^<^^^<

IMAGE EVALUATION
TEST TARGET (MT-3)

1.0

1.1

III

140

125

2.0

IL25 HI 1.4

iy4i

1.6

FhoiDgraphic

Sciences
Corporation

23 WEST MAIN STREET

WBUTER,N.Y. 14510

(716)I72-4S03

•N^

CIHM/ICMH

Microfiche

Series.

CIHM/ICIVIH
Collection de
microfiches.

Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions / Institut Canadian de microreproductions historiques

TMhnioal and BIbliooraphIc NotM/NotM t«chniquM M MMIogrMhiqiiM

Th« Iratitut* has sttamptMl to obtain the boat
original copy avaiiaMa for filming. Faaturas of thia
copy whieh may ba bibllographlcally unlqua.
which may altar any of tha imagaa in tha
raproduction, or which may algnificantly changa
tha usual mathod of filming, ara chackad balow.

Colourad eovara/
Couvartura da coulaur

|~~| Covars damagad/

Couvartura andommagia

Covars rastorad and/or laminatad/
Couvartura rastaurAa at/ou paliiculAa

□ Covar titia missing/
La

I titra da couvartura manqua

r~~| Colourad maps/

Cartas gAographiquas an coulaur

Colourad ink (i.a. othar than blua or black)/
Encra da coulaur (i.a. autra qua blaua ou noira)

□ Colourad platas and/or illustrations/
Planchas at/ou illustrations an coulaur

□ Bound with othar matarial/
RalM avac d'autras documents

Tight binding may causa shadows or distortion
along intorior margin/

La raliura sarrie paut causar da I'ombra ou da la
distortion la long da la marga intiriaura

Blank laavas addad during rastoration may
appaar within tha taxt. Whanavar possibia, thasa
hava baan omittad from filming/
II sa paut qua cartainas pagas blanches ajouttas
lors d'una rastauration apparaissant dans la taxta,
mais, lorsqua cala Atait possible, cas pagas n'ont
pas «ti filmAas.

Additional comments:/
Commentaires supplAmentaires:

L'Instltut a microfilm^ la maiHaur examplaira
qu'li lui a AtA poaalbia da aa procurer. Lea dAtaiis
da cat exemplaira qui aont paut-ftra uniquae du
point da vua bibliographiqua, qui peuvent modifier
une image reprodulte. ou qui peuvent exiger une
modification dans la mAthoda normale de filmage
sont indlquAs ci-desaous.

r~| Coloured pages/

D
Q
D

D
D

Pages de couleur

Pages damaged/
Peges endommagias

Pages restored end/or laminated/
Pages restaurAes at/ou pellicuUkes

Pages discoloured, stained or foxed/
Peges dAcolories, tacheties ou piquAes

Pages detached/
Pages dAtachies

Showthrough/
Transparence

Quality of print varies/
Quaiit* inAgaie de I'lmpression

Includes supplementery material/
Comprend du metAriel supplAmentaira

The(
tothi

Thai
possi
of th
filmii

Origi
begir
the li
sion,
othei
first I
sion,
or ill(

I — I Only edition eveilable/

Seuie Mition disponible

Peges wholly or pertially obscured by errata
slips, tissues, etc., have been refilmed to
ensure the best possible image/
Les peges totalement ou partiellement
obscurcies par un feuillet d'errata, une peiure,
etc., ont AtA fiimies A nouveeu de fa^on A
obtenir la mallieure imege possible.

The!
shall
TINU
whic

IVIapi
diffei
entir(
begir
right
requi
meth

This Item is filmed at the reduction ratio checked below/

Ce document est film* au taux de reduction indEquA ci-dessous

10X 14X 18X 22X

26X

30X

12X

16X

aox

24X

28X

32X

Th« copy filmed here has b««n reproduced thanks
to the generosity of:

National Library of Canada

L'exemplaire f limA f ut reproduit grAce A la
ginArositA de:

BibliothAque nationaie du Canada

The images appeering here are the best quali^,'
possible considering the condition and legibility
of the original copy and in keeping with the
filming contract specifications.

Les images suivantes ont AtA reproduites avec le
plus grsnd soin, compte tenu de le condition et
de la nettetA de rexemplaire filmA, et en
conformitA avec les conditions du contrat de
fiimage.

Original copies in printed paper covers are filmed
beginning with the front cover and ending on
the last page with a printed or illustrated impres-
sion, or the beck cover when eppropriate. All
other original copies are filmed beginning on the
first pegs with <i printed or illustrated impres-
sion, and ending on the last page with a printed
or illustrated impression.

The last recorded frame on each microfiche
shall contain the symbol — ^ (meening "CON-
TINUED"), or the symbol V (meaning "END"),
whichever applies.

Les exemplaires originaux dont la couverture en
papier est ImprimAe sent filmAs en commen9ent
per le premier plat et en terminant soit par la
dernlAre page qui comporte une empreinte
d'impression ou d'iliustration, soit par le second
plat, salon le cas. Tous les autres exemplaires
originaux sont filmAs en commen^ant par la
premiAre page qui comporte une empreinte
d'impression ou d'illustretion et en terminant par
la derniAre page qui comporte une telle
empreinte.

Un dee symboles suivants apparaftra sur la
derniAre image de cheque microfiche, selon le
cas: le symbols — ^ signifie "A SUIVRE", le
symbole ▼ signifie "FIN".

IVIaps. plates, charts, etc., may be filmed at
different reduction retios. Those too large to be
entirely included in one exposure ere filmed
beginning in the upper left hand corner, left to
right and top to bottom, as many frames as
required. The following diagrams illustrate the
method:

Les cartes, planches, tableaux, etc., peuvent Atre
fil(<iiAs A des taux de rAduction diffArents.
Loiique le document est trop grand pour Atre
reproduit en un seul clichA, 11 est filmA A partir
de I'angle supArieur gauche, de gauche A droite,
et de haut en bee, en prenant le nombre
d'images nAcessaire. Les diagrammes suivants
illustrent la mAthode.

1 2 3

32X

tlbe Camelot Serfes

Edited By Ernest Rhvs

THE ENGLISH POETS.

HE ENGLISH POETS:
LESSING, ROUSSEAU:
ESSAYS BY JAMES RUSSELL
LOWELL. WITH "AN APOLOGY
FOR A PREFACE."

LONDON
WALTER SCOTT, 24 WARWICK LANE

TORONtO : W. J. GAGE AND CO.
< 1888

SP]
SH.
MI]
WO
KEi
LES
ROl

CONTENTS.

-»» ■■

SPENSER

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE .

MILTON

WORDSWORTH

KEATS

LESSING

ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS

PAGK
ZI

8i
149
194
240
261

thi

th(

Th
the
ho!
for
the
fell
his
]

AN APOLOGY FOR A PREFACE.

THE Editor of this little volume asks me to furnish it
with a preface. I am by no means clear that I have
any native desire to do this, while I am perfectly so,
that whatever is written from an extraneous impulse alone
must be a thing of naught The Moralist no doubt assures
me that to do what we do not like is good for us. But here
the question is rather what is good for other people, since it
is for them that prefaces are intended ; and this is a point
about which I have observed that the most sincere lovers of
theii neighbour are apt to be mistaken.

Prefaces may be roughly classed in two general divisions.
They either are apologetic or explanatory. In the one case
they prompt the retort of Dean Swift to his deprecatory
host, that he would go where he could get what he wanted
for his money ; in the other they seem to cast a slight on
the reader's intelligence, who is apt to grumble^ " Does the
fellow fancy himself so mighty deep, then, that I can't catch
his drift without a nudge from his elbow at every turn ? "

But whatever prefaces may be, their effect too commonly

viii

AN APOLOGY FOR A PREFACE,

is to remind the reader of his experience at an Ordinary,
where the imposing flourish with which the waiter Hfts a
cover is apt to be in inverse ratio to the merit of the
viands he betrays. Nevertheless, all prefaces may be said
to have one valid excuse for being — namely, that the
judicious reader can, and generally does, skip them, thus
securing one pleasurable emotion at least from his book,
a success beyond the average, if I may trust my own
experience.

And yet, feeling as I do my incompetence for this species
of literature, in which I have had no more practice than one
has in dying, having written but one in my life, I see no
great harm in doing, out of mere good-nature or easiness of
disposition, what I had rather not do at all, just as an
indifferent whist-player may consent to take his place at
table to make out a fourth hand. But if he should, one
can only wish that he may be as sure of a saint as he is of a
martyr in his partner. And this puts one upon thinking
that in the game of prefaces one's vis-h-vis is the Public, and
in no conceivable hagiology will that respected name
(which, I think, has parted with some of its dignity in
dropping its final K) ever appear with an S before, or, if its
bearer have any choice in the matter, an M after it.

Meanwhile, having been asked for a few paragraphs only,
I find that I have nearly completed the task imposed on
me in making my excuses for not venturing to attempt it.

AN APOLOGY FOR A PREFACE.

And as I say this another obstacle rises in my path. The
papers of which this volume is made up are more than
thirty years old. Now, a preface is in some sort also a
letter of introduction, and how shall I assume such a
responsibility in respect of a person so little known to me
as Myself of a generation ago? We are no longer on
speaking terms, and, if we still nod to each other on the
rare occasions when we chance to meet, it is more from
involuntary habit than for any reason of good-fellowship.
We are still intimate with each other's failings and weak-
nesses, as those of the same blood are apt to be ; but there
is likewise such an estrangement between us as is possible
only between those who by birth are in possession of those
fatal secrets.

Yet in trying to evade writing a preface, it occurs to me
that there is one explanation I should be glad to make.
The contents of this book (with the single exception of the
essay on Lessing) were originally written «is lectures for an
audience consisting not only of my . ven classes, but also of
whatever other members of the University might choose to
attend. This will account for, if it do not excuse, their
more rhetorical tone. They were meant to be suggestive
rather than methodically paedagogic. As my own excur-
sions widened, as I opened new vistas through the crowding
growth of my own prejudices and predilections, I was fain
to encourage in others that intellectual hospitality which in

AJf APOLOGY FOR A PREFACE.

myself I had found strengthening from an impulse till it
became a conviction that the wiser mind should have as
many entrances for unbidden guests as was fabled of the
Arabian prince's tent. I have had much gratifying evidence
that I was fairly successful in hitting what I aimed at,
though never satisfied that I had in me the stut) of which a
perfectly adequate professor is made, however well it might
have served the turn lor a tolerable Mercury. I make
this confession because I am conscious that, while capable
of endless drudgery in acquisition, I am by nature quite
too impatient of detail in communicating what 1 have
acquired. Moreover, in giving what 1 had written to the
press, I omitted much subsidiary and illustrative matter;
and this I regret now when it is too late.

Let me end with saying how much it pleases me to think
that I should find readers here in the Old Home, where I
have never been made to feel that I was a stranger, though
my ancestor did his best to make me one by seeking a new
home in New England two hundred and fifty years ago.

October 13/^ 1888.

J, R. LOWELL.

ESSAYS ON THE ENGLISH POETS.

SPENSER.

CHAUCER had been in his grave one hundred and fifty
years ere England had secreted choice material enough
for the making of another great poet. The nature of men
living together in societies, as of the individual man, seems to
have its periodic ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the
ideal and the matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful boundary line
of shore between them is in one generation a hard sandy
actuality strewn only with such remembrances of beauty as a
dead sea-moss here and there, and in the next is whelmed with
those lace-like curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding foam, and
that dance of joyous spray which for a moment catches and
holds the sunshine.

From the two centuries between 1400 and 1600 the inde-
fatigable Ritson, in his Bibliographia Poetica^ has made us a
catalogue of some six hundred English poets, or, more properly,
verse-makers. Ninety-nine in a hundred of them are mere
names, most of them no more than shadows of names, some of
them mere initials. Nor can it be said of them that their
works have perished because they were written in an obsolete
dialect ; for it is the poem that keeps the language alive, and
not the language thai buoys up the poem. The revival of
letters, as it is called, was at first the revival of ancient letters,
which, while it made men pedants, could do very little toward

SPENSEH,

making them poets, much less toward making them original
Mrriters. There was nothing left of the freshness, vivacity,
invention, and careless faith in the present which make many
of the productions of the Norman Trouv^res delightful reading
even now. The whole of Europe during the fifteenth century
produced no book which has continued readable, or has become,
in any sense of the word, a classic. I do not mean that that
century has left us no illustrious names, that it was not enriched
with some august intellects who kept alive the apostolic suc-
cession of thought and speculation, who passed along the still
unextinguished torch of intelligence, the iampada vitce, to
those who came after them. But a classic is properly a book
which maintains itself by virtue of that happy coalescence of
matter and style, that innate and exquisite sympathy between
the thought that gives life and the form that consents to every
mood of grace and dignity, which can be simple without being
vulgar, elevated without being distant, and which is something
neither ancient nor modern, always new and incapable of
growing old. It is not his Latin which makes Horace cos-
mopolitan, nor can Bdranger's French prevent his becoming so.
No hedge of language, however thorny, no dragon-coil of
centuries, will keep men away from these true apples of the
Hesperides if once they have caught sight or scent of them. If
poems die, it is because there was never true life in them — ^that
is, that true poetic vitality which no depth of thought, no
airiness of fancy, no sincerity of feeling, can singly communi-
cate, but which leaps throbbing at touch of that shaping faculty,
the imagination. Take Aristotle's ethics, the scholastic philo-
sophy, the theology of Aquinas, the Ptolemaic system of
astronomy, the small politics of a provincial city of the Middle
Ages, mix in at will Grecian, Roman, and Christian mythology,
and tell me what chance there is to make an immortal poem of
such an incongruous mixture. Can these dry bones live ? Yes,
Dante can create such a soul under these ribs of death that one
hundred and fifty editions of his poem shall be called for in
these last sixty years, the first half of the sixth century since his
death. Accordingly, I am apt to believe that the complaints

SPENSER.

one sometimes hears of the neglect of oui older literature are
the regrets of archaeologists rather than of critics. One does
not need to advertise the squirrels where the nut-trees are, nor
could any amount of lecturing persuade them to spend their
teeth on a hollow nut.

On the whole, the Scottish poetry of the fifteenth century has
more meat in it than the English, but this is to say very little.
Where it is meant to be serious and lofty it falls into the same
vices of unreality and allegory which were the fashion of the
day, and which there are some patriots so fearfully and wonder-
fully made as to relish. Stripped of the archaisms (that turn
every j to a meaningless ^, spell which quhilk^ shake schaik,
bugle bowgiilj powder ////^/r, and will not let us simply whistle
till we have puckered our mouths to quhissill) in which the
Scottish antiquaries love to keep it disguised — as if it were
nearer to poetry the further it got from all human recognition
and sympathy— stripped of these, there is little to distinguish it
from the contemporary verse-mongering south of the Tweed
Their compositions are generally as stiff and artificial as a
trellis, in striking contrast with the popular ballad-poetry of
Scotland (some of which possibly falls within this period,
though most of it is later), which clambers, lawlessly if you will,
but at least freely and simply, twining the bare stem of old
tradition with graceful sentiment and lively natural sympathies.
I find a few sweet and flowing verses in Dunbar's " Merle and
Nightingale " — indeed, one whole stanza that has always seemed
exquisite to me. It is this —

" Ne'er sweeter noise was heard by living man
Than made this merry, gentle nightingale.
Her sound went with the river as it ran
Out through the fresh and flourished lusty vale ;
O merle, quoth she, fool, leave oflF thy tale.
For in thy song good teaching there is none,
For both are lost— the time and the travail
Of every love but upon God alone."

