of doctrine the principal consequences of the sovereignty of the reason in literature.[ ] that was hardly his aim, and certainly not his attainment. but he was, at all events, one of the first modern critics to affirm that there is a standard of perfection for each specific form of literature, to show that this standard may be arrived at _a priori_ through the reason, and to attempt a formulation of such standard for each literary form. "est in omni rerum genere unum primum ac rectum ad cuius tum norman, tum rationem cætera dirigenda sunt."[ ] this, the fundamental assumption of scaliger's _poetics_, is also one of the basic ideas of classicism. not only is there a standard, a norm, in every species of literature, but this norm can be definitely formulated and defined by means of the reason; and it is the duty of the critic to formulate this norm, and the duty of the poet to study and follow it without deviating from the norm in any way. even homer, as we have seen, is to be judged according to this standard arrived at through the reason. such a method cuts off all possibility of novelty of form or expression, and holds every poet, ancient or modern, great or small, accountable to one and the same standard of perfection. the growth and influence of rationalism in italian criticism may be best observed by the gradual effect which its development had on the element of aristotelianism. in other words, rationalism changed the point of view according to which the aristotelian canons were regarded in the italian renaissance. the earlier italian critics accepted their rules and precepts on the authority of aristotle alone. thus trissino, at the beginning of the fifth section of his _poetica_, finished in , although begun about twenty years before, says, "i shall not depart from the rules and precepts of the ancients, and especially aristotle."[ ] somewhat later, in , varchi says, "reason _and_ aristotle are my _two_ guides."[ ] here the element of the reason first asserts itself, but there is no intimation that the aristotelian canons are in themselves reasonable. the critic has two guides, the individual reason and the aristotelian rules, and each of these two guides is to serve wherever the other is found wanting. this same point of view is found a decade later in tasso, who says that the defenders of the unity of the epic poem have made "a shield of the authority of aristotle, nor do they lack the arms afforded by the reason;"[ ] and similarly, in , sir philip sidney says that the unity of time is demanded "both by aristotle's precept and common reason."[ ] here both tasso and sidney, while contending that the particular law under discussion is in itself reasonable, speak of aristotle's _poetics_ and the reason as separate and distinct authorities, and fail to show that aristotle himself based all his precepts upon the reason. in denores, a few years later, the development is carried one stage farther in the direction of the ultimate classical attitude, as when he speaks of "reason and aristotle's _poetics_, which is indeed founded on naught save reason."[ ] this is as far as italian criticism ever went. it was the function of neo-classicism in france, as will be seen, to show that such a phrase as "reason _and_ aristotle" is a contradiction in itself, that the aristotelian canons and the reason are ultimately reducible to the same thing, and that not only what is in aristotle will be found reasonable, but all that reason dictates for literary observance will be found in aristotle. rationalism produced several very important results in literature and literary criticism during the sixteenth century. in the first place, it tended to give the reason a higher place in literature than imagination or sensibility. poetry, it will be remembered, was often classified by renaissance critics as one of the logical sciences; and nothing could be in greater accord with the neo-classical ideal than the assertion of varchi and others that the better logician the poet is, the better he will be as a poet. sainte-beuve gives scaliger the credit of having first formulated this theory of literature which subordinates the creative imagination and poetic sensibility to the reason;[ ] but the credit or discredit of originating it does not belong exclusively to scaliger. this tendency toward the apotheosis of the reason was diffused throughout the sixteenth century, and does not characterize any individual author. the italian critics of this period were the first to formulate the classical ideal that the standard of perfection may be conceived of by the reason, and that perfection is to be attained only by the realization of this standard. the rationalistic spirit also tended to set the seal of disapprobation on extravagances of any sort. subjectivity and individualism came to be regarded more and more, at least in theory, as out of keeping with classical perfection. clearness, reasonableness, sociableness, were the highest requirements of art; and any excessive expression of the poet's individuality was entirely disapproved of. man, not only as a reasonable being, but also as a social being, was regarded as the basis of literature. boileau's lines:-- "que les vers ne soient pas votre éternel emploi; cultivez vos amis, soyez homme de foi; c'est peu d'être agréable et charmant dans un livre, il faut savoir encore et converser et vivre,"[ ] were anticipated in berni's _dialogo contra i poeti_, written in , though not published until . this charming invective is directed against the fashionable literature of the time, and especially against all professional poets. writing from the standpoint of a polished and rationalistic society, berni lays great stress on the fact that poetry is not to be taken too seriously, that it is a pastime, a recreation for cultured people, a mere bagatelle; and he professes to despise those who spend all their time in writing verses. the vanity, the uselessness, the extravagances, and the ribaldry of the professional poets receive his hearty contempt; only those who write verses for pastime merit approbation. "are you so stupid," he cries, "as to think that i call any one who writes verses a poet, and that i regard such men as vida, pontano, bembo, sannazaro, as mere poets? i do not call any one a poet, and condemn him as such, unless he does nothing but write verses, and wretched ones at that, and is good for nothing else. but the men i have mentioned are not poets by profession."[ ] here the sentiments expressed are those of a refined and social age,--the age of louis xiv. no less than that of leo x. the irreligious character of neo-classic art may also be regarded as one of the consequences of this rationalistic temper. the combined effect of humanism, essentially pagan, and rationalism, essentially sceptical, was not favorable to the growth of religious feeling in literature. classicism, the result of these two tendencies, became more and more rationalistic, more and more pagan; and in consequence, religious poetry in any real sense ceased to flourish wherever the more stringent forms of classicism prevailed. in boileau these tendencies result in a certain distinct antagonism to the very forms of christianity in literature:-- "c'est donc bien vainement que nos auteurs déçus, bannissant de leurs vers ces ornemens reçus, pensent faire agir dieu, ses saints et ses prophètes, comme ces dieux éclos du cerveau des poëtes; mettent à chaque pas le lecteur en enfer; n'offrent rien qu'astaroth, belzébuth, lucifer. de la foi d'un chrétien les mystères terribles d'ornemens égayés ne sont point susceptibles; l'Évangile à l'esprit n'offre de tous côtés que pénitence à faire et tourmens mérités; et de vos fictions le mélange coupable même à ses vérités donne l'air de la fable."[ ] foot-notes: [ ] symonds, ii. , based on voigt. [ ] _cf._ woodward, p. _sq._ [ ] hallam, _lit. of europe_, i. . . _cf._ pope, i. : "omnia sed numeris vocum concordibus aptant," etc. [ ] bembo, _le prose_, ; dolce, _osservationi_, , lib. iv.; etc. [ ] _versi e regole de la nuova poesia toscana_, . [ ] trissino, _poetica_, lib. i.-iv., ; tomitano, _della lingua toscana_, ; etc. [ ] pope, i. . _cf._ de sanctis, ii. _sq._ [ ] pope, i. . [ ] partenio, p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] _opere_, xi. . [ ] _defence_, p. . [ ] _poet._ v. . [ ] _poet._ v. ; vi. . [ ] _cf._ brunetière, p. . [ ] symonds, ii. _sq._ [ ] muzio, p. . [ ] _cf._ dennis, _select works_, , ii. _sq._ [ ] pope, i. . [ ] laas, _die paedagogik des johannes sturm_, berlin, , p. _sq._ [ ] _inst. orat._ x. . [ ] pope, i. . [ ] _poet._ i. . [ ] _poet._ iii. . [ ] partenio, p. _sq._ [ ] _cf._ brunetière, p. _sq._, and lanson, _hist. de la litt. fr._, p. _sq._ [ ] _lettres grecques_, ed. legrand, , p. . [ ] "quæcunque ab aristotele dicta sint falsa et commentitia esse;" bayle, _dict._ s. v. ramus, note c. [ ] fracastoro, i. . [ ] tiraboschi, vii. . [ ] maggi, dedication. [ ] in an appendix to this essay will be found an excerpt from salviati's unpublished commentary on the _poetics_, giving his judgment of the commentators who had preceded him. [ ] tasso, xv. . [ ] _poet._ vii. ii. . [ ] _hamburg. dramat._ - . [ ] _essay on pope_, d ed., i. . [ ] _arte poetica_, p. . [ ] muzio, pp. v., v. [ ] _poet._ i. . [ ] pope, _essay on criticism_, . [ ] viperano, author of _de poetica libri tres_, antwerp, . [ ] maranta, author of _lucullanæ quæstiones_, basle, . [ ] three writers of the renaissance bore this name: g. pontano, the famous italian humanist and latin poet, who died in ; p. pontano, of bruges, the author of an _ars versificatoria_, published in ; and j. pontanus, a bohemian jesuit, author of _institutiones poeticæ_, first published at ingolstadt in , and several times reprinted. [ ] sedano, _parnaso español_, madrid, , viii. , . [ ] _cf._ berghoeffer, _opitz' buch von der poeterei_, , and beckherrn, _opitz, ronsard, und heinsius_, . the first reference to aristotle's _poetics_, north of the alps, is to be found in luther's _address to the christian nobles of the german nation_, . schosser's _disputationes de tragoedia_, published in , two years before scaliger's work appeared, is entirely based on aristotle's _poetics_. [ ] pope, i. . [ ] _loc. cit._, beginning, "nec te fors inopina regat." [ ] pope, i. , beginning, "ne tamen ah nimium." [ ] lintilhac, in _nouvelle revue_, lxiv. . [ ] scaliger, _poet._ iii. . [ ] trissino, ii. . [ ] varchi, p. . [ ] tasso, xii. . [ ] _defense of poesy_, p. . [ ] _discorso_, , p. v. [ ] _causeries du lundi_, iii. . [ ] _art poét._ iv. . [ ] berni, p. . [ ] _art poét._ iii. . _cf._ dryden, _discourse on satire_, in _works_, xiii. _sq._ chapter vi romantic elements in italian criticism in the italian critical literature of the sixteenth century there are to be found the germs of romantic as well as classical criticism. the development of romanticism in renaissance criticism is due to various tendencies, of ancient, of mediæval, and of modern origin. the ancient element is platonism; the mediæval elements are christianity, and the influence of the literary forms and the literary subject-matter of the middle ages; and the modern elements are the growth of national life and national literatures, and the opposition of modern philosophy to aristotelianism. i. _the ancient romantic element_ as the element of reason is the predominant feature of neo-classicism, so the element of imagination is the predominant feature of romanticism; and according as the reason or the imagination predominates in renaissance literature, there results neo-classicism or romanticism, while the most perfect art finds a reconciliation of both elements in the imaginative reason. according to the faculty of reason, when made the basis of literature, the poet is, as it were, held down to earth, and art becomes the mere reasoned expression of the truth of life. by the faculty of imagination, the poet is made to create a new world of his own,--a world in which his genius is free to mould whatever its imagination takes hold of. this romantic doctrine of the freedom of genius, of inspiration and the power of imagination, in so far as it forms a part of renaissance criticism, owes its origin to platonism. the influence of the platonic doctrines among the humanists has already been alluded to. plato was regarded by them as their leader in the struggle against mediævalism, scholasticism, and aristotelianism. the aristotelian dialectic of the middle ages appealed exclusively to the reason; platonism gave opportunities for the imagination to soar to vague and sublime heights, and harmonize with the divine mysteries of the universe. as regards poetry and imaginative literature in general, the critics of the renaissance appealed from the plato of the _republic_ and the _laws_ to the plato of the _ion_, the _phædrus_, and the _symposium_. beauty being the subject-matter of art, plato's praise of beauty was transferred by the renaissance to poetry, and his praise of the philosopher was transferred to the poet. the aristotelian doctrine defines beauty according to its relations to the external world; that is, poetry is an imitation of nature, expressed in general terms. the platonic doctrine, on the contrary, is concerned with poetry, or beauty, in so far as it concerns the poet's own nature; that is, the poet is divinely inspired and is a creator like god. fracastoro, as has been seen, makes the platonic rapture, the delight in the true and essential beauty of things, the true tests of poetic power. in introducing this platonic ideal of poetic beauty into modern literary criticism, he defines and distinguishes poetry according to a subjective criterion; and it is according to whether the objective or the subjective conception of art is insisted upon, that we have the classic spirit or the romantic spirit. the extreme romanticists, like the schlegels and their contemporaries in germany, entirely eliminate the relation of poetry to the external world, and in this extreme form romanticism becomes identified with the exaggerated subjective idealism of fichte and schelling. the extreme classicists entirely eliminate the poet's personality; that is, poetry is merely reasoned expression, a perfected expression of what all men can see in nature, for the poet has no more insight into life--no more imagination--than any ordinary, judicious person. the effects of this platonic element upon renaissance criticism were various. in the first place, it was through the platonic influence that the relation of beauty to poetry was first made prominent.[ ] according to scaliger, tasso, sidney, another world of beauty is created by the poet,--a world that possesses beauty in its perfection as this world never can. the reason alone leaves no place for beauty; and accordingly, for the neo-classicists, art was ultimately restricted to moral and psychological observation. moreover, platonism raised the question of the freedom of genius and of the imagination. of all men, only the poet, as sidney and others pointed out, is bound down and restricted by no laws. but if poetry is a matter of inspiration, how can it be called an art? if genius alone suffices, what need is there of study and artifice? for the extreme romanticists of this period, genius alone was accounted sufficient to produce the greatest works of poetry; for the extreme classicists, studious and labored art unaided by genius fulfilled all the functions of poetic creation; but most of the critics of the sixteenth century seem to have agreed with horace that genius, or an inborn aptitude, is necessary to begin with, but that it needs art and study to regulate and perfect it. genius cannot suffice without restraint and cultivation. scaliger, curiously, reconciles both classic and romantic elements. the poet, according to scaliger, is inspired, is in fact a creator like god; but poetry is an imitation (that is, re-creation) of nature, according to certain fixed rules obtained from the observation of the anterior expression of nature in great art. it is these rules that make poetry an art; and these rules form a distinct neo-classic element imposed on the aristotelian doctrine. ii. _mediæval elements_ the middle ages contributed to the poetic ideal of the renaissance two elements: romantic themes and the christian spirit. the forms and subjects of mediæval literature are distinctly romantic. dante's _divine comedy_ is an allegorical vision; it is almost unique in form, and has no classical prototype.[ ] the tendency of petrarchism was also in the direction of romanticism. its "conceits" and its subjectivity led to an unclassical extravagance of thought and expression; and the petrarchistic influence made lyric poetry, and accordingly the criticism of lyric poetry, more romantic than any other form of literature or literary criticism during the period of classicism. it was for this reason that there was little lyricism in the classical period, not only in france, but wherever the classic temper predominated. the themes of the _romanzi_ are also mediæval and romantic; but while they are mediæval contributions to literature,[ ] they became contributions to literary criticism only after the growth of national life and the development of the feeling of nationality, both distinctly modern. some reference has already been made to the paganization of culture by the humanists. but with the growth of that revival of christian sentiment which led to the reformation, there were numerous attempts to reconcile christianity with pagan culture.[ ] such men as ficino and pico della mirandola attempted to harmonize christianity and platonic philosophy; and under the great patron of letters, pope leo x., there were various attempts to harmonize christianity with the classic spirit in literature. in such poems as vida's _christiad_ and sannazaro's _de partu virginis_, christianity is covered with the drapery of paganism or classicism. the first reaction against this paganization of culture was, as has been seen, effected by savonarola. this reaction was reënforced, in the next century, by the influence and authority of the council of trent; and after the middle of the sixteenth century the christian ideal plays a prominent part in literary criticism. the spirit of both giraldi cintio and minturno is distinctly christian. for giraldi the _romanzi_ are christian, and hence superior to the classical epics. he allows the introduction of pagan deities only into epics dealing with the ancient classical subjects; but tasso goes further, and says that no modern heroic poet should have anything to do with them. according to tasso, the heroes of an heroic poem must be christian knights, and the poem itself must deal with a true, not a false, religion. the subject is not to be connected with any article of christian faith or dogma, because that was fixed by the council of trent; but paganism in any form is altogether unfit for a modern epic. tasso even goes so far as to assert that piety shall be numbered among the virtues of the knightly heroes of epic poetry. at the same time also, lorenzo gambara wrote his work, _de perfecta poeseos ratione_, to prove that it is essential for every poet to exclude from his poems, not only everything that is wicked or obscene, but also everything that is fabulous or that deals with pagan divinities.[ ] it was to this religious reaction that we owe the christian poetry of tasso, du bartas, and spenser. but humanism was strong, and rationalism was rife; and the religious revival was hardly more than temporary. neo-classicism throughout europe was essentially pagan. iii. _modern elements_ the literature of the middle ages constitutes, as it were, one vast body of european literature; only with the renaissance did distinctly national literatures spring into existence. nationalism as well as individualism was subsequent to the renaissance; and it was at this period that the growth of a national literature, of national life,--in a word, patriotism in its widest sense,--was first effected. the linguistic discussions and controversies of the sixteenth century prepared the way for a higher appreciation of national languages and literatures. these controversies on the comparative merits of the classical and vernacular tongues had begun in the time of dante, and were continued in the sixteenth century by bembo, castiglione, varchi, muzio, tolomei, and many others; and in salviati summed up the italian side of the question in an oration in which he asserted that the tuscan, or, as he called it, the florentine language and the florentine literature are vastly superior to any other language or literature, whether ancient or modern. however extravagant this claim may appear, the mere fact that salviati made such a claim at all is enough to give him a place worthy of serious consideration in the history of italian literature. the other side of the controversy finds its extremest expression in a treatise of celio calcagnini addressed to giraldi cintio, in which the hope is expressed that the italian language, and all the literature composed in that language, would be absolutely abandoned by the world.[ ] in giraldi cintio we find the first traces of purely national criticism. his purpose, in writing the discourse on the _romanzi_, was primarily to defend ariosto, whom he had known personally in his youth. the point of view from which he starts is that the _romanzi_ constitute a new form of poetry of which aristotle did not know, and to which, therefore, aristotle's rules do not apply. giraldi regarded the romantic poems of ariosto and boiardo both as national and as christian works; and italian literature is thus for the first time critically distinguished from classical literature in regard to language, religion, and nationality. in giraldi's discourse there is no apparent desire either to underrate or to disregard the _poetics_ of aristotle; the fact was simply that aristotle had not known the poems which deal with many actions of many men, and hence it would be absurd to demand that such poems should conform to his rules. the _romanzi_ deal with phases of poetry, and phases of life, which aristotle could not be expected to understand. a similar feeling of the distinct nationality of italian literature is to be found in many of the prefaces of the italian comedies of this period. il lasca, in the preface of the _strega_ (_c._ ), says that "aristotle and horace knew their own times, but ours are not the same at all. we have other manners, another religion, and another mode of life; and it is therefore necessary to make comedies after a different fashion." as early as , aretino, in the prologue of his _cortegiana_, warned his audience "not to be astonished if the comic style is not observed in the manner required, for we live after a different fashion in modern rome than they did in ancient athens." similarly, gelli, in the dedication of the _sporta_ ( ), justifies the use of language not to be found in the great sources of italian speech, on the ground that "language, together with all other natural things, continually varies and changes."[ ] although there is in giraldi cintio no fundamental opposition to aristotle, it is in his discourse on the _romanzi_ that there may be found the first attempt to wrest a province of art from aristotle's supreme authority. neither salviati, who had rated the italian language above all others, nor calcagnini, who had regarded it as the meanest of all, had understood the discussion of the importance of the tuscan tongue to be concerned with the question of aristotle's literary supremacy. it was simply a national question--a question as to the national limits of aristotle's authority, just as was the case in the several controversies connected with tasso, dante, and guarini's _pastor fido_.[ ] castelvetro, in his commentary on the _poetics_, differs from aristotle on many occasions, and does not hesitate even to refute him. yet his reverence for aristotle is great; his sense of aristotle's supreme authority is strong; and on one occasion, where horace, quintilian, and cicero seem to differ from aristotle, castelvetro does not hesitate to assert that they could not have seen the passage of the _poetics_ in question, and that, in fact, they did not thoroughly understand the true constitution of a poet.[ ] the opposition to aristotelianism among the humanists has already been alluded to. this opposition increased more and more with the development of modern philosophy. in ramus had attacked aristotle's authority at paris. a few years later, in , ortensio landi, who had been at the court of france for some time, published his _paradossi_, in which it is contended that the works which pass under the name of aristotle are not really aristotle's at all, and that aristotle himself was not only an ignoramus, but also the most villanous man of his age. "we have, of our own accord," he says, "placed our necks under the yoke, putting that vile beast of an aristotle on a throne, and depending on his conclusions as if he were an oracle."[ ] it is the philosophical authority of aristotle that landi is attacking. his attitude is not that of a humanist, for cicero and boccaccio do not receive more respectful treatment at his hands than aristotle does. landi, despite his mere eccentricities, represents the growth of modern free thought and the antagonism of modern philosophy to aristotelianism. the literary opposition and the philosophical opposition to aristotelianism may be said to meet in francesco patrizzi, and, in a less degree, in giordano bruno. patrizzi's bitter antiperipateticism is to be seen in his _nova de universis philosophia_ ( ), in which the doctrines of aristotle are shown to be false, inconsistent, and even opposed to the doctrines of the catholic church. his literary antagonism to aristotle is shown in his remarkable work, _della poetica_, published at ferrara in . this work is divided into two parts,--the first historical, _la deca istoriale_, and the second controversial, _la deca disputata_. in the historical section he attempts to derive the norm of the different poetic forms, not from one or two great works as aristotle had done, but from the whole history of literature. it is thus the first work in modern times to attempt the philosophical study of literary history, and to trace out the evolution of literary forms. the second or controversial section is directed against the _poetics_ of aristotle, and in part also against the critical doctrines of torquato tasso. in this portion of his work patrizzi sets out to demonstrate--_per istoria, e per ragioni, e per autorità de' grandi antichi_--that the accepted critical opinions of his time were without foundation; and the _poetics_ of aristotle himself he exhibits as obscure, inconsistent, and entirely unworthy of credence. similar antagonism to the critical doctrines of aristotle is to be found in passages scattered here and there throughout the works of giordano bruno. in the first dialogue of the _eroici furori_, published at london in , while bruno was visiting england, he expresses his contempt for the mere pedants who judge poets by the rules of aristotle's _poetics_. his contention is that there are as many sorts of poets as there are human sentiments and ideas, and that poets, so far from being subservient to rules, are themselves really the authors of all critical dogma. those who attack the great poets whose works do not accord with the rules of aristotle are called by bruno stupid pedants and beasts. the gist of his argument may be gathered from the following passage:-- "tans. thou dost well conclude that poetry is not born in rules, or only slightly and accidentally so; the rules are derived from the poetry, and there are as many kinds and sorts of true rules as there are kinds and sorts of true poets. cic. how then are the true poets to be known? tans. by the singing of their verses; in that singing they give delight, or they edify, or they edify and delight together. cic. to whom then are the rules of aristotle useful? tans. to him who, unlike homer, hesiod, orpheus, and others, could not sing without the rules of aristotle, and who, having no muse of his own, would coquette with that of homer."[ ] a similar antagonism to aristotle and a similar literary individualism are to be found in a much later work by benedetto fioretti, who under the pseudonym of udeno nisieli published the five volumes of his _proginnasmi poetici_ between and .[ ] just before the close of the sixteenth century, however, the _poetics_ had obtained an ardent defender against such attacks in the person of francesco buonamici, in his _discorsi poetici_; and three years later, in , faustino summo published a similar defence of aristotle. the attacks on aristotle's literary dictatorship were of little avail; it was hardly necessary even to defend him. for two centuries to come he was to reign supreme on the continent of europe; and in italy this supremacy was hardly disturbed until the days of goldoni and metastasio. foot-notes: [ ] de sanctis, ii. _sq._ [ ] _cf._ bosanquet, _hist. of Æsthetic_, p. _sq._ [ ] _cf._ foffano, p. _sq._ [ ] symonds, ii. . [ ] baillet, iii. . [ ] tiraboschi, vii. . [ ] several similar extracts from italian comic prologues may be found in symonds, v. _sq._ [ ] foffano, p. _sq._ [ ] _poetica_, p. . [ ] _paradossi_, venetia, , ii. . [ ] _opere_, ii. (williams's translation). [ ] _cf._ the diverse opinions of tiraboschi, viii. , and hallam, _lit. of europe_, pt. iii. ch. . part second _literary criticism in france_ literary criticism in france chapter i the character and development of french criticism in the sixteenth century literary criticism in france, while beginning somewhat later than in italy, preceded the birth of criticism in england and in spain by a number of years. critical activity in nearly all the countries of western europe seems to have been ushered in by the translation of horace's _ars poetica_ into the vernacular tongues. critical activity in italy began with dolce's italian version of the _ars poetica_ in ; in france, with the french version of pelletier in ; in england, with the english version of drant in ; and in spain, with the spanish versions of espinel and zapata in and , respectively. two centuries of literary discussion had prepared the way for criticism in italy; and lacking this period of preparation, french criticism during the sixteenth century was necessarily of a much more practical character than that of italy during the same age. the critical works of france, and of england also, were on the whole designed for those whose immediate intention it was to write verse themselves. the disinterested and philosophic treatment of æsthetic problems, wholly aside from all practical considerations, characterized much of the critical activity of the italian renaissance, but did not become general in france until the next century. for this reason, in the french and english sections of this essay, it will be necessary to deal with various rhetorical and metrical questions which in the italian section could be largely disregarded. in these matters, as in the more general questions of criticism, it will be seen that sixteenth-century italy furnished the source of all the accepted critical doctrines of western europe. the comparative number of critical works in italy and in france is also noteworthy. while those of the italian renaissance may be counted by the score, the literature of france during the sixteenth century, exclusive of a few purely rhetorical treatises, hardly offers more than a single dozen. it is evident, therefore, that the treatment of french criticism must be more limited in extent than that of italian criticism, and somewhat different in character. the literature of the sixteenth century in france is divided into two almost equal parts by du bellay's _défense et illustration de la langue française_, published in . in no other country of europe is the transition from the middle ages to the renaissance so clearly marked as it is in france by this single book. with the invasion of italy by the army of charles viii. in , the influence of italian art, of italian learning, of italian poetry, had received its first impetus in france. but over half a century was to elapse before the effects of this influence upon the creative literature of france was universally and powerfully felt. during this period the activity of budæus, erasmus, dolet, and numerous other french and foreign humanists strengthened the cause and widened the influence of the new learning. but it is only with the birth of the pléiade that modern french literature may be said to have begun. in du bellay's _défense_, the manifesto of the new school, appeared. ronsard's _odes_ were published in the next year; and in jodelle inaugurated french tragedy with his _cléopâtre_, and first, as ronsard said, "françoisement chanta la grecque tragédie." the _défense_ therefore marks a distinct epoch in the critical as well as the creative literature of france. the critical works that preceded it, if they may be called critical in any real sense, did not attempt to do more than formulate the conventional notions of rhetorical and metrical structure common to the french poets of the later middle ages. the pléiade itself, as will be more clearly understood later, was also chiefly concerned with linguistic and rhetorical reforms; and as late as montaigne could say that there were more poets in france than judges and interpreters of poetry.[ ] the creative reforms of the pléiade lay largely in the direction of the formation of a poetic language, the introduction of new _genres_, the creation of new rhythms, and the imitation of classical literature. but with the imitation of classical literature there came the renewal of the ancient subjects of inspiration; and from this there proceeded a high and dignified conception of the poet's office. indeed, many of the more general critical ideas of the pléiade spring from the desire to justify the function of poetry, and to magnify its importance. the new school and its epigones dominate the second half of the sixteenth century; and as the first half of the century was practically unproductive of critical literature, a history of french renaissance criticism is hardly more than an account of the poetic theories of the pléiade. the series of rhetorical and metrical treatises that precede du bellay's _défense_ begins with _l'art de dictier et de fere chançons, balades, virelais et rondeaulx_, written by the poet eustache deschamps in , over half a century after the similar work of antonio da tempo in italy.[ ] toward the close of the fifteenth century a work of the same nature, the _fleur de rhétorique_, by an author who refers to himself as l'infortuné, seems to have had some influence on later treatises. three works of this sort fall within the first half of the sixteenth century: the _grand et vrai art de pleine rhétorique_ of pierre fabri, published at rouen in ; the _rhétorique metrifiée_ of gracien du pont, published at paris in ; and the _art poétique_ of thomas sibilet, published at paris in . the second part of fabri's _rhétorique_ deals with questions of versification--of rhyme, rhythm, and the complex metrical form of such poets as crétin, meschinot, and molinet, in whom pasquier found _prou de rime et équivoque, mais peu de raison_. as the _rhétorique_ of fabri is little more than an amplification of the similar work of l'infortuné, so the work of gracien du pont is little more than a reproduction of fabri's. gracien du pont is still chiefly intent on _rime équivoquée_, _rime entrelacée_, _rime retrograde_, _rime concatenée_, and the various other mediæval complexities of versification. sibilet's _art poétique_ is more interesting than any of its predecessors. it was published a year before the _défense_ of du bellay, and discusses many of the new _genres_ which the latter advocates. sibilet treats of the sonnet, which had recently been borrowed from the italians by mellin de saint-gelais, the ode, which had just been employed by pelletier, and the epigram, as practised by marot. the eclogue is described as "greek by invention, latin by usurpation, and french by imitation." but one of the most interesting passages in sibilet's book is that in which the french morality is compared with the classical drama. this passage exhibits perhaps the earliest trace of the influence of italian ideas on french criticism; it will be discussed later in connection with the dramatic theories of this period. it is about the middle of the sixteenth century, then, that the influence of italian criticism is first visible. the literature of italy was read with avidity in france. many educated young frenchmen travelled in italy, and several italian men of letters visited france. girolamo muzio travelled in france in , and again in with giulio camillo.[ ] aretino mentions the fact that a vincenzo maggi was at the court of france in , but it has been doubted whether this was the author of the commentary on the _poetics_.[ ] in , after the completion of the two last parts of his _poetica_, dedicated to the bishop of arras, trissino made a tour about france.[ ] nor must we forget the number of italian scholars called to paris by francis i.[ ] the literary relations between the two countries do not concern us here; but it is no insignificant fact that the great literary reforms of the pléiade should take place between and , the very time when critical activity first received its great impetus in italy. this italian influence is just becoming apparent in sibilet, for whom the poets between jean le maire de belges and clément marot are the chief models, but who is not wholly averse to the moderate innovations derived by france from classical antiquity and the italian renaissance. m. brunetière, in a very suggestive chapter of his history of french criticism, regards the _défense_ of du bellay, the _poetics_ of scaliger, and the _art poétique_ of vauquelin de la fresnaye as the most important critical works in france during the sixteenth century.[ ] it may indeed be said that du bellay's _défense_ ( ) is not in any true sense a work of literary criticism at all; that scaliger's _poetics_ ( ) is the work, not of a french critic, but of an italian humanist; and that vauquelin's _art poétique_ (not published until ), so far as any influence it may have had is concerned, does not belong to the sixteenth century, and can hardly be called important. at the same time these three works are interesting documents in the literary history of france, and represent three distinct stages in the development of french criticism in the sixteenth century. du bellay's work marks the beginning of the introduction of classical ideals into french literature; scaliger's work, while written by an italian and in latin, was composed and published in france, and marks the introduction of the aristotelian canons into french criticism; and vauquelin's work indicates the sum of critical ideas which france had gathered and accepted in the sixteenth century. with du bellay's _défense et illustration de la langue française_ ( ) modern literature and modern criticism in france may be said to begin. the _défense_ is a monument of the influence of italian upon french literary and linguistic criticism. the purpose of the book, as its title implies, is to defend the french language, and to indicate the means by which it can approach more closely to dignity and perfection. the fundamental contention of du bellay is, first, that the french language is capable of attaining perfection; and, secondly, that it can only hope to do so by imitating greek and latin. this thesis is propounded and proved in the first book of the _défense_; and the second book is devoted to answering the question: by what specific means is this perfection, based on the imitation of the perfection of greek and latin, to be attained by the french tongue? du bellay contends that as the diversity of language among the different nations is ascribable entirely to the caprice of men, the perfection of any tongue is due exclusively to the diligence and artifice of those who use it. it is the duty, therefore, of every one to set about consciously to improve his native speech. the latin tongue was not always as perfect as it was in the days of virgil and cicero; and if these writers had regarded language as incapable of being polished and enriched, or if they had imagined that their language could only be perfected by the imitation of their own national predecessors, latin would never have arrived at a higher state of perfection than that of ennius and crassus. but as virgil and cicero perfected latin by imitating greek, so the french tongue can only be made beautiful by imitating greek, latin, and italian, all of which have attained a certain share of perfection.[ ] at the same time, two things must be guarded against. the french tongue cannot be improved by merely translating the classic and italian tongues. translation has its value in popularizing ideas; but by mere translation no language or literature can hope to attain perfection. nor is a mere bald imitation sufficient; but, in du bellay's oft-cited phrase, the beauties of these foreign tongues "must be converted into blood and nourishment."[ ] the classics have "blood, nerves, and bones," while the older french writers have merely "skin and color."[ ] the modern french writer should therefore dismiss with contempt the older poets of france, and set about to imitate the greeks, latins, and italians. he should leave off composing rondeaux, ballades, virelays, and such _épiceries_, which corrupt the taste of the french language, and serve only to show its ignorance and poverty; and in their stead he should employ the epigram, which mingles, in horace's words, the profitable with the pleasant, the tearful elegy, in imitation of ovid and tibullus, the ode, one of the sublimest forms of poetry, the eclogue, in imitation of theocritus, virgil, and sannazaro, and the beautiful sonnet, an italian invention no less learned than pleasing.[ ] instead of the morality and the farce, the poet should write tragedies and comedies; he should attempt another _iliad_ or _Æneid_ for the glory and honor of france. this is the gist of du bellay's argument in so far as it deals in general terms with the french language and literature. the six or seven concluding chapters treat of more minute and detailed questions of language and versification. du bellay advises the adoption of classical words as a means of enriching the french tongue, and speaks with favor of the use of rhymeless verse in imitation of the classics. the _défense_ ends with an appeal to the reader not to fear to go and despoil greece and rome of their treasures for the benefit of french poetry.[ ] from this analysis it will be seen that the _défense_ is really a philological polemic, belonging to the same class as the long series of italian discussions on the vulgar tongue which begins with dante, and which includes the works of bembo, castiglione, varchi, and others. it is, as a french critic has said, a combined pamphlet, defence, and _ars poetica_;[ ] but it is only an _ars poetica_ in so far as it advises the french poet to employ certain poetic forms, and treats of rhythm and rhyme in a concluding chapter or two. but curiously enough, the source and inspiration of du bellay's work have never been pointed out. the actual model of the _défense_ was without doubt dante's _de vulgari eloquio_, which, in the italian version of trissino, had been given to the world for the first time in , exactly twenty years before the _défense_. the two works, allowing for the difference in time and circumstance, resemble each other closely in spirit and purpose as well as in contents and design. du bellay's work, like dante's, is divided into two books, each of which is again divided into about the same number of chapters. the first book of both works deals with language in general, and the relations of the vulgar tongue to the ancient and modern languages; the second book of both works deals with the particular practices of the vulgar tongue concerning which each author is arguing. both works begin with a somewhat similar theory of the origin of language; both works close with a discussion of the versification of the vernacular. the purpose of both books is the justification of the vulgar tongue, and the consideration of the means by which it can attain perfection; the title of _de vulgari eloquio_ might be applied with equal force to either treatise. the _défense_, by this justification of the french language on rational if not entirely cogent and consistent grounds, prepared the way for critical activity in france; and it is no insignificant fact that the first critical work of modern france should have been based on the first critical work of modern italy. thirty years later, henri estienne, in his _précellence du langage françois_, could assert that french is the best language of ancient or modern times, just as salviati in had claimed that preëminent position for italian.[ ] it is not to be expected that so radical a break with the national traditions of france as was implied by du bellay's innovations would be left unheeded by the enemies of the pléiade. the answer came soon, in an anonymous pamphlet, entitled _le quintil horatian sur la défense et illustration de la langue françoise_. until a very few years ago, this treatise was ascribed to a disciple of marot, charles fontaine. but in an autograph letter of fontaine's was discovered, in which he strenuously denies the authorship of the _quintil horatian_; and more recent researches have shown pretty conclusively that the real author was a friend of fontaine's, barthélemy aneau, head of the college of lyons.[ ] the _quintil horatian_ was first published in , the year after the appearance of the _défense_.[ ] the author informs us that he had translated the whole of horace's _ars poetica_ into french verse "over twenty years ago, before pelletier or any one else," that is, between and .[ ] this translation was never published, but fragments of it are cited in the _quintil horatian_. the pamphlet itself takes up the arguments of du bellay step by step, and refutes them. the author finds fault with the constructions, the metaphors, and the neologisms of du bellay. aneau's temperament was dogmatic and pedagogic; his judgment was not always good; and modern french critics cannot forgive him for attacking du bellay's use of such a word as _patrie_. but it is not entirely just to speak of the _quintil horatian_, in the words of a modern literary historian, as full of futile and valueless criticisms. the author's minute linguistic objections are often hypercritical, but his work represents a natural reaction against the pléiade. his chief censure of the _défense_ was directed against the introduction of classical and italian words into the french language. "est-ce là défense et illustration," he exclaims, "ou plus tost offense et dénigration?" he charges the pléiade with having contemned the classics of french poetry; the new school advocated the disuse of the complicated metrical forms merely because they were too difficult. the sonnet, the ode, and the elegy he dismisses as useless innovations. the object of poetry, according to horace, is to gladden and please, while the elegy merely saddens and brings tears to the eyes. "poetry," he says, "is like painting; and as painting is intended to fill us with delight, and not to sadden us, so the mournful elegy is one of the meanest forms of poetry." aneau is unable to appreciate the high and sublime conception of the poet's office which the pléiade first introduced into french literature; for him the poet is a mere versifier who amuses his audience. he represents the general reaction of the national spirit against the classical innovations of the pléiade; and the _quintil horatian_ may therefore be called the last representative work of the older school of poetry. it was at about this period that aristotle's _poetics_ first influenced french criticism. in one of the concluding chapters of the _défense_ du bellay remarks that "the virtues and vices of a poem have been diligently treated by the ancients, such as aristotle and horace, and after them by hieronymus vida."[ ] horace is mentioned and cited in numerous other places, and the influence of the general rhetorical portions of the _ars poetica_ is very marked throughout the _défense_; there are also many traces of the influence of vida. but there is no evidence whatsoever of any knowledge of aristotle's _poetics_. of its name and importance du bellay had probably read in the writings of the italians, but of its contents he knew little or nothing. there is indeed no well-established allusion to the _poetics_ in france before this time. none of the french humanists seems to have known it. its title is cited by erasmus in a letter dated february , , and it was published by him without any commentary at basle in the same year, though simon grynæus appears to have been the real editor of this work. an edition of the _poetics_ was also published at paris in , but does not seem to have had any appreciable influence on the critical activity of france. several years after the publication of the _défense_, in the satirical poem, _le poëte courtisan_, written shortly after his return from italy in , du bellay shows a somewhat more definite knowledge of the contents of the _poetics_:-- "je ne veux point ici du maistre d'alexandre [_i.e._ aristotle], touchant l'art poétic, les preceptes t'apprendre tu n'apprendras de moy comment jouer il faut les miseres des rois dessus un eschaffaut: je ne t'enseigne l'art de l'humble comoedie ni du méonien la muse plus hardie: bref je ne monstre ici d'un vers horacien les vices et vertus du poëme ancien: je ne depeins aussi le poëte du vide."[ ] in guillaume morel, the disciple of turnebus, published an edition of aristotle's _poetics_ at paris. it is interesting to note, however, that the reference in the _défense_ is the first allusion to the _poetics_ to be found in the critical literature of france; by the italian renaissance, and italian criticism, had come into france for good. in , the year before the publication of scaliger's _poetics_, aristotle's treatise had acquired such prominence that in a volume of selections from aristotle's works, published at paris in that year, _aristotelis sententiæ_, the selections from the _poetics_ are placed at the head of the volume.[ ] in jean de la taille refers his readers to what "the great aristotle in his _poetics_, and after him horace though not with the same subtlety, have said more amply and better than i."[ ] the influence of scaliger's _poetics_ on the french dramatic criticism of this period has generally been overestimated. scaliger's influence in france was not inconsiderable during the sixteenth century, but it was not until the very end of the century that he held the dictatorial position afterward accorded to him. no edition of his _poetics_ was ever published at paris. the first edition appeared at lyons, and subsequent editions appeared at heidelberg and leyden. it was in germany, in spain, and in england that his influence was first felt; and it was largely through the dutch scholars, heinsius and vossius, that his influence was carried into france in the next century. it is a mistake to say that he had any primary influence on the formulation and acceptance of the unities of time and place in french literature; there is in his _poetics_, as has been seen, no such definite and formal statement of the unities as may be found in castelvetro, in jean de la taille, in sir philip sidney, or in chapelain. at the same time, while scaliger's _poetics_ did not assume during the sixteenth century the dictatorial supremacy it attained during the seventeenth, and while the particular views enunciated in its pages had no direct influence on the current of sixteenth-century ideas, it certainly had an indirect influence on the general tendency of the critical activity of the french renaissance. this indirect influence manifests itself in the gradual latinization of culture during the second half of the sixteenth century, and, as will be seen later, in the emphasis on the aristotelian canons in french dramatic criticism. scaliger was a personal friend of several members of the pléiade, and there is every reason to believe that he wielded considerable, even if merely indirect, influence on the development of that great literary movement. the last expression of the poetic theories of the pléiade is to be found in the didactic poem of vauquelin de la fresnaye, _l'art poétique françois, où l'on peut remarquer la perfection et le défaut des anciennes et des modernes poésies_. this poem, though not published until , was begun in at the command of henry iii., and, augmented by successive additions, was not yet complete by . vauquelin makes the following explicit acknowledgment of his indebtedness to the critical writers that preceded him:-- "pour ce ensuivant les pas du fils de nicomache [_i.e._ aristotle], du harpeur de calabre [_i.e._ horace], et tout ce que remache vide et minturne aprés, j'ay cet oeuvre apresté."[ ] aristotle, horace, vida, and minturno are thus his acknowledged models and sources. nearly the whole of horace's _ars poetica_ he has translated and embodied in his poem; and he has borrowed from vida a considerable number of images and metaphors.[ ] his indebtedness to aristotle and to minturno brings up several intricate questions. it has been said that vauquelin simply mentioned minturno in order to put himself under the protection of a respectable italian authority.[ ] on the contrary, exclusive of horace, ronsard, and du bellay, the whole of whose critical discussions he has almost incorporated into his poem, minturno is his chief authority, his model, and his guide. in fact, it was probably from minturno that he derived his entire knowledge of the aristotelian canons; it is not aristotle, but minturno's conception of aristotle, that vauquelin has adhered to. many points in his poem are explained by this fact; here only one can be mentioned. vauquelin's account, in the second canto of his _art poétique_, of the origin of the drama from the songs at the altar of bacchus at the time of the vintage, is undoubtedly derived from minturno.[ ] it may have been observed that during the renaissance there were two distinct conceptions of the origin of poetry. one, which might be called ethical, was derived from horace, according to whom the poet was originally a lawgiver, or divine prophet; and this conception persists in modern literature from poliziano to shelley. the other, or scientific conception, was especially applied to the drama, and was based on aristotle's remarks on the origin of tragedy; this attempt to discover some scientific explanation for poetic phenomena may be found in the more rationalistic of renaissance critics, such as scaliger and viperano. vauquelin de la fresnaye, the disciple of ronsard and the last exponent of the critical doctrines of the pléiade, thus represents the incorporation of the body of italian ideas into french criticism. with vauquelin de la fresnaye and de laudun daigaliers ( ) the history of french criticism during the sixteenth century is at an end. the critical activity of this period, as has already been remarked, is of a far more practical character than that of italy. literary criticism in france was created by the exigencies of a great literary movement; and throughout the century it never lost its connection with this movement, or failed to serve it in some practical way. the poetic criticism was carried on by poets, whose desire it was to further a cause, to defend their own works, or to justify their own views. the dramatic criticism was for the most part carried on by dramatists, sometimes even in the prefaces of their plays. in the sixteenth century, as ever since, the interrelation of the creative and the critical faculties in france was marked and definite. but there was, one might almost say, little critical theorizing in the french renaissance. excepting, of course, scaliger, there was even nothing of the deification of aristotle found in italian criticism. to take notice of a minute but significant detail, there was no attempt to explain aristotle's doctrine of _katharsis_, the source of infinite controversy in italy. there was no detailed and consistent discussion of the theory of the epic poem. all these things may be found in seventeenth-century france; but their home was sixteenth-century italy. foot-notes: [ ] _essais_, i. . [ ] on these early works, see langlois, _de artibus rhetoricæ rhythmicæ_, parisiis, . [ ] tiraboschi, vii. . [ ] _ibid._ vii. . [ ] morsolin, _trissino_, p. . [ ] egger, _hellénisme_, ch. vii. [ ] brunetière, i. . [ ] _cf._ horace, _ars poet._ _sq._ [ ] _défense_, i. . [ ] _ibid._ ii. . [ ] _ibid._ ii. . [ ] _cf._ vida, in pope, i. . [ ] lanson, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] _cf._ t. tasso, xxiii. . [ ] h. chamard, "le date et l'auteur du quintil horatian," in the _revue d'histoire littéraire de la france_, , v. _sq._ [ ] _ibid._ v. _sq._ [ ] _ibid._ v. ; , n. . [ ] _défense_, ii. . [ ] du bellay, p. . [ ] parisiis, apud hieronymum de marnaf, . [ ] robert, appendix iii. [ ] _art poét._ i. . [ ] pellissier, pp. - . [ ] lemercier, _Étude sur vauquelin_, , p. , and pellissier, p. . [ ] minturno, _arte poetica_, p. ; _de poeta_, p. . _cf._ vauquelin, pellissier's introduction, p. xliv. chapter ii the theory of poetry in the french renaissance it is in keeping with the practical character of the literary criticism of this period that the members of the pléiade did not concern themselves with the general theory of poetry. until the very end of the century there is not to be found any systematic poetic theory in france. it is in dramatic criticism that this period has most to offer, and the dramatic criticism is peculiarly interesting because it foreshadows in many ways the doctrines upon which were based the dramas of racine and corneille. i. _the poetic art_ in du bellay's _défense_ there is no attempt to formulate a consistent body of critical doctrine; but the book exhibits, in a more or less crude form, all the tendencies for which the pléiade stands in french literature. the fundamental idea of the _défense_ is that french poetry can only hope to reach perfection by imitating the classics. the imitation of the classics implies, in the first place, erudition on the part of the poet; and, moreover, it requires intellectual labor and study. the poet is born, it is true; but this only refers to the ardor and joyfulness of spirit which naturally excite him, but which, without learning and erudition, are absolutely useless. "he who wishes poetic immortality," says du bellay, "must spend his time in the solitude of his own chamber; instead of eating, drinking, and sleeping, he must endure hunger, thirst, and long vigils."[ ] elsewhere he speaks of silence and solitude as _amy des muses_. from all this there arises a natural contempt for the ignorant people, who know nothing of ancient learning: "especially do i wish to admonish him who aspires to a more than vulgar glory, to separate himself from such inept admirers, to flee from the ignorant people,--the people who are the enemies of all rare and antique learning,--and to content himself with few readers, following the example of him who did not demand for an audience any one beside plato himself."[ ] in the _art poétique_ of jacques pelletier du mans, published at lyons in , the point of view is that of the pléiade, but more mellow and moderate than that of its most advanced and radical members. the treatise begins with an account of the antiquity and excellence of poetry; and poets are spoken of as originally the _maîtres et réformateurs de la vie_. poetry is then compared with oratory and with painting, after the usual renaissance fashion; and pelletier agrees with horace in regarding the combined power of art and nature as necessary to the fashioning of a poet. his conception of the latter's office is not unlike that of tasso and shelley, "it is the office of the poet to give novelty to old things, authority to the new, beauty to the rude, light to the obscure, faith to the doubtful, and to all things their true nature, and to their true nature all things." concerning the questions of language, versification, and the feeling for natural scenery, he agrees fundamentally with the chief writers of the pléiade. the greatest of these, ronsard, has given expression to his views on the poetic art in his _abrégé de l'art poétique françois_ ( ), and later in the two prefaces of his epic of the _franciade_. the chief interest of the _abrégé_ in the present discussion is that it expounds and emphasizes the high notion of the poet's office introduced into french poetry by the pléiade. before the advent of the new school, mere skill in the complicated forms of verse was regarded as the test of poetry. the poet was simply a _rimeur_; and the term "_poète_," with all that it implies, first came into use with the pléiade. the distinction between the versifier and the poet, as pointed out by aristotle and insisted upon by the italians, became with the pléiade almost vital. binet, the disciple and biographer of ronsard, says of his master that "he was the mortal enemy of versifiers, whose conceptions are all debased, and who think they have wrought a masterpiece when they have transposed something from prose into verse."[ ] ronsard's own account of the dignity and high function of poetry must needs be cited at length:-- "above all things you will hold the muses in reverence, yea, in singular veneration, and you will never let them serve in matters that are dishonest, or mere jests, or injudicious libels; but you will hold them dear and sacred, as the daughters of jupiter, that is, god, who by his holy grace has through them first made known to ignorant people the excellencies of his majesty. for poetry in early times was only an allegorical theology, in order to make stupid men, by pleasant and wondrously colored fables, know the secrets they could not comprehend, were the truth too openly made known to them.... now, since the muses do not care to lodge in a soul unless it is good, holy, and virtuous, you should try to be of a good disposition, not wicked, scowling, and cross, but animated by a gentle spirit; and you should not let anything enter your mind that is not superhuman and divine. you should have, in the first place, conceptions that are high, grand, beautiful, and not trailing upon the ground; for the principal part of poetry consists of invention, which comes as much from a beautiful nature as from the reading of good and ancient authors. if you undertake any great work, you will show yourself devout and fearing god, commencing it either with his name or by any other which represents some effects of his majesty, after the manner of the greek poets ... for the muses, apollo, mercury, pallas, and other similar deities, merely represent the powers of god, to which the first men gave several names for the diverse effects of his incomprehensible majesty."[ ] in this eloquent passage the conception of the poet as an essentially moral being,--a doctrine first enunciated by strabo, and repeated by minturno and others,--and boccaccio's notion of poetry as originally an allegorical theology, are both introduced into french criticism. elsewhere ronsard repeats the mediæval concept that poets "d'un voile divers par fables ont caché le vray sens de leurs vers."[ ] it will be seen also that for ronsard, poetry is essentially a matter of inspiration; and in the poem just quoted, the _discours à jacques grévin_, he follows the platonic conception of divine inspiration or madness. a few years later montaigne said of poetry that "it is an easier matter to frame it than to know it; being base and humble, it may be judged by the precepts and art of it, but the good and lofty, the supreme and divine, are beyond rules and above reason. it hath no community with our judgment, but ransacketh and ravisheth the same."[ ] in his various critical works ronsard shows considerable indebtedness to the italian theorists, especially to minturno. he does not attempt any formal definition of poetry, but its function is described as follows: "as the end of the orator is to persuade, so that of the poet is to imitate, invent, and represent the things that are, that can be, or that the ancients regarded as true."[ ] the concluding clause of this passage is intended to justify the modern use of the ancient mythology; but the whole passage seems primarily to follow scaliger[ ] and minturno.[ ] it is to be observed that verse is not mentioned in this definition as an essential requirement of poetry. it was indeed a favorite contention of his, and one for which he was indebted to the italians, that all who write in verse are not poets. lucan and silius italicus have robed history with the raiment of verse; but according to ronsard they would have done better in many ways to have written in prose. the poet, unlike the historian, deals with the verisimilar and the probable; and while he cannot be responsible for falsehoods which are in opposition to the truth of things, any more than the historian can, he is not interested to know whether or not the details of his poems are actual historical facts. verisimilitude, and not fact, is therefore the test of poetry. in vauquelin de la fresnaye may be found most of the aristotelian distinctions in regard to imitation, harmony, rhythm, and poetic theory in general; but these distinctions he derived, as has already been said, not directly from aristotle, but in all probability from minturno. poetry is defined as an art of imitation:-- "c'est un art d'imiter, un art de contrefaire que toute poësie, ainsi que de pourtraire."[ ] verse is described as a heaven-sent instrument, the language of the gods; and its value in poetry consists in clarifying and making the design compact.[ ] but it is not an essential of poetry; aristotle permits us to poetize in prose; and the romances of heliodorus and montemayor are examples of this poetic prose.[ ] the object of poetry is that it shall cause delight, and unless it succeeds in this it is entirely futile:-- "c'est le but, c'est la fin des vers que resjouir: les muses autrement ne les veulent ouir." as it is the function of the orator to persuade and the physician to cure, and as they fail in their offices unless they effect these ends, so the poet fails unless he succeeds in pleasing.[ ] this comparison is a favorite one with the italian critics. a similar passage has already been cited from daniello; and the same notion is thus expressed by lodovico dolce: "the aim of the physician is to cure diseases by means of medicine; the orator's to persuade by force of his arguments; and if neither attains this end, he is not called physician or orator. so if the poet does not delight, he is not a poet, for poetry delights all, even the ignorant."[ ] but delight, according to vauquelin, is merely the means of directing us to higher things; poetry is a delightful means of leading us to virtue:-- "c'est pourquoy des beaus vers la joyeuse alegresse nous conduit aux vertus d'une plaisante addresse."[ ] vauquelin, like scaliger, tasso, sidney, compares the poet with god, the great workman, who made everything out of nothing.[ ] the poet is a divinely inspired person, who, _sans art, sans sçavoir_, creates works of divine beauty. vauquelin's contemporary, du bartas, has in his _uranie_ expressed this idea in the following manner:-- "each art is learned by art; but poesie is a mere heavenly gift, and none can taste the dews we drop from pindus plenteously, if sacred fire have not his heart embraced. "hence is't that many great philosophers, deep-learned clerks, in prose most eloquent, labor in vain to make a graceful verse, which many a novice frames most excellent."[ ] while this is the accepted renaissance doctrine of inspiration, vauquelin, in common with all other followers of the pléiade, was fully alive to the necessity of artifice and study in poetry; and he agrees with horace in regarding both art and nature as equally necessary to the making of a good poet. it is usage that makes art, but art perfects and regulates usage:-- "et ce bel art nous sert d'escalier pour monter a dieu."[ ] ii. _the drama_ dramatic criticism in france begins as a reaction against the drama of the middle ages. the mediæval drama was formless and inorganic, without art or dignity. the classical drama, on the other hand, possessed both form and dignity; and the new school, perceiving this contrast, looked to the aristotelian canons, as restated by the italians, to furnish the dignity and art which the tragedy of greece and rome possessed, and which their own moralities and farces fundamentally lacked. in the first reference to dramatic literature in french criticism, the mediæval and classical dramas are compared after this fashion; but as sibilet ( ), in whose work this passage appears, wrote a year or so before the advent of the pléiade, the comparison is not so unfavorable to the morality and the farce as it became in later critics. "the french morality," says sibilet, "represents, in certain distinct traits, greek and latin tragedy, especially in that it treats of grave and momentous deeds (_faits graves et principaus_); and if the french had always made the ending of the morality sad and dolorous, the morality would be a tragedy. but in this, as in all things, we have followed our natural taste or inclination, which is to take from foreign things not all we see, but only what we think will be useful to us and of national advantage; for in the morality we treat, as the greeks and romans do in their tragedies, the narration of deeds that are illustrious, magnanimous, and virtuous, or true, or at least verisimilar; but we do otherwise in what is useful to the information of our manners and life, without subjecting ourselves to any sorrow or pleasure of the issue."[ ] it would seem that sibilet regards the morality as lacking nothing but the unhappy ending of classical tragedy. at the same time this passage exhibits perhaps the first trace of aristotelianism in french critical literature; for sibilet specifies several characteristic features of greek and latin tragedy, which he could have found only in aristotle or in the italians. in the first place, tragedy deals only with actions that are grave, illustrious, and for the most part magnanimous or virtuous. in the second place, the actions of tragedy are either really true, that is, historical, or if not true, have all the appearance of truth, that is, they are verisimilar. thirdly, the end of tragedy is always sad and dolorous. fourthly, tragedy performs a useful function, which is connected in some way with the reformation of manners and life; and, lastly, the effect of tragedy is connected with the sorrow or pleasure brought about by the catastrophe. these distinctions anticipate many of those found later in scaliger and in the french critics. in du bellay ( ) we find no traces of dramatic theory beyond the injunction, already noted, that the french should substitute classical tragedy and comedy for the old morality and farce. a few years later, however, in pelletier ( ), there appears an almost complete system of dramatic criticism. he urges the french to attempt the composition of tragedy and comedy. "this species of poetry," he says, "will bring honor to the french language, if it is attempted,"--a remark which illustrates the innate predisposition of the french for dramatic poetry.[ ] he then proceeds to distinguish tragedy from comedy much in the same manner as scaliger does six years later. it is to be remembered that pelletier's _art poétique_ was published at lyons in , while scaliger's _poetics_ was published at the same place in . pelletier may have known scaliger personally; but it is more probable that pelletier derived his information from the same classical and traditional sources as did scaliger. at all events, pelletier distinguishes tragedy from comedy in regard to style, subject, characters, and ending in exact scaligerian fashion. comedy has nothing in common with tragedy except the fact that neither can have more or less than five acts. the style and diction of comedy are popular and colloquial, while those of tragedy are most dignified and sublime. the comic characters are men of low condition, while those of tragedy are kings, princes, and great lords. the conclusion of comedy is always joyous, that of tragedy is always sorrowful and heart-rending. the themes of tragedy are deaths, exiles, and unhappy changes of fortune; those of comedy are the loves and passions of young men and young women, the indulgence of mothers, the wiles of slaves, and the diligence of nurses.[ ] by this time, then, aristotle's theory of tragedy, as restated by the italians, had become part of french criticism. the actual practice of the french drama had been modified by the introduction of these rules; and they had played so important a part that grévin, in his _bref discours pour l'intelligence de ce théâtre_, prefixed to his _mort de césar_ ( ), could say that french tragedy had already attained perfection, even when regarded from the standpoint of the aristotelian canons. "our tragedies," says grévin, "have been so well polished that there is nothing left now to be desired,--i speak of those which are composed according to the rules of aristotle and horace." grévin's _discours_ was published the year after scaliger's _poetics_, but shows no indication of scaligerian influence. his definition of tragedy is based on a most vague and incomplete recollection of aristotle, "tragedy, as aristotle says in his _poetics_, is an imitation or representation of some action that is illustrious and great in itself, such as the death of cæsar." he shows his independence or his ignorance of scaliger by insisting on the inferiority of seneca, whom scaliger had rated above all the greeks; and he shows his independence of the ancients by substituting a crowd of cæsar's soldiers for the singers of the older chorus, on the ground that there ought not to be singing in the representation of tragedy any more than there is in actual life itself, for tragedy is a representation of truth or of what has the appearance of truth. there are in grévin's _discours_ several indications that the national feeling had not been entirely destroyed by the imitation of the classics; but a discussion of this must be left for a later chapter. in jean de la taille's _art de tragédie_, prefixed to his _saül le furieux_ ( ), a drama in which a biblical theme is fashioned after the manner of classical tragedy, there is to be found the most explicit and distinct antagonism to the old, irregular moralities, which are not modelled according to the true art and the pattern of the ancients. they are but _amères épiceries_--words that recall du bellay. but curiously enough, jean de la taille differs entirely from grévin, and asserts positively that france had as yet no real tragedies, except possibly a few translated from the classics. waging war, as he is, against the crude formlessness of the national drama, perfect construction assumes for him a very high importance. "the principal point in tragedy," he says, "is to know how to dispose and fashion it well, so that the plot is well intertwined, mingled, interrupted, and resumed, ... and that there is nothing useless, without purpose, or out of place." for jean de la taille, as for most renaissance writers, tragedy is the least popular and the most elegant and elevated form of poetry, exclusive of the epic. it deals with the pitiful ruin of great lords, with the inconstancy of fortune, with banishment, war, pestilence, famine, captivity, and the execrable cruelty of tyrants.[ ] the end of tragedy is in fact to move and to sting the feelings and the emotions of men. the characters of tragedy--and this is the aristotelian conception--should be neither extremely bad, such men as by their crimes merit punishment, nor perfectly good and holy, like socrates, who was wrongfully put to death. invented or allegorical characters, such as death, avarice, or truth, are not to be employed. at the same time, jean de la taille, like grévin, is not averse to the use of scriptural subjects in tragedy, although he cautions the poet against long-winded theological discussions. the senecan drama was his model in treating of tragedy, as it was indeed that of the renaissance in general; and tragedy approached more and more closely to the oratorical and sententious manner of the latin poet. ronsard, for example, asserts that tragedy and comedy are entirely _didascaliques et enseignantes_, and should be enriched by numerous excellent and rare _sentences_ (_sententiæ_), "for in a few words the drama must teach much, being the mirror of human life."[ ] similarly, du bellay advises poets to embellish their poetry with grave _sentences_, and pelletier praises seneca principally because he is _sentencieux_. vauquelin, in his _art poétique_, gives a metrical paraphrase of aristotle's definition of tragedy:-- "mais le sujet tragic est un fait imité de chose juste et grave, en ses vers limité; auquel on y doit voir de l'affreux, du terrible, un fait non attendu, qui tienne de l'horrible, du pitoyable aussi, le coeur attendrissant d'un tigre furieux, d'un lion rugissant."[ ] the subject of tragedy should be old, and should be connected with the fall of great tyrants and princes;[ ] and in regard to the number of acts, the number of interlocutors on the stage, the _deus ex machina_, and the chorus,[ ] vauquelin merely paraphrases horace. comedy is defined as the imitation of an action which by common usage is accounted wicked, but which is not so wicked that there is no remedy for it; thus, for example, a man who has seduced a young girl may recompense her by taking her in marriage.[ ] hence while the actions of tragedy are "virtuous, magnificent, and grand, royal, and sumptuous," the incidents of comedy are actually and ethically of a lower grade.[ ] for tragi-comedy vauquelin has nothing but contempt. it is, in fact, a bastard form, since the tragedy with a happy ending serves a similar but more dignified purpose. vauquelin, like boileau and most other french critics after him, follows aristotle at length in the description of dramatic recognitions and reversals of fortune.[ ] most of the other aristotelian distinctions are also to be found in his work. in the _art poétique françois_ of pierre de laudun, sieur d'aigaliers, published in , these distinctions reappear in a more or less mutilated form. in the fifth and last book of this treatise, de laudun follows the italian scholars, especially scaliger and viperano. he does not differ essentially from scaliger in the definition of tragedy, in the division into acts and the place of the chorus, in the discussion of the characters and subjects of tragedy, and in the distinction between tragedy and comedy.[ ] his conception of tragedy is in keeping with the usual senecan ideal; it should be adorned by frequent _sentences_, allegories, similitudes, and other ornaments of poetry. the more cruel and sanguinary the tragic action is, the more excellent it will be; but at the same time, much that makes the action cruel is to be enacted only behind the stage. like pelletier, he objects to the introduction of all allegorical and invented characters, or even gods and goddesses, on the ground that these are not actual beings, and hence are out of keeping with the theme of tragedy, which must be real and historical. de laudun has also something to say concerning the introduction of ghosts in the tragic action; and his discussion is peculiarly interesting when we remember that it was almost at this very time, in england, that the ghost played so important a part in the shakespearian drama. "if the ghosts appear before the action begins," says de laudun, "they are permissible; but if they appear during the course of the action, and speak to the actors themselves, they are entirely faulty and reprehensible." de laudun borrowed from scaliger the scheme of the ideal tragedy: "the first act contains the complaints; the second, the suspicions; the third, the counsels; the fourth, the menaces and preparations; the fifth, the fulfilment and effusion of blood."[ ] but despite his subservience to scaliger, he is not afraid to express his independence of the ancients. we are not, he says, entirely bound to their laws, especially in the number of actors on the stage, which according to classic usage never exceeded three; for nowadays, notwithstanding the counsels of aristotle and horace, an audience has not the patience to be satisfied with only two or three persons at one time. the history of the dramatic unities in france during the sixteenth century demands some attention. that they had considerable effect on the actual practice of dramatic composition from the very advent of the pléiade is quite obvious; for in the first scene of the first french tragedy, the _cléopâtre_ of jodelle ( ), there is an allusion to the unity of time, which corneille was afterward to call the _règle des règles_:-- "avant que ce soleil, qui vient ores de naître, ayant tracé son jour chez sa tante se plonge, cléopâtre mourra!" in mellin de saint-gelais translated trissino's _sofonisba_ into french, and the influence of the italian drama became fixed in france. but the first distinct formulation of the unities is to be found in jean de la taille's _art de tragédie_ ( ). his statement of the unity is explicit, "il faut toujours représenter l'histoire ou le jeu en un même jour, en un même temps, et en un même lieu."[ ] jean de la taille was indebted for this to castelvetro, who two years before had stated them thus, "la mutatione tragica non può tirar con esso seco se non una giornata e un luogo."[ ] the unity of time was adopted by ronsard about this same time in the following words:-- "tragedy and comedy are circumscribed and limited to a short space of time, that is, to one whole day. the most excellent masters of this craft commence their works from one midnight to another, and not from sunrise to sunset, in order to have greater compass and length of time. on the other hand, the heroic poem, which is entirely of a martial character (_tout guerrier_), comprehends only the actions of one whole year."[ ] this passage is without doubt borrowed from minturno ( ):-- "whoever regards well the works of the most admired ancient authors will find that the materials of scenic poetry terminate in one day, or do not pass beyond the space of two days; just as the action of the epic poem, however great and however long it may be, does not occupy more than one year."[ ] minturno, it will be remembered, was the first to limit the action of the heroic poem to one year. in another passage he deduces the rule from the practice of virgil and homer;[ ] but ronsard seems to think that virgil himself has not obeyed this law. we have already alluded to the influence of minturno on the pléiade. vauquelin de la fresnaye, who explicitly acknowledges his indebtedness to minturno, also follows him in limiting the action of the drama to one day and that of the epic to one year:-- "or comme eux l'heroic suivant le droit sentier, doit son oeuvre comprendre au cours d'un an entier; le tragic, le comic, dedans une journee comprend ce que fait l'autre au cours de son annee: le theatre jamais ne doit estre rempli d'un argument plus long que d'un jour accompli."[ ] the two last lines of this passage bear considerable resemblance to boileau's famous statement of the unities three-quarters of a century later.[ ] toward the end of the sixteenth century, then, the unity of time, and in a less degree the unity of place, had become almost inviolable laws of the drama. but at this very period strong notes of revolt against the tyranny of the unities begin to be heard. up to this time the classical italian drama had been the pattern for french playwrights; but the irregular spanish drama was now commencing to exert considerable influence in france, and with this spanish influence came the spanish opposition to the unities. in jean de beaubreuil, in the preface of his tragedy of _régulus_, had spoken with contempt of the rule of twenty-four hours as _trop superstitieux_. but de laudun was probably the first european critic to argue formally against it. the concluding chapter of his _art poétique_ ( ) gives five different reasons why the unity of time should not be observed in the drama. the chapter is entitled, "concerning those who say that the action of tragedy must conclude in a single day;" and de laudun begins by asserting that this opinion had never been sustained by any good author. this is fairly conclusive evidence that de laudun had never directly consulted aristotle's _poetics_, but was indebted for his knowledge of aristotle to the italians, and especially to scaliger. the five arguments which he formulates against the unity of time are as follows:-- "in the first place, this law, if it is observed by any of the ancients, need not force us to restrict our tragedies in any way, since we are not bound by their manner of writing or by the measure of feet and syllables with which they compose their verses. in the second place, if we were forced to observe this rigorous law, we should fall into one of the greatest of absurdities, by being obliged to introduce impossible and incredible things in order to enhance the beauty of our tragedies, or else they would lack all grace; for besides being deprived of matter, we could not embellish our poems with long discourses and various interesting events. in the third place, the action of the _troades_, an excellent tragedy by seneca, could not have occurred in one day, nor could even some of the plays of euripides or sophocles. in the fourth place, according to the definition already given [on the authority of aristotle], tragedy is the recital of the lives of heroes, the fortune and grandeur of kings, princes, and others; and all this could not be accomplished in one day. besides, a tragedy must contain five acts, of which the first is joyous, and the succeeding ones exhibit a gradual change, as i have already indicated above; and this change a single day would not suffice to bring about. in the fifth and last place, the tragedies in which this rule is observed are not any better than the tragedies in which it is not observed; and the tragic poets, greek and latin, or even french, do not and need not and cannot observe it, since very often in a tragedy the whole life of a prince, king, emperor, noble, or other person is represented;--besides a thousand other reasons which i could advance if time permitted, but which must be left for a second edition."[ ] the history of the unity of time during the next century does not strictly concern us here; but it may be well to point out that it was through the offices of chapelain, seconded by the authority of cardinal richelieu, that it became fixed in the dramatic theory of france. in a long letter, dating from november, , and recently published for the first time, chapelain sets out to answer all the objections made against the rule of twenty-four hours. it is sustained, he says, by the practice of the ancients and the universal consensus of the italians; but his own proof is based on reason alone. it is the old argument of _vraisemblance_, as found in maggi, scaliger, and especially castelvetro, whom chapelain seems in part to follow. by he had formulated the whole theory of the three unities and converted cardinal richelieu to his views. in the previous year mairet's _sophonisbe_, the first "regular" french tragedy, had been produced. in the famous _cid_ controversy had begun. by the battle was gained, and the unities became a part of the classic theory of the drama throughout europe. a few years later their practical application was most thoroughly indicated by the abbé d'aubignac, in his _pratique du théâtre_; and they were definitely formulated for all time by boileau in the celebrated couplet:-- "qu'en un lieu, qu'en un jour, un seul fait accompli tienne jusqu'à la fin le théâtre rempli."[ ] iii. _heroic poetry_ it was the supreme ambition of the pléiade to produce a great french epic. in the very first manifesto of the new school, du bellay urges every french poet to attempt another _iliad_ or _Æneid_ for the honor and glory of france. for pelletier ( ) the heroic poem is the one that really gives the true title of poet; it may be compared to the ocean, and all other forms to rivers.[ ] he seems to be following giraldi cintio's discourse on the _romanzi_, published the year before his own work, when he says that the french poet should write a _heracleid_, the deeds of hercules furnishing the mightiest and most heroic material he can think of.[ ] at the same time virgil is for him the model of an epic poet; and his parallel between homer and virgil bears striking resemblance to the similar parallel in capriano's _della vera poetica_, published in the very same year as his own treatise.[ ] like capriano, pelletier censures the superfluous exuberance, the loquaciousness, the occasional indecorum, and the inferiority in eloquence and dignity of homer when compared with the latin poet. it was ronsard's personal ambition to be the french virgil, as in lyric poetry he had been proclaimed the french pindar. for twenty years he labored on the _franciade_, but never finished it. in the two prefaces which he wrote for it, the first in , and the second (published posthumously) about , he attempts to give expression to his ideal of the heroic poet. in neither of them does he succeed in formulating any very definite or consistent body of epic theory. they are chiefly interesting in that they indicate the general tendencies of the pléiade, and show ronsard's own rhetorical principles, and his feeling for nature and natural beauty. the passage has already been cited in which he speaks of the heroic poem as entirely of a martial character, and limits its action to the space of one year. it has also been seen that for him, as for the italians, verisimilitude, and not fact, is the test of poetry. at the same time, the epic poet is to avoid anachronisms and misstatements of fact. such faults do not disturb the reader so much when the story is remote in point of time; and the poet should therefore always use an argument, the events of which are at least three or four hundred years old. the basis of the work should rest upon some old story of past times and of long-established renown, which has gained the credit of men.[ ] this notion of the antiquity of the epic fable had been accepted long ago by the italians. it is stated, for example, in tasso's _discorsi dell' arte poetica_, written about , though not published until , fifteen years after tasso had visited ronsard in paris. vauquelin de la fresnaye has the pléiade veneration for heroic poetry; but he cannot be said to exhibit any more definite conception of its form and function. for him the epic is a vast and magnificent narration, a world in itself, wherein men, things, and thoughts are wondrously mirrored:-- "c'est un tableau du monde, un miroir qui raporte les gestes des mortels en differente sorte.... car toute poësie il contient en soyméme, soit tragique ou comique, ou soit autre poëme."[ ] with this we may compare what muzio had said in :-- "il poema sovrano è una pittura de l' universo, e però in sè comprende ogni stilo, ogni forma, ogni ritratto." but despite this very vague conception of the epic in the french renaissance, there was, as has been said, a high veneration for it as a form, and for its masters, homer and especially virgil. this accounts for the large number of attempts at epic composition in france during the next century. but beyond the earlier and indefinite notion of heroic poetry the french did not get for a long time to come. even for boileau the epic poem was merely the _vaste récit d'une longue action_.[ ] foot-notes: [ ] _défense_, ii. . [ ] _ibid._ ii. . [ ] ronsard, vii. , . [ ] ronsard, vii. _sq._ [ ] ronsard, vi. _sq._ [ ] _essais_, i. , florio's translation. [ ] ronsard, vii. . _cf._ aristotle, _poet._ ix. - ; xxv. , . [ ] _poet._ iii. . [ ] _de poeta_, pp. , . [ ] _art poét._ i. . [ ] _ibid._ i. _sq._ [ ] _art poét._ ii. . [ ] _ibid._ i. _sq._ [ ] _osservationi_, vinegia, , p. . [ ] _art poét._ i. . [ ] _art poét._ i. . _cf._ tasso, cited by shelley, _defence_, p. , "no one merits the name of creator except god and the poet." [ ] sylvester's _du bartas_, , p. . [ ] _art poét._ i. . [ ] sibilet, _art poét._ ii. . [ ] pelletier, _art poét._ ii. . [ ] _ibid._ [ ] robert, app. iii. [ ] ronsard, iii. _sq._ [ ] _art poét._ iii. . [ ] _ibid._ ii. , . [ ] _art poét._ ii. . [ ] _ibid._ iii. . [ ] _ibid._ iii. . [ ] _ibid._ iii. _sq._ [ ] robert, app. iv. [ ] _art poét._ v. . [ ] robert, app. iii. [ ] _poetica_, p. . [ ] ronsard, iii. . [ ] _arte poetica_, p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. ; _de poeta_, p. . [ ] _art poét._ ii. . [ ] boileau, _art poét._ iii. . [ ] arnaud, app. iii. [ ] _art poét._ iii. . [ ] _art poét._ ii. . [ ] _ibid._ i. . [ ] _ibid._ i. . _cf._ capriano, cap. v. [ ] ronsard, iii. , . [ ] vauquelin, _art poét._ i. , . [ ] boileau, _art poét._ iii. . chapter iii classic and romantic elements in french criticism during the sixteenth century the principle for which the pléiade stood was, like that of humanism, the imitation of the classics; and the pléiade was the first to introduce this as a literary principle into france. this means, as regards french literature, in the first place, the substitution of the classical instead of its own national tradition; and, secondly, the substitution of the imitation of the classics for the imitation of nature itself. in making these vital substitutions, du bellay and his school have been accused of creating once and for all the gulf that separates french poetry from the national life.[ ] this accusation is perhaps unfair to the pléiade, which insisted on the poet's going directly to nature, which emphasized most strongly the sentiment for natural scenery and beauty, and which first declared the importance of the artisan and the peasant as subjects for poetry. but there can be but little doubt that the separation of poetry from the national life was the logical outcome of the doctrines of the pléiade. in disregarding the older french poets and the evolution of indigenous poetry, in formulating an ideal of the poet as an unsociable and ascetic character, it separated itself from the natural tendencies of french life and letters, and helped to effect the final separation between poetry and the national development. i. _classical elements_ it was to du bellay ( ) that france owes the introduction of classical ideas into french literature. he was the first to regard the imitation of the classics as a literary principle, and to advise the poet, after the manner of vida, to purloin all the treasures of greek and latin literature for the benefit of french poetry. moreover, he first formulated the aristocratic conception of the poet held by the pléiade. the poet was advised to flee from the ignorant people, to bury himself in the solitude of his own chamber, to dream and to ponder, and to content himself with few readers. "beyond everything," says du bellay, "the poet should have one or more learned friends to whom he can show all his verses; he should converse not only with learned men, but with all sorts of workmen, mechanics, artists, and others, in order to learn the technical terms of their arts, for use in beautiful descriptions."[ ] this was a favorite theory of the pléiade, which like some of our own contemporary writers regarded the technical arts as important subjects of inspiration. but the essential point at the bottom of all these discussions is a high contempt for the opinion of the vulgar in matters of art. the _quintil horatian_ ( ) represents, as has already been seen, a natural reaction against the foreign and classical innovations of the pléiade. du bellay's advice, "prens garde que ce poëme soit eslogné du vulgaire,"--advice insisted upon by many of the rhetoricians of the italian renaissance,--receives considerable censure; on the contrary, says the author of the _quintil_, the poet must be understood and appreciated by all, unlearned as well as learned, just as marot was. the _quintil_ was, in fact, the first work to insist on definiteness and clearness in poetry, as these were afterward insisted on by malherbe and boileau. like malherbe, and his disciple deimier, the author of the _académie de l'art poétique_ ( ), in which the influence of the _quintil_ is fully acknowledged, the author of the _quintil_ objects to all forms of poetic license, to all useless metaphors that obscure the sense, to all latinisms and foreign terms and locutions.[ ] du bellay had dwelt on the importance of a knowledge of the classical and italian tongues, and had strongly advised the french poet to naturalize as many latin, greek, and even spanish and italian terms as he could. the _quintil_ is particularly bitter against all such foreign innovations. the poet need not know foreign tongues at all; without this knowledge he can be as good a poet as any of the _græcaniseurs, latiniseurs, et italianiseurs en françoys_. this protest availed little, and du bellay's advice in regard to the use of italian terms was so well followed that several years later, in , henri estienne vigorously protested against the practice in his _dialogues du nouveau langage françois italianisé_. as ronsard and du bellay represent the foreign elements that went to make up classicism in france, so the author of the _quintil horatian_ may be said to represent in his humble way certain enduring elements of the _esprit gaulois_. he represents the national traditions, and he prepares the way for the two great bourgeois poets of france,--boileau, with his "tout doit tendre au bon sens," and molière, with his bluff cry, "je suis pour le bon sens." according to pelletier ( ), french poetry is too much like colloquial speech; in order to equal classical literature, the poets of france must be more daring and less popular.[ ] pelletier's point of view is here that of the pléiade, which aimed at a distinct poetic language, diverse from ordinary prose speech. but he is thoroughly french, and in complete accord with the author of the _quintil horatian_, in his insistence on perfect clearness in poetry. "clearness," he says, "is the first and worthiest virtue of a poem."[ ] obscurity is the chief fault of poetry, "for there is no difference between not speaking at all and not being understood."[ ] for these reasons he is against all unnecessary and bombastic ornament; the true use of metaphors and comparisons of all sorts is "to explain and represent things as they really are." similarly, ronsard, while recognizing the value of comparisons, rightfully used, as the very nerves and tendons of poetry, declares that if instead of perfecting and clarifying, they obscure or confuse the idea, they are ridiculous.[ ] obscurity was the chief danger, and indeed the chief fault, of the pléiade; and it is no small merit that both ronsard and pelletier perceived this fact. the pléiade exhibits the classic temper in its insistence on study and art as essential to poetry; but it was not in keeping with the doctrines of later french classicists in so far as it regarded the poetic labors as of an unsociable and even ascetic character. in this, as has been seen, ronsard is a true exponent of the doctrines of the new school. but on the whole the classic spirit was strong in him. he declares that the poet's ideas should be high and noble, but not fantastic. "they should be well ordered and disposed; and while they seem to transcend those of the vulgar, they should always appear to be easily conceived and understood by any one."[ ] here du bellay's aristocratic conception of poetry is modified so as to become a very typical statement of the principle underlying french classicism. again, ronsard points out, as vida and other italian critics had done before, that the great classical poets seldom speak of things by their bare and naked names. virgil does not, for example, say, "it was night," or "it was day," but he uses some such circumlocution as this:-- "postera phoebea lustrabat lampade terras." the unfortunate results of the excessive use of such circumlocutions are well exemplified in the later classicists of france. ronsard perhaps foresaw this danger, and wisely says that circumlocution, if not used judiciously, makes the style inflated and bombastic. in the first preface to the _franciade_, he expresses a decided preference for the naïve facility of homer over the artful diligence of virgil.[ ] in the second preface, however, written a dozen years later, and published posthumously as revised by his disciple binet, there is interesting evidence, in the preëminence given to virgil, of the rapidity with which the latinization of culture was being effected at this period. "our french authors," says ronsard, "know virgil far better than they know homer or any other greek writer." and again, "virgil is the most excellent and the most rounded, the most compact and the most perfect of all poets."[ ] of the naïve facility of homer we hear absolutely nothing. we are now beginning to enter the era of rules. ronsard did not undervalue the "rules and secrets" of poetry; and vauquelin de la fresnaye calls his own critical poem _cet art de règles recherchées_.[ ] in regard to the imitation of the classics, vauquelin agrees heart and soul with the pléiade that the ancients "nous ont desja tracé un sentier qui de nous ne doit estre laissé."[ ] nothing, indeed, could be more classical than his comparison of poetry to a garden symmetrically laid out and trimmed.[ ] moreover, like the classicists of the next century, he affirms, as does ronsard also, that art must fundamentally imitate and resemble nature.[ ] the imitation of the classics had also a decided effect on the technique of french verse and on the linguistic principles of the pléiade. enjambement (the carrying over into another line of words required to complete the sense) and hiatus (the clash of vowels in a line) were both employed in latin and greek verse, and were therefore permitted in french poetry by the new school. ronsard, however, anticipated the reforms of malherbe and the practice of french classic verse, in forbidding both hiatus and enjambement, though in a later work of his this opinion is reversed. he was also probably the first to insist on the regular alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes in verse. this had never been strictly adhered to in practice, or required by stringent rule, before ronsard, but has become the invariable usage of french poetry ever since. ronsard regards this device as a means of making verse keep tune more harmoniously with the music of instruments. it was one of the favorite theories of the pléiade that poetry is intended, not to be read, but to be recited or sung, and that the words and the notes should be coupled lovingly together. poetry without an accompaniment of vocal or instrumental music exhibits but a small part of its harmony or perfection; and while composing verses, the poet should always pronounce them aloud, or rather sing them, in order to test their melody.[ ] this conception of music "married to immortal verse" doubtless came from italy, and is connected with the rise of operatic music. de laudun ( ) differs from the members of the pléiade in forbidding the use of words newly coined or taken from the dialects of france, and in objecting to the use of enjambement and hiatus. it is evident, therefore, that while the influence of the pléiade is visible throughout de laudun's treatise, his disagreement with ronsard and du bellay on a considerable number of essential points shows that by the end of the century the supremacy of the pléiade had begun to wane. the new school also attempted to introduce classical metres into french poetry. the similar attempt at using the ancient versification in italy has already been incidentally referred to.[ ] according to vasari, leon battista alberti, in his epistle, "questa per estrema miserabile pistola mando," was the first to attempt to reduce the vernacular versification to the measure of the latins.[ ] in october, , the _scena dell' amicizia_ of leonardo dati was composed and recited before the accademia coronaria at florence.[ ] the first two parts of this piece are written in hexameters, the third in sapphics, the fourth in sonnet form and rhymed. the prologues of ariosto's comedies, the _negromante_ and the _cassaria_, are also in classical metres. but the remarkable collection of claudio tolomei, _versi e regole de la nuova poesia toscana_, published at rome in , marked an epoch in sixteenth-century letters. in this work the employment of classical metres in the vulgar tongue is defended, and rules for their use given; then follows a collection of italian verse written after this fashion by a large number of scholars and poets, among them annibal caro and tolomei himself. this group of scholars had formed itself into an esoteric circle, the accademia della nuova poesia; and from the tone of the verses addressed to tolomei by the members of this circle, it would seem that he regarded himself, and was regarded by them, as the founder and expositor of this poetic innovation.[ ] luigi alamanni, whose life was chiefly spent at the court of france, published in a comedy, _la flora_, written in classical metres; and two years later francesco patrizzi published an heroic poem, the _eridano_, written in hexameters, with a defence of the form of versification employed.[ ] this learned innovation spread throughout western europe.[ ] in france, toward the close of the fifteenth century, according to agrippa d'aubigné, a certain mousset had translated the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_ into french hexameters; but nothing else is known either of mousset or of his translations. as early as one michel de bouteauville, the author of an _art de métrifier françois_, wrote a poem in classical distichs on the english war. sibilet ( ) accepted the use of classical metres, though with some distrust, for to him rhyme seemed as essential to french poetry as long and short syllables to greek and latin. in ramus, in his _grammar_, recommended the ancient versification, and expressed his regret that it had not been accepted with favor by the public. in the same year jacques de la taille wrote his treatise, _la manière de faire des vers en françois comme en grec et en latin_, but it was not published until , eleven years after his death. his main object in writing the book was to show that it is not as difficult to employ quantity in french verse as some people think, nor even any more difficult than in greek and latin.[ ] in answer to the objection that the vulgar tongues are by their nature incapable of quantity, he argues, after the manner of du bellay, that such things do not proceed from the nature of a language, but from the labor and diligence of those who employ it. he is tired of vulgar rhymes, and is anxious to find a more ingenious and more difficult path to parnassus. he then proceeds to treat of quantity and measure in french, of feet and verse, and of figures and poetic license.[ ] the name most inseparably connected with the introduction of classical metres into france in the sixteenth century is that of jean antoine de baïf. this young member of the pléiade, after publishing several unsuccessful volumes of verse, visited italy, and was present at the council of trent in . in italy he doubtless learnt of the metrical innovations then being employed; and upon his return, without any apparent knowledge of jacques de la taille's as yet unpublished treatise, he set about to make a systematic reform in french versification. his purpose was to bring about a more perfect unison between poetry and music; and in order to accomplish this, he adopted classical metres, based as they were on a musical prosody, and accepted the phonetic reforms of ramus. he also established, no doubt in imitation of the accademia della nuova poesia, the académie de poésie et de musique, authorized by letters patent from charles ix. in november, .[ ] the purpose of this academy was to encourage and establish the metrical and musical innovations advocated by baïf and his friends. on the death of charles ix. the society's existence was menaced; but it was restored, with a broader purpose and function, as the académie du palais, by guy du faur de pibrac in , under the protection of henry iii., and it continued to nourish until dispersed by the turmoils of the league about . but baïf's innovations were not entirely without fruit. a similar movement, and a not dissimilar society, will be found somewhat later in elizabethan england. ii. _romantic elements_ some of the romantic elements in the critical theory of the pléiade have already been indicated. the new movement started, in du bellay's _défense_, with a high conception of the poet's office. it emphasized the necessity, on the part of the poet, of profound and solitary study, of a refined and ascetic life, and of entire separation from vulgar people and pleasures. du bellay himself is romantic in that he decides against the _traditions de règles_,[ ] deeming the good judgment of the poet sufficient in matters of taste; but the reason of this was that there were no rules which he would have been willing to accept. it took more than a century for the french mind to arrive at the conclusion that reason and rules, in matters of art, proceed from one and the same cause. the feeling for nature and for natural beauty is very marked in all the members of the pléiade. pelletier speaks of war, love, agriculture, and pastoral life as the chief themes of poetry.[ ] he warns the poet to observe nature and life itself, and not depend on books alone; and he dwells on the value of descriptions of landscapes, tempests, and sunrises, and similar natural scenes.[ ] the feeling for nature is even more intense in ronsard; and like pelletier, he urges the poet to describe in verse the rivers, forests, mountains, winds, the sea, gods and goddesses, sunrise, night, and noon.[ ] in another place the poet is advised to embellish his work with accounts of trees, flowers, and herbs, especially those dignified by some medicinal or magical virtues, and with descriptions of rivers, towns, forests, mountains, caverns, rocks, harbors, and forts. here the appreciation of natural beauty as introduced into modern europe by the italian renaissance--the feeling for nature in its wider aspects, the broad landscape, the distant prospect--first becomes visible in france. "in the painting or rather imitation of nature," says ronsard, "consists the very soul of heroic poetry." ronsard also gives warning that ordinary speech is not to be banished from poetry, or too much evaded, for by doing so the poet is dealing a death-blow to "naïve and natural poetry."[ ] this sympathy for the simple and popular forms of poetry as models for the poetic artist is characteristic of the pléiade. there is a very interesting passage in montaigne, in which the popular ballads of the peasantry are praised in a manner that recalls the famous words of sir philip sidney concerning the old song of percy and douglas,[ ] and which seems to anticipate the interest in popular poetry in england two centuries later:-- "popular and purely natural and indigenous poetry has a certain native simplicity and grace by which it may be favorably compared with the principal beauty of perfect poetry composed according to the rules of art; as may be seen in the villanelles of gascony, and in songs coming from nations that have no knowledge of any science, not even of writing. but mediocre poetry, which is neither perfect nor popular, is held in disdain by every one, and receives neither honor nor reward."[ ] the pléiade, as has already been intimated, accepted without reserve the platonic doctrine of inspiration. by a considerable number of the platonic dialogues had already been translated into french. dolet had translated two of the spurious dialogues; duval, the _lysis_ in ; and le roy, the _phædo_ in and the _symposium_ in . the thesis of ramus in had started an anti-aristotelian tendency in france, and the literature of the french renaissance became impregnated with platonism.[ ] it received the royal favor of marguerite de navarre, and its influence became fixed in , by the appointment of ramus to a professorship in the collège de france. ronsard, vauquelin, du bartas, all give expression to the platonic theory of poetic inspiration. the poet must feel what he writes, as horace says, or his reader will never be moved by his verses; and for the pléiade, the excitement of high emotions in the reader or hearer was the test or touchstone of poetry.[ ] the national and christian points of view never found expression in france during the sixteenth century in so marked a manner as in italy. there are, indeed, traces of both a national and a christian criticism, but they are hardly more than sporadic. thus, it has been seen that sibilet, as early as , had clearly perceived the distinguishing characteristic of the french genius. he had noted that the french have only taken from foreign literature what they have deemed useful and of national advantage; and only the other day a distinguished french critic asserted in like manner that the high importance of french literature consists in the fact that it has taken from the other literatures of europe the things of universal interest and disregarded the accidental picturesque details. distinct traces of a national point of view may be found in the dramatic criticism of this period. thus grévin, in his _bref discours_ ( ), attempts to justify the substitution of a crowd of cæsar's soldiers for the singers of the ancient chorus, in one of his tragedies, on the following grounds:-- "if it be alleged that this practice was observed throughout antiquity by the greeks and latins, i reply that it is permitted to us to attempt some innovation of our own, especially when there is occasion for it, or when the grace of the poem is not diminished thereby. i know well that it will be answered that the ancients employed the chorus of singers to divert the audience, made gloomy perhaps by the cruelties represented in the play. to this i reply that diverse nations require diverse manners of doing things, and that among the french there are other means of doing this without interrupting the continuity of a story."[ ] the christian point of view, on the other hand, is found in vauquelin de la fresnaye, who differs from ronsard and du bellay in his preference for scriptural themes in poetry. the pléiade was essentially pagan, vauquelin essentially christian. the employment of the pagan divinities in modern poetry seemed to him often odious, for the times had changed, and the muses were governed by different laws. the poet should attempt christian themes; and indeed the greeks themselves, had they been christians, would have sung the life and death of christ. in this passage vauquelin is evidently following minturno, as the latter was afterward followed by corneille:-- "si les grecs, comme vous, chrestiens eussent escrit, ils eussent les hauts faits chanté de iesus christ.... hé! quel plaisir seroit-ce à cette heure de voir nos poëtes chrestiens, les façons recevoir du tragique ancien? et voir à nos misteres les payens asservis sous les loix salutaires de nos saints et martyrs? et du vieux testament voir une tragedie extraite proprement?"[ ] vauquelin's opinion here is out of keeping with the general theory of the pléiade, especially in that his suggestions imply a return to the mediæval mystery and morality plays. the _uranie_ of du bartas is another and more fervid expression of this same ideal of christian poetry. in the _semaines_, du bartas himself composed the typical biblical poem; and tragedies on christian or scriptural subjects were composed during the french renaissance from the time of buchanan and beza to that of garnier and montchrestien. but vauquelin's ideal was not that of the later classicism; and boileau, as has been seen, distinctly rejects christian themes from modern poetry. although the linguistic and prosodic theories of the pléiade partly anticipate both the theory and the practice of later classicism, the members of the school exhibit numerous deviations from what was afterward accepted as inviolable law in french poetry. the most important of these deviations concerns the use of words from the various french dialects, from foreign tongues, and from the technical and mechanical arts. a partial expression of this theory of poetic language has already been seen in du bellay's _défense et illustration_, in which the poet is urged to use the more elegant technical dialectic terms. ronsard gives very much the same advice. the best words in all the french dialects are to be employed by the poet; for it is doubtless to the number of the dialects of greece that we may ascribe the supreme beauty of its language and literature. the poet is not to affect too much the language of the court, since it is often very bad, being the language of ladies and of young gentlemen who make a profession of fighting well rather than of speaking well.[ ] unlike malherbe and his school, ronsard allows a certain amount of poetic license, but only rarely and judiciously. it is to poetic license, he says, that we owe nearly all the beautiful figures with which poets, in their divine rapture, enfranchising the laws of grammar, have enriched their works. "this is that birthright," said dryden, a century later, in the preface of his _state of innocence and the fall of man_, "which is derived to us from our great forefathers, even from homer down to ben; and they who would deny it to us have, in plain terms, the fox's quarrel to the grapes--they cannot reach it." vauquelin de la fresnaye follows ronsard and du bellay in urging the use of new and dialect words, the employment of terms and comparisons from the mechanic arts, and the various other doctrines by which the pléiade is distinguished from the school of malherbe. how these useless linguistic innovations were checked and banished from the french language forever will be briefly alluded to in the next chapter. foot-notes: [ ] brunetière, i. . [ ] _défense_, ii. . [ ] _cf._ rucktäschel, p. _sq._ [ ] _art poét._ i. . [ ] _ibid._ i. . [ ] _ibid._ i. . [ ] ronsard, iii. _sq._ [ ] _ibid._ vii. . [ ] ronsard, iii. _sq._ [ ] _ibid._ iii. , . [ ] _art poét._ iii. . [ ] _ibid._ i. . [ ] _art poét._ i. _sq._ [ ] _ibid._ i. . _cf._ ronsard, ii. . [ ] ronsard, vii. , . [ ] the early italian poetry written in classical metres has been collected by carducci, _la poesia barbara nei secoli xv e xvi_, bologna, . [ ] carducci, p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. _sq._ [ ] carducci, pp. , , etc. [ ] _ibid._ pp. , . _cf._ du bellay, _défense_, ii. . [ ] for the history of classical metres in france, _cf._ egger, _hellénisme en france_, p. _sq._, and darmesteter and hatzfeld, _seizième siècle en france_, p. _sq._ [ ] estienne pasquier, in his _recherches de la france_, vii. , attempts to prove that the french language is capable of employing quantity in its verse, but does not decide whether quantity or rhymed verse is to be preferred. [ ] _cf._ rucktäschel, p. _sq._, and carducci, p. _sq._ [ ] this academy has been made the subject of an excellent monograph by É. fremy, _l'académie des derniers valois_, paris, n. d. the statutes of the academy will be found on page of this work, and the letters-patent granted to it by charles ix. on page . [ ] _défense_, ii. . [ ] _art poét._ i. . [ ] _art poét._ ii. ; i. . [ ] ronsard, vii. , . [ ] _ibid._ iii. _sq._ [ ] sidney, _defence_, p. . [ ] _essais_, i. . [ ] _cf._ the _revue d'hist. litt. de la france_, , iii. _sq._ [ ] ronsard, iii. ; du bellay, _défense_, ii. . [ ] arnaud, app. ii. [ ] vauquelin, _art poét._ iii. ; _cf._ iii. ; i. . [ ] ronsard, vii. . chapter iv the formation of the classic ideal in the seventeenth century i. _the romantic revolt_ it is a well-known fact that between and there was a break in the national evolution of french literature. this was especially so in the drama, and in france the drama is the connecting link between century and century. the dramatic works of the sixteenth century had been fashioned after the regular models borrowed by the italians from seneca. the change that came was a change from italian classical to spanish romantic models. the note of revolt was beginning to be heard in grévin, de laudun, and others. the seventeenth century opened with the production of hardy's irregular drama, _les amours de théagène et cariclée_ ( ), and the influence of the spanish romantic drama and the italian pastoral, dominant for over a quarter of a century, was inaugurated in france. the logic of this innovation was best expounded in spain, and it was there that arguments in favor of the romantic and irregular drama were first formulated. the two most interesting defences of the spanish national drama are doubtless the _egemplar poético_ of juan de la cueva ( ) and lope de vega's _arte nuevo de hacer comedias_ ( ). their inspiration is at bottom the same. their authors were both classicists at heart, or rather classicists in theory, yet with differences. juan de la cueva's conception of poetry is entirely based on the precepts of the italians, except in what regards the national drama, for here he is a partisan and a patriot. he insists that the difference of time and circumstance frees the spanish playwright from all necessity of imitating the ancients or obeying their rules. "this change in the drama," he says, "was effected by wise men, who applied to new conditions the new things they found most suitable and expedient; for we must consider the various opinions, the times, and the manners, which make it necessary for us to change and vary our operations."[ ] his theory of the drama was entirely opposed to his conception of the other forms of poetry. according to this standpoint, as a recent writer has put it, "the theatre was to imitate nature, and to please; poetry was to imitate the italians, and satisfy the orthodox but minute critic."[ ] lope de vega, writing three years later, does not deny the universal applicability of the aristotelian canons, and even acknowledges that they are the only true rules. but the people demand romantic plays, and the people, rather than the poet's literary conscience, must be satisfied by the playwright. "i myself," he says, "write comedies according to the art invented by those whose sole object it is to obtain the applause of the crowd. after all, since it is the public who pays for these stupidities, why should we not serve what it wants?"[ ] perhaps the most interesting of all the expositions of the theory of the spanish national drama is a defence of lope de vega's plays by one alfonso sanchez, published in in france, or possibly in spain with a false french imprint. the apology of sanchez is comprehended in six distinct propositions. first, the arts have their foundation in nature. secondly, a wise and learned man may alter many things in the existing arts. thirdly, nature does not obey laws, but gives them. fourthly, lope de vega has done well in creating a new art. fifthly, in his writings everything is adjusted to art, and that a real and living art. lastly, lope de vega has surpassed all the ancient poets.[ ] the following passage may be extracted from this treatise, if only to show how little there was of novelty in the tenets of the french romanticists two centuries later:-- "is it said that we have no infallible art by which to adjust our precepts? but who can doubt it? we have art, we have precepts and rules which bind us, and the principal precept is to imitate nature, for the works of poets express the nature, the manners, and the genius of the age in which they write.... lope de vega writes in conformity with art, because he follows nature. if, on the contrary, the spanish drama adjusted itself to the rules and laws of the ancients, it would proceed against the requirements of nature, and against the foundations of poetry.... the great lope has done things over and above the laws of the ancients, but never against these laws." another spanish writer defines art as "an attentive observation of examples graded by experience, and reduced to method and the majesty of laws."[ ] it was this naturalistic conception of the poetic art, and especially of the drama, that obtained in france during the first thirty years of the seventeenth century. the french playwrights imitated the spanish drama in practice, and from the spanish theorists seemed to have derived the critical justification of their plays. hardy himself, like lope de vega, argues that "everything which is approved by usage and the public taste is legitimate and more than legitimate." another writer of this time, françois ogier, in the preface of the second edition of jean de schelandre's remarkable drama of _tyr et sidon_ ( ), argues for intellectual independence of the ancients much in the same way as giraldi cintio, pigna, and the other partisans of the _romanzi_ had done three-quarters of a century before. the taste of every nation, he says, is quite different from any other. "the greeks wrote for the greeks, and in the judgment of the best men of their time they succeeded. but we should imitate them very much better by giving heed to the tastes of our own country, and the genius of our own language, than by forcing ourselves to follow step by step both their intention and their expression." this would seem to be at bottom goethe's famous statement that we can best imitate the greeks by trying to be as great men as they were. it is interesting to note, in all of these early critics, traces of that historical criticism which is usually regarded as the discovery of our own century. but after all, the french like the spanish playwrights were merely beginning to practise what the italian dramatists in their prefaces, and some of the italian critics in their treatises, had been preaching for nearly a century. the abbé d'aubignac speaks of hardy as "arresting the progress of the french theatre"; and whatever practical improvements the french theatre owes to him, there can be little doubt that for a certain number of years the evolution of the classical drama was partly arrested by his efforts and the efforts of his school. but during this very period the foundations of the great literature that was to come were being built on classical lines; and the continuance of the classical tradition after was due to three distinct causes, each of which will be discussed by itself as briefly as possible. these three causes were the reaction against the pléiade, the second influx of the critical ideas of the italian renaissance, and the influence of the rationalistic philosophy of the period. ii. _the reaction against the pléiade_ the reaction against the pléiade was effected, or at least begun, by malherbe. malherbe's power or message as a poet is of no concern here; in his rôle of grammarian and critic he accomplished certain important and widespread reforms in french poetry. these reforms were connected chiefly, if not entirely, with the external or formal side of poetry. his work was that of a grammarian, of a prosodist--in a word, that of a purist. he did not, indeed, during his lifetime, publish any critical work, or formulate any critical system. but the reforms he executed were on this account no less influential or enduring. his critical attitude is to be looked for in the memoirs of his life written by his disciple racan, and in his own _commentaire sur desportes_, which was not published in its entirety until very recently.[ ] this commentary consists of a series of manuscript notes written by malherbe about the year in the margins of a copy of desportes. these notes are of a most fragmentary kind; they seldom go beyond a word or two of disapproval, such as _faible_, _mal conçu_, _superflu_, _sans jugement_, _sottise_, or _mal imaginé_; and yet, together with a few detached utterances recorded in his letters and in the memoirs by racan, they indicate quite clearly the critical attitude of malherbe and the reforms he was bent on bringing about. these reforms were, in the first place, largely linguistic. the pléiade had attempted to widen the sphere of poetic expression in french literature by the introduction of words from the classics, from the italian and even the spanish, from the provincial dialects, from the old romances, and from the terminology of the mechanic arts. all these archaisms, neologisms, latinisms, compound words, and dialectic and technical expressions, malherbe set about to eradicate from the french language. his object was to purify french, and, as it were, to centralize it. the test he set up was actual usage, and even this was narrowed down to the usage of the court. ronsard had censured the exclusive use of courtly speech in poetry, on the ground that the courtier cares more about fighting well than about speaking or writing well. but malherbe's ideal was the ideal of french classicism--the ideal of boileau, racine, and bossuet. french was to be no longer a hodgepodge or a patois, but the pure and perfect speech of the king and his court. malherbe, while thus reacting against the pléiade, made no pretensions of returning to the linguistic usages of marot; his test was present usage, his model the living language.[ ] at the same time his reforms in language, as in other things, represent a reaction against foreign innovations and a return to the pure french idiom. they were in the interest of the national traditions; and it is this national element which is his share in the body of neo-classical theory and practice. his reforms were all in the direction of that verbal and mechanical perfection, the love of which is innate in the french nature, and which forms the indigenous or racial element in french classicism. he eliminated from french verse hiatus, enjambement, inversions, false and imperfect rhymes, and licenses or cacophonies of all kinds. he gave it, as has been said, mechanical perfection,-- "et réduisit la muse aux règles du devoir." for such a man--_tyran des mots et des syllabes_, as balzac called him--the higher qualities of poetry could have little or no meaning. his ideals were propriety, clearness, regularity, and force. these, as chapelain perceived at the time, are oratorical rather than purely poetic qualities; yet for these, all the true qualities that go to make up a great poet were to be sacrificed. of imagination and poetic sensibility he takes no account whatsoever. after the verbal perfection of the verse, the logical unity of the poem was his chief interest. logic and reason are without doubt important things, but they cannot exist in poetry to the exclusion of imagination. by eliminating inspiration, as it were, malherbe excluded the possibility of lyrical production in france throughout the period of classicism. he hated poetic fictions, since for him, as for boileau, only actual reality is beautiful. if he permitted the employment of mythological figures, it was because they are reasonable and universally intelligible symbols. the french mind is essentially rational and logical, and malherbe reintroduced this native rationality into french poetry. he set up common sense as a poetic ideal, and made poetry intelligible to the average mind. the pléiade had written for a learned literary coterie; malherbe wrote for learned and unlearned alike. for the pléiade, poetry had been a divine office, a matter of prophetic inspiration; for malherbe, it was a trade, a craft, to be learnt like any other. du bellay had said that "it is a well-accepted fact, according to the most learned men, that natural talents without learning can accomplish more in poetry than learning without natural talents." malherbe, it has been neatly said, would have upheld the contrary doctrine that "learning without natural talents can accomplish more than natural talents without learning."[ ] after all, eloquence was malherbe's ideal; and as the french are by nature an eloquent rather than a poetic people, he deserves the honor of having first shown them how to regain their true inheritance. in a word, he accomplished for classical poetry in france all that the national instinct, the _esprit gaulois_, could accomplish by itself. consistent structural laws for the larger poetic forms he could not give; these france owes to italy. nor could he appreciate the high notion of abstract perfection, or the classical conception of an absolute standard of taste--that of several expressions or several ways of doing something, one way and only one is the right one; this france owes to rationalistic philosophy. malherbe seems almost to be echoing montaigne when he says in a letter to balzac:-- "do you not know that the diversity of opinions is as natural as the difference of men's faces, and that to wish that what pleases or displeases us should please or displease everybody is to pass the limits where it seems that god in his omnipotence has commanded us to stop?"[ ] with this individualistic expression of the questions of opinion and taste, we have but to compare the following passage from la bruyère to indicate how far malherbe is still from the classic ideal:-- "there is a point of perfection in art, as of excellence or maturity in nature. he who is sensible of it and loves it has perfect taste; he who is not sensible of it and loves this or that else on either side of it has a faulty taste. there is then a good and a bad taste, and men dispute of tastes not without reason."[ ] iii. _the second influx of italian ideas_ the second influx of italian critical ideas into france came through two channels. in the first place, the direct literary relations between italy and france during this period were very marked. the influence of marino, who lived for a long time at paris and published a number of his works there, was not inconsiderable, especially upon the french concettists and _précieux_. two italian ladies founded and presided over the famous hotel de rambouillet,--julie savelli, marquise de pisani, and catherine de vivonne, marquise de rambouillet. it was partly to the influence of the accademia della crusca that the foundation of the french academy was due. chapelain and ménage were both members of the italian society, and submitted to it their different opinions on a verse of petrarch. like the accademia della crusca, the french academy purposed the preparation of a great dictionary; and each began its existence by attacking a great work of literature, the _gerusalemme liberata_ in the case of the italian society, corneille's _cid_ in the case of the french. the regency of marie de medici, the supremacy of mazarin, and other political events, all conspired to bring italy and france into the closest social and literary relationship. but the two individuals who first brought into french literature and naturalized the primal critical concepts of italy were chapelain and balzac. chapelain's private correspondence indicates how thorough was his acquaintance with the critical literature of italy. "i have a particular affection for the italian language," he wrote in to balzac.[ ] of the _cid_, he says that "in italy it would be considered barbarous, and there is not an academy which would not banish it beyond the confines of its jurisdiction."[ ] speaking of the greatness of ronsard, he says that his own opinion was in accord with that of "two great savants beyond the alps, speroni and castelvetro";[ ] and he had considerable correspondence with balzac on the subject of the controversy between caro and castelvetro in the previous century. in a word, he knew and studied the critics and scholars of italy, and was interested in discussing them. balzac's interest, on the other hand, was rather toward spanish literature; but he was the agent of the cardinal de la valette at rome, and it was on his return to france that he published the first collection of his letters. the influence of both chapelain and balzac on french classicism was considerable. during the sixteenth century, literary criticism had been entirely in the hands of learned men. chapelain and balzac vulgarized the critical ideas of the italian renaissance, and made them popular, human, but inviolable. balzac introduced into france the fine critical sense of the italians; chapelain introduced their formal rules, and imposed the three unities on french tragedy. together they effected a humanizing of the classical ideal, even while subjecting it to rules. it was to the same italian influences that france owed the large number of artificial epics that appeared during this period. about ten epics were published in the fifteen years between and .[ ] the italians of the sixteenth century had formulated a fixed theory of the artificial epic; and the nations of western europe rivalled one another in attempting to make practical use of this theory. it is to this that the large number of spanish epics in the sixteenth century and of french epics in the seventeenth may be ascribed. among the latter we may mention scudéry's _alaric_, lemoyne's _saint louis_, saint-amant's _moyse sauvé_, and chapelain's own epic, _la pucelle_, awaited by the public for many years, and published only to be damned forever by boileau. the prefaces of all these epics indicate clearly enough their indebtedness to the italians. they were indeed scarcely more than attempts to put the rules and precepts of the italian renaissance into practice. "i then consulted the masters of this art," says scudéry, in the preface of _alaric_, "that is to say, aristotle and horace, and after them macrobius, scaliger, tasso, castelvetro, piccolomini, vida, vossius, robortelli, riccoboni, paolo beni, mambrun, and several others; and passing from theory to practice i reread very carefully the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_, the _Æneid_, the _pharsalia_, the _thebaid_, the _orlando furioso_, and the _gerusalemme liberata_, and many other epic poems in diverse languages." similarly, saint-amant, in the preface of his _moyse sauvé_, says that he had rigorously observed "the unities of action and place, which are the principal requirements of the epic; and besides, by an entirely new method, i have restricted my subject not only within twenty-four hours, the limit of the dramatic poem, but almost within half of that time. this is more than even aristotle, horace, scaliger, castelvetro, piccolomini, and all the other moderns have ever required." it is obvious that for these epic-makers the rules and precepts of the italians were the final tests of heroic poetry. similarly, the abbé d'aubignac, at the beginning of his _pratique du théâtre_, advises the dramatic poet to study, among other writers, "aristotle, horace, castelvetro, vida, heinsius, vossius, and scaliger, of whom not a word should be lost." from the italians also came the theory of poetry in general as held throughout the period of classicism, and expounded by the abbé d'aubignac, la mesnardière, corneille, boileau, and numerous others; and it is hardly necessary to repeat that rapin, tracing the history of criticism at the beginning of his _réflexions sur la poétique_, deals with scarcely any critics but the italians. besides the direct influence of the italian critics, another influence contributed its share to the sum of critical ideas which french classicism owes to the italian renaissance. this was the tradition of scaliger, carried on by the dutch scholars heinsius and vossius. daniel heinsius was the pupil of joseph scaliger, the illustrious son of the author of the _poetics_; and through heinsius the dramatic theories of the elder scaliger influenced classical tragedy in france. the treatise of heinsius, _de tragoediæ constitutione_, published at leyden in , was called by chapelain "the quintessence of aristotle's _poetics_"; and chapelain called heinsius himself "a prophet or sibyl in matters of criticism."[ ] annoted by racine, cited as an infallible authority by corneille, heinsius's work exercised a marked influence on french tragedy by fixing upon it the laws of scaliger; and later the works of vossius coöperated with those of heinsius in widening the sphere of the italian influence. it is evident, therefore, that while french literature had already during the sixteenth century taken from the italian renaissance its respect for antiquity and its admiration for classical mythology, the seventeenth century owed to italy its definitive conception of the theory of poetry, and especially certain rigid structural laws for tragedy and epic. it may be said without exaggeration that there is not an essential idea or precept in the works of corneille and d'aubignac on dramatic poetry, or of le bossu and mambrun on epic poetry, that cannot be found in the critical writings of the italian renaissance. iv. _the influence of rationalistic philosophy_ the influence of rationalistic philosophy on the general attitude of classicism manifested itself in what may be called the gradual rationalization of all that the renaissance gave to france. the process thus effected is most definitely exhibited in the evolution of the rules which france owed to italy. it has already been shown how the rules and precepts of the italians had originally been based on authority alone, but had gradually obtained a general significance of their own, regardless of their ancient authority. somewhat later, in england, the aristotelian canons were defended by ben jonson on the ground that aristotle understood the causes of things, and that what others had done by chance or custom, aristotle did by reason alone.[ ] by this time, then, the reasonableness of the aristotelian canons was distinctly felt, although they were still regarded as having authoritativeness in themselves; and it was first in the french classicists of the seventeenth century that reason and the ancient rules were regarded as one and inseparable. rationalism, indeed, is to be found at the very outset of the critical activity of the renaissance; and vida's words, already cited, "semper nutu rationis eant res," represent in part the attitude of the renaissance mind toward literature. but the "reason" of the earlier theorists was merely empirical and individualistic; it did not differ essentially from horace's ideal of "good sense." in fact, rationalism and humanism, while existing together throughout the renaissance, were never to any extent harmonized; and extreme rationalism generally took the form of an avowed antagonism to aristotle. the complete rationalization of the laws of literature is first evident toward the middle of the seventeenth century. "the rules of the theatre," says the abbé d'aubignac, at the beginning of his _pratique du théâtre_, "are founded, not on authority, but on reason," and if they are called the rules of the ancients, it is simply "because the ancients have admirably practised them." similarly, corneille, in his discourse _des trois unités_, says that the unity of time would be arbitrary and tyrannical if it were merely required by aristotle's _poetics_, but that its real prop is the natural reason; and boileau sums up the final attitude of classicism in these words:-- "aimez donc la _raison_; que toujours vos écrits empruntent _d'elle seule_ et leur lustre et leur prix."[ ] here the rationalizing process is complete, and the actual requirements of authority become identical with the dictates of the reason. the rules expounded by boileau, while for the most part the same as those enunciated by the italians, are no longer mere rules. they are laws dictated by abstract and universal reason, and hence inevitable and infallible; they are not tyrannical or arbitrary, but imposed upon us by the very nature of the human mind. this is not merely, as we have said, the good nature and the good sense, in a word, the sweet reasonableness, of such a critic as horace.[ ] there is more than this in the classicists of the seventeenth century. good sense becomes universalized, becomes, in fact, as has been said, not merely an empirical notion of good sense, but the abstract and universal reason itself. from this follows the absolute standard of taste at the bottom of classicism, as exemplified in the passage already cited from la bruyère, and in such a line as this from boileau:-- "la raison pour marcher n'a souvent qu'une voie."[ ] this rationalization of the renaissance rules of poetry was effected by contemporary philosophy; if not by the works and doctrines of descartes himself, at least by the general tendency of the human mind at this period, of which these works and doctrines are the most perfect expressions. boileau's _art poétique_ has been aptly called the _discours de la méthode_ of french poetry. so that while the contribution of malherbe and his school to classicism lay in the insistence on clearness, propriety, and verbal and metrical perfection, and the contribution of the italian renaissance lay in the infusion of respect for classical antiquity and the imposition of a certain body of fixed rules, the contribution of contemporary philosophy lay in the rationalization or universalization of these rules, and in the imposition of an abstract and absolute standard of taste. but cartesianism brought with it certain important limitations and deficiencies. boileau himself is reported to have said that "the philosophy of descartes has cut the throat of poetry;"[ ] and there can be no doubt that this is the exaggerated expression of a certain inevitable truth. the excessive insistence on the reason brought with it a corresponding undervaluation of the imagination. the rational and rigidly scientific basis of cartesianism was forced on classicism; and reality became its supreme object and its final test:-- "rien n'est beau que le vrai." reference has already been made to various disadvantages imposed on classicism by the very nature of its origin and growth; but the most vital of all these disadvantages was the influence of the cartesian philosophy or philosophic temper. with the scientific basis thus imposed on literature, its only safeguard against extinction was the vast influence of a certain body of fixed rules, which literature dared not deviate from, and which it attempted to justify on the wider grounds of philosophy. these rules, then, the contribution of italy, saved poetry in france from extinction during the classical period; and of this a remarkable confirmation is to be found in the fact that not until the rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was superseded in france, did french literature rid itself of this body of renaissance rules. cartesianism, or at least the rationalistic spirit, humanized these rules, and imposed them on the rest of europe. but though quintessentialized, they remained artificial, and circumscribed the workings of the french imagination for over a century. foot-notes: [ ] sedano, _parnaso español_, viii. . [ ] hannay, _later renaissance_, , p. . [ ] menéndez y pelayo, iii. . [ ] _ibid._ iii. _sq._ [ ] menéndez y pelayo, iii. . [ ] the _commentaire_ is printed entire in lalanne's edition of malherbe, paris, , vol. iv. the critical doctrine of malherbe has been formulated by brunot, _doctrine de malherbe_, pp. - . [ ] _cf._ horace, _ars poet._ , . [ ] brunot, p. . [ ] _oeuvres_, lalanne's edition, iv. . [ ] _caractères_, "des ouvrages de l'esprit." [ ] _lettres_, i. . the references are to the edition by tamizey de larroque, paris, - . [ ] _ibid._ i. . [ ] _ibid._ i. _sq._ [ ] these epics have been treated at length by duchesne, _histoire des poèmes Épiques français du xvii siècle_, paris, . [ ] _lettres_, i. , . on the theories of heinsius, see zerbst, _ein vorläufer lessings in der aristotelesinterpretation_, jena, . [ ] _discoveries_, p. . [ ] _art poét._ i. . [ ] _cf._ brunetière, _Études critiques_, iv. ; and krantz, p. _sq._ [ ] _art poét._ i. . [ ] reported by j. b. rousseau, in a letter to brossette, july , . part third _literary criticism in england_ literary criticism in england chapter i the evolution of english criticism from ascham to milton literary criticism in england during the elizabethan age was neither so influential nor so rich and varied as the contemporary criticism of italy and france. this fact might perhaps be thought insufficient to affect the interest or patriotism of english-speaking people, yet the most charming critical monument of this period, sidney's _defence of poesy_, has been slightingly referred to by the latest historian of english poetry. such interest and importance as elizabethan criticism possesses must therefore be of an historical nature, and lies in two distinct directions. in the first place, the study of the literature of this period will show, not only that there was a more or less complete body of critical doctrine during the renaissance, but also that englishmen shared in this creation, or inheritance, of the renaissance as truly as did their continental neighbors; and on the other hand this study may be said to possess an interest in itself, in so far as it will make the growth of classicism in england intelligible, and will indicate that the formation of the classic ideal had begun before the introduction of the french influence. in neither case, however, can early english criticism be considered wholly apart from the general body of renaissance doctrine; and its study loses in importance and perspicuity according as it is kept distinct from the consideration of the critical literature of france, and especially of italy. english criticism, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, passed through five more or less distinct stages of development. the first stage, characterized by the purely rhetorical study of literature, may be said to begin with leonard coxe's _arte or crafte of rhetoryke_, a hand-book for young students, compiled about , chiefly from one of the rhetorical treatises of melanchthon.[ ] this was followed by wilson's _arte of rhetorike_ ( ), which is more extensive and certainly more original than coxe's manual, and which has been called by warton "the first book or system of criticism in our language." but the most important figure of this period is roger ascham. the educational system expounded in his _scholemaster_, written between and , he owed largely to his friend, john sturm, the strasburg humanist, and to his teacher, sir john cheke, who had been greek lecturer at the university of padua; but for the critical portions of this work he seems directly indebted to the rhetorical treatises of the italians.[ ] yet his obligations to the italian humanists did not prevent the expression of his stern and unyielding antagonism to the romantic italian spirit as it influenced the imaginative literature of his time. in studying early english literature it must always be kept in mind that the italian renaissance influenced the elizabethan age in two different directions. the italianization of english poetry had been effected, or at least begun, by the publication of tottel's _miscellany_ in ; on this, the creative side of english literature, the italian influence was distinctly romantic. the influence of the italian humanists, on the other hand, was directly opposed to this romantic spirit; even in their own country they had antagonized all that was not classical in tendency. ascham, therefore, as a result of his humanistic training, became not only the first english man of letters, but also the first english classicist. the first stage of english criticism, then, was entirely given up to rhetorical study. it was at this time that english writers first attained the appreciation of form and style as distinguishing features of literature; and it was to this appreciation that the formation of an english prose style was due. this period may therefore be compared with the later stages of italian humanism in the fifteenth century; and the later humanists were the masters and models of these early english rhetoricians. gabriel harvey, as a ciceronian of the school of bembo, was perhaps their last representative. the second stage of english criticism--a period of classification and especially of metrical studies--commences with gascoigne's _notes of instruction concerning the making of verse_,[ ] published in , and modelled apparently on ronsard's _abrégé de l'art poétique françois_ ( ). besides this brief pamphlet, the first work on english versification, this stage also includes puttenham's _arte of english poesie_, the first systematic classification of poetic forms and subjects, and of rhetorical figures; bullokar's _bref grammar_, the first systematic treatise on english grammar; and harvey's _letters_ and webbe's _discourse of english poetrie_, the first systematic attempts to introduce classical metres into english poetry. this period was characterized by the study and classification of the practical questions of language and versification; and in this labor it was coöperating with the very tendencies which ascham had been attempting to counteract. the study of the verse-forms introduced into england from italy helped materially to perfect the external side of english poetry; and a similar result was obtained by the crude attempts at quantitative verse suggested by the school of tolomei. the italian prosodists were thus, directly or indirectly, the masters of the english students of this era. the representative work of the third stage--the period of philosophical and apologetic criticism--is sir philip sidney's _defence of poesy_, published posthumously in , though probably written about . harington's _apologie of poetrie_, daniel's _defence of ryme_, and a few others, are also contemporary treatises. these works, as their titles indicate, are all defences or apologies, and were called forth by the attacks of the puritans on poetry, especially dramatic poetry, and the attacks of the classicists on english versification and rhyme. required by the exigencies of the moment to defend poetry in general, these authors did not attempt to do so on local or temporary grounds, but set out to examine the fundamental grounds of criticism, and to formulate the basic principles of poetry. in this attempt they consciously or unconsciously sought aid from the critics of italy, and thus commenced in england the influence of the italian theory of poetry. how great was their indebtedness to the italians the course of the present study will make somewhat clear; but it is certainly remarkable that this indebtedness has never been pointed out before. speaking of sidney's _defence of poesy_, one of the most distinguished english authorities on the renaissance says: "much as the italians had recently written upon the theory of poetry, i do not remember any treatise which can be said to have supplied the material or suggested the method of this apology."[ ] on the contrary, the doctrines discussed by sidney had been receiving very similar treatment from the italians for over half a century; and it can be said without exaggeration that there is not an essential principle in the _defence of poesy_ which cannot be traced back to some italian treatise on the poetic art. the age of which sidney is the chief representative is therefore the first period of the influence of italian critics. the fourth stage of english criticism, of which ben jonson is, as it were, the presiding genius, occupies the first half of the seventeenth century. the period that preceded it was in general romantic in its tendencies; that of jonson leaned toward a strict though never servile classicism. sidney's contemporaries had studied the general theory of poetry, not for the purpose of enunciating rules or dogmas of criticism, but chiefly in order to defend the poetic art, and to understand its fundamental principles. the spirit of the age was the spirit, let us say, of fracastoro; that of jonson was, in a moderate form, the spirit of scaliger or castelvetro. with jonson the study of the art of poetry became an inseparable guide to creation; and it is this element of self-conscious art, guided by the rules of criticism, which distinguishes him from his predecessors. the age which he represents is therefore the second period of the influence of italian criticism; and the same influence also is to be seen in such critical poems as suckling's _session of the poets_, and the _great assises holden in parnassus_, ascribed to wither, both of which may be traced back to the class of critical poetry of which boccalini's _ragguagli di parnaso_ is the type.[ ] the fifth period, which covers the second half of the seventeenth century, is characterized by the introduction of french influence, and begins with davenant's letter to hobbes, and hobbes's answer, both prefixed to the epic of _gondibert_ ( ). these letters, written while davenant and hobbes were at paris, display many of the characteristic features of the new influence,--the rationalistic spirit, the stringent classicism, the restriction of art to the imitation of nature, with the further limitation of nature to the life of the city and the court, and the confinement of the imagination to what is called "wit." this specialized sense of the word "wit" is characteristic of the new age, of which dryden, in part the disciple of davenant, is the leading figure. the elizabethans used the term in the general sense of the understanding,--wit, the mental faculty, as opposed to will, the faculty of volition. with the neo-classicists it was used sometimes to represent, in a limited sense, the imagination,[ ] more often, however, to designate what we should call fancy,[ ] or even mere propriety of poetic expression;[ ] but whatever its particular use, it was always regarded as of the essence of poetic art. with the fifth stage of english criticism this essay is not concerned. the history of literary criticism in england will be traced no farther than , when the influence of france was substituted for that of italy. this section deals especially with the two great periods of italian influence,--that of sidney and that of ben jonson. these two men are the central figures, and their names, like those of dryden, pope, and samuel johnson, represent distinct and important epochs in the history of literary criticism. foot-notes: [ ] _cf._ _mod. lang. notes_, , xiii. . [ ] _cf._ ascham, _works_, ii. - . [ ] the _reulis and cautelis of scottis poesie_ by james vi. of scotland is wholly based on gascoigne's treatise. [ ] j. a. symonds, _sir philip sidney_, p. . _cf._ also, sidney, _defence_, cook's introduction, p. xxvii. [ ] _cf._ foffano, p. _sq._ in spain, lope de vega's _laurel de apolo_ and cervantes' _viage del parnaso_ belong to the same class of poems. [ ] _cf._ dryden, ded. epist. to the _annus mirabilis_. [ ] addison, _spectator_, no. . [ ] dryden, preface to the _state of innocence_. chapter ii the general theory of poetry in the elizabethan age those who have some acquaintance, however superficial, with the literary criticism of the italian renaissance will find an account of the elizabethan theory of poetry a twice-told tale. in england, as in france, criticism during this period was of a more practical character than in italy; but even for the technical questions discussed by the elizabethans, some prototype, or at least some equivalent, may be found among the italians. the first four stages of english criticism have therefore little novelty or original value; and their study is chiefly important as evidence of the gradual application of the ideas of the renaissance to english literature. the writers of the first stage, as might be expected, concerned themselves but little with the theory of poetry, beyond repeating here and there the commonplaces they found in the italian rhetoricians. yet it is interesting to note that as early as , wilson, in the third book of his _rhetoric_, gives expression to the allegorical conception of poetry which in italy had held sway from the time of petrarch and boccaccio, and which, more than anything else, colored critical theory in elizabethan england. the ancient poets, according to wilson, did not spend their time inventing meaningless fables, but used the story merely as a framework for contents of ethical, philosophic, scientific, or historical import; the trials of ulysses, for example, were intended to furnish a lively picture of man's misery in this life. the poets are, in fact, wise men, spiritual legislators, reformers, who have at heart the redressing of wrongs; and in accomplishing this end,--either because they fear to rebuke these wrongs openly, or because they doubt the expediency or efficacy of such frankness with ignorant people,--they hide their true meaning under the veil of pleasant fables. this theory of poetic art, one of the commonplaces of the age, may be described as the great legacy of the middle ages to renaissance criticism. the writers of the second stage were, in many cases, too busy with questions of versification and other practical matters to find time for abstract theorizing on the art of poetry. a long period of rhetorical and metrical study had helped to formulate a rhetorical and technical conception of the poet's function, aptly exemplified in the sonnet describing the perfect poet prefixed to king james's brief treatise on scotch poetry.[ ] the marks of a perfect poet are there given as skilfulness in the rhetorical figures, quick wit, as shown in the use of apt and pithy words, and a good memory;--a merely external view of the poet's gifts, which takes no account of such essentials as imagination, sensibility, and knowledge of nature and human life. webbe's _discourse of english poetrie_ ( ) gives expression to a conception of the object of poetry which is the logical consequence of the allegorical theory, and which was therefore almost universally accepted by renaissance writers. the poet teaches by means of the allegorical truth hidden under the pleasing fables he invents; but his first object must be to make these fables really pleasing, or the reader is deterred at the outset from any acquaintance with the poet's works. poetry is therefore a delightful form of instruction; it pleases and profits together; but first of all it must delight, "for the very sum and chiefest essence of poetry did always for the most part consist in delighting the readers or hearers."[ ] the poet has the highest welfare of man at heart; and by his sweet allurements to virtue and effective caveats against vice, he gains his end, not roughly or tyrannically, but, as it were, with a loving authority.[ ] from the very beginnings of human society poetry has been the means of civilizing men, of drawing them from barbarity to civility and virtue. if it be objected that this art--or rather, from the divine origin of its inspiration, this more than art--has ever been made the excuse for the enticing expression of obscenity and blasphemy, webbe has three answers. in the first place, poetry is to be moralized, that is, to be read allegorically. the _metamorphoses_ of ovid, for example, will become, when so understood, a fount of ethical teaching; and harington, a few years later, actually explains in detail the allegorical significance of the fourth book of that poem.[ ] this was a well-established tradition, and indeed a favorite occupation, of the middle ages; and the _ovide moralisé_, a long poem by chrétien le gouais, written about the beginning of the fourteenth century, and the equally long ovidian commentary of pierre berçuire, are typical examples of this practice.[ ] in the second place, the picture of vices to be found in poetry is intended, not to entice the reader to imitate them, but rather to deter sensible men from doing likewise by showing the misfortune that inevitably results from evil. moreover, obscenity is in no way essentially connected with poetic art; it is to the abuse of poetry, and not to poetry itself, that we must lay all blame for this fault. a still higher conception of the poet's function is to be found in puttenham's _arte of english poesie_ ( ). the author of this treatise informs us that he had lived at the courts of france, italy, and spain, and knew the languages of these and other lands; and the results of his travels and studies are sufficiently shown in his general theory of poetry. his conception of the poet is directly based on that of scaliger. poetry, in its highest form, is an art of "making," or creation; and in this sense the poet is a creator like god, and forms a world out of nothing. in another sense, poetry is an art of imitation, in that it presents a true and lively picture of everything set before it. in either case, it can attain perfection only by a divine instinct, or by a great excellence of nature, or by vast observation and experience of the world, or indeed by all these together; but whatever the source of its inspiration, it is ever worthy of study and praise, and its creators deserve preëminence and dignity above all other artificers, scientific or mechanical.[ ] the poets were the first priests, prophets, and legislators of the world, the first philosophers, scientists, orators, historians, and musicians. they have been held in the highest esteem by the greatest men from the very first; and the nobility, antiquity, and universality of their art prove its preëminence and worth. with such a history and such a nature, it is sacrilege to debase poetry, or to employ it upon any unworthy subject or for ignoble purpose. its chief themes should therefore be such as these: the honor and glory of the gods, the worthy deeds of noble princes and great warriors, the praise of virtue and the reproof of vice, instruction in moral doctrine or scientific knowledge, and finally, "the common solace of mankind in all the travails and cares of this transitory life," or even for mere recreation alone.[ ] this is the sum of poetic theorizing during the second stage of english criticism. yet it was at this very time that the third, or apologetic, period was prepared for by the attacks which the puritans directed against poetry, and especially the drama. of these attacks, gosson's, as the most celebrated, may be taken as the type. underlying the rant and exaggerated vituperation of his _schoole of abuse_ ( ), there is a basis of right principles, and some evidence at least of a spirit not wholly vulgar. he was a moral reformer, an idealist, who looked back with regret toward "the old discipline of england," and contrasted it with the spirit of his own day, when englishmen seemed to have "robbed greece of gluttony, italy of wantonness, spain of pride, france of deceit, and dutchland of quaffing."[ ] the typical evidences of this moral degradation and effeminacy he found in poetry and the drama; and it is to this motive that his bitter assault on both must be ascribed. he specifically insists that his intention was not to banish poetry, or to condemn music, or to forbid harmless recreation to mankind, but merely to chastise the abuse of all these.[ ] he praises plays which possess real moral purpose and effect, and points out the true use and the worthy subjects of poetry much in the same manner as puttenham does a few years later.[ ] but he affirms, as plato had done hundreds of years before, and as a distinguished french critic has done only the other day, that art contains within itself the germ of its own disintegration; and he shows that in the english poetry of his own time this disintegration had already taken place. the delights and ornaments of verse, intended really to make moral doctrine more pleasing and less abstruse and thorny, had become, with his contemporaries, mere alluring disguises for obscenity and blasphemy. in the first of the replies to gosson, lodge's _defence of poetry, musick, and stage plays_, written before either of the treatises of webbe and puttenham, are found the old principles of allegorical and moral interpretation,--principles which to us may seem well worn, but which to the english criticism of that time were novel enough. lodge points out the efficacy of poetry as a civilizing factor in primitive times, and as a moral agency ever since. if the poets have on occasion erred, so have the philosophers, even plato himself, and grievously.[ ] poetry is a heavenly gift, and is to be contemned only when abused and debased. lodge did not perceive that his point of view was substantially the same as his opponent's; and indeed, throughout the elizabethan age, there was this similarity in the point of view of those who attacked and those who defended poetry. both sides admitted that not poetry, but its abuse, is to be disparaged; and they differed chiefly in that one side insisted almost entirely on the ideal perfection of the poetic art, while the other laid stress on the debased state into which it had fallen. a dual point of view was attempted in a work, licensed in january, , which pretended to be "a commendation of true poetry, and a discommendation of all bawdy, ribald, and paganized poets."[ ] this puritan movement against the paganization of poetry corresponds to the similar movement started by the council of trent in catholic countries. the theory of poetry during the second stage of english criticism was in the main horatian, with such additions and modifications as the early renaissance had derived from the middle ages. the aristotelian canons had not yet become a part of english criticism. webbe alludes to aristotle's dictum that empedocles, having naught but metre in common with homer, was in reality a natural philosopher rather than a poet;[ ] but all such allusions to aristotle's _poetics_ were merely incidental and sporadic. the introduction of aristotelianism into england was the direct result of the influence of the italian critics; and the agent in bringing this new influence into english letters was sir philip sidney. his _defence of poesy_ is a veritable epitome of the literary criticism of the italian renaissance; and so thoroughly is it imbued with this spirit, that no other work, italian, french, or english, can be said to give so complete and so noble a conception of the temper and the principles of renaissance criticism. for the general theory of poetry, its sources were the critical treatises of minturno[ ] and scaliger.[ ] yet without any decided novelty of ideas, or even of expression, it can lay claim to distinct originality in its unity of feeling, its ideal and noble temper, and its adaptation to circumstance. its eloquence and dignity will hardly appear in a mere analysis, which pretends to give only the more important and fundamental of its principles; but such a summary--and this is quite as important--will at least indicate the extent of its indebtedness to italian criticism. in all that relates to the antiquity, universality, and preëminence of poetry, sidney apparently follows minturno. poetry, as the first light-giver to ignorance, flourished before any other art or science. the first philosophers and historians were poets; and such supreme works as the _psalms_ of david and the _dialogues_ of plato are in reality poetical. among the greeks and the romans, the poet was regarded as a sage or prophet; and no nation, however primitive or barbarous, has been without poets, or has failed to receive delight and instruction from poetry.[ ] but before proceeding to defend an art so ancient and universal, it is necessary to define it; and the definition which sidney gives agrees substantially with what might be designated renaissance aristotelianism. "poetry," says sidney,[ ] "is an art of imitation, for so aristotle termeth it in his word [greek: mimêsis], that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth; to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture,[ ] with this end,--to teach and delight."[ ] poetry is, accordingly, an art of imitation, and not merely the art of versifying; for although most poets have seen fit to apparel their poetic inventions in verse, verse is but the raiment and ornament of poetry, and not one of its causes or essentials.[ ] "one may be a poet without versing," says sidney, "and a versifier without poetry."[ ] speech and reason are the distinguishing features between man and brute; and whatever helps to perfect and polish speech deserves high commendation. besides its mnemonic value, verse is the most fitting raiment of poetry because it is most dignified and compact, not colloquial and slipshod. but with all its merits, it is not an essential of poetry, of which the true test is this,--feigning notable images of vices and virtues, and teaching delightfully. in regard to the object, or function, of poetry, sidney is at one with scaliger. the aim of poetry is accomplished by teaching most delightfully a notable morality; or, in a word, by delightful instruction.[ ] not instruction alone, or delight alone, as horace had said, but instruction made delightful; and it is this dual function which serves not only as the end but as the very test of poetry. the object of all arts and sciences is to lift human life to the highest altitudes of perfection; and in this respect they are all servants of the sovereign, or architectonic, science, whose end is well-doing and not well-knowing only.[ ] virtuous action is therefore the end of all learning;[ ] and sidney sets out to prove that the poet, more than any one else, conduces to this end. this is the beginning of the apologetic side of sidney's argument. the ancient controversy--ancient even in plato's days--between poetry and philosophy is once more reopened; and the question is the one so often debated by the italians,--shall the palm be given to the poet, to the philosopher, or to the historian? the gist of sidney's argument is that while the philosopher teaches by precept alone, and the historian by example alone, the poet conduces most to virtue because he employs both precept and example. the philosopher teaches virtue by showing what virtue is and what vice is, by setting down, in thorny argument, and without clarity or beauty of style, the bare rule.[ ] the historian teaches virtue by showing the experience of past ages; but, being tied down to what actually happened, that is, to the particular truth of things and not to general reason, the example he depicts draws no necessary consequence. the poet alone accomplishes this dual task. what the philosopher says should be done is by the poet pictured most perfectly in some one by whom it has been done, thus coupling the general notion with the particular instance. the philosopher, moreover, teaches the learned only; the poet teaches all, and is, in plutarch's phrase, "the right popular philosopher,"[ ] for he seems only to promise delight, and moves men to virtue unawares. but even if the philosopher excel the poet in teaching, he cannot move his readers as the poet can, and this is of higher importance than teaching; for what is the use of teaching virtue if the pupil is not moved to act and accomplish what he is taught?[ ] on the other hand, the historian deals with particular instances, with vices and virtues so commingled that the reader can find no pattern to imitate. the poet makes history reasonable; he gives perfect examples of vices and virtues for human imitation; he makes virtue succeed and vice fail, as history can but seldom do. poetry, therefore, conduces to virtue, the end of all learning, better than any other art or science, and so deserves the palm as the highest and the noblest form of human wisdom.[ ] the basis of sidney's distinction between the poet and the historian is the famous passage in which aristotle explains why poetry is more philosophic and of more serious value than history.[ ] the poet deals, not with the particular, but with the universal,--with what might or should be, not with what is or has been. but sidney, in the assertion of this principle, follows minturno[ ] and scaliger,[ ] and goes farther than aristotle would probably have gone. all arts have the works of nature as their principal object, and follow nature as actors follow the lines of their play. only the poet is not tied to such subjects, but creates another nature better than ever nature itself brought forth. for, going hand in hand with nature, and being enclosed not within her limits, but only by the zodiac of his own imagination, he creates a golden world for nature's brazen; and in this sense he may be compared as a creator with god.[ ] where shall you find in life such a friend as pylades, such a hero as orlando, such an excellent man as Æneas? sidney then proceeds to answer the various objections that have been made against poetry. these objections, partly following gosson and cornelius agrippa,[ ] and partly his own inclinations, he reduces to four.[ ] in the first place, it is objected that a man might spend his time more profitably than by reading the figments of poets. but since teaching virtue is the real aim of all learning, and since poetry has been shown to accomplish this better than all other arts or sciences, this objection is easily answered. in the second place, poetry has been called the mother of lies; but sidney shows that it is less likely to misstate facts than other sciences, for the poet does not publish his figments as facts, and, since he affirms nothing, cannot ever be said to lie.[ ] thirdly, poetry has been called the nurse of abuse, that is to say, poetry misuses and debases the mind of man by turning it to wantonness and by making it unmartial and effeminate. but sidney argues that it is man's wit that abuses poetry, and not poetry that abuses man's wit; and as to making men effeminate, this charge applies to all other sciences more than to poetry, which in its description of battles and praise of valiant men notably stirs courage and enthusiasm. lastly, it is pointed out by the enemies of poetry that plato, one of the greatest of philosophers, banished poets from his ideal commonwealth. but plato's _dialogues_ are in reality themselves a form of poetry; and it argues ingratitude in the most poetical of philosophers, that he should defile the fountain which was his source.[ ] yet though sidney perceives how fundamental are plato's objections to poetry, he is inclined to believe that it was rather against the abuse of poetry by the contemporary greek poets that plato was chiefly cavilling; for poets are praised in the _ion_, and the greatest men of every age have been patrons and lovers of poetry. in the dozen years or so which elapsed between the composition and the publication of the _defence of poesy_, during which time it seems to have circulated in manuscript, a number of critical works appeared, and the indebtedness of several of them to sidney's book is considerable. this is especially so of the _apologie of poetrie_ which sir john harington prefixed to his translation of the _orlando furioso_ in . this brief treatise includes an apology for poetry in general, for the _orlando furioso_ in particular, and also for his own translation. the first section, which alone concerns us here, is almost entirely based on the _defence of poesy_. the distinguishing features of poetry are imitation, or fiction, and verse.[ ] harington disclaims all intention of discussing whether writers of fiction and dialogue in prose, such as plato and xenophon, are poets or not, or whether lucan, though writing in verse, is to be regarded as an historiographer rather than as a poet;[ ] so that his argument is confined to the element of imitation, or fiction. he treats poetry rather as a propædeutic to theology and moral philosophy than as one of the fine arts. all human learning may be regarded by the orthodox christian as vain and superfluous; but poetry is one of the most effective aids to the higher learning of god's divinity, and poets themselves are really popular philosophers and popular divines. harington then takes up, one by one, the four specific charges of cornelius agrippa, that poetry is a nurse of lies, a pleaser of fools, a breeder of dangerous errors, and an enticer to wantonness; and answers them after the manner of sidney. he differs from sidney, however, in laying particular stress on the allegorical interpretation of imaginative literature. this element is minimized in the _defence of poesy_; but harington accepts, and discusses in detail, the mediæval conception of the three meanings of poetry, the literal, the moral, and the allegorical.[ ] the death-knell of this mode of interpreting literature was sounded by bacon, who, while not asserting that all the fables of poets are but meaningless fictions, declared without hesitation that the fable had been more often written first and the exposition devised afterward, than the moral first conceived and the fable merely framed to give expression to it.[ ] this passage occurs in the second book of the _advancement of learning_ ( ), where bacon has briefly stated his theory of poetry. his point of view does not differ essentially from that of sidney, though the expression is more compact and logical. the human understanding, according to bacon, includes the three faculties of memory, imagination, and reason, and each of these faculties finds typical expression in one of the three great branches of learning, memory in history, reason in philosophy, and imagination in poetry.[ ] the imagination, not being tied to the laws of matter, may join what nature has severed and sever what nature has joined; and poetry, therefore, while restrained in the measure of words, is in all things else extremely licensed. it may be defined as feigned history, and in so far as its form is concerned, may be either in prose or in verse. its source is to be found in the dissatisfaction of the human mind with the actual world; and its purpose is to satisfy man's natural longing for more perfect greatness, goodness, and variety than can be found in the nature of things. poetry therefore invents actions and incidents greater and more heroic than those of nature, and hence conduces to magnanimity; it invents actions more agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, more just in retribution, more in accordance with revealed providence, and hence conduces to morality; it invents actions more varied and unexpected, and hence conduces to delectation. "and therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things."[ ] for the expression of affections, passions, corruptions, and customs, the world is more indebted to poets than to the works of philosophers, and for wit and eloquence no less than to orators and their orations. it is for these reasons that in rude times, when all other learning was excluded, poetry alone found access and admiration. this is pure idealism of a romantic type; but in his remarks on allegory bacon was foreshadowing the development of classicism, for from the time of ben jonson the allegorical mode of interpreting poetry ceased to have any effect on literary criticism. the reason for this is obvious. the allegorical critics regarded the plot, or fable,--to use a simile so often found in renaissance criticism--as a mere sweet and pleasant covering for the wholesome but bitter pill of moral doctrine. the neo-classicists, limiting the sense and application of aristotle's definition of poetry as an imitation of life, regarded the fable as the medium of this imitation, and the more perfect according as it became more truly and more minutely an image of human life. in criticism, therefore, the growth of classicism is more or less coextensive with the growth of the conception of the fable, or plot, as an end in itself. this vaguely defines the change which comes over the spirit of criticism about the beginning of the seventeenth century, and which is exemplified in the writings of ben jonson. his definition of poetry does not differ substantially from that of sidney, but seems more directly aristotelian:-- "a poet, _poeta_, is ... a maker, or feigner; his art, an art of imitation or feigning; expressing the life of men in fit measure, numbers, and harmony; according to aristotle from the word [greek: poiein], which signifies to make or feign. hence he is called a poet, not he which writeth in measure only, but that feigneth and formeth a fable, and writes things like the truth; for the fable and fiction is, as it were, the form and soul of any poetical work or poem."[ ] poetry and painting agree in that both are arts of imitation, both accommodate all they invent to the use and service of nature, and both have as their common object profit and pleasure; but poetry is a higher form of art than painting, since it appeals to the understanding, while painting appeals primarily to the senses.[ ] jonson's conception of his art is thus essentially noble; of all arts it ranks highest in dignity and ethical importance. it contains all that is best in philosophy, divinity, and the science of politics, and leads and persuades men to virtue with a ravishing delight, while the others but threaten and compel.[ ] it therefore offers to mankind a certain rule and pattern of living well and happily in human society. this conception of poetry jonson finds in aristotle;[ ] but it is to the italians of the renaissance, and not to the stagyrite, that these doctrines really belong. jonson ascribes to the poet himself a dignity no less than that of his craft. mere excellence in style or versification does not make a poet, but rather the exact knowledge of vices and virtues, with ability to make the latter loved and the former hated;[ ] and this is so far true, that to be a good poet it is necessary, first of all, to be a really good man.[ ] a similar doctrine has already been found in many critical writers of the sixteenth century; but perhaps the noblest expression of this conception of the poet's consecrated character and office occurs in the original quarto edition of jonson's _every man in his humour_, in which the "reverend name" of poet is thus exalted:-- "i can refell opinion, and approve the state of poesy, such as it is, blessed, eternal, and most true divine: indeed, if you will look on poesy, as she appears in many, poor and lame, patched up in remnants and old worn-out rags, half-starved for want of her peculiar food, sacred invention; then i must confirm both your conceit and censure of her merit: but view her in her glorious ornaments, attired in the majesty of art, set high in spirit with the precious taste of sweet philosophy; and, which is most, crowned with the rich traditions of a soul, that hates to have her dignity prophaned with any relish of an earthly thought, oh then how proud a presence doth she bear! then is she like herself, fit to be seen of none but grave and consecrated eyes."[ ] milton also gives expression to this consecrated conception of the poet. poetry is a gift granted by god only to a few in every nation;[ ] but he who would partake of the gift of eloquence must first of all be virtuous.[ ] it is impossible for any one to write well of laudable things without being himself a true poem, without having in himself the experience and practice of all that is praiseworthy.[ ] poets are the champions of liberty and the "strenuous enemies of despotism";[ ] and they have power to imbreed and cherish in a people the seeds of virtue and public civility, to set the affections in right tune, and to allay the perturbations of the mind.[ ] poetry, which at its best is "simple, sensuous, and passionate," describes everything that passes through the brain of man,--all that is holy and sublime in religion, all that in virtue is amiable and grave. thus by means of delight and the force of example, those who would otherwise flee from virtue are taught to love her. foot-notes: [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] _ibid._ ii. . [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] _hist. litt. de la france_, xxix. - . [ ] puttenham, p. _sq._ [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] gosson, p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] _ibid._ pp. , . [ ] lodge, _defence_ (_shakespeare soc. publ._), p. . [ ] arber, _transcript of the stat. reg._, iii. . [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] sidney's acquaintance with minturno is proved beyond doubt, even were such proof necessary, by the list of poets (_defence_, pp. , ) which he has copied from minturno's _de poeta_, pp. , . [ ] scaliger's _poetics_ is specifically mentioned and cited by sidney four or five times; but these citations are far from exhausting his indebtedness to scaliger. [ ] _defence_, p. _sq._; _cf._ minturno, _de poeta_, pp. , . [ ] _defence_, p. . [ ] this ancient phrase had become, as has been seen, a commonplace during the renaissance. _cf._, _e.g._, dolce, _osservationi_, , p. ; vauquelin, _art poét._ i. ; camoens, _lusiad._ vii. . [ ] sidney's classification of poets, _defence_, p. , is borrowed from scaliger, _poet._ i. . [ ] _defence_, p. . _cf._ castelvetro, _poetica_, pp. , . [ ] _defence_, p. . _cf._ ronsard, _oeuvres_, iii. , vii. ; and shelley, _defence of poetry_, p. : "the distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error." [ ] _defence_, pp. , . _cf._ scaliger, _poet._ i. , and vii. i. : "poetæ finem esse, docere cum delectatione." [ ] aristotle, _ethics_, i. ; cicero, _de offic._ i. . [ ] this was the usual attitude of the humanists; _cf._ woodward, p. _sq._ [ ] _cf._ daniello, p. ; minturno, _de poeta_, p. . [ ] _defence_, p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. . _cf._ minturno, _de poeta_, p. ; varchi, _lezzioni_, p. . [ ] that is, the highest form of _human_ wisdom, for sidney, as a christian philosopher, naturally leaves revealed religion out of the discussion. [ ] _poet._ ix. - . [ ] _de poeta_, p. _sq._ [ ] _poet._ i. . [ ] _defence_, pp. , . [ ] _de van. et incert. scient._ cap. v. [ ] _defence_, p. _sq._ [ ] _cf._ boccaccio, _gen. degli dei_, p. _sq._; and haslewood, ii. . [ ] _defence_, pp. , ; _cf._ daniello, p. . [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] _ibid._ ii. . [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] bacon, _works_, vi. - . [ ] _cf._ _anglia_, , xxi. . [ ] _works_, vi. . [ ] _discoveries_, p. . jonson's distinction between poet (_poeta_), poem (_poema_), and poesy (_poesis_), was derived from scaliger or maggi. [ ] _discoveries_, p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] _works_, i. . [ ] _works_, i. , _n._ [ ] milton, _prose works_, ii. . [ ] _ibid._ iii. . [ ] _ibid._ iii. . [ ] _prose works_, i. . [ ] _ibid._ ii. . chapter iii the theory of dramatic and heroic poetry dramatic criticism in england began with sir philip sidney. casual references to the drama can be found in critical writings anterior to the _defence of poesy_; but to sidney belongs the credit of having first formulated, in a more or less systematic manner, the general principles of dramatic art. these principles, it need hardly be said, are those which, for half a century or more, had been undergoing discussion and modification in italy and france, and of which the ultimate source was the _poetics_ of aristotle. dramatic criticism in england was thus, from its very birth, both aristotelian and classical, and it remained so for two centuries. the beginnings of the elizabethan drama were almost contemporary with the composition of the _defence of poesy_, and the decay of the drama with jonson's _discoveries_. yet throughout this period the romantic drama never received literary exposition. the great spanish drama had its critical champions and defenders, the elizabethan drama had none. it was, perhaps, found to be a simpler task to echo the doctrines of others, than to formulate the principles of a novel dramatic form. but the true explanation has already been suggested. the sources of the dramatic criticism were the writings of the italian critics, and these were entirely classical. in creative literature, however, the italian renaissance influenced the elizabethans almost entirely on the romantic side. this, perhaps, suffices to explain the lack of fundamental coördination between dramatic theory and dramatic practice during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. ascham, writing twenty years before sidney, indicated "aristotle's precepts and euripides' example" as the criteria of dramatic art;[ ] and in spirit these remained the final tests throughout the elizabethan age. i. _tragedy_ in webbe's _discourse of english poetrie_ we find those general distinctions between tragedy and comedy which had been common throughout the middle ages from the days of the post-classic grammarians. tragedies express sorrowful and lamentable histories, dealing with gods and goddesses, kings and queens, and men of high estate, and representing miserable calamities, which become worse and worse until they end in the most woful plight that can be devised. comedies, on the other hand, begin doubtfully, become troubled for a while, but always, by some lucky chance, end with the joy and appeasement of all concerned.