But except this lucky poem, I find little else in the serious
verses of Dunbar that does not seem to me tedious and

SPENSER.

pedantic. I dare say a few more lines might be found scattered
here and there, but I hold it a sheer waste of time to hunt
after these thin needles of wit buried in unwieldy haystacks of
verse. If that be genius, the less we have of it the better. His
" Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins," over which the excellent
Lord Hailes went into raptures, is wanting in everything but
coarseness ; and if his invention dance at all, it is like a galley-
slave in chains under the lash. It would be well for us if the
sins themselves were indeed such wretched bugaboos as he has
painted for us. What he means for humour is but the dullest
vulgarity ; his satire would be Billingsgate if it could, and,
failing, becomes a mere offence in the nostrils, for it takes a
great deal of salt to keep scurrility sweet. Mr. Sibbald, in his
Chronicle of Scottish Poetry ^ has admiringly preserved more
than enough of it, and seems to find a sort of national savour
therein, such as delights his countrymen in a haggis, or the
German in his sauer-kraut. The uninitiated foreigner puts his
handkerchief to his nose, wonders, and gets out of the way as
soon as he civilly can. Barbour's " Brus," if not precisely a
poem, has passages whose simple tenderness raises them to
that level. That on Freedom is familiar.* But its highest
merit is the natural and unstrained tone of manly courage in it,
the easy and familiar way in which Barbour always takes
chivalrous conduct as a matter of course, as if heroism were the
least you could ask of any man. I modernise a few verses to
show what I mean. When the King of England turns to fly
from the battle of Bannockbum (and Barbour, with his usual
generosity, tells us he has heard that Sir Aymer de Valence
led him away by the bridle-rein against his will), Sir Giles
d'Argente

" Saw the king thus and his menie
Shape them to flee so speedily,
He came right to the king in hy [hastily]

♦ Though always misapplied in quotation, as if he had used the word in
that generalised meaning which is common now, but which could not
without an imjjossible anachronism have been present to his mind. He
meant merely fx-eedom from prison.

SPENSER.

And said, ' Sir, since that is so
That ye thus gate your gate will go,
Have ye good-day, for back will I :
Tet never fled I certainly,
And I choose here to bide and die
Than to live shamefully and fly.' "

The " Brus " is in many ways the best rhymed chronicle ever
written. It is national in a high and generous way, but I
confess I have little faith in that quality in literature which is
commonly called nationality — a kind of praise seldom given
where there is anything better to be said. Literature that loses
its meaning, or the best part of it, when it gets beyond sight of
the parish steeple, is not what I understand by literature. To
tell you, when you cannot fully taste a book, that it is because it
is so thoroughly national, is to condemn the book. To say it of
a poem is even worse, for it is to say that what should be true
of the whole compass of human nature is true only to some
north-and-by-east-half-east point of it. I can understand the
nationality of Firdusi when, looking sadly back to the former
glories of his country, he tells us that "the nightingale still
sings old Persian ; " I can understand the nationality of Bums
when he turns his plough aside to spare the rough burr thistle,
and hopes he may write a song or two for dear auld Scotia's
sake. That sort of nationality belongs to a country of which
we are all citizens — that country of the heart which has no
boundaries laid down on the map. All great poetry must
smack of the soil, for it must be rooted in it, must suck life and
substance from it, but it must do so with the aspiring instinct of
the pine that climbs forever toward diviner air, and not in the
grovelling fashion of the potato. Any verse that makes you
and me foreigners is not only not great poetry, but no poetry
at all. Dunbar's works were disinterred and edited some
thirty years ago by Mr. Laing, and whoso is national enough
to like thistles may browse there to his heart's content. I
am inclined for other pasture, having long ago satisfied myself
by a good deal of dogged reading that every generation is sure
of its own share of bores without borrowing from the past.

SPENSER,

A little later came Gawain Douglas, whose translation of
the ^neid is linguistically valuable, and whose introduc-
tions to the seventh and twelfth books— the one describing
winter and the other May — have been safely praised, they
are so hard to read. There is certainly some poetic feeling
in them; and the welcome to the sun comes as near enthu-
siasm as is possible for a ploughman, with a good steady
yoke of oxen, who lays over one furrow of verse, and then
turns about to lay the next as cleverly alongside it as he can.
But it is a wrong done to good taste to hold up this item kind of
description any longer as deserving any other credit than that
of a good memory. It is a mere bill of parcels, a post-mortem
inventory of nature, where imagination is not merely not called
for, but would be out of place. Why, a recipe in the rookery-
book is as much like a good dinner as this kind of stuff is like
true word-painting. The poet with a real eye in his head does
not give us everything, but only the best of everything. He
selects, he combines, or else gives what is characteristic only ;
while the false style of which I have been speaking seems to be
as glad to get a pack of impertinences on its shoulders as
Christian in the Pilgrinis Progress was to be rid of his. One
strong verse that can hold itselt upright (as the French critic
Rivarol said of Dante) with the bare help of the substantive
and verb, is worth acres ot this dead cord-wood piled stick on
stick, a boundless continuity of dryness. I would rather have
written that half-stanza of Longfellow's, in the " Wreck of the
Hesperus," of the " billow that swept her crew like icicles from
her deck," than all Gawain Douglas's tedious enumeration of
meteorological phenomena put together. A real landscape is
never tiresome ; it never presents itself to us as a disjointed
succession of isolated particulars ; we take it in with one sweep
of the eye — its light, its shadow, its melting gradations of dis-
tance ; we do not say it is this, it is that, and the other ; and we
may be sure that if a description in poetry is tiresome there is a
grievous mistake somewhere. All the pictorial adjectives in the
dictionary will not bring it a hair's-breadth nearer to truth
and nature. The fact is that what we see is in the mind to

SPENSEJi.

a greater degree than we are commonly aware. As Coleridge

says —

'• lady, wo receive but what wo give,

And in our life alone doth Nature live I "

I have made the unfortunate Dunbar the text for a diatribe on
the subject of descriptive poetry, because I find that this old
ghost is not laid yet, but comes back like a vampire to suck the
life out of a true enjoyment of poetry — and the medicine by
which vampires were cured was to unbury them, drive a stake
through them, and get them under ground again with all
despatch. The first duty of the Muse is to be delightful, and it
is an injury done to all of us when we are put in the wrong by a
kind of statutory affirmation on the part of the critics ot some-
thing to which our judgment will not consent, and from whicli
our taste revolts. A collection of poets is commonly made up,
nine parts in ten, of this perfunctory verse-making, and I never
look at one without regretting that we have lost that" excellent
Latin phrase, Corpus poetarum. In fancy I always read it on
the backs of the volumes — a body of poets, indeed, with scarce
one soul to a hundred of them.

One genuine English poet illustrated the early years of the
sbcteenth century — John Skelton. He had vivacity, fancy,
humour, and originality. Gleams of the truest poetical sensibility
alternate in him with an almost brutal coarseness. He was
truly Rabelaisian before Rabelais. But tr:nie is a freedom and
hilarity in much of his writing that gives it a singular attraction.
A breath of cheerfulness runs along the slender stream of his
verse, under which it seems to ripple and crinkle, catching and
casting back the sunshine like a stream blown on by clear
western winds.

Lut Skelton was an exceptional blossom of autumn. A long
and dreary winter follows. Surrey, who brought back with him
from Italy the blank-verse not long before introduced by
Trissino, is to some extent another exception. He had
the sentiment of nature and unhackneyed feeling, but he
has no mastery of verse, nor any elegance of diction. We
have Gascoyne, Surrey, Wyatt, stiff, pedantic, artificial,

552

SPENSER.

systematic as a country cemetery, and, worst of all, the whole
time desperately in love. Every verse is as flat, thin, and
regular as a lath, and their poems are nothing more than
bundles of such tied trimly together. They are said to have
refined our language. Let us devoutly hope they did, for it
would be pleasant to be grateful to them for something. But I
fear it was not so, for only genius can do that ; and Sternhold
and Hopkins are inspired men in comparison with them, ^or
Sternhold was at least the author of two noble stanzas : —

" The Lord descended from above

And bowed the heavens high,

And underneath his feet he cast

The darkness of tlie sky ;
On cherubs and on cherubims

Full royally ho rode,
And on the wings of all the wluds
Came ilying all abroad."

But Gascoyne and the rest did nothing more than put the
worst school of Italian love poetry into an awkward English
dress. The Italian proverb says, " Inglese italianizzato, Diavolo
incarnato," that an Englishman Italianized is the very devil
incarnate, and one feels the truth of it here. The very titles of
their poems set one yawning, and their wit is the cause of the
dulness that is in other men. ''The lover, deceived by his
love, repenteth him of the true love he bare her." As thus : —

" Where I sought heaven there found I hap ;

From danger unto death,
Much like the mouse that treads the trap

In hope to find her food, *

And bites the bread that stops her breath, —

So in like case I stood."

** The lover, accusing his love for her unfaithfulness, proposeth
to live in liberty." He says : —

"But I am like the beaten fowl
That from the net escaped ;
And thou art like the ravening owl
That all the night hath waked."

SPENSEH,

And yet at the very time these men were writing there were
simple ballad-writers who could have set them an example of
simplicity, force, and grandeur. Compare the futile efforts of
these poetasters to kindle themselves by a painted flame,
and to be pathetic over the lay figure of a mistress, with
the wild vigour and almost fierce sincerity of the "Twa
Corbies " : —

** As I was walkhig all alone,
I heard twa corbies making a moan ;
The one unto the other did say,
Where shall we gang dine to-day f
In beyond that old turf dyke
I wot there lies a new-slain knight ;
And naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair.
His hound is to the hunting gone,
His hawk to fetch the wild fowl home.
His lady has ta'en another mate.
So we may make our dinner sweet.
O'er his white bones as they lie bare
The wind shall blow forevermair."

There was a lesson in rhetoric for our worthy friends, could
they have understood it But they were as much afraid of an
attack of nature as of the plague.

Such was the poetical inheritance of style and diction into
which Spenser was born, and which he did more than any one
else to redeem from the leaden gripe of vulgar and pedantic
conceit. Sir Philip Sidney, born the year after him, with a
keener critical instinct, and a taste earlier emancipated than
his own, would have been, had he lived longer, perhaps even
more directly influential in educating the taste and reflning
the vocabulary of his contemporaries and immediate succes-
sors. The better of his pastoral poems in the "Arcadia" are,
in my judgment, more simple, natural, and, above all, more
pathetic than those of Spenser, who sometimes strains the
shepherd's pipe with a blast that would better suit the trumpet.
Sidney had the good sense to feel that it was unsophisticated

SPENSEH.

lentiment rather than rusticity of phrase that befitted such
themes.* He recognised the distinction between simplicity
and vulgarity, which Wordsworth was so long in finding out,
and seems to have divined the fact that there is but one kind
of English that is always appropriate and never obsolete,
namely, the very best.t With the single exception of Thomas
Campion, his experiments in adapting classical metres to Eng-
lish verse are more successful than those of his contemporaries.
Some of his elegiacs are not ungrateful to the ear, and it can
hardly be doubted that Coleridge borrowed from his eclogue of
Strephon and Klaius the pleasing movement of his own
CatuUian Hendecasyllabics. Spenser, perhaps out of defer-
ence to Sidney, also tried his hand at English hexameters, the
introduction of which was claimed by his friend Gabriel
Harvey, who thereby assured to himself an immortality of
grateful remembrance. But the result was a series of jolts and
jars, proving that the language had run off the track. He
seems to have been half conscious of it himself, and there is a
gleam of mischief in what he writes to Harvey : " I like your
late English hexameter so exceedingly well that I also enure
my pen sometime in that kind, Wi ich I find indeed, as I have
often heard you defend in word, neither so hard nor so harsh
but that it will easily yield itself :o our mother-tongue. For
the only or chiefest hardness, which seemeth, as in the accent,
which sometime gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ill-favouredly,
coming short of that it should, and sometime exceeding the
measure of the number, as in Carpenters the middle syllable
being used short in speech, when it shall be read long in verse,
seemeth like a lame gosling that draweth one leg after her ;

* In his "Defence of Poesy" he condemns the archaisms and provin-
cialisms of the "Shepherd's Calendar."

t " There is, as you must have heard Wordsworth point out, a language
of piurei intelligible Enghsh, which was spoken in Chaucer's time, and is
spoken in ours ; equally understood tlxei; and now ; and of which the Bible
is the written and permanent standard, as it has undoubtedly been the
great means of preserving it." — {So\Uhey*8 Lift and Correspondencef iiL,
198, 194.)

SPENSER.

•t

as and provin-

and Heaven being used short as one syllable, when it is in
verse stretched out xvith a diastole, is like a lame dog that holds
up one leg."* It is almost inconceivable that Spenser's hex-
ameters should have been written by the man who was so soon
to teach his native language how to soar and sing, and to give a
fuller sail to English verse.

One of the most striking facts in our literary history is the
pre-eminence at once so frankly and unanimously conceded to
Spenser by his contemporaries. At first, it is true, he had not
many rivals. Before the " Faery Queen," two long poems were
printed and popular — the " Mirror for Magistrates " and
Warner's "Albion's England"— and not long after it came
tiie " Polyolbion " of Drayton and the " Civil Wars" of Da. iel.
This was the period of the saurians in English poetry, inter-
minable poems, book after book and canto after canto, like
far-stretching vertebrce^ that at first sight would seem to have
rendered earth unfit for the habitation of man. They most of
them sleep well now, as once they made their readers sleep,
and their huge remains lie embedded in the deep morasses of
Chambers and Anderson. We wonder at the length of face
and general atrabilious look that mark the portraits of the men
of that generation ; but it is no marvel, when even their
relaxations were such downright hard work. Fathers, when
their day on earth was up, must have folded down the leaf and
left the task to be finished by their sons — a dreary inheritance.
Yet both Drayton and Daniel are fine poets, though both of
them in their most elaborate works made shipwreck of their
genius on the shoal of a bad subject. Neither of them could
make poetry coalesce with gazetteerinjj or chronicle-making.
It was like trying to put a declaration of love into the forms of

• Nash, who has far better claims than Swift to be called the English
Rabelais, thus at once describes and parodies Harvej''s hexameters in
prose, "that drunken, staggering kind of verse, which is all up hill and
down hill, like the way betwixt Stamford and Beechfield, and goes like a
horse plunging through the mire in the deep of winter, now soused up tcf
tlie saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes." It was & happy thought to
satirise (in this inverted way) prose written in the form of verse.

§a

SPENSER.

a declaration in trover. The " Polyolbion " is nothing leti than
A versified gazetteer of England and Wales— fortunately Scot-
land was not yet annexed, or the poem would have been longer,
and already it is the plesiosaurus of verse. Mountains, rivers,
and even marshes are personified, to narrate historical episodes,
or to give us geographical lectures. There are two fine verses
in the seventh book, where, speaking of the cutting down tome
noble woods, he says : —

" Their trunki, like aged folk, now bare and naked stand,
Afl for revenge to heaven each held a withered hand ;"

and there is a passage about the sea in the twentieth book that
comes near being fine ; but the far greater part is mere joiner-
work. Consider the life of man, that we flee away as a [ '.ladow,
that our days arc as a post ; and then think whether we can
afford to honour such a draft upon our time as is implied in
these thirty books all in alexandrines ! Even the laborious
Selden, who wrote annotations on it, sometimes more enter-
taining than the text, gave out at the end of the eighteenth
book. Yet Drayton could write well, and had an agreeable
lightsomeness of fancy, as his " Nymphidia " proves. His poem,
" To the Cambro-Britons on their Harp," is full of vigour ; it
runs, it leaps, clashing its verses like swords upon bucklers, and
moves the pulse to a charge.

Daniel was in all respects a man of finer mould. He did
indeed refine our tongue, and deserved the praise his con-
temporaries concur in giving him of being " well-languaged."*
Writing two hundred and fifty years ago, he stands in no need
of a glossary, and I have noted scarce a dozen words, and not
more turns of phrase, in his works, that have become obsolete.

* Edmund Bolton, in his Hypercritica, says, "The works of Sam Daniel
contained somewhat a flat, but yet withal a very pure and copious English,
and words as warrantable as any man's, and^^, perhaps, for prose than
measwe." I have italicised his second thought, which chimes curiously
with the feeling Daniel leaves in the mind. (See HaslewoooPs Ancient
Critical Essays, vol. ii.) Wordsworth, an excellent judge, much admired
Daniel's poem to the Countess of Cumberland.

SPENSER.

This certainly indicates both remarkable tuste and equally
remarkable judgment. There Is an equable dignity in his
thought and sentiment such as we rarely meet. His best
poems always remind me of a table-land, where, because all is
so level, we are apt to forget on how lofty a plane we are
standing. I think his *' Musophilus" the best poem of its kind
in the language. The reflections are natural, the expression
condensed, the thought weighty, and the language worthy of it.
But he also wasted himself on an historical poem, in which the
characters were incapable of that remoteness from ordinary
associations which is essential to the ideal. Not that we can
escape into the ideal by merely emigrating into the past or the
unfamiliar. As in the German legend, the little black K -^bold
of prose that haunts us in the present will seat himself on
the first load of furniture when we undertake our flitting, if the
magician be not there to exorcise him. No man can jump off
his own shadow, nor, for that matter, off his own age ; and it is
very likely that Daniel had only the thinking and languaging
parts of a poet's outfit, without the higher creative gift which
alone can endow his conceptions with enduring life and with
an interest which transcends the parish limits of his generation.
In the prologue to his " Masque at Court" he has unconsciously
defined his own poetry : —

" Wherein no wild, no rude, no antic sport,
But tender passions, motions soft and grave,
The still spectator must expect to have."

And, indeed, his verse does not snatch you away from ordinary
associations and hurry you along with it as is the wont of the
higher kind of poetry, but leaves you, as it were, upon the
bank watching the peaceful current, and lulled by its somewhat
monotonous murmur. His best-known poem, blunderingly
misprinted in all the collections, is that addressed to the
Countess of Cumberland. It is an amplification of Horace's
Integer Vi'/ce, and when we compare it with the original we miss
the point, the compactness, and above all the urbane tone of
the original. It is very fine English, but it is the English of

SPENSER.

diplomacy somehow, and is never downright this or that, but
always has the honour to be so or so, with sentiments of the
highest consideration. Yet the praise of well-languaged^ since
it implies that good writing then as now demanded choice and
forethought, is not without interest for those who would classify
the elements of a style that will wear and hold its colours well.
His diction, if wanting in the more hardy evidences of muscle,
has a suppleness and spring that give proof of training and
endurance. His "Defence of Rhyme," written in prose (a
more difficult test than verse), has a passionate eloquence that
reminds one of Burke, and is more light-armed and modern
than the prose of Milton fifty years later. For us Occidentals
he has a kindly prophetic word : —

"And who in time knows whither we raay vent
The treasure of our tongue ? to wliat strange shores
Tlie gain of our best glory may be sent
To enrich unknowing nations with our stores ?
What worlds in the yet unformed Occident
May come refined with accents that are ours ? "

During the period when Spenser was getting his artistic
training a great change was goiiio on in our mother-tongue,
and the language of literature was disengaging itself more and
more from that of ordinary talk. The poets of Italy, Spain,
and France began to rain influence, and to modify and refine
not only style but vocabulary. Men were discovering new
worlds in more senses than one, and the visionary finger of
expectation still pointed forv/ard. There was, as we learn from
contemporary pamphlets, very much the same demand for a
national literature that we have heard in America. This
demand was nobly answered in the next generation. But no
man contributed so much to the transformation of style and
language as Spenser ; for not only did he deliberately
endeavour at reform, but by the charm of his diction, the
novel harmonies of his verse, his ideal method of treatment,
and the splendour of his fancy, he made the new manner
popular and fruitful. We can trace in Spenser's poems the
gradual growth of his taste through experiment and failure

SPENSER.

to that assured self-confidence which indicates that he had at
length found out the true bent of his genius — that happiest of
discoveries (and not so easy as it might seem) which puts a
man in undisturbed possession of his own individuality. Before
his time the boundary between poetiy and prose had not been
clearly defined. His great merit lies not only in the ideal
treatment with which he glorified common things and gilded
them with a ray of enthusiasm, but far more in the ideal point
of view which he first revealed to his countrymen. He at first
sought for that remoteness, which is implied in an escape from
the realism of daily hfe, in the pastoral — a kind of writing
which, oddly enough, from its original intention as a protest in
favour of naturalness, and of human as opposed to h roic
sentiments, had degenerated into the most artificial of
abstractions. But he was soon convinced of his error, and
was not long in choosing between an unreality which pretended
to be real and those everlasting realities of the mind which
seem unreal only because they lie beyond the horizon of the
eveiy-day world, and become visible only when the mirage of
fantasy lifts them up and hangs them in an ideal atmosphere.
As in the old fairy tales, the task which the age imposes on its
poet is to weave its straw into a golden tissue ; and when
every device has failed, in comes the witch Imagination, and
with a touch the miracle is achieved, simple as miracles always
are after they are wrought.

Spenser, like Chaucer a Londoner, was born in 1553.*
Nothing is known of his parents, except that the name of his
mother was Elizabeth ; but he was of gentle birth, as he more
than once informs us, with the natural satisfaction of a poor
man of genius at a time when the business talent of the middle

* Mr. Hales, in the excellent memoir of the poet prefixed to the Globe
edition of his works, puts his birth a year earlier, on the strength of a line
in tlie sixtieth sonnet. But it is not established tliat this sonnet was
written in 1593, and even if it were, a sonnet is not upon oath, and the
poet would prefer the round number forty, which suited the measure of hia
verse, to thirty -nine or forty-one, which might have been truer to the
measure of his days.

' r

•T ,

IV'

■ H

SPENSER.

class was opening to it the door of prosperous preferment. In
1569 he was entered as a sizar at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge,
and in due course took his bachelor's degree in 1573, and his
master's in 1576. He is supposed, on insufficient grounds, as it
appears to me, to have met with some disgust or disappointment
during his residence at the University.* Between 1576 and
1578 Spenser seems to have been with some of his kinsfolk ** in
the North.'' It was during this interval that he conceived his
fruitless passion for the Rosalinde, whose jilting him for another
shepherd, whom he calls Menalcas, is somewhat perfunctorily
bemoaned in his pastorals.! Before the publication of his
" Shepherd's Calendar," in 1579, he had made the acquaintance
of Sir Philip Sidney, and was domiciled with him for a time at
Penshurst, whether as guest or literary dependant is uncertain.
In October 1 579 he is in the household of the Earl of Leicester.
In July 1580 he accompanied Lord Grey de Wilton to Ireland

♦ This has been inferred from a passage in one of Gabriel Harvey's
letters to him. But it would seem more natural, from the many allusions
in Harvey's pamphlets against Nash, that it was his own wrongs which he
had in mind, and his self-absorption would take it for granted that
Spenser sympathised with him in all his grudges. Harvey is a remarkable
instance of the refining influence of classical studies Amid the pedantic
farrago of his omni-sufficiency (to borrow one of his own words) we come
suddenly upon passages whose gravity of sentiment, stateliness of move>
ment, and purity of diction remind us of Landor. These lucid intervals in
his overweening vanity explain and justify the friendship of Spenser. Yet
the reiteration of emphasis with which he insists on all the world's
knowing that Nash had called him an ass, probably gave Shakespeare the
hint for one of the most comic touches in the character of Dogberry.

t The late Major C. G. Halpine, in a very interesting essay, makes it
extremely probable that Rosalinde is the anagram of Rose Daniel, sister of
the poet, and married to John Florio. He leaves little doubt, also, that
the name of Spenser's wife (hitherto unknown) was Elizabeth Nagle. (See
Atlantic Monthly, vol. ii., 674, November 1858.) Mr. Halpine informed
me that he found the substance of his essay among the papers of his father,
the late Rev. N. J. Halpine, of Dublin The latter published in the series
of the Shakespeare Society a sprightly little tract, entitled " Oberon,"
which, if not quite convincing, is well worth reading for its ingenuity and
research.

SPENSER,

•7

as secretary, and in that country he spent the rest of his life,
with occasional flying visits to England to publish poems or in
search of preferment. His residence in that country has been
compared to that of Ovid in Pontus. And, no doubt, there
were certain outward points of likeness. The Irishry by whom
he was surrounded were to the full as savage, as hostile, and as
tenacious of their ancestral habitudes as the Scythians* who
made Tomi a prison, and the descendants of the earlier English
settlers had degenerated as much as the Mix-Hellenes who
disgusted the Latin poet. Spenser himself looked on his life in
Ireland as a banishment. In his " Colin Clout's come Home
again " he tells us that Sir Walter Raleigh, who visited hin in
1589, and heard what was then finished of the " Faery Queen " —

" 'Oan to cast great liking to my lore
And great disliking to my luckless lot,
That banisht had myself, like wight forlore,
Into that waste, where I was quite foigot.
The which to leave thenceforth he counselled me,
Unmeet for man in whom was aught regardful,
And wend with him his Cynthia to see,
Whose grace was great and bounty most rewardful."

But Spenser was already living at Kilcolman Castle (which,
with 3028 acres of land from the forfeited estates of the Earl of
Desmond, was confirmed to him by grant two years later), amid
scenery at once placid and noble, whose varied charm he felt
profoundly. He could not complain with Ovid —

" Non liber hie ullus, non qui mihi commodet aurem,"

for he was within reach of a cultivated society, which gave him
the stimulus of hearty admiration both as poet and scholar.
Above all, he was fortunate in a seclusion that prompted study
and deepened meditation, while it enabled him to converse with
his genius disengaged from those worldly influences which
would have disenchanted it of its mystic enthusiasm, if they did

* In his prose tract on Ireland, Spenser, perhaps with some memory of
Ovid in his mind, derives the Irish mainly from the Scythians.

i I

/ ',

« \

'I ■

■. '"1
. I?

SPENSER.

not muddle it ingloriously away. Surely this sequestered nest
was more congenial to the brooding of those ethereal visions of
the " Faery Queen " and to giving his " soul a loose " than

" The smoke, the wealth, and noise of Home,
And all the busy pageantry
That wise men scorn and fools adore."

Yet he longed for London, if not with the homesickness of
Bussy-Rabutin in exile from the Parisian sun, yet enough to
make him joyfully accompany Raleigh thither in the early
winter of 1 589, carrying with him the first three books of the
great poem begun ten years before. Horace's Jionum prematur
in annum had been more than complied with, and the success
was answerable to the well-seasoned material and conscientious
faithfulness of the work. But Spenser did not stay long in
London to enjoy his fame. Seen close at hand, with its
jealousies, intrigues, and selfish basenesses, the court had lost the
enchantment lent by the distance of Kilcolman. A nature so
prone to ideal contemplation as Spenser's would be profoundly
shocked by seeing too closely the ignoble springs of con-
temporaneous policy, and learning by what paltry personal
motives the noble opportunities of the world are at any given
moment endangered. It is a sad discovery that history is so
mainly made by ignoble men.

" Vide qnesto globo
Tal ch'ei sorrise del suo vil sembiante."

In his "Colin Clout," written just after his return to Ireland, he
speaks of the Court in a tone of contemptuous bitterness, in
which, as it seems to me, there is more of the sorrow of disil-
lusion than of the gall of personal disappointment. He speaks,
so he tells us, —

" To warn young shepherds' wandering wit
Which, through report of that life's painted bliss,
Abandon quiet home to seek for it
And leave their lambs to loss misled amiss ;
For, sooth to say, it is no sort of life
For shepherd fit to live in that same place,

SFENSER, t9

Where each one seeks with malice and with strife

To thrust down other into foul disgrace

Himself to raise ; and he doth soonest rise

That best can handle his deceitful wit

In subtle shifts ....

To which him needs a guileful lioUow heart

Masked with fair dissembling courtesy,

A filed tongue furnisht with terms of art,

No art of scliool, but courtiers' schoolery.

For arts of school have there small countenance,

Counted but toys to busy idle brains.

And there professors find small maintenance,

But to be instruments of others' gains.

Nor is there place for any gentle wit

Unless to please it can itself apply.

• • • • •

Even such is all their vaunted vanity.

Naught else but smoke that passeth soon away.

• • • • •

So they themselves for praise of fools do sell.
And all their wealth for painting on a wall.

• • • • •

Whiles single Truth and simple Honesty
Do wander up and down despised of all."*

And, again, in his " Mother Hubberd's Tales," in the most pithy
and masculine verses he ever wrote : —

" Most miserable man, whom wicked Fate
Hath brought to Court to sue for Had-I-wist
That few have found and many one hath mist 1
Full little knowest thou that hast not tried
What hell it is in suing long to bide ;
To lose good days that might be better spent,
To waste long nights in pensive discontent,
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow,
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow,
To have tliy Prince's grace yet want her Peers',
To have thy asking yet wait many years,
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares.
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs^,

* Compare Shakespeare's IxvL Sonnet.

-i

'/!

SPENSEH.

To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.

• •••••

Whoever leaves sweet home, where mean estate
In safe assurance, without strife or hate,
Finds all things needful for contentment meek,
And will to court fur shadows vain to seek,

That curse God send unto mine enemy

»»#

When Spenser had once got safely back to the secure retreat
and serene companionship of his great poem, writh what pro-
found and pathetic exultation must he have recalled the verses
of Dante 1 —

" Chi dietro a jura, e chi ad aforismi
Sen giva, e chi seguendo sacerdozio,
E chi regnar per forza e per sofismi,
E chi rubare, e chi civil negozio,
Chi nei diletti della came involto
S' affaticava, e chi si dava all' ozio,
Quando da tutte queste cose sciolto,
Con Beatrice m' era suso in cielo
Cotanto gloriosamente accolto."t

What Spenser says of the indifference of the court to learning,
and literature is the more remarkable because he himself was
by no means an unsuccessful suitor. Queen Elizabeth bestowed
on him a pension of fifty pounds, and shortly after he received

* This poem, published in 1591, was, Spenser tells us in his dedication,
"long sithens composed in the raw conceit of my youth." But he had
evidently retouched it. The verses quoted show a firmer hand than is
generally seen in it, and we are safe in assuming that they were added
after his visit to England. Dr. Johnson epigrammatised Spenser's indict-
ment into

" There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail,"

but I think it loses in pathos more than it gains in point.

t Paradiso, xl 4-12. Spenser was familiar with the " Divina Corn-
media," though I do not remember that his commentators have pointed
out his chief obligations to it.