[ ] this distinction is said to be derived from imitation of the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_; and in this, as well in his fanciful account of the origins of the drama, webbe seems to have had a vague recollection of aristotle. puttenham's account of dramatic development is scarcely more aristotelian;[ ] yet in its general conclusions it agrees with those in the _poetics_. his conception of tragedy and comedy is similar to webbe's. comedy expresses the common behavior and manner of life of private persons, and such as are of the meaner sort of men.[ ] tragedy deals with the doleful falls of unfortunate and afflicted princes, for the purpose of reminding men of the mutability of fortune, and of god's just punishment of a vicious life.[ ] the senecan drama and the aristotelian precepts were the sources of sidney's theory of tragedy. the oratorical and sententious tragedies of seneca had influenced dramatic theory and practice throughout europe from the very outset of the renaissance. ascham, indeed, preferred sophocles and euripides to seneca, and cited pigna, the rival of giraldi cintio, in confirmation of his opinion;[ ] but this, while an indication of ascham's own good taste, is an exceptional verdict, and in direct opposition to the usual opinion of contemporary critics. sidney, in his account of the english drama, could find but one tragedy modelled as it should be on the senecan drama.[ ] the tragedy of _gorboduc_, however, has one defect that provokes sidney's censure,--it does not observe the unities of time and place. in all other respects, it is an ideal model for english playwrights to imitate. its stately speeches and well-sounding phrases approach almost to the height of seneca's style; and in teaching most delightfully a notable morality, it attains the very end of poetry. the ideal tragedy--and in this sidney closely follows the italians--is an imitation of a noble action, in the representation of which it stirs "admiration and commiseration,"[ ] and teaches the uncertainty of the world and the weak foundations upon which golden roofs are built. it makes kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humors. sidney's censure of the contemporary drama is that it outrages the grave and weighty character of tragedy, its elevated style, and the dignity of the personages represented, by mingling kings and clowns, and introducing the most inappropriate buffoonery. there are, indeed, one or two examples of tragi-comedy in ancient literature, such as plautus's _amphitryon_;[ ] but never do the ancients, like the english, match hornpipes and funerals.[ ] the english dramas are neither true comedies nor true tragedies, and disregard both the rules of poetry and honest civility. tragedy is not tied to the laws of history, and may arrange and modify events as it pleases; but it is certainly bound by the rules of poetry. it is evident, therefore, that the _defence of poesy_, as a french writer has observed, "gives us an almost complete theory of neo-classic tragedy, a hundred years before the _art poétique_ of boileau: the severe separation of poetic forms, the sustained dignity of language, the unities, the _tirade_, the _récit_, nothing is lacking."[ ] ben jonson pays more attention to the theory of comedy than to that of tragedy; but his conception of the latter does not differ from sidney's. the parts, or divisions, of comedy and tragedy are the same, and both have on the whole a common end, to teach and delight; so that comic as well as tragic poets were called by the greeks [greek: didaskaloi].[ ] the external conditions of the drama require that it should have the equal division into acts and scenes, the true number of actors, the chorus, and the unities.[ ] but jonson does not insist on the strict observance of these formal requirements, for the history of the drama shows that each successive poet of importance has gradually and materially altered the dramatic structure, and there is no reason why the modern poet may not do likewise. moreover, while these requirements may have been regularly observed in the ancient state and splendor of dramatic poetry, it is impossible to retain them now and preserve any measure of popular delight. the outward forms of the ancients, therefore, may in part be disregarded; but there are certain essentials which must be observed by the tragic poet in whatsoever age he may flourish. these are, "truth of argument, dignity of persons, gravity and height of elocution, fulness and frequency of sentence."[ ] in other words, jonson's model is the oratorical and sententious tragedy of seneca, with its historical plots and its persons of high estate. in the address, "of that sort of dramatic poem which is called tragedy," prefixed to _samson agonistes_, milton has minutely adhered to the italian theory of tragedy. after referring to the ancient dignity and moral effect of tragedy,[ ] milton acknowledges that, in the modelling of his poem, he has followed the ancients and the italians as of greatest authority in such matters. he has avoided the introduction of trivial and vulgar persons and the intermingling of comic and tragic elements; he has used the chorus, and has observed the laws of verisimilitude and decorum. his explanation of the peculiar effect of tragedy--the purgation of pity and fear--has already been referred to in the first section of this essay.[ ] ii. _comedy_ the elizabethan theory of comedy was based on the body of rules and observations which the italian critics, aided by a few hints from aristotle, had deduced from the practice of plautus and terence. it will, therefore, be unnecessary to dwell at any great length on the doctrines of sidney and ben jonson, who are the main comic theorists of this period. sidney defines comedy as "an imitation of the common errors of our life," which are represented in the most ridiculous and scornful manner, so that the spectator is anxious to avoid such errors himself. comedy, therefore, shows the "filthiness of evil," but only in "our private and domestical matters."[ ] it should aim at being wholly delightful, just as tragedy should be maintained by a well-raised admiration. delight is thus the first requirement of comedy; but the english comic writers err in thinking that delight cannot be obtained without laughter, whereas laughter is neither an essential cause nor an essential effect of delight. sidney then distinguishes delight from laughter almost exactly after the manner of trissino.[ ] the great fault of english comedy is that it stirs laughter concerning things that are sinful, _i.e._ execrable rather than merely ridiculous--forbidden plainly, according to sidney, by aristotle himself--and concerning things that are miserable, and rather to be pitied than scorned. comedy should not only produce delightful laughter, but mixed with it that delightful teaching which is the end of all poetry. ben jonson, like sidney, makes human follies or errors the themes of comedy, which should be "an image of the times, and sport with human follies, not with crimes, except we make them such, by loving still our popular errors, when we know they're ill; i mean such errors as you'll all confess by laughing at them, they deserve no less."[ ] in depicting these human follies, it is the office of the comic poet to imitate justice, to improve the moral life and purify language, and to stir up gentle affections.[ ] the moving of mere laughter is not always the end of comedy; in fact, jonson interprets aristotle as asserting that the moving of laughter is a fault in comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves a part of man's nature.[ ] this conclusion is based on an interpretation of aristotle which has persisted almost to the present day. in the _poetics_, [greek: to geloion], the ludicrous, is said to be the subject of comedy;[ ] and many critics have thought that aristotle intended by this to distinguish between the risible and the ridiculous, between mere laughter and laughter mixed with contempt or disapprobation.[ ] the nature and the source of one of the most important elements in jonson's theory of comedy, his doctrine of "humours," have been briefly discussed in the first section of this essay. it will suffice here to define a "humour" as an absorbing singularity of character,[ ] and to note that it grew out of the conception of _decorum_ which played so important a part in poetic theory during the italian renaissance. iii. _the dramatic unities_ before leaving the theory of the drama, there is one further point to be discussed,--the doctrine of the unities. it has been seen that the unities of time and place were, in italy, first formulated together by castelvetro in , and in france by jean de la taille in . the first mention of the unities in england is to be found, a dozen years later, in the _defence of poesy_, and it cannot be doubted that sidney derived them directly from castelvetro. sidney, in discussing the tragedy of _gorboduc_, finds it "faulty in time and place, the two necessary companions of all corporal actions; for where the stage should always represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by aristotle's precept and common reason, but one day, there [_i.e._ in _gorboduc_] is both many days and many places inartificially imagined."[ ] he also objects to the confusions of the english stage, where on one side africa and on the other asia may be represented, and where in an hour a youth may grow from boyhood to old age.[ ] how absurd this is, common sense, art, and ancient examples ought to teach the english playwright; and at this day, says sidney, the ordinary players in italy will not err in it. if indeed it be objected that one or two of the comedies of plautus and terence do not observe the unity of time, let us not follow them when they err but when they are right; it is no excuse for us to do wrong because plautus on one occasion has done likewise. the law of the unities does not receive such rigid application in england as is given by sidney until the introduction of the french influence nearly three quarters of a century later. ben jonson is considerably less stringent in this respect than sidney. he lays particular stress on the unity of action, and in the _discoveries_ explains at length the aristotelian conception of the unity and magnitude of the fable. "the fable is called the imitation of one entire and perfect action, whose parts are so joined and knit together, as nothing in the structure can be changed, or taken away, without impairing or troubling the whole, of which there is a proportionable magnitude in the members."[ ] simplicity, then, should be one of the chief characteristics of the action, and nothing receives so much of jonson's censure as "monstrous and forced action."[ ] as to the unity of time, jonson says that the action should be allowed to grow until necessity demands a conclusion; the argument, however, should not exceed the compass of one day, but should be large enough to allow place for digressions and episodes, which are to the fable what furniture is to a house.[ ] jonson does not formally require the observance of the unity of place, and even acknowledges having disregarded it in his own plays; but he does not favor much change of scene on the stage. in the prologue of _volpone_, he boasts that he has followed all the laws of refined comedy, "as best critics have designed; the laws of time, place, persons he observeth, from no needful rule he swerveth." milton observes the unity of time in the _samson agonistes_: "the circumscription of time, wherein the whole drama begins and ends is, according to ancient rule and best example, within the space of twenty-four hours." with the introduction of the french influence, the unities became fixed requirements of the english drama, and remained so for over a century. sir robert howard, in the preface of his tragedy, _the duke of lerma_, impugned their force and authority; but dryden, in answering him, pointed out that to attack the unities is really to contend against aristotle, horace, ben jonson, and corneille.[ ] farquhar, however, in his _discourse upon comedy_ ( ), argued with force and wit against the unities of time and place, and scoffed at all the legislators of parnassus, ancient and modern,--aristotle, horace, scaliger, vossius, heinsius, d'aubignac, and rapin. iv. _epic poetry_ the elizabethan theory of heroic poetry may be dismissed briefly. webbe refers to the epic as "that princely part of poetry, wherein are displayed the noble acts and valiant exploits of puissant captains, expert soldiers, wise men, with the famous reports of ancient times;"[ ] and puttenham defines heroic poems as "long histories of the noble gests of kings and great princes, intermeddling the dealings of gods, demi-gods, and heroes, and weighty consequences of peace and war."[ ] the importance of this form of poetry, according to puttenham, is largely historical, in that it sets forth an example of the valor and virtue of our forefathers.[ ] sidney is scarcely more explicit.[ ] he asserts that heroic poetry is the best and noblest of all forms; he shows that such characters as achilles, Æneas, and rinaldo are shining examples for all men's imitation; but of the nature or structure of the epic he says nothing. the second part of harington's _apologie of poetrie_ is given up to a defence of the _orlando furioso_, and here the aristotelian theory of the epic appears for the first time in english criticism. harington, taking the _Æneid_ as the approved model of all heroic poetry, first shows that ariosto has followed closely in virgil's footsteps, but is to be preferred even to virgil in that the latter pays reverence to false deities, while ariosto has the advantage of the christian spirit. but since some critics, "reducing all heroical poems unto the method of homer and certain precepts of aristotle," insist that ariosto is wanting in art, harington sets out to prove that the _orlando furioso_ may not only be defended by the example of homer, but that it has even followed very strictly the rules and precepts of aristotle.[ ] in the first place, aristotle says that the epic should be based on some historical action, only a short part of which, in point of time, should be treated by the poet; so ariosto takes the story of charlemagne, and does not exceed a year or so in the compass of the argument.[ ] secondly, aristotle holds that nothing that is utterly incredible should be invented by the poet; and nothing in the _orlando_ exceeds the possibility of belief. thirdly, epics, as well as tragedies, should be full of [greek: peripeteia], which harington interprets to mean "an agnition of some unlooked for fortune either good or bad, and a sudden change thereof"; and of this, as well as of apt similitudes and passions well expressed, the _orlando_ is really full. in conclusion, it may be observed that epic poetry did not receive adequate critical treatment in england until after the introduction of the french influence. the rules and theories of the italian renaissance, restated in the writings of le bossu, mambrun, rapin, and vossius, were thus brought into english criticism, and found perhaps their best expression in addison's essays on _paradise lost_. such epics as davenant's _gondibert_, chamberlayne's _pharonnida_, dryden's _annus mirabilis_, and blackmore's _prince arthur_, like the french epics of the same period, doubtless owed their inspiration to the desire to put into practice the classical rules of heroic poetry.[ ] foot-notes: [ ] _scholemaster_, p. . [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] puttenham, p. _sq._ [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] ascham, _works_, ii. . [ ] _defence_, p. _sq._ [ ] _defence_, p. . this is the elizabethan equivalent for aristotle's _katharsis_ of "pity and terror." [ ] _cf._ scaliger, _poet._ i. . [ ] _defence_, p. . [ ] breitinger, p. . [ ] _discoveries_, p. . [ ] _works_, i. . [ ] _works_, i. . [ ] _cf._ bacon, _de augm. scient._ iii. ; and ascham, _scholemaster_, p. . [ ] he seems also to allude to the theory of _katharsis_ in the _reason of church government_; _prose works_, ii. . [ ] _defence_, p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. _sq._ _cf._ trissino, _opere_, ii. _sq._; and cicero, _de orat._ ii. _sq._ [ ] _works_, i. . [ ] _ibid._ i. . [ ] _discoveries_, p. . [ ] _poet._ v. . [ ] _cf._ twining, i. _sq._, and kames, _elements of criticism_, vol. i. chap. . [ ] _cf._ jonson, _works_, i. and . [ ] _defence_, p. ; _cf._ castelvetro, _poetica_, pp. , . [ ] _cf._ whetstone, _promos and cassandra_ ( ), cited in ward, _dram. lit._ i. ; also, jonson, _works_, i. , ; cervantes, _don quix._ i. ; boileau, _art poét._ iii. . in the theory of the drama, sidney's point of view coincides very closely with that of cervantes. [ ] _discoveries_, p. . [ ] _works_, i. . [ ] _discoveries_, p. . [ ] _essay of dram. poesy_, p. . [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] puttenham, p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. . [ ] _defence_, p. . [ ] haslewood, ii. _sq._ [ ] _cf._ minturno, _arte poetica_, p. ; and ronsard, _oeuvres_, iii. . [ ] _cf._ dryden, _discourse on satire_, in _works_, xiii. . chapter iv classical elements in elizabethan criticism i. _introductory: romantic elements_ it were no less than supererogation to adduce evidences of the romantic spirit of the age of shakespeare. no period in english literature is more distinctly romantic; and although in england criticism is less affected by creative literature, and has had less effect upon it, than in france, it is only natural to suppose that elizabethan criticism should be as distinctly romantic as the works of imagination of which it is presumably an exposition. as early as wilson's _rhetoric_ we find evidences of that independence of spirit in questions of art which seems typical of the elizabethan age; and none of the writers of this period exhibits anything like the predisposition of the french mind to submit instinctively to any rule, or set of rules, which bears the stamp of authority. from the outset the element of nationality colors english criticism, and this is especially noticeable in the linguistic discussions of the age. at the very time when sidney was writing the _defence of poesy_, spenser's old teacher, mulcaster, wrote: "i love rome, but london better; i favor italy, but england more; i honor the latin, but i worship the english."[ ] it is this spirit which pervades what may be called the chief expression of the romantic temper in elizabethan criticism,--daniel's _defence of rhyme_ ( ), written in answer to campion's attack on rhyme in the _observations in the art of english poesy_. the central argument of daniel's defence is that the use of rhyme is sanctioned both by custom and by nature--"custom that is before all law, nature that is above all art."[ ] he rebels against that conception which would limit "within a little plot of grecian ground the sole of mortal things that can avail;" and he shows that each age has its own perfections and its own usages. this attempt at historical criticism leads him into a defence of the middle ages; and he does not hesitate to assert that even classical verse had its imperfections and deficiencies. in the minutiæ of metrical criticism, also, he is in opposition to the neo-classic tendencies of the next age; and his favorable opinion of _enjambement_ and his unfavorable comments on the heroic couplet[ ] drew from ben jonson an answer, never published, in which the latter attempted to prove that the couplet is the best form of english verse, and that all other forms are forced and detestable.[ ] ii. _classical metres_ daniel's _defence of rhyme_ may be said to have dealt a death-blow to a movement which for over half a century had been a subject of controversy among english men of letters. in reading the critical works of this period, it is impossible not to notice the remarkable amount of attention paid by the elizabethans to the question of classical metres in the vernacular. the first organized attempt to introduce the classical versification into a modern language was, as daniel himself points out,[ ] that of claudio tolomei in . the movement then passed into france; and classical metres were adopted by baïf in practice, and defended by jacques de la taille in theory. in england the first recorded attempt at the use of quantity in the vernacular was that of thomas watson, from whose unpublished translation of the _odyssey_ in the metre of the original ascham has cited a single distich:-- "all travellers do gladly report great prayse of ulysses, for that he knew many mens maners, and saw many cities."[ ] this was probably written between and ; toward the close of the preceding century, we are told, a certain mousset had already translated the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_ into french hexameters. ascham was the first critical champion of the use of quantity in english verse.[ ] rhyme, he says, was introduced by the goths and huns at a time when poetry and learning had ceased to exist in europe; and englishmen must choose either to imitate these barbarians or to follow the perfect grecians. he acknowledges that the monosyllabic character of the english language renders the use of the dactyl very difficult, for the hexameter "doth rather trot and hobble than run smoothly in our english tongue;" but he argues that english will receive the _carmen iambicum_ as naturally as greek or latin. he praises surrey's blank verse rendering of the fourth book of the _Æneid_, but regrets that, in disregarding quantity, it falls short of the "perfect and true versifying." an attempt to put ascham's theories into practice was made by thomas blenerhasset in ; but the verse of his _complaynt of cadwallader_, though purporting to be "a new kind of poetry," is merely an unrhymed alexandrine.[ ] in , however, five letters which had passed between spenser and gabriel harvey appeared in print as _three proper, and wittie, familiar letters_ and _two other very commendable letters_; and from this correspondence we learn that an organized movement to introduce classical metres into english had been started. it would seem that for several years harvey had been advocating the use of quantitative verse to several of his friends; but the organized movement to which reference has just been made seems to have been started independently by thomas drant, who died in . drant had devised a set of rules and precepts for english classical verse; and these rules, with certain additions and modifications, were adopted by a coterie of scholars and courtiers, among them being sidney, dyer, greville, and spenser, who thereupon formed a society, the areopagus,[ ] independent of harvey, but corresponding with him regularly. this society appears to have been modelled on baïf's académie de poésie et de musique, which had been founded in for a similar purpose, and which sidney doubtless became acquainted with when at paris in . from the correspondence published in , it becomes evident that harvey's and drant's systems of versification were almost antipodal. according to drant's system, the quantity of english words was to be regulated entirely by the laws of latin prosody,--by position, diphthong, and the like. thus, for example, the penult of the word _carpenter_ was regarded as long by drant because followed by two consonants. harvey, who was unacquainted with drant's rules before apprised of them by spenser in the published letters, follows a more normal and logical system. to him, accent alone is the best of quantity, and the law of position cannot make the penult of _carpenter_ or _majesty_ long. "the latin is no rule for us," says harvey;[ ] and often where position and diphthong fall together, as in the penult of _merchaundise_, we must pronounce the syllable short. in all such matters, the use, custom, propriety, or majesty of our speech must be accounted the only infallible and sovereign rule of rules. it was not, then, harvey's purpose to latinize our tongue. his intention was apparently twofold,--to abolish rhyme, and to introduce new metres into english poetry. only a few years before, gascoigne had lamented that english verse had only one form of metre, the iambic.[ ] harvey, in observing merely the english accent, can scarcely be said to have introduced quantity into our verse, but was simply adapting new metres, such as dactyls, trochees, and spondees, to the requirements of english poetry. drant's and harvey's rules therefore constitute two opposing systems. according to the former, english verse is to be regulated by latin prosody regardless of accent; according to the latter, by accent regardless of latin prosody. by neither system can quantity be successfully attempted in english; and a distinguished classical scholar of our own day has indicated what is perhaps the only method by which this can be accomplished.[ ] this method may be described as the harmonious observance of both accent and position; all accented syllables being generally accounted long, and no syllable which violates the latin law of position being used when a short syllable is required by the scansion. these three systems, with more or less variation, have been employed throughout english literature. drant's system is followed in the quantitative verse of sidney and spenser; harvey's method is that employed by longfellow in _evangeline_; and tennyson's beautiful classical experiments are practical illustrations of the method of professor robinson ellis. in , richard stanyhurst published at leyden a translation of the first four books of the _Æneid_ into english hexameters. from ascham he seems to have derived his inspiration, and from harvey his metrical system. like harvey he refuses to be bound by the laws of latin prosody,[ ] and follows the english accent as much as possible. but in one respect his translation is unique. harvey, in his correspondence with spenser, had suggested that the use of quantitative verse in english necessitated the adoption of a certain uniformity in spelling; and the curious orthography of stanyhurst was apparently intended as a serious attempt at phonetic reform. spelling reform had been agitated in france for some time; and in baïf's _etrennes de poésie françoise_ ( ), we find french quantitative verse written according to the phonetic system of ramus. webbe's _discourse of english poetrie_ is really a plea in favor of quantitative verse. his system is based primarily on latin prosody, but reconciled with english usage. the latin rules are to be followed when the english and latin words agree; but no word is to be used that notoriously impugns the laws of latin prosody, and the spelling of english words should, when possible, be altered to conform to the ancient rules. the difficulty of observing the law of position in the middle of english words may be obviated by change in spelling, as in the word _mournfully_, which should be spelled _mournfuly_; but where this is impossible, the law of position is to be observed, despite the english accent, as in _royalty_. unlike ascham, webbe regards the hexameter as the easiest of all classical metres to use in english.[ ] puttenham is not averse to the use of classical metres, but as a conservative he considers all sudden innovations dangerous.[ ] the system he adopts is not unlike harvey's. sidney's original enthusiasm for quantitative verse soon abated; and in the _defence of poesy_ he points out that although the ancient versification is better suited to musical accompaniment than the modern, both systems cause delight, and are therefore equally effective and valuable; and english is more fitted than any other language to use both.[ ] campion, like ascham, regards english polysyllables as too heavy to be used as dactyls; so that only trochaic and iambic verse can be suitably employed in english poetry.[ ] he suggests eight new forms of verse. the english accent is to be diligently observed, and is to yield to nothing save the law of position; hence the second syllable of _trumpington_ is to be accounted long.[ ] in observing the law of position, however, the sound, and not the spelling, is to be the test of quantity; thus, _love-sick_ is pronounced _love-sik_, _dangerous_ is pronounced _dangerus_, and the like.[ ] iii. _other evidences of classicism_ with campion's _observations_ ( ) the history of classical metres in england may be said to close, until the resuscitation of quantitative verse in the present century. daniel's _defence of rhyme_ effectually put an end to this innovation; but the strong hold which the movement seems to have had during the elizabethan age is interesting evidence of the classical tendencies of the period. ben jonson has usually been regarded as the forerunner of neo-classicism in england; but long before his influence was felt, classical tendencies may be observed in english criticism. thus ascham's conservatism and aversion to singularity in matters of art are distinctly classical. "he that can neither like aristotle in logic and philosophy, nor tully in rhetoric and eloquence," says ascham, "will from these steps likely enough presume by like pride to mount higher to the misliking of graver matters; that is, either in religion to have a dissentious head, or in the commonwealth to have a factious heart."[ ] his insistence that it is no slavery to be bound by the laws of art, and the stress he lays on perfection of style, are no less classical.[ ] similar tendencies may be observed in the writers that follow ascham. harvey's strictures on the _faerie queene_ were inspired by two influences. as a humanist, he looked back with contempt on mediæval literature in general, its superstitions, its fairy lore, and the like. as a classicist in art, he preferred the regular, or classic, form of the epic to the romantic, or irregular form; and his strictures may be compared in this respect with those of bembo on the _orlando_ or those of salviati on the _gerusalemme_. so harington attempts to make the _orlando_ chime with the laws of aristotle, and sidney attempts to force these laws on the english drama. so also sidney declares that genius, without "art, imitation, and exercise," is as nothing, and censures his contemporaries for neglecting "artificial rules and imitative patterns."[ ] so webbe attempts to find a fixed standard or criterion by which to judge good and bad poets, and translates fabricius's summary of the rules of horace as a guide for english poetry.[ ] english criticism, therefore, may be said to exhibit classical tendencies from its very beginning. but it is none the less true that before ben jonson there was no systematic attempt to force, as it were, the classic ideal on english literature. in spain, as has been seen, juan de la cueva declared that poetry should be classical and imitative, while the drama should be romantic and original. sidney, on the contrary, sought to make the drama classical, while allowing freedom of imagination and originality of form to the non-dramatic poet. ben jonson was the first complete and consistent english classicist; and his classicism differs from that of the succeeding age rather in degree than in kind. bacon's assertion that poetry is restrained in the measure of words, but in all other points extremely licensed,[ ] is characteristic of the elizabethan point of view. the early critics allowed extreme license in the choice and treatment of material, while insisting on strict regularity of expression. thus sidney may advocate the use of classical metres, but this does not prevent him from celebrating the freedom of genius and the soaring heights of the imagination. there is nothing of these things in ben jonson. he, too, celebrates the nobility and power of poetry, and the dignity of the poet's office; but nowhere does he speak of the freedom of the imagination or the force of genius. literature for him was not an expression of personality, not a creation of the imagination, but an image of life, a picture of the world. in other words, he effected what may be called an objectification of the literary ideal. in the second place, this image of life can be created only by conscious effort on the part of the artist. for the creation of great poetry, genius, exercise, imitation, and study are all necessary, but to these art must be added to make them perfect, for only art can lead to perfection.[ ] it is this insistence on art as a distinct element, almost as an end in itself, that distinguishes jonson from his predecessors; and nowhere is his ideal of art expressed as pithily as in the address to the reader prefixed to the _alchemist_ ( ):-- "in poetry, especially in plays, ... the concupiscence of dances and of antics so reigneth, as to run away from nature, and be afraid of her, is the only point of art that tickles the spectators. but how out of purpose, and place, do i name art? when the professors are grown so obstinate contemners of it, and presumers on their own naturals, as they are deriders of all diligence that way, and, by simple mocking at the terms, when they understand not the things, think to get off wittily with their ignorance. nay, they are esteemed the more learned, and sufficient for this, by the many, through their excellent vice of judgment. for they commend writers as they do fencers or wrestlers; who, if they come in robustiously, and put for it with a great deal of violence, are received for the braver fellows; when many times their own rudeness is the cause of their disgrace, and a little touch of their adversary gives all that boisterous force the foil. i deny not but that these men, who always seek to do more than enough, may some time happen on some thing that is good and great; but very seldom; and when it comes it doth not recompense the rest of their ill.... but i give thee warning, that there is a great difference between those that, to gain the opinion of copy [_i.e._ copiousness], utter all they can, however unfitly; and those that use election and a mean[ ] [_i.e._ selection and moderation]. for it is only the disease of the unskilful to think rude things greater than polished; or scattered more numerous than composed."[ ] literature, then, aims at presenting an image of life through the medium of art; and the guide to art, according to jonson, is to be found in the rules of criticism. thus, for example, success in comedy is to be attained "by observation of those comic laws which i, your master, first did teach the age;"[ ] and elsewhere, it will be remembered, jonson boasts that he had swerved from no "needful law." but though art can find a never-failing guide and monitor in the rules of criticism, he does not believe in mere servile adherence to the practice or theory of classical literature. the ancients are to be regarded as guides, not commanders.[ ] in short, the english mind was not yet prepared to accept the neo-classic ideal in all its consequences; and absolute subservience to ancient authority came only with the introduction of the french influence. this is, perhaps, best indicated by the history of aristotle's influence in english criticism from ascham to milton. the first reference to the _poetics_ in england is to be found in ascham's _scholemaster_.[ ] there we are told that ascham, cheke, and watson had many pleasant talks together at cambridge, comparing the poetic precepts of aristotle and horace with the examples of euripides, sophocles, and seneca. in sidney's _defence of poesy_, aristotle is cited several times; and in the drama, his authority is regarded by sidney as almost on a par with that of the "common reason."[ ] harington was not satisfied until he had proved that the _orlando_ agrees substantially with aristotle's requirements. jonson wrote a commentary on horace's _ars poetica_, with elucidations from aristotle, in which "all the old venusine [_i.e._ horace], in poetry, and lighted by the stagyrite [_i.e._ aristotle], could spy, was there made english;"[ ] but the manuscript was unfortunately destroyed by fire in . yet jonson was aware how ridiculous it is to make any author a dictator.[ ] his admiration for aristotle was great; but he acknowledges that the aristotelian rules are useless without natural talent, and that a poet's liberty cannot be bound within the narrow limits prescribed by grammarians and philosophers.[ ] at the same time, he points out that aristotle was the first critic, and the first of all men to teach the poet how to write. the aristotelian authority is not to be contemned, since aristotle did not invent his rules, but, taking the best things from nature and the poets, converted them into a complete and consistent code of art. milton, also, had a sincere admiration for "that sublime art which [is taught] in aristotle's _poetics_, in horace, and the italian commentaries of castelvetro, tasso, mazzoni, and others."[ ] but despite all this, the english independence of spirit never failed; and before the french influence we can find no such thing in english criticism as the literary dictatorship of aristotle.[ ] to conclude, then, it would seem that by the middle of the sixteenth century there had grown up in italy an almost complete body of poetic rules and theories. this critical system passed into france, england, spain, germany, portugal, and holland; so that by the beginning of the seventeenth century there was a common body of renaissance doctrine throughout western europe. each country, however, gave this system a national cast of its own; but the form which it received in france ultimately triumphed, and modern classicism therefore represents the supremacy of the french phase, or version, of renaissance aristotelianism. a number of modern writers, among them lessing and shelley, have returned more or less to the original italian form. this is represented, in elizabethan criticism, by sidney; ben jonson represents a transitional phase, and dryden and pope the final form of french classicism. foot-notes: [ ] morley, _english writers_, ix. . [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] _ibid._ ii. . [ ] jonson, _works_, iii. . _cf._ gascoigne's comments on _enjambement_, in haslewood, ii. . [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] _scholemaster_, p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. _sq._ [ ] _cf._ haslewood, ii. p. xxii. the treatises of gascoigne ( ) and king james vi. ( ) contain no reference to quantitative verse. [ ] _cf._ pulci, _morgante maggiore_, xxv. . [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] r. ellis, _poems and fragments of catullus translated in the original metres_, london, , p. xiv. _sq._ [ ] stanyhurst, p. _sq._ [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] puttenham, p. _sq._ [ ] _defence_, p. . [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] haslewood, ii. . [ ] _cf._ ellis, _op. cit._, p. xvi. [ ] _scholemaster_, p. . [ ] _ibid._ pp. , . [ ] _defence_, p. . [ ] haslewood, ii. , _sq._ [ ] _works_, vi. . [ ] _discoveries_, p. . [ ] _cf._ scaliger, _poet._ v. , where the highest virtue of a poet is said to be _electio et sui fastidium_; and vi. , where it is said that the "life of all excellence lies in measure." [ ] _works_, ii. ; _cf._ _discoveries_, pp. - . [ ] _works_, iii. . [ ] _discoveries_, p. . [ ] _scholemaster_, p. . [ ] _defence_, p. . [ ] _works_, iii. ; _cf._ i. , iii. . [ ] _discoveries_, p. . [ ] _ibid._ p. _sq._ [ ] _works_, iii. . [ ] the chapter on poetry in peacham's _compleat gentleman_ ( ) is interesting chiefly because of its indebtedness to scaliger, who is called by peacham (p. ) "the prince of all learning and the judge of judgments, the divine julius cæsar scaliger." this constitutes him a literary arbiter if not dictator. in the _great assises holden in parnassus_ ( ), scaliger is proclaimed one of the lords of parnassus, in company with bacon, sidney, erasmus, budæus, heinsius, vossius, casaubon, mascardo, pico della mirandola, selden, grotius, and others. appendices appendix a chronological table of the chief critical works of the sixteenth century ======================================================================= date |italy |date |france |date |england -----+-------------------+------+----------------+---------+----------- | | | | | | vida: _de arte | | | c. | cox: | poetica_. | | | | _rhetoric_. | | | | | | trissino: | | | | | _poetica_, | | | | | pts. i.-iv. | | | | | | | | | | dolce: | | | | | trans. of | | | | | horace's | | | | | _ars poetica_. | | | | | | | | | | pazzi: transl. | | | | | of aristotle's | | | | | _poetics_. | | | | | | | | | | daniello: | | | | | _poetica_. | | | | | | | | | | tolomei: | | pelletier: | | | _versi e regole | | trans. of | | | della nuova | | horace's _ars | | | poesia_. | | poetica_. | | | | | | | | robortelli: | | sibilet: _art | | | ed. of | | poétique_. | | | aristotle's | | | | | _poetics_. | | | | | | | | | | segni: transl. | | du bellay: | | | of aristotle's | | _défense et | | | _poetics_. | | illustration_. | | | | | | | | maggi: ed. of | | | | wilson: | aristotle's | | | | _rhetoric_. | _poetics_. | | | | | | | | | | muzio: _arte | | | | | poetica_. | | | | | | | | | | giraldi | | pelletier: | | | cintio: | | _art | | | _discorsi_. | | poétique_. | | | | | | | | minturno: _de | | morel: ed. of | | | poeta_. | | aristotle's | | | | | _poetics_. | | | vettori: ed. | | | | drant: | of aristotle's | | pasquier: | | transl. of | _poetics_. | | _recherches_. | | horace's | | | | | _ars poetica_. | scaliger: | | [scaliger: | | ascham: | _poetics_. | | _poetics_.] | | _scholemaster_. | | | | | | trissino: | | | | gascoigne: | _poetica_, | | | | _notes of | pts. v., vi. | | | | instruction_. | | | | | | minturno: | | | | | _arte | | | | | poetica_. | | | | gosson: | | | | | _school | castelvetro: | | ronsard: | | of abuse_. | ed. of | | _abrégé | | | aristotle's | | de l'art | | lodge: | _poetics_. | | poétique_. | | _reply to | | | | | gosson_. | | | | | | piccolomini: | | jean de la | | harvey and | ed. of | | taille: | | spenser: | aristotle's | | preface of | | _letters_. | _poetics_. | | _saül_. | | | | | | c. | sidney: | viperano: | | ronsard: | | _defence | _de arte | | preface of | | of poesy_ | poetica_. | | _franciade_. | | (publ. ). | | | | | | patrizzi: | | | | james vi.: | _della | | | | _reulis and | poetica_. | | | | cautelis_. | | | | | | t. tasso: | | jacques de la | | | _discorsi | | taille: | | webbe: | dell' | | treatise | | _discourse | arte poetica_. | | on french | | of english | | | classical | | poetrie_. | denores: | | metres. | | | _poetica_. | | | | | | | | | | buonamici: | | de laudun: | | puttenham: | _discorsi | | _art | | _arte of | poetici_. | | poétique | | english | | | françois_. | | poesie_. | ingegneri: | | | | | _poesia | -- | vauquelin: | | | rappresentativa_. | | _art | | harington: | | | poétique_. | | _apologie | summo: _discorsi | | | | of | poetici_. | | | | poetrie_. ======================================================================= appendix b salviati's account of the commentators on aristotle's "poetics." the following is lionardo salviati's account of the commentators on aristotle's _poetics_ up to . the passage is cited from an unpublished ms. at florence (cod. magliabech. ii. ii. ii.), beginning at fol. . the title of the ms. is _parafrasi e commento della poetica d'aristotile_; and at fol. it is dated january , . delli interpreti di questo libro della poetica [sidenote: =averroës.=] averroe primo di tutti quelli interpreti della poetica che a nostri tempi sono pervenuti, fece intorno a esso una breve parafrasi, nella quale come che pure alcune buone considerationi si ritrovino, tutta via per la diversità e lontananza de costumi, che tra greco havea, e tra gli arabi poca notizia havendone, pochissima ne potè dare altrui. [sidenote: =valla.=] appresso hebbe voglia giorgio valla di tradur questo libro in latino, ma o che la copia del testo greco lo ingannasse, o che verso di sè fusse l'opera malagevole per ogni guisa massimamente in quei tempi, egli di quella impresa picciola lode si guadagnò. [sidenote: =pazzi.=] il che considerando poi alessandro de pazzi, huomo delle lingue intendente, et ingegnoso molto, alla medesima cura si diede, et ci lasciò la latina traduzzione, che in tutti i latini comenti fuorch'in quello del vettorio si leggie. e per ciò che dotto huomo era, et hebbe copia di ottimi testi scritti a penna, diede non poca luce a questa opera, e più anche fatto havrebbe se da la morte stato non fusse sopravenuto. [sidenote: =robortelli.=] ma francesco rubertello a tempi nostri, nelli studj delle lingue esercitatissimo, conoscendo che di maggior aviso li faceva mestieri, non solamente purgò il testo di molte macchie che accecato il tenevano, ma il primo fu ancora, che con distese dichiarationi, et con innumerabili esempli di poeti greci e latini, fece opera di illustrarlo. [sidenote: =segni.=] vulgarizzollo appresso bernardo segni in questo nostro idioma, et con alcune sue brevi annotationi lo diede in luce. e nella tradutione per alcune proprie voci et ai greci vocaboli ottimamente corrisposero, non se n' uscì anche egli senza commendazione. ma con molto maggior grido et applauso, il comento del [sidenote: =maggi.=] maggio, chiarissimo filosopho, fu dal mondo ricevuto; perciochè havendo egli con somma gloria nella continua lettura della philosophia i suoi anni trapassati, con l' ordine principalmente giovò a questo libro, e col mostrarne la continuatione et in non pochi luoghi soccorse il rubertello. e se si fusse alquanto meno ardente contro di lui dimonstrato, nè così vago stato fusse di contrapporseli, sarebbe alcuna volta per avventura uscito fuor più libero il parer suo, e più saldo. [sidenote: =vettori.=] a lato a quel del maggio fu la latina traduzione et comento di pier vettori pubblicato, il quale essendo oltre ad ogni altro, delle antiche scritture diligentissimo osservatore, e nella cognitione delle lingue havendosi sì come io stimo a tempi nostri, il primo luogo guadagnato, hauta commodità, et in gran numero di preziosi et antichi esemplarj scritti a mano, in ogni parte, ma nella correzzione del testo spetialmente e nella traduzione, ha fatto sì che poco più avanti pare che di lume a questo libro possa desiderarsi. [sidenote: =castelvetro.=] pur non di manco a questi anni di nuovo, da un dotto huomo in questa lingua volgarizzato et esposto, et più a lungo che alcun altro che ciò habbia fin quì adoprato ancor mai. questo sarà da me per tutto ovunque mi convenga nominarlo, il comento vulgare appellato, e per più brevità con quelle due prime lettere c. v. in questa guisa lo noterò. nel qual comento hanno senza alcun fallo di sottilissimi avvedimenti, ma potrebb' essere, sì come io credo, più sincero. perciò che io stimo, che dove egli dal vero si diparte, il faccia per emulazione per lo più per dimostrarsi di sottil sentimento e per non dire come li altri. È la costui tradutione, fuorchè in alcune parti dove egli secondo che io avviso volontariamente erra, tra le toscane la migliore. e sono le sue parole et in essa e nell' espositione molto pure, et in puro volgare fiorentino, quanto comporta la materia l'una e l'altra è dettata. ultimamente la traduzzione, e con essa l'annotazione di [sidenote: =piccolomini.=] mgr. alessandro piccolomini sono uscite in stampa, il quale havendosi con molte altre sue opere d' astrologia e di filosofia e di rettorica parte composte, parte volgarizzate, non picciol nome e molta riputazione acquistata, creder si può altrettanto doverli della presente faticha avvenire. dietro a sì chiari interpreti non per emulatione, la quale tra me e sì fatti huomini [sidenote: =salviati.=] non potrebbe haver luogo, ma per vaghezza che io pure havrei di dover ancor io, se io potessi a questa impresa, alcun aiuto arrecare dopo lo studio di dieci anni che io ci ho spesi, scendo, quantunque timido, in questo campo, più con accesa volontà, che con speranza, o vigore desideroso che avanti che venirmi gloria per false opinioni, sieno i miei difetti discretamente da savio giudice gastigati. bibliography this bibliography includes a list of the principal books and editions used in the preparation of the essay, and should be consulted for the full titles of works cited in the text and in the foot-notes. i. sources ascham, r. _the scholemaster_, edited by e. arber. london, . ---- _the whole works_, edited by rev. dr. giles. vols. in parts. london, . aubignac, abbé d'. _la pratique du théâtre_. vols. amsterdam, . bacon, f. _works_, edited by j. spedding, r. l. ellis, and d. d. heath. vols. boston, . batteux, c. _les quatres poétiques d'aristote, d'horace, de vida, de despréaux_. paris, . berni, f. _rime, poesie latine, e lettere_, per cura di p. virgili. firenze, . boccaccio, g. _geneologia degli dei_, trad. per g. betussi. vinegia, . ---- _vita di dante_, per cura di f. macrì-leone. firenze, . bruno, g. _opere_, raccolte da a. wagner. vols. lipsia, . butcher, s. h. _aristotle's theory of poetry and fine art, with a critical text and a translation of the poetics_. london, . carducci, g. _la poesia barbara nei secoli xv e xvi_. bologna, . caro, a. _apologia degli academici di bianchi di roma contra m. lodovico castelvetro_. parma, . castelvetro, l. _poetica d' aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta_. basilea, . ---- _opere varie critiche_, colla vita dell' autore scritta da l. a. muratori. milano, . cook, a. s. _the art of poetry: the poetical treatises of horace, vida, and boileau, with the translations by howes, pitt, and soame_. boston, . dacier, a. _la poétique traduite en françois, avec des rémarques_. paris, . daniello, b. _la poetica_. vinegia, . dante alighieri. _tutte le opere_, per cura di e. moore. oxford, . denores, j. _discorso intorno a que' principii che la comedia, la tragedia, et il poema heroico ricevono dalla philosophia_. padova, . ---- _in epistolam q. horatij flacci de arte poetica, ex quotidianis tryphonis gabrielij sermonibus interpretatio_. venetiis, . ---- _poetica, nel qual si tratta secondo l' opinion d' arist. della tragedia, del poema heroico, & della comedia_. padova, . donatus, a. _ars poetica_. bononiæ, . dryden, j. _an essay of dramatic poesy_, edited by t. arnold. oxford, . du bellay, j. _oeuvres choisies_, publiées par l. becq de fouquières. paris, . fracastoro, g. _opera_. vols. genevæ, . giraldi cintio, g. b. _scritti estetici: de' romanzi, delle comedie, e delle tragedie, ecc._ (daelli's _biblioteca rara_, lii., liii.) vols. milano, . gosson, s. _the schoole of abuse_, edited by e. arber. london, . haslewood, j. _ancient critical essays upon english poets and poesy_. vols. london, - . ingegneri, a. _della poesia rappresentativa_. firenze, . jonson, b. _timber, or discoveries made upon men and matter_, edited by f. e. schelling. boston, . ---- works, with notes and memoir by w. gifford, edited by f. cunningham. vols. london, n. d. klette, t. _beiträge zur geschichte und litteratur der italienischen gelehrtenrenaissance_. parts. greifswald, - . le bossu, r. _treatise of the epic poem_, made english by w. j. second edition. vols. london, . lionardi, a. _dialogi della inventione poetica_. venetia, . luisino, f. _in librum q. horatii flacci de arte poetica commentarius_. venetiis, . maggi, v., and lombardi, b. _in aristotelis librum de poetica explanationes_. venetijs, . milton, j. _prose works_, edited by j. a. st. john. 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"la gerusalemme conquistata e l' arte poetica di tasso," in _il propugnatore_ ( ), n.s. vol. ii. parts , . ebert, a. _allgemeine geschichte der literatur des mittelalters im abendlande_. vols. leipzig, - . egger, É. _essai sur l'histoire de la critique chez les grecs_. deuxième édition. paris, . ---- _l'hellénisme en france_. vols. paris, . faguet, É. _la tragédie française au xvi^e siècle_. paris, . foffano, f. _ricerche letterarie_. livorno, . gaspary, a. _geschichte der italienischen literatur_. vols. strassburg, - . hamelius, p. _die kritik in der englischen literatur des . und . jahrhunderts_. leipzig, . jacquinet, p. _francisci baconi de re litteraria judicia_. parisiis, . koerting, g. _geschichte der litteratur italiens im zeitalter der renaissance_. vols. leipzig, - . krantz, É. _l'esthétique de descartes, étudiée dans les rapports de la doctrine cartésienne avec la littérature classique française au xvii^e siècle_. paris, . langlois, e. _de artibus rhetoricæ rhythmicæ_. parisiis, . lintilhac, e. _de j.-c. scaligeri poetice_. paris, . ---- "un coup d'État dans la république des lettres," in the _nouvelle revue_ ( ), vol. lxiv. menéndez y pelayo, m. _historia de las ideas estéticas en españa_. segunda edición. vols. madrid, - . müller, e. _geschichte der theorie der kunst bei den alten_. vols. breslau, - . natali, g. _torquato tasso, filosofo del bello, dell' arte, e dell' amore_. roma, . pellissier, g. _de sexti decimi sæculi in francia artibus poeticis_. paris, . perrens, f. t. _jérome savonarole_. vols. paris, . quadrio, f. s. _della storia e della ragione d' ogni poesia_. vols. milano, - . quossek, c. _sidney's defense of poesy und die poetik des aristoteles_. krefeld, . robert, p. _la poétique de racine_. paris, . rosenbauer, a. _die poetischen theorien der plejade nach ronsard und dubellay_. erlangen, . rucktäschel, t. _einige arts poétiques aus der zeit ronsard's und malherbe's_. leipzig, . schelling, f. e. _poetic and verse criticism of the reign of elizabeth_. philadelphia, university of pennsylvania press, . solerti, a. _vita di torquato tasso_. vols. torino, . symonds, j. a. _renaissance in italy_. vols. new york, . teichmüller, g. _aristotelische forschungen_. vols. halle, . tiraboschi, g. _storia della letteratura italiana_. vols. firenze, - . villari, p. _life and times of girolamo savonarola_, translated by l. villari. new york, . index abu-baschar, . académie de poésie et de musique, , . accademia della crusca, . accademia della nuova poesia, , . addison, . Æschylus, . agricola, . agrippa, cornelius, , , . alamanni, luigi, . alberti, leon battista, . alexander of aphrodisias, . ambrose of milan, . aneau, barthélemy, _sq._ aphthonius, . aquinas, thomas, , . areopagus, . aretino, , . ariosto, , _sq._, _sq._, , , , _sq._ aristophanes, . aristotle, _passim_, especially _sq._, _sq._, _sq._, _sq._, _sq._; _poetics_, _passim_; _rhetoric_, . ascham, _sq._, _sq._, _sq._, _sq._; _scholemaster_, . aubignac, abbé d', , , , _sq._; _pratique du théâtre_, , . averroës, , , , . bacon, francis, _sq._, ; _advancement of learning_, . bacon, roger, . baïf, j. a. de, _sq._, , . baldini, _ars poetica aristotelis_, . balzac, guez de, , _sq._ bartas, salluste du, , , , , . beaubreuil, jean de, . bellay, joachim du, _sq._, _sq._, _sq._, _sq._; _défense et illustration_, , _sq._ bembo, , , , , , , . beni, paolo, , , , , . bernays, . berni, _dialogo contra i poeti_, , . beza, . binet, , . blackmore, . blenerhasset, thomas, . boccaccio, , , , , , , ; _de genealogia deorum_, . boccalini, _ragguagli di parnaso_, . boileau, , , , _sq._, , _sq._, _sq._, ; _art poétique_, , . bossuet, , . bouteauville, michel de, . breitinger, h., . brunetière, , . bruni, lionardo, , ; _de studiis et literis_, . bruno, giordano, _sq._ buchanan, . budæus, , _n._ bullokar, . buonamici, _discorsi poetici_, , . butcher, s. h., _n._, , , . calcagnini, _sq._ cammillo, giulio, , . campanella, _sq._ campion, _observations in the art of english poesy_, , . capriano, , , ; _della vera poetica_, , . caro, annibal, . cascales, . castelvetro, _sq._, , , _et passim_. castiglione, , , . cavalcanti, . cecchi, . cervantes, , , _n._, _n._ chamberlayne, . chapelain, , , , _sq._ cheke, sir john, , . chrétien le gouais, . cicero, , , , , , . coleridge, , , . corneille, , , , , , , , , . council of trent, , , , , , , . coxe, leonard, . cueva, juan de la, , , ; _egemplar poético_, , . dacier, , , . daniel, _defence of rhyme_, , _sq._, . daniello, , , , , , , . dante, , , , , , , _sq._ dati, leonardo, . davenant, , . deimier, . denores, . descartes, . deschamps, eustache, . desportes, . diomedes, _sq._ dolce, lodovico, , , . dolet, , . donatus, . drant, thomas, , _sq._ dryden, , , , , , , , . duval, . dyer, . ellis, robinson, _sq._ equicola, , . erasmus, , . espinel, . estienne, henri, , . euanthius-donatus, . euripides, , . fabri, pierre, _sq._ fabricius, , . fanucci, . farquhar, . fichte, . ficino, . filelfo, , . fioretti, benedetto, . _fleur de rhétorique_, . fontaine, charles, _sq._ fracastoro, , _sq._, _sq._, , , ; _naugerius_, . fulgentius, , . gabrielli, trifone, . gambara, _de perfecta poeseos ratione_, . garnier, . gascoigne, , . gelli, , . giraldi cintio, , , , , , , _sq._, , , , , , , . goldoni, . gosson, , _sq._, . gracien du pont, _sq._ _great assises holden in parnassus_, , _n._ gregory the great, . greville, fulke, . grévin, _sq._, , . grynæus, . guarini, _pastor fido_, . guarino, _de ordine docendi_, . hardy, alexandre, , _sq._ harington, , , , ; _apologie of poetrie_, , , . harvey, gabriel, , , _sq._, _sq._ heinsius, daniel, , , , ; _de tragoediæ constitutione_, . heliodorus, , . hermann, . hermogenes, ; _idea_, . hilary of poitiers, . hobbes, _n._, . homer, , , , _et passim_. horace, , , _et passim_; _ars poetica_, _passim_. howard, sir robert, . isidore of seville, , , . james vi. of scotland, . jodelle, , . johannes januensis de balbis, . john of salisbury, . johnson, samuel, , . jonson, ben, , _sq._, , , , , _sq._, _sq._, , _sq._ la bruyère, , . lamartine, . la mesnardière, . landi, ortensio, , ; _paradossi_, . lasca, il, , , . laudun, pierre de, , , , ; _art poétique_, . le bossu, , . lemoyne, . leo x., , , . le roy, . lessing, , , , , . lionardi, alessandro, , . livy, , . lodge, _defence of poetry, musick, and stage plays_, . lombardi, . longfellow, . lucan, , . lucian, . lucretius, . luisino, . luther, _n._ macrobius, . maggi, , , , , , _et passim_. mairet, . malherbe, , , , _sq._; _commentaire sur desportes_, . mambrun, , , . mantinus of tortosa, . mantuan, . maranta, , . marguerite de navarre, . marino, . marot, , , . mascardo, _n._ maximus of tyre, . mazzoni, jacopo, ; _difesa di dante_, _n._ melanchthon, , . mellin de saint-gelais, , . ménage, . metastasio, . michele, a., . milton, , _n._, _sq._, , , , , , _sq._ minturno, , , , _et passim_; _arte poetica_, ; _de poeta_, . mirandola, pico della, , _n._ molière, . montaigne, , , _sq._, . montchrestien, . montemayor, . morel, guillaume, . mousset, , . mulcaster, . musæus, . muzio, , , , , , , , ; _arte poetica_, . nisieli, udeno, _v._ fioretti, benedetto. nores, j. de, _v._ denores. ogier, françois, . opitz, _buch von der deutschen poeterei_, . ovid, , . palingenius, . partenio, , , , ; _della imitatione poetica_, . pasquier, _n._ patrizzi, _sq._, ; _della poetica_, . pazzi, alessandro de', , , . peacham, _compleat gentleman_, _n._ pellegrino, camillo, _sq._ pelletier, , , , , _sq._, , , , . petrarch, , , , , . philo judæus, . pibrac, guy du faur de, . piccolomini, Æneas sylvius, . piccolomini, alessandro, _sq._, , . pierre berçuire, . pigna, g. b., _sq._, , , . pinciano, . pindar, . pisani, marquise de, . plato, _sq._, , , _et passim_, especially _sq._ plautus, , , , . plutarch, , , . poliziano, _sq._, ; _sylvæ_, . pomponazzi, . pontano, g., _n._, _n._, . pontano, p., _n._ pontanus, j., _n._, . pope, alexander, , ; _essay on criticism_, . prynne, . puttenham, _sq._, , ; _arte of english poesie_, , . _quintil horatian_, _sq._, _sq._ quintilian, , , , . racan, . racine, , , , . rambouillet, marquise de, . ramus, , , _sq._, . rapin, , , , , ; _réflexions sur l'art poétique_, . regolo, . rengifo, . _rhetores græci_, . rhodiginus, . ricci, b., . riccoboni, , , . richelieu, _sq._ robortelli, , , _sq._, , , , , , , . ronsard, , , , _sq._, , , _sq._, _sq._, , . rucellai, . ruscelli, , . sackville, _gorboduc_, , . saint-amant, . sainte-beuve, . salviati, lionardo, _sq._, _sq._, _n._, , , , , , . sanchez, alfonso, . sannazaro, , , , , . savonarola, , _sq._, , , , . scaliger, joseph justus, . scaliger, julius cæsar, , _sq._, , , _sq._, _n._, _et passim_; _poetics_, , , _et passim_. schelandre, j. de, . schelling, . schlegel, . schosser, _disputationes de tragoedia_, _n._ scudéry, . segni, a., _n._ segni, b., , , , . selden, _n._ seneca, , , , , , _sq._, . shaftesbury, . shakespeare, , , , _sq._, , . shelley, , , , , , , , . sibilet, _sq._, ; _art poétique_, . sidney, sir philip, , , , , _et passim_; _defence of poesy_, _sq._, _et passim_. silius italicus, . simonides, . sophocles, , , . spenser, , , , , , . speroni, sperone, , , _sq._, . stanyhurst, richard, . strabo, , , , , . sturm, john, , . suckling, _session of the poets_, . suetonius, _de poetis_, . summo, faustino, , . surrey, . symonds, j. a., . taille, jacques de la, _sq._, . taille, jean de la, _sq._, _sq._, ; _art de tragédie_, , . tasso, bernardo, , , , . tasso, torquato, , , , , , _sq._, , , , , , ; _discorsi dell'arte poetica_, , ; _apologia_, . tempo, antonio di, . tennyson, . terence, , , , . tertullian, . theocritus, . theophrastus, _sq._ tibullus, . tolomei, claudio, , , , , . tomitano, . toscanella, . tottel's _miscellany_, . trincaveli, . trissino, , _sq._, , , , , , , , ; _poetica_, , , , , . turnebus, . twining, . valla, giorgio, , . varchi, , , , , _n._, , , , , . vauquelin de la fresnaye, , _sq._, , , , , , , _sq._ vega, lope de, _sq._, _n._ vettori, _n._, , , , . vida, , , , _sq._, _sq._, , , , , , , , . viperano, _n._, , . virgil, , , , , _et passim_. voltaire, . vossius, , _sq._, , , _n._ warton, joseph, . warton, thomas, . watson, thomas, , . webbe, william, , , , , ; _discourse of english poetrie_, , , . wilson, _rhetoric_, , , . wither, . woodberry, g. e., _n._ xenophon, , . zabarella, _sq._ zapata, . li livres du gouvernement des rois. _being a thirteenth century french version of egidio colonna's treatise, "de regimine principium." from the kerr ms._ edited by samuel paul molenaer, a.m., _instructor in the university of pennsylvania; sometime fellow of columbia university._ vo. cloth. $ . , net. * * * * * this treatise, "on the education of princes," was prepared in latin about the year , by the preceptor of the boy prince philip the fair (afterward philip iv. of france), and on the accession of the youthful king was by him ordered translated into french for the benefit of the general public. numerous editions in the original latin were published in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but the french version has never before appeared in print. the work covers a wide range of topics, educational and social, discussed in the spirit of enlightened mediæval scholarship. it is believed that, in its present accessible form, it will be found to constitute an interesting chapter in the history of educational ideas. boston transcript. "to professional scholars and to those interested in the study of political science in the middle ages it will have unusual interest." san francisco argonaut. "the work will appeal not only to the limited number of professional scholars for whom the edition is primarily intended, but beyond that to the wider circle of those interested in the study of the middle ages and in the evolution of pedagogy and of political economy." annals of the american academy. "the edition of colonna's 'de regimine principium,' of which dr. molenaer has given us an excellent thirteenth-century french version, will interest students of widely differing tastes." * * * * * the macmillan company, fifth avenue, new york. publications of the columbia university press. classical studies in honour of henry drisler. _a volume of essays on classical subjects contributed by a number of dr. drisler's former pupils, in commemoration of the fiftieth year of his official connection with columbia college._ vo. cloth. $ . , net. * * * * * the titles of the contributions are as follows: on the meaning of 'nauta' and 'viator' in horace, sat. i. . - . anaximander on the prolongation of infancy in man. a note on the history of the theory of evolution. of two passages in euripides' medea. the preliminary military service of the equestrian cursus honorum. references to zoroaster in syriac and arabic literature. literary frauds among the greeks. henotheism in the rig-veda. on plato and the attic comedy. herodotus vii. , or the arms of the ancient persian illustrated from iranian sources. archaism in aulus gellius. on certain parallelisms between the ancient and the modern drama. ovid's use of colour and colour-terms. a bronze of polyclitan affinities in the metropolitan museum. geryon in cyprus. hercules, hydra, and crab. onomatopoetic words in latin. notes on the vedic deity pusan. the so-called medusa ludovisi. aristotle and the arabs. iphigenia in greek and french tragedy. gargettus: an attic deme. * * * * * "the circumstances of the issue of this handsome volume give it an emotional interest which makes it a volume separate and distinct among the collected records of the investigations of scholars. the studies themselves, for the most part, appeal in the first instance to specialists, but many of them have a much wider interest. the book is a credit to american scholarship, as well as a fit tribute to the honored name of professor drisler."--_the outlook_. * * * * * the macmillan company, fifth avenue, new york. * * * * * corrections: footnote : ad nostras was changed to ad nostra ("jacuit liber hic neglectus, ad nostra"). page : [greek: tôn euantiôn] was changed to [greek: tôn enantiôn]. page : postero was changed to postera (postera phoebea lustrabat lampade terras). page : sulutaires was changed to salutaires (sous les loix salutaires). remarks: part i, chapter iv: trissino ( ): appendix a does not list trissino in . part ii, chapter i: the two subsections listed in the table of contents do not appear in the text. the art of letters by robert lynd new york to j.c. squire my dear jack, you were godfather to a good many of the chapters in this book when they first appeared in the _london mercury_, the _new statesman_, and the _british review_. others of the chapters appeared in the _daily news_, the _nation_, the _athenæum_, the _observer_, and _everyman_. will it embarrass you if i now present you with the entire brood in the name of a friendship that has lasted many midnights? yours, robert lynd. steyning, th august contents i. mr. pepys ii. john bunyan iii. thomas campion iv. john donne v. horace walpole vi. william cowper vii. a note on elizabethan plays viii. the office of the poets ix. edward young as critic x. gray and collins xi. aspects of shelley ( ) the character half-comic ( ) the experimentalist ( ) the poet of hope xii. the wisdom of coleridge ( ) coleridge as critic ( ) coleridge as a talker xiii. tennyson: a temporary criticism xiv. the politics of swift and shakespeare ( ) swift ( ) shakespeare xv. the personality of morris xvi. george meredith ( ) the egoist ( ) the olympian unbends ( ) the anglo-irish aspect xvii. oscar wilde xviii. two english critics ( ) mr. saintsbury ( ) mr. gosse xix. an american critic: professor irving babbit xx. georgians ( ) mr. de la mare ( ) the group ( ) the young satirists xxi. labour of authorship xxii. the theory of poetry xxiii. the critic as destroyer xxiv. book reviewing the art of letters i.--mr. pepys mr. pepys was a puritan. froude once painted a portrait of bunyan as an old cavalier. he almost persuaded one that it was true till the later discovery of bunyan's name on the muster-roll of one of cromwell's regiments showed that he had been a puritan from the beginning. if one calls mr. pepys a puritan, however, one does not do so for the love of paradox or at a guess. he tells us himself that he "was a great roundhead when i was a boy," and that, on the day on which king charles was beheaded, he said: "were i to preach on him, my text should be--'the memory of the wicked shall rot.'" after the restoration he was uneasy lest his old schoolfellow, mr. christmas, should remember these strong words. true, when it came to the turn of the puritans to suffer, he went, with a fine impartiality, to see general harrison disembowelled at charing cross. "thus it was my chance," he comments, "to see the king beheaded at white hall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the king at charing cross. from thence to my lord's, and took captain cuttance and mr. shepley to the sun tavern, and did give them some oysters." pepys was a spectator and a gourmet even more than he was a puritan. he was a puritan, indeed, only north-north-west. even when at cambridge he gave evidence of certain susceptibilities to the sins of the flesh. he was "admonished" on one occasion for "having been scandalously overserved with drink ye night before." he even began to write a romance entitled _love a cheate_, which he tore up ten years later, though he "liked it very well." at the same time his writing never lost the tang of puritan speech. "blessed be god" are the first words of his shocking diary. when he had to give up keeping the diary nine and a half years later, owing to failing sight, he wound up, after expressing his intention of dictating in the future a more seemly journal to an amanuensis, with the characteristic sentences: or, if there be anything, which cannot be much, now my amours to deb. are past, i must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add, here and there, a note in shorthand with my own hand. and so i betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave; for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good god prepare me. with these words the great book ends--the diary of one of the godliest and most lecherous of men. in some respects mr. pepys reminds one of a type that is now commoner in scotland, i fancy, than elsewhere. he himself seems at one time to have taken the view that he was of scottish descent. none of the authorities, however, will admit this, and there is apparently no doubt that he belonged to an old cambridgeshire family that had come down in the world, his father having dwindled into a london tailor. in temperament, however, he seems to me to have been more scottish than the very scottish boswell. he led a double life with the same simplicity of heart. he was scottish in the way in which he lived with one eye on the "lassies" and the other on "the meenister." he was notoriously respectable, notoriously hard-working, a judge of sermons, fond of the bottle, cautious, thrifty. he had all the virtues of a k.c.b. he was no scapegrace or scallywag such as you might find nowadays crowing over his sins in chelsea. he lived, so far as the world was concerned, in the complete starch of rectitude. he was a pillar of society, and whatever age he had been born in, he would have accepted its orthodoxy. he was as grave a man as holy willie. stevenson has commented on the gradual decline of his primness in the later years of the diary. "his favourite ejaculation, 'lord!' occurs," he declares, "but once that i have observed in , never in ' , twice in ' , and at least five times in ' ; after which the 'lords' may be said to pullulate like herrings, with here and there a solitary 'damned,' as it were a whale among the shoal." as a matter of fact, mr. pepys's use of the expression "lord!" has been greatly exaggerated, especially by the parodists. his primness, if that is the right word, never altogether deserted him. we discover this even in the story of his relations with women. in , for instance, he writes with surprised censoriousness of mrs. penington: there we drank and laughed [he relates], and she willingly suffered me to put my hand in her bosom very wantonly, and keep it there long. which methought was very strange, and i looked upon myself as a man mightily deceived in a lady, for i could not have thought she could have suffered it by her former discourse with me; so modest she seemed and i know not what. it is a sad world for idealists. mr. pepys's puritanism, however, was something less than mr. pepys. it was but a pair of creaking sunday boots on the feet of a pagan. mr. pepys was an appreciator of life to a degree that not many englishmen have been since chaucer. he was a walking appetite. and not an entirely ignoble appetite either. he reminds one in some respects of the poet in browning's "how it strikes a contemporary," save that he had more worldly success. one fancies him with the same inquisitive ferrule on the end of his stick, the same "scrutinizing hat," the same eye for the bookstall and "the man who slices lemon into drink." "if any cursed a woman, he took note." browning's poet, however, apparently "took note" on behalf of a higher power. it is difficult to imagine mr. pepys sending his diary to the address of the recording angel. rather, the diary is the soliloquy of an egoist, disinterested and daring as a bad boy's reverie over the fire. nearly all those who have written about pepys are perplexed by the question whether pepys wrote his diary with a view to its ultimate publication. this seems to me to betray some ignorance of the working of the human mind. those who find one of the world's puzzles in the fact that mr. pepys wrapped his great book in the secrecy of a cipher, as though he meant no other eye ever to read it but his own, perplex their brains unnecessarily. pepys was not the first human being to make his confession in an empty confessional. criminals, lovers and other egoists, for lack of a priest, will make their confessions to a stone wall or a tree. there is no more mystery in it than in the singing of birds. the motive may be either to obtain discharge from the sense of guilt or a desire to save and store up the very echoes and last drops of pleasure. human beings keep diaries for as many different reasons as they write lyric poems. with pepys, i fancy, the main motive was a simple happiness in chewing the cud of pleasure. the fact that so much of his pleasure had to be kept secret from the world made it all the more necessary for him to babble when alone. true, in the early days his confidences are innocent enough. pepys began to write in cipher some time before there was any purpose in it save the common prudence of a secretive man. having built, however, this secret and solitary fastness, he gradually became more daring. he had discovered a room to the walls of which he dared speak aloud. here we see the respectable man liberated. he no longer needs to be on his official behaviour, but may play the part of a small nero, if he wishes, behind the safety of shorthand. and how he takes advantage of his opportunities! he remains to the end something of a puritan in his standards and his public carriage, but in his diary he reveals himself as a pig from the sty of epicurus, naked and only half-ashamed. he never, it must be admitted, entirely shakes off his timidity. at a crisis he dare not confess in english even in a cipher, but puts the worst in bad french with a blush. in some instances the french may be for facetiousness rather than concealment, as in the reference to the ladies of rochester castle in : thence to rochester, walked to the crowne, and while dinner was getting ready, i did then walk to visit the old castle ruines, which hath been a noble place, and there going up i did upon the stairs overtake three pretty mayds or women and took them up with me, and i did _baiser sur mouches et toucher leur mains_ and necks to my great pleasure; but lord! to see what a dreadfull thing it is to look down the precipices, for it did fright me mightily, and hinder me of much pleasure which i would have made to myself in the company of these three, if it had not been for that. even here, however, mr. pepys's french has a suggestion of evasion. he always had a faint hope that his conscience would not understand french. some people have written as though mr. pepys, in confessing himself in his diary, had confessed us all. they profess to see in the diary simply the image of everyman in his bare skin. they think of pepys as an ordinary man who wrote an extraordinary book. to me it seems that pepys's diary is not more extraordinary as a book than pepys himself is as a man. taken separately, nine out of ten of his characteristics may seem ordinary enough--his fears, his greeds, his vices, his utilitarian repentances. they were compounded in him, however, in such proportion as to produce an entirely new mixture--a character hardly less original than dr. johnson or charles lamb. he had not any great originality of virtue, as these others had, but he was immensely original in his responsiveness--his capacity for being interested, tempted and pleased. the voluptuous nature of the man may be seen in such a passage as that in which, speaking of "the wind-musique when the angel comes down" in _the virgin martyr_, he declares: it ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as i have formerly been when in love with my wife. writing of mrs. knipp on another occasion, he says: she and i singing, and god forgive me! i do still see that my nature is not to be quite conquered, but will esteem pleasure above all things, though yet in the middle of it, it has reluctances after my business, which is neglected by my following my pleasure. however, musique and women i cannot but give way to, whatever my business is. within a few weeks of this we find him writing again: so abroad to my ruler's of my books, having, god forgive me! a mind to see nan there, which i did, and so back again, and then out again to see mrs. bettons, who were looking out of the window as i came through fenchurch streete. so that, indeed, i am not, as i ought to be, able to command myself in the pleasures of my eye. though page after page of the diary reveals mr. pepys as an extravagant pleasure-lover, however, he differed from the majority of pleasure-lovers in literature in not being a man of taste. he had a rolling rather than a fastidious eye. he kissed promiscuously, and was not aspiring in his lusts. he once held lady castlemaine in his arms, indeed, but it was in a dream. he reflected, he tells us, that since it was a dream, and that i took so much real pleasure in it, what a happy thing it would be if when we are in our graves (as shakespeare resembles it) we could dream, and dream but such dreams as this, that then we should not need to be so fearful of death, as we are this plague time. he praises this dream at the same time as "the best that ever was dreamt." mr. pepys's idea of paradise, it would be seen, was that commonly attributed to the mohammedans. meanwhile he did his best to turn london into an anticipatory harem. we get a pleasant picture of a little roundhead sultan in such a sentence as "at night had mercer comb my head and so to supper, sing a psalm and to bed." * * * * * it may seem unfair to over-emphasize the voluptuary in mr. pepys, but it is mr. pepys, the promiscuous amourist; stringing his lute (god forgive him!) on a sunday, that is the outstanding figure in the diary. mr. pepys attracts us, however, in a host of other aspects--mr. pepys whose nose his jealous wife attacked with the red-hot tongs as he lay in bed; mr. pepys who always held an anniversary feast on the date on which he had been cut for the stone; mr. pepys who was not "troubled at it at all" as soon as he saw that the lady who had spat on him in the theatre was a pretty one; mr. pepys drinking; mr. pepys among his dishes; mr. pepys among princes; mr. pepys who was "mightily pleased" as he listened to "my aunt jenny, a poor, religious, well-meaning good soul, talking of nothing but god almighty"; mr. pepys, as he counts up his blessings in wealth, women, honour and life, and decides that "all these things are ordered by god almighty to make me contented"; mr. pepys as, having just refused to see lady pickering, he comments, "but how natural it is for us to slight people out of power!"; mr. pepys who groans as he sees his office clerks sitting in more expensive seats than himself at the theatre. mr. pepys is a man so many-sided, indeed, that in order to illustrate his character one would have to quote the greater part of his diary. he is a mass of contrasts and contradictions. he lives without sequence except in the business of getting-on (in which he might well have been taken as a model by samuel smiles). one thinks of him sometimes as a sort of deacon brodie, sometimes as the most innocent sinner who ever lived. for, though he was brutal and snobbish and self-seeking and simian, he had a pious and a merry and a grateful heart. he felt that god had created the world for the pleasure of samuel pepys, and had no doubt that it was good. ii.--john bunyan once, when john bunyan had been preaching in london, a friend congratulated him on the excellence of his sermon. "you need not remind me of that," replied bunyan. "the devil told me of it before i was out of the pulpit." on another occasion, when he was going about in disguise, a constable who had a warrant for his arrest spoke to him and inquired if he knew that devil bunyan. "know him?" said bunyan. "you might call him a devil if you knew him as well as i once did." we have in these anecdotes a key to the nature of bunyan's genius. he was a realist, a romanticist, and a humourist. he was as exact a realist (though in a different way) as mr. pepys, whose contemporary he was. he was a realist both in his self-knowledge and in his sense of the outer world. he had the acute eye of the artist which was aware of the stones of the street and the crows in the ploughed field. as a preacher, he did not guide the thoughts of his hearers, as so many preachers do, into the wind. he recalled them from orthodox abstractions to the solid earth. "have you forgot," he asked his followers, "the close, the milk-house, the stable, the barn, and the like, where god did visit your souls?" he himself could never be indifferent to the place or setting of the great tragi-comedy of salvation. when he relates how he gave up swearing as a result of a reproof from a "loose and ungodly" woman, he begins the story: "one day, as i was standing at a neighbour's shop-window, and there cursing and swearing after my wonted manner, there sat within the woman of the house, who heard me." this passion for locality was always at his elbow. a few pages further on in _grace abounding_, when he tells us how he abandoned not only swearing but the deeper-rooted sins of bell-ringing and dancing, and nevertheless remained self-righteous and "ignorant of jesus christ," he introduces the next episode in the story of his conversion with the sentence: "but upon a day the good providence of god called me to bedford to work at my calling, and in one of the streets of that town i came where there were three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun, talking about the things of god." that seems to me to be one of the most beautiful sentences in english literature. its beauty is largely due to the hungry eyes with which bunyan looked at the present world during his progress to the next. if he wrote the greatest allegory in english literature, it is because he was able to give his narrative the reality of a travel-book instead of the insubstantial quality of a dream. he leaves the reader with the feeling that he is moving among real places and real people. as for the people, bunyan can give even an abstract virtue--still more, an abstract vice--the skin and bones of a man. a recent critic has said disparagingly that bunyan would have called hamlet mr. facing-both-ways. as a matter of fact, bunyan's secret is the direct opposite of this. his great and singular gift was the power to create an atmosphere in which a character with a name like mr. facing-both-ways is accepted on the same plane of reality as hamlet. if bunyan was a realist, however, as regards place and character, his conception of life was none the less romantic. life to him was a story of hairbreadth escapes--of a quest beset with a thousand perils. not only was there that great dragon the devil lying in wait for the traveller, but there was doubting castle to pass, and giant despair, and the lions. we have in _the pilgrim's progress_ almost every property of romantic adventure and terror. we want only a map in order to bring home to us the fact that it belongs to the same school of fiction as _treasure island_. there may be theological contentions here and there that interrupt the action of the story as they interrupt the interest of _grace abounding_. but the tedious passages are extraordinarily few, considering that the author had the passions of a preacher. no doubt the fact that, when he wrote _the pilgrim's progress_, he was not definitely thinking of the edification of his neighbours, goes far towards explaining the absence of commonplace arguments and exhortations. "i did it mine own self to gratify," he declared in his rhymed "apology for his book." later on, in reply to some brethren of the stricter sort who condemned such dabbling in fiction, he defended his book as a tract, remarking that, if you want to catch fish, they must be groped for, and be tickled too, or they will not be catch't, whate'er you do. but in its origin _the pilgrim's progress_ was not a tract, but the inevitable image of the experiences of the writer's soul. and what wild adventures those were every reader of _grace abounding_ knows. there were terrific contests with the devil, who could never charm john bunyan as he charmed eve. to bunyan these contests were not metaphorical battles, but were as struggles with flesh and blood. "he pulled, and i pulled," he wrote in one place; "but, god be praised, i overcame him--i got sweetness from it." and the devil not only fought him openly, but made more subtle attempts to entice him to sin. "sometimes, again, when i have been preaching, i have been violently assaulted with thoughts of blasphemy, and strongly tempted to speak the words with my mouth before the congregation." bunyan, as he looked back over the long record of his spiritual torments, thought of it chiefly as a running fight with the devil. outside the covers of the bible, little existed save temptations for the soul. no sentence in _the pilgrim's progress_ is more suggestive of bunyan's view of life than that in which the merchandise of vanity fair is described as including "delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not." it is no wonder that one to whom so much of the common life of man was simply devil's traffic took a tragic view of even the most innocent pleasures, and applied to himself, on account of his love of strong language, sunday sports and bell-ringing, epithets that would hardly have been too strong if he had committed all the crimes of the latest bluebeard. he himself, indeed, seems to have become alarmed when--probably as a result of his own confessions--it began to be rumoured that he was a man with an unspeakable past. he now demanded that "any woman in heaven, earth or hell" should be produced with whom he had ever had relations before his marriage. "my foes," he declared, "have missed their mark in this shooting at me. i am not the man. i wish that they themselves be guiltless. if all the fornicators and adulterers in england were hanged up by the neck till they be dead, john bunyan, the object of their envy, would still be alive and well." bunyan, one observes, was always as ready to defend as to attack himself. the verses he prefixed to _the holy war_ are an indignant reply to those who accused him of not being the real author of _the pilgrim's progress_. he wound up a fervent defence of his claims to originality by pointing out the fact that his name, if "anagrammed," made the words: "nu hony in a b." many worse arguments have been used in the quarrels of theologians. bunyan has been described as a tall, red-haired man, stern of countenance, quick of eye, and mild of speech. his mildness of speech, i fancy, must have been an acquired mildness. he loved swearing as a boy, and, as _the pilgrim's progress_ shows, even in his later life he had not lost the humour of calling names. no other english author has ever invented a name of the labelling kind equal to that of mr. worldly wiseman--a character, by the way, who does not appear in the first edition of _the pilgrim's progress_, but came in later as an afterthought. congreve's "tribulation spintext" and dickens's "lord frederick verisopht" are mere mechanical contrivances compared to this triumph of imagination and phrase. bunyan's gift for names was in its kind supreme. his humorous fancy chiefly took that form. even atheists can read him with pleasure for the sake of his names. the modern reader, no doubt, often smiles at these names where bunyan did not mean him to smile, as when mrs. lightmind says: "i was yesterday at madam wantons, when we were as merry as the maids. for who do you think should be there but i and mrs. love-the-flesh, and three or four more, with mr. lechery, mrs. filth, and some others?" bunyan's fancifulness, however, gives us pleasure quite apart from such quaint effects as this. how delightful is mr. by-ends's explanation of the two points in regard to which he and his family differ in religion from those of the stricter sort: "first, we never strive against wind and tide. secondly, we are always most zealous when religion goes in his silver slippers; we love much to walk with him in the street, if the sun shines, and the people applaud him." what a fine grotesque, again, bunyan gives us in toothless giant pope sitting in the mouth of the cave, and, though too feeble to follow christian, calling out after him: "you will never mend till more of you be burnt." we do not read _the pilgrim's progress_, however, as a humorous book. bunyan's pains mean more to us than the play of his fancy. his books are not seventeenth-century grotesques, but the story of his heart. he has written that story twice over--with the gloom of the realist in _grace abounding_, and with the joy of the artist in _the pilgrim's progress_. even in _grace abounding_, however, much as it is taken up with a tale of almost lunatic terror, the tenderness of bunyan's nature breaks out as he tells us how, when he was taken off to prison, "the parting with my wife and four children hath often been to me in the place as the pulling the flesh from the bones ... especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all beside. oh, the thoughts of the hardship i thought my poor blind one might go under would break my heart to pieces!" at the same time, fear and not love is the dominating passion in _grace abounding_. we are never far from the noise of hell in its pages. in _grace abounding_ man is a trembling criminal. in _the pilgrim's progress_ he has become, despite his immense capacity for fear, a hero. the description of the fight with apollyon is a piece of heroic literature equal to anything in those romances of adventure that went to the head of don quixote. "but, as god would have it, while apollyon was fetching his last blow, thereby to make a full end of this good man, christian nimbly reached out his hand for his sword, and caught it, saying: 'rejoice not against me, o mine enemy! when i fall i shall arise'; and with that gave him a deadly thrust, which made him give back, as one that had received a mortal wound." heroic literature cannot surpass this. its appeal is universal. when one reads it, one ceases to wonder that there exists even a catholic version of _the pilgrim's progress_, in which giant pope is discreetly omitted, but the heroism of christian remains. bunyan disliked being called by the name of any sect. his imagination was certainly as little sectarian as that of a seventeenth-century preacher could well be. his hero is primarily not a baptist, but a man. he bears, perhaps, almost too close a resemblance to everyman, but his journey, his adventures and his speech save him from sinking into a pulpit generalization. iii.--thomas campion thomas campion is among english poets the perfect minstrel. he takes love as a theme rather than is burned by it. his most charming, if not his most beautiful poem begins: "hark, all you ladies." he sings of love-making rather than of love. his poetry, like moore's--though it is infinitely better poetry than moore's--is the poetry of flirtation. little is known about his life, but one may infer from his work that his range of amorous experience was rather wide than deep. there is no lady "with two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes" troubling his pages with a constant presence. the mellea and caspia--the one too easy of capture, the other too difficult--to whom so many of the latin epigrams are addressed, are said to have been his chief schoolmistresses in love. but he has buried most of his erotic woes, such as they were, in a dead language. his english poems do not portray him as a man likely to die of love, or even to forget a meal on account of it. his world is a happy land of song, in which ladies all golden in the sunlight succeed one another as in a pageant of beauties. lesbia, laura, and corinna with her lute equally inhabit it. they are all characters in a masque of love, forms and figures in a revel. their maker is an epicurean and an enemy to "the sager sort": my sweetest lesbia, let us live and love, and, though the sager sort our deeps reprove, let us not weigh them. heav'n's great lamps do dive into their west, and straight again revive. but, soon as once is set our little light, then must we sleep our ever-during night. ladies in so bright and insecure a day must not be permitted to "let their lovers moan." if they do, they will incur the just vengeance of the fairy queen proserpina, who will send her attendant fairies to pinch their white hands and pitiless arms. campion is the fairy queen's court poet. he claims all men--perhaps, one ought rather to say all women--as her subjects: in myrtle arbours on the downs the fairy queen proserpina, this night by moonshine leading merry rounds, holds a watch with sweet love, down the dale, up the hill; no plaints or groans may move their holy vigil. all you that will hold watch with love, the fairy queen proserpina will make you fairer than dione's dove; roses red, lilies white and the clear damask hue, shall on your cheeks alight: love will adorn you. all you that love, or lov'd before, the fairy queen proserpina bids you increase that loving humour more: they that have not fed on delight amorous, she vows that they shall lead apes in avernus. it would be folly to call the poem that contains these three verses one of the great english love-songs. it gets no nearer love than a ballet does. there are few lyrics of "delight amorous" in english, however, that can compare with it in exquisite fancy and still more exquisite music. campion, at the same time, if he was the poet of the higher flirtation, was no mere amorous jester, as moore was. his affairs of the heart were also affairs of the imagination. love may not have transformed the earth for him, as it did shakespeare and donne and browning, but at least it transformed his accents. he sang neither the "de profundis" of love nor the triumphal ode of love that increases from anniversary to anniversary; but he knew the flying sun and shadow of romantic love, and staged them in music of a delicious sadness, of a fantastic and playful gravity. his poems, regarded as statements of fact, are a little insincere. they are the compliments, not the confessions, of a lover. he exaggerates the burden of his sigh, the incurableness of his wounded heart. but beneath these conventional excesses there is a flow of sincere and beautiful feeling. he may not have been a worshipper, but his admirations were golden. in one or two of his poems, such as: follow your saint, follow with accents sweet; haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet, admiration treads on the heels of worship. all that i sung still to her praise did tend; still she was first, still she my song did end-- in these lines we find a note of triumphant fidelity rare in campion's work. compared with this, that other song beginning: follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow, though thou be black as night, and she made all of light, yet follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow-- seems but the ultimate perfection among valentines. others of the songs hesitate between compliment and the finer ecstasy. the compliment is certainly of the noblest in the lyric which sets out-- when thou must home to shades of underground, and, there arriv'd, a new admired guest, the beauteous spirits do ingirt thee round, white lope, blithe helen, and the rest, to hear the stories of thy finisht love from that smooth tongue whose music hell can move; but it fades by way of beauty into the triviality of convention in the second verse: then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights, of masks and revels which sweet youth did make, of tourneys and great challenges of knights, and all these triumphs for thy beauty's sake: when thou hast told these honours done to thee, then tell, o tell, how thou didst murther me. there is more of jest than of sorrow in the last line. it is an act of courtesy. through all these songs, however, there is a continuous expense of beauty, of a very fortune of admiration, that entitles campion to a place above any of the other contemporaries of shakespeare as a writer of songs. his dates ( - ) almost coincide with those of shakespeare. living in an age of music, he wrote music that shakespeare alone could equal and even shakespeare could hardly surpass. campion's words are themselves airs. they give us at once singer and song and stringed instrument. it is only in music, however, that campion is in any way comparable to shakespeare. shakespeare is the nonpareil among song-writers, not merely because of his music, but because of the imaginative riches that he pours out in his songs. in contrast with his abundance, campion's fortune seems lean, like his person. campion could not see the world for lovely ladies. shakespeare in his lightest songs was always aware of the abundant background of the visible world. campion seems scarcely to know of the existence of the world apart from the needs of a masque-writer. among his songs there is nothing comparable to "when daisies pied and violets blue," or "where the bee sucks," or "you spotted snakes with double tongue," or "when daffodils begin to peer," or "full fathom five," or "fear no more the heat o' the sun." he had neither shakespeare's eye nor shakespeare's experiencing soul. he puts no girdle round the world in his verse. he knows but one mood and its sub-moods. though he can write there is a garden in her face, where roses and white lilies grow, he brings into his songs none of the dye and fragrance of flowers. perhaps it was because he suspected a certain levity and thinness in his genius that campion was so contemptuous of his english verse. his songs he dismissed as "superfluous blossoms of his deeper studies." it is as though he thought, like bacon, that anything written for immortality should be written in latin. bacon, it may be remembered, translated his essays into latin for fear they might perish in so modern and barbarous a tongue as english. campion was equally inclined to despise his own language in comparison with that of the greeks and romans. his main quarrel with it arose, however, from the obstinacy with which english poets clung to "the childish titillation of rhyming." "bring before me now," he wrote, "any the most self-loved rhymer, and let me see if without blushing he be able to read his lame, halting rhymes." there are few more startling paradoxes in literature than that it should have been this hater of rhymes who did more than any other writer to bring the art of rhyme to perfection in the english language. the bent of his intellect was classical, as we see in his astonishing _observations on the art of english poesy_, in which he sets out to demonstrate "the unaptness of rhyme in poesy." the bent of his genius, on the other hand, was romantic, as was shown when, desiring to provide certain airs with words, he turned out--that seems, in the circumstances, to be the proper word--"after the fashion of the time, ear-pleasing rhymes without art." his songs can hardly be called "pot-boilers," but they were equally the children of chance. they were accidents, not fulfilments of desire. luckily, campion, writing them with music in his head, made his words themselves creatures of music. "in these english airs," he wrote in one of his prefaces, "i have chiefly aimed to couple my words and notes lovingly together." it would be impossible to improve on this as a description of his achievement in rhyme. only one of his good poems, "rosecheek'd laura," is to be found among those which he wrote according to his pseudo-classical theory. all the rest are among those in which he coupled his words and notes lovingly together, not as a duty, but as a diversion. irish critics have sometimes hoped that certain qualities in campion's music might be traced to the fact that his grandfather was "john campion of dublin, ireland." the art--and in campion it was art, not artlessness--with which he made use of such rhymes as "hill" and "vigil," "sing" and "darling," besides his occasional use of internal rhyme and assonance (he rhymed "licens'd" and "silence," "strangeness" and "plainness," for example), has seemed to be more akin to the practices of irish than of english poets. no evidence exists, however, as to whether campion's grandfather was irish in anything except his adventures. of campion himself we know that his training was english. he went to peterhouse, and, though he left it without taking a degree, he was apparently regarded as one of the promising figures in the cambridge of his day. "i know, cambridge," apostrophized a writer of the time, "howsoever now old, thou hast some young. bid them be chaste, yet suffer them to be witty. let them be soundly learned, yet suffer them to be gentlemanlike qualified"; and the admonitory reference, though he had left cambridge some time before, is said to have been to "sweet master campion." the rest of his career may be summarized in a few sentences. he was admitted to gray's inn, but was never called to the bar. that he served as a soldier in france under essex is inferred by his biographers. he afterwards practised as a doctor, but whether he studied medicine during his travels abroad or in england is not known. the most startling fact recorded of his maturity is that he acted as a go-between in bribing the lieutenant of the tower to resign his post and make way for a more pliable successor on the eve of the murder of sir thomas overbury. this he did on behalf of sir thomas monson, one of whose dependants, as mr. percival vivian says, "actually carried the poisoned tarts and jellies." campion afterwards wrote a masque in celebration of the nuptials of the murderers. both monson and he, however, are universally believed to have been innocent agents in the crime. campion boldly dedicated his _third book of airs_ to monson after the first shadow of suspicion had passed. as a poet, though he was no puritan, he gives the impression of having been a man of general virtue. it is not only that he added piety to amorousness. this might be regarded as flirting with religion. did not he himself write, in explaining why he mixed pious and light songs; "he that in publishing any work hath a desire to content all palates must cater for them accordingly"? even if the spiritual depth of his graver songs has been exaggerated, however, they are clearly the expression of a charming and tender spirit. never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore, never tired pilgrim's limbs affected slumber more, than my wearied sprite now longs to fly out of my troubled breast. o come quickly, sweetest lord, and take my soul to rest. what has the "sweet master campion" who wrote these lines to do with poisoned tarts and jellies? they are not ecstatic enough to have been written by a murderer. iv.--john donne izaak walton in his short life of donne has painted a figure of almost seraphic beauty. when donne was but a boy, he declares, it was said that the age had brought forth another pico della mirandola. as a young man in his twenties, he was a prince among lovers, who by his secret marriage with his patron's niece--"for love," says walton, "is a flattering mischief"--purchased at first only the ruin of his hopes and a term in prison. finally, we have the later donne in the pulpit of st. paul's represented, in a beautiful adaptation of one of his own images, as "always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, though in none; carrying some, as st. paul was, to heaven in holy raptures, and enticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives." the picture is all of noble charm. walton speaks in one place of "his winning behaviour--which, when it would entice, had a strange kind of elegant irresistible art." there are no harsh phrases even in the references to those irregularities of donne's youth, by which he had wasted the fortune of £ , --equal, i believe, to more than £ , of our money--bequeathed to him by his father, the ironmonger. "mr. donne's estate," writes walton gently, referring to his penury at the time of his marriage, "was the greatest part spent in many and chargeable travels, books, and dear-bought experience." it is true that he quotes donne's own confession of the irregularities of his early life. but he counts them of no significance. he also utters a sober reproof of donne's secret marriage as "the remarkable error of his life." but how little he condemned it in his heart is clear when he goes on to tell us that god blessed donne and his wife "with so mutual and cordial affections, as in the midst of their sufferings made their bread of sorrow taste more pleasantly than the banquets of dull and low-spirited people." it was not for walton to go in search of small blemishes in him whom he regarded as the wonder of the world--him whose grave, mournful friends "strewed ... with an abundance of curious and costly flowers," as alexander the great strewed the grave of "the famous achilles." in that grave there was buried for walton a whole age magnificent with wit, passion, adventure, piety and beauty. more than that, the burial of donne was for him the burial of an inimitable christian. he mourns over "that body, which once was a temple of the holy ghost, and is now become a small quantity of christian dust," and, as he mourns, he breaks off with the fervent prophecy, "but i shall see it reanimated." that is his valediction. if donne is esteemed three hundred years after his death less as a great christian than as a great pagan, this is because we now look for him in his writings rather than in his biography, in his poetry rather than in his prose, and in his _songs and sonnets_ and _elegies_ rather than in his _divine poems_. we find, in some of these, abundant evidence of the existence of a dark angel at odds with the good angel of walton's raptures. donne suffered in his youth all the temptations of faust. his thirst was not for salvation but for experience--experience of the intellect and experience of sensation. he has left it on record in one of his letters that he was a victim at one period of "the worst voluptuousness, an hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning and languages." faust in his cell can hardly have been a more insatiate student than donne. "in the most unsettled days of his youth," walton tells us, "his bed was not able to detain him beyond the hour of four in the morning; and it was no common business that drew him out of his chamber till past ten; all which time was employed in study; though he took great liberty after it." his thoroughness of study may be judged from the fact that "he left the resultance of , authors, most of them abridged and analyzed with his own hand." but we need not go beyond his poems for proof of the wilderness of learning that he had made his own. he was versed in medicine and the law as well as in theology. he subdued astronomy, physiology, and geography to the needs of poetry. nine muses were not enough for him, even though they included urania. he called in to their aid galen and copernicus. he did not go to the hills and the springs for his images, but to the laboratory and the library, and in the library the books that he consulted to the greatest effect were the works of men of science and learning, not of the great poets with whom london may almost be said to have been peopled during his lifetime. i do not think his verse or correspondence contains a single reference to shakespeare, whose contemporary he was, being born only nine years later. the only great elizabethan poet whom he seems to have regarded with interest and even friendship was ben jonson. jonson's catholicism may have been a link between them. but, more important than that, jonson was, like donne himself, an inflamed pedant. for each of them learning was the necessary robe of genius. jonson, it is true, was a pedant of the classics, donne of the speculative sciences; but both of them alike ate to a surfeit of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. it was, i think, because donne was to so great a degree a pagan of the renaissance, loving the proud things of the intellect more than the treasures of the humble, that he found it easy to abandon the catholicism of his family for protestantism. he undoubtedly became in later life a convinced and passionate christian of the protestant faith, but at the time when he first changed his religion he had none of the fanaticism of the pious convert. he wrote in an early satire as a man whom the intellect had liberated from dogma-worship. nor did he ever lose this rationalist tolerance. "you know," he once wrote to a friend, "i have never imprisoned the word religion.... they" (the churches) "are all virtual beams of one sun." few converts in those days of the wars of religion wrote with such wise reason of the creeds as did donne in the lines: to adore or scorn an image, or protest, may all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way to stand inquiring right, is not to stray; to sleep or run wrong is. on a huge hill, cragged and steep, truth stands, and he that will reach her, about must and about must go; and what the hill's suddenness resists win so. this surely was the heresy of an inquisitive mind, not the mood of a theologian. it betrays a tolerance springing from ardent doubt, not from ardent faith. it is all in keeping with one's impression of the young donne as a man setting out bravely in his cockle-shell on the oceans of knowledge and experience. he travels, though he knows not why he travels. he loves, though he knows not why he loves. he must escape from that "hydroptic, immoderate" thirst of experience by yielding to it. one fancies that it was in this spirit that he joined the expedition of essex to cadiz in and afterwards sailed to the azores. or partly in this spirit, for he himself leads one to think that his love-affairs may have had something to do with it. in the second of those prematurely realistic descriptions of storm and calm relating to the azores voyage, he writes: whether a rotten state, and hope of gain, or to disuse me from the queasy pain of being belov'd, and loving, or the thirst of honour, or fair death, out pusht me first. in these lines we get a glimpse of the donne that has attracted most interest in recent years--the donne who experienced more variously than any other poet of his time "the queasy pain of being beloved and loving." donne was curious of adventures of many kinds, but in nothing more than in love. as a youth he leaves the impression of having been an odysseus of love, a man of many wiles and many travels. he was a virile neurotic, comparable in some points to baudelaire, who was a sensualist of the mind even more than of the body. his sensibilities were different as well as less of a piece, but he had something of baudelaire's taste for hideous and shocking aspects of lust. one is not surprised to find among his poems that "heroical epistle of sappho to philaenis," in which he makes himself the casuist of forbidden things. his studies of sensuality, however, are for the most part normal, even in their grossness. there was in him more of the yahoo than of the decadent. there was an excremental element in his genius as in the genius of that other gloomy dean, jonathan swift. donne and swift were alike satirists born under saturn. they laughed more frequently from disillusion than from happiness. donne, it must be admitted, turned his disillusion to charming as well as hideous uses. _go and catch a falling star_ is but one of a series of delightful lyrics in disparagement of women. in several of the _elegies_, however, he throws away his lute and comes to the satirist's more prosaic business. he writes frankly as a man in search of bodily experiences: whoever loves, if he do not propose the right true end of love, he's one that goes to sea for nothing but to make him sick. in _love progress_ he lets his fancy dwell on the detailed geography of a woman's body, with the sick imagination of a schoolboy, till the beautiful seems almost beastly. in _the anagram_ and _the comparison_ he plays the yahoo at the expense of all women by the similes he uses in insulting two of them. in _the perfume_ he relates the story of an intrigue with a girl whose father discovered his presence in the house as a result of his using scent. donne's jest about it is suggestive of his uncontrollable passion for ugliness: had it been some bad smell, he would have thought that his own feet, or breath, that smell had brought. it may be contended that in _the perfume_ he was describing an imaginary experience, and indeed we have his own words on record: "i did best when i had least truth for my subjects." but even if we did not accept mr. gosse's common-sense explanation of these words, we should feel that the details of the story have a vividness that springs straight from reality. it is difficult to believe that donne had not actually lived in terror of the gigantic manservant who was set to spy on the lovers: the grim eight-foot-high iron-bound serving-man that oft names god in oaths, and only then; he that to bar the first gate doth as wide as the great rhodian colossus stride, which, if in hell no other pains there were, makes me fear hell, because he must be there. but the most interesting of all the sensual intrigues of donne, from the point of view of biography, especially since mr. gosse gave it such commanding significance in that _life of john donne_ in which he made a living man out of a mummy, is that of which we have the story in _jealousy_ and _his parting from her_. it is another story of furtive and forbidden love. its theme is an intrigue carried on under a husband's towering eyes, that flamed with oily sweat of jealousy. a characteristic touch of grimness is added to the story by making the husband a deformed man. donne, however, merely laughs at his deformity, as he bids the lady laugh at the jealousy that reduces her to tears: o give him many thanks, he is courteous, that in suspecting kindly warneth us. we must not, as we used, flout openly, in scoffing riddles, his deformity; nor at his board together being set, with words nor touch scarce looks adulterate. and he proposes that, now that the husband seems to have discovered them, they shall henceforth carry on their intrigue at some distance from where he, swol'n and pampered with great fare, sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair. it is an extraordinary story, if it is true. it throws a scarcely less extraordinary light on the nature of donne's mind, if he invented it. at the same time, i do not think the events it relates played the important part which mr. gosse assigns to them in donne's spiritual biography. it is impossible to read mr. gosse's two volumes without getting the impression that "the deplorable but eventful liaison," as he calls it, was the most fruitful occurrence in donne's life as a poet. he discovers traces of it in one great poem after another--even in the _nocturnal upon st. lucy's day_, which is commonly supposed to relate to the countess of bedford, and in _the funeral_, the theme of which professor grierson takes to be the mother of george herbert. i confess that the oftener i read the poetry of donne the more firmly i become convinced that, far from being primarily the poet of desire gratified and satiated, he is essentially the poet of frustrated love. he is often described by the historians of literature as the poet who finally broke down the tradition of platonic love. i believe that, so far is this from being the case, he is the supreme example of a platonic lover among the english poets. he was usually platonic under protest, but at other times exultantly so. whether he finally overcame the more consistent platonism of his mistress by the impassioned logic of _the ecstasy_ we have no means of knowing. if he did, it would be difficult to resist the conclusion that the lady who wished to continue to be his passionate friend and to ignore the physical side of love was anne more, whom he afterwards married. if not, we may look for her where we will, whether in magdalen herbert (already a young widow who had borne ten children when he first met her) or in the countess of bedford or in another. the name is not important, and one is not concerned to know it, especially when one remembers donne's alarming curse on: whoever guesses, thinks, or dreams he knows who is my mistress. one sort of readers will go on speculating, hoping to discover real people in the shadows, as they speculate about swift's stella and vanessa, and his relations to them. it is enough for us to feel, however, that these poems railing at or glorying in platonic love are no mere goldsmith's compliments, like the rhymed letters to mrs. herbert and lady bedford. miracles of this sort are not wrought save by the heart. we do not find in them the underground and sardonic element that appears in so much of donne's merely amorous work. we no longer picture him as a sort of vulcan hammering out the poetry of base love, raucous, powerful, mocking. he becomes in them a child apollo, as far as his temperament will allow him. he makes music of so grave and stately a beauty that one begins to wonder at all the critics who have found fault with his rhythms--from ben jonson, who said that "for not keeping accent, donne deserved hanging," down to coleridge, who declared that his "muse on dromedary trots," and described him as "rhyme's sturdy cripple." coleridge's quatrain on donne is, without doubt, an unequalled masterpiece of epigrammatic criticism. but donne rode no dromedary. in his greatest poems he rides pegasus like a master, even if he does rather weigh the poor beast down by carrying an encyclopædia in his saddle-bags. not only does donne remain a learned man on his pegasus, however: he also remains a humorist, a serious fantastic. humour and passion pursue each other through the labyrinth of his being, as we find in those two beautiful poems, _the relic_ and _the funeral_, addressed to the lady who had given him a bracelet of her hair. in the former he foretells what will happen if ever his grave is broken up and his skeleton discovered with a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. people will fancy, he declares, that the bracelet is a device of lovers to make their souls at the last busy day meet at the grave and make a little stay. bone and bracelet will be worshipped as relics--the relics of a magdalen and her lover. he conjectures with a quiet smile: all women shall adore us, and some men. he warns his worshippers, however, that the facts are far different from what they imagine, and tells the miracle seekers what in reality were "the miracles we harmless lovers wrought": first we loved well and faithfully, yet knew not what we lov'd, nor why; difference of sex no more we knew than our guardian angels do; coming and going, we perchance might kiss, but not between those meals; our hands ne'er touch'd the seals, which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free: these miracles we did; but now, alas! all measure, and all language i should pass, should i tell what a miracle she was. in _the funeral_ he returns to the same theme: whoever comes to shroud me do not harm nor question much that subtle wreath of hair that crowns my arm; the mystery, the sign you must not touch, for 'tis my outward soul. in this poem, however, he finds less consolation than before in the too miraculous nobleness of their love: whate'er she meant by it, bury it with me, for since i am love's martyr, it might breed idolatry, if into other hands these relics came; as 'twas humility to afford to it all that a soul can do, so, 'tis some bravery, that, since you would have none of me, i bury some of you. in _the blossom_ he is in a still more earthly mood, and declares that, if his mistress remains obdurate, he will return to london, where he will find a mistress: as glad to have my body as my mind. _the primrose_ is another appeal for a less intellectual love: should she be more than woman, she would get above all thought of sex, and think to move my heart to study her, and not to love. if we turn back to _the undertaking_, however, we find donne boasting once more of the miraculous purity of a love which it would be useless to communicate to other men, since, there being no other mistress to love in the same kind, they "would love but as before." hence he will keep the tale a secret: if, as i have, you also do, virtue attir'd in woman see, and dare love that, and say so too, and forget the he and she. and if this love, though placed so, from profane men you hide, which will no faith on this bestow, or, if they do, deride: then you have done a braver thing than all the worthies did; and a braver thence will spring, which is, to keep that hid. it seems to me, in view of this remarkable series of poems, that it is useless to look in donne for a single consistent attitude to love. his poems take us round the entire compass of love as the work of no other english poet--not even, perhaps, browning's--does. he was by destiny the complete experimentalist in love in english literature. he passed through phase after phase of the love of the body only, phase after phase of the love of the soul only, and ended as the poet of the perfect marriage. in his youth he was a gay--but was he ever really gay?--free-lover, who sang jestingly: how happy were our sires in ancient time, who held plurality of loves no crime! but even then he looks forward, not with cynicism, to a time when he shall not so easily be to change dispos'd, nor to the arts of several eyes obeying; but beauty with true worth securely weighing, which, being found assembled in some one, we'll love her ever, and love her alone. by the time he writes _the ecstasy_ the victim of the body has become the protesting victim of the soul. he cries out against a love that is merely an ecstatic friendship: but o alas, so long, so far, our bodies why do we forbear? he pleads for the recognition of the body, contending that it is not the enemy but the companion of the soul: soul into the soul may flow though it to body first repair. the realistic philosophy of love has never been set forth with greater intellectual vehemence: so must pure lovers' souls descend t' affections and to faculties, which sense may reach and apprehend, else a great prince in prison lies. to our bodies turn we then, that so weak men on love reveal'd may look; love's mysteries in souls do grow but yet the body is the book. i, for one, find it impossible to believe that all this passionate verse--verse in which we find the quintessence of donne's genius--was a mere utterance of abstract thoughts into the wind. donne, as has been pointed out, was more than most writers a poet of personal experience. his greatest poetry was born of struggle and conflict in the obscure depths of the soul as surely as was the religion of st. paul. i doubt if, in the history of his genius, any event ever happened of equal importance to his meeting with the lady who first set going in his brain that fevered dialogue between the body and the soul. had he been less of a frustrated lover, less of a martyr, in whom love's art did express a quintessence even from nothingness, from dull privations and lean emptiness, much of his greatest poetry, it seems to me, would never have been written. one cannot, unfortunately, write the history of the progress of donne's genius save by inference and guessing. his poems were not, with some unimportant exceptions, published in his lifetime. he did not arrange them in chronological or in any sort of order. his poem on the flea that has bitten both him and his inamorata comes after the triumphant _anniversary_, and but a page or two before the _nocturnal upon st. lucy's day_. hence there is no means of telling how far we are indebted to the platonism of one woman, how much to his marriage with another, for the enrichment of his genius. such a poem as _the canonisation_ can be interpreted either in a platonic sense or as a poem written to anne more, who was to bring him both imprisonment and the liberty of love. it is, in either case, written in defence of his love against some who censured him for it: for god's sake, hold your tongue, and let me love. in the last verses of the poem donne proclaims that his love cannot be measured by the standards of the vulgar: we can die by it, if not live by love, and if unfit for tombs or hearse our legend be, it will be fit for verse; and, if no piece of chronicle we prove, we'll build in sonnets pretty rooms; as well a well-wrought urn becomes the greatest ashes as half-acre tombs, and by these hymns all shall approve us canoniz'd by love: and thus invoke us: "you whom reverend love made one another's hermitage; you to whom love was peace, that now is rage; who did the whole world's soul contract and drove into the glasses of your eyes (so made such mirrors, and such spies, that they did all to you epitomize), countries, towns, courts. beg from above a pattern of your love!" according to walton, it was to his wife that donne addressed the beautiful verses beginning: sweetest love, i do not go for weariness of thee; as well as the series of _valedictions_. of many of the other love-poems, however, we can measure the intensity but not guess the occasion. all that we can say with confidence when we have read them is that, after we have followed one tributary on another leading down to the ultimate thames of his genius, we know that his progress as a lover was a progress from infidelity to fidelity, from wandering amorousness to deep and enduring passion. the image that is finally stamped on his greatest work is not that of a roving adulterer, but of a monotheist of love. it is true that there is enough don-juanism in the poems to have led even sir thomas browne to think of donne's verse rather as a confession of his sins than as a golden book of love. browne's quaint poem, _to the deceased author, before the promiscuous printing of his poems, the looser sort, with the religious_, is so little known that it may be quoted in full as the expression of one point of view in regard to donne's work: when thy loose raptures, donne, shall meet with those that do confine tuning unto the duller line, and sing not but in sanctified prose, how will they, with sharper eyes, the foreskin of thy fancy circumcise, and fear thy wantonness should now begin example, that hath ceased to be sin! and that fear fans their heat; whilst knowing eyes will not admire at this strange fire that here is mingled with thy sacrifice, but dare read even thy wanton story as thy confession, not thy glory; and will so envy both to future times, that they would buy thy goodness with thy crimes. to the modern reader, on the contrary, it will seem that there is as much divinity in the best of the love-poems as in the best of the religious ones. donne's last word as a secular poet may well be regarded as having been uttered in that great poem in celebration of lasting love, _the anniversary_, which closes with so majestic a sweep: here upon earth we are kings, and none but we can be such kings, nor of such subjects be. who is so safe as we, where none can do treason to us, except one of us two? true and false fears let us refrain; let us love nobly, and live, and add again years and years unto years, till we attain to write three-score: this is the second of our reign. donne's conversion as a lover was obviously as complete and revolutionary as his conversion in religion. it is said, indeed, to have led to his conversion to passionate religion. when his marriage with sir george more's sixteen-year-old daughter brought him at first only imprisonment and poverty, he summed up the sorrows of the situation in the famous line--a line which has some additional interest as suggesting the correct pronunciation of his name: john donne; anne donne; undone. his married life, however, in spite of a succession of miseries due to ill-health, debt and thwarted ambition, seems to have been happy beyond prophecy; and when at the end of sixteen years his wife died in childbed, after having borne him twelve children, a religious crisis resulted that turned his conventional churchmanship into sanctity. his original change from catholicism to protestantism has been already mentioned. most of the authorities are agreed, however, that this was a conversion in a formal rather than in a spiritual sense. even when he took holy orders in , at the age of forty-two, he appears to have done so less in answer to any impulse to a religious life from within than because, with the downfall of somerset, all hope of advancement through his legal attainments was brought to an end. undoubtedly, as far back as , he had thought of entering the church. but we find him at the end of writing an epithalamium for the murderers of sir thomas overbury. it is a curious fact that three great poets--donne, ben jonson, and campion--appear, though innocently enough, in the story of the countess of essex's sordid crime. donne's temper at the time is still clearly that of a man of the world. his jest at the expense of sir walter raleigh, then in the tower, is the jest of an ungenerous worldling. even after his admission into the church he reveals himself as ungenerously morose when the countess of bedford, in trouble about her own extravagances, can afford him no more than £ to pay his debts. the truth is, to be forty and a failure is an affliction that might sour even a healthy nature. the effect on a man of donne's ambitious and melancholy temperament, together with the memory of his dissipated health and his dissipated fortune, and the spectacle of a long family in constant process of increase, must have been disastrous. to such a man poverty and neglected merit are a prison, as they were to swift. one thinks of each of them as a lion in a cage, ever growing less and less patient of his bars. shakespeare and shelley had in them some volatile element that could, one feels, have escaped through the bars and sung above the ground. donne and swift were morbid men suffering from claustrophobia. they were pent and imprisoned spirits, hating the walls that seemed to threaten to close in on them and crush them. in his poems and letters donne is haunted especially by three images--the hospital, the prison, and the grave. disease, i think, preyed on his mind even more terrifyingly than warped ambition. "put all the miseries that man is subject to together," he exclaims in one of the passages in that luxuriant anthology that mr. logan pearsall smith has made from the _sermons_; "sickness is more than all .... in poverty i lack but other things; in banishment i lack but other men; but in sickness i lack myself." walton declares that it was from consumption that donne suffered; but he had probably the seeds of many diseases. in some of his letters he dwells miserably on the symptoms of his illnesses. at one time, his sickness "hath so much of a cramp that it wrests the sinews, so much of tetane that it withdraws and pulls the mouth, and so much of the gout ... that it is not like to be cured.... i shall," he adds, "be in this world, like a porter in a great house, but seldomest abroad; i shall have many things to make me weary, and yet not get leave to be gone." even after his conversion he felt drawn to a morbid insistence on the details of his ill-health. those amazing records which he wrote while lying ill in bed in october, , give us a realistic study of a sick-bed and its circumstances, the gloom of which is hardly even lightened by his odd account of the disappearance of his sense of taste: "my taste is not gone away, but gone up to sit at david's table; my stomach is not gone, but gone upwards toward the supper of the lamb." "i am mine own ghost," he cries, "and rather affright my beholders than interest them.... miserable and inhuman fortune, when i must practise my lying in the grave by lying still." it does not surprise one to learn that a man thus assailed by wretchedness and given to looking in the mirror of his own bodily corruptions was often tempted, by "a sickly inclination," to commit suicide, and that he even wrote, though he did not dare to publish, an apology for suicide on religious grounds, his famous and little-read _biathanatos_. the family crest of the donnes was a sheaf of snakes, and these symbolize well enough the brood of temptations that twisted about in this unfortunate christian's bosom. donne, in the days of his salvation, abandoned the family crest for a new one--christ crucified on an anchor. but he might well have left the snakes writhing about the anchor. he remained a tempted man to the end. one wishes that the _sermons_ threw more light on his later personal life than they do. but perhaps that is too much to expect of sermons. there is no form of literature less personal except a leading article. the preacher usually regards himself as a mouthpiece rather than a man giving expression to himself. in the circumstances what surprises us is that the _sermons_ reveal, not so little, but so much of donne. indeed, they make us feel far more intimate with donne than do his private letters, many of which are little more than exercises in composition. as a preacher, no less than as a poet, he is inflamed by the creative heat. he shows the same vehemence of fancy in the presence of the divine and infernal universe--a vehemence that prevents even his most far-sought extravagances from disgusting us as do the lukewarm follies of the euphuists. undoubtedly the modern reader smiles when donne, explaining that man can be an enemy of god as the mouse can be an enemy to the elephant, goes on to speak of "god who is not only a multiplied elephant, millions of elephants multiplied into one, but a multiplied world, a multiplied all, all that can be conceived by us, infinite many times over; nay (if we may dare to say so) a multiplied god, a god that hath the millions of the heathens' gods in himself alone." but at the same time one finds oneself taking a serious pleasure in the huge sorites of quips and fancies in which he loves to present the divine argument. nine out of ten readers of the _sermons_, i imagine, will be first attracted to them through love of the poems. they need not be surprised if they do not immediately enjoy them. the dust of the pulpit lies on them thickly enough. as one goes on reading them, however, one becomes suddenly aware of their florid and exiled beauty. one sees beyond their local theology to the passion of a great suffering artist. here are sentences that express the paradise, the purgatory, and the hell of john donne's soul. a noble imagination is at work--a grave-digging imagination, but also an imagination that is at home among the stars. one can open mr. pearsall smith's anthology almost at random and be sure of lighting on a passage which gives us a characteristic movement in the symphony of horror and hope that was donne's contribution to the art of prose. listen to this, for example, from a sermon preached in st. paul's in january, : let me wither and wear out mine age in a discomfortable, in an unwholesome, in a penurious prison, and so pay my debts with my bones, and recompense the wastefulness of my youth with the beggary of mine age; let me wither in a spittle under sharp, and foul, and infamous diseases, and so recompense the wantonness of my youth with that loathsomeness in mine age; yet, if god withdraw not his spiritual blessings, his grace, his patience, if i can call my suffering his doing, my passion his action, all this that is temporal, is but a caterpillar got into one corner of my garden, but a mildew fallen upon one acre of my corn: the body of all, the substance of all is safe, so long as the soul is safe. the self-contempt with which his imagination loved to intoxicate itself finds more lavish expression in a passage in a sermon delivered on easter sunday two years later: when i consider what i was in my parents' loins (a substance unworthy of a word, unworthy of a thought), when i consider what i am now (a volume of diseases bound up together; a dry cinder, if i look for natural, for radical moisture; and yet a sponge, a bottle of overflowing rheums, if i consider accidental; an aged child, a grey-headed infant, and but the ghost of mine own youth), when i consider what i shall be at last, by the hand of death, in my grave (first, but putrefaction, and, not so much as putrefaction; i shall not be able to send forth so much as ill air, not any air at all, but shall be all insipid, tasteless, savourless, dust; for a while, all worms, and after a while, not so much as worms, sordid, senseless, nameless dust), when i consider the past, and present, and future state of this body, in this world, i am able to conceive, able to express the worst that can befall it in nature, and the worst that can be inflicted on it by man, or fortune. but the least degree of glory that god hath prepared for that body in heaven, i am not able to express, not able to conceive. excerpts of great prose seldom give us that rounded and final beauty which we expect in a work of art; and the reader of donne's _sermons_ in their latest form will be wise if he comes to them expecting to find beauty piecemeal and tarnished though in profusion. he will be wise, too, not to expect too many passages of the same intimate kind as that famous confession in regard to prayer which mr. pearsall smith quotes, and which no writer on donne can afford not to quote: i throw myself down in my chamber, and i call in, and invite god, and his angels thither, and when they are there, i neglect god and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door. i talk on, in the same posture of praying; eyes lifted up; knees bowed down; as though i prayed to god; and, if god, or his angels should ask me, when i thought last of god in that prayer, i cannot tell. sometimes i find that i had forgot what i was about, but when i began to forget it, i cannot tell. a memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain troubles me in my prayer. if donne had written much prose in this kind, his _sermons_ would be as famous as the writings of any of the saints since the days of the apostles. even as it is, there is no other elizabethan man of letters whose personality is an island with a crooked shore, inviting us into a thousand bays and creeks and river-mouths, to the same degree as the personality that expressed itself in the poems, sermons, and life of john donne. it is a mysterious and at times repellent island. it lies only intermittently in the sun. a fog hangs around its coast, and at the base of its most radiant mountain-tops there is, as a rule, a miasma-infested swamp. there are jewels to be found scattered among its rocks and over its surface, and by miners in the dark. it is richer, indeed, in jewels and precious metals and curious ornaments than in flowers. the shepherd on the hillside seldom tells his tale uninterrupted. strange rites in honour of ancient infernal deities that delight in death are practised in hidden places, and the echo of these reaches him on the sighs of the wind and makes him shudder even as he looks at his beloved. it is an island with a cemetery smell. the chief figure who haunts it is a living man in a winding-sheet. it is, no doubt, walton's story of the last days of donne's life that makes us, as we read even the sermons and the love-poems, so aware of this ghostly apparition. donne, it will be remembered, almost on the eve of his death, dressed himself in a winding-sheet, "tied with knots at his head and feet," and stood on a wooden urn with his eyes shut, and "with so much of the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and death-like face," while a painter made a sketch of him for his funeral monument. he then had the picture placed at his bedside, to which he summoned his friends and servants in order to bid them farewell. as he lay awaiting death, he said characteristically, "i were miserable if i might not die," and then repeatedly, in a faint voice, "thy kingdom come, thy will be done." at the very end he lost his speech, and "as his soul ascended and his last breath departed from him he closed his eyes, and then disposed his hands and body into such a posture as required not the least alteration by those that came to shroud him." it was a strange chance that preserved his spectral monument almost uninjured when st. paul's was burned down in the great fire, and no other monument in the cathedral escaped. among all his fantasies none remains in the imagination more despotically than this last fanciful game of dying. donne, however, remained in all respects a fantastic to the last, as we may see in that hymn which he wrote eight days before the end, tricked out with queer geography, and so anciently egoistic amid its worship, as in the verse: whilst my physicians by their love are grown cosmographers, and i their map, who lie flat on this bed, that by them may be shown that this is my south-west discovery, _per fretum febris_, by these straits to die. donne was the poet-geographer of himself, his mistresses, and his god. other poets of his time dived deeper and soared to greater altitudes, but none travelled so far, so curiously, and in such out-of-the-way places, now hurrying like a nervous fugitive, and now in the exultation of the first man in a new found land. v.--horace walpole[ ] [ ] _letters of horace walpole_; oxford university press, vols., s. _supplementary letters_, ; oxford university press, vols., s. horace walpole was "a dainty rogue in porcelain" who walked badly. in his best days, as he records in one of his letters, it was said of him that he "tripped like a pewit." "if i do not flatter myself," he wrote when he was just under sixty, "my march at present is more like a dab-chick's." a lady has left a description of him entering a room, "knees bent, and feet on tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor." when his feet were not swollen with the gout, they were so slender, he said, that he "could dance a minuet on a silver penny." he was ridiculously lean, and his hands were crooked with his unmerited disease. an invalid, a caricature of the birds, and not particularly well dressed in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk stockings, he has nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an impression of almost perfect grace and dandyism. he had all the airs of a beau. he affected coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. he was a china figure of insolence. he lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded everything that happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not be helped. he warmed into humanity in his friendships and in his defence of the house of walpole; but if he descended from his mantelpiece, it was more likely to be in order to feed a squirrel than to save an empire. his most common image of the world was a puppet-show. he saw kings, prime ministers, and men of genius alike about the size of dolls. when george ii. died, he wrote a brief note to thomas brand: "dear brand--you love laughing; there is a king dead; can you help coming to town?" that represents his measure of things. those who love laughing will laugh all the more when they discover that, a week earlier, walpole had written a letter, rotund, fulsome, and in the language of the bended knee, begging lord bute to be allowed to kiss the prince of wales's hand. his attitude to the court he described to george montagu as "mixing extreme politeness with extreme indifference." his politeness, like his indifference, was but play at the expense of a solemn world. "i wrote to lord bute," he informed montagu; "thrust all the _unexpecteds, want of ambition, disinterestedness, etc._, that i could amass, gilded with as much duty, affection, zeal, etc., as possible." he frankly professed relief that he had not after all to go to court and act out the extravagant compliments he had written. "was ever so agreeable a man as king george the second," he wrote, "to die the very day it was necessary to save me from ridicule?" "for my part," he adds later in the same spirit, "my man harry will always be a favourite; he tells me all the amusing news; he first told me of the late prince of wales's death, and to-day of the king's." it is not that walpole was a republican of the school of plutarch. he was merely a toy republican who enjoyed being insolent at the expense of kings, and behind their backs. he was scarcely capable of open rudeness in the fashion of beau brummell's "who's your fat friend?" his ridicule was never a public display; it was a secret treasured for his friends. he was the greatest private entertainer of the eighteenth century, and he ridiculed the great, as people say, for the love of diversion. "i always write the thoughts of the moment," he told the dearest of his friends, conway, "and even laugh to divert the person i am writing to, without any ill will on the subjects i mention." his letters are for the most part those of a good-natured man. it is not that he was above the foible--it was barely more than that--of hatred. he did not trouble greatly about enemies of his own, but he never could forgive the enemies of sir robert walpole. his ridicule of the duke of newcastle goes far beyond diversion. it is the baiting of a mean and treacherous animal, whose teeth were "tumbling out," and whose mouth was "tumbling in." he rejoices in the exposure of the dribbling indignity of the duke, as when he describes him going to court on becoming prime minister in : on friday this august remnant of the pelhams went to court for the first time. at the foot of the stairs he cried and sunk down; the yeomen of the guard were forced to drag him up under the arms. when the closet-door opened, he flung himself at his length at the king's feet, sobbed, and cried, "god bless your majesty! god preserve your majesty!" and lay there howling, embracing the king's knees, with one foot so extended that my lord coventry, who was _luckily_ in waiting, and begged the standers-by to retire, with, "for god's sake, gentlemen, don't look at a great man in distress!" endeavouring to shut the door, caught his grace's foot, and made him roar with pain. the caricature of the duke is equally merciless in the description of george ii.'s funeral in the abbey, in which the "burlesque duke" is introduced as comic relief into the solemn picture: he fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back in a stall, the archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass to spy who was or was not there, spying with one hand and mopping his eyes with the other. then returned the fear of catching cold; and the duke of cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself weighed down, and turning round found it was the duke of newcastle standing upon his train to avoid the chill of the marble. walpole, indeed, broke through his habit of public decorum in his persecution of the duke; and he tells how on one occasion at a ball at bedford house he and brand and george selwyn plagued the pitiful old creature, who "wriggled, and shuffled, and lisped, and winked, and spied" his way through the company, with a conversation at his expense carried on in stage whispers. there was never a more loyal son than horace walpole. he offered up a prime minister daily as a sacrifice at sir robert's tomb. at the same time, his aversions were not always assumed as part of a family inheritance. he had by temperament a small opinion of men and women outside the circle of his affections. it was his first instinct to disparage. he even described his great friend madame du deffand, at the first time of meeting her, as "an old blind débauchée of wit." his comments on the men of genius of his time are almost all written in a vein of satirical intolerance. he spoke ill of sterne and dr. johnson, of fielding and richardson, of boswell and goldsmith. goldsmith he found "silly"; he was "an idiot with once or twice a fit of parts." boswell's _tour of the hebrides_ was "the story of a mountebank and his zany." walpole felt doubly justified in disliking johnson owing to the criticism of gray in the _lives of the poets_. he would not even, when johnson died, subscribe to a monument. a circular letter asking for a subscription was sent to him, signed by burke, boswell, and reynolds. "i would not deign to write an answer," walpole told the miss berrys, "but sent down word by my footman, as i would have done to parish officers with a brief, that i would not subscribe." walpole does not appear in this incident the "sweet-tempered creature" he had earlier claimed to be. his pose is that of a schoolgirl in a cutting mood. at the same time his judgment of johnson has an element of truth in it. "though he was good-natured at bottom," he said of him, "he was very ill-natured at top." it has often been said of walpole that, in his attitude to contemporary men of genius, he was influenced mainly by their position in society--that he regarded an author who was not a gentleman as being necessarily an inferior author. this is hardly fair. the contemporary of whom he thought most highly was gray, the son of a money broker. he did not spare lady mary wortley montagu any more than richardson. if he found an author offensive, it was more likely to be owing to a fastidious distaste for low life than to an aristocratic distaste for low birth; and to him bohemianism was the lowest of low life. it was certainly fielding's bohemianism that disgusted him. he relates how two of his friends called on fielding one evening and found him "banqueting with a blind man, a woman, and three irishmen, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth." horace walpole's daintiness recoiled from the spirit of an author who did not know how to sup decently. if he found boswell's _johnson_ tedious, it was no doubt partly due to his inability to reconcile himself to johnson's table manners. it can hardly be denied that he was unnaturally sensitive to surface impressions. he was a great observer of manners, but not a great portrayer of character. he knew men in their absurd actions rather than in their motives--even their absurd motives. he never admits us into the springs of action in his portraits as saint-simon does. he was too studied a believer in the puppetry of men and women to make them more than ridiculous. and unquestionably the vain race of authors lent itself admirably to his love of caricature. his account of the vanity of gibbon, whose history he admired this side enthusiasm, shows how he delighted in playing with an egoistic author as with a trout: you will be diverted to hear that mr. gibbon has quarrelled with me. he lent me his second volume in the middle of november. i returned it with a most civil panegyric. he came for more incense. i gave it, but, alas, with too much sincerity! i added, "mr. gibbon, i am sorry _you_ should have pitched on so disgusting a subject as the constantinopolitan history. there is so much of the arians and eumonians, and semi-pelagians; and there is such a strange contrast between roman and gothic manners, and so little harmony between a consul sabinus and a ricimer, duke of the palace, that though you have written the story as well as it could be written, i fear few will have patience to read it." he coloured; all his round features squeezed themselves into sharp angles; he screwed up his button mouth, and rapping his snuff-box, said, "it had never been put together before"--_so well_ he meant to add--but gulped it. he meant _so well_ certainly, for tillemont, whom he quotes in every page, has done the very thing. well, from that hour to this i have never seen him, though he used to call once or twice a week; nor has he sent me the third volume, as he promised. i well knew his vanity, even about his ridiculous face and person, but thought he had too much sense to avow it so palpably. "so much," he concludes, "for literature and its fops." the comic spirit leans to an under-estimate rather than an over-estimate of human nature, and the airs the authors gave themselves were not only a breach of his code, but an invitation to his contempt. "you know," he once wrote, "i shun authors, and would never have been one myself if it obliged me to keep such bad company. they are always in earnest and think their profession serious, and will dwell upon trifles and reverence learning. i laugh at all these things, and write only to laugh at them and divert myself. none of us are authors of any consequence, and it is the most ridiculous of all vanities to be vain of being _mediocre."_ he followed the chinese school of manners and made light of his own writings. "what have i written," he asks, "that was worth remembering, even by myself?" "it would be affected," he tells gray, "to say i am indifferent to fame. i certainly am not, but i am indifferent to almost anything i have done to acquire it. the greater part are mere compilations; and no wonder they are, as you say, incorrect when they were commonly written with people in the room." it is generally assumed that, in speaking lightly of himself, walpole was merely posturing. to me it seems that he was sincere enough. he had a sense of greatness in literature, as is shown by his reverence of shakespeare, and he was too much of a realist not to see that his own writings at their best were trifles beside the monuments of the poets. he felt that he was doing little things in a little age. he was diffident both for his times and for himself. so difficult do some writers find it to believe that there was any deep genuineness in him that they ask us to regard even his enthusiasm for great literature as a pretence. they do not realize that the secret of his attraction for us is that he was an enthusiast disguised as an eighteenth-century man of fashion. his airs and graces were not the result of languor, but of his pleasure in wearing a mask. he was quick, responsive, excitable, and only withdrew into, the similitude of a china figure, as diogenes into his tub, through philosophy. the truth is, the only dandies who are tolerable are those whose dandyism is a cloak of reserve. our interest in character is largely an interest in contradictions of this kind. the beau capable of breaking into excitement awakens our curiosity, as does the conqueror stooping to a humane action, the puritan caught in the net of the senses, or the pacifist in a rage of violence. the average man, whom one knows superficially, is a formula, or seems to live the life of a formula. that is why we find him dull. the characters who interest us in history and literature, on the other hand, are perpetually giving the lie to the formulae we invent, and are bound to invent, for them. they give us pleasure not by confirming us, but by surprising us. it seems to me absurd, then, to regard walpole's air of indifference as the only real thing about him and to question his raptures. from his first travels among the alps with gray down to his senile letters to hannah more about the french revolution, we see him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity of his sensations, whether of joy or of horror. he lived for his sensations like an æsthete. he wrote of himself as "i, who am as constant at a fire as george selwyn at an execution." if he cared for the crownings of kings and such occasions, it was because he took a childish delight in the fireworks and illuminations. he had the keen spirit of a masquerader. masquerades, he declared, were "one of my ancient passions," and we find him as an elderly man dressing out "a thousand young conways and cholmondeleys" for an entertainment of the kind, and going "with more pleasure to see them pleased than when i formerly delighted in that diversion myself." he was equally an enthusiast in his hobbies and his tastes. he rejoiced to get back in may to strawberry hill, "where my two passions, lilacs and nightingales, are in bloom." he could not have made his collections or built his battlements in a mood of indifference. in his love of mediæval ruins he showed himself a goth-intoxicated man. as for strawberry hill itself, the result may have been a ridiculous mouse, but it took a mountain of enthusiasm to produce it. walpole's own description of his house and its surroundings has an exquisite charm that almost makes one love the place as he did. "it is a little plaything house," he told conway, "that i got out of mrs. chenevix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. it is set in enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges: "a small euphrates through the piece is roll'd, and little finches wave their wings in gold." he goes on to decorate the theme with comic and fanciful properties: two delightful roads that you would call dusty supply me continually with coaches and chaises; barges as solemn as barons of the exchequer move under my window; richmond hill and ham-walks bound my prospect; but, thank god, the thames is between me and the duchess of queensberry. dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. i have about land enough to keep such a farm as noah's when he set up in the ark with a pair of each kind. it is in the spirit of a child throwing its whole imagination into playing with a noah's ark that he describes his queer house. it is in this spirit that he sees the fields around his house "speckled with cows, horses and sheep." the very phrase suggests toy animals. walpole himself declared at the age of seventy-three: "my best wisdom has consisted in forming a baby-house full of playthings for my second childhood." that explains why one almost loves the creature. macaulay has severely censured him for devoting himself to the collection of knick-knacks, such as king william iii.'s spurs, and it is apparently impossible to defend walpole as a collector to be taken seriously. walpole, however, collected things in a mood of fantasy as much as of connoisseurship. he did not take himself quite seriously. it was fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang up magna charta beside his bed and, opposite it, the warrant for the execution of king charles i., on which he had written "major charta." who can question the fantastic quality of the mind that wrote to conway: "remember, neither lady salisbury nor you, nor mrs. damer, have seen my new divine closet, nor the billiard-sticks with which the countess of pembroke and arcadia used to play with her brother, sir philip," and ended: "i never did see cotchel, and am sorry. is not the old ward-robe there still? there was one from the time of cain, but adam's breeches and eve's under-petticoat were eaten by a goat in the ark. good-night." he laughed over the knick-knacks he collected for himself and his friends. "as to snuff-boxes and toothpick cases," he wrote to the countess of ossory from paris in , "the vintage has entirely failed this year." everything that he turned his mind to in strawberry hill he regarded in the same spirit of comic delight. he stood outside himself, like a spectator, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to figure himself as a master of the ceremonies among the bantams, and the squirrels and the goldfish. in one of his letters he describes himself and bentley fishing in the pond for goldfish with "nothing but a pail and a basin and a tea-strainer, which i persuade my neighbours is the chinese method." this was in order to capture some of the fish for bentley, who "carried a dozen to town t'other day in a decanter." walpole is similarly amused by the spectacle of himself as a planter and gardener. "i have made great progress," he boasts, "and talk very learnedly with the nursery-men, except that now and then a lettuce runs to seed, overturns all my botany, and i have more than once taken it for a curious west indian flowering shrub. then the deliberation with which trees grow is extremely inconvenient to my natural impatience." he goes on enviously to imagine the discovery by posterity of a means of transplanting oaks of a hundred and fifty years as easily as tulip-bulbs. this leads him to enlarge upon the wonders that the horace walpole of posterity will be able to possess when the miraculous discoveries have been made. then the delightfulness of having whole groves of humming-birds, tatne tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spying-glasses to see all that is doing in china, and a thousand other toys, which we now look upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would laugh in our face for staring at. among the various creatures with which he loved to surround himself, it is impossible to forget either the little black spaniel, tony, that the wolf carried off near a wood in the alps during his first travels, or the more imperious little dog, tonton, which he has constantly to prevent from biting people at madame du deffand's, but which with madame du deffand herself "grows the greater favourite the more people he devours." "t'other night," writes walpole, to whom madame du deffand afterwards bequeathed the dog in her will, "he flew at lady barrymore's face, and i thought would have torn her eye out, but it ended in biting her finger. she was terrified; she fell into tears. madame du deffand, who has too much parts not to see everything in its true light, perceiving that she had not beaten tonton half enough, immediately told us a story of a lady whose dog having bitten a piece out of a gentleman's leg, the tender dame, in a great fright, cried out, 'won't it make him sick?'" in the most attractive accounts we possess of walpole in his old age, we see him seated at the breakfast-table, drinking tea out of "most rare and precious ancient porcelain of japan," and sharing the loaf and butter with tonton (now grown almost too fat to move, and spread on a sofa beside him), and afterwards going to the window with a basin of bread and milk to throw to the squirrels in the garden. many people would be willing to admit, however, that walpole was an excitable creature where small things were concerned--a parroquet or the prospect of being able to print original letters of ninon de l'enclos at strawberry, or the discovery of a poem by the brother of anne boleyn, or ranelagh, where "the floor is all of beaten princes." what is not generally realized is that he was also a high-strung and eager spectator of the greater things. i have already spoken of his enthusiasm for wild nature as shown in his letters from the alps. it is true he grew weary of them. "such uncouth rocks," he wrote, "and such uncomely inhabitants." "i am as surfeited with mountains and inns as if i had eat them," he groaned in a later letter. but the enthusiasm was at least as genuine as the fatigue. his tergiversation of mood proves only that there were two walpoles, not that the walpole of the romantic enthusiasms was insincere. he was a devotee of romance, but it was romance under the control of the comic spirit. he was always amused to have romance brought down to reality, as when, writing of mary queen of scots, he said: "i believe i have told you that, in a very old trial of her, which i bought for lord oxford's collection, it is said that she was a large lame woman. take sentiments out of their _pantaufles_, and reduce them to the infirmities of mortality, what a falling off there is!" but see him in the picture-gallery in his father's old house at houghton, after an absence of sixteen years, and the romantic mood is upper-most. "in one respect," he writes, speaking of the pictures, "i am very young; i cannot satiate myself with looking," and he adds, "not a picture here but calls a history; not one but i remember in downing street or chelsea, where queens and crowds admired them." and, if he could not "satiate himself with looking" at the italian and flemish masters, he similarly preserved the heat of youth in his enthusiasm for shakespeare. "when," he wrote, during his dispute with voltaire on the point, "i think over all the great authors of the greeks, romans, italians, french and english (and i know no other languages), i set shakespeare first and alone and then begin anew." one is astonished to find that he was contemptuous of montaigne. "what signifies what a man thought," he wrote, "who never thought of anything but himself, and what signifies what a man did who never did anything?" this sentence might have served as a condemnation of walpole himself, and indeed he meant it so. walpole, however, was an egoist of an opposite kind to montaigne. walpole lived for his eyes, and saw the world as a masque of bright and amusing creatures. montaigne studied the map of himself rather than the map of his neighbours' vanities. walpole was a social being, and not finally self-centred. his chief purpose in life was not to know himself, but to give pleasure to his friends. if he was bored by montaigne, it was because he had little introspective curiosity. like montaigne himself, however, he was much the servant of whim in his literary tastes. that he was no sceptic but a disciple as regards shakespeare and milton and pope and gray suggests, on the other hand, how foolish it is to regard him as being critically a fashionable trifler. not that it is possible to represent him as a man with anything dionysiac in his temperament. the furthest that one can go is to say that he was a man of sincere strong sentiment with quivering nerves. capricious in little things, he was faithful in great. his warmth of nature as a son, as a friend, as a humanitarian, as a believer in tolerance and liberty, is so unfailing that it is curious it should ever have been brought in question by any reader of the letters. his quarrels are negligible when put beside his ceaseless extravagance of good humour to his friends. his letters alone were golden gifts, but we also find him offering his fortune to conway when the latter was in difficulties. "i have sense enough," he wrote, "to have real pleasure in denying myself baubles, and in saving a very good income to make a man happy for whom i have a just esteem and most sincere friendship." "blameable in ten thousand other respects," he wrote to conway seventeen years later, "may not i almost say i am perfect with regard to you? since i was fifteen have i not loved you unalterably?" "i am," he claimed towards the end of his life, "very constant and sincere to friends of above forty years." in his friendships he was more eager to give than to receive. madame du deffand was only dissuaded from making him her heir by his threat that if she did so he would never visit her again. ever since his boyhood he was noted for his love of giving pleasure and for his thoughtfulness regarding those he loved. the earliest of his published letters was until recently one written at the age of fourteen. but dr. paget toynbee, in his supplementary volumes of walpole letters, recently published, has been able to print one to lady walpole written at the age of eight, which suggests that walpole was a delightful sort of child, incapable of forgetting a parent, a friend, or a pet: dear mama, i hop you are wall, and i am very wall, and i hop papa is wal, and i begin to slaap, and i hop al wall and my cosens like there pla things vary wall and i hop doly phillips is wall and pray give my duty to papa. horace walpole. and i am very glad to hear by tom that all my cruatuars are all wall. and mrs. selwyn has sprand her fot and givs her sarves to you and i dind ther yester day. at eton later on he was a member of two leagues of friendship--the "triumvirate," as it was called, which included the two montagus, and the "quadruple alliance," in which one of his fellows was gray. the truth is, walpole was always a person who depended greatly on being loved. "one loves to find people care for one," he wrote to conway, "when they can have no view in it." his friendship in his old age for the miss berrys--his "twin wifes," his "dear both"--to each of whom he left an annuity of £ , , was but a continuation of that kindliness which ran like a stream (ruffled and sparkling with malice, no doubt) through his long life. and his kindness was not limited to his friends, but was at the call of children and, as we have seen, of animals. "you know," he explains to conway, apologizing for not being able to visit him on account of the presence of a "poor little sick girl" at strawberry hill, "how courteous a knight i am to distrest virgins of five years old, and that my castle gates are always open to them." one does not think of walpole primarily as a squire of children, and certainly, though he loved on occasion to romp with the young, there was little in him of a dickens character. but he was what is called "sympathetic." he was sufficient of a man of imagination to wish to see an end put to the sufferings of "those poor victims, chimney-sweepers." so far from being a heartless person, as he has been at times portrayed, he had a heart as sensitive as an anti-vivisectionist. this was shown in his attitude to animals. in , when there was a great terror of mad dogs in london, and an order was issued that all dogs found in the streets were to be killed, he wrote to the earl of strafford: in london there is a more cruel campaign than that waged by the russians: the streets are a very picture of the murder of the innocents--one drives over nothing but poor dead dogs! the dear, good-natured, honest, sensible creatures! christ! how can anybody hurt them? nobody could but those cherokees the english, who desire no better than to be halloo'd to blood--one day samuel byng, the next lord george sackville, and to-day the poor dogs! as for walpole's interest in politics, we are told by writer after writer that he never took them seriously, but was interested in them mainly for gossip's sake. it cannot be denied that he made no great fight for good causes while he sat in the house of commons. nor had he the temper of a ruler of men. but as a commentator on politics and a spreader of opinion in private, he showed himself to be a politician at once sagacious, humane, and sensitive to the meaning of events. his detestation of the arbitrary use of power had almost the heat of a passion. he detested it alike in a government and in a mob. he loathed the violence that compassed the death of admiral byng and the violence that made war on america. he raged against a public world that he believed was going to the devil. "i am not surprised," he wrote in , "at the idea of the devil being always at our elbows. they who invented him no doubt could not conceive how men could be so atrocious to one another, without the intervention of a fiend. don't you think, if he had never been heard of before, that he would have been invented on the late partition of poland?" "philosophy has a poor chance with me," he wrote a little later in regard to america, "when my warmth is stirred--and yet i know that an angry old man out of parliament, and that can do nothing but be angry, is a ridiculous animal." the war against america he described as "a wretched farce of fear daubed over with airs of bullying." war at any time was, in his eyes, all but the unforgivable sin. in , however, his hatred had lightened into contempt. "the dutch fleet is hovering about," he wrote, "but it is a pickpocket war, and not a martial one, and i never attend to petty larceny." as for mobs, his attitude to them is to be seen in his comment on the wilkes riots, when he declares: i cannot bear to have the name of liberty profaned to the destruction of the cause; for frantic tumults only lead to that terrible corrective, arbitrary power--which cowards call out for as protection, and knaves are so ready to grant. not that he feared mobs as he feared governments. he regarded them with an aristocrat's scorn. the only mob that almost won his tolerance was that which celebrated the acquittal of admiral keppel in . it was of the mob at this time that he wrote to the countess of ossory: "they were, as george montagu said of our earthquakes, _so tame you might have stroked them_." when near the end of his life the september massacres broke out in paris, his mob-hatred revived again, and he denounced the french with the hysterical violence with which many people to-day denounce the bolshevists. he called them "_inferno-human_ beings," "that atrocious and detestable nation," and declared that "france must be abhorred to latest posterity." his letters on the subject to "holy hannah," whatever else may be said against them, are not those of a cold and dilettante gossip. they are the letters of the same excitable horace walpole who, at an earlier age, when a row had broken out between the manager and the audience in drury lane theatre, had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried angrily from his box, "he is an impudent rascal!" but his politics never got beyond an angry cry. his conduct in drury lane was characteristic of him: the whole pit huzzaed, and repeated the words. only think of my being a popular orator! but what was still better, while my shadow of a person was dilating to the consistence of a hero, one of the chief ringleaders of the riot, coming under the box where i sat, and pulling off his hat, said, "mr. walpole, what would you please to have us do next?" it is impossible to describe to you the confusion into which this apostrophe threw me. i sank down into the box, and have never since ventured to set my foot into the playhouse. there you have the fable of walpole's life. he always in the end sank down into his box or clambered back to his mantelpiece. other men might save the situation. as for him, he had to look after his squirrels and his friends. this means no more than that he was not a statesman, but an artist. he was a connoisseur of great actions, not a practicer of them. at strawberry hill he could at least keep himself in sufficient health with the aid of iced water and by not wearing a hat when out of doors to compose the greatest works of art of their kind that have appeared in english. had he written his letters for money we should have praised him as one of the busiest and most devoted of authors, and never have thought of blaming him for abstaining from statesmanship as he did from wine. possibly he had the constitution for neither. his genius was a genius, not of westminster, but of strawberry hill. it is in strawberry hill that one finally prefers to see him framed, an extraordinarily likeable, charming, and whimsical figure. he himself has suggested his kingdom entrancingly for us in a letter describing his return to strawberry after a visit to paris in : i feel myself here like a swan, that after living six weeks in a nasty pool upon a common, is got back into its own thames. i do nothing but plume and clean myself, and enjoy the verdure and silent waves. neatness and greenth are so essential in my opinion to the country, that in france, where i see nothing but chalk and dirty peasants, i seem in a terrestrial purgatory that is neither town or country. the face of england is so beautiful, that i do not believe tempe or arcadia were half so rural; for both lying in hot climates, must have wanted the turf of our lawns. it is unfortunate to have so pastoral a taste, when i want a cane more than a crook. we are absurd creatures; at twenty i loved nothing but london. back in strawberry hill, he is the prince charming among correspondents. one cannot love him as one loves charles lamb and men of a deeper and more imaginative tenderness. but how incomparable he is as an acquaintance! how exquisite a specimen--hand-painted--for the collector of the choice creatures of the human race! vi.--william cowper cowper has the charm of littleness. his life and genius were on the miniature scale, though his tragedy was a burden for atlas. he left several pictures of himself in his letters, all of which make one see him as a veritable tom thumb among christians. he wrote, he tells us, at olney, in "a summerhouse not much bigger than a sedan-chair." at an earlier date, when he was living at huntingdon, he compared himself to "a thames wherry in a world full of tempest and commotion," and congratulated himself on "the creek i have put into and the snugness it affords me." his very clothes suggested that he was the inhabitant of a plaything world. "green and buff," he declared, "are colours in which i am oftener seen than in any others, and are become almost as natural to me as a parrot." "my thoughts," he informed the rev. john newton, "are clad in a sober livery, for the most part as grave as that of a bishop's servants"; but his body was dressed in parrot's colours, and his bald head was bagged or in a white cap. if he requested one of his friends to send him anything from town, it was usually some little thing, such as a "genteelish toothpick case," a handsome stock-buckle, a new hat--"not a round slouch, which i abhor, but a smart well-cocked fashionable affair"--or a cuckoo-clock. he seems to have shared wordsworth's taste for the last of these. are we not told that wordsworth died as his favourite cuckoo-clock was striking noon? cowper may almost be said, so far as his tastes and travels are concerned, to have lived in a cage. he never ventured outside england, and even of england he knew only a few of the southern counties. "i have lived much at southampton," boasted at the age of sixty, "have slept and caught a sore throat at lyndhurst, and have swum in the bay of weymouth." that was his grand tour. he made a journey to eastham, near chichester, about the time of this boast, and confessed that, as he drove with mrs. unwin over the downs by moonlight, "i indeed myself was a little daunted by the tremendous height of the sussex hills in comparison of which all i had seen elsewhere are dwarfs." he went on a visit to some relations on the coast of norfolk a few years later, and, writing to lady hesketh, lamented: "i shall never see weston more. i have been tossed like a ball into a far country, from which there is no rebound for me." who but the little recluse of a little world could think of norfolk as a far country and shake with alarm before the "tremendous height" of the sussex downs? "we are strange creatures, my little friend," cowper once wrote to christopher rowley; "everything that we do is in reality important, though half that we do seems to be push-pin." here we see one of the main reasons of cowper's eternal attractiveness. he played at push-pin during most of his life, but he did so in full consciousness of the background of doom. he trifled because he knew, if he did not trifle, he would go mad with thinking about heaven and hell. he sought in the infinitesimal a cure for the disease of brooding on the infinite. his distractions were those not of too light, but of too grave, a mind. if he picnicked with the ladies, it was in order to divert his thoughts from the wrath to come. he was gay, but on the edge of the precipice. i do not mean to suggest that he had no natural inclination to trifling. even in the days when he was studying law in the temple he dined every thursday with six of his old school-fellows at the nonsense club. his essays in bonnell thornton and coleman's paper, _the connoisseur_, written some time before he went mad and tried to hang himself in a garter, lead one to believe that, if it had not been for his breakdown, he might have equalled or surpassed addison as a master of light prose. he was something of the traditional idle apprentice, indeed, during his first years in a solicitor's office, as we gather from the letter in which he reminds lady hesketh how he and thurlow used to pass the time with her and her sister, theodora, the object of his fruitless love. "there was i, and the future lord chancellor," he wrote, "constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and making giggle, instead of studying the law." such was his life till the first attack of madness came at the age of thirty-two. he had already, it is true, on one occasion, felt an ominous shock as a schoolboy at westminster, when a skull thrown up by a gravedigger at st. margaret's rolled towards him and struck him on the leg. again, in his chambers in the middle temple, he suffered for a time from religious melancholy, which he did his best to combat with the aid of the poems of george herbert. even at the age of twenty-three he told robert lloyd in a rhymed epistle that he "addressed the muse," not in order to show his genius or his wit, but to divert a fierce banditti (sworn foe to everything that's witty) that, in a black infernal train, make cruel inroads in my brain, and daily threaten to drive thence my little garrison of sense. it was not till after his release from the st. alban's madhouse in his thirties, however, that he began to build a little new world of pleasures on the ruins of the old. he now set himself of necessity to the task of creating a refuge within sight of the cross, where he could live, in his brighter moments, a sort of epicurean of evangelical piety. he was a damned soul that must occupy itself at all costs and not damn itself still deeper in the process. his round of recreation, it must be admitted, was for the most part such as would make the average modern pleasure-seeker quail worse than any inferno of miseries. only a nature of peculiar sweetness could charm us from the atmosphere of endless sermons and hymns in which cowper learned to be happy in the unwins' huntingdon home. breakfast, he tells us, was between eight and nine. then, "till eleven, we read either the scripture, or the sermons of some faithful preacher of those holy mysteries." church was at eleven. after that he was at liberty to read, walk, ride, or work in the garden till the three o'clock dinner. then to the garden, "where with mrs. unwin and her son i have generally the pleasure of religious conversation till tea-time." after tea came a four-mile walk, and "at night we read and converse, as before, till supper, and commonly finish the evening either with hymns or a sermon; and last of all the family are called to prayers." in those days, it may be, evangelical religion had some of the attractions of a new discovery. theories of religion were probably as exciting a theme of discussion in the age of wesley as theories of art and literature in the age of cubism and _vers libre_. one has to remember this in order to be able to realize that, as cowper said, "such a life as this is consistent with the utmost cheerfulness." he unquestionably found it so, and, when the rev. morley unwin was killed as the result of a fall from his horse, cowper and mrs. unwin moved to olney in order to enjoy further evangelical companionship in the neighbourhood of the rev. john newton, the converted slave-trader, who was curate in that town. at olney cowper added at once to his terrors of hell and to his amusements. for the terrors, newton, who seems to have wielded the gospel as fiercely as a slaver's whip, was largely responsible. he had earned a reputation for "preaching people mad," and cowper, tortured with shyness, was even subjected to the ordeal of leading in prayer at gatherings of the faithful. newton, however, was a man of tenderness, humour, and literary tastes, as well as of a somewhat savage piety. he was not only cowper's tyrant, but cowper's nurse, and, in setting cowper to write the olney hymns, he gave a powerful impulse to a talent hitherto all but hidden. at the same time, when, as a result of the too merciless flagellation of his parishioners on the occasion of some fifth of november revels, newton was attacked by a mob and driven out of olney, cowper undoubtedly began to breathe more freely. even under the eye of newton, however, cowper could enjoy his small pleasures, and we have an attractive picture of him feeding his eight pair of tame pigeons every morning on the gravel walk in the garden. he shared with newton his amusements as well as his miseries. we find him in writing to the departed newton to tell him of his recreations as an artist and gardener. "i draw," he said, "mountains, valleys, woods, and streams, and ducks, and dab-chicks." he represents himself in this lively letter as a christian lover of baubles, rather to the disadvantage of lovers of baubles who are not christians: i delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the earth--what are the planets--what is the sun itself but a bauble? better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, "the maker of all these wonders is my friend!" their eyes have never been opened to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever. they think a fine estate, a large conservatory, a hothouse rich as a west indian garden, things of consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse upon them with ten times more. i am pleased with a frame of four lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ever be worth a farthing; amuse myself with a greenhouse which lord bute's gardener could take upon his back, and walk away with; and when i have paid it the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it air, i say to myself: "this is not mine, it is a plaything lent me for the present; i must leave it soon." in this and the following year we find him turning his thoughts more and more frequently to writing as a means of forgetting himself. "the necessity of amusement," he wrote to mrs. unwin's clergyman son, "makes me sometimes write verses; it made me a carpenter, a birdcage maker, a gardener; and has lately taught me to draw, and to draw too with ... surprising proficiency in the art, considering my total ignorance of it two months ago." his impulse towards writing verses, however, was an impulse of a playful fancy rather than of a burning imagination. "i have no more right to the name of poet," he once said, "than a maker of mouse-traps has to that of an engineer.... such a talent in verse as mine is like a child's rattle--very entertaining to the trifler that uses it, and very disagreeable to all beside." "alas," he wrote in another letter, "what can i do with my wit? i have not enough to do great things with, and these little things are so fugitive that, while a man catches at the subject, he is only filling his hand with smoke. i must do with it as i do with my linnet; i keep him for the most part in a cage, but now and then set open the door, that he may whisk about the room a little, and then shut him up again." it may be doubted whether, if subjects had not been imposed on him from without, he would have written much save in the vein of "dear mat prior's easy jingle" or the latin trifles of vincent bourne, of whom cowper said: "he can speak of a magpie or a cat in terms so exquisitely appropriated to the character he draws that one would suppose him animated by the spirit of the creature he describes." cowper was not to be allowed to write, except occasionally, on magpies and cats. mrs. unwin, who took a serious view of the poet's art, gave him as a subject _the progress of error_, and is thus mainly responsible for the now little-read volume of moral satires, with which he began his career as a poet at the age of fifty in . it is not a book that can be read with unmixed, or even with much, delight. it seldom rises above a good man's rhetoric. cowper, instead of writing about himself and his pets, and his cucumber-frames, wrote of the wicked world from which he had retired, and the vices of which he could not attack with that particularity that makes satire interesting. the satires are not exactly dull, but they are lacking in force, either of wit or of passion. they are hardly more than an expression of sentiment and opinion. the sentiments are usually sound--for cowper was an honest lover of liberty and goodness--but even the cause of liberty is not likely to gain much from such a couplet as: man made for kings! those optics are but dim that tell you so--say, rather, they for him. nor will the manners of the clergy benefit much as the result of such an attack on the "pleasant-sunday-afternoon" kind of pastor as is contained in the lines: if apostolic gravity be free to play the fool on sundays, why not we? if he the tinkling harpsichord regards as inoffensive, what offence in cards? these, it must in fairness be said, are not examples of the best in the moral satires; but the latter is worth quoting as evidence of the way in which cowper tried to use verse as the pulpit of a rather narrow creed. the satires are hardly more than denominational in their interest. they belong to the religious fashion of their time, and are interesting to us now only as the old clothes of eighteenth-century evangelicalism. the subject-matter is secular as well as religious, but the atmosphere almost always remains evangelical. the rev. john newton wrote a preface for the volume, suggesting this and claiming that the author "aims to communicate his own perceptions of the truth, beauty and influence of the religion of the bible." the publisher became so alarmed at this advertisement of the piety of the book that he succeeded in suppressing it in the first edition. cowper himself had enough worldly wisdom to wish to conceal his pious intentions from the first glance of the reader, and for this reason opened the book, not with _the progress of error_, but with the more attractively-named _table talk_. "my sole drift is to be useful," he told a relation, however. "... my readers will hardly have begun to laugh before they will be called upon to correct that levity, and peruse me with a more serious air." he informed newton at the same time: "thinking myself in a measure obliged to tickle, if i meant to please, i therefore affected a jocularity i did not feel." he also told newton: "i am merry that i may decoy people into my company." on the other hand, cowper did not write _john gilpin_ which is certainly his masterpiece, in the mood of a man using wit as a decoy. he wrote it because it irresistibly demanded to be written. "i wonder," he once wrote to newton, "that a sportive thought should ever knock at the door of my intellects, and still more that it should gain admittance. it is as if harlequin should intrude himself into the gloomy chamber where a corpse is deposited in state." harlequin, luckily for us, took hold of his pen in _john gilpin_ and in many of the letters. in the moral satires, harlequin is dressed in a sober suit and sent to a theological seminary. one cannot but feel that there is something incongruous in the boast of a wit and a poet that he had "found occasion towards the close of my last poem, called _retirement_, to take some notice of the modern passion for seaside entertainments, and to direct the means by which they might be made useful as well as agreeable." this might serve well enough as a theme for a "letter to the editor" of _the baptist eye-opener_. one cannot imagine, however, its causing a flutter in the breast of even the meekest of the nine muses. cowper, to say truth, had the genius not of a poet but of a letter-writer. the interest of his verse is chiefly historical. he was a poet of the transition to wordsworth and the revolutionists, and was a mouthpiece of his time. but he has left only a tiny quantity of memorable verse. lamb has often been quoted in his favour. "i have," he wrote to coleridge in , "been reading _the task_ with fresh delight. i am glad you love cowper. i could forgive a man for not enjoying milton, but i would not call that man my friend who should be offended with the 'divine chit-chat of cowper.'" lamb, it should be remembered, was a youth of twenty-one when he wrote this, and cowper's verse had still the attractions of early blossoms that herald the coming of spring. there is little in _the task_ to make it worth reading to-day, except to the student of literary history. like the olney hymns and the moral satires it was a poem written to order. lady austen, the vivacious widow who had meanwhile joined the olney group, was anxious that cowper should show what he could do in blank verse. he undertook to humour her if she would give him a subject. "oh," she said, "you can never be in want of a subject; you can write upon any; write upon this sofa!" cowper, in his more ambitious verse, seems seldom to have written under the compulsion of the subject as the great poets do. even the noble lines _on the loss of the royal george_ were written, as he confessed, "by desire of lady austen, who wanted words to the march in _scipio_." for this lady austen deserves the world's thanks, as she does for cheering him up in his low spirits with the story of john gilpin. he did not write _john gilpin_ by request, however. he was so delighted on hearing the story that he lay awake half the night laughing at it, and the next day he felt compelled to sit down and write it out as a ballad. "strange as it may seem," he afterwards said of it, "the most ludicrous lines i ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at all." "the grinners at _john gilpin_," he said in another letter, "little dream what the author sometimes suffers. how i hated myself yesterday for having ever wrote it!" it was the publication of _the task_ and _john gilpin_ that made cowper famous. it is not _the task_ that keeps him famous to-day. there is, it seems to me, more of the divine fire in any half-dozen of his good letters than there is in the entire six books of _the task_. one has only to read the argument at the top of the third book, called _the garden_, in order to see in what a dreary didactic spirit it is written. here is the argument in full: self-recollection and reproof--address to domestic happiness--some account of myself--the vanity of many of the pursuits which are accounted wise--justification of my censures--divine illumination necessary to the most expert philosopher--the question, what is truth? answered by other questions--domestic happiness addressed again--few lovers of the country--my tame hare--occupations of a retired gentleman in the garden--pruning--framing--greenhouse--sowing of flower-seeds--the country preferable to the town even in the winter--reasons why it is deserted at that season--ruinous effects of gaming and of expensive improvement--book concludes with an apostrophe to the metropolis. it is true that, in the intervals of addresses to domestic happiness and apostrophes to the metropolis, there is plenty of room here for virgilian verse if cowper had had the genius for it. unfortunately, when he writes about his garden, he too often writes about it as prosaically as a contributor to a gardening paper. his description of the making of a hot frame is merely a blank-verse paraphrase of the commonest prose. first, he tells us: the stable yields a stercoraceous heap, impregnated with quick fermenting salts, and potent to resist the freezing blast; for, ere the beech and elm have cast their leaf, deciduous, when now november dark checks vegetation in the torpid plant, expos'd to his cold breath, the task begins. warily therefore, and with prudent heed he seeks a favour'd spot; that where he builds th' agglomerated pile his frame may front the sun's meridian disk, and at the back enjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or hedge impervious to the wind. having further prepared the ground: th' uplifted frame, compact at every joint, and overlaid with clear translucent glass, he settles next upon the sloping mount, whose sharp declivity shoots off secure from the dash'd pane the deluge as it falls. the writing of blank verse puts the poet to the severest test, and cowper does not survive the test. had _the task_ been written in couplets he might have been forced to sharpen his wit by the necessity of rhyme. as it is, he is merely ponderous--a snail of imagination labouring under a heavy shell of eloquence. in the fragment called _yardley oak_ he undoubtedly achieved something worthier of a distant disciple of milton. but i do not think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with poetry to be a good poet. he had even ceased to read poetry by the time he began in earnest to write it. "i reckon it," he wrote in , "among my principal advantages, as a composer of verses, that i have not read an english poet these thirteen years, and but one these thirteen years." so mild was his interest in his contemporaries that he had never heard collins's name till he read about him in johnson's _lives of the poets_. though descended from donne--his mother was anne donne--he was apparently more interested in churchill and beattie than in him. his one great poetical master in english was milton, johnson's disparagement of whom he resented with amusing vehemence. he was probably the least bookish poet who had ever had a classical education. he described himself in a letter to the rev. walter bagot, in his later years, as "a poor man who has but twenty books in the world, and two of them are your brother chester's." the passages i have quoted give, no doubt, an exaggerated impression of cowper's indifference to literature. his relish for such books as he enjoyed is proved in many of his letters. but he was incapable of such enthusiasm for the great things in literature as keats showed, for instance, in his sonnet on chapman's homer. though cowper, disgusted with pope, took the extreme step of translating homer into english verse, he enjoyed even homer only with certain evangelical reservations. "i should not have chosen to have been the original author of such a business," he declared, while he was translating the nineteenth book of the _iliad_, "even though all the nine had stood at my elbow. time has wonderful effects. we admire that in an ancient for which we should send a modern bard to bedlam." it is hardly to be wondered at that his translation of homer has not survived, while his delightful translation of vincent bourne's _jackdaw_ has. cowper's poetry, however, is to be praised, if for nothing else, because it played so great a part in giving the world a letter-writer of genius. it brought him one of the best of his correspondents, his cousin, lady hesketh, and it gave various other people a reason for keeping his letters. had it not been for his fame as a poet his letters might never have been published, and we should have missed one of the most exquisite histories of small beer to be had outside the pages of jane austen. as a letter-writer he does not, i think, stand in the same rank as horace walpole and charles lamb. he has less wit and humour, and he mirrors less of the world. his letters, however, have an extraordinarily soothing charm. cowper's occupations amuse one, while his nature delights one. his letters, like lamb's, have a soul of goodness--not of mere virtue, but of goodness--and we know from his biography that in life he endured the severest test to which a good nature can be subjected. his treatment of mrs. unwin in the imbecile despotism of her old age was as fine in its way as lamb's treatment of his sister. mrs. unwin, who had supported cowper through so many dark and suicidal hours, afterwards became palsied and lost her mental faculties. "her character," as sir james frazer writes in the introduction to his charming selection from the letters,[ ] "underwent a great change, and she who for years had found all her happiness in ministering to her afflicted friend, and seemed to have no thought but for his welfare, now became querulous and exacting, forgetful of him and mindful, apparently, only of herself. unable to move out of her chair without help, or to walk across the room unless supported by two people, her speech at times almost unintelligible, she deprived him of all his wonted exercises, both bodily and mental, as she did not choose that he should leave her for a moment, or even use a pen or a book, except when he read to her. to these demands he responded with all the devotion of gratitude and affection; he was assiduous in his attentions to her, but the strain told heavily on his strength." to know all this does not modify our opinion of cowper's letters, except is so far as it strengthens it. it helps us, however, to explain to ourselves why we love them. we love them because, as surely as the writings of shakespeare and lamb, they are an expression of that sort of heroic gentleness which can endure the fires of the most devastating tragedy. shakespeare finally revealed the strong sweetness of his nature in _the tempest_. many people are inclined to over-estimate _the tempest_ as poetry simply because it gives them so precious a clue to the character of his genius, and makes clear once more that the grand source and material of poetry is the infinite tenderness of the human heart. cowper's letters are a tiny thing beside shakespeare's plays. but the same light falls on them. they have an eighteenth-century restraint, and freedom from emotionalism and gush. but behind their chronicle of trifles, their small fancies, their little vanities, one is aware of an intensely loving and lovable personality. cowper's poem, _to mary_, written to mrs. unwin in the days of her feebleness, is, to my mind, made commonplace by the odious reiteration of "my mary!" at the end of every verse. leave the "my marys" out, however, and see how beautiful, as well as moving, a poem it becomes. cowper was at one time on the point of marrying mrs. unwin, when an attack of madness prevented him. later on lady austen apparently wished to marry him. he had an extraordinary gift for commanding the affections of those of both sexes who knew him. his friendship with the poet hayley, then a rocket fallen to earth, towards the close of his life, reveals the lovableness of both men. [ ] _letters of william cowper_. chosen and edited by j.g. frazer. two vols. eversley series. macmillan. s. net. if we love cowper, then, it is not only because of his little world, but because of his greatness of soul that stands in contrast to it. he is like one of those tiny pools among the rocks, left behind by the deep waters of ocean and reflecting the blue height of the sky. his most trivial actions acquire a pathos from what we know of the _de profundis_ that is behind them. when we read of the olney household--"our snug parlour, one lady knitting, the other netting, and the gentleman winding worsted"--we feel that this marionette-show has some second and immortal significance. on another day, "one of the ladies has been playing a harpsichord, while i, with the other, have been playing at battledore and shuttlecock." it is a game of cherubs, though of cherubs slightly unfeathered as a result of belonging to the pious english upper-middle classes. the poet, inclined to be fat, whose chief occupation in winter is "to walk ten times in a day from the fireside to his cucumber frame and back again," is busy enough on a heavenly errand. with his pet hares, his goldfinches, his dog, his carpentry, his greenhouse--"is not our greenhouse a cabinet of perfumes?"