SPENSEH,

the grant of lands already mentioned. It is said, indeed, that
Lord Burleigh in some way hindered the advancement of the
poet, who more than once directly alludes to him either in
reproach or remonstrance. In "The Ruins of Time," after
speaking of the death of Walsingham,

" Since whose decease learning lies unregarded,
And men of armes do wander unrewarded,"

he gives the following reason for their neglect : —

" For he that now wields all things at his will,
Scorns th' one and th' other in his deeper skill.
grief of griefs I gall of all good hearts.
To see that virtue should despised be
Of him that first was raised for virtuous parts,
And now, broad-sprea^ling like an aged tree.
Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted he :
let the man of whom the Muse is scorned
Nor live nor dead be of the Muse adorned I "

And in the introduction to the fourth book of the ** Faery
Queen " he says again : —

" The rugged forehead that with grave foresight
Wields kingdoms' causes and affairs of state,
M> looser rhymes, I wot, doth sharply wite
For praising Love, as I have done of late,—

By which frail youth is oft to folly led

Through false allurement of that pleasing bait.

That better were in virtues discipled

Than with vain poems' weeds to have their ftmcies fed.

" Such ones ill judge of love that cannot love
Nor in their frozen hearts feel kindly flame ;
Forthy they ought not thing unknown reprove,
Ne natural affection faultless blame
For fault of few that have abused the same :
For it of honour and all virtue is
The root, and brings forth glorious flowers of fame
That crown true lovers with immortal bliss.
The meed of them that love and do not live amiss."

( /

1 ^
lit

; f

I
ft

ill

i, i

SrENSEJi,

If Lord Burleigh could not relish such a dish of nightingales'
tongues as the " Faery Queen," he is very much more to be
pitied than Spenser. The sensitive purity of the poet might
indeed well be wounded when a poem in which he proposed to
himself "to discourse at large" of "the etiiick part of Moral
Philosophy"* could be so misinterpreted. But Spenser speaks
in the same strain, and without any other than a general
application, in his "Tears of the Muses," and his friend Sidney
undertakes the defence of poesy because it was undervalued.
But undervalued by whom? By the only persons about whom
he knew or cared anything, those whom we should now call
Society, and who were then called the Court. The inference I
would draw is that, among the causes which contributed to the
marvellous efflorescence of genius in the last quarter of the
sixteenth century, the influence of direct patronage from above
is to be reckoned at almost nothing.t Then, as when the
same phenomenon has happened elsewhere, there must have
been a sympathetic public. Literature, properly so called,
draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common
and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mould of
countless generations [oi-ri irep <p6X\uu yeve-q), and not from any
top-dressing capriciously scattered over the surface at some

* His own words as reported by Lodowick Bryskett. (Todd's Spenser,
I. Ix.) The whole passage is very interesting as giving us the only glimjise
we get of the living Spenser in actual contact with his fellow-men. It
shows him to us, as we could wish to see him, surrounded with loving
respect, companionable and helpful. Bryskett tells us that he v/us
"perfect in the Greek tongue," and "also very well read in philosophy
both moral and natural." He encouraged Bryskett in the study of Greek,
and offered to help him in it. Comparing thu last verse of the above
citation of the " Faery Queen " with other passages in Spenser, I cannot
help thinking that he wrote, "do not love amiss."

t " And know, sweet prince, when you shall come to know.
That 't is not in the po .^er of kings to raise
A spirit for verse that is not born thereto ;
Nor are they born in every prince's days."

Daniel's Dedic. Trag. of "Philotc.s."

SPENSER.

,f nightingales'
ch more to be
;he poet might
he proposed to

part of Moral
Spenser speaks
than a general
is friend Sidney
as undervalued,
ns about whom
should now call

The inference I
niributed to the
t quarter of the
lage from above
en, as when the
there must have
jperly so called,
nature's common

leaf-mould of
,nd not from any
surface at some

tt. (Todd's Spenser,
us the only glimpse
liis fellow-men. It
•rounded witli loving
lis us that he v/us
1 read in philosophy
1 the study of Greek,
it verse of the above
in Spenser, I cannot

1 come to know,
•aise

'rag. of "Philotc.s:'

master's bidding.* England had long been growing more truly

insular in language and political ideas when the Reformation

came to precipitate her national consciousness by secluding her

more completely from the rest of Europe. Hitherto there had

been Englishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly hating

foreigners, and reigned over by kings of whom they were proud

I or not as the case might be, but there was no England as a

I separate entity from the sovereign who embodied it for the time

being.t But now an English people began to be dimly aware

[of itself. Their having got a religion to themselves must have

lintensiiied them much as the having a god of their own d.d the

[ews. The exhilaration of relief after the long tension of

[anxiety, when the Spanish Armada was overwhelmed like the

(hosts of Pharaoh, while it confirmed their assurance of a

)rovincial deity, must also have been like sunshine to bring

[into flower all that there was of imaginative or sentimental in

Ithe English nature, already just in the first flush of its spring.

("The yonge sonne
Had in the Bull half of his course yronne.")

ind just at this moment of blossoming every breeze was dusty

nth the golden pollen of Greece, Rome, and Italy. If Keats

Dould say, when he first opened Chapman's Homer —

*' Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken ;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise ; "

* Louis XIV. is commonly supposed in some miraculous way to have
reated French literature. He may more truly be said to have petrified

so far as his influence went. The French renaissance in the preceding

sntury was produced by causes similar in essentials to those which

rought about that in England not long after. The grand Steele grew

^y natural processes of development out of that which liad preceded it,

id whicli, to the impartial foreigner at least, has more flavour, and more

french flavour too, than the Gallo-lioman usurper that puslied it from

stool. The best modern French poetry has been forced to temper its
Brses in the colder natural springs of tlie ante-classic period.

t In the Elizabethan drama the words "England" and "France" are
instantly used to signify the kings of those countries.

553

SPENSER.

f ■

■/

'. ti.

I i

if Keats could say this, whose mind had been unconsciously fed
with the results of this culture— results that permeated all
thought, all literature, and all talk— fancy what must have
been the awakening shock and impulse communicated to men's
brains by the revelation of this new world of thought and fancy,
an unveiling gradual yet sudden, like that of a great organ,
which discovered to them what a wondrous instrument was in
the soul of man with its epic and lyric stops, its deep thunders
of tragedy, and its passionate vox humanal It might almost
seem as if Shakespeare had typified all this in Miranda, when
she cries out at first sight of the king and his courtiers —

"O, wonder !
How many goodly creatures are there here I
How beauteous mankind is 1 0, brave new world
That hath such people in 't I "

The civil wars of the Roses had been a barren period in English
literature, becausr they had been merely dynastic squabbles, in
which no great principles were involved which could shake all
minds with controversy and heat them to intense conviction.
A conflict of opposing ambitions wears out the moral no le^s
than the material forces of a people, but the ferment of hostile
ideas and convictions may realise resources of character which
before were only potential, may transform a merely gregarious
multitude into a nation proud in its strength, sensible of the
dignity and duty which strength involves, and groping after a
common ideal. Some such transformation had been wrough:
or was going on in England. For the first time a distinc;
image of her was disengaging itself from the tangled blur o;
tradition and association in the minds of her children, and i
was now only that her great poet could speak exultingly t{
an audience that would understand him with a passionat(
sympathy of

" This happy breed of mcu, this little world,
This precious stone set \w. a silver sea,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
England, bound in with the triumphant sea ! "

SPENSER.

:onsdou8ly fed
permeated all
lat must have
icated to men's
aght and fancy,
a great organ,
strument was in
5 deep thunders
It might almost
1 Miranda, when
aurtiers—

QW world

period in English
istic squabbles, in
:h could shake all
ntense conviction,
the moral no less
ferment of hostile
3f character which
merely gregarious
rth, sensible of the
*nd groping after a
had been wrought
rst time a distinc:
the tangled blur oi
her children, and i
speak exultingly tc
with a passionatf

|ld,

this England,
dear land,

1^ sea \

Such a period can hardly recur again, but something like it,
something pointing back to similar producing causes, is
observable in the revival of English imaginative literature at the
close of the last and in the early years of the present century.
Again, after long fermentation, there was a war of principles,
again the national consciousness was heightened and stung by
a danger to the national existence, and again there was a crop
of great poets and heroic men.

Spenser once more visited England, bringing with him three
more books of the " Faery Queen," in 1595. He is supposed
ito have remained there during the two following years.* In
1594 he had been married to the lady celebrated in his some-
what artificial amoreUi. By her he had four children. He was
[now at the height of his felicity ; by universal acclaim the first
Ipoet of his age, and the one obstacle to his material advance-
ment (if obstacle it was) had been put out of the way by the
death of Lord Burleigh, August 1598. In the next month he
was recommended in a letter from Queen Elizabeth for the
jshrievalty of the county of Cork. But alas for Polycrates 1 In
§October the wild kerns and gallowglasses rose in no mood for
iparing the house of Pindarus. They sacked and burned his
:astle, from which he with his wife and children barely escaped.t
[e sought shelter in London, and died there on the i6th

* I say supposed, for the names of his two sons, Sylvanus and Peregrine,
idicate that they were born in Ireland, and that Spenser continued to
egard it as a wilderness and his abode there as exile. The two other
lildren are added on the authority of a pedigree drawn up by Sir W.
Btham and cited in Mr. Hales'a Life of Spenser, prefixed to the Globe
lition.

t Ben Jonson told Drummond that one child perished in the flames.
Jut he was speaking after an interval of twenty-one years, and, of course,
rom hearsay. Spenser's misery was exaggerated by succeeding poets, who
sed him to point a moral, and from the shelter of his tomb launched many

shaft of sarcasm at an unappreciative public. Giles Fletcher, in his

Purple Island " (a poem which reminds us of the " Faery Queen" by the
ipreme tediousness of its allegory, but in nothing else), set the example in
le best verse he ever wrote : —

"Poorly, poor man, he lived ; poorly, poor man, he died."

; '

. \l

}

,'j

SPENSER.

January 1599, at a tavern in Kinp Street, Westminster. Me
was buried in the nei^jhbouring Abbey next to Chaucer, at the
cost of the Karl of Essex, poets bearing Ills pall and castinjj
verses into his ^t.ivc. He died poor, br.t not in want. On the
whole, his life may be reckoned a happy one, as in the main the
lives of the great poets must have commonly been. If they feci
more passionately the pang of the moment, so also the compen-
sations are incalculable, and not the least of them this very
capacity of passionate emotion. The real good fortune is to be
measured, not by more or less of outward prosperity, but by the
opportunity given for the development and free play of the
genius. It should be remembered that the power of expression
which exaggerates their griefs is also no inconsiderable consola-
tion for them. We should measure what Spenser says of his
worldly disappointments by the bitterness of the unavailing
tears he shed for Rosalind. A careful analysis of these leaves
no perceptible residuum of salt, and we are tempted to believe
that the passion itself was not much more real than the pastoral
accessories of pipe and crook. I very much doubt whether
Spenser ever felt more than one profound passion in his life,
and that, luckily, was for his " Faery Queen." He was tortunate
in the friendship of the best men and women of his time, in the
seclusion which made him free of the still better society of the
past, in the loving recognition of his countrymen. All that we
know of him is amiable and of good report. He was faithful to

Gradually this poetical tradition established itself firmly as authentic
history. Spenser could never have been poor, except by comparison,
The whole story of his later days has a strong savour of legend. He must
have had ample warning of Tyrone's rebellion, and would probably have
sent away his wife and children to Cork, if he did not go thither himself.
I am inclined to think that he did, carrying his papers with him, and
among them the two cantos of "Mutability," first published in 1611. These,
it is most likely, were the only ones he ever completed, for, with all liis
abundance, he was evidently a laborious finisher. When we remember
that ten years were given to the elaboration of the first tliree books, and
that five more elapsed before the next three were ready, we shall waste no
vain regrets on the six concluding books supposed to have been lost by the
carelessness of an imaginary servant on their way from Ireland.

(11

SPENSER.

itminstcr. He
:hauccr, at Ihc
ill and casting
want. On the
in the main the
•n. If they feci
Iso the compen-

ihem this very
fortune is to be
,crity, but by the
free play of the
ver of expression
,iderable consolu-
jnser says of his
af the unavailing
iis of these leaves
empted to believe
i than the pastoral
ph doubt whether
lassion in his life,

He was lortunale
of his time, in the
»ttcr society of the
men. All that we

He was faithful to

firmly as authentic
ccept by comparison.
• of legend. He must
would probahly have
pot go thither himself,
[papers with him, and
Pushed in 1611. These,
eted, for, with all las
When we remember
first three books, and
idy, we shall waste no
, have been lost by the
3m Ireland.

the friendships of his youth, pure in his loves, unspotted in his
life. Above ail, the ideal with him was not a thin^' apart and
unattainable, but the sweetener and cnnobler of the street and
the fireside.

There are two ways of mcasurinjj a poet— cither by an
absolute fcsthetic standard, or relatively to his position in the
literary history of his country and the conditions of his genera-
tion. Both should be borne in mind as cocfticients in a
perfectly fair judgment. If his positive merit is to be settled
irrevocably by the former, yet an intelligent criticism will find
jits advantage, not only in considering what lie was, but what,
[under the given circumstances, it was possible for him to be.
The fact that the great poem of Spenser was inspired by the
►rlando of Arioslo, and written in avowed emulation of it, and
that the poet almost always needs to have his fancy set agoing
by the hint of some predecessor, must not lead us to overlook
hks manifest claim to originality. It is not what a poet takes,
but what he makes out of what he has taken, that shows what

fative force is in him. Above all, did his mind dwell com-
lacently in those forms and fashions which in their very birth
ire already obsolescent, or was it instinctively drawn to those
[uaiities which are permanent in language and whatever is
rrought in it ? There is much in Spenser that is contemporary
fnd evanescent ; but the substance of him is durable, and his
jrork was the deliberate result of intelligent purpose and ample
ilture. The publication of his "Shepherd's Calendar" in 1579
though the poem itself be of little interest), is one of the epochs
our literature. Spenser had at least the originality to see
learly and to feel keenly that it was essential to bring poetry
ick again to some kind of understanding with natt're. His
imediate predecessors seem to have conceived of it as a kind
bird of paradise, born to float somewhere between heaven
id earth, with no very well defined relation to either. It is
le that the nearest approach they were able to make to this
■y ideal was a shuttlecock, winged with a bright plume or so
►m Italy, but, after all, nothing but cork and feathers, which
jy bandied back and forth from one stanza to another, with

I' I

)

i< I

I i

SPENSER.

^ X i/x«cy as they could. To

the useful ambition of keeping ,^ -^^^^^J^ Needle » is
U mind the old comedy of Gamm ^^^^^^ ^^,

il;*;::et,:\i:Xult^^-manamon.men.^

Jfidai, absurdly so l^l^X.^^^Z^l^s.^, unless it b. a
not Dcrhaps, the wisest way to loo ^^ ^^^ spirit of it

"^ oTa volume of the ^-^-^ f ^*: over the supe^tluon
is fresh and origmaL We nave ^^^^ ^^ ^^^pier than

that shepherds and sbepherdesses are any ^^ ^.^

other people. Weknowtha^^.sdomcanbe^ ^^^ ^^

commerce with men and books, and tna v ^^,j„^

Tuners or style, is the c^wnmgresuU of

But the pastorals of Spfnser resultant form

Afferent both in the movmg ^P'"' ""..pucatory Eclogues"
fr!m the later ones "f »«>"";" *o,ne and Fletcher wrote
o^Phinehas Fletcher And why ? Brow ^^^^^ ^^^^ ^

because Spenser had ^[^^"^ Sb« '»"^'*-'° "'•''"' tvh
inward impulse-an ms mrt " ^'S%^ atmosphere into which

risks, into the fresh a.r f™"'^'^*^'^;; carbonic-acid gas w^ft
rhymer after rhymer had been pu W ^^^ ^„ j^.

Ib^ full force of his lungs -^ » wh^tmething truer and bette,
edge of suffocation. His long^S ^^ i„„g before to

l!s as honest as ^^-^^^fj^^ long after to make a.
idealise the Germans, and Roussea

angel of the savage. overlooks the whole chasB

""Ipenser Wmself supremdy over^o^ ^^^^^^^ ^

between himself and Chau<=".^' /^ ^m„„ „as afterwards l
vTrgil. He called Chauc" maste^ as M^ ^^^^ ^^.g^;^, „f ^

y ««.. And, even «1>'1« ^^ ^S to nature and life-«
forms, his =''™-*^* .fjThimself, and must be obviou

conscious, 1 have no ^""^ ' to^^^e ends of his fingers
virhoever reads with anything butt .^^^ j^^^,

True that Sannazzaro had breughy P ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^
r i C::- ^m^^ner he instinctively turned .c

SPENSER.

to Chaucer, the first and then only great English poet. He has

given common instead of classic names to his personages, for

characters they can hardly be called. Above all, he has gone

to the provincial dialects for words wherewith to enlarge and

freshen his poetical vocabulary.* I look upon the " Shepherd's

Calendar" as being no less a conscious and deliberate attempt

at reform than Thomson's "Seasons" were in the topics, and

Wordsworth's " Lyrical Ballads " in the language of poetry.

But the great merit of these pastorals was not so much in their

matter as their manner. They show a sense of style in its

larger meaning hitherto displayed by no English poet since

Chaucer. Surrey had brought back from Italy a certain inkling

of it, so far as it is contained in decorum. But here was a new

language, a choice and arrangement of words, a variety,

[elasticity, and harmony of verse most grateful to the ears of

[men. If not passion, there was fervour, which was perhaps as

|near it as the somewhat stately movement of Spenser's mind

[would allow him to come. Sidney had tried many experiments

in versification, which are curious and interesting, especially his

[attempts to naturalise the sliding rhymes of Sannazzaro in

jEnglish. But there is everywhere the uncertainty of a 'prentice

[hand. Spenser shows himself already a master, at least in

iverse, and we ce: *race the studies of Milton, a yet greater

[master, in the " Shepherd's Calendar" as well as in the " Faery

* Sir Philip Sidney did not approve of this. " That same framing of his

style to an old rustic language I dare not allow, since neither Theocritus

in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazzaro in Italian, did affect it."

(" Defence of Poesy.") Ben Jonson, on the other hand, said that Guarini

I** kept not decorum in making shepherds speak as well as himself could."

("Conversations with Drummond.") I think Sidney was right, for the

)oets' Arcadia is a purely ideal world, and should be treated accordingly.

Jut whoever looks into the glossary appended to the " Calendar," by

S. K., will be satisfied that Spenser's object was to find unhackneyed and

)oetical words rather than such as should seem more on a level with the

ipeakers. See also the "Epistle Dedicatory." I cannot help thinking

^hat E. K. was Spenser himself, with occasional interjections of Harvey.

^ho else could have written such English as many passages in this

Spistle ?

I*:

I'll

i f

/,{

»'

'II

ii.

/ I

! t 1

if
ill

SPENSER.

Queen." We have seen that Spenser, under the misleading
influence of Sidney* and Harvey, tried his hand at English
hexameters. But his great glory is that he taught his own
language to sing and move to measures harmonious and noble.
Chaucer had done much to vocalise it, as I have tried to show
elsewhere,t but Spenser was to prove

" That no tongue hath the muse's utterance heired
For verse, and that sweet music to the ear
Struck out of rhyme, so naturally as this."

The " Shepherd's Calendar " contains, perhaps, the most
picturesquely imaginative verse which Spenser has written.
It is in the eclogue for February, where he tells us of the

•* Faded oak
Whose body is sere, whose branches broke,
Whose naked arms stretch unto the fire."

It is one of those verses that Joseph Warton would have liked
in secret, that Dr. Johnson would have proved to be untrans-
latable into reasonable prose, and which the imagination
welcomes at once without caring wheth or it be exactly conform-
able to barbara or celarent. Another pretty verse in the same
eclogue —

" But gently took that uugently came"—

pleased Coleridge so greatly that he thought it was his own.
But in general it is not so much the sentiments and images
that are new as the modulation of the verses in which they
float. The cold obstmction of two centuries' thaws, and the
stream of speech, once more let loose, seeks out its old
windings, or overflows musically in unpractised channels. The
service which Spenser did to our literature by this exquisite
sense of harmony is incalculable. His fine ear, abhorrent of

* It was at Penshurst that he wrote the only speci;nen that has come
down to us, and bad enough it is. I have said that some of Sidney's are
pleasing.

t See My Study Windows^ 264 seqq.

»5

zr.-^ iixr^^^M.

SPENSEJR.

le misleading
id at English
light his own
lus and noble,
tried to show

eired

ps, the most
has written.
s of the

Lild have liked
o be untrans-
5 imagination
ictly conform-
in the same

was his own.

and images
n which they
laws, and the

out its old
lannels. The
this exquisite

abhorrent of

that has come
of Sidney's are

barbarous dissonance, his dainty tongue that loves to prolong
the relish of a musical phrase, made possible the transition
from the cast-iron stiffness of " Ferrex and Porrex" to the
Damascus pliancy of Fletcher and Shakespeare. It was he
ithat

"^Taught the dumb on high to cting,
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly :
That added feathers to the learned's wing,
And gave to grace a double majesty."

[I do not mean that in the "Shepherd's Calendar" he had
ilready achieved that transmutation of language and metre by
irhich he was afterwards to endow English verse with the most
raried and majestic of stanzas, in which the droning old
ilexandrine, awakened for the first time to a feeling of the
)oetry that was in him, was to wonder, like M. Jorrdain, that
le had been talking prose nil his life — but already he gave
:lear indications of the tendency and premonitions of the
)ower which were to carry it forward to ultimate perfection,
harmony and alacrity of language like this were unexampled
Enghsh verse : —

" Ye dainty nymphs, that in this blessod brook

Do bathe your breast,
Forsake your watci-y bowers and hither look

At my request. . . .
And eke you virgins that on Pamass dwell.
Whence floweth Helicon, the learned well,

Help me to blaze

Her wortliy praise,
Which in her sex doth all excel."

[ere we have the natural gait of the measure, somewhat formal
lind slow, as befits an invocation ; and now mark how the fame
feet shall be made to quicken their pace at the bidding of the
tune : —

*' Bring here the pink and purple columbine.
With gilliflowers ;
Bring coronations and sops in wine,
Worne of paramours ;

//I

48 SPENSER.

Strow me the ground with daflfadowndillies,
And cowslips and kingcups and loved lilies ;

The pretty paunce

And the chevisance
Shall match with the fair flowerdelice."*

The argument prefixed by E. K. to the tenth Eclogue has
a special interest for us, as showing how high a conception
Spenser had of poetry and the poet's office. By Cuddy he
evidently means himself, though choosing out of modesty
another name instead of the familiar Colin. "In Cuddy is
set forth the perfect pattern of a Poet, which, finding no
maintenance of his state and studies, complaineth of the con-
tempt of Poetry and the causes thereof, specially having been
in all ages, and even amongst the most barbarous, always
of singular account and honour, and being indeed so worthy
and commendable an art, or rather no art, but a divine gift
and heavenly instinct not to be gotten by labour and learnings
but adorned with both, and poured into the wit by a certain

* Of course dillies and lilies must be read with a slight accentuation
of the last syllable (permissible then), in order to chime with delice.
In the first line I have put here instead of hether, which (like other
words where th comes between two vowels) was then very often a mono-
syllable, in order to throw the accent back more strongly on hringy where
it belongs. Spenser's innovation lies in making his verses by ear instead
of on the finger-tips, and in valuing the stave more than any of the single
verses that compose it. This is the secret of his easy superiority to all
ethers in the stanza which he composed, and which bears his name.
Milton (who got more of his schooling in those matters from Spenser than
anywhere else) gave this principle a greater range, and applied it with
more various mastery. I have little doubt that the tune of the last stanza
cited above was clinging i- Shakespeare's ear when he wrote those
exquisite verses in "Midsummer Night's Dream" ("I know a bank"),
where our grave pentameter is in like manner surprised into a lyrica!
movement. See also the pretty song in the eclogue for August. Ber
Jonson, too, evidently caught some cadences from Spenser for his lyrics.
I need hardly say that in those eclogues (May, for example) where Spensei
thought he was imitating what wiseacres used to call the riding-rhyme o:
Chaucer, he fails most lamentably. He had evidently learned to scan hi
master's verses better when he wrote his '' Mother Hubberd's Tale."

SPENSEH.

h Eclogue has
1 a conception

By Cuddy he
>ut of modesty

"In Cuddy is
ich, finding no
leth of the con-
,lly having been
trbarous, always
ndeed so worthy
ut a divine gift
ur and learning,
wit by a certain

slight accentuation
chime with delice,
, which (like other
u very often a mono-
Dgly on bring, where
verses hy ear instead
ban any of the single
asy superiority to all
lich "bears his name,
jrs from Spenser than

and applied it with
une of the last stanza
hen he wrote those

(" I know a hank'li
rprised into a lyrical
ue for August. Bei
Spenser for his lyrici
sample) where Spense:
ill \\i(i riding-rhyme <i
tly learned to scan b
lubberd's Tale."

\Enthoustasmos and celestial inspiration^ as the author hereof

{elsewhere at large discourseth in his book called The

English Poet, which book being lately come into my hands,

|I mind also by God's grace, upon further advisement, to

>ublish." E. K., whoever he was, never carried out his

(intention, and the book is no doubt lost ; a loss to be borne

[with less equanimity than that of Cicero's treatise, De Gloria^

)nce possessed by Petrarch. The passage I have italicised

is most likely an extract, and reminds one of the long-breathed

)eriods of Milton. Drummond of Hawthornden tells us, "he

[Ben Jonson] hath by heart some verses of Spenser's * Calen-

iar,' about wine, between Coline and Percye" (Cuddie and

*iers).* These verses are in this eclogue, and are worth

quoting, both as having the approval of dear old Ben, the

>est critic of the day, and because they are a good sample

»f Spenser's earlier verse : —

" Thou kenst not, Percie, how the rhyme should rage ;
0, if my temples were distained wi^h wine,
And girt in garlands of wild ivy-twine,
How I could rear the Muse on stately stage
And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine
With quaint Bellona in her equipage 1 "

* Drummond, it will be remarked, speaking from memory, takes Cuddy
be Colin. In Milton's ''Lycidas" there are reminiscences of this
Bclogue as well as of that for May. The latter are the more evident, but
think that Spenser's

•' Cuddie, the praise is better than the price,"

iggested Milton's

" But not the praise,
Phcebus replied, and touched my trembling ears."

Shakespeare had read and remembered this pastoral. Compare

" But, ah, Meceenasis yci. d in clay.
And great Augustus lon^ ago is dead.
And all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead,"
rith

" King Pandion, he is dead ;
All thy friends are lapt in lead "

is odd that Shakespeare, in his " iapt in ^ead," is more Spenserian than
Ipenser himself, from whom he caught this " hunting of the letter."

SPENSER.

In this eclogue he gives hints of that spacious style which
was to distinguish him, and which, Hke his own Fame,

" With golden wings aloft doth fly
Above the reach of ruinous decay,
And with brave plumes doth b<*at the azure sky,
Admired of base-born men from far away."*

He was letting his wings grow, as Milton said, and foreboding
the " Faery Queen " : —

Lift thyself up out of the lowly dust

• • « • •

To 'doubted knights whose woundless armour rusts
And helms unbruisM waxen daily brown :
There may thy Muse display her fluttering wing,
And stretch herself at large from East to West."

Verses like these, especially the last (which Dry den would have
liked), were such as English ears had not yet heard, and
curiously prophetic of the maturer man. The language and
verse of Spenser at his best have an ideal lift in them, and
there is scarce any of our poets who can so hardly help being
poetical.

It was this instantly felt if not easily definable charm that
forthwith won for Spenser his never-disputed rank as the chiel
English poet of that age, and gave him a popularity which,
during his life and in the following generation, was, in its select
quality, without a competitor. It may be thought that I lay too
much stress on this single attribute of diction. But apart from
its importance in his case as showing their way to the poets
who were just then learning the accidence of their art, and
leaving them a material to work in already mellowed to theii
hands, it should be remembered that it is subtle perfection ol
phrase and that happy coalescence of music and meaning.
where each reinforces the other, that define a man as poet and

* "Ruins of Time." It is, perhaps, not considering too nicely to
remark how often this image of wings recurred to Spenser's mind. A
certain aerial latitude was essential to the large circlings of his style.

' I ',

SPENSEH.

s style which
ime,

ky.

ind foreboding

ir rusts

wing,
est."

rden would have
yet heard, and
e language and
ift in them, and
ardly help being

able charm that
rank as the chiel
►opularity which,
was, in its select
ght that I lay too
But apart from
way to the poets
of their art, and
nellowed to theii
3tle perfection ot
ic and meaning,
man as poet and

make all cars converts and partisans. Spenser was an epicure

in language. He loved "seldseen costly" words perhaps too

well, and did not always distinguish between mere strangeness

j and that novelty which is so agreeable as to cheat us with some

charm of seeming association. He had not the concentrated

power which can sometimes pack infinite riches in the little

room of a single epithet, for his genius is rather for dilatation

[than compression.* But he was, with the exception of Milton

ind possibly Gray, the most learned of our poets. His

|familiarity with ancient and modern literature was easy and

intimate, and as he perfected himself in his art, he caught the

fraud manner and high-bred ways of the society he frequented.

Jut even to the last he did not quite shake off the blunt

isticity of phrase that was habitual with the generation that

)receded him. In the fifth book of the " Faery Queen," where

ne is describing the passion of Britomart at the supposed

llnfidelity of Arthegall, he descends to a Teniers-like realismt —

Perhaps his most striking single epithet is the "sea-shouldering
irhales," B. II. 12, zxiii. His ear seems to delight in prolongations.
Tor example, he makes such words as glorious, gratioics, joyeouSy

voior, chapelet dactyles, and that, not at the end of verses, where it
rould not have been unusual, but in the first half of them. Milton

mtrives a break (a kind of heave, as it were) in the uniformity of his

^erse by a practice exactly the opposite of this. He also shuns a hiatus

rhich does not seem to have been generally displeasing to Spenser's

r, though perhaps in +he compound epithet bees-alluring he intentionally

raids it by the plural form.

t " Like as a wayward child, whose sounder sleep
Is broken with some fearful dream's affright,
With froward will doth set himself to weep
Ne can be stilled for all his nurse's might,
But kicks and squalls and shrieks for fell desplght,
Now scratching her and her loose locks misusing,
Now seeking darkness and now seeking light,
Then craving suck, and then the suck refusing."

too nicely to S^® would doubtless have justified himself by the familiar example of
lering jj^i^d. A vomer's comparing Ajax to a donkey in the eleventh book of the Iliad.

f h's stvle. wt *^^° ^" *^® " Epithalamion " it grates our nerves to hear,

V'f

(
)

!i I

SPENSER.

he whose verses generally remind us of the dancing Hours of
Guido, where we catch but a glimpse of the real earth, and that
far away beneath. But his habitual style is that of gracious
loftiness and refined luxury.