--his clergymen, his ladies, and his tasks, he is not only constantly amusing himself, but carrying on a secret battle, with all the terrors of hell. he is, indeed, a pilgrim who struggles out of one slough of despond only to fall waist-deep into another. this strange creature who passed so much of his time writing such things as _verses written at bath on finding the heel of a shoe, ode to apollo on an ink-glass almost dried in the sun, lines sent with two cockscombs to miss green_, and _on the death of mrs. throckmorton's bullfinch_, stumbled along under a load of woe and repentance as terrible as any of the sorrows that we read of in the great tragedies. the last of his original poems, _the castaway_, is an image of his utter hopelessness. as he lay dying in he was asked how he felt. he replied, "i feel unutterable despair." to face damnation with the sweet unselfishness of william cowper is a rare and saintly accomplishment. it gives him a place in the company of the beloved authors with men of far greater genius than himself--with shakespeare and lamb and dickens. sir arthur quiller-couch has, in one of his essays, expressed the opinion that of all the english poets "the one who, but for a stroke of madness, would have become our english horace was william cowper. he had the wit," he added, "with the underlying moral seriousness." as for the wit, i doubt it. cowper had not the wit that inevitably hardens into "jewels five words long." laboriously as he sought after perfection in his verse, he was never a master of the horatian phrase. such phrases of his--and there are not many of them--as have passed into the common speech flash neither with wit nor with wisdom. take the best-known of them: "the cups that cheer but not inebriate;" "god made the country and man made the town;" "i am monarch of all i survey;" "regions cæsar never knew;" and "england, with all thy faults, i love thee still!" this is lead for gold. horace, it is true, must be judged as something more than an inventor of golden tags. but no man can hope to succeed horace unless his lines and phrases are of the kind that naturally pass into golden tags. this, i know, is a matter not only of style but of temper. but it is in temper as much as in style that cowper differs from horace. horace mixed on easy terms with the world. he enjoyed the same pleasures; he paid his respects to the same duties. he was a man of the world above all other poets. cowper was in comparison a man of the parlour. his sensibilities would, i fancy, have driven him into retreat, even if he had been neither mad nor pious. he was the very opposite of a worldling. he was, as he said of himself in his early thirties, "of a very singular temper, and very unlike all the men that i have ever conversed with." while claiming that he was not an absolute fool, he added: "if i was as fit for the next world as i am unfit for this--and god forbid i should speak it in vanity--i would not change conditions with any saint in christendom." had horace lived in the eighteenth century he would almost certainly have been a deist. cowper was very nearly a methodist. the difference, indeed, between them is fundamental. horace was a pig, though a charming one; cowper was a pigeon. this being so, it seems to me a mistake to regard cowper as a horace _manqué_, instead of being content with his miraculous achievement as a letter-writer. it may well be that his sufferings, so far from destroying his real genius, harrowed and fertilized the soil in which it grew. he unquestionably was more ambitious for his verse than for his prose. he wrote his letters without labour, while he was never weary of using the file on his poems. "to touch and retouch," he once wrote to the rev. william unwin, "is, though some writers boast of negligence, and others would be ashamed to show their foul copies, the secret of almost all good writing, especially in verse. i am never weary of it myself." even if we count him only a middling poet, however, this does not mean that all his fastidiousness of composition was wasted. he acquired in the workshop of verse the style that stood him in such good stead in the field of familiar prose. it is because of this hard-won ease of style that readers of english will never grow weary of that epistolary autobiography in which he recounts his maniacal fear that his food has been poisoned; his open-eyed wonder at balloons; the story of his mouse; the cure of the distention of his stomach by lady hesketh's gingerbread; the pulling out of a tooth at the dinner-table unperceived by the other guests; his desire to thrash dr. johnson till his pension jingled in his pocket; and the mildly fascinated tastes to which he confesses in such a paragraph as: i know no beast in england whose voice i do not account musical save and except always the braying of an ass. the notes of all our birds and fowls please me without one exception. i should not indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage, that i might hang him up in the parlour for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a farm-yard, is no bad performer. here he is no missfire rival of horace or milton or prior, or any of the other poets. here he has arrived at the perfection for which he was born. how much better he was fitted to be a letter-writer than a poet may be seen by anyone who compares his treatment of the same incidents in verse and in prose. there is, for instance, that charming letter about the escaped goldfinch, which is not spoiled for us even though we may take blake's view of caged birds: i have two goldfinches, which in the summer occupy the greenhouse. a few days since, being employed in cleaning out their cages, i placed that which i had in hand upon the table, while the other hung against the wall; the windows and the doors stood wide open. i went to fill the fountain at the pump, and on my return was not a little surprised to find a goldfinch sitting on the top of the cage i had been cleaning, and singing to and kissing the goldfinch within. i approached him, and he discovered no fear; still nearer, and he discovered none. i advanced my hand towards him, and he took no notice of it. i seized him, and supposed i had caught a new bird, but casting my eye upon the other cage perceived my mistake. its inhabitant, during my absence, had contrived to find an opening, where the wire had been a little bent, and made no other use of the escape it afforded him, than to salute his friend, and to converse with him more intimately than he had done before. i returned him to his proper mansion, but in vain. in less than a minute he had thrust his little person through the aperture again, and again perched upon his neighbour's cage, kissing him, as at the first, and singing, as if transported with the fortunate adventure. i could not but respect such friendship, as for the sake of its gratification had twice declined an opportunity to be free, and consenting to their union, resolved that for the future one cage should hold them both. i am glad of such incidents; for at a pinch, and when i need entertainment, the versification of them serves to divert me.... cowper's "versification" of the incident is vapid compared to this. the incident of the viper and the kittens again, which he "versified" in _the colubriad_, is chronicled far more charmingly in the letters. his quiet prose gave him a vehicle for that intimacy of the heart and fancy which was the deepest need of his nature. he made a full confession of himself only to his friends. in one of his letters he compares himself, as he rises in the morning to "an infernal frog out of acheron, covered with the ooze and mud of melancholy." in his most ambitious verse he is a frog trying to blow himself out into a bull. it is the frog in him, not the intended bull, that makes friends with us to-day. vii.--a note on elizabethan plays voltaire's criticism of shakespeare as rude and barbarous has only one fault. it does not fit shakespeare. shakespeare, however, is the single dramatist of his age to whom it is not in a measure applicable. "he was a savage," said voltaire, "who had imagination. he has written many happy lines; but his pieces can please only in london and in canada." had this been said of marlowe, or chapman, or jonson (despite his learning), or cyril tourneur, one might differ, but one would admit that perhaps there was something in it. again, voltaire's boast that he had been the first to show the french "some pearls which i had found" in the "enormous dunghill" of shakespeare's plays was the sort of thing that might reasonably have been said by an anthologist who had made selections from dekker or beaumont and fletcher or any dramatist writing under elizabeth and james except william shakespeare. one reads the average elizabethan play in the certainty that the pearls will be few and the rubbish-heap practically five acts high. there are, perhaps, a dozen elizabethan plays apart from shakespeare's that are as great as his third-best work. but there are no _hamlets_ or _lears_ among them. there are no _midsummer night's dreams_. there is not even a _winter's tale_. if lamb, then, had boasted about what he had done for the elizabethans in general in the terms used by voltaire concerning himself and shakespeare his claim would have been just. lamb, however, was free from voltaire's vanity. he did not feel that he was shedding lustre on the elizabethans as a patron: he regarded himself as a follower. voltaire was infuriated by the suggestion that shakespeare wrote better than himself; lamb probably looked on even cyril tourneur as his superior. lamb was in this as wide of the mark as voltaire had been. his reverent praise has made famous among virgins and boys many an old dramatist who but for him would long ago have been thrown to the antiquaries, and have deserved it. everyone goes to the elizabethans at some time or another in the hope of coming on a long succession of sleeping beauties. the average man retires disappointed from the quest. he would have to be unusually open to suggestion not to be disappointed at the first reading of most of the plays. many a man can read the elizabethans with charles lamb's enthusiasm, however, who never could have read them with his own. one day, when swinburne was looking over mr. gosse's books, he took down lamb's _specimens of the english dramatic poets_, and, turning to mr. gosse, said, "that book taught me more than any other book in the world--that and the bible." swinburne was a notorious borrower of other men's enthusiasms. he borrowed republicanism from landor and mazzini, the devil from baudelaire, and the elizabethans from lamb. he had not, as lamb had, elizabethan blood in his veins. lamb had the elizabethan love of phrases that have cost a voyage of fancies discovered in a cave. swinburne had none of this rich taste in speech. he used words riotously, but he did not use great words riotously. he was excitedly extravagant where lamb was carefully extravagant. he often seemed to be bent chiefly on making a beautiful noise. nor was this the only point on which he was opposed to lamb and the elizabethans. he differed fundamentally from them in his attitude to the spectacle of life. his mood was the mood not of a spectator but of a revivalist. he lectured his generation on the deadly virtues. he was far more anxious to shock the drawing-room than to entertain the bar-parlour. lamb himself was little enough of a formal puritan. he felt that the wings both of the virtues and the vices had been clipped by the descendants of the puritans. he did not scold, however, but retired into the spectacle of another century. he wandered among old plays like an exile returning with devouring eyes to a dusty ancestral castle. swinburne, for his part, cared little for seeing things and much for saying things. as a result, a great deal of his verse--and still more of his prose--has the heat of an argument rather than the warmth of life. his posthumous book on the elizabethans is liveliest when it is most argumentative. swinburne is less amusing when he is exalting the elizabethans than when he is cleaving the skull of a pet aversion. his style is an admirable one for faction-fighting, but is less suitable for intimate conversation. he writes in superlatives that give one the impression that he is furious about something or other even when he is being fairly sensible. his criticism has thus an air of being much more insane than it is. his estimates of chapman and richard brome are both far more moderate and reasonable than appears at first reading. he out-lambs lamb in his appreciativeness; but one cannot accuse him of injudicious excess when he says of brome: were he now alive, he would be a brilliant and able competitor in their own field of work and study with such admirable writers as mrs. oliphant and mr. norris. brome, i think, is better than this implies. swinburne is not going many miles too far when he calls _the antipodes_ "one of the most fanciful and delightful farces in the world." it is a piece of poetic low comedy that will almost certainly entertain and delight any reader who goes to it expecting to be bored. it is safe to say of most of the elizabethan dramatists that the average reader must fulfil one of two conditions if he is not to be disappointed in them. he must not expect to find them giants on the shakespeare scale. better still, he must turn to them as to a continent or age of poetry rather than for the genius of separate plays. of most of them it may be said that their age is greater than they--that they are glorified by their period rather than glorify it. they are figures in a golden and teeming landscape, and one moves among them under the spell of their noble circumstances. they are less great individually than in the mass. if they are giants, few of them are giants who can stand on their own legs. they prop one another up. there are not more than a dozen elizabethan plays that are individually worth a superlative, as a novel by jane austen or a sonnet by wordsworth is. the elizabethan lyrics are an immensely more precious possession than the plays. the best of the dramatists, indeed, were poets by destiny and dramatists by accident. it is conceivable that the greatest of them apart from shakespeare--marlowe and jonson and webster and dekker--might have been greater writers if the english theatre had never existed. shakespeare alone was as great in the theatre as in poetry. jonson, perhaps, also came near being so. _the alchemist_ is a brilliant heavy-weight comedy, which one would hardly sacrifice even for another of jonson's songs. as for dekker, on the other hand, much as one admires the excellent style in which he writes as well as the fine poetry and comedy which survive in his dialogue, his _sweet content_ is worth all the purely dramatic work he ever wrote. one thing that differentiates the other elizabethan and jacobean dramatists from shakespeare is their comparative indifference to human nature. there is too much mechanical malice in their tragedies and too little of the passion that every man recognizes in his own breast. even so good a play as _the duchess of malfi_ is marred by inadequacy of motive on the part of the duchess's persecutors. similarly, in chapman's _bussy d'ambois_, the villains are simply a dramatist's infernal machines. shakespeare's own plays contain numerous examples of inadequacy of motive--the casting-off of cordelia by her father, for instance, and in part the revenge of iago. but, if we accept the first act of _king lear_ as an incident in a fairy-tale, the motive of the passion of lear in the other four acts is not only adequate out overwhelming. _othello_ breaks free from mechanism of plot in a similar way. shakespeare as a writer of the fiction of human nature was as supreme among his contemporaries as was gulliver among the lilliputians. having recognized this, one can begin to enjoy the elizabethan dramatists again. lamb and coleridge and hazlitt found them lying flat, and it was natural that they should raise them up and set them affectionately on pedestals for the gaze of a too indifferent world. the modern reader, accustomed to seeing them on their pedestals, however, is tempted to wish that they were lying flat again. most of the elizabethans deserve neither fate. they should be left neither flat nor standing on separate pedestals, but leaning at an angle of about forty-five degrees--resting against the base of shakespeare's colossal statue. had swinburne written of them all as imaginatively as he has written of chapman, his interpretations, excessive though they often are, would have added to one's enjoyment of them. his _chapman_ gives us a portrait of a character. several of the chapters in _contemporaries of shakespeare_, however, are, apart from the strong language, little more inspiring than the summaries of novels and plays in a school history of literature. even mr. gosse himself, if i remember right, in his _life of swinburne_, described one of the chapters as "unreadable." the book as a whole is not that. but it unquestionably shows us some of the minor elizabethans by fog rather than by the full light of day. viii.--the office of the poets there is--at least, there seems to be--more cant talked about poetry just now than at any previous time. tartuffe is to-day not a priest but a poet--or a critic. or, perhaps, tartuffe is too lively a prototype for the curates of poetry who swarm in the world's capitals at the present hour. there is a tendency in the followers of every art or craft to impose it on the world as a mystery of which the vulgar can know nothing. in medicine, as in bricklaying, there is a powerful trade union into which the members can retire as into a sanctuary of the initiate. in the same way, the theologians took possession of the temple of religion and refused admittance to laymen, except as a meek and awe-struck audience. this largely resulted from the pharisaic instinct that assumes superiority over other men. pharisaism is simply an imperialism of the spirit--joyless and domineering. religion is a communion of immortal souls. pharisaism is a denial of this and an attempt to set up an oligarchy of superior persons. all the great religious reformations have been rebellions on the part of the immortal souls against the superior persons. religion, the reformers have proclaimed, is the common possession of mankind. christ came into the world not to afford a career to theological pedants, but that the mass of mankind might have life and might have it more abundantly. poetry is in constant danger of suffering the same fate as religion. in the great ages of poetry, poetry was what is called a popular subject. the greatest poets, both of greece and of england, took their genius to that extremely popular institution, the theatre. they wrote not for pedants or any exclusive circle, but for mankind. they were, we have reason to believe, under no illusions as to the imperfections of mankind. but it was the best audience they could get, and represented more or less the same kind of world that they found in their own bosoms. it is a difficult thing to prove that the ordinary man can appreciate poetry, just as it is a difficult thing to prove that the ordinary man has an immortal soul. but the great poets, like the great saints, gave him the benefit of the doubt. if they had not, we should not have had the greek drama or shakespeare. that they were right seems probable in view of the excellence of the poems and songs that survive among a peasantry that has not been de-educated in the schools. if the arts were not a natural inheritance of simple people, neither the irish love-songs collected by dr. douglas hyde nor the irish music edited by moore could have survived. i do not mean to suggest that any art can be kept alive without the aid of such specialists as the poet, the singer, and the musician; but neither can it be kept healthily alive without the popular audience. tolstoy's use of the unspoiled peasant as the test of art may lead to absurdities, if carried too far. but at least it is an error in the right direction. it is an affirmation of the fact that every man is potentially an artist just as christianity is an affirmation of the fact that every man is potentially a saint. it is also an affirmation of the fact that art, like religion, makes its appeal to feelings which are shared by the mass of men rather than the feelings which are the exclusive possession of the few. where tolstoy made his chief mistake was in failing to see that the artistic sense, like the religious sense, is something that, so far from being born perfect, even in the unspoiled peasant, passes though stage after stage of labour and experience on the way to perfection. every man is an artist in the seed: he is not an artist in the flower. he may pass all his life without ever coming to flower. the great artist, however, appeals to a universal potentiality of beauty. tolstoy's most astounding paradox came _to_ nothing more than this--that art exists, not for the hundreds of people who are artists in name, but for the millions of people who are artists in embryo. at the same time, there is no use in being too confident that the average man will ever be a poet, even in the sense of being a reader of poetry. all that one can ask is that the doors of literature shall be thrown open to him, as the doors of religion are in spite of the fact that he is not a perfect saint. the histories of literature and religion, it seems likely, both go back to a time in which men expressed their most rapturous emotions in dances. in time the inarticulate shouts of the dancers--scottish dancers still utter those shouts, do they not?--gave place to rhythmic words. it may have been the genius of a single dancer that first broke into speech, but his genius consisted not so much in his separateness from the others as in his power to express what all the others felt. he was the prophet of a rapture that was theirs as much as his own. men learned to speak rhythmically, however, not merely in order to liberate their deepest emotions, but in order to remember things. poetry has a double origin in joy and utility. the "thirty days hath september" rhyme of the english child suggests the way in which men must have turned to verse in prehistoric times as a preservative of facts, of proverbial wisdom, of legend and narrative. sir henry newbolt, i gather from his _new study of english poetry_, would deny the name of poetry to all verse that is not descended from the choric dance. in my opinion it is better to recognize the two lines, as of the father and the mother, in the pedigree of poetry. we find abundant traces of them not only in hesiod and virgil, but in homer and chaucer. the utility of form and the joy of form have in all these poets become inextricably united. the objection to most of the "free verse" that is being written to-day is that in form it is neither delightful nor memorable. the truth is, the memorableness of the writings of a man of genius becomes a part of their delight. if pope is a delightful writer it is not merely because he expressed interesting opinions; it is because he threw most of the energies of his being into the task of making them memorable and gave them a heightened vitality by giving them rhymes. his satires and _the rape of the lock_ are, no doubt, better poetry than the _essay on man_, because he poured into them a still more vivid energy. but i doubt if there is any reasonable definition of poetry which would exclude even pope the "essayist" from the circle of the poets. he was a puny poet, it may be, but poets were always, as they are to-day, of all shapes and sizes. unfortunately, "poetry," like "religion," is a word that we are almost bound to use in several senses. sometimes we speak of "poetry" in contradistinction to prose: sometimes in contradistinction to bad poetry. similarly, "religion" would in one sense include the abode of love as opposed to rationalism, and in another sense would exclude the abode of love as opposed to the religion of st. james. in a common-sense classification, it seems to me, poetry includes every kind of literature written in verse or in rhythms akin to verse. sir thomas browne may have been more poetic than erasmus darwin, but in his best work he did not write poetry. erasmus darwin may have been more prosaic than sir thomas browne, but in his most famous work he did not write prose. sir henry newbolt will not permit a classification of this kind. for him poetry is an expression of intuitions--an emotional transfiguration of life--while prose is the expression of a scientific fact or a judgment. i doubt if this division is defensible. everything that is literature is, in a sense, poetry as opposed to science; but both prose and poetry contain a great deal of work that is preponderantly the result of observation and judgment, as well as a great deal that is preponderantly imaginative. poetry is a house of many mansions. it includes fine poetry and foolish poetry, noble poetry and base poetry. the chief duty of criticism is the praise--the infectious praise--of the greatest poetry. the critic has the right to demand not only a transfiguration of life, but a noble transfiguration of life. swinburne transfigures life in _anactoria_ no less than shakespeare transfigures it in _king lear_. but swinburne's is an ignoble, shakespeare's a noble transfiguration. poetry may be divine or devilish, just as religion may be. literary criticism is so timid of being accused of puritanism that it is chary of admitting that there may be a heaven and a hell of poetic genius as well as of religious genius. the moralists go too far on the other side and are tempted to judge literature by its morality rather than by its genius. it seems more reasonable to conclude that it is possible to have a poet of genius who is nevertheless a false poet, just as it is possible to have a prophet of genius who is nevertheless a false prophet. the lover of literature will be interested in them all, but he will not finally be deceived into blindness to the fact that the greatest poets are spiritually and morally, as well as aesthetically, great. if shakespeare is infinitely the greatest of the elizabethans, it is not merely because he is imaginatively the greatest; it is also because he had a soul incomparably noble and generous. sir henry newbolt deals in an interesting way with this ennoblement of life that is the mark of great poetry. he does not demand of poetry an orthodox code of morals, but he does contend that great poetry marches along the path that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate egotism. the greatest value of his book, however, lies in the fact that he treats poetry as a natural human activity, and that he sees that poetry must be able to meet the challenge to its right to exist. the extreme moralist would deny that it had a right to exist unless it could be proved to make men more moral. the hedonist is content if it only gives him pleasure. the greatest poets, however, do not accept the point of view either of the extreme moralist or of the hedonist. poetry exists for the purpose of delivering us neither to good conduct nor to pleasure. it exists for the purpose of releasing the human spirit to sing, like a lark, above this scene of wonder, beauty and terror. it is consonant both with the world of good conduct and the world of pleasure, but its song is a voice and an enrichment of the earth, uttered on wings half-way between earth and heaven. sir henry newbolt suggests that the reason why hymns almost always fail as poetry is that the writers of hymns turn their eyes away so resolutely from the earth we know to the world that is only a formula. poetry, in his view, is a transfiguration of life heightened by the home-sickness of the spirit from a perfect world. but it must always use the life we live as the material of its joyous vision. it is born of our double attachment to earth and to paradise. there is no formula for absolute beauty, but the poet can praise the echo and reflection of it in the songs of the birds and the colours of the flowers. it is open to question whether there is a fountain filled with blood expresses the home-sickness of the spirit as yearningly as and now my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils. there are many details on which one would like to join issue with sir henry newbolt, but his main contentions are so suggestive, his sympathies so catholic and generous, that it seems hardly worth while arguing with him about questions of scansion or of the relation of blake to contemporary politics, or of the evil of anthologies. his book is the reply of a capable and honest man of letters to the challenge uttered to poets by keats in _the fall of hyperion_, where moneta demands: what benfits canst thou, or all thy tribe to the great world? and declares: none can usurp this height ... but those to whom the miseries of the world are misery, and will not let them rest. sir henry newbolt, like sir sidney colvin, no doubt, would hold that here keats dismisses too slightingly his own best work. but how noble is keats's dissatisfaction with himself! it is such noble dissatisfaction as this that distinguishes the great poets from the amateurs. poetry and religion--the impulse is very much the same. the rest is but a parlour-game. ix.--edward young as critic so little is edward young read in these days that we have almost forgotten how wide was his influence in the eighteenth century. it was not merely that he was popular in england, where his satires, _the love of fame, the universal passion_, are said to have made him £ , . he was also a power on the continent. his _night thoughts_ was translated not only into all the major languages, but into portuguese, swedish and magyar. it was adopted as one of the heralds of the romantic movement in france. even his _conjectures on original composition_, written in in the form of a letter to samuel richardson, earned in foreign countries a fame that has lasted till our own day. a new edition of the german translation was published at bonn so recently as . in england there is no famous author more assiduously neglected. not so much as a line is quoted from him in _the oxford book of english verse_. i recently turned up a fairly full anthology of eighteenth-century verse only to find that though it has room for mallet and ambrose phillips and picken, young has not been allowed to contribute a purple patch even five lines long. i look round my own shelves, and they tell the same story. small enough poets stand there in shivering neglect. akenside, churchill and parnell have all been thought worth keeping. but not on the coldest, topmost shelf has space been found for young. he scarcely survives even in popular quotations. the copy-books have perpetuated one line: procrastination is the thief of time. apart from that, _night thoughts_ have been swallowed up in an eternal night. and certainly a study of the titles of his works will not encourage the average reader to go to him in search of treasures of the imagination. at the age of thirty, in , he wrote a _poem on the last day_, which he dedicated to queen anne. in the following year he wrote _the force of religion, or vanquish'd love_, a poem about lady jane grey, which he dedicated to the countess of salisbury. and no sooner was queen anne dead than he made haste to salute the rising sun in an epistle _on the late queen's death and his majesty's accession to the throne_. passing over a number of years, we find him, in , publishing a so-called pindaric ode, _imperium pelagi; a naval lyric_, in the preface to which he declares with characteristic italics: "_trade_ is a very _noble_ subject in itself; more _proper_ than any for an englishman; and particularly _seasonable_ at this juncture." add to this that he was the son of a dean, that he married the daughter of an earl, and that, other means of advancement having failed, he became a clergyman at the age of between forty and fifty, and the suggested portrait is that of a prudent hanger-on rather than a fiery man of genius. his prudence was rewarded with a pension of £ a year, a royal chaplaincy, and the position (after george iii.'s accession) of clerk of the closet to the princess dowager. in the opinion of young himself, who lived till the age of , the reward was inadequate. at the age of , however, he had conquered his disappointment to a sufficient degree to write a poem on _resignation_. readers who, after a hasty glance at his biography, are inclined to look satirically on young as a time-server, oily with the mediocrity of self-help, will have a pleasant surprise if they read his _conjectures on original composition_ for the first time. it is a bold and masculine essay on literary criticism, written in a style of quite brilliant, if old-fashioned, rhetoric. mrs. thrale said of it: "in the _conjectures upon original composition_ ... we shall perhaps read the wittiest piece of prose our whole language has to boast; yet from its over-twinkling, it seems too little gazed at and too little admired perhaps." this is an exaggerated estimate. dr. johnson, who heard young read the _conjectures_ at richardson's house, said that "he was surprised to find young receive as novelties what he thought very common maxims." if one tempers mrs. thrale's enthusiasms and dr. johnson's scorn, one will have a fairly just idea of the quality of young's book. it is simply a shot fired with a good aim in the eternal war between authority and liberty in literature. this is a controversy for which, were men wise, there would be no need. we require in literature both the authority of tradition and the liberty of genius to such new conquests. unfortunately, we cannot agree as to the proportions in which each of them is required. the french exaggerated the importance of tradition, and so gave us the classical drama of racine and corneille. walt whitman exaggerated the importance of liberty, and so gave us _leaves of grass_. in nearly all periods of literary energy, we find writers rushing to one or other of these extremes. either they declare that the classics are perfect and cannot be surpassed but only imitated; or, like the futurists, they want to burn the classics and release the spirit of man for new adventures. it is all a prolonged duel between reaction and revolution, and the wise man of genius doing his best, like a liberal, to bring the two opponents to terms. much of the interest of young's book is due to the fact that in an age of reaction he came out on the revolutionary side. there was seldom a time at which the classics were more slavishly idolized and imitated. miss morley quotes from pope the saying that "all that is left us is to recommend our productions by the imitation of the ancients." young threw all his eloquence on the opposite side. he uttered the bold paradox: "the less we copy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more." "become a noble collateral," he advised, "not a humble descendant from them. let us build our compositions in the spirit, and in the taste, of the ancients, but not with their materials. thus will they resemble the structures of pericles at athens, which plutarch commends for having had an air of antiquity as soon as they were built." he refuses to believe that the moderns are necessarily inferior to the ancients. if they are inferior, it is because they plagiarize from the ancients instead of emulating them. "if ancients and moderns," he declares, "were no longer considered as masters, and pupils, but as hard-matched rivals for renown, then moderns, by the longevity of their labours, might one day become ancients themselves." he deplores the fact that pope should have been so content to indenture his genius to the work of translation and imitation: though we stand much obliged to him for giving us an homer, yet had he doubled our obligation by giving us--a pope. he had a strong imagination and the true sublime? that granted, we might have had two homers instead of one, if longer had been his life; for i heard the dying swan talk over an epic plan a few weeks before his decease. for ourselves, we hold that pope showed himself to be as original as needs be in his epistles to martha blount and dr. arbuthnot. none the less, the general philosophy of young's remarks is sound enough. we should reverence tradition in literature, but not superstitiously. too much awe of the old masters may easily scare a modern into hiding his talent in a napkin. true, we are not in much danger of servitude to tradition in literature to-day. we no longer imitate the ancients; we only imitate each other. on the whole, we wish there was rather more sense of the tradition in contemporary writing. the danger of arbitrary egoism is quite as great as the danger of classicism. luckily, young, in stating the case against the classicists, has at the same time stated perfectly the case for familiarity with the classics. "it is," he declares, "but a sort of noble contagion, from a general familiarity with their writings, and not by any particular sordid theft, that we can be the better for those who went before us," however we may deride a servile classicism, we should always set out assuming the necessity of the "noble contagion for every man of letters." the truth is, the man of letters must in some way reconcile himself to the paradox that he is at once the acolyte and the rival of the ancients. young is optimistic enough to believe that it is possible to surpass them. in the mechanic arts, he complains, men are always attempting to go beyond their predecessors; in the liberal arts, they merely try to follow them. the analogy between the continuous advance of science and a possible continuous advance in literature is perhaps, a misleading one. professor gilbert murray, in _religio grammatici_, bases much of his argument on a denial that such an analogy should be drawn. literary genius cannot be bequeathed and added to as a scientific discovery can. the modern poet does not stand on shakespeare's shoulders as the modern astronomer stands on galileo's shoulders. scientific discovery is progressive. literary genius, like religious genius, is a miracle less dependent on time. none the less, we may reasonably believe that literature, like science, has ever new worlds to conquer--that, even if Æschylus and shakespeare cannot be surpassed, names as great as theirs may one day be added to the roll of literary fame. and this will be possible only if men in each generation are determined, in the words of goldsmith, "bravely to shake off admiration, and, undazzled by the splendour of another's reputation, to chalk out a path to fame for themselves, and boldly cultivate untried experiment." goldsmith wrote these words in _the bee_ in the same year in which young's _conjectures_ was published. i feel tolerably certain that he wrote them as a result of reading young's work. the reaction against traditionalism, however, was gathering general force by this time, and the desire to be original was beginning to oust the desire to copy. both young's and goldsmith's essays are exceedingly interesting as anticipations of the romantic movement. young was a true romantic when he wrote that nature "brings us into the world all originals--no two faces, no two minds, are just alike; but all bear evident marks of separation on them. born originals, how comes it to pass that we are copies?" genius, he thinks, is commoner than is sometimes supposed, if we would make use of it. his book is a plea for giving genius its head. he wants to see the modern writer, instead of tilling an exhausted soil, staking out a claim in the perfectly virgin field of his own experience. he cannot teach you to be a man of genius; he could not even teach himself to be one. but at least he lays down many of the right rules for the use of genius. his book marks a most interesting stage in the development of english literary criticism. x.--gray and collins there seems to be a definite connection between good writing and indolence. the men whom we call stylists have, most of them, been idlers. from horace to robert louis stevenson, nearly all have been pigs from the sty of epicurus. they have not, to use an excellent anglo-irish word, "industered" like insects or millionaires. the greatest men, one must admit, have mostly been as punctual at their labours as the sun--as fiery and inexhaustible. but, then, one does not think of the greatest writers as stylists. they are so much more than that. the style of shakespeare is infinitely more marvellous than the style of gray. but one hardly thinks of style in presence of the sea or a range of mountains or in reading shakespeare. his munificent and gorgeous genius was as far above style as the statesmanship of pericles or the sanctity of joan of arc was above good manners. the world has not endorsed ben jonson's retort to those who commended shakespeare for never having "blotted out" a line: "would he had blotted out a thousand!" we feel that so vast a genius is beyond the perfection of control we look for in a stylist. there may be badly-written scenes in shakespeare, and pot-house jokes, and wordy hyperboles, but with all this there are enchanted continents left in him which we may continue to explore though we live to be a hundred. the fact that the noble impatience of a shakespeare is above our fault-finding, however, must not be used to disparage the lazy patience of good writing. an Æschylus or a shakespeare, a browning or a dickens, conquers us with an abundance like nature's. he feeds us out of a horn, of plenty. this, unfortunately, is possible only to writers of the first order. the others, when they attempt profusion, become fluent rather than abundant, facile of ink rather than generous of golden grain. who does not agree with pope that dryden, though not shakespeare, would have been a better poet if he had learned: the last and greatest art--the art to blot? who is there who would not rather have written a single ode of gray's than all the poetical works of southey? if voluminousness alone made a man a great writer, we should have to canonize lord lytton. the truth is, literary genius has no rule either of voluminousness or of the opposite. the genius of one writer is a world ever moving. the genius of another is a garden often still. the greatest genius is undoubtedly of the former kind. but as there is hardly enough genius of this kind to fill a wall, much less a library, we may well encourage the lesser writers to cultivate their gardens, and, in the absence of the wilder tumult of creation, to delight us with blooms of leisurely phrase and quiet thought. gray and collins were both writers who labored in little gardens. collins, indeed, had a small flower-bed--perhaps only a pot, indeed--rather than a garden. he produced in it one perfect bloom--the _ode to evening_. the rest of his work is carefully written, inoffensive, historically interesting. but his continual personification of abstract ideas makes the greater part of his verse lifeless as allegories or as sculpture in a graveyard. he was a romantic, an inventor of new forms, in his own day. he seems academic to ours. his work is that of a man striking an attitude rather than of one expressing the deeps of a passionate nature. he is always careful not to confess. his _ode to fear_ does not admit us to any of the secrets of his maniacal and melancholy breast. it is an anticipation of the factitious gloom of byron, not of the nerve-shattered gloom of dostoevsky. collins, we cannot help feeling, says in it what he does not really think. he glorifies fear as though it were the better part of imagination, going so far as to end his ode with the lines: o thou whose spirit most possessed, the sacred seat of shakespeare's breast! by all that from thy prophet broke in thy divine emotions spoke: hither again thy fury deal, teach me but once, like him, to feel; his cypress wreath my meed decree, and i, o fear, will dwell with thee! we have only to compare these lines with claudio's terrible speech about death in _measure for measure_ to see the difference between pretence and passion in literature. shakespeare had no fear of telling us what he knew about fear. collins lived in a more reticent century, and attempted to fob off a disease on us as an accomplishment. what perpetually delights us in the _ode to evening_ is that here at least collins can tell the truth without falsification or chilling rhetoric. here he is writing of the world as he has really seen it and been moved by it. he still makes use of personifications, but they have been transmuted by his emotion into imagery. in these exquisite formal unrhymed lines, collins has summed up his view and dream of life. one knows that he was not lying or bent upon expressing any other man's experiences but his own when he described how the air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat, with short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, or where the beetle winds his small but sullen horn. he speaks here, not in the stiffness of rhetoric, but in the liberty of a new mood, never, for all he knew or cared, expressed before. as far as all the rest of his work is concerned, his passion for style is more or less wasted. but the _ode to evening_ justifies both his pains and his indolence. as for the pains he took with his work, we have it on the authority of thomas warton that "all his odes ... had the marks of repeated correction: he was perpetually changing his epithets." as for his indolence, his uncle, colonel martin, thought him "too indolent even for the army," and advised him to enter the church--a step from which he was dissuaded, we are told, by "a tobacconist in fleet street." for the rest, he was the son of a hatter, and went mad. he is said to have haunted the cloisters of chichester cathedral during his fits of melancholia, and to have uttered a strange accompaniment of groans and howls during the playing of the organ. the castle of indolence was for collins no keep of the pleasures. one may doubt if it is ever this for any artist. did not even horace attempt to escape into stoicism? did not stevenson write _pulvis et umbra_? assuredly gray, though he was as fastidious in his appetites as collins was wild, cannot be called in as a witness to prove the castle of indolence a happy place. "low spirits," he wrote, when he was still an undergraduate, "are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me, go to bed with me, make journeys and return as i do; nay, and pay visits, and will even affect to be jocose, and force a feeble laugh with me." the end of the sentence shows (as do his letters, indeed, and his verses on the drowning of horace walpole's cat) that his indolent melancholy was not without its compensations. he was a wit, an observer of himself and the world about him, a man who wrote letters that have the genius of the essay. further, he was horace walpole's friend, and (while his father had a devil in him) his mother and his aunts made a circle of quiet tenderness into which he could always retire. "i do not remember," mr. gosse has said of gray, "that the history of literature presents us with the memoirs of any other poet favoured by nature with so many aunts as gray possessed." this delicious sentence contains an important criticism of gray. gray was a poet of the sheltered life. his genius was shy and retiring. he had no ambition to thrust himself upon the world. he kept himself to himself, as the saying is. he published the _elegy in a country churchyard_ in only because the editors of the _magazine of magazines_ had got hold of a copy and gray was afraid that they would publish it first. how lethargic a poet gray was may be gathered from the fact that he began the _elegy_ as far back as --mason says it was begun in august, --and did not finish it until june , . probably there is no other short poem in english literature which was brooded over for so many seasons. nor was there ever a greater justification for patient brooding. gray in this poem liberated the english imagination after half a century of prose and rhetoric. he restored poetry to its true function as the confession of an individual soul. wordsworth has blamed gray for introducing, or at least, assisting to introduce, the curse of poetic diction into english literature. but poetic diction was in use long before gray. he is remarkable among english poets, not for having succumbed to poetic diction, but for having triumphed over it. it is poetic feeling, not poetic diction, that distinguishes him from the mass of eighteenth-century writers. it is an interesting coincidence that gray and collins should have brought about a poetic revival by the rediscovery of the beauty of evening, just as mr. yeats and "a.e." brought about a poetic revival in our own day by the rediscovery of the beauty of twilight. both schools of poetry (if it is permissible to call them schools) found in the stillness of the evening a natural refuge for the individual soul from the tyrannical prose of common day. there have been critics, including matthew arnold, who have denied that the _elegy_ is the greatest of gray's poems. this, i think, can only be because they have been unable to see the poetry for the quotations. no other poem that gray ever wrote was a miracle. _the bard_ is a masterpiece of imaginative rhetoric. but the _elegy_ is more than this. it is an autobiography and the creation of a world for the hearts of men. here gray delivers the secret doctrine of the poets. here he escapes out of the eighteenth century into immortality. one realizes what an effort it must have been to rise above his century when one reads an earlier version of some of his most famous lines: some village cato (----) with dauntless breast the little tyrant of his fields withstood; some mute, inglorious tully here may rest; some cæsar guiltless of his country's blood. could there be a more effective example of the return to reality than we find in the final shape of this verse? some village hampden, that with dauntless breast the little tyrant of his fields withstood; some mute, inglorious milton here may rest, some cromwell guiltless of his country's blood. it is as though suddenly it had been revealed to gray that poetry is not a mere literary exercise but the image of reality; that it does not consist in vain admiration of models far off in time and place, but that it is as near to one as one's breath and one's country. not that the _elegy_ would have been one of the great poems of the world if it had never plunged deeper into the heart than in this verse. it is a poem of beauty and sorrow that cannot be symbolized by such public figures as cromwell and milton. here the genius of the parting day, and all that it means to the imagination, its quiet movement and its music, its pensiveness and its regrets, have been given a form more lasting than bronze. perhaps the poem owes a part of its popularity to the fact that it is a great homily, though a homily transfigured. but then does not _hamlet_ owe a great part of its popularity to the fact that it is (among other things) a great blood-and-thunder play with duels and a ghost? one of the so-called mysteries of literature is the fact that gray, having written so greatly, should have written so little. he spoke of himself as a "shrimp of an author," and expressed the fear that his works might be mistaken for those of "a pismire or a flea." but to make a mystery of the indolence of a rather timid, idle, and unadventurous scholar, who was blessed with more fastidiousness than passion, is absurd. to say perfectly once and for all what one has to say is surely as fine an achievement as to keep restlessly trying to say it a thousand times over. gray was no blabber. it is said that he did not even let his mother and his aunts know that he wrote poetry. he lacked boldness, volubility and vital energy. he stood aside from life. he would not even take money from his publishers for his poetry. no wonder that he earned the scorn of dr. johnson, who said of him to boswell, "sir, he was dull in his company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. he was dull in a new way, and that made many think him great." luckily, gray's reserve tempted him into his own heart and into external nature for safety and consolation. johnson could see in him only a "mechanical poet." to most of us he seems the first natural poet in modern literature. xi.--aspects of shelley ( ) the character half-comic shelley is one of the most difficult of men of genius to portray. it is easy enough to attack him or defend him--to damn him as an infidel or to praise him because he made harriet westbrook so miserable that she threw herself into the serpentine. but this is an entirely different thing from recapturing the likeness of the man from the nine hundred and ninety-nine anecdotes that are told of him. these for the most part leave him with an air of absurdity. in his habit of ignoring facts he appeals again and again to one's sense of the comic, like a drunken man who fails to see the kerb or who walks into a wall. he was indeed drunken with doctrine. he lived almost as much from doctrine as from passion. he pursued theories as a child chases butterflies. there is a story told of his oxford days which shows how eccentrically his theories converted themselves into conduct. having been reading plato with hogg, and having soaked himself in the theory of pre-existence and reminiscence, he was walking on magdalen bridge when he met a woman with a child in her arms. he seized the child, while its mother, thinking he was about to throw it into the river, clung on to it by the clothes. "will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, madam?" he asked, in a piercing voice and with a wistful look. she made no answer, but on shelley repeating the question she said, "he cannot speak." "but surely," exclaimed shelley, "he can if he will, for he is only a few weeks old! he may fancy perhaps that he cannot, but it is only a silly whim; he cannot have forgotten entirely the use of speech in so short a time; the thing is absolutely impossible." the woman, obviously taking him for a lunatic, replied mildly: "it is not for me to dispute with you gentlemen, but i can safely declare that i never heard him speak, nor any child, indeed, of his age." shelley walked away with his friend, observing, with a deep sigh: "how provokingly close are these new-born babes!" one can, possibly, discover similar anecdotes in the lives of other men of genius and of men who thought they had genius. but in such cases it is usually quite clear that the action was a jest or a piece of attitudinizing, or that the person who performed it was, as the vulgar say, "a little above himself." in any event it almost invariably appears as an abnormal incident in the life of a normal man. shelley's life, on the other hand, is largely a concentration of abnormal incidents. he was habitually "a bit above himself." in the above incident he may have been consciously behaving comically. but many of his serious actions were quite as comically extraordinary. godwin is related to have said that "shelley was so beautiful, it was a pity he was so wicked." i doubt if there is a single literate person in the world to-day who would apply the word "wicked" to shelley. it is said that browning, who had begun as so ardent a worshipper, never felt the same regard for shelley after reading the full story of his desertion of harriet westbrook and her suicide. but browning did not know the full story. no one of us knows the full story. on the face of it, it looks a peculiarly atrocious thing to desert a wife at a time when she is about to become a mother. it seems ungenerous, again, when a man has an income of £ , a year to make an annual allowance of only £ to a deserted wife and her two children. shelley, however, had not married harriet for love. a nineteen-year-old boy, he had run away with a seventeen-year-old girl in order to save her from the imagined tyranny of her father. at the end of three years harriet had lost interest in him. besides this, she had an intolerable elder sister whom shelley hated. harriet's sister, it is suggested, influenced her in the direction of a taste for bonnet-shops instead of supporting shelley's exhortations to her that she should cultivate her mind. "harriet," says mr. ingpen in _shelley in england_, "foolishly allowed herself to be influenced by her sister, under whose advice she probably acted when, some months earlier, she prevailed upon shelley to provide her with a carriage, silver plate and expensive clothes." we cannot help sympathizing a little with harriet. at the same time, she was making a breach with shelley inevitable. she wished him to remain her husband and to pay for her bonnets, but she did not wish even to pretend to "live up to him" any longer. as mr. ingpen says, "it was love, not matrimony," for which shelley yearned. "marriage," shelley had once written, echoing godwin, "is hateful, detestable. a kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when i think of this most despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies." having lived for years in a theory of "anti-matrimonialism," he now saw himself doomed to one of those conventional marriages which had always seemed to him a denial of the holy spirit of love. this, too, at a time when he had found in mary godwin a woman belonging to the same intellectual and spiritual race as himself--a woman whom he loved as the great lovers in all the centuries have loved. shelley himself expressed the situation in a few characteristic words to thomas love peacock: "everyone who knows me," he said, "must know that the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. harriet is a noble animal, but she can do neither." "it always appeared to me," said peacock, "that you were very fond of harriet." shelley replied: "but you did not know how i hated her sister." and so harriet's marriage-lines were, torn up, as people say nowadays, like a scrap of paper. that shelley did not feel he had done anything inconsiderate is shown by the fact that, within three weeks of his elopement with mary godwin, he was writing to harriet, describing the scenery through which mary and he had travelled, and urging her to come and live near them in switzerland. "i write," his letter runs-- to urge you to come to switzerland, where you will at least find one firm and constant friend, to whom your interests will be always dear--by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured. from none can you expect this but me--all else are unfeeling, or selfish, or have beloved friends of their own, as mrs. b[oinville], to whom their attention and affection is confined. he signed this letter (the ianthe of whom he speaks was his daughter): with love to my sweet little ianthe, ever most affectionately yours, s. this letter, if it had been written by an amorist, would seem either base or priggish. coming from shelley, it is a miracle of what can only be called innocence. the most interesting of the "new facts and letters" in mr. ingpen's book relate to shelley's expulsion from oxford and his runaway match with harriet, and to his father's attitude on both these occasions. shelley's father, backed by the family solicitor, cuts a commonplace figure in the story. he is simply the conventional grieved parent. he made no effort to understand his son. the most he did was to try to save his respectability. he objected to shelley's studying for the bar, but was anxious to make him a member of parliament; and shelley and he dined with the duke of norfolk to discuss the matter, the result being that the younger man was highly indignant "at what he considered an effort to shackle his mind, and introduce him into life as a mere follower of the duke." how unpromising as a party politician shelley was may be gathered from the fact that in , the same year in which he dined with the duke, he not only wrote a satire on the regent _à propos_ of a carlton house fête, but "amused himself with throwing copies into the carriages of persons going to carlton house after the fête." shelley's methods of propaganda were on other occasions also more eccentric than is usual with followers of dukes. his journey to dublin to preach catholic emancipation and repeal of the union was, the beginning of a brief but extraordinary period of propaganda by pamphlet. having written a fivepenny pamphlet, _an address to the irish people_, he stood in the balcony of his lodgings in lower sackville street, and threw copies to the passers-by. "i stand," he wrote at the time, "at the balcony of our window, and watch till i see a man _who looks likely_; i throw a book to him." harriet, it is to be feared, saw only the comic side of the adventure. writing to elizabeth hitchener--"the brown demon," as shelley called her when he came to hate her--she said: i'm sure you would laugh were you to see us give the pamphlets. we throw them out of the window, and give them to men that we pass in the streets. for myself, i am ready to die of laughter when it is done, and percy looks so grave. yesterday he put one into a woman's hood and cloak. she knew nothing of it, and we passed her. i could hardly get on: my muscles were so irritated. shelley, none the less, was in regard to ireland a wiser politician than the politicians, and he was indulging in no turgid or fanciful prose in his _address_ when he described the act of union as "the most successful engine that england ever wielded over the misery of fallen ireland." godwin, with whom shelley had been corresponding for some time, now became alarmed at his disciple's reckless daring. "shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!" he wrote to him in his anxiety. it is evidence of the extent of godwin's influence over shelley that the latter withdrew his irish publications and returned to england, having spent about six weeks on his mission to the irish people. mr. ingpen has really written a new biography of shelley rather than a compilation of new material. the new documents incorporated in the book were discovered by the successors to mr. william whitton, the shelleys' family solicitor, but they can hardly be said to add much to our knowledge of the facts about shelley. they prove, however, that his marriage to harriet westbrook took place in a presbyterian church in edinburgh, and that, at a later period, he was twice arrested for debt. mr. ingpen holds that they also prove that shelley "appeared on the boards of the windsor theatre as an actor in shakespearean drama." but we have only william whitton, the solicitor's words for this, and it is clear that he had been at no pains to investigate the matter. "it was mentioned to me yesterday," he wrote to shelley's father in november, , "that mr. p.b. shelley was exhibiting himself on the windsor stage in the character of shakespeare's plays, under the figured name of cooks." "the character of shakespeare's plays" sounds oddly, as though whitton did not know what he was talking about, unless he was referring to allegorical "tableaux vivants" of some sort. certainly, so vague a rumour as this--the sort of rumour that would naturally arise in regard to a young man who was supposed to have gone to the bad--is no trustworthy evidence that shelley was ever "an actor in shakespearean drama." at the same time, mr. ingpen deserves enthusiastic praise for the untiring pursuit of facts which has enabled him to add an indispensable book to the shelley library. i wish that, as he has to some extent followed the events of shelley's life until the end, he had filled in the details of the life abroad as well as the life in england. his book is an absorbing biography, but it remains of set purpose a biography with gaps. he writes, it should be added, in the spirit of a collector of facts rather than of a psychologist. one has to create one's own portrait of shelley out of the facts he has brought together. one is surprised, by the way, to find so devoted a student of shelley--a student to whom every lover of literature is indebted for his edition of shelley's letters as well as for the biography--referring to shelley again and again as "bysshe." shelley's family, it may be admitted, called him "bysshe." but never was a more inappropriate name given to a poet who brought down music from heaven. at the same time, as we read his biography over again, we feel that it is possible that the two names do somehow express two incongruous aspects of the man. in his life he was, to a great extent, bysshe; in his poetry he was shelley. shelley wrote _the skylark_ and _pan_ and _the west wind_. it was bysshe who imagined that a fat old woman in a train had infected him with incurable elephantiasis. mr. ingpen quotes peacock's account of this characteristic illusion: he was continually on the watch for its symptoms; his legs were to swell to the size of an elephant's, and his skin was to be crumpled over like goose-skin. he would draw the skin of his own hands arms, and neck, very tight, and, if he discovered any deviation from smoothness, he would seize the person next to him and endeavour, by a corresponding pressure, to see if any corresponding deviation existed. he often startled young ladies in an evening party by this singular process, which was as instantaneous as a flash of lightning. mr. ingpen has wisely omitted nothing about bysshe, however ludicrous. after reading a biography so unsparing in tragi-comic narrative, however, one has to read _prometheus_ again in order to recall that divine song of a freed spirit, the incarnation of which we call shelley. ( ) the experimentalist mr. buxton forman has an original way of recommending books to our notice. in an introduction to medwin's _life of percy bysshe shelley_ he begins by frankly telling us that it is a bad book, and that the only point of controversy in regard to it is as to the kind of bad book it is. "last century," he declares, "produced a plethora of bad books that were valuable, and of fairly good books with no lasting value. medwin's distinction is that he left two bad books which were and still are valuable, but whether the _byron conversations_ and the _life of shelley_ should be called the two most valuable bad books of the century or the two worst valuable books of the century is a hard point in casuistry." medwin, we may admit, even if he was not the "perfect idiot" he has been called, would have been a dull fellow enough if he had never met shelley or byron. but he did meet them, and as a result he will live to all eternity, or near it, a little gilded by their rays. he was not, mr. forman contends, the original of the man who "saw shelley plain" in browning's lyric. none the less, he is precisely that man in the imaginations of most of us. a relative of shelley, a school friend, an intimate of the last years in italy, even though we know him to have been one of those men who cannot help lying because they are so stupid, he still fascinates us as a treasury of sidelights on one of the loveliest and most flashing lives in the history of english literature. shelley is often presented to us as a kind of creature from fairyland, continually wounded in a struggle with the despotic realities of earth. here and in his poetry, however, we see him rather as the herald of the age of science: he was a born experimentalist; he experimented, not only in chemistry, but in life and in politics. at school, he and his solar microscope were inseparable. ardently interested in chemistry, he once, we are told, borrowed a book on the subject from medwin's father, but his own father sent it back with a note saying: "i have returned the book on chemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at eton." during his life at university college, oxford, his delight in chemical experiments continued. his chemical operations seemed to an unskilful observer to premise nothing but disasters. he had blown himself up at eton. he had inadvertently swallowed some mineral poison, which he declared had seriously injured his health, and from the effects of which he should never recover. his hands, his clothes, his books, and his furniture, were stained and covered by medical acids--more than one hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena of combustion, especially in the middle of the room, where the floor had also been burnt by his mixing ether or some other fluid in a crucible, and the honourable wound was speedily enlarged by rents, for the philosopher, as he hastily crossed the room in pursuit of truth, was frequently caught in it by the foot. the same eagerness of discovery is shown in his passion for kite-flying as a boy: he was fond of flying kites, and at field place made an electrical one, an idea borrowed from franklin, in order to draw lightning from the clouds--fire from heaven, like a new prometheus. and his generous dream of bringing science to the service of humanity is revealed in his reflection: what a comfort it would be to the poor at all times, and especially in winter, if we could be masters of caloric, and could at will furnish them with a constant supply! shelley's many-sided zeal in the pursuit of truth naturally led him early to invade theology. from his eton days, he used to enter into controversies by letter with learned divines. medwin declares that he saw one such correspondence in which shelley engaged in argument with a bishop "under the assumed name of a woman." it must have been in a somewhat similar mood that "one sunday after we had been to rowland hill's chapel, and were dining together in the city, he wrote to him under an assumed name, proposing to preach to his congregation." certainly, shelley loved mystification scarcely less than he loved truth itself. he was a romanticist as well as a philosopher, and the reading in his childhood of novels like _zofloya the moor_--a work as wild, apparently, as anything cyril tourneur ever wrote--excited his imagination to impossible flights of adventure. few of us have the endurance to study the effects of this ghostly reading in shelley's own work--his forgotten novels, _zastrossi_, and _st. irvyne or the rosicrucian_--but we can see how his life itself borrowed some of the extravagances of fiction. many of his recorded adventures are supposed to have been hallucinations, like the story of the "stranger in a military cloak," who, seeing him in a post-office at pisa, said, "what! are you that d--d atheist, shelley?" and felled him to the ground. on the other hand, shelley's story of his being attacked by a midnight assassin in wales, after being disbelieved for three-quarters of a century, has in recent years been corroborated in the most unexpected way. wild a fiction as his life was in many respects, it was a fiction he himself sincerely and innocently believed. his imaginative appetite, having devoured science by day and sixpenny romances by night, still remained unsatisfied, and, quite probably, went on to mix up reality and make-believe past all recognition for its next dish. francis thompson, with all respect to many critics, was right when he noted what a complete playfellow shelley was in his life. when he was in london after his expulsion from the university, he could throw himself with all his being into childish games like skimming stones on the serpentine, "counting with the utmost glee the number of bounds, as the flat stones flew skimming over the surface of the water." he found a perfect pleasure in paper boats, and we hear of his making a sail on one occasion out of a ten-pound note--one of those myths, perhaps, which gather round poets. it must have been the innocence of pleasure shown in games like these that made him an irresistible companion to so many comparatively prosaic people. for the idea that shelley in private life was aloof and unpopular from his childhood up is an entirely false one. as medwin points out, in referring to his school-days, he "must have had a rather large circle of friends, since his parting breakfast at eton cost £ ." even at the distance of a century, we are still seized by the fascination of that boyish figure with the "stag eyes," so enthusiastically in pursuit of truth and of dreams, of trifles light as air and of the redemption of the human race. "his figure," hogg tells us, "was slight and fragile, and yet his bones were large and strong. he was tall, but he stooped so much that he seemed of low stature." and, in medwin's book, we even become reconciled to that shrill voice of his, which lamb and most other people found so unpleasant. medwin gives us nothing in the nature of a portrait of shelley in these heavy and incoherent pages; but he gives us invaluable materials for such a portrait--in descriptions, for instance, of how he used to go on with his reading, even when he was out walking, and would get so absorbed in his studies that he sometimes asked, "mary, have i dined?" more important, as revealing his too exquisite sensitiveness, is the account of how medwin saw him, "after threading the carnival crowd in the lung' arno corsos, throw himself, half-fainting, into a chair, overpowered by the atmosphere of evil passions, as he used to say, in that sensual and unintellectual crowd." some people, on reading a passage like this, will rush to the conclusion that shelley was a prig. but the prig is a man easily wounded by blows to his self-esteem, not by the miseries and imperfections of humanity. shelley, no doubt, was more convinced of his own rightness than any other man of the same fine genius in english history. he did not indulge in repentance, like burns and byron. on the other hand, he was not in the smallest degree an egolator. he had not even such an innocent egoism as thoreau's. he was always longing to give himself to the world. in the italian days we find him planning an expedition with byron to rescue, by main force, a man who was in danger of being burnt alive for sacrilege. he has often been denounced for his heartless treatment of harriet westbrook, and, though we may not judge him, it is possible that a better man would have behaved differently. but it was a mark of his unselfishness, at least, that he went through the marriage service with both his wives, in spite of his principles, that he so long endured harriet's sister as the tyrant of his house, and that he neglected none of his responsibilities to her, in so far as they were consistent with his deserting her for another woman. this may seem a _bizarre_ defence, but i merely wish to emphasize the fact that shelley behaved far better than ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done, given the same principles and the same circumstances. he was a man who never followed the line of least resistance or of self-indulgence, as most men do in their love affairs. he fought a difficult fight all his life in a world that ignored him, except when it was denouncing him as a polluter of society. whatever mistakes we may consider him to have made, we can hardly fail to admit that he was one of the greatest of english puritans. ( ) the poet of hope shelley is the poet for a revolutionary age. he is the poet of hope, as wordsworth is the poet of wisdom. he has been charged with being intangible and unearthly, but he is so only in the sense in which the future is intangible and unearthly. he is no more unearthly than the skylark or the rainbow or the dawn. his world, indeed, is a universe of skylarks and rainbows and dawns--a universe in which like a thousand dawns on a single night the splendours rise and spread. he at once dazzles and overwhelms us with light and music. he is unearthly in the sense that as we read him we seem to move in a new element. we lose to some extent the gravity of flesh and find ourselves wandering among stars and sunbeams, or diving under sea or stream to visit the buried day of some wonder-strewn cave. there are other great poets besides shelley who have had a vision of the heights and depths. compared with him, however, they have all about them something of goliath's disadvantageous bulk. shelley alone retains a boyish grace like david's, and does not seem to groan under the burden of his task. he does not round his shoulders in gloom in the presence of heaven and hell. his cosmos is a constellation. his thousand dawns are shaken out over the earth with a promise that turns even the long agony of prometheus into joy. there is no other joy in literature like shelley's. it is the joy not of one who is blind or untroubled, but of one who, in a midnight of tyranny and suffering of the unselfish, has learned ... to hope till hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates. to write like this is to triumph over death. it is to cease to be a victim and to become a creator. shelley recognized that the world had been bound into slavery by the devil, but he more than anyone else believed that it was possible for the human race in a single dayspring to recover the first intention of god. in the great morning of the world, the spirit of god with might unfurled the flag of freedom over chaos. shelley desired to restore to earth not the past of man but the past of god. he lacked the bad sort of historical sense that will sacrifice the perfect to-morrow to pride in the imperfect yesterday. he was the devoted enemy of that dark spirit of power which holds fast to the old greed as to a treasure. in _hellas_ he puts into the mouth of christ a reproof of mahomet which is a reproof to all the carsons and those who are haters of a finer future to-day. obdurate spirit! thou seest but the past in the to-come. pride is thy error and thy punishment. boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops before the power that wields and kindles them. true greatness asks not space. there are some critics who would like to separate shelley's politics from his poetry. but shelley's politics are part of his poetry. they are the politics of hope as his poetry is the poetry of hope. europe did not adopt his politics in the generation that followed the napoleonic wars, and the result is we have had an infinitely more terrible war a hundred years later. every generation rejects shelley; it prefers incredulity to hope, fear to joy, obedience to common sense, and is surprised when the logic of its common sense turns out to be a tragedy such as even the wildest orgy of idealism could not have produced. shelley must, no doubt, still seem a shocking poet to an age in which the limitation of the veto of the house of lords was described as a revolutionary step. to shelley even the new earth for which the bolsheviks are calling would not have seemed an extravagant demand. he was almost the only english poet up to his own time who believed that the world had a future. one can think of no other poet to whom to turn for the prophetic music of a real league of nations. tennyson may have spoken of the federation of the world, but his passion was not for that but for the british empire. he had the craven fear of being great on any but the old imperialist lines. his work did nothing to make his country more generous than it was before. shelley, on the other hand, creates for us a new atmosphere of generosity. his patriotism was love of the people of england, not love of the government of england. hence, when the government of england allied itself with the oppressors of mankind, he saw nothing unpatriotic in arraigning it as he would have arraigned a german or a russian government in the same circumstances. he arraigned it, indeed, in the preface to _hellas_ in a paragraph which the publisher nervously suppressed, and which was only restored in by mr. buxton forman. the seditious paragraph ran: should the english people ever become free, they will reflect upon the part which those who presume to represent them will have played in the great drama of the revival of liberty, with feelings which it would become them to anticipate. this is the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, called sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a mightier fear. of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth are virtual members. but a new race has arisen throughout europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that destiny which tyrants foresee and dread. it is nearly a hundred years since shelley proclaimed this birth of a new race throughout europe. would he have turned pessimist if he had lived to see the world infected with prussianism as it has been in our time? i do not think he would. he would have been the singer of the new race to-day as he was then. to him the resurrection of the old despotism, foreign and domestic, would have seemed but a fresh assault by the furies on the body of prometheus. he would have scattered the furies with a song. for shelley has not failed. he is one of those who have brought down to earth the creative spirit of freedom. and that spirit has never ceased to brood, with however disappointing results, over the chaos of europe until our own time. his greatest service to freedom is, perhaps, that he made it seem, not a policy, but a part of nature. he made it desirable as the spring, lovely as a cloud in a blue sky, gay as a lark, glad as a wave, golden as a star, mighty as a wind. other poets speak of freedom, and invite the birds on to the platform. shelley spoke of freedom and himself became a bird in the air, a wave of the sea. he did not humiliate beauty into a lesson. he scattered beauty among men not as a homily but as a spirit-- singing hymns unbidden, till the world is wrought to sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not. his politics are implicit in _the cloud_ and _the skylark_ and _the west wind_, no less than in _the mask of anarchy_. his idea of the state as well as his idea of sky and stream and forest was rooted in the exuberant imagination of a lover. the whole body of his work, whether lyrical in the strictest sense or propagandist, is in the nature of a book of revelation. it is impossible to say whether he might not have been a greater poet if he had not been in such haste to rebuild the world. he would, one fancies, have been a better artist if he had had a finer patience of phrase. on the other hand, his achievement even in the sphere of phrase and music is surpassed by no poet since shakespeare. he may hurry along at intervals in a cloud of second-best words, but out of the cloud suddenly comes a song like ariel's and a radiance like the radiance of a new day. with him a poem is a melody rather than a manuscript. not since prospero commanded songs from his attendant spirits has there been singing heard like the _hymn of pan_ and _the indian serenade_. _the cloud_ is the most magical transmutation of things seen into things heard in the english language. not that shelley misses the wonder of things seen. but he sees things, as it were, musically. my soul is an enchanted boat which, like a sleeping swan, doth float upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing. there is more of music than painting in this kind of writing. there is no other music but shelley's which seems to me likely to bring healing to the madness of the modern saul. for this reason i hope that professor herford's fine edition of the shorter poems (arranged for the first time in chronological order) will encourage men and women to turn to shelley again. professor herford promises us a companion volume on the same lines, containing the dramas and longer poems, if sufficient interest is shown in his book. the average reader will probably be content with mr. hutchinson's cheap and perfect "oxford edition" of shelley. but the scholar, as well as the lover of a beautiful page, will find in professor herford's edition a new pleasure in old verse. xii.--the wisdom of coleridge ( ) coleridge as critic coleridge was the thirteenth child of a rather queer clergyman. the rev. john coleridge was queer enough in having thirteen children: he was queerer still in being the author of a latin grammar in which he renamed the "ablative" the "quale-quare-quidditive case." coleridge was thus born not only with an unlucky number, but trailing clouds of definitions. he was in some respects the unluckiest of all englishmen of literary genius. he leaves on us an impression of failure as no other writer of the same stature does. the impression may not be justified. there are few writers who would not prefer the magnificent failure of a coleridge to their own little mole-hill of success. coleridge was a failure in comparison not with ordinary men, but only with the immense shadow of his own genius. his imperfection is the imperfection of a demi-god. charles lamb summed up the truth about his genius as well as about his character in that final phrase, "an archangel a little damaged." this was said at a time when the archangel was much more than a little damaged by the habit of laudanum; but even then lamb wrote: "his face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory." most of coleridge's great contemporaries were aware of that glory. even those who were afterwards to be counted among his revilers, such as hazlitt and de quincey, had known what it was to be disciples at the feet of this inspired ruin. they spoke not only of his mind, but even of his physical characteristics--his voice and his hair--as though these belonged to the one man of his time whose food was ambrosia. even as a boy at christ's hospital, according to lamb, he used to make the "casual passer through the cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the _speech_ and the _garb_ of the young mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of iamblichus, or plotinus ... or reciting homer in the greek, or pindar--while the walls of the old grey friars re-echoed to the accents of the _inspired charity-boy!_" it is exceedingly important that, as we read coleridge, we should constantly remember what an archangel he was in the eyes of his contemporaries. _christabel_ and _kubla kahn_ we could read, no doubt, in perfect enjoyment even if we did not know the author's name. for the rest, there is so much flagging of wing both in his verse and in his prose that, if we did not remind ourselves what flights he was born to take, we might persuade ourselves at times that there was little in his work but the dull flappings and slitherings of a penguin. his genius is intermittent and comes arbitrarily to an end. he is inspired only in fragments and aphorisms. he was all but incapable of writing a complete book or a complete poem at a high level. his irresponsibility as an author is described in that sentence in which he says: "i have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion." his literary plans had a ludicrous way of breaking down. it was characteristic of him that, in , when he projected a complete edition of his poems, under the title _sibylline leaves_, he omitted to publish volume i. and published only volume ii. he would announce a lecture on milton, and then give his audience "a very eloquent and popular discourse on the general character of shakespeare." his two finest poems he never finished. he wrote not by an act of the will but according to the wind, and when the wind dropped he came to earth. it was as though he could soar but was unable to fly. it is this that differentiates him from other great poets or critics. none of them has left such a record of unfulfilled purposes. it is not that he did not get through an enormous amount of work, but that, like the revellers in mr. chesterton's poem, he "went to birmingham by way of beachy head," and in the end he did not get to birmingham. sir arthur quiller-couch gives an amusing account of the way in which _biographia literaria_ came to be written. originally, in , it was conceived as a preface--to be "done in two, or at farthest three days"--to a collection of some "scattered and manuscript poems." two months later the plan had changed. coleridge was now busy on a preface to an _autobiographia literaria, sketches of my literary life and opinions_. this in turn developed into "a full account (_raisonné_) of the controversy concerning wordsworth's poems and theory," with a "disquisition on the powers of association ... and on the generic difference between the fancy and the imagination." this ran to such a length that he decided not to use it as a preface, but to amplify it into a work in three volumes. he succeeded in writing the first volume, but he found himself unable to fill the second. "then, as the volume obstinately remained too small, he tossed in _satyrane_, an epistolary account of his wanderings in germany, topped up with a critique of a bad play, and gave the whole painfully to the world in july, ." it is one of the ironies of literary history that coleridge, the censor of the incongruous in literature, the vindicator of the formal purpose as opposed to the haphazard inspiration of the greatest of writers, a missionary of the "shaping imagination," should himself have given us in his greatest book of criticism an incongruous, haphazard, and shapeless jumble. it is but another proof of the fact that, while talent cannot safely ignore what is called technique, genius almost can. coleridge, in spite of his formlessness, remains the wisest man who ever spoke in english about literature. his place is that of an oracle among controversialists. even so, _biographia literaria_ is a disappointing book. it is the porch, but it is not the temple. it may be that, in literary criticism, there can be no temple. literary criticism is in its nature largely an incitement to enter, a hint of the treasures that are to be found within. persons who seek rest in literary orthodoxy are always hoping to discover written upon the walls of the porch the ten commandments of good writing. it is extremely easy to invent ten such commandments--it was done in the age of racine and in the age of pope--but the wise critic knows that in literature the rules are less important than the "inner light." hence, criticism at its highest is not a theorist's attempt to impose iron laws on writers: it is an attempt to capture the secret of that "inner light" and of those who possess it and to communicate it to others. it is also an attempt to define the conditions in which the "inner light" has most happily manifested itself, and to judge new writers of promise according to the measure in which they have been true to the spirit, though not necessarily to the technicalities, of the great tradition. criticism, then, is not the roman father of good writing: it is the disciple and missionary of good writing. the end of criticism is less law-giving than conversion. it teaches not the legalities, but the love, of literature. _biographia literaria_ does this in its most admirable parts by interesting us in coleridge's own literary beginnings, by emphasizing the strong sweetness of great poets in contrast to the petty animosities of little ones, by pointing out the signs of the miracle of genius in the young shakespeare, and by disengaging the true genius of wordsworth from a hundred extravagances of theory and practice. coleridge's remarks on the irritability of minor poets--"men of undoubted talents, but not of genius," whose tempers are "rendered yet more irritable by their desire to _appear_ men of genius"--should be written up on the study walls of everyone commencing author. his description, too, of his period as "this age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with sort of egyptian superstition if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail," conveys a warning to writers that is not of an age but for all time. coleridge may have exaggerated the "manly hilarity" and "evenness and sweetness of temper" of men of genius. but there is no denying that, the smaller the genius, the greater is the spite of wounded self-love. "experience informs us," as coleridge says, "that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate." as for coleridge's great service to wordsworth's fame, it was that of a gold-washer. he cleansed it from all that was false in wordsworth's reaction both in theory and in practice against "poetic diction." coleridge pointed out that wordsworth had misunderstood the ultimate objections to eighteenth-century verse. the valid objection to a great deal of eighteenth-century verse was not, he showed, that it was written in language different from that of prose, but that it consisted of "translations of prose thoughts into poetic language." coleridge put it still more strongly, indeed, when he said that "the language from pope's translation of homer to darwin's _temple of nature_ may, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions, be too faithfully characterized as claiming to be poetical for no better reason than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose." wordsworth, unfortunately, in protesting against the meretricious garb of mean thoughts, wished to deny verse its more splendid clothing altogether. if we accepted his theories we should have to condemn his _ode_, the greatest of his sonnets, and, as coleridge put it, "two-thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry." the truth is, wordsworth created an engine that was in danger of destroying not only pope but himself. coleridge destroyed the engine and so helped to save wordsworth. coleridge may, in his turn, have gone too far in dividing language into three groups--language peculiar to poetry, language peculiar to prose, and language common to both, though there is much to be said for the division; but his jealousy for the great tradition in language was the jealousy of a sound critic. "language," he declared, "is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests." he, himself, wrote idly enough at times: he did not shrink from the phrase, "literary man," abominated by mr. birrell. but he rises in sentence after sentence into the great manner, as when he declares: no man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher. for poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. how excellently, again, he describes wordsworth's early aim as being-- to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us. he explains wordsworth's gift more fully in another passage: it was the union of deep feeling with profound thought, the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed, and, above all, the original gift of spreading the tone, the _atmosphere_, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world, around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew-drops. coleridge's censures on wordsworth, on the other hand, such as that on _the daffodil_, may not all be endorsed by us to-day. but in the mass they have the insight of genius, as when he condemns "the approximation to what might be called _mental_ bombast, as distinguished from verbal." his quotations of great passages, again, are the very flower of good criticism. mr. george sampson's editorial selection from _biographia literaria_ and his pleasant as well as instructive notes give one a new pleasure in re-reading this classic of critical literature. the "quale-quare-quidditive" chapters have been removed, and wordsworth's revolutionary prefaces and essays given in their place. in its new form, _biographia literaria_ may not be the best book that could be written, but there is good reason for believing that it is the best book that has been written on poetry in the english tongue. ( ) coleridge as a talker coleridge's talk resembles the movements of one of the heavenly bodies. it moves luminously on its way without impediment, without conflict. when dr. johnson talks, half our pleasure is due to our sense of conflict. his sentences are knobby sticks. we love him as a good man playing the bully even more than as a wise man talking common sense. he is one of the comic characters in literature. he belongs, in his eloquence, to the same company as falstaff and micawber. he was, to some extent, the invention of a scottish humourist named boswell. "burke," we read in coleridge's _table talk_, "said and wrote more than once that he thought johnson greater in talking than writing, and greater in boswell than in real life." coleridge's conversation is not to the same extent a coloured expression of personality. he speaks out of the solitude of an oracle rather than struts upon the stage of good company, a master of repartees. at his best, he becomes the mouthpiece of universal wisdom, as when he says: "to most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed." he can give us in a sentence the central truth of politics, reconciling what is good in individualism with what is good in socialism in a score or so of words: that is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy of the man. and he can give common sense as well as wisdom imaginative form, as in the sentence: truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of error, lest you get your brains knocked out. "i am, by the law of my nature, a reasoner," said coleridge, and he explained that he did not mean by this "an arguer." he was a discoverer of order, of laws, of causes, not a controversialist. he sought after principles, whether in politics or literature. he quarrelled with gibbon because his _decline and fall_ was "little else but a disguised collection of ... splendid anecdotes" instead of a philosophic search for the ultimate causes of the ruin of the roman empire. coleridge himself formulated these causes in sentences that are worth remembering at a time when we are debating whether the world of the future is to be a vast boxing ring of empires or a community of independent nations. he said: the true key to the declension of the roman empire--which is not to be found in all gibbon's immense work--may be stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the _national_ character. rome under trajan was an empire without a nation. one must not claim too much for coleridge, however. he was a seer with his head among the stars, but he was also a human being with uneven gait, stumbling amid infirmities, prejudices, and unhappinesses. he himself boasted in a delightful sentence: for one mercy i owe thanks beyond all utterance--that, with all my gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head of a mountain in blue air and sunshine. it is to be feared that coleridge's "gastric and bowel distempers" had more effect on his head than he was aware of. like other men, he often spoke out of a heart full of grievances. he uttered the bitterness of an unhappily married dyspeptic when he said: "the most happy marriage i can picture or image to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman." it is amusing to reflect that one of the many books which he wished to write was "a book on the duties of women, more especially to their husbands." one feels, again, that in his defence of the egoism of the great reformers, he was apologizing for a vice of his own rather than making an impersonal statement of truth. "how can a tall man help thinking of his size," he asked, "when dwarfs are constantly standing on tiptoe beside him?" the personal note that occasionally breaks in upon the oracular rhythm of the _table talk_, however, is a virtue in literature, even if a lapse in philosophy. the crumbs of a great man's autobiography are no less precious than the crumbs of his wisdom. there are moods in which one prefers his egotism to his great thoughts. it is pleasant to hear coleridge boasting; "the _ancient mariner_ cannot be imitated, nor the poem _love_. _they may be excelled; they are not imitable._" one is amused to know that he succeeded in offending lamb on one occasion by illustrating "the cases of vast genius in proportion to talent and the predominance of talent in conjunction with genius in the persons of lamb and himself." it is amusing, too, to find that, while wordsworth regarded _the ancient mariner_ as a dangerous drag on the popularity of _lyrical ballads_, coleridge looked on his poem as the feature that had sold the greatest number of the copies of the book. it is only fair to add that in taking this view he spoke not self-complacently, but humorously: i was told by longmans that the greater part of the _lyrical ballads_ had been sold to seafaring men, who, having heard of the _ancient mariner_, concluded that it was a naval song-book, or, at all events, that it had some relation to nautical matters. of autobiographical confessions there are not so many in _table talk_ as one would like. at the same time, there are one or two which throw light on the nature of coleridge's imagination. we get an idea of one of the chief differences between the poetry of coleridge and the poetry of wordsworth when we read the confession: i had the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim one of the relation of place. i remember the man or the tree, but where i saw them i mostly forget. the nephew who collected coleridge's talk declared that there was no man whom he would more readily have chosen as a guide in morals, but "i would not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads." the author of _kubla khan_ asserted still more strongly on another occasion his indifference to locality: dear sir walter scott and myself were exact but harmonious opposites in this--that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations, just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees; whereas, for myself, notwithstanding dr. johnson, i believe i should walk over the plain of marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features. yet i receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the battle, in herodotus, as anyone can. charles lamb wrote an essay on a man who lived in past time: i thought of adding another to it on one who lived not _in time_ at all, past, present, or future--but beside or collaterally. some of coleridge's other memories are of a more trifling and amusing sort. he recalls, for instance, the occasion of his only flogging at school. he had gone to a shoemaker and asked to be taken on as an apprentice. the shoemaker, "being an honest man," had at once told the boy's master: bowyer asked me why i had made myself such a fool? to which i answered, that i had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that i hated the thought of being a clergyman. "why so?" said he. "because, to tell you the truth, sir," said i, "i am an infidel!" for this, without more ado, bowyer flogged me--wisely, as i think--soundly, as i know. any whining or sermonizing would have gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, i laughed at, and got heartily ashamed of my folly. among the reminiscences of coleridge no passage is more famous than that in which he relates how, as he was walking in a lane near highgate one day, a "loose, slack, not well-dressed youth" was introduced to him: it was keats. he was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. after he had left us a little way, he came back, and said: "let me carry away the memory, coleridge, of having pressed your hand!" "there is death in that hand," i said to ----, when keats was gone; yet this was, i believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly. another famous anecdote relates to the time at which coleridge, like wordsworth, carried the fires of the french revolution about him into the peace of the west country. speaking of a fellow-disciple of the liberty of those days, coleridge afterwards said: john thelwall had something very good about him. we were once sitting in a beautiful recess in the quantocks, when i said to him: "citizen john, this is a fine place to talk treason in!" "nay! citizen samuel," replied he, "it is rather a place to make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason!" is there any prettier anecdote in literary history? besides the impersonal wisdom and the personal anecdotes of the _table talk_, however, there are a great number of opinions which show us coleridge not as a seer, but as a "character"--a crusty gentleman, every whit as ready to express an antipathy as a principle. he shared dr. johnson's quarrel with the scots, and said of them: i have generally found a scotchman with a little literature very disagreeable. he is a superficial german or a dull frenchman. the scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the english. he had no love for jews, or dissenters, or catholics, and anticipated carlyle's hostility to the emancipation of the negroes. he raged against the reform bill, catholic emancipation, and the education of the poor in schools. he was indignant with belgium for claiming national independence. one cannot read much of his talk about politics without amazement that so wise a man should have been so frequently a fool. at the same time, he generally remained an original fool. he never degenerated into a mere partisan. he might be deceived by reactionary ideals, but he was not taken in by reactionary leaders. he was no more capable than shelley of mistaking castlereagh for a great man, and he did not join in the glorification of pitt. like dr. johnson, he could be a tory without feeling that it was necessary at all costs to bully ireland. coleridge, indeed, went so far as to wish to cut the last link with ireland as the only means of saving england. discussing the irish question, he said: i am quite sure that no dangers are to be feared by england from the disannexing and independence of ireland at all comparable with the evils which have been, and will yet be, caused to england by the union. we have never received one particle of advantage from our association with ireland.... mr. pitt has received great credit for effecting the union; but i believe it will sooner or later be discovered that the manner in which, and the terms upon which, he effected it made it the most fatal blow that ever was levelled against the peace and prosperity of england. from it came the catholic bill. from the catholic bill has come this reform bill! and what next? when one thinks of the injury that the subjection of ireland has done the english name in america, in russia, in australia, and elsewhere in quite recent times, one can hardly deny that on this matter coleridge was a sound prophet. it is the literary rather than the political opinions, however, that will bring every generation of readers afresh to coleridge's _table talk_. no man ever talked better in a few sentences on shakespeare, sterne, and the tribe of authors. one may not agree with coleridge in regarding jeremy taylor as one of the four chief glories of english literature, or in thinking southey's style "next door to faultless." but one listens to his _obiter dicta_ eagerly as the sayings of one of the greatest minds that have interested themselves in the criticism of literature. there are tedious pages in _table talk_, but these are, for the most part, concerned with theology. on the whole, the speech of coleridge was golden. even the leaden parts are interesting because they are coleridge's lead. one wishes the theology was balanced, however, by a few more glimpses of his lighter interests, such as we find in the passage: "never take an iambus for a christian name. a trochee, or tribrach, will do very well. edith and rotha are my favourite names for women." what we want most of all in table talk is to get an author into the confession album. coleridge's _table talk_ would have stood a worse chance of immortality were it not for the fact that he occasionally came down out of the pulpit and babbled. xiii.--tennyson: a temporary criticism if tennyson's reputation has diminished, it is not that it has fallen before hostile criticism: it has merely faded through time. perhaps there was never an english poet who loomed so large to his own age as tennyson--who represented his contemporaries with the same passion and power. pope was sufficiently representative of his age, but his age meant, by comparison, a limited and aristocratic circle. byron represented and shocked his age by turns. tennyson, on the other hand, was as close to the educated middle-class men and women of his time as the family clergyman. that is why, inevitably, he means less to us than he did to them. that he was ahead of his age on many points on which this could not be said of the family clergyman one need not dispute. he was a kind of "new theologian." he stood, like dean farrar, for the larger hope and various other heresies. every representative man is ahead of his age--a little, but not enough to be beyond the reach of the sympathies of ordinary people. it may be objected that tennyson is primarily an artist, not a thinker, and that he should be judged not by his message but by his song. but his message and his song sprang from the same vision--a vision of the world seen, not _sub specie æternitatis_, but _sub specie_ the reign of queen victoria. before we appreciate tennyson's real place in literature, we must frankly recognize the fact that his muse wore a crinoline. the great mass of his work bears its date stamped upon it as obviously almost as a copy of _the times_. how topical, both in mood and phrasing, are such lines as those in _locksley hall:_ then her cheek was pale, and thinner than should be for one so young. and her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung. and i said "my cousin amy, speak, and speak the truth to me, trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee." one would not, of course, quote these lines as typical of tennyson's genius. i think, however, they may be fairly quoted as lines suggesting the mid-victorian atmosphere that clings round all but his greatest work. they bring before our minds the genteel magazine illustrations of other days. they conjure up a world of charming, vapid faces, where there is little life apart from sentiment and rhetoric. contrast such a poem as _locksley hall_ with _the flight of the duchess_. each contains at once a dramatization of human relations, and the statement of a creed. the human beings in browning's poem, however, are not mere shadows out of old magazines; they are as real as the men and women in the portraits of the masters, as real as ourselves. similarly, in expressing his thought, browning gives it imaginative dignity as philosophy, while tennyson writes what is after all merely an exalted leading article. there is more in common between tennyson and lytton than is generally realized. both were fond of windy words. they were slaves of language to almost as great an extent as swinburne. one feels that too often phrases like "moor and fell" and "bower and hall" were mere sounding substitutes for a creative imagination. i have heard it argued that the lines in _maud_: all night have the roses heard the flute, violin, bassoon; introduce a curiously inappropriate instrument into a ball-room orchestra merely for the sake of euphony. the mistake about the bassoon is a small one, and is, i suppose, borrowed from coleridge, but it is characteristic. tennyson was by no means the complete artist that for years he was generally accepted as being. he was an artist of lines rather than of poems. he seldom wrote a poem which seemed to spring full-armed from the imagination as the great poems of the world do. he built them up haphazard, as thackeray wrote his novels. they are full of sententious padding and prettiness, and the wordiness is not merely a philosopher's vacuous babbling in his sleep, as so much of wordsworth is; it is the word-spinning of a man who loves words more than people, or philosophy, or things. let us admit at once that when tennyson is word perfect he takes his place among the immortals. one may be convinced that the bulk of his work is already as dead as the bulk of longfellow's work. but in his great poems he awoke to the vision of romance in its perfect form, and expressed it perfectly. he did this in _ulysses_, which comes nearer a noble perfection, perhaps, than anything else he ever wrote. one can imagine the enthusiasm of some literary discoverer many centuries hence, when tennyson is as little known as donne was fifty years ago, coming upon lines hackneyed for us by much quotation: the lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: the long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep moans round with many voices. come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world. push off, and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars, until i die. it may be that the gulfs will wash us down; it may be we shall touch the happy isles, and see the great achilles, whom we knew. there, even if you have not the stalwart imagination which makes browning's people alive, you have a most beautiful fancy illustrating an old story. one of the most beautiful lines tennyson ever wrote: the horns of elfland faintly blowing, has the same suggestion of having been forged from the gold of the world's romance. tennyson's art at its best, however, and in these two instances is art founded upon art, not art founded upon life. we used to be asked to admire the vivid observation shown in such lines as: more black than ashbuds in the front of march; and it is undoubtedly interesting to learn that tennyson had a quick eye for the facts of nature. but such lines, however accurate, do not make a man a poet. it is in his fine ornamental moods that tennyson means most to our imaginations nowadays--in the moods of such lines as: now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost. the truth is, tennyson, with all his rhetoric and with all his prosaic victorian opinions, was an æsthete in the immortal part of him no less than were rossetti and swinburne. he seemed immense to his contemporaries, because he put their doubts and fears into music, and was master of the fervid rhetoric of the new gospel of imperialism. they did not realize that great poetry cannot be founded on a basis of perishable doubts and perishable gospels. it was enough for them to feel that _in memoriam_ gave them soothing anchorage and shelter from the destructive hurricanes of science. it was enough for them to thrill to the public-speech poetry of _of old sat freedom on the heights_, the patriotic triumph of _the relief of lucknow_, the glorious contempt for foreigners exhibited in his references to "the red fool-fury of the seine." is it any wonder that during a great part of his life tennyson was widely regarded as not only a poet, but a teacher and a statesman? his sneering caricature of bright as the "broad-brimmed hawker of holy things" should have made it clear that in politics he was but a party man, and that his political intelligence was commonplace. he was too deficient in the highest kind of imagination and intellect to achieve the greatest things. he seldom or never stood aloof from his own time, as wordsworth did through his philosophic imagination, as keats did through his æsthetic imagination, as browning did through his dramatic imagination. he wore a poetical cloak, and avoided the vulgar crowd physically; he had none of browning's taste for tea-parties. but browning had not the tea-party imagination; tennyson, in a great degree, had. he preached excellent virtues to his time; but they were respectable rather than spiritual virtues. thus, _the idylls of the king_ have become to us mere ancient fashion-plates of the virtues, while the moral power of _the ring and the book_ is as commanding to-day as in the year in which the poem was first published. it is all the more surprising that no good selection from tennyson has yet appeared. his "complete works" contain so much that is ephemeral and uninspired as to be a mere book of reference on our shelves. when will some critic do for him what matthew arnold did for wordsworth, and separate the gold from the dross--do it as well as matthew arnold did it for wordsworth? such a volume would be far thinner than the wordsworth selection. but it would entitle tennyson to a much higher place among the poets than in these years of the reaction he is generally given. xiv.--the politics of swift and shakespeare ( ) swift there are few greater ironies in history than that the modern conservatives should be eager to claim swift as one of themselves. one finds even the _morning post_--which someone has aptly enough named the _morning prussian_--cheerfully counting the author of _a voyage to houyhnhnms_ in the list of sound tories. it is undeniable that swift wrote pamphlets for the tory party of his day. a whig, he turned from the whigs of queen anne in disgust, and carried the tory label for the rest of his life. if we consider realities rather than labels, however, what do we find were the chief political ideals for which swift stood? his politics, as every reader of his pamphlets knows, were, above all, the politics of a pacifist and a home ruler--the two things most abhorrent to the orthodox tories of our own time. swift belonged to the tory party at one of those rare periods at which it was a peace party. _the conduct of the allies_ was simply a demand for a premature peace. worse than this, it was a pamphlet against england's taking part in a land-war on the continent instead of confining herself to naval operations. "it was the kingdom's misfortune," wrote swift, "that the sea was not the duke of marlborough's element, otherwise the whole force of the war would infallibly have been bestowed there, infinitely to the advantage of his country." whether swift and the tories were right in their attack on marlborough and the war is a question into which i do not propose to enter. i merely wish to emphasize the fact that _the conduct of the allies_ was, from the modern tory point of view, not merely a pacifist, but a treasonable, document. were anything like it to appear nowadays, it would be suppressed under the defence of the realm act. and that swift was a hater of war, not merely as a party politician, but as a philosopher, is shown by the discourse on the causes of war which he puts into the mouth of gulliver when the latter is trying to convey a picture of human society to his houyhnhnm master: sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretends to any right. sometimes one prince quarrelleth with another for fear the other should quarrel with him. sometimes a war is entered upon because the enemy is too strong, and sometimes because he is too weak. sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have the things which we want; and we both fight till they take ours or give us theirs. it is a very justifiable cause of a war to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence or embroiled by factions among themselves. it is justifiable to enter into war with our nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a territory of land that would render our dominions round and complete. if a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death or make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous way of living. there you have "kultur" wars, and "white man's burden" wars, and wars for "places of strategic importance," satirized as though by a twentieth-century humanitarian. when the _morning post_ begins to write leaders in the same strain, we shall begin to believe that swift was a tory in the ordinary meaning of the word. as for swift's irish politics, mr. charles whibley, like other conservative writers, attempts to gloss over their essential nationalism by suggesting that swift was merely a just man righteously indignant at the destruction of irish manufactures. at least, one would never gather from the present book that swift was practically the father of the modern irish demand for self-government. swift was an irish patriot in the sense in which washington was an american patriot. like washington, he had no quarrel with english civilization. he was not an eighteenth-century sinn feiner. he regarded himself as a colonist, and his nationalism was colonial nationalism. as such he was the forerunner of grattan and flood, and also, in a measure, of parnell and redmond. while not a separatist, he had the strongest possible objection to being either ruled or ruined from london. in his _short view of the state of ireland_, published in , he preached the whole gospel of colonial nationalism as it is accepted by irishmen like sir horace plunkett to-day. he declared that one of the causes of a nation's thriving-- ... is by being governed only by laws made with their own consent, for otherwise they are not a free people. and, therefore, all appeals for justice, or applications for favour or preferment, to another country are so many grievous impoverishments. he said of the irish: we are in the condition of patients who have physic sent to them by doctors at a distance, strangers to their constitution and the nature of their disease. in the _drapier's letters_ he denied the right of the english parliament to legislate for ireland. he declared that all reason was on the side of ireland's being free, though power and the love of power made for ireland's servitude. "the arguments on both sides," he said in a passage which sums up with perfect irony the centuries-old controversy between england and ireland, were "invincible": for in reason all government without the consent of the governed is slavery. but, in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt. it would be interesting to know how the modern tory, whose gospel is the gospel of the eleven men well armed, squares this with swift's passionate championship of the "one single man in his shirt." one wishes very earnestly that the toryism of swift were in fact the toryism of the modern conservative party. had it been so, there would have been no such thing as carsonism in pre-war england; and, had there been no carsonism, one may infer from mr. gerard's recent revelations, there might have been no european war. mr. whibley, it is only fair to say, is concerned with swift as a man of letters and a friend, rather than with swift as a party politician. the present book is a reprint of the leslie stephen lecture which he delivered at cambridge a few months ago. it was bound, therefore, to be predominantly literary in interest. at the same time, mr. whibley's political bias appears both in what he says and in what he keeps silent about. his defence of swift against the charge of misanthropy is a defence with which we find ourselves largely in agreement. but mr. whibley is too single-minded a party politician to be able to defend the dean without clubbing a number of his own pet antipathies in the process. he seems to think that the only alternative to the attitude of dean swift towards humanity is the attitude of persons who, "feigning a bland and general love of abtract humanity ... wreak a wild revenge upon individuals." he apparently believes that it is impossible for one human being to wish well to the human race in general, and to be affectionate to john, peter and thomas in particular. here are some of mr. whibley's rather wild comments on this topic. he writes: we know well enough whither universal philanthropy leads us. the friend of man is seldom the friend of men. at his best he is content with a moral maxim, and buttons up his pocket in the presence of poverty. "i _give_ thee sixpence! i will see thee damned first!" it is not for nothing that canning's immortal words were put in the mouth of the friend of humanity, who, finding that he cannot turn the needy knife grinder to political account, give him kicks for ha'pence, and goes off in "a transport of republican enthusiasm." such is the friend of man at his best. "at his best" is good. it makes one realize that mr. whibley is merely playing a game of make-believe, and playing it very hard. his indictment of humanitarians has about as much, or as little, basis in fact as would an indictment of wives or seagulls or fields of corn. one has only to mention shelley with his innumerable personal benevolences to set mr. whibley's card-castle of abuse tumbling. with mr. whibley's general view of swift as opposed to his general view of politics, i find myself for the most part in harmony. i doubt, however, whether swift has been pursued in his grave with such torrential malignity as mr. whibley imagines. thackeray's denigration, i admit, takes the breath away. one can hardly believe that thackeray had read either swift's writings or his life. of course he had done so, but his passion for the sentimental graces made him incapable of doing justice to a genius of saturnine realism such as swift's. the truth is, though swift was among the staunchest of friends, he is not among the most sociable of authors. his writings are seldom in the vein either of tenderness or of merriment. we know of the tenderness of swift only from a rare anecdote or from the prattle of the _journal to stella_. as for his laughter, as mr. whibley rightly points out, pope was talking nonsense when he wrote of swift as laughing and shaking in rabelais's easy chair. swift's humour is essentially of the intellect. he laughs out of his own bitterness rather than to amuse his fellow-men. as mr. whibley says, he is not a cynic. he is not sufficiently indifferent for that. he is a satirist, a sort of perverted and suffering idealist: an idealist with the cynic's vision. it is the essential nobleness of swift's nature which makes the voyage to the houyhnhnms a noble and not a disgusting piece of literature. there are people who pretend that this section of _gulliver's travels_ is almost too terrible for sensitive persons to read. this is sheer affectation. it can only be honestly maintained by those who believe that life is too terrible for sensitive persons to live! ( ) shakespeare mr. whibley goes through history like an electioneering bill-poster. he plasters up his election-time shrillnesses not only on fox's house of commons but on shakespeare's theatre. he is apparently interested in men of genius chiefly as regards their attitude to his electioneering activities. shakespeare, he seems to imagine, was the sort of person who would have asked for nothing better as a frieze in his sitting-room in new place than a scroll bearing in huge letters some such motto as "vote for podgkins and down with the common people" or "vote for podgkins and no league of nations." mr. whibley thinks shakespeare was like that, and so he exalts shakespeare. he has, i do not doubt, read shakespeare, but that has made no difference, he would clearly have taken much the same view of shakespeare if he had never read him. to be great, said emerson, is to be misunderstood. to be great is assuredly to be misunderstood by mr. whibley. i do not think it is doing an injustice to mr. whibley to single out the chapter on "shakespeare: patriot and tory" as the most representative in his volume of _political portraits_. it would be unjust if one were to suggest that mr. whibley could write nothing better than this. his historical portraits are often delightful as the work of a clever illustrator, even if we cannot accept them as portraits. those essays in which he keeps himself out of the picture and eschews ideas most successfully attract us as coming from the hand of a skilful writer. his studies of clarendon, metternich, napoleon and melbourne are all of them good entertainment. if i comment on the shakespeare essay rather than on these, it is because here more than anywhere else in the book the author's skill as a portrait-painter is put to the test. here he has to depend almost exclusively on his imagination, intelligence, and knowledge of human nature. here, where there are scarcely any epigrams or anecdotes to quote, a writer must reveal whether he is an artist and a critic, or a pedestrian intelligence with the trick of words. mr. whibley, i fear, comes badly off from the test. one does not blame him for having written on the theme that "shakespeare, being a patriot, was a tory also." it would be easy to conceive a scholarly and amusing study of shakespeare on these lines. whitman maintained that there is much in shakespeare to offend the democratic mind; and there is no reason why an intelligent tory should not praise shakespeare for what whitman deplored in him. there is every reason, however, why the portraiture of shakespeare as a tory, if it is to be done, should be done with grace, intelligence, and sureness of touch. mr. whibley throws all these qualifications to the winds, especially the second. the proof of shakespeare's toryism, for instance, which he draws from _troilus and cressida_, is based on a total misunderstanding of the famous and simple speech of ulysses about the necessity of observing "degree, priority and place." mr. whibley, plunging blindly about in tory blinkers, imagines that in this speech ulysses, or rather shakespeare, is referring to the necessity of keeping the democracy in its place. "might he not," he asks, "have written these prophetic lines with his mind's eye upon france of the terror or upon modern russia?" had mr. whibley read the play with that small amount of self-forgetfulness without which no man has ever yet been able to appreciate literature, he would have discovered that it is the unruliness not of the democracy but of the aristocracy against which ulysses--or, if you prefer it, shakespeare--inveighs in this speech. the speech is aimed at the self-will and factiousness of achilles and his disloyalty to agamemnon. if there are any moderns who come under the noble lash of ulysses, they must be sought for not among either french or russian revolutionists, but in the persons of such sound tories as sir edward carson and such sound patriots as mr. lloyd george. it is tolerably certain that neither ulysses nor shakespeare foresaw sir edward carson's escapades or mr. lloyd george's insurbordinate career as a member of mr. asquith's cabinet. but how admirably they sum up all the wild statesmanship of these later days in lines which mr. whibley, accountably enough, fails to quote: they tax our policy, and call it cowardice; count wisdom as no member of the war; forestall prescience, and esteem no act but that of hand; the still and mental parts-- that do contrive how many hands shall strike, when fitness calls them on, and know, by measure of their observant toil, the enemies' weight-- why, this hath not a finger's dignity. they call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war: so that the ram, that batters down the wall, for the great swing and rudeness of his poise, they place before his hand that made the engine, or those that with the fineness of their souls by reason guide his execution. there is not much in the moral of this speech to bring balm to the soul of the author of the _letters of an englishman_. mr. whibley is not content, unfortunately, with having failed to grasp the point of _troilus and cressida_. he blunders with equal assiduity in regard to _coriolanus_. he treats this play, not as a play about coriolanus, but as a pamphlet in favour of coriolanus. he has not been initiated, it seems, into the first secret of imaginative literature, which is that one may portray a hero sympathetically without making believe that his vices are virtues. shakespeare no more endorses coriolanus's patrician pride than he endorses othello's jealousy or macbeth's murderous ambition. shakespeare was concerned with painting noble natures, not with pandering to their vices. he makes us sympathize with coriolanus in his heroism, in his sufferings, in his return to his better nature, in his death; but from shakespeare's point of view, as from most men's the nietzschean arrogance which led coriolanus to become a traitor to his city is a theme for sadness, not (as apparently with mr. whibley) for enthusiasm. "shakespeare," cries mr. whibley, as he quotes some of coriolanus's anti-popular speeches, "will not let the people off. he pursues it with an irony of scorn." "there in a few lines," he writes of some other speeches, "are expressed the external folly and shame of democracy. ever committed to the worse cause, the people has not even the courage of its own opinions." it would be interesting to know whether in mr. whibley's eyes coriolanus's hatred of the people is a sufficiently splendid virtue to cover his guilt in becoming a traitor. that good tories have the right to become traitors was a gospel preached often enough in regard to the ulster trouble before the war. it may be doubted, however, whether shakespeare was sufficiently a tory to foresee the necessity of such a gospel in _coriolanus_. certainly, the mother of coriolanus, who was far from being a radical, or even a mild whig, preached the very opposite of the gospel of treason. she warned coriolanus that his triumph over rome would be a traitor's triumph, that his name would be "dogg'd with curses," and that his character would be summed up in history in one fatal sentence: the man was noble, but with his last attempt he wiped it out, destroyed his country, and his name remains to the ensuing age abhorr'd. mr. whibley appears to loathe the mass of human beings so excessively that he does not quite realize the enormity (from the modern point of view) of coriolanus's crime. it would, i agree, be foolish to judge coriolanus too scrupulously from a modern point of view. but mr. whibley has asked us to accept the play as a tract for the times, and we must examine it as such in order to discover what mr. whibley means. but, after all, mr. whibley's failure as a portrait-painter is a failure of the spirit even more than of the intellect. a narrow spirit cannot comprehend a magnanimous spirit, and mr. whibley's imagination does not move in that large shakespearean world in which illustrious men salute their mortal enemies in immortal sentences of praise after the manner of he was the noblest roman of them all. the author who is capable of writing mr. whibley's character-study of fox does not understand enough about the splendour and the miseries of human nature to write well on shakespeare. of fox mr. whibley says: he put no bounds upon his hatred of england, and he thought it not shameful to intrigue with foreigners against the safety and credit of the land to which he belonged. wherever there was a foe to england, there was a friend of fox. america, ireland, france, each in turn inspired his enthusiasm. when howe was victorious at brooklyn, he publicly deplored "the terrible news." after valmy he did not hesitate to express his joy. "no public event," he wrote, "not excepting yorktown and saratoga, ever happened that gave me so much delight. i could not allow myself to believe it for some days for fear of disappointment." it does not seem to occur to mr. whibley that in regard to america, ireland, and france, fox was, according to the standard of every ideal for which the allies professed to fight, tremendously right, and that, were it not for yorktown and valmy, america and france would not in our own time have been great free nations fighting against the embattled whibleys of germany. so far as mr. whibley's political philosophy goes, i see no reason why he should not have declared himself on the side of germany. he believes in patriotism, it is true, but he is apparently a patriot of the sort that loves his country and hates his fellow-countrymen (if that is what he means by "the people," and presumably it must be). mr. whibley has certainly the mind of a german professor. his vehemence against the germans for appreciating shakespeare is strangely like a german professor's vehemence against the english for not appreciating him. "why then," he asks, should the germans have attempted to lay violent hands upon our shakespeare? it is but part of their general policy of pillage. stealing comes as easy to them as it came to bardolph and nym, who in calais stole a fire-shovel. wherever they have gone they have cast a thievish eye upon what does not belong to them. they hit upon the happy plan of levying tolls upon starved belgium. it was not enough for their greed to empty a country of food; they must extract something from its pocket, even though it be dying of hunger.... no doubt, if they came to these shores, they would feed their fury by scattering shakespeare's dust to the winds of heaven. as they are unable to sack stratford, they do what seems to them the next best thing: they hoist the jolly roger over shakespeare's works. their arrogance is busy in vain. shakespeare shall never be theirs. he was an english patriot, who would always have refused to bow the knee to an insolent alien. this is mere foaming at the mouth--the tawdry violence of a tory thersites. this passage is a measure of the good sense and imagination mr. whibley brings to the study of shakespeare. it is simply theatrical jolly-rogerism. xv.--the personality of morris one thinks of william morris as a man who wished to make the world as beautiful as an illuminated manuscript. he loved the bright colours, the gold, the little strange insets of landscape, the exquisite craftsmanship of decoration, in which the genius of the medieval illuminators expressed itself. his utopia meant the restoration, not so much of the soul of man, as of the selected delights of the arts and crafts of the middle ages. his passion for trappings--and what fine trappings!--is admirably suggested by mr. cunninghame graham in his preface to mr. compton-rickett's _william morris: a study in personality_. morris he declares, was in his opinion "no mystic, but a sort of symbolist set in a medieval frame, and it appeared to me that all his love of the old times of which he wrote was chiefly of the setting; of tapestries well wrought; of needlework, rich colours of stained glass falling upon old monuments, and of fine work not scamped." to emphasize the preoccupation of morris with the very handiwork, rather than with the mystic secrets, of beauty is not necessarily to diminish his name. he was essentially a man for whom the visible world existed, and in the manner in which he wore himself out in his efforts to reshape the visible world he proved himself one of the great men of his century. his life was, in its own way, devotional ever since those years in which burne-jones, his fellow-undergraduate at oxford, wrote to him: "we must enlist you in this crusade and holy warfare against the age." like all revolutions, of course, the morris revolution was a prophecy rather than an achievement. but, perhaps, a prophecy of utopia is itself one of the greatest achievements of which humanity is capable. it is odd that one who spilled out his genius for the world of men should have been so self-sufficing, so little dependent on friendships and ordinary human relationships as morris is depicted both in mr. mackail's biography and mr. compton-rickett's study. obviously, he was a man with whom generosity was a second nature. when he became a socialist, he sold the greater part of his precious library in order to help the cause. on the other hand, to balance this, we have rossetti's famous assertion: "top"--the general nickname for morris--"never gives money to a beggar." mr. mackail, if i remember right, accepted rossetti's statement as expressive of morris's indifference to men as compared with causes. mr. compton-rickett, however, challenges the truth of the observation. "the number of 'beggars,'" he affirms, "who called at his house and went away rewarded were legion." mr. belfort bax declares that he kept a drawerful of half-crowns for foreign anarchists, because, as he explained apologetically: "they always wanted half-a-crown, and it saved time to have a stock ready." but this is no real contradiction of rossetti. morris's anarchists represented his life's work to him. he did not help them from that personal and irrational charity which made rossetti want to give a penny to a beggar in the street. this may be regarded as a supersubtle distinction; but it is necessary if we are to understand the important fact about morris that--to quote mr. compton-rickett--"human nature in the concrete never profoundly interested him." enthusiastic as were the friendships of his youth--when he gushed into "dearests" in his letters--we could imagine him as living without friends and yet being tolerably happy. he was, as mr. compton-rickett suggests, like a child with a new toy in his discovery of ever-fresh pursuits in the three worlds of politics, literature and art. he was a person to whom even duties were pleasures. mr. mackail has spoken of him as "the rare distance of a man who, without ever once swerving from truth or duty, knew what he liked and did what he liked, all his life long." one thinks of him in his work as a child with a box of paints--an inspired child with wonderful paints and the skill to use them. he was such a child as accepts companions with pleasure, but also accepts the absence of companions with pleasure. he could absorb himself in his games of genius anywhere and everywhere. "much of his literary work was done on buses and in trains." his poetry is often, as it were, the delightful nursery-work of a grown man. "his best work," as mr. compton-rickett says, "reads like happy improvisations." he had a child's sudden and impulsive temper, too. once, having come into his studio in a rage, he "took a flying kick at the door, and smashed in a panel." "it's all right," he assured the scared model, who was preparing to fly; "it's all right--_something_ had to give way." the same violence of impulse is seen in the story of how, on one occasion, when he was staying in the country, he took an artistic dislike to his hostess's curtains, and tore them down during the night. his judgments were often much the same kind of untempered emotions as he showed in the matter of the curtains--his complaint, for example, that a greek temple was "like a table on four legs: a damned dull thing!" he was a creature of whims: so much so that, as a boy, he used to have the curse, "unstable as water, thou shalt not excel," flung at him. he enjoyed the expression of knock-out opinions such as: "i always bless god for making anything so strong as an onion!" he laughed easily, not from humour so much as from a romping playfulness. he took a young boy's pleasure in showing off the strength of his mane of dark brown hair. he would get a child to get hold of it, and lift him off the ground by it "with no apparent inconvenience." he was at the same time nervous and restless. he was given to talking to himself; his hands were never at peace; "if he read aloud, he punched his own head in the exuberance of his emotions." possibly there was something high-strung even about his play, as when, mr. mackail tells us, "he would imitate an eagle with considerable skill and humour, climbing on to a chair and, after a sullen pause, coming down with a soft, heavy flop." it seems odd that mr. john burns could say of this sensitive and capricious man of genius, as we find him saying in mr. compton-rickett's book, that "william morris was a chunk of humanity in the rough; he was a piece of good, strong, unvarnished oak--nothing of the elm about him." but we can forgive mr. burns's imperfect judgment in gratitude for the sentences that follow: there is no side of modern life which he has not touched for good. i am sure he would have endorsed heartily the house and town planning act for which i am responsible. morris, by the way, would have appreciated mr. burns's reference to him as a fellow-craftsman: did he not once himself boast of being "a master artisan, if i may claim that dignity"? the buoyant life of this craftsman-preacher--whose craftsmanship, indeed, was the chief part of his preaching--who taught the labourers of his age, both by precept and example, that the difference between success and failure in life was the difference between being artisans of loveliness and poor hackworkers of profitable but hideous things--has a unique attractiveness in the history of the latter half of the nineteenth century. he is a figure of whom we cannot be too constantly and vividly reminded. when i took up mr. compton-rickett's book i was full of hope that it would reinterpret for a new generation morris's evangelistic personality and ideals. unfortunately, it contains very little of importance that has not already appeared in mr. mackail's distinguished biography; and the only interpretation of first-rate interest in the book occurs in the bold imaginative prose of mr. cunninghame graham's introduction. more than once the author tells us the same things as mr. mackail, only in a less life-like way. for example, where mr. mackail says of morris that "by the time he was seven years old he had read all the waverley novels, and many of marryat's," mr. compton-rickett vaguely writes: "he was suckled on romance, and knew his scott and marryat almost before he could lisp their names." that is typical of mr. compton-rickett's method. instead of contenting himself with simple and realistic sentences like mr. mackail's, he aims at--and certainly achieves--a kind of imitative picturesqueness. we again see his taste for the high-flown in such a paragraph as that which tells us that "a common bond unites all these men--dickens, carlyle, ruskin and morris. they differed in much; but, like great mountains lying apart in the base, they converge high up in the air." the landscape suggested in these sentences is more topsy-turvy than the imagination likes to dwell upon. and the criticisms in the book are seldom lightning-flashes of revelation. for instance: a more polished artistry we find in tennyson; a greater intellectual grip in browning; a more haunting magic in rossetti; but for easy mastery over his material and general diffusion of beauty morris has no superior. that, apart from the excellent "general diffusion of beauty," is the kind of conventional criticism that might pass in a paper read to a literary society. but somehow, in a critic who deliberately writes a book, we look for a greater and more personal mastery of his authors than mr. compton-rickett gives evidence of in the too facile eloquence of these pages. the most interesting part of the book is that which is devoted to personalia. but even in the matter of personalia mr. cunninghame graham tells us more vital things in a page of his introduction than mr. compton-rickett scatters through a chapter. his description of morris's appearance, if not a piece of heroic painting, gives us a fine grotesque design of the man: his face was ruddy, and his hair inclined to red, and grew in waves like water just before it breaks over a fall. his beard was of the same colour as his hair. his eyes were blue and fiery. his teeth, small and irregular, but white except upon the side on which he hew his pipe, where they were stained with brown. when he walked he swayed a little, not like (_sic_) a sailor sways, but as a man who lives a sedentary life toddles a little in his gait. his ears were small, his nose high and well-made, his hands and feet small for a man of his considerable bulk. his speech and address were fitting the man; bold, bluff, and hearty.... he was quick-tempered and irritable, swift to anger and swift to reconciliation, and i should think never bore malice in his life. when he talked he seldom looked at you, and his hands were always twisting, as if they wished to be at work. such was the front the man bore. the ideal for which he lived may be summed up, in mr. compton-rickett's expressive phrase, as "the democratization of beauty." or it may be stated more humanly in the words which morris himself spoke at the grave of a young man who died of injuries received at the hands of the police in trafalgar square on "bloody sunday." "our friend," he then said: our friend who lies here has had a hard life, and met with a hard death; and, if society had been differently constituted, his life might have been a delightful, a beautiful, and a happy one. it is our business to begin to organize for the purpose of seeing that such things shall not happen; to try and make this earth a beautiful and happy place. there you have the sum of all morris's teaching. like so many fine artists since plato, he dreamed of a society which would be as beautiful as a work of art. he saw the future of society as a radiant picture, full of the bright light of hope, as he saw the past of society as a picture steeped in the charming lights of fancy. he once explained rossetti's indifference to politics by saying that he supposed "it needs a person of hopeful mind to take disinterested notice of politics, and rossetti was certainly not hopeful." morris was the very illuminator of hope. he was as hopeful a man as ever set out with words and colours to bring back the innocent splendours of the golden age. xvi.--george meredith ( ) the egoist george meredith, as his friends used to tell one with amusement, was a vain man. someone has related how, in his later years, he regarded it as a matter of extreme importance that his visitors should sit in a position from which they would see his face in profile. this is symbolic of his attitude to the world. all his life he kept one side of his face hidden. mr. ellis, who is the son of one of meredith's cousins, now takes us for a walk round meredith's chair. no longer are we permitted to remain in restful veneration of "a god and a greek." mr. ellis invites us--and we cannot refuse the invitation--to look at the other side of the face, to consider the full face and the back of the head. he encourages us to feel meredith's bumps, and no man whose bumps we are allowed to feel can continue for five minutes the pretence of being an olympian. he becomes a human being under a criticizing thumb. we discover that he had a genius for imposture, an egoist's temper, and a stomach that fluttered greedily at the thought of dainty dishes. we find all those characteristics that prevented him from remaining on good terms first with his father, next with his wife, and then with his son. at first, when one reads the full story of meredith's estrangements through three generations, one has the feeling that one is in the presence of an idol in ruins. certainly, one can never mistake box hill for olympus again. on the other hand, let us but have time to accustom ourselves to see meredith in other aspects than that which he himself chose to present to his contemporaries--let us begin to see in him not so much one of the world's great comic censors, as one of the world's great comic subjects, and we shall soon find ourselves back among his books, reading them no longer with tedious awe, but with a new passion of interest in the figure-in-the-background of the complex human being who wrote them. for meredith was his own great subject. had he been an olympian he could not have written _the egoist_ or _harry richmond_. he was an egoist and pretender, coming of a line of egoists and pretenders, and his novels are simply the confession and apology of such a person. meredith concealed the truth about himself in his daily conversation; he revealed it in his novels. he made such a mystery about his birth that many people thought he was a cousin of queen victoria's or at least a son of bulwer lytton's. it was only in _evan harrington_ that he told the essentials of the truth about the tailor's shop in portsmouth above which he was born. outside his art, nothing would persuade him to own up to the tailor's shop. once, when mr. clodd was filling in a census-paper for him, meredith told him to put "near petersfield" as his place of birth. the fact that he was born at portsmouth was not publicly known, indeed, until some time after his death. and not only was there the tailor's shop to live down, but on his mother's side he was the grandson of a publican, michael macnamara. meredith liked to boast that his mother was "pure irish"--an exaggeration, according to mr. ellis--but he said nothing about michael macnamara of "the vine." at the same time it was the presence not of a bar sinister but of a yardstick sinister in his coat of arms that chiefly filled him with shame. when he was marrying his first wife he wrote "esquire" in the register as a description of his father's profession. there is no evidence, apparently, as to whether meredith himself ever served in the tailor's shop after his father moved from portsmouth to st. james's street, london. nothing is known of his life during the two years after his return from the moravian school at neuwied. as for his hapless father (who had been trained as a medical student but went into the family business in order to save it from ruin), he did not succeed in london any better than in portsmouth, and in he emigrated to south africa and opened a shop in cape town. it was while in cape town that he read meredith's ironical comedy on the family tailordom, _evan harrington; or he would be a gentleman_. naturally, he regarded the book (in which his father and himself were two of the chief figures) with horror. it was as though george had washed the family tape-measure in public. augustus meredith, no less than george, blushed for the tape-measure daily. probably, melchizedek meredith, who begat augustus, who begat george, had also blushed for it in his day. as the "great mel" in _evan harrington_ he is an immortal figure of genteel imposture. his lordly practice of never sending in a bill was hardly that of a man who accepted the conditions of his trade. in _evan harrington_ three generations of a family's shame were held up to ridicule. no wonder that augustus meredith, when he was congratulated by a customer on his son's fame, turned away silently with a look of pain. the comedy of the meredith family springs, of course, not from the fact that they were tailors, but that they pretended not to be tailors. whether meredith himself was more ashamed of their tailoring or their pretentiousness it is not easy to decide. both _evan harrington_ and _harry richmond_ are in a measure, comedies of imposture, in which the vice of imposture is lashed as fiercely as molière lashes the vice of hypocrisy in _tartuffe_. but it may well be that in life meredith was a snob, while in art he was a critic of snobs. mr. yeats, in his last book of prose, put forward the suggestion that the artist reveals in his art not his "self" (which is expressed in his life), but his "anti-self," a complementary and even contrary self. he might find in the life and works of meredith some support for his not quite convincing theory. meredith was an egoist in his life, an anti-egoist in his books. he was pretentious in his life, anti-pretentious in his books. he took up the attitude of the wronged man in his life; he took up the case of the wronged woman in his books. in short, his life was vehemently pro-george-meredith, while his books were vehemently anti-george-meredith. he knew himself more thoroughly, so far as we can discover from his books, than any other english novelist has ever done. he knew himself comically, no doubt, rather than tragically. in _modern love_ and _richard feverel_ he reveals himself as by no means a laughing philosopher; but he strove to make fiction a vehicle of philosophic laughter rather than of passionate sympathy. were it not that a great poetic imagination is always at work--in his prose, perhaps, even more than in his verse--his genius might seem a little cold and head-in-the-air. but his poet's joy in his characters saves his books from inhumanity. as diana warwick steps out in the dawn she is not a mere female human being undergoing critical dissection; she is bird-song and the light of morning and the coming of the flowers. meredith had as great a capacity for rapture as for criticism and portraiture. he has expressed in literature as no other novelist has done the rapturous vision of a boy in love. he knew that a boy in love is not mainly a calf but a poet. _love in a valley_ is the incomparable music of a boy's ecstasy. much of _richard feverel_ is its incomparable prose. rapture and criticism, however, make a more practical combination in literature than in life. in literature, criticism may add flavour to rapture; in life it is more than likely to destroy the flavour. one is not surprised, then, to learn the full story of meredith's first unhappy marriage. a boy of twenty-one, he married a widow of thirty, high-strung, hot and satirical like himself; and after a depressing sequence of dead babies, followed by the birth of a son who survived, she found life with a man of genius intolerable, and ran away with a painter. meredith apparently refused her request to go and see her when she was dying. his imaginative sympathy enabled him to see the woman's point of view in poetry and fiction; it does not seem to have extended to his life. thus, his biography is to a great extent a "showing-up" of george meredith. he proved as incapable of keeping the affection of his son arthur, as of keeping that of his wife. much as he loved the boy he had not been married again long before he allowed him to become an alien presence. the boy felt he had a grievance. he said--probably without justice--that his father kept him short of money. possibly he was jealous for his dead mother's sake. further, though put into business, he had literary ambitions--a prolific source of bitterness. when arthur died, meredith did not even attend his funeral. mr. ellis has shown meredith up not only as a husband and a father, but as a hireling journalist and a lark-devouring gourmet. on the whole, the poet who could eat larks in a pie seems to me to be a more shocking "great man" than the radical who could write tory articles in a newspaper for pay. at the same time, it is only fair to say that meredith remains a sufficiently splendid figure in. mr. ellis's book even when we know the worst about him. was his a generous genius? it was at least a prodigal one. as poet, novelist, correspondent, and conversationalist, he leaves an impression of beauty, wit, and power in a combination without a precedent. ( ) the olympian unbends lady butcher's charming _memoirs of george meredith_ is admittedly written in reply to mr. ellis's startling volume. it seems to me, however, that it is a supplement rather than a reply. mr. ellis was not quite fair to meredith as a man, but he enabled us to understand the limitations which were the conditions of meredith's peculiar genius. many readers were shocked by the suggestion that characters, like countries, must have boundaries. where mr. ellis failed, in my opinion, was not in drawing these as carefully as possible, but in the rather unfriendly glee with which, one could not help feeling, he did so. it is also true that he missed some of the grander mountain-peaks in meredith's character. lady butcher, on the other hand, is far less successful than mr. ellis in drawing a portrait which makes us feel that now we understand something of the events that gave birth to _the egoist_ and _richard feverel_ and _modern love_. her book tells us nothing of the seed-time of genius, but is a delightful account of its autumn. at the same time it helps to dissipate one ridiculous popular fallacy about meredith. meredith, like most all the wits, has been accused of straining after image and epigram. wit acts as an irritant on many people. they forget the admirable saying of coleridge: "exclusive of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms; and the greatest of men is but an aphorism." they might as well denounce a hedge for producing wild roses or a peacock for growing tail feathers with pretty eyes as a witty writer for flowering into aphorism, epigram and image. even so artificial a writer as wilde had not to labour to be witty. it has often been laid to his charge that his work smells of the lamp, whereas what is really the matter with it is that it smells of the drawing-room gas. it was the result of too much "easy-goingness," not of too much strain. as for meredith, his wit was the wit of an abounding imagination. lady butcher gives some delightful examples of it. he could not see a baby in long robes without a witty image leaping into his mind. he said he adored babies "in the comet stage." of a lady of his acquaintance he said: "she is a woman who has never had the first tadpole wriggle of an idea," adding, "she has a mind as clean and white and flat as a plate: there are no eminences in it." lady butcher tells of a picnic-party on box hill at which meredith was one of the company. "after our picnic ... it came on to rain, and as we drearily trudged down the hill with cloaks and umbrellas, and burdened with our tea baskets, mr. meredith, with a grimace, called out to a passing friend: 'behold! the funeral of picnic!'" if meredith is to some extent an obscure author, it is clear that this was not due to his over-reaching himself in laborious efforts after wit. his obscurity is not that of a man straining after expression, but the obscurity of a man deliberately hiding something. meredith believed in being as mysterious as an oracle. he assumed the olympian manner, and objected to being mistaken for a frequenter of the market-place. he was impatient of ordinary human witlessness, and spoke to his fellows, not as man to man, but as apollo from his seat. this was probably a result of the fact that his mind marched much too fast for the ordinary man to keep pace with it. "how i leaped through leagues of thought when i could walk!" he once said when he had lost the power of his legs. such buoyancy of the imagination and intellect separated him more and more from a world in which most of the athletics are muscular, not mental; and he began to take a malicious pleasure in exaggerating the difference that already existed between himself and ordinary mortals. he dressed his genius in a mannerism, and, as he leaped through his leagues of thought, the flying skirts of his mannerism were all that the average reader panting desperately after him could see. shakespeare and the greatest men of genius are human enough to wait for us, and give us time to recover our breath. meredith, however, was a proud man, and a mocker. in the ordinary affairs of life, lady butcher tells us, he was so proud that it was difficult to give him even trifling gifts. "i remember," she says, "bringing him two silver flat poached-egg spoons from norway, and he implored me to take them back with me to london, and looked much relieved when i consented to do so!" he would always "prefer to bestow rather than to accept gifts." lady butcher, replying to the charge that he was ungrateful, suggests that "no one should expect an eagle to be grateful." but then, neither can one love an eagle, and one would like to be able to love the author of _love in a valley_ and _richard feverel_. meredith was too keenly aware what an eagle he was. speaking of the reviewers who had attacked him, he said: "they have always been abusing me. i have been observing them. it is the crueller process." it is quite true, but it was a superior person who said it. meredith, however, among his friends and among the young, loses this air of superiority, and becomes something of a radiant romp as well as an olympian. lady butcher's first meeting with him took place when she was a girl of thirteen. she was going up box hill to see the sun rise with a sixteen-year-old cousin, when the latter said: "i know a madman who lives on box hill. he's quite mad, but very amusing; he likes walks and sunrises. let's go and shout him up!" it does meredith credit that he got out of bed and joined them, "his nightshirt thrust into brown trousers." even when the small girl insisted on "reading aloud to him one of the hymns from keble's _christian year_," he did not, as the saying is, turn a hair. his attachment to his daughter mariette--his "dearie girl," as he spoke of her with unaffected softness of phrase--also helps one to realize that he was not all olympian. meredith, the condemner of the "guarded life," was humanly nervous in guarding his own little daughter. "he would never allow mariette to travel alone, even the very short distance by train from box hill to ewell; a maid had always to be sent with her or to fetch her. he never allowed her to walk by herself." one likes meredith the better for lady butcher's picture of him as a "harassed father." one likes him, too, as he converses with his dogs, and for his thoughtfulness in giving some of his mss., including that of _richard feverel_, to frank cole, his gardener, in the hope that "some day the gardener would be able to sell them" and so get some reward for his devotion. as to the underground passages in meredith's life and character, lady butcher is not concerned with them. she writes of him merely as she knew him. her book is a friend's tribute, though not a blind tribute. it may not be effective as an argument against those who are bent on disparaging the greatest lyrical wit in modern english literature. but it will be welcomed by those for whom meredith's genius is still a bubbling spring of good sense and delight. ( ) the anglo-irish aspect meredith never wrote a novel which was less a novel than _celt and saxon_. it is only a fragment of a book. it is so much a series of essays and sharp character-sketches, however, that the untimely fall of the curtain does not greatly trouble us. there is no excitement of plot, no gripping anxiety as to whether this or that pair of lovers will ever reach the altar. philip o'donnell and patrick, his devoted brother, and their caricature relative, the middle-aged captain con, all interest us as they abet each other in the affairs of love or politics, or as they discuss their native country or the temperament of the country which oppresses it; but they are chiefly desirable as performers in an anglo-irish fantasia, a meredithian piece of comic music, with various national anthems, english, welsh, and irish, running through and across it in all manner of guises, and producing all manner of agreeable disharmonies. in the beginning we have patrick o'donnell, an enthusiast, a celt, a catholic, setting out for the english mansion of the father of adiante adister to find if the girl cannot be pleaded over to reconsider her refusal of his brother philip. he arrives in the midst of turmoil in the house, the cause of it being a hasty marriage which adiante had ambitiously contracted with a hook-nosed foreign prince. patrick, a broken-hearted proxy, successfully begs her family for a miniature of the girl to take back to his brother, but he falls so deeply in love with her on seeing the portrait that his loyalty to philip almost wavers, when the latter carelessly asks him to leave the miniature on a more or less public table instead of taking it off to the solitude of his own room for a long vigil of adoration. in the rest of the story we have an account of the brothers in the london house of captain con, the happy husband married to a stark english wife of mechanical propriety--a rebellious husband, too, when in the sociable atmosphere of his own upper room, amid the blackened clay pipes and the friendly fumes of whiskey, he sings her praises, while at the same time full of grotesque and whimsical criticisms of all those things, saxon and more widely human, for which she stands. there is a touch of farce in the relations of these two, aptly symbolized by the bell which rings for captain con, and hastens him away from his midnight eloquence with patrick and philip. "he groaned, 'i must go. i haven't heard the tinkler for months. it signifies she's cold in her bed. the thing called circulation is unknown to her save by the aid of outward application, and i'm the warming-pan, as legitimately as i should be, i'm her husband and her harvey in one.'" it is in the house of captain con, it should be added, that philip and patrick meet jane mattock, the saxon woman; and the story as we have it ends with philip invalided home from service in india, and jane, a victim of love, catching "glimpses of the gulfs of bondage, delicious, rose-enfolded, foreign." there are nearly three hundred pages of it altogether, some of them as fantastic and lyrical as any that meredith ever wrote. as one reads _celt and saxon_, however, one seems to get an inkling of the reason why meredith has so often been set down as an obscure author. it is not entirely that he is given to using imagery as the language of explanation--a subtle and personal sort of hieroglyphics. it is chiefly, i think, because there is so little direct painting of men and women in his books. despite his lyricism, he had something of an x-ray's imagination. the details of the modelling of a face, the interpreting lines and looks, did not fix themselves with preciseness on his vision enabling him to pass them on to us with the surface reality we generally demand in prose fiction. it is as though he painted some of his men and women upon air: they are elusive for all we know of their mental and spiritual processes. even though he is at pains to tell us that diana's hair is dark, we do not at once accept the fact but are at liberty to go on believing she is a fair woman, for he himself was general rather than insistently particular in his vision of such matters. in the present book, again, we have a glimpse of adiante in her miniature--"this lighted face, with the dark raised eyes and abounding auburn tresses, where the contrast of colours was in itself thrilling," "the light above beauty distinguishing its noble classic lines and the energy of radiance, like a morning of chivalrous promise, in the eyes"--and, despite the details mentioned, the result is to give us only the lyric aura of the woman where we wanted a design. ultimately, these women of meredith's become intensely real to us--the most real women, i think, in english fiction--but, before we come to handshaking terms with them, we have sometimes to go to them over bogs and rocky places with the sun in our eyes. before this, physically, they are apt to be exquisite parts of a landscape, sharers of a lyric beauty with the cherry-trees and the purple crocuses. coming to the substance of the book--the glance from many sides at the irish and english temperaments--we find meredith extremely penetrating in his criticism of john bullishness, but something of a foreigner in his study of the irish character. the son of an irishwoman, he chose an irishwoman as his most conquering heroine, but he writes of the race as one who has known the men and women of it entirely, or almost entirely, in an english setting--a setting, in other words, which shows up their strangeness and any surface eccentricities they may have, but does not give us an ordinary human sense of them. captain con is vital, because meredith imagined him vitally, but when all is said and done, he is largely a stage-irishman, winking over his whiskey that has paid no excise--a better-born relative of captain costigan. politically, _celt and saxon_ seems to be a plea for home rule--home rule, with a view towards a "consolidation of the union." its diagnosis of the irish difficulty is one which has long been popular with many intellectual men on this side of the irish sea. meredith sees, as the roots of the trouble, misunderstanding, want of imagination, want of sympathy. it has always seemed curious to me that intelligent men could persuade themselves that ireland was chiefly suffering from want of understanding and want of sympathy on the part of england, when all the time her only ailment has been want of liberty. to adapt the organ-grinder's motto, sympathy without relief is like mustard without beef. as a matter of fact, meredith realized this, and was a friend to many irish national movements from the home rule struggle down to the gaelic league, to the latter of which the irish part of him sent a subscription a year or two ago. he saw things from the point of view of an imperial liberal idealist, however, not of a nationalist. in the result, he did not know the every-day and traditional setting of irish life sufficiently well to give us an irish nationalist central figure as winning and heroic, even in his extravagances, as, say, the patriotic englishman, neville beauchamp. at the same time, one must be thankful for a book so obviously the work of a great abundant mind--a mind giving out its criticisms like flutters of birds--a heroic intellect always in the service of an ideal liberty, courage, and gracious manners--a characteristically island brain, that was yet not insular. xvii--oscar wilde oscar wilde is a writer whom one must see through in order to appreciate. one must smash the idol in order to preserve the god. if mr. ransome's estimate of wilde in his clever and interesting and seriously-written book is a little unsatisfactory, it is partly because he is not enough of an iconoclast. he has not realized with sufficient clearness that, while wilde belonged to the first rank as a wit, he was scarcely better than second-rate as anything else. consequently, it is not wilde the beau of literature who dominates his book. rather, it is wilde the egoistic,--æsthetic philosopher, and wilde the imaginative artist. this is, of course, as wilde would have liked it to be. for, as mr. ransome says, "though wilde had the secret of a wonderful laughter, he preferred to think of himself as a person with magnificent dreams." indeed, so much was this so, that it is even suggested that, if _salomé_ had not been censored, the social comedies might never have been written. "it is possible," observes mr. ransome, "that we owe _the importance of being earnest_ to the fact that the censor prevented sarah bernhardt from playing _salomé_ at the palace theatre." if this conjecture is right, one can never think quite so unkindly of the censor again, for in _the importance of being earnest_, and in it alone, wilde achieved a work of supreme genius in its kind. it is as lightly-built as a house of cards, a frail edifice of laughter for laughter's sake. or you might say that, in the literature of farce, it has a place as a "dainty rogue in porcelain." it is even lighter and more fragile than that. it is a bubble, or a flight of bubbles. it is the very ecstasy of levity. as we listen to lady bracknell discussing the possibility of parting with her daughter to a man who had been "born, or at least bred, in a handbag," or as we watch jack and algernon wrangling over the propriety of eating muffins in an hour of gloom, we seem somehow to be caught up and to sail through an exhilarating mid-air of nonsense. some people will contend that wilde's laughter is always the laughter not of the open air but of the salon. but there is a spontaneity in the laughter of _the importance of being earnest_ that seems to me to associate it with running water and the sap rising in the green field. it is when he begins to take wilde seriously as a serious writer that one quarrels with mr. ransome. wilde was much better at showing off than at revealing himself, and, as the comedy of showing off is much more delightful than the solemn vanity of it, he was naturally happiest as a wit and persifleur. on his serious side he ranks, not as an original artist, but as a popularizer--the most accomplished popularizer, perhaps, in english literature. he popularized william morris, both his domestic interiors and his utopias, in the æsthetic lectures and in _the soul of man under socialism_--a wonderful pamphlet, the secret of the world-wide fame of which mr. ransome curiously misses. he popularized the cloistral æstheticism of pater and the cultural egoism of goethe in _intentions_ and elsewhere. in _salomé_ he popularized the gorgeous processionals of ornamental sentences upon which flaubert had expended not the least marvellous portion of his genius. into an age that guarded respectability more closely than virtue and ridiculed beauty because it paid no dividend came wilde, the assailant of even the most respectable ugliness, parrying the mockery of the meat tea with a mockery that sparkled like wine. lighting upon a world that advertised commercial wares, he set himself to advertise art with, as heroic an extravagance, and who knows how much his puce velvet knee-breeches may have done to make the british public aware of the genius, say, of walter pater? not that wilde was not a finished egoist, using the arts and the authors to advertise himself rather than himself to advertise them. but the time-spirit contrived that the arts and the authors should benefit by his outrageous breeches. it is in the relation of a great popularizer, then--a popularizer who, for a new thing, was not also a vulgarizer--that wilde seems to me to stand to his age. what, then, of mr. ransome's estimate of _salomé_? that it is a fascinating play no lover of the pageantry of words can deny. but of what quality is this fascination? it is, when all is said and done, the fascination of the lust of painted faces. here we have no tragedy, but a mixing of degenerate philtres. mr. ransome hears "the beating of the wings of the angel of death" in the play; but that seems to me to be exactly the atmosphere that wilde fails to create. as the curtain falls on the broken body of _salomé_ one has a sick feeling, as though one had been present where vermin were being crushed. there is not a hint of the elation, the liberation, of real tragedy. the whole thing is simply a wonderful piece of coloured sensationalism. and even if we turn to the costly sentences of the play, do we not find that, while in his choice of colour and jewel and design flaubert wrought in language like a skilled artificer, wilde, in his treatment of words, was more like a lavish amateur about town displaying his collection of splendid gems? wilde speaks of himself in _de profundis_ as a lord of language. of course, he was just the opposite. language was a vice with him. he took to it as a man might take to drink. he was addicted rather than devoted to language. he had a passion for it, but too little sense of responsibility towards it, and, in his choice of beautiful words, we are always conscious of the indolence as well as the extravagance of the man of pleasure. how beautifully, with what facility of beauty, he could use words, everyone knows who has read his brief _endymion_ (to name one of the poems), and the many hyacinthine passages in _intentions_. but when one is anxious to see the man himself as in _de profundis_--that book of a soul imprisoned in embroidered sophistries--one feels that this cloak of strange words is no better than a curse. if wilde was not a lord of language, however, but only its bejewelled slave, he was a lord of laughter, and it is because there is so much laughter as well as language in _intentions_ that i am inclined to agree with mr. ransome that _intentions_ is "that one of wilde's books that most nearly represents him." even here, however, mr. ransome will insist on taking wilde far too seriously. for instance, he tells us that "his paradoxes are only unfamiliar truths." how horrified wilde would have been to hear him say so! his paradoxes are a good deal more than truths--or a good deal less. they helped, no doubt, to redress a balance, but many of them were the merest exercises in intellectual rebellion. mr. ransome's attitude on the question of wilde's sincerity seems to me as impossible as his attitude in regard to the paradoxes. he draws up a code of artistic sincerity which might serve as a gospel for minor artists, but of which every great artist is a living denial. but there is no room to go into that. disagree as we may with many of mr. ransome's conclusions, we must be grateful to him for a thoughtful, provocative, and ambitious study of one of the most brilliant personalities and wits, though by no means one of the most brilliant imaginative artists, of the nineteenth century. xviii.--two english critics ( ) mr. saintsbury mr. saintsbury as a critic possesses in a high degree the gift of sending the reader post-haste to the works he criticizes. his _peace of the augustans_ is an almost irresistible incitement to go and forget the present world among the poets and novelists and biographers and letter-writers of the eighteenth century. his enthusiasm weaves spells about even the least of them. he does not merely remind us of the genius of pope and swift, of fielding and johnson and walpole. he also summons us to armory's _john buncle_ and to the reverend richard graves's _spiritual quixote_ as to a feast. of the latter novel he declares that "for a book that is to be amusing without being flimsy, and substantial without being ponderous, _the spiritual quixote_ may, perhaps, be commended above all its predecessors and contemporaries outside the work of the great four themselves." that is characteristic of the wealth of invitations scattered through _the peace of the augustans_. after reading the book, one can scarcely resist the temptation to spend an evening over young's _night thoughts_ and one will be almost more likely to turn to prior than to shakespeare himself--prior who, "with the eternal and almost unnecessary exception of shakespeare ... is about the first to bring out the true english humour which involves sentiment and romance, which laughs gently at its own, tears, and has more than half a tear for its own laughter"--prior, of whom it is further written that "no one, except thackeray, has ever entered more thoroughly into the spirit of _ecclesiastes_." it does not matter that in a later chapter of the book it is _rasselas_ which is put with _ecclesiastes_, and, after _rasselas_, _the vanity of human wishes_. one does not go to mr. saintsbury as an inspector of literary weights and measures. his estimates of authors are the impressions of a man talking in a hurry, and his method is the method of exaggeration rather than of precise statement. how deficient he is in the sense of proportion may be judged from the fact that he devotes slightly more space to collins than to pope, unless the pages in which he assails "grub street" as a malicious invention of pope's are to be counted to the credit of the latter. but mr. saintsbury's book is not so much a thorough and balanced survey of eighteenth-century literature as a confession, an almost garrulous monologue on the delights of that literature. how pleasant and unexpected it is to see a critic in his seventies as incautious, as pugnacious, as boisterous as an undergraduate! it is seldom that we find the apostolic spirit of youth living in the same breast with the riches of experience and memory, as we do in the present book. one of the great attractions of the eighteenth century for the modern world is that, while it is safely set at an historical distance from us, it is, at the same time, brought within range of our everyday interests. it is not merely that about the beginning of it men began to write and talk according to the simple rules of modern times. it is rather that about this time the man of letters emerges from the mists of legend and becomes as real as one's uncle in his daily passions and his train of little interests. one has not to reconstruct the lives of swift and pope from a handful of myths and references in legal documents. there is no room for anything akin to baconianism in their regard. they live in a thousand letters and contemporary illusions, and one might as well be an agnostic about mr. asquith as about either of them. pope was a champion liar, and swift spun mystifications about himself. but, in spite of lies and mystifications and gossip, they are both as real to us as if we met them walking down the strand. one could not easily imagine shakespeare walking down the strand. the strand would have to be rebuilt, and the rest of us would have to put on fancy dress in order to receive him. but though swift and pope lived in a century of wig and powder and in a london strangely unlike the london of to-day, we do not feel that similar preparations would be needed in their case. if swift came back, one can without difficulty imagine him pamphleteering about war as though he had merely been asleep for a couple of centuries; and pope, we may be sure, would resume, without too great perplexity, his attack on the egoists and dunces of the world of letters. but shakespeare's would be a return from legendary elysian fields. hence mr. saintsbury may justly hope that his summons to the modern random reader, no less than to the scholar, to go and enjoy himself among the writers of the eighteenth century will not fall on entirely deaf ears. at the same time, it is only fair to warn the general reader not to follow mr. saintsbury's recommendations and opinions too blindly. he will do well to take the author's advice and read pope, but he will do very ill to take the author's advice as regards what in pope is best worth reading. mr. saintsbury speaks with respect, for instance, of the _elegy on an unfortunate lady_--an insincere piece of tombstone rhetoric. "there are some," he declared in a footnote, "to whom this singular piece is pope's strongest atonement, both as poet and man, for his faults as both." it seems to me to be a poem which reveals pope's faults as a poet, while of pope the man it tells us simply nothing. it has none of pope's wit, none of his epigrammatic characterization, none of his bewigged and powdered fancies, none of his malicious self-revelation. almost the only interesting thing about it is the notes the critics have written on it, discussing whether the lady ever lived, and, if so, whether she was a miss wainsbury or a lady of title, whether she was beautiful or deformed, whether she was in love with pope or the duke of buckingham or the duc de berry, whether pope was in love with her, or even knew her, or whether she killed herself with a sword or by hanging herself. one can find plenty of "rest and refreshment" among the conjectures of the commentators, but in the verse itself one can find little but a good example of the technique of the rhymed couplet. but mr. saintsbury evidently loves the heroic couplet for itself alone. the only long example of pope's verse which he quotes is merely ding-dong, and might have been written by any capable imitator of the poet later in the century. surely, if his contention is true that pope's reputation as a poet is now lower than it ought to be, he ought to have quoted something from the _epistle to dr. arbuthnot_ or _the rape of the lock_, or even _the essay on man_. the two first are almost flawless masterpieces. here pope suddenly becomes a star. here he gilds his age and his passions with wit and fancy; he ceases to be a mere rhymed moralist, a mechanician of metre. mr. saintsbury, i regret to see, contends that the first version of _the rape of the lock_ is the best. one can hardly forgive this throwing overboard of the toilet and the fairies which pope added in the later edition. we may admit that the gnomes are a less happy invention than the sylphs, and that their introduction lets the poem down from its level of magic illusion. but in the second telling the poem is an infinitely richer and more peopled thing. had we only known the first version, we should, no doubt, have felt with addison that it was madness to tamper with such exquisite perfection. but pope, who foolishly attributed addison's advice to envy, proved that addison was wrong. his revision of _the rape of the lock_ is one of the few magnificently successful examples in literature of painting the lily. one differs from mr. saintsbury, however, less in liking a different garden from his than in liking a different seat in the same garden. one who is familiar as he is with all the literature he discusses in the present volume is bound to indulge all manner of preferences, whims and even eccentricities. an instance of mr. saintsbury's whims is his complaint that the eighteenth-century essays are almost always reprinted only in selections and without the advertisements that appeared with them on their first publication. he is impatient of j. r. green's dismissal of the periodical essayist as a "mass of rubbish," and he demands his eighteenth-century essayists in full, advertisements and all. "here," he insists, "these things fringe and vignette the text in the most appropriate manner, and so set off the quaint variety and the other-worldly character as nothing else could do." is not the author's contention, however, as to the great loss the addisonian essay suffers when isolated from its context a severe criticism on that essay as literature? the man of letters likes to read from a complete _spectator_ as he does from a complete wordsworth. at the same time, the best of addison, as of wordsworth, can stand on its own feet in an anthology, and this is the final proof of its literary excellence. the taste for eighteenth century advertisements is, after all, only literary antiquarianism--a delightful indulgence, a by-path, but hardly necessary to the enjoyment of addison's genius. but it is neither pope nor addison who is ultimately mr. saintsbury's idol among the poets and prose-writers of the eighteenth century. his idol of idols is swift, and next to him he seems most wholeheartedly to love and admire dr. johnson and fielding. he makes no bones about confessing his preference of swift to aristophanes and rabelais and molière. swift does not at once fascinate and cold-shoulder him as he does to so many people. mr. saintsbury glorifies _gulliver_, and wisely so, right down to the last word about the houyhnhnms, and he demands for the _journal to stella_ recognition as "the first great novel, being at the same time a marvellous and absolutely genuine autobiography." his ultimate burst of appreciation is a beautifully characteristic example of what has before been called saintsburyese--not because of any obscurity in it, but because of its oddity of phrase and metaphor: swift never wearies, for, as bossuet said of human passion generally, there is in this greatest master of one of its most terrible forms, _quelque chose d'infini_, and the refreshment which he offers varies unceasingly from the lightest froth of pure nonsense, through beverages middle and stronger to the most drastic restoratives--the very strychnine and capsicum of irony. but what, above all, attracts mr. saintsbury in swift, fielding and johnson is their eminent manliness. he is an enthusiast within limits for the genius of sterne and the genius of horace walpole. but he loves them in a grudging way. he is disgusted with their lack of muscle. he admits of the characters in _tristrom shandy_ that "they are ... much more intrinsically true to life than many, if not almost all, the characters of dickens," but he is too greatly shocked by sterne's humour to be just to his work as a whole. it is the same with walpole's letters. mr. saintsbury will heap sentence after sentence of praise upon them, till one would imagine they were his favourite eighteenth-century literature. he even defends walpole's character against macaulay, but in the result he damns him with faint praise quite as effectively as macaulay did. that he has an enviable appetite for walpole's letters is shown by the fact that, in speaking of mrs. toynbee's huge sixteen-volume edition of them, he observes that "even a single reading of it will supply the evening requirements of a man who does not go to bed very late, and has learnt the last lesson of intellectual as of other enjoyment--to enjoy _slowly_--for nearer a month than a week, and perhaps for longer still." the man who can get through horace walpole in a month of evenings without sitting up late seems to me to be endowed not only with an avarice of reading, but with an avarice of walpole. but, in spite of this, mr. saintsbury does not seem to like his author. his ideal author is one of whom he can say, as he does of johnson, that he is "one of the greatest of englishmen, one of the greatest men of letters, and one of the greatest of _men_." one of his complaints against gray is that, though he liked _joseph andrews_, he "had apparently not enough manliness to see some of fielding's real merits." as for fielding, mr. saintsbury's verdict is summed up in dryden's praise of chaucer. "here is god's plenty." in _tom jones_ he contends that fielding "puts the whole plant of the pleasure-giver in motion, as no novel-writer--not even cervantes--had ever done before." for myself, i doubt whether the exaltation of fielding has not become too much a matter of orthodoxy in recent years. compare him with swift, and he is long-winded in his sentences. compare him with sterne, and his characters are mechanical. compare him with dickens, and he reaches none of the depths, either of laughter or of sadness. this is not to question the genius of fielding's vivid and critical picture of eighteenth-century manners and morals. it is merely to put a drag on the wheel of mr saintsbury's galloping enthusiasm. but, however one may quarrel with it, _the peace of the augustans_ is a book to read with delight--an eccentric book, an extravagant book, a grumpy book, but a book of rare and amazing enthusiasm for good literature. mr. saintsbury's constant jibes at the present age, as though no one had ever been unmanly enough to make a joke before mr. shaw, become amusing in the end like dr. johnson's rudenesses. and mr. saintsbury's one attempt to criticize contemporary fiction--where he speaks of _sinister street_ in the same breath with _waverley_ and _pride and prejudice_--is both amusing and rather appalling. but, in spite of his attitude to his own times, one could not ask for more genial company on going on a pilgrimage among the augustans. mr. saintsbury has in this book written the most irresistible advertisement of eighteenth-century literature that has been published for many years. ( ) mr. gosse mr. gosse and mr. saintsbury are the two kings of sparta among english critics of to-day. they stand preeminent among those of our contemporaries who have served literature in the capacity of law-givers during the past fifty years. i do not suggest that they are better critics than mr. birrell or sir sidney colvin or the late sir e.t. cook. but none of these three was ever a professional and whole-time critic, as mr. gosse and mr. saintsbury are. one thinks of the latter primarily as the authors of books about books, though mr. gosse is a poet and biographer as well, and mr. saintsbury, it is said, once dreamed of writing a history of wine. one might say of mr. gosse that even in his critical work he writes largely as a poet and biographer, while mr. saintsbury writes of literature as though he were writing a history of wine. mr. saintsbury seeks in literature, above all things, exhilarating qualities. he can read almost anything and in any language, provided it is not non-intoxicating. he has a good head, and it cannot be said that he ever allows an author to go to it. but the authors whom he has collected in his wonderful cellar unquestionably make him merry. in his books he always seems to be pressing on us "another glass of jane austen," or "just a thimbleful of pope," or "a drop of ' tennyson." no other critic of literature writes with the garrulous gusto of a boon-companion as mr. saintsbury does. in our youth, when we demand style as well as gusto, we condemn him on account of his atrocious english. as we grow older, we think of his english merely as a rather eccentric sort of coat, and we begin to recognize that geniality such as his is a part of critical genius. true, he is not over-genial to new authors. he regards them as he might claret. perhaps he is right. authors undoubtedly get mellower with age. even great poetry is, we are told, a little crude to the taste till it has stood for a few seasons. mr. gosse is at once more grave and more deferential in his treatment of great authors. one cannot imagine mr. saintsbury speaking in a hushed voice before shakespeare himself. one can almost hear him saying, "hullo, shakespeare!" to mr. gosse, however, literature is an almost sacred subject. he glows in its presence. he is more lyrical than mr. saintsbury, more imaginative and more eloquent. his short history of english literature is a book that fills a young head with enthusiasm. he writes as a servant of the great tradition. he is a whig, where mr. saintsbury is an heretical old jacobite. he is, however, saved from a professorial earnestness by his sharp talent for portraiture. mr. gosse's judgments may or may not last: his portraits certainly will. it is to be hoped that he will one day write his reminiscences. such a book would, we feel sure, be among the great books of portraiture in the history of english literature. he has already set patmore and swinburne before us in comic reality, and who can forget the grotesque figure of hans andersen, sketched in a few lines though it is, in _two visits to denmark_? it may be replied that mr. gosse has already given us the best of his reminiscences in half a dozen books of essay and biography. even so, there were probably many things which it was not expedient to tell ten or twenty years ago, but which might well be related for the sake of truth and entertainment to-day. mr. gosse in the past has usually told the truth about authors with the gentleness of a modern dentist extracting a tooth. he keeps up a steady conversation of praise while doing the damage. the truth is out before you know. one becomes suddenly aware that the author has ceased to be as coldly perfect as a tailor's model, and is a queer-looking creature with a gap in his jaw. it is possible that the author, were he alive, would feel furious, as a child sometimes feels with the dentist. none the less, mr. gosse has done him a service. the man who extracts a truth is as much to be commended as the man who extracts a tooth. it is not the function of the biographer any more than it is that of a dentist to prettify his subject. each is an enemy of decay, a furtherer of life. there is such a thing as painless biography, but it is the work of quacks. mr. gosse is one of those honest dentists who reassure you by allowing it to hurt you "just a little." this gift for telling the truth is no small achievement in a man of letters. literature is a broom that sweeps lies out of the mind, and fortunate is the man who wields it. unhappily, while mr. gosse is daring in portraiture, he is the reverse in comment. in comment, as his writings on the war showed, he will fall in with the cant of the times. he can see through the cant of yesterday with a sparkle in his eyes, but he is less critical of the cant of to-day. he is at least fond of throwing out saving clauses, as when, writing of mr. sassoon's verse, he says: "his temper is not altogether to be applauded, for such sentiments must tend to relax the effort of the struggle, yet they can hardly be reproved when conducted with so much honesty and courage." mr. gosse again writes out of the official rather than the imaginative mind when, speaking of the war poets, he observes: it was only proper that the earliest of all should be the poet laureate's address to england, ending with the prophecy: much suffering shall cleanse thee! but thou through the flood shall win to salvation, to beauty through blood. had a writer of the age of charles ii. written a verse like that, mr. gosse's chortles would have disturbed the somnolent peace of the house of peers. even if it had been written in the time of albert the good, he would have rent it with the destructive dagger of a phrase. as it is, one is not sure that mr. gosse regards this appalling scrap from a bad hymnal as funny. one hopes that he quoted it with malicious intention. but did he? was it not mr. gosse who early in the war glorified the blood that was being shed as a cleansing stream of condy's fluid? the truth is, apart from his thoughts about literature, mr. gosse thinks much as the leader-writers tell him. he is sensitive to beauty of style and to idiosyncrasy of character, but he lacks philosophy and that tragic sense that gives the deepest sympathy. that, we fancy, is why we would rather read him on catherine trotter, the precursor of the bluestockings, than on any subject connected with the war. two of the most interesting chapters in mr. gosse's _diversions of a man of letters_ are the essay on catherine trotter and that on "the message of the wartons." here he is on ground on which there is no leader-writer to take him by the hand and guide him into saying "the right thing." he writes as a disinterested scholar and an entertainer. he forgets the war and is amused. how many readers are there in england who know that catherine trotter "published in a copy of verses addressed to mr. bevil higgons on the occasion of his recovery from the smallpox," and that "she was then fourteen years of age"? how many know even that she wrote a blank-verse tragedy in five acts, called _agnes de cestro_, and had it produced at drury lane at the age of sixteen? at the age of nineteen she was the friend of congreve, and was addressed by farquhar as "one of the fairest of her sex and the best judge." by the age of twenty-five, however, she had apparently written herself out, so far as the stage was concerned, and after her tragedy, _the revolution in sweden_, the theatre knows her no more. though described as "the sappho of scotland" by the queen of prussia, and by the duke of marlborough as "the wisest virgin i ever knew," her fame did not last even as long as her life. she married a clergyman, wrote on philosophy and religion, and lived till seventy. her later writings, according to mr. gosse, "are so dull that merely to think of them brings tears into one's eyes." her husband, who was a bit of a jacobite, lost his money on account of his opinions, even though--"a perfect gentleman at heart--'he always prayed for the king and royal family by name.'" "meanwhile," writes mr. gosse, "to uplift his spirits in this dreadful condition, he is discovered engaged upon a treatise on the mosaic deluge, which he could persuade no publisher to print. he reminds us of dr. primrose in _the vicar of wakefield_, and, like him, mr. cockburn probably had strong views on the whistonian doctrine." altogether the essay on catherine trotter is an admirable example of mr. gosse in a playful mood. the study of joseph and thomas warton as "two pioneers of romanticism" is more serious in purpose, and is a scholarly attempt to discover the first symptoms of romanticism in eighteenth-century literature. mr. gosse finds in _the enthusiast_, written by joseph warton at the age of eighteen, "the earliest expression of full revolt against the classical attitude which had been sovereign in all european literature for nearly a century." he does not pretend that it is a good poem, but "here, for the first time, we find unwaveringly emphasized and repeated what was entirely new in literature, the essence of romantic hysteria." it is in joseph warton, according to mr. gosse, that we first meet with "the individualist attitude to nature." readers of horace walpole's letters, however, will remember still earlier examples of the romantic attitude to nature. but these were not published for many years afterwards. the other essays in the book range from the charm of sterne to the vivacity of lady dorothy nevill, from a eulogy of poe to a discussion of disraeli as a novelist. the variety, the scholarship, the portraiture of the book make it a pleasure to read; and, even when mr. gosse flatters in his portraits, his sense of truth impels him to draw the features correctly, so that the facts break through the praise. the truth is mr. gosse is always doing his best to balance the pleasure of saying the best with the pleasure of saying the worst. his books are all the more vital because they bear the stamp of an appreciative and mildly cruel personality. xix.--an american critic: professor irving babbitt it is rather odd that two of the ablest american critics should also be two of the most unsparing enemies of romanticism in literature. professor babbitt and mr. paul elmer more cannot get over the french revolution. they seem to think that the rights of man have poisoned literature. one suspects that they have their doubts even about the american revolution; for there, too, the rights of man were asserted against the lust of power. it is only fair to professor babbitt to say that he does not defend the lust of power. on the contrary, he damns it, and explains it as the logical and almost inevitable outcome of the rights of man! the steps of the process by which the change is effected are these. first, we have the rousseaus asserting that the natural man is essentially good, but that he has been depraved by an artificial social system imposed on him from without. instead of the quarrel between good and evil in his breast, they see only the quarrel between the innate good in man and his evil environment. they hold that all will be well if only he is set free--if his genius or natural impulses are liberated. "rousseauism is ... an emancipation of impulse--especially of the impulse of sex." it is a gospel of egoism and leaves little room for conscience. hence it makes men mengalomaniacs, and the lust for dominion is given its head no less than the lust of the flesh. "in the absence of ethical discipline," writes professor babbitt in _rousseau and romanticism_, "the lust for knowledge and the lust for feeling count very little, at least practically, compared with the third main lust of human nature--the lust for power. hence the emergence of that most sinister of all types, the efficient megalomaniac." in the result it appears that not only rousseau and hugo, but wordsworth, keats, and shelley, helped to bring about the european war! had there been no wars, no tyrants, and no lascivious men before rousseau, one would have been ready to take professor babbitt's indictment more seriously. professor babbitt, however, has a serious philosophic idea at the back of all he says. he believes that man at his noblest lives the life of obligation rather than of impulse; and that romantic literature discourages him in this. he holds that man should rise from the plane of nature to the plane of humanism or the plane of religion, and that to live according to one's temperament, as the romanticists preach, is to sink back from human nature, in the best sense, to animal nature. he takes the view that men of science since bacon, by the great conquests they have made in the material sphere, have prepared man to take the romantic and boastful view of himself. "if men had not been so heartened by scientific progress they would have been less ready, we may be sure, to listen to rousseau when he affirmed that they were naturally good." not that professor babbitt looks on us as utterly evil and worthy of damnation. he objects to the gloomy jonathan-edwards view, because it helps to precipitate by reaction the opposite extreme--"the boundless sycophancy of human nature from which we are now suffering." it was, perhaps, in reaction against the priests that rousseau made the most boastful announcements of his righteousness. "rousseau feels himself so good that he is ready, as he declares, to appear before the almighty at the sound of the trump of the last judgment, with the book of his _confessions_ in his hand, and there to issue a challenge to the whole human race, 'let a single one assert to thee if he dare: "i am better than that man."'" rousseau would have been saved from this fustian virtue, professor babbitt thinks, if he had accepted either the classic or the religious view of life: for the classic view imposes on human nature the discipline of decorum, while the religious view imposes the discipline of humility. human nature, he holds, requires the restrictions of the everlasting "no." virtue is a struggle within iron limitations, not an easy gush of feeling. at the same time, professor babbitt does not offer us as a cure for our troubles the decorum of the pharisees and the pseudo-classicists, who bid us obey outward rules instead of imitating a spirit. he wishes our men of letters to rediscover the ethical imagination of the greeks. "true classicism," he observes, "does not rest on the observance of rules or the imitation of modes, but on an immediate insight into the universal." the romanticists, he thinks, cultivate not the awe we find in the great writers, but mere wonder. he takes poe as a typical romanticist. "it is not easy to discover in either the personality or writings of poe an atom of awe or reverence. on the other hand, he both experiences wonder and seeks in his art to be a pure wonder-smith." one of the results of putting wonder above awe is that the romanticists unduly praise the ignorant--the savage, the peasant, and the child. wordsworth here comes in for denunciation for having hailed a child of six as "mighty prophet! seer blest!" christ, professor babbitt tells us, praised the child not for its capacity for wonder, but for its freedom from sin. the romanticist, on the other hand, loves the spontaneous gush of wonder. he loves day-dreams, arcadianism, fairy-tale utopianism. he begins with an uncontrolled fancy and ends with an uncontrolled character. he tries all sorts of false gods--nature-worship, art-worship, humanitarianism, sentimentalism about animals. as regards the last of these, romanticism, according to the author, has meant the rehabilitation of the ass, and the rousseauists are guilty of onolatry. "medical men have given a learned name to the malady of those who neglect the members of their own family and gush over animals (zoöphilpsychosis). but rousseau already exhibits this 'psychosis.' he abandoned his five children one after the other, but had, we are told, an unspeakable affection for his dog." as for the worship of nature, it leads to a "wise passiveness" instead of the wise energy of knowledge and virtue, and tempts man to idle in pantheistic reveries. "in rousseau or walt whitman it amounts to a sort of ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine illumination." professor babbitt distrusts ecstasy as he distrusts arcadianism. he perceives the mote of arcadianism even in "the light that never was on sea or land." he has no objection to a "return to nature," if it is for purposes of recreation: he denounces it, however, when it is set up as a cult or "a substitute for philosophy and religion." he denounces, indeed, every kind of "painless substitute for genuine spiritual effort." he admires the difficult virtues, and holds that the gift of sympathy or pity or fraternity is in their absence hardly worth having. on points of this kind, i fancy, he would have had on his side wordsworth, coleridge, browning, and many of the other "rousseauists" whom he attacks. professor babbitt, however, is a merciless critic, and the writers of the nineteenth century, who seemed to most of us veritable monsters of ethics, are to him simply false prophets of romanticism and scientific complacency. "the nineteenth century," he declares, "may very well prove to have been the most wonderful and the least wise of centuries." he admits the immense materialistic energy of the century, but this did not make up for the lack of a genuine philosophic insight in life and literature. man is a morally indolent animal, and he was never more so than when he was working "with something approaching frenzy according to the natural law." faced with the spectacle of a romantic spiritual sloth accompanied by a materialistic, physical, and even intellectual energy, the author warns us that "the discipline that helps a man to self-mastery is found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature." he sees a peril to our civilization in our absorption in the temporal and our failure to discover that "something abiding" on which civilization must rest. he quotes aristotle's anti-romantic saying that "most men would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner." he feels that in conduct, politics, and the arts, we have, as the saying is, "plumped for" the disorderly manner to-day. his book is a very useful challenge to the times, though it is a dangerous book to put in the hands of anyone inclined to conservatism. after all, romanticism was a great liberating force. it liberated men, not from decorum, but from pseudo-decorum--not from humility, but from subserviency. it may be admitted that, without humility and decorum of the true kind, liberty is only pseudo-liberty, equality only pseudo-equality, and fraternity only pseudo-fraternity. i am afraid, however, that in getting rid of the vices of romanticism professor babbitt would pour away the baby with the bath water. where professor babbitt goes wrong is in not realizing that romanticism with its emphasis on rights is a necessary counterpart to classicism with its emphasis on duties. each of them tries to do without the other. the most notorious romantic lovers were men who failed to realize the necessity of fidelity, just as the minor romantic artists to-day fail to realize the necessity of tradition. on the other hand, the classicist-in-excess prefers a world in which men preserve the decorum of servants to a world in which they might attain to the decorum of equals. professor babbitt refers to the pseudo-classical drama of seventeenth-century france, in which men confused nobility of language with the language of the nobility. he himself unfortunately is not free from similar prejudices. he is antipathetic, so far as one can see, to any movement for a better social system than we already possess. he is definitely in reaction against the whole forward movement of the last two centuries. he has pointed out certain flaws in the moderns, but he has failed to appreciate their virtues. literature to-day is less noble than the literature of shakespeare, partly, i think, because men have lost the "sense of sin." without the sense of sin we cannot have the greatest tragedy. the greeks and shakespeare perceived the contrast between the pure and the impure, the noble and the base, as no writer perceives it to-day. romanticism undoubtedly led to a confusion of moral values. on the other hand, it was a necessary counterblast to formalism. in the great books of the world, in _isaiah_ and the gospels, the best elements of both the classic and the romantic are found working together in harmony. if christ were living to-day, is professor babbitt quite sure that he himself would not have censured the anthophilpsychosis of "consider the lilies of the field"? xx.--georgians ( ) mr. de la mare mr. walter de la mare gives us no thames of song. his genius is scarcely more than a rill. but how the rill shines! how sweet a music it makes! into what lands of romance does it flow, and beneath what hedges populous with birds! it seems at times as though it were a little fugitive stream attempting to run as far away as possible from the wilderness of reality and to lose itself in quiet, dreaming places. there never were shyer songs than these. mr. de la mare is at the opposite pole to poets so robustly at ease with experience as browning and whitman. he has no cheers or welcome for the labouring universe on its march. he is interested in the daily procession only because he seeks in it one face, one figure. he is love-sick for love, for beauty, and longs to save it from the contamination of the common world. like the lover in _the tryst_, he dreams always of a secret place of love and beauty set solitarily beyond the bounds of the time and space we know: beyond the rumour even of paradise come, there, out of all remembrance, make our home: seek we some close hid shadow for our lair, hollowed by noah's mouse beneath the chair wherein the omnipotent, in slumber bound, nods till the piteous trump of judgment sound. perchance leviathan of the deep sea would lease a lost mermaiden's grot to me, there of your beauty we would joyance make-- a music wistful for the sea-nymph's sake: haply elijah, o'er his spokes of fire, cresting steep leo, or the heavenly lyre, spied, tranced in azure of inanest space, some eyrie hostel meet for human grace, where two might happy be--just you and i-- lost in the uttermost of eternity. this is, no doubt, a far from rare mood in poetry. even the waltz-songs of the music-halls express, or attempt to express, the longing of lovers for an impossible loneliness. mr. de la mare touches our hearts, however, not because he shares our sentimental day-dreams, but because he so mournfully turns back from them to the bitterness of reality: no, no. nor earth, nor air, nor fire, nor deep could lull poor mortal longingness asleep. somewhere there nothing is; and there lost man shall win what changeless vague of peace he can. these lines (ending in an unsatisfactory and ineffective vagueness of phrase, which is mr. de la mare's peculiar vice as a poet) suggests something of the sad philosophy which runs through the verse in _motley_. the poems are, for the most part, praise of beauty sought and found in the shadow of death. melancholy though it is, however, mr. de la mare's book is, as we have said, a book of praise, not of lamentations. he triumphantly announces that, if he were to begin to write of earth's wonders: flit would the ages on soundless wings ere unto z my pen drew nigh; leviathan told, and the honey-fly. he cannot come upon a twittering linnet, a "thing of light," in a bush without realizing that-- all the throbbing world of dew and sun and air by this small parcel of life is made more fair. he bids us in _farewell_: look thy last on all things lovely every hour. let no night seal thy sense in deathly slumber till to delight thou have paid thy utmost blessing. thus, there is nothing faint-hearted in mr. de la mare's melancholy. his sorrow is idealist's sorrow. he has the heart of a worshipper, a lover. we find evidence of this not least in his war-verses. at the outbreak of the war he evidently shared with other lovers and idealists the feeling of elation in the presence of noble sacrifices made for the world. now each man's mind all europe is, he cries, in the first line in _happy england_, and, as he remembers the peace of england, "her woods and wilds, her loveliness," he exclaims: o what a deep contented night the sun from out her eastern seas would bring the dust which in her sight had given its all for these! so beautiful a spirit as mr. de la mare's, however, could not remain content with idealizing from afar the sacrifices and heroism of dying men. in the long poem called _motley_ he turns from the heroism to the madness of war, translating his vision into a fool's song: nay, but a dream i had of a world all mad, not simply happy mad like me, who am mad like an empty scene of water and willow-tree, where the wind hath been; but that foul satan-mad, who rots in his own head.... the fool's vision of men going into battle is not a vision of knights of the holy ghost nobly falling in the lists with their country looking on, but of men's bodies-- dragging cold cannon through a mire of rain and blood and spouting fire, the new moon glinting hard on eyes wide with insanities! in _the marionettes_ mr. de la mare turns to tragic satire for relief from the bitterness of a war-maddened world: let the foul scene proceed: there's laughter in the wings; 'tis sawdust that they bleed, but a box death brings. how rare a skill is theirs these extreme pangs to show, how real a frenzy wears each feigner of woe! and the poem goes on in perplexity of anger and anguish: strange, such a piece is free, while we spectators sit, aghast at its agony, yet absorbed in it! dark is the outer air, coldly the night draughts blow, mutely we stare, and stare, at the frenzied show. yet heaven hath its quiet shroud of deep, immutable blue-- we cry, "the end!" we are bowed by the dread, "'tis true!" while the shape who hoofs applause behind our deafened ear, hoots--angel-wise--"the cause"! and affrights even fear. there is something in these lines that reminds one of mr. thomas hardy's black-edged indictment of life. as we read mr. de la mare, indeed, we are reminded again and again of the work of many other poets--of the ballad-writers, the elizabethan song-writers, blake and wordsworth, mr. hardy and mr. w.b. yeats. in some instances it is as though mr. de la mare had deliberately set himself to compose a musical variation on the same theme as one of the older masters. thus, _april moon_, which contains the charming verse-- "the little moon that april brings, more lovely shade than light, that, setting, silvers lonely hills upon the verge of night"-- is merely wordsworth's "she dwelt among the untrodden ways" turned into new music. new music, we should say, is mr. de la mare's chief gift to literature--a music not regular or precise or certain, but none the less a music in which weak rhymes and even weak phrases are jangled into a strange beauty, as in _alexander_, which begins: it was the great alexander, capped with a golden helm, sate in the ages, in his floating ship, in a dead calm. one finds mr. de la mare's characteristic, unemphatic music again in the opening lines of _mrs. grundy_: step very softly, sweet quiet-foot, stumble not, whisper not, smile not, where "foot" and "not" are rhymes. it is the stream of music flowing through his verses rather than any riches of imagery or phrase that makes one rank the author so high among living poets. but music in verse can hardly be separated from intensity and sincerity of vision. this music of mr. de la mare's is not a mere craftsman's tune: it is an echo of the spirit. had he not seen beautiful things passionately, mr. de la mare could never have written: thou with thy cheek on mine, and dark hair loosed, shalt see take the far stars for fruit the cypress tree, and in the yew's black shall the moon be. beautiful as mr. de la mare's vision is, however, and beautiful as is his music, we miss in his work that frequent perfection of phrase which is part of the genius of (to take another living writer) mr. yeats. one has only to compare mr. yeats's _i heard the old, old men say_ with mr. de la mare's _the old men_ to see how far the latter falls below verbal mastery. mr. yeats has found the perfect embodiment for his imagination. mr. de la mare seems in comparison to be struggling with his medium, and contrives in his first verse to be no more than just articulate: old and alone, sit we, caged, riddle-rid men, lost to earth's "listen!" and "see!" thought's "wherefore?" and "when?" there is vision in some of the later verses in the poem, but, if we read it alongside of mr. yeats's, we get an impression of unsuccess of execution. whether one can fairly use the word "unsuccess" in reference to verse which succeeds so exquisitely as mr. de la mare's in being literature is a nice question. but how else is one to define the peculiar quality of his style--its hesitations, its vaguenesses, its obscurities? on the other hand, even when his lines leave the intellect puzzled and the desire for grammar unsatisfied, a breath of original romance blows through them and appeals to us like the illogical burden of a ballad. here at least are the rhythms and raptures of poetry, if not always the beaten gold of speech. sometimes mr. de la mare's verse reminds one of piano-music, sometimes of bird-music: it wavers so curiously between what is composed and what is unsophisticated. not that one ever doubts for a moment that mr. de la mare has spent on his work an artist's pains. he has made a craft out of his innocence. if he produces in his verse the effect of the wind among the reeds, it is the result not only of his artlessness, but of his art. he is one of the modern poets who have broken away from the metrical formalities of swinburne and the older men, and who, of set purpose, have imposed upon poetry the beauty of a slightly irregular pulse. he is typical of his generation, however, not only in his form, but in the pain of his unbelief (as shown in _betrayal_), and in that sense of half-revelation that fills him always with wonder and sometimes with hope. his poems tell of the visits of strange presences in dream and vacancy. in _a vacant day_, after describing the beauty of a summer moon, with clear waters flowing under willows, he closes with the verses: i listened; and my heart was dumb with praise no language could express; longing in vain for him to come who had breathed such blessedness. on this fair world, wherein we pass so chequered and so brief a stay, and yearned in spirit to learn, alas! what kept him still away. in these poems we have the genius of the beauty of gentleness expressing itself as it is doing nowhere else just now in verse. mr. de la mare's poetry is not only lovely, but lovable. he has a personal possession-- the skill of words to sweeten despair, such as will, we are confident, give him a permanent place in english literature. ( ) the group the latest collection of georgian verse has had a mixed reception. one or two distinguished critics have written of it in the mood of a challenge to mortal combat. men have begun to quarrel over the question whether we are living in an age of poetic dearth or of poetic plenty--whether the world is a nest of singing-birds or a cage in which the last canary has been dead for several years. all this, i think, is a good sign. it means that poetry is interesting people sufficiently to make them wish to argue about it. better a breeze--even a somewhat excessive breeze--than stagnant air. it is good both for poets and for the reading public. it prevents the poets from resting on their wings, as they might be tempted to do by a consistent calm of praise. it compels them to examine their work more critically. anyhow, "fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil," and a reasonable amount of sharp censure will do a true poet more good than harm. it will not necessarily injure even his sales. i understand the latest volume of _georgian poetry_ is already in greater demand than its predecessor. it is a good anthology of the poetry of the last two years without being an ideal anthology. some good poets and some good poems have been omitted. and they have been omitted, in some instances, in favour of inferior work. many of us would prefer an anthology of the best poems rather than an anthology of authors. at the same time, with all its faults, _georgian poetry_ still remains the best guide we possess to the poetic activities of the time. i am glad to see that the editor includes the work of a woman in his new volume. this helps to make it more representative than the previous selections. but there are several other living women who are better poets, at the lowest estimate, than at least a quarter of the men who have gained admission. mr. w.h. davies is by now a veteran among the georgians, and one cannot easily imagine a presence more welcome in a book of verse. among poets he is a bird singing in a hedge. he communicates the same sense of freshness while he sings. he has also the quick eye of a bird. he is, for all his fairy music, on the look-out for things that will gratify his appetite. he looks to the earth rather than the sky, though he is by no means deaf to the lark that raves in his windy heights above a cloud. at the same time, at his best, he says nothing about his appetite, and sings in the free spirit of a child at play. his best poems are songs of innocence. at least, that is the predominant element in them. he warned the public in a recent book that he is not so innocent as he sounds. but his genius certainly is. he has written greater poems than any that are included in the present selection. _birds_, however, is a beautiful example of his gift for joy. we need not fear for contemporary poetry while the hedges contain a poet such as mr. davies. mr. de la mare does not sing from a hedge. he is a child of the arts. he plays an instrument. his music is the music of a lute of which some of the strings have been broken. it is so extraordinarily sweet, indeed, that one has to explain him to oneself as the perfect master of an imperfect instrument. he is at times like watts's figure of hope listening to the faint music of the single string that remains unbroken. there is always some element of hope, or of some kindred excuse for joy, even in his deepest melancholy. but it is the joy of a spirit, not of a "super-tramp." prospero might have summoned just such a spirit through the air to make music for him. and mr. de la mare's is a spirit perceptible to the ear rather than to the eye. one need not count him the equal of campion in order to feel that he has something of campion's beautiful genius for making airs out of words. he has little enough of the keatsian genius for choosing the word that has the most meaning for the seeing imagination. but there is a secret melody in his words that, when once one has recognized it, one can never forget. how different the georgian poets are from each other may be seen if we compare three of the best poems in this book, all of them on similar subjects--mr. davies's _birds_, mr. de la mare's _linnet_, and mr. squire's _birds_. mr. squire would feel as out of place in a hedge as would mr. de la mare. he has an aquiline love of soaring and surveying immense tracts with keen eyes. he loves to explore both time and the map, but he does this without losing his eyehold on the details of the noah's ark of life on the earth beneath him. he does not lose himself in vaporous abstractions; his eye, as well as his mind, is extraordinarily interesting. this poem of his, _birds_, is peopled with birds. we see them in flight and in their nests. at the same time, the philosophic wonder of mr. squire's poem separates him from mr. davies and mr. de la mare. mr. davies, i fancy, loves most to look at birds; mr. de la mare to listen to birds; mr. squire to brood over them with the philosophic imagination. it would, of course, be absurd to offer this as a final statement of the poetic attitude of the three writers. it is merely an attempt to differentiate among them with the help of a prominent characteristic of each. the other poets in the collection include mr. robert graves (with his pleasant bias towards nursery rhymes), mr. sassoon (with his sensitive, passionate satire), and mr. edward shanks (with his trembling responsiveness to beauty). it is the first time that mr. shanks appears among the georgians, and his _night piece_ and _glow-worm_ both show how exquisite is his sensibility. he differs from the other poets by his quasi-analytic method. he seems to be analyzing the beauty of the evening in both these poems. mrs. shove's _a man dreams that he is the creator_ is a charming example of fancy toying with a great theme. ( ) the young satirists satire, it has been said, is an ignoble art; and it is probable that there are no satirists in heaven. probably there are no doctors either. satire and medicine are our responses to a diseased world--to our diseased selves. they are responses, however, that make for health. satire holds the medicine-glass up to human nature. it also holds the mirror up in a limited way. it does not show a man what he looks like when he is both well and good. it does show a man what he looks like, however, when he breaks out into spots or goes yellow, pale, or mottled as a result of making a beast of himself. it reflects only sick men; but it reflects them with a purpose. it would be a crime to permit it, if the world were a hospital for incurables. to write satire is an act of faith, not a luxurious exercise. the despairing swift was a fighter, as the despairing anatole france is a fighter. they may have uttered the very z of melancholy about the animal called man; but at least they were sufficiently optimistic to write satires and to throw themselves into defeated causes. it would be too much to expect of satire that it alone will cure mankind of the disease of war. it is a good sign, however, that satires on war have begun to be written. war has affected with horror or disgust a number of great imaginative writers in the last two or three thousand years. the tragic indictment of war in _the trojan women_ and the satiric indictment in _the voyage to the houyhnhnms_ are evidence that some men at least saw through the romance of war before the twentieth century. in the war that has just ended, however--or that would have ended if the peace conference would let it--we have seen an imaginative revolt against war, not on the part of mere men of letters, but on the part of soldiers. ballads have survived from other wars, depicting the plight of the mutilated soldier left to beg: you haven't an arm and you haven't a leg, you're an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg, you ought to be put in a bowl to beg-- och, johnnie, i hardly knew you! but the recent war has produced a literature of indictment, basing itself neither on the woes of women nor on the wrongs of ex-soldiers, but on the right of common men not to be forced into mutual murder by statesmen who themselves never killed anything more formidable than a pheasant. soldiers--or some of them--see that wars go on only because the people who cause them do not realize what war is like. i do not mean to suggest that the kings, statesmen and journalists who bring wars about would not themselves take part in the fighting rather than that there should be no fighting at all. the people who cause wars, however, are ultimately the people who endure kings, statesmen and journalists of the exploiting and bullying kind. the satire of the soldiers is an appeal not to the statesmen and journalists, but to the general imagination of mankind. it is an attempt to drag our imaginations away from the heroics of the senate-house into the filth of the slaughter-house. it does not deny the heroism that exists in the slaughter-house any more than it denies the heroism that exists in the hospital ward. but it protests that, just as the heroism of a man dying of cancer must not be taken to justify cancer, so the heroism of a million men dying of war must not be taken to justify war. there are some who believe that neither war nor cancer is a curable disease. one thing we can be sure of in this connection: we shall never get rid either of war or of cancer if we do not learn to look at them realistically and see how loathsome they are. so long as war was regarded as inevitable, the poet was justified in romanticizing it, as in that epigram in the _greek anthology:_ demætia sent eight sons to encounter the phalanx of the foe, and she buried them all beneath one stone. no tear did she shed in her mourning, but said this only: "ho, sparta, i bore these children for thee." as soon as it is realized, however, that wars are not inevitable, men cease to idealize demætia, unless they are sure she did her best to keep the peace. to a realistic poet of war such as mr. sassoon, she is an object of pity rather than praise. his sonnet, _glory of women_, suggests that there is another point of view besides demætia's: you love us when we're heroes, home on leave, or wounded in a mentionable place. you worship decorations; you believe that chivalry redeems the war's disgrace. you make us shells. you listen with delight, by tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled. you crown our distant ardours while we fight, and mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed. you can't believe that british troops "retire" when hell's last horror breaks them, and they run, trampling the terrible corpses--blind with blood. _o german mother dreaming by the fire,_ _while you, are knitting socks to send your son_ _his face is trodden deeper in the mud._ to mr. sassoon and the other war satirists, indeed, those stay at home and incite others to go out and kill or get killed seem either pitifully stupid or pervertedly criminal. mr. sassoon has now collected all his war poems into one volume, and one is struck by the energetic hatred of those who make war in safety that finds expression in them. most readers will remember the bitter joy of the dream that one day he might hear "the yellow pressmen grunt and squeal," and see the junkers driven out of parliament by the returned soldiers. mr. sassoon cannot endure the enthusiasm of the stay-at-home--especially the enthusiasm that pretends that soldiers not only behave like music-hall clowns, but are incapable of the more terrible emotional experiences. he would like, i fancy, to forbid civilians to make jokes during war-time. his hatred of the jesting civilian attains passionate expression in the poem called _blighters_: the house is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin and cackle at the show, while prancing ranks of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din; "we're sure the kaiser loves the dear old tanks!" i'd like to see a tank come down the stalls, lurching to rag-time tunes, or "home, sweet home,"-- and there'd be no more jokes in music-halls to mock the riddled corpses round bapaume. mr. sassoon himself laughs on occasion, but it is the laughter of a man being driven insane by an insane world. the spectacle of lives being thrown away by the hundred thousand by statesmen and generals without the capacity to run a village flower-show, makes him find relief now and then in a hysteria of mirth, as in _the general_: "good-morning; good-morning!" the general said when we met him last week on our way to the line, now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead, and we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine. "he's a cheery old card," grunted harry to jack as they slogged up to arras with rifle and pack. * * * * * but he did for them both by his plan of attack. mr. sassoon's verse is also of importance because it paints life in the trenches with a realism not to be found elsewhere in the english poetry of the war. he spares us nothing of: the strangled horror and butchered, frantic gestures of the dead. he gives us every detail of the filth, the dullness, and the agony of the trenches. his book is in its aim destructive. it is a great pamphlet against war. if posterity wishes to know what war was like during this period, it will discover the truth, not in _barrack-room ballads_, but in mr. sassoon's verse. the best poems in the book are poems of hatred. this means that mr. sassoon has still other worlds to conquer in poetry. his poems have not the constructive ardour that we find in the revolutionary poems of shelley. they are utterances of pain rather than of vision. many of them, however, rise to a noble pity--_the prelude_, for instance, and _aftermath_, the latter of which ends: do you remember the dark months you held the sector at mametz,-- the night you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets? do you remember the rats; and the stench of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,-- and dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain? do you ever stop and ask, "is it all going to happen again?" do you remember that hour of din before the attack-- and the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then as you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men? do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back with dying eyes and lolling heads,--those ashen-grey masks of the lad who once were keen and kind and gay? _have you forgotten yet?..._ _look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you'll never forget._ mr. sitwell's satires--which occupy the most interesting pages of _argonaut and juggernaut_--seldom take us into the trenches. mr. sitwell gets all the subjects he wants in london clubs and drawing-rooms. these "free-verse" satires do not lend themselves readily to quotation, but both the manner and the mood of them can be guessed from the closing verses of _war-horses_, in which the "septuagenarian butterflies" of society return to their platitudes and parties after seeing the war through: but now they have come out. they have preened and dried themselves after their blood bath. old men seem a little younger, and tortoise-shell combs are longer than ever; earrings weigh down aged ears; and golconda has given them of its best. they have seen it through! theirs is the triumph, and, beneath the carved smile of the mona lisa, false teeth rattle like machine-guns, in anticipation of food and platitudes. les vieilles dames sans merci! mr. sitwell's hatred of war is seldom touched with pity. it is arrogant hatred. there is little emotion in it but that of a young man at war with age. he pictures the dotards of two thousand years ago complaining that christ did not die-- like a hero with an oath on his lips, or the refrain from a comic song-- or a cheerful comment of some kind. his own verse, however, seems to me to be hardly more in sympathy with the spirit of christ than with the spirit of those who mocked him. he is moved to write by unbelief in the ideals of other people rather than by the passionate force of ideals of his own. he is a sceptic, not a sufferer. his work proceeds less from his heart than from his brain. it is a clever brain, however, and his satirical poems are harshly entertaining and will infuriate the right people. they may not kill goliath, but at least they will annoy goliath's friends. david's weapon, it should be remembered, was a sling, with some pebbles from the brook, not a pea-shooter. the truth is, so far as i can see, mr. sitwell has not begun to take poetry quite seriously. his non-satirical verse is full of bright colour, but it has the brightness, not of the fields and the flowers, but of captive birds in an aviary. it is as though mr. sitwell had taken poetry for his hobby. i suspect his argonauts of being ballet dancers. he enjoys amusing little decorations--phrases such as "concertina waves" and-- the ocean at a toy shore yaps like a pekinese. his moonlight owl is surely a pretty creature from the unreality of a ballet: an owl, horned wizard of the night, flaps through the air so soft and still; moaning, it wings its flight far from the forest cool, to find the star-entangled surface of a pool, where it may drink its fill of stars. at the same time, here and there are evidences that mr. sitwell has felt as well as fancied. the opening verse of _pierrot old_ gives us a real impression of shadows: the harvest moon is at its height, the evening primrose greets its light with grace and joy: then opens up the mimic moon within its cup. tall trees, as high as babel tower, throw down their shadows to the flower-- shadows that shiver--seem to see an ending to infinity. but there is too much of pan, the fauns and all those other ballet-dancers in his verse. mr. sitwell's muse wears some pretty costumes. but one wonders when she will begin to live for something besides clothes. xxi.--labour of authorship literature maintains an endless quarrel with idle sentences. twenty years ago this would have seemed too obvious to bear saying. but in the meantime there has been a good deal of dipping of pens in chaos, and authors have found excuses for themselves in a theory of literature which is impatient of difficult writing. it would not matter if it were only the paunched and flat-footed authors who were proclaiming the importance of writing without style. unhappily, many excellent writers as well have used their gift of style to publish the praise of stylelessness. within the last few weeks i have seen it suggested by two different critics that the hasty writing which has left its mark on so much of the work of scott and balzac was a good thing and almost a necessity of genius. it is no longer taken for granted, as it was in the days of stevenson, that the starry word is worth the pains of discovery. stevenson, indeed, is commonly dismissed as a pretty-pretty writer, a word-taster without intellect or passion, a juggler rather than an artist. pater's bust also is mutilated by irreverent schoolboys: it is hinted that he may have done well enough for the days of victoria, but that he will not do at all for the world of george. it is all part of the reaction against style which took place when everybody found out the æsthetes. it was, one may admit, an excellent thing to get rid of the æsthetes, but it was by no means an excellent thing to get rid of the virtue which they tried to bring into english art and literature. the æsthetes were wrong in almost everything they said about art and literature, but they were right in impressing upon the children of men the duty of good drawing and good words. with the condemnation of oscar wilde, however, good words became suspected of kinship with evil deeds. style was looked on as the sign of minor poets and major vices. possibly, on the other hand, the reaction against style had nothing to do with the wilde condemnation. the heresy of the stylelessness is considerably older than that. perhaps it is not quite fair to call it the heresy of stylelessness: it would be more accurate to describe it as the heresy of style without pains. it springs from the idea that great literature is all a matter of first fine careless raptures, and it is supported by the fact that apparently much of the greatest literature is so. if lines like hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings, or when daffodils begin to peer, or his golden locks time hath to silver turned, shape themselves in the poet's first thoughts, he would be a manifest fool to trouble himself further. genius is the recognition of the perfect line, the perfect phrase, the perfect word, when it appears, and this perfect line or phrase or word is quite as likely to appear in the twinkling of an eye as after a week of vigils. but the point is that it does not invariably so appear. it sometimes cost flaubert three days' labour to write one perfect sentence. greater writers have written more hurriedly. but this does not justify lesser writers in writing hurriedly too. of all the authors who have exalted the part played in literature by inspiration as compared with labour, none has written more nobly or with better warrant than shelley. "the mind," he wrote in the _defence of poetry_-- the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; the power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. i appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study. he then goes on to interpret literally milton's reference to _paradise lost_ as an "unpremeditated song" "dictated" by the muse, and to reply scornfully to those "who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the _orlando furioso_." who is there who would not agree with shelley quickly if it were a question of having to choose between his inspirational theory of literature and the mechanical theory of the arts advocated by writers like sir joshua reynolds? literature without inspiration is obviously even a meaner thing than literature without style. but the idea that any man can become an artist by taking pains is merely an exaggerated protest against the idea that a man can become an artist without taking pains. anthony trollope, who settled down industriously to his day's task of literature as to bookkeeping, did not grow into an artist in any large sense; and zola, with the motto "nulle dies sine linea" ever facing him on his desk, made himself a prodigious author, indeed, but never more than a second-rate writer. on the other hand, trollope without industry would have been nobody at all, and zola without pains might as well have been a waiter. nor is it only the little or the clumsy artists who have found inspiration in labour. it is a pity we have not first drafts of all the great poems in the world: we might then see how much of the magic of literature is the result of toil and how much of the unprophesied wind of inspiration. sir sidney colvin recently published an early draft of keats's sonnet, "bright star, would i were stedfast as thou art," which showed that in the case of keats at least the mind in creation was not "as a fading coal," but as a coal blown to increasing flame and splendour by sheer "labour and study." and the poetry of keats is full of examples of the inspiration not of first but of second and later thoughts. henry stephens, a medical student who lived with him for time, declared that an early draft of _endymion_ opened with the line: a thing of beauty is a constant joy --a line which, stephens observed on hearing it, was "a fine line, but wanting something." keats thought over it for a little, then cried out, "i have it," and wrote in its place: a thing of beauty is a joy for ever. nor is this an exceptional example of the studied miracles of keats. the most famous and, worn and cheapened by quotation though it is, the most beautiful of all his phrases-- magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn-- did not reach its perfect shape without hesitation and thinking. he originally wrote "the wide casements" and "keelless seas": the wide casements, opening on the foam of keelless seas, in fairy lands forlorn. that would probably have seemed beautiful if the perfect version had not spoiled it for us. but does not the final version go to prove that shelley's assertion that "when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline" does not hold good for all poets? on the contrary, it is often the heat of labour which produces the heat of inspiration. or rather it is often the heat of labour which enables the writer to recall the heat of inspiration. ben jonson, who held justly that "the poet must be able by nature and instinct to pour out the treasure of his mind," took care to add the warning that no one must think he "can leap forth suddenly a poet by dreaming he hath been in parnassus." poe has uttered a comparable warning against an excessive belief in the theory of the plenary inspiration of poets in his _marginalia_, where he declares that "this untenable and paradoxical idea of the incompatibility of genius and _art_" must be "kick[ed] out of the world's way." wordsworth's saying that poetry has its origin in "emotion recollected in tranquillity" also suggests that the inspiration of poetry is an inspiration that may be recaptured by contemplation and labour. how eagerly one would study a shakespeare manuscript, were it unearthed, in which one could see the shaping imagination of the poet at work upon his lines! many people have the theory--it is supported by an assertion of jonson's--that shakespeare wrote with a current pen, heedless of blots and little changes. he was, it is evident, not one of the correct authors. but it seems unlikely that no pains of rewriting went to the making of the speeches in _a midsummer night's dream_ or hamlet's address to the skull. shakespeare, one feels, is richer than any other author in the beauty of first thoughts. but one seems to perceive in much of his work the beauty of second thoughts too. there have been few great writers who have been so incapable of revision as robert browning, but browning with all his genius is not a great stylist to be named with shakespeare. he did indeed prove himself to be a great stylist in more than one poem, such as _childe roland_--which he wrote almost at a sitting. his inspiration, however, seldom raised his work to the same beauty of perfection. he is, as regards mere style, the most imperfect of the great poets. if only tennyson had had his genius! if only browning had had tennyson's desire for golden words! it would be absurd, however, to suggest that the main labour of an author consists in rewriting. the choice of words may have been made before a single one of them has been written down, as tradition tells us was the case with menander, who described one of his plays as "finished" before he had written a word of it. it would be foolish, too, to write as though perfection of form in literature were merely a matter of picking and choosing among decorative words. style is a method, not of decoration, but of expression. it is an attempt to make the beauty and energy of the imagination articulate. it is not any more than is construction the essence of the greatest art: it is, however, a prerequisite of the greatest art. even those writers whom we regard as the least decorative labour and sorrow after it no less than the æsthetes. we who do not know russian do not usually think of tolstoy as a stylist, but he took far more trouble with his writing than did oscar wilde (whose chief fault is, indeed, that in spite of his theories his style is not laboured and artistic but inspirational and indolent). count ilya tolstoy, the son of the novelist, published a volume of reminiscences of his father last year, in which he gave some interesting particulars of his father's energetic struggle for perfection in writing: when _anna karénina_ began to come out in the _russki vyéstnik_ [he wrote], long galley-proofs were posted to my father, and he looked them through and corrected them. at first, the margins would be marked with the ordinary typographical signs, letters omitted, marks of punctuation, and so on; then individual words would be changed, and then whole sentences; erasures and additions would begin, till in the end the proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass of patches, quite black in places, and it was quite impossible to send it back as it stood because no one but my mother could make head or tail of the tangle of conventional signs, transpositions, and erasures. my mother would sit up all night copying the whole thing out afresh. in the morning there lay the pages on her table, neatly piled together, covered all over with her fine, clear handwriting, and everything ready, so that when "lyóvotchka" came down he could send the proof-sheets out by post. my father would carry them off to his study to have "just one last look," and by the evening it was worse than before; the whole thing had been rewritten and messed up once more. "sonya, my dear, i am very sorry, but i've spoilt all your work again; i promise i won't do it any more," he would say, showing her the passages with a guilty air. "we'll send them off to-morrow without fail." but his to-morrow was put off day by day for weeks or months together. "there's just one bit i want to look through again," my father would say; but he would get carried away and rewrite the whole thing afresh. there were even occasions when, after posting the proofs, my father would remember some particular words next day and correct them by telegraph. there, better than in a thousand generalizations, you see what the artistic conscience is. in a world in which authors, like solicitors, must live, it is, of course, seldom possible to take pains in this measure. dostoevsky used to groan that his poverty left him no time or chance to write his best as tolstoy and turgenev could write theirs. but he at least laboured all that he could. novel-writing has since his time become as painless as dentistry, and the result may be seen in a host of books that, while affecting to be fine literature, have no price except as merchandise. xxii.--the theory of poetry matthew arnold once advised people who wanted to know what was good poetry not to trouble themselves with definitions of poetry, but to learn by heart passages, or even single lines, from the works of the great poets, and to apply these as touchstones. certainly a book like mr. cowl's _theory of poetry in england_, which aims at giving us a representative selection of the theoretical things which were said in england about poetry between the time of elizabeth and the time of victoria, makes one wonder at the barrenness of men's thoughts about so fruitful a world as that of the poets. mr. cowl's book is not intended to be read as an anthology of fine things. its value is not that of a book of golden thoughts. it is an ordered selection of documents chosen, not for their beauty, but simply for their use as milestones in the progress of english poetic theory. it is a work, not of literature, but of literary history; and students of literary history are under a deep debt of gratitude to the author for bringing together and arranging the documents of the subject in so convenient and lucid a form. the arrangement is under subjects, and chronological. there are forty-one pages on the theory of poetic creation, beginning with george gascoigne and ending with matthew arnold. these are followed by a few pages of representative passages about poetry as an imitative art, the first of the authors quoted being roger ascham and the last f.w.h. myers. the hook is divided into twelve sections of this kind, some of which have a tendency to overlap. thus, in addition to the section on poetry as an imitative art, we have a section on imitation of nature, another on external nature, and another on imitation. imitation, in the last of these, it is true, means for the most part imitation of the ancients, as in the sentence in which thomas rymer urged the seventeenth-century dramatists to imitate attic tragedy even to the point of introducing the chorus. mr. cowl's book is interesting, however, less on account of the sections and subsections into which it is divided than because of the manner in which it enables us to follow the flight of english poetry from the romanticism of the elizabethans to the neo-classicism of the eighteenth century, and from this on to the romanticism of wordsworth and coleridge, and from this to a newer neo-classicism whose prophet was matthew arnold. there is not much of poetry captured in these cold-blooded criticisms, but still the shadow of the poetry of his time occasionally falls on the critic's formulae and aphorisms. how excellently sir philip sidney expresses the truth that the poet does not imitate the world, but creates a world, in his observation that nature's world "is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden!" this, however, is a fine saying rather than an interpretation. it has no importance as a contribution to the theory of poetry to compare with a passage like that so often quoted from wordsworth's preface to _lyrical ballads_: i have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. as a theory of poetic creation this may not apply universally. but what a flood of light it throws on the creative genius of wordsworth himself! how rich in psychological insight it is, for instance, compared with dryden's comparable reference to the part played by the memory in poetry: the composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit; and wit in the poet ... is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after. as a matter of fact, few of these generalizations carry one far. ben jonson revealed more of the secret of poetry when he said simply: "it utters somewhat above a mortal mouth." so did edgar allan poe, when he said: "it is no mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the beauty above." coleridge, again, initiates us into the secrets of the poetic imagination when he speaks of it as something which-- combining many circumstances into one moment of consciousness, tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its principle and fountain, which is alone truly one. on the other hand, the most dreadful thing that was ever written about poetry was also written by coleridge, and is repeated in mr. cowl's book: how excellently the german _einbildungskraft_ expresses this prime and loftiest faculty, the power of coadunation, the faculty that forms the many into one--_ineins-bildung_! eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from fantasy, either catoptric or metoptric--repeating simply, or by transposition--and, again, involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will. the meaning is simple enough: it is much the same as that of the preceding paragraph. but was there ever a passage written suggesting more forcibly how much easier it is to explain poetry by writing it than by writing about it? mr. cowl's book makes it clear that fiercely as the critics may dispute about poetry, they are practically all agreed on at least one point--that it is an imitation. the schools have differed less over the question whether it is an imitation than over the question how, in a discussion on the nature of poetry, the word "imitation" must be qualified. obviously, the poet must imitate something--either what he sees in nature, or what he sees in memory, or what he sees in other poets, or what he sees in his soul, or it may me, all together. there arise schools every now and then--classicists, parnassians, realists, and so forth--who believe in imitation, but will not allow it to be a free imitation of things seen in the imaginative world. in the result their work is no true imitation of life. pope's poetry is not as true an imitation of life as shakespeare's. nor is zola's, for all its fidelity, as close an imitation of life as victor hugo's. poetry, or prose either, without romance, without liberation, can never rise above the second order. the poet must be faithful not only to his subject, but to his soul. poe defined art as the "reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul," and this, though like most definitions of art, incomplete, is true in so far as it reminds us that art at its greatest is the statement of a personal and ideal vision. that is why the reverence of rules in the arts is so dangerous. it puts the standards of poetry not in the hands of the poet, but in the hands of the grammarians. it is a procrustes' bed which mutilates the poet's vision. luckily, england has always been a rather lawless country, and we find even pope insisting that "to judge ... of shakespeare by aristotle's rules is like trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under those of another." dennis might cry: "poetry is either an art or whimsy and fanaticism.... the great design of the arts is to restore the decays that happened to human nature by the fall, by restoring order." but, on the whole, the english poets and critics have realized the truth that it is not an order imposed from without, but an order imposed from within at which the poet must aim. he aims at bringing order into chaos, but that does not mean that he aims at bringing aristotle into chaos. he is, in a sense, "beyond good and evil," so far as the orthodoxies of form are concerned. coleridge put the matter in a nutshell when he remarked that the mistake of the formal critics who condemned shakespeare as "a sort of african nature, rich in beautiful monsters," lay "in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form." and he states the whole duty of poets as regards form in another sentence in the same lecture: as it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes its genius--the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination. mr. cowl enables us to follow, as in no other book we know, the endless quarrel between romance and the rules, between the spirit and the letter, among the english authorities on poetry. it is a quarrel which will obviously never be finally settled in any country. the mechanical theory is a necessary reaction against romance that has decayed into windiness, extravagance, and incoherence. it brings the poets back to literature again. the romantic theory, on the other hand, is necessary as a reminder that the poet must offer to the world, not a formula, but a vision. it brings the poets back to nature again. no one but a dennis will hesitate an instant in deciding which of the theories is the more importantly and eternally true one. xxiii.--the critic as destroyer it has been said often enough that all good criticism is praise. pater boldly called one of his volumes of critical essays _appreciations_. there are, of course, not a few brilliant instances of hostility in criticism. the best-known of these in english is macaulay's essay on robert montgomery. in recent years we have witnessed the much more significant assault by tolstoy upon almost the whole army of the authors of the civilized world from Æschylus down to mallarmé. _what is art?_ was unquestionably the most remarkable piece of sustained hostile criticism that was ever written. at the same time, it was less a denunciation of individual authors than an attack on the general tendencies of the literary art. tolstoy quarrelled with shakespeare not so much for being shakespeare as for failing to write like the authors of the gospels. tolstoy would have made every book a bible. he raged against men of letters because with them literature was a means not to more abundant life but to more abundant luxury. like so many inexorable moralists, he was intolerant of all literature that did not serve as a sort of example of his own moral and social theories. that is why he was not a great critic, though he was immeasurably greater than a great critic. one would not turn to him for the perfect appreciation even of one of the authors he spared, like hugo or dickens. the good critic must in some way begin by accepting literature as it is, just as the good lyric poet must begin by accepting life as it is. he may be as full of revolutionary and reforming theories as he likes, but he must not allow any of these to come like a cloud between him and the sun, moon and stars of literature. the man who disparages the beauty of flowers and birds and love and laughter and courage will never be counted among the lyric poets; and the man who questions the beauty of the inhabited world the imaginative writers have made--a world as unreasonable in its loveliness as the world of nature--is not in the way of becoming a critic of literature. another argument which tells in favour of the theory that the best criticism is praise is the fact that almost all the memorable examples of critical folly have been denunciations. one remembers that carlyle dismissed herbert spencer as a "never-ending ass." one remembers that byron thought nothing of keats--"jack ketch," as he called him. one remembers that the critics damned wagner's operas as a new form of sin. one remembers that ruskin denounced one of whistler's nocturnes as a pot of paint flung in the face of the british public. in the world of science we have a thousand similar examples of new genius being hailed by the critics as folly and charlatanry. only the other day a biographer of lord lister was reminding us how, at the british association in , lister's antiseptic treatment was attacked as a "return to the dark ages of surgery," the "carbolic mania," and "a professional criminality." the history of science, art, music and literature is strewn with the wrecks of such hostile criticisms. it is an appalling spectacle for anyone interested in asserting the intelligence of the human race. so appalling is it, indeed, that most of us nowadays labour under such a terror of accidentally condemning something good that we have not the courage to condemn anything at all. we think of the way in which browning was once taunted for his obscurity, and we cannot find it in our hearts to censure mr. doughty. we recall the ignorant attacks on manet and monet, and we will not risk an onslaught on the follies of picasso and the worse-than-picassos of contemporary art. we grow a monstrous and unhealthy plant of tolerance in our souls, and its branches drop colourless good words on the just and on the unjust--on everybody, indeed, except miss marie corelli, mr. hall caine, and a few others whom we know to be second-rate because they have such big circulations. this is really a disastrous state of affairs for literature and the other arts. if criticism is, generally speaking, praise, it is, more definitely, praise of the right things. praise for the sake of praise is as great an evil as blame for the sake of blame. indiscriminate praise, in so far as it is the result of distrust of one's own judgment or of laziness or of insincerity, is one of the deadly sins in criticism. it is also one of the deadly dull sins. its effect is to make criticism ever more unreadable, and in the end even the publishers, who love silly sentences to quote about their bad books, will open their eyes to the futility of it. they will realize that, when once criticism has become unreal and unreadable, people will no more be bothered with it than they will with drinking lukewarm water. i mention the publisher in especial, because there is no doubt that it is with the idea of putting the publishers in a good, open-handed humour that so many papers and reviews have turned criticism into a kind of stagnant pond. publishers, fortunately, are coming more and more to see that this kind of criticism is of no use to them. reviews in such-and-such a paper, they will tell you, do not sell books. and the papers to which they refer in such cases are always papers in which praise is disgustingly served out to everybody, like spoonfuls of treacle-and-brimstone to a mob of schoolchildren. criticism, then, is praise, but it is praise of literature. there is all the difference in the world between that and the praise of what pretends to be literature. true criticism is a search for beauty and truth and an announcement of them. it does not care twopence whether the method of their revelation is new or old, academic or futuristic. it only asks that the revelation shall be genuine. it is concerned with form, because beauty and truth demand perfect expression. but it is a mere heresy in æsthetics to say that perfect expression is the whole of art that matters. it is the spirit that breaks through the form that is the main interest of criticism. form, we know, has a permanence of its own: so much so that it has again and again been worshipped by the idolators of art as being in itself more enduring than the thing which it embodies. robert burns, by his genius for perfect statement, can give immortality to the joys of being drunk with whiskey as the average hymn-writer cannot give immortality to the joys of being drunk with the love of god. style, then, does seem actually to be a form of life. the critic may not ignore it any more than he may exaggerate its place in the arts. as a matter of fact, he could not ignore it if he would, for style and spirit have a way of corresponding to one another like health and sunlight. it is to combat the stylelessness of many contemporary writers that the destructive kind of criticism is just now most necessary. for, dangerous as the heresy of style was forty or fifty years ago, the newer heresy of sylelessness is more dangerous still. it has become the custom even of men who write well to be as ashamed of their style as a schoolboy is of being caught in an obvious piece of goodness. they keep silent about it as though it were a kind of powdering or painting. they do not realize that it is merely a form of ordinary truthfulness--the truthfulness of the word about the thought. they forget that one has no more right to misuse words than to beat one's wife. someone has said that in the last analysis style is a moral quality. it is a sincerity, a refusal to bow the knee to the superficial, a passion for justice in language. stylelessness, where it is not, like colour-blindness, an accident of nature, is for the most part merely an echo of the commercial man's world of hustle. it is like the rushing to and fro of motor-buses which save minutes with great loss of life. it is like the swift making of furniture with unseasoned wood. it is a kind of introduction of the quick-lunch system into literature. one cannot altogether acquit mr. masefield of a hasty stylelessness in some of those long poems which the world has been raving about in the last year or two. his line in _the everlasting mercy:_ and yet men ask, "are barmaids chaste?" is a masterpiece of inexpertness. and the couplet: the bosun turned: "i'll give you a thick ear! do it? i didn't. get to hell from here!" is like a sunday-school teacher's lame attempt to repeat a blasphemous story. mr. masefield, on the other hand, is, we always feel, wrestling with language. if he writes in a hurry, it is not because he is indifferent, but because his soul is full of something that he is eager to express. he does not gabble; he is, as it were, a man stammering out a vision. so vastly greater are his virtues than his faults as a poet, indeed, that the latter would only be worth the briefest mention if it were not for the danger of their infecting other writers who envy him his method but do not possess his conscience. one cannot contemplate with equanimity the prospect of a masefield school of poetry with all mr. masefield's ineptitudes and none of his genius. criticism, however, it is to be feared, is a fight for a lost cause if it essays to prevent the founding of schools upon the faults of good writers. criticism will never kill the copyist. nothing but the end of the world can do that. still, whatever the practical results of his work may be, it is the function of the critic to keep the standard of writing high--to insist that the authors shall write well, even if his own sentences are like torn strips of newspaper for commonness. he is the enemy of sloppiness in others--especially of that airy sloppiness which so often nowadays runs to four or five hundred pages in a novel. it was amazing to find with what airiness a promising writer like mr. compton mackenzie gave us some years ago _sinister street_, a novel containing thousands of sentences that only seemed to be there because he had not thought it worth his while to leave them out, and thousands of others that seemed to be mere hurried attempts to express realities upon which he was unable to spend more time. here is a writer who began literature with a sense of words, and who is declining into a mere sense of wordiness. it is simply another instance of the ridiculous rush of writing that is going on all about us--a rush to satisfy a public which demands quantity rather than quality in its books. i do not say that mr. mackenzie consciously wrote down to the public, but the atmosphere obviously affected him. otherwise he would hardly have let his book go out into the world till he had rewritten it--till he had separated his necessary from his unnecessary sentences and given his conversations the tones of reality. there is no need, however, for criticism to lash out indiscriminately at all hurried writing. there are a multitude of books turned out every year which make no claim to be literature--the "thrillers," for example, of mr. phillips oppenheim and of that capable firm of feuilletonists, coralie stanton and heath hosken. i do not think literature stands to gain anything, even though all the critics in europe were suddenly to assail this kind of writing. it is a frankly commercial affair, and we have no more right to demand style from those who live by it than from the authors of the weather reports in the newspapers. often, one notices, when the golden youth, fresh from college and the reading of shelley and anatole france, commences literary critic, he begins damning the sensational novelists as though it were their business to write like jane austen. this is a mere waste of literary standards, which need only be applied to what pretends to be literature. that is why one is often impelled to attack really excellent writers, like sir arthur quiller-couch or mr. galsworthy, as one would never dream of attacking, say, mr. william le queux. to attack sir arthur quiller-couch is, indeed, a form of appreciation, for the only just criticism that can be levelled against him is that his later work does not seem to be written with that singleness of imagination and that deliberate rightness of phrase which made _noughts and crosses_ and _the ship of stars_ books to be kept beyond the end of the year. if one attacks mr. galsworthy, again, it is usually because one admires his best work so whole-heartedly that one is not willing to accept from him anything but the best. one cannot, however, be content to see the author of _the man of property_ dropping the platitudes and the false fancifulness of _the inn of tranquillity_. it is the false pretences in literature which criticism must seek to destroy. recognizing mr. galsworthy's genius for the realistic representation of men and women, it must not be blinded by that genius to the essential second-rateness and sentimentality of much of his presentation of ideas. he is a man of genius in the black humility with which he confesses strength and weakness through the figures of men and women. he achieves too much of a pulpit complacency--therefore of condescendingness--therefore of falseness to the deep intimacy of good literature--when he begins to moralize about time and the universe. one finds the same complacency, the same condescendingness, in a far higher degree in the essays of mr. a.c. benson. mr. benson, i imagine, began writing with a considerable literary gift, but his later work seems to me to have little in it but a good man's pretentiousness. it has the air of going profoundly into the secrecies of love and joy and truth, but it contains hardly a sentence that would waken a ruffle on the surface of the shallowest spirit. it is not of the literature that awakens, indeed, but of the literature that puts to sleep, and that is always a danger unless it is properly labelled and recognizable. sleeping-draughts may be useful to help a sick man through a bad night, but one does not recommend them as a cure for ordinary healthy thirst. nor will mr. benson escape just criticism on the score of his manner of writing. he is an absolute master of the otiose word, the superfluous sentence. he pours out pages as easily as a bird sings, but, alas! it is a clockwork bird in this instance. he lacks the true innocent absorption in his task which makes happy writing and happy reading. it is not always the authors, on the other hand, whose pretences it is the work of criticism to destroy. it is frequently the wild claims of the partisans of an author that must be put to the test. this sort of pretentiousness often happens during "booms," when some author is talked of as though he were the only man who had ever written well. how many of these booms have we had in recent years--booms of wilde, of synge, of donne, of dostoevsky! on the whole, no doubt, they do more good than harm. they create a vivid enthusiasm for literature that affects many people who might not otherwise know that to read a fine book is as exciting an experience as going to a horse-race. hundreds of people would not have the courage to sit down to read a book like _the brothers karamazov_ unless they were compelled to do so as a matter of fashionable duty. on the other hand, booms more than anything else make for false estimates. it seems impossible with many people to praise dostoevsky without saying that he is greater than tolstoy or turgenev. oscar wilde enthusiasts, again, invite us to rejoice, not only over that pearl of triviality, _the importance of being earnest_, but over a blaze of paste jewelry like _salomé_. similarly, donne worshippers are not content to ask us to praise donne's gifts of fancy, analysis and idiosyncratic music. they insist that we shall also admit that he knew the human heart better than shakespeare. it may be all we like sheep have gone astray in this kind of literary riot. and so long as the exaggeration of a good writer's genius is an honest personal affair, one resents it no more than one resents the large nose or the bandy legs of a friend. it is when men begin to exaggerate in herds--to repeat like a lesson learned the enthusiasm of others--that the boom becomes offensive. it is as if men who had not large noses were to begin to pretend that they had, or as if men whose legs were not bandy were to pretend that they were, for fashion's sake. insincerity is the one entirely hideous artistic sin--whether in the creation or in the appreciation of art. the man who enjoys reading _the family herald_, and admits it, is nearer a true artistic sense than the man who is bored by henry james and denies it: though, perhaps, hypocrisy is a kind of homage paid to art as well as to virtue. still, the affectation of literary rapture offends like every other affectation. it was the chorus of imitative rapture over synge a few years ago that helped most to bring about a speedy reaction against him. synge was undoubtedly a man of fine genius--the genius of gloomy comedy and ironic tragedy. his mind delved for strangenesses in speech and imagination among people whom the new age had hardly touched, and his discoveries were sufficiently magnificent to make the eyes of any lover of language brighten. his work showed less of the mastery of life, however, than of the mastery of a theme. it was a curious by-world of literature, a little literature of death's-heads, and, therefore, no more to be mentioned with the work of the greatest than the stories of villiers de l'isle-adam. unfortunately, some disturbances in dublin at the first production of _the playboy_ turned the play into a battle-cry, and the artists, headed by mr. yeats, used synge to belabour the philistinism of the mob. in the excitement of the fight they were soon talking about synge as though dublin had rejected a shakespeare. mr. yeats even used the word "homeric" about him--surely the most inappropriate word it would be possible to imagine. before long mr. yeats's enthusiasm had spread to england, where people who ignored the real magic of synge's work, as it is to be found in _riders to the sea_, _in the shadow of the glen_, and _the well of the saints_, went into ecstasies over the inferior _playboy_. such a boom meant not the appreciation of synge but a glorification of his more negligible work. it was almost as if we were to boom swinburne on the score of his later political poetry. criticism makes for the destruction of such booms. i do not mean that the critic has not the right to fling about superlatives like any other man. criticism, in one aspect, is the art of flinging about superlatives finely. but they must be personal superlatives, not boom superlatives. even when they are showered on an author who is the just victim of a boom--and, on a reasonable estimate, at least fifty per cent of the booms have some justification--they are as unbeautiful as rotten apples unless they have this personal kind of honesty. it may be thought that an attitude of criticism like this may easily sink into pharisaism--a sort of "superior-person" aloofness from other people. and no doubt the critic, like other people, needs to beat his breast and pray, "god be merciful to me, a--critic." on the whole, however, the critic is far less of a professional faultfinder than is sometimes imagined. he is first of all a virtue-finder, a singer of praise. he is not concerned with getting rid of the dross except in so far as it hides the gold. in other words, the destructive side of criticism is purely a subsidiary affair. none of the best critics have been men of destructive minds. they are like gardeners whose business is more with the flowers than with the weeds. if i may change the metaphor, the whole truth about criticism is contained in the eastern proverb which declares that "love is the net of truth." it is as a lover that the critic, like the lyric poet and the mystic, will be most excellently symbolized. xxiv.--book reviewing i notice that in mr. seekers' _art and craft of letters_ series no volume on book-reviewing has yet been announced. a volume on criticism has been published, it is true, but book-reviewing is something different from criticism. it swings somewhere between criticism on the one hand and reporting on the other. when mr. arthur bourchier a few years ago, in the course of a dispute about mr. walkley's criticisms, spoke of the dramatic critic as a dramatic reporter, he did a very insolent thing. but there was a certain reasonableness in his phrase. the critic on the press is a news-gatherer as surely as the man who is sent to describe a public meeting or a strike. whether he is asked to write a report on a play of mr. shaw's or an exhibition of etchings by mr. bone or a volume of short stories by mr. conrad or a speech by mr. asquith or a strike on the clyde, his function is the same. it is primarily to give an account, a description, of what he has seen or heard or read. this may seem to many people--especially to critics--a degrading conception of a book-reviewer's work. but it is quite the contrary. a great deal of book-reviewing at the present time is dead matter. book-reviews ought at least to be alive as news. at present everybody is ready to write book-reviews. this is because nearly everybody believes that they are the easiest kind of thing to write. people who would shrink from offering to write poems or leading articles or descriptive sketches of football matches, have an idea that reviewing books is something with the capacity for which every man is born, as he is born with the capacity for talking prose. they think it is as easy as having opinions. it is simply making a few remarks at the end of a couple of hours spent with a book in an armchair. many men and women--novelists, barristers, professors and others--review books in their spare time, as they look on this as work they can do when their brains are too tired to do anything which is of genuine importance. a great deal of book-reviewing is done contemptuously, as though to review books well were not as difficult as to do anything else well. this is perhaps due in some measure to the fact that, for the amount of hard work it involves, book-reviewing is one of the worst-paid branches of journalism. the hero of mr. beresford's new novel, _the invisible event_, makes an income of £ a year as an outside reviewer, and it is by no means every outside reviewer who makes as much as that from reviewing alone. it is not that there is not an immense public which reads book-reviews. mr. t.p. o'connor showed an admirable journalistic instinct when twenty years or so ago he filled the front page of the _weekly sun_ with a long book-review. the sale of the _times literary supplement_, since it became a separate publication, is evidence that, for good or bad, many thousands of readers have acquired the habit of reading criticism of current literature. but i do not think that the mediocre quality of most book-reviewing is due to low payment. it is a result, i believe, of a wrong conception of what a book-review should be. my own opinion is that a review should be, from one point of view, a portrait of a book. it should present the book instead of merely presenting remarks about the book. in reviewing, portraiture is more important than opinion. one has to get the reflexion of the book, and not a mere comment on it, down on paper. obviously, one must not press this theory of portraiture too far. it is useful chiefly as a protest against the curse of comment. many clever writers, when they come to write book-reviews, instead of portraying the book, waste their time in remarks to the effect that the book should never have been written, and so forth. that, in fact, is the usual attitude of clever reviewers when they begin. they are so horrified to find that mr. william le queux does not write like dostoevsky and that mrs. florence barclay lacks the grandeur of Æschylus that they run amok among their contemporaries with something of the furious destructiveness of don quixote on his adventures. it is the noble intolerance of youth; but how unreasonable it is! suppose a portrait-painter were suddenly to take his sitter by the throat on the ground that he had no right to exist. one would say to him that that was not his business: his business is to take the man's existence for granted, and to paint him until he becomes in a new sense alive. if he is worthless, paint his worthlessness, but do not merely comment on it. there is no reason why a portrait should be flattering, but it should be a portrait. it may be a portrait in the grand matter, or a portrait in caricature: if it expresses its subject honestly and delightfully, that is all we can ask of it. a critical portrait of a book by mr. le queux may be amazingly alive: a censorious comment can only be dull. mr. hubert bland was at one time an almost ideal portrait-painter of commonplace novels. he obviously liked them, as the caricaturist likes the people in the street. the novels themselves might not be readable, but mr. bland's reviews of them were. he could reveal their characteristics in a few strokes, which would tell you more of what you wanted to know about them than a whole dictionary of adjectives of praise and blame. one could tell at a glance whether the book had any literary value, whether it was worth turning to as a stimulant, whether it was even intelligent of its kind. one would not like to see mr. bland's method too slavishly adopted by reviewers: it was suitable only for portraying certain kinds of books. but it is worth recalling as the method of a man who, dealing with books that were for the most part insipid and worthless, made his reviews delightfully alive as well as admirably interpretative. the comparison of a review to a portrait fixes attention on one essential quality of a book-review. a reviewer should never forget his responsibility to his subject. he must allow nothing to distract him from his main task of setting down the features of his book vividly and recognizably. one may say this even while admitting that the most delightful book-reviews of modern times--for the literary causeries of anatole france may fairly be classified as book-reviews--were the revolt of an escaped angel against the limitations of a journalistic form. but anatole france happens to be a man of genius, and genius is a justification of any method. in the hands of a pinchbeck anatole france, how unendurable the review conceived as a causerie would become! anatole france observes that "all books in general, and even the most admirable, seem to me infinitely less precious for what they contain than for what he who reads puts into them." that, in a sense, is true. but no reviewer ought to believe it. his duty is to his author: whatever he "puts into him" is a subsidiary matter. "the critic," says anatole france again, "must imbue himself thoroughly with the idea that every book has as many different aspects as it has readers, and that a poem, like a landscape, is transformed in all the eyes that see it, in all the souls that conceive it." here he gets nearer the idea of criticism as portraiture, and practically every critic of importance has been a portrait-painter. in this respect saint-beuve is at one with macaulay, pater with matthew arnold, anatole france (occasionally) with henry james. they may portray authors rather than books, artists rather than their work, but this only means that criticism at its highest is a study of the mind of the artist as reflected in his art. clearly, if the reviewer can paint the portrait of an author, he is achieving something better even than the portrait of a book. but what, at all costs, he must avoid doing is to substitute for a portrait of one kind or another the rag-bag of his own moral, political or religious opinions. it is one of the most difficult things in the world for anyone who happens to hold strong opinions not to make the mind of shakespeare himself a pulpit from which to roar them at the world. reviewers with theories about morality and religion can seldom be induced to come to the point of portraiture until they have enjoyed a preliminary half-column of self-explanation. in their eyes a review is a moral essay rather than an imaginative interpretation. in dissenting from this view, one is not pleading for a race of reviewers without moral or religious ideas, or even prepossessions. one is merely urging that in a review, as in a novel or a play, the moral should be seated at the heart instead of sprawling all over the surface. in the well-worn phrase it should be implicit, not explicit. undoubtedly a rare critic of genius can make an interesting review-article out of a statement of his own moral and political ideas. but that only justifies the article as an essay, not as a review. to many reviewers--especially in the bright days of youth--it seems an immensely more important thing to write a good essay than a good review. and so it is, but not when a review is wanted. it is a far, far better thing to write a good essay about america than a good review of a book on america. but the one should not be substituted for the other. if one takes up a review of a book on america by mr. wells or mr. bennett, it is in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in order to find out what the author thinks, not what the reviewer thinks. if the reviewer begins with a paragraph of general remarks about america--or, worse still, about some abstract thing like liberty--he is almost invariably wasting paper. i believe it is a sound rule to destroy all preliminary paragraphs of this kind. they are detestable in almost all writing, but most detestable of all in book-reviews, where it is important to plunge all at once into the middle of things. i say this, though there is an occasional book-reviewer whose preliminary paragraphs i would not miss for worlds. but one has even known book-reviewers who wrote delightful articles, though they made scarcely any reference to the books under review at all. to my mind, nothing more clearly shows the general misconception of the purpose of a book-review than the attitude of the majority of journalists to the quotational review. it is the custom to despise the quotational review--to dismiss is as mere "gutting." as a consequence, it is generally very badly done. it is done as if under the impression that it does not matter what quotations one gives so long as one fills the space. one great paper lends support to this contemptuous attitude towards quotational criticism by refusing to pay its contributors for space taken up by quotations. a london evening newspaper was once guilty of the same folly. a reviewer on the staff of the latter confessed to me that to the present day he finds it impossible, without an effort, to make quotations in a review, because of the memory of those days when to quote was to add to one's poverty. despised work is seldom done well, and it is not surprising that it is almost more seldom that one finds a quotational review well done than any other sort. yet how critically illuminating a quotation may be! there are many books in regard to which quotation is the only criticism necessary. books of memoirs and books of verse--the least artistic as well as the most artistic forms of literature--both lend themselves to it. to criticize verse without giving quotations is to leave one largely in ignorance of the quality of the verse. the selection of passages to quote is at least as fine a test of artistic judgment as any comment the critic can make. in regard to books of memoirs, gossip, and so forth, one does not ask for a test of delicate artistic judgment. books of this kind should simply be rummaged for entertaining "news." to review them well is to make an anthology of (in a wide sense) amusing passages. there is no other way to portray them. and yet i have known a very brilliant reviewer take a book of gossip about the german court and, instead of quoting any of the numerous things that would interest people, fill half a column with abuse of the way in which the book was written, of the inconsequence of the chapters, of the second-handedness of many of the anecdotes. now, i do not object to any of these charges being brought. it is well that "made" books should not be palmed off on the public as literature. on the other hand, a mediocre book (from the point of view of literature or history) is no excuse for a mediocre review. no matter how mediocre a book is, if it is on a subject of great interest, it usually contains enough vital matter to make an exciting half-column. many reviewers despise a bad book so heartily that, instead of squeezing every drop of interest out of it, as they ought to do, they refrain from squeezing a single drop of interest out of it. they are frequently people who suffer from anecdotophobia. "scorn not the anecdote" is a motto that might be modestly hung up in the heart of every reviewer. after all, montaigne did not scorn it, and there is no reason why the modern journalist should be ashamed of following so respectable an example. one can quite easily understand how the gluttony of many publishers for anecdotes has driven writers with a respect for their intellect into revolt. but let us not be unjust to the anecdote because it has been cheapened through no fault of its own. we may be sure of one thing. a review--a review, at any rate, of a book of memoirs or any similar kind of non-literary book--which contains an anecdote is better than a review which does not contain an anecdote. if an anecdotal review is bad, it is because it is badly done, not because it is anecdotal. this, one might imagine, is too obvious to require saying; but many men of brains go through life without ever being able to see it. one of the chief virtues of the anecdote is that it brings the reviewer down from his generalizations to the individual instances. generalizations mixed with instances make a fine sort of review, but to flow on for a column of generalizations without ever pausing to light them into life with instances, concrete examples, anecdotes, is to write not a book-review but a sermon. of the two, the sermon is much the easier to write: it does not involve the trouble of constant reference to one's authorities. perhaps, however, someone with practice in writing sermons will argue that the sermon without instances is as somniferous as the book-review with the same want. whether that it so or not, the book-review is not, as a rule, the place for abstract argument. not that one wants to shut out controversy. there is no pleasanter review to read than a controversial review. even here, however, one demands portrait as well as argument. it is, in nine cases out of ten, waste of time to assail a theory when you can portray a man. it always seems to me to be hopelessly wrong for the reviewer of biographies, critical studies, or books of a similar kind, to allow his mind to wander from the main figure in the book to the discussion of some theory or other that has been incidentally put forward. thus, in a review of a book on stevenson, the important thing is to reconstruct the figure of stevenson, the man and the artist. this is much more vitally interesting and relevant than theorizing on such questions as whether the writing of prose or of poetry is the more difficult art, or what are the essential characteristics of romance. these and many other questions may arise, and it is the proper task of the reviewer to discuss them, so long as their discussion is kept subordinate to the portraiture of the central figure. but they must not be allowed to push the leading character in the whole business right out of the review. if they are brought in at all, they must be brought in, like moral sentiments, inoffensively by the way. in pleading that a review should be a portrait of a book to a vastly greater degree than it is a direct comment on the book, i am not pleading that it should be a mere bald summary. the summary kind of review is no more a portrait than is the scotland yard description of a man wanted by the police. portraiture implies selection and a new emphasis. the synopsis of the plot of a novel is as far from being a good review as is a paragraph of general comment on it. the review must justify itself, not as a reflection of dead bones, but by a new life of its own. further, i am not pleading for the suppression of comment and, if need be, condemnation. but either to praise or condemn without instances is dull. neither the one thing nor the other is the chief thing in the review. they are the crown of the review, but not its life. there are many critics to whom condemnation of books they do not like seems the chief end of man. they regard themselves as engaged upon a holy war against the devil and his works. horace complained that it was only poets who were not allowed to be mediocre. the modern critic--i should say the modern critic of the censorious kind, not the critic who looks on it as his duty to puff out meaningless superlatives over every book that appears--will not allow any author to be mediocre. the war against mediocrity is a necessary war, but i cannot help thinking that mediocrity is more likely to yield to humour than to contemptuous abuse. apart from this, it is the reviewer's part to maintain high standards for work that aims at being literature, rather than to career about, like a destroying angel, among books that have no such aim. criticism, anatole france has said, is the record of the soul's adventures among masterpieces. reviewing, alas! is for the most part the record of the soul's adventures among books that are the reverse of masterpieces. what, then, are his standards to be? well, a man must judge linen as linen, cotton as cotton, and shoddy as shoddy. it is ridiculous to denounce any of them for not being silk. to do so is not to apply high standards so much as to apply wrong standards. one has no right as a reviewer to judge a book by any standard save that which the author aims at reaching. as a private reader, one has the right to say of a novel by mr. joseph hocking, for instance: "this is not literature. this is not realism. this does not interest me. this is awful." i do not say that these sentences can be fairly used of any of mr. hocking's novels. i merely take him as an example of a popular novelist who would be bound to be condemned if judged by comparison with flaubert or meredith or even mr. galsworthy. but the reviewer is not asked to state whether he finds mr. hocking readable so much as to state the kind of readableness at which mr. hocking aims and the measure of his success in achieving it. it is the reviewer's business to discover the quality of a book rather than to keep announcing that the quality does not appeal to him. not that he need conceal the fact that it has failed to appeal to him, but he should remember that this is a comparatively irrelevant matter. he may make it as clear as day--indeed, he ought to make it as clear as day, if it is his opinion--that he regards the novels of charles garvice as shoddy, but he ought also to make it clear whether they are the kind of shoddy that serves its purpose. is this to lower literary standards? i do not think so, for, in cases of this kind, one is not judging literature, but popular books. those to whom popular books are anathema have a temperament which will always find it difficult to fall in with the limitations of the work of a general reviewer. the curious thing is that this intolerance of easy writing is most generally found among those who are most opposed to intolerance in the sphere of morals. it is as though they had escaped from one sort of puritanism into another. personally, i do not see why, if we should be tolerant of the breach of a moral commandment, we should not be equally tolerant of the breach of a literary commandment. we should gently scan, not only our brother man, but our brother author. the æsthete of to-day, however, will look kindly on adultery, but show all the harshness of a pilgrim father in his condemnation of a split infinitive. i cannot see the logic of this. if irregular and commonplace people have the right to exist, surely irregular and commonplace books have a right to exist by their side. the reviewer, however, is often led into a false attitude to a book, not by its bad quality, but by some irrelevant quality--some underlying moral or political idea. he denounces a novel the moral ideas of which offend him, without giving sufficient consideration to the success or failure of the novelist in the effort to make his characters live. similarly, he praises a novel with the moral ideas of which he agrees, without reflecting that perhaps it is as a tract rather than as a work of art that it has given him pleasure. both the praise and blame which have been heaped upon mr. kipling are largely due to appreciation or dislike of his politics. the imperialist finds his heart beating faster as he reads _the english flag_, and he praises mr. kipling as an artist when it is really mr. kipling as a propagandist who has moved him. the anti-imperialist, on the other hand, is often led by detestation of mr. kipling's politics to deny even the palpable fact that mr. kipling is a very brilliant short-story teller. it is for the reviewer to raise himself above such prejudices and to discover what are mr. kipling's ideas apart from his art, and what is his art apart from his ideas. the relation between one and the other is also clearly a relevant matter for discussion. but the confusion of one with the other is fatal. in the field of morals we are perhaps led astray in our judgments even more frequently than in matters of politics. mr. shaw's plays are often denounced by critics whom they have made laugh till their sides ached, and the reason is that, after leaving the theatre, the critics remember that they do not like mr, shaw's moral ideas. in the same way, it seems to me, a great deal of the praise that has been given to mr. d.h. lawrence as an artist ought really to be given to him as a distributor of certain moral ideas. that he has studied wonderfully one aspect of human nature, that he can describe wonderfully some aspects of external nature, i know; but i doubt whether his art is fine enough or sympathetic enough to make enthusiastic anyone who differs from the moral attitude, as it may be called, of his stories. this is the real test of a work of art--has it sufficient imaginative vitality to capture the imagination of artistic readers who are not in sympathy with its point of view? the _book of job_ survives the test: it is a book to the spell of which no imaginative man could be indifferent, whether christian, jew or atheist. similarly, shelley is read and written about with enthusiasm by many who hold moral, religious, and political ideas directly contrary to his own. mr. kipling's _recessional_, with its sombre imaginative glow, its recapturing of old testament prides and fears, commands the praise of thousands to whom much of the rest of his poetry is the abominable thing. it is the reviewer's task to discover imagination even in those who are the enemies of the ideas he cherishes. in so far as he cannot do this, he fails in his business as a critic of the arts. it may be said in answer to all this, however, that to appeal for tolerance in book-reviewers is not necessary. the press is already overcrowded with laudations of commonplace books. not a day passes but at least a dozen books are praised as having "not a dull moment," being "readable from cover to cover," and as reminding the reviewer of stevenson, meredith, oscar wilde, paul de kock, and jane austen. that is not the kind of tolerance which one is eager to see. that kind of review is scarcely different from a publisher's advertisement. besides, it usually sins in being mere summary and comment, or even comment without summary. it is a thoughtless scattering of acceptable words and is as unlike the review conceived as a portrait as is the hostile kind of commentatory review which i have been discussing. it is generally the comment of a lazy brain, instead of being, like the other, the comment of a clever brain. praise is the vice of the commonplace reviewer, just as censoriousness is the vice of the more clever sort. not that one wishes either praise or censure to be stinted. one is merely anxious not to see them misapplied. it is a vice, not a virtue, of reviewing to be lukewarm either in the one or the other. what one desires most of all in a reviewer, after a capacity to portray books, is the courage of his opinions, so that, whether he is face to face with an old reputation like mr. conrad's or a new reputation like mr. mackenzie's, he will boldly express his enthusiasms and his dissatisfactions without regard to the estimate of the author, which is, for the moment, "in the air." what seems to be wanted, then, in a book-reviewer is that, without being servile, he should be swift to praise, and that, without being censorious, he should have the courage to blame. while tolerant of kinds in literature, he should be intolerant of pretentiousness. he should be less patient, for instance, of a pseudo-milton than of a writer who frankly aimed at nothing higher than a book of music-hall songs. he should be more eager to define the qualities of a book than to heap comment upon comment. if--i hope the image is not too strained--he draws a book from the life, he will produce a better review than if he spends his time calling it names, whether foul or fair. but what of the equipment of the reviewer? it may be asked. what of his standards? one of the faults of modern reviewing seems to me to be that the standards of many critics are derived almost entirely from the literature of the last thirty years. this is especially so with some american critics, who rush feverishly into print with volumes spotted with the names of modern writers as christmas pudding is spotted with currants. to read them is to get the impression that the world is only a hundred years old. it seems to me that matthew arnold was right when he urged men to turn to the classics for their standards. his definition of the classics may have been too narrow, and nothing could be more utterly dead than a criticism which tries to measure imaginary literature by an academic standard or the rules of aristotle. but it is only those to whom the classics are themselves dead who are likely to lay this academic dead hand on new literature. besides, even the most academic standards are valuable in a world in which chaos is hailed with enthusiasm both in art and in politics. but, when all is said, the taste which is the essential quality of a critic is something with which he is born. it is something which is not born of reading sophocles and plato and does not perish of reading miss marie corelli. this taste must illuminate all the reviewer's portraits. without it, he had far better be a coach-builder than a reviewer of books. it is this taste in the background that gives distinction to a tolerant and humorous review of even the most unambitious detective story. biographia literaria by samuel taylor coleridge list of contents chap. i motives to the present work--reception of the author's first publication--discipline of his taste at school--effect of contemporary writers on youthful minds--bowles's sonnets-- comparison between the poets before and since pope ii supposed irritability of genius brought to the test of facts--causes and occasions of the charge--its injustice iii the author's obligations to critics, and the probable occasion--principles of modern criticism--mr. southey's works and character iv the lyrical ballads with the preface--mr. wordsworth's earlier poems--on fancy and imagination--the investigation of the distinction important to the fine arts v on the law of association--its history traced from aristotle to hartley vi that hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of aristotle, is neither tenable in theory, nor founded in facts vii of the necessary consequences of the hartleian theory--of the original mistake or equivocation which procured its admission--memoria technica viii the system of dualism introduced by des cartes--refined first by spinoza and afterwards by leibnitz into the doctrine of harmonia praestabilita--hylozoism--materialism --none of these systems, or any possible theory of association, supplies or supersedes a theory of perception, or explains the formation of the associable xi is philosophy possible as a science, and what are its conditions?--giordano bruno--literary aristocracy, or the existence of a tacit compact among the learned as a privileged order--the author's obligations to the mystics- to immanuel kant--the difference between the letter and the spirit of kant's writings, and a vindication of prudence in the teaching of philosophy--fichte's attempt to complete the critical system-its partial success and ultimate failure--obligations to schelling; and among english writers to saumarez x a chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the nature and genesis of the imagination or plastic power--on pedantry and pedantic expressions-- advice to young authors respecting publication--various anecdotes of the author's literary life, and the progress of his opinions in religion and politics xi an affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel themselves disposed to become authors xii a chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal or omission of the chapter that follows xiii on the imagination, or esemplastic power xiv occasion of the lyrical ballads, and the objects originally proposed--preface to the second edition--the ensuing controversy, its causes and acrimony--philosophic definitions of a poem and poetry with scholia xv the specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis of shakespeare's venus and adonis, and rape of lucrece xvi striking points of difference between the poets of the present age and those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--wish expressed for the union of the characteristic merits of both xvii examination of the tenets peculiar to mr. wordsworth-- rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially unfavourable to the formation of a human diction-the best parts of language the product of philosophers, not of clowns or shepherds--poetry essentially ideal and generic-- the language of milton as much the language of real life, yea, incomparably more so than that of the cottager xviii language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially different from that of prose--origin and elements of metre --its necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby imposed on the metrical writer in the choice of his diction xix continuation--concerning the real object, which, it is probable, mr. wordsworth had before him in his critical preface--elucidation and application of this xx the former subject continued--the neutral style, or that common to prose and poetry, exemplified by specimens from chaucer, herbert, and others xxi remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals xxii the characteristic defects of wordsworth's poetry, with the principles from which the judgment, that they are defects, is deduced--their proportion to the beauties--for the greatest part characteristic of his theory only satyrane's letters xxiii critique on bertram xxiv conclusion so wenig er auch bestimmt seyn mag, andere zu belehren, so wuenscht er doch sich denen mitzutheilen, die er sich gleichgesinnt weis, (oder hofft,) deren anzahl aber in der breite der welt zerstreut ist; er wuenscht sein verhaeltniss zu den aeltesten freunden dadurch wieder anzuknuepfen, mit neuen es fortzusetzen, und in der letzten generation sich wieder andere fur seine uebrige lebenszeit zu gewinnen. er wuenscht der jugend die umwege zu ersparen, auf denen er sich selbst verirrte. (goethe. einleitung in die propylaeen.) translation. little call as he may have to instruct others, he wishes nevertheless to open out his heart to such as he either knows or hopes to be of like mind with himself, but who are widely scattered in the world: he wishes to knit anew his connections with his oldest friends, to continue those recently formed, and to win other friends among the rising generation for the remaining course of his life. he wishes to spare the young those circuitous paths, on which he himself had lost his way. biographia literaria chapter i motives to the present work--reception of the author's first publication--discipline of his taste at school--effect of contemporary writers on youthful minds--bowles's sonnets--comparison between the poets before and since pope. it has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation, and in print, more frequently than i find it easy to explain, whether i consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance, in which i have lived, both from the literary and political world. most often it has been connected with some charge which i could not acknowledge, or some principle which i had never entertained. nevertheless, had i had no other motive or incitement, the reader would not have been troubled with this exculpation. what my additional purposes were, will be seen in the following pages. it will be found, that the least of what i have written concerns myself personally. i have used the narration chiefly for the purpose of giving a continuity to the work, in part for the sake of the miscellaneous reflections suggested to me by particular events, but still more as introductory to a statement of my principles in politics, religion, and philosophy, and an application of the rules, deduced from philosophical principles, to poetry and criticism. but of the objects, which i proposed to myself, it was not the least important to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the long continued controversy concerning the true nature of poetic diction; and at the same time to define with the utmost impartiality the real poetic character of the poet, by whose writings this controversy was first kindled, and has been since fuelled and fanned. in the spring of , when i had but little passed the verge of manhood, i published a small volume of juvenile poems. they were received with a degree of favour, which, young as i was, i well know was bestowed on them not so much for any positive merit, as because they were considered buds of hope, and promises of better works to come. the critics of that day, the most flattering, equally with the severest, concurred in objecting to them obscurity, a general turgidness of diction, and a profusion of new coined double epithets [ ]. the first is the fault which a writer is the least able to detect in his own compositions: and my mind was not then sufficiently disciplined to receive the authority of others, as a substitute for my own conviction. satisfied that the thoughts, such as they were, could not have been expressed otherwise, or at least more perspicuously, i forgot to inquire, whether the thoughts themselves did not demand a degree of attention unsuitable to the nature and objects of poetry. this remark however applies chiefly, though not exclusively, to the religious musings. the remainder of the charge i admitted to its full extent, and not without sincere acknowledgments both to my private and public censors for their friendly admonitions. in the after editions, i pruned the double epithets with no sparing hand, and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction; though in truth, these parasite plants of youthful poetry had insinuated themselves into my longer poems with such intricacy of union, that i was often obliged to omit disentangling the weed, from the fear of snapping the flower. from that period to the date of the present work i have published nothing, with my name, which could by any possibility have come before the board of anonymous criticism. even the three or four poems, printed with the works of a friend [ ], as far as they were censured at all, were charged with the same or similar defects, (though i am persuaded not with equal justice),--with an excess of ornament, in addition to strained and elaborate diction. i must be permitted to add, that, even at the early period of my juvenile poems, i saw and admitted the superiority of an austerer and more natural style, with an insight not less clear, than i at present possess. my judgment was stronger than were my powers of realizing its dictates; and the faults of my language, though indeed partly owing to a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire of giving a poetic colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths, in which a new world then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part likewise, originate in unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative talent.--during several years of my youth and early manhood, i reverenced those who had re-introduced the manly simplicity of the greek, and of our own elder poets, with such enthusiasm as made the hope seem presumptuous of writing successfully in the same style. perhaps a similar process has happened to others; but my earliest poems were marked by an ease and simplicity, which i have studied, perhaps with inferior success, to impress on my later compositions. at school, (christ's hospital,) i enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the reverend james bowyer. he early moulded my taste to the preference of demosthenes to cicero, of homer and theocritus to virgil, and again of virgil to ovid. he habituated me to compare lucretius, (in such extracts as i then read,) terence, and above all the chaster poems of catullus, not only with the roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages; but with even those of the augustan aera: and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic to see and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction. at the same time that we were studying the greek tragic poets, he made us read shakespeare and milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. i learned from him, that poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. in the truly great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word; and i well remember that, availing himself of the synonymes to the homer of didymus, he made us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered the same purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the original text. in our own english compositions, (at least for the last three years of our school education,) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words [ ]. lute, harp, and lyre, muse, muses, and inspirations, pegasus, parnassus, and hippocrene were all an abomination to him. in fancy i can almost hear him now, exclaiming "harp? harp? lyre? pen and ink, boy, you mean! muse, boy, muse? your nurse's daughter, you mean! pierian spring? oh aye! the cloister-pump, i suppose!" nay certain introductions, similes, and examples, were placed by name on a list of interdiction. among the similes, there was, i remember, that of the manchineel fruit, as suiting equally well with too many subjects; in which however it yielded the palm at once to the example of alexander and clytus, which was equally good and apt, whatever might be the theme. was it ambition? alexander and clytus!--flattery? alexander and clytus!--anger--drunkenness--pride--friendship--ingratitude--late repentance? still, still alexander and clytus! at length, the praises of agriculture having been exemplified in the sagacious observation that, had alexander been holding the plough, he would not have run his friend clytus through with a spear, this tried, and serviceable old friend was banished by public edict in saecula saeculorum. i have sometimes ventured to think, that a list of this kind, or an index expurgatorius of certain well-known and ever-returning phrases, both introductory, and transitional, including a large assortment of modest egoisms, and flattering illeisms, and the like, might be hung up in our law-courts, and both houses of parliament, with great advantage to the public, as an important saving of national time, an incalculable relief to his majesty's ministers, but above all, as insuring the thanks of country attornies, and their clients, who have private bills to carry through the house. be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which i cannot pass over in silence, because i think it imitable and worthy of imitation. he would often permit our exercises, under some pretext of want of time, to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked over. then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the day. the reader will, i trust, excuse this tribute of recollection to a man, whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams, by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep; but neither lessen nor dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations. he sent us to the university excellent latin and greek scholars, and tolerable hebraists. yet our classical knowledge was the least of the good gifts, which we derived from his zealous and conscientious tutorage. he is now gone to his final reward, full of years, and full of honours, even of those honours, which were dearest to his heart, as gratefully bestowed by that school, and still binding him to the interests of that school, in which he had been himself educated, and to which during his whole life he was a dedicated thing. from causes, which this is not the place to investigate, no models of past times, however perfect, can have the same vivid effect on the youthful mind, as the productions of contemporary genius. the discipline, my mind had undergone, ne falleretur rotundo sono et versuum cursu, cincinnis, et floribus; sed ut inspiceret quidnam subesset, quae, sedes, quod firmamentum, quis fundus verbis; an figures essent mera ornatura et orationis fucus; vel sanguinis e materiae ipsius corde effluentis rubor quidam nativus et incalescentia genuina;--removed all obstacles to the appreciation of excellence in style without diminishing my delight. that i was thus prepared for the perusal of mr. bowles's sonnets and earlier poems, at once increased their influence, and my enthusiasm. the great works of past ages seem to a young man things of another race, in respect to which his faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. but the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man. his very admiration is the wind which fans and feeds his hope. the poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. to recite, to extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one, who exists to receive it. there are indeed modes of teaching which have produced, and are producing, youths of a very different stamp; modes of teaching, in comparison with which we have been called on to despise our great public schools, and universities, in whose halls are hung armoury of the invincible knights of old-- modes, by which children are to be metamorphosed into prodigies. and prodigies with a vengeance have i known thus produced; prodigies of self-conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and infidelity! instead of storing the memory, during the period when the memory is the predominant faculty, with facts for the after exercise of the judgment; and instead of awakening by the noblest models the fond and unmixed love and admiration, which is the natural and graceful temper of early youth; these nurslings of improved pedagogy are taught to dispute and decide; to suspect all but their own and their lecturer's wisdom; and to hold nothing sacred from their contempt, but their own contemptible arrogance; boy-graduates in all the technicals, and in all the dirty passions and impudence of anonymous criticism. to such dispositions alone can the admonition of pliny be requisite, neque enim debet operibus ejus obesse, quod vivit. an si inter eos, quos nunquam vidimus, floruisset, non solum libros ejus, verum etiam imagines conquireremus, ejusdem nunc honor prasentis, et gratia quasi satietate languescet? at hoc pravum, malignumque est, non admirari hominem admiratione dignissimum, quia videre, complecti, nec laudare tantum, verum etiam amare contingit. i had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the sonnets of mr. bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me, by a schoolfellow who had quitted us for the university, and who, during the whole time that he was in our first form (or in our school language a grecian,) had been my patron and protector. i refer to dr. middleton, the truly learned, and every way excellent bishop of calcutta: qui laudibus amplis ingenium celebrare meum, calamumque solebat, calcar agens animo validum. non omnia terra obruta; vivit amor, vivit dolor; ora negatur dulcia conspicere; at fiere et meminisse relictum est. it was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender recollection, that i should have received from a friend so revered the first knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year after year, i was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. my earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal, with which i laboured to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom i conversed, of whatever rank, and in whatever place. as my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, i made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents i could offer to those, who had in any way won my regard. and with almost equal delight did i receive the three or four following publications of the same author. though i have seen and known enough of mankind to be well aware, that i shall perhaps stand alone in my creed, and that it will be well, if i subject myself to no worse charge than that of singularity; i am not therefore deterred from avowing, that i regard, and ever have regarded the obligations of intellect among the most sacred of the claims of gratitude. a valuable thought, or a particular train of thoughts, gives me additional pleasure, when i can safely refer and attribute it to the conversation or correspondence of another. my obligations to mr. bowles were indeed important, and for radical good. at a very premature age, even before my fifteenth year, i had bewildered myself in metaphysics, and in theological controversy. nothing else pleased me. history, and particular facts, lost all interest in my mind. poetry--(though for a school-boy of that age, i was above par in english versification, and had already produced two or three compositions which, i may venture to say, without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity, and which had gained me more credit than the sound, good sense of my old master was at all pleased with,)--poetry itself, yea, novels and romances, became insipid to me. in my friendless wanderings on our leave-days [ ], (for i was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections in london,) highly was i delighted, if any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black, would enter into conversation with me. for i soon found the means of directing it to my favourite subjects of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate, fixed fate, free will, fore-knowledge absolute, and found no end in wandering mazes lost. this preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, injurious both to my natural powers, and to the progress of my education. it would perhaps have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this i was auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to an amiable family, chiefly however, by the genial influence of a style of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems of mr. bowles. well would it have been for me, perhaps, had i never relapsed into the same mental disease; if i had continued to pluck the flower and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. and if in after time i have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtilty of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart; still there was a long and blessed interval, during which my natural faculties were allowed to expand, and my original tendencies to develop themselves;--my fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds. the second advantage, which i owe to my early perusal, and admiration of these poems, (to which let me add,) though known to me at a somewhat later period, the lewesdon hill of mr. crowe bears more immediately on my present subject. among those with whom i conversed, there were, of course, very many who had formed their taste, and their notions of poetry, from the writings of pope and his followers; or to speak more generally, in that school of french poetry, condensed and invigorated by english understanding, which had predominated from the last century. i was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from inexperience of the world, and consequent want of sympathy with the general subjects of these poems, they gave me little pleasure, i doubtless undervalued the kind, and with the presumption of youth withheld from its masters the legitimate name of poets. i saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form: that even when the subject was addressed to the fancy, or the intellect, as in the rape of the lock, or the essay on man; nay, when it was a consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity pope's translation of the iliad; still a point was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was, as it were, a sorites, or, if i may exchange a logical for a grammatical metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams. meantime the matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. on this last point, i had occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and more plain to myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning darwin's botanic garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only by the reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and natural robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act foremost in dissipating these "painted mists" that occasionally rise from the marshes at the foot of parnassus. during my first cambridge vacation, i assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society in devonshire: and in this i remember to have compared darwin's work to the russian palace of ice, glittering, cold and transitory. in the same essay too, i assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a comparison of passages in the latin poets with the original greek, from which they were borrowed, for the preference of collins's odes to those of gray; and of the simile in shakespeare how like a younker or a prodigal the scarfed bark puts from her native bay, hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind! how like the prodigal doth she return, with over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails, lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind! (merch. of ven. act ii. sc. .) to the imitation in the bard; fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows while proudly riding o'er the azure realm in gallant trim the gilded vessel goes, youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm; regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway, that hush'd in grim repose, expects it's evening prey. (in which, by the bye, the words "realm" and "sway" are rhymes dearly purchased)--i preferred the original on the ground, that in the imitation it depended wholly on the compositor's putting, or not putting, a small capital, both in this, and in many other passages of the same poet, whether the words should be personifications, or mere abstractions. i mention this, because, in referring various lines in gray to their original in shakespeare and milton, and in the clear perception how completely all the propriety was lost in the transfer, i was, at that early period, led to a conjecture, which, many years afterwards was recalled to me from the same thought having been started in conversation, but far more ably, and developed more fully, by mr. wordsworth;--namely, that this style of poetry, which i have characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the custom of writing latin verses, and the great importance attached to these exercises, in our public schools. whatever might have been the case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the latin tongue was so general among learned men, that erasmus is said to have forgotten his native language; yet in the present day it is not to be supposed, that a youth can think in latin, or that he can have any other reliance on the force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer from whom he has adopted them. consequently he must first prepare his thoughts, and then pick out, from virgil, horace, ovid, or perhaps more compendiously from his gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in which to embody them. i never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided i find him always arguing on one side of the question. the controversies, occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a favourite contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of great advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and critical opinions. in my defence of the lines running into each other, instead of closing at each couplet; and of natural language, neither bookish, nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel, such as i will remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up in the rag-fair finery of, ------thy image on her wing before my fancy's eye shall memory bring,-- i had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the greek poets, from homer to theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder english poets, from chaucer to milton. nor was this all. but as it was my constant reply to authorities brought against me from later poets of great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to truth, nature, logic, and the laws of universal grammar; actuated too by my former passion for metaphysical investigations; i laboured at a solid foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the component faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative dignity and importance. according to the faculty or source, from which the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived, i estimated the merit of such poem or passage. as the result of all my reading and meditation, i abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style;--first, that not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry;--secondly, that whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction. be it however observed, that i excluded from the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived from mere novelty in the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment at his powers in the author. oftentimes since then, in pursuing french tragedies, i have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each line, as hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own cleverness. our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate excitement. i was wont boldly to affirm, that it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in milton or shakespeare, (in their most important works at least,) without making the poet say something else, or something worse, than he does say. one great distinction, i appeared to myself to see plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. in the former, from donne to cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother english, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract [ ] meaning. the one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery. the reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand and account for the effect produced on me by the sonnets, the monody at matlock, and the hope, of mr. bowles; for it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. the poems of west, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction; but they were cold, and, if i may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the best of warton's there is a stiffness, which too often gives them the appearance of imitations from the greek. whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse percy's collection of ballads may bear to the most popular poems of the present day; yet in a more sustained and elevated style, of the then living poets, cowper and bowles [ ] were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head. it is true, as i have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own powers, i for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction, which i myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior worth. gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better judgment; and the compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years--(for example, the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which now form the middle and conclusion of the poem entitled the destiny of nations, and the tragedy of remorse)--are not more below my present ideal in respect of the general tissue of the style than those of the latest date. their faults were at least a remnant of the former leaven, and among the many who have done me the honour of putting my poems in the same class with those of my betters, the one or two, who have pretended to bring examples of affected simplicity from my volume, have been able to adduce but one instance, and that out of a copy of verses half ludicrous, half splenetic, which i intended, and had myself characterized, as sermoni propiora. every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, which will itself need reforming. the reader will excuse me for noticing, that i myself was the first to expose risu honesto the three sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to beset a young writer. so long ago as the publication of the second number of the monthly magazine, under the name of nehemiah higginbottom, i contributed three sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism, and at the recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double defect of being at once trite and licentious;--the second was on low creeping language and thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity; the third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. the reader will find them in the note [ ] below, and will i trust regard them as reprinted for biographical purposes alone, and not for their poetic merits. so general at that time, and so decided was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style, that a celebrated physician (now, alas! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness, to a gentleman, who was about to meet me at a dinner party, could not however resist giving him a hint not to mention 'the house that jack built' in my presence, for "that i was as sore as a boil about that sonnet;" he not knowing that i was myself the author of it. chapter ii supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of facts--causes and occasions of the charge--its injustice. i have often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct consciousness, that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against the author, in favour of the critic; and the readiness with which they apply to all poets the old sarcasm of horace upon the scribblers of his time ------genus irritabile vatum. a debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do, we know well, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. having a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of this class seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which they do not possess singly. cold and phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp hay, they heat and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees they become restless and irritable through the increased temperature of collected multitudes. hence the german word for fanaticism, (such at least was its original import,) is derived from the swarming of bees, namely, schwaermen, schwaermerey. the passion being in an inverse proportion to the insight,--that the more vivid, as this the less distinct--anger is the inevitable consequence. the absense of all foundation within their own minds for that, which they yet believe both true and indispensable to their safety and happiness, cannot but produce an uneasy state of feeling, an involuntary sense of fear from which nature has no means of rescuing herself but by anger. experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate. there's no philosopher but sees, that rage and fear are one disease; tho' that may burn, and this may freeze, they're both alike the ague. but where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things; and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most important events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into thoughts. the sanity of the mind is between superstition with fanaticism on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and a diseased slowness to action on the other. for the conceptions of the mind may be so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the realizing of them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who possess more than mere talent, (or the faculty of appropriating and applying the knowledge of others,)--yet still want something of the creative and self-sufficing power of absolute genius. for this reason therefore, they are men of commanding genius. while the former rest content between thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which their own living spirit supplies the substance, and their imagination the ever-varying form; the latter must impress their preconceptions on the world without, in order to present them back to their own view with the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality. these in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a perfect poem in palace, or temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of romance in canals that join sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which, shouldering back the billows, imitate the power, and supply the benevolence of nature to sheltered navies; or in aqueducts that, arching the wide vale from mountain to mountain, give a palmyra to the desert. but alas! in times of tumult they are the men destined to come forth as the shaping spirit of ruin, to destroy the wisdom of ages in order to substitute the fancies of a day, and to change kings and kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the clouds [ ]. the records of biography seem to confirm this theory. the men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves. in the inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent or resigned with regard to immediate reputation. through all the works of chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity which makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author himself. shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost proverbial in his own age. that this did not arise from ignorance of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his sonnets, which could scarcely have been known to pope [ ], when he asserted, that our great bard-- ------grew immortal in his own despite. (epist. to augustus.) speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration of his works with that of his personal existence, shakespeare adds: your name from hence immortal life shall have, tho' i once gone to all the world must die; the earth can yield me but a common grave, when you entombed in men's eyes shall lie. your monument shall be my gentle verse, which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read; and tongues to be your being shall rehearse, when all the breathers of this world are dead: you still shall live, such virtue hath my pen, where breath most breathes, e'en in the mouth of men. sonnet lxxxi. i have taken the first that occurred; but shakespeare's readiness to praise his rivals, ore pleno, and the confidence of his own equality with those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise, are alike manifested in another sonnet. was it the proud full sail of his great verse, bound for the praise of all-too-precious you, that did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse, making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew? was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write above a mortal pitch that struck me dead? no, neither he, nor his compeers by night giving him aid, my verse astonished. he, nor that affable familiar ghost, which nightly gulls him with intelligence, as victors of my silence cannot boast; i was not sick of any fear from thence! but when your countenance fill'd up his line, then lack'd i matter, that enfeebled mine. s. lxxxvi. in spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate, and, in comparison with his three great compeers, i had almost said, effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution of burleigh, and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter days. these causes have diffused over all his compositions "a melancholy grace," and have drawn forth occasional strains, the more pathetic from their gentleness. but no where do we find the least trace of irritability, and still less of quarrelsome or affected contempt of his censurers. the same calmness, and even greater self-possession, may be affirmed of milton, as far as his poems, and poetic character are concerned. he reserved his anger for the enemies of religion, freedom, and his country. my mind is not capable of forming a more august conception, than arises from the contemplation of this great man in his latter days;--poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted,-- darkness before, and danger's voice behind,-- in an age in which he was as little understood by the party, for whom, as by that against whom, he had contended; and among men before whom he strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still listening to the music of his own thoughts, or if additionally cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three solitary individuals, he did nevertheless ------argue not against heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer'd right onward. from others only do we derive our knowledge that milton, in his latter day, had his scorners and detractors; and even in his day of youth and hope, that he had enemies would have been unknown to us, had they not been likewise the enemies of his country. i am well aware, that in advanced stages of literature, when there exist many and excellent models, a high degree of talent, combined with taste and judgment, and employed in works of imagination, will acquire for a man the name of a great genius; though even that analogon of genius, which, in certain states of society, may even render his writings more popular than the absolute reality could have done, would be sought for in vain in the mind and temper of the author himself. yet even in instances of this kind, a close examination will often detect, that the irritability, which has been attributed to the author's genius as its cause, did really originate in an ill conformation of body, obtuse pain, or constitutional defect of pleasurable sensation. what is charged to the author, belongs to the man, who would probably have been still more impatient, but for the humanizing influences of the very pursuit, which yet bears the blame of his irritability. how then are we to explain the easy credence generally given to this charge, if the charge itself be not, as i have endeavoured to show, supported by experience? this seems to me of no very difficult solution. in whatever country literature is widely diffused, there will be many who mistake an intense desire to possess the reputation of poetic genius, for the actual powers, and original tendencies which constitute it. but men, whose dearest wishes are fixed on objects wholly out of their own power, become in all cases more or less impatient and prone to anger. besides, though it may be paradoxical to assert, that a man can know one thing and believe the opposite, yet assuredly a vain person may have so habitually indulged the wish, and persevered in the attempt, to appear what he is not, as to become himself one of his own proselytes. still, as this counterfeit and artificial persuasion must differ, even in the person's own feelings, from a real sense of inward power, what can be more natural, than that this difference should betray itself in suspicious and jealous irritability? even as the flowery sod, which covers a hollow, may be often detected by its shaking and trembling. but, alas! the multitude of books and the general diffusion of literature, have produced other and more lamentable effects in the world of letters, and such as are abundant to explain, though by no means to justify, the contempt with which the best grounded complaints of injured genius are rejected as frivolous, or entertained as matter of merriment. in the days of chaucer and gower, our language might (with due allowance for the imperfections of a simile) be compared to a wilderness of vocal reeds, from which the favourites only of pan or apollo could construct even the rude syrinx; and from this the constructors alone could elicit strains of music. but now, partly by the labours of successive poets, and in part by the more artificial state of society and social intercourse, language, mechanized as it were into a barrel-organ, supplies at once both instrument and tune. thus even the deaf may play, so as to delight the many. sometimes (for it is with similes, as it is with jests at a wine table, one is sure to suggest another) i have attempted to illustrate the present state of our language, in its relation to literature, by a press-room of larger and smaller stereotype pieces, which, in the present anglo-gallican fashion of unconnected, epigrammatic periods, it requires but an ordinary portion of ingenuity to vary indefinitely, and yet still produce something, which, if not sense, will be so like it as to do as well. perhaps better: for it spares the reader the trouble of thinking; prevents vacancy, while it indulges indolence; and secures the memory from all danger of an intellectual plethora. hence of all trades, literature at present demands the least talent or information; and, of all modes of literature, the manufacturing of poems. the difference indeed between these and the works of genius is not less than between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look alike. now it is no less remarkable than true, with how little examination works of polite literature are commonly perused, not only by the mass of readers, but by men of first rate ability, till some accident or chance [ ] discussion have roused their attention, and put them on their guard. and hence individuals below mediocrity not less in natural power than in acquired knowledge; nay, bunglers who have failed in the lowest mechanic crafts, and whose presumption is in due proportion to their want of sense and sensibility; men, who being first scribblers from idleness and ignorance, next become libellers from envy and malevolence,--have been able to drive a successful trade in the employment of the booksellers, nay, have raised themselves into temporary name and reputation with the public at large, by that most powerful of all adulation, the appeal to the bad and malignant passions of mankind [ ]. but as it is the nature of scorn, envy, and all malignant propensities to require a quick change of objects, such writers are sure, sooner or later, to awake from their dream of vanity to disappointment and neglect with embittered and envenomed feelings. even during their short-lived success, sensible in spite of themselves on what a shifting foundation it rests, they resent the mere refusal of praise as a robbery, and at the justest censures kindle at once into violent and undisciplined abuse; till the acute disease changing into chronical, the more deadly as the less violent, they become the fit instruments of literary detraction and moral slander. they are then no longer to be questioned without exposing the complainant to ridicule, because, forsooth, they are anonymous critics, and authorized, in andrew marvell's phrase, as "synodical individuals" to speak of themselves plurali majestatico! as if literature formed a caste, like that of the paras in hindostan, who, however maltreated, must not dare to deem themselves wronged! as if that, which in all other cases adds a deeper dye to slander, the circumstance of its being anonymous, here acted only to make the slanderer inviolable! [ ] thus, in part, from the accidental tempers of individuals--(men of undoubted talent, but not men of genius)--tempers rendered yet more irritable by their desire to appear men of genius; but still more effectively by the excesses of the mere counterfeits both of talent and genius; the number too being so incomparably greater of those who are thought to be, than of those who really are men of genius; and in part from the natural, but not therefore the less partial and unjust distinction, made by the public itself between literary and all other property; i believe the prejudice to have arisen, which considers an unusual irascibility concerning the reception of its products as characteristic of genius. it might correct the moral feelings of a numerous class of readers, to suppose a review set on foot, the object of which should be to criticise all the chief works presented to the public by our ribbon-weavers, calico-printers, cabinet-makers, and china-manufacturers; which should be conducted in the same spirit, and take the same freedom with personal character, as our literary journals. they would scarcely, i think, deny their belief, not only that the genus irritabile would be found to include many other species besides that of bards; but that the irritability of trade would soon reduce the resentments of poets into mere shadow-fights in the comparison. or is wealth the only rational object of human interest? or even if this were admitted, has the poet no property in his works? or is it a rare, or culpable case, that he who serves at the altar of the muses, should be compelled to derive his maintenance from the altar, when too he has perhaps deliberately abandoned the fairest prospects of rank and opulence in order to devote himself, an entire and undistracted man, to the instruction or refinement of his fellow-citizens? or, should we pass by all higher objects and motives, all disinterested benevolence, and even that ambition of lasting praise which is at once the crutch and ornament, which at once supports and betrays, the infirmity of human virtue,--is the character and property of the man, who labours for our intellectual pleasures, less entitled to a share of our fellow feeling, than that of the wine-merchant or milliner? sensibility indeed, both quick and deep, is not only a characteristic feature, but may be deemed a component part, of genius. but it is not less an essential mark of true genius, that its sensibility is excited by any other cause more powerfully than by its own personal interests; for this plain reason, that the man of genius lives most in the ideal world, in which the present is still constituted by the future or the past; and because his feelings have been habitually associated with thoughts and images, to the number, clearness, and vivacity of which the sensation of self is always in an inverse proportion. and yet, should he perchance have occasion to repel some false charge, or to rectify some erroneous censure, nothing is more common than for the many to mistake the general liveliness of his manner and language, whatever is the subject, for the effects of peculiar irritation from its accidental relation to himself. [ ] for myself, if from my own feelings, or from the less suspicious test of the observations of others, i had been made aware of any literary testiness or jealousy; i trust, that i should have been, however, neither silly nor arrogant enough to have burthened the imperfection on genius. but an experience--(and i should not need documents in abundance to prove my words, if i added)--a tried experience of twenty years, has taught me, that the original sin of my character consists in a careless indifference to public opinion, and to the attacks of those who influence it; that praise and admiration have become yearly less and less desirable, except as marks of sympathy; nay that it is difficult and distressing to me to think with any interest even about the sale and profit of my works, important as, in my present circumstances, such considerations must needs be. yet it never occurred to me to believe or fancy, that the quantum of intellectual power bestowed on me by nature or education was in any way connected with this habit of my feelings; or that it needed any other parents or fosterers than constitutional indolence, aggravated into languor by ill-health; the accumulating embarrassments of procrastination; the mental cowardice, which is the inseparable companion of procrastination, and which makes us anxious to think and converse on any thing rather than on what concerns ourselves; in fine, all those close vexations, whether chargeable on my faults or my fortunes, which leave me but little grief to spare for evils comparatively distant and alien. indignation at literary wrongs i leave to men born under happier stars. i cannot afford it. but so far from condemning those who can, i deem it a writer's duty, and think it creditable to his heart, to feel and express a resentment proportioned to the grossness of the provocation, and the importance of the object. there is no profession on earth, which requires an attention so early, so long, or so unintermitting as that of poetry; and indeed as that of literary composition in general, if it be such as at all satisfies the demands both of taste and of sound logic. how difficult and delicate a task even the mere mechanism of verse is, may be conjectured from the failure of those, who have attempted poetry late in life. where then a man has, from his earliest youth, devoted his whole being to an object, which by the admission of all civilized nations in all ages is honourable as a pursuit, and glorious as an attainment; what of all that relates to himself and his family, if only we except his moral character, can have fairer claims to his protection, or more authorize acts of self-defence, than the elaborate products of his intellect and intellectual industry? prudence itself would command us to show, even if defect or diversion of natural sensibility had prevented us from feeling, a due interest and qualified anxiety for the offspring and representatives of our nobler being. i know it, alas! by woful experience. i have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion. the greater part indeed have been trod under foot, and are forgotten; but yet no small number have crept forth into life, some to furnish feathers for the caps of others, and still more to plume the shafts in the quivers of my enemies, of them that unprovoked have lain in wait against my soul. sic vos, non vobis, mellificatis, apes! chapter iii the author's obligations to critics, and the probable occasion--principles of modern criticism--mr. southey's works and character. to anonymous critics in reviews, magazines, and news-journals of various name and rank, and to satirists with or without a name in verse or prose, or in verse-text aided by prose-comment, i do seriously believe and profess, that i owe full two-thirds of whatever reputation and publicity i happen to possess. for when the name of an individual has occurred so frequently, in so many works, for so great a length of time, the readers of these works--(which with a shelf or two of beauties, elegant extracts and anas, form nine-tenths of the reading of the reading public [ ])--cannot but be familiar with the name, without distinctly remembering whether it was introduced for eulogy or for censure. and this becomes the more likely, if (as i believe) the habit of perusing periodical works may be properly added to averroes' catalogue of anti-mnemonics, or weakeners of the memory [ ]. but where this has not been the case, yet the reader will be apt to suspect that there must be something more than usually strong and extensive in a reputation, that could either require or stand so merciless and long-continued a cannonading. without any feeling of anger therefore--(for which indeed, on my own account, i have no pretext)--i may yet be allowed to express some degree of surprise, that, after having run the critical gauntlet for a certain class of faults which i had, nothing having come before the judgment-seat in the interim, i should, year after year, quarter after quarter, month after month--(not to mention sundry petty periodicals of still quicker revolution, "or weekly or diurnal")--have been, for at least seventeen years consecutively, dragged forth by them into the foremost ranks of the proscribed, and forced to abide the brunt of abuse, for faults directly opposite, and which i certainly had not. how shall i explain this? whatever may have been the case with others, i certainly cannot attribute this persecution to personal dislike, or to envy, or to feelings of vindictive animosity. not to the former, for with the exception of a very few who are my intimate friends, and were so before they were known as authors, i have had little other acquaintance with literary characters, than what may be implied in an accidental introduction, or casual meeting in a mixed company. and as far as words and looks can be trusted, i must believe that, even in these instances, i had excited no unfriendly disposition. neither by letter, nor in conversation, have i ever had dispute or controversy beyond the common social interchange of opinions. nay, where i had reason to suppose my convictions fundamentally different, it has been my habit, and i may add, the impulse of my nature, to assign the grounds of my belief, rather than the belief itself; and not to express dissent, till i could establish some points of complete sympathy, some grounds common to both sides, from which to commence its explanation. still less can i place these attacks to the charge of envy. the few pages which i have published, are of too distant a date, and the extent of their sale a proof too conclusive against their having been popular at any time, to render probable, i had almost said possible, the excitement of envy on their account; and the man who should envy me on any other, verily he must be envy-mad! lastly, with as little semblance of reason, could i suspect any animosity towards me from vindictive feelings as the cause. i have before said, that my acquaintance with literary men has been limited and distant; and that i have had neither dispute nor controversy. from my first entrance into life, i have, with few and short intervals, lived either abroad or in retirement. my different essays on subjects of national interest, published at different times, first in the morning post and then in the courier, with my courses of lectures on the principles of criticism as applied to shakespeare and milton, constitute my whole publicity; the only occasions on which i could offend any member of the republic of letters. with one solitary exception in which my words were first misstated and then wantonly applied to an individual, i could never learn that i had excited the displeasure of any among my literary contemporaries. having announced my intention to give a course of lectures on the characteristic merits and defects of english poetry in its different aeras; first, from chaucer to milton; second, from dryden inclusively to thomson; and third, from cowper to the present day; i changed my plan, and confined my disquisition to the former two periods, that i might furnish no possible pretext for the unthinking to misconstrue, or the malignant to misapply my words, and having stamped their own meaning on them, to pass them as current coin in the marts of garrulity or detraction. praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving; and it is too true, and too frequent, that bacon, harrington, machiavel, and spinoza, are not read, because hume, condillac, and voltaire are. but in promiscuous company no prudent man will oppugn the merits of a contemporary in his own supposed department; contenting himself with praising in his turn those whom he deems excellent. if i should ever deem it my duty at all to oppose the pretensions of individuals, i would oppose them in books which could be weighed and answered, in which i could evolve the whole of my reasons and feelings, with their requisite limits and modifications; not in irrecoverable conversation, where however strong the reasons might be, the feelings that prompted them would assuredly be attributed by some one or other to envy and discontent. besides i well know, and, i trust, have acted on that knowledge, that it must be the ignorant and injudicious who extol the unworthy; and the eulogies of critics without taste or judgment are the natural reward of authors without feeling or genius. sint unicuique sua praemia. how then, dismissing, as i do, these three causes, am i to account for attacks, the long continuance and inveteracy of which it would require all three to explain? the solution seems to be this,--i was in habits of intimacy with mr. wordsworth and mr. southey! this, however, transfers, rather than removes the difficulty. be it, that, by an unconscionable extension of the old adage, noscitur a socio, my literary friends are never under the water-fall of criticism, but i must be wet through with the spray; yet how came the torrent to descend upon them? first then, with regard to mr. southey. i well remember the general reception of his earlier publications; namely, the poems published with mr. lovell under the names of moschus and bion; the two volumes of poems under his own name, and the joan of arc. the censures of the critics by profession are extant, and may be easily referred to:--careless lines, inequality in the merit of the different poems, and (in the lighter works) a predilection for the strange and whimsical; in short, such faults as might have been anticipated in a young and rapid writer, were indeed sufficiently enforced. nor was there at that time wanting a party spirit to aggravate the defects of a poet, who with all the courage of uncorrupted youth had avowed his zeal for a cause, which he deemed that of liberty, and his abhorrence of oppression by whatever name consecrated. but it was as little objected by others, as dreamed of by the poet himself, that he preferred careless and prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or indeed that he pretended to any other art or theory of poetic diction, except that which we may all learn from horace, quinctilian, the admirable dialogue, de oratoribus, generally attributed to tacitus, or strada's prolusions; if indeed natural good sense and the early study of the best models in his own language had not infused the same maxims more securely, and, if i may venture the expression, more vitally. all that could have been fairly deduced was, that in his taste and estimation of writers mr. southey agreed far more with thomas warton, than with dr. johnson. nor do i mean to deny, that at all times mr. southey was of the same mind with sir philip sidney in preferring an excellent ballad in the humblest style of poetry to twenty indifferent poems that strutted in the highest. and by what have his works, published since then, been characterized, each more strikingly than the preceding, but by greater splendour, a deeper pathos, profounder reflections, and a more sustained dignity of language and of metre? distant may the period be, but whenever the time shall come, when all his works shall be collected by some editor worthy to be his biographer, i trust that an appendix of excerpta of all the passages, in which his writings, name, and character have been attacked, from the pamphlets and periodical works of the last twenty years, may be an accompaniment. yet that it would prove medicinal in after times i dare not hope; for as long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate. and such readers will become in all probability more numerous, in proportion as a still greater diffusion of literature shall produce an increase of sciolists, and sciolism bring with it petulance and presumption. in times of old, books were as religious oracles; as literature advanced, they next became venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank of instructive friends; and, as their numbers increased, they sank still lower to that of entertaining companions; and at present they seem degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge, who chooses to write from humour or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and to abide the decision "of him that reads in malice, or him that reads after dinner." the same retrograde movement may be traced, in the relation which the authors themselves have assumed towards their readers. from the lofty address of bacon: "these are the meditations of francis of verulam, which that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed their interest:" or from dedication to monarch or pontiff, in which the honour given was asserted in equipoise to the patronage acknowledged: from pindar's ------'ep' alloi-- si d'alloi megaloi: to d'eschaton kory- phoutai basilensi. maeketi paptaine porsion. eiae se te touton upsou chronon patein, eme te tossade nikaphorois omilein, prophanton sophian kath' el- lanas eonta panta.--olymp. od. i. there was a gradual sinking in the etiquette or allowed style of pretension. poets and philosophers, rendered diffident by their very number, addressed themselves to "learned readers;" then aimed to conciliate the graces of "the candid reader;" till, the critic still rising as the author sank, the amateurs of literature collectively were erected into a municipality of judges, and addressed as the town! and now, finally, all men being supposed able to read, and all readers able to judge, the multitudinous public, shaped into personal unity by the magic of abstraction, sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism. but, alas! as in other despotisms, it but echoes the decisions of its invisible ministers, whose intellectual claims to the guardianship of the muses seem, for the greater part, analogous to the physical qualifications which adapt their oriental brethren for the superintendence of the harem. thus it is said, that st. nepomuc was installed the guardian of bridges, because he had fallen over one, and sunk out of sight; thus too st. cecilia is said to have been first propitiated by musicians, because, having failed in her own attempts, she had taken a dislike to the art and all its successful professors. but i shall probably have occasion hereafter to deliver my convictions more at large concerning this state of things, and its influences on taste, genius and morality. in the thalaba, the madoc, and still more evidently in the unique [ ] cid, in the kehama, and, as last, so best, the roderick; southey has given abundant proof, se cogitare quam sit magnum dare aliquid in manus hominum: nec persuadere sibi posse, non saepe tractandum quod placere et semper et omnibus cupiat. but on the other hand, i conceive, that mr. southey was quite unable to comprehend, wherein could consist the crime or mischief of printing half a dozen or more playful poems; or to speak more generally, compositions which would be enjoyed or passed over, according as the taste and humour of the reader might chance to be; provided they contained nothing immoral. in the present age periturae parcere chartae is emphatically an unreasonable demand. the merest trifle he ever sent abroad had tenfold better claims to its ink and paper than all the silly criticisms on it, which proved no more than that the critic was not one of those, for whom the trifle was written; and than all the grave exhortations to a greater reverence for the public--as if the passive page of a book, by having an epigram or doggerel tale impressed on it, instantly assumed at once loco-motive power and a sort of ubiquity, so as to flutter and buz in the ear of the public to the sore annoyance of the said mysterious personage. but what gives an additional and more ludicrous absurdity to these lamentations is the curious fact, that if in a volume of poetry the critic should find poem or passage which he deems more especially worthless, he is sure to select and reprint it in the review; by which, on his own grounds, he wastes as much more paper than the author, as the copies of a fashionable review are more numerous than those of the original book; in some, and those the most prominent instances, as ten thousand to five hundred. i know nothing that surpasses the vileness of deciding on the merits of a poet or painter,--(not by characteristic defects; for where there is genius, these always point to his characteristic beauties; but)--by accidental failures or faulty passages; except the impudence of defending it, as the proper duty, and most instructive part, of criticism. omit or pass slightly over the expression, grace, and grouping of raffael's figures; but ridicule in detail the knitting-needles and broom-twigs, that are to represent trees in his back grounds; and never let him hear the last of his galli-pots! admit that the allegro and penseroso of milton are not without merit; but repay yourself for this concession, by reprinting at length the two poems on the university carrier! as a fair specimen of his sonnets, quote "a book was writ of late called tetrachordon;" and, as characteristic of his rhythm and metre, cite his literal translation of the first and second psalm! in order to justify yourself, you need only assert, that had you dwelt chiefly on the beauties and excellencies of the poet, the admiration of these might seduce the attention of future writers from the objects of their love and wonder, to an imitation of the few poems and passages in which the poet was most unlike himself. but till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with far other motives; till in the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference to fixed canons of criticism, previously established and deduced from the nature of man; reflecting minds will pronounce it arrogance in them thus to announce themselves to men of letters, as the guides of their taste and judgment. to the purchaser and mere reader it is, at all events, an injustice. he who tells me that there are defects in a new work, tells me nothing which i should not have taken for granted without his information. but he, who points out and elucidates the beauties of an original work does indeed give me interesting information, such as experience would not have authorized me in anticipating. and as to compositions which the authors themselves announce with haec ipsi novimus esse nihil, why should we judge by a different rule two printed works, only because the one author is alive, and the other in his grave? what literary man has not regretted the prudery of spratt in refusing to let his friend cowley appear in his slippers and dressing gown? i am not perhaps the only one who has derived an innocent amusement from the riddles, conundrums, tri-syllable lines, and the like, of swift and his correspondents, in hours of languor, when to have read his more finished works would have been useless to myself, and, in some sort, an act of injustice to the author. but i am at a loss to conceive by what perversity of judgment, these relaxations of his genius could be employed to diminish his fame as the writer of gulliver, or the tale of a tub. had mr. southey written twice as many poems of inferior merit, or partial interest, as have enlivened the journals of the day, they would have added to his honour with good and wise men, not merely or principally as proving the versatility of his talents, but as evidences of the purity of that mind, which even in its levities never dictated a line which it need regret on any moral account. i have in imagination transferred to the future biographer the duty of contrasting southey's fixed and well-earned fame, with the abuse and indefatigable hostility of his anonymous critics from his early youth to his ripest manhood. but i cannot think so ill of human nature as not to believe, that these critics have already taken shame to themselves, whether they consider the object of their abuse in his moral or his literary character. for reflect but on the variety and extent of his acquirements! he stands second to no man, either as an historian or as a bibliographer; and when i regard him as a popular essayist,--(for the articles of his compositions in the reviews are, for the greater part, essays on subjects of deep or curious interest rather than criticisms on particular works)--i look in vain for any writer, who has conveyed so much information, from so many and such recondite sources, with so many just and original reflections, in a style so lively and poignant, yet so uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one, in short, who has combined so much wisdom with so much wit; so much truth and knowledge with so much life and fancy. his prose is always intelligible and always entertaining. in poetry he has attempted almost every species of composition known before, and he has added new ones; and if we except the highest lyric,--(in which how few, how very few even of the greatest minds have been fortunate)--he has attempted every species successfully; from the political song of the day, thrown off in the playful overflow of honest joy and patriotic exultation, to the wild ballad; from epistolary ease and graceful narrative, to austere and impetuous moral declamation; from the pastoral charms and wild streaming lights of the thalaba, in which sentiment and imagery have given permanence even to the excitement of curiosity; and from the full blaze of the kehama,--(a gallery of finished pictures in one splendid fancy piece, in which, notwithstanding, the moral grandeur rises gradually above the brilliance of the colouring and the boldness and novelty of the machinery)--to the more sober beauties of the madoc; and lastly, from the madoc to his roderick, in which, retaining all his former excellencies of a poet eminently inventive and picturesque, he has surpassed himself in language and metre, in the construction of the whole, and in the splendour of particular passages. here then shall i conclude? no! the characters of the deceased, like the encomia on tombstones, as they are described with religious tenderness, so are they read, with allowing sympathy indeed, but yet with rational deduction. there are men, who deserve a higher record; men with whose characters it is the interest of their contemporaries, no less than that of posterity, to be made acquainted; while it is yet possible for impartial censure, and even for quick-sighted envy, to cross-examine the tale without offence to the courtesies of humanity; and while the eulogist, detected in exaggeration or falsehood, must pay the full penalty of his baseness in the contempt which brands the convicted flatterer. publicly has mr. southey been reviled by men, who, as i would fain hope for the honour of human nature, hurled fire-brands against a figure of their own imagination; publicly have his talents been depreciated, his principles denounced; as publicly do i therefore, who have known him intimately, deem it my duty to leave recorded, that it is southey's almost unexampled felicity, to possess the best gifts of talent and genius free from all their characteristic defects. to those who remember the state of our public schools and universities some twenty years past, it will appear no ordinary praise in any man to have passed from innocence into virtue, not only free from all vicious habit, but unstained by one act of intemperance, or the degradations akin to intemperance. that scheme of head, heart, and habitual demeanour, which in his early manhood, and first controversial writings, milton, claiming the privilege of self-defence, asserts of himself, and challenges his calumniators to disprove; this will his school-mates, his fellow-collegians, and his maturer friends, with a confidence proportioned to the intimacy of their knowledge, bear witness to, as again realized in the life of robert southey. but still more striking to those, who by biography or by their own experience are familiar with the general habits of genius, will appear the poet's matchless industry and perseverance in his pursuits; the worthiness and dignity of those pursuits; his generous submission to tasks of transitory interest, or such as his genius alone could make otherwise; and that having thus more than satisfied the claims of affection or prudence, he should yet have made for himself time and power, to achieve more, and in more various departments, than almost any other writer has done, though employed wholly on subjects of his own choice and ambition. but as southey possesses, and is not possessed by, his genius, even so is he master even of his virtues. the regular and methodical tenor of his daily labours, which would be deemed rare in the most mechanical pursuits, and might be envied by the mere man of business, loses all semblance of formality in the dignified simplicity of his manners, in the spring and healthful cheerfulness of his spirits. always employed, his friends find him always at leisure. no less punctual in trifles, than steadfast in the performance of highest duties, he inflicts none of those small pains and discomforts which irregular men scatter about them, and which in the aggregate so often become formidable obstacles both to happiness and utility; while on the contrary he bestows all the pleasures, and inspires all that ease of mind on those around him or connected with him, which perfect consistency, and (if such a word might be framed) absolute reliability, equally in small as in great concerns, cannot but inspire and bestow; when this too is softened without being weakened by kindness and gentleness. i know few men who so well deserve the character which an antient attributes to marcus cato, namely, that he was likest virtue, in as much as he seemed to act aright, not in obedience to any law or outward motive, but by the necessity of a happy nature, which could not act otherwise. as son, brother, husband, father, master, friend, he moves with firm yet light steps, alike unostentatious, and alike exemplary. as a writer, he has uniformly made his talents subservient to the best interests of humanity, of public virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever been the cause of pure religion and of liberty, of national independence and of national illumination. when future critics shall weigh out his guerdon of praise and censure, it will be southey the poet only, that will supply them with the scanty materials for the latter. they will likewise not fail to record, that as no man was ever a more constant friend, never had poet more friends and honourers among the good of all parties; and that quacks in education, quacks in politics, and quacks in criticism were his only enemies. [ ] chapter iv the lyrical ballads with the preface--mr. wordsworth's earlier poems--on fancy and imagination--the investigation of the distinction important to the fine arts. i have wandered far from the object in view, but as i fancied to myself readers who would respect the feelings that had tempted me from the main road; so i dare calculate on not a few, who will warmly sympathize with them. at present it will be sufficient for my purpose, if i have proved, that mr. southey's writings no more than my own furnished the original occasion to this fiction of a new school of poetry, and to the clamours against its supposed founders and proselytes. as little do i believe that mr. wordsworth's lyrical ballads were in themselves the cause. i speak exclusively of the two volumes so entitled. a careful and repeated examination of these confirms me in the belief, that the omission of less than a hundred lines would have precluded nine-tenths of the criticism on this work. i hazard this declaration, however, on the supposition, that the reader has taken it up, as he would have done any other collection of poems purporting to derive their subjects or interests from the incidents of domestic or ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of meditation which the poet utters in his own person and character; with the proviso, that these poems were perused without knowledge of, or reference to, the author's peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his attention previously directed to those peculiarities. in that case, as actually happened with mr. southey's earlier works, the lines and passages which might have offended the general taste, would have been considered as mere inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to perversity of judgment. the men of business who had passed their lives chiefly in cities, and who might therefore be expected to derive the highest pleasure from acute notices of men and manners conveyed in easy, yet correct and pointed language; and all those who, reading but little poetry, are most stimulated with that species of it, which seems most distant from prose, would probably have passed by the volumes altogether. others more catholic in their taste, and yet habituated to be most pleased when most excited, would have contented themselves with deciding, that the author had been successful in proportion to the elevation of his style and subject. not a few, perhaps, might, by their admiration of the lines written near tintern abbey, on revisiting the wye, those left upon a yew tree seat, the old cumberland beggar, and ruth, have been gradually led to peruse with kindred feeling the brothers, the hart-leap well, and whatever other poems in that collection may be described as holding a middle place between those written in the highest and those in the humblest style; as for instance between the tintern abbey, and the thorn, or simon lee. should their taste submit to no further change, and still remain unreconciled to the colloquial phrases, or the imitations of them, that are, more or less, scattered through the class last mentioned; yet even from the small number of the latter, they would have deemed them but an inconsiderable subtraction from the merit of the whole work; or, what is sometimes not unpleasing in the publication of a new writer, as serving to ascertain the natural tendency, and consequently the proper direction of the author's genius. in the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the lyrical ballads, i believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of the unexampled opposition which mr. wordsworth's writings have been since doomed to encounter. the humbler passages in the poems themselves were dwelt on and cited to justify the rejection of the theory. what in and for themselves would have been either forgotten or forgiven as imperfections, or at least comparative failures, provoked direct hostility when announced as intentional, as the result of choice after full deliberation. thus the poems, admitted by all as excellent, joined with those which had pleased the far greater number, though they formed two-thirds of the whole work, instead of being deemed (as in all right they should have been, even if we take for granted that the reader judged aright) an atonement for the few exceptions, gave wind and fuel to the animosity against both the poems and the poet. in all perplexity there is a portion of fear, which predisposes the mind to anger. not able to deny that the author possessed both genius and a powerful intellect, they felt very positive,--but yet were not quite certain that he might not be in the right, and they themselves in the wrong; an unquiet state of mind, which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the occasion of it, and by wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had written a long and argumentative essay to persuade them, that fair is foul, and foul is fair; in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring without judgment, and were now about to censure without reason. [ ] that this conjecture is not wide from the mark, i am induced to believe from the noticeable fact, which i can state on my own knowledge, that the same general censure has been grounded by almost every different person on some different poem. among those, whose candour and judgment i estimate highly, i distinctly remember six who expressed their objections to the lyrical ballads almost in the same words, and altogether to the same purport, at the same time admitting, that several of the poems had given them great pleasure; and, strange as it might seem, the composition which one cited as execrable, another quoted as his favourite. i am indeed convinced in my own mind, that could the same experiment have been tried with these volumes, as was made in the well known story of the picture, the result would have been the same; the parts which had been covered by black spots on the one day, would be found equally albo lapide notatae on the succeeding. however this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to fix the attention on a few separate and insulated poems with as much aversion, as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole work, instead of passing them over in silence, as so much blank paper, or leaves of a bookseller's catalogue; especially, as no one pretended to have found in them any immorality or indelicacy; and the poems, therefore, at the worst, could only be regarded as so many light or inferior coins in a rouleau of gold, not as so much alloy in a weight of bullion. a friend whose talents i hold in the highest respect, but whose judgment and strong sound sense i have had almost continued occasion to revere, making the usual complaints to me concerning both the style and subjects of mr. wordsworth's minor poems; i admitted that there were some few of the tales and incidents, in which i could not myself find a sufficient cause for their having been recorded in metre. i mentioned alice fell as an instance; "nay," replied my friend with more than usual quickness of manner, "i cannot agree with you there!--that, i own, does seem to me a remarkably pleasing poem." in the lyrical ballads, (for my experience does not enable me to extend the remark equally unqualified to the two subsequent volumes,) i have heard at different times, and from different individuals, every single poem extolled and reprobated, with the exception of those of loftier kind, which as was before observed, seem to have won universal praise. this fact of itself would have made me diffident in my censures, had not a still stronger ground been furnished by the strange contrast of the heat and long continuance of the opposition, with the nature of the faults stated as justifying it. the seductive faults, the dulcia vitia of cowley, marine, or darwin might reasonably be thought capable of corrupting the public judgment for half a century, and require a twenty years war, campaign after campaign, in order to dethrone the usurper and re-establish the legitimate taste. but that a downright simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity, prosaic words in feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases, and a preference of mean, degrading, or at best trivial associations and characters, should succeed in forming a school of imitators, a company of almost religious admirers, and this too among young men of ardent minds, liberal education, and not ------with academic laurels unbestowed; and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is characterized as below criticism, should for nearly twenty years have well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph; this is indeed matter of wonder. of yet greater is it, that the contest should still continue as undecided as [ ] that between bacchus and the frogs in aristophanes; when the former descended to the realms of the departed to bring back the spirit of old and genuine poesy;-- ch. brekekekex, koax, koax. d. all' exoloisth' auto koax. ouden gar est' all', hae koax. oimozet' ou gar moi melei. ch. alla maen kekraxomestha g', oposon hae pharynx an haemon chandanae di' haemeras, brekekekex, koax, koax! d. touto gar ou nikaesete. ch. oude men haemas su pantos. d. oude maen humeis ge dae m' oudepote. kekraxomai gar, kan me deae, di' haemeras, eos an humon epikrataeso tou koax! ch. brekekekex, ko'ax, koax! during the last year of my residence at cambridge, , i became acquainted with mr. wordsworth's first publication entitled descriptive sketches; and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced. in the form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of the particular lines and periods, there is a harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words and images all a-glow, which might recall those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out of a hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich fruit is elaborating. the language is not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength; while the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in conjunction with the difficulties of the style, demands always a greater closeness of attention, than poetry,--at all events, than descriptive poetry--has a right to claim. it not seldom therefore justified the complaint of obscurity. in the following extract i have sometimes fancied, that i saw an emblem of the poem itself, and of the author's genius as it was then displayed.-- 'tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour, all day the floods a deepening murmur pour; the sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight dark is the region as with coming night; yet what a sudden burst of overpowering light! triumphant on the bosom of the storm, glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form; eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine the wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline; those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold, at once to pillars turned that flame with gold; behind his sail the peasant strives to shun the west, that burns like one dilated sun, where in a mighty crucible expire the mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire. the poetic psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes as many changes as its greek namesake, the butterfly [ ]. and it is remarkable how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the faults and errors of its earliest products; faults which, in its earliest compositions, are the more obtrusive and confluent, because as heterogeneous elements, which had only a temporary use, they constitute the very ferment, by which themselves are carried off. or we may compare them to some diseases, which must work on the humours, and be thrown out on the surface, in order to secure the patient from their future recurrence. i was in my twenty-fourth year, when i had the happiness of knowing mr. wordsworth personally, and while memory lasts, i shall hardly forget the sudden effect produced on my mind, by his recitation of a manuscript poem, which still remains unpublished, but of which the stanza and tone of style were the same as those of the female vagrant, as originally printed in the first volume of the lyrical ballads. there was here no mark of strained thought, or forced diction, no crowd or turbulence of imagery; and, as the poet hath himself well described in his lines on revisiting the wye, manly reflection and human associations had given both variety, and an additional interest to natural objects, which, in the passion and appetite of the first love, they had seemed to him neither to need nor permit. the occasional obscurities, which had risen from an imperfect control over the resources of his native language, had almost wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary and illogical phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will, more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless the attention has been specially directed to their worthlessness and incongruity [ ]. i did not perceive anything particular in the mere style of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except indeed such difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the spenserian stanza, which always, more or less, recalls to the reader's mind spenser's own style, would doubtless have authorized, in my then opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life, than could without an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet. it was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as to common defects, or to those more properly his own, which made so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judgment. it was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying, the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops. this excellence, which in all mr. wordsworth's writings is more or less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, i no sooner felt, than i sought to understand. repeated meditations led me first to suspect,--(and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my conjecture into full conviction,)--that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. it is not, i own, easy to conceive a more apposite translation of the greek phantasia than the latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize [ ] those words originally of the same meaning, which the conflux of dialects supplied to the more homogeneous languages, as the greek and german: and which the same cause, joined with accidents of translation from original works of different countries, occasion in mixed languages like our own. the first and most important point to be proved is, that two conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under one and the same word, and--this done--to appropriate that word exclusively to the one meaning, and the synonyme, should there be one, to the other. but if,--(as will be often the case in the arts and sciences,)--no synonyme exists, we must either invent or borrow a word. in the present instance the appropriation has already begun, and been legitimated in the derivative adjective: milton had a highly imaginative, cowley a very fanciful mind. if therefore i should succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties generally different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. to the faculty by which i had characterized milton, we should confine the term 'imagination;' while the other would be contra-distinguished as 'fancy.' now were it once fully ascertained, that this division is no less grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania, or otway's lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber, from shakespeare's what! have his daughters brought him to this pass? or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements; the theory of the fine arts, and of poetry in particular, could not but derive some additional and important light. it would in its immediate effects furnish a torch of guidance to the philosophical critic; and ultimately to the poet himself. in energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power; and from directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the production. to admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of originality. it has been already hinted, that metaphysics and psychology have long been my hobby-horse. but to have a hobby-horse, and to be vain of it, are so commonly found together, that they pass almost for the same. i trust therefore, that there will be more good humour than contempt, in the smile with which the reader chastises my self-complacency, if i confess myself uncertain, whether the satisfaction from the perception of a truth new to myself may not have been rendered more poignant by the conceit, that it would be equally so to the public. there was a time, certainly, in which i took some little credit to myself, in the belief that i had been the first of my countrymen, who had pointed out the diverse meaning of which the two terms were capable, and analyzed the faculties to which they should be appropriated. mr. w. taylor's recent volume of synonymes i have not yet seen [ ]; but his specification of the terms in question has been clearly shown to be both insufficient and erroneous by mr. wordsworth in the preface added to the late collection of his poems. the explanation which mr. wordsworth has himself given, will be found to differ from mine, chiefly, perhaps as our objects are different. it could scarcely indeed happen otherwise, from the advantage i have enjoyed of frequent conversation with him on a subject to which a poem of his own first directed my attention, and my conclusions concerning which he had made more lucid to myself by many happy instances drawn from the operation of natural objects on the mind. but it was mr. wordsworth's purpose to consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude their diversity in kind; while it is my object to investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree. my friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. i wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness. yet even in this attempt i am aware that i shall be obliged to draw more largely on the reader's attention, than so immethodical a miscellany as this can authorize; when in such a work (the ecclesiasical polity) of such a mind as hooker's, the judicious author, though no less admirable for the perspicuity than for the port and dignity of his language,--and though he wrote for men of learning in a learned age,--saw nevertheless occasion to anticipate and guard against "complaints of obscurity," as often as he was to trace his subject "to the highest well-spring and fountain." which, (continues he) "because men are not accustomed to, the pains we take are more needful a great deal, than acceptable; and the matters we handle, seem by reason of newness (till the mind grow better acquainted with them) dark and intricate." i would gladly therefore spare both myself and others this labour, if i knew how without it to present an intelligible statement of my poetic creed,--not as my opinions, which weigh for nothing, but as deductions from established premises conveyed in such a form, as is calculated either to effect a fundamental conviction, or to receive a fundamental confutation. if i may dare once more adopt the words of hooker, "they, unto whom we shall seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, because it is in their own hands to spare that labour, which they are not willing to endure." those at least, let me be permitted to add, who have taken so much pains to render me ridiculous for a perversion of taste, and have supported the charge by attributing strange notions to me on no other authority than their own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well as to me not to refuse their attention to my own statement of the theory which i do acknowledge; or shrink from the trouble of examining the grounds on which i rest it, or the arguments which i offer in its justification. chapter v on the law of association--its history traced from aristotle to hartley. there have been men in all ages, who have been impelled as by an instinct to propose their own nature as a problem, and who devote their attempts to its solution. the first step was to construct a table of distinctions, which they seem to have formed on the principle of the absence or presence of the will. our various sensations, perceptions, and movements were classed as active or passive, or as media partaking of both. a still finer distinction was soon established between the voluntary and the spontaneous. in our perceptions we seem to ourselves merely passive to an external power, whether as a mirror reflecting the landscape, or as a blank canvass on which some unknown hand paints it. for it is worthy of notice, that the latter, or the system of idealism may be traced to sources equally remote with the former, or materialism; and berkeley can boast an ancestry at least as venerable as gassendi or hobbes. these conjectures, however, concerning the mode in which our perceptions originated, could not alter the natural difference of things and thoughts. in the former, the cause appeared wholly external, while in the latter, sometimes our will interfered as the producing or determining cause, and sometimes our nature seemed to act by a mechanism of its own, without any conscious effort of the will, or even against it. our inward experiences were thus arranged in three separate classes, the passive sense, or what the school-men call the merely receptive quality of the mind; the voluntary; and the spontaneous, which holds the middle place between both. but it is not in human nature to meditate on any mode of action, without inquiring after the law that governs it; and in the explanation of the spontaneous movements of our being, the metaphysician took the lead of the anatomist and natural philosopher. in egypt, palestine, greece, and india the analysis of the mind had reached its noon and manhood, while experimental research was still in its dawn and infancy. for many, very many centuries, it has been difficult to advance a new truth, or even a new error, in the philosophy of the intellect or morals. with regard, however, to the laws that direct the spontaneous movements of thought and the principle of their intellectual mechanism there exists, it has been asserted, an important exception most honourable to the moderns, and in the merit of which our own country claims the largest share. sir james mackintosh,--(who, amid the variety of his talents and attainments, is not of less repute for the depth and accuracy of his philosophical inquiries than for the eloquence with which he is said to render their most difficult results perspicuous, and the driest attractive,)--affirmed in the lectures, delivered by him in lincoln's inn hall, that the law of association as established in the contemporaneity of the original impressions, formed the basis of all true psychology; and that any ontological or metaphysical science, not contained in such (that is, an empirical) psychology, was but a web of abstractions and generalizations. of this prolific truth, of this great fundamental law, he declared hobbes to have been the original discoverer, while its full application to the whole intellectual system we owed to hartley; who stood in the same relation to hobbes as newton to kepler; the law of association being that to the mind, which gravitation is to matter. of the former clause in this assertion, as it respects the comparative merits of the ancient metaphysicians, including their commentators, the school-men, and of the modern and british and french philosophers from hobbes to hume, hartley, and condillac, this is not the place to speak. so wide indeed is the chasm between sir james mackintosh's philosophical creed and mine, that so far from being able to join hands, we could scarcely make our voices intelligible to each other: and to bridge it over would require more time, skill, and power than i believe myself to possess. but the latter clause involves for the greater part a mere question of fact and history, and the accuracy of the statement is to be tried by documents rather than reasoning. first, then, i deny hobbes's claim in toto: for he had been anticipated by des cartes, whose work de methodo, preceded hobbes's de natura humana, by more than a year. but what is of much more importance, hobbes builds nothing on the principle which he had announced. he does not even announce it, as differing in any respect from the general laws of material motion and impact: nor was it, indeed, possible for him so to do, compatibly with his system, which was exclusively material and mechanical. far otherwise is it with des cartes; greatly as he too in his after writings (and still more egregiously his followers de la forge, and others) obscured the truth by their attempts to explain it on the theory of nervous fluids, and material configurations. but, in his interesting work, de methodo, des cartes relates the circumstance which first led him to meditate on this subject, and which since then has been often noticed and employed as an instance and illustration of the law. a child who with its eyes bandaged had lost several of his fingers by amputation, continued to complain for many days successively of pains, now in this joint and now in that, of the very fingers which had been cut off. des cartes was led by this incident to reflect on the uncertainty with which we attribute any particular place to any inward pain or uneasiness, and proceeded after long consideration to establish it as a general law: that contemporaneous impressions, whether images or sensations, recall each other mechanically. on this principle, as a ground work, he built up the whole system of human language, as one continued process of association. he showed in what sense not only general terms, but generic images,--under the name of abstract ideas,--actually existed, and in what consist their nature and power. as one word may become the general exponent of many, so by association a simple image may represent a whole class. but in truth hobbes himself makes no claims to any discovery, and introduces this law of association, or (in his own language) discursion of mind, as an admitted fact, in the solution alone of which, and this by causes purely physiological, he arrogates any originality. his system is briefly this; whenever the senses are impinged on by external objects, whether by the rays of light reflected from them, or by effluxes of their finer particles, there results a correspondent motion of the innermost and subtlest organs. this motion constitutes a representation, and there remains an impression of the same, or a certain disposition to repeat the same motion. whenever we feel several objects at the same time, the impressions that are left, (or in the language of mr. hume, the ideas,) are linked together. whenever therefore any one of the movements, which constitute a complex impression, is renewed through the senses, the others succeed mechanically. it follows of necessity, therefore, that hobbes, as well as hartley and all others who derive association from the connection and interdependence of the supposed matter, the movements of which constitute our thoughts, must have reduced all its forms to the one law of time. but even the merit of announcing this law with philosophic precision cannot be fairly conceded to him. for the objects of any two ideas need not have co-existed in the same sensation in order to become mutually associable. the same result will follow when one only of the two ideas has been represented by the senses, and the other by the memory. long however before either hobbes or des cartes the law of association had been defined, and its important functions set forth by ludovicus vives. phantasia, it is to be noticed, is employed by vives to express the mental power of comprehension, or the active function of the mind; and imaginatio for the receptivity (via receptiva) of impressions, or for the passive perception. the power of combination he appropriates to the former: "quae singula et simpliciter acceperat imaginatio, ea conjungit et disjungait phantasia." and the law by which the thoughts are spontaneously presented follows thus: "quae simul sunt a phantasia comprehensa, si alterutrum occurrat, solet secum alterum representare." to time therefore he subordinates all the other exciting causes of association. the soul proceeds "a causa ad effectum, ab hoc ad instrumentum, a parte ad totum;" thence to the place, from place to person, and from this to whatever preceded or followed, all as being parts of a total impression, each of which may recall the other. the apparent springs "saltus vel transitus etiam longissimos," he explains by the same thought having been a component part of two or more total impressions. thus "ex scipione venio in cogitationem potentiae turcicae, propter victorias ejus de asia, in qua regnabat antiochus." but from vives i pass at once to the source of his doctrines, and (as far as we can judge from the remains yet extant of greek philosophy) as to the first, so to the fullest and most perfect enunciation of the associative principle, namely, to the writings of aristotle; and of these in particular to the treatises de anima, and "de memoria," which last belongs to the series of essays entitled in the old translations parva naturalia. in as much as later writers have either deviated from, or added to his doctrines, they appear to me to have introduced either error or groundless supposition. in the first place it is to be observed, that aristotle's positions on this subject are unmixed with fiction. the wise stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls, as hobbes; nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch engravings on the brain, as the followers of des cartes, and the humoral pathologists in general; nor of an oscillating ether which was to effect the same service for the nerves of the brain considered as solid fibres, as the animal spirits perform for them under the notion of hollow tubes, as hartley teaches--nor finally, (with yet more recent dreamers) of chemical compositions by elective affinity, or of an electric light at once the immediate object and the ultimate organ of inward vision, which rises to the brain like an aurora borealis, and there, disporting in various shapes,--as the balance of plus and minus, or negative and positive, is destroyed or re-established,--images out both past and present. aristotle delivers a just theory without pretending to an hypothesis; or in other words a comprehensive survey of the different facts, and of their relations to each other without supposition, that is, a fact placed under a number of facts, as their common support and explanation; though in the majority of instances these hypotheses or suppositions better deserve the name of upopoiaeseis, or suffictions. he uses indeed the word kinaeseis, to express what we call representations or ideas, but he carefully distinguishes them from material motion, designating the latter always by annexing the words en topo, or kata topon. on the contrary, in his treatise de anima, he excludes place and motion from all the operations of thought, whether representations or volitions, as attributes utterly and absurdly heterogeneous. the general law of association, or, more accurately, the common condition under which all exciting causes act, and in which they may be generalized, according to aristotle is this. ideas by having been together acquire a power of recalling each other; or every partial representation awakes the total representation of which it had been a part. in the practical determination of this common principle to particular recollections, he admits five agents or occasioning causes: first, connection in time, whether simultaneous, preceding, or successive; second, vicinity or connection in space; third, interdependence or necessary connection, as cause and effect; fourth, likeness; and fifth, contrast. as an additional solution of the occasional seeming chasms in the continuity of reproduction he proves, that movements or ideas possessing one or the other of these five characters had passed through the mind as intermediate links, sufficiently clear to recall other parts of the same total impressions with which they had co-existed, though not vivid enough to excite that degree of attention which is requisite for distinct recollection, or as we may aptly express it, after consciousness. in association then consists the whole mechanism of the reproduction of impressions, in the aristotelian psychology. it is the universal law of the passive fancy and mechanical memory; that which supplies to all other faculties their objects, to all thought the elements of its materials. in consulting the excellent commentary of st. thomas aquinas on the parva naturalia of aristotle, i was struck at once with its close resemblance to hume's essay on association. the main thoughts were the same in both, the order of the thoughts was the same, and even the illustrations differed only by hume's occasional substitution of more modern examples. i mentioned the circumstance to several of my literary acquaintances, who admitted the closeness of the resemblance, and that it seemed too great to be explained by mere coincidence; but they thought it improbable that hume should have held the pages of the angelic doctor worth turning over. but some time after mr. payne showed sir james mackintosh some odd volumes of st. thomas aquinas, partly perhaps from having heard that he had in his lectures passed a high encomium on this canonized philosopher; but chiefly from the fact, that the volumes had belonged to mr. hume, and had here and there marginal marks and notes of reference in his own hand writing. among these volumes was that which contains the parva naturalia, in the old latin version, swathed and swaddled in the commentary afore mentioned it remains then for me, first to state wherein hartley differs from aristotle; then, to exhibit the grounds of my conviction, that he differed only to err: and next as the result, to show, by what influences of the choice and judgment the associative power becomes either memory or fancy; and, in conclusion, to appropriate the remaining offices of the mind to the reason, and the imagination. with my best efforts to be as perspicuous as the nature of language will permit on such a subject, i earnestly solicit the good wishes and friendly patience of my readers, while i thus go "sounding on my dim and perilous way." chapter vi that hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of aristotle, is neither tenable in theory, nor founded in facts. of hartley's hypothetical vibrations in his hypothetical oscillating ether of the nerves, which is the first and most obvious distinction between his system and that of aristotle, i shall say little. this, with all other similar attempts to render that an object of the sight which has no relation to sight, has been already sufficiently exposed by the younger reimarus, maasz, and others, as outraging the very axioms of mechanics in a scheme, the merit of which consists in its being mechanical. whether any other philosophy be possible, but the mechanical; and again, whether the mechanical system can have any claim to be called philosophy; are questions for another place. it is, however, certain, that as long as we deny the former, and affirm the latter, we must bewilder ourselves, whenever we would pierce into the adyta of causation; and all that laborious conjecture can do, is to fill up the gaps of fancy. under that despotism of the eye (the emancipation from which pythagoras by his numeral, and plato by his musical, symbols, and both by geometric discipline, aimed at, as the first propaideuma of the mind)--under this strong sensuous influence, we are restless because invisible things are not the objects of vision; and metaphysical systems, for the most part, become popular, not for their truth, but in proportion as they attribute to causes a susceptibility of being seen, if only our visual organs were sufficiently powerful. from a hundred possible confutations let one suffice. according to this system the idea or vibration a from the external object a becomes associable with the idea or vibration m from the external object m, because the oscillation a propagated itself so as to re-produce the oscillation m. but the original impression from m was essentially different from the impression a: unless therefore different causes may produce the same effect, the vibration a could never produce the vibration m: and this therefore could never be the means, by which a and m are associated. to understand this, the attentive reader need only be reminded, that the ideas are themselves, in hartley's system, nothing more than their appropriate configurative vibrations. it is a mere delusion of the fancy to conceive the pre-existence of the ideas, in any chain of association, as so many differently coloured billiard-balls in contact, so that when an object, the billiard-stick, strikes the first or white ball, the same motion propagates itself through the red, green, blue and black, and sets the whole in motion. no! we must suppose the very same force, which constitutes the white ball, to constitute the red or black; or the idea of a circle to constitute the idea of a triangle; which is impossible. but it may be said, that by the sensations from the objects a and m, the nerves have acquired a disposition to the vibrations a and m, and therefore a need only be repeated in order to re-produce m. now we will grant, for a moment, the possibility of such a disposition in a material nerve, which yet seems scarcely less absurd than to say, that a weather-cock had acquired a habit of turning to the east, from the wind having been so long in that quarter: for if it be replied, that we must take in the circumstance of life, what then becomes of the mechanical philosophy? and what is the nerve, but the flint which the wag placed in the pot as the first ingredient of his stone broth, requiring only salt, turnips, and mutton, for the remainder! but if we waive this, and pre-suppose the actual existence of such a disposition; two cases are possible. either, every idea has its own nerve and correspondent oscillation, or this is not the case. if the latter be the truth, we should gain nothing by these dispositions; for then, every nerve having several dispositions, when the motion of any other nerve is propagated into it, there will be no ground or cause present, why exactly the oscillation m should arise, rather than any other to which it was equally pre-disposed. but if we take the former, and let every idea have a nerve of its own, then every nerve must be capable of propagating its motion into many other nerves; and again, there is no reason assignable, why the vibration m should arise, rather than any other ad libitum. it is fashionable to smile at hartley's vibrations and vibratiuncles; and his work has been re-edited by priestley, with the omission of the material hypothesis. but hartley was too great a man, too coherent a thinker, for this to have been done, either consistently or to any wise purpose. for all other parts of his system, as far as they are peculiar to that system, once removed from their mechanical basis, not only lose their main support, but the very motive which led to their adoption. thus the principle of contemporaneity, which aristotle had made the common condition of all the laws of association, hartley was constrained to represent as being itself the sole law. for to what law can the action of material atoms be subject, but that of proximity in place? and to what law can their motions be subjected but that of time? again, from this results inevitably, that the will, the reason, the judgment, and the understanding, instead of being the determining causes of association, must needs be represented as its creatures, and among its mechanical effects. conceive, for instance, a broad stream, winding through a mountainous country with an indefinite number of currents, varying and running into each other according as the gusts chance to blow from the opening of the mountains. the temporary union of several currents in one, so as to form the main current of the moment, would present an accurate image of hartley's theory of the will. had this been really the case, the consequence would have been, that our whole life would be divided between the despotism of outward impressions, and that of senseless and passive memory. take his law in its highest abstraction and most philosophical form, namely, that every partial representation recalls the total representation of which it was a part; and the law becomes nugatory, were it only for its universality. in practice it would indeed be mere lawlessness. consider, how immense must be the sphere of a total impression from the top of st. paul's church; and how rapid and continuous the series of such total impressions. if, therefore, we suppose the absence of all interference of the will, reason, and judgment, one or other of two consequences must result. either the ideas, or reliques of such impression, will exactly imitate the order of the impression itself, which would be absolute delirium: or any one part of that impression might recall any other part, and--(as from the law of continuity, there must exist in every total impression, some one or more parts, which are components of some other following total impression, and so on ad infinitum)--any part of any impression might recall any part of any other, without a cause present to determine what it should be. for to bring in the will, or reason, as causes of their own cause, that is, as at once causes and effects, can satisfy those only who, in their pretended evidences of a god, having first demanded organization, as the sole cause and ground of intellect, will then coolly demand the pre-existence of intellect, as the cause and ground-work of organization. there is in truth but one state to which this theory applies at all, namely, that of complete light-headedness; and even to this it applies but partially, because the will and reason are perhaps never wholly suspended. a case of this kind occurred in a roman catholic town in germany a year or two before my arrival at goettingen, and had not then ceased to be a frequent subject of conversation. a young woman of four or five and twenty, who could neither read, nor write, was seized with a nervous fever; during which, according to the asseverations of all the priests and monks of the neighbourhood, she became possessed, and, as it appeared, by a very learned devil. she continued incessantly talking latin, greek, and hebrew, in very pompous tones and with most distinct enunciation. this possession was rendered more probable by the known fact that she was or had been a heretic. voltaire humorously advises the devil to decline all acquaintance with medical men; and it would have been more to his reputation, if he had taken this advice in the present instance. the case had attracted the particular attention of a young physician, and by his statement many eminent physiologists and psychologists visited the town, and cross-examined the case on the spot. sheets full of her ravings were taken down from her own mouth, and were found to consist of sentences, coherent and intelligible each for itself, but with little or no connection with each other. of the hebrew, a small portion only could be traced to the bible; the remainder seemed to be in the rabbinical dialect. all trick or conspiracy was out of the question. not only had the young woman ever been a harmless, simple creature; but she was evidently labouring under a nervous fever. in the town, in which she had been resident for many years as a servant in different families, no solution presented itself. the young physician, however, determined to trace her past life step by step; for the patient herself was incapable of returning a rational answer. he at length succeeded in discovering the place, where her parents had lived: travelled thither, found them dead, but an uncle surviving; and from him learned, that the patient had been charitably taken by an old protestant pastor at nine years old, and had remained with him some years, even till the old man's death. of this pastor the uncle knew nothing, but that he was a very good man. with great difficulty, and after much search, our young medical philosopher discovered a niece of the pastor's, who had lived with him as his house-keeper, and had inherited his effects. she remembered the girl; related, that her venerable uncle had been too indulgent, and could not bear to hear the girl scolded; that she was willing to have kept her, but that, after her patron's death, the girl herself refused to stay. anxious inquiries were then, of course, made concerning the pastor's habits; and the solution of the phenomenon was soon obtained. for it appeared, that it had been the old man's custom, for years, to walk up and down a passage of his house into which the kitchen door opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice, out of his favourite books. a considerable number of these were still in the niece's possession. she added, that he was a very learned man and a great hebraist. among the books were found a collection of rabbinical writings, together with several of the greek and latin fathers; and the physician succeeded in identifying so many passages with those taken down at the young woman's bedside, that no doubt could remain in any rational mind concerning the true origin of the impressions made on her nervous system. this authenticated case furnishes both proof and instance, that reliques of sensation may exist for an indefinite time in a latent state, in the very same order in which they were originally impressed; and as we cannot rationally suppose the feverish state of the brain to act in any other way than as a stimulus, this fact (and it would not be difficult to adduce several of the same kind) contributes to make it even probable, that all thoughts are in themselves imperishable; and, that if the intelligent faculty should be rendered more comprehensive, it would require only a different and apportioned organization,--the body celestial instead of the body terrestrial,--to bring before every human soul the collective experience of its whole past existence. and this, this, perchance, is the dread book of judgment, in the mysterious hieroglyphics of which every idle word is recorded! yea, in the very nature of a living spirit, it may be more possible that heaven and earth should pass away, than that a single act, a single thought, should be loosened or lost from that living chain of causes, with all the links of which, conscious or unconscious, the free-will, our only absolute self, is coextensive and co-present. but not now dare i longer discourse of this, waiting for a loftier mood, and a nobler subject, warned from within and from without, that it is profanation to speak of these "mysteries tois maede phantasteisin, os kalon to taes dikaiosynaes kai sophrosynaes prosopon, kai oute hesperos oute eoos outo kala. to gar horon pros to horomenon syngenes kai homoion poiaesamenon dei epiballein tae thea, ou gar an popote eiden ophthalmos haelion, haelioeidaes mae gegenaemenos oude to kalon an idae psychae, mae kagae genomenae--to those to whose imagination it has never been presented, how beautiful is the countenance of justice and wisdom; and that neither the morning nor the evening star are so fair. for in order to direct the view aright, it behoves that the beholder should have made himself congenerous and similar to the object beheld. never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soliform," (i.e. pre-configured to light by a similarity of essence with that of light) "neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty." chapter vii of the necessary consequences of the hartleian theory--of the original mistake or equivocation which procured its admission--memoria technica. we will pass by the utter incompatibility of such a law--if law it may be called, which would itself be a slave of chances--with even that appearance of rationality forced upon us by the outward phaenomena of human conduct, abstracted from our own consciousness. we will agree to forget this for the moment, in order to fix our attention on that subordination of final to efficient causes in the human being, which flows of necessity from the assumption, that the will and, with the will, all acts of thought and attention are parts and products of this blind mechanism, instead of being distinct powers, the function of which it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos of association. the soul becomes a mere ens logicum; for, as a real separable being, it would be more worthless and ludicrous than the grimalkins in the cat-harpsichord, described in the spectator. for these did form a part of the process; but, to hartley's scheme, the soul is present only to be pinched or stroked, while the very squeals or purring are produced by an agency wholly independent and alien. it involves all the difficulties, all the incomprehensibility (if it be not indeed, os emoige dokei, the absurdity), of intercommunion between substances that have no one property in common, without any of the convenient consequences that bribed the judgment to the admission of the dualistic hypothesis. accordingly, this caput mortuum of the hartleian process has been rejected by his followers, and the consciousness considered as a result, as a tune, the common product of the breeze and the harp though this again is the mere remotion of one absurdity to make way for another, equally preposterous. for what is harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse of which is percipi?--an ens rationale, which pre-supposes the power, that by perceiving creates it? the razor's edge becomes a saw to the armed vision; and the delicious melodies of purcell or cimarosa might be disjointed stammerings to a hearer, whose partition of time should be a thousand times subtler than ours. but this obstacle too let us imagine ourselves to have surmounted, and "at one bound high overleap all bound." yet according to this hypothesis the disquisition, to which i am at present soliciting the reader's attention, may be as truly said to be written by saint paul's church, as by me: for it is the mere motion of my muscles and nerves; and these again are set in motion from external causes equally passive, which external causes stand themselves in interdependent connection with every thing that exists or has existed. thus the whole universe co-operates to produce the minutest stroke of every letter, save only that i myself, and i alone, have nothing to do with it, but merely the causeless and effectless beholding of it when it is done. yet scarcely can it be called a beholding; for it is neither an act nor an effect; but an impossible creation of a something nothing out of its very contrary! it is the mere quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass; and in this alone consists the poor worthless i! the sum total of my moral and intellectual intercourse, dissolved into its elements, is reduced to extension, motion, degrees of velocity, and those diminished copies of configurative motion, which form what we call notions, and notions of notions. of such philosophy well might butler say-- the metaphysic's but a puppet motion that goes with screws, the notion of a notion; the copy of a copy and lame draught unnaturally taken from a thought that counterfeits all pantomimic tricks, and turns the eyes, like an old crucifix; that counterchanges whatsoe'er it calls by another name, and makes it true or false; turns truth to falsehood, falsehood into truth, by virtue of the babylonian's tooth. the inventor of the watch, if this doctrine be true, did not in reality invent it; he only looked on, while the blind causes, the only true artists, were unfolding themselves. so must it have been too with my friend allston, when he sketched his picture of the dead man revived by the bones of the prophet elijah. so must it have been with mr. southey and lord byron, when the one fancied himself composing his roderick, and the other his childe harold. the same must hold good of all systems of philosophy; of all arts, governments, wars by sea and by land; in short, of all things that ever have been or that ever will be produced. for, according to this system, it is not the affections and passions that are at work, in as far as they are sensations or thoughts. we only fancy, that we act from rational resolves, or prudent motives, or from impulses of anger, love, or generosity. in all these cases the real agent is a something-nothing-everything, which does all of which we know, and knows nothing of all that itself does. the existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will, must, on this system, be mere articulated motions of the air. for as the function of the human understanding is no other than merely to appear to itself to combine and to apply the phaenomena of the association; and as these derive all their reality from the primary sensations; and the sensations again all their reality from the impressions ab extra; a god not visible, audible, or tangible, can exist only in the sounds and letters that form his name and attributes. if in ourselves there be no such faculties as those of the will, and the scientific reason, we must either have an innate idea of them, which would overthrow the whole system; or we can have no idea at all. the process, by which hume degraded the notion of cause and effect into a blind product of delusion and habit, into the mere sensation of proceeding life (nisus vitalis) associated with the images of the memory; this same process must be repeated to the equal degradation of every fundamental idea in ethics or theology. far, very far am i from burthening with the odium of these consequences the moral characters of those who first formed, or have since adopted the system! it is most noticeable of the excellent and pious hartley, that, in the proofs of the existence and attributes of god, with which his second volume commences, he makes no reference to the principle or results of the first. nay, he assumes, as his foundations, ideas which, if we embrace the doctrines of his first volume, can exist no where but in the vibrations of the ethereal medium common to the nerves and to the atmosphere. indeed the whole of the second volume is, with the fewest possible exceptions, independent of his peculiar system. so true is it, that the faith, which saves and sanctifies, is a collective energy, a total act of the whole moral being; that its living sensorium is in the heart; and that no errors of the understanding can be morally arraigned unless they have proceeded from the heart. but whether they be such, no man can be certain in the case of another, scarcely perhaps even in his own. hence it follows by inevitable consequence, that man may perchance determine what is a heresy; but god only can know who is a heretic. it does not, however, by any means follow that opinions fundamentally false are harmless. a hundred causes may co-exist to form one complex antidote. yet the sting of the adder remains venomous, though there are many who have taken up the evil thing, and it hurted them not. some indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbour nation at least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all its moral and religious consequences; some-- ------who deem themselves most free, when they within this gross and visible sphere chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent, proud in their meanness; and themselves they cheat with noisy emptiness of learned phrase, their subtle fluids, impacts, essences, self-working tools, uncaus'd effects, and all those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves, untenanting creation of its god! such men need discipline, not argument; they must be made better men, before they can become wiser. the attention will be more profitably employed in attempting to discover and expose the paralogisms, by the magic of which such a faith could find admission into minds framed for a nobler creed. these, it appears to me, may be all reduced to one sophism as their common genus; the mistaking the conditions of a thing for its causes and essence; and the process, by which we arrive at the knowledge of a faculty, for the faculty itself. the air i breathe is the condition of my life, not its cause. we could never have learned that we had eyes but by the process of seeing; yet having seen we know that the eyes must have pre-existed in order to render the process of sight possible. let us cross-examine hartley's scheme under the guidance of this distinction; and we shall discover, that contemporaneity, (leibnitz's lex continui,) is the limit and condition of the laws of mind, itself being rather a law of matter, at least of phaenomena considered as material. at the utmost, it is to thought the same, as the law of gravitation is to loco-motion. in every voluntary movement we first counteract gravitation, in order to avail ourselves of it. it must exist, that there may be a something to be counteracted, and which, by its re-action, may aid the force that is exerted to resist it. let us consider what we do when we leap. we first resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to alight on the spot, which we had previously proposed to ourselves. now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous. most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. this is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking. there are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. in philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the imagination. but, in common language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary control over it. contemporaneity, then, being the common condition of all the laws of association, and a component element in the materia subjecta, the parts of which are to be associated, must needs be co-present with all. nothing, therefore, can be more easy than to pass off on an incautious mind this constant companion of each, for the essential substance of all. but if we appeal to our own consciousness, we shall find that even time itself, as the cause of a particular act of association, is distinct from contemporaneity, as the condition of all association. seeing a mackerel, it may happen, that i immediately think of gooseberries, because i at the same time ate mackerel with gooseberries as the sauce. the first syllable of the latter word, being that which had coexisted with the image of the bird so called, i may then think of a goose. in the next moment the image of a swan may arise before me, though i had never seen the two birds together. in the first two instances, i am conscious that their co-existence in time was the circumstance, that enabled me to recollect them; and equally conscious am i that the latter was recalled to me by the joint operation of likeness and contrast. so it is with cause and effect: so too with order. so i am able to distinguish whether it was proximity in time, or continuity in space, that occasioned me to recall b on the mention of a. they cannot be indeed separated from contemporaneity; for that would be to separate them from the mind itself. the act of consciousness is indeed identical with time considered in its essence. i mean time per se, as contra-distinguished from our notion of time; for this is always blended with the idea of space, which, as the opposite of time, is therefore its measure. nevertheless the accident of seeing two objects at the same moment, and the accident of seeing them in the same place are two distinct or distinguishable causes: and the true practical general law of association is this; that whatever makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct than the rest, will determine the mind to recall these in preference to others equally linked together by the common condition of contemporaneity, or (what i deem a more appropriate and philosophical term) of continuity. but the will itself by confining and intensifying [ ] the attention may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever; and from hence we may deduce the uselessness, if not the absurdity, of certain recent schemes which promise an artificial memory, but which in reality can only produce a confusion and debasement of the fancy. sound logic, as the habitual subordination of the individual to the species, and of the species to the genus; philosophical knowledge of facts under the relation of cause and effect; a cheerful and communicative temper disposing us to notice the similarities and contrasts of things, that we may be able to illustrate the one by the other; a quiet conscience; a condition free from anxieties; sound health, and above all (as far as relates to passive remembrance) a healthy digestion; these are the best, these are the only arts of memory. chapter viii the system of dualism introduced by des cartes--refined first by spinoza and afterwards by leibnitz into the doctrine of harmonia praestabilita--hylozoism--materialism--none of these systems, or any possible theory of association, supplies or supersedes a theory of perception, or explains the formation of the associable. to the best of my knowledge des cartes was the first philosopher who introduced the absolute and essential heterogenity of the soul as intelligence, and the body as matter. the assumption, and the form of speaking have remained, though the denial of all other properties to matter but that of extension, on which denial the whole system of dualism is grounded, has been long exploded. for since impenetrability is intelligible only as a mode of resistance; its admission places the essence of matter in an act or power, which it possesses in common with spirit; and body and spirit are therefore no longer absolutely heterogeneous, but may without any absurdity be supposed to be different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substratum. to this possibility, however, it was not the fashion to advert. the soul was a thinking substance, and body a space-filling substance. yet the apparent action of each on the other pressed heavy on the philosopher on the one hand; and no less heavily on the other hand pressed the evident truth, that the law of causality holds only between homogeneous things, that is, things having some common property; and cannot extend from one world into another, its contrary. a close analysis evinced it to be no less absurd than the question whether a man's affection for his wife lay north-east, or south-west of the love he bore towards his child. leibnitz's doctrine of a pre-established harmony; which he certainly borrowed from spinoza, who had himself taken the hint from des cartes's animal machines, was in its common interpretation too strange to survive the inventor--too repugnant to our common sense; which is not indeed entitled to a judicial voice in the courts of scientific philosophy; but whose whispers still exert a strong secret influence. even wolf, the admirer and illustrious systematizer of the leibnitzian doctrine, contents himself with defending the possibility of the idea, but does not adopt it as a part of the edifice. the hypothesis of hylozoism, on the other side, is the death of all rational physiology, and indeed of all physical science; for that requires a limitation of terms, and cannot consist with the arbitrary power of multiplying attributes by occult qualities. besides, it answers no purpose; unless, indeed, a difficulty can be solved by multiplying it, or we can acquire a clearer notion of our soul by being told that we have a million of souls, and that every atom of our bodies has a soul of its own. far more prudent is it to admit the difficulty once for all, and then let it lie at rest. there is a sediment indeed at the bottom of the vessel, but all the water above it is clear and transparent. the hylozoist only shakes it up, and renders the whole turbid. but it is not either the nature of man, or the duty of the philosopher to despair concerning any important problem until, as in the squaring of the circle, the impossibility of a solution has been demonstrated. how the esse assumed as originally distinct from the scire, can ever unite itself with it; how being can transform itself into a knowing, becomes conceivable on one only condition; namely, if it can be shown that the vis representativa, or the sentient, is itself a species of being; that is, either as a property or attribute, or as an hypostasis or self subsistence. the former--that thinking is a property of matter under particular conditions,--is, indeed, the assumption of materialism; a system which could not but be patronized by the philosopher, if only it actually performed what it promises. but how any affection from without can metamorphose itself into perception or will, the materialist has hitherto left, not only as incomprehensible as he found it, but has aggravated it into a comprehensible absurdity. for, grant that an object from without could act upon the conscious self, as on a consubstantial object; yet such an affection could only engender something homogeneous with itself. motion could only propagate motion. matter has no inward. we remove one surface, but to meet with another. we can but divide a particle into particles; and each atom comprehends in itself the properties of the material universe. let any reflecting mind make the experiment of explaining to itself the evidence of our sensuous intuitions, from the hypothesis that in any given perception there is a something which has been communicated to it by an impact, or an impression ab extra. in the first place, by the impact on the percipient, or ens representans, not the object itself, but only its action or effect, will pass into the same. not the iron tongue, but its vibrations, pass into the metal of the bell. now in our immediate perception, it is not the mere power or act of the object, but the object itself, which is immediately present. we might indeed attempt to explain this result by a chain of deductions and conclusions; but that, first, the very faculty of deducing and concluding would equally demand an explanation; and secondly, that there exists in fact no such intermediation by logical notions, such as those of cause and effect. it is the object itself, not the product of a syllogism, which is present to our consciousness. or would we explain this supervention of the object to the sensation, by a productive faculty set in motion by an impulse; still the transition, into the percipient, of the object itself, from which the impulse proceeded, assumes a power that can permeate and wholly possess the soul, and like a god by spiritual art, be all in all, and all in every part. and how came the percipient here? and what is become of the wonder- promising matter, that was to perform all these marvels by force of mere figure, weight and motion? the most consistent proceeding of the dogmatic materialist is to fall back into the common rank of soul-and- bodyists; to affect the mysterious, and declare the whole process a revelation given, and not to be understood, which it would be profane to examine too closely. datur non intelligitur. but a revelation unconfirmed by miracles, and a faith not commanded by the conscience, a philosopher may venture to pass by, without suspecting himself of any irreligious tendency. thus, as materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly unintelligible, and owes all its proselytes to the propensity so common among men, to mistake distinct images for clear conceptions; and vice versa, to reject as inconceivable whatever from its own nature is unimaginable. but as soon as it becomes intelligible, it ceases to be materialism. in order to explain thinking, as a material phaenomenon, it is necessary to refine matter into a mere modification of intelligence, with the two-fold function of appearing and perceiving. even so did priestley in his controversy with price. he stripped matter of all its material properties; substituted spiritual powers; and when we expected to find a body, behold! we had nothing but its ghost--the apparition of a defunct substance! i shall not dilate further on this subject; because it will, (if god grant health and permission), be treated of at large and systematically in a work, which i have many years been preparing, on the productive logos human and divine; with, and as the introduction to, a full commentary on the gospel of st. john. to make myself intelligible as far as my present subject requires, it will be sufficient briefly to observe.-- . that all association demands and presupposes the existence of the thoughts and images to be associated.-- . that the hypothesis of an external world exactly correspondent to those images or modifications of our own being, which alone, according to this system, we actually behold, is as thorough idealism as berkeley's, inasmuch as it equally, perhaps in a more perfect degree, removes all reality and immediateness of perception, and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres, the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motions in our own brains.-- . that this hypothesis neither involves the explanation, nor precludes the necessity, of a mechanism and co-adequate forces in the percipient, which at the more than magic touch of the impulse from without is to create anew for itself the correspondent object. the formation of a copy is not solved by the mere pre-existence of an original; the copyist of raffael's transfiguration must repeat more or less perfectly the process of raffael. it would be easy to explain a thought from the image on the retina, and that from the geometry of light, if this very light did not present the very same difficulty. we might as rationally chant the brahim creed of the tortoise that supported the bear, that supported the elephant, that supported the world, to the tune of "this is the house that jack built." the sic deo placitum est we all admit as the sufficient cause, and the divine goodness as the sufficient reason; but an answer to the whence and why is no answer to the how, which alone is the physiologist's concern. it is a sophisma pigrum, and (as bacon hath said) the arrogance of pusillanimity, which lifts up the idol of a mortal's fancy and commands us to fall down and worship it, as a work of divine wisdom, an ancile or palladium fallen from heaven. by the very same argument the supporters of the ptolemaic system might have rebuffed the newtonian, and pointing to the sky with self-complacent grin [ ] have appealed to common sense, whether the sun did not move and the earth stand still. chapter ix is philosophy possible as a science, and what are its conditions?--giordano bruno--literary aristocracy, or the existence of a tacit compact among the learned as a privileged order--the author's obligations to the mystics--to immanuel kant--the difference between the letter and the spirit of kant's writings, and a vindication of prudence in the teaching of philosophy--fichte's attempt to complete the critical system--its partial success and ultimate failure--obligations to schelling; and among english writers to saumarez. after i had successively studied in the schools of locke, berkeley, leibnitz, and hartley, and could find in none of them an abiding place for my reason, i began to ask myself; is a system of philosophy; as different from mere history and historic classification, possible? if possible, what are its necessary conditions? i was for a while disposed to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit that the sole practicable employment for the human mind was to observe, to collect, and to classify. but i soon felt, that human nature itself fought up against this wilful resignation of intellect; and as soon did i find, that the scheme, taken with all its consequences and cleared of all inconsistencies, was not less impracticable than contranatural. assume in its full extent the position, nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu, assume it without leibnitz's qualifying praeter ipsum intellectum, and in the same sense, in which the position was understood by hartley and condillac: and then what hume had demonstratively deduced from this concession concerning cause and effect, will apply with equal and crushing force to all the other eleven categorical forms [ ], and the logical functions corresponding to them. how can we make bricks without straw;--or build without cement? we learn all things indeed by occasion of experience; but the very facts so learned force us inward on the antecedents, that must be presupposed in order to render experience itself possible. the first book of locke's essay, (if the supposed error, which it labours to subvert, be not a mere thing of straw, an absurdity which, no man ever did, or indeed ever could, believe,) is formed on a sophisma heterozaetaeseos, and involves the old mistake of cum hoc: ergo, propter hoc. the term, philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but truth is the correlative of being. this again is no way conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate, that both are ab initio, identical and coinherent; that intelligence and being are reciprocally each other's substrate. i presumed that this was a possible conception, (i.e. that it involved no logical inconsonance,) from the length of time during which the scholastic definition of the supreme being, as actus purissimus sine ulla potentialitate, was received in the schools of theology, both by the pontifician and the reformed divines. the early study of plato and plotinus, with the commentaries and the theologia platonica of the illustrious florentine; of proclus, and gemistius pletho; and at a later period of the de immenso et innumerabili and the "de la causa, principio et uno," of the philosopher of nola, who could boast of a sir philip sidney and fulke greville among his patrons, and whom the idolaters of rome burnt as an atheist in the year ; had all contributed to prepare my mind for the reception and welcoming of the cogito quia sum, et sum quia cogito; a philosophy of seeming hardihood, but certainly the most ancient, and therefore presumptively the most natural. why need i be afraid? say rather how dare i be ashamed of the teutonic theosophist, jacob behmen? many, indeed, and gross were his delusions; and such as furnish frequent and ample occasion for the triumph of the learned over the poor ignorant shoemaker, who had dared think for himself. but while we remember that these delusions were such, as might be anticipated from his utter want of all intellectual discipline, and from his ignorance of rational psychology, let it not be forgotten that the latter defect he had in common with the most learned theologians of his age. neither with books, nor with book-learned men was he conversant. a meek and shy quietest, his intellectual powers were never stimulated into feverous energy by crowds of proselytes, or by the ambition of proselyting. jacob behmen was an enthusiast, in the strictest sense, as not merely distinguished, but as contra-distinguished, from a fanatic. while i in part translate the following observations from a contemporary writer of the continent, let me be permitted to premise, that i might have transcribed the substance from memoranda of my own, which were written many years before his pamphlet was given to the world; and that i prefer another's words to my own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication; but still more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence only was possible. whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy, during the last two or three centuries, cannot but admit that there appears to have existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science. the privilege of free thought, so highly extolled, has at no time been held valid in actual practice, except within this limit; and not a single stride beyond it has ever been ventured without bringing obloquy on the transgressor. the few men of genius among the learned class, who actually did overstep this boundary, anxiously avoided the appearance of having so done. therefore the true depth of science, and the penetration to the inmost centre, from which all the lines of knowledge diverge to their ever distant circumference, was abandoned to the illiterate and the simple, whom unstilled yearning, and an original ebulliency of spirit, had urged to the investigation of the indwelling and living ground of all things. these, then, because their names had never been enrolled in the guilds of the learned, were persecuted by the registered livery-men as interlopers on their rights and privileges. all without distinction were branded as fanatics and phantasts; not only those, whose wild and exorbitant imaginations had actually engendered only extravagant and grotesque phantasms, and whose productions were, for the most part, poor copies and gross caricatures of genuine inspiration; but the truly inspired likewise, the originals themselves. and this for no other reason, but because they were the unlearned, men of humble and obscure occupations. when, and from whom among the literati by profession, have we ever heard the divine doxology repeated, i thank thee, o father! lord of heaven and earth! because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes [ ]. no; the haughty priests of learning not only banished from the schools and marts of science all who had dared draw living waters from the fountain, but drove them out of the very temple, which mean time the buyers, and sellers, and money-changers were suffered to make a den of thieves. and yet it would not be easy to discover any substantial ground for this contemptuous pride in those literati, who have most distinguished themselves by their scorn of behmen, thaulerus, george fox, and others; unless it be, that they could write orthographically, make smooth periods, and had the fashions of authorship almost literally at their fingers' ends, while the latter, in simplicity of soul, made their words immediate echoes of their feelings. hence the frequency of those phrases among them, which have been mistaken for pretences to immediate inspiration; as for instance, "it was delivered unto me; "--"i strove not to speak;"-"i said, i will be silent;"--"but the word was in my heart as a burning fire;"--"and i could not forbear." hence too the unwillingness to give offence; hence the foresight, and the dread of the clamours, which would be raised against them, so frequently avowed in the writings of these men, and expressed, as was natural, in the words of the only book, with which they were familiar [ ]. "woe is me that i am become a man of strife, and a man of contention,--i love peace: the souls of men are dear unto me: yet because i seek for light every one of them doth curse me!" o! it requires deeper feeling, and a stronger imagination, than belong to most of those, to whom reasoning and fluent expression have been as a trade learnt in boyhood, to conceive with what might, with what inward strivings and commotion, the perception of a new and vital truth takes possession of an uneducated man of genius. his meditations are almost inevitably employed on the eternal, or the everlasting; for "the world is not his friend, nor the world's law." need we then be surprised, that, under an excitement at once so strong and so unusual, the man's body should sympathize with the struggles of his mind; or that he should at times be so far deluded, as to mistake the tumultuous sensations of his nerves, and the co-existing spectres of his fancy, as parts or symbols of the truths which were opening on him? it has indeed been plausibly observed, that in order to derive any advantage, or to collect any intelligible meaning, from the writings of these ignorant mystics, the reader must bring with him a spirit and judgment superior to that of the writers themselves: and what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek? --a sophism, which i fully agree with warburton, is unworthy of milton; how much more so of the awful person, in whose mouth he has placed it? one assertion i will venture to make, as suggested by my own experience, that there exist folios on the human understanding, and the nature of man, which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if in the whole huge volume there could be found as much fulness of heart and intellect, as burst forth in many a simple page of george fox, jacob behmen, and even of behmen's commentator, the pious and fervid william law. the feeling of gratitude, which i cherish toward these men, has caused me to digress further than i had foreseen or proposed; but to have passed them over in an historical sketch of my literary life and opinions, would have seemed to me like the denial of a debt, the concealment of a boon. for the writings of these mystics acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic system. they contributed to keep alive the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of death, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which i had not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or shelter. if they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet they were always a pillar of fire throughout the night, during my wanderings through the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without crossing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief. that the system is capable of being converted into an irreligious pantheism, i well know. the ethics of spinoza, may, or may not, be an instance. but at no time could i believe, that in itself and essentially it is incompatible with religion, natural or revealed: and now i am most thoroughly persuaded of the contrary. the writings of the illustrious sage of koenigsberg, the founder of the critical philosophy, more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding. the originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine chain of the logic; and i will venture to add--(paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of immanuel kant from reviewers and frenchmen)--the clearness and evidence, of the critique of the pure reason; and critique of the judgment; of the metaphysical elements of natural philosophy; and of his religion within the bounds of pure reason, took possession of me as with the giant's hand. after fifteen years' familiarity with them, i still read these and all his other productions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration. the few passages that remained obscure to me, after due efforts of thought, (as the chapter on original apperception,) and the apparent contradictions which occur, i soon found were hints and insinuations referring to ideas, which kant either did not think it prudent to avow, or which he considered as consistently left behind in a pure analysis, not of human nature in toto, but of the speculative intellect alone. here therefore he was constrained to commence at the point of reflection, or natural consciousness: while in his moral system he was permitted to assume a higher ground (the autonomy of the will) as a postulate deducible from the unconditional command, or (in the technical language of his school) the categorical imperative, of the conscience. he had been in imminent danger of persecution during the reign of the late king of prussia, that strange compound of lawless debauchery and priest-ridden superstition: and it is probable that he had little inclination, in his old age, to act over again the fortunes, and hair-breadth escapes of wolf. the expulsion of the first among kant's disciples, who attempted to complete his system, from the university of jena, with the confiscation and prohibition of the obnoxious work by the joint efforts of the courts of saxony and hanover, supplied experimental proof, that the venerable old man's caution was not groundless. in spite therefore of his own declarations, i could never believe, that it was possible for him to have meant no more by his noumenon, or thing in itself, than his mere words express; or that in his own conception he confined the whole plastic power to the forms of the intellect, leaving for the external cause, for the materiale of our sensations, a matter without form, which is doubtless inconceivable. i entertained doubts likewise, whether, in his own mind, he even laid all the stress, which he appears to do, on the moral postulates. an idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol; and, except in geometry, all symbols of necessity involve an apparent contradiction. phonaese synetoisin: and for those who could not pierce through this symbolic husk, his writings were not intended. questions which cannot be fully answered without exposing the respondent to personal danger, are not entitled to a fair answer; and yet to say this openly, would in many cases furnish the very advantage which the adversary is insidiously seeking after. veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating, truth; and the philosopher who cannot utter the whole truth without conveying falsehood, and at the same time, perhaps, exciting the most malignant passions, is constrained to express himself either mythically or equivocally. when kant therefore was importuned to settle the disputes of his commentators himself, by declaring what he meant, how could he decline the honours of martyrdom with less offence, than by simply replying, "i meant what i said, and at the age of near fourscore, i have something else, and more important to do, than to write a commentary on my own works." fichte's wissenschaftslehre, or lore of ultimate science, was to add the key-stone of the arch: and by commencing with an act, instead of a thing or substance, fichte assuredly gave the first mortal blow to spinozism, as taught by spinoza himself; and supplied the idea of a system truly metaphysical, and of a metaphysique truly systematic: (i.e. having its spring and principle within itself). but this fundamental idea he overbuilt with a heavy mass of mere notions, and psychological acts of arbitrary reflection. thus his theory degenerated into a crude [ ] egoismus, a boastful and hyperstoic hostility to nature, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy: while his religion consisted in the assumption of a mere ordo ordinans, which we were permitted exoterice to call god; and his ethics in an ascetic, and almost monkish, mortification of the natural passions and desires. in schelling's natur-philosophie, and the system des transcendentalen idealismus, i first found a genial coincidence with much that i had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what i had yet to do. i have introduced this statement, as appropriate to the narrative nature of this sketch; yet rather in reference to the work which i have announced in a preceding page, than to my present subject. it would be but a mere act of justice to myself, were i to warn my future readers, than an identity of thought, or even similarity of phrase, will not be at all times a certain proof that the passage has been borrowed from schelling, or that the conceptions were originally learnt from him. in this instance, as in the dramatic lectures of schlegel to which i have before alluded, from the same motive of self-defence against the charge of plagiarism, many of the most striking resemblances, indeed all the main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before i had ever seen a single page of the german philosopher; and i might indeed affirm with truth, before the more important works of schelling had been written, or at least made public. nor is this coincidence at all to be wondered at. we had studied in the same school; been disciplined by the same preparatory philosophy, namely, the writings of kant; we had both equal obligations to the polar logic and dynamic philosophy of giordano bruno; and schelling has lately, and, as of recent acquisition, avowed that same affectionate reverence for the labours of behmen, and other mystics, which i had formed at a much earlier period. the coincidence of schelling's system with certain general ideas of behmen, he declares to have been mere coincidence; while my obligations have been more direct. he needs give to behmen only feelings of sympathy; while i owe him a debt of gratitude. god forbid! that i should be suspected of a wish to enter into a rivalry with schelling for the honours so unequivocally his right, not only as a great and original genius, but as the founder of the philosophy of nature, and as the most successful improver of the dynamic system [ ] which, begun by bruno, was re-introduced (in a more philosophical form, and freed from all its impurities and visionary accompaniments) by kant; in whom it was the native and necessary growth of his own system. kant's followers, however, on whom (for the greater part) their master's cloak had fallen without, or with a very scanty portion of, his spirit, had adopted his dynamic ideas, only as a more refined species of mechanics. with exception of one or two fundamental ideas, which cannot be withheld from fichte, to schelling we owe the completion, and the most important victories, of this revolution in philosophy. to me it will be happiness and honour enough, should i succeed in rendering the system itself intelligible to my countrymen, and in the application of it to the most awful of subjects for the most important of purposes. whether a work is the offspring of a man's own spirit, and the product of original thinking, will be discovered by those who are its sole legitimate judges, by better tests than the mere reference to dates. for readers in general, let whatever shall be found in this or any future work of mine, that resembles, or coincides with, the doctrines of my german predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly attributed to him: provided, that the absence of distinct references to his books, which i could not at all times make with truth as designating citations or thoughts actually derived from him; and which, i trust, would, after this general acknowledgment be superfluous; be not charged on me as an ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism. i have not indeed (eheu! res angusta domi!) been hitherto able to procure more than two of his books, viz. the first volume of his collected tracts, and his system of transcendental idealism; to which, however, i must add a small pamphlet against fichte, the spirit of which was to my feelings painfully incongruous with the principles, and which (with the usual allowance afforded to an antithesis) displayed the love of wisdom rather than the wisdom of love. i regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: i care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible. "albeit, i must confess to be half in doubt, whether i should bring it forth or no, it being so contrary to the eye of the world, and the world so potent in most men's hearts, that i shall endanger either not to be regarded or not to be understood." and to conclude the subject of citation, with a cluster of citations, which as taken from books, not in common use, may contribute to the reader's amusement, as a voluntary before a sermon: "dolet mihi quidem deliciis literarum inescatos subito jam homines adeo esse, praesertim qui christianos se profitentur, et legere nisi quod ad delectationem facit, sustineant nihil: unde et discipline severiores et philosophia ipsa jam fere prorsus etiam a doctis negliguntur. quod quidem propositum studiorum, nisi mature corrigitur, tam magnum rebus incommodum dabit, quam dedit barbaries olim. pertinax res barbaries est, fateor: sed minus potent tamen, quam illa mollities et persuasa prudentia literarum, si ratione caret, sapientiae virtutisque specie mortales misere circumducens. succedet igitur, ut arbitror, haud ita multo post, pro rusticana seculi nostri ruditate captatrix illa communi-loquentia robur animi virilis omne, omnem virtutem masculam, profligatura nisi cavetur." a too prophetic remark, which has been in fulfilment from the year , to the present . by persuasa prudentia, grynaeus means self- complacent common sense as opposed to science and philosophic reason. est medius ordo, et velut equestris, ingeniorum quidem sagacium, et commodorum rebus humanis, non tamen in primam magnitudinem patentium. eorum hominum, ut sic dicam, major annona est. sedulum esse, nihil temere loqui, assuescere labori, et imagine prudentiae et modistiae tegere angustiores partes captus, dum exercitationem ac usum, quo isti in civilibus rebus pollent, pro natura et magnitudine ingenii plerique accipiunt. "as therefore physicians are many times forced to leave such methods of curing as themselves know to be the fittest, and being overruled by the patient's impatiency, are fain to try the best they can: in like sort, considering how the case doth stand with this present age, full of tongue and weak of brain, behold we would (if our subject permitted it) yield to the stream thereof. that way we would be contented to prove our thesis, which being the worse in itself, is notwithstanding now by reason of common imbecility the fitter and likelier to be brooked." if this fear could be rationally entertained in the controversial age of hooker, under the then robust discipline of the scholastic logic, pardonably may a writer of the present times anticipate a scanty audience for abstrusest themes, and truths that can neither be communicated nor received without effort of thought, as well as patience of attention. "che s'io non erro al calcolar de' punti, par ch' asinina stella a noi predomini, e'l somaro e'l castron si sian congiunti. il tempo d'apuleio piu non si nomini: che se allora un sol huom sembrava un asino, mille asini a' miei di rassembran huomini!" chapter x a chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the nature and genesis of the imagination or plastic power--on pedantry and pedantic expressions--advice to young authors respecting publication--various anecdotes of the author's literary life, and the progress of his opinions in religion and politics. "esemplastic. the word is not in johnson, nor have i met with it elsewhere." neither have, i. i constructed it myself from the greek words, eis en plattein, to shape into one; because, having to convey a new sense, i thought that a new term would both aid the recollection of my meaning, and prevent its being confounded with the usual import of the word, imagination. "but this is pedantry!" not necessarily so, i hope. if i am not misinformed, pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company. the language of the market would be in the schools as pedantic, though it might not be reprobated by that name, as the language of the schools in the market. the mere man of the world, who insists that no other terms but such as occur in common conversation should be employed in a scientific disquisition, and with no greater precision, is as truly a pedant as the man of letters, who either over-rating the acquirements of his auditors, or misled by his own familiarity with technical or scholastic terms, converses at the wine-table with his mind fixed on his museum or laboratory; even though the latter pedant instead of desiring his wife to make the tea should bid her add to the quant. suff. of thea sinensis the oxyd of hydrogen saturated with caloric. to use the colloquial (and in truth somewhat vulgar) metaphor, if the pedant of the cloister, and the pedant of the lobby, both smell equally of the shop, yet the odour from the russian binding of good old authentic-looking folios and quartos is less annoying than the steams from the tavern or bagnio. nay, though the pedantry of the scholar should betray a little ostentation, yet a well-conditioned mind would more easily, methinks, tolerate the fox brush of learned vanity, than the sans culotterie of a contemptuous ignorance, that assumes a merit from mutilation in the self-consoling sneer at the pompous incumbrance of tails. the first lesson of philosophic discipline is to wean the student's attention from the degrees of things, which alone form the vocabulary of common life, and to direct it to the kind abstracted from degree. thus the chemical student is taught not to be startled at disquisitions on the heat in ice, or on latent and fixible light. in such discourse the instructor has no other alternative than either to use old words with new meanings (the plan adopted by darwin in his zoonomia;) or to introduce new terms, after the example of linnaeus, and the framers of the present chemical nomenclature. the latter mode is evidently preferable, were it only that the former demands a twofold exertion of thought in one and the same act. for the reader, or hearer, is required not only to learn and bear in mind the new definition; but to unlearn, and keep out of his view, the old and habitual meaning; a far more difficult and perplexing task, and for which the mere semblance of eschewing pedantry seems to me an inadequate compensation. where, indeed, it is in our power to recall an unappropriate term that had without sufficient reason become obsolete, it is doubtless a less evil to restore than to coin anew. thus to express in one word all that appertains to the perception, considered as passive and merely recipient, i have adopted from our elder classics the word sensuous; because sensual is not at present used, except in a bad sense, or at least as a moral distinction; while sensitive and sensible would each convey a different meaning. thus too have i followed hooker, sanderson, milton and others, in designating the immediateness of any act or object of knowledge by the word intuition, used sometimes subjectively, sometimes objectively, even as we use the word, thought; now as the thought, or act of thinking, and now as a thought, or the object of our reflection; and we do this without confusion or obscurity. the very words, objective and subjective, of such constant recurrence in the schools of yore, i have ventured to re-introduce, because i could not so briefly or conveniently by any more familiar terms distinguish the percipere from the percipi. lastly, i have cautiously discriminated the terms, the reason, and the understanding, encouraged and confirmed by the authority of our genuine divines and philosophers, before the revolution. ------both life, and sense, fancy and understanding; whence the soul reason receives, and reason is her bring, discursive or intuitive: discourse [ ] is oftest yours, the latter most is ours, differing but in degree, in kind the same. i say, that i was confirmed by authority so venerable: for i had previous and higher motives in my own conviction of the importance, nay, of the necessity of the distinction, as both an indispensable condition and a vital part of all sound speculation in metaphysics, ethical or theological. to establish this distinction was one main object of the friend; if even in a biography of my own literary life i can with propriety refer to a work, which was printed rather than published, or so published that it had been well for the unfortunate author, if it had remained in manuscript. i have even at this time bitter cause for remembering that, which a number of my subscribers have but a trifling motive for forgetting. this effusion might have been spared; but i would fain flatter myself, that the reader will be less austere than an oriental professor of the bastinado, who during an attempt to extort per argumentum baculinum a full confession from a culprit, interrupted his outcry of pain by reminding him, that it was "a mere digression!" "all this noise, sir! is nothing to the point, and no sort of answer to my questions!" "ah! but," (replied the sufferer,) "it is the most pertinent reply in nature to your blows." an imprudent man of common goodness of heart cannot but wish to turn even his imprudences to the benefit of others, as far as this is possible. if therefore any one of the readers of this semi-narrative should be preparing or intending a periodical work, i warn him, in the first place, against trusting in the number of names on his subscription list. for he cannot be certain that the names were put down by sufficient authority; or, should that be ascertained, it still remains to be known, whether they were not extorted by some over zealous friend's importunity; whether the subscriber had not yielded his name, merely from want of courage to answer, no; and with the intention of dropping the work as soon as possible. one gentleman procured me nearly a hundred names for the friend, and not only took frequent opportunity to remind me of his success in his canvass, but laboured to impress my mind with the sense of the obligation, i was under to the subscribers; for, (as he very pertinently admonished me,) "fifty-two shillings a year was a large sum to be bestowed on one individual, where there were so many objects of charity with strong claims to the assistance of the benevolent." of these hundred patrons ninety threw up the publication before the fourth number, without any notice; though it was well known to them, that in consequence of the distance, and the slowness and irregularity of the conveyance, i was compelled to lay in a stock of stamped paper for at least eight weeks beforehand; each sheet of which stood me in five pence previously to its arrival at my printer's; though the subscription money was not to be received till the twenty-first week after the commencement of the work; and lastly, though it was in nine cases out of ten impracticable for me to receive the money for two or three numbers without paying an equal sum for the postage. in confirmation of my first caveat, i will select one fact among many. on my list of subscribers, among a considerable number of names equally flattering, was that of an earl of cork, with his address. he might as well have been an earl of bottle, for aught i knew of him, who had been content to reverence the peerage in abstracto, rather than in concretis. of course the friend was regularly sent as far, if i remember right, as the eighteenth number; that is, till a fortnight before the subscription was to be paid. and lo! just at this time i received a letter from his lordship, reproving me in language far more lordly than courteous for my impudence in directing my pamphlets to him, who knew nothing of me or my work! seventeen or eighteen numbers of which, however, his lordship was pleased to retain, probably for the culinary or post-culinary conveniences of his servants. secondly, i warn all others from the attempt to deviate from the ordinary mode of publishing a work by the trade. i thought indeed, that to the purchaser it was indifferent, whether thirty per cent of the purchase-money went to the booksellers or to the government; and that the convenience of receiving the work by the post at his own door would give the preference to the latter. it is hard, i own, to have been labouring for years, in collecting and arranging the materials; to have spent every shilling that could be spared after the necessaries of life had been furnished, in buying books, or in journeys for the purpose of consulting them or of acquiring facts at the fountain head; then to buy the paper, pay for the printing, and the like, all at least fifteen per cent beyond what the trade would have paid; and then after all to give thirty per cent not of the net profits, but of the gross results of the sale, to a man who has merely to give the books shelf or warehouse room, and permit his apprentice to hand them over the counter to those who may ask for them; and this too copy by copy, although, if the work be on any philosophical or scientific subject, it may be years before the edition is sold off. all this, i confess, must seem a hardship, and one, to which the products of industry in no other mode of exertion are subject. yet even this is better, far better, than to attempt in any way to unite the functions of author and publisher. but the most prudent mode is to sell the copy-right, at least of one or more editions, for the most that the trade will offer. by few only can a large remuneration be expected; but fifty pounds and ease of mind are of more real advantage to a literary man, than the chance of five hundred with the certainty of insult and degrading anxieties. i shall have been grievously misunderstood, if this statement should be interpreted as written with the desire of detracting from the character of booksellers or publishers. the individuals did not make the laws and customs of their trade, but, as in every other trade, take them as they find them. till the evil can be proved to be removable, and without the substitution of an equal or greater inconvenience, it were neither wise nor manly even to complain of it. but to use it as a pretext for speaking, or even for thinking, or feeling, unkindly or opprobriously of the tradesmen, as individuals, would be something worse than unwise or even than unmanly; it would be immoral and calumnious. my motives point in a far different direction and to far other objects, as will be seen in the conclusion of the chapter. a learned and exemplary old clergyman, who many years ago went to his reward followed by the regrets and blessings of his flock, published at his own expense two volumes octavo, entitled, a new theory of redemption. the work was most severely handled in the monthly or critical review, i forget which; and this unprovoked hostility became the good old man's favourite topic of conversation among his friends. "well!" (he used to exclaim,) "in the second edition, i shall have an opportunity of exposing both the ignorance and the malignity of the anonymous critic." two or three years however passed by without any tidings from the bookseller, who had undertaken the printing and publication of the work, and who was perfectly at his ease, as the author was known to be a man of large property. at length the accounts were written for; and in the course of a few weeks they were presented by the rider for the house, in person. my old friend put on his spectacles, and holding the scroll with no very firm hand, began--"paper, so much: o moderate enough--not at all beyond my expectation! printing, so much: well! moderate enough! stitching, covers, advertisements, carriage, and so forth, so much."--still nothing amiss. selleridge (for orthography is no necessary part of a bookseller's literary acquirements) l . s. "bless me! only three guineas for the what d'ye call it--the selleridge?" "no more, sir!" replied the rider. "nay, but that is too moderate!" rejoined my old friend. "only three guineas for selling a thousand copies of a work in two volumes?" "o sir!" (cries the young traveller) "you have mistaken the word. there have been none of them sold; they have been sent back from london long ago; and this l . s. is for the cellaridge, or warehouse-room in our book cellar." the work was in consequence preferred from the ominous cellar of the publisher's to the author's garret; and, on presenting a copy to an acquaintance, the old gentleman used to tell the anecdote with great humour and still greater good nature. with equal lack of worldly knowledge, i was a far more than equal sufferer for it, at the very outset of my authorship. toward the close of the first year from the time, that in an inauspicious hour i left the friendly cloisters, and the happy grove of quiet, ever honoured jesus college, cambridge, i was persuaded by sundry philanthropists and anti-polemists to set on foot a periodical work, entitled the watchman, that, according to the general motto of the work, all might know the truth, and that the truth might make us free! in order to exempt it from the stamp-tax, and likewise to contribute as little as possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom, it was to be published on every eighth day, thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely printed, and price only four-pence. accordingly with a flaming prospectus,--"knowledge is power," "to cry the state of the political atmosphere,"--and so forth, i set off on a tour to the north, from bristol to sheffield, for the purpose of procuring customers, preaching by the way in most of the great towns, as an hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that not a rag of the woman of babylon might be seen on me. for i was at that time and long after, though a trinitarian (that is ad normam platonis) in philosophy, yet a zealous unitarian in religion; more accurately, i was a psilanthropist, one of those who believe our lord to have been the real son of joseph, and who lay the main stress on the resurrection rather than on the crucifixion. o! never can i remember those days with either shame or regret. for i was most sincere, most disinterested. my opinions were indeed in many and most important points erroneous; but my heart was single. wealth, rank, life itself then seemed cheap to me, compared with the interests of what i believed to be the truth, and the will of my maker. i cannot even accuse myself of having been actuated by vanity; for in the expansion of my enthusiasm i did not think of myself at all. my campaign commenced at birmingham; and my first attack was on a rigid calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. he was a tall dingy man, in whom length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have been borrowed for a foundery poker. o that face! a face kat' emphasin! i have it before me at this moment. the lank, black, twine-like hair, pingui-nitescent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his thin gunpowder eye-brows, that looked like a scorched after-math from a last week's shaving. his coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage, which i suppose he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the neck,--the only approach to flexure in his whole figure,--slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, dark, very hard, and with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of some one looking at me through a used gridiron, all soot, grease, and iron! but he was one of the thorough-bred, a true lover of liberty, and, as i was informed, had proved to the satisfaction of many, that mr. pitt was one of the horns of the second beast in the revelations, that spake as a dragon. a person, to whom one of my letters of recommendation had been addressed, was my introducer. it was a new event in my life, my first stroke in the new business i had undertaken of an author, yea, and of an author trading on his own account. my companion after some imperfect sentences and a multitude of hums and has abandoned the cause to his client; and i commenced an harangue of half an hour to phileleutheros, the tallow-chandler, varying my notes, through the whole gamut of eloquence, from the ratiocinative to the declamatory, and in the latter from the pathetic to the indignant. i argued, i described, i promised, i prophesied; and beginning with the captivity of nations i ended with the near approach of the millennium, finishing the whole with some of my own verses describing that glorious state out of the religious musings: ------such delights as float to earth, permitted visitants! when in some hour of solemn jubilee the massive gates of paradise are thrown wide open, and forth come in fragments wild sweet echoes of unearthly melodies, and odours snatched from beds of amaranth, and they, that from the crystal river of life spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales! my taper man of lights listened with perseverant and praiseworthy patience, though, as i was afterwards told, on complaining of certain gales that were not altogether ambrosial, it was a melting day with him. "and what, sir," he said, after a short pause, "might the cost be?" "only four-pence,"--(o! how i felt the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that four-pence!)--"only four-pence, sir, each number, to be published on every eighth day."--"that comes to a deal of money at the end of a year. and how much, did you say, there was to be for the money?"--"thirty-two pages, sir, large octavo, closely printed."--"thirty and two pages? bless me! why except what i does in a family way on the sabbath, that's more than i ever reads, sir! all the year round. i am as great a one, as any man in brummagem, sir! for liberty and truth and all them sort of things, but as to this,--no offence, i hope, sir,--i must beg to be excused." so ended my first canvass: from causes that i shall presently mention, i made but one other application in person. this took place at manchester to a stately and opulent wholesale dealer in cottons. he took my letter of introduction, and, having perused it, measured me from head to foot and again from foot to head, and then asked if i had any bill or invoice of the thing. i presented my prospectus to him. he rapidly skimmed and hummed over the first side, and still more rapidly the second and concluding page; crushed it within his fingers and the palm of his hand; then most deliberately and significantly rubbed and smoothed one part against the other; and lastly putting it into his pocket turned his back on me with an "over-run with these articles!" and so without another syllable retired into his counting house. and, i can truly say, to my unspeakable amusement. this, i have said, was my second and last attempt. on returning baffled from the first, in which i had vainly essayed to repeat the miracle of orpheus with the brummagem patriot, i dined with the tradesman who had introduced me to him. after dinner he importuned me to smoke a pipe with him, and two or three other illuminati of the same rank. i objected, both because i was engaged to spend the evening with a minister and his friends, and because i had never smoked except once or twice in my lifetime, and then it was herb tobacco mixed with oronooko. on the assurance, however, that the tobacco was equally mild, and seeing too that it was of a yellow colour; not forgetting the lamentable difficulty, i have always experienced, in saying, "no," and in abstaining from what the people about me were doing,--i took half a pipe, filling the lower half of the bowl with salt. i was soon however compelled to resign it, in consequence of a giddiness and distressful feeling in my eyes, which, as i had drunk but a single glass of ale, must, i knew, have been the effect of the tobacco. soon after, deeming myself recovered, i sallied forth to my engagement; but the walk and the fresh air brought on all the symptoms again, and, i had scarcely entered the minister's drawing-room, and opened a small pacquet of letters, which he had received from bristol for me; ere i sank back on the sofa in a sort of swoon rather than sleep. fortunately i had found just time enough to inform him of the confused state of my feelings, and of the occasion. for here and thus i lay, my face like a wall that is white-washing, deathly pale and with the cold drops of perspiration running down it from my forehead, while one after another there dropped in the different gentlemen, who had been invited to meet, and spend the evening with me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty. as the poison of tobacco acts but for a short time, i at length awoke from insensibility, and looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by the candles which had been lighted in the interim. by way of relieving my embarrassment one of the gentlemen began the conversation, with "have you seen a paper to-day, mr. coleridge?" "sir!" i replied, rubbing my eyes, "i am far from convinced, that a christian is permitted to read either newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary interest." this remark, so ludicrously inapposite to, or rather, incongruous with, the purpose, for which i was known to have visited birmingham, and to assist me in which they were all then met, produced an involuntary and general burst of laughter; and seldom indeed have i passed so many delightful hours, as i enjoyed in that room from the moment of that laugh till an early hour the next morning. never, perhaps, in so mixed and numerous a party have i since heard conversation, sustained with such animation, enriched with such variety of information and enlivened with such a flow of anecdote. both then and afterwards they all joined in dissuading me from proceeding with my scheme; assured me in the most friendly and yet most flattering expressions, that neither was the employment fit for me, nor i fit for the employment. yet, if i determined on persevering in it, they promised to exert themselves to the utmost to procure subscribers, and insisted that i should make no more applications in person, but carry on the canvass by proxy. the same hospitable reception, the same dissuasion, and, that failing, the same kind exertions in my behalf, i met with at manchester, derby, nottingham, sheffield,--indeed, at every place in which i took up my sojourn. i often recall with affectionate pleasure the many respectable men who interested themselves for me, a perfect stranger to them, not a few of whom i can still name among my friends. they will bear witness for me how opposite even then my principles were to those of jacobinism or even of democracy, and can attest the strict accuracy of the statement which i have left on record in the tenth and eleventh numbers of the friend. from this rememberable tour i returned with nearly a thousand names on the subscription list of the watchman; yet more than half convinced, that prudence dictated the abandonment of the scheme. but for this very reason i persevered in it; for i was at that period of my life so completely hag-ridden by the fear of being influenced by selfish motives, that to know a mode of conduct to be the dictate of prudence was a sort of presumptive proof to my feelings, that the contrary was the dictate of duty. accordingly, i commenced the work, which was announced in london by long bills in letters larger than had ever been seen before, and which, i have been informed, for i did not see them myself, eclipsed the glories even of the lottery puffs. but alas! the publication of the very first number was delayed beyond the day announced for its appearance. in the second number an essay against fast days, with a most censurable application of a text from isaiah for its motto, lost me near five hundred of my subscribers at one blow. in the two following numbers i made enemies of all my jacobin and democratic patrons; for, disgusted by their infidelity, and their adoption of french morals with french psilosophy; and perhaps thinking, that charity ought to begin nearest home; instead of abusing the government and the aristocrats chiefly or entirely, as had been expected of me, i levelled my attacks at "modern patriotism," and even ventured to declare my belief, that whatever the motives of ministers might have been for the sedition, or as it was then the fashion to call them, the gagging bills, yet the bills themselves would produce an effect to be desired by all the true friends of freedom, as far as they should contribute to deter men from openly declaiming on subjects, the principles of which they had never bottomed and from "pleading to the poor and ignorant, instead of pleading for them." at the same time i avowed my conviction, that national education and a concurring spread of the gospel were the indispensable condition of any true political melioration. thus by the time the seventh number was published, i had the mortification--(but why should i say this, when in truth i cared too little for any thing that concerned my worldly interests to be at all mortified about it?)--of seeing the preceding numbers exposed in sundry old iron shops for a penny a piece. at the ninth number i dropt the work. but from the london publisher i could not obtain a shilling; he was a ------ and set me at defiance. from other places i procured but little, and after such delays as rendered that little worth nothing; and i should have been inevitably thrown into jail by my bristol printer, who refused to wait even for a month, for a sum between eighty and ninety pounds, if the money had not been paid for me by a man by no means affluent, a dear friend, who attached himself to me from my first arrival at bristol, who has continued my friend with a fidelity unconquered by time or even by my own apparent neglect; a friend from whom i never received an advice that was not wise, nor a remonstrance that was not gentle and affectionate. conscientiously an opponent of the first revolutionary war, yet with my eyes thoroughly opened to the true character and impotence of the favourers of revolutionary principles in england, principles which i held in abhorrence,--(for it was part of my political creed, that whoever ceased to act as an individual by making himself a member of any society not sanctioned by his government, forfeited the rights of a citizen)--a vehement anti-ministerialist, but after the invasion of switzerland, a more vehement anti-gallican, and still more intensely an anti-jacobin, i retired to a cottage at stowey, and provided for my scanty maintenance by writing verses for a london morning paper. i saw plainly, that literature was not a profession, by which i could expect to live; for i could not disguise from myself, that, whatever my talents might or might not be in other respects, yet they were not of the sort that could enable me to become a popular writer; and that whatever my opinions might be in themselves, they were almost equi-distant from all the three prominent parties, the pittites, the foxites, and the democrats. of the unsaleable nature of my writings i had an amusing memento one morning from our own servant girl. for happening to rise at an earlier hour than usual, i observed her putting an extravagant quantity of paper into the grate in order to light the fire, and mildly checked her for her wastefulness; "la, sir!" (replied poor nanny) "why, it is only watchmen." i now devoted myself to poetry and to the study of ethics and psychology; and so profound was my admiration at this time of hartley's essay on man, that i gave his name to my first-born. in addition to the gentleman, my neighbour, whose garden joined on to my little orchard, and the cultivation of whose friendship had been my sole motive in choosing stowey for my residence, i was so fortunate as to acquire, shortly after my settlement there, an invaluable blessing in the society and neighbourhood of one, to whom i could look up with equal reverence, whether i regarded him as a poet, a philosopher, or a man. his conversation extended to almost all subjects, except physics and politics; with the latter he never troubled himself. yet neither my retirement nor my utter abstraction from all the disputes of the day could secure me in those jealous times from suspicion and obloquy, which did not stop at me, but extended to my excellent friend, whose perfect innocence was even adduced as a proof of his guilt. one of the many busy sycophants of that day,--(i here use the word sycophant in its original sense, as a wretch who flatters the prevailing party by informing against his neighbours, under pretence that they are exporters of prohibited figs or fancies,--for the moral application of the term it matters not which)--one of these sycophantic law-mongrels, discoursing on the politics of the neighbourhood, uttered the following deep remark: "as to coleridge, there is not so much harm in him, for he is a whirl-brain that talks whatever comes uppermost; but that ------! he is the dark traitor. you never hear him say a syllable on the subject." now that the hand of providence has disciplined all europe into sobriety, as men tame wild elephants, by alternate blows and caresses; now that englishmen of all classes are restored to their old english notions and feelings; it will with difficulty be credited, how great an influence was at that time possessed and exerted by the spirit of secret defamation,--(the too constant attendant on party-zeal)--during the restless interim from to the commencement of the addington administration, or the year before the truce of amiens. for by the latter period the minds of the partizans, exhausted by excess of stimulation and humbled by mutual disappointment, had become languid. the same causes, that inclined the nation to peace, disposed the individuals to reconciliation. both parties had found themselves in the wrong. the one had confessedly mistaken the moral character of the revolution, and the other had miscalculated both its moral and its physical resources. the experiment was made at the price of great, almost, we may say, of humiliating sacrifices; and wise men foresaw that it would fail, at least in its direct and ostensible object. yet it was purchased cheaply, and realized an object of equal value, and, if possible, of still more vital importance. for it brought about a national unanimity unexampled in our history since the reign of elizabeth; and providence, never wanting to a good work when men have done their parts, soon provided a common focus in the cause of spain, which made us all once more englishmen by at once gratifying and correcting the predilections of both parties. the sincere reverers of the throne felt the cause of loyalty ennobled by its alliance with that of freedom; while the honest zealots of the people could not but admit, that freedom itself assumed a more winning form, humanized by loyalty and consecrated by religious principle. the youthful enthusiasts who, flattered by the morning rainbow of the french revolution, had made a boast of expatriating their hopes and fears, now, disciplined by the succeeding storms and sobered by increase of years, had been taught to prize and honour the spirit of nationality as the best safeguard of national independence, and this again as the absolute pre-requisite and necessary basis of popular rights. if in spain too disappointment has nipped our too forward expectations, yet all is not destroyed that is checked. the crop was perhaps springing up too rank in the stalk to kern well; and there were, doubtless, symptoms of the gallican blight on it. if superstition and despotism have been suffered to let in their wolvish sheep to trample and eat it down even to the surface, yet the roots remain alive, and the second growth may prove the stronger and healthier for the temporary interruption. at all events, to us heaven has been just and gracious. the people of england did their best, and have received their rewards. long may we continue to deserve it! causes, which it had been too generally the habit of former statesmen to regard as belonging to another world, are now admitted by all ranks to have been the main agents of our success. "we fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought against sisera." if then unanimity grounded on moral feelings has been among the least equivocal sources of our national glory, that man deserves the esteem of his countrymen, even as patriots, who devotes his life and the utmost efforts of his intellect to the preservation and continuance of that unanimity by the disclosure and establishment of principles. for by these all opinions must be ultimately tried; and, (as the feelings of men are worthy of regard only as far as they are the representatives of their fixed opinions,) on the knowledge of these all unanimity, not accidental and fleeting, must be grounded. let the scholar, who doubts this assertion, refer only to the speeches and writings of edmund burke at the commencement of the american war and compare them with his speeches and writings at the commencement of the french revolution. he will find the principles exactly the same and the deductions the same; but the practical inferences almost opposite in the one case from those drawn in the other; yet in both equally legitimate and in both equally confirmed by the results. whence gained he the superiority of foresight? whence arose the striking difference, and in most instances even, the discrepancy between the grounds assigned by him and by those who voted with him, on the same questions? how are we to explain the notorious fact, that the speeches and writings of edmund burke are more interesting at the present day than they were found at the time of their first publication; while those of his illustrious confederates are either forgotten, or exist only to furnish proofs, that the same conclusion, which one man had deduced scientifically, may be brought out by another in consequence of errors that luckily chanced to neutralize each other. it would be unhandsome as a conjecture, even were it not, as it actually is, false in point of fact to attribute this difference to the deficiency of talent on the part of burke's friends, or of experience, or of historical knowledge. the satisfactory solution is, that edmund burke possessed and had sedulously sharpened that eye, which sees all things, actions, and events, in relation to the laws that determine their existence and circumscribe their possibility. he referred habitually to principles. he was a scientific statesman; and therefore a seer. for every principle contains in itself the germs of a prophecy; and, as the prophetic power is the essential privilege of science, so the fulfilment of its oracles supplies the outward and, (to men in general,) the only test of its claim to the title. wearisome as burke's refinements appeared to his parliamentary auditors, yet the cultivated classes throughout europe have reason to be thankful, that he ------went on refining, and thought of convincing, while they thought of dining. our very sign-boards, (said an illustrious friend to me,) give evidence, that there has been a titian in the world. in like manner, not only the debates in parliament, not only our proclamations and state papers, but the essays and leading paragraphs of our journals are so many remembrancers of edmund burke. of this the reader may easily convince himself, if either by recollection or reference he will compare the opposition newspapers at the commencement and during the five or six following years of the french revolution with the sentiments, and grounds of argument assumed in the same class of journals at present, and for some years past. whether the spirit of jacobinism, which the writings of burke exorcised from the higher and from the literary classes, may not, like the ghost in hamlet, be heard moving and mining in the underground chambers with an activity the more dangerous because less noisy, may admit of a question. i have given my opinions on this point, and the grounds of them, in my letters to judge fletcher occasioned by his charge to the wexford grand jury, and published in the courier. be this as it may, the evil spirit of jealousy, and with it the cerberean whelps of feud and slander, no longer walk their rounds, in cultivated society. far different were the days to which these anecdotes have carried me back. the dark guesses of some zealous quidnunc met with so congenial a soil in the grave alarm of a titled dogberry of our neighbourhood, that a spy was actually sent down from the government pour surveillance of myself and friend. there must have been not only abundance, but variety of these "honourable men" at the disposal of ministers: for this proved a very honest fellow. after three weeks' truly indian perseverance in tracking us, (for we were commonly together,) during all which time seldom were we out of doors, but he contrived to be within hearing,--(and all the while utterly unsuspected; how indeed could such a suspicion enter our fancies?)--he not only rejected sir dogberry's request that he would try yet a little longer, but declared to him his belief, that both my friend and myself were as good subjects, for aught he could discover to the contrary, as any in his majesty's dominions. he had repeatedly hid himself, he said, for hours together behind a bank at the sea-side, (our favourite seat,) and overheard our conversation. at first he fancied, that we were aware of our danger; for he often heard me talk of one spy nozy, which he was inclined to interpret of himself, and of a remarkable feature belonging to him; but he was speedily convinced that it was the name of a man who had made a book and lived long ago. our talk ran most upon books, and we were perpetually desiring each other to look at this, and to listen to that; but he could not catch a word about politics. once he had joined me on the road; (this occurred, as i was returning home alone from my friend's house, which was about three miles from my own cottage,) and, passing himself off as a traveller, he had entered into conversation with me, and talked of purpose in a democrat way in order to draw me out. the result, it appears, not only convinced him that i was no friend of jacobinism; but, (he added,) i had "plainly made it out to be such a silly as well as wicked thing, that he felt ashamed though he had only put it on." i distinctly remembered the occurrence, and had mentioned it immediately on my return, repeating what the traveller with his bardolph nose had said, with my own answer; and so little did i suspect the true object of my "tempter ere accuser," that i expressed with no small pleasure my hope and belief, that the conversation had been of some service to the poor misled malcontent. this incident therefore prevented all doubt as to the truth of the report, which through a friendly medium came to me from the master of the village inn, who had been ordered to entertain the government gentleman in his best manner, but above all to be silent concerning such a person being in his house. at length he received sir dogberry's commands to accompany his guest at the final interview; and, after the absolving suffrage of the gentleman honoured with the confidence of ministers, answered, as follows, to the following queries: d. "well, landlord! and what do you know of the person in question? l. i see him often pass by with maister ----, my landlord, (that is, the owner of the house,) and sometimes with the new-comers at holford; but i never said a word to him or he to me. d. but do you not know, that he has distributed papers and hand-bills of a seditious nature among the common people? l. no, your honour! i never heard of such a thing. d. have you not seen this mr. coleridge, or heard of, his haranguing and talking to knots and clusters of the inhabitants?--what are you grinning at, sir? l. beg your honour's pardon! but i was only thinking, how they'd have stared at him. if what i have heard be true, your honour! they would not have understood a word he said. when our vicar was here, dr. l. the master of the great school and canon of windsor, there was a great dinner party at maister's; and one of the farmers, that was there, told us that he and the doctor talked real hebrew greek at each other for an hour together after dinner. d. answer the question, sir! does he ever harangue the people? l. i hope your honour an't angry with me. i can say no more than i know. i never saw him talking with any one, but my landlord, and our curate, and the strange gentleman. d. has he not been seen wandering on the hills towards the channel, and along the shore, with books and papers in his hand, taking charts and maps of the country? l. why, as to that, your honour! i own, i have heard; i am sure, i would not wish to say ill of any body; but it is certain, that i have heard--d. speak out, man! don't be afraid, you are doing your duty to your king and government. what have you heard? l. why, folks do say, your honour! as how that he is a poet, and that he is going to put quantock and all about here in print; and as they be so much together, i suppose that the strange gentleman has some consarn in the business."--so ended this formidable inquisition, the latter part of which alone requires explanation, and at the same time entitles the anecdote to a place in my literary life. i had considered it as a defect in the admirable poem of the task, that the subject, which gives the title to the work, was not, and indeed could not be, carried on beyond the three or four first pages, and that, throughout the poem, the connections are frequently awkward, and the transitions abrupt and arbitrary. i sought for a subject, that should give equal room and freedom for description, incident, and impassioned reflections on men, nature, and society, yet supply in itself a natural connection to the parts, and unity to the whole. such a subject i conceived myself to have found in a stream, traced from its source in the hills among the yellow-red moss and conical glass-shaped tufts of bent, to the first break or fall, where its drops become audible, and it begins to form a channel; thence to the peat and turf barn, itself built of the same dark squares as it sheltered; to the sheepfold; to the first cultivated plot of ground; to the lonely cottage and its bleak garden won from the heath; to the hamlet, the villages, the market-town, the manufactories, and the seaport. my walks therefore were almost daily on the top of quantock, and among its sloping coombes. with my pencil and memorandum-book in my hand, i was making studies, as the artists call them, and often moulding my thoughts into verse, with the objects and imagery immediately before my senses. many circumstances, evil and good, intervened to prevent the completion of the poem, which was to have been entitled the brook. had i finished the work, it was my purpose in the heat of the moment to have dedicated it to our then committee of public safety as containing the charts and maps, with which i was to have supplied the french government in aid of their plans of invasion. and these too for a tract of coast that, from clevedon to minehead, scarcely permits the approach of a fishing-boat! all my experience from my first entrance into life to the present hour is in favour of the warning maxim, that the man, who opposes in toto the political or religious zealots of his age, is safer from their obloquy than he who differs from them but in one or two points, or perhaps only in degree. by that transfer of the feelings of private life into the discussion of public questions, which is the queen bee in the hive of party fanaticism, the partisan has more sympathy with an intemperate opposite than with a moderate friend. we now enjoy an intermission, and long may it continue! in addition to far higher and more important merits, our present bible societies and other numerous associations for national or charitable objects, may serve perhaps to carry off the superfluous activity and fervour of stirring minds in innocent hyperboles and the bustle of management. but the poison-tree is not dead, though the sap may for a season have subsided to its roots. at least let us not be lulled into such a notion of our entire security, as not to keep watch and ward, even on our best feelings. i have seen gross intolerance shown in support of toleration; sectarian antipathy most obtrusively displayed in the promotion of an undistinguishing comprehension of sects: and acts of cruelty, (i had almost said,) of treachery, committed in furtherance of an object vitally important to the cause of humanity; and all this by men too of naturally kind dispositions and exemplary conduct. the magic rod of fanaticism is preserved in the very adyta of human nature; and needs only the re-exciting warmth of a master hand to bud forth afresh and produce the old fruits. the horror of the peasants' war in germany, and the direful effects of the anabaptists' tenets, (which differed only from those of jacobinism by the substitution of theological for philosophical jargon,) struck all europe for a time with affright. yet little more than a century was sufficient to obliterate all effective memory of these events. the same principles with similar though less dreadful consequences were again at work from the imprisonment of the first charles to the restoration of his son. the fanatic maxim of extirpating fanaticism by persecution produced a civil war. the war ended in the victory of the insurgents; but the temper survived, and milton had abundant grounds for asserting, that "presbyter was but old priest writ large!" one good result, thank heaven! of this zealotry was the re-establishment of the church. and now it might have been hoped, that the mischievous spirit would have been bound for a season, "and a seal set upon him, that he should deceive the nation no more." [ ] but no! the ball of persecution was taken up with undiminished vigour by the persecuted. the same fanatic principle that, under the solemn oath and covenant, had turned cathedrals into stables, destroyed the rarest trophies of art and ancestral piety, and hunted the brightest ornaments of learning and religion into holes and corners, now marched under episcopal banners, and, having first crowded the prisons of england, emptied its whole vial of wrath on the miserable covenanters of scotland [ ]. a merciful providence at length constrained both parties to join against a common enemy. a wise government followed; and the established church became, and now is, not only the brightest example, but our best and only sure bulwark, of toleration!--the true and indispensable bank against a new inundation of persecuting zeal--esto perpetua! a long interval of quiet succeeded; or rather, the exhaustion had produced a cold fit of the ague which was symptomatized by indifference among the many, and a tendency to infidelity or scepticism in the educated classes. at length those feelings of disgust and hatred, which for a brief while the multitude had attached to the crimes and absurdities of sectarian and democratic fanaticism, were transferred to the oppressive privileges of the noblesse, and the luxury; intrigues and favouritism of the continental courts. the same principles, dressed in the ostentatious garb of a fashionable philosophy, once more rose triumphant and effected the french revolution. and have we not within the last three or four years had reason to apprehend, that the detestable maxims and correspondent measures of the late french despotism had already bedimmed the public recollections of democratic phrensy; had drawn off to other objects the electric force of the feelings which had massed and upheld those recollections; and that a favourable concurrence of occasions was alone wanting to awaken the thunder and precipitate the lightning from the opposite quarter of the political heaven? in part from constitutional indolence, which in the very hey-day of hope had kept my enthusiasm in check, but still more from the habits and influences of a classical education and academic pursuits, scarcely had a year elapsed from the commencement of my literary and political adventures before my mind sank into a state of thorough disgust and despondency, both with regard to the disputes and the parties disputant. with more than poetic feeling i exclaimed: the sensual and the dark rebel in vain, slaves by their own compulsion! in mad game they break their manacles, to wear the name of freedom, graven on a heavier chain. o liberty! with profitless endeavour have i pursued thee many a weary hour; but thou nor swell'st the victor's pomp, nor ever didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power! alike from all, howe'er they praise thee, (nor prayer nor boastful name delays thee) from superstition's harpy minions and factious blasphemy's obscener slaves, thou speedest on thy cherub pinions, the guide of homeless winds and playmate of the waves! i retired to a cottage in somersetshire at the foot of quantock, and devoted my thoughts and studies to the foundations of religion and morals. here i found myself all afloat. doubts rushed in; broke upon me "from the fountains of the great deep," and fell "from the windows of heaven." the fontal truths of natural religion and the books of revelation alike contributed to the flood; and it was long ere my ark touched on an ararat, and rested. the idea of the supreme being appeared to me to be as necessarily implied in all particular modes of being as the idea of infinite space in all the geometrical figures by which space is limited. i was pleased with the cartesian opinion, that the idea of god is distinguished from all other ideas by involving its reality; but i was not wholly satisfied. i began then to ask myself, what proof i had of the outward existence of anything? of this sheet of paper for instance, as a thing in itself, separate from the phaenomenon or image in my perception. i saw, that in the nature of things such proof is impossible; and that of all modes of being, that are not objects of the senses, the existence is assumed by a logical necessity arising from the constitution of the mind itself,--by the absence of all motive to doubt it, not from any absolute contradiction in the supposition of the contrary. still the existence of a being, the ground of all existence, was not yet the existence of a moral creator, and governour. "in the position, that all reality is either contained in the necessary being as an attribute, or exists through him, as its ground, it remains undecided whether the properties of intelligence and will are to be referred to the supreme being in the former or only in the latter sense; as inherent attributes, or only as consequences that have existence in other things through him [ ]. were the latter the truth, then notwithstanding all the pre-eminence which must be assigned to the eternal first from the sufficiency, unity, and independence of his being, as the dread ground of the universe, his nature would yet fall far short of that, which we are bound to comprehend in the idea of god. for, without any knowledge or determining resolve of its own, it would only be a blind necessary ground of other things and other spirits; and thus would be distinguished from the fate of certain ancient philosophers in no respect, but that of being more definitely and intelligibly described." for a very long time, indeed, i could not reconcile personality with infinity; and my head was with spinoza, though my whole heart remained with paul and john. yet there had dawned upon me, even before i had met with the critique of the pure reason, a certain guiding light. if the mere intellect could make no certain discovery of a holy and intelligent first cause, it might yet supply a demonstration, that no legitimate argument could be drawn from the intellect against its truth. and what is this more than st. paul's assertion, that by wisdom,--(more properly translated by the powers of reasoning)--no man ever arrived at the knowledge of god? what more than the sublimest, and probably the oldest, book on earth has taught us, silver and gold man searcheth out: bringeth the ore out of the earth, and darkness into light. but where findeth he wisdom? where is the place of understanding? the abyss crieth; it is not in me! ocean echoeth back; not in me! whence then cometh wisdom? where dwelleth understanding? hidden from the eyes of the living kept secret from the fowls of heaven! hell and death answer; we have heard the rumour thereof from afar! god marketh out the road to it; god knoweth its abiding place! he beholdeth the ends of the earth; he surveyeth what is beneath the heavens! and as he weighed out the winds, and measured the sea, and appointed laws to the rain, and a path to the thunder, a path to the flashes of the lightning! then did he see it, and he counted it; he searched into the depth thereof, and with a line did he compass it round! but to man he said, the fear of the lord is wisdom for thee! and to avoid evil, that is thy understanding. [ ] i become convinced, that religion, as both the cornerstone and the key-stone of morality, must have a moral origin; so far at least, that the evidence of its doctrines could not, like the truths of abstract science, be wholly independent of the will. it were therefore to be expected, that its fundamental truth would be such as might be denied; though only, by the fool, and even by the fool from the madness of the heart alone! the question then concerning our faith in the existence of a god, not only as the ground of the universe by his essence, but as its maker and judge by his wisdom and holy will, appeared to stand thus. the sciential reason, the objects of which are purely theoretical, remains neutral, as long as its name and semblance are not usurped by the opponents of the doctrine. but it then becomes an effective ally by exposing the false show of demonstration, or by evincing the equal demonstrability of the contrary from premises equally logical [ ]. the understanding meantime suggests, the analogy of experience facilitates, the belief. nature excites and recalls it, as by a perpetual revelation. our feelings almost necessitate it; and the law of conscience peremptorily commands it. the arguments, that at all apply to it, are in its favour; and there is nothing against it, but its own sublimity. it could not be intellectually more evident without becoming morally less effective; without counteracting its own end by sacrificing the life of faith to the cold mechanism of a worth less because compulsory assent. the belief of a god and a future state, (if a passive acquiescence may be flattered with the name of belief,) does not indeed always beget a good heart; but a good heart so naturally begets the belief, that the very few exceptions must be regarded as strange anomalies from strange and unfortunate circumstances. from these premises i proceeded to draw the following conclusions. first, that having once fully admitted the existence of an infinite yet self-conscious creator, we are not allowed to ground the irrationality of any other article of faith on arguments which would equally prove that to be irrational, which we had allowed to be real. secondly, that whatever is deducible from the admission of a self-comprehending and creative spirit may be legitimately used in proof of the possibility of any further mystery concerning the divine nature. possibilitatem mysteriorum, (trinitatis, etc.) contra insultus infidelium et haereticorum a contradictionibus vindico; haud quidem veritatem, quae revelatione sola stabiliri possit; says leibnitz in a letter to his duke. he then adds the following just and important remark. "in vain will tradition or texts of scripture be adduced in support of a doctrine, donec clava impossibilitatis et contradictionis e manibus horum herculum extorta fuerit. for the heretic will still reply, that texts, the literal sense of which is not so much above as directly against all reason, must be understood figuratively, as herod is a fox, and so forth." these principles i held, philosophically, while in respect of revealed religion i remained a zealous unitarian. i considered the idea of the trinity a fair scholastic inference from the being of god, as a creative intelligence; and that it was therefore entitled to the rank of an esoteric doctrine of natural religion. but seeing in the same no practical or moral bearing, i confined it to the schools of philosophy. the admission of the logos, as hypostasized (that is, neither a mere attribute, nor a personification) in no respect removed my doubts concerning the incarnation and the redemption by the cross; which i could neither reconcile in reason with the impassiveness of the divine being, nor in my moral feelings with the sacred distinction between things and persons, the vicarious payment of a debt and the vicarious expiation of guilt. a more thorough revolution in my philosophic principles, and a deeper insight into my own heart, were yet wanting. nevertheless, i cannot doubt, that the difference of my metaphysical notions from those of unitarians in general contributed to my final re-conversion to the whole truth in christ; even as according to his own confession the books of certain platonic philosophers (libri quorundam platonicorum) commenced the rescue of st. augustine's faith from the same error aggravated by the far darker accompaniment of the manichaean heresy. while my mind was thus perplexed, by a gracious providence for which i can never be sufficiently grateful, the generous and munificent patronage of mr. josiah, and mr. thomas wedgwood enabled me to finish my education in germany. instead of troubling others with my own crude notions and juvenile compositions, i was thenceforward better employed in attempting to store my own head with the wisdom of others. i made the best use of my time and means; and there is therefore no period of my life on which i can look back with such unmingled satisfaction. after acquiring a tolerable sufficiency in the german language [ ] at ratzeburg, which with my voyage and journey thither i have described in the friend, i proceeded through hanover to goettingen. here i regularly attended the lectures on physiology in the morning, and on natural history in the evening, under blumenbach, a name as dear to every englishman who has studied at that university, as it is venerable to men of science throughout europe! eichhorn's lectures on the new testament were repeated to me from notes by a student from ratzeburg, a young man of sound learning and indefatigable industry, who is now, i believe, a professor of the oriental languages at heidelberg. but my chief efforts were directed towards a grounded knowledge of the german language and literature. from professor tychsen i received as many lessons in the gothic of ulphilas as sufficed to make me acquainted with its grammar, and the radical words of most frequent occurrence; and with the occasional assistance of the same philosophical linguist, i read through [ ] ottfried's metrical paraphrase of the gospel, and the most important remains of the theotiscan, or the transitional state of the teutonic language from the gothic to the old german of the swabian period. of this period--(the polished dialect of which is analogous to that of our chaucer, and which leaves the philosophic student in doubt, whether the language has not since then lost more in sweetness and flexibility, than it has gained in condensation and copiousness)--i read with sedulous accuracy the minnesinger (or singers of love, the provencal poets of the swabian court) and the metrical romances; and then laboured through sufficient specimens of the master singers, their degenerate successors; not however without occasional pleasure from the rude, yet interesting strains of hans sachs, the cobbler of nuremberg. of this man's genius five folio volumes with double columns are extant in print, and nearly an equal number in manuscript; yet the indefatigable bard takes care to inform his readers, that he never made a shoe the less, but had virtuously reared a large family by the labour of his hands. in pindar, chaucer, dante, milton, and many more, we have instances of the close connection of poetic genius with the love of liberty and of genuine reformation. the moral sense at least will not be outraged, if i add to the list the name of this honest shoemaker, (a trade by the by remarkable for the production of philosophers and poets). his poem entitled the morning star, was the very first publication that appeared in praise and support of luther; and an excellent hymn of hans sachs, which has been deservedly translated into almost all the european languages, was commonly sung in the protestant churches, whenever the heroic reformer visited them. in luther's own german writings, and eminently in his translation of the bible, the german language commenced. i mean the language as it is at present written; that which is called the high-german, as contra- distinguished from the platt-teutsch, the dialect on the flat or northern countries, and from the ober-teutsch, the language of the middle and southern germany. the high german is indeed a lingua communis, not actually the native language of any province, but the choice and fragrancy of all the dialects. from this cause it is at once the most copious and the most grammatical of all the european tongues. within less than a century after luther's death the german was inundated with pedantic barbarisms. a few volumes of this period i read through from motives of curiosity; for it is not easy to imagine any thing more fantastic, than the very appearance of their pages. almost every third word is a latin word with a germanized ending, the latin portion being always printed in roman letters, while in the last syllable the german character is retained. at length, about the year , opitz arose, whose genius more nearly resembled that of dryden than any other poet, who at present occurs to my recollection. in the opinion of lessing, the most acute of critics, and of adelung, the first of lexicographers, opitz, and the silesian poets, his followers, not only restored the language, but still remain the models of pure diction. a stranger has no vote on such a question; but after repeated perusal of the works of opitz my feelings justified the verdict, and i seemed to have acquired from them a sort of tact for what is genuine in the style of later writers. of the splendid aera, which commenced with gellert, klopstock, ramler, lessing, and their compeers, i need not speak. with the opportunities which i enjoyed, it would have been disgraceful not to have been familiar with their writings; and i have already said as much as the present biographical sketch requires concerning the german philosophers, whose works, for the greater part, i became acquainted with at a far later period. soon after my return from germany i was solicited to undertake the literary and political department in the morning post; and i acceded to the proposal on the condition that the paper should thenceforwards be conducted on certain fixed and announced principles, and that i should neither be obliged nor requested to deviate from them in favour of any party or any event. in consequence, that journal became and for many years continued anti-ministerial indeed, yet with a very qualified approbation of the opposition, and with far greater earnestness and zeal both anti-jacobin and anti-gallican. to this hour i cannot find reason to approve of the first war either in its commencement or its conduct. nor can i understand, with what reason either mr. perceval, (whom i am singular enough to regard as the best and wisest minister of this reign,) nor the present administration, can be said to have pursued the plans of mr. pitt. the love of their country, and perseverant hostility to french principles and french ambition are indeed honourable qualities common to them and to their predecessor. but it appears to me as clear as the evidence of the facts can render any question of history, that the successes of the perceval and of the existing ministry have been owing to their having pursued measures the direct contrary to mr. pitt's. such for instance are the concentration of the national force to one object; the abandonment of the subsidizing policy, so far at least as neither to goad nor bribe the continental courts into war, till the convictions of their subjects had rendered it a war of their own seeking; and above all, in their manly and generous reliance on the good sense of the english people, and on that loyalty which is linked to the very [ ] heart of the nation by the system of credit and the interdependence of property. be this as it may, i am persuaded that the morning post proved a far more useful ally to the government in its most important objects, in consequence of its being generally considered as moderately anti- ministerial, than if it had been the avowed eulogist of mr. pitt. the few, whose curiosity or fancy should lead them to turn over the journals of that date, may find a small proof of this in the frequent charges made by the morning chronicle, that such and such essays or leading paragraphs had been sent from the treasury. the rapid and unusual increase in the sale of the morning post is a sufficient pledge, that genuine impartiality with a respectable portion of literary talent will secure the success of a newspaper without the aid of party or ministerial patronage. but by impartiality i mean an honest and enlightened adherence to a code of intelligible principles previously announced, and faithfully referred to in support of every judgment on men and events; not indiscriminate abuse, not the indulgence of an editor's own malignant passions, and still less, if that be possible, a determination to make money by flattering the envy and cupidity, the vindictive restlessness and self-conceit of the half-witted vulgar; a determination almost fiendish, but which, i have been informed, has been boastfully avowed by one man, the most notorious of these mob-sycophants! from the commencement of the addington administration to the present day, whatever i have written in the morning post, or (after that paper was transferred to other proprietors) in the courier, has been in defence or furtherance of the measures of government. things of this nature scarce survive that night that gives them birth; they perish in the sight; cast by so far from after-life, that there can scarcely aught be said, but that they were! yet in these labours i employed, and, in the belief of partial friends wasted, the prime and manhood of my intellect. most assuredly, they added nothing to my fortune or my reputation. the industry of the week supplied the necessities of the week. from government or the friends of government i not only never received remuneration, nor ever expected it; but i was never honoured with a single acknowledgment, or expression of satisfaction. yet the retrospect is far from painful or matter of regret. i am not indeed silly enough to take as any thing more than a violent hyperbole of party debate, mr. fox's assertion that the late war (i trust that the epithet is not prematurely applied) was a war produced by the morning post; or i should be proud to have the words inscribed on my tomb. as little do i regard the circumstance, that i was a specified object of buonaparte's resentment during my residence in italy in consequence of those essays in the morning post during the peace of amiens. of this i was warned, directly, by baron von humboldt, the prussian plenipotentiary, who at that time was the minister of the prussian court at rome; and indirectly, through his secretary, by cardinal fesch himself. nor do i lay any greater weight on the confirming fact, that an order for my arrest was sent from paris, from which danger i was rescued by the kindness of a noble benedictine, and the gracious connivance of that good old man, the present pope. for the late tyrant's vindictive appetite was omnivorous, and preyed equally on a duc d'enghien [ ], and the writer of a newspaper paragraph. like a true vulture [ ], napoleon with an eye not less telescopic, and with a taste equally coarse in his ravin, could descend from the most dazzling heights to pounce on the leveret in the brake, or even on the field mouse amid the grass. but i do derive a gratification from the knowledge, that my essays contributed to introduce the practice of placing the questions and events of the day in a moral point of view; in giving a dignity to particular measures by tracing their policy or impolicy to permanent principles, and an interest to principles by the application of them to individual measures. in mr. burke's writings indeed the germs of almost all political truths may be found. but i dare assume to myself the merit of having first explicitly defined and analyzed the nature of jacobinism; and that in distinguishing the jacobin from the republican, the democrat, and the mere demagogue, i both rescued the word from remaining a mere term of abuse, and put on their guard many honest minds, who even in their heat of zeal against jacobinism, admitted or supported principles from which the worst parts of that system may be legitimately deduced. that these are not necessary practical results of such principles, we owe to that fortunate inconsequence of our nature, which permits the heart to rectify the errors of the understanding. the detailed examination of the consular government and its pretended constitution, and the proof given by me, that it was a consummate despotism in masquerade, extorted a recantation even from the morning chronicle, which had previously extolled this constitution as the perfection of a wise and regulated liberty. on every great occurrence i endeavoured to discover in past history the event, that most nearly resembled it. i procured, wherever it was possible, the contemporary historians, memorialists, and pamphleteers. then fairly subtracting the points of difference from those of likeness, as the balance favoured the former or the latter, i conjectured that the result would be the same or different. in the series of essays entitled "a comparison of france under napoleon with rome under the first caesars," and in those which followed "on the probable final restoration of the bourbons," i feel myself authorized to affirm, by the effect produced on many intelligent men, that, were the dates wanting, it might have been suspected that the essays had been written within the last twelve months. the same plan i pursued at the commencement of the spanish revolution, and with the same success, taking the war of the united provinces with philip ii as the ground work of the comparison. i have mentioned this from no motives of vanity, nor even from motives of self defence, which would justify a certain degree of egotism, especially if it be considered, how often and grossly i have been attacked for sentiments, which i have exerted my best powers to confute and expose, and how grievously these charges acted to my disadvantage while i was in malta. or rather they would have done so, if my own feelings had not precluded the wish of a settled establishment in that island. but i have mentioned it from the full persuasion that, armed with the two-fold knowledge of history and the human mind, a man will scarcely err in his judgment concerning the sum total of any future national event, if he have been able to procure the original documents of the past, together with authentic accounts of the present, and if he have a philosophic tact for what is truly important in facts, and in most instances therefore for such facts as the dignity of history has excluded from the volumes of our modern compilers, by the courtesy of the age entitled historians. to have lived in vain must be a painful thought to any man, and especially so to him who has made literature his profession. i should therefore rather condole than be angry with the mind, which could attribute to no worthier feelings than those of vanity or self-love, the satisfaction which i acknowledged myself to have enjoyed from the republication of my political essays (either whole or as extracts) not only in many of our own provincial papers, but in the federal journals throughout america. i regarded it as some proof of my not having laboured altogether in vain, that from the articles written by me shortly before and at the commencement of the late unhappy war with america, not only the sentiments were adopted, but in some instances the very language, in several of the massachusetts state papers. but no one of these motives nor all conjointly would have impelled me to a statement so uncomfortable to my own feelings, had not my character been repeatedly attacked, by an unjustifiable intrusion on private life, as of a man incorrigibly idle, and who intrusted not only with ample talents, but favoured with unusual opportunities of improving them, had nevertheless suffered them to rust away without any efficient exertion, either for his own good or that of his fellow creatures. even if the compositions, which i have made public, and that too in a form the most certain of an extensive circulation, though the least flattering to an author's self-love, had been published in books, they would have filled a respectable number of volumes, though every passage of merely temporary interest were omitted. my prose writings have been charged with a disproportionate demand on the attention; with an excess of refinement in the mode of arriving at truths; with beating the ground for that which might have been run down by the eye; with the length and laborious construction of my periods; in short with obscurity and the love of paradox. but my severest critics have not pretended to have found in my compositions triviality, or traces of a mind that shrunk from the toil of thinking. no one has charged me with tricking out in other words the thoughts of others, or with hashing up anew the cramben jam decies coctam of english literature or philosophy. seldom have i written that in a day, the acquisition or investigation of which had not cost me the previous labour of a month. but are books the only channel through which the stream of intellectual usefulness can flow? is the diffusion of truth to be estimated by publications; or publications by the truth, which they diffuse or at least contain? i speak it in the excusable warmth of a mind stung by an accusation, which has not only been advanced in reviews of the widest circulation, not only registered in the bulkiest works of periodical literature, but by frequency of repetition has become an admitted fact in private literary circles, and thoughtlessly repeated by too many who call themselves my friends, and whose own recollections ought to have suggested a contrary testimony. would that the criterion of a scholar's utility were the number and moral value of the truths, which he has been the means of throwing into the general circulation; or the number and value of the minds, whom by his conversation or letters, he has excited into activity, and supplied with the germs of their after-growth! a distinguished rank might not indeed, even then, be awarded to my exertions; but i should dare look forward with confidence to an honourable acquittal. i should dare appeal to the numerous and respectable audiences, which at different times and in different places honoured my lecture rooms with their attendance, whether the points of view from which the subjects treated of were surveyed,--whether the grounds of my reasoning were such, as they had heard or read elsewhere, or have since found in previous publications. i can conscientiously declare, that the complete success of the remorse on the first night of its representation did not give me as great or as heart-felt a pleasure, as the observation that the pit and boxes were crowded with faces familiar to me, though of individuals whose names i did not know, and of whom i knew nothing, but that they had attended one or other of my courses of lectures. it is an excellent though perhaps somewhat vulgar proverb, that there are cases where a man may be as well "in for a pound as for a penny." to those, who from ignorance of the serious injury i have received from this rumour of having dreamed away my life to no purpose, injuries which i unwillingly remember at all, much less am disposed to record in a sketch of my literary life; or to those, who from their own feelings, or the gratification they derive from thinking contemptuously of others, would like job's comforters attribute these complaints, extorted from me by the sense of wrong, to self conceit or presumptuous vanity, i have already furnished such ample materials, that i shall gain nothing by withholding the remainder. i will not therefore hesitate to ask the consciences of those, who from their long acquaintance with me and with the circumstances are best qualified to decide or be my judges, whether the restitution of the suum cuique would increase or detract from my literary reputation. in this exculpation i hope to be understood as speaking of myself comparatively, and in proportion to the claims, which others are entitled to make on my time or my talents. by what i have effected, am i to be judged by my fellow men; what i could have done, is a question for my own conscience. on my own account i may perhaps have had sufficient reason to lament my deficiency in self-control, and the neglect of concentering my powers to the realization of some permanent work. but to verse rather than to prose, if to either, belongs the voice of mourning for keen pangs of love, awakening as a babe turbulent, with an outcry in the heart; and fears self-willed that shunned the eye of hope; and hope that scarce would know itself from fear; sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, and genius given and knowledge won in vain; and all which i had culled in wood-walks wild, and all which patient toil had reared, and all, commune with thee had opened out--but flowers strewed on my corpse, and borne upon my bier, in the same coffin, for the self-same grave! these will exist, for the future, i trust, only in the poetic strains, which the feelings at the time called forth. in those only, gentle reader, affectus animi varios, bellumque sequacis perlegis invidiae, curasque revolvis inanes, quas humilis tenero stylus olim effudit in aevo. perlegis et lacrymas, et quod pharetratus acuta ille puer puero fecit mihi cuspide vulnus. omnia paulatim consumit longior aetas, vivendoque simul morimur, rapimurque manendo. ipse mihi collatus enim non ille videbor; frons alia est, moresque alii, nova mentis imago, vox aliudque sonat--jamque observatio vitae multa dedit--lugere nihil, ferre omnia; jamque paulatim lacrymas rerum experientia tersit. chapter xi an affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel themselves disposed to become authors. it was a favourite remark of the late mr. whitbread's, that no man does any thing from a single motive. the separate motives, or rather moods of mind, which produced the preceding reflections and anecdotes have been laid open to the reader in each separate instance. but an interest in the welfare of those, who at the present time may be in circumstances not dissimilar to my own at my first entrance into life, has been the constant accompaniment, and (as it were) the under-song of all my feelings. whitehead exerting the prerogative of his laureateship addressed to youthful poets a poetic charge, which is perhaps the best, and certainly the most interesting, of his works. with no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, i would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. it will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: never pursue literature as a trade. with the exception of one extraordinary man, i have never known an individual, least of all an individual of genius, healthy or happy without a profession, that is, some regular employment, which does not depend on the will of the moment, and which can be carried on so far mechanically that an average quantum only of health, spirits, and intellectual exertion are requisite to its faithful discharge. three hours of leisure, unannoyed by any alien anxiety, and looked forward to with delight as a change and recreation, will suffice to realize in literature a larger product of what is truly genial, than weeks of compulsion. money, and immediate reputation form only an arbitrary and accidental end of literary labour. the hope of increasing them by any given exertion will often prove a stimulant to industry; but the necessity of acquiring them will in all works of genius convert the stimulant into a narcotic. motives by excess reverse their very nature, and instead of exciting, stun and stupify the mind. for it is one contradistinction of genius from talent, that its predominant end is always comprised in the means; and this is one of the many points, which establish an analogy between genius and virtue. now though talents may exist without genius, yet as genius cannot exist, certainly not manifest itself, without talents, i would advise every scholar, who feels the genial power working within him, so far to make a division between the two, as that he should devote his talents to the acquirement of competence in some known trade or profession, and his genius to objects of his tranquil and unbiassed choice; while the consciousness of being actuated in both alike by the sincere desire to perform his duty, will alike ennoble both. "my dear young friend," (i would say) "suppose yourself established in any honourable occupation. from the manufactory or counting house, from the law-court, or from having visited your last patient, you return at evening, dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of home is sweetest------ to your family, prepared for its social enjoyments, with the very countenances of your wife and children brightened, and their voice of welcome made doubly welcome, by the knowledge that, as far as they are concerned, you have satisfied the demands of the day by the labour of the day. then, when you retire into your study, in the books on your shelves you revisit so many venerable friends with whom you can converse. your own spirit scarcely less free from personal anxieties than the great minds, that in those books are still living for you! even your writing desk with its blank paper and all its other implements will appear as a chain of flowers, capable of linking your feelings as well as thoughts to events and characters past or to come; not a chain of iron, which binds you down to think of the future and the remote by recalling the claims and feelings of the peremptory present. but why should i say retire? the habits of active life and daily intercourse with the stir of the world will tend to give you such self-command, that the presence of your family will be no interruption. nay, the social silence, or undisturbing voices of a wife or sister will be like a restorative atmosphere, or soft music which moulds a dream without becoming its object. if facts are required to prove the possibility of combining weighty performances in literature with full and independent employment, the works of cicero and xenophon among the ancients; of sir thomas more, bacon, baxter, or to refer at once to later and contemporary instances, darwin and roscoe, are at once decisive of the question." but all men may not dare promise themselves a sufficiency of self- control for the imitation of those examples: though strict scrutiny should always be made, whether indolence, restlessness, or a vanity impatient for immediate gratification, have not tampered with the judgment and assumed the vizard of humility for the purposes of self- delusion. still the church presents to every man of learning and genius a profession, in which he may cherish a rational hope of being able to unite the widest schemes of literary utility with the strictest performance of professional duties. among the numerous blessings of christianity, the introduction of an established church makes an especial claim on the gratitude of scholars and philosophers; in england, at least, where the principles of protestantism have conspired with the freedom of the government to double all its salutary powers by the removal of its abuses. that not only the maxims, but the grounds of a pure morality, the mere fragments of which ------the lofty grave tragedians taught in chorus or iambic, teachers best of moral prudence, with delight received in brief sententious precepts; [ ] and that the sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, which a plato found most hard to learn and deemed it still more difficult to reveal; that these should have become the almost hereditary property of childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to the unlettered they sound as common place, is a phaenomenon, which must withhold all but minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the services even of the pulpit and the reading desk. yet those, who confine the efficiency of an established church to its public offices, can hardly be placed in a much higher rank of intellect. that to every parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighten; a model sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near to encourage and facilitate, imitation; this, the unobtrusive, continuous agency of a protestant church establishment, this it is, which the patriot, and the philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of peace with the faith in the progressive melioration of mankind, cannot estimate at too high a price. it cannot be valued with the gold of ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. no mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies. the clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbour and a family-man, whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the rich landholder, while his duties make him the frequent visitor of the farmhouse and the cottage. he is, or he may become, connected, with the families of his parish or its vicinity by marriage. and among the instances of the blindness, or at best of the short-sightedness, which it is the nature of cupidity to inflict, i know few more striking than the clamours of the farmers against church property. whatever was not paid to the clergyman would inevitably at the next lease be paid to the landholder, while, as the case at present stands, the revenues of the church are in some sort the reversionary property of every family, that may have a member educated for the church, or a daughter that may marry a clergyman. instead of being foreclosed and immovable, it is in fact the only species of landed property, that is essentially moving and circulative. that there exist no inconveniences, who will pretend to assert? but i have yet to expect the proof, that the inconveniences are greater in this than in any other species; or that either the farmers or the clergy would be benefited by forcing the latter to become either trullibers or salaried placemen. nay, i do not hesitate to declare my firm persuasion, that whatever reason of discontent the farmers may assign, the true cause is this; that they may cheat the parson, but cannot cheat the steward; and that they are disappointed, if they should have been able to withhold only two pounds less than the legal claim, having expected to withhold five. at all events, considered relatively to the encouragement of learning and genius, the establishment presents a patronage at once so effective and unburdensome, that it would be impossible to afford the like or equal in any but a christian and protestant country. there is scarce a department of human knowledge without some bearing on the various critical, historical, philosophical and moral truths, in which the scholar must be interested as a clergyman; no one pursuit worthy of a man of genius, which may not be followed without incongruity. to give the history of the bible as a book, would be little less than to relate the origin or first excitement of all the literature and science, that we now possess. the very decorum, which the profession imposes, is favourable to the best purposes of genius, and tends to counteract its most frequent defects. finally, that man must be deficient in sensibility, who would not find an incentive to emulation in the great and burning lights, which in a long series have illustrated the church of england; who would not hear from within an echo to the voice from their sacred shrines, et pater aeneas et avunculus excitat hector. but, whatever be the profession or trade chosen, the advantages are many and important, compared with the state of a mere literary man, who in any degree depends on the sale of his works for the necessaries and comforts of life. in the former a man lives in sympathy with the world, in which he lives. at least he acquires a better and quicker tact for the knowledge of that, with which men in general can sympathize. he learns to manage his genius more prudently and efficaciously. his powers and acquirements gain him likewise more real admiration; for they surpass the legitimate expectations of others. he is something besides an author, and is not therefore considered merely as an author. the hearts of men are open to him, as to one of their own class; and whether he exerts himself or not in the conversational circles of his acquaintance, his silence is not attributed to pride, nor his communicativeness to vanity. to these advantages i will venture to add a superior chance of happiness in domestic life, were it only that it is as natural for the man to be out of the circle of his household during the day, as it is meritorious for the woman to remain for the most part within it. but this subject involves points of consideration so numerous and so delicate, and would not only permit, but require such ample documents from the biography of literary men, that i now merely allude to it in transitu. when the same circumstance has occurred at very different times to very different persons, all of whom have some one thing in common; there is reason to suppose that such circumstance is not merely attributable to the persons concerned, but is in some measure occasioned by the one point in common to them all. instead of the vehement and almost slanderous dehortation from marriage, which the misogyne, boccaccio [ ] addresses to literary men, i would substitute the simple advice: be not merely a man of letters! let literature be an honourable augmentation to your arms; but not constitute the coat, or fill the escutcheon! to objections from conscience i can of course answer in no other way, than by requesting the youthful objector (as i have already done on a former occasion) to ascertain with strict self-examination, whether other influences may not be at work; whether spirits, "not of health," and with whispers "not from heaven," may not be walking in the twilight of his consciousness. let him catalogue his scruples, and reduce them to a distinct intelligible form; let him be certain, that he has read with a docile mind and favourable dispositions the best and most fundamental works on the subject; that he has had both mind and heart opened to the great and illustrious qualities of the many renowned characters, who had doubted like himself, and whose researches had ended in the clear conviction, that their doubts had been groundless, or at least in no proportion to the counter-weight. happy will it be for such a man, if among his contemporaries elder than himself he should meet with one, who, with similar powers and feelings as acute as his own, had entertained the same scruples; had acted upon them; and who by after-research (when the step was, alas! irretrievable, but for that very reason his research undeniably disinterested) had discovered himself to have quarrelled with received opinions only to embrace errors, to have left the direction tracked out for him on the high road of honourable exertion, only to deviate into a labyrinth, where when he had wandered till his head was giddy, his best good fortune was finally to have found his way out again, too late for prudence though not too late for conscience or for truth! time spent in such delay is time won: for manhood in the meantime is advancing, and with it increase of knowledge, strength of judgment, and above all, temperance of feelings. and even if these should effect no change, yet the delay will at least prevent the final approval of the decision from being alloyed by the inward censure of the rashness and vanity, by which it had been precipitated. it would be a sort of irreligion, and scarcely less than a libel on human nature to believe, that there is any established and reputable profession or employment, in which a man may not continue to act with honesty and honour; and doubtless there is likewise none, which may not at times present temptations to the contrary. but wofully will that man find himself mistaken, who imagines that the profession of literature, or (to speak more plainly) the trade of authorship, besets its members with fewer or with less insidious temptations, than the church, the law, or the different branches of commerce. but i have treated sufficiently on this unpleasant subject in an early chapter of this volume. i will conclude the present therefore with a short extract from herder, whose name i might have added to the illustrious list of those, who have combined the successful pursuit of the muses, not only with the faithful discharge, but with the highest honours and honourable emoluments of an established profession. the translation the reader will find in a note below [ ]. "am sorgfaeltigsten, meiden sie die autorschaft. zu frueh oder unmaessig gebraucht, macht sie den kopf wueste and das herz leer; wenn sie auch sonst keine ueble folgen gaebe. ein mensch, der nur lieset um zu druecken, lieset wahrscheinlich uebel; und wer jeden gedanken, der ihm aufstosst, durch feder and presse versendet, hat sie in kurzer zeit alle versandt, und wird bald ein blosser diener der druckerey, ein buchstabensetzer werden." chapter xii a chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal or omission of the chapter that follows. in the perusal of philosophical works i have been greatly benefited by a resolve, which, in the antithetic form and with the allowed quaintness of an adage or maxim, i have been accustomed to word thus: until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding. this golden rule of mine does, i own, resemble those of pythagoras in its obscurity rather than in its depth. if however the reader will permit me to be my own hierocles, i trust, that he will find its meaning fully explained by the following instances. i have now before me a treatise of a religious fanatic, full of dreams and supernatural experiences. i see clearly the writer's grounds, and their hollowness. i have a complete insight into the causes, which through the medium of his body has acted on his mind; and by application of received and ascertained laws i can satisfactorily explain to my own reason all the strange incidents, which the writer records of himself. and this i can do without suspecting him of any intentional falsehood. as when in broad day-light a man tracks the steps of a traveller, who had lost his way in a fog or by a treacherous moonshine, even so, and with the same tranquil sense of certainty, can i follow the traces of this bewildered visionary. i understand his ignorance. on the other hand, i have been re-perusing with the best energies of my mind the timaeus of plato. whatever i comprehend, impresses me with a reverential sense of the author's genius; but there is a considerable portion of the work, to which i can attach no consistent meaning. in other treatises of the same philosopher, intended for the average comprehensions of men, i have been delighted with the masterly good sense, with the perspicuity of the language, and the aptness of the inductions. i recollect likewise, that numerous passages in this author, which i thoroughly comprehend, were formerly no less unintelligible to me, than the passages now in question. it would, i am aware, be quite fashionable to dismiss them at once as platonic jargon. but this i cannot do with satisfaction to my own mind, because i have sought in vain for causes adequate to the solution of the assumed inconsistency. i have no insight into the possibility of a man so eminently wise, using words with such half-meanings to himself, as must perforce pass into no meaning to his readers. when in addition to the motives thus suggested by my own reason, i bring into distinct remembrance the number and the series of great men, who, after long and zealous study of these works had joined in honouring the name of plato with epithets, that almost transcend humanity, i feel, that a contemptuous verdict on my part might argue want of modesty, but would hardly be received by the judicious, as evidence of superior penetration. therefore, utterly baffled in all my attempts to understand the ignorance of plato, i conclude myself ignorant of his understanding. in lieu of the various requests which the anxiety of authorship addresses to the unknown reader, i advance but this one; that he will either pass over the following chapter altogether, or read the whole connectedly. the fairest part of the most beautiful body will appear deformed and monstrous, if dissevered from its place in the organic whole. nay, on delicate subjects, where a seemingly trifling difference of more or less may constitute a difference in kind, even a faithful display of the main and supporting ideas, if yet they are separated from the forms by which they are at once clothed and modified, may perchance present a skeleton indeed; but a skeleton to alarm and deter. though i might find numerous precedents, i shall not desire the reader to strip his mind of all prejudices, nor to keep all prior systems out of view during his examination of the present. for in truth, such requests appear to me not much unlike the advice given to hypochondriacal patients in dr. buchan's domestic medicine; videlicet, to preserve themselves uniformly tranquil and in good spirits. till i had discovered the art of destroying the memory a parte post, without injury to its future operations, and without detriment to the judgment, i should suppress the request as premature; and therefore, however much i may wish to be read with an unprejudiced mind, i do not presume to state it as a necessary condition. the extent of my daring is to suggest one criterion, by which it may be rationally conjectured beforehand, whether or no a reader would lose his time, and perhaps his temper, in the perusal of this, or any other treatise constructed on similar principles. but it would be cruelly misinterpreted, as implying the least disrespect either for the moral or intellectual qualities of the individuals thereby precluded. the criterion is this: if a man receives as fundamental facts, and therefore of course indemonstrable and incapable of further analysis, the general notions of matter, spirit, soul, body, action, passiveness, time, space, cause and effect, consciousness, perception, memory and habit; if he feels his mind completely at rest concerning all these, and is satisfied, if only he can analyse all other notions into some one or more of these supposed elements with plausible subordination and apt arrangement: to such a mind i would as courteously as possible convey the hint, that for him the chapter was not written. vir bonus es, doctus, prudens; ast haud tibi spiro. for these terms do in truth include all the difficulties, which the human mind can propose for solution. taking them therefore in mass, and unexamined, it required only a decent apprenticeship in logic, to draw forth their contents in all forms and colours, as the professors of legerdemain at our village fairs pull out ribbon after ribbon from their mouths. and not more difficult is it to reduce them back again to their different genera. but though this analysis is highly useful in rendering our knowledge more distinct, it does not really add to it. it does not increase, though it gives us a greater mastery over, the wealth which we before possessed. for forensic purposes, for all the established professions of society, this is sufficient. but for philosophy in its highest sense as the science of ultimate truths, and therefore scientia scientiarum, this mere analysis of terms is preparative only, though as a preparative discipline indispensable. still less dare a favourable perusal be anticipated from the proselytes of that compendious philosophy, which talking of mind but thinking of brick and mortar, or other images equally abstracted from body, contrives a theory of spirit by nicknaming matter, and in a few hours can qualify its dullest disciples to explain the omne scibile by reducing all things to impressions, ideas, and sensations. but it is time to tell the truth; though it requires some courage to avow it in an age and country, in which disquisitions on all subjects, not privileged to adopt technical terms or scientific symbols, must be addressed to the public. i say then, that it is neither possible nor necessary for all men, nor for many, to be philosophers. there is a philosophic (and inasmuch as it is actualized by an effort of freedom, an artificial) consciousness, which lies beneath or (as it were) behind the spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflecting beings. as the elder romans distinguished their northern provinces into cis-alpine and trans-alpine, so may we divide all the objects of human knowledge into those on this side, and those on the other side of the spontaneous consciousness; citra et trans conscientiam communem. the latter is exclusively the domain of pure philosophy, which is therefore properly entitled transcendental, in order to discriminate it at once, both from mere reflection and representation on the one hand, and on the other from those flights of lawless speculation which, abandoned by all distinct consciousness, because transgressing the bounds and purposes of our intellectual faculties, are justly condemned, as transcendent [ ]. the first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of human life, is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants. on its ridges the common sun is born and departs. from them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish. by the many, even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. its higher ascents are too often hidden by mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to penetrate. to the multitude below these vapours appear, now as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may intrude with impunity; and now all aglow, with colours not their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of happiness and power. but in all ages there have been a few, who measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls have learned, that the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few, who even in the level streams have detected elements, which neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains contained or could supply [ ]. how and whence to these thoughts, these strong probabilities, the ascertaining vision, the intuitive knowledge may finally supervene, can be learnt only by the fact. i might oppose to the question the words with which [ ] plotinus supposes nature to answer a similar difficulty. "should any one interrogate her, how she works, if graciously she vouchsafe to listen and speak, she will reply, it behoves thee not to disquiet me with interrogatories, but to understand in silence, even as i am silent, and work without words." likewise in the fifth book of the fifth ennead, speaking of the highest and intuitive knowledge as distinguished from the discursive, or in the language of wordsworth, "the vision and the faculty divine;" he says: "it is not lawful to inquire from whence it sprang, as if it were a thing subject to place and motion, for it neither approached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other place; but it either appears to us or it does not appear. so that we ought not to pursue it with a view of detecting its secret source, but to watch in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us; preparing ourselves for the blessed spectacle as the eye waits patiently for the rising sun." they and they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antenna, yet to come. they know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them! in short, all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and we have it. all the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: though the latter organs are not developed in all alike. but they exist in all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being. how else could it be, that even worldlings, not wholly debased, will contemplate the man of simple and disinterested goodness with contradictory feelings of pity and respect? "poor man! he is not made for this world." oh! herein they utter a prophecy of universal fulfilment; for man must either rise or sink. it is the essential mark of the true philosopher to rest satisfied with no imperfect light, as long as the impossibility of attaining a fuller knowledge has not been demonstrated. that the common consciousness itself will furnish proofs by its own direction, that it is connected with master-currents below the surface, i shall merely assume as a postulate pro tempore. this having been granted, though but in expectation of the argument, i can safely deduce from it the equal truth of my former assertion, that philosophy cannot be intelligible to all, even of the most learned and cultivated classes. a system, the first principle of which it is to render the mind intuitive of the spiritual in man (i.e. of that which lies on the other side of our natural consciousness) must needs have a great obscurity for those, who have never disciplined and strengthened this ulterior consciousness. it must in truth be a land of darkness, a perfect anti-goshen, for men to whom the noblest treasures of their own being are reported only through the imperfect translation of lifeless and sightless motions. perhaps, in great part, through words which are but the shadows of notions; even as the notional understanding itself is but the shadowy abstraction of living and actual truth. on the immediate, which dwells in every man, and on the original intuition, or absolute affirmation of it, (which is likewise in every man, but does not in every man rise into consciousness) all the certainty of our knowledge depends; and this becomes intelligible to no man by the ministry of mere words from without. the medium, by which spirits understand each other, is not the surrounding air; but the freedom which they possess in common, as the common ethereal element of their being, the tremulous reciprocations of which propagate themselves even to the inmost of the soul. where the spirit of a man is not filled with the consciousness of freedom (were it only from its restlessness, as of one still struggling in bondage) all spiritual intercourse is interrupted, not only with others, but even with himself. no wonder then, that he remains incomprehensible to himself as well as to others. no wonder, that, in the fearful desert of his consciousness, he wearies himself out with empty words, to which no friendly echo answers, either from his own heart, or the heart of a fellow being; or bewilders himself in the pursuit of notional phantoms, the mere refractions from unseen and distant truths through the distorting medium of his own unenlivened and stagnant understanding! to remain unintelligible to such a mind, exclaims schelling on a like occasion, is honour and a good name before god and man. the history of philosophy (the same writer observes) contains instances of systems, which for successive generations have remained enigmatic. such he deems the system of leibnitz, whom another writer (rashly i think, and invidiously) extols as the only philosopher, who was himself deeply convinced of his own doctrines. as hitherto interpreted, however, they have not produced the effect, which leibnitz himself, in a most instructive passage, describes as the criterion of a true philosophy; namely, that it would at once explain and collect the fragments of truth scattered through systems apparently the most incongruous. the truth, says he, is diffused more widely than is commonly believed; but it is often painted, yet oftener masked, and is sometimes mutilated and sometimes, alas! in close alliance with mischievous errors. the deeper, however, we penetrate into the ground of things, the more truth we discover in the doctrines of the greater number of the philosophical sects. the want of substantial reality in the objects of the senses, according to the sceptics; the harmonies or numbers, the prototypes and ideas, to which the pythagoreans and platonists reduced all things: the one and all of parmenides and plotinus, without [ ] spinozism; the necessary connection of things according to the stoics, reconcilable with the spontaneity of the other schools; the vital-philosophy of the cabalists and hermetists, who assumed the universality of sensation; the substantial forms and entelechies of aristotle and the schoolmen, together with the mechanical solution of all particular phaenomena according to democritus and the recent philosophers--all these we shall find united in one perspective central point, which shows regularity and a coincidence of all the parts in the very object, which from every other point of view must appear confused and distorted. the spirit of sectarianism has been hitherto our fault, and the cause of our failures. we have imprisoned our own conceptions by the lines, which we have drawn, in order to exclude the conceptions of others. j'ai trouve que la plupart des sectes ont raison dans une bonne partie de ce qu'elles avancent, mais non pas tant en ce qu'elles nient. a system, which aims to deduce the memory with all the other functions of intelligence, must of course place its first position from beyond the memory, and anterior to it, otherwise the principle of solution would be itself a part of the problem to be solved. such a position therefore must, in the first instance be demanded, and the first question will be, by what right is it demanded? on this account i think it expedient to make some preliminary remarks on the introduction of postulates in philosophy. the word postulate is borrowed from the science of mathematics [ ]. in geometry the primary construction is not demonstrated, but postulated. this first and most simple construction in space is the point in motion, or the line. whether the point is moved in one and the same direction, or whether its direction is continually changed, remains as yet undetermined. but if the direction of the point have been determined, it is either by a point without it, and then there arises the straight line which incloses no space; or the direction of the point is not determined by a point without it, and then it must flow back again on itself, that is, there arises a cyclical line, which does enclose a space. if the straight line be assumed as the positive, the cyclical is then the negation of the straight. it is a line, which at no point strikes out into the straight, but changes its direction continuously. but if the primary line be conceived as undetermined, and the straight line as determined throughout, then the cyclical is the third compounded of both. it is at once undetermined and determined; undetermined through any point without, and determined through itself. geometry therefore supplies philosophy with the example of a primary intuition, from which every science that lays claim to evidence must take its commencement. the mathematician does not begin with a demonstrable proposition, but with an intuition, a practical idea. but here an important distinction presents itself. philosophy is employed on objects of the inner sense, and cannot, like geometry, appropriate to every construction a correspondent outward intuition. nevertheless, philosophy, if it is to arrive at evidence, must proceed from the most original construction, and the question then is, what is the most original construction or first productive act for the inner sense. the answer to this question depends on the direction which is given to the inner sense. but in philosophy the inner sense cannot have its direction determined by an outward object. to the original construction of the line i can be compelled by a line drawn before me on the slate or on sand. the stroke thus drawn is indeed not the line itself, but only the image or picture of the line. it is not from it, that we first learn to know the line; but, on the contrary, we bring this stroke to the original line generated by the act of the imagination; otherwise we could not define it as without breadth or thickness. still however this stroke is the sensuous image of the original or ideal line, and an efficient mean to excite every imagination to the intuition of it. it is demanded then, whether there be found any means in philosophy to determine the direction of the inner sense, as in mathematics it is determinable by its specific image or outward picture. now the inner sense has its direction determined for the greater part only by an act of freedom. one man's consciousness extends only to the pleasant or unpleasant sensations caused in him by external impressions; another enlarges his inner sense to a consciousness of forms and quantity; a third in addition to the image is conscious of the conception or notion of the thing; a fourth attains to a notion of his notions--he reflects on his own reflections; and thus we may say without impropriety, that the one possesses more or less inner sense, than the other. this more or less betrays already, that philosophy in its first principles must have a practical or moral, as well as a theoretical or speculative side. this difference in degree does not exist in the mathematics. socrates in plato shows, that an ignorant slave may be brought to understand and of himself to solve the most difficult geometrical problem. socrates drew the figures for the slave in the sand. the disciples of the critical philosophy could likewise (as was indeed actually done by la forge and some other followers of des cartes) represent the origin of our representations in copper-plates; but no one has yet attempted it, and it would be utterly useless. to an esquimaux or new zealander our most popular philosophy would be wholly unintelligible. the sense, the inward organ, for it is not yet born in him. so is there many a one among us, yes, and some who think themselves philosophers too, to whom the philosophic organ is entirely wanting. to such a man philosophy is a mere play of words and notions, like a theory of music to the deaf, or like the geometry of light to the blind. the connection of the parts and their logical dependencies may be seen and remembered; but the whole is groundless and hollow, unsustained by living contact, unaccompanied with any realizing intuition which exists by and in the act that affirms its existence, which is known, because it is, and is, because it is known. the words of plotinus, in the assumed person of nature, hold true of the philosophic energy. to theoroun mou, theoraema poiei, osper oi geometrai theorountes graphousin; all' emon mae graphousaes, theorousaes de, uphistantai ai ton somaton grammai. with me the act of contemplation makes the thing contemplated, as the geometricians contemplating describe lines correspondent; but i not describing lines, but simply contemplating, the representative forms of things rise up into existence. the postulate of philosophy and at the same time the test of philosophic capacity, is no other than the heaven-descended know thyself! (e coelo descendit, gnothi seauton). and this at once practically and speculatively. for as philosophy is neither a science of the reason or understanding only, nor merely a science of morals, but the science of being altogether, its primary ground can be neither merely speculative nor merely practical, but both in one. all knowledge rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject. (my readers have been warned in a former chapter that, for their convenience as well as the writer's, the term, subject, is used by me in its scholastic sense as equivalent to mind or sentient being, and as the necessary correlative of object or quicquid objicitur menti.) for we can know that only which is true: and the truth is universally placed in the coincidence of the thought with the thing, of the representation with the object represented. now the sum of all that is merely objective, we will henceforth call nature, confining the term to its passive and material sense, as comprising all the phaenomena by which its existence is made known to us. on the other hand the sum of all that is subjective, we may comprehend in the name of the self or intelligence. both conceptions are in necessary antithesis. intelligence is conceived of as exclusively representative, nature as exclusively represented; the one as conscious, the other as without consciousness. now in all acts of positive knowledge there is required a reciprocal concurrence of both, namely of the conscious being, and of that which is in itself unconscious. our problem is to explain this concurrence, its possibility and its necessity. during the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs. there is here no first, and no second; both are coinstantaneous and one. while i am attempting to explain this intimate coalition, i must suppose it dissolved. i must necessarily set out from the one, to which therefore i give hypothetical antecedence, in order to arrive at the other. but as there are but two factors or elements in the problem, subject and object, and as it is left indeterminate from which of them i should commence, there are two cases equally possible. . either the objective is taken as the first, and then we have to account for the supervention of the subjective, which coalesces with it. the notion of the subjective is not contained in the notion of the objective. on the contrary they mutually exclude each other. the subjective therefore must supervene to the objective. the conception of nature does not apparently involve the co-presence of an intelligence making an ideal duplicate of it, that is, representing it. this desk for instance would (according to our natural notions) be, though there should exist no sentient being to look at it. this then is the problem of natural philosophy. it assumes the objective or unconscious nature as the first, and as therefore to explain how intelligence can supervene to it, or how itself can grow into intelligence. if it should appear, that all enlightened naturalists, without having distinctly proposed the problem to themselves, have yet constantly moved in the line of its solution, it must afford a strong presumption that the problem itself is founded in nature. for if all knowledge has, as it were, two poles reciprocally required and presupposed, all sciences must proceed from the one or the other, and must tend toward the opposite as far as the equatorial point in which both are reconciled and become identical. the necessary tendency therefore of all natural philosophy is from nature to intelligence; and this, and no other is the true ground and occasion of the instinctive striving to introduce theory into our views of natural phaenomena. the highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist in the perfect spiritualization of all the laws of nature into laws of intuition and intellect. the phaenomena (the material) most wholly disappear, and the laws alone (the formal) must remain. thence it comes, that in nature itself the more the principle of law breaks forth, the more does the husk drop off, the phaenomena themselves become more spiritual and at length cease altogether in our consciousness. the optical phaenomena are but a geometry, the lines of which are drawn by light, and the materiality of this light itself has already become matter of doubt. in the appearances of magnetism all trace of matter is lost, and of the phaenomena of gravitation, which not a few among the most illustrious newtonians have declared no otherwise comprehensible than as an immediate spiritual influence, there remains nothing but its law, the execution of which on a vast scale is the mechanism of the heavenly motions. the theory of natural philosophy would then be completed, when all nature was demonstrated to be identical in essence with that, which in its highest known power exists in man as intelligence and self-consciousness; when the heavens and the earth shall declare not only the power of their maker, but the glory and the presence of their god, even as he appeared to the great prophet during the vision of the mount in the skirts of his divinity. this may suffice to show, that even natural science, which commences with the material phaenomenon as the reality and substance of things existing, does yet by the necessity of theorizing unconsciously, and as it were instinctively, end in nature as an intelligence; and by this tendency the science of nature becomes finally natural philosophy, the one of the two poles of fundamental science. . or the subjective is taken as the first, and the problem then is, how there supervenes to it a coincident objective. in the pursuit of these sciences, our success in each, depends on an austere and faithful adherence to its own principles, with a careful separation and exclusion of those, which appertain to the opposite science. as the natural philosopher, who directs his views to the objective, avoids above all things the intermixture of the subjective in his knowledge, as for instance, arbitrary suppositions or rather suflictions, occult qualities, spiritual agents, and the substitution of final for efficient causes; so on the other hand, the transcendental or intelligential philosopher is equally anxious to preclude all interpellation of the objective into the subjective principles of his science, as for instance the assumption of impresses or configurations in the brain, correspondent to miniature pictures on the retina painted by rays of light from supposed originals, which are not the immediate and real objects of vision, but deductions from it for the purposes of explanation. this purification of the mind is effected by an absolute and scientific scepticism, to which the mind voluntarily determines itself for the specific purpose of future certainty. des cartes who (in his meditations) himself first, at least of the moderns, gave a beautiful example of this voluntary doubt, this self-determined indetermination, happily expresses its utter difference from the scepticism of vanity or irreligion: nec tamen in scepticos imitabar, qui dubitant tantum ut dubitent, et praeter incertitudinem ipsam nihil quaerunt. nam contra totus in eo eram ut aliquid certi reperirem [ ]. nor is it less distinct in its motives and final aim, than in its proper objects, which are not as in ordinary scepticism the prejudices of education and circumstance, but those original and innate prejudices which nature herself has planted in all men, and which to all but the philosopher are the first principles of knowledge, and the final test of truth. now these essential prejudices are all reducible to the one fundamental presumption, that there exist things without us. as this on the one hand originates, neither in grounds nor arguments, and yet on the other hand remains proof against all attempts to remove it by grounds or arguments (naturam furca expellas tamen usque redibit;) on the one hand lays claim to immediate certainty as a position at once indemonstrable and irresistible, and yet on the other hand, inasmuch as it refers to something essentially different from ourselves, nay even in opposition to ourselves, leaves it inconceivable how it could possibly become a part of our immediate consciousness; (in other words how that, which ex hypothesi is and continues to be extrinsic and alien to our being, should become a modification of our being) the philosopher therefore compels himself to treat this faith as nothing more than a prejudice, innate indeed and connatural, but still a prejudice. the other position, which not only claims but necessitates the admission of its immediate certainty, equally for the scientific reason of the philosopher as for the common sense of mankind at large, namely, i am, cannot so properly be entitled a prejudice. it is groundless indeed; but then in the very idea it precludes all ground, and separated from the immediate consciousness loses its whole sense and import. it is groundless; but only because it is itself the ground of all other certainty. now the apparent contradiction, that the former position, namely, the existence of things without us, which from its nature cannot be immediately certain, should be received as blindly and as independently of all grounds as the existence of our own being, the transcendental philosopher can solve only by the supposition, that the former is unconsciously involved in the latter; that it is not only coherent but identical, and one and the same thing with our own immediate self consciousness. to demonstrate this identity is the office and object of his philosophy. if it be said, that this is idealism, let it be remembered that it is only so far idealism, as it is at the same time, and on that very account, the truest and most binding realism. for wherein does the realism of mankind properly consist? in the assertion that there exists a something without them, what, or how, or where they know not, which occasions the objects of their perception? oh no! this is neither connatural nor universal. it is what a few have taught and learned in the schools, and which the many repeat without asking themselves concerning their own meaning. the realism common to all mankind is far elder and lies infinitely deeper than this hypothetical explanation of the origin of our perceptions, an explanation skimmed from the mere surface of mechanical philosophy. it is the table itself, which the man of common sense believes himself to see, not the phantom of a table, from which he may argumentatively deduce the reality of a table, which he does not see. if to destroy the reality of all, that we actually behold, be idealism, what can be more egregiously so, than the system of modern metaphysics, which banishes us to a land of shadows, surrounds us with apparitions, and distinguishes truth from illusion only by the majority of those who dream the same dream? "i asserted that the world was mad," exclaimed poor lee, "and the world said, that i was mad, and confound them, they outvoted me." it is to the true and original realism, that i would direct the attention. this believes and requires neither more nor less, than the object which it beholds or presents to itself, is the real and very object. in this sense, however much we may strive against it, we are all collectively born idealists, and therefore and only therefore are we at the same time realists. but of this the philosophers of the schools know nothing, or despise the faith as the prejudice of the ignorant vulgar, because they live and move in a crowd of phrases and notions from which human nature has long ago vanished. oh, ye that reverence yourselves, and walk humbly with the divinity in your own hearts, ye are worthy of a better philosophy! let the dead bury the dead, but do you preserve your human nature, the depth of which was never yet fathomed by a philosophy made up of notions and mere logical entities. in the third treatise of my logosophia, announced at the end of this volume, i shall give (deo volente) the demonstrations and constructions of the dynamic philosophy scientifically arranged. it is, according to my conviction, no other than the system of pythagoras and of plato revived and purified from impure mixtures. doctrina per tot manus tradita tandem in vappam desiit! the science of arithmetic furnishes instances, that a rule may be useful in practical application, and for the particular purpose may be sufficiently authenticated by the result, before it has itself been fully demonstrated. it is enough, if only it be rendered intelligible. this will, i trust, have been effected in the following theses for those of my readers, who are willing to accompany me through the following chapter, in which the results will be applied to the deduction of the imagination, and with it the principles of production and of genial criticism in the fine arts. thesis i truth is correlative to being. knowledge without a correspondent reality is no knowledge; if we know, there must be somewhat known by us. to know is in its very essence a verb active. thesis ii all truth is either mediate, that is, derived from some other truth or truths; or immediate and original. the latter is absolute, and its formula a. a.; the former is of dependent or conditional certainty, and represented in the formula b. a. the certainty, which adheres in a, is attributable to b. scholium. a chain without a staple, from which all the links derived their stability, or a series without a first, has been not inaptly allegorized, as a string of blind men, each holding the skirt of the man before him, reaching far out of sight, but all moving without the least deviation in one straight line. it would be naturally taken for granted, that there was a guide at the head of the file: what if it were answered, no! sir, the men are without number, and infinite blindness supplies the place of sight? equally inconceivable is a cycle of equal truths without a common and central principle, which prescribes to each its proper sphere in the system of science. that the absurdity does not so immediately strike us, that it does not seem equally unimaginable, is owing to a surreptitious act of the imagination, which, instinctively and without our noticing the same, not only fills up the intervening spaces, and contemplates the cycle (of b. c. d. e. f. etc.) as a continuous circle (a.) giving to all collectively the unity of their common orbit; but likewise supplies, by a sort of subintelligitur, the one central power, which renders the movement harmonious and cyclical. thesis iii we are to seek therefore for some absolute truth capable of communicating to other positions a certainty, which it has not itself borrowed; a truth self-grounded, unconditional and known by its own light. in short, we have to find a somewhat which is, simply because it is. in order to be such, it must be one which is its own predicate, so far at least that all other nominal predicates must be modes and repetitions of itself. its existence too must be such, as to preclude the possibility of requiring a cause or antecedent without an absurdity. thesis iv that there can be but one such principle, may be proved a priori; for were there two or more, each must refer to some other, by which its equality is affirmed; consequently neither would be self-established, as the hypothesis demands. and a posteriori, it will be proved by the principle itself when it is discovered, as involving universal antecedence in its very conception. scholium. if we affirm of a board that it is blue, the predicate (blue) is accidental, and not implied in the subject, board. if we affirm of a circle that it is equi-radial, the predicate indeed is implied in the definition of the subject; but the existence of the subject itself is contingent, and supposes both a cause and a percipient. the same reasoning will apply to the indefinite number of supposed indemonstrable truths exempted from the profane approach of philosophic investigation by the amiable beattie, and other less eloquent and not more profound inaugurators of common sense on the throne of philosophy; a fruitless attempt, were it only that it is the two-fold function of philosophy to reconcile reason with common sense, and to elevate common sense into reason. thesis v such a principle cannot be any thing or object. each thing is what it is in consequence of some other thing. an infinite, independent [ ] thing, is no less a contradiction, than an infinite circle or a sideless triangle. besides a thing is that, which is capable of being an object which itself is not the sole percipient. but an object is inconceivable without a subject as its antithesis. omne perceptum percipientem supponit. but neither can the principle be found in a subject as a subject, contra-distinguished from an object: for unicuique percipienti aliquid objicitur perceptum. it is to be found therefore neither in object nor subject taken separately, and consequently, as no other third is conceivable, it must be found in that which is neither subject nor object exclusively, but which is the identity of both. thesis vi this principle, and so characterised manifests itself in the sum or i am; which i shall hereafter indiscriminately express by the words spirit, self, and self-consciousness. in this, and in this alone, object and subject, being and knowing, are identical, each involving and supposing the other. in other words, it is a subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject. it may be described therefore as a perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into object and subject, which presuppose each other, and can exist only as antitheses. scholium. if a man be asked how he knows that he is? he can only answer, sum quia sum. but if (the absoluteness of this certainty having been admitted) he be again asked, how he, the individual person, came to be, then in relation to the ground of his existence, not to the ground of his knowledge of that existence, he might reply, sum quia deus est, or still more philosophically, sum quia in deo sum. but if we elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great eternal i am, then the principle of being, and of knowledge, of idea, and of reality; the ground of existence, and the ground of the knowledge of existence, are absolutely identical, sum quia sum [ ]; i am, because i affirm myself to be; i affirm myself to be, because i am. thesis vii if then i know myself only through myself, it is contradictory to require any other predicate of self, but that of self-consciousness. only in the self-consciousness of a spirit is there the required identity of object and of representation; for herein consists the essence of a spirit, that it is self-representative. if therefore this be the one only immediate truth, in the certainty of which the reality of our collective knowledge is grounded, it must follow that the spirit in all the objects which it views, views only itself. if this could be proved, the immediate reality of all intuitive knowledge would be assured. it has been shown, that a spirit is that, which is its own object, yet not originally an object, but an absolute subject for which all, itself included, may become an object. it must therefore be an act; for every object is, as an object, dead, fixed, incapable in itself of any action, and necessarily finite. again the spirit (originally the identity of object and subject) must in some sense dissolve this identity, in order to be conscious of it; fit alter et idem. but this implies an act, and it follows therefore that intelligence or self-consciousness is impossible, except by and in a will. the self-conscious spirit therefore is a will; and freedom must be assumed as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it. thesis viii whatever in its origin is objective, is likewise as such necessarily finite. therefore, since the spirit is not originally an object, and as the subject exists in antithesis to an object, the spirit cannot originally be finite. but neither can it be a subject without becoming an object, and, as it is originally the identity of both, it can be conceived neither as infinite nor finite exclusively, but as the most original union of both. in the existence, in the reconciling, and the recurrence of this contradiction consists the process and mystery of production and life. thesis ix this principium commune essendi et cognoscendi, as subsisting in a will, or primary act of self-duplication, is the mediate or indirect principle of every science; but it is the immediate and direct principle of the ultimate science alone, i.e. of transcendental philosophy alone. for it must be remembered, that all these theses refer solely to one of the two polar sciences, namely, to that which commences with, and rigidly confines itself within, the subjective, leaving the objective (as far as it is exclusively objective) to natural philosophy, which is its opposite pole. in its very idea therefore as a systematic knowledge of our collective knowing, (scientia scientiae) it involves the necessity of some one highest principle of knowing, as at once the source and accompanying form in all particular acts of intellect and perception. this, it has been shown, can be found only in the act and evolution of self-consciousness. we are not investigating an absolute principium essendi; for then, i admit, many valid objections might be started against our theory; but an absolute principium cognoscendi. the result of both the sciences, or their equatorial point, would be the principle of a total and undivided philosophy, as, for prudential reasons, i have chosen to anticipate in the scholium to thesis vi and the note subjoined. in other words, philosophy would pass into religion, and religion become inclusive of philosophy. we begin with the i know myself, in order to end with the absolute i am. we proceed from the self, in order to lose and find all self in god. thesis x the transcendental philosopher does not inquire, what ultimate ground of our knowledge there may lie out of our knowing, but what is the last in our knowing itself, beyond which we cannot pass. the principle of our knowing is sought within the sphere of our knowing. it must be some thing therefore, which can itself be known. it is asserted only, that the act of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle of all our possible knowledge. whether abstracted from us there exists any thing higher and beyond this primary self-knowing, which is for us the form of all our knowing must be decided by the result. that the self-consciousness is the fixed point, to which for us all is mortised and annexed, needs no further proof. but that the self- consciousness may be the modification of a higher form of being, perhaps of a higher consciousness, and this again of a yet higher, and so on in an infinite regressus; in short, that self-consciousness may be itself something explicable into something, which must lie beyond the possibility of our knowledge, because the whole synthesis of our intelligence is first formed in and through the self-consciousness, does not at all concern us as transcendental philosophers. for to us, self-consciousness is not a kind of being, but a kind of knowing, and that too the highest and farthest that exists for us. it may however be shown, and has in part already been shown earlier, that even when the objective is assumed as the first, we yet can never pass beyond the principle of self-consciousness. should we attempt it, we must be driven back from ground to ground, each of which would cease to be a ground the moment we pressed on it. we must be whirled down the gulf of an infinite series. but this would make our reason baffle the end and purpose of all reason, namely, unity and system. or we must break off the series arbitrarily, and affirm an absolute something that is in and of itself at once cause and effect (causa sui), subject and object, or rather the absolute identity of both. but as this is inconceivable, except in a self-consciousness, it follows, that even as natural philosophers we must arrive at the same principle from which as transcendental philosophers we set out; that is, in a self-consciousness in which the principium essendi does not stand to the principlum cognoscende in the relation of cause to effect, but both the one and the other are co-inherent and identical. thus the true system of natural philosophy places the sole reality of things in an absolute, which is at once causa sui et effectus, pataer autopator, uios heautou--in the absolute identity of subject and object, which it calls nature, and which in its highest power is nothing else than self-conscious will or intelligence. in this sense the position of malebranche, that we see all things in god, is a strict philosophical truth; and equally true is the assertion of hobbes, of hartley, and of their masters in ancient greece, that all real knowledge supposes a prior sensation. for sensation itself is but vision nascent, not the cause of intelligence, but intelligence itself revealed as an earlier power in the process of self-construction. makar, ilathi moi; pater, ilathi moi ei para kosmon, ei para moiran ton son ethigon! bearing then this in mind, that intelligence is a self-development, not a quality supervening to a substance, we may abstract from all degree, and for the purpose of philosophic construction reduce it to kind, under the idea of an indestructible power with two opposite and counteracting forces, which by a metaphor borrowed from astronomy, we may call the centrifugal and centripetal forces. the intelligence in the one tends to objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in the object. it will be hereafter my business to construct by a series of intuitions the progressive schemes, that must follow from such a power with such forces, till i arrive at the fulness of the human intelligence. for my present purpose, i assume such a power as my principle, in order to deduce from it a faculty, the generation, agency, and application of which form the contents of the ensuing chapter. in a preceding page i have justified the use of technical terms in philosophy, whenever they tend to preclude confusion of thought, and when they assist the memory by the exclusive singleness of their meaning more than they may, for a short time, bewilder the attention by their strangeness. i trust, that i have not extended this privilege beyond the grounds on which i have claimed it; namely, the conveniency of the scholastic phrase to distinguish the kind from all degrees, or rather to express the kind with the abstraction of degree, as for instance multeity instead of multitude; or secondly, for the sake of correspondence in sound in interdependent or antithetical terms, as subject and object; or lastly, to avoid the wearying recurrence of circumlocutions and definitions. thus i shall venture to use potence, in order to express a specific degree of a power, in imitation of the algebraists. i have even hazarded the new verb potenziate, with its derivatives, in order to express the combination or transfer of powers. it is with new or unusual terms, as with privileges in courts of justice or legislature; there can be no legitimate privilege, where there already exists a positive law adequate to the purpose; and when there is no law in existence, the privilege is to be justified by its accordance with the end, or final cause, of all law. unusual and new-coined words are doubtless an evil; but vagueness, confusion, and imperfect conveyance of our thoughts, are a far greater. every system, which is under the necessity of using terms not familiarized by the metaphysics in fashion, will be described as written in an unintelligible style, and the author must expect the charge of having substituted learned jargon for clear conception; while, according to the creed of our modern philosophers, nothing is deemed a clear conception, but what is representable by a distinct image. thus the conceivable is reduced within the bounds of the picturable. hinc patet, qui fiat, ut cum irrepraesentabile et impossibile vulgo ejusdem significatus habeantur, conceptus tam continui, quam infiniti, a plurimis rejiciantur, quippe quorum, secundum leges cognitionis intuitivae, repraesentatio est impossibilis. quanquam autem harum e non paucis scholis explosarum notionum, praesertim prioris, causam hic non gero, maximi tamen momendi erit monuisse. gravissimo illos errore labi, qui tam perverse argumentandi ratione utuntur. quicquid enim repugnat legibus intellectus et rationis, utique est impossibile; quod autem, cum rationis purae sit objectum, legibus cognitionis intuitivae tantummodo non subest, non item. nam hic dissensus inter facultatem sensitivam et intellectualem, (quarum indolem mox exponam,) nihil indigitat, nisi, quas mens ab intellectu acceptas fert ideas abstractas, illas in concreto exsequi et in intuitus commutare saepenumero non posse. haec autem reluctantia subjectiva mentitur, ut plurimum, repugnantiam aliquam objectivam, et incautos facile fallit, limitibus, quibus mens humana circumscribitur, pro iis habitis, quibus ipsa rerum essentia continetur. [ ] critics, who are most ready to bring this charge of pedantry and unintelligibility, are the most apt to overlook the important fact, that, besides the language of words, there is a language of spirits--(sermo interior)--and that the former is only the vehicle of the latter. consequently their assurance, that they do not understand the philosophic writer, instead of proving any thing against the philosophy, may furnish an equal, and (caeteris paribus) even a stronger presumption against their own philosophic talent. great indeed are the obstacles which an english metaphysician has to encounter. amongst his most respectable and intelligent judges, there will be many who have devoted their attention exclusively to the concerns and interests of human life, and who bring with them to the perusal of a philosophic system an habitual aversion to all speculations, the utility and application of which are not evident and immediate. to these i would in the first instance merely oppose an authority, which they themselves hold venerable, that of lord bacon: non inutiles scientiae existimandae sunt, quarum in se nullus est usus, si ingenia acuant et ordinent. there are others, whose prejudices are still more formidable, inasmuch as they are grounded in their moral feelings and religious principles, which had been alarmed and shocked by the impious and pernicious tenets defended by hume, priestley, and the french fatalists or necessitarians; some of whom had perverted metaphysical reasonings to the denial of the mysteries and indeed of all the peculiar doctrines of christianity; and others even to the subversion of all distinction between right and wrong. i would request such men to consider what an eminent and successful defender of the christian faith has observed, that true metaphysics are nothing else but true divinity, and that in fact the writers, who have given them such just offence, were sophists, who had taken advantage of the general neglect into which the science of logic has unhappily fallen, rather than metaphysicians, a name indeed which those writers were the first to explode as unmeaning. secondly, i would remind them, that as long as there are men in the world to whom the gnothi seauton is an instinct and a command from their own nature, so long will there be metaphysicians and metaphysical speculations; that false metaphysics can be effectually counteracted by true metaphysics alone; and that if the reasoning be clear, solid and pertinent, the truth deduced can never be the less valuable on account of the depth from which it may have been drawn. a third class profess themselves friendly to metaphysics, and believe that they are themselves metaphysicians. they have no objection to system or terminology, provided it be the method and the nomenclature to which they have been familiarized in the writings of locke, hume, hartley, condillac, or perhaps dr. reid, and professor stewart. to objections from this cause, it is a sufficient answer, that one main object of my attempt was to demonstrate the vagueness or insufficiency of the terms used in the metaphysical schools of france and great britain since the revolution, and that the errors which i propose to attack cannot subsist, except as they are concealed behind the mask of a plausible and indefinite nomenclature. but the worst and widest impediment still remains. it is the predominance of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and the mortal enemy of all true and manly metaphysical research. it is that corruption, introduced by certain immethodical aphorisming eclectics, who, dismissing not only all system, but all logical connection, pick and choose whatever is most plausible and showy; who select, whatever words can have some semblance of sense attached to them without the least expenditure of thought; in short whatever may enable men to talk of what they do not understand, with a careful avoidance of every thing that might awaken them to a moment's suspicion of their ignorance. this alas! is an irremediable disease, for it brings with it, not so much an indisposition to any particular system, but an utter loss of taste and faculty for all system and for all philosophy. like echoes that beget each other amongst the mountains, the praise or blame of such men rolls in volleys long after the report from the original blunderbuss. sequacitas est potius et coitio quam consensus: et tamen (quod pessimum est) pusillanimitas ista non sine arrogantia et fastidio se offert. [ ] i shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the imagination; but i must first take leave to notice, that after a more accurate perusal of mr. wordsworth's remarks on the imagination, in his preface to the new edition of his poems, i find that my conclusions are not so consentient with his as, i confess, i had taken for granted. in an article contributed by me to mr. southey's omniana, on the soul and its organs of sense, are the following sentences. "these (the human faculties) i would arrange under the different senses and powers: as the eye, the ear, the touch, etc.; the imitative power, voluntary and automatic; the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the fancy, or the aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or the regulative, substantiating and realizing power; the speculative reason, vis theoretica et scientifica, or the power by which we produce or aim to produce unity, necessity, and universality in all our knowledge by means of principles a priori [ ]; the will, or practical reason; the faculty of choice (germanice, willkuehr) and (distinct both from the moral will and the choice,) the sensation of volition, which i have found reason to include under the head of single and double touch." to this, as far as it relates to the subject in question, namely the words (the aggregative and associative power) mr. wordsworth's "objection is only that the definition is too general. to aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as well to the imagination as to the fancy." i reply, that if, by the power of evoking and combining, mr. wordsworth means the same as, and no more than, i meant by the aggregative and associative, i continue to deny, that it belongs at all to the imagination; and i am disposed to conjecture, that he has mistaken the copresence of fancy with imagination for the operation of the latter singly. a man may work with two very different tools at the same moment; each has its share in the work, but the work effected by each is distinct and different. but it will probably appear in the next chapter, that deeming it necessary to go back much further than mr. wordsworth's subject required or permitted, i have attached a meaning to both fancy and imagination, which he had not in view, at least while he was writing that preface. he will judge. would to heaven, i might meet with many such readers! i will conclude with the words of bishop jeremy taylor: "he to whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace and rest of spirit." [ ] chapter xiii on the imagination, or esemplastic power o adam, one almighty is, from whom all things proceed, and up to him return, if not deprav'd from good, created all such to perfection, one first matter all, endued with various forms, various degrees of substance, and, in things that live, of life; but more refin'd, more spiritous and pure, as nearer to him plac'd, or nearer tending, each in their several active spheres assigu'd, till body up to spirit work, in bounds proportion'd to each kind. so from the root springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves more aery: last the bright consummate flower spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit, man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd, to vital spirits aspire: to animal: to intellectual!--give both life and sense, fancy and understanding; whence the soul reason receives, and reason is her being, discursive or intuitive. [ ] "sane dicerentur si res corporales nil nisi materiale continerent, verissime in fluxu consistere, neque habere substantiale quicquam, quemadmodum et platonici olim recte agnovere." "hinc igitur, praeter pure mathematica et phantasiae subjecta, collegi quaedam metaphysica solaque mente perceptibilia, esse admittenda et massae materiali principium quoddam superius et, ut sic dicam, formale addendum: quandoquidem omnes veritates rerum corporearum ex solis axiomatibus logisticis et geometricis, nempe de magno et parvo, toto et parte, figura et situ, colligi non possint; sed alia de causa et effectu, actioneque et passione, accedere debeant, quibus ordinis rerum rationes salventur. id principium rerum, an entelecheian an vim appellemus, non refert, modo meminerimus, per solam virium notionem intelligibiliter explicari." [ ] sebomai noeron kruphian taxin chorei ti meson ou katachuthen. [ ] des cartes, speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of archimedes, said, give me matter and motion and i will construct you the universe. we must of course understand him to have meant; i will render the construction of the universe intelligible. in the same sense the transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and i will cause the world of intelllgences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you. every other science presupposes intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to the mind from its birth to its maturity. the venerable sage of koenigsberg has preceded the march of this master-thought as an effective pioneer in his essay on the introduction of negative quantities into philosophy, published . in this he has shown, that instead of assailing the science of mathematics by metaphysics, as berkeley did in his analyst, or of sophisticating it, as wolf did, by the vain attempt of deducing the first principles of geometry from supposed deeper grounds of ontology, it behoved the metaphysician rather to examine whether the only province of knowledge, which man has succeeded in erecting into a pure science, might not furnish materials, or at least hints, for establishing and pacifying the unsettled, warring, and embroiled domain of philosophy. an imitation of the mathematical method had indeed been attempted with no better success than attended the essay of david to wear the armour of saul. another use however is possible and of far greater promise, namely, the actual application of the positions which had so wonderfully enlarged the discoveries of geometry, mutatis mutandis, to philosophical subjects. kant having briefly illustrated the utility of such an attempt in the questions of space, motion, and infinitely small quantities, as employed by the mathematician, proceeds to the idea of negative quantities and the transfer of them to metaphysical investigation. opposites, he well observes, are of two kinds, either logical, that is, such as are absolutely incompatible; or real, without being contradictory. the former he denominates nihil negativum irrepraesentabile, the connection of which produces nonsense. a body in motion is something--aliquid cogitabile; but a body, at one and the same time in motion and not in motion, is nothing, or, at most, air articulated into nonsense. but a motory force of a body in one direction, and an equal force of the same body in an opposite direction is not incompatible, and the result, namely, rest, is real and representable. for the purposes of mathematical calculus it is indifferent which force we term negative, and which positive, and consequently we appropriate the latter to that, which happens to be the principal object in our thoughts. thus if a man's capital be ten and his debts eight, the subtraction will be the same, whether we call the capital negative debt, or the debt negative capital. but in as much as the latter stands practically in reference to the former, we of course represent the sum as - . it is equally clear that two equal forces acting in opposite directions, both being finite and each distinguished from the other by its direction only, must neutralize or reduce each other to inaction. now the transcendental philosophy demands; first, that two forces should be conceived which counteract each other by their essential nature; not only not in consequence of the accidental direction of each, but as prior to all direction, nay, as the primary forces from which the conditions of all possible directions are derivative and deducible: secondly, that these forces should be assumed to be both alike infinite, both alike indestructible. the problem will then be to discover the result or product of two such forces, as distinguished from the result of those forces which are finite, and derive their difference solely from the circumstance of their direction. when we have formed a scheme or outline of these two different kinds of force, and of their different results, by the process of discursive reasoning, it will then remain for us to elevate the thesis from notional to actual, by contemplating intuitively this one power with its two inherent indestructible yet counteracting forces, and the results or generations to which their inter-penetration gives existence, in the living principle and in the process of our own self-consciousness. by what instrument this is possible the solution itself will discover, at the same time that it will reveal to and for whom it is possible. non omnia possumus omnes. there is a philosophic no less than a poetic genius, which is differenced from the highest perfection of talent, not by degree but by kind. the counteraction then of the two assumed forces does not depend on their meeting from opposite directions; the power which acts in them is indestructible; it is therefore inexhaustibly re-ebullient; and as something must be the result of these two forces, both alike infinite, and both alike indestructible; and as rest or neutralization cannot be this result; no other conception is possible, but that the product must be a tertium aliquid, or finite generation. consequently this conception is necessary. now this tertium aliquid can be no other than an inter-penetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both. * * * * * * thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when i received the following letter from a friend, whose practical judgment i have had ample reason to estimate and revere, and whose taste and sensibility preclude all the excuses which my self-love might possibly have prompted me to set up in plea against the decision of advisers of equal good sense, but with less tact and feeling. "dear c. "you ask my opinion concerning your chapter on the imagination, both as to the impressions it made on myself, and as to those which i think it will make on the public, i.e. that part of the public, who, from the title of the work and from its forming a sort of introduction to a volume of poems, are likely to constitute the great majority of your readers. "as to myself, and stating in the first place the effect on my understanding, your opinions and method of argument were not only so new to me, but so directly the reverse of all i had ever been accustomed to consider as truth, that even if i had comprehended your premises sufficiently to have admitted them, and had seen the necessity of your conclusions, i should still have been in that state of mind, which in your note in chap. iv you have so ingeniously evolved, as the antithesis to that in which a man is, when he makes a bull. in your own words, i should have felt as if i had been standing on my head. "the effect on my feelings, on the other hand, i cannot better represent, than by supposing myself to have known only our light airy modern chapels of ease, and then for the first time to have been placed, and left alone, in one of our largest gothic cathedrals in a gusty moonlight night of autumn. 'now in glimmer, and now in gloom;' often in palpable darkness not without a chilly sensation of terror; then suddenly emerging into broad yet visionary lights with coloured shadows of fantastic shapes, yet all decked with holy insignia and mystic symbols; and ever and anon coming out full upon pictures and stone-work images of great men, with whose names i was familiar, but which looked upon me with countenances and an expression, the most dissimilar to all i had been in the habit of connecting with those names. those whom i had been taught to venerate as almost super-human in magnitude of intellect, i found perched in little fret-work niches, as grotesque dwarfs; while the grotesques, in my hitherto belief, stood guarding the high altar with all the characters of apotheosis. in short, what i had supposed substances were thinned away into shadows, while everywhere shadows were deepened into substances: if substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd, for each seem'd either! "yet after all, i could not but repeat the lines which you had quoted from a ms. poem of your own in the friend, and applied to a work of mr. wordsworth's though with a few of the words altered: ------an orphic tale indeed, a tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts to a strange music chanted! "be assured, however, that i look forward anxiously to your great book on the constructive philosophy, which you have promised and announced: and that i will do my best to understand it. only i will not promise to descend into the dark cave of trophonius with you, there to rub my own eyes, in order to make the sparks and figured flashes, which i am required to see. "so much for myself. but as for the public i do not hesitate a moment in advising and urging you to withdraw the chapter from the present work, and to reserve it for your announced treatises on the logos or communicative intellect in man and deity. first, because imperfectly as i understand the present chapter, i see clearly that you have done too much, and yet not enough. you have been obliged to omit so many links, from the necessity of compression, that what remains, looks (if i may recur to my former illustration) like the fragments of the winding steps of an old ruined tower. secondly, a still stronger argument (at least one that i am sure will be more forcible with you) is, that your readers will have both right and reason to complain of you. this chapter, which cannot, when it is printed, amount to so little as an hundred pages, will of necessity greatly increase the expense of the work; and every reader who, like myself, is neither prepared nor perhaps calculated for the study of so abstruse a subject so abstrusely treated, will, as i have before hinted, be almost entitled to accuse you of a sort of imposition on him. for who, he might truly observe, could from your title-page, to wit, "my literary life and opinions," published too as introductory to a volume of miscellaneous poems, have anticipated, or even conjectured, a long treatise on ideal realism which holds the same relation in abstruseness to plotinus, as plotinus does to plato. it will be well, if already you have not too much of metaphysical disquisition in your work, though as the larger part of the disquisition is historical, it will doubtless be both interesting and instructive to many to whose unprepared minds your speculations on the esemplastic power would be utterly unintelligible. be assured, if you do publish this chapter in the present work, you will be reminded of bishop berkeley's siris, announced as an essay on tar-water, which beginning with tar ends with the trinity, the omne scibile forming the interspace. i say in the present work. in that greater work to which you have devoted so many years, and study so intense and various, it will be in its proper place. your prospectus will have described and announced both its contents and their nature; and if any persons purchase it, who feel no interest in the subjects of which it treats, they will have themselves only to blame. "i could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary motives, and particularly from the probable effects on the sale of your present publication; but they would weigh little with you compared with the preceding. besides, i have long observed, that arguments drawn from your own personal interests more often act on you as narcotics than as stimulants, and that in money concerns you have some small portion of pig-nature in your moral idiosyncrasy, and, like these amiable creatures, must occasionally be pulled backward from the boat in order to make you enter it. all success attend you, for if hard thinking and hard reading are merits, you have deserved it. "your affectionate, etc." in consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete conviction on my mind, i shall content myself for the present with stating the main result of the chapter, which i have reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find at the close of the second volume. the imagination then i consider either as primary, or secondary. the primary imagination i hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite i am. the secondary imagination i consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. it dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. it is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. the fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express by the word choice. but equally with the ordinary memory the fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. chapter xiv occasion of the lyrical ballads, and the objects originally proposed--preface to the second edition--the ensuing controversy, its causes and acrimony--philosophic definitions of a poem and poetry with scholia. during the first year that mr. wordsworth and i were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. the sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. these are the poetry of nature. the thought suggested itself--(to which of us i do not recollect)--that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. in the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. and real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. for the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves. in this idea originated the plan of the lyrical ballads; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. mr. wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. with this view i wrote the ancient mariner, and was preparing among other poems, the dark ladie, and the christabel, in which i should have more nearly realized my ideal, than i had done in my first attempt. but mr. wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. mr. wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction, which is characteristic of his genius. in this form the lyrical ballads were published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest, which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. to the second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which, notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms of speech that were not included in what he (unfortunately, i think, adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life. from this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long-continued controversy. for from the conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy i explain the inveteracy and in some instances, i grieve to say, the acrimonious passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the assailants. had mr. wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things, which they were for a long time described as being had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged the preface along with them. but year after year increased the number of mr. wordsworth's admirers. they were found too not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their admiration (inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its intensity, i might almost say, by its religious fervour. these facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would of itself have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled them round and round. with many parts of this preface in the sense attributed to them and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, i never concurred; but on the contrary objected to them as erroneous in principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to the author's own practice in the greater part of the poems themselves. mr. wordsworth in his recent collection has, i find, degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end of his second volume, to be read or not at the reader's choice. but he has not, as far as i can discover, announced any change in his poetic creed. at all events, considering it as the source of a controversy, in which i have been honoured more than i deserve by the frequent conjunction of my name with his, i think it expedient to declare once for all, in what points i coincide with the opinions supported in that preface, and in what points i altogether differ. but in order to render myself intelligible i must previously, in as few words as possible, explain my views, first, of a poem; and secondly, of poetry itself, in kind, and in essence. the office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware, that distinction is not division. in order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. but having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy. a poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference therefore must consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object being proposed. according to the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination. it is possible, that the object may be merely to facilitate the recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial arrangement; and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is distinguished from prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly. in this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to the well-known enumeration of the days in the several months; "thirty days hath september, april, june, and november," etc. and others of the same class and purpose. and as a particular pleasure is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities, all compositions that have this charm super-added, whatever be their contents, may be entitled poems. so much for the superficial form. a difference of object and contents supplies an additional ground of distinction. the immediate purpose may be the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and demonstrable, as in works of science; or of facts experienced and recorded, as in history. pleasure, and that of the highest and most permanent kind, may result from the attainment of the end; but it is not itself the immediate end. in other works the communication of pleasure may be the immediate purpose; and though truth, either moral or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will distinguish the character of the author, not the class to which the work belongs. blest indeed is that state of society, in which the immediate purpose would be baffled by the perversion of the proper ultimate end; in which no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the bathyllus even of an anacreon, or the alexis of virgil, from disgust and aversion! but the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree attained, as in novels and romances. would then the mere superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? the answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. if metre be superadded, all other parts must be made consonant with it. they must be such, as to justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each part, which an exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to excite. the final definition then, so deduced, may be thus worded. a poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species--(having this object in common with it)--it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part. controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few instances has this been more striking, than in disputes concerning the present subject. if a man chooses to call every composition a poem, which is rhyme, or measure, or both, i must leave his opinion uncontroverted. the distinction is at least competent to characterize the writer's intention. if it were subjoined, that the whole is likewise entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a series of interesting reflections; i of course admit this as another fit ingredient of a poem, and an additional merit. but if the definition sought for be that of a legitimate poem, i answer, it must be one, the parts of which mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement. the philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distiches, each of which, absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself, becomes disjoined from its context, and forms a separate whole, instead of a harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the component parts. the reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasureable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. like the motion of a serpent, which the egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air;--at every step he pauses and half recedes; and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward. praecipitandus est liber spiritus, says petronius most happily. the epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer words. but if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem, we have still to seek for a definition of poetry. the writings of plato, and jeremy taylor, and burnet's theory of the earth, furnish undeniable proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even without the contradistringuishing objects of a poem. the first chapter of isaiah--(indeed a very large portion of the whole book)--is poetry in the most emphatic sense; yet it would be not less irrational than strange to assert, that pleasure, and not truth was the immediate object of the prophet. in short, whatever specific import we attach to the word, poetry, there will be found involved in it, as a necessary consequence, that a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry. yet if an harmonious whole is to be produced, the remaining parts must be preserved in keeping with the poetry; and this can be no otherwise effected than by such a studied selection and artificial arrangement, as will partake of one, though not a peculiar property of poetry. and this again can be no other than the property of exciting a more continuous and equal attention than the language of prose aims at, whether colloquial or written. my own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the word, have been in part anticipated in some of the remarks on the fancy and imagination in the early part of this work. what is poetry?--is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet?--that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. for it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind. the poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. he diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which i would exclusively appropriate the name of imagination. this power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control, laxis effertur habenis, reveals "itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant" qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. doubtless, as sir john davies observes of the soul--(and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately, to the poetic imagination)-- doubtless this could not be, but that she turns bodies to spirit by sublimation strange, as fire converts to fire the things it burns, as we our food into our nature change. from their gross matter she abstracts their forms, and draws a kind of quintessence from things; which to her proper nature she transforms to bear them light on her celestial wings. thus does she, when from individual states she doth abstract the universal kinds; which then re-clothed in divers names and fates steal access through the senses to our minds. finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole. chapter xv the specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis of shakespeare's venus and adonis, and rape of lucrece. in the application of these principles to purposes of practical criticism, as employed in the appraisement of works more or less imperfect, i have endeavoured to discover what the qualities in a poem are, which may be deemed promises and specific symptoms of poetic power, as distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition by accidental motives, by an act of the will, rather than by the inspiration of a genial and productive nature. in this investigation, i could not, i thought, do better, than keep before me the earliest work of the greatest genius, that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded [ ] shakespeare. i mean the venus and adonis, and the lucrece; works which give at once strong promises of the strength, and yet obvious proofs of the immaturity, of his genius. from these i abstracted the following marks, as characteristics of original poetic genius in general. . in the venus and adonis, the first and most obvious excellence is the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the subject; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant. the delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently original, and not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, i regard as a highly favourable promise in the compositions of a young man. the man that hath not music in his soul can indeed never be a genuine poet. imagery,--(even taken from nature, much more when transplanted from books, as travels, voyages, and works of natural history),--affecting incidents, just thoughts, interesting personal or domestic feelings, and with these the art of their combination or intertexture in the form of a poem,--may all by incessant effort be acquired as a trade, by a man of talent and much reading, who, as i once before observed, has mistaken an intense desire of poetic reputation for a natural poetic genius; the love of the arbitrary end for a possession of the peculiar means. but the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination; and this together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learned. it is in these that "poeta nascitur non fit." . a second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. at least i have found, that where the subject is taken immediately from the author's personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic power. we may perhaps remember the tale of the statuary, who had acquired considerable reputation for the legs of his goddesses, though the rest of the statue accorded but indifferently with ideal beauty; till his wife, elated by her husband's praises, modestly acknowledged that she had been his constant model. in the venus and adonis this proof of poetic power exists even to excess. it is throughout as if a superior spirit more intuitive, more intimately conscious, even than the characters themselves, not only of every outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excitement, which had resulted from the energetic fervour of his own spirit in so vividly exhibiting what it had so accurately and profoundly contemplated. i think, i should have conjectured from these poems, that even then the great instinct, which impelled the poet to the drama, was secretly working in him, prompting him--by a series and never broken chain of imagery, always vivid and, because unbroken, often minute; by the highest effort of the picturesque in words, of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, even dante not excepted; to provide a substitute for that visual language, that constant intervention and running comment by tone, look and gesture, which in his dramatic works he was entitled to expect from the players. his venus and adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those characters by the most consummate actors. you seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything. hence it is, from the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader; from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images; and above all from the alienation, and, if i may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings, from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst; that though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account. instead of doing as ariosto, and as, still more offensively, wieland has done, instead of degrading and deforming passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of concupiscence; shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse itself, so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful, now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery; or by diverting our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty or profound reflections, which the poet's ever active mind has deduced from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents. the reader is forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely passive of our nature. as little can a mind thus roused and awakened be brooded on by mean and indistinct emotion, as the low, lazy mist can creep upon the surface of a lake, while a strong gale is driving it onward in waves and billows. . it has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. they become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit, which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air. in the two following lines for instance, there is nothing objectionable, nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their proper place, part of a descriptive poem: behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow'd bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve. but with a small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. the same image will rise into semblance of poetry if thus conveyed: yon row of bleak and visionary pines, by twilight glimpse discerned, mark! how they flee from the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild streaming before them. i have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, of that particular excellence which i had in view, and in which shakespeare even in his earliest, as in his latest, works surpasses all other poets. it is by this, that he still gives a dignity and a passion to the objects which he presents. unaided by any previous excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and in power,-- "full many a glorious morning have i seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye." "not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come-- * * * * * * * * * * * * the mortal moon hath her eclipse endured, and the sad augurs mock their own presage; incertainties now crown themselves assur'd, and peace proclaims olives of endless age. now with the drops of this most balmy time my love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes, since spite of him, i'll live in this poor rhyme, while he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes. and thou in this shalt find thy monument, when tyrants' crests, and tombs of brass are spent." as of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and colours itself to the circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost in the mind. for unrivalled instances of this excellence, the reader's own memory will refer him to the lear, othello, in short to which not of the "great, ever living, dead man's" dramatic works? inopem em copia fecit. how true it is to nature, he has himself finely expressed in the instance of love in his th sonnet. from you have i been absent in the spring, when proud-pied april drest in all its trim, hath put a spirit of youth in every thing; that heavy saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him. yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell of different flowers in odour and in hue, could make me any summer's story tell, or from their proud lap pluck them, where they grew nor did i wonder at the lilies white, nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose; they were, tho' sweet, but figures of delight, drawn after you, you pattern of all those. yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away, as with your shadow, i with these did play!" scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable mark gonimon men poiaetou------ ------hostis rhaema gennaion lakoi, will the imagery supply, when, with more than the power of the painter, the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of simultaneousness:-- with this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace of those fair arms, which bound him to her breast, and homeward through the dark laund runs apace;-- * * * * * * look! how a bright star shooteth from the sky, so glides he in the night from venus' eye. . the last character i shall mention, which would prove indeed but little, except as taken conjointly with the former;--yet without which the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were possible) would give promises only of transitory flashes and a meteoric power;--is depth, and energy of thought. no man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. for poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. in shakespeare's poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. at length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other and intermix reluctantly and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice. the venus and adonis did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. but the story of lucretia seems to favour and even demand their intensest workings. and yet we find in shakespeare's management of the tale neither pathos, nor any other dramatic quality. there is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspirited by the same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language. what then shall we say? even this; that shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration, possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with milton as his compeer not rival. while the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. all things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of milton; while shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself. o what great men hast thou not produced, england, my country!--truly indeed-- we must be free or die, who speak the tongue, which shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold, which milton held. in everything we are sprung of earth's first blood, have titles manifold. chapter xvi striking points of difference between the poets of the present age and those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--wish expressed for the union of the characteristic merits of both. christendom, from its first settlement on feudal rights, has been so far one great body, however imperfectly organized, that a similar spirit will be found in each period to have been acting in all its members. the study of shakespeare's poems--(i do not include his dramatic works, eminently as they too deserve that title)--led me to a more careful examination of the contemporary poets both in england and in other countries. but my attention was especially fixed on those of italy, from the birth to the death of shakespeare; that being the country in which the fine arts had been most sedulously, and hitherto most successfully cultivated. abstracted from the degrees and peculiarities of individual genius, the properties common to the good writers of each period seem to establish one striking point of difference between the poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that of the present age. the remark may perhaps be extended to the sister art of painting. at least the latter will serve to illustrate the former. in the present age the poet--(i would wish to be understood as speaking generally, and without allusion to individual names)--seems to propose to himself as his main object, and as that which is the most characteristic of his art, new and striking images; with incidents that interest the affections or excite the curiosity. both his characters and his descriptions he renders, as much as possible, specific and individual, even to a degree of portraiture. in his diction and metre, on the other hand, he is comparatively careless. the measure is either constructed on no previous system, and acknowledges no justifying principle but that of the writer's convenience; or else some mechanical movement is adopted, of which one couplet or stanza is so far an adequate specimen, as that the occasional differences appear evidently to arise from accident, or the qualities of the language itself, not from meditation and an intelligent purpose. and the language from pope's translation of homer, to darwin's temple of nature [ ], may, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions, be too faithfully characterized, as claiming to be poetical for no better reason, than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose. though alas! even our prose writings, nay even the style of our more set discourses, strive to be in the fashion, and trick themselves out in the soiled and over-worn finery of the meretricious muse. it is true that of late a great improvement in this respect is observable in our most popular writers. but it is equally true, that this recurrence to plain sense and genuine mother english is far from being general; and that the composition of our novels, magazines, public harangues, and the like is commonly as trivial in thought, and yet enigmatic in expression, as if echo and sphinx had laid their heads together to construct it. nay, even of those who have most rescued themselves from this contagion, i should plead inwardly guilty to the charge of duplicity or cowardice, if i withheld my conviction, that few have guarded the purity of their native tongue with that jealous care, which the sublime dante in his tract de la volgare eloquenza, declares to be the first duty of a poet. for language is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests. animadverte, says hobbes, quam sit ab improprietate verborum pronum hominihus prolabi in errores circa ipsas res! sat [vero], says sennertus, in hac vitae brevitate et naturae obscuritate, rerum est, quibus cognoscendis tempus impendatur, ut [confusis et multivotis] sermonibus intelligendis illud consumere opus non sit. [eheu! quantas strages paravere verba nubila, quae tot dicunt ut nihil dicunt;--nubes potius, e quibus et in rebus politicis et in ecclesia turbines et tonitrua erumpunt!] et proinde recte dictum putamus a platone in gorgia: os an ta onomata eidei, eisetai kai ta pragmata: et ab epicteto, archae paideuseos hae ton onomaton episkepsis: et prudentissime galenus scribit, hae ton onomaton chraesis tarachtheisa kai taen ton pragmaton epitarattei gnosin. egregie vero j. c. scaliger, in lib. i. de plantis: est primum, inquit, sapientis officium, bene sentire, ut sibi vivat: proximum, bene loqui, ut patriae vivat. something analogous to the materials and structure of modern poetry i seem to have noticed--(but here i beg to be understood as speaking with the utmost diffidence)--in our common landscape painters. their foregrounds and intermediate distances are comparatively unattractive: while the main interest of the landscape is thrown into the background, where mountains and torrents and castles forbid the eye to proceed, and nothing tempts it to trace its way back again. but in the works of the great italian and flemish masters, the front and middle objects of the landscape are the most obvious and determinate, the interest gradually dies away in the background, and the charm and peculiar worth of the picture consists, not so much in the specific objects which it conveys to the understanding in a visual language formed by the substitution of figures for words, as in the beauty and harmony of the colours, lines, and expression, with which the objects are represented. hence novelty of subject was rather avoided than sought for. superior excellence in the manner of treating the same subjects was the trial and test of the artist's merit. not otherwise is it with the more polished poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially those of italy. the imagery is almost always general: sun, moon, flowers, breezes, murmuring streams, warbling songsters, delicious shades, lovely damsels cruel as fair, nymphs, naiads, and goddesses, are the materials which are common to all, and which each shaped and arranged according to his judgment or fancy, little solicitous to add or to particularize. if we make an honourable exception in favour of some english poets, the thoughts too are as little novel as the images; and the fable of their narrative poems, for the most part drawn from mythology, or sources of equal notoriety, derive their chief attractions from the manner of treating them; from impassioned flow, or picturesque arrangement. in opposition to the present age, and perhaps in as faulty an extreme, they placed the essence of poetry in the art. the excellence, at which they aimed, consisted in the exquisite polish of the diction, combined with perfect simplicity. this their prime object they attained by the avoidance of every word, which a gentleman would not use in dignified conversation, and of every word and phrase, which none but a learned man would use; by the studied position of words and phrases, so that not only each part should be melodious in itself, but contribute to the harmony of the whole, each note referring and conducting to the melody of all the foregoing and following words of the same period or stanza; and lastly with equal labour, the greater because unbetrayed, by the variation and various harmonies of their metrical movement. their measures, however, were not indebted for their variety to the introduction of new metres, such as have been attempted of late in the alonzo and imogen, and others borrowed from the german, having in their very mechanism a specific overpowering tune, to which the generous reader humours his voice and emphasis, with more indulgence to the author than attention to the meaning or quantity of the words; but which, to an ear familiar with the numerous sounds of the greek and roman poets, has an effect not unlike that of galloping over a paved road in a german stage-waggon without springs. on the contrary, the elder bards both of italy and england produced a far greater as well as more charming variety by countless modifications, and subtle balances of sound in the common metres of their country. a lasting and enviable reputation awaits that man of genius, who should attempt and realize a union;--who should recall the high finish, the appropriateness, the facility, the delicate proportion, and above all, the perfusive and omnipresent grace, which have preserved, as in a shrine of precious amber, the sparrow of catullus, the swallow, the grasshopper, and all the other little loves of anacreon; and which, with bright, though diminished glories, revisited the youth and early manhood of christian europe, in the vales of [ ] arno, and the groves of isis and of cam; and who with these should combine the keener interest, deeper pathos, manlier reflection, and the fresher and more various imagery, which give a value and a name that will not pass away to the poets who have done honour to our own times, and to those of our immediate predecessors. chapter xvii examination of the tenets peculiar to mr. wordsworth--rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially unfavourable to the formation of a human diction--the best parts of language the product of philosophers, not of clowns or shepherds--poetry essentially ideal and generic--the language of milton as much the language of real life, yea, incomparably more so than that of the cottager. as far then as mr. wordsworth in his preface contended, and most ably contended, for a reformation in our poetic diction, as far as he has evinced the truth of passion, and the dramatic propriety of those figures and metaphors in the original poets, which, stripped of their justifying reasons, and converted into mere artifices of connection or ornament, constitute the characteristic falsity in the poetic style of the moderns; and as far as he has, with equal acuteness and clearness, pointed out the process by which this change was effected, and the resemblances between that state into which the reader's mind is thrown by the pleasurable confusion of thought from an unaccustomed train of words and images; and that state which is induced by the natural language of impassioned feeling; he undertook a useful task, and deserves all praise, both for the attempt and for the execution. the provocations to this remonstrance in behalf of truth and nature were still of perpetual recurrence before and after the publication of this preface. i cannot likewise but add, that the comparison of such poems of merit, as have been given to the public within the last ten or twelve years, with the majority of those produced previously to the appearance of that preface, leave no doubt on my mind, that mr. wordsworth is fully justified in believing his efforts to have been by no means ineffectual. not only in the verses of those who have professed their admiration of his genius, but even of those who have distinguished themselves by hostility to his theory, and depreciation of his writings, are the impressions of his principles plainly visible. it is possible, that with these principles others may have been blended, which are not equally evident; and some which are unsteady and subvertible from the narrowness or imperfection of their basis. but it is more than possible, that these errors of defect or exaggeration, by kindling and feeding the controversy, may have conduced not only to the wider propagation of the accompanying truths, but that, by their frequent presentation to the mind in an excited state, they may have won for them a more permanent and practical result. a man will borrow a part from his opponent the more easily, if he feels himself justified in continuing to reject a part. while there remain important points in which he can still feel himself in the right, in which he still finds firm footing for continued resistance, he will gradually adopt those opinions, which were the least remote from his own convictions, as not less congruous with his own theory than with that which he reprobates. in like manner with a kind of instinctive prudence, he will abandon by little and little his weakest posts, till at length he seems to forget that they had ever belonged to him, or affects to consider them at most as accidental and "petty annexments," the removal of which leaves the citadel unhurt and unendangered. my own differences from certain supposed parts of mr. wordsworth's theory ground themselves on the assumption, that his words had been rightly interpreted, as purporting that the proper diction for poetry in general consists altogether in a language taken, with due exceptions, from the mouths of men in real life, a language which actually constitutes the natural conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings. my objection is, first, that in any sense this rule is applicable only to certain classes of poetry; secondly, that even to these classes it is not applicable, except in such a sense, as hath never by any one (as far as i know or have read,) been denied or doubted; and lastly, that as far as, and in that degree in which it is practicable, it is yet as a rule useless, if not injurious, and therefore either need not, or ought not to be practised. the poet informs his reader, that he had generally chosen low and rustic life; but not as low and rustic, or in order to repeat that pleasure of doubtful moral effect, which persons of elevated rank and of superior refinement oftentimes derive from a happy imitation of the rude unpolished manners and discourse of their inferiors. for the pleasure so derived may be traced to three exciting causes. the first is the naturalness, in fact, of the things represented. the second is the apparent naturalness of the representation, as raised and qualified by an imperceptible infusion of the author's own knowledge and talent, which infusion does, indeed, constitute it an imitation as distinguished from a mere copy. the third cause may be found in the reader's conscious feeling of his superiority awakened by the contrast presented to him; even as for the same purpose the kings and great barons of yore retained, sometimes actual clowns and fools, but more frequently shrewd and witty fellows in that character. these, however, were not mr. wordsworth's objects. he chose low and rustic life, "because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and consequently may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and from the necessary character of rural occupations are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." now it is clear to me, that in the most interesting of the poems, in which the author is more or less dramatic, as the brothers, michael, ruth, the mad mother, and others, the persons introduced are by no means taken from low or rustic life in the common acceptation of those words! and it is not less clear, that the sentiments and language, as far as they can be conceived to have been really transferred from the minds and conversation of such persons, are attributable to causes and circumstances not necessarily connected with "their occupations and abode." the thoughts, feelings, language, and manners of the shepherd- farmers in the vales of cumberland and westmoreland, as far as they are actually adopted in those poems, may be accounted for from causes, which will and do produce the same results in every state of life, whether in town or country. as the two principal i rank that independence, which raises a man above servitude, or daily toil for the profit of others, yet not above the necessity of industry and a frugal simplicity of domestic life; and the accompanying unambitious, but solid and religious, education, which has rendered few books familiar, but the bible, and the liturgy or hymn book. to this latter cause, indeed, which is so far accidental, that it is the blessing of particular countries and a particular age, not the product of particular places or employments, the poet owes the show of probability, that his personages might really feel, think, and talk with any tolerable resemblance to his representation. it is an excellent remark of dr. henry more's, that "a man of confined education, but of good parts, by constant reading of the bible will naturally form a more winning and commanding rhetoric than those that are learned: the intermixture of tongues and of artificial phrases debasing their style." it is, moreover, to be considered that to the formation of healthy feelings, and a reflecting mind, negations involve impediments not less formidable than sophistication and vicious intermixture. i am convinced, that for the human soul to prosper in rustic life a certain vantage-ground is prerequisite. it is not every man that is likely to be improved by a country life or by country labours. education, or original sensibility, or both, must pre-exist, if the changes, forms, and incidents of nature are to prove a sufficient stimulant. and where these are not sufficient, the mind contracts and hardens by want of stimulants: and the man becomes selfish, sensual, gross, and hard- hearted. let the management of the poor laws in liverpool, manchester, or bristol be compared with the ordinary dispensation of the poor rates in agricultural villages, where the farmers are the overseers and guardians of the poor. if my own experience have not been particularly unfortunate, as well as that of the many respectable country clergymen with whom i have conversed on the subject, the result would engender more than scepticism concerning the desirable influences of low and rustic life in and for itself. whatever may be concluded on the other side, from the stronger local attachments and enterprising spirit of the swiss, and other mountaineers, applies to a particular mode of pastoral life, under forms of property that permit and beget manners truly republican, not to rustic life in general, or to the absence of artificial cultivation. on the contrary the mountaineers, whose manners have been so often eulogized, are in general better educated and greater readers than men of equal rank elsewhere. but where this is not the case, as among the peasantry of north wales, the ancient mountains, with all their terrors and all their glories, are pictures to the blind, and music to the deaf. i should not have entered so much into detail upon this passage, but here seems to be the point, to which all the lines of difference converge as to their source and centre;--i mean, as far as, and in whatever respect, my poetic creed does differ from the doctrines promulgated in this preface. i adopt with full faith, the principle of aristotle, that poetry, as poetry, is essentially ideal, that it avoids and excludes all accident; that its apparent individualities of rank, character, or occupation must be representative of a class; and that the persons of poetry must be clothed with generic attributes, with the common attributes of the class: not with such as one gifted individual might possibly possess, but such as from his situation it is most probable before-hand that he would possess. if my premises are right and my deductions legitimate, it follows that there can be no poetic medium between the swains of theocritus and those of an imaginary golden age. the characters of the vicar and the shepherd-mariner in the poem of the brothers, and that of the shepherd of green-head ghyll in the michael, have all the verisimilitude and representative quality, that the purposes of poetry can require. they are persons of a known and abiding class, and their manners and sentiments the natural product of circumstances common to the class. take michael for instance: an old man stout of heart, and strong of limb. his bodily frame had been from youth to age of an unusual strength: his mind was keen, intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs, and in his shepherd's calling he was prompt and watchful more than ordinary men. hence he had learned the meaning of all winds, of blasts of every tone; and oftentimes when others heeded not, he heard the south make subterraneous music, like the noise of bagpipers on distant highland hills. the shepherd, at such warning, of his flock bethought him, and he to himself would say, `the winds are now devising work for me!' and truly, at all times, the storm, that drives the traveller to a shelter, summoned him up to the mountains: he had been alone amid the heart of many thousand mists, that came to him and left him on the heights. so lived he, until his eightieth year was past. and grossly that man errs, who should suppose that the green valleys, and the streams and rocks, were things indifferent to the shepherd's thoughts. fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed the common air; the hills, which he so oft had climbed with vigorous steps; which had impressed so many incidents upon his mind of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear; which, like a book, preserved the memory of the dumb animals, whom he had saved, had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts, so grateful in themselves, the certainty of honourable gain; these fields, these hills which were his living being, even more than his own blood--what could they less? had laid strong hold on his affections, were to him a pleasurable feeling of blind love, the pleasure which there is in life itself. on the other hand, in the poems which are pitched in a lower key, as the harry gill, and the idiot boy, the feelings are those of human nature in general; though the poet has judiciously laid the scene in the country, in order to place himself in the vicinity of interesting images, without the necessity of ascribing a sentimental perception of their beauty to the persons of his drama. in the idiot boy, indeed, the mother's character is not so much the real and native product of a "situation where the essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in which they can attain their maturity and speak a plainer and more emphatic language," as it is an impersonation of an instinct abandoned by judgment. hence the two following charges seem to me not wholly groundless: at least, they are the only plausible objections, which i have heard to that fine poem. the one is, that the author has not, in the poem itself, taken sufficient care to preclude from the reader's fancy the disgusting images of ordinary morbid idiocy, which yet it was by no means his intention to represent. he was even by the "burr, burr, burr," uncounteracted by any preceding description of the boy's beauty, assisted in recalling them. the other is, that the idiocy of the boy is so evenly balanced by the folly of the mother, as to present to the general reader rather a laughable burlesque on the blindness of anile dotage, than an analytic display of maternal affection in its ordinary workings. in the thorn, the poet himself acknowledges in a note the necessity of an introductory poem, in which he should have portrayed the character of the person from whom the words of the poem are supposed to proceed: a superstitious man moderately imaginative, of slow faculties and deep feelings, "a captain of a small trading vessel, for example, who, being past the middle age of life, had retired upon an annuity, or small independent income, to some village or country town of which he was not a native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live. such men having nothing to do become credulous and talkative from indolence." but in a poem, still more in a lyric poem--and the nurse in romeo and juliet alone prevents me from extending the remark even to dramatic poetry, if indeed even the nurse can be deemed altogether a case in point--it is not possible to imitate truly a dull and garrulous discourser, without repeating the effects of dullness and garrulity. however this may be, i dare assert, that the parts--(and these form the far larger portion of the whole)--which might as well or still better have proceeded from the poet's own imagination, and have been spoken in his own character, are those which have given, and which will continue to give, universal delight; and that the passages exclusively appropriate to the supposed narrator, such as the last couplet of the third stanza [ ]; the seven last lines of the tenth [ ]; and the five following stanzas, with the exception of the four admirable lines at the commencement of the fourteenth, are felt by many unprejudiced and unsophisticated hearts, as sudden and unpleasant sinkings from the height to which the poet had previously lifted them, and to which he again re-elevates both himself and his reader. if then i am compelled to doubt the theory, by which the choice of characters was to be directed, not only a priori, from grounds of reason, but both from the few instances in which the poet himself need be supposed to have been governed by it, and from the comparative inferiority of those instances; still more must i hesitate in my assent to the sentence which immediately follows the former citation; and which i can neither admit as particular fact, nor as general rule. "the language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the action of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions." to this i reply; that a rustic's language, purified from all provincialism and grossness, and so far reconstructed as to be made consistent with the rules of grammar--(which are in essence no other than the laws of universal logic, applied to psychological materials)--will not differ from the language of any other man of common sense, however learned or refined he may be, except as far as the notions, which the rustic has to convey, are fewer and more indiscriminate. this will become still clearer, if we add the consideration--(equally important though less obvious)--that the rustic, from the more imperfect development of his faculties, and from the lower state of their cultivation, aims almost solely to convey insulated facts, either those of his scanty experience or his traditional belief; while the educated man chiefly seeks to discover and express those connections of things, or those relative bearings of fact to fact, from which some more or less general law is deducible. for facts are valuable to a wise man, chiefly as they lead to the discovery of the indwelling law, which is the true being of things, the sole solution of their modes of existence, and in the knowledge of which consists our dignity and our power. as little can i agree with the assertion, that from the objects with which the rustic hourly communicates the best part of language is formed. for first, if to communicate with an object implies such an acquaintance with it, as renders it capable of being discriminately reflected on, the distinct knowledge of an uneducated rustic would furnish a very scanty vocabulary. the few things and modes of action requisite for his bodily conveniences would alone be individualized; while all the rest of nature would be expressed by a small number of confused general terms. secondly, i deny that the words and combinations of words derived from the objects, with which the rustic is familiar, whether with distinct or confused knowledge, can be justly said to form the best part of language. it is more than probable, that many classes of the brute creation possess discriminating sounds, by which they can convey to each other notices of such objects as concern their food, shelter, or safety. yet we hesitate to call the aggregate of such sounds a language, otherwise than metaphorically. the best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself. it is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to internal acts, to processes and results of imagination, the greater part of which have no place in the consciousness of uneducated man; though in civilized society, by imitation and passive remembrance of what they hear from their religious instructors and other superiors, the most uneducated share in the harvest which they neither sowed, nor reaped. if the history of the phrases in hourly currency among our peasants were traced, a person not previously aware of the fact would be surprised at finding so large a number, which three or four centuries ago were the exclusive property of the universities and the schools; and, at the commencement of the reformation, had been transferred from the school to the pulpit, and thus gradually passed into common life. the extreme difficulty, and often the impossibility, of finding words for the simplest moral and intellectual processes of the languages of uncivilized tribes has proved perhaps the weightiest obstacle to the progress of our most zealous and adroit missionaries. yet these tribes are surrounded by the same nature as our peasants are; but in still more impressive forms; and they are, moreover, obliged to particularize many more of them. when, therefore, mr. wordsworth adds, "accordingly, such a language"--(meaning, as before, the language of rustic life purified from provincialism)--"arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art in proportion as they indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression;" it may be answered, that the language, which he has in view, can be attributed to rustics with no greater right, than the style of hooker or bacon to tom brown or sir roger l'estrange. doubtless, if what is peculiar to each were omitted in each, the result must needs be the same. further, that the poet, who uses an illogical diction, or a style fitted to excite only the low and changeable pleasure of wonder by means of groundless novelty, substitutes a language of folly and vanity, not for that of the rustic, but for that of good sense and natural feeling. here let me be permitted to remind the reader, that the positions, which i controvert, are contained in the sentences--"a selection of the real language of men;"--"the language of these men" (that is, men in low and rustic life) "has been adopted; i have proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men." "between the language of prose and that of metrical composition, there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference:" it is against these exclusively that my opposition is directed. i object, in the very first instance, to an equivocation in the use of the word "real." every man's language varies, according to the extent of his knowledge, the activity of his faculties, and the depth or quickness of his feelings. every man's language has, first, its individualities; secondly, the common properties of the class to which he belongs; and thirdly, words and phrases of universal use. the language of hooker, bacon, bishop taylor, and burke differs from the common language of the learned class only by the superior number and novelty of the thoughts and relations which they had to convey. the language of algernon sidney differs not at all from that, which every well-educated gentleman would wish to write, and (with due allowances for the undeliberateness, and less connected train, of thinking natural and proper to conversation) such as he would wish to talk. neither one nor the other differ half as much from the general language of cultivated society, as the language of mr. wordsworth's homeliest composition differs from that of a common peasant. for "real" therefore, we must substitute ordinary, or lingua communis. and this, we have proved, is no more to be found in the phraseology of low and rustic life than in that of any other class. omit the peculiarities of each and the result of course must be common to all. and assuredly the omissions and changes to be made in the language of rustics, before it could be transferred to any species of poem, except the drama or other professed imitation, are at least as numerous and weighty, as would be required in adapting to the same purpose the ordinary language of tradesmen and manufacturers. not to mention, that the language so highly extolled by mr. wordsworth varies in every county, nay in every village, according to the accidental character of the clergyman, the existence or non-existence of schools; or even, perhaps, as the exciteman, publican, and barber happen to be, or not to be, zealous politicians, and readers of the weekly newspaper pro bono publico. anterior to cultivation the lingua communis of every country, as dante has well observed, exists every where in parts, and no where as a whole. neither is the case rendered at all more tenable by the addition of the words, "in a state of excitement." for the nature of a man's words, where he is strongly affected by joy, grief, or anger, must necessarily depend on the number and quality of the general truths, conceptions and images, and of the words expressing them, with which his mind had been previously stored. for the property of passion is not to create; but to set in increased activity. at least, whatever new connections of thoughts or images, or--(which is equally, if not more than equally, the appropriate effect of strong excitement)--whatever generalizations of truth or experience the heat of passion may produce; yet the terms of their conveyance must have pre-existed in his former conversations, and are only collected and crowded together by the unusual stimulation. it is indeed very possible to adopt in a poem the unmeaning repetitions, habitual phrases, and other blank counters, which an unfurnished or confused understanding interposes at short intervals, in order to keep hold of his subject, which is still slipping from him, and to give him time for recollection; or, in mere aid of vacancy, as in the scanty companies of a country stage the same player pops backwards and forwards, in order to prevent the appearance of empty spaces, in the procession of macbeth, or henry viii. but what assistance to the poet, or ornament to the poem, these can supply, i am at a loss to conjecture. nothing assuredly can differ either in origin or in mode more widely from the apparent tautologies of intense and turbulent feeling, in which the passion is greater and of longer endurance than to be exhausted or satisfied by a single representation of the image or incident exciting it. such repetitions i admit to be a beauty of the highest kind; as illustrated by mr. wordsworth himself from the song of deborah. at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead. judges v. . chapter xviii language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially different from that of prose--origin and elements of metre--its necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby imposed on the metrical writer in the choice of his diction. i conclude, therefore, that the attempt is impracticable; and that, were it not impracticable, it would still be useless. for the very power of making the selection implies the previous possession of the language selected. or where can the poet have lived? and by what rules could he direct his choice, which would not have enabled him to select and arrange his words by the light of his own judgment? we do not adopt the language of a class by the mere adoption of such words exclusively, as that class would use, or at least understand; but likewise by following the order, in which the words of such men are wont to succeed each other. now this order, in the intercourse of uneducated men, is distinguished from the diction of their superiors in knowledge and power, by the greater disjunction and separation in the component parts of that, whatever it be, which they wish to communicate. there is a want of that prospectiveness of mind, that surview, which enables a man to foresee the whole of what he is to convey, appertaining to any one point; and by this means so to subordinate and arrange the different parts according to their relative importance, as to convey it at once, and as an organized whole. now i will take the first stanza, on which i have chanced to open, in the lyrical ballads. it is one the most simple and the least peculiar in its language. "in distant countries have i been, and yet i have not often seen a healthy man, a man full grown, weep in the public roads, alone. but such a one, on english ground, and in the broad highway, i met; along the broad highway he came, his cheeks with tears were wet sturdy he seemed, though he was sad; and in his arms a lamb he had." the words here are doubtless such as are current in all ranks of life; and of course not less so in the hamlet and cottage than in the shop, manufactory, college, or palace. but is this the order, in which the rustic would have placed the words? i am grievously deceived, if the following less compact mode of commencing the same tale be not a far more faithful copy. "i have been in a many parts, far and near, and i don't know that i ever saw before a man crying by himself in the public road; a grown man i mean, that was neither sick nor hurt," etc., etc. but when i turn to the following stanza in the thorn: "at all times of the day and night this wretched woman thither goes; and she is known to every star, and every wind that blows and there, beside the thorn, she sits, when the blue day-light's in the skies, and when the whirlwind's on the hill, or frosty air is keen and still, and to herself she cries, oh misery! oh misery! oh woe is me! oh misery!" and compare this with the language of ordinary men; or with that which i can conceive at all likely to proceed, in real life, from such a narrator, as is supposed in the note to the poem; compare it either in the succession of the images or of the sentences; i am reminded of the sublime prayer and hymn of praise, which milton, in opposition to an established liturgy, presents as a fair specimen of common extemporary devotion, and such as we might expect to hear from every self-inspired minister of a conventicle! and i reflect with delight, how little a mere theory, though of his own workmanship, interferes with the processes of genuine imagination in a man of true poetic genius, who possesses, as mr. wordsworth, if ever man did, most assuredly does possess, "the vision and the faculty divine." one point then alone remains, but that the most important; its examination having been, indeed, my chief inducement for the preceding inquisition. "there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition." such is mr. wordsworth's assertion. now prose itself, at least in all argumentative and consecutive works, differs, and ought to differ, from the language of conversation; even as [ ] reading ought to differ from talking. unless therefore the difference denied be that of the mere words, as materials common to all styles of writing, and not of the style itself in the universally admitted sense of the term, it might be naturally presumed that there must exist a still greater between the ordonnance of poetic composition and that of prose, than is expected to distinguish prose from ordinary conversation. there are not, indeed, examples wanting in the history of literature, of apparent paradoxes that have summoned the public wonder as new and startling truths, but which, on examination, have shrunk into tame and harmless truisms; as the eyes of a cat, seen in the dark, have been mistaken for flames of fire. but mr. wordsworth is among the last men, to whom a delusion of this kind would be attributed by anyone, who had enjoyed the slightest opportunity of understanding his mind and character. where an objection has been anticipated by such an author as natural, his answer to it must needs be interpreted in some sense which either is, or has been, or is capable of being controverted. my object then must be to discover some other meaning for the term "essential difference" in this place, exclusive of the indistinction and community of the words themselves. for whether there ought to exist a class of words in the english, in any degree resembling the poetic dialect of the greek and italian, is a question of very subordinate importance. the number of such words would be small indeed, in our language; and even in the italian and greek, they consist not so much of different words, as of slight differences in the forms of declining and conjugating the same words; forms, doubtless, which having been, at some period more or less remote, the common grammatic flexions of some tribe or province, had been accidentally appropriated to poetry by the general admiration of certain master intellects, the first established lights of inspiration, to whom that dialect happened to be native. essence, in its primary signification, means the principle of individuation, the inmost principle of the possibility of any thing, as that particular thing. it is equivalent to the idea of a thing, whenever we use the word, idea, with philosophic precision. existence, on the other hand, is distinguished from essence, by the superinduction of reality. thus we speak of the essence, and essential properties of a circle; but we do not therefore assert, that any thing, which really exists, is mathematically circular. thus too, without any tautology we contend for the existence of the supreme being; that is, for a reality correspondent to the idea. there is, next, a secondary use of the word essence, in which it signifies the point or ground of contra-distinction between two modifications of the same substance or subject. thus we should be allowed to say, that the style of architecture of westminster abbey is essentially different from that of st. paul, even though both had been built with blocks cut into the same form, and from the same quarry. only in this latter sense of the term must it have been denied by mr. wordsworth (for in this sense alone is it affirmed by the general opinion) that the language of poetry (that is the formal construction, or architecture, of the words and phrases) is essentially different from that of prose. now the burden of the proof lies with the oppugner, not with the supporters of the common belief. mr. wordsworth, in consequence, assigns as the proof of his position, "that not only the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but likewise that some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose, when prose is well written. the truth of this assertion might be demonstrated by innumerable passages from almost all the poetical writings, even of milton himself." he then quotes gray's sonnet-- "in vain to me the smiling mornings shine, and reddening phoebus lifts his golden fire; the birds in vain their amorous descant join, or cheerful fields resume their green attire. these ears, alas! for other notes repine; _a different object do these eyes require; my lonely anguish melts no heart but mine; and in my breast the imperfect joys expire._ yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer, and new-born pleasure brings to happier men; the fields to all their wonted tribute bear; to warm their little loves the birds complain: _i fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, and weep the more, because i weep in vain."_ and adds the following remark:--"it will easily be perceived, that the only part of this sonnet which is of any value, is the lines printed in italics; it is equally obvious, that, except in the rhyme, and in the use of the single word `fruitless' for fruitlessly, which is so far a defect, the language of these lines does in no respect differ from that of prose." an idealist defending his system by the fact, that when asleep we often believe ourselves awake, was well answered by his plain neighbour, "ah, but when awake do we ever believe ourselves asleep?" things identical must be convertible. the preceding passage seems to rest on a similar sophism. for the question is not, whether there may not occur in prose an order of words, which would be equally proper in a poem; nor whether there are not beautiful lines and sentences of frequent occurrence in good poems, which would be equally becoming as well as beautiful in good prose; for neither the one nor the other has ever been either denied or doubted by any one. the true question must be, whether there are not modes of expression, a construction, and an order of sentences, which are in their fit and natural place in a serious prose composition, but would be disproportionate and heterogeneous in metrical poetry; and, vice versa, whether in the language of a serious poem there may not be an arrangement both of words and sentences, and a use and selection of (what are called) figures of speech, both as to their kind, their frequency, and their occasions, which on a subject of equal weight would be vicious and alien in correct and manly prose. i contend, that in both cases this unfitness of each for the place of the other frequently will and ought to exist. and first from the origin of metre. this i would trace to the balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion. it might be easily explained likewise in what manner this salutary antagonism is assisted by the very state, which it counteracts; and how this balance of antagonists became organized into metre (in the usual acceptation of that term), by a supervening act of the will and judgment, consciously and for the foreseen purpose of pleasure. assuming these principles, as the data of our argument, we deduce from them two legitimate conditions, which the critic is entitled to expect in every metrical work. first, that, as the elements of metre owe their existence to a state of increased excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural language of excitement. secondly, that as these elements are formed into metre artificially, by a voluntary act, with the design and for the purpose of blending delight with emotion, so the traces of present volition should throughout the metrical language be proportionately discernible. now these two conditions must be reconciled and co- present. there must be not only a partnership, but a union; an interpenetration of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and of voluntary purpose. again, this union can be manifested only in a frequency of forms and figures of speech, (originally the offspring of passion, but now the adopted children of power), greater than would be desired or endured, where the emotion is not voluntarily encouraged and kept up for the sake of that pleasure, which such emotion, so tempered and mastered by the will, is found capable of communicating. it not only dictates, but of itself tends to produce a more frequent employment of picturesque and vivifying language, than would be natural in any other case, in which there did not exist, as there does in the present, a previous and well understood, though tacit, compact between the poet and his reader, that the latter is entitled to expect, and the former bound to supply this species and degree of pleasurable excitement. we may in some measure apply to this union the answer of polixenes, in the winter's tale, to perdita's neglect of the streaked gilliflowers, because she had heard it said, "there is an art, which, in their piedness, shares with great creating nature. pol. say there be; yet nature is made better by no mean, but nature makes that mean; so, o'er that art, which, you say, adds to nature, is an art, that nature makes. you see, sweet maid, we marry a gentler scion to the wildest stock; and make conceive a bark of baser kind by bud of nobler race. this is an art, which does mend nature,--change it rather; but the art itself is nature." secondly, i argue from the effects of metre. as far as metre acts in and for itself, it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention. this effect it produces by the continued excitement of surprise, and by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight indeed to be at any one moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate influence. as a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation, they act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed. where, therefore, correspondent food and appropriate matter are not provided for the attention and feelings thus roused there must needs be a disappointment felt; like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair-case, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four. the discussion on the powers of metre in the preface is highly ingenious and touches at all points on truth. but i cannot find any statement of its powers considered abstractly and separately. on the contrary mr. wordsworth seems always to estimate metre by the powers, which it exerts during, (and, as i think, in consequence of) its combination with other elements of poetry. thus the previous difficulty is left unanswered, what the elements are, with which it must be combined, in order to produce its own effects to any pleasurable purpose. double and tri-syllable rhymes, indeed, form a lower species of wit, and, attended to exclusively for their own sake, may become a source of momentary amusement; as in poor smart's distich to the welsh squire who had promised him a hare: "tell me, thou son of great cadwallader! hast sent the hare? or hast thou swallow'd her?" but for any poetic purposes, metre resembles, (if the aptness of the simile may excuse its meanness), yeast, worthless or disagreeable by itself, but giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is proportionally combined. the reference to the children in the wood by no means satisfies my judgment. we all willingly throw ourselves back for awhile into the feelings of our childhood. this ballad, therefore, we read under such recollections of our own childish feelings, as would equally endear to us poems, which mr. wordsworth himself would regard as faulty in the opposite extreme of gaudy and technical ornament. before the invention of printing, and in a still greater degree, before the introduction of writing, metre, especially alliterative metre, (whether alliterative at the beginning of the words, as in pierce plouman, or at the end, as in rhymes) possessed an independent value as assisting the recollection, and consequently the preservation, of any series of truths or incidents. but i am not convinced by the collation of facts, that the children in the wood owes either its preservation, or its popularity, to its metrical form. mr. marshal's repository affords a number of tales in prose inferior in pathos and general merit, some of as old a date, and many as widely popular. tom hickathrift, jack the giant-killer, goody two-shoes, and little red riding-hood are formidable rivals. and that they have continued in prose, cannot be fairly explained by the assumption, that the comparative meanness of their thoughts and images precluded even the humblest forms of metre. the scene of goody two-shoes in the church is perfectly susceptible of metrical narration; and, among the thaumata thaumastotata even of the present age, i do not recollect a more astonishing image than that of the "whole rookery, that flew out of the giant's beard," scared by the tremendous voice, with which this monster answered the challenge of the heroic tom hickathrift! if from these we turn to compositions universally, and independently of all early associations, beloved and admired; would the maria, the monk, or the poor man's ass of sterne, be read with more delight, or have a better chance of immortality, had they without any change in the diction been composed in rhyme, than in their present state? if i am not grossly mistaken, the general reply would be in the negative. nay, i will confess, that, in mr. wordsworth's own volumes, the anecdote for fathers, simon lee, alice fell, beggars, and the sailor's mother, notwithstanding the beauties which are to be found in each of them where the poet interposes the music of his own thoughts, would have been more delightful to me in prose, told and managed, as by mr. wordsworth they would have been, in a moral essay or pedestrian tour. metre in itself is simply a stimulant of the attention, and therefore excites the question: why is the attention to be thus stimulated? now the question cannot be answered by the pleasure of the metre itself; for this we have shown to be conditional, and dependent on the appropriateness of the thoughts and expressions, to which the metrical form is superadded. neither can i conceive any other answer that can be rationally given, short of this: i write in metre, because i am about to use a language different from that of prose. besides, where the language is not such, how interesting soever the reflections are, that are capable of being drawn by a philosophic mind from the thoughts or incidents of the poem, the metre itself must often become feeble. take the last three stanzas of the sailor's mother, for instance. if i could for a moment abstract from the effect produced on the author's feelings, as a man, by the incident at the time of its real occurrence, i would dare appeal to his own judgment, whether in the metre itself he found a sufficient reason for their being written metrically? and, thus continuing, she said, "i had a son, who many a day sailed on the seas; but he is dead; in denmark he was cast away; and i have travelled far as hull to see what clothes he might have left, or other property. the bird and cage they both were his 'twas my son's bird; and neat and trim he kept it: many voyages this singing-bird hath gone with him; when last he sailed he left the bird behind; as it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind. he to a fellow-lodger's care had left it, to be watched and fed, till he came back again; and there i found it when my son was dead; and now, god help me for my little wit! i trail it with me, sir! he took so much delight in it." if disproportioning the emphasis we read these stanzas so as to make the rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely produce an equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in finding rhymes at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. i would further ask whether, but for that visionary state, into which the figure of the woman and the susceptibility of his own genius had placed the poet's imagination,--(a state, which spreads its influence and colouring over all, that co-exists with the exciting cause, and in which "the simplest, and the most familiar things gain a strange power of spreading awe around them,") [ ] i would ask the poet whether he would not have felt an abrupt downfall in these verses from the preceding stanza? "the ancient spirit is not dead; old times, thought i, are breathing there; proud was i that my country bred such strength, a dignity so fair: she begged an alms, like one in poor estate; i looked at her again, nor did my pride abate." it must not be omitted, and is besides worthy of notice, that those stanzas furnish the only fair instance that i have been able to discover in all mr. wordsworth's writings, of an actual adoption, or true imitation, of the real and very language of low and rustic life, freed from provincialisms. thirdly, i deduce the position from all the causes elsewhere assigned, which render metre the proper form of poetry, and poetry imperfect and defective without metre. metre, therefore, having been connected with poetry most often and by a peculiar fitness, whatever else is combined with metre must, though it be not itself essentially poetic, have nevertheless some property in common with poetry, as an intermedium of affinity, a sort, (if i may dare borrow a well-known phrase from technical chemistry), of mordaunt between it and the super-added metre. now poetry, mr. wordsworth truly affirms, does always imply passion: which word must be here understood in its most general sense, as an excited state of the feelings and faculties. and as every passion has its proper pulse, so will it likewise have its characteristic modes of expression. but where there exists that degree of genius and talent which entitles a writer to aim at the honours of a poet, the very act of poetic composition itself is, and is allowed to imply and to produce, an unusual state of excitement, which of course justifies and demands a correspondent difference of language, as truly, though not perhaps in as marked a degree, as the excitement of love, fear, rage, or jealousy. the vividness of the descriptions or declamations in donne or dryden, is as much and as often derived from the force and fervour of the describer, as from the reflections, forms or incidents, which constitute their subject and materials. the wheels take fire from the mere rapidity of their motion. to what extent, and under what modifications, this may be admitted to act, i shall attempt to define in an after remark on mr. wordsworth's reply to this objection, or rather on his objection to this reply, as already anticipated in his preface. fourthly, and as intimately connected with this, if not the same argument in a more general form, i adduce the high spiritual instinct of the human being impelling us to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and thus establishing the principle that all the parts of an organized whole must be assimilated to the more important and essential parts. this and the preceding arguments may be strengthened by the reflection, that the composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the same throughout the radically different, or of the different throughout a base radically the same. lastly, i appeal to the practice of the best poets, of all countries and in all ages, as authorizing the opinion, (deduced from all the foregoing,) that in every import of the word essential, which would not here involve a mere truism, there may be, is, and ought to be an essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical composition. in mr. wordsworth's criticism of gray's sonnet, the reader's sympathy with his praise or blame of the different parts is taken for granted rather perhaps too easily. he has not, at least, attempted to win or compel it by argumentative analysis. in my conception at least, the lines rejected as of no value do, with the exception of the two first, differ as much and as little from the language of common life, as those which he has printed in italics as possessing genuine excellence. of the five lines thus honourably distinguished, two of them differ from prose even more widely, than the lines which either precede or follow, in the position of the words. "a different object do these eyes require; my lonely anguish melts no heart but mine; and in my breast the imperfect joys expire." but were it otherwise, what would this prove, but a truth, of which no man ever doubted?--videlicet, that there are sentences, which would be equally in their place both in verse and prose. assuredly it does not prove the point, which alone requires proof; namely, that there are not passages, which would suit the one and not suit the other. the first line of this sonnet is distinguished from the ordinary language of men by the epithet to morning. for we will set aside, at present, the consideration, that the particular word "smiling" is hackneyed, and, as it involves a sort of personification, not quite congruous with the common and material attribute of "shining." and, doubtless, this adjunction of epithets for the purpose of additional description, where no particular attention is demanded for the quality of the thing, would be noticed as giving a poetic cast to a man's conversation. should the sportsman exclaim, "come boys! the rosy morning calls you up:" he will be supposed to have some song in his head. but no one suspects this, when he says, "a wet morning shall not confine us to our beds." this then is either a defect in poetry, or it is not. whoever should decide in the affirmative, i would request him to re-peruse any one poem, of any confessedly great poet from homer to milton, or from aeschylus to shakespeare; and to strike out, (in thought i mean), every instance of this kind. if the number of these fancied erasures did not startle him; or if he continued to deem the work improved by their total omission; he must advance reasons of no ordinary strength and evidence, reasons grounded in the essence of human nature. otherwise, i should not hesitate to consider him as a man not so much proof against all authority, as dead to it. the second line, "and reddening phoebus lifts his golden fire;--" has indeed almost as many faults as words. but then it is a bad line, not because the language is distinct from that of prose; but because it conveys incongruous images; because it confounds the cause and the effect; the real thing with the personified representative of the thing; in short, because it differs from the language of good sense! that the "phoebus" is hackneyed, and a school-boy image, is an accidental fault, dependent on the age in which the author wrote, and not deduced from the nature of the thing. that it is part of an exploded mythology, is an objection more deeply grounded. yet when the torch of ancient learning was re-kindled, so cheering were its beams, that our eldest poets, cut off by christianity from all accredited machinery, and deprived of all acknowledged guardians and symbols of the great objects of nature, were naturally induced to adopt, as a poetic language, those fabulous personages, those forms of the [ ]supernatural in nature, which had given them such dear delight in the poems of their great masters. nay, even at this day what scholar of genial taste will not so far sympathize with them, as to read with pleasure in petrarch, chaucer, or spenser, what he would perhaps condemn as puerile in a modern poet? i remember no poet, whose writings would safelier stand the test of mr. wordsworth's theory, than spenser. yet will mr. wordsworth say, that the style of the following stanza is either undistinguished from prose, and the language of ordinary life? or that it is vicious, and that the stanzas are blots in the faery queen? "by this the northern wagoner had set his sevenfold teme behind the stedfast starre, that was in ocean waves yet never wet, but firme is fixt and sendeth light from farre to all that in the wild deep wandering arre and chearfull chaunticlere with his note shrill had warned once that phoebus' fiery carre in hast was climbing up the easterne hill, full envious that night so long his roome did fill." "at last the golden orientall gate of greatest heaven gan to open fayre, and phoebus fresh, as brydegrome to his mate, came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre, and hurl'd his glist'ring beams through gloomy ayre: which when the wakeful elfe perceived, streightway he started up, and did him selfe prepayre in sun-bright armes and battailous array; for with that pagan proud he combat will that day." on the contrary to how many passages, both in hymn books and in blank verse poems, could i, (were it not invidious), direct the reader's attention, the style of which is most unpoetic, because, and only because, it is the style of prose? he will not suppose me capable of having in my mind such verses, as "i put my hat upon my head and walk'd into the strand; and there i met another man, whose hat was in his hand." to such specimens it would indeed be a fair and full reply, that these lines are not bad, because they are unpoetic; but because they are empty of all sense and feeling; and that it were an idle attempt to prove that "an ape is not a newton, when it is self-evident that he is not a man." but the sense shall be good and weighty, the language correct and dignified, the subject interesting and treated with feeling; and yet the style shall, notwithstanding all these merits, be justly blamable as prosaic, and solely because the words and the order of the words would find their appropriate place in prose, but are not suitable to metrical composition. the civil wars of daniel is an instructive, and even interesting work; but take the following stanzas, (and from the hundred instances which abound i might probably have selected others far more striking): "and to the end we may with better ease discern the true discourse, vouchsafe to shew what were the times foregoing near to these, that these we may with better profit know. tell how the world fell into this disease; and how so great distemperature did grow; so shall we see with what degrees it came; how things at full do soon wax out of frame." "ten kings had from the norman conqu'ror reign'd with intermix'd and variable fate, when england to her greatest height attain'd of power, dominion, glory, wealth, and state; after it had with much ado sustain'd the violence of princes, with debate for titles and the often mutinies of nobles for their ancient liberties." "for first, the norman, conqu'ring all by might, by might was forc'd to keep what he had got; mixing our customs and the form of right with foreign constitutions, he had brought; mast'ring the mighty, humbling the poorer wight, by all severest means that could be wrought; and, making the succession doubtful, rent his new-got state, and left it turbulent." will it be contended on the one side, that these lines are mean and senseless? or on the other, that they are not prosaic, and for that reason unpoetic? this poet's well-merited epithet is that of the "well-languaged daniel;" but likewise, and by the consent of his contemporaries no less than of all succeeding critics, "the prosaic daniel." yet those, who thus designate this wise and amiable writer from the frequent incorrespondency of his diction to his metre in the majority of his compositions, not only deem them valuable and interesting on other accounts; but willingly admit, that there are to be found throughout his poems, and especially in his epistles and in his hymen's triumph, many and exquisite specimens of that style which, as the neutral ground of prose and verse, is common to both. a fine and almost faultless extract, eminent as for other beauties, so for its perfection in this species of diction, may be seen in lamb's dramatic specimens, a work of various interest from the nature of the selections themselves, (all from the plays of shakespeare's contemporaries),--and deriving a high additional value from the notes, which are full of just and original criticism, expressed with all the freshness of originality. among the possible effects of practical adherence to a theory, that aims to identify the style of prose and verse,--(if it does not indeed claim for the latter a yet nearer resemblance to the average style of men in the viva voce intercourse of real life)--we might anticipate the following as not the least likely to occur. it will happen, as i have indeed before observed, that the metre itself, the sole acknowledged difference, will occasionally become metre to the eye only. the existence of prosaisms, and that they detract from the merit of a poem, must at length be conceded, when a number of successive lines can be rendered, even to the most delicate ear, unrecognizable as verse, or as having even been intended for verse, by simply transcribing them as prose; when if the poem be in blank verse, this can be effected without any alteration, or at most by merely restoring one or two words to their proper places, from which they have been transplanted [ ] for no assignable cause or reason but that of the author's convenience; but if it be in rhyme, by the mere exchange of the final word of each line for some other of the same meaning, equally appropriate, dignified and euphonic. the answer or objection in the preface to the anticipated remark "that metre paves the way to other distinctions," is contained in the following words. "the distinction of rhyme and metre is regular and uniform, and not, like that produced by (what is usually called) poetic diction, arbitrary, and subject to infinite caprices, upon which no calculation whatever can be made. in the one case the reader is utterly at the mercy of the poet respecting what imagery or diction he may choose to connect with the passion." but is this a poet, of whom a poet is speaking? no surely! rather of a fool or madman: or at best of a vain or ignorant phantast! and might not brains so wild and so deficient make just the same havoc with rhymes and metres, as they are supposed to effect with modes and figures of speech? how is the reader at the mercy of such men? if he continue to read their nonsense, is it not his own fault? the ultimate end of criticism is much more to establish the principles of writing, than to furnish rules how to pass judgment on what has been written by others; if indeed it were possible that the two could be separated. but if it be asked, by what principles the poet is to regulate his own style, if he do not adhere closely to the sort and order of words which he hears in the market, wake, high-road, or plough-field? i reply; by principles, the ignorance or neglect of which would convict him of being no poet, but a silly or presumptuous usurper of the name. by the principles of grammar, logic, psychology. in one word by such a knowledge of the facts, material and spiritual, that most appertain to his art, as, if it have been governed and applied by good sense, and rendered instinctive by habit, becomes the representative and reward of our past conscious reasonings, insights, and conclusions, and acquires the name of taste. by what rule that does not leave the reader at the poet's mercy, and the poet at his own, is the latter to distinguish between the language suitable to suppressed, and the language, which is characteristic of indulged, anger? or between that of rage and that of jealousy? is it obtained by wandering about in search of angry or jealous people in uncultivated society, in order to copy their words? or not far rather by the power of imagination proceeding upon the all in each of human nature? by meditation, rather than by observation? and by the latter in consequence only of the former? as eyes, for which the former has pre-determined their field of vision, and to which, as to its organ, it communicates a microscopic power? there is not, i firmly believe, a man now living, who has, from his own inward experience, a clearer intuition, than mr. wordsworth himself, that the last mentioned are the true sources of genial discrimination. through the same process and by the same creative agency will the poet distinguish the degree and kind of the excitement produced by the very act of poetic composition. as intuitively will he know, what differences of style it at once inspires and justifies; what intermixture of conscious volition is natural to that state; and in what instances such figures and colours of speech degenerate into mere creatures of an arbitrary purpose, cold technical artifices of ornament or connection. for, even as truth is its own light and evidence, discovering at once itself and falsehood, so is it the prerogative of poetic genius to distinguish by parental instinct its proper offspring from the changelings, which the gnomes of vanity or the fairies of fashion may have laid in its cradle or called by its names. could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art. it would be morphosis, not poiaesis. the rules of the imagination are themselves the very powers of growth and production. the words to which they are reducible, present only the outlines and external appearance of the fruit. a deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colours may be elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths. we find no difficulty in admitting as excellent, and the legitimate language of poetic fervour self-impassioned, donne's apostrophe to the sun in the second stanza of his progress of the soul. "thee, eye of heaven! this great soul envies not; by thy male force is all, we have, begot. in the first east thou now beginn'st to shine, suck'st early balm and island spices there, and wilt anon in thy loose-rein'd career at tagus, po, seine, thames, and danow dine, and see at night this western world of mine: yet hast thou not more nations seen than she, who before thee one day began to be, and, thy frail light being quench'd, shall long, long outlive thee." or the next stanza but one: "great destiny, the commissary of god, that hast mark'd out a path and period for every thing! who, where we offspring took, our ways and ends see'st at one instant: thou knot of all causes! thou, whose changeless brow ne'er smiles nor frowns! o! vouchsafe thou to look, and shew my story in thy eternal book," etc. as little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of unaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudopoesy, or the startling hysteric of weakness over-exerting itself, which bursts on the unprepared reader in sundry odes and apostrophes to abstract terms. such are the odes to jealousy, to hope, to oblivion, and the like, in dodsley's collection and the magazines of that day, which seldom fail to remind me of an oxford copy of verses on the two suttons, commencing with "inoculation, heavenly maid! descend!" it is not to be denied that men of undoubted talents, and even poets of true, though not of first-rate, genius, have from a mistaken theory deluded both themselves and others in the opposite extreme. i once read to a company of sensible and well-educated women the introductory period of cowley's preface to his "pindaric odes," written in imitation of the style and manner of the odes of pindar. "if," (says cowley), "a man should undertake to translate pindar, word for word, it would be thought that one madman had translated another as may appear, when he, that understands not the original, reads the verbal traduction of him into latin prose, than which nothing seems more raving." i then proceeded with his own free version of the second olympic, composed for the charitable purpose of rationalizing the theban eagle. "queen of all harmonious things, dancing words and speaking strings, what god, what hero, wilt thou sing? what happy man to equal glories bring? begin, begin thy noble choice, and let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice. pisa does to jove belong, jove and pisa claim thy song. the fair first-fruits of war, th' olympic games, alcides, offer'd up to jove; alcides, too, thy strings may move, but, oh! what man to join with these can worthy prove? join theron boldly to their sacred names; theron the next honour claims; theron to no man gives place, is first in pisa's and in virtue's race; theron there, and he alone, ev'n his own swift forefathers has outgone." one of the company exclaimed, with the full assent of the rest, that if the original were madder than this, it must be incurably mad. i then translated the ode from the greek, and as nearly as possible, word for word; and the impression was, that in the general movement of the periods, in the form of the connections and transitions, and in the sober majesty of lofty sense, it appeared to them to approach more nearly, than any other poetry they had heard, to the style of our bible, in the prophetic books. the first strophe will suffice as a specimen: "ye harp-controlling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps! what god? what hero? what man shall we celebrate? truly pisa indeed is of jove, but the olympiad (or the olympic games) did hercules establish, the first-fruits of the spoils of war. but theron for the four-horsed car, that bore victory to him, it behoves us now to voice aloud: the just, the hospitable, the bulwark of agrigentum, of renowned fathers the flower, even him who preserves his native city erect and safe." but are such rhetorical caprices condemnable only for their deviation from the language of real life? and are they by no other means to be precluded, but by the rejection of all distinctions between prose and verse, save that of metre? surely good sense, and a moderate insight into the constitution of the human mind, would be amply sufficient to prove, that such language and such combinations are the native product neither of the fancy nor of the imagination; that their operation consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxta-position and apparent reconciliation of widely different or incompatible things. as when, for instance, the hills are made to reflect the image of a voice. surely, no unusual taste is requisite to see clearly, that this compulsory juxtaposition is not produced by the presentation of impressive or delightful forms to the inward vision, nor by any sympathy with the modifying powers with which the genius of the poet had united and inspirited all the objects of his thought; that it is therefore a species of wit, a pure work of the will, and implies a leisure and self-possession both of thought and of feeling, incompatible with the steady fervour of a mind possessed and filled with the grandeur of its subject. to sum up the whole in one sentence. when a poem, or a part of a poem, shall be adduced, which is evidently vicious in the figures and centexture of its style, yet for the condemnation of which no reason can be assigned, except that it differs from the style in which men actually converse, then, and not till then, can i hold this theory to be either plausible, or practicable, or capable of furnishing either rule, guidance, or precaution, that might not, more easily and more safely, as well as more naturally, have been deduced in the author's own mind from considerations of grammar, logic, and the truth and nature of things, confirmed by the authority of works, whose fame is not of one country nor of one age. chapter xix continuation--concerning the real object which, it is probable, mr. wordsworth had before him in his critical preface--elucidation and application of this. it might appear from some passages in the former part of mr. wordsworth's preface, that he meant to confine his theory of style, and the necessity of a close accordance with the actual language of men, to those particular subjects from low and rustic life, which by way of experiment he had purposed to naturalize as a new species in our english poetry. but from the train of argument that follows; from the reference to milton; and from the spirit of his critique on gray's sonnet; those sentences appear to have been rather courtesies of modesty, than actual limitations of his system. yet so groundless does this system appear on a close examination; and so strange and overwhelming [ ] in its consequences, that i cannot, and i do not, believe that the poet did ever himself adopt it in the unqualified sense, in which his expressions have been understood by others, and which, indeed, according to all the common laws of interpretation they seem to bear. what then did he mean? i apprehend, that in the clear perception, not unaccompanied with disgust or contempt, of the gaudy affectations of a style which passed current with too many for poetic diction, (though in truth it had as little pretensions to poetry, as to logic or common sense,) he narrowed his view for the time; and feeling a justifiable preference for the language of nature and of good sense, even in its humblest and least ornamented forms, he suffered himself to express, in terms at once too large and too exclusive, his predilection for a style the most remote possible from the false and showy splendour which he wished to explode. it is possible, that this predilection, at first merely comparative, deviated for a time into direct partiality. but the real object which he had in view, was, i doubt not, a species of excellence which had been long before most happily characterized by the judicious and amiable garve, whose works are so justly beloved and esteemed by the germans, in his remarks on gellert, from which the following is literally translated. "the talent, that is required in order to make, excellent verses, is perhaps greater than the philosopher is ready to admit, or would find it in his power to acquire: the talent to seek only the apt expression of the thought, and yet to find at the same time with it the rhyme and the metre. gellert possessed this happy gift, if ever any one of our poets possessed it; and nothing perhaps contributed more to the great and universal impression which his fables made on their first publication, or conduces more to their continued popularity. it was a strange and curious phaenomenon, and such as in germany had been previously unheard of, to read verses in which everything was expressed just as one would wish to talk, and yet all dignified, attractive, and interesting; and all at the same time perfectly correct as to the measure of the syllables and the rhyme. it is certain, that poetry when it has attained this excellence makes a far greater impression than prose. so much so indeed, that even the gratification which the very rhymes afford, becomes then no longer a contemptible or trifling gratification." [ ] however novel this phaenomenon may have been in germany at the time of gellert, it is by no means new, nor yet of recent existence in our language. spite of the licentiousness with which spenser occasionally compels the orthography of his words into a subservience to his rhymes, the whole fairy queen is an almost continued instance of this beauty. waller's song go, lovely rose, is doubtless familiar to most of my readers; but if i had happened to have had by me the poems of cotton, more but far less deservedly celebrated as the author of the virgil travestied, i should have indulged myself, and i think have gratified many, who are not acquainted with his serious works, by selecting some admirable specimens of this style. there are not a few poems in that volume, replete with every excellence of thought, image, and passion, which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder muse; and yet so worded, that the reader sees no one reason either in the selection or the order of the words, why he might not have said the very same in an appropriate conversation, and cannot conceive how indeed he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise without loss or injury to his meaning. but in truth our language is, and from the first dawn of poetry ever has been, particularly rich in compositions distinguished by this excellence. the final e, which is now mute, in chaucer's age was either sounded or dropt indifferently. we ourselves still use either "beloved" or "belov'd" according as the rhyme, or measure, or the purpose of more or less solemnity may require. let the reader then only adopt the pronunciation of the poet and of the court, at which he lived, both with respect to the final e and to the accentuation of the last syllable; i would then venture to ask, what even in the colloquial language of elegant and unaffected women, (who are the peculiar mistresses of "pure english and undefiled,") what could we hear more natural, or seemingly more unstudied, than the following stanzas from chaucer's troilus and creseide. "and after this forth to the gate he wente, ther as creseide out rode a ful gode pass, and up and doun there made he many' a wente, and to himselfe ful oft he said, alas! fro hennis rode my blisse and my solas as woulde blisful god now for his joie, i might her sene agen come in to troie! and to the yondir hil i gan her bide, alas! and there i toke of her my leve and yond i saw her to her fathir ride; for sorow of whiche mine hert shall to-cleve; and hithir home i came whan it was eve, and here i dwel, out-cast from ally joie, and steal, til i maie sene her efte in troie. "and of himselfe imaginid he ofte to ben defaitid, pale and woxin lesse than he was wonte, and that men saidin softe, what may it be? who can the sothe gesse, why troilus hath al this hevinesse? and al this n' as but his melancolie, that he had of himselfe suche fantasie. anothir time imaginin he would that every wight, that past him by the wey, had of him routhe, and that thei saien should, i am right sory, troilus wol dey! and thus he drove a daie yet forth or twey, as ye have herde: suche life gan he to lede as he that stode betwixin hope and drede: for which him likid in his songis shewe th' encheson of his wo as he best might, and made a songe of words but a fewe, somwhat his woful herte for to light, and whan he was from every mann'is sight with softe voice he of his lady dere, that absent was, gan sing as ye may here: * * * * * * this song, when he thus songin had, ful bone he fil agen into his sighis olde and every night, as was his wonte to done; he stode the bright moone to beholde and all his sorowe to the moone he tolde, and said: i wis, whan thou art hornid newe, i shall be glad, if al the world be trewe!" another exquisite master of this species of style, where the scholar and the poet supplies the material, but the perfect well-bred gentleman the expressions and the arrangement, is george herbert. as from the nature of the subject, and the too frequent quaintness of the thoughts, his temple; or sacred poems and private ejaculations are comparatively but little known, i shall extract two poems. the first is a sonnet, equally admirable for the weight, number, and expression of the thoughts, and for the simple dignity of the language. unless, indeed, a fastidious taste should object to the latter half of the sixth line. the second is a poem of greater length, which i have chosen not only for the present purpose, but likewise as a striking example and illustration of an assertion hazarded in a former page of these sketches namely, that the characteristic fault of our elder poets is the reverse of that, which distinguishes too many of our more recent versifiers; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct and natural language; the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thoughts. the latter is a riddle of words; the former an enigma of thoughts. the one reminds me of an odd passage in drayton's ideas as other men, so i myself do muse, why in this sort i wrest invention so; and why these giddy metaphors i use, leaving the path the greater part do go; i will resolve you: i am lunatic! [ ] the other recalls a still odder passage in the synagogue: or the shadow of the temple, a connected series of poems in imitation of herbert's temple, and, in some editions, annexed to it. o how my mind is gravell'd! not a thought, that i can find, but's ravell'd all to nought! short ends of threds, and narrow shreds of lists, knots, snarled ruffs, loose broken tufts of twists, are my torn meditations ragged clothing, which, wound and woven, shape a suit for nothing: one while i think, and then i am in pain to think how to unthink that thought again. immediately after these burlesque passages i cannot proceed to the extracts promised, without changing the ludicrous tone of feeling by the interposition of the three following stanzas of herbert's. virtue. sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, the bridal of the earth and sky, the dew shall weep thy fall to-night; for thou must die. sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave bids the rash gazer wipe his eye thy root is ever in its grave, and thou must die. sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, a box, where sweets compacted lie my music shews, ye have your closes, and all must die. the bosom sin: a sonnet by george herbert. lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round, parents first season us; then schoolmasters deliver us to laws; they send us bound to rules of reason, holy messengers, pulpits and sundays, sorrow dogging sin, afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes, fine nets and stratagems to catch us in, bibles laid open, millions of surprises; blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness, the sound of glory ringing in our ears without, our shame; within, our consciences; angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears. yet all these fences and their whole array one cunning bosom-sin blows quite away. love unknown. dear friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad and in my faintings, i presume, your love will more comply than help. a lord i had, and have, of whom some grounds, which may improve, i hold for two lives, and both lives in me. to him i brought a dish of fruit one day, and in the middle placed my heart. but he (i sigh to say) look'd on a servant, who did know his eye, better than you know me, or (which is one) than i myself. the servant instantly, quitting the fruit, seiz'd on my heart alone, and threw it in a font, wherein did fall a stream of blood, which issued from the side of a great rock: i well remember all, and have good cause: there it was dipt and dyed, and wash'd, and wrung: the very wringing yet enforceth tears. "your heart was foul, i fear." indeed 'tis true. i did and do commit many a fault, more than my lease will bear; yet still ask'd pardon, and was not denied. but you shall hear. after my heart was well, and clean and fair, as i one eventide (i sigh to tell) walk'd by myself abroad, i saw a large and spacious furnace flaming, and thereon a boiling caldron, round about whose verge was in great letters set affliction. the greatness shew'd the owner. so i went to fetch a sacrifice out of my fold, thinking with that, which i did thus present, to warm his love, which, i did fear, grew cold. but as my heart did tender it, the man who was to take it from me, slipt his hand, and threw my heart into the scalding pan; my heart that brought it (do you understand?) the offerer's heart. "your heart was hard, i fear." indeed 'tis true. i found a callous matter began to spread and to expatiate there: but with a richer drug than scalding water i bath'd it often, ev'n with holy blood, which at a board, while many drank bare wine, a friend did steal into my cup for good, ev'n taken inwardly, and most divine to supple hardnesses. but at the length out of the caldron getting, soon i fled unto my house, where to repair the strength which i had lost, i hasted to my bed: but when i thought to sleep out all these faults, (i sigh to speak) i found that some had stuff'd the bed with thoughts, i would say thorns. dear, could my heart not break, when with my pleasures ev'n my rest was gone? full well i understood who had been there: for i had given the key to none but one: it must be he. "your heart was dull, i fear." indeed a slack and sleepy state of mind did oft possess me; so that when i pray'd, though my lips went, my heart did stay behind. but all my scores were by another paid, who took my guilt upon him. "truly, friend, "for aught i hear, your master shews to you "more favour than you wot of. mark the end. "the font did only what was old renew "the caldron suppled what was grown too hard: "the thorns did quicken what was grown too dull: "all did but strive to mend what you had marr'd. "wherefore be cheer'd, and praise him to the full "each day, each hour, each moment of the week "who fain would have you be new, tender quick." chapter xx the former subject continued--the neutral style, or that common to prose and poetry, exemplified by specimens from chaucer, herbert, and others. i have no fear in declaring my conviction, that the excellence defined and exemplified in the preceding chapter is not the characteristic excellence of mr. wordsworth's style; because i can add with equal sincerity, that it is precluded by higher powers. the praise of uniform adherence to genuine, logical english is undoubtedly his; nay, laying the main emphasis on the word uniform, i will dare add that, of all contemporary poets, it is his alone. for, in a less absolute sense of the word, i should certainly include mr. bowies, lord byron, and, as to all his later writings, mr. southey, the exceptions in their works being so few and unimportant. but of the specific excellence described in the quotation from garve, i appear to find more, and more undoubted specimens in the works of others; for instance, among the minor poems of mr. thomas moore, and of our illustrious laureate. to me it will always remain a singular and noticeable fact; that a theory, which would establish this lingua communis, not only as the best, but as the only commendable style, should have proceeded from a poet, whose diction, next to that of shakespeare and milton, appears to me of all others the most individualized and characteristic. and let it be remembered too, that i am now interpreting the controverted passages of mr. wordsworth's critical preface by the purpose and object, which he may be supposed to have intended, rather than by the sense which the words themselves must convey, if they are taken without this allowance. a person of any taste, who had but studied three or four of shakespeare's principal plays, would without the name affixed scarcely fail to recognise as shakespeare's a quotation from any other play, though but of a few lines. a similar peculiarity, though in a less degree, attends mr. wordsworth's style, whenever he speaks in his own person; or whenever, though under a feigned name, it is clear that he himself is still speaking, as in the different dramatis personae of the recluse. even in the other poems, in which he purposes to be most dramatic, there are few in which it does not occasionally burst forth. the reader might often address the poet in his own words with reference to the persons introduced: "it seems, as i retrace the ballad line by line that but half of it is theirs, and the better half is thine." who, having been previously acquainted with any considerable portion of mr. wordsworth's publications, and having studied them with a full feeling of the author's genius, would not at once claim as wordsworthian the little poem on the rainbow? "the child is father of the man, etc." or in the lucy gray? "no mate, no comrade lucy knew; she dwelt on a wide moor; the sweetest thing that ever grew beside a human door." or in the idle shepherd-boys? "along the river's stony marge the sand-lark chants a joyous song; the thrush is busy in the wood, and carols loud and strong. a thousand lambs are on the rocks, all newly born! both earth and sky keep jubilee, and more than all, those boys with their green coronal; they never hear the cry, that plaintive cry! which up the hill comes from the depth of dungeon-ghyll." need i mention the exquisite description of the sea-loch in the blind highland boy. who but a poet tells a tale in such language to the little ones by the fire-side as-- "yet had he many a restless dream; both when he heard the eagle's scream, and when he heard the torrents roar, and heard the water beat the shore near where their cottage stood. beside a lake their cottage stood, not small like our's, a peaceful flood; but one of mighty size, and strange; that, rough or smooth, is full of change, and stirring in its bed. for to this lake, by night and day, the great sea-water finds its way through long, long windings of the hills, and drinks up all the pretty rills and rivers large and strong: then hurries back the road it came returns on errand still the same; this did it when the earth was new; and this for evermore will do, as long as earth shall last. and, with the coming of the tide, come boats and ships that sweetly ride, between the woods and lofty rocks; and to the shepherds with their flocks bring tales of distant lands." i might quote almost the whole of his ruth, but take the following stanzas: but, as you have before been told, this stripling, sportive, gay, and bold, and, with his dancing crest, so beautiful, through savage lands had roamed about with vagrant bands of indians in the west. the wind, the tempest roaring high, the tumult of a tropic sky, might well be dangerous food for him, a youth to whom was given so much of earth--so much of heaven, and such impetuous blood. whatever in those climes he found irregular in sight or sound did to his mind impart a kindred impulse, seemed allied to his own powers, and justified the workings of his heart. nor less, to feed voluptuous thought, the beauteous forms of nature wrought, fair trees and lovely flowers; the breezes their own languor lent; the stars had feelings, which they sent into those magic bowers. yet in his worst pursuits, i ween, that sometimes there did intervene pure hopes of high intent for passions linked to forms so fair and stately, needs must have their share of noble sentiment." but from mr. wordsworth's more elevated compositions, which already form three-fourths of his works; and will, i trust, constitute hereafter a still larger proportion;--from these, whether in rhyme or blank verse, it would be difficult and almost superfluous to select instances of a diction peculiarly his own, of a style which cannot be imitated without its being at once recognised, as originating in mr. wordsworth. it would not be easy to open on any one of his loftier strains, that does not contain examples of this; and more in proportion as the lines are more excellent, and most like the author. for those, who may happen to have been less familiar with his writings, i will give three specimens taken with little choice. the first from the lines on the boy of winander-mere,--who "blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, that they might answer him.