He first shows his mature hand in the " Muiopotmos," the
most airily fanciful of his poems, a marvel for delicate concep*
tion and treatment, whose breezy verse seems to float between
a blue sky and golden earth in imperishable sunshine. No
other English poet has found the variety and compass which
enlivened the octave stanza under his sensitive touch. It can
hardly be doubted that in Clarion, the butterfly, he has sym-
bolised himself, and surely never was the poetic temperament
so picturesquely exemplified : —

" Over the fields, in his frank lustiness,
And all the champain o'er, he soared light,
And all the country wide he did possess.
Feeding upon their pleasures bounteously.
That none gainsaid and none did him envy.

*' The woods, the rivers, and the meadows gi-een.
With his air-cutting wings he measured wide.
Nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen,
Nor the rank grassy fens' delights untried ;
But none of these, however sweet they been,
Mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide ;
His choiceful sense with every change doth flit ;
No common things may please a wavering wit.

•' To the gay gardens his unstaid desire
Him wholly carried, to refresh his sprights ;
There lavish Nature, in her best attire,
Pours forth sweet odours and alluring sights.
And Art, with her contciing doth aspire,
To excel the natural with made delights ;
And all that fair or pleasant may be found,
In riotous excess doth there abound.

" Pour not by ct ps, but by the bellyful,
Pour out to all chat wull."

Such examples serve to show how strong a dose of Spenser's aurw^
potdbile the language needed.

SPENSER,

" There he arriving, round about cloth flie,
From bed to bed, from one to the other border,
And takes survey with curio as busy eye,
Of every flower and herb there set in order,
Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly.
Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder,
Ne with his feet their silken leaves displace,
But pastures on the pleasures of each plaoe.

" And evermore with most variety
And change of sweetness (for all change is sweet)
He casts his glutton sense to satisfy,
Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet.
Or of the dew which yet on them doth lie.
Now in the same bathing his tender feet ;
And then he percheth on some branch thereby
To weather him and his moist wings to dry.

" And then again he turneth to his play,
To spoil [plunder] the pleasures of that paradise ;
The wholesome sage, the lavender still grey.
Rank -smelling rue, ^nd cummin good for eyes,
The roses reigning in the pride of May,
Sharp hyssop good for gi'een wounds' remedies
Fair marigolds, and bees- alluring thyme,
Sweet marjoram and daisies decking prime.

*♦ Cool violets, and orpine grow;ng still,
Embathed balm, and cheerful ^i^lingale.
Fresh costmary and breathful camomill,
Dull poppy and drink-quickening setuale.
Vein-healing vervain and head-purging dill,
Sound Si voury, and basil hporty-hale,
Fat cole'irorts and comforting perseline,
Cold lettuce, and refreshing rosemarine.*

* I could not bring myself to root out this odourous herb-garden, though

make my extract too long. It is a pretty reminiscence of his master

laucer, but is also very characteristic of Spenser himself. He coold

}t help planting a flower or two among his serviceable plants, and after

this abundance he is not satisfied, but begins the next stanza with

[And whatso else. "

' /

48 SPENSER,

"And whatso else of virtue good or ill,
Grow in this garden, fetched from fur away,
Of every one he takes and tastes nt will,
And on their pleasures greedily doth prey ;
Then, when he hath both played and fed his fill,
In the warm sun he doth himself embay,
And there him rests in riotous suffisance
Of all his gladfulness and kingly joyance.

* What more felicity can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty,
And to be lord of all the works of nature ?
To reign in the air f'om earth to highest sky,
To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature,
To take whatever thing doth please the eye ?
Who rests not pleased with such happiness.
Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness."

The " Muiopotmos " pleases us all the more that it vibrates
in us a string of classical association by adding an episode to
Ovid's story of Arachne. " Talkipg the other day with a friend
(the late Mr. Keats) about Dante, he observed that whenever
so great a poet told us anything in addition or continuation oi
an ancient story, he had a right to be regarded as classical
authority. For instance, said he, when he tells us of that
characteristic death of Ulysses ... we ought to receive the
information as authentic, and be glad that we have more news
of Ulysses than we looked for."* We can hardly doubt that
Ovid would have been glad to admit this exquisitely fantastic
illumination into his margin.

No German analyser of aesthetics has given us so convincing
a definition of the artistic nature as these radiant verses. " To
reign in the air" was certainly Spenser's function. And yet
the commentators, who seem never willing to let their poet be
a poet pure and simple, though, had he not been so, they would
bave lost their only hold upon life, try to make out from his
"Mother Hubberd's Tale" that he might have been a very
sensible matter-of-fact man if he would. For my own part, i

* Leigh Hunt's Indicator, xvii.

SPENSER.

5 that it vibrates
I an episode to
lay with a friend
d that whenever

continuation ot
ded as classical

tells us of that
t to receive the
have more news

,rdly doubt that

[uisitely fantastic

us so convincing
int verses. " To
iction. And yet
let their poet be
ixi so, they would
ike out from his
^ave been a very
my own part, 1

am quite willing to confess that I like i-..n none the worse for
being ////practical, and that my reading has convinced me that
being too poetical is the rarest fault of poets. Practical men
are not so scarce, one would think ; and I am not sure that the
tree was a gainer when the hamadryad flitted and left it
nothing but ship-timber. Such men as Spenser are not sent
into the world to be part of its motive power. The blind old
engine would not know the difference though we got up its
I steam with attar of roses, nor make one revolution more to the
minute for it. What practical man ever left such an heirloom
|to his countrymen as the " Faery Queen?"

Undoubtedly Spenser wished to be useful, and in the highest
rocation of all, that of teacher, and Milton calls him " our sage
md serious poet, whom I dare be known to think a better
teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." And good Dr. Henry More
iras of the same mind. I fear he makes his vices so beautiful
low and then that we should not be very much afraid of them

we chanced to meet them ; for he could not escape from his
|;enius, which, if it led him as philosopher to the abstract
Contemplation of the beautiful, left him as poet open to every

ipression of sensuous delight. When he wrote the "Shep-
lerd's Calendar" he was certainly a Puritan, and probably so
»y conviction rather than from any social influences or thought
^f personal interests. There is a verse, it is true, in the second
^f the two detached cantos of " Mutability,"

" Like that ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace,"

fhich is supposed to glance at the straiter religionists, and
rom which it has been inferred that he drew away from
lem as he grew older. It is very likely that years and
ridened experience of men may have produced in him their
[atural result of tolerant wisdom which revolts at the hasty
istructiveness of inconsiderate zeal. But with the more
jnerous side of Puritanism I think he sympathised to the
^st. His rebukes of clerical worldliness are in the Puritan
^ne, and as severe a one as any is in " Mother Hubberd's

554

SPENSEH.

V «

Tale," published in 15;!.* There is an iconoclastic relish in
his account of Sir Guyon's demolishing the Bower of Bliss
that makes us think he would not have regretted the plundered
abbeys as perhaps Shakespeare did when he speaks of the
winter woods as "bare ruined choirs where late the sweet
birds sang" : —

" But ull thosti plcftHuiit bowers and palace brave
Guyoii broke dowu with rigour pitiloas,
Ne ought their goodly Wv.-kiiuinHhip might save
Them from the tempest of lu: wratlifulness,
But that tiieir bliss he turned to 'lalefulness ;
Tlieir groves ho felled, their gardens did uelV-e,
Their arbours spoil, their cabinets suppress,
Their banquet-houses burn, their buildings rase,
And of the fairest late now made the foulest idace."

But whatever may have been Spenser's religious opinions
(which do not nearly concern us here), the bent of his mind was
toward a Platonic mysticism, a supramundane sphere where
it could shape universal forms out of the primal elements
of things, instead of being forced to put up with their fortuitous
combinations in the unwilling material of mortal c'ay. He
who, when his singing robes were on, could never be tempted
nearer to the real world than under some subterfuge of
pastoral or allegory, expatiates joyously in this untrammelled
ether : —

•'Lifting himself out of the lowly dust
On golden plumes up to the purest sky."

* Ben Jonson told Drummond " that in that paper Sir W. Raleigh li.ul
of the allegories of his Faery Queen, by the Blatant Beast the Puritan^
were understood." But this is certainly wrong. Tliero were very
dilferent shades of Puritanism, according to individual temperament,
That of Winthroj) and Higginson had a mellowness of which Endicott an ;
Standish were incapable. The gradual change of Milton's opinions wa-
.'imilar to that which I suppose in Spenser. The passage in "Motlie:
Hubberd " may have been aimed at the Pi-otestant clergy of Ireland (for lie
Bays much the same thing in his " View of the State of Ireland "), but it
is general in its terms.

SPENSER,

ilic relish iu
wcr of lil'»s3
ic plundered
peaks of the
te the sweet

'.'•e.

rase,
t place."

igious opinions
of bis mind was
,e sphere where
Kimal elements
their fortuitous
lortal c'ay. He
^ever be tempted
subterfuge of
us untrammelled

Siv W. Kalelgli U;iil

Beast tlio Puritiv'>

Thero were vivj

idual tempevaw^'i^^,

wliich Eudicott aiv.
Liltou's opinions ^^=
|passa.^e in -Motb.
'rav of Ireland (for li'

of Ireland"), ^^it It

Nowhere does his j-cnius soar and bing with such continuous
aspiration, nowhere is his |)hrasc so decorously stalely, though
risin}? to an enthusiasm wliich reaches intensity while it sloj)s
sliort of vehemence, as in his Hymns to Love and Beauty,
especially the latter. There is an exulting' spurn of earth
in it, as of a soul just loosed from its cage. I shall make
no extracts from it, for it is ore of those intimately coherent
and transcendentally logical poems that " movclh altogether
if it move at all,"' the breaking off a fragment from which
>vouId maim it as it would a perfect group of crystals. What-
ever there is of sentiment and passion is for the most part
purely disembodied and without sex, like that of angels
I— a kind of poetry which has of late gone out of fashion,
[whether to our gain or not may be questioned. Perhaps
[one may venture to hint that the animal instincts are
Ithose that stand i i least need of stimulation. Spenser's
lotions of love were so nobly pure, so far from those of
mr common ancestor who could hang by his tail, as not
lo dis(jualify him for achieving the quest of the Holy Grail, and
iccordingly it is not uninstructive to remember that he had
trunk, among others, at French sources not yet deboshed with
ibsinthc* Yet, with a purity like that of thrice-bolted snow, he
iad none of its coldness. He is, of all our poets, the most truly
knsuous, using the word as Milton probably meant it when he
|aid thai poetry should be " simple, sensuous, and passionate."
poet is innocently sensuous when his mind permeates and
[lumines his senses ; when they, on the other hand, muddy the
lind, he becomes sensual. Every one of Spenser's senses was
|s exquisitely alive to the impressions of material, as every
jrgan of his soul was to those of spiritual beauty. Accordingly,

* Two ofliis eclogues, as T have said, are fi-oiii IMarot, and liis earliest

lowu verses are translations from Bellay, a jiout "wlio Avas charming

leuevev he had Die courage to phiy truant from a Lad scliool. AN'e must

[>t suppose that an analysis of the liteiuturo of the daal-ntimdc will give

all the elements ot the French character. It has been botii grave and
Jofouud ; nay, it has even contrived to be "wise and lively at tlie same

le, a combination so incomprehensible by the Teutonic races that they
Ive labelled it levity. It puts them out as Nature did Fuseli.

SPENSER.

if he painted the weeds of sensuality at all, he could not help
making them "of glorious feature." It was this, it may be
suspected, rather than his "praising love," that made Lord
Burleigh shake his "rugged forehead." Spenser's gamut,
indeed, is a wide one, ranging from a purely corporeal delight
in "precious odours fetched from far away" upward to such
refinement as

\ \

1 U

" Upon her eyelids many graces sate
Unaer the shadow of her even hrows,"

where the eye shares its pleasure with the mind. He is court-
painter in ordinary to each of the senses in turn, and idealises
these frail favourites of his majesty King Lusty Juventus, till
they half believe themselves the innocent shepherdesses into
which h*" travesties them. *

In his great poem he had two objects in view — first, the
ephemeral one of pleasing the court, and then that of recom-
mending himself to the permanent approval of his own and
following ages as a poet, and especially as a moral poet. To
meet the first demand, he lays the scene of his poem in con-
temporary England, and brings in all the leading personages of
the day under the thin disguise of his knights and their squires
and lady-loves. He says this expressly in the prologue to the
second book : —

* Taste must be partially excepted. It is remarkable how little eatin;
and drinking there is in the " Faery Queen. " The only time he fairly set
a table is in the house of Malbecco, where it is necessary to the Conduct o.
the story. Yet taste is not wholly forgotten : —

" In her left hand a cup of gold she held,
And with her right the riper fruit did reacb .
Whose sappy liquor, that with fulness 8vi\,id,
Into her cup she scruzed with dainty breach
Of bar fine fingers without foul impeach,
That so fair wine-press made the wine more sweet."

B. II., c. xii., Sd

Taste can hardly compl&in of unhandsome treatment !

ould not help
s, it may be
; made Lord
nser's gainut,
poreal deliglit
Dward to such

He is court-
•n, and idealises
ty Juvenius, till
jpherdesses into

view— first, the
n that of reconv

of his own and
moral poet. To
his poem in con-
ing personages of
, and their squires
le prologue to the

ible how little eatin:
nly time he fairly sefc
sary to the Conduct o;

acb. g

reach

more sweet."

Qtl

SPENSER, 53

** Of Faery Laiid yet if he more inquire,
By certain signs, here set in sundry place,
He may it find ; . . .
And thou, fairest princess under sky,
In this fair mirror mayst hehold thy face
And thine own realms in land of Faery."

Many of his personages we can still identify, and all of them
were once as easily recognisable as those of Mademoiselle de
Scuddry. This, no doubt, added greatly to the immediate
piquancy of the allusions. The interest they would excite
may be inferred from the fact that King James, in 1596, wished
to have the author prosecuted and punished for his indecent
handling of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, under the name
of Duessa. * To suit the wider application of his plan's other and
more important half, Spenser made all his characters double
their parts, and appear in his allegory as the impersonations of
abstract moral qualities. When the cardinal and theological
virtues tell Dante,

" Noi siam qui ninfe e in ciel siamo stelle,"

the sweetness of the verse enables the fancy, by a slight gulp,
to swallow without solution the problem of being in two places
at the same time. But there is something fairly ludicrous in
such a duality as that of Prince Arthur and the Earl of
Leicester, Arthegall and Lord Grey, and Belphcebe and
Elizabeth.