--and they would shout across the watery vale, and shout again, with long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild of mirth and jocund din! and when it chanced, that pauses of deep silence mocked his skill, then sometimes in that silence, while he hung listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise has carried far into his heart the voice of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene [ ] would enter unawares into his mind with all its solemn imagery, its rocks, its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received into the bosom of the steady lake." the second shall be that noble imitation of drayton [ ] (if it was not rather a coincidence) in the lines to joanna. --"when i had gazed perhaps two minutes' space, joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld that ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud. the rock, like something starting from a sleep, took up the lady's voice, and laughed again! that ancient woman seated on helm-crag was ready with her cavern; hammar-scar and the tall steep of silver-how sent forth a noise of laughter; southern lougbrigg heard, and fairfield answered with a mountain tone. helvellyn far into the clear blue sky carried the lady's voice!--old skiddaw blew his speaking trumpet!--back out of the clouds from glaramara southward came the voice: and kirkstone tossed it from its misty head!" the third, which is in rhyme, i take from the song at the feast of brougham castle, upon the restoration of lord clifford, the shepherd, to the estates and honours of his ancestors. ------"now another day is come, fitter hope, and nobler doom; he hath thrown aside his crook, and hath buried deep his book; armour rusting in his halls on the blood of clifford calls,-- 'quell the scot,' exclaims the lance! bear me to the heart of france, is the longing of the shield-- tell thy name, thou trembling field!-- field of death, where'er thou be, groan thou with our victory! happy day, and mighty hour, when our shepherd, in his power, mailed and horsed, with lance and sword, to his ancestors restored, like a re-appearing star, like a glory from afar, first shall head the flock of war!" "alas! the fervent harper did not know, that for a tranquil soul the lay was framed, who, long compelled in humble walks to go, was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed. love had he found in huts where poor men lie; his daily teachers had been woods and rills, the silence that is in the starry sky, the sleep that is among the lonely hills." the words themselves in the foregoing extracts, are, no doubt, sufficiently common for the greater part.--but in what poem are they not so, if we except a few misadventurous attempts to translate the arts and sciences into verse? in the excursion the number of polysyllabic (or what the common people call, dictionary) words is more than usually great. and so must it needs be, in proportion to the number and variety of an author's conceptions, and his solicitude to express them with precision.--but are those words in those places commonly employed in real life to express the same thought or outward thing? are they the style used in the ordinary intercourse of spoken words? no! nor are the modes of connections; and still less the breaks and transitions. would any but a poet--at least could any one without being conscious that he had expressed himself with noticeable vivacity--have described a bird singing loud by, "the thrush is busy in the wood?"--or have spoken of boys with a string of club-moss round their rusty hats, as the boys "with their green coronal?"--or have translated a beautiful may-day into "both earth and sky keep jubilee!"--or have brought all the different marks and circumstances of a sealoch before the mind, as the actions of a living and acting power? or have represented the reflection of the sky in the water, as "that uncertain heaven received into the bosom of the steady lake?" even the grammatical construction is not unfrequently peculiar; as "the wind, the tempest roaring high, the tumult of a tropic sky, might well be dangerous food to him, a youth to whom was given, etc." there is a peculiarity in the frequent use of the asymartaeton (that is, the omission of the connective particle before the last of several words, or several sentences used grammatically as single words, all being in the same case and governing or governed by the same verb) and not less in the construction of words by apposition ("to him, a youth"). in short, were there excluded from mr. wordsworth's poetic compositions all, that a literal adherence to the theory of his preface would exclude, two thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry must be erased. for a far greater number of lines would be sacrificed than in any other recent poet; because the pleasure received from wordsworth's poems being less derived either from excitement of curiosity or the rapid flow of narration, the striking passages form a larger proportion of their value. i do not adduce it as a fair criterion of comparative excellence, nor do i even think it such; but merely as matter of fact. i affirm, that from no contemporary writer could so many lines be quoted, without reference to the poem in which they are found, for their own independent weight or beauty. from the sphere of my own experience i can bring to my recollection three persons of no every-day powers and acquirements, who had read the poems of others with more and more unallayed pleasure, and had thought more highly of their authors, as poets; who yet have confessed to me, that from no modern work had so many passages started up anew in their minds at different times, and as different occasions had awakened a meditative mood. chapter xxi remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals. long have i wished to see a fair and philosophical inquisition into the character of wordsworth, as a poet, on the evidence of his published works; and a positive, not a comparative, appreciation of their characteristic excellencies, deficiencies, and defects. i know no claim that the mere opinion of any individual can have to weigh down the opinion of the author himself; against the probability of whose parental partiality we ought to set that of his having thought longer and more deeply on the subject. but i should call that investigation fair and philosophical in which the critic announces and endeavours to establish the principles, which he holds for the foundation of poetry in general, with the specification of these in their application to the different classes of poetry. having thus prepared his canons of criticism for praise and condemnation, he would proceed to particularize the most striking passages to which he deems them applicable, faithfully noticing the frequent or infrequent recurrence of similar merits or defects, and as faithfully distinguishing what is characteristic from what is accidental, or a mere flagging of the wing. then if his premises be rational, his deductions legitimate, and his conclusions justly applied, the reader, and possibly the poet himself, may adopt his judgment in the light of judgment and in the independence of free-agency. if he has erred, he presents his errors in a definite place and tangible form, and holds the torch and guides the way to their detection. i most willingly admit, and estimate at a high value, the services which the edinburgh review, and others formed afterwards on the same plan, have rendered to society in the diffusion of knowledge. i think the commencement of the edinburgh review an important epoch in periodical criticism; and that it has a claim upon the gratitude of the literary republic, and indeed of the reading public at large, for having originated the scheme of reviewing those books only, which are susceptible and deserving of argumentative criticism. not less meritorious, and far more faithfully and in general far more ably executed, is their plan of supplying the vacant place of the trash or mediocrity, wisely left to sink into oblivion by its own weight, with original essays on the most interesting subjects of the time, religious, or political; in which the titles of the books or pamphlets prefixed furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisition. i do not arraign the keenness, or asperity of its damnatory style, in and for itself, as long as the author is addressed or treated as the mere impersonation of the work then under trial. i have no quarrel with them on this account, as long as no personal allusions are admitted, and no re-commitment (for new trial) of juvenile performances, that were published, perhaps forgotten, many years before the commencement of the review: since for the forcing back of such works to public notice no motives are easily assignable, but such as are furnished to the critic by his own personal malignity; or what is still worse, by a habit of malignity in the form of mere wantonness. "no private grudge they need, no personal spite the viva sectio is its own delight! all enmity, all envy, they disclaim, disinterested thieves of our good name: cool, sober murderers of their neighbour's fame!" s. t. c. every censure, every sarcasm respecting a publication which the critic, with the criticised work before him, can make good, is the critic's right. the writer is authorized to reply, but not to complain. neither can anyone prescribe to the critic, how soft or how hard; how friendly, or how bitter, shall be the phrases which he is to select for the expression of such reprehension or ridicule. the critic must know, what effect it is his object to produce; and with a view to this effect must he weigh his words. but as soon as the critic betrays, that he knows more of his author, than the author's publications could have told him; as soon as from this more intimate knowledge, elsewhere obtained, he avails himself of the slightest trait against the author; his censure instantly becomes personal injury, his sarcasms personal insults. he ceases to be a critic, and takes on him the most contemptible character to which a rational creature can be degraded, that of a gossip, backbiter, and pasquillant: but with this heavy aggravation, that he steals the unquiet, the deforming passions of the world into the museum; into the very place which, next to the chapel and oratory, should be our sanctuary, and secure place of refuge; offers abominations on the altar of the muses; and makes its sacred paling the very circle in which he conjures up the lying and profane spirit. this determination of unlicensed personality, and of permitted and legitimate censure, (which i owe in part to the illustrious lessing, himself a model of acute, spirited, sometimes stinging, but always argumentative and honourable, criticism) is beyond controversy the true one: and though i would not myself exercise all the rights of the latter, yet, let but the former be excluded, i submit myself to its exercise in the hands of others, without complaint and without resentment. let a communication be formed between any number of learned men in the various branches of science and literature; and whether the president and central committee be in london, or edinburgh, if only they previously lay aside their individuality, and pledge themselves inwardly, as well as ostensibly, to administer judgment according to a constitution and code of laws; and if by grounding this code on the two-fold basis of universal morals and philosophic reason, independent of all foreseen application to particular works and authors, they obtain the right to speak each as the representative of their body corporate; they shall have honour and good wishes from me, and i shall accord to them their fair dignities, though self-assumed, not less cheerfully than if i could inquire concerning them in the herald's office, or turn to them in the book of peerage. however loud may be the outcries for prevented or subverted reputation, however numerous and impatient the complaints of merciless severity and insupportable despotism, i shall neither feel, nor utter aught but to the defence and justification of the critical machine. should any literary quixote find himself provoked by its sounds and regular movements, i should admonish him with sancho panza, that it is no giant but a windmill; there it stands on its own place, and its own hillock, never goes out of its way to attack anyone, and to none and from none either gives or asks assistance. when the public press has poured in any part of its produce between its mill-stones, it grinds it off, one man's sack the same as another, and with whatever wind may happen to be then blowing. all the two-and-thirty winds are alike its friends. of the whole wide atmosphere it does not desire a single finger-breadth more than what is necessary for its sails to turn round in. but this space must be left free and unimpeded. gnats, beetles, wasps, butterflies, and the whole tribe of ephemerals and insignificants, may flit in and out and between; may hum, and buzz, and jar; may shrill their tiny pipes, and wind their puny horns, unchastised and unnoticed. but idlers and bravadoes of larger size and prouder show must beware, how they place themselves within its sweep. much less may they presume to lay hands on the sails, the strength of which is neither greater nor less than as the wind is, which drives them round. whomsoever the remorseless arm slings aloft, or whirls along with it in the air, he has himself alone to blame; though, when the same arm throws him from it, it will more often double than break the force of his fall. putting aside the too manifest and too frequent interference of national party, and even personal predilection or aversion; and reserving for deeper feelings those worse and more criminal intrusions into the sacredness of private life, which not seldom merit legal rather than literary chastisement, the two principal objects and occasions which i find for blame and regret in the conduct of the review in question are first, its unfaithfulness to its own announced and excellent plan, by subjecting to criticism works neither indecent nor immoral, yet of such trifling importance even in point of size and, according to the critic's own verdict, so devoid of all merit, as must excite in the most candid mind the suspicion, either that dislike or vindictive feelings were at work; or that there was a cold prudential pre-determination to increase the sale of the review by flattering the malignant passions of human nature. that i may not myself become subject to the charge, which i am bringing against others, by an accusation without proof, i refer to the article on dr. rennell's sermon in the very first number of the edinburgh review as an illustration of my meaning. if in looking through all the succeeding volumes the reader should find this a solitary instance, i must submit to that painful forfeiture of esteem, which awaits a groundless or exaggerated charge. the second point of objection belongs to this review only in common with all other works of periodical criticism: at least, it applies in common to the general system of all, whatever exception there may be in favour of particular articles. or if it attaches to the edinburgh review, and to its only corrival (the quarterly), with any peculiar force, this results from the superiority of talent, acquirement, and information which both have so undeniably displayed; and which doubtless deepens the regret though not the blame. i am referring to the substitution of assertion for argument; to the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts, not seldom unsupported even by a single quotation from the work condemned, which might at least have explained the critic's meaning, if it did not prove the justice of his sentence. even where this is not the case, the extracts are too often made without reference to any general grounds or rules from which the faultiness or inadmissibility of the qualities attributed may be deduced; and without any attempt to show, that the qualities are attributable to the passage extracted. i have met with such extracts from mr. wordsworth's poems, annexed to such assertions, as led me to imagine, that the reviewer, having written his critique before he had read the work, had then pricked with a pin for passages, wherewith to illustrate the various branches of his preconceived opinions. by what principle of rational choice can we suppose a critic to have been directed (at least in a christian country, and himself, we hope, a christian) who gives the following lines, portraying the fervour of solitary devotion excited by the magnificent display of the almighty's works, as a proof and example of an author's tendency to downright ravings, and absolute unintelligibility? "o then what soul was his, when on the tops of the high mountains he beheld the sun rise up, and bathe the world in light! he looked-- ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth, and ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay in gladness and deep joy. the clouds were touched, and in their silent faces did he read unutterable love. sound needed none, nor any voice of joy: his spirit drank the spectacle! sensation, soul, and form, all melted into him; they swallowed up his animal being; in them did he live, and by them did he live: they were his life." can it be expected, that either the author or his admirers, should be induced to pay any serious attention to decisions which prove nothing but the pitiable state of the critic's own taste and sensibility? on opening the review they see a favourite passage, of the force and truth of which they had an intuitive certainty in their own inward experience confirmed, if confirmation it could receive, by the sympathy of their most enlightened friends; some of whom perhaps, even in the world's opinion, hold a higher intellectual rank than the critic himself would presume to claim. and this very passage they find selected, as the characteristic effusion of a mind deserted by reason!--as furnishing evidence that the writer was raving, or he could not have thus strung words together without sense or purpose! no diversity of taste seems capable of explaining such a contrast in judgment. that i had over-rated the merit of a passage or poem, that i had erred concerning the degree of its excellence, i might be easily induced to believe or apprehend. but that lines, the sense of which i had analysed and found consonant with all the best convictions of my understanding; and the imagery and diction of which had collected round those convictions my noblest as well as my most delightful feelings; that i should admit such lines to be mere nonsense or lunacy, is too much for the most ingenious arguments to effect. but that such a revolution of taste should be brought about by a few broad assertions, seems little less than impossible. on the contrary, it would require an effort of charity not to dismiss the criticism with the aphorism of the wise man, in animam malevolam sapientia haud intrare potest. what then if this very critic should have cited a large number of single lines and even of long paragraphs, which he himself acknowledges to possess eminent and original beauty? what if he himself has owned, that beauties as great are scattered in abundance throughout the whole book? and yet, though under this impression, should have commenced his critique in vulgar exultation with a prophecy meant to secure its own fulfilment? with a "this won't do!" what? if after such acknowledgments extorted from his own judgment he should proceed from charge to charge of tameness and raving; flights and flatness; and at length, consigning the author to the house of incurables, should conclude with a strain of rudest contempt evidently grounded in the distempered state of his own moral associations? suppose too all this done without a single leading principle established or even announced, and without any one attempt at argumentative deduction, though the poet had presented a more than usual opportunity for it, by having previously made public his own principles of judgment in poetry, and supported them by a connected train of reasoning! the office and duty of the poet is to select the most dignified as well as "the gayest, happiest attitude of things." the reverse, for in all cases a reverse is possible, is the appropriate business of burlesque and travesty, a predominant taste for which has been always deemed a mark of a low and degraded mind. when i was at rome, among many other visits to the tomb of julius ii. i went thither once with a prussian artist, a man of genius and great vivacity of feeling. as we were gazing on michael angelo's moses, our conversation turned on the horns and beard of that stupendous statue; of the necessity of each to support the other; of the super-human effect of the former, and the necessity of the existence of both to give a harmony and integrity both to the image and the feeling excited by it. conceive them removed, and the statue would become un-natural, without being super-natural. we called to mind the horns of the rising sun, and i repeated the noble passage from taylor's holy dying. that horns were the emblem of power and sovereignty among the eastern nations, and are still retained as such in abyssinia; the achelous of the ancient greeks; and the probable ideas and feelings, that originally suggested the mixture of the human and the brute form in the figure, by which they realized the idea of their mysterious pan, as representing intelligence blended with a darker power, deeper, mightier, and more universal than the conscious intellect of man; than intelligence;--all these thoughts and recollections passed in procession before our minds. my companion who possessed more than his share of the hatred, which his countrymen bore to the french, had just observed to me, "a frenchman, sir! is the only animal in the human shape, that by no possibility can lift itself up to religion or poetry:" when, lo! two french officers of distinction and rank entered the church! "mark you," whispered the prussian, "the first thing which those scoundrels will notice--(for they will begin by instantly noticing the statue in parts, without one moment's pause of admiration impressed by the whole)--will be the horns and the beard. and the associations, which they will immediately connect with them will be those of a he-goat and a cuckold." never did man guess more luckily. had he inherited a portion of the great legislator's prophetic powers, whose statue we had been contemplating, he could scarcely have uttered words more coincident with the result: for even as he had said, so it came to pass. in the excursion the poet has introduced an old man, born in humble but not abject circumstances, who had enjoyed more than usual advantages of education, both from books and from the more awful discipline of nature. this person he represents, as having been driven by the restlessness of fervid feelings, and from a craving intellect to an itinerant life; and as having in consequence passed the larger portion of his time, from earliest manhood, in villages and hamlets from door to door, "a vagrant merchant bent beneath his load." now whether this be a character appropriate to a lofty didactick poem, is perhaps questionable. it presents a fair subject for controversy; and the question is to be determined by the congruity or incongruity of such a character with what shall be proved to be the essential constituents of poetry. but surely the critic who, passing by all the opportunities which such a mode of life would present to such a man; all the advantages of the liberty of nature, of solitude, and of solitary thought; all the varieties of places and seasons, through which his track had lain, with all the varying imagery they bring with them; and lastly, all the observations of men, "their manners, their enjoyments, and pursuits, their passions and their feelings=" which the memory of these yearly journeys must have given and recalled to such a mind--the critic, i say, who from the multitude of possible associations should pass by all these in order to fix his attention exclusively on the pin-papers, and stay-tapes, which might have been among the wares of his pack; this critic, in my opinion, cannot be thought to possess a much higher or much healthier state of moral feeling, than the frenchmen above recorded. chapter xxii the characteristic defects of wordsworth's poetry, with the principles from which the judgment, that they are defects, is deduced--their proportion to the beauties--for the greatest part characteristic of his theory only. if mr. wordsworth have set forth principles of poetry which his arguments are insufficient to support, let him and those who have adopted his sentiments be set right by the confutation of those arguments, and by the substitution of more philosophical principles. and still let the due credit be given to the portion and importance of the truths, which are blended with his theory; truths, the too exclusive attention to which had occasioned its errors, by tempting him to carry those truths beyond their proper limits. if his mistaken theory have at all influenced his poetic compositions, let the effects be pointed out, and the instances given. but let it likewise be shown, how far the influence has acted; whether diffusively, or only by starts; whether the number and importance of the poems and passages thus infected be great or trifling compared with the sound portion; and lastly, whether they are inwoven into the texture of his works, or are loose and separable. the result of such a trial would evince beyond a doubt, what it is high time to announce decisively and aloud, that the supposed characteristics of mr. wordsworth's poetry, whether admired or reprobated; whether they are simplicity or simpleness; faithful adherence to essential nature, or wilful selections from human nature of its meanest forms and under the least attractive associations; are as little the real characteristics of his poetry at large, as of his genius and the constitution of his mind. in a comparatively small number of poems he chose to try an experiment; and this experiment we will suppose to have failed. yet even in these poems it is impossible not to perceive that the natural tendency of the poet's mind is to great objects and elevated conceptions. the poem entitled fidelity is for the greater part written in language, as unraised and naked as any perhaps in the two volumes. yet take the following stanza and compare it with the preceding stanzas of the same poem. "there sometimes doth a leaping fish send through the tarn a lonely cheer; the crags repeat the raven's croak, in symphony austere; thither the rainbow comes--the cloud-- and mists that spread the flying shroud; and sun-beams; and the sounding blast, that, if it could, would hurry past; but that enormous barrier holds it fast." or compare the four last lines of the concluding stanza with the former half. "yes, proof was plain that, since the day on which the traveller thus had died, the dog had watched about the spot, or by his master's side: how nourish'd here through such long time he knows, who gave that love sublime,-- and gave that strength of feeling, great above all human estimate!" can any candid and intelligent mind hesitate in determining, which of these best represents the tendency and native character of the poet's genius? will he not decide that the one was written because the poet would so write, and the other because he could not so entirely repress the force and grandeur of his mind, but that he must in some part or other of every composition write otherwise? in short, that his only disease is the being out of his element; like the swan, that, having amused himself, for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river's bank, soon returns to his own majestic movements on its reflecting and sustaining surface. let it be observed that i am here supposing the imagined judge, to whom i appeal, to have already decided against the poet's theory, as far as it is different from the principles of the art, generally acknowledged. i cannot here enter into a detailed examination of mr. wordsworth's works; but i will attempt to give the main results of my own judgment, after an acquaintance of many years, and repeated perusals. and though, to appreciate the defects of a great mind it is necessary to understand previously its characteristic excellences, yet i have already expressed myself with sufficient fulness, to preclude most of the ill effects that might arise from my pursuing a contrary arrangement. i will therefore commence with what i deem the prominent defects of his poems hitherto published. the first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which i appear to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the style. under this name i refer to the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity--(at all events striking and original)--to a style, not only unimpassioned but undistinguished. he sinks too often and too abruptly to that style, which i should place in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species; first, that which is peculiar to poetry; second, that which is only proper in prose; and third, the neutral or common to both. there have been works, such as cowley's essay on cromwell, in which prose and verse are intermixed (not as in the consolation of boetius, or the argenis of barclay, by the insertion of poems supposed to have been spoken or composed on occasions previously related in prose, but) the poet passing from one to the other, as the nature of the thoughts or his own feelings dictated. yet this mode of composition does not satisfy a cultivated taste. there is something unpleasant in the being thus obliged to alternate states of feeling so dissimilar, and this too in a species of writing, the pleasure from which is in part derived from the preparation and previous expectation of the reader. a portion of that awkwardness is felt which hangs upon the introduction of songs in our modern comic operas; and to prevent which the judicious metastasio (as to whose exquisite taste there can be no hesitation, whatever doubts may be entertained as to his poetic genius) uniformly placed the aria at the end of the scene, at the same time that he almost always raises and impassions the style of the recitative immediately preceding. even in real life, the difference is great and evident between words used as the arbitrary marks of thought, our smooth market-coin of intercourse, with the image and superscription worn out by currency; and those which convey pictures either borrowed from one outward object to enliven and particularize some other; or used allegorically to body forth the inward state of the person speaking; or such as are at least the exponents of his peculiar turn and unusual extent of faculty. so much so indeed, that in the social circles of private life we often find a striking use of the latter put a stop to the general flow of conversation, and by the excitement arising from concentred attention produce a sort of damp and interruption for some minutes after. but in the perusal of works of literary art, we prepare ourselves for such language; and the business of the writer, like that of a painter whose subject requires unusual splendour and prominence, is so to raise the lower and neutral tints, that what in a different style would be the commanding colours, are here used as the means of that gentle degradation requisite in order to produce the effect of a whole. where this is not achieved in a poem, the metre merely reminds the reader of his claims in order to disappoint them; and where this defect occurs frequently, his feelings are alternately startled by anticlimax and hyperclimax. i refer the reader to the exquisite stanzas cited for another purpose from the blind highland boy; and then annex, as being in my opinion instances of this disharmony in style, the two following: "and one, the rarest, was a shell, which he, poor child, had studied well: the shell of a green turtle, thin and hollow;--you might sit therein, it was so wide, and deep." "our highland boy oft visited the house which held this prize; and, led by choice or chance, did thither come one day, when no one was at home, and found the door unbarred." or page , vol. i. "'tis gone forgotten, let me do my best. there was a smile or two-- i can remember them, i see the smiles worth all the world to me. dear baby! i must lay thee down: thou troublest me with strange alarms; smiles hast thou, sweet ones of thine own; i cannot keep thee in my arms; for they confound me: as it is, i have forgot those smiles of his!" or page , vol. i. "thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest and though little troubled with sloth drunken lark! thou would'st be loth to be such a traveller as i. happy, happy liver! _with a soul as strong as a mountain river pouring out praise to th' almighty giver,_ joy and jollity be with us both! hearing thee or else some other, as merry a brother i on the earth will go plodding on by myself cheerfully till the day is done." the incongruity, which i appear to find in this passage, is that of the two noble lines in italics with the preceding and following. so vol. ii. page . "close by a pond, upon the further side, he stood alone; a minute's space i guess, i watch'd him, he continuing motionless to the pool's further margin then i drew; he being all the while before me full in view." compare this with the repetition of the same image, the next stanza but two. "and, still as i drew near with gentle pace, beside the little pond or moorish flood motionless as a cloud the old man stood, that heareth not the loud winds when they call; and moveth altogether, if it move at all." or lastly, the second of the three following stanzas, compared both with the first and the third. "my former thoughts returned; the fear that kills; and hope that is unwilling to be fed; cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills; and mighty poets in their misery dead. but now, perplex'd by what the old man had said, my question eagerly did i renew, 'how is it that you live, and what is it you do?' "he with a smile did then his words repeat; and said, that gathering leeches far and wide he travell'd; stirring thus about his feet the waters of the ponds where they abide. `once i could meet with them on every side; 'but they have dwindled long by slow decay; 'yet still i persevere, and find them where i may.' while he was talking thus, the lonely place, the old man's shape, and speech, all troubled me in my mind's eye i seemed to see him pace about the weary moors continually, wandering about alone and silently." indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author. there is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it would not present a specimen. but it would be unjust not to repeat that this defect is only occasional. from a careful reperusal of the two volumes of poems, i doubt whether the objectionable passages would amount in the whole to one hundred lines; not the eighth part of the number of pages. in the excursion the feeling of incongruity is seldom excited by the diction of any passage considered in itself, but by the sudden superiority of some other passage forming the context. the second defect i can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the reader will pardon an uncouth and new-coined word. there is, i should say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. this may be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances, in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to establish the probability of a statement in real life, where nothing is taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry, where the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. to this actidentality i object, as contravening the essence of poetry, which aristotle pronounces to be spoudaiotaton kai philosophotaton genos, the most intense, weighty and philosophical product of human art; adding, as the reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. the following passage from davenant's prefatory letter to hobbes well expresses this truth. "when i considered the actions which i meant to describe; (those inferring the persons), i was again persuaded rather to choose those of a former age, than the present; and in a century so far removed, as might preserve me from their improper examinations, who know not the requisites of a poem, nor how much pleasure they lose, (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable), who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of an historian. for why should a poet doubt in story to mend the intrigues of fortune by more delightful conveyances of probable fictions, because austere historians have entered into bond to truth? an obligation, which were in poets as foolish and unnecessary, as is the bondage of false martyrs, who lie in chains for a mistaken opinion. but by this i would imply, that truth, narrative and past, is the idol of historians, (who worship a dead thing), and truth operative, and by effects continually alive, is the mistress of poets, who hath not her existence in matter, but in reason." for this minute accuracy in the painting of local imagery, the lines in the excursion, pp. , , and , may be taken, if not as a striking instance, yet as an illustration of my meaning. it must be some strong motive--(as, for instance, that the description was necessary to the intelligibility of the tale)--which could induce me to describe in a number of verses what a draughtsman could present to the eye with incomparably greater satisfaction by half a dozen strokes of his pencil, or the painter with as many touches of his brush. such descriptions too often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is determined to understand his author, a feeling of labour, not very dissimilar to that, with which he would construct a diagram, line by line, for a long geometrical proposition. it seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map out of its box. we first look at one part, and then at another, then join and dove-tail them; and when the successive acts of attention have been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of mind to behold it as a whole. the poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy; and i know no happier case to exemplify the distinction between these two faculties. master-pieces of the former mode of poetic painting abound in the writings of milton, for example: "the fig-tree; not that kind for fruit renown'd, "but such as at this day, to indians known, "in malabar or decan spreads her arms "branching so broad and long, that in the ground "the bended twigs take root, and daughters grow "about the mother tree, a pillar'd shade "high over-arch'd and echoing walks between; "there oft the indian herdsman, shunning heat, "shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds "at hoop-holes cut through thickest shade." this is creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flashed at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. but the poet must likewise understand and command what bacon calls the vestigia communia of the senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially as by a magical penny duplex, the excitement of vision by sound and the exponents of sound. thus, "the echoing walks between," may be almost said to reverse the fable in tradition of the head of memnon, in the egyptian statue. such may be deservedly entitled the creative words in the world of imagination. the second division respects an apparent minute adherence to matter- of-fact in character and incidents; a biographical attention to probability, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect. under this head i shall deliver, with no feigned diffidence, the results of my best reflection on the great point of controversy between mr. wordsworth and his objectors; namely, on the choice of his characters. i have already declared, and, i trust justified, my utter dissent from the mode of argument which his critics have hitherto employed. to their question, "why did you choose such a character, or a character from such a rank of life?"--the poet might in my opinion fairly retort: why with the conception of my character did you make wilful choice of mean or ludicrous associations not furnished by me, but supplied from your own sickly and fastidious feelings? how was it, indeed, probable, that such arguments could have any weight with an author, whose plan, whose guiding principle, and main object it was to attack and subdue that state of association, which leads us to place the chief value on those things on which man differs from man, and to forget or disregard the high dignities, which belong to human nature, the sense and the feeling, which may be, and ought to be, found in all ranks? the feelings with which, as christians, we contemplate a mixed congregation rising or kneeling before their common maker, mr. wordsworth would have us entertain at all times, as men, and as readers; and by the excitement of this lofty, yet prideless impartiality in poetry, he might hope to have encouraged its continuance in real life. the praise of good men be his! in real life, and, i trust, even in my imagination, i honour a virtuous and wise man, without reference to the presence or absence of artificial advantages. whether in the person of an armed baron, a laurelled bard, or of an old pedlar, or still older leech-gatherer, the same qualities of head and heart must claim the same reverence. and even in poetry i am not conscious, that i have ever suffered my feelings to be disturbed or offended by any thoughts or images, which the poet himself has not presented. but yet i object, nevertheless, and for the following reasons. first, because the object in view, as an immediate object, belongs to the moral philosopher, and would be pursued, not only more appropriately, but in my opinion with far greater probability of success, in sermons or moral essays, than in an elevated poem. it seems, indeed, to destroy the main fundamental distinction, not only between a poem and prose, but even between philosophy and works of fiction, inasmuch as it proposes truth for its immediate object, instead of pleasure. now till the blessed time shall come, when truth itself shall be pleasure, and both shall be so united, as to be distinguishable in words only, not in feeling, it will remain the poet's office to proceed upon that state of association, which actually exists as general; instead of attempting first to make it what it ought to be, and then to let the pleasure follow. but here is unfortunately a small hysteron-proteron. for the communication of pleasure is the introductory means by which alone the poet must expect to moralize his readers. secondly: though i were to admit, for a moment, this argument to be groundless: yet how is the moral effect to be produced, by merely attaching the name of some low profession to powers which are least likely, and to qualities which are assuredly not more likely, to be found in it? the poet, speaking in his own person, may at once delight and improve us by sentiments, which teach us the independence of goodness, of wisdom, and even of genius, on the favours of fortune. and having made a due reverence before the throne of antonine, he may bow with equal awe before epictetus among his fellow-slaves ------"and rejoice in the plain presence of his dignity." who is not at once delighted and improved, when the poet wordsworth himself exclaims, "oh! many are the poets that are sown by nature; men endowed with highest gifts the vision and the faculty divine, yet wanting the accomplishment of verse, nor having e'er, as life advanced, been led by circumstance to take unto the height the measure of themselves, these favoured beings, all but a scattered few, live out their time, husbanding that which they possess within, and go to the grave, unthought of. strongest minds are often those of whom the noisy world hears least." to use a colloquial phrase, such sentiments, in such language, do one's heart good; though i for my part, have not the fullest faith in the truth of the observation. on the contrary i believe the instances to be exceedingly rare; and should feel almost as strong an objection to introduce such a character in a poetic fiction, as a pair of black swans on a lake, in a fancy landscape. when i think how many, and how much better books than homer, or even than herodotus, pindar or aeschylus, could have read, are in the power of almost every man, in a country where almost every man is instructed to read and write; and how restless, how difficultly hidden, the powers of genius are; and yet find even in situations the most favourable, according to mr. wordsworth, for the formation of a pure and poetic language; in situations which ensure familiarity with the grandest objects of the imagination; but one burns, among the shepherds of scotland, and not a single poet of humble life among those of english lakes and mountains; i conclude, that poetic genius is not only a very delicate but a very rare plant. but be this as it may, the feelings with which, "i think of chatterton, the marvellous boy, the sleepless soul, that perished in his pride; of burns, who walk'd in glory and in joy behind his plough, upon the mountain-side"-- are widely different from those with which i should read a poem, where the author, having occasion for the character of a poet and a philosopher in the fable of his narration, had chosen to make him a chimney-sweeper; and then, in order to remove all doubts on the subject, had invented an account of his birth, parentage and education, with all the strange and fortunate accidents which had concurred in making him at once poet, philosopher, and sweep! nothing, but biography, can justify this. if it be admissible even in a novel, it must be one in the manner of de foe's, that were meant to pass for histories, not in the manner of fielding's: in the life of moll flanders, or colonel jack, not in a tom jones, or even a joseph andrews. much less then can it be legitimately introduced in a poem, the characters of which, amid the strongest individualization, must still remain representative. the precepts of horace, on this point, are grounded on the nature both of poetry and of the human mind. they are not more peremptory, than wise and prudent. for in the first place a deviation from them perplexes the reader's feelings, and all the circumstances which are feigned in order to make such accidents less improbable, divide and disquiet his faith, rather than aid and support it. spite of all attempts, the fiction will appear, and unfortunately not as fictitious but as false. the reader not only knows, that the sentiments and language are the poet's own, and his own too in his artificial character, as poet; but by the fruitless endeavours to make him think the contrary, he is not even suffered to forget it. the effect is similar to that produced by an epic poet, when the fable and the characters are derived from scripture history, as in the messiah of klopstock, or in cumberland's calvary; and not merely suggested by it as in the paradise lost of milton. that illusion, contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment, is rendered impossible by their immediate neighbourhood to words and facts of known and absolute truth. a faith, which transcends even historic belief, must absolutely put out this mere poetic analogon of faith, as the summer sun is said to extinguish our household fires, when it shines full upon them. what would otherwise have been yielded to as pleasing fiction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. the effect produced in this latter case by the solemn belief of the reader, is in a less degree brought about in the instances, to which i have been objecting, by the balked attempts of the author to make him believe. add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project and of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. is there one word, for instance, attributed to the pedlar in the excursion, characteristic of a pedlar? one sentiment, that might not more plausibly, even without the aid of any previous explanation, have proceeded from any wise and beneficent old man, of a rank or profession in which the language of learning and refinement are natural and to be expected? need the rank have been at all particularized, where nothing follows which the knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate? when on the contrary this information renders the man's language, feelings, sentiments, and information a riddle, which must itself be solved by episodes of anecdote? finally when this, and this alone, could have induced a genuine poet to inweave in a poem of the loftiest style, and on subjects the loftiest and of most universal interest, such minute matters of fact, (not unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the friends of some obscure "ornament of society lately deceased" in some obscure town,) as "among the hills of athol he was born there, on a small hereditary farm, an unproductive slip of rugged ground, his father dwelt; and died in poverty; while he, whose lowly fortune i retrace, the youngest of three sons, was yet a babe, a little one--unconscious of their loss. but ere he had outgrown his infant days his widowed mother, for a second mate, espoused the teacher of the village school; who on her offspring zealously bestowed needful instruction." "from his sixth year, the boy of whom i speak, in summer tended cattle on the hills; but, through the inclement and the perilous days of long-continuing winter, he repaired to his step-father's school,"-etc. for all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might, with trifling alterations, have been far more appropriately, and with far greater verisimilitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet; and without incurring another defect which i shall now mention, and a sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated. third; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems, from which one or other of two evils result. either the thoughts and diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks. the fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: in this class, i comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying, instead of progression, of thought. as instances, see pages , , and of the poems, vol. i. and the first eighty lines of the vith book of the excursion. fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. this is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. this, by the bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. it is the awkwardness and strength of hercules with the distaff of omphale. it is a well-known fact, that bright colours in motion both make and leave the strongest impressions on the eye. nothing is more likely too, than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may become the link of association in recalling the feelings and images that had accompanied the original impression. but if we describe this in such lines, as "they flash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude!" in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed "the bliss of solitude?" assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say burlesquely, and almost as in a medley, from this couplet to-- "and then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils." vol. i. p. . the second instance is from vol. ii. page , where the poet having gone out for a day's tour of pleasure, meets early in the morning with a knot of gipsies, who had pitched their blanket-tents and straw-beds, together with their children and asses, in some field by the road-side. at the close of the day on his return our tourist found them in the same place. "twelve hours," says he, "twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while i have been a traveller under open sky, much witnessing of change and cheer, yet as i left i find them here!" whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one whole day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might be quite as necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was pleasing or healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his indignation in a series of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather above, than below the mark, had they been applied to the immense empire of china improgressive for thirty centuries: "the weary sun betook himself to rest:-- --then issued vesper from the fulgent west, outshining, like a visible god, the glorious path in which he trod. and now, ascending, after one dark hour, and one night's diminution of her power, behold the mighty moon! this way she looks, as if at them--but they regard not her:--oh, better wrong and strife, better vain deeds or evil than such life! the silent heavens have goings on the stars have tasks!--but these have none!" the last instance of this defect,(for i know no other than these already cited) is from the ode, page , vol. ii., where, speaking of a child, "a six years' darling of a pigmy size," he thus addresses him: "thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep thy heritage, thou eye among the blind, that, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, haunted for ever by the eternal mind,-- mighty prophet! seer blest! on whom those truths do rest, which we are toiling all our lives to find! thou, over whom thy immortality broods like the day, a master o'er a slave, a present which is not to be put by!" now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects the epithets "deaf and silent," with the apostrophized eye: or (if we are to refer it to the preceding word, "philosopher"), the faulty and equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of making a "master brood o'er a slave," or "the day" brood at all; we will merely ask, what does all this mean? in what sense is a child of that age a philosopher? in what sense does he read "the eternal deep?" in what sense is he declared to be "for ever haunted" by the supreme being? or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a mighty prophet, a blessed seer? by reflection? by knowledge? by conscious intuition? or by any form or modification of consciousness? these would be tidings indeed; but such as would pre-suppose an immediate revelation to the inspired communicator, and require miracles to authenticate his inspiration. children at this age give us no such information of themselves; and at what time were we dipped in the lethe, which has produced such utter oblivion of a state so godlike? there are many of us that still possess some remembrances, more or less distinct, respecting themselves at six years old; pity that the worthless straws only should float, while treasures, compared with which all the mines of golconda and mexico were but straws, should be absorbed by some unknown gulf into some unknown abyss. but if this be too wild and exorbitant to be suspected as having been the poet's meaning; if these mysterious gifts, faculties, and operations, are not accompanied with consciousness; who else is conscious of them? or how can it be called the child, if it be no part of the child's conscious being? for aught i know, the thinking spirit within me may be substantially one with the principle of life, and of vital operation. for aught i know, it might be employed as a secondary agent in the marvellous organization and organic movements of my body. but, surely, it would be strange language to say, that i construct my heart! or that i propel the finer influences through my nerves! or that i compress my brain, and draw the curtains of sleep round my own eyes! spinoza and behmen were, on different systems, both pantheists; and among the ancients there were philosophers, teachers of the en kai pan, who not only taught that god was all, but that this all constituted god. yet not even these would confound the part, as a part, with the whole, as the whole. nay, in no system is the distinction between the individual and god, between the modification, and the one only substance, more sharply drawn, than in that of spinoza. jacobi indeed relates of lessing, that, after a conversation with him at the house of the poet, gleim, (the tyrtaeus and anacreon of the german parnassus,) in which conversation lessing had avowed privately to jacobi his reluctance to admit any personal existence of the supreme being, or the possibility of personality except in a finite intellect, and while they were sitting at table, a shower of rain came on unexpectedly. gleim expressed his regret at the circumstance, because they had meant to drink their wine in the garden: upon which lessing in one of his half-earnest, half-joking moods, nodded to jacobi, and said, "it is i, perhaps, that am doing that," i.e. raining!--and jacobi answered, "or perhaps i;" gleim contented himself with staring at them both, without asking for any explanation. so with regard to this passage. in what sense can the magnificent attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or afield of corn: or even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? the omnipresent spirit works equally in them, as in the child; and the child is equally unconscious of it as they. it cannot surely be, that the four lines, immediately following, are to contain the explanation? "to whom the grave is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight of day or the warm light, a place of thought where we in waiting lie;"-- surely, it cannot be that this wonder-rousing apostrophe is but a comment on the little poem, "we are seven?"--that the whole meaning of the passage is reducible to the assertion, that a child, who by the bye at six years old would have been better instructed in most christian families, has no other notion of death than that of lying in a dark, cold place? and still, i hope, not as in a place of thought! not the frightful notion of lying awake in his grave! the analogy between death and sleep is too simple, too natural, to render so horrid a belief possible for children; even had they not been in the habit, as all christian children are, of hearing the latter term used to express the former. but if the child's belief be only, that "he is not dead, but sleepeth:" wherein does it differ from that of his father and mother, or any other adult and instructed person? to form an idea of a thing's becoming nothing; or of nothing becoming a thing; is impossible to all finite beings alike, of whatever age, and however educated or uneducated. thus it is with splendid paradoxes in general. if the words are taken in the common sense, they convey an absurdity; and if, in contempt of dictionaries and custom, they are so interpreted as to avoid the absurdity, the meaning dwindles into some bald truism. thus you must at once understand the words contrary to their common import, in order to arrive at any sense; and according to their common import, if you are to receive from them any feeling of sublimity or admiration. though the instances of this defect in mr. wordsworth's poems are so few, that for themselves it would have been scarcely just to attract the reader's attention toward them; yet i have dwelt on it, and perhaps the more for this very reason. for being so very few, they cannot sensibly detract from the reputation of an author, who is even characterized by the number of profound truths in his writings, which will stand the severest analysis; and yet few as they are, they are exactly those passages which his blind admirers would be most likely, and best able, to imitate. but wordsworth, where he is indeed wordsworth, may be mimicked by copyists, he may be plundered by plagiarists; but he cannot be imitated, except by those who are not born to be imitators. for without his depth of feeling and his imaginative power his sense would want its vital warmth and peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his mysticism would become sickly--mere fog, and dimness! to these defects which, as appears by the extracts, are only occasional, i may oppose, with far less fear of encountering the dissent of any candid and intelligent reader, the following (for the most part correspondent) excellencies. first, an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. of how high value i deem this, and how particularly estimable i hold the example at the present day, has been already stated: and in part too the reasons on which i ground both the moral and intellectual importance of habituating ourselves to a strict accuracy of expression. it is noticeable, how limited an acquaintance with the masterpieces of art will suffice to form a correct and even a sensitive taste, where none but master-pieces have been seen and admired: while on the other hand, the most correct notions, and the widest acquaintance with the works of excellence of all ages and countries, will not perfectly secure us against the contagious familiarity with the far more numerous offspring of tastelessness or of a perverted taste. if this be the case, as it notoriously is, with the arts of music and painting, much more difficult will it be, to avoid the infection of multiplied and daily examples in the practice of an art, which uses words, and words only, as its instruments. in poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which i have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning. be it observed, however, that i include in the meaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but likewise all the associations which it recalls. for language is framed to convey not the object alone but likewise the character, mood and intentions of the person who is representing it. in poetry it is practicable to preserve the diction uncorrupted by the affectations and misappropriations, which promiscuous authorship, and reading not promiscuous only because it is disproportionally most conversant with the compositions of the day, have rendered general. yet even to the poet, composing in his own province, it is an arduous work: and as the result and pledge of a watchful good sense of fine and luminous distinction, and of complete self-possession, may justly claim all the honour which belongs to an attainment equally difficult and valuable, and the more valuable for being rare. it is at all times the proper food of the understanding; but in an age of corrupt eloquence it is both food and antidote. in prose i doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our style wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere, from the sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator to the speech from the convivial chair, announcing a toast or sentiment. our chains rattle, even while we are complaining of them. the poems of boetius rise high in our estimation when we compare them with those of his contemporaries, as sidonius apollinaris, and others. they might even be referred to a purer age, but that the prose, in which they are set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the true age of the writer. much however may be effected by education. i believe not only from grounds of reason, but from having in great measure assured myself of the fact by actual though limited experience, that, to a youth led from his first boyhood to investigate the meaning of every word and the reason of its choice and position, logic presents itself as an old acquaintance under new names. on some future occasion, more especially demanding such disquisition, i shall attempt to prove the close connection between veracity and habits of mental accuracy; the beneficial after-effects of verbal precision in the preclusion of fanaticism, which masters the feelings more especially by indistinct watch-words; and to display the advantages which language alone, at least which language with incomparably greater ease and certainty than any other means, presents to the instructor of impressing modes of intellectual energy so constantly, so imperceptibly, and as it were by such elements and atoms, as to secure in due time the formation of a second nature. when we reflect, that the cultivation of the judgment is a positive command of the moral law, since the reason can give the principle alone, and the conscience bears witness only to the motive, while the application and effects must depend on the judgment when we consider, that the greater part of our success and comfort in life depends on distinguishing the similar from the same, that which is peculiar in each thing from that which it has in common with others, so as still to select the most probable, instead of the merely possible or positively unfit, we shall learn to value earnestly and with a practical seriousness a mean, already prepared for us by nature and society, of teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by the same unremembered process and with the same never forgotten results, as those by which it is taught to speak and converse. now how much warmer the interest is, how much more genial the feelings of reality and practicability, and thence how much stronger the impulses to imitation are, which a contemporary writer, and especially a contemporary poet, excites in youth and commencing manhood, has been treated of in the earlier pages of these sketches. i have only to add, that all the praise which is due to the exertion of such influence for a purpose so important, joined with that which must be claimed for the infrequency of the same excellence in the same perfection, belongs in full right to mr. wordsworth. i am far however from denying that we have poets whose general style possesses the same excellence, as mr. moore, lord byron, mr. bowles, and, in all his later and more important works, our laurel-honouring laureate. but there are none, in whose works i do not appear to myself to find more exceptions, than in those of wordsworth. quotations or specimens would here be wholly out of place, and must be left for the critic who doubts and would invalidate the justice of this eulogy so applied. the second characteristic excellence of mr. wordsworth's work is: a correspondent weight and sanity of the thoughts and sentiments,--won, not from books; but--from the poet's own meditative observation. they are fresh and have the dew upon them. his muse, at least when in her strength of wing, and when she hovers aloft in her proper element, makes audible a linked lay of truth, of truth profound a sweet continuous lay, not learnt, but native, her own natural notes! even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one, which is not rendered valuable by some just and original reflection. see page , vol. ii.: or the two following passages in one of his humblest compositions. "o reader! had you in your mind such stores as silent thought can bring, o gentle reader! you would find a tale in every thing;" and "i've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds with coldness still returning; alas! the gratitude of men has oftener left me mourning;" or in a still higher strain the six beautiful quatrains, page . "thus fares it still in our decay: and yet the wiser mind mourns less for what age takes away than what it leaves behind. the blackbird in the summer trees, the lark upon the hill, let loose their carols when they please, are quiet when they will. with nature never do they wage a foolish strife; they see a happy youth, and their old age is beautiful and free! but we are pressed by heavy laws; and often glad no more, we wear a face of joy, because we have been glad of yore. if there is one, who need bemoan his kindred laid in earth, the household hearts that were his own, it is the man of mirth. my days, my friend, are almost gone, my life has been approved, and many love me; but by none am i enough beloved;" or the sonnet on buonaparte, page , vol. ii. or finally (for a volume would scarce suffice to exhaust the instances,) the last stanza of the poem on the withered celandine, vol. ii. p. . "to be a prodigal's favorite--then, worse truth, a miser's pensioner--behold our lot! o man! that from thy fair and shining youth age might but take the things youth needed not." both in respect of this and of the former excellence, mr. wordsworth strikingly resembles samuel daniel, one of the golden writers of our golden elizabethan age, now most causelessly neglected: samuel daniel, whose diction bears no mark of time, no distinction of age which has been, and as long as our language shall last, will be so far the language of the to-day and for ever, as that it is more intelligible to us, than the transitory fashions of our own particular age. a similar praise is due to his sentiments. no frequency of perusal can deprive them of their freshness. for though they are brought into the full day-light of every reader's comprehension; yet are they drawn up from depths which few in any age are privileged to visit, into which few in any age have courage or inclination to descend. if mr. wordsworth is not equally with daniel alike intelligible to all readers of average understanding in all passages of his works, the comparative difficulty does not arise from the greater impurity of the ore, but from the nature and uses of the metal. a poem is not necessarily obscure, because it does not aim to be popular. it is enough, if a work be perspicuous to those for whom it is written, and "fit audience find, though few." to the "ode on the intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood" the poet might have prefixed the lines which dante addresses to one of his own canzoni-- "canzone, i' credo, che saranno radi color, che tua ragione intendan bene, tanto lor sei faticoso ed alto." "o lyric song, there will be few, i think, who may thy import understand aright: thou art for them so arduous and so high!" but the ode was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet can not be conveyed, save in symbols of time and space. for such readers the sense is sufficiently plain, and they will be as little disposed to charge mr. wordsworth with believing the platonic pre-existence in the ordinary interpretation of the words, as i am to believe, that plato himself ever meant or taught it. polla oi ut' anko- nos okea belae endon enti pharetras phonanta synetoisin; es de to pan hermaeneon chatizei; sophos o pol- la eidos phua; mathontes de labroi panglossia, korakes os, akranta garueton dios pros ornicha theion. third (and wherein he soars far above daniel) the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs: the frequent curiosa felicitas of his diction, of which i need not here give specimens, having anticipated them in a preceding page. this beauty, and as eminently characteristic of wordsworth's poetry, his rudest assailants have felt themselves compelled to acknowledge and admire. fourth; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all the works of nature. like a green field reflected in a calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality only by its greater softness and lustre. like the moisture or the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colours its objects; but on the contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint, which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the dusty high road of custom. let me refer to the whole description of skating, vol. i. page to , especially to the lines "so through the darkness and the cold we flew, and not a voice was idle. with the din meanwhile the precipices rang aloud; the leafless trees and every icy crag tinkled like iron; while the distant hills into the tumult sent an alien sound of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars, eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west the orange sky of evening died away." or to the poem on the green linnet, vol. i. page . what can be more accurate yet more lovely than the two concluding stanzas? "upon yon tuft of hazel trees, that twinkle to the gusty breeze, behold him perched in ecstasies, yet seeming still to hover; there! where the flutter of his wings upon his back and body flings shadows and sunny glimmerings, that cover him all over. while thus before my eyes he gleams, a brother of the leaves he seems; when in a moment forth he teems his little song in gushes as if it pleased him to disdain and mock the form which he did feign while he was dancing with the train of leaves among the bushes." or the description of the blue-cap, and of the noontide silence, page ; or the poem to the cuckoo, page ; or, lastly, though i might multiply the references to ten times the number, to the poem, so completely wordsworth's, commencing "three years she grew in sun and shower"-- fifth: a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, (spectator, haud particeps) but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, or toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. the superscription and the image of the creator still remain legible to him under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or cross-barred it. here the man and the poet lose and find themselves in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. in this mild and philosophic pathos, wordsworth appears to me without a compeer. such as he is: so he writes. see vol. i. page to , or that most affecting composition, the affliction of margaret ---- of ----, page to , which no mother, and, if i may judge by my own experience, no parent can read without a tear. or turn to that genuine lyric, in the former edition, entitled, the mad mother, page to , of which i cannot refrain from quoting two of the stanzas, both of them for their pathos, and the former for the fine transition in the two concluding lines of the stanza, so expressive of that deranged state, in which, from the increased sensibility, the sufferer's attention is abruptly drawn off by every trifle, and in the same instant plucked back again by the one despotic thought, bringing home with it, by the blending, fusing power of imagination and passion, the alien object to which it had been so abruptly diverted, no longer an alien but an ally and an inmate. "suck, little babe, oh suck again! it cools my blood; it cools my brain; thy lips, i feel them, baby! they draw from my heart the pain away. oh! press me with thy little hand; it loosens something at my chest about that tight and deadly band i feel thy little fingers prest. the breeze i see is in the tree! it comes to cool my babe and me." "thy father cares not for my breast, 'tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest; 'tis all thine own!--and if its hue be changed, that was so fair to view, 'tis fair enough for thee, my dove! my beauty, little child, is flown, but thou wilt live with me in love; and what if my poor cheek be brown? 'tis well for me, thou canst not see how pale and wan it else would be." last, and pre-eminently, i challenge for this poet the gift of imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. in the play of fancy, wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite. the likeness is occasionally too strange, or demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous presentation. indeed his fancy seldom displays itself, as mere and unmodified fancy. but in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern writers to shakespeare and milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own. to employ his own words, which are at once an instance and an illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects-- "------add the gleam, the light that never was, on sea or land, the consecration, and the poet's dream." i shall select a few examples as most obviously manifesting this faculty; but if i should ever be fortunate enough to render my analysis of imagination, its origin and characters, thoroughly intelligible to the reader, he will scarcely open on a page of this poet's works without recognising, more or less, the presence and the influences of this faculty. from the poem on the yew trees, vol. i. page , . "but worthier still of note are those fraternal four of borrowdale, joined in one solemn and capacious grove; huge trunks!--and each particular trunk a growth of intertwisted fibres serpentine up-coiling, and inveterately convolved; not uninformed with phantasy, and looks that threaten the profane;--a pillared shade, upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue, by sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged perennially--beneath whose sable roof of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked with unrejoicing berries--ghostly shapes may meet at noontide; fear and trembling hope, silence and foresight; death, the skeleton, and time, the shadow; there to celebrate, as in a natural temple scattered o'er with altars undisturbed of mossy stone, united worship; or in mute repose to lie, and listen to the mountain flood murmuring from glazamara's inmost caves." the effect of the old man's figure in the poem of resolution and independence, vol. ii. page . "while he was talking thus, the lonely place, the old man's shape, and speech, all troubled me in my mind's eye i seemed to see him pace about the weary moors continually, wandering about alone and silently." or the th, th, th, th, st, and rd, in the collection of miscellaneous sonnets--the sonnet on the subjugation of switzerland, page , or the last ode, from which i especially select the two following stanzas or paragraphs, page to . "our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: the soul that rises with us, our life's star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar. not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from god, who is our home: heaven lies about us in our infancy! shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy; but he beholds the light, and whence it flows, he sees it in his joy! the youth who daily further from the east must travel, still is nature's priest, and by the vision splendid is on his way attended; at length the man perceives it die away, and fade into the light of common day." and page to of the same ode. "o joy! that in our embers is something that doth live, that nature yet remembers what was so fugitive! the thought of our past years in me doth breed perpetual benedictions: not indeed for that which is most worthy to be blest; delight and liberty, the simple creed of childhood, whether busy or at rest, with new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:-- not for these i raise the song of thanks and praise; but for those obstinate questionings of sense and outward things, fallings from us, vanishings; blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized, high instincts, before which our mortal nature did tremble like a guilty thing surprised! but for those first affections, those shadowy recollections, which, be they what they may, are yet the fountain light of all our day, are yet a master light of all our seeing; uphold us--cherish--and have power to make our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal silence; truths that wake to perish never; which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, nor man nor boy, nor all that is at enmity with joy, can utterly abolish or destroy! hence, in a season of calm weather, though inland far we be, our souls have sight of that immortal sea which brought us hither; can in a moment travel thither,-- and see the children sport upon the shore, and hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." and since it would be unfair to conclude with an extract, which, though highly characteristic, must yet, from the nature of the thoughts and the subject, be interesting or perhaps intelligible, to but a limited number of readers; i will add, from the poet's last published work, a passage equally wordsworthian; of the beauty of which, and of the imaginative power displayed therein, there can be but one opinion, and one feeling. see white doe, page . "fast the church-yard fills;--anon look again and they all are gone; the cluster round the porch, and the folk who sate in the shade of the prior's oak! and scarcely have they disappeared ere the prelusive hymn is heard;-- with one consent the people rejoice, filling the church with a lofty voice! they sing a service which they feel: for 'tis the sun-rise now of zeal; and faith and hope are in their prime in great eliza's golden time." "a moment ends the fervent din, and all is hushed, without and within; for though the priest, more tranquilly, recites the holy liturgy, the only voice which you can hear is the river murmuring near. --when soft!--the dusky trees between, and down the path through the open green, where is no living thing to be seen; and through yon gateway, where is found, beneath the arch with ivy bound, free entrance to the church-yard ground-- and right across the verdant sod, towards the very house of god; comes gliding in with lovely gleam, comes gliding in serene and slow, soft and silent as a dream. a solitary doe! white she is as lily of june, and beauteous as the silver moon when out of sight the clouds are driven and she is left alone in heaven! or like a ship some gentle day in sunshine sailing far away a glittering ship that hath the plain of ocean for her own domain." * * * * * * "what harmonious pensive changes wait upon her as she ranges round and through this pile of state overthrown and desolate! now a step or two her way is through space of open day, where the enamoured sunny light brightens her that was so bright; now doth a delicate shadow fall, falls upon her like a breath, from some lofty arch or wall, as she passes underneath." the following analogy will, i am apprehensive, appear dim and fantastic, but in reading bartram's travels i could not help transcribing the following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor of wordsworth's intellect and genius.--"the soil is a deep, rich, dark mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay; and that on a foundation of rocks, which often break through both strata, lifting their backs above the surface. the trees which chiefly grow here are the gigantic, black oak; magnolia grandi-flora; fraximus excelsior; platane; and a few stately tulip trees." what mr. wordsworth will produce, it is not for me to prophesy but i could pronounce with the liveliest convictions what he is capable of producing. it is the first genuine philosophic poem. the preceding criticism will not, i am aware, avail to overcome the prejudices of those, who have made it a business to attack and ridicule mr. wordsworth's compositions. truth and prudence might be imaged as concentric circles. the poet may perhaps have passed beyond the latter, but he has confined himself far within the bounds of the former, in designating these critics, as "too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and too feeble to grapple with him;----men of palsied imaginations, in whose minds all healthy action is languid;----who, therefore, feed as the many direct them, or with the many are greedy after vicious provocatives." so much for the detractors from wordsworth's merits. on the other hand, much as i might wish for their fuller sympathy, i dare not flatter myself, that the freedom with which i have declared my opinions concerning both his theory and his defects, most of which are more or less connected with his theory, either as cause or effect, will be satisfactory or pleasing to all the poet's admirers and advocates. more indiscriminate than mine their admiration may be: deeper and more sincere it cannot be. but i have advanced no opinion either for praise or censure, other than as texts introductory to the reasons which compel me to form it. above all, i was fully convinced that such a criticism was not only wanted; but that, if executed with adequate ability, it must conduce, in no mean degree, to mr. wordsworth's reputation. his fame belongs to another age, and can neither be accelerated nor retarded. how small the proportion of the defects are to the beauties, i have repeatedly declared; and that no one of them originates in deficiency of poetic genius. had they been more and greater, i should still, as a friend to his literary character in the present age, consider an analytic display of them as pure gain; if only it removed, as surely to all reflecting minds even the foregoing analysis must have removed, the strange mistake, so slightly grounded, yet so widely and industriously propagated, of mr. wordsworth's turn for simplicity! i am not half as much irritated by hearing his enemies abuse him for vulgarity of style, subject, and conception, as i am disgusted with the gilded side of the same meaning, as displayed by some affected admirers, with whom he is, forsooth, a "sweet, simple poet!" and so natural, that little master charles and his younger sister are so charmed with them, that they play at "goody blake," or at "johnny and betty foy!" were the collection of poems, published with these biographical sketches, important enough, (which i am not vain enough to believe,) to deserve such a distinction; even as i have done, so would i be done unto. for more than eighteen months have the volume of poems, entitled sibylline leaves, and the present volume, up to this page, been printed, and ready for publication. but, ere i speak of myself in the tones, which are alone natural to me under the circumstances of late years, i would fain present myself to the reader as i was in the first dawn of my literary life: when hope grew round me, like the climbing vine, and fruits, and foliage, not my own, seem'd mine! for this purpose i have selected from the letters, which i wrote home from germany, those which appeared likely to be most interesting, and at the same time most pertinent to the title of this work. satyrane's letters letter i on sunday morning, september , , the hamburg packet set sail from yarmouth; and i, for the first time in my life, beheld my native land retiring from me. at the moment of its disappearance--in all the kirks, churches, chapels, and meeting-houses, in which the greater number, i hope, of my countrymen were at that time assembled, i will dare question whether there was one more ardent prayer offered up to heaven, than that which i then preferred for my country. "now then," (said i to a gentleman who was standing near me,) "we are out of our country." "not yet, not yet!" he replied, and pointed to the sea; "this, too, is a briton's country." this bon mot gave a fillip to my spirits, i rose and looked round on my fellow-passengers, who were all on the deck. we were eighteen in number, videlicet, five englishmen, an english lady, a french gentleman and his servant, an hanoverian and his servant, a prussian, a swede, two danes, and a mulatto boy, a german tailor and his wife, (the smallest couple i ever beheld,) and a jew. we were all on the deck; but in a short time i observed marks of dismay. the lady retired to the cabin in some confusion, and many of the faces round me assumed a very doleful and frog-coloured appearance; and within an hour the number of those on deck was lessened by one half. i was giddy, but not sick, and the giddiness soon went away, but left a feverishness and want of appetite, which i attributed, in great measure, to the saeva mephitis of the bilge-water; and it was certainly not decreased by the exportations from the cabin. however, i was well enough to join the able-bodied passengers, one of whom observed not inaptly, that momus might have discovered an easier way to see a man's inside, than by placing a window in his breast. he needed only have taken a saltwater trip in a packet-boat. i am inclined to believe, that a packet is far superior to a stage- coach, as a means of making men open out to each other. in the latter the uniformity of posture disposes to dozing, and the definitiveness of the period, at which the company will separate, makes each individual think more of those to whom he is going, than of those with whom he is going. but at sea, more curiosity is excited, if only on this account, that the pleasant or unpleasant qualities of your companions are of greater importance to you, from the uncertainty how long you may be obliged to house with them. besides, if you are countrymen, that now begins to form a distinction and a bond of brotherhood; and if of different countries, there are new incitements of conversation, more to ask and more to communicate. i found that i had interested the danes in no common degree. i had crept into the boat on the deck and fallen asleep; but was awakened by one of them, about three o'clock in the afternoon, who told me that they had been seeking me in every hole and corner, and insisted that i should join their party and drink with them. he talked english with such fluency, as left me wholly unable to account for the singular and even ludicrous incorrectness with which he spoke it. i went, and found some excellent wines and a dessert of grapes with a pine-apple. the danes had christened me doctor teology, and dressed as i was all in black, with large shoes and black worsted stockings, i might certainly have passed very well for a methodist missionary. however i disclaimed my title. what then may you be? a man of fortune? no!--a merchant? no!--a merchant's traveller? no!--a clerk? no!--un philosophe, perhaps? it was at that time in my life, in which of all possible names and characters i had the greatest disgust to that of "un philosophe." but i was weary of being questioned, and rather than be nothing, or at best only the abstract idea of a man, i submitted by a bow, even to the aspersion implied in the word "un philosophe."--the dane then informed me, that all in the present party were philosophers likewise. certes we were not of the stoick school. for we drank and talked and sung, till we talked and sung all together; and then we rose and danced on the deck a set of dances, which in one sense of the word at least, were very intelligibly and appropriately entitled reels. the passengers, who lay in the cabin below in all the agonies of sea- sickness, must have found our bacchanalian merriment ------a tune harsh and of dissonant mood from their complaint. i thought so at the time; and, (by way, i suppose, of supporting my newly assumed philosophical character,) i thought too, how closely the greater number of our virtues are connected with the fear of death, and how little sympathy we bestow on pain, where there is no danger. the two danes were brothers. the one was a man with a clear white complexion, white hair, and white eyebrows; looked silly, and nothing that he uttered gave the lie to his looks. the other, whom, by way of eminence i have called the dane, had likewise white hair, but was much shorter than his brother, with slender limbs, and a very thin face slightly pockfretten. this man convinced me of the justice of an old remark, that many a faithful portrait in our novels and farces has been rashly censured for an outrageous caricature, or perhaps nonentity. i had retired to my station in the boat--he came and seated himself by my side, and appeared not a little tipsy. he commenced the conversation in the most magnific style, and, as a sort of pioneering to his own vanity, he flattered me with such grossness! the parasites of the old comedy were modest in the comparison. his language and accentuation were so exceedingly singular, that i determined for once in my life to take notes of a conversation. here it follows, somewhat abridged, indeed, but in all other respects as accurately as my memory permitted. the dane. vat imagination! vat language! vat vast science! and vat eyes! vat a milk-vite forehead! o my heafen! vy, you're a got! answer. you do me too much honour, sir. the dane. o me! if you should dink i is flattering you!--no, no, no! i haf ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand pound a year! vel--and vat is dhat? a mere trifle! i 'ouldn't gif my sincere heart for ten times dhe money. yes, you're a got! i a mere man! but, my dear friend! dhink of me, as a man! is, is--i mean to ask you now, my dear friend--is i not very eloquent? is i not speak english very fine? answer. most admirably! believe me, sir! i have seldom heard even a native talk so fluently. the dane. (squeezing my hand with great vehemence.) my dear friend! vat an affection and fidelity ve have for each odher! but tell me, do tell me,--is i not, now and den, speak some fault? is i not in some wrong? answer. why, sir! perhaps it might be observed by nice critics in the english language, that you occasionally use the word "is" instead of "am." in our best companies we generally say i am, and not i is or i'se. excuse me, sir! it is a mere trifle. the dane. o!--is, is, am, am, am. yes, yes--i know, i know. answer. i am, thou art, he is, we are, ye are, they are. the dane. yes, yes,--i know, i know--am, am, am, is dhe praesens, and is is dhe perfectum--yes, yes--and are is dhe plusquam perfectum. answer. and art, sir! is--? the dane. my dear friend! it is dhe plusquam perfectum, no, no--dhat is a great lie; are is dhe plusquam perfectum--and art is dhe plasquam plue-perfectum--(then swinging my hand to and fro, and cocking his little bright hazel eyes at me, that danced with vanity and wine)--you see, my dear friend that i too have some lehrning? answer. learning, sir? who dares suspect it? who can listen to you for a minute, who can even look at you, without perceiving the extent of it? the dane. my dear friend!--(then with a would-be humble look, and in a tone of voice as if he was reasoning) i could not talk so of prawns and imperfectum, and futurum and plusquamplue perfectum, and all dhat, my dear friend! without some lehrning? answer. sir! a man like you cannot talk on any subject without discovering the depth of his information. the dane. dhe grammatic greek, my friend; ha! ha! ha! (laughing, and swinging my hand to and fro--then with a sudden transition to great solemnity) now i will tell you, my dear friend! dhere did happen about me vat de whole historia of denmark record no instance about nobody else. dhe bishop did ask me all dhe questions about all dhe religion in dhe latin grammar. answer. the grammar, sir? the language, i presume-- the dane. (a little offended.) grammar is language, and language is grammar-- answer. ten thousand pardons! the dane. vell, and i was only fourteen years-- answer. only fourteen years old? the dane. no more. i vas fourteen years old--and he asked me all questions, religion and philosophy, and all in dhe latin language--and i answered him all every one, my dear friend! all in dhe latin language. answer. a prodigy! an absolute prodigy! the dane. no, no, no! he was a bishop, a great superintendent. answer. yes! a bishop. the dane. a bishop--not a mere predicant, not a prediger. answer. my dear sir! we have misunderstood each other. i said that your answering in latin at so early an age was a prodigy, that is, a thing that is wonderful; that does not often happen. the dane. often! dhere is not von instance recorded in dhe whole historia of denmark. answer. and since then, sir--? the dane. i was sent ofer to dhe vest indies--to our island, and dhere i had no more to do vid books. no! no! i put my genius anodher way--and i haf made ten tousand pound a year. is not dhat ghenius, my dear friend?--but vat is money?--i dhink dhe poorest man alive my equal. yes, my dear friend; my little fortune is pleasant to my generous heart, because i can do good--no man with so little a fortune ever did so much generosity--no person--no man person, no woman person ever denies it. but we are all got's children. here the hanoverian interrupted him, and the other dane, the swede, and the prussian, joined us, together with a young englishman who spoke the german fluently, and interpreted to me many of the prussian's jokes. the prussian was a travelling merchant, turned of threescore, a hale man, tall, strong, and stout, full of stories, gesticulations, and buffoonery, with the soul as well as the look of a mountebank, who, while he is making you laugh, picks your pocket. amid all his droll looks and droll gestures, there remained one look untouched by laughter; and that one look was the true face, the others were but its mask. the hanoverian was a pale, fat, bloated young man, whose father had made a large fortune in london, as an army-contractor. he seemed to emulate the manners of young englishmen of fortune. he was a good-natured fellow, not without information or literature; but a most egregious coxcomb. he had been in the habit of attending the house of commons, and had once spoken, as he informed me, with great applause in a debating society. for this he appeared to have qualified himself with laudable industry: for he was perfect in walker's pronouncing dictionary, and with an accent, which forcibly reminded me of the scotchman in roderic random, who professed to teach the english pronunciation, he was constantly deferring to my superior judgment, whether or no i had pronounced this or that word with propriety, or "the true delicacy." when he spoke, though it were only half a dozen sentences, he always rose: for which i could detect no other motive, than his partiality to that elegant phrase so liberally introduced in the orations of our british legislators, "while i am on my legs." the swede, whom for reasons that will soon appear, i shall distinguish by the name of nobility, was a strong-featured, scurvy-faced man, his complexion resembling in colour, a red hot poker beginning to cool. he appeared miserably dependent on the dane; but was, however, incomparably the best informed and most rational of the party. indeed his manners and conversation discovered him to be both a man of the world and a gentleman. the jew was in the hold: the french gentleman was lying on the deck so ill, that i could observe nothing concerning him, except the affectionate attentions of his servant to him. the poor fellow was very sick himself, and every now and then ran to the side of the vessel, still keeping his eye on his master, but returned in a moment and seated himself again by him, now supporting his head, now wiping his forehead and talking to him all the while in the most soothing tones. there had been a matrimonial squabble of a very ludicrous kind in the cabin, between the little german tailor and his little wife. he had secured two beds, one for himself and one for her. this had struck the little woman as a very cruel action; she insisted upon their having but one, and assured the mate in the most piteous tones, that she was his lawful wife. the mate and the cabin boy decided in her favour, abused the little man for his want of tenderness with much humour, and hoisted him into the same compartment with his sea-sick wife. this quarrel was interesting to me, as it procured me a bed, which i otherwise should not have had. in the evening, at seven o'clock, the sea rolled higher, and the dane, by means of the greater agitation, eliminated enough of what he had been swallowing to make room for a great deal more. his favourite potation was sugar and brandy, i.e. a very little warm water with a large quantity of brandy, sugar, and nutmeg his servant boy, a black-eyed mulatto, had a good-natured round face, exactly the colour of the skin of the walnut-kernel. the dane and i were again seated, tete-a-tete, in the ship's boat. the conversation, which was now indeed rather an oration than a dialogue, became extravagant beyond all that i ever heard. he told me that he had made a large fortune in the island of santa cruz, and was now returning to denmark to enjoy it. he expatiated on the style in which he meant to live, and the great undertakings which he proposed to himself to commence, till, the brandy aiding his vanity, and his vanity and garrulity aiding the brandy, he talked like a madman--entreated me to accompany him to denmark--there i should see his influence with the government, and he would introduce me to the king, etc., etc. thus he went on dreaming aloud, and then passing with a very lyrical transition to the subject of general politics, he declaimed, like a member of the corresponding society, about, (not concerning,) the rights of man, and assured me that, notwithstanding his fortune, he thought the poorest man alive his equal. "all are equal, my dear friend! all are equal! ve are all got's children. the poorest man haf the same rights with me. jack! jack! some more sugar and brandy. dhere is dhat fellow now! he is a mulatto--but he is my equal.--that's right, jack! (taking the sugar and brandy.) here you sir! shake hands with dhis gentleman! shake hands with me, you dog! dhere, dhere!--we are all equal my dear friend! do i not speak like socrates, and plato, and cato--they were all philosophers, my dear philosophe! all very great men!--and so was homer and virgil--but they were poets. yes, yes! i know all about it!--but what can anybody say more than this? we are all equal, all got's children. i haf ten tousand a year, but i am no more dhan de meanest man alive. i haf no pride; and yet, my dear friend! i can say, do! and it is done. ha! ha! ha! my dear friend! now dhere is dhat gentleman (pointing to nobility) he is a swedish baron--you shall see. ho! (calling to the swede) get me, will you, a bottle of wine from the cabin. swede.--here, jack! go and get your master a bottle of wine from the cabin. dane. no, no, no! do you go now--you go yourself you go now! swede. pah!--dane. now go! go, i pray you." and the swede went!! after this the dane commenced an harangue on religion, and mistaking me for un philosophe in the continental sense of the word, he talked of deity in a declamatory style, very much resembling the devotional rants of that rude blunderer, mr. thomas paine, in his age of reason, and whispered in my ear, what damned hypocrism all jesus christ's business was. i dare aver, that few men have less reason to charge themselves with indulging in persiflage than myself. i should hate it, if it were only that it is a frenchman's vice, and feel a pride in avoiding it, because our own language is too honest to have a word to express it by. but in this instance the temptation had been too powerful, and i have placed it on the list of my offences. pericles answered one of his dearest friends, who had solicited him on a case of life and death, to take an equivocal oath for his preservation: debeo amicis opitulari, sed usque ad deos [ ]. friendship herself must place her last and boldest step on this side the altar. what pericles would not do to save a friend's life, you may be assured, i would not hazard merely to mill the chocolate-pot of a drunken fool's vanity till it frothed over. assuming a serious look, i professed myself a believer, and sunk at once an hundred fathoms in his good graces. he retired to his cabin, and i wrapped myself up in my great coat, and looked at the water. a beautiful white cloud of foam at momently intervals coursed by the side of the vessel with a roar, and little stars of flame danced and sparkled and went out in it: and every now and then light detachments of this white cloud-like foam darted off from the vessel's side, each with its own small constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a tartar troop over a wilderness. it was cold, the cabin was at open war with my olfactories, and i found reason to rejoice in my great coat, a weighty high-caped, respectable rug, the collar of which turned over, and played the part of a night-cap very passably. in looking up at two or three bright stars, which oscillated with the motion of the sails, i fell asleep, but was awakened at one o'clock, monday morning, by a shower of rain. i found myself compelled to go down into the cabin, where i slept very soundly, and awoke with a very good appetite at breakfast time, my nostrils, the most placable of all the senses, reconciled to, or indeed insensible of the mephitis. monday, september th, i had a long conversation with the swede, who spoke with the most poignant contempt of the dane, whom he described as a fool, purse-mad; but he confirmed the boasts of the dane respecting the largeness of his fortune, which he had acquired in the first instance as an advocate, and afterwards as a planter. from the dane and from himself i collected that he was indeed a swedish nobleman, who had squandered a fortune, that was never very large, and had made over his property to the dane, on whom he was now utterly dependent. he seemed to suffer very little pain from the dane's insolence. he was in a high degree humane and attentive to the english lady, who suffered most fearfully, and for whom he performed many little offices with a tenderness and delicacy which seemed to prove real goodness of heart. indeed his general manners and conversation were not only pleasing, but even interesting; and i struggled to believe his insensibility respecting the dane philosophical fortitude. for though the dane was now quite sober, his character oozed out of him at every pore. and after dinner, when he was again flushed with wine, every quarter of an hour or perhaps oftener he would shout out to the swede, "ho! nobility, go--do such a thing! mr. nobility!--tell the gentlemen such a story, and so forth;" with an insolence which must have excited disgust and detestation, if his vulgar rants on the sacred rights of equality, joined to his wild havoc of general grammar no less than of the english language, had not rendered it so irresistibly laughable. at four o'clock i observed a wild duck swimming on the waves, a single solitary wild duck. it is not easy to conceive, how interesting a thing it looked in that round objectless desert of waters. i had associated such a feeling of immensity with the ocean, that i felt exceedingly disappointed, when i was out of sight of all land, at the narrowness and nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon. so little are images capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected with words. in the evening the sails were lowered, lest we should run foul of the land, which can be seen only at a small distance. and at four o'clock, on tuesday morning, i was awakened by the cry of "land! land!" it was an ugly island rock at a distance on our left, called heiligeland, well known to many passengers from yarmouth to hamburg, who have been obliged by stormy weather to pass weeks and weeks in weary captivity on it, stripped of all their money by the exorbitant demands of the wretches who inhabit it. so at least the sailors informed me.--about nine o'clock we saw the main land, which seemed scarcely able to hold its head above water, low, flat, and dreary, with lighthouses and land-marks which seemed to give a character and language to the dreariness. we entered the mouth of the elbe, passing neu-werk; though as yet the right bank only of the river was visible to us. on this i saw a church, and thanked god for my safe voyage, not without affectionate thoughts of those i had left in england. at eleven o'clock on the same morning we arrived at cuxhaven, the ship dropped anchor, and the boat was hoisted out, to carry the hanoverian and a few others on shore. the captain agreed to take us, who remained, to hamburg for ten guineas, to which the dane contributed so largely, that the other passengers paid but half a guinea each. accordingly we hauled anchor, and passed gently up the river. at cuxhaven both sides of the river may be seen in clear weather; we could now see the right bank only. we passed a multitude of english traders that had been waiting many weeks for a wind. in a short time both banks became visible, both flat and evidencing the labour of human hands by their extreme neatness. on the left bank i saw a church or two in the distance; on the right bank we passed by steeple and windmill and cottage, and windmill and single house, windmill and windmill, and neat single house, and steeple. these were the objects and in the succession. the shores were very green and planted with trees not inelegantly. thirty-five miles from cuxhaven the night came on us, and, as the navigation of the elbe is perilous, we dropped anchor. over what place, thought i, does the moon hang to your eye, my dearest friend? to me it hung over the left bank of the elbe. close above the moon was a huge volume of deep black cloud, while a very thin fillet crossed the middle of the orb, as narrow and thin and black as a ribbon of crape. the long trembling road of moonlight, which lay on the water and reached to the stern of our vessel, glimmered dimly and obscurely. we saw two or three lights from the right bank, probably from bed-rooms. i felt the striking contrast between the silence of this majestic stream, whose banks are populous with men and women and children, and flocks and herds--between the silence by night of this peopled river, and the ceaseless noise, and uproar, and loud agitations of the desolate solitude of the ocean. the passengers below had all retired to their beds; and i felt the interest of this quiet scene the more deeply from the circumstance of having just quitted them. for the prussian had during the whole of the evening displayed all his talents to captivate the dane, who had admitted him into the train of his dependents. the young englishman continued to interpret the prussian's jokes to me. they were all without exception profane and abominable, but some sufficiently witty, and a few incidents, which he related in his own person, were valuable as illustrating the manners of the countries in which they had taken place. five o'clock on wednesday morning we hauled the anchor, but were soon obliged to drop it again in consequence of a thick fog, which our captain feared would continue the whole day; but about nine it cleared off, and we sailed slowly along, close by the shore of a very beautiful island, forty miles from cuxhaven, the wind continuing slack. this holm or island is about a mile and a half in length, wedge-shaped, well wooded, with glades of the liveliest green, and rendered more interesting by the remarkably neat farm-house on it. it seemed made for retirement without solitude--a place that would allure one's friends, while it precluded the impertinent calls of mere visitors. the shores of the elbe now became more beautiful, with rich meadows and trees running like a low wall along the river's edge; and peering over them, neat houses and, (especially on the right bank,) a profusion of steeple-spires, white, black, or red. an instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries with spire-steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object, point, as with silent finger, to the sky and stars, and sometimes, when they reflect the brazen light of a rich though rainy sun-set, appear like a pyramid of flame burning heavenward. i remember once, and once only, to have seen a spire in a narrow valley of a mountainous country. the effect was not only mean but ludicrous, and reminded me against my will of an extinguisher; the close neighbourhood of the high mountain, at the foot of which it stood, had so completely dwarfed it, and deprived it of all connection with the sky or clouds. forty-six english miles from cuxhaven, and sixteen from hamburg, the danish village veder ornaments the left bank with its black steeple, and close by it is the wild and pastoral hamlet of schulau. hitherto both the right and left bank, green to the very brink, and level with the river, resembled the shores of a park canal. the trees and houses were alike low, sometimes the low trees over-topping the yet lower houses, sometimes the low houses rising above the yet lower trees. but at schulau the left bank rises at once forty or fifty feet, and stares on the river with its perpendicular facade of sand, thinly patched with tufts of green. the elbe continued to present a more and more lively spectacle from the multitude of fishing boats and the flocks of sea gulls wheeling round them, the clamorous rivals and companions of the fishermen; till we came to blankaness, a most interesting village scattered amid scattered trees, over three hills in three divisions. each of the three hills stares upon the river, with faces of bare sand, with which the boats with their bare poles, standing in files along the banks, made a sort of fantastic harmony. between each facade lies a green and woody dell, each deeper than the other. in short it is a large village made up of individual cottages, each cottage in the centre of its own little wood or orchard, and each with its own separate path: a village with a labyrinth of paths, or rather a neighbourhood of houses! it is inhabited by fishermen and boat-makers, the blankanese boats being in great request through the whole navigation of the elbe. here first we saw the spires of hamburg, and from hence, as far as altona, the left bank of the elbe is uncommonly pleasing, considered as the vicinity of an industrious and republican city--in that style of beauty, or rather prettiness, that might tempt the citizen into the country, and yet gratify the taste which he had acquired in the town. summer-houses and chinese show-work are everywhere scattered along the high and green banks; the boards of the farm-houses left unplastered and gaily painted with green and yellow; and scarcely a tree not cut into shapes and made to remind the human being of his own power and intelligence instead of the wisdom of nature. still, however, these are links of connection between town and country, and far better than the affectation of tastes and enjoyments for which men's habits have disqualified them. pass them by on saturdays and sundays with the burghers of hamburg smoking their pipes, the women and children feasting in the alcoves of box and yew, and it becomes a nature of its own. on wednesday, four o'clock, we left the vessel, and passing with trouble through the huge masses of shipping that seemed to choke the wide elbe from altona upward, we were at length landed at the boom house, hamburg. letter ii to a lady. ratzeburg. meine liebe freundinn, see how natural the german comes from me, though i have not yet been six weeks in the country!--almost as fluently as english from my neighbour the amtsschreiber, (or public secretary,) who as often as we meet, though it should be half a dozen times in the same day, never fails to greet me with--"---ddam your ploot unt eyes, my dearest englander! vhee goes it!"--which is certainly a proof of great generosity on his part, these words being his whole stock of english. i had, however, a better reason than the desire of displaying my proficiency: for i wished to put you in good humour with a language, from the acquirement of which i have promised myself much edification and the means too of communicating a new pleasure to you and your sister, during our winter readings. and how can i do this better than by pointing out its gallant attention to the ladies? our english affix, ess, is, i believe, confined either to words derived from the latin, as actress, directress, etc., or from the french, as mistress, duchess, and the like. but the german, inn, enables us to designate the sex in every possible relation of life. thus the amtmann's lady is the frau amtmanninn--the secretary's wife, (by the bye, the handsomest woman i have yet seen in germany,) is die allerliebste frau amtsschreiberinn--the colonel's lady, die frau obristinn or colonellinn--and even the parson's wife, die frau pastorinn. but i am especially pleased with their freundinn, which, unlike the amica of the romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. now, i know it will be said, that a friend is already something more than a friend, when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a female; but this i deny--in that sense at least in which the objection will be made. i would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a sister--nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name. now i know, my gentle friend, what you are murmuring to yourself--"this is so like him! running away after the first bubble, that chance has blown off from the surface of his fancy; when one is anxious to learn where he is and what he has seen." well then! that i am settled at ratzeburg, with my motives and the particulars of my journey hither, will inform you. my first letter to him, with which doubtless he has edified your whole fireside, left me safely landed at hamburg on the elbe stairs, at the boom house. while standing on the stairs, i was amused by the contents of the passage-boat which crosses the river once or twice a day from hamburg to haarburg. it was stowed close with all people of all nations, in all sorts of dresses; the men all with pipes in their mouths, and these pipes of all shapes and fancies--straight and wreathed, simple and complex, long and short, cane, clay, porcelain, wood, tin, silver, and ivory; most of them with silver chains and silver bole-covers. pipes and boots are the first universal characteristic of the male hamburgers that would strike the eye of a raw traveller. but i forget my promise of journalizing as much as possible.--therefore, septr. th afternoon. my companion, who, you recollect, speaks the french language with unusual propriety, had formed a kind of confidential acquaintance with the emigrant, who appeared to be a man of sense, and whose manners were those of a perfect gentleman. he seemed about fifty or rather more. whatever is unpleasant in french manners from excess in the degree, had been softened down by age or affliction; and all that is delightful in the kind, alacrity and delicacy in little attentions, etc., remained, and without bustle, gesticulation, or disproportionate eagerness. his demeanour exhibited the minute philanthropy of a polished frenchman, tempered by the sobriety of the english character disunited from its reserve. there is something strangely attractive in the character of a gentleman when you apply the word emphatically, and yet in that sense of the term which it is more easy to feel than to define. it neither includes the possession of high moral excellence, nor of necessity even the ornamental graces of manner. i have now in my mind's eye a person whose life would scarcely stand scrutiny even in the court of honour, much less in that of conscience; and his manners, if nicely observed, would of the two excite an idea of awkwardness rather than of elegance: and yet every one who conversed with him felt and acknowledged the gentleman. the secret of the matter, i believe to be this--we feel the gentlemanly character present to us, whenever, under all the circumstances of social intercourse, the trivial not less than the important, through the whole detail of his manners and deportment, and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to others in such a way, as at the same time implies in his own feelings an habitual and assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to himself. in short, the gentlemanly character arises out of the feeling of equality acting, as a habit, yet flexible to the varieties of rank, and modified without being disturbed or superseded by them. this description will perhaps explain to you the ground of one of your own remarks, as i was englishing to you the interesting dialogue concerning the causes of the corruption of eloquence. "what perfect gentlemen these old romans must have been! i was impressed, i remember, with the same feeling at the time i was reading a translation of cicero's philosophical dialogues and of his epistolary correspondence: while in pliny's letters i seemed to have a different feeling--he gave me the notion of a very fine gentleman." you uttered the words as if you had felt that the adjunct had injured the substance and the increased degree altered the kind. pliny was the courtier of an absolute monarch--cicero an aristocratic republican. for this reason the character of gentleman, in the sense to which i have confined it, is frequent in england, rare in france, and found, where it is found, in age or the latest period of manhood; while in germany the character is almost unknown. but the proper antipode of a gentleman is to be sought for among the anglo-american democrats. i owe this digression, as an act of justice to this amiable frenchman, and of humiliation for myself. for in a little controversy between us on the subject of french poetry, he made me feel my own ill behaviour by the silent reproof of contrast, and when i afterwards apologized to him for the warmth of my language, he answered me with a cheerful expression of surprise, and an immediate compliment, which a gentleman might both make with dignity and receive with pleasure. i was pleased therefore to find it agreed on, that we should, if possible, take up our quarters in the same house. my friend went with him in search of an hotel, and i to deliver my letters of recommendation. i walked onward at a brisk pace, enlivened not so much by anything i actually saw, as by the confused sense that i was for the first time in my life on the continent of our planet. i seemed to myself like a liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary, who now, after his first soar of freedom, poises himself in the upper air. very naturally i began to wonder at all things, some for being so like and some for being so unlike the things in england--dutch women with large umbrella hats shooting out half a yard before them, with a prodigal plumpness of petticoat behind--the women of hamburg with caps plaited on the caul with silver, or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened lace, which stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the eyes sparkled through it--the hanoverian with the fore part of the head bare, then a stiff lace standing up like a wall perpendicular on the cap, and the cap behind tailed with an enormous quantity of ribbon which lies or tosses on the back: "their visnomies seem'd like a goodly banner spread in defiance of all enemies." the ladies all in english dresses, all rouged, and all with bad teeth: which you notice instantly from their contrast to the almost animal, too glossy mother-of-pearl whiteness and the regularity of the teeth of the laughing, loud-talking country-women and servant-girls, who with their clean white stockings and with slippers without heel quarters, tripped along the dirty streets, as if they were secured by a charm from the dirt: with a lightness too, which surprised me, who had always considered it as one of the annoyances of sleeping in an inn, that i had to clatter up stairs in a pair of them. the streets narrow; to my english nose sufficiently offensive, and explaining at first sight the universal use of boots; without any appropriate path for the foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the street, some in the ordinary triangular form and entire as the botanists say; but the greater number notched and scolloped with more than chinese grotesqueness. above all, i was struck with the profusion of windows, so large and so many, that the houses look all glass. mr. pitt's window tax, with its pretty little additionals sprouting out from it like young toadlets on the back of a surinam toad, would certainly improve the appearance of the hamburg houses, which have a slight summer look, not in keeping with their size, incongruous with the climate, and precluding that feeling of retirement and self-content, which one wishes to associate with a house in a noisy city. but a conflagration would, i fear, be the previous requisite to the production of any architectural beauty in hamburg: for verily it is a filthy town. i moved on and crossed a multitude of ugly bridges, with huge black deformities of water wheels close by them. the water intersects the city everywhere, and would have furnished to the genius of italy the capabilities of all that is most beautiful and magnificent in architecture. it might have been the rival of venice, and it is huddle and ugliness, stench and stagnation. the jungfer stieg, (that is, young ladies' walk), to which my letters directed me, made an exception. it was a walk or promenade planted with treble rows of elm trees, which, being yearly pruned and cropped, remain slim and dwarf-like. this walk occupies one side of a square piece of water, with many swans on it perfectly tame, and, moving among the swans, shewy pleasure-boats with ladies in them, rowed by their husbands or lovers.------ (some paragraphs have been here omitted.)------thus embarrassed by sad and solemn politeness still more than by broken english, it sounded like the voice of an old friend when i heard the emigrant's servant inquiring after me. he had come for the purpose of guiding me to our hotel. through streets and streets i pressed on as happy as a child, and, i doubt not, with a childish expression of wonderment in my busy eyes, amused by the wicker waggons with movable benches across them, one behind the other, (these were the hackney coaches;) amused by the sign-boards of the shops, on which all the articles sold within are painted, and that too very exactly, though in a grotesque confusion, (a useful substitute for language in this great mart of nations;) amused with the incessant tinkling of the shop and house door bells, the bell hanging over each door and struck with a small iron rod at every entrance and exit;--and finally, amused by looking in at the windows, as i passed along; the ladies and gentlemen drinking coffee or playing cards, and the gentlemen all smoking. i wished myself a painter, that i might have sent you a sketch of one of the card parties. the long pipe of one gentleman rested on the table, its bole half a yard from his mouth, fuming like a censer by the fish-pool--the other gentleman, who was dealing the cards, and of course had both hands employed, held his pipe in his teeth, which hanging down between his knees, smoked beside his ancles. hogarth himself never drew a more ludicrous distortion both of attitude and physiognomy, than this effort occasioned nor was there wanting beside it one of those beautiful female faces which the same hogarth, in whom the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as a poet, so often and so gladly introduces, as the central figure, in a crowd of humorous deformities, which figures, (such is the power of true genius!) neither acts, nor is meant to act as a contrast; but diffuses through all, and over each of the group, a spirit of reconciliation and human kindness; and, even when the attention is no longer consciously directed to the cause of this feeling, still blends its tenderness with our laughter: and thus prevents the instructive merriment at the whims of nature or the foibles or humours of our fellow-men from degenerating into the heart-poison of contempt or hatred. our hotel die wilde man, (the sign of which was no bad likeness of the landlord, who had ingrafted on a very grim face a restless grin, that was at every man's service, and which indeed, like an actor rehearsing to himself, he kept playing in expectation of an occasion for it)--neither our hotel, i say, nor its landlord were of the genteelest class. but it has one great advantage for a stranger, by being in the market place, and the next neighbour of the huge church of st. nicholas: a church with shops and houses built up against it, out of which wens and warts its high massy steeple rises, necklaced near the top with a round of large gilt balls. a better pole-star could scarcely be desired. long shall i retain the impression made on my mind by the awful echo, so loud and long and tremulous, of the deep-toned clock within this church, which awoke me at two in the morning from a distressful dream, occasioned, i believe, by the feather bed, which is used here instead of bed-clothes. i will rather carry my blanket about with me like a wild indian, than submit to this abominable custom. our emigrant acquaintance was, we found, an intimate friend of the celebrated abbe de lisle: and from the large fortune which he possessed under the monarchy, had rescued sufficient not only for independence, but for respectability. he had offended some of his fellow-emigrants in london, whom he had obliged with considerable sums, by a refusal to make further advances, and in consequence of their intrigues had received an order to quit the kingdom. i thought it one proof of his innocence, that he attached no blame either to the alien act, or to the minister who had exerted it against him; and a still greater, that he spoke of london with rapture, and of his favourite niece, who had married and settled in england, with all the fervour and all the pride of a fond parent. a man sent by force out of a country, obliged to sell out of the stocks at a great loss, and exiled from those pleasures and that style of society which habit had rendered essential to his happiness, whose predominant feelings were yet all of a private nature, resentment for friendship outraged, and anguish for domestic affections interrupted--such a man, i think, i could dare warrant guiltless of espionnage in any service, most of all in that of the present french directory. he spoke with ecstasy of paris under the monarchy: and yet the particular facts, which made up his description, left as deep a conviction on my mind, of french worthlessness, as his own tale had done of emigrant ingratitude. since my arrival in germany, i have not met a single person, even among those who abhor the revolution, that spoke with favour, or even charity of the french emigrants. though the belief of their influence in the organization of this disastrous war (from the horrors of which, north germany deems itself only reprieved, not secured,) may have some share in the general aversion with which they are regarded: yet i am deeply persuaded that the far greater part is owing to their own profligacy, to their treachery and hardheartedness to each other, and the domestic misery or corrupt principles which so many of them have carried into the families of their protectors. my heart dilated with honest pride, as i recalled to mind the stern yet amiable characters of the english patriots, who sought refuge on the continent at the restoration! o let not our civil war under the first charles be paralleled with the french revolution! in the former, the character overflowed from excess of principle; in the latter from the fermentation of the dregs! the former, was a civil war between the virtues and virtuous prejudices of the two parties; the latter, between the vices. the venetian glass of the french monarchy shivered and flew asunder with the working of a double poison. sept. th. i was introduced to mr. klopstock, the brother of the poet, who again introduced me to professor ebeling, an intelligent and lively man, though deaf: so deaf, indeed, that it was a painful effort to talk with him, as we were obliged to drop our pearls into a huge ear-trumpet. from this courteous and kind-hearted man of letters, (i hope, the german literati in general may resemble this first specimen), i heard a tolerable italian pun, and an interesting anecdote. when buonaparte was in italy, having been irritated by some instance of perfidy, he said in a loud and vehement tone, in a public company--"'tis a true proverb, gli italiani tutti ladroni"--(that is, the italians all plunderers.) a lady had the courage to reply, "non tutti; ma buona parte," (not all, but a good part, or buonaparte.) this, i confess, sounded to my ears, as one of the many good things that might have been said. the anecdote is more valuable; for it instances the ways and means of french insinuation. hoche had received much information concerning the face of the country from a map of unusual fulness and accuracy, the maker of which, he heard, resided at duesseldorf. at the storming of duesseldorf by the french army, hoche previously ordered, that the house and property of this man should be preserved, and intrusted the performance of the order to an officer on whose troop he could rely. finding afterwards, that the man had escaped before the storming commenced, hoche exclaimed, "he had no reason to flee! it is for such men, not against them, that the french nation makes war, and consents to shed the blood of its children." you remember milton's sonnet-- "the great emathian conqueror bid spare the house of pindarus when temple and tower went to the ground"------ now though the duesseldorf map-maker may stand in the same relation to the theban bard, as the snail, that marks its path by lines of film on the wall it creeps over, to the eagle that soars sunward and beats the tempest with its wings; it does not therefore follow, that the jacobin of france may not be as valiant a general and as good a politician, as the madman of macedon. from professor ebeling's mr. klopstock accompanied my friend and me to his own house, where i saw a fine bust of his brother. there was a solemn and heavy greatness in his countenance, which corresponded to my preconceptions of his style and genius.--i saw there, likewise, a very fine portrait of lessing, whose works are at present the chief object of my admiration. his eyes were uncommonly like mine, if anything, rather larger and more prominent. but the lower part of his face and his nose--o what an exquisite expression of elegance and sensibility!--there appeared no depth, weight, or comprehensiveness in the forehead.--the whole face seemed to say, that lessing was a man of quick and voluptuous feelings; of an active but light fancy; acute; yet acute not in the observation of actual life, but in the arrangements and management of the ideal world, that is, in taste, and in metaphysics. i assure you, that i wrote these very words in my memorandum-book with the portrait before my eyes, and when i knew nothing of lessing but his name, and that he was a german writer of eminence. we consumed two hours and more over a bad dinner, at the table d'hote. "patience at a german ordinary, smiling at time." the germans are the worst cooks in europe. there is placed for every two persons a bottle of common wine--rhenish and claret alternately; but in the houses of the opulent, during the many and long intervals of the dinner, the servants hand round glasses of richer wines. at the lord of culpin's they came in this order. burgundy--madeira--port--frontiniac--pacchiaretti--old hock--mountain--champagne--hock again--bishop, and lastly, punch. a tolerable quantum, methinks! the last dish at the ordinary, viz. slices of roast pork, (for all the larger dishes are brought in, cut up, and first handed round and then set on the table,) with stewed prunes and other sweet fruits, and this followed by cheese and butter, with plates of apples, reminded me of shakespeare [ ], and shakespeare put it in my head to go to the french comedy. bless me! why it is worse than our modern english plays! the first act informed me, that a court martial is to be held on a count vatron, who had drawn his sword on the colonel, his brother-in-law. the officers plead in his behalf--in vain! his wife, the colonel's sister, pleads with most tempestuous agonies--in vain! she falls into hysterics and faints away, to the dropping of the inner curtain! in the second act sentence of death is passed on the count--his wife, as frantic and hysterical as before: more so (good industrious creature!) she could not be. the third and last act, the wife still frantic, very frantic indeed!--the soldiers just about to fire, the handkerchief actually dropped; when reprieve! reprieve! is heard from behind the scenes: and in comes prince somebody, pardons the count, and the wife is still frantic, only with joy; that was all! o dear lady! this is one of the cases, in which laughter is followed by melancholy: for such is the kind of drama, which is now substituted every where for shakespeare and racine. you well know, that i offer violence to my own feelings in joining these names. but however meanly i may think of the french serious drama, even in its most perfect specimens; and with whatever right i may complain of its perpetual falsification of the language, and of the connections and transitions of thought, which nature has appropriated to states of passion; still, however, the french tragedies are consistent works of art, and the offspring of great intellectual power. preserving a fitness in the parts, and a harmony in the whole, they form a nature of their own, though a false nature. still they excite the minds of the spectators to active thought, to a striving after ideal excellence. the soul is not stupefied into mere sensations by a worthless sympathy with our own ordinary sufferings, or an empty curiosity for the surprising, undignified by the language or the situations which awe and delight the imagination. what, (i would ask of the crowd, that press forward to the pantomimic tragedies and weeping comedies of kotzebue and his imitators), what are you seeking? is it comedy? but in the comedy of shakespeare and moliere the more accurate my knowledge, and the more profoundly i think, the greater is the satisfaction that mingles with my laughter. for though the qualities which these writers pourtray are ludicrous indeed, either from the kind or the excess, and exquisitely ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the human mind and such as, with more or less change in the drapery, i can apply to my own heart, or at least to whole classes of my fellow-creatures. how often are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human thought and action to quotations, not only from the tragic characters, but equally from the jaques, falstaff, and even from the fools and clowns of shakespeare, or from the miser, hypochondriast, and hypocrite, of moliere! say not, that i am recommending abstractions: for these class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness of a character, are so modified and particularized in each person of the shakesperian drama, that life itself does not excite more distinctly that sense of individuality which belongs to real existence. paradoxical as it may sound, one of the essential properties of geometry is not less essential to dramatic excellence, and, (if i may mention his name without pedantry to a lady,) aristotle has accordingly required of the poet an involution of the universal in the individual. the chief differences are, that in geometry it is the universal truth itself, which is uppermost in the consciousness, in poetry the individual form in which the truth is clothed. with the ancients, and not less with the elder dramatists of england and france, both comedy and tragedy were considered as kinds of poetry. they neither sought in comedy to make us laugh merely, much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of commonplace morals in metaphors drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of their characters; nor did they condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the applause of the spectators, by representing before them fac-similes of their own mean selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on their sluggish sympathies by a pathos not a whit more respectable than the maudlin tears of drunkenness. their tragic scenes were meant to affect us indeed, but within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with the activity both of our understanding and imagination. they wished to transport the mind to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant the germs of that greatness during the temporary oblivion of the worthless "thing, we are" and of the peculiar state, in which each man happens to be; suspending our individual recollections and lulling them to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts. hold!--(methinks i hear the spokesman of the crowd reply, and we will listen to him. i am the plaintiff, and he the defendant.) defendant. hold! are not our modern sentimental plays filled with the best christian morality? plaintiff. yes! just as much of it, and just that part of it, which you can exercise without a single christian virtue--without a single sacrifice that is really painful to you!--just as much as flatters you, sends you away pleased with your own hearts, and quite reconciled to your vices, which can never be thought very ill of, when they keep such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and generosity; adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man's face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and gobble it out of a common trough. no caesar must pace your boards--no antony, no royal dane, no orestes, no andromache! d. no: or as few of them as possible. what has a plain citizen of london, or hamburg, to do with your kings and queens, and your old school-boy pagan heroes? besides, every body knows the stories; and what curiosity can we feel---- p. what, sir, not for the manner?--not for the delightful language of the poet?--not for the situations, the action and reaction of the passions? d. you are hasty, sir! the only curiosity, we feel, is in the story: and how can we be anxious concerning the end of a play, or be surprised by it, when we know how it will turn out? p. your pardon, for having interrupted you! we now understand each other. you seek then, in a tragedy, which wise men of old held for the highest effort of human genius, the same gratification, as that you receive from a new novel, the last german romance, and other dainties of the day, which can be enjoyed but once. if you carry these feelings to the sister art of painting, michael angelo's sixtine chapel, and the scripture gallery of raphael can expect no favour from you. you know all about them beforehand; and are, doubtless, more familiar with the subjects of those paintings, than with the tragic tales of the historic or heroic ages. there is a consistency, therefore, in your preference of contemporary writers: for the great men of former times, those at least who were deemed great by our ancestors, sought so little to gratify this kind of curiosity, that they seemed to have regarded the story in a not much higher light, than the painter regards his canvass: as that on, not by, which they were to display their appropriate excellence. no work, resembling a tale or romance, can well show less variety of invention in the incidents, or less anxiety in weaving them together, than the don quixote of cervantes. its admirers feel the disposition to go back and re-peruse some preceding chapter, at least ten times for once that they find any eagerness to hurry forwards: or open the book on those parts which they best recollect, even as we visit those friends oftenest whom we love most, and with whose characters and actions we are the most intimately acquainted. in the divine ariosto, (as his countrymen call this, their darling poet,) i question whether there be a single tale of his own invention, or the elements of which, were not familiar to the readers of "old romance." i will pass by the ancient greeks, who thought it even necessary to the fable of a tragedy, that its substance should be previously known. that there had been at least fifty tragedies with the same title, would be one of the motives which determined sophocles and euripides, in the choice of electra as a subject. but milton-- d. aye milton, indeed!--but do not dr. johnson and other great men tell us, that nobody now reads milton but as a task? p. so much the worse for them, of whom this can be truly said! but why then do you pretend to admire shakespeare? the greater part, if not all, of his dramas were, as far as the names and the main incidents are concerned, already stock plays. all the stories, at least, on which they are built, pre-existed in the chronicles, ballads, or translations of contemporary or preceding english writers. why, i repeat, do you pretend to admire shakespeare? is it, perhaps, that you only pretend to admire him? however, as once for all, you have dismissed the well-known events and personages of history, or the epic muse, what have you taken in their stead? whom has your tragic muse armed with her bowl and dagger? the sentimental muse i should have said, whom you have seated in the throne of tragedy? what heroes has she reared on her buskins? d. o! our good friends and next-door neighbours--honest tradesmen, valiant tars, high-spirited half-pay officers, philanthropic jews, virtuous courtezans, tender-hearted braziers, and sentimental rat- catchers!--(a little bluff or so, but all our very generous, tender- hearted characters are a little rude or misanthropic, and all our misanthropes very tender-hearted.) p. but i pray you, friend, in what actions great or interesting, can such men be engaged? d. they give away a great deal of money; find rich dowries for young men and maidens who have all other good qualities; they brow-beat lords, baronets, and justices of the peace, (for they are as bold as hector!)--they rescue stage coaches at the instant they are falling down precipices; carry away infants in the sight of opposing armies; and some of our performers act a muscular able-bodied man to such perfection, that our dramatic poets, who always have the actors in their eye, seldom fail to make their favourite male character as strong as samson. and then they take such prodigious leaps!! and what is done on the stage is more striking even than what is acted. i once remember such a deafening explosion, that i could not hear a word of the play for half an act after it: and a little real gunpowder being set fire to at the same time, and smelt by all the spectators, the naturalness of the scene was quite astonishing! p. but how can you connect with such men and such actions that dependence of thousands on the fate of one, which gives so lofty an interest to the personages of shakespeare, and the greek tragedians? how can you connect with them that sublimest of all feelings, the power of destiny and the controlling might of heaven, which seems to elevate the characters which sink beneath its irresistible blow? d. o mere fancies! we seek and find on the present stage our own wants and passions, our own vexations, losses, and embarrassments. p. it is your own poor pettifogging nature then, which you desire to have represented before you?--not human nature in its height and vigour? but surely you might find the former with all its joys and sorrows, more conveniently in your own houses and parishes. d. true! but here comes a difference. fortune is blind, but the poet has his eyes open, and is besides as complaisant as fortune is capricious. he makes every thing turn out exactly as we would wish it. he gratifies us by representing those as hateful or contemptible whom we hate and wish to despise. p. (aside.) that is, he gratifies your envy by libelling your superiors. d. he makes all those precise moralists, who affect to be better than their neighbours, turn out at last abject hypocrites, traitors, and hard-hearted villains; and your men of spirit, who take their girl and their glass with equal freedom, prove the true men of honour, and, (that no part of the audience may remain unsatisfied,) reform in the last scene, and leave no doubt in the minds of the ladies, that they will make most faithful and excellent husbands: though it does seem a pity, that they should be obliged to get rid of qualities which had made them so interesting! besides, the poor become rich all at once; and in the final matrimonial choice the opulent and high-born themselves are made to confess; that virtue is the only true nobility, and that a lovely woman is a dowry of herself!! p. excellent! but you have forgotten those brilliant flashes of loyalty, those patriotic praises of the king and old england, which, especially if conveyed in a metaphor from the ship or the shop, so often solicit and so unfailingly receive the public plaudit! i give your prudence credit for the omission. for the whole system of your drama is a moral and intellectual jacobinism of the most dangerous kind, and those common-place rants of loyalty are no better than hypocrisy in your playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross self-delusion. for the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists with you in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of things, their causes and their effects; in the excitement of surprise, by representing the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour, (those things rather which pass among you for such), in persons and in classes of life where experience teaches us least to expect them; and in rewarding with all the sympathies, that are the dues of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem! and now--good night! truly! i might have written this last sheet without having gone to germany; but i fancied myself talking to you by your own fireside, and can you think it a small pleasure to me to forget now and then, that i am not there? besides, you and my other good friends have made up your minds to me as i am, and from whatever place i write you will expect that part of my "travels" will consist of excursions in my own mind. letter iii ratzeburg. no little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unimprisoned from a child's hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than i this clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town, groves, and lake of ratzeburg, from the window at which i am writing. my spirits certainly, and my health i fancied, were beginning to sink under the noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our hamburg hotel. i left it on sunday, sept. rd, with a letter of introduction from the poet klopstock, to the amtmann of ratzeburg. the amtmann received me with kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to board and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. the vehicle, in which i took my place, was considerably larger than an english stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and rude resemblance, that an elephant's ear does to the human. its top was composed of naked boards of different colours, and seeming to have been parts of different wainscots. instead of windows there were leathern curtains with a little eye of glass in each: they perfectly answered the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the cold. i could observe little therefore, but the inns and farmhouses at which we stopped. they were all alike, except in size: one great room, like a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in tufts through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the floor of the loft. from this room, which is paved like a street, sometimes one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end. these are commonly floored. in the large room the cattle, pigs, poultry, men, women, and children, live in amicable community; yet there was an appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. one of these houses i measured. it was an hundred feet in length. the apartments were taken off from one corner. between these and the stalls there was a small interspace, and here the breadth was forty-eight feet, but thirty-two where the stalls were; of course, the stalls were on each side eight feet in depth. the faces of the cows, etc. were turned towards the room; indeed they were in it, so that they had at least the comfort of seeing each other's faces. stall-feeding is universal in this part of germany, a practice concerning which the agriculturist and the poet are likely to entertain opposite opinions--or at least, to have very different feelings. the woodwork of these buildings on the outside is left unplastered, as in old houses among us, and, being painted red and green, it cuts and tesselates the buildings very gaily. from within three miles of hamburg almost to molln, which is thirty miles from it, the country, as far as i could see it, was a dead flat, only varied by woods. at molln it became more beautiful. i observed a small lake nearly surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the king of great britain, and inhabited by the inspector of the forests. we were nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from hamburg to ratzeburg, as we had been in going from london to yarmouth, one hundred and twenty-six miles. the lake of ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine miles in length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. about a mile from the southernmost point it is divided into two, of course very unequal, parts by an island, which, being connected by a bridge and a narrow slip of land with the one shore, and by another bridge of immense length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. on this island the town of ratzeburg is built. the pastor's house or vicarage, together with the amtmann's amtsschreiber's, and the church, stands near the summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land and the little bridge, from which, through a superb military gate, you step into the island-town of ratzeburg. this again is itself a little hill, by ascending and descending which, you arrive at the long bridge, and so to the other shore. the water to the south of the town is called the little lake, which however almost engrosses the beauties of the whole the shores being just often enough green and bare to give the proper effect to the magnificent groves which occupy the greater part of their circumference. from the turnings, windings, and indentations of the shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and the whole has a sort of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. at the north of the great lake, and peeping over it, i see the seven church towers of luebec, at the distance of twelve or thirteen miles, yet as distinctly as if they were not three. the only defect in the view is, that ratzeburg is built entirely of red bricks, and all the houses roofed with red tiles. to the eye, therefore, it presents a clump of brick-dust red. yet this evening, oct. th, twenty minutes past five, i saw the town perfectly beautiful, and the whole softened down into complete keeping, if i may borrow a term from the painters. the sky over ratzeburg and all the east was a pure evening blue, while over the west it was covered with light sandy clouds. hence a deep red light spread over the whole prospect, in undisturbed harmony with the red town, the brown-red woods, and the yellow-red reeds on the skirts of the lake. two or three boats, with single persons paddling them, floated up and down in the rich light, which not only was itself in harmony with all, but brought all into harmony. i should have told you that i went back to hamburg on thursday (sept. th) to take leave of my friend, who travels southward, and returned hither on the monday following. from empfelde, a village half way from ratzeburg, i walked to hamburg through deep sandy roads and a dreary flat: the soil everywhere white, hungry, and excessively pulverised; but the approach to the city is pleasing. light cool country houses, which you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with arbours and trellis work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in cloisters and piazzas, each house with neat rails before it, and green seats within the rails. every object, whether the growth of nature or the work of man, was neat and artificial. it pleased me far better, than if the houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a nobler taste: for this nobler taste would have been mere apery. the busy, anxious, money-loving merchant of hamburg could only have adopted, he could not have enjoyed the simplicity of nature. the mind begins to love nature by imitating human conveniences in nature; but this is a step in intellect, though a low one--and were it not so, yet all around me spoke of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and i entered with unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts even of the busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of hamburg. in this charitable and catholic mood i reached the vast ramparts of the city. these are huge green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees growing in the interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. of my return i have nothing worth communicating, except that i took extra post, which answers to posting in england. these north german post chaises are uncovered wicker carts. an english dust-cart is a piece of finery, a chef d'auvre of mechanism, compared with them and the horses!--a savage might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numeration table. wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle with the brown rye bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting together; only the horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion no water to his gin. now and henceforward for subjects of more interest to you, and to the objects in search of which i left you: namely, the literati and literature of germany. believe me, i walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as w----and myself accompanied mr. klopstock to the house of his brother, the poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate. it is one of a row of little common-place summer-houses, (for so they looked,) with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected with several roads. whatever beauty, (thought i,) may be before the poet's eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation. we waited a few minutes in a neat little parlour, ornamented with the figures of two of the muses and with prints, the subjects of which were from klopstock's odes. the poet entered. i was much disappointed in his countenance, and recognised in it no likeness to the bust. there was no comprehension in the forehead, no weight over the eye-brows, no expression of peculiarity, moral or intellectual, on the eyes, no massiveness in the general countenance. he is, if anything, rather below the middle size. he wore very large half-boots, which his legs filled, so fearfully were they swollen. however, though neither w---- nor myself could discover any indications of sublimity or enthusiasm in his physiognomy, we were both equally impressed with his liveliness, and his kind and ready courtesy. he talked in french with my friend, and with difficulty spoke a few sentences to me in english. his enunciation was not in the least affected by the entire want of his upper teeth. the conversation began on his part by the expression of his rapture at the surrender of the detachment of french troops under general humbert. their proceedings in ireland with regard to the committee which they had appointed, with the rest of their organizing system, seemed to have given the poet great entertainment. he then declared his sanguine belief in nelson's victory, and anticipated its confirmation with a keen and triumphant pleasure. his words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement anti-gallicanism. the subject changed to literature, and i inquired in latin concerning the history of german poetry and the elder german poets. to my great astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little on the subject. he had indeed occasionally read one or two of their elder writers, but not so as to enable him to speak of their merits. professor ebeling, he said, would probably give me every information of this kind: the subject had not particularly excited his curiosity. he then talked of milton and glover, and thought glover's blank verse superior to milton's. w---- and myself expressed our surprise: and my friend gave his definition and notion of harmonious verse, that it consisted, (the english iambic blank verse above all,) in the apt arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs, "with many a winding bout of linked sweetness long drawn out," and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence of antithetic vigour, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose. klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine glover's superiority to single lines. he told us that he had read milton, in a prose translation, when he was fourteen [ ]. i understood him thus myself, and w---- interpreted klopstock's french as i had already construed it. he appeared to know very little of milton or indeed of our poets in general. he spoke with great indignation of the english prose translation of his messiah. all the translations had been bad, very bad--but the english was no translation--there were pages on pages not in the original--and half the original was not to be found in the translation. w---- told him that i intended to translate a few of his odes as specimens of german lyrics--he then said to me in english, "i wish you would render into english some select passages of the messiah, and revenge me of your countryman!". it was the liveliest thing which he produced in the whole conversation. he told us, that his first ode was fifty years older than his last. i looked at him with much emotion--i considered him as the venerable father of german poetry; as a good man; as a christian; seventy-four years old; with legs enormously swollen; yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative. my eyes felt as if a tear were swelling into them. in the portrait of lessing there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect of his physiognomy--klopstock wore the same, powdered and frizzled. by the bye, old men ought never to wear powder--the contrast between a large snow-white wig and the colour of an old man's skin is disgusting, and wrinkles in such a neighbourhood appear only channels for dirt. it is an honour to poets and great men, that you think of them as parts of nature; and anything of trick and fashion wounds you in them, as much as when you see venerable yews clipped into miserable peacocks.--the author of the messiah should have worn his own grey hair.--his powder and periwig were to the eye what mr. virgil would be to the ear. klopstock dwelt much on the superior power which the german language possessed of concentrating meaning. he said, he had often translated parts of homer and virgil, line by line, and a german line proved always sufficient for a greek or latin one. in english you cannot do this. i answered, that in english we could commonly render one greek heroic line in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and i conjectured that this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than one german or greek hexameter. he did not understand me [ ]: and i, who wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad that he did not. we now took our leave. at the beginning of the french revolution klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. he received some honorary presents from the french republic, (a golden crown i believe), and, like our priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he declined. but when french liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury, he sent back these presents with a palinodia, declaring his abhorrence of their proceedings: and since then he has been perhaps more than enough an anti-gallican. i mean, that in his just contempt and detestation of the crimes and follies of the revolutionists, he suffers himself to forget that the revolution itself is a process of the divine providence; and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of god, so are their iniquities instruments of his goodness. from klopstock's house we walked to the ramparts, discoursing together on the poet and his conversation, till our attention was diverted to the beauty and singularity of the sunset and its effects on the objects around us. there were woods in the distance. a rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,) lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. over that part of the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist floated. the trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and brassy light. had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been divided into equal segments by a rule or pair of compasses, the portions could not have been more regular. all else was obscure. it was a fairy scene!--and to increase its romantic character, among the moving objects, thus divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a beautiful child, dressed with the elegant simplicity of an english child, riding on a stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other accoutrements of which were in a high degree costly and splendid. before i quit the subject of hamburg, let me say, that i remained a day or two longer than i otherwise should have done, in order to be present at the feast of st. michael, the patron saint of hamburg, expecting to see the civic pomp of this commercial republic. i was however disappointed. there were no processions, two or three sermons were preached to two or three old women in two or three churches, and st. michael and his patronage wished elsewhere by the higher classes, all places of entertainment, theatre, etc. being shut up on this day. in hamburg, there seems to be no religion at all; in luebec it is confined to the women. the men seemed determined to be divorced from their wives in the other world, if they cannot in this. you will not easily conceive a more singular sight, than is presented by the vast aisle of the principal church at luebec, seen from the organ loft: for being filled with female servants and persons in the same class of life, and all their caps having gold and silver cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold and silver. i will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes, which my friend w---- made of his conversations with klopstock, during the interviews that took place after my departure. on these i shall make but one remark at present, and that will appear a presumptuous one, namely, that klopstock's remarks on the venerable sage of koenigsburg are to my own knowledge injurious and mistaken; and so far is it from being true, that his system is now given up, that throughout the universities of germany there is not a single professor who is not either a kantean or a disciple of fichte, whose system is built on the kantean, and presupposes its truth; or lastly who, though an antagonist of kant, as to his theoretical work, has not embraced wholly or in part his moral system, and adopted part of his nomenclature. "klopstock having wished to see the calvary of cumberland, and asked what was thought of it in england, i went to remnant's (the english bookseller) where i procured the analytical review, in which is contained the review of cumberland's calvary. i remembered to have read there some specimens of a blank verse translation of the messiah. i had mentioned this to klopstock, and he had a great desire to see them. i walked over to his house and put the book into his hands. on adverting to his own poem, he told me he began the messiah when he was seventeen; he devoted three entire years to the plan without composing a single line. he was greatly at a loss in what manner to execute his work. there were no successful specimens of versification in the german language before this time. the first three cantos he wrote in a species of measured or numerous prose. this, though done with much labour and some success, was far from satisfying him. he had composed hexameters both latin and greek as a school exercise, and there had been also in the german language attempts in that style of versification. these were only of very moderate merit.--one day he was struck with the idea of what could be done in this way--he kept his room a whole day, even went without his dinner, and found that in the evening he had written twenty-three hexameters, versifying a part of what he had before written in prose. from that time, pleased with his efforts, he composed no more in prose. today he informed me that he had finished his plan before he read milton. he was enchanted to see an author who before him had trod the same path. this is a contradiction of what he said before. he did not wish to speak of his poem to any one till it was finished: but some of his friends who had seen what he had finished, tormented him till he had consented to publish a few books in a journal. he was then, i believe, very young, about twenty-five. the rest was printed at different periods, four books at a time. the reception given to the first specimens was highly flattering. he was nearly thirty years in finishing the whole poem, but of these thirty years not more than two were employed in the composition. he only composed in favourable moments; besides he had other occupations. he values himself upon the plan of his odes, and accuses the modern lyrical writers of gross deficiency in this respect. i laid the same accusation against horace: he would not hear of it--but waived the discussion. he called rousseau's ode to fortune a moral dissertation in stanzas. i spoke of dryden's st. cecilia; but he did not seem familiar with our writers. he wished to know the distinctions between our dramatic and epic blank verse. he recommended me to read his hermann before i read either the messiah or the odes. he flattered himself that some time or other his dramatic poems would be known in england. he had not heard of cowper. he thought that voss in his translation of the iliad had done violence to the idiom of the germans, and had sacrificed it to the greeks, not remembering sufficiently that each language has its particular spirit and genius. he said lessing was the first of their dramatic writers. i complained of nathan as tedious. he said there was not enough of action in it; but that lessing was the most chaste of their writers. he spoke favourably of goethe; but said that his sorrows of werter was his best work, better than any of his dramas: he preferred the first written to the rest of goethe's dramas. schiller's robbers he found so extravagant, that he could not read it. i spoke of the scene of the setting sun. he did not know it. he said schiller could not live. he thought don carlos the best of his dramas; but said that the plot was inextricable.--it was evident he knew little of schiller's works: indeed, he said, he could not read them. buerger, he said, was a true poet, and would live; that schiller, on the contrary, must soon be forgotten; that he gave himself up to the imitation of shakespeare, who often was extravagant, but that schiller was ten thousand times more so. he spoke very slightingly of kotzebue, as an immoral author in the first place, and next, as deficient in power. at vienna, said he, they are transported with him; but we do not reckon the people of vienna either the wisest or the wittiest people of germany. he said wieland was a charming author, and a sovereign master of his own language: that in this respect goethe could not be compared to him, nor indeed could any body else. he said that his fault was to be fertile to exuberance. i told him the oberon had just been translated into english. he asked me if i was not delighted with the poem. i answered, that i thought the story began to flag about the seventh or eighth book; and observed, that it was unworthy of a man of genius to make the interest of a long poem turn entirely upon animal gratification. he seemed at first disposed to excuse this by saying, that there are different subjects for poetry, and that poets are not willing to be restricted in their choice. i answered, that i thought the passion of love as well suited to the purposes of poetry as any other passion; but that it was a cheap way of pleasing to fix the attention of the reader through a long poem on the mere appetite. well! but, said he, you see, that such poems please every body. i answered, that it was the province of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs. he agreed, and confessed, that on no account whatsoever would he have written a work like the oberon. he spoke in raptures of wieland's style, and pointed out the passage where retzia is delivered of her child, as exquisitely beautiful. i said that i did not perceive any very striking passages; but that i made allowance for the imperfections of a translation. of the thefts of wieland, he said, they were so exquisitely managed, that the greatest writers might be proud to steal as he did. he considered the books and fables of old romance writers in the light of the ancient mythology, as a sort of common property, from which a man was free to take whatever he could make a good use of. an englishman had presented him with the odes of collins, which he had read with pleasure. he knew little or nothing of gray, except his elegy written in a country church-yard. he complained of the fool in lear. i observed that he seemed to give a terrible wildness to the distress; but still he complained. he asked whether it was not allowed, that pope had written rhymed poetry with more skill than any of our writers--i said i preferred dryden, because his couplets had greater variety in their movement. he thought my reason a good one; but asked whether the rhyme of pope were not more exact. this question i understood as applying to the final terminations, and observed to him that i believed it was the case; but that i thought it was easy to excuse some inaccuracy in the final sounds, if the general sweep of the verse was superior. i told him that we were not so exact with regard to the final endings of the lines as the french. he did not seem to know that we made no distinction between masculine and feminine (i.e. single or double,) rhymes: at least he put inquiries to me on this subject. he seemed to think that no language could be so far formed as that it might not be enriched by idioms borrowed from another tongue. i said this was a very dangerous practice; and added, that i thought milton had often injured both his prose and verse by taking this liberty too frequently. i recommended to him the prose works of dryden as models of pure and native english. i was treading upon tender ground, as i have reason to suppose that he has himself liberally indulged in the practice." the same day i dined at mr. klopstock's, where i had the pleasure of a third interview with the poet. we talked principally about indifferent things. i asked him what he thought of kant. he said that his reputation was much on the decline in germany. that for his own part he was not surprised to find it so, as the works of kant were to him utterly incomprehensible--that he had often been pestered by the kanteans; but was rarely in the practice of arguing with them. his custom was to produce the book, open it and point to a passage, and beg they would explain it. this they ordinarily attempted to do by substituting their own ideas. i do not want, i say, an explanation of your own ideas, but of the passage which is before us. in this way i generally bring the dispute to an immediate conclusion. he spoke of wolfe as the first metaphysician they had in germany. wolfe had followers; but they could hardly be called a sect, and luckily till the appearance of kant, about fifteen years ago, germany had not been pestered by any sect of philosophers whatsoever; but that each man had separately pursued his inquiries uncontrolled by the dogmas of a master. kant had appeared ambitious to be the founder of a sect; that he had succeeded: but that the germans were now coming to their senses again. that nicolai and engel had in different ways contributed to disenchant the nation; but above all the incomprehensibility of the philosopher and his philosophy. he seemed pleased to hear, that as yet kant's doctrines had not met with many admirers in england--did not doubt but that we had too much wisdom to be duped by a writer who set at defiance the common sense and common understandings of men. we talked of tragedy. he seemed to rate highly the power of exciting tears--i said that nothing was more easy than to deluge an audience, that it was done every day by the meanest writers. i must remind you, my friend, first, that these notes are not intended as specimens of klopstock's intellectual power, or even "colloquial prowess," to judge of which by an accidental conversation, and this with strangers, and those too foreigners, would be not only unreasonable, but calumnious. secondly, i attribute little other interest to the remarks than what is derived from the celebrity of the person who made them. lastly, if you ask me, whether i have read the messiah, and what i think of it? i answer--as yet the first four books only: and as to my opinion--(the reasons of which hereafter)--you may guess it from what i could not help muttering to myself, when the good pastor this morning told me, that klopstock was the german milton--"a very german milton indeed!!!" heaven preserve you, and s. t. coleridge. chapter xxiii quid quod praefatione praemunierim libellum, qua conor omnem offendiculi ansam praecidere? [ ] neque quicquam addubito, quin ea candidis omnibus faciat satis. quid autem facias istis, qui vel ob ingenii pertinaciam sibi satisfieri nolint, vel stupidiores sint, quam ut satisfactionem intelligant? nam quemadmodum simonides dixit, thessalos hebetiores esse, quam ut possint a se decipi, ita quosdam videas stupidiores, quam ut placari queant. adhaec, non mirum est invenire quod calumnietur, qui nihil aliud quaerit, nisi quod calumnietur. erasmus ad dorpium, theologum. in the rifacimento of the friend, i have inserted extracts from the conciones ad populum, printed, though scarcely published, in the year , in the very heat and height of my anti-ministerial enthusiasm: these in proof that my principles of politics have sustained no change.--in the present chapter, i have annexed to my letters from germany, with particular reference to that, which contains a disquisition on the modern drama, a critique on the tragedy of bertram, written within the last twelve months: in proof, that i have been as falsely charged with any fickleness in my principles of taste.--the letter was written to a friend: and the apparent abruptness with which it begins, is owing to the omission of the introductory sentences. you remember, my dear sir, that mr. whitbread, shortly before his death, proposed to the assembled subscribers of drury lane theatre, that the concern should be farmed to some responsible individual under certain conditions and limitations: and that his proposal was rejected, not without indignation, as subversive of the main object, for the attainment of which the enlightened and patriotic assemblage of philodramatists had been induced to risk their subscriptions. now this object was avowed to be no less than the redemption of the british stage not only from horses, dogs, elephants, and the like zoological rarities, but also from the more pernicious barbarisms and kotzebuisms in morals and taste. drury lane was to be restored to its former classical renown; shakespeare, jonson, and otway, with the expurgated muses of vanbrugh, congreve, and wycherley, were to be reinaugurated in their rightful dominion over british audiences; and the herculean process was to commence, by exterminating the speaking monsters imported from the banks of the danube, compared with which their mute relations, the emigrants from exeter 'change, and polito (late pidcock's) show-carts, were tame and inoffensive. could an heroic project, at once so refined and so arduous, be consistently entrusted to, could its success be rationally expected from, a mercenary manager, at whose critical quarantine the lucri bonus odor would conciliate a bill of health to the plague in person? no! as the work proposed, such must be the work-masters. rank, fortune, liberal education, and (their natural accompaniments, or consequences) critical discernment, delicate tact, disinterestedness, unsuspected morals, notorious patriotism, and tried maecenasship, these were the recommendations that influenced the votes of the proprietary subscribers of drury lane theatre, these the motives that occasioned the election of its supreme committee of management. this circumstance alone would have excited a strong interest in the public mind, respecting the first production of the tragic muse which had been announced under such auspices, and had passed the ordeal of such judgments: and the tragedy, on which you have requested my judgment, was the work on which the great expectations, justified by so many causes, were doomed at length to settle. but before i enter on the examination of bertram, or the castle of st. aldobrand, i shall interpose a few words, on the phrase german drama, which i hold to be altogether a misnomer. at the time of lessing, the german stage, such as it was, appears to have been a flat and servile copy of the french. it was lessing who first introduced the name and the works of shakespeare to the admiration of the germans; and i should not perhaps go too far, if i add, that it was lessing who first proved to all thinking men, even to shakespeare's own countrymen, the true nature of his apparent irregularities. these, he demonstrated, were deviations only from the accidents of the greek tragedy; and from such accidents as hung a heavy weight on the wings of the greek poets, and narrowed their flight within the limits of what we may call the heroic opera. he proved, that, in all the essentials of art, no less than in the truth of nature, the plays of shakespeare were incomparably more coincident with the principles of aristotle, than the productions of corneille and racine, notwithstanding the boasted regularity of the latter. under these convictions were lessing's own dramatic works composed. their deficiency is in depth and imagination: their excellence is in the construction of the plot; the good sense of the sentiments; the sobriety of the morals; and the high polish of the diction and dialogue. in short, his dramas are the very antipodes of all those which it has been the fashion of late years at once to abuse and enjoy, under the name of the german drama. of this latter, schiller's robbers was the earliest specimen; the first fruits of his youth, (i had almost said of his boyhood), and as such, the pledge, and promise of no ordinary genius. only as such, did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the play. during his whole life he expressed himself concerning this production with more than needful asperity, as a monster not less offensive to good taste, than to sound morals; and, in his latter years, his indignation at the unwonted popularity of the robbers seduced him into the contrary extremes, viz. a studied feebleness of interest, (as far as the interest was to be derived from incidents and the excitement of curiosity); a diction elaborately metrical; the affectation of rhymes; and the pedantry of the chorus. but to understand the true character of the robbers, and of the countless imitations which were its spawn, i must inform you, or at least call to your recollection, that, about that time, and for some years before it, three of the most popular books in the german language were, the translations of young's night thoughts, hervey's meditations, and richardson's clarissa harlow. now we have only to combine the bloated style and peculiar rhythm of hervey, which is poetic only on account of its utter unfitness for prose, and might as appropriately be called prosaic, from its utter unfitness for poetry; we have only, i repeat, to combine these herveyisms with the strained thoughts, the figurative metaphysics and solemn epigrams of young on the one hand; and with the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness of every thought and feeling in the whole flux and reflux of the mind, in short the self-involution and dreamlike continuity of richardson on the other hand; and then to add the horrific incidents, and mysterious villains, (geniuses of supernatural intellect, if you will take the authors' words for it, but on a level with the meanest ruffians of the condemned cells, if we are to judge by their actions and contrivances)--to add the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine of a modern author, (themselves the literary brood of the castle of otranto, the translations of which, with the imitations and improvements aforesaid, were about that time beginning to make as much noise in germany as their originals were making in england),--and as the compound of these ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called german drama. the olla podrida thus cooked up, was denounced, by the best critics in germany, as the mere cramps of weakness, and orgasms of a sickly imagination on the part of the author, and the lowest provocation of torpid feeling on that of the readers. the old blunder, however, concerning the irregularity and wildness of shakespeare, in which the german did but echo the french, who again were but the echoes of our own critics, was still in vogue, and shakespeare was quoted as authority for the most anti-shakespearean drama. we have indeed two poets who wrote as one, near the age of shakespeare, to whom, (as the worst characteristic of their writings), the coryphaeus of the present drama may challenge the honour of being a poor relation, or impoverished descendant. for if we would charitably consent to forget the comic humour, the wit, the felicities of style, in other words, all the poetry, and nine-tenths of all the genius of beaumont and fletcher, that which would remain becomes a kotzebue. the so-called german drama, therefore, is english in its origin, english in its materials, and english by re-adoption; and till we can prove that kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of kotzebues, whether dramatists or romantic writers, or writers of romantic dramas, were ever admitted to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated germans than were occupied by their originals, and apes' apes in their mother country, we should submit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders; or rather consider it as a lack-grace returned from transportation with such improvements only in growth and manners as young transported convicts usually come home with. i know nothing that contributes more to a clearer insight into the true nature of any literary phaenomenon, than the comparison of it with some elder production, the likeness of which is striking, yet only apparent, while the difference is real. in the present case this opportunity is furnished us, by the old spanish play, entitled atheista fulminato, formerly, and perhaps still, acted in the churches and monasteries of spain, and which, under various names (don juan, the libertine, etc.) has had its day of favour in every country throughout europe. a popularity so extensive, and of a work so grotesque and extravagant, claims and merits philosophical attention and investigation. the first point to be noticed is, that the play is throughout imaginative. nothing of it belongs to the real world, but the names of the places and persons. the comic parts, equally with the tragic; the living, equally with the defunct characters, are creatures of the brain; as little amenable to the rules of ordinary probability, as the satan of paradise lost, or the caliban of the tempest, and therefore to be understood and judged of as impersonated abstractions. rank, fortune, wit, talent, acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty of person, vigorous health, and constitutional hardihood,--all these advantages, elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and national character, are supposed to have combined in don juan, so as to give him the means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine of a godless nature, as the sole ground and efficient cause not only of all things, events, and appearances, but likewise of all our thoughts, sensations, impulses and actions. obedience to nature is the only virtue: the gratification of the passions and appetites her only dictate: each individual's self-will the sole organ through which nature utters her commands, and "self-contradiction is the only wrong! for, by the laws of spirit, in the right is every individual character that acts in strict consistence with itself." that speculative opinions, however impious and daring they may be, are not always followed by correspondent conduct, is most true, as well as that they can scarcely in any instance be systematically realized, on account of their unsuitableness to human nature and to the institutions of society. it can be hell, only where it is all hell: and a separate world of devils is necessary for the existence of any one complete devil. but on the other hand it is no less clear, nor, with the biography of carrier and his fellow atheists before us, can it be denied without wilful blindness, that the (so called) system of nature (that is, materialism, with the utter rejection of moral responsibility, of a present providence, and of both present and future retribution) may influence the characters and actions of individuals, and even of communities, to a degree that almost does away the distinction between men and devils, and will make the page of the future historian resemble the narration of a madman's dreams. it is not the wickedness of don juan, therefore, which constitutes the character an abstraction, and removes it from the rules of probability; but the rapid succession of the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual superiority, and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable qualities, as co-existent with entire wickedness in one and the same person. but this likewise is the very circumstance which gives to this strange play its charm and universal interest. don juan is, from beginning to end, an intelligible character: as much so as the satan of milton. the poet asks only of the reader, what, as a poet, he is privileged to ask: namely, that sort of negative faith in the existence of such a being, which we willingly give to productions professedly ideal, and a disposition to the same state of feeling, as that with which we contemplate the idealized figures of the apollo belvidere, and the farnese hercules. what the hercules is to the eye in corporeal strength, don juan is to the mind in strength of character. the ideal consists in the happy balance of the generic with the individual. the former makes the character representative and symbolical, therefore instructive; because, mutatis mutandis, it is applicable to whole classes of men. the latter gives it living interest; for nothing lives or is real, but as definite and individual. to understand this completely, the reader need only recollect the specific state of his feelings, when in looking at a picture of the historic (more properly of the poetic or heroic) class, he objects to a particular figure as being too much of a portrait; and this interruption of his complacency he feels without the least reference to, or the least acquaintance with, any person in real life whom he might recognise in this figure. it is enough that such a figure is not ideal: and therefore not ideal, because one of the two factors or elements of the ideal is in excess. a similar and more powerful objection he would feel towards a set of figures which were mere abstractions, like those of cipriani, and what have been called greek forms and faces, that is, outlines drawn according to a recipe. these again are not ideal; because in these the other element is in excess. "forma formans per formam formatam translucens," [ ] is the definition and perfection of ideal art. this excellence is so happily achieved in the don juan, that it is capable of interesting without poetry, nay, even without words, as in our pantomime of that name. we see clearly how the character is formed; and the very extravagance of the incidents, and the super-human entireness of don juan's agency, prevents the wickedness from shocking our minds to any painful degree. we do not believe it enough for this effect; no, not even with that kind of temporary and negative belief or acquiescence which i have described above. meantime the qualities of his character are too desirable, too flattering to our pride and our wishes, not to make up on this side as much additional faith as was lost on the other. there is no danger (thinks the spectator or reader) of my becoming such a monster of iniquity as don juan! i never shall be an atheist! i shall never disallow all distinction between right and wrong! i have not the least inclination to be so outrageous a drawcansir in my love affairs! but to possess such a power of captivating and enchanting the affections of the other sex!--to be capable of inspiring in a charming and even a virtuous woman, a love so deep, and so entirely personal to me!--that even my worst vices, (if i were vicious), even my cruelty and perfidy, (if i were cruel and perfidious), could not eradicate the passion!--to be so loved for my own self, that even with a distinct knowledge of my character, she yet died to save me!--this, sir, takes hold of two sides of our nature, the better and the worse. for the heroic disinterestedness, to which love can transport a woman, can not be contemplated without an honourable emotion of reverence towards womanhood: and, on the other hand, it is among the miseries, and abides in the dark ground-work of our nature, to crave an outward confirmation of that something within us, which is our very self, that something, not made up of our qualities and relations, but itself the supporter and substantial basis of all these. love me, and not my qualities, may be a vicious and an insane wish, but it is not a wish wholly without a meaning. without power, virtue would be insufficient and incapable of revealing its being. it would resemble the magic transformation of tasso's heroine into a tree, in which she could only groan and bleed. hence power is necessarily an object of our desire and of our admiration. but of all power, that of the mind is, on every account, the grand desideratum of human ambition. we shall be as gods in knowledge, was and must have been the first temptation: and the coexistence of great intellectual lordship with guilt has never been adequately represented without exciting the strongest interest, and for this reason, that in this bad and heterogeneous co-ordination we can contemplate the intellect of man more exclusively as a separate self-subsistence, than in its proper state of subordination to his own conscience, or to the will of an infinitely superior being. this is the sacred charm of shakespeare's male characters in general. they are all cast in the mould of shakespeare's own gigantic intellect; and this is the open attraction of his richard, iago, edmund, and others in particular. but again; of all intellectual power, that of superiority to the fear of the invisible world is the most dazzling. its influence is abundantly proved by the one circumstance, that it can bribe us into a voluntary submission of our better knowledge, into suspension of all our judgment derived from constant experience, and enable us to peruse with the liveliest interest the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards, genii, and secret talismans. on this propensity, so deeply rooted in our nature, a specific dramatic probability may be raised by a true poet, if the whole of his work be in harmony: a dramatic probability, sufficient for dramatic pleasure, even when the component characters and incidents border on impossibility. the poet does not require us to be awake and believe; he solicits us only to yield ourselves to a dream; and this too with our eyes open, and with our judgment perdue behind the curtain, ready to awaken us at the first motion of our will: and meantime, only, not to disbelieve. and in such a state of mind, who but must be impressed with the cool intrepidity of don john on the appearance of his father's ghost: "ghost.--monster! behold these wounds! "d. john.--i do! they were well meant and well performed, i see. "ghost.------repent, repent of all thy villanies. my clamorous blood to heaven for vengeance cries, heaven will pour out his judgments on you all. hell gapes for you, for you each fiend doth call, and hourly waits your unrepenting fall. you with eternal horrors they'll torment, except of all your crimes you suddenly repent. (ghost sinks.) "d. john.--farewell, thou art a foolish ghost. repent, quoth he! what could this mean? our senses are all in a mist sure. "d. antonio.--(one of d. juan's reprobate companions.) they are not! 'twas a ghost. "d. lopez.--(another reprobate.) i ne'er believed those foolish tales before. "d. john.--come! 'tis no matter. let it be what it will, it must be natural. "d. ant.--and nature is unalterable in us too. "d. john.--'tis true! the nature of a ghost can not change our's." who also can deny a portion of sublimity to the tremendous consistency with which he stands out the last fearful trial, like a second prometheus? "chorus of devils. "statue-ghost.--will you not relent and feel remorse? "d. john.--could'st thou bestow another heart on me i might. but with this heart i have, i can not. "d. lopez.--these things are prodigious. "d. anton.--i have a sort of grudging to relent, but something holds me back. "d. lop.--if we could, 'tis now too late. i will not. "d. ant.--we defy thee! "ghost.--perish ye impious wretches, go and find the punishments laid up in store for you! (thunder and lightning. d. lop. and d. ant. are swallowed up.) "ghost to d. john.--behold their dreadful fates, and know that thy last moment's come! "d. john.--think not to fright me, foolish ghost; i'll break your marble body in pieces and pull down your horse. (thunder and lightning--chorus of devils, etc.) "d. john.--these things i see with wonder, but no fear. were all the elements to be confounded, and shuffled all into their former chaos; were seas of sulphur flaming round about me, and all mankind roaring within those fires, i could not fear, or feel the least remorse. to the last instant i would dare thy power. here i stand firm, and all thy threats contemn. thy murderer (to the ghost of one whom he had murdered) stands here! now do thy worst!" (he is swallowed up in a cloud of fire.) in fine the character of don john consists in the union of every thing desirable to human nature, as means, and which therefore by the well known law of association becomes at length desirable on their own account. on their own account, and, in their own dignity, they are here displayed, as being employed to ends so unhuman, that in the effect, they appear almost as means without an end. the ingredients too are mixed in the happiest proportion, so as to uphold and relieve each other--more especially in that constant interpoise of wit, gaiety, and social generosity, which prevents the criminal, even in his most atrocious moments, from sinking into the mere ruffian, as far at least, as our imagination sits in judgment. above all, the fine suffusion through the whole, with the characteristic manners and feelings, of a highly bred gentleman gives life to the drama. thus having invited the statue-ghost of the governor, whom he had murdered, to supper, which invitation the marble ghost accepted by a nod of the head, don john has prepared a banquet. "d. john.--some wine, sirrah! here's to don pedro's ghost--he should have been welcome. "d. lop.--the rascal is afraid of you after death. (one knocks hard at the door.) "d. john.--(to the servant)--rise and do your duty. "serv.--oh the devil, the devil! (marble ghost enters.) "d. john.--ha! 'tis the ghost! let's rise and receive him! come, governour, you are welcome, sit there; if we had thought you would have come, we would have staid for you. * * * * * * here, governour, your health! friends, put it about! here's excellent meat, taste of this ragout. come, i'll help you, come eat, and let old quarrels be forgotten. (the ghost threatens him with vengeance.) "d. john.--we are too much confirmed--curse on this dry discourse. come, here's to your mistress, you had one when you were living: not forgetting your sweet sister. (devils enter.) "d. john.--are these some of your retinue? devils, say you? i'm sorry i have no burnt brandy to treat 'em with, that's drink fit for devils," etc. nor is the scene from which we quote interesting, in dramatic probability alone; it is susceptible likewise of a sound moral; of a moral that has more than common claims on the notice of a too numerous class, who are ready to receive the qualities of gentlemanly courage, and scrupulous honour, (in all the recognised laws of honour,) as the substitutes of virtue, instead of its ornaments. this, indeed, is the moral value of the play at large, and that which places it at a world's distance from the spirit of modern jacobinism. the latter introduces to us clumsy copies of these showy instrumental qualities, in order to reconcile us to vice and want of principle; while the atheista fulminato presents an exquisite portraiture of the same qualities, in all their gloss and glow, but presents them for the sole purpose of displaying their hollowness, and in order to put us on our guard by demonstrating their utter indifference to vice and virtue, whenever these and the like accomplishments are contemplated for themselves alone. eighteen years ago i observed, that the whole secret of the modern jacobinical drama, (which, and not the german, is its appropriate designation,) and of all its popularity, consists in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of things in their causes and effects: namely, in the excitement of surprise by representing the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour (those things rather which pass amongst us for such) in persons and in classes where experience teaches us least to expect them; and by rewarding with all the sympathies which are the due of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem. this of itself would lead me back to bertram, or the castle of st. aldobrand; but, in my own mind, this tragedy was brought into connection with the libertine, (shadwell's adaptation of the atheista fulminato to the english stage in the reign of charles the second,) by the fact, that our modern drama is taken, in the substance of it, from the first scene of the third act of the libertine. but with what palpable superiority of judgment in the original! earth and hell, men and spirits are up in arms against don john; the two former acts of the play have not only prepared us for the supernatural, but accustomed us to the prodigious. it is, therefore, neither more nor less than we anticipate when the captain exclaims: "in all the dangers i have been, such horrors i never knew. i am quite unmanned:" and when the hermit says, that he had "beheld the ocean in wildest rage, yet ne'er before saw a storm so dreadful, such horrid flashes of lightning, and such claps of thunder, were never in my remembrance." and don john's burst of startling impiety is equally intelligible in its motive, as dramatic in its effect. but what is there to account for the prodigy of the tempest at bertram's shipwreck? it is a mere supernatural effect, without even a hint of any supernatural agency; a prodigy, without any circumstance mentioned that is prodigious; and a miracle introduced without a ground, and ending without a result. every event and every scene of the play might have taken place as well if bertram and his vessel had been driven in by a common hard gale, or from want of provisions. the first act would have indeed lost its greatest and most sonorous picture; a scene for the sake of a scene, without a word spoken; as such, therefore, (a rarity without a precedent), we must take it, and be thankful! in the opinion of not a few, it was, in every sense of the word, the best scene in the play. i am quite certain it was the most innocent: and the steady, quiet uprightness of the flame of the wax-candles, which the monks held over the roaring billows amid the storm of wind and rain, was really miraculous. the sicilian sea coast: a convent of monks: night: a most portentous, unearthly storm: a vessel is wrecked contrary to all human expectation, one man saves himself by his prodigious powers as a swimmer, aided by the peculiarity of his destination-- "prior.------all, all did perish first monk.--change, change those drenched weeds-- prior.--i wist not of them--every soul did perish-- enter third monk hastily. "third monk.--no, there was one did battle with the storm with careless desperate force; full many times his life was won and lost, as tho' he recked not-- no hand did aid him, and he aided none-- alone he breasted the broad wave, alone that man was saved." well! this man is led in by the monks, supposed dripping wet, and to very natural inquiries he either remains silent, or gives most brief and surly answers, and after three or four of these half-line courtesies, "dashing off the monks" who had saved him, he exclaims in the true sublimity of our modern misanthropic heroism-- "off! ye are men--there's poison in your touch. but i must yield, for this" (what?) "hath left me strengthless." so end the three first scenes. in the next (the castle of st. aldobrand,) we find the servants there equally frightened with this unearthly storm, though wherein it differed from other violent storms we are not told, except that hugo informs us, page -- "piet.--hugo, well met. does e'en thy age bear memory of so terrible a storm? hugo.--they have been frequent lately. piet.--they are ever so in sicily. hugo.--so it is said. but storms when i was young would still pass o'er like nature's fitful fevers, and rendered all more wholesome. now their rage, sent thus unseasonable and profitless, speaks like the threats of heaven." a most perplexing theory of sicilian storms is this of old hugo! and what is very remarkable, not apparently founded on any great familiarity of his own with this troublesome article. for when pietro asserts the "ever more frequency" of tempests in sicily, the old man professes to know nothing more of the fact, but by hearsay. "so it is said."--but why he assumed this storm to be unseasonable, and on what he grounded his prophecy, (for the storm is still in full fury), that it would be profitless, and without the physical powers common to all other violent sea-winds in purifying the atmosphere, we are left in the dark; as well concerning the particular points in which he knew it, during its continuance, to differ from those that he had been acquainted with in his youth. we are at length introduced to the lady imogine, who, we learn, had not rested "through" the night; not on account of the tempest, for "long ere the storm arose, her restless gestures forbade all hope to see her blest with sleep." sitting at a table, and looking at a portrait, she informs us--first, that portrait-painters may make a portrait from memory, "the limner's art may trace the absent feature." for surely these words could never mean, that a painter may have a person sit to him who afterwards may leave the room or perhaps the country? secondly, that a portrait-painter can enable a mourning lady to possess a good likeness of her absent lover, but that the portrait- painter cannot, and who shall-- "restore the scenes in which they met and parted?" the natural answer would have been--why the scene-painter to be sure! but this unreasonable lady requires in addition sundry things to be painted that have neither lines nor colours-- "the thoughts, the recollections, sweet and bitter, or the elysian dreams of lovers when they loved." which last sentence must be supposed to mean; when they were present, and making love to each other.--then, if this portrait could speak, it would "acquit the faith of womankind." how? had she remained constant? no, she has been married to another man, whose wife she now is. how then? why, that, in spite of her marriage vow, she had continued to yearn and crave for her former lover-- "this has her body, that her mind: which has the better bargain?" the lover, however, was not contented with this precious arrangement, as we shall soon find. the lady proceeds to inform us that during the many years of their separation, there have happened in the different parts of the world, a number of "such things;" even such, as in a course of years always have, and till the millennium, doubtless always will happen somewhere or other. yet this passage, both in language and in metre, is perhaps amongst the best parts of the play. the lady's love companion and most esteemed attendant, clotilda, now enters and explains this love and esteem by proving herself a most passive and dispassionate listener, as well as a brief and lucky querist, who asks by chance, questions that we should have thought made for the very sake of the answers. in short, she very much reminds us of those puppet-heroines, for whom the showman contrives to dialogue without any skill in ventriloquism. this, notwithstanding, is the best scene in the play, and though crowded with solecisms, corrupt diction, and offences against metre, would possess merits sufficient to out-weigh them, if we could suspend the moral sense during the perusal. it tells well and passionately the preliminary circumstances, and thus overcomes the main difficulty of most first acts, to wit, that of retrospective narration. it tells us of her having been honourably addressed by a noble youth, of rank and fortune vastly superior to her own: of their mutual love, heightened on her part by gratitude; of his loss of his sovereign's favour; his disgrace; attainder; and flight; that he (thus degraded) sank into a vile ruffian, the chieftain of a murderous banditti; and that from the habitual indulgence of the most reprobate habits and ferocious passions, he had become so changed, even in appearance, and features, "that she who bore him had recoiled from him, nor known the alien visage of her child, yet still she (imogine) lov'd him." she is compelled by the silent entreaties of a father, perishing with "bitter shameful want on the cold earth," to give her hand, with a heart thus irrecoverably pre-engaged, to lord aldobrand, the enemy of her lover, even to the very man who had baffled his ambitious schemes, and was, at the present time, entrusted with the execution of the sentence of death which had been passed on bertram. now, the proof of "woman's love," so industriously held forth for the sympathy, if not for the esteem of the audience, consists in this, that, though bertram had become a robber and a murderer by trade, a ruffian in manners, yea, with form and features at which his own mother could not but "recoil," yet she (lady imogine) "the wife of a most noble, honoured lord," estimable as a man, exemplary and affectionate as a husband, and the fond father of her only child--that she, notwithstanding all this, striking her heart, dares to say to it-- "but thou art bertram's still, and bertram's ever." a monk now enters, and entreats in his prior's name for the wonted hospitality, and "free noble usage" of the castle of st. aldobrand for some wretched shipwrecked souls, and from this we learn, for the first time, to our infinite surprise, that notwithstanding the supernaturalness of the storm aforesaid, not only bertram, but the whole of his gang, had been saved, by what means we are left to conjecture, and can only conclude that they had all the same desperate swimming powers, and the same saving destiny as the hero, bertram himself. so ends the first act, and with it the tale of the events, both those with which the tragedy begins, and those which had occurred previous to the date of its commencement. the second displays bertram in disturbed sleep, which the prior, who hangs over him, prefers calling a "starting trance," and with a strained voice, that would have awakened one of the seven sleepers, observes to the audience-- "how the lip works! how the bare teeth do grind! and beaded drops course [ ] down his writhen brow!" the dramatic effect of which passage we not only concede to the admirers of this tragedy, but acknowledge the further advantages of preparing the audience for the most surprising series of wry faces, proflated mouths, and lunatic gestures that were ever "launched" on an audience to "sear the sense." [ ] "prior.--i will awake him from this horrid trance. this is no natural sleep! ho, wake thee, stranger!" this is rather a whimsical application of the verb reflex we must confess, though we remember a similar transfer of the agent to the patient in a manuscript tragedy, in which the bertram of the piece, prostrating a man with a single blow of his fist, exclaims--"knock me thee down, then ask thee if thou liv'st." well; the stranger obeys, and whatever his sleep might have been, his waking was perfectly natural; for lethargy itself could not withstand the scolding stentorship of mr. holland, the prior. we next learn from the best authority, his own confession, that the misanthropic hero, whose destiny was incompatible with drowning, is count bertram, who not only reveals his past fortunes, but avows with open atrocity, his satanic hatred of imogine's lord, and his frantick thirst of revenge; and so the raving character raves, and the scolding character scolds--and what else? does not the prior act? does he not send for a posse of constables or thief-takers to handcuff the villain, or take him either to bedlam or newgate? nothing of the kind; the author preserves the unity of character, and the scolding prior from first to last does nothing but scold, with the exception indeed of the last scene of the last act, in which, with a most surprising revolution, he whines, weeps, and kneels to the condemned blaspheming assassin out of pure affection to the high-hearted man, the sublimity of whose angel-sin rivals the star-bright apostate, (that is, who was as proud as lucifer, and as wicked as the devil), and, "had thrilled him," (prior holland aforesaid), with wild admiration. accordingly in the very next scene, we have this tragic macheath, with his whole gang, in the castle of st. aldobrand, without any attempt on the prior's part either to prevent him, or to put the mistress and servants of the castle on their guard against their new inmates; though he (the prior) knew, and confesses that he knew, that bertram's "fearful mates" were assassins so habituated and naturalized to guilt, that-- "when their drenched hold forsook both gold and gear, they griped their daggers with a murderer's instinct;" and though he also knew, that bertram was the leader of a band whose trade was blood. to the castle however he goes, thus with the holy prior's consent, if not with his assistance; and thither let us follow him. no sooner is our hero safely housed in the castle of st. aldobrand, than he attracts the notice of the lady and her confidante, by his "wild and terrible dark eyes," "muffled form," "fearful form," [ ] "darkly wild," "proudly stern," and the like common-place indefinites, seasoned by merely verbal antitheses, and at best, copied with very slight change, from the conrade of southey's joan of arc. the lady imogine, who has been, (as is the case, she tells us, with all soft and solemn spirits,) worshipping the moon on a terrace or rampart within view of the castle, insists on having an interview with our hero, and this too tete-a-tete. would the reader learn why and wherefore the confidante is excluded, who very properly remonstrates against such "conference, alone, at night, with one who bears such fearful form;" the reason follows--"why, therefore send him!" i say, follows, because the next line, "all things of fear have lost their power over me," is separated from the former by a break or pause, and besides that it is a very poor answer to the danger, is no answer at all to the gross indelicacy of this wilful exposure. we must therefore regard it as a mere after-thought, that a little softens the rudeness, but adds nothing to the weight, of that exquisite woman's reason aforesaid. and so exit clotilda and enter bertram, who "stands without looking at her," that is, with his lower limbs forked, his arms akimbo, his side to the lady's front, the whole figure resembling an inverted y. he is soon however roused from the state surly to the state frantick, and then follow raving, yelling, cursing, she fainting, he relenting, in runs imogine's child, squeaks "mother!" he snatches it up, and with a "god bless thee, child! bertram has kissed thy child,"--the curtain drops. the third act is short, and short be our account of it. it introduces lord st. aldobrand on his road homeward, and next imogine in the convent, confessing the foulness of her heart to the prior, who first indulges his old humour with a fit of senseless scolding, then leaves her alone with her ruffian paramour, with whom she makes at once an infamous appointment, and the curtain drops, that it may be carried into act and consummation. i want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust with which i witnessed the opening of the fourth act, considering it as a melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind. the shocking spirit of jacobinism seemed no longer confined to politics. the familiarity with atrocious events and characters appeared to have poisoned the taste, even where it had not directly disorganized the moral principles, and left the feelings callous to all the mild appeals, and craving alone for the grossest and most outrageous stimulants. the very fact then present to our senses, that a british audience could remain passive under such an insult to common decency, nay, receive with a thunder of applause, a human being supposed to have come reeking from the consummation of this complex foulness and baseness, these and the like reflections so pressed as with the weight of lead upon my heart, that actor, author, and tragedy would have been forgotten, had it not been for a plain elderly man sitting beside me, who, with a very serious face, that at once expressed surprise and aversion, touched my elbow, and, pointing to the actor, said to me in a half-whisper--"do you see that little fellow there? he has just been committing adultery!" somewhat relieved by the laugh which this droll address occasioned, i forced back my attention to the stage sufficiently to learn, that bertram is recovered from a transient fit of remorse by the information, that st. aldobrand was commissioned (to do, what every honest man must have done without commission, if he did his duty) to seize him and deliver him to the just vengeance of the law; an information which, (as he had long known himself to be an attainted traitor and proclaimed outlaw, and not only a trader in blood himself, but notoriously the captain of a gang of thieves, pirates, and assassins), assuredly could not have been new to him. it is this, however, which alone and instantly restores him to his accustomed state of raving, blasphemy, and nonsense. next follows imogine's constrained interview with her injured husband, and his sudden departure again, all in love and kindness, in order to attend the feast of st. anselm at the convent. this was, it must be owned, a very strange engagement for so tender a husband to make within a few minutes after so long an absence. but first his lady has told him that she has "a vow on her," and wishes "that black perdition may gulf her perjured soul,"--(note: she is lying at the very time)--if she ascends his bed, till her penance is accomplished. how, therefore, is the poor husband to amuse himself in this interval of her penance? but do not be distressed, reader, on account of the st. aldobrand's absence! as the author has contrived to send him out of the house, when a husband would be in his, and the lover's way, so he will doubtless not be at a loss to bring him back again as soon as he is wanted. well! the husband gone in on the one side, out pops the lover from the other, and for the fiendish purpose of harrowing up the soul of his wretched accomplice in guilt, by announcing to her, with most brutal and blasphemous execrations, his fixed and deliberate resolve to assassinate her husband; all this too is for no discoverable purpose on the part of the author, but that of introducing a series of super-tragic starts, pauses, screams, struggling, dagger-throwing, falling on the ground, starting up again wildly, swearing, outcries for help, falling again on the ground, rising again, faintly tottering towards the door, and, to end the scene, a most convenient fainting fit of our lady's, just in time to give bertram an opportunity of seeking the object of his hatred, before she alarms the house, which indeed she has had full time to have done before, but that the author rather chose she should amuse herself and the audience by the above-described ravings and startings. she recovers slowly, and to her enter, clotilda, the confidante and mother confessor; then commences, what in theatrical language is called the madness, but which the author more accurately entitles, delirium, it appearing indeed a sort of intermittent fever with fits of lightheadedness off and on, whenever occasion and stage effect happen to call for it. a convenient return of the storm, (we told the reader before-hand how it would be), had changed-- "the rivulet, that bathed the convent walls, into a foaming flood: upon its brink the lord and his small train do stand appalled. with torch and bell from their high battlements the monks do summon to the pass in vain; he must return to-night." talk of the devil, and his horns appear, says the proverb and sure enough, within ten lines of the exit of the messenger, sent to stop him, the arrival of lord st. aldobrand is announced. bertram's ruffian band now enter, and range themselves across the stage, giving fresh cause for imogine's screams and madness. st. aldobrand, having received his mortal wound behind the scenes, totters in to welter in his blood, and to die at the feet of this double-damned adultress. of her, as far as she is concerned in this fourth act, we have two additional points to notice: first, the low cunning and jesuitical trick with which she deludes her husband into words of forgiveness, which he himself does not understand; and secondly, that everywhere she is made the object of interest and sympathy, and it is not the author's fault, if, at any moment, she excites feelings less gentle, than those we are accustomed to associate with the self-accusations of a sincere religious penitent. and did a british audience endure all this?--they received it with plaudits, which, but for the rivalry of the carts and hackney coaches, might have disturbed the evening-prayers of the scanty week day congregation at st. paul's cathedral. tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. of the fifth act, the only thing noticeable, (for rant and nonsense, though abundant as ever, have long before the last act become things of course,) is the profane representation of the high altar in a chapel, with all the vessels and other preparations for the holy sacrament. a hymn is actually sung on the stage by the chorister boys! for the rest, imogine, who now and then talks deliriously, but who is always light-headed as far as her gown and hair can make her so, wanders about in dark woods with cavern-rocks and precipices in the back-scene; and a number of mute dramatis personae move in and out continually, for whose presence, there is always at least this reason, that they afford something to be seen, by that very large part of a drury lane audience who have small chance of hearing a word. she had, it appears, taken her child with her, but what becomes of the child, whether she murdered it or not, nobody can tell, nobody can learn; it was a riddle at the representation, and after a most attentive perusal of the play, a riddle it remains. "no more i know, i wish i did, and i would tell it all to you; for what became of this poor child there's none that ever knew." our whole information [ ] is derived from the following words-- "prior.--where is thy child? clotil.--(pointing to the cavern into which she has looked) oh he lies cold within his cavern-tomb! why dost thou urge her with the horrid theme? prior.--(who will not, the reader may observe, be disappointed of his dose of scolding) it was to make (query wake) one living cord o' th' heart, and i will try, tho' my own breaks at it. where is thy child? imog.--(with a frantic laugh) the forest fiend hath snatched him-- he (who? the fiend or the child?) rides the night-mare thro' the wizard woods." now these two lines consist in a senseless plagiarism from the counterfeited madness of edgar in lear, who, in imitation of the gypsy incantations, puns on the old word mair, a hag; and the no less senseless adoption of dryden's forest fiend, and the wisard stream by which milton, in his lycidas, so finely characterizes the spreading deva, fabulosus amnis. observe too these images stand unique in the speeches of imogine, without the slightest resemblance to anything she says before or after. but we are weary. the characters in this act frisk about, here, there, and every where, as teasingly as the jack o' lantern-lights which mischievous boys, from across a narrow street, throw with a looking-glass on the faces of their opposite neighbours. bertram disarmed, outheroding charles de moor in the robbers, befaces the collected knights of st. anselm, (all in complete armour) and so, by pure dint of black looks, he outdares them into passive poltroons. the sudden revolution in the prior's manners we have before noticed, and it is indeed so outre, that a number of the audience imagined a great secret was to come out, viz.: that the prior was one of the many instances of a youthful sinner metamorphosed into an old scold, and that this bertram would appear at last to be his son. imogine re-appears at the convent, and dies of her own accord. bertram stabs himself, and dies by her side, and that the play may conclude as it began, to wit, in a superfetation of blasphemy upon nonsense, because he had snatched a sword from a despicable coward, who retreats in terror when it is pointed towards him in sport; this felo de se, and thief-captain--this loathsome and leprous confluence of robbery, adultery, murder, and cowardly assassination,--this monster, whose best deed is, the having saved his betters from the degradation of hanging him, by turning jack ketch to himself; first recommends the charitable monks and holy prior to pray for his soul, and then has the folly and impudence to exclaim-- "i die no felon's death, a warriour's weapon freed a warriour's soul!" chapter xxiv conclusion it sometimes happens that we are punished for our faults by incidents, in the causation of which these faults had no share: and this i have always felt the severest punishment. the wound indeed is of the same dimensions; but the edges are jagged, and there is a dull underpain that survives the smart which it had aggravated. for there is always a consolatory feeling that accompanies the sense of a proportion between antecedents and consequents. the sense of before and after becomes both intelligible and intellectual when, and only when, we contemplate the succession in the relations of cause and effect, which, like the two poles of the magnet manifest the being and unity of the one power by relative opposites, and give, as it were, a substratum of permanence, of identity, and therefore of reality, to the shadowy flux of time. it is eternity revealing itself in the phaenomena of time: and the perception and acknowledgment of the proportionality and appropriateness of the present to the past, prove to the afflicted soul, that it has not yet been deprived of the sight of god, that it can still recognise the effective presence of a father, though through a darkened glass and a turbid atmosphere, though of a father that is chastising it. and for this cause, doubtless, are we so framed in mind, and even so organized in brain and nerve, that all confusion is painful. it is within the experience of many medical practitioners, that a patient, with strange and unusual symptoms of disease, has been more distressed in mind, more wretched, from the fact of being unintelligible to himself and others, than from the pain or danger of the disease: nay, that the patient has received the most solid comfort, and resumed a genial and enduring cheerfulness, from some new symptom or product, that had at once determined the name and nature of his complaint, and rendered it an intelligible effect of an intelligible cause: even though the discovery did at the same moment preclude all hope of restoration. hence the mystic theologians, whose delusions we may more confidently hope to separate from their actual intuitions, when we condescend to read their works without the presumption that whatever our fancy, (always the ape, and too often the adulterator and counterfeit of our memory,) has not made or cannot make a picture of, must be nonsense,--hence, i say, the mystics have joined in representing the state of the reprobate spirits as a dreadful dream in which there is no sense of reality, not even of the pangs they are enduring--an eternity without time, and as it were below it--god present without manifestation of his presence. but these are depths, which we dare not linger over. let us turn to an instance more on a level with the ordinary sympathies of mankind. here then, and in this same healing influence of light and distinct beholding, we may detect the final cause of that instinct which, in the great majority of instances, leads, and almost compels the afflicted to communicate their sorrows. hence too flows the alleviation that results from "opening out our griefs:" which are thus presented in distinguishable forms instead of the mist, through which whatever is shapeless becomes magnified and (literally) enormous. casimir, in the fifth ode of his third book, has happily [ ] expressed this thought. me longus silendi edit amor, facilesque luctus hausit medullas. fugerit ocyus, simul negantem visere jusseris aures amicorum, et loquacem questibus evacuaris iram. olim querendo desinimus queri, ipsoque fletu lacryma perditur nec fortis [ ] aeque, si per omnes cura volat residetque ramos. vires amicis perdit in auribus, minorque semper dividitur dolor, per multa permissus vagari pectora.-- i shall not make this an excuse, however, for troubling my readers with any complaints or explanations, with which, as readers, they have little or no concern. it may suffice, (for the present at least,) to declare, that the causes that have delayed the publication of these volumes for so long a period after they had been printed off, were not connected with any neglect of my own; and that they would form an instructive comment on the chapter concerning authorship as a trade, addressed to young men of genius in the first volume of this work. i remember the ludicrous effect produced on my mind by the fast sentence of an auto-biography, which, happily for the writer, was as meagre in incidents as it is well possible for the life of an individual to be--"the eventful life which i am about to record, from the hour in which i rose into existence on this planet, etc." yet when, notwithstanding this warning example of self-importance before me, i review my own life, i cannot refrain from applying the same epithet to it, and with more than ordinary emphasis--and no private feeling, that affected myself only, should prevent me from publishing the same, (for write it i assuredly shall, should life and leisure be granted me,) if continued reflection should strengthen my present belief, that my history would add its contingent to the enforcement of one important truth, to wit, that we must not only love our neighbours as ourselves, but ourselves likewise as our neighbours; and that we can do neither unless we love god above both. who lives, that's not depraved or depraves? who dies, that bears not one spurn to the grave of their friends' gift? strange as the delusion may appear, yet it is most true, that three years ago i did not know or believe that i had an enemy in the world: and now even my strongest sensations of gratitude are mingled with fear, and i reproach myself for being too often disposed to ask,--have i one friend?--during the many years which intervened between the composition and the publication of the christabel, it became almost as well known among literary men as if it had been on common sale; the same references were made to it, and the same liberties taken with it, even to the very names of the imaginary persons in the poem. from almost all of our most celebrated poets, and from some with whom i had no personal acquaintance, i either received or heard of expressions of admiration that, (i can truly say,) appeared to myself utterly disproportionate to a work, that pretended to be nothing more than a common faery tale. many, who had allowed no merit to my other poems, whether printed or manuscript, and who have frankly told me as much, uniformly made an exception in favour of the christabel and the poem entitled love. year after year, and in societies of the most different kinds, i had been entreated to recite it and the result was still the same in all, and altogether different in this respect from the effect produced by the occasional recitation of any other poems i had composed.--this before the publication. and since then, with very few exceptions, i have heard nothing but abuse, and this too in a spirit of bitterness at least as disproportionate to the pretensions of the poem, had it been the most pitiably below mediocrity, as the previous eulogies, and far more inexplicable.--this may serve as a warning to authors, that in their calculations on the probable reception of a poem, they must subtract to a large amount from the panegyric, which may have encouraged them to publish it, however unsuspicious and however various the sources of this panegyric may have been. and, first, allowances must be made for private enmity, of the very existence of which they had perhaps entertained no suspicion--for personal enmity behind the mask of anonymous criticism: secondly for the necessity of a certain proportion of abuse and ridicule in a review, in order to make it saleable, in consequence of which, if they have no friends behind the scenes, the chance must needs be against them; but lastly and chiefly, for the excitement and temporary sympathy of feeling, which the recitation of the poem by an admirer, especially if he be at once a warm admirer and a man of acknowledged celebrity, calls forth in the audience. for this is really a species of animal magnetism, in which the enkindling reciter, by perpetual comment of looks and tones, lends his own will and apprehensive faculty to his auditors. they live for the time within the dilated sphere of his intellectual being. it is equally possible, though not equally common, that a reader left to himself should sink below the poem, as that the poem left to itself should flag beneath the feelings of the reader.--but, in my own instance, i had the additional misfortune of having been gossiped about, as devoted to metaphysics, and worse than all, to a system incomparably nearer to the visionary flights of plato, and even to the jargon of the mystics, than to the established tenets of locke. whatever therefore appeared with my name was condemned beforehand, as predestined metaphysics. in a dramatic poem, which had been submitted by me to a gentleman of great influence in the theatrical world, occurred the following passage:-- "o we are querulous creatures! little less than all things can suffice to make us happy: and little more than nothing is enough to make us wretched." aye, here now! (exclaimed the critic) here come coleridge's metaphysics! and the very same motive (that is, not that the lines were unfit for the present state of our immense theatres; but that they were metaphysics [ ]) was assigned elsewhere for the rejection of the two following passages. the first is spoken in answer to a usurper, who had rested his plea on the circumstance, that he had been chosen by the acclamations of the people.-- "what people? how convened? or, if convened, must not the magic power that charms together millions of men in council, needs have power to win or wield them? rather, o far rather shout forth thy titles to yon circling mountains, and with a thousand-fold reverberation make the rocks flatter thee, and the volleying air, unbribed, shout back to thee, king emerick! by wholesome laws to embank the sovereign power, to deepen by restraint, and by prevention of lawless will to amass and guide the flood in its majestic channel, is man's task and the true patriot's glory! in all else men safelier trust to heaven, than to themselves when least themselves: even in those whirling crowds where folly is contagious, and too oft even wise men leave their better sense at home, to chide and wonder at them, when returned." the second passage is in the mouth of an old and experienced courtier, betrayed by the man in whom he had most trusted. "and yet sarolta, simple, inexperienced, could see him as he was, and often warned me. whence learned she this?--o she was innocent! and to be innocent is nature's wisdom! the fledge-dove knows the prowlers of the air, feared soon as seen, and flutters back to shelter. and the young steed recoils upon his haunches, the never-yet-seen adder's hiss first heard. o surer than suspicion's hundred eyes is that fine sense, which to the pure in heart, by mere oppugnancy of their own goodness, reveals the approach of evil." as therefore my character as a writer could not easily be more injured by an overt act than it was already in consequence of the report, i published a work, a large portion of which was professedly metaphysical. a long delay occurred between its first annunciation and its appearance; it was reviewed therefore by anticipation with a malignity, so avowedly and exclusively personal, as is, i believe, unprecedented even in the present contempt of all common humanity that disgraces and endangers the liberty of the press. after its appearance, the author of this lampoon undertook to review it in the edinburgh review; and under the single condition, that he should have written what he himself really thought, and have criticised the work as he would have done had its author been indifferent to him, i should have chosen that man myself, both from the vigour and the originality of his mind, and from his particular acuteness in speculative reasoning, before all others.--i remembered catullus's lines. desine de quoquam quicquam bene velle mereri, aut aliquem fieri posse putare pium. omnia sunt ingrata: nihil fecisse benigne est: immo, etiam taedet, taedet obestque magis; ut mihi, quem nemo gravius nec acerbius urget, quam modo qui me unum atque unicum amicum habuit. but i can truly say, that the grief with which i read this rhapsody of predetermined insult, had the rhapsodist himself for its whole and sole object. * * * * * * i refer to this review at present, in consequence of information having been given me, that the inuendo of my "potential infidelity," grounded on one passage of my first lay sermon, has been received and propagated with a degree of credence, of which i can safely acquit the originator of the calumny. i give the sentences, as they stand in the sermon, premising only that i was speaking exclusively of miracles worked for the outward senses of men. "it was only to overthrow the usurpation exercised in and through the senses, that the senses were miraculously appealed to. reason and religion are their own evidence. the natural sun is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual. ere he is fully arisen, and while his glories are still under veil, he calls up the breeze to chase away the usurping vapours of the night-season, and thus converts the air itself into the minister of its own purification: not surely in proof or elucidation of the light from heaven, but to prevent its interception." "wherever, therefore, similar circumstances co-exist with the same moral causes, the principles revealed, and the examples recorded, in the inspired writings, render miracles superfluous: and if we neglect to apply truths in expectation of wonders, or under pretext of the cessation of the latter, we tempt god, and merit the same reply which our lord gave to the pharisees on a like occasion." in the sermon and the notes both the historical truth and the necessity of the miracles are strongly and frequently asserted. "the testimony of books of history (that is, relatively to the signs and wonders, with which christ came) is one of the strong and stately pillars of the church: but it is not the foundation!" instead, therefore, of defending myself, which i could easily effect by a series of passages, expressing the same opinion, from the fathers and the most eminent protestant divines, from the reformation to the revolution, i shall merely state what my belief is, concerning the true evidences of christianity. . its consistency with right reason, i consider as the outer court of the temple--the common area, within which it stands. . the miracles, with and through which the religion was first revealed and attested, i regard as the steps, the vestibule, and the portal of the temple. . the sense, the inward feeling, in the soul of each believer of its exceeding desirableness--the experience, that he needs something, joined with the strong foretokening, that the redemption and the graces propounded to us in christ are what he needs--this i hold to be the true foundation of the spiritual edifice. with the strong a priori probability that flows in from and on the correspondent historical evidence of , no man can refuse or neglect to make the experiment without guilt. but, , it is the experience derived from a practical conformity to the conditions of the gospel--it is the opening eye; the dawning light: the terrors and the promises of spiritual growth; the blessedness of loving god as god, the nascent sense of sin hated as sin, and of the incapability of attaining to either without christ; it is the sorrow that still rises up from beneath and the consolation that meets it from above; the bosom treacheries of the principal in the warfare and the exceeding faithfulness and long-suffering of the uninteresting ally;--in a word, it is the actual trial of the faith in christ, with its accompaniments and results, that must form the arched roof, and the faith itself is the completing key-stone. in order to an efficient belief in christianity, a man must have been a christian, and this is the seeming argumentum in circulo, incident to all spiritual truths, to every subject not presentable under the forms of time and space, as long as we attempt to master by the reflex acts of the understanding what we can only know by the act of becoming. do the will of my father, and ye shall know whether i am of god. these four evidences i believe to have been and still to be, for the world, for the whole church, all necessary, all equally necessary: but at present, and for the majority of christians born in christian countries, i believe the third and the fourth evidences to be the most operative, not as superseding but as involving a glad undoubting faith in the two former. credidi, ideoque intellexi, appears to me the dictate equally of philosophy and religion, even as i believe redemption to be the antecedent of sanctification, and not its consequent. all spiritual predicates may be construed indifferently as modes of action or as states of being, thus holiness and blessedness are the same idea, now seen in relation to act and now to existence. the ready belief which has been yielded to the slander of my "potential infidelity," i attribute in part to the openness with which i have avowed my doubts, whether the heavy interdict, under which the name of benedict spinoza lies, is merited on the whole or to the whole extent. be this as it may, i wish, however, that i could find in the books of philosophy, theoretical or moral, which are alone recommended to the present students of theology in our established schools, a few passages as thoroughly pauline, as completely accordant with the doctrines of the established church, as the following sentences in the concluding page of spinoza's ethics. deinde quo mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine magis gaudet, eo plus intelligit, hoc est, eo majorem in affectus habet potentiam, et eo minus ab affectibus, qui mali sunt, patitur; atque adeo ex eo, quod mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine gaudet, potestatem habet libidines coercendi; et quia humana potentia ad coercendos affectus in solo intellectu consistit; ergo nemo beatitudine gaudet, quia affectus coercuit, sed contra potestas libidines coercendi ex ipsa beatitudine oritur. with regard to the unitarians, it has been shamelessly asserted, that i have denied them to be christians. god forbid! for how should i know, what the piety of the heart may be, or what quantum of error in the understanding may consist with a saving faith in the intentions and actual dispositions of the whole moral being in any one individual? never will god reject a soul that sincerely loves him: be his speculative opinions what they may: and whether in any given instance certain opinions, be they unbelief, or misbelief, are compatible with a sincere love of god, god can only know.--but this i have said, and shall continue to say: that if the doctrines, the sum of which i believe to constitute the truth in christ, be christianity, then unitarianism is not, and vice versa: and that, in speaking theologically and impersonally, i.e. of psilanthropism and theanthropism as schemes of belief, without reference to individuals, who profess either the one or the other, it will be absurd to use a different language as long as it is the dictate of common sense, that two opposites cannot properly be called by the same name. i should feel no offence if a unitarian applied the same to me, any more than if he were to say, that two and two being four, four and four must be eight. alla broton ton men keneophrones auchai ex agathon ebalon; ton d' au katamemphthent' agan ischun oikeion paresphalen kalon, cheiros elkon opisso, thumos atolmos eon. this has been my object, and this alone can be my defence--and o! that with this my personal as well as my literary life might conclude!--the unquenched desire i mean, not without the consciousness of having earnestly endeavoured to kindle young minds, and to guard them against the temptations of scorners, by showing that the scheme of christianity, as taught in the liturgy and homilies of our church, though not discoverable by human reason, is yet in accordance with it; that link follows link by necessary consequence; that religion passes out of the ken of reason only where the eye of reason has reached its own horizon; and that faith is then but its continuation: even as the day softens away into the sweet twilight, and twilight, hushed and breathless, steals into the darkness. it is night, sacred night! the upraised eye views only the starry heaven which manifests itself alone: and the outward beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in the awful depth, though suns of other worlds, only to preserve the soul steady and collected in its pure act of inward adoration to the great i am, and to the filial word that re-affirmeth it from eternity to eternity, whose choral echo is the universe. theo, mono, doxa. footnotes [footnote : the authority of milton and shakespeare may be usefully pointed out to young authors. in the comus and other early poems of milton there is a superfluity of double epithets; while in the paradise lost we find very few, in the paradise regained scarce any. the same remark holds almost equally true of the love's labour lost, romeo and juliet, venus and adonis, and lucrece, compared with the lear, macbeth, othello, and hamlet of our great dramatist. the rule for the admission of double epithets seems to be this: either that they should be already denizens of our language, such as blood-stained, terror-stricken, self-applauding: or when a new epithet, or one found in books only, is hazarded, that it, at least, be one word, not two words made one by mere virtue of the printers hyphen. a language which, like the english, is almost without cases, is indeed in its very genius unfitted for compounds. if a writer, every time a compounded word suggests itself to him, would seek for some other mode of expressing the same sense, the chances are always greatly in favour of his finding a better word. ut tanquam scopulum sic fugias insolens verbum, is the wise advice of caesar to the roman orators, and the precept applies with double force to the writers in our own language. but it must not be forgotten, that the same caesar wrote a treatise for the purpose of reforming the ordinary language by bringing it to a greater accordance with the principles of logic or universal grammar.] [footnote : see the criticisms on the ancient mariner, in the monthly and critical reviews of the first volume of the lyrical ballads.] [footnote : this is worthy of ranking as a maxim, (regula maxima,) of criticism. whatever is translatable in other and simpler words of the same language, without loss of sense or dignity, is bad. n.b.--by dignity i mean the absence of ludicrous and debasing associations.] [footnote : the christ's hospital phrase, not for holidays altogether, but for those on which the boys are permitted to go beyond the precincts of the school.] [footnote : i remember a ludicrous instance in the poem of a young tradesman: "no more will i endure love's pleasing pain, or round my heart's leg tie his galling chain."] [footnote : cowper's task was published some time before the sonnets of mr. bowles; but i was not familiar with it till many years afterwards. the vein of satire which runs through that excellent poem, together with the sombre hue of its religious opinions, would probably, at that time, have prevented its laying any strong hold on my affections. the love of nature seems to have led thomson to a cheerful religion; and a gloomy religion to have led cowper to a love of nature. the one would carry his fellow-men along with him into nature; the other flies to nature from his fellow-men. in chastity of diction however, and the harmony of blank verse, cowper leaves thomson immeasurably below him; yet still i feel the latter to have been the born poet.] [footnote : sonnet i pensive at eve, on the hard world i mused, and m poor heart was sad; so at the moon i gazed and sighed, and sighed; for ah how soon eve saddens into night! mine eyes perused with tearful vacancy the dampy grass that wept and glitter'd in the paly ray and i did pause me on my lonely way and mused me on the wretched ones that pass o'er the bleak heath of sorrow. but alas! most of myself i thought! when it befel, that the soothe spirit of the breezy wood breath'd in mine ear: "all this is very well, but much of one thing, is for no thing good." oh my poor heart's inexplicable swell! sonnet ii oh i do love thee, meek simplicity! for of thy lays the lulling simpleness goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress, distress the small, yet haply great to me. 'tis true on lady fortune's gentlest pad i amble on; and yet i know not why so sad i am! but should a friend and i frown, pout and part, then i am very sad. and then with sonnets and with sympathy my dreamy bosom's mystic woes i pall: now of my false friend plaining plaintively, now raving at mankind in general; but whether sad or fierce, 'tis simple all, all very simple, meek simplicity! sonnet iii and this reft house is that, the which he built, lamented jack! and here his malt he pil'd, cautious in vain! these rats, that squeak so wild, squeak not unconscious of their father's guilt. did he not see her gleaming thro' the glade! belike 'twas she, the maiden all forlorn. what the she milk no cow with crumpled horn, yet, aye she haunts the dale where erst she stray'd: and aye, beside her stalks her amorous knight still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn, and thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn, his hindward charms gleam an unearthly white. ah! thus thro' broken clouds at night's high noon peeps to fair fragments forth the full-orb'd harvest-moon! the following anecdote will not be wholly out of place here, and may perhaps amuse the reader. an amateur performer in verse expressed to a common friend a strong desire to be introduced to me, but hesitated in accepting my friend's immediate offer, on the score that "he was, he must acknowledge, the author of a confounded severe epigram on my ancient mariner, which had given me great pain." i assured my friend that, if the epigram was a good one, it would only increase my desire to become acquainted with the author, and begged to hear it recited: when, to my no less surprise than amusement, it proved to be one which i had myself some time before written and inserted in the "morning post," to wit-- to the author of the ancient mariner. your poem must eternal be, dear sir! it cannot fail, for 'tis incomprehensible, and without head or tail.] [footnote : -- of old things all are over old, of good things none are good enough;-- we'll show that we can help to frame a world of other stuff. i too will have my kings, that take from me the sign of life and death: kingdoms shall shift about, like clouds, obedient to my breath. wordsworth's rob roy.--poet. works, vol. iii. p. .] [footnote : pope was under the common error of his age, an error far from being sufficiently exploded even at the present day. it consists (as i explained at large, and proved in detail in my public lectures,) in mistaking for the essentials of the greek stage certain rules, which the wise poets imposed upon themselves, in order to render all the remaining parts of the drama consistent with those, that had been forced upon them by circumstances independent of their will; out of which circumstances the drama itself arose. the circumstances in the time of shakespeare, which it was equally out of his power to alter, were different, and such as, in my opinion, allowed a far wider sphere, and a deeper and more human interest. critics are too apt to forget, that rules are but means to an end; consequently, where the ends are different, the rules must be likewise so. we must have ascertained what the end is, before we can determine what the rules ought to be. judging under this impression, i did not hestitate to declare my full conviction, that the consummate judgment of shakespeare, not only in the general construction, but in all the details, of his dramas, impressed me with greater wonder, than even the might of his genius, or the depth of his philosophy. the substance of these lectures i hope soon to publish; and it is but a debt of justice to myself and my friends to notice, that the first course of lectures, which differed from the following courses only, by occasionally varying the illustrations of the same thoughts, was addressed to very numerous, and i need not add, respectable audiences at the royal institution, before mr. schlegel gave his lectures on the same subjects at vienna.] [footnote : in the course of one of my lectures, i had occasion to point out the almost faultless position and choice of words, in pope's original compositions, particularly in his satires and moral essays, for the purpose of comparing them with his translation of homer, which, i do not stand alone in regarding, as the main source of our pseudo-poetic diction. and this, by the bye, is an additional confirmation of a remark made, i believe, by sir joshua reynolds, that next to the man who forms and elevates the taste of the public, he that corrupts it, is commonly the greatest genius. among other passages, i analyzed sentence by sentence, and almost word by word, the popular lines, as when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, etc. (iliad. b. viii.) much in the same way as has been since done, in an excellent article on chalmers's british poets in the quarterly review. the impression on the audience in general was sudden and evident: and a number of enlightened and highly educated persons, who at different times afterwards addressed me on the subject, expressed their wonder, that truth so obvious should not have struck them before; but at the same time acknowledged--(so much had they been accustomed, in reading poetry, to receive pleasure from the separate images and phrases successively, without asking themselves whether the collective meaning was sense or nonsense)--that they might in all probability have read the same passage again twenty times with undiminished admiration, and without once reflecting, that astra phaeinaen amphi selaenaen phainet aritretea-- (that is, the stars around, or near the full moon, shine pre-eminently bright) conveys a just and happy image of a moonlight sky: while it is difficult to determine whether, in the lines, around her throne the vivid planets roll, and stars unnumber'd gild the glowing pole, the sense or the diction be the more absurd. my answer was; that, though i had derived peculiar advantages from my school discipline, and though my general theory of poetry was the same then as now, i had yet experienced the same sensations myself, and felt almost as if i bad been newly couched, when, by mr. wordsworth's conversation, i had been induced to re-examine with impartial strictness gray's celebrated elegy. i had long before detected the defects in the bard; but the elegy i had considered as proof against all fair attacks; and to this day i cannot read either without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm. at all events, whatever pleasure i may have lost by the clearer perception of the faults in certain passages, has been more than repaid to me by the additional delight with which i read the remainder. another instance in confirmation of these remarks occurs to me in the faithful shepherdess. seward first traces fletcher's lines; more foul diseases than e'er yet the hot sun bred thro' his burnings, while the dog pursues the raging lion, throwing the fog and deadly vapour from his angry breath, filling the lower world with plague and death, to spenser's shepherd's calendar, the rampant lion hunts he fast with dogs of noisome breath; whose baleful barking brings, in haste, pine, plagues, and dreary death! he then takes occasion to introduce homer's simile of the appearance of achilles' mail to priam compared with the dog star; literally thus-- "for this indeed is most splendid, but it was made an evil sign, and brings many a consuming disease to wretched mortals." nothing can be more simple as a description, or more accurate as a simile; which, (says seward,) is thus finely translated by mr. pope terrific glory! for his burning breath taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death! now here--(not to mention the tremendous bombast)--the dog star, so called, is turned into a real dog, a very odd dog, a fire, fever, plague, and death-breathing, red, air-tainting dog: and the whole visual likeness is lost, while the likeness in the effects is rendered absurd by the exaggeration. in spenser and fletcher the thought is justifiable; for the images are at least consistent, and it was the intention of the writers to mark the seasons by this allegory of visualized puns.] [footnote : especially in this age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with a sort of egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail;--when the most vapid satires have become the objects of a keen public interest, purely from the number of contemporary characters named in the patch-work notes, (which possess, however, the comparative merit of being more poetical than the text,) and because, to increase the stimulus, the author has sagaciously left his own name for whispers and conjectures.] [footnote : if it were worth while to mix together, as ingredients, half the anecdotes which i either myself know to be true, or which i have received from men incapable of intentional falsehood, concerning the characters, qualifications, and motives of our anonymous critics, whose decisions are oracles for our reading public; i might safely borrow the words of the apocryphal daniel; "give me leave, o sovereign public, and i shall slay this dragon without sward or staff." for the compound would be as the "pitch, and fat, and hair, which daniel took, and did seethe them together, and made lumps thereof; this he put in the dragon's mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder; and daniel said, lo, these are the gods ye worship."] [footnote : this is one instance among many of deception, by the telling the half of a fact, and omitting the other half, when it is from their mutual counteraction and neutralization, that the whole truth arises, as a tertium aliquid different from either. thus in dryden's famous line great wit (meaning genius) to madness sure is near allied. now if the profound sensibility, which is doubtless one of the components of genius, were alone considered, single and unbalanced, it might be fairly described as exposing the individual to a greater chance of mental derangement; but then a more than usual rapidity of association, a more than usual power of passing from thought to thought, and image to image, is a component equally essential; and to the due modification of each by the other the genius itself consists; so that it would be just as fair to describe the earth, as in imminent danger of exorbitating, or of falling into the sun, according as the assertor of the absurdity confined his attention either to the projectile or to the attractive force exclusively.] [footnote : for as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, i dare not compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of reading. call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness, and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one mans delirium, so as to people the barrenness of a hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose. we should therefore transfer this species of amusement--(if indeed those can be said to retire a musis, who were never in their company, or relaxation be attributable to those, whose bows are never bent)--from the genus, reading, to that comprebensive class characterized by the power of reconciling the two contrary yet coexisting propensities of human nature, namely, indulgence of sloth, and hatred of vacancy. in addition to novels and tales of chivalry to prose or rhyme, (by which last i mean neither rhythm nor metre) this genus comprises as its species, gaming, swinging, or swaying on a chair or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tete-a-tete quarrels after dinner between husband and wife; conning word by word all the advertisements of a daily newspaper in a public house on a rainy day, etc. etc. etc.] [footnote : ex. gr. pediculos e capillis excerptos in arenam jacere incontusos; eating of unripe fruit; gazing on the clouds, and (in genere) on movable things suspended in the air; riding among a multitude of camels; frequent laughter; listening to a series of jests and humorous anecdotes,--as when (so to modernize the learned saracen's meaning) one man's droll story of an irishman inevitably occasions another's droll story of a scotchman, which again, by the same sort of conjunction disjunctive, leads to some etourderie of a welshman, and that again to some sly hit of a yorkshireman;--the habit of reading tomb-stones in church-yards, etc. by the bye, this catalogue, strange as it may appear, is not insusceptible of a sound psychological commentary.] [footnote : i have ventured to call it unique; not only because i know no work of the kind in our language, (if we except a few chapters of the old translation of froissart)--none, which uniting the charms of romance and history, keeps the imagination so constantly on the wing, and yet leaves so much for after reflection; but likewise, and chiefly, because it is a compilation, which, in the various excellencies of translation, selection, and arrangement, required and proves greater genius in the compiler, as living in the present state of society, than in the original composers.] [footnote : it is not easy to estimate the effects which the example of a young man as highly distinguished for strict purity of disposition and conduct, as for intellectual power and literary acquirements, may produce on those of the same age with himself, especially on those of similar pursuits and congenial minds. for many years, my opportunities of intercourse with mr. southey have been rare, and at long intervals; but i dwell with unabated pleasure on the strong and sudden, yet i trust not fleeting, influence, which my moral being underwent on my acquaintance with him at oxford, whither i had gone at the commencement of our cambridge vacation on a visit to an old school-fellow. not indeed on my moral or religious principles, for they had never been contaminated; but in awakening the sense of the duty and dignity of making my actions accord with those principles, both in word and deed. the irregularities only not universal among the young men of my standing, which i always knew to be wrong, i then learned to feel as degrading; learned to know that an opposite conduct, which was at that time considered by us as the easy virtue of cold and selfish prudence, might originate in the noblest emotions, in views the most disinterested and imaginative. it is not however from grateful recollections only, that i have been impelled thus to leave these my deliberate sentiments on record; but in some sense as a debt of justice to the man, whose name has been so often connected with mine for evil to which he is a stranger. as a specimen i subjoin part of a note, from the beauties of the anti-jacobin, in which, having previously informed the public that i had been dishonoured at cambridge for preaching deism, at a time when, for my youthful ardour in defence of christianity, i was decried as a bigot by the proselytes of french phi-(or to speak more truly psi-)-losophy, the writer concludes with these words; "since this time he has left his native country, commenced citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute. ex his disce his friends, lamb and southey." with severest truth it may be asserted, that it would not be easy to select two men more exemplary in their domestic affections than those whose names were thus printed at full length as in the same rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his children fatherless and his wife destitute! is it surprising, that many good men remained longer than perhaps they otherwise would have done adverse to a party, which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of such atrocious calumnies? qualis es, nescio; sed per quales agis, scio et doleo.] [footnote : in opinions of long continuance, and in which we have never before been molested by a single doubt, to be suddenly convinced of an error, is almost like being convicted of a fault. there is a state of mind, which is the direct antithesis of that, which takes place when we make a bull. the bull namely consists in the bringing her two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense, of their connection. the psychological condition, or that which constitutes the possibility, of this state, being such disproportionate vividness of two distant thoughts, as extinguishes or obscures the consciousness of the intermediate images or conceptions, or wholly abstracts the attention from them. thus in the well known bull, "i was a fine child, but they changed me:" the first conception expressed in the word "i," is that of personal identity--ego contemplans: the second expressed in the word "me," is the visual image or object by which the mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its personal identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have existed,--ego contemplatus. now the change of one visual image for another involves in itself no absurdity, and becomes absurd only by its immediate juxta-position with the fast thought, which is rendered possible by the whole attention being successively absorbed to each singly, so as not to notice the interjacent notion, changed, which by its incongruity, with the first thought, i, constitutes the bull. add only, that this process is facilitated by the circumstance of the words i, and me, being sometimes equivalent, and sometimes having a distinct meaning; sometimes, namely, signifying the act of self-consciousness, sometimes the external image in and by which the mind represents that act to itself, the result and symbol of its individuality. now suppose the direct contrary state, and you will have a distinct sense of the connection between two conceptions, without that sensation of such connection which is supplied by habit. the man feels as if he were standing on his head though he cannot but see that he is truly standing on his feet. this, as a painful sensation, will of course have a tendency to associate itself with him who occasions it; even as persons, who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are known to feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician.] [footnote : without however the apprehensions attributed to the pagan reformer of the poetic republic. if we may judge from the preface to the recent collection of his poems, mr. w. would have answered with xanthias-- su d' ouk edeisas ton huophon ton rhaematon, kai tas apeilas; xan, ou ma di', oud' ephrontisa.--ranae, - . and here let me hint to the authors of the numerous parodies, and pretended imitations of mr. wordsworth's style, that at once to conceal and convey wit and wisdom in the semblance of folly and dulness, as is done in the clowns and fools, nay even in the dogberry, of our shakespeare, is doubtless a proof of genius, or at all events of satiric talent; but that the attempt to ridicule a silly and childish poem, by writing another still sillier and still more childish, can only prove (if it prove any thing at all) that the parodist is a still greater blockhead than the original writer, and, what is far worse, a malignant coxcomb to boot. the talent for mimicry seems strongest where the human race are most degraded. the poor, naked half human savages of new holland were found excellent mimics: and, in civilized society, minds of the very lowest stamp alone satirize by copying. at least the difference which must blend with and balance the likeness, in order to constitute a just imitation, existing here merely in caricature, detracts from the libeller's heart, without adding an iota to the credit of his understanding.] [footnote : -- the butterfly the ancient grecians made the soul's fair emblem, and its only name-- but of the soul, escaped the slavish trade of mortal life! for to this earthly frame ours is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame, manifold motions making little speed, and to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.] [footnote : mr. wordsworth, even in his two earliest poems, the evening walk and the descriptive sketches, is more free from this latter defect than most of the young poets his contemporaries. it may however be exemplified, together with the harsh and obscure construction, in which he more often offended, in the following lines:-- "'mid stormy vapours ever driving by, where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry; where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer, denied the bread of life the foodful ear, dwindles the pear on autumn's latest spray, and apple sickens pale in summer's ray; ev'n here content has fixed her smiling reign with independence, child of high disdain." i hope, i need not say, that i have quoted these lines for no other purpose than to make my meaning fully understood. it is to be regretted that mr. wordsworth has not republished these two poems entire.] [footnote : this is effected either by giving to the one word a general, and to the other an exclusive use; as "to put on the back" and "to indorse;" or by an actual distinction of meanings, as "naturalist," and "physician;" or by difference of relation, as "i" and "me" (each of which the rustics of our different provinces still use in all the cases singular of the first personal pronoun). even the mere difference, or corruption, in the pronunciation of the same word, if it have become general, will produce a new word with a distinct signification; thus "property" and "propriety;" the latter of which, even to the time of charles ii was the written word for all the senses of both. there is a sort of minim immortal among the animalcula infusoria, which has not naturally either birth, or death, absolute beginning, or absolute end: for at a certain period a small point appears on its back, which deepens and lengthens till the creature divides into two, and the same process recommences in each of the halves now become integral. this may be a fanciful, but it is by no means a bad emblem of the formation of words, and may facilitate the conception, how immense a nomenclature may be organized from a few simple sounds by rational beings in a social state. for each new application, or excitement of the same sound, will call forth a different sensation, which cannot but affect the pronunciation. the after recollections of the sound, without the same vivid sensation, will modify it still further till at length all trace of the original likeness is worn away.] [footnote : i ought to have added, with the exception of a single sheet which i accidentally met with at the printer's. even from this scanty specimen, i found it impossible to doubt the talent, or not to admire the ingenuity, of the author. that his distinctions were for the greater part unsatisfactory to my mind, proves nothing against their accuracy; but it may possibly be serviceable to him, in case of a second edition, if i take this opportunity of suggesting the query; whether he may not have been occasionally misled, by having assumed, as to me he appears to have done, the non-existence of any absolute synonymes in our language? now i cannot but think, that there are many which remain for our posterity to distinguish and appropriate, and which i regard as so much reversionary wealth in our mother tongue. when two distinct meanings are confounded under one or more words,--(and such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is progressive and of course imperfect)--erroneous consequences will be drawn, and what is true in one sense of the word will be affirmed as true in toto. men of research, startled by the consequences, seek in the things themselves--(whether in or out of the mind)--for a knowledge of the fact, and having discovered the difference, remove the equivocation either by the substitution of a new word, or by the appropriation of one of the two or more words, which had before been used promiscuously. when this distinction has been so naturalized and of such general currency that the language does as it were think for us--(like the sliding rule which is the mechanic's safe substitute for arithmetical knowledge)--we then say, that it is evident to common sense. common sense, therefore, differs in different ages. what was born and christened in the schools passes by degrees into the world at large, and becomes the property of the market and the tea-table. at least i can discover no other meaning of the term, common sense, if it is to convey any specific difference from sense and judgment in genere, and where it is not used scholastically for the universal reason. thus in the reign of charles ii the philosophic world was called to arms by the moral sophisms of hobbes, and the ablest writers exerted themselves in the detection of an error, which a school-boy would now be able to confute by the mere recollection, that compulsion and obligation conveyed two ideas perfectly disparate, and that what appertained to the one, had been falsely transferred to the other by a mere confusion of terms.] [footnote : i here use the word idea in mr. hume's sense on account of its general currency amongst the english metaphysicians; though against my own judgment, for i believe that the vague use of this word has been the cause of much error and more confusion. the word, idea, in its original sense as used by pindar, aristophanes, and in the gospel of st. matthew, represented the visual abstraction of a distant object, when we see the whole without distinguishing its parts. plato adopted it as a technical term, and as the antithesis to eidolon, or sensuous image; the transient and perishable emblem, or mental word, of the idea. ideas themselves he considered as mysterious powers, living, seminal, formative, and exempt from time. in this sense the word idea became the property of the platonic school; and it seldom occurs in aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it, as according to plato, or as plato says. our english writers to the end of the reign of charles ii or somewhat later, employed it either in the original sense, or platonically, or in a sense nearly correspondent to our present use of the substantive, ideal; always however opposing it, more or less to image, whether of present or absent objects. the reader will not be displeased with the following interesting exemplification from bishop jeremy taylor. "st. lewis the king sent ivo bishop of chartres on an embassy, and he told, that he met a grave and stately matron on the way with a censer of fire in one band, and a vessel of water in the other; and observing her to have a melancholy, religious, and phantastic deportment and look, he asked her what those symbols meant, and what she meant to do with her fire and water; she answered, my purpose is with the fire to burn paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve god purely for the love of god. but we rarely meet with such spirits which love virtue so metaphysically as to abstract her from all sensible compositions, and love the purity of the idea." des cartes having introduced into his philosophy the fanciful hypothesis of material ideas, or certain configurations of the brain, which were as so many moulds to the influxes of the external world,--locke adopted the term, but extended its signification to whatever is the immediate object of the mind's attention or consciousness. hume, distinguishing those representations which are accompanied with a sense of a present object from those reproduced by the mind itself, designated the former by impressions, and confined the word idea to the latter.] [footnote : i am aware, that this word occurs neither in johnson's dictionary nor in any classical writer. but the word, to intend, which newton and others before him employ in this sense, is now so completely appropriated to another meaning, that i could not use it without ambiguity: while to paraphrase the sense, as by render intense, would often break up the sentence and destroy that harmony of the position of the words with the logical position of the thoughts, which is a beauty in all composition, and more especially desirable in a close philosophical investigation. i have therefore hazarded the word, intensify: though, i confess, it sounds uncouth to my own ear.] [footnote : and coxcombs vanquish berkeley by a grin.] [footnote : videlicet; quantity, quality, relation, and mode, each consisting of three subdivisions. see kritik der reinen vernunft. see too the judicious remarks on locke and hume.] [footnote : st. luke x. .] [footnote : an american indian with little variety of images, and a still scantier stock of language, is obliged to turn his few words to many purposes, by likenesses so clear and analogies so remote as to give his language the semblance and character of lyric poetry interspersed with grotesques. something not unlike this was the case of such men as behmen and fox with regard to the bible. it was their sole armoury of expressions, their only organ of thought.] [footnote : the following burlesque on the fichtean egoisnsus may, perhaps, be amusing to the few who have studied the system, and to those who are unacquainted with it, may convey as tolerable a likeness of fichte's idealism as can be expected from an avowed caricature. the categorical imperative, or the annunciation of the new teutonic god, egoenkaipan: a dithyrambic ode, by querkopf von klubstick, grammarian, and subrector in gymmasic. eu! dei vices gerens, ipse divus, (speak english, friend!) the god imperativus, here on this market-cross aloud i cry: i, i, i! i itself i! the form and the substance, the what and the why, the when and the where, and the low and the high, the inside and outside, the earth and the sky, i, you and he, and he, you and i, all souls and all bodies are i itself i! all i itself i! (fools! a truce with this starting!) all my i! all my i! he's a heretic dog who but adds betty martin! thus cried the god with high imperial tone; in robe of stiffest state, that scoffed at beauty, a pronoun-verb imperative he shone-- then substantive and plural-singular grown he thus spake on! behold in i alone (for ethics boast a syntax of their own) or if in ye, yet as i doth depute ye, in o! i, you, the vocative of duty! i of the world's whole lexicon the root! of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight the genitive and ablative to boot: the accusative of wrong, the nominative of right, and in all cases the case absolute! self-construed, i all other moods decline: imperative, from nothing we derive us; yet as a super-postulate of mine, unconstrued antecedence i assign to x, y, z, the god infinitivus!] [footnote : it would be an act of high and almost criminal injustice to pass over in silence the name of mr. richard saumarez, a gentleman equally well known as a medical man and as a philanthropist, but who demands notice on the present occasion as the author of "a new system of physiology" in two volumes octavo, published ; and in of "an examination of the natural and artificial systems of philosophy which now prevail" in one volume octavo, entitled, "the principles of physiological and physical science." the latter work is not quite equal to the former in style or arrangement; and there is a greater necessity of distinguishing the principles of the author's philosophy from his conjectures concerning colour, the atmospheric matter, comets, etc. which, whether just or erroneous, are by no means necessary consequences of that philosophy. yet even in this department of this volume, which i regard as comparatively the inferior work, the reasonings by which mr. saumarez invalidates the immanence of an infinite power in any finite substance are the offspring of no common mind; and the experiment on the expansibility of the air is at least plausible and highly ingenious. but the merit, which will secure both to the book and to the writer a high and honourable name with posterity, consists in the masterly force of reasoning, and the copiousness of induction, with which he has assailed, and (in my opinion) subverted the tyranny of the mechanic system in physiology; established not only the existence of final causes, but their necessity and efficiency to every system that merits the name of philosophical; and, substituting life and progressive power for the contradictory inert force, has a right to be known and remembered as the first instaurator of the dynamic philosophy in england. the author's views, as far as concerns himself, are unborrowed and completely his own, as he neither possessed nor do his writings discover, the least acquaintance with the works of kant, in which the germs of the philosophy exist: and his volumes were published many years before the full development of these germs by schelling. mr. saumarez's detection of the braunonian system was no light or ordinary service at the time; and i scarcely remember in any work on any subject a confutation so thoroughly satisfactory. it is sufficient at this time to have stated the fact; as in the preface to the work, which i have already announced on the logos, i have exhibited in detail the merits of this writer, and genuine philosopher, who needed only have taken his foundation somewhat deeper and wider to have superseded a considerable part of my labours.] [footnote : but for sundry notes on shakespeare, and other pieces which have fallen in my way, i should have deemed it unnecessary to observe; that discourse here, or elsewhere does not mean what we now call discoursing; but the discursion of the mind, the processes of generalization and subsumption, of deduction and conclusion. thus, philosophy has hitherto been discursive; while geometry is always and essentially intuitive.] [footnote : revelation xx. .] [footnote : see laing's history of scotland.--walter scott's bards, ballads, etc.] [footnote : thus organization, and motion are regarded as from god, not in god.] [footnote : job, chap. xxviii.] [footnote : wherever a=b, and a is not=b, are equally demonstrable, the premise in each undeniable, the induction evident, and the conclusion legitimate--the result must be, either that contraries can both be true, (which is absurd,) or that the faculty and forms of reasoning employed are inapplicable to the subject--i.e. that there is a metabasis eis allo genos. thus, the attributes of space and time applied to spirit are heterogeneous--and the proof of this is, that by admitting them explicite or implicite contraries may be demonstrated true--i.e. that the same, taken in the same sense, is true and not true.--that the world had a beginning in time and a bound in space; and that the world had not a beginning and has no limit;--that a self originating act is, and is not possible, are instances.] [footnote : to those, who design to acquire the language of a country in the country itself, it may be useful, if i mention the incalculable advantage which i derived from learning all the words, that could possibly be so learned, with the objects before me, and without the intermediation of the english terms. it was a regular part of my morning studies for the first six weeks of my residence at ratzeburg, to accompany the good and kind old pastor, with whom i lived, from the cellar to the roof, through gardens, farmyard, etc. and to call every, the minutest, thing by its german name. advertisements, farces, jest books, and the conversation of children while i was at play with them, contributed their share to a more home-like acquaintance with the language than i could have acquired from works of polite literature alone, or even from polite society. there is a passage of hearty sound sense in luther's german letter on interpretation, to the translation of which i shall prefix, for the sake of those who read the german, yet are not likely to have dipped often in the massive folios of this heroic reformer, the simple, sinewy, idiomatic words of the original. "denn man muss nicht die buchstaben in der lateinischen sprache fragen wie man soll deutsch reden: sondern man muss die mutter in hause, die kinder auf den gassen, den gemeinen mann auf dem markte, darum fragen: und denselbigen auf das maul sehen wie sie reden, und darnach dolmetschen. so verstehen sie es denn, und merken dass man deutsch mit ihnen redet." translation: for one must not ask the letters in the latin tongue, how one ought to speak german; but one must ask the mother in the house, the children in the lanes and alleys, the common man in the market, concerning this; yea, and look at the moves of their mouths while they are talking, and thereafter interpret. they understand you then, and mark that one talks german with them.] [footnote : this paraphrase, written about the time of charlemagne, is by no means deficient in occasional passages of considerable poetic merit. there is a flow, and a tender enthusiasm in the following lines (at the conclusion of chapter xi.) which, even in the translation will not, i flatter myself, fail to interest the reader. ottfried is describing the circumstances immediately following the birth of our lord. she gave with joy her virgin breast; she hid it not, she bared the breast, which suckled that divinest babe! blessed, blessed were the breasts which the saviour infant kiss'd; and blessed, blessed was the mother who wrapp'd his limbs in swaddling clothes, singing placed him on her lap, hung o'er him with her looks of love, and sooth'd him with a lulling motion. blessed; for she shelter'd him from the damp and chilling air; blessed, blessed! for she lay with such a babe in one blest bed, close as babes and mothers lie! blessed, blessed evermore, with her virgin lips she kiss'd, with her arms, and to her breast she embraced the babe divine, her babe divine the virgin mother! there lives not on this ring of earth a mortal, that can sing her praise. mighty mother, virgin pure, in the darkness and the night for us she bore the heavenly lord! most interesting is it to consider the effect, when the feelings are wrought above the natural pitch by the belief of something mysterious, while all the images are purely natural. then it is, that religion and poetry strike deepest.] [footnote : lord grenville has lately re-asserted (in the house of lords) the imminent danger of a revolution in the earlier part of the war against france. i doubt not, that his lordship is sincere; and it must be flattering to his feelings to believe it. but where are the evidences of the danger, to which a future historian can appeal? or must he rest on an assertion? let me be permitted to extract a passage on the subject from the friend. "i have said that to withstand the arguments of the lawless, the anti-jacobins proposed to suspend the law, and by the interposition of a particular statute to eclipse the blessed light of the universal sun, that spies and informers might tyrannize and escape in the ominous darkness. oh! if these mistaken men, intoxicated with alarm and bewildered by that panic of property, which they themselves were the chief agents in exciting, had ever lived in a country where there really existed a general disposition to change and rebellion! had they ever travelled through sicily; or through france at the first coming on of the revolution; or even alas! through too many of the provinces of a sister island; they could not but have shrunk from their own declarations concerning the state of feeling and opinion at that time predominant throughout great britain. there was a time--(heaven grant that that time may have passed by!)--when by crossing a narrow strait, they might have learned the true symptoms of approaching danger, and have secured themselves from mistaking the meetings and idle rant of such sedition, as shrank appalled from the sight of a constable, for the dire murmuring and strange consternation which precedes the storm or earthquake of national discord. not only in coffee-houses and public theatres, but even at the tables of the wealthy, they would have heard the advocates of existing government defend their cause in the language and with the tone of men, who are conscious that they are in a minority. but in england, when the alarm was at its highest, there was not a city, no, not a town or village, in which a man suspected of holding democratic principles could move abroad without receiving some unpleasant proof of the hatred in which his supposed opinions were held by the great majority of the people; and the only instances of popular excess and indignation were on the side of the government and the established church. but why need i appeal to these invidious facts? turn over the pages of history and seek for a single instance of a revolution having been effected without the concurrence of either the nobles, or the ecclesiastics, or the monied classes, in any country, in which the influences of property had ever been predominant, and where the interests of the proprietors were interlinked! examine the revolution of the belgic provinces under philip ii; the civil wars of france in the preceding generation; the history of the american revolution, or the yet more recent events in sweden and in spain; and it will be scarcely possible not to perceive that in england from to the peace of amiens there were neither tendencies to confederacy nor actual confederacies, against which the existing laws had not provided both sufficient safeguards and an ample punishment. but alas! the panic of property had been struck in the first instance for party purposes; and when it became general, its propagators caught it themselves and ended in believing their own lie; even as our bulls to borrowdale sometimes run mad with the echo of their own bellowing. the consequences were most injurious. our attention was concentrated on a monster, which could not survive the convulsions, in which it had been brought forth,--even the enlightened burke himself too often talking and reasoning, as if a perpetual and organized anarchy had been a possible thing! thus while we were warring against french doctrines, we took little heed whether the means by which we attempted to overthrow them, were not likely to aid and augment the far more formidable evil of french ambition. like children we ran away from the yelping of a cur, and took shelter at the heels of a vicious war horse." (vol. ii. essay i. p. , th edit.)] [footnote : i seldom think of the murder of this illustrious prince without recollecting the lines of valerius flaccus: ------super ipsius ingens instat fama viri, virtusque haud laeta tyranno; ergo anteire metus, juvenemque exstinguere pergit. argonaut, i. .] [footnote : -- theara de kai ton chaena kai taen dorkada, kai ton lagoon, kai to ton tauron genos. manuel phile, de animal. proprietat. sect. i. i. .] [footnote : paradise regained. book iv. i. .] [footnote : vita e costumi di dante.] [footnote : translation: "with the greatest possible solicitude avoid authorship. too early or immoderately employed, it makes the head waste and the heart empty; even were there no other worse consequences. a person, who reads only to print, to all probability reads amiss; and he, who sends away through the pen and the press every thought, the moment it occurs to him, will in a short time have sent all away, and will become a mere journeyman of the printing-office, a compositor." to which i may add from myself, that what medical physiologists affirm of certain secretions applies equally to our thoughts; they too must be taken up again into the circulation, and be again and again re-secreted to order to ensure a healthful vigour, both to the mind and to its intellectual offspring.] [footnote : this distinction between transcendental and transcendent is observed by our elder divines and philosophers, whenever they express themselves scholastically. dr. johnson indeed has confounded the two words; but his own authorities do not bear him out. of this celebrated dictionary i will venture to remark once for all, that i should suspect the man of a morose disposition who should speak of it without respect and gratitude as a most instructive and entertaining book, and hitherto, unfortunately, an indispensable book; but i confess, that i should be surprised at hearing from a philosophic and thorough scholar any but very qualified praises of it, as a dictionary. i am not now alluding to the number of genuine words omitted; for this is (and perhaps to a greater extent) true, as mr. wakefield has noticed, of our best greek lexicons, and this too after the successive labours of so many giants in learning. i refer at present both to omissions and commissions of a more important nature. what these are, me saltem judice, will be stated at full in the friend, re-published and completed. i had never heard of the correspondence between wakefield and fox till i saw the account of it this morning ( th september ) in the monthly review. i was not a little gratified at finding, that mr. wakefield had proposed to himself nearly the same plan for a greek and english dictionary, which i had formed, and began to execute, now ten years ago. but far, far more grieved am i, that he did not live to complete it. i cannot but think it a subject of most serious regret, that the same heavy expenditure, which is now employing in the republication of stephanus augmented, had not been applied to a new lexicon on a more philosophical plan, with the english, german, and french synonymes as well as the latin. in almost every instance the precise individual meaning might be given in an english or german word; whereas in latin we must too often be contented with a mere general and inclusive term. how indeed can it be otherwise, when we attempt to render the most copious language of the world, the most admirable for the fineness of its distinctions, into one of the poorest and most vague languages? especially when we reflect on the comparative number of the works, still extant, written while the greek and latin were living languages. were i asked what i deemed the greatest and most unmixed benefit, which a wealthy individual, or an association of wealthy individuals could bestow on their country and on mankind, i should not hesitate to answer, "a philosophical english dictionary; with the greek, latin, german, french, spanish, and italian synonymes, and with correspondent indexes." that the learned languages might thereby be acquired, better, in half the time, is but a part, and not the most important part, of the advantages which would accrue from such a work. o! if it should be permitted by providence, that without detriment to freedom and independence our government might be enabled to become more than a committee for war and revenue! there was a time, when every thing was to be done by government. have we not flown off to the contrary extreme?] [footnote : april, . if i did not see it with my own eyes, i should not believe that i had been guilty of so many hydrostatic bulls as bellow in this unhappy allegory or string of metaphors! how a river was to travel up hill from a vale far inward, over the intervening mountains, morpheus, the dream weaver, can alone unriddle. i am ashamed and humbled. s. t. coleridge.] [footnote : ennead, iii. . . the force of the greek sunienai is imperfectly expressed by "understand;" our own idiomatic phrase "to go along with me" comes nearest to it. the passage, that follows, full of profound sense, appears to me evidently corrupt; and in fact no writer more wants, better deserves, or is less likely to obtain, a new and more correct edition-ti oun sunienai; oti to genomenon esti theama emon, siopaesis (mallem, theama, emon sioposaes,) kai physei genomenon theoraema, kai moi genomenae ek theorias taes odi, taen physin echein philotheamona uparkei. (mallem, kai moi hae genomenae ek theorias autaes odis). "what then are we to understand? that whatever is produced is an intuition, i silent; and that, which is thus generated, is by its nature a theorem, or form of contemplation; and the birth; which results to me from this contemplation, attains to have a contemplative nature." so synesius: 'odis hiera 'arraeta gona the after comparison of the process of the natura naturans with that of the geometrician is drawn from the very heart of philosophy.] [footnote : this is happily effected in three lines by synesius, in his third hymn: 'en kai pan'ta--(taken by itself) is spinozism. 'en d' 'apan'ton--a mere anima mundi. 'en te pro panton--is mechanical theism. but unite all three, and the result is the theism of saint paul and christianity. synesius was censured for his doctrine of the pre- existence of the soul; but never, that i can find, arraigned or deemed heretical for his pantheism, though neither giordano bruno, nor jacob behmen ever avowed it more broadly. mystas de noos, ta te kai ta legei, buthon arraeton amphichoreuon. su to tikton ephus, su to tiktomenon; su to photizon, su to lampomenon; su to phainomenon, su to kryptomenon idiais augais. 'en kai panta, 'en kath' heauto, kai dia panton. pantheism is therefore not necessarily irreligious or heretical; though it may be taught atheistically. thus spinoza would agree with synesius in calling god physis en noerois, the nature in intelligences; but he could not subscribe to the preceding nous kai noeros, i.e. himself intelligence and intelligent. in this biographical sketch of my literary life i may be excused, if i mention here, that i had translated the eight hymns of synesius from the greek into english anacreontics before my fifteenth year.] [footnote : see schell. abhandl. zur erlaeuter. des id. der wissenschafslehre.] [footnote : des cartes, diss. de methodo.] [footnote : the impossibility of an absolute thing (substantia unica) as neither genus, species, nor individuum: as well as its utter unfitness for the fundamental position of a philosophic system, will be demonstrated in the critique on spinozism in the fifth treatise of my logosophia.] [footnote : it is most worthy of notice, that in the first revelation of himself, not confined to individuals; indeed in the very first revelation of his absolute being, jehovah at the same time revealed the fundamental truth of all philosophy, which must either commence with the absolute, or have no fixed commencement; that is, cease to be philosophy. i cannot but express my regret, that in the equivocal use of the word that, for in that, or because, our admirable version has rendered the passage susceptible of a degraded interpretation in the mind of common readers or hearers, as if it were a mere reproof to an impertinent question, i am what i am, which might be equally affirmed of himself by any existent being. the cartesian cogito ergo sum is objectionable, because either the cogito is used extra gradum, and then it is involved to the sum and is tautological; or it is taken as a particular mode or dignity, and then it is subordinated to the sum as the species to the genus, or rather as a particular modification to the subject modified; and not pre- ordinated as the arguments seem to require. for cogito is sum cogitans. this is clear by the inevidence of the converse. cogitat, ergo est is true, because it is a mere application of the logical rule: quicquid in genere est, est et in specie. est (cogitans), ergo est. it is a cherry tree; therefore it is a tree. but, est ergo cogitat, is illogical: for quod est in specie, non nbcessario in genere est. it may be true. i hold it to be true, that quicquid vere est, est per veram sui affirmationem; but it is a derivative, not an immediate truth. here then we have, by anticipation, the distinction between the conditional finite! (which, as known in distinct consciousness by occasion of experience, is called by kant's followers the empirical!) and the absolute i am, and likewise the dependence or rather the inherence of the former in the latter; in whom "we live, and move, and have our being," as st. paul divinely asserts, differing widely from the theists of the mechanic school (as sir j. newton, locke, and others) who must say from whom we had our being, and with it life and the powers of life.] [footnote : translation. "hence it is clear, from what cause many reject the notion of the continuous and the infinite. they take, namely, the words irrepresentable and impossible in one and the same meaning; and, according to the forms of sensuous evidence, the notion of the continuous and the infinite is doubtless impossible. i am not now pleading the cause of these laws, which not a few schools have thought proper to explode, especially the former (the law of continuity). but it is of the highest importance to admonish the reader, that those, who adopt so perverted a mode of reasoning, are under a grievous error. whatever opposes the formal principles of the understanding and the reason is confessedly impossible; but not therefore that, which is therefore not amenable to the forms of sensuous evidence, because it is exclusively an object of pure intellect. for this non-coincidence of the sensuous and the intellectual (the nature of which i shall presently lay open) proves nothing more, but that the mind cannot always adequately represent to the concrete, and transform into distinct images, abstract notions derived from the pure intellect. but this contradiction, which is in itself merely subjective (i.e. an incapacity in the nature of man), too often passes for an incongruity or impossibility in the object (i.e. the notions themselves), and seduces the incautious to mistake the limitations of the human faculties for the limits of things, as they really exist." i take this occasion to observe, that here and elsewhere kant uses the term intuition, and the verb active (intueri germanice anschauen) for which we have unfortunately no correspondent word, exclusively for that which can be represented in space and time. he therefore consistently and rightly denies the possibility of intellectual intuitions. but as i see no adequate reason for this exclusive sense of the term, i have reverted to its wider signification, authorized by our elder theologians and metaphysicians, according to whom the term comprehends all truths known to us without a medium. from kant's treatise de mundi sensibilis et intelligibilis forma et principiis. .] [footnote : franc. baconis de verulam, novum organum.] [footnote : this phrase, a priori, is in common, most grossly misunderstood, and as absurdity burdened on it, which it does not deserve. by knowledge a priori, we do not mean, that we can know anything previously to experience, which would be a contradiction in terms; but that having once known it by occasion of experience (that is, something acting upon us from without) we then know, that it must have existed, or the experience itself would have been impossible. by experience only now, that i have eyes; but then my reason convinces me, that i must have had eyes in order to the experience.] [footnote : jer. taylor's via pacis.] [footnote : par. lost. book v. i. .] [footnote : leibnitz. op. t. ii. p. ii. p. .--t. iii. p. .] [footnote : synesii episcop. hymn. iii. i. ] [footnote : 'anaer morionous, a phrase which i have borrowed from a greek monk, who applies it to a patriarch of constantinople. i might have said, that i have reclaimed, rather than borrowed, it: for it seems to belong to shakespeare, de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naturae.] [footnote : first published in .] [footnote : these thoughts were suggested to me during the perusal of the madrigals of giovambatista strozzi published in florence in may, , by his sons lorenzo and filippo strozzi, with a dedication to their paternal uncle, signor leone strozzi, generale delle battaglie di santa chiesa. as i do not remember to have seen either the poems or their author mentioned in any english work, or to have found them in any of the common collections of italian poetry; and as the little work is of rare occurrence; i will transcribe a few specimens. i have seldom met with compositions that possessed, to my feelings, more of that satisfying entireness, that complete adequateness of the manner to the matter which so charms us in anacreon, joined with the tenderness, and more than the delicacy of catullus. trifles as they are, they were probably elaborated with great care; yet to the perusal we refer them to a spontaneous energy rather than to voluntary effort. to a cultivated taste there is a delight in perfection for its own sake, independently of the material in which it is manifested, that none but a cultivated taste can understand or appreciate. after what i have advanced, it would appear presumption to offer a translation; even if the attempt were not discouraged by the different genius of the english mind and language, which demands a denser body of thought as the condition of a high polish, than the italian. i cannot but deem it likewise an advantage in the italian tongue, in many other respects inferior to our own, that the language of poetry is more distinct from that of prose than with us. from the earlier appearance and established primacy of the tuscan poets, concurring with the number of independent states, and the diversity of written dialects, the italians have gained a poetic idiom, as the greeks before them had obtained from the same causes with greater and more various discriminations, for example, the ionic for their heroic verses; the attic for their iambic; and the two modes of the doric for the lyric or sacerdotal, and the pastoral, the distinctions of which were doubtless more obvious to the greeks themselves than they are to us. i will venture to add one other observation before i proceed to the transcription. i am aware that the sentiments which i have avowed concerning the points of difference between the poetry of the present age, and that of the period between and , are the reverse of the opinion commonly entertained. i was conversing on this subject with a friend, when the servant, a worthy and sensible woman, coming in, i placed before her two engravings, the one a pinky-coloured plate of the day, the other a masterly etching by salvator rosa from one of his own pictures. on pressing her to tell us, which she preferred, after a little blushing and flutter of feeling, she replied "why, that, sir, to be sure! (pointing to the ware from the fleet-street print shops);--it's so neat and elegant. t'other is such a scratchy slovenly thing." an artist, whose writings are scarcely less valuable than his pictures, and to whose authority more deference will be willingly paid, than i could even wish should be shown to mine, has told us, and from his own experience too, that good taste must be acquired, and like all other good things, is the result of thought and the submissive study of the best models. if it be asked, "but what shall i deem such?"--the answer is; presume those to be the best, the reputation of which has been matured into fame by the consent of ages. for wisdom always has a final majority, if not by conviction, yet by acquiescence. in addition to sir j. reynolds i may mention harris of salisbury; who in one of his philosophical disquisitions has written on the means of acquiring a just taste with the precision of aristotle, and the elegance of quinctilian. madrigali. gelido suo ruscel chiaro, e tranquillo m'insegno amor di state a mezzo'l giorno; ardean le solve, ardean le piagge, e i colli. ond' io, ch' al piu gran gielo ardo e sfavillo, subito corsi; ma si puro adorno girsene il vidi, che turbar no'l volli: sol mi specchiava, e'n dolce ombrosa sponda mi stava intento al mormorar dell' onda. aure dell' angoscioso viver mio refrigerio soave, e dolce si, che piu non mi par grave ne'l ardor, ne'l morir, anz' il desio; deh voil ghiaccio, e le nubi, e'l tempo rio discacciatene omai, che londa chiara, e l'ombra non men cara a scherzare, a cantar per suoi boschetti, e prati festa et allegrezza alletti. pacifiche, ma spesso in amorosa guerra co'fiori, e l'erba alla stagione acerba verdi insegne del giglio e della rosa, movete, aure, pian pian; che tregua o posa, se non pace, io ritrove; e so ben dove:--oh vago, a mansueto sguardo, oh labbra d'ambrosia, oh rider, lieto! hor come un scoglio stassi, hor come un rio se'n fugge, ed hor crud' orsa rugge, hor canta angelo pio: ma che non fassi! e che non fammi, o sassi, o rivi, o belue, o dii, questa mia vaga non so, se ninfa, o magna, non so, se donna, o dea, non so, se dolce o rea? piangendo mi baciaste, e ridendo il negaste: in doglia hebbivi pin, in festa hebbivi ria: nacque gioia di pianti, dolor di riso: o amanti miseri, habbiate insieme ognor paura e speme. bel fior, tu mi rimembri la rugiadosa guancia del bet viso; e si vera l'assembri, che'n te sovente, come in lei m'affiso: et hor del vago riso, hor del serene sguardo io pur cieco riguardo. ma qual fugge, o rosa, il mattin lieve! e chi te, come neve, e'l mio cor teco, e la mia vita strugge! anna mia, anna dolce, oh sempre nuovo e piu chiaro concento, quanta dolcezza sento in sol anna dicendo? io mi pur pruovo, ne qui tra noi ritruovo, ne tra cieli armonia, che del bel nome suo piu dolce sia: altro il cielo, altro amore, altro non suona l'ecco del mio core. hor che'l prato, e la selva si scoiora, al tuo serena ombroso muovine, alto riposo, deh ch'io riposi una sol notte, un hora: han le fere, e git augelli, ognun talora ha qualche pace; io quando, lasso! non vonne errando, e non piango, e non grido? e qual pur forte? ma poiche, non sent' egli, odine, morte. risi e piansi d'amor; ne pero mai se non in fiamma, o'n onda, o'n vento scrissi spesso msrce trovai crudel; sempre in me morto, in altri vissi: hor da' piu scuri abissi al ciel m'aizai, hor ne pur caddi giuso; stance al fin qui son chiuso. [footnote : -- "i've measured it from side to side; 'tis three feet long, and two feet wide."] [footnote : -- "nay, rack your brain--'tis all in vain, i'll tell you every thing i know; but to the thorn, and to the pond which is a little step beyond, i wish that you would go: perhaps, when you are at the place, you something of her tale may trace. i'll give you the best help i can before you up the mountain go, up to the dreary mountain-top, i'll tell you all i know. 'tis now some two-and-twenty years since she (her name is martha ray) gave, with a maiden's true good will, her company to stephen hill; and she was blithe and gay, and she was happy, happy still whene'er she thought of stephen hill. and they had fixed the wedding-day, the morning that must wed them both but stephen to another maid had sworn another oath; and, with this other maid, to church unthinking stephen went-- poor martha! on that woeful day a pang of pitiless dismay into her soul was sent; a fire was kindled in her breast, which might not burn itself to rest. they say, full six months after this, while yet the summer leaves were green, she to the mountain-top would go, and there was often seen; 'tis said a child was in her womb, as now to any eye was plain; she was with child, and she was mad; yet often she was sober sad from her exceeding pain. oh me! ten thousand times i'd rather that he had died, that cruel father! * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * last christmas when they talked of this, old farmer simpson did maintain, that in her womb the infant wrought about its mother's heart, and brought her senses back again: and, when at last her time drew near, her looks were calm, her senses clear. no more i know, i wish i did, and i would tell it all to you for what became of this poor child there's none that ever knew and if a child was born or no, there's no one that could ever tell; and if 'twas born alive or dead, there's no one knows, as i have said: but some remember well, that martha ray about this time would up the mountain often climb."] [footnote : it is no less an error in teachers, than a torment to the poor children, to enforce the necessity of reading as they would talk. in order to cure them of singing as it is called, that is, of too great a difference, the child is made to repeat the words with his eyes from off the book; and then, indeed, his tones resemble talking, as far as his fears, tears and trembling will permit. but as soon as the eye is again directed to the printed page, the spell begins anew; for an instinctive sense tells the child's feelings, that to utter its own momentary thoughts, and to recite the written thoughts of another, as of another, and a far wiser than himself, are two widely different things; and as the two acts are accompanied with widely different feelings, so must they justify different modes of enunciation. joseph lancaster, among his other sophistications of the excellent dr. bell's invaluable system, cures this fault of singing, by hanging fetters and chains on the child, to the music of which one of his school-fellows, who walks before, dolefully chants out the child's last speech and confession, birth, parentage, and education. and this soul-benumbing ignominy, this unholy and heart-hardening burlesque on the last fearful infliction of outraged law, in pronouncing the sentence to which the stern and familiarized judge not seldom bursts into tears, has been extolled as a happy and ingenious method of remedying--what? and how?--why, one extreme in order to introduce another, scarce less distant from good sense, and certainly likely to have worse moral effects, by enforcing a semblance of petulant ease and self-sufficiency, in repression and possible after-perversion of the natural feelings. i have to beg dr. bell's pardon for this connection of the two names, but he knows that contrast is no less powerful a cause of association than likeness.] [footnote : altered from the description of night-mair in the remorse. "oh heaven! 'twas frightful! now ran down and stared at by hideous shapes that cannot be remembered; now seeing nothing and imagining nothing; but only being afraid--stifled with fear! while every goodly or familiar form had a strange power of spreading terror round me!" n.b.--though shakespeare has, for his own all justifying purposes, introduced the night-mare with her own foals, yet mair means a sister, or perhaps a hag.] [footnote : but still more by the mechanical system of philosophy which has needlessly infected our theological opinions, and teaching us to consider the world in its relation to god, as of a building to its mason, leaves the idea of omnipresence a mere abstract notion in the stateroom of our reason.] [footnote : as the ingenious gentleman under the influence of the tragic muse contrived to dislocate, "i wish you a good morning, sir! thank you, sir, and i wish you the same," into two blank-verse heroics:-- to you a morning good, good sir! i wish. you, sir! i thank: to you the same wish i. in those parts of mr. wordsworth's works which i have thoroughly studied, i find fewer instances in which this would be practicable than i have met to many poems, where an approximation of prose has been sedulously and on system guarded against. indeed excepting the stanzas already quoted from the sailor's mother, i can recollect but one instance: that is to say, a short passage of four or five lines in the brothers, that model of english pastoral, which i never yet read with unclouded eye.--"james, pointing to its summit, over which they had all purposed to return together, informed them that he would wait for them there. they parted, and his comrades passed that way some two hours after, but they did not find him at the appointed place, _a circumstance of which they took no heed:_ but one of them, going by chance into the house, which at this time was james's house, learnt _there,_ that nobody had seen him all that day." the only change which has been made is in the position of the little word there in two instances, the position in the original being clearly such as is not adopted in ordinary conversation. the other words printed in italics were so marked because, though good and genuine english, they are not the phraseology of common conversation either in the word put in apposition, or in the connection by the genitive pronoun. men in general would have said, "but that was a circumstance they paid no attention to, or took no notice of;" and the language is, on the theory of the preface, justified only by the narrator's being the vicar. yet if any ear could suspect, that these sentences were ever printed as metre, on those very words alone could the suspicion have been grounded.] [footnote : i had in my mind the striking but untranslatable epithet, which the celebrated mendelssohn applied to the great founder of the critical philosophy "der alleszermalmende kant," that is, the all-becrushing, or rather the all-to-nothing-crushing kant. in the facility and force of compound epithets, the german from the number of its cases and inflections approaches to the greek, that language so "bless'd in the happy marriage of sweet words." it is in the woful harshness of its sounds alone that the german need shrink from the comparison.] [footnote : sammlung einiger abhandlungen von christian garve.] [footnote : sonnet ix.] [footnote : mr. wordsworth's having judiciously adopted "concourse wild" in this passage for "a wild scene" as it stood to the former edition, encourages me to hazard a remark, which i certainly should not have made in the works of a poet less austerely accurate in the use of words, than he is, to his own great honour. it respects the propriety of the word, "scene," even in the sentence in which it is retained. dryden, and he only in his more careless verses, was the first, as far as my researches have discovered, who for the convenience of rhyme used this word in the vague sense, which has been since too current even in our best writers, and which (unfortunately, i think) is given as its first explanation in dr. johnson's dictionary and therefore would be taken by an incautious reader as its proper sense. in shakespeare and milton the word is never used without some clear reference, proper or metaphorical, to the theatre. thus milton: "cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm a sylvan scene; and, as the ranks ascend shade above shade, a woody theatre of stateliest view." i object to any extension of its meaning, because the word is already more equivocal than might be wished; inasmuch as to the limited use, which i recommend, it may still signify two different things; namely, the scenery, and the characters and actions presented on the stage during the presence of particular scenes. it can therefore be preserved from obscurity only by keeping the original signification full in the mind. thus milton again, ------"prepare thee for another scene."] [footnote : -- which copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every hill, upon her verge that stands, the neighbouring vallies fill; helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw, from whom as soon again, the sound dunbalrase drew, from whose stone-trophied head, it on the windross went, which tow'rds the sea again, resounded it to dent. that brodwater, therewith within her banks astound, in sailing to the sea, told it to egremound, whose buildings, walks, and streets, with echoes loud and long, did mightily commend old copland for her song. drayton's polyolbion: song xxx.] [footnote : translation. it behoves me to side with my friends, but only as far as the gods.] [footnote : "slender. i bruised my shin with playing with sword and dagger for a dish of stewed prunes, and by my troth i cannot abide the smell of hot meat since."--so again, evans. "i will make an end of my dinner: there's pippins and cheese to come."] [footnote : this was accidentally confirmed to me by an old german gentleman at helmstadt, who had been klopstock's school and bed-fellow. among other boyish anecdotes, he related that the young poet set a particular value on a translation of the paradise lost, and always slept with it under his pillow.] [footnote : klopstock's observation was partly true and partly erroneous. in the literal sense of his words, and, if we confine the comparison to the average of space required for the expression of the same thought in the two languages, it is erroneous. i have translated some german hexameters into english hexameter; and find, that on the average three english lines will express four lines german. the reason is evident: our language abounds in monosyllables and dissyllables. the german, not less than the greek, is a polysyllable language. but in another point of view the remark was not without foundation. for the german possessing the same unlimited privilege of forming compounds, both with prepositions and with epithets, as the greek, it can express the richest single greek word in a single german one, and is thus freed from the necessity of weak or ungraceful paraphrases. i will content myself with one at present, viz. the use of the prefixed participles ver, zer, ent, and weg: thus reissen to rend, verreissen to rend away, zerreissen to rend to pieces, entreissen to rend off or out of a thing, in the active sense: or schmelzen to melt--ver, zer, ent, schmelzen--and in like manner through all the verbs neuter and active. if you consider only how much we should feel the loss of the prefix be, as in bedropt, besprinkle, besot, especially in our poetical language, and then think that this same mode of composition is carved through all their simple and compound prepositions, and many of their adverbs; and that with most of these the germans have the same privilege as we have of dividing them from the verb and placing them at the end of the sentence; you will have no difficulty in comprehending the reality and the cause of this superior power in the german of condensing meaning, in which its great poet exulted. it is impossible to read half a dozen pages of wieland without perceiving that in this respect the german has no rival but the greek. and yet i feel, that concentration or condensation is not the happiest mode of expressing this excellence, which seems to consist not so much in the less time required for conveying an impression, as in the unity and simultaneousness with which the impression is conveyed. it tends to make their language more picturesque: it depictures images better. we have obtained this power in part by our compound verbs derived from the latin: and the sense of its great effect no doubt induced our milton both to the use and the abuse of latin derivatives. but still these prefixed particles, conveying no separate or separable meaning to the mere english reader, cannot possibly act on the mind with the force or liveliness of an original and homogeneous language such as the german is, and besides are confined to certain words.] [footnote : praecludere calumniam, in the original.] [footnote : better thus: forma specifica per formam individualem translucens: or better yet--species individualisata, sive individuum cuilibet speciei determinatae in omni parte correspondens et quasi versione quadam eam interpretans et repetens.] [footnote : -- ------"the big round tears cours'd one another down his innocent nose in piteous chase," says shakespeare of a wounded stag hanging its head over a stream: naturally, from the position of the head, and most beautifully, from the association of the preceding image, of the chase, in which "the poor sequester'd stag from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt." in the supposed position of bertram, the metaphor, if not false, loses all the propriety of the original.] [footnote : among a number of other instances of words chosen without reason, imogine in the first act declares, that thunder-storms were not able to intercept her prayers for "the desperate man, in desperate ways who dealt"---- "yea, when the launched bolt did sear her sense, her soul's deep orisons were breathed for him;" that is, when a red-hot bolt, launched at her from a thunder-cloud, had cauterized her sense, to plain english, burnt her eyes out of her head, she kept still praying on. "was not this love? yea, thus doth woman love!"] [footnote : this sort of repetition is one of this writers peculiarities, and there is scarce a page which does not furnish one or more instances--ex. gr. in the first page or two. act i, line th, "and deemed that i might sleep."--line , "did rock and quiver in the bickering glare."--lines , , , "but by the momently gleams of sheeted blue, did the pale marbles dare so sternly on me, i almost deemed they lived."--line , "the glare of hell."--line , "o holy prior, this is no earthly storm."--line , "this is no earthly storm."--line , "dealing with us."--line , "deal thus sternly:"--line , "speak! thou hast something seen?"--"a fearful sight!"--line , "what hast thou seen! a piteous, fearful sight."--line , "quivering gleams."--line , "in the hollow pauses of the storm."--line , "the pauses of the storm, etc."] [footnote : the child is an important personage, for i see not by what possible means the author could have ended the second and third acts but for its timely appearance. how ungrateful then not further to notice its fate!] [footnote : classically too, as far as consists with the allegorizing fancy of the modern, that still striving to project the inward, contradistinguishes itself from the seeming ease with which the poetry of the ancients reflects the world without. casimir affords, perhaps, the most striking instance of this characteristic difference.--for his style and diction are really classical: while cowley, who resembles casimir in many respects, completely barbarizes his latinity, and even his metre, by the heterogeneous nature of his thoughts. that dr. johnson should have passed a contrary judgment, and have even preferred cowley's latin poems to milton's, is a caprice that has, if i mistake not, excited the surprise of all scholars. i was much amused last summer with the laughable affright, with which an italian poet perused a page of cowley's davideis, contrasted with the enthusiasm with which he first ran through, and then read aloud, milton's mansus and ad patrem.] [footnote : flectit, or if the metre had allowed, premit would have supported the metaphor better.] [footnote : poor unlucky metaphysicks! and what are they? a single sentence expresses the object and thereby the contents of this science. gnothi seauton: nosce te ipsum, tuque deum, quantum licet, inque deo omnia noscas.] know thyself: and so shalt thou know god, as far as is permitted to a creature, and in god all things.--surely, there is a strange--nay, rather too natural--aversion to many to know themselves.] an essay on criticism. by alexander pope, _with introductory and explanatory notes_. alexander pope. * * * * * this eminent english poet was born in london, may , . his parents were roman catholics, and to this faith the poet adhered, thus debarring himself from public office and employment. his father, a linen merchant, having saved a moderate competency, withdrew from business, and settled on a small estate he had purchased in windsor forest. he died at chiswick, in . his son shortly afterwards took a long lease of a house and five acres of land at twickenham, on the banks of the thames, whither he retired with his widowed mother, to whom he was tenderly attached and where he resided till death, cultivating his little domain with exquisite taste and skill, and embellishing it with a grotto, temple, wilderness, and other adjuncts poetical and picturesque. in this famous villa pope was visited by the most celebrated wits, statesmen and beauties of the day, himself being the most popular and successful poet of his age. his early years were spent at binfield, within the range of the royal forest. he received some education at little catholic schools, but was his own instructor after his twelfth year. he never was a profound or accurate scholar, but he read latin poets with ease and delight, and acquired some greek, french, and italian. he was a poet almost from infancy, he "lisped in numbers," and when a mere youth surpassed all his contemporaries in metrical harmony and correctness. his pastorals and some translations appeared in , but were written three or four years earlier. these were followed by the _essay on criticism_, ; _rape of the lock_ (when completed, the most graceful, airy, and imaginative of his works), - ; _windsor forest_, ; _temple of fame_, . in a collection of his works printed in he included the _epistle of eloisa_ and _elegy on an unfortunate lady_, two poems inimitable for pathetic beauty and finished melodious versification. from till pope was chiefly engaged on his translations of the _iliad_ and _odyssey_, which, though wanting in time homeric simplicity, naturalness, and grandeur, are splendid poems. in - he published his greatest satire--the _dunciad_, an attack on all poetasters and pretended wits, and on all other persons against whom the sensitive poet had conceived any enmity. in he gave to the world a volume of his _literary correspondence_, containing some pleasant gossip and observations, with choice passages of description but it appears that the correspondence was manufactured for publication not composed of actual letters addressed to the parties whose names are given, and the collection was introduced to the public by means of an elaborate stratagem on the part of the scheming poet. between the years and he issued a series of poetical essays moral and philosophical, with satires and imitations of horace, all admirable for sense, wit, spirit and brilliancy of these delightful productions, the most celebrated is the _essay on man_ to which bolingbroke is believed to have contributed the spurious philosophy and false sentiment, but its merit consists in detached passages, descriptions, and pictures. a fourth book to the _dunciad_, containing many beautiful and striking lines and a general revision of his works, closed the poet's literary cares and toils. he died on the th of may, , and was buried in the church at twickenham. pope was of very diminutive stature and deformed from his birth. his physical infirmity, susceptible temperament, and incessant study rendered his life one long disease. he was, as his friend lord chesterfield said, "the most irritable of all the _genus irritabile vatum_, offended with trifles and never forgetting or forgiving them." his literary stratagems, disguises, assertions, denials, and (we must add) misrepresentations would fill volumes. yet when no disturbing jealousy vanity, or rivalry intervened was generous and affectionate, and he had a manly, independent spirit. as a poet he was deficient in originality and creative power, and thus was inferior to his prototype, dryden, but as a literary artist, and brilliant declaimer satirist and moralizer in verse he is still unrivaled. he is the english horace, and will as surely descend with honors to the latest posterity. an essay on criticism, written in the year [the title, _an essay on criticism_ hardly indicates all that is included in the poem. it would have been impossible to give a full and exact idea of the art of poetical criticism without entering into the consideration of the art of poetry. accordingly pope has interwoven the precepts of both throughout the poem which might more properly have been styled an essay on the art of criticism and of poetry.] * * * * * part i. 'tis hard to say if greater want of skill appear in writing or in judging ill, but of the two less dangerous is the offense to tire our patience than mislead our sense some few in that but numbers err in this, ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss, a fool might once himself alone expose, now one in verse makes many more in prose. 'tis with our judgments as our watches, none go just alike, yet each believes his own in poets as true genius is but rare true taste as seldom is the critic share both must alike from heaven derive their light, these born to judge as well as those to write let such teach others who themselves excel, and censure freely, who have written well authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true [ ] but are not critics to their judgment too? yet if we look more closely we shall find most have the seeds of judgment in their mind nature affords at least a glimmering light the lines though touched but faintly are drawn right, but as the slightest sketch if justly traced is by ill coloring but the more disgraced so by false learning is good sense defaced some are bewildered in the maze of schools [ ] and some made coxcombs nature meant but fools in search of wit these lose their common sense and then turn critics in their own defense each burns alike who can or cannot write or with a rival's or an eunuch's spite all fools have still an itching to deride and fain would be upon the laughing side if maevius scribble in apollo's spite [ ] there are who judge still worse than he can write. some have at first for wits then poets passed turned critics next and proved plain fools at last some neither can for wits nor critics pass as heavy mules are neither horse nor ass. those half-learned witlings, numerous in our isle, as half-formed insects on the banks of nile unfinished things one knows not what to call their generation is so equivocal to tell them would a hundred tongues require, or one vain wits that might a hundred tire. but you who seek to give and merit fame, and justly bear a critic's noble name, be sure yourself and your own reach to know how far your genius taste and learning go. launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet and mark that point where sense and dullness meet. nature to all things fixed the limits fit and wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit. as on the land while here the ocean gains. in other parts it leaves wide sandy plains thus in the soul while memory prevails, the solid power of understanding fails where beams of warm imagination play, the memory's soft figures melt away one science only will one genius fit, so vast is art, so narrow human wit not only bounded to peculiar arts, but oft in those confined to single parts like kings, we lose the conquests gained before, by vain ambition still to make them more each might his several province well command, would all but stoop to what they understand. first follow nature and your judgment frame by her just standard, which is still the same. unerring nature still divinely bright, one clear, unchanged and universal light, life force and beauty, must to all impart, at once the source and end and test of art art from that fund each just supply provides, works without show and without pomp presides in some fair body thus the informing soul with spirits feeds, with vigor fills the whole, each motion guides and every nerve sustains, itself unseen, but in the effects remains. some, to whom heaven in wit has been profuse, [ ] want as much more, to turn it to its use; for wit and judgment often are at strife, though meant each other's aid, like man and wife. 'tis more to guide, than spur the muse's steed, restrain his fury, than provoke his speed, the winged courser, like a generous horse, [ ] shows most true mettle when you check his course. those rules, of old discovered, not devised, are nature still, but nature methodized; nature, like liberty, is but restrained by the same laws which first herself ordained. hear how learned greece her useful rules indites, when to repress and when indulge our flights. high on parnassus' top her sons she showed, [ ] and pointed out those arduous paths they trod; held from afar, aloft, the immortal prize, and urged the rest by equal steps to rise. [ ] just precepts thus from great examples given, she drew from them what they derived from heaven. the generous critic fanned the poet's fire, and taught the world with reason to admire. then criticism the muse's handmaid proved, to dress her charms, and make her more beloved: but following wits from that intention strayed who could not win the mistress, wooed the maid against the poets their own arms they turned sure to hate most the men from whom they learned so modern pothecaries taught the art by doctors bills to play the doctor's part. bold in the practice of mistaken rules prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools. some on the leaves of ancient authors prey, nor time nor moths e'er spoil so much as they. some dryly plain, without invention's aid, write dull receipts how poems may be made these leave the sense their learning to display, and those explain the meaning quite away. you then, whose judgment the right course would steer, know well each ancient's proper character, his fable subject scope in every page, religion, country, genius of his age without all these at once before your eyes, cavil you may, but never criticise. be homers works your study and delight, read them by day and meditate by night, thence form your judgment thence your maxims bring and trace the muses upward to their spring. still with itself compared, his text peruse, and let your comment be the mantuan muse. [ ] when first young maro in his boundless mind, [ ] a work to outlast immortal rome designed, perhaps he seemed above the critic's law and but from nature's fountain scorned to draw but when to examine every part he came nature and homer were he found the same convinced, amazed, he checks the bold design and rules as strict his labored work confine as if the stagirite o'erlooked each line [ ] learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem, to copy nature is to copy them. some beauties yet no precepts can declare, for there's a happiness as well as care. music resembles poetry--in each are nameless graces which no methods teach, and which a master hand alone can reach if, where the rules not far enough extend (since rules were made but to promote their end), some lucky license answer to the full the intent proposed that license is a rule. thus pegasus a nearer way to take may boldly deviate from the common track great wits sometimes may gloriously offend, and rise to faults true critics dare not mend, from vulgar bounds with brave disorder part, and snatch a grace beyond the reach of art, which without passing through the judgment gains the heart and all its end at once attains. in prospects, thus, some objects please our eyes, which out of nature's common order rise, the shapeless rock or hanging precipice. but though the ancients thus their rules invade (as kings dispense with laws themselves have made), moderns beware! or if you must offend against the precept, ne'er transgress its end, let it be seldom, and compelled by need, and have, at least, their precedent to plead. the critic else proceeds without remorse, seizes your fame, and puts his laws in force. i know there are, to whose presumptuous thoughts those freer beauties, even in them, seem faults some figures monstrous and misshaped appear, considered singly, or beheld too near, which, but proportioned to their light, or place, due distance reconciles to form and grace. a prudent chief not always must display his powers in equal ranks and fair array, but with the occasion and the place comply. conceal his force, nay, seem sometimes to fly. those oft are stratagems which errors seem, nor is it homer nods, but we that dream. [ ] still green with bays each ancient altar stands, above the reach of sacrilegious hands, secure from flames, from envy's fiercer rage, [ ] destructive war, and all-involving age. see, from each clime the learned their incense bring; hear, in all tongues consenting paeans ring! in praise so just let every voice be joined, and fill the general chorus of mankind. hail! bards triumphant! born in happier days; immortal heirs of universal praise! whose honors with increase of ages grow, as streams roll down, enlarging as they flow; nations unborn your mighty names shall sound, [ ] and worlds applaud that must not yet be found! oh may some spark of your celestial fire, the last, the meanest of your sons inspire, (that, on weak wings, from far pursues your flights, glows while he reads, but trembles as he writes), to teach vain wits a science little known, to admire superior sense, and doubt their own! * * * * * part ii. of all the causes which conspire to blind man's erring judgment and misguide the mind, what the weak head with strongest bias rules, is pride, the never-failing vice of fools. whatever nature has in worth denied, she gives in large recruits of needful pride; for as in bodies, thus in souls, we find what wants in blood and spirits, swelled with wind: pride where wit fails steps in to our defense, and fills up all the mighty void of sense. if once right reason drives that cloud away, truth breaks upon us with resistless day trust not yourself, but your defects to know, make use of every friend--and every foe. a little learning is a dangerous thing drink deep, or taste not the pierian spring [ ] there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again. fired at first sight with what the muse imparts, in fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts while from the bounded level of our mind short views we take nor see the lengths behind but more advanced behold with strange surprise, new distant scenes of endless science rise! so pleased at first the towering alps we try, mount o'er the vales and seem to tread the sky, the eternal snows appear already passed and the first clouds and mountains seem the last. but those attained we tremble to survey the growing labors of the lengthened way the increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes, hills peep o'er hills and alps on alps arise! a perfect judge will read each work of wit with the same spirit that its author writ survey the whole nor seek slight faults to find where nature moves and rapture warms the mind, nor lose for that malignant dull delight the generous pleasure to be charmed with wit but in such lays as neither ebb nor flow, correctly cold and regularly low that, shunning faults, one quiet tenor keep; we cannot blame indeed--but we may sleep. in wit, as nature, what affects our hearts is not the exactness of peculiar parts, 'tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call, but the joint force and full result of all. thus, when we view some well proportioned dome (the worlds just wonder, and even thine, o rome!), [ ] no single parts unequally surprise, all comes united to the admiring eyes; no monstrous height or breadth, or length, appear; the whole at once is bold, and regular. whoever thinks a faultless piece to see. thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be. in every work regard the writer's end, since none can compass more than they intend; and if the means be just, the conduct true, applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due. as men of breeding, sometimes men of wit, to avoid great errors, must the less commit: neglect the rules each verbal critic lays, for not to know some trifles is a praise. most critics, fond of some subservient art, still make the whole depend upon a part: they talk of principles, but notions prize, and all to one loved folly sacrifice. once on a time la mancha's knight, they say, [ ] a certain bard encountering on the way, discoursed in terms as just, with looks as sage, as e'er could dennis, of the grecian stage; [ ] concluding all were desperate sots and fools, who durst depart from aristotle's rules our author, happy in a judge so nice, produced his play, and begged the knight's advice; made him observe the subject, and the plot, the manners, passions, unities, what not? all which, exact to rule, were brought about, were but a combat in the lists left out "what! leave the combat out?" exclaims the knight. "yes, or we must renounce the stagirite." "not so, by heaven!" (he answers in a rage) "knights, squires, and steeds must enter on the stage." "so vast a throng the stage can ne'er contain." "then build a new, or act it in a plain." thus critics of less judgment than caprice, curious, not knowing, not exact, but nice, form short ideas, and offend in arts (as most in manners) by a love to parts. some to conceit alone their taste confine, and glittering thoughts struck out at every line; pleased with a work where nothing's just or fit; one glaring chaos and wild heap of wit. poets, like painters, thus, unskilled to trace the naked nature and the living grace, with gold and jewels cover every part, and hide with ornaments their want of art. true wit is nature to advantage dressed; what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed; something, whose truth convinced at sight we find that gives us back the image of our mind. as shades more sweetly recommend the light, so modest plainness sets off sprightly wit for works may have more wit than does them good, as bodies perish through excess of blood. others for language all their care express, and value books, as women men, for dress. their praise is still--"the style is excellent," the sense they humbly take upon content [ ] words are like leaves, and where they most abound much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. false eloquence, like the prismatic glass. [ ] its gaudy colors spreads on every place, the face of nature we no more survey. all glares alike without distinction gay: but true expression, like the unchanging sun, clears and improves whate'er it shines upon; it gilds all objects, but it alters none. expression is the dress of thought, and still appears more decent, as more suitable, a vile conceit in pompous words expressed, is like a clown in regal purple dressed for different styles with different subjects sort, as several garbs with country town and court some by old words to fame have made pretense, ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense; such labored nothings, in so strange a style, amaze the unlearned, and make the learned smile. unlucky, as fungoso in the play, [ ] these sparks with awkward vanity display what the fine gentleman wore yesterday; and but so mimic ancient wits at best, as apes our grandsires in their doublets dressed. in words as fashions the same rule will hold, alike fantastic if too new or old. be not the first by whom the new are tried, nor yet the last to lay the old aside but most by numbers judge a poet's song and smooth or rough, with them is right or wrong. in the bright muse though thousand charms conspire, her voice is all these tuneful fools admire, who haunt parnassus but to please their ear, not mend their minds, as some to church repair, not for the doctrine but the music there these equal syllables alone require, though oft the ear the open vowels tire; while expletives their feeble aid do join; and ten low words oft creep in one dull line, while they ring round the same unvaried chimes, with sure returns of still expected rhymes, where'er you find "the cooling western breeze," in the next line it "whispers through the trees" if crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep" the reader's threatened (not in vain) with "sleep" then, at the last and only couplet fraught with some unmeaning thing they call a thought, a needless alexandrine ends the song [ ] that, like a wounded snake drags its slow length along. leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know what's roundly smooth or languishingly slow; and praise the easy vigor of a line, where denham's strength, and waller's sweetness join. [ ] true ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance 'tis not enough no harshness gives offense, the sound must seem an echo to the sense. soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows, [ ] and the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows, but when loud surges lash the sounding shore, the hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar, when ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, the line too labors, and the words move slow; not so, when swift camilla scours the plain, flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main. [ ] hear how timotheus' varied lays surprise, [ ] and bid alternate passions fall and rise! while, at each change, the son of libyan jove [ ] now burns with glory, and then melts with love; now his fierce eyes with sparkling fury glow, now sighs steal out, and tears begin to flow: persians and greeks like turns of nature found, and the world's victor stood subdued by sound? [ ] the power of music all our hearts allow, and what timotheus was, is dryden now. avoid extremes, and shun the fault of such, who still are pleased too little or too much. at every trifle scorn to take offense, that always shows great pride, or little sense: those heads, as stomachs, are not sure the best, which nauseate all, and nothing can digest. yet let not each gay turn thy rapture move; for fools admire, but men of sense approve: as things seem large which we through mist descry, dullness is ever apt to magnify. [ ] some foreign writers, some our own despise, the ancients only, or the moderns prize. thus wit, like faith, by each man is applied to one small sect, and all are damned beside. meanly they seek the blessing to confine, and force that sun but on a part to shine, which not alone the southern wit sublimes, but ripens spirits in cold northern climes. which from the first has shone on ages past, enlights the present, and shall warm the last, though each may feel increases and decays, and see now clearer and now darker days. regard not then if wit be old or new, but blame the false, and value still the true. some ne'er advance a judgment of their own, but catch the spreading notion of the town, they reason and conclude by precedent, and own stale nonsense which they ne'er invent. some judge of authors names not works, and then nor praise nor blame the writing, but the men. of all this servile herd the worst is he that in proud dullness joins with quality a constant critic at the great man's board, to fetch and carry nonsense for my lord what woful stuff this madrigal would be, in some starved hackney sonnetteer, or me! but let a lord once own the happy lines, how the wit brightens! how the style refines! before his sacred name flies every fault, and each exalted stanza teems with thought! the vulgar thus through imitation err; as oft the learned by being singular. so much they scorn the crowd that if the throng by chance go right they purposely go wrong: so schismatics the plain believers quit, and are but damned for having too much wit. some praise at morning what they blame at night, but always think the last opinion right. a muse by these is like a mistress used, this hour she's idolized, the next abused; while their weak heads, like towns unfortified, 'twixt sense and nonsense daily change their side. ask them the cause, they're wiser still they say; and still to-morrow's wiser than to-day. we think our fathers fools, so wise we grow; our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so. once school-divines this zealous isle o'erspread. who knew most sentences was deepest read, [ ] faith, gospel, all, seemed made to be disputed, and none had sense enough to be confuted: scotists and thomists now in peace remain, [ ] amidst their kindred cobwebs in duck lane. [ ] if faith itself has different dresses worn, what wonder modes in wit should take their turn? oft, leaving what is natural and fit, the current folly proves the ready wit; and authors think their reputation safe, which lives as long as fools are pleased to laugh. some valuing those of their own side or mind, still make themselves the measure of mankind: fondly we think we honor merit then, when we but praise ourselves in other men. parties in wit attend on those of state, and public faction doubles private hate. pride, malice, folly against dryden rose, in various shapes of parsons, critics, beaux; [ ] but sense survived, when merry jests were past; for rising merit will buoy up at last. might he return, and bless once more our eyes, new blackmores and new millbourns must arise: [ ] nay, should great homer lift his awful head, zoilus again would start up from the dead [ ] envy will merit, as its shade, pursue, but like a shadow, proves the substance true: for envied wit, like sol eclipsed, makes known the opposing body's grossness, not its own. when first that sun too powerful beams displays, it draws up vapors which obscure its rays, but even those clouds at last adorn its way reflect new glories and augment the day be thou the first true merit to befriend his praise is lost who stays till all commend short is the date alas! of modern rhymes and 'tis but just to let them live betimes no longer now that golden age appears when patriarch wits survived a thousand years [ ] now length of fame (our second life) is lost and bare threescore is all even that can boast, our sons their fathers failing language see and such as chaucer is shall dryden be so when the faithful pencil has designed some bright idea of the master's mind where a new world leaps out at his command and ready nature waits upon his hand when the ripe colors soften and unite and sweetly melt into just shade and light when mellowing years their full perfection give and each bold figure just begins to live the treacherous colors the fair art betray and all the bright creation fades away! unhappy wit, like most mistaken things atones not for that envy which it brings in youth alone its empty praise we boast but soon the short lived vanity is lost. like some fair flower the early spring supplies that gayly blooms but even in blooming dies what is this wit, which must our cares employ? the owner's wife that other men enjoy then most our trouble still when most admired and still the more we give the more required whose fame with pains we guard, but lose with ease, sure some to vex, but never all to please, 'tis what the vicious fear, the virtuous shun, by fools 'tis hated, and by knaves undone! if wit so much from ignorance undergo, ah! let not learning too commence its foe! of old, those met rewards who could excel, and such were praised who but endeavored well: though triumphs were to generals only due, crowns were reserved to grace the soldiers too. now they who reach parnassus' lofty crown, employ their pains to spurn some others down; and, while self-love each jealous writer rules, contending wits become the sport of fools: but still the worst with most regret commend, for each ill author is as bad a friend to what base ends, and by what abject ways, are mortals urged, through sacred lust of praise! ah, ne'er so dire a thirst of glory boast, nor in the critic let the man be lost good-nature and good sense must ever join; to err is human, to forgive, divine. but if in noble minds some dregs remain, not yet purged off, of spleen and sour disdain; discharge that rage on more provoking crimes, nor fear a dearth in these flagitious times. no pardon vile obscenity should find, though wit and art conspire to move your mind; but dullness with obscenity must prove as shameful sure as impotence in love. in the fat age of pleasure, wealth, and ease, sprung the rank weed, and thrived with large increase: when love was all an easy monarch's care, [ ] seldom at council, never in a war jilts ruled the state, and statesmen farces writ; nay, wits had pensions, and young lords had wit: the fair sat panting at a courtier's play, and not a mask went unimproved away: [ ] the modest fan was lifted up no more, and virgins smiled at what they blushed before. the following license of a foreign reign, [ ] did all the dregs of bold socinus drain, [ ] then unbelieving priests reformed the nation. and taught more pleasant methods of salvation; where heaven's free subjects might their rights dispute, lest god himself should seem too absolute: pulpits their sacred satire learned to spare, and vice admired to find a flatterer there! encouraged thus, wit's titans braved the skies, [ ] and the press groaned with licensed blasphemies. these monsters, critics! with your darts engage, here point your thunder, and exhaust your rage! yet shun their fault, who, scandalously nice, will needs mistake an author into vice; all seems infected that the infected spy, as all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye. * * * * * part iii. learn, then, what morals critics ought to show, for 'tis but half a judge's task to know. 'tis not enough, taste, judgment, learning, join; in all you speak, let truth and candor shine: that not alone what to your sense is due all may allow, but seek your friendship too. be silent always, when you doubt your sense; and speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence: some positive persisting fops we know, who, if once wrong will needs be always so; but you, with pleasure, own your errors past, and make each day a critique on the last. 'tis not enough your counsel still be true; blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do; men must be taught as if you taught them not, and things unknown proposed as things forgot. without good breeding truth is disapproved; that only makes superior sense beloved. be niggards of advice on no pretense; for the worst avarice is that of sense with mean complacence, ne'er betray your trust, nor be so civil as to prove unjust fear not the anger of the wise to raise, those best can bear reproof who merit praise. 'twere well might critics still this freedom take, but appius reddens at each word you speak, [ ] and stares, tremendous with a threatening eye, like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry fear most to tax an honorable fool whose right it is uncensured to be dull such, without wit are poets when they please, as without learning they can take degrees leave dangerous truths to unsuccessful satires, and flattery to fulsome dedicators whom, when they praise, the world believes no more, than when they promise to give scribbling o'er. 'tis best sometimes your censure to restrain, and charitably let the dull be vain your silence there is better than your spite, for who can rail so long as they can write? still humming on, their drowsy course they keep, and lashed so long like tops are lashed asleep. false steps but help them to renew the race, as after stumbling, jades will mend their pace. what crowds of these, impenitently bold, in sounds and jingling syllables grown old, still run on poets in a raging vein, even to the dregs and squeezing of the brain; strain out the last dull droppings of their sense, and rhyme with all the rage of impotence! such shameless bards we have, and yet, 'tis true, there are as mad abandoned critics, too the bookful blockhead ignorantly read, with loads of learned lumber in his head, with his own tongue still edifies his ears, and always listening to himself appears all books he reads and all he reads assails from dryden's fables down to durfey's tales [ ] with him most authors steal their works or buy; garth did not write his own dispensary [ ] name a new play, and he's the poets friend nay, showed his faults--but when would poets mend? no place so sacred from such fops is barred, nor is paul's church more safe than paul's churchyard: [ ] nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead, for fools rush in where angels fear to tread distrustful sense with modest caution speaks, it still looks home, and short excursions makes; but rattling nonsense in full volleys breaks, and, never shocked, and never turned aside. bursts out, resistless, with a thundering tide, but where's the man who counsel can bestow, still pleased to teach, and yet not proud to know? unbiased, or by favor, or in spite, not dully prepossessed, nor blindly right; though learned, well-bred, and though well bred, sincere, modestly bold, and humanly severe, who to a friend his faults can freely show, and gladly praise the merit of a foe? blessed with a taste exact, yet unconfined; a knowledge both of books and human kind; generous converse, a soul exempt from pride; and love to praise, with reason on his side? such once were critics such the happy few, athens and rome in better ages knew. the mighty stagirite first left the shore, [ ] spread all his sails, and durst the deeps explore; he steered securely, and discovered far, led by the light of the maeonian star. [ ] poets, a race long unconfined and free, still fond and proud of savage liberty, received his laws, and stood convinced 'twas fit, who conquered nature, should preside o'er wit. [ ] horace still charms with graceful negligence, and without method talks us into sense; will like a friend familiarly convey the truest notions in the easiest way. he who supreme in judgment as in wit, might boldly censure, as he boldly writ, yet judged with coolness though he sung with fire; his precepts teach but what his works inspire our critics take a contrary extreme they judge with fury, but they write with phlegm: nor suffers horace more in wrong translations by wits than critics in as wrong quotations. see dionysius homer's thoughts refine, [ ] and call new beauties forth from every line! fancy and art in gay petronius please, [ ] the scholar's learning with the courtier's ease. in grave quintilian's copious work we find [ ] the justest rules and clearest method joined: thus useful arms in magazines we place, all ranged in order, and disposed with grace, but less to please the eye, than arm the hand, still fit for use, and ready at command. thee bold longinus! all the nine inspire, [ ] and bless their critic with a poet's fire. an ardent judge, who, zealous in his trust, with warmth gives sentence, yet is always just: whose own example strengthens all his laws; and is himself that great sublime he draws. thus long succeeding critics justly reigned, license repressed, and useful laws ordained. learning and rome alike in empire grew; and arts still followed where her eagles flew, from the same foes at last, both felt their doom, and the same age saw learning fall, and rome. [ ] with tyranny then superstition joined as that the body, this enslaved the mind; much was believed but little understood, and to be dull was construed to be good; a second deluge learning thus o'errun, and the monks finished what the goths begun. [ ] at length erasmus, that great injured name [ ] (the glory of the priesthood and the shame!) stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age, and drove those holy vandals off the stage. [ ] but see! each muse, in leo's golden days, [ ] starts from her trance and trims her withered bays, rome's ancient genius o'er its ruins spread shakes off the dust, and rears his reverent head then sculpture and her sister arts revive, stones leaped to form, and rocks began to live; with sweeter notes each rising temple rung, a raphael painted, and a vida sung [ ] immortal vida! on whose honored brow the poets bays and critic's ivy grow cremona now shall ever boast thy name as next in place to mantua, next in fame! but soon by impious arms from latium chased, their ancient bounds the banished muses passed. thence arts o'er all the northern world advance, but critic-learning flourished most in france, the rules a nation born to serve, obeys; and boileau still in right of horace sways [ ] but we, brave britons, foreign laws despised, and kept unconquered and uncivilized, fierce for the liberties of wit and bold, we still defied the romans as of old. yet some there were, among the sounder few of those who less presumed and better knew, who durst assert the juster ancient cause, and here restored wit's fundamental laws. such was the muse, whose rule and practice tell "nature's chief masterpiece is writing well." such was roscommon, not more learned than good, with manners generous as his noble blood, to him the wit of greece and rome was known, and every author's merit, but his own such late was walsh--the muse's judge and friend, who justly knew to blame or to commend, to failings mild, but zealous for desert, the clearest head, and the sincerest heart, this humble praise, lamented shade! receive, this praise at least a grateful muse may give. the muse whose early voice you taught to sing prescribed her heights and pruned her tender wing, (her guide now lost) no more attempts to rise, but in low numbers short excursions tries, content if hence the unlearned their wants may view, the learned reflect on what before they knew careless of censure, nor too fond of fame, still pleased to praise, yet not afraid to blame, averse alike to flatter, or offend, not free from faults, nor yet too vain to mend. * * * * * line notes [line : wit is used in the poem in a great variety of meanings ( ) here it seems to mean _genius_ or _fancy_, ( ) in line _a man of fancy_, ( ) in line _the understanding_ or _powers of the mind_, ( ) in line it means _judgment_.] [line : schools--different systems of doctrine or philosophy as taught by particular teachers.] [line : maevius--an insignificant poet of the augustan age, ridiculed by virgil in his third eclogue and by horace in his tenth epode.] [lines , : there is here a slight inaccuracy or inconsistency, since "wit" has a different meaning in the two lines: in , it means _fancy,_ in , _judgment_.] [line : the winged courser.--pegasus, a winged horse which sprang from the blood of medusa when perseus cut off her head. as soon as born he left the earth and flew up to heaven, or, according to ovid, took up his abode on mount helicon, and was always associated with the muses.] [line : parnassus.--a mountain of phocis, which received its name from parnassus, the son of neptune, and was sacred to the muses, apollo and bacchus.] [line : equal steps.--steps equal to the undertaking.] [line : the mantuan muse--virgil called maro in the next line (his full name being, virgilius publius maro) born near mantua, b.c.] [lines - : it is said that virgil first intended to write a poem on the alban and roman affairs which he found beyond his powers, and then he imitated homer: cum canerem reges et proelia cynthius aurem vellit--_virg. ecl. vi_] [line : the stagirite--aristotle, born at the greek town of stageira on the strymonic gulf (gulf of contessa, in turkey) b.c., whose treatises on rhetoric and the art of poetry were the earliest development of a philosophy of criticism and still continue to be studied. the poet contradicts himself with regard to the principle he is here laying down in lines - where he laughs at dennis for concluding all were desperate sots and fools who durst depart from aristotle's rules.] [line : homer nods--_quandoque bonus dormitat homerus_, 'even the good homer nods'--horace, _epistola ad pisones_, .] [lines , : secure from flames.--the poet probably alludes to such fires as those in which the alexandrine and palatine libraries were destroyed. from envy's fiercer rage.--probably he alludes to the writings of such men as maevius (see note to line ) and zoilus, a sophist and grammarian of amphipolis, who distinguished himself by his criticism on isocrates, plato, and homer, receiving the nickname of _homeromastic_ (chastiser of homer). destructive war--probably an allusion to the irruption of the barbarians into the south of europe. and all-involving age; that is, time. this is usually explained as an allusion to 'the long reign of ignorance and superstition in the cloisters,' but it is surely far-fetched, and more than the language will bear.] [lines , : 'round the whole world this dreaded name shall sound, and reach to worlds that must not yet be found,"--cowley.] [line : the pierian spring--a fountain in pieria, a district round mount olympus and the native country of the muses.] [line : and even thine, o rome.--the dome of st peter's church, designed by michael angelo.] [line : la mancha's knight.--don quixote, a fictitious spanish knight, the hero of a book written ( ) by cervantes, a spanish writer.] [line : dennis, the son of a saddler in london, born , was a mediocre writer, and rather better critic of the time, with whom pope came a good deal into collision. addison's tragedy of _cato_, for which pope had written a prologue, had been attacked by dennis. pope, to defend addison, wrote an imaginary report, pretending to be written by a notorious quack mad-doctor of the day, entitled _the narrative of dr. robert norris on the frenz of f. d._ dennis replied to it by his _character of mr. pope_. ultimately pope gave him a place in his _dunciad_, and wrote a prologue for his benefit.] [line : on content.--on trust, a common use of the word in pope's time.] [lines , : prismatic glass.--a glass prism by which light is refracted, and the component rays, which are of different colors being refracted at different angles show what is called a spectrum or series of colored bars, in the order violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.] [line : fungoso--one of the characters in ben jonson's _every man out of his humor_ who assumed the dress and tried to pass himself off for another.] [line : alexandrine--a line of twelve syllables, so called from a french poem on the life of alexander the great, written in that meter. the poet gives a remarkable example in the next line.] [line : sir john denham, a poet of the time of charles i. ( - ). his verse is characterized by considerable smoothness and ingenuity of rhythm, with here and there a passage of some force--edmund waller ( - ) is celebrated as one of the refiners of english poetry. his rank among english poets, however, is very subordinate.] [line : zephyr.--zephyrus, the west wind personified by the poets and made the most mild and gentle of the sylvan deities.] [lines - : in this passage the poet obviously intended to make "the sound seem an echo to the sense". the success of the attempt has not been very complete except in the second two lines, expressing the dash and roar of the waves, and in the last two, expressing the skimming, continuous motion of camilla. what he refers to is the onomatopoeia of homer and virgil in the passages alluded to. ajax, the son of telamon, was, next to achilles, the bravest of all the greeks in the trojan war. when the greeks were challenged by hector he was chosen their champion and it was in their encounter that he seized a huge stone and hurled it at hector. thus rendered by pope himself: "then ajax seized the fragment of a rock applied each nerve, and swinging round on high, with force tempestuous let the ruin fly the huge stone thundering through his buckler broke." camilla, queen of the volsci, was brought up in the woods, and, according to virgil, was swifter than the winds. she led an army to assist turnus against aeneas. "dura pan, cursuque pedum praevertere ventos. illa vel intactae segetis per summa volaret gramina nec teneras cursu laesisset aristas; vel mare per medium fluctu suspensa tumenti, ferret iter, celeres nec tingeret aequore plantas." _aen_. vii - . thus rendered by dryden. "outstripped the winds in speed upon the plain, flew o'er the fields, nor hurt the bearded grain; she swept the seas, and as she skimmed along, her flying feet unbathed on billows hung"] [lines - : this passage refers to dryden's ode, _alexander's feast_, or _the power of music_. timotheus, mentioned in it, was a musician of boeotia, a favorite of alexander's, not the great musician timotheus, who died before alexander was born, unless, indeed, dryden have confused the two.] [line : the son of libyan jove.--a title arrogated to himself by alexander.] [line : dullness here 'seems to be incorrectly used. ignorance is apt to magnify, but dullness reposes in stolid indifference.'] [line : sentences--passages from the fathers of the church who were regarded as decisive authorities on all disputed points of doctrine.] [line : scotists--the disciples of duns scotus, one of the most famous and influential of the scholastics of the fourteenth century, who was opposed to thomas aquinas ( - ), another famous scholastic, regarding the doctrines of grace and the freedom of the will, but especially the immaculate conception of the virgin. the followers of the latter were called thomists, between whom and the scotists bitter controversies were carried on.] [line : duck lane.--a place near smithfield where old books were sold. the cobwebs were kindred to the works of these controversialists, because their arguments were intricate and obscure. scotus is said to have demolished two hundred objections to the doctrine of the immaculate conception, and established it by a cloud of proofs.] [line : parsons.--this is an allusion to jeremy collier, the author of _a short view etc, of the english stage_. critics, beaux.--this to the duke of buckingham, the author of _the rehearsal_.] [line : blackmore, sir richard ( - ), one of the court physicians and the writer of a great deal of worthless poetry. he attacked the dramatists of the time generally and dryden individually, and is the quack maurus of dryden's prologue to _the secular masque_. millbourn, rev. luke, who criticised dryden; which criticism, although sneered at by pope, is allowed to have been judicious and decisive.] [line : zoilus. see note on line .] [line : patriarch wits--perhaps an allusion to the great age to which the antediluvian patriarchs of the bible lived.] [line : an easy monarch.--charles ii.] [line : at that time ladies went to the theater in masks.] [line : a foreign reign.--the reign of the foreigner, william iii.] [line : socinus.--the reaction from the fanaticism of the puritans, who held extreme notions of free grace and satisfaction, by resolving all christianity into morality, led the way to the introduction of socinianism, the most prominent feature of which is the denial of the existence of the trinity.] [line : wit's titans.--the titans, in greek mythology, were the children of uranus (heaven) and gaea (earth), and of gigantic size. they engaged in a conflict with zeus, the king of heaven, which lasted ten years. they were completely defeated, and hurled down into a dungeon below tartarus. very often they are confounded with the giants, as has apparently been done here by pope. these were a later progeny of the same parents, and in revenge for what had been done to the titans, conspired to dethrone zeus. in order to scale heaven, they piled mount ossa upon pelion, and would have succeeded in their attempt if zeus had not called in the assistance of his son hercules.] [line : appius.--he refers to dennis (see note to verse ) who had published a tragedy called _appius and virginia_. he retaliated for these remarks by coarse personalities upon pope, in his criticism of this poem.] [line : durfey's tales.--thomas d'urfey, the author (in the reign of charles ii.) of a sequel in five acts of _the rehearsal_, a series of sonnets entitled _pills to purge melancholy_, the tales here alluded to, etc. he was a very inferior poet, although addison pleaded for him.] [line : garth, dr., afterwards sir samuel (born ) an eminent physician and a poet of considerable reputation he is best known as the author of _the dispensary_, a poetical satire on the apothecaries and physicians who opposed the project of giving medicine gratuitously to the sick poor. the poet alludes to a slander current at the time with regard to the authorship of the poem.] [line : st paul's churchyard, before the fire of london, was the headquarters of the booksellers.] [lines , : see note on line .] [line : the maeonian star.--homer, supposed by some to have been born in maeonia, a part of lydia in asia minor, and whose poems were the chief subject of aristotle's criticism.] [line : who conquered nature--he wrote, besides his other works, treatises on astronomy, mechanics, physics, and natural history.] [line : dionysius, born at halicarnassus about b.c., was a learned critic, historian, and rhetorician at rome in the augustan age.] [line : petronius.--a roman voluptuary at the court of nero whose ambition was to shine as a court exquisite. he is generally supposed to be the author of certain fragments of a comic romance called _petronii arbitri satyricon_.] [line : quintilian, born in spain a.d. was a celebrated teacher of rhetoric and oratory at rome. his greatwork is _de institutione oratorica_, a complete system of rhetoric, which is here referred to.] [line : longinus, a platonic philosopher and famous rhetorician, born either in syria or at athens about a.d., was probably the best critic of antiquity. from his immense knowledge, he was called "a living library" and "walking museum," hence the poet speaks of him as inspired by _all the nine_--muses that is. these were clio, the muse of history, euterpe, of music, thaleia, of pastoral and comic poetry and festivals, melpomene, of tragedy, terpsichore, of dancing, erato, of lyric and amorous poetry, polyhymnia, of rhetoric and singing, urania, of astronomy, calliope, of eloquence and heroic poetry.] [line : rome.--for this pronunciation (to rhyme with _doom_) he has shakespeare's example as precedent.] [line : goths.--a powerful nation of the germanic race, which, originally from the baltic, first settled near the black sea, and then overran and took an important part in the subversion of the roman empire. they were distinguished as ostro goths (eastern goths) on the shores of the black sea, the visi goths (western goths) on the danube, and the moeso goths, in moesia ] [line : erasmus.--a dutchman ( - ), and at one time a roman catholic priest, who acted as tutor to alexander stuart, a natural son of james iv. of scotland as professor of greek for a short time at oxford, and was the most learned man of his time. his best known work is his _colloquia_, which contains satirical onslaughts on monks, cloister life, festivals, pilgrimages etc.] [line : vandals.--a race of european barbarians, who first appear historically about the second century, south of the baltic. they overran in succession gaul, spain, and italy. in they took and plundered rome, and the way they mutilated and destroyed the works of art has become a proverb, hence the monks are compared to them in their ignorance of art and science.] [line : leo.--leo x., or the great ( - ), was a scholar himself, and gave much encouragement to learning and art.] [line : raphael ( - ), an italian, is almost universally regarded as the greatest of painters. he received much encouragement from leo. vida--a poet patronised by leo. he was the son of poor parents at cremona (see line ), which therefore the poet says, would be next in fame to mantua, the birthplace of virgil as it was next to it in place. "mantua vae miserae nimium vicina cremona."--virg.] [line : boileau.--an illustrious french poet ( - ), who wrote a poem on the art of poetry, which is copiously imitated by pope in this poem.] [lines , : refers to the duke of buckingham's _essay on poetry_ which had been eulogized also by dryden and dr. garth.] [line : roscommon, the earl of, a poet, who has the honor to be the first critic who praised milton's _paradise lost_, died .] [line : walsh.--an indifferent writer, to whom pope owed a good deal, died .]