" In this same interlude it doth befall
That I, one Snout by name, present a wall."

* Had the poet lived longer, he might perhaps have verified his friend
Raleigh's saj !ng, that " whosoever in writing modem history shall follow
truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out hia teeth." The passage
is one of the very few disgusting ones in the ** Faery Queen." Spenser was
copying Ariosto ; but the Italian poet, with the discreeter taste of hia
race, keeps to generalities. Spenser goes into particulars which can only
he called nasty. He did this, no doubt, to pleasure his mistress, Mary's
rival , and this gives us a measure of the brutal coarseness of contemporary
manners. It becomes only the more marvellous that the fine flower of his
genius could have transmuted the juices of such a soil into the purity and
i sweetness which are its own peculiar properties.

i-l

)■

SPENSER.

The rcnlity seems to heighten the improbability, ah'e.idy hard
enou<^h to manage. But Spenser had fortunately almost as
little sense of humour as Wordsworth,* or he could never have
carried his poem on with enthusiastic good faith so far as he
did. It is evident that to him the Land of Faery was an unreal
world of picture and illusion,

" The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome tnrmoil,"

in which he could shut himself up from the actual, with its
shortcomings and failures.

" The ways throngh whicli my weary steps I gnide
In this delightful laml of Faery
Are so exceedirg spacious and wide,
And sprinkh.'d with such sweet variety
Of all til at pleasant is to ear and eye,
Tliat T, nigh ravisht with rare thoughts' delight,

ISvj tedious travail ao forget thereby,
And, when I 'gin to fjcl decay of might,
It strength to me supplies, arl cheers my dulled spright."

Spenser seems here to confess a little weariness ; but the
alacrity of his mind is so great that, even where his inventi.
fails a httle, v/e do not share his feeling nor suspect it, charmed
as we are by the variety and sweep of his measure, the beauty
or vigour of his similes, the musical felicity of his diction, and
the mellow versatility o^ his pictures. In this last quality
Ariosto, whose emulous pupil he was, is as Bologna to Venice
in the comparison. That, when the personal allusions have lost
their meaning and the allegory has become a burden, the book
should continue to be read with delight, is proof enough, were
any wanting, how full of life and light and the other-worldliness
of poetry it must be. As a narrative it has, I think, every fault

* There is a gleam of humour in one of the couplets of " Mothoi
Hnbberd's Tale," where the Fox, persuading the Ape that they shouM
disguise themselves as discharged soldiers in order to beg the moro
successfully, says —

" Be you the soldier, for you likest are
For manly semblance and small skill in war."

SPENSER.

of which that kind of writing is caprible. The characters are
vague, and, even were they not, they drop out of the story so
often and remain out of it so long, that we have forgotten who
they arc when we meet them again ; the episodes hinder the
advance of the action instead of relieving it with variety of
incident or novelty of situation ; the plot, if plot it may be
called,

" Tliat shape has none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,"

recalls drearily our ancient enemy, the Metrical Romance ;
while the fighting, which, in those old poems, was tediously
sincere, is between shadow and shadow, where we know
that neither can harm the other, though we are tempted
to wish he might. Hazlitt bids us not mind the allegory,
and says that it won't bite us nor meddle with us if we do
not meddle with it. But how if it bore us, which after all is
the fatal question } The truth is that it is too often forced upon
s against our will, as people were formerly driven to church till
hey began to look on a day of rest as a penal institution, and
;o transfer to the Scriptures that suspicion of defective inspira-
lon which was awakened in them by the preaching. The true
ype of the allegory is the " Odyssey," which we read without
uspicion as pure poem, and then find a new pleasure in
divining its double meaning, as if we somehow got a better
bargain of our author than he meant to give us. But this
complex feeling must not be so exacting as lo prevent our
lapsing into the old Arabian Nights simplicity of interest
again. The moral of a poem should be suggested, as when in
some mediaeval church we cast down our eyes to muse over a
fresco of Giotto, and are reminded ol the transitoriness of life
by the mortuary tablets under our feet. The vast superiority
of Bunyan over Spenser lies in the fact that we help to make
his allegory out of our own experience. Instead of striving to
embody abstract passions and temptations, he has given us his
own in all their pathetic simplicity. He is the Ulysses of his
wn prose-epic. This is the secret of his power and his charm

'/J I

If /I

/ '

* 1

SPENSER,

that, while the representation of what may happen to all men
comes home to none of us in particular, the story of any one
man's real experience finds its startling parallel in that of every
one of us. The very homeliness of Bunyan's names and the
evcrydayness of his scenery, too, put us off our guard, and we
soon find ourselves on as easy a footing with his allegorical
beings as we might be with Adam or Socrates in a dream. In-
deed, he has prepared us for such incongruities by telling us at
setting out that the story was of a dream. The long nights of
Bedford jail had so intensified his imagination, and made the
figures with which it peopled his solitude so real to him, that
the creatures of his mind become things^ as clear to the
memory as if we had seen them. But Spenser's are too often
mere names, with no bodies to back them, entered on the
Muses* muster-roll by the specious trick of personification.
There is, likewise, in Bunyan, a childlike simplicity and taking-
for-granted which win our confidence. His Giant Despair,*
for example, is by no means the Ossianic figure into which
artists who mistake the vague for the sublime have mis-
conceived it. He is the ogre of the fairy-tales, with his
malicious wife ; and he comes forth to us from those regions
of early faith and wonder as something beforehand accepted by
the imagination. These figures of Bunyan's are already familiar
inmates of the mind, and, if there be any sublimity in him, it is
the daring frankness of his verisimilitude. Spenser's giants
are those of the later romances, except that grand figure with
the balances in the second Canto of Book V., the most original
of all his conceptions, yet no real giant, but a pure eidolon
of the mind. As Bunyan rises not seldom to a natural poetry,
so Spenser sinks now and then, through the fault of his topics,
tc unmistakable prose. Take his description of the House of
Alma,t for instance : —

* Bunyan probably took the hint of the Giant's suicidal offer of " knife,
halter, or poison," from Spenser's "swords, ropes, poison," in "Faery
Queen," B. T., c. ix., 1.

f Book IT., c. ix.

SPENSER,

n to all men
•y of any one
that of every
ttnes and the
Tuard, and we
lis allegorical
a dream. IR-
)y telling us at
long nights of
and made the
il to him, that
clear to the
5 are too often
mtered on the
personification,
nty and taking-
iiant Despair,*
rure into which
ime have mis-
■tales, with his
n those regions
and accepted by
already familiar
nity in him, it is
Ipenser's giants
rand figure with
he most original
a pure eidolon
. natural poetry,
,ult of his topics,
of the House of

idal offer of " knife,

)oison," m

" Faery

" The master cook was cald Concoction,

A careful man, and full of comely guise ;
The kitchen-clerk, that hight Digestion,
Did order all the achates in seemly wise."

And so on through all the organs of the body. The author of

Eccelsiastes understood these matters better in that last

pathetic chapter of his, blunderingly translated as it apparently

is. This, I admit, is the worst failure of Spenser in this kind ;

though, even here, when he gets on to the organs of the n.ind,

I the enchantments of his fancy and style come to the rescue

and put us in good-humour again, hard as it is to conceive of

armed knights entering the chamber of the mind, and talking

iwith such visionary damsels as Ambition and Shamefastress.

jNay, even in the most prosy parts, unless my partiality

{deceive me, there is an infantile confidence in the magical

)wers of Prosopopoeia which half beguiles us, as of children

lYio play that everything is something else, and are quite

itisfied with the transformation.

The problem for Spenser was a double one : how to commend

>oetry at all to a generation which thought it effeminate

ifling,* and how he, Master Edmund Spenser, of imagination

U compact, could commend his poetry to Master John Bull,

16 most practical of mankind in his habitual mood, but at

lat moment in a passion of religious anxiety about his soul.

Imne iulit puncium qui miscuit utile dulci was not only

irrefragable axiom because a Latin poet had said it,

jut it exactly met the case in point. He would convince the

:orners that poetry might be seriously useful, and show Master

Jull his new way of making fine words butter parsnips, in

rhymed moral primer. Allegory, as then practised, was

lagination adapted for beginners, in words of one syllable and

llustrated with cuts, and would thus serve both his ethical and

pictorial purpose. Such a primer, or a first instalment of it, he

roceeded to put forth ; but he so bordered it with bright-

• See Sidney's Defence and Puttenham's Art <if English Poesy,
5k T.J c, viii.

\ '.>

I ,

SPENSER,

coloured fancies, he so often filled whole pages and crowded
the text hard in others with the gay frolics of his pencil, that, as
in the Grimani missal, the holy function of the book is forgotten
in the ecstasy of ils adornment. Worse than all, does not his
brush linger more lovingly along the rosy contours of his sirens
than on the modest wimples of the Wise Virgins ? " The
general end of the book," he tells us in his Dedication to Sir
Waller Raleigh, " is to fashion a gentleman of noble person in
virtuous and gentle discipline." But a little further or he
evidently has a qualm, as he thinks how generously he had
interpreted his promise of cuts : "To some I know this method
will seem displeasant, which had rather have good discipline
delivered plainly in way of precepts or sermoned at large,* as
they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devices."
Lord Burleigh was of this way of thinking, undoubtedly, but
how could poor Clarion help it ? Has he not said,

" And whatso else, of virtue good or ill,

Grew in that garden, fetclit from far away,
Of every one lie takes and tastes at will,

And on their pleasures greedily doth prey ? "

One sometimes feels in reading him as if he were the pure
sense of the beautiful incarnated to the one end that he might
interpret it to our duller perceptions. So exquisite was his
sensibility,t that with him sensation and intellection seem
identical, and we "can almost say his body thought." This
subtle interfusion of sense with spirit it is that gives his poetry
a crystalline purity without lack of warmth. He is full of
feeling, and yet of such a kind that we can neither say it is mere
intellectual perception of what is fair and good, nor yet
associate it with that throbbing fervour which leads us to call
sensibility by the physical name of heart.

* We can fancy how he would have done this by Jeremy Taylor, who
was a kind of Spenser in a cassock.

t Of this he himself gives a striking hint, where speaking in his owr
person he suddenly breaks in on his narrative with the passionate cry,
" All, dearest God, rae grant I dead be not defouled."

" Faery Queen," B. I., c, x.^ 43,

SPENSER,

[ind crowded
cncil, that, as
k is forgotten
, does not his
s of his sirens
rgins? "The
dication to Sir
oble person in
further or he
srously he had
DW this method
rood discipline
id at large,* as
orical devices."
idoubtedly, but
lid,

way,

prey \

were the pure
..d that he might
Ixquisite was his
ntellection seem
thought." This
gives his poetry
He is full of
[her say it is mere
good, nor yet
leads us to call

1 Jeremy Taylor, wlio

speaking in his ovn;
le passionate cry,

llefouled."
[en,"B. I.,c. x.^43,

Charles Lamb made the most pithy criticism of Spenser when

he cal'^^d him the poets' poet. We may fairly leave the allegory

on one side, for perhaps, after all, he adopted it only for the

I reason that it was in fashion, and put it on as he did his ruff,

not because it was becoming, but because it was the only wear.

IThc true use of him is as a galleiy of pictures which we visit as

[the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two at a

time, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long as to

:loy them. lie makes one think always of Venice ; for not

)nly is his style Venetian,* but as the gallery there is housed in

[he shell of an abandoned convent, so his in that of a deserted

lllegory. And again, as at Venice you swim in a gondola from

lian IJellini to Titian, .and from Titian to Tintorct, so in him,

irhcrc other cheer is wanting, the gentle sway of his measure,

|ikc the rhythmical impulse of the oar, floats you luUingly along

)m picture to picture.

" If all the pens that ever })oet held
Had fed tlio feeling of their master's thonf,^hts,
And every sweetness tliat inspired their hearts
nieir minds and muses on admired themes,
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers ol' poesy,

Was not this picture painted by Paul Veronese, for example ?

" Arachne figured how Jove did abuse
Enropa like a bull, and on his back
Her through the sea did bear : . . .
She seemed still back unto the land to look,
And her playfellows' aid to call, and fear
The dashing of the waves, that up she took,
Her dainty feet, and garments gathered near. . , .
liefuto the bull she pictured winged Love,
With his young brother Sport, . . .
And many nymphs about them flocking round,
And many Tritons which their horns did souud."

Muiojwtmos, 281-206.

Jpcnser begins a complimentary sonnet prefixed to tlie " Conmiouwcalth
CoverniiiLiit of Venice" (1599) with this beautiful verse,

" Fair Venice, flower of the last world's delight'
Perhaps we shoidd read "lost" ?

SPENSER.

If theso had made one poem's period,
i\ nd all combined in beauty's worthiness ;
Yet shouid there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at tho best,
Which into v/ords no virtue can digest." *

Spenser, at his ])est. has come as near to expressing this
unattainable something as any other poet. He is so purely
poet that with him the meaning does not so often modulate the
music of the verse as the music makes great part of the
meaning and leads the thought along its pleasant paths. No
poet is so splendidly superfluous as he ; none knows so well
that in poetry enough is not only not so good as a fea'",t, but
a beggarly pf. simony. He spends himself in a careless
abundance only to be justified by incomes of immortal youth.

■' Pensler canuto nfe molto n6 p )co
Si pud quivi albergare iu alcun cuore ;
Non entra quivi disagio n^ inopia,
Ma vi sta ogn'or col como pien la Copia." t

This delicious abundance and overrunning luxury of Spenser
appear in the very structure of his verse. He found the ottav&
rima too monotonously iterative ; so, by changing the order o
his rhymes, he shifted the couplet from the end of the stave
where it always seems to put on the brakes with a jar, to tlie
middle, where it may serve at will as a brace or a bridge ; lis
found it not roomy enough, so first ran it over into another line
and then ran that added line into an alexandrine, in which ths
melody of one stanza seems forever longing and feeling forwarc
after that which is to follow. There is no ebb and flow in h;
metre more than on the shores of the Adriatic, I i^t wave follof
wave with equable gainings and recessions, the one sliding bad
in fluent music to be mingled with and carried forward b

Marlowe's "Tamburlaine," Part I., Art v,> 2.

" Greyheaded Thought, nor much nor little, may
Take up its lodging here in any heart ;
Unea&ti nor Lack can enter at this door ;
But here dwells full-horned Plenty evermore."

Qrl, fw., c. vi., 73.

SPENSP.R.

expressing this
He is so purely
ten modulate the
jeat part of the
asant paths. No
ne knows so well
3d as a fea'it, but
self in a careless
inimortal youth.

re ;

Jopia." t

luxury of Spensei
le found the ottan
anging the order o;
e end of the stave,
^s with a jar, to tb
Lce or a bridge ; b
er into another line
idrins, in which tli;

and feeling forwari
ebb and flow in h
ticj I iTt wave follow
the one sliding bac

carried loirward t

r littls, may
Lrt ;
ioor ;
evermore."
Qrl. Fw.y c vi., 73'

the next. In all this there is soothingness indeed, but no
slumberous monotony ; for Sper^er was no mere metrist, but a
great composer. By the variety of his pauses — now at the close
of the first or second foot, now of the third, and again of the
fourth— he gives spirit and energy to a measure whose tendency
it certainly is to become languorous. He knew how to make it
rapid and passionate at need, as in such verses as,

'* But lie, my lion, and my noble lord,
How does he tind in cruel heart to hate
Her that him loved and ever most adored
As the God of my life ? Why hath he me abhorred ? "*

Or this,

«' Come hither, come hither, 0, come hastily !"t

Jjoseph Warton objects to Spenser's stanza, that its " constraint
'led him into many absurdities." Of these he instances three,
€f which I shall notice only one, since the two others (which
suppose him at a loss for words and rhymes) will hardly seem
valid to any one who knows the poet. It is that it " obliged
ihim to dilate the thing to be expressed, however unimportant,
with trifling and tedious circumlocutions — namely, * Faery
Queen,' II., ii., 44 : —

* Now hath fair Phoebe with her silver face

Thrice seen the shadows of this nether world,
Sith last I left that honourable place,
In which her royal presence is enrolled.'

That is, it is three months since I left her palace."J But Dr.
Warton should have remembered (what he too often forgets in
his own verses) that, in cpite of Dr. Johnson's dictum, poetry is

* B. 1., c. iii., 7. Leigh Hunt, one of the most sympathetic of critics, has
remarked the passionate change from the third to the first person in the
last two verses.

t B. IL, c. viii.,3.

X Observations on Fa"/ry Queen, vol. i., pp. 158, 159. Mr. Hughes also
objects to Spenser's measure, that it is "closed always by a full-stop, in
the same place, by which every stanza is made as it were a distinct

.11

i *

( I

■\

SPENSER,

not prose, and that verse only loses its advantage over the
hitter l)v invading its province.* Verse itself is an absurdity,
except as an expression of some higher movement of the mind,
or as an expedient to lift other minds to the same ideal level.
It is the cothurnus which gives language an heroic stature. 1
have said that one leading characteristic of Spenser's style was
its spaciousness, that he habitually dilates rather than com-
presses. But his way of measuring time was perfectly natural
in an age when everybody did not carry a dial in his poke as
now. He is the last of the poets who went (without affecta-
tion) by the great clock of the firmament. Dante, the misar of
words, who gc^s by the same timepiece, is full of these round-
about ways of telling us the hour. It had nothing to do with
Spenser's stanza, and I for one should be sorry to lose these
stately revolutions of the siipcrnc mote. Time itself becomes
more noble when so measured ; we never knew before of
how precious a mnnnodity we had the wasting. Who would
prefer the plain time of day t»> this ?

or this ?

" Now wlu'ii Akk'ljarau was iiiounted high
Above tlio btarry Cassiopeia's chair ; "

" By this tlio nortliorn wagoner had set

His seveii-lolil teimi hejijnd the steadfast star

paragraph." (Todd's Spenser, II., xli.) But he could hardly have read the
pooiu attentively, for there are numerous Instances to tlie contrary.
Spenser was a consummate master of versiilcation, and not only diil
Marlowe and Sludcespeare learn of him, but I have little doubt that, IjuI
for the "Faery Queen," wo shoidd never have liad the varied majesty ol
Milton's blank-vcise.
* As where Dr. Warton himself says : —

" How nearly had my sphlt j)ast,

Till stopt |jy I.ietcalf's skilful hand,
To deatli'.s dark regions wide and waste

And the black river's mournful strand,
• Or to," etc.,

to the end of the next stanza. That is, I hail died but for Dr. Mctcalf's
boluses.

or this ?

I lor Dr. Mctcair.s

SPENSEIi. 63

Tliftt was ill ocoiin's waves yet never wet,

I5iit lirm is lixt juul .semletli liglit from far
To all that iu tlic wide ileep waiulcriuK are ; "

"At last the golden oriental gate

Of greatest heaven 'gan to open fair,
And l'}iaibus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate.

Came dancing forth, sliaking liis dewy hair -^
Antl luirls his glistening beams throngli dewy air."

The generous indcfiniteness, which treats an hour more or less
as of no account, is in keeping with that sense of e^idicss
leisures which it is one chief merit of the poem to suggest.
Ikit Spenser's dilatation extends to thoughts as well as to
phrases and images, lie does not love the concise. Yet his
dilatation is not mere distension, but the expansion of natural
I growth in the rich soil of his own mind, wherein the merest
stick of a verse puts forth leaves and blossoms. Here is one of
his, suggested by Homer :* —

•* Ui)OU the top of all his lofty crest
A bunch of hairs discolouretl diversely,
Witii sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest,
Did sliake, and seemed to dance for jollity ;
Like to an almond-true ymouuted high
On top of green Selinus all alone
With blossoms brave bedeckec^ daintily.
Whose tender locks do tremble every one

At every little breath that under heaveu is blown."

And this is the way he reproduces five pregnant verses of

I Dante : —

" Seggendo iu piume
In fanui non si vieii, ne sotto coltre,

* Iliad, xvii., 55 seqq. Referred to in Upton's note on " Faery
iQiieen," B. I., c. vii., 32. Into what a breezy couplet trailing olf with an
|n](X;indrine has Homer's irvoial iravToitjjv dpifnov expantled ! Cliapman
|iiiifi)i'tuiiately lias slurred this passage iu his version, and Pope tittivated
lit more than usual in his. I have no otlier translation at hand. Marlowe
Iva.s so taken by this passage in Spenser that he put it bodily into his
\Tainbiuiaine.

rTTsessRsasiaaRffisn

'/> i!

64 SPENSER.

Bonzala qual chi sua vita cotiHuma,

Cotul vustigio in tuna di hu lancia

(jual fumo iu aero ud iu acqua la Buhiumo."*

" Whoso in pomp of proud estate, (iuoth she,

Does swim, and bathes himself in courtly bliss,

Does waste his days iu dark obscurity

And in oblivion ever burieii is ;

Where ease abounds it's eath to do amiss :

But who his limbs with labours and his mind

Behaves with cares, cannot so easy miss.

Abroad in arms, at home in studious kind.
Who seeks with painful toil shall Honour soonest And.

" In woods, iu waves, in wars, she wonts to dwell,

And will be found with peril and with paiD|

Ne can the man that moulds in idle cell

Unto her happy mansion attain ;

Before her gate high God did Sweat ordain,

And wakeful watches ever to abide ;

But easy is the way and passage plain

To pleasure's palace ; it may soon be spied,
And day and night lier doors to all stand open wide."f

Spenser's mind always demands this large elbow-room. His
thoughts are never pithily expressed, but with a stately and
sonorous proclamation, as if under the open sky, that seems to
me very noble. For example —

li^emOf xxiv., 46-52.

" For sitting upon down,
Or under qnilt, one cometh not to fame,
Withouten which whoso his life consumeth
Such vestige leaveth of himself on earth

As smoke in air or in the water foam/

-Longfellow.

It shows how little Dante was read during the last century that none of
the commcitators on Spenser notice his most important obligations to the
great Tuscan.

t "Faery Queen," B. II., c. iii., 40, 41.

—Longfellow.

SPENSER, 65

" Tli« noblo heart thnt harbours virtuous thought
And is with ohiM of glorious-greut intent
Can never rest until it forth have brouglit
The etorniil brood of glory excellent."*

)nc's very soul seems to dilate with that last verse. And here
a passage which Milton had read and remembered :—

" And is there care In Heaven ? and is there love
In lieavenly spirits to these creatures base,
Tliat may oompussiou of their evils move ?
There is : else much more wretched were the case
Of man than beasts : but 0, the exceeding grace
Of higliest Go<l, that loves his creatures so,
And all his works with mercy doth embrace,
That blessed angels he sends to and fro,

To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe !

" How oft do they their silver bowers leave,
To come to succour us that succour want t
How oft do they with golden pinions cleave
The fleeting skies like flying pursuivant.
Against foul flends to aid us militant !
They for us fight, they watch and duly ward,
And their bright squadrons round about us plant ;
And all for love and nothing for reward ;

0, why should heavenly God to men have such regard ? " f

lis natural tendency is to shun whatever is sharp and abrupt.
[e loves to prolong emotion, and lingers in his honeyed
tnsations like a bee in the translucent cup of a lily. So
itirely are beauty and delight in it the native element of
)enser, that, whenever in the "Faery Queen" you come
iddenly on the moral, it gives you a shock of unpleasant
irprise, a kind of grit, as when one's teeth close on a bit of
ravel in a dish of strawberries and cream. He is the most
lent of our poets. Sensation passing through emotion into
^very is a prime quality of his manner. And to read him puts
\e in the condition of revery, a state of mind in which our
Noughts and feelings float motionless, as one sees fish do in a

Ibid., B. I., c. v., 1. t Ihid.y B. U., c. viii., 1, 2.

555

SPENSER.

gentle stream, with just enough vibration of their fins to keep
themselves from going down with the currei'jl, while their
bodies yield indolently to all its soothing curves. He chooses
his language for its rich canorousness rather than for intensity
of meaning. To characterise his style in a single word, I
should call it costly. None but the daintiest and nicest phrases
will serve him, and he allures us from one to the other with
such cunning baits of alliteration, and such sweet lapses of
verse, that never any word seems more eminent than the rest,
nor detains the feeling to eddy around it, but you must go on to
the end before you have time to stop and muse over the wealth
that has been lavished on you. But he has characterised
and exemplified his own style better than any description
could do : —

" For round about the walls yclotlied were

With goodly arras of great majesty,

Woven with gold and silk so close and near

That the rich metal lurked privily

As fainiug to be hid from envious eye ;

Yet here and there and everywhere, un wares

It showed itself and shone unwillingly

Like to a discoloured snake whose hidden snares
Through the green grass his long bright-burnished back
declares."*

And of the lulling quality of his verse take this as a sample ;—

*' And, more to lull him in his slumber soft,
A trickling stream from high rock tuaibling dowu
And ever drizzling rain uj)ou the loft,
Mixt with the murmuring wind much like the soiiu
Of swarming bees did cast him in a swoon.
No other noise, nor peoples' troublous cries,
As still are wont to annoy the walled town.
Might there be heard : but careless quiet lies

Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies, "f

In the world into which Spenser carries us there is neither
time nor space, or rather it is outside of and independent of
them both, and so is purely ideal, or, more truly, imaginary i

B. III., c. xi., 28.

t B. I., c. i., 41.

/ V

SPENSER,

;ir fins to keep
i,t, while their
IS. He chooses
an for intensity

single word, I
d nicest phrases

the other with
sweet lapses of
,t than the rest,
)U must go on to
I over the wealth
is characterised
any description

fyet

ires

snares
nislied back

as a sample :-

Qg dowu

e tbo soim

es,

'^11

lies

there is neither
d independent o(
truly, imaginary;

L, 41.

is full of form, colour, and all earthly luxury, and so far, if
^. . ^al, yet apprehensible by the senses. There are no men and
omen in it, yet it throngs with airy and immortal shapes that
ave the likeness of men and women, and hint at some kind of
brcgonc reality. Now this place, somewhere between mind
nd matter, between soul and sense, between the actual and the
ossible, is precisely the region which Spenser assigns (if I
ave rightly divined him) to the poetic susceptibility of im-
ression —

" To reign in the air from earth to liighest sky."

nderneath every one of the senses lies the soul and spirit of
;t, dormant till they are magnetised by some powerful emotion.

hen whatever is imperishable in us recognises for an instant
nd claims kindred with something outside and distinct

\wom

it, yet in some inconceivable way a part of it, that

Jashes back on it an ideal beauty which impoverishes all
ther companionship. This exaltation with which love some-
Imes subtilises the nerves of coarsest men so that they feel and
fee, not the thing as it seems to others, but the beauty of it, the
joy of it, the soul of eternal youth that is in it, would appear to
lave been the normal condition of Spenser. While the senses
>f most men live in the cellar, his " w°re laid in a large upper
thamber which opened toward the sunrising."

"His birth was of the womb of morning dew,
And his conception of the joyous prime."

'he very greatest poets (and is there, after all, more than one
)f them?) have a way, I admit, of getting within our inmost
:onsciousness and in a manner betraying us to ourselves.

'here is in Spenser a remoteness very different from this, but
|t is also a seclusion, and quite as agreeable, perhaps quite as

wholesome in certain moods when we are glad to get away from
)urselves and those importunate trifles whi^h we gravely call
the realities of life. In the warm Mediterrai.ean of his mind
jverything

"Suffers a sea-change
Into something rich and strauge."

SPENSER.

He lifts everything, not beyond recognition, but to an ideal
distance where no moital, I had almost said human, fleck is
visible. Instead of the ordinary bridal gifts, he hallows his
wife witn an Epithalamion fit for a -jnscious goddesr., and the
" savage soil "* of Ireland becomes a turf of Arcady under her
feet, where the merchants' daughters of the town are no more
at home than the angels and the fair shapes of pagan
mythology whom they meet there. He seems to have had a
common-sense side to him, and could look at things (if we may
judge by his tract on Irish affairs) in a practical and even hard
way ; but the moment he turned toward poetry he fulfilled the
condition which his teacher Plato imposes on poets, and had
not a particle of prosaic understanding left. His fancy,
habitually moving about in words not realised, unrealises
everything at a touch. The critics blame him because in his
Prothalamion the subjects of it enter on the Thames as swans
and leave it at Temple Gardens as noble damsels ; but to those
who are grown familiar with his imaginary world such a trans-
formation seems as natural as in the old legend of the Knight
of the Swan.

" Come, now, ye damsels, daughters of Delight,
Help quickly her to dight :
But first come ye, fair Hours, which were begot
In Jove's sweet paradise of Day and Night, . . ,
And ye three handmaids of the Cyprian Queen,
The which do still adorn her beauty's pride,
Help to adorn my beautifr.lest bride.

• • • • t

Crown ye god Bacchus with a coronal.
And Hymen also crown with wreaths of vina,
And let the Graces dance unto the rest —
For they can do it best.
The whiles the maidens do their carols sing.
To which the woods shall answer and their echo ring."

* This phrase occurs in the sonn. t addressed to the Earl of Ormond, an:
in that to Lord Grey de Wilton in the series prefixed to the "Faen
Queen." These sonnets are of a much stronger build than the " Amoretti,
and some of them (especially that to Sir John Norris) recall the firm trea;
of Milton'3, though differing in structuio.

ii.

SPENSER.

lUt to an ideal
luman, flcLk is
he hallows his
)ddesr3, and the
cady under her
m are no more
apes of pagan
5 to have had a
lings (if we may
1 and even hard
f he fulfilled the
poets, and had
ft. His fancy,
lised, unrealises
1 because in his
rhames as swans
els ; but to those
rid such a trans-
nd of the Knight

ght,
begot

/• • • •

^ueen,
de,

vine,

ing,

echo ring."

Earl of Ormond, anc
fixed to the " Faery
than the "Amoretti,
) recall the firm trea.

The whole "Epithalamion" is very noble, with an organ-like
l-oli and majesty of numbers, while it is instinct with the same
|oyousness which must have been the familiar mood of Spenser.
[t is no superficial and tiresome merriment, but a profound
ielight in the beauty of the universe, and in that delicately-
surfaced nature of his which was its mirror and counterpart,
ladness was alien to him, and at funerals he was, to be sure, a
lecorous mourner, as could not fail with so sympathetic a
;mperament ; but his condolences are graduated to the unim-
^assioned scale of social requirement. Even for Sir Philip
Sidney his sighs are regulated by the official standard. It was
an unreal world that his affections found their true object
id vent, and it is in an elegy of a lady whom he had never
|[nown, that he puts into the mouth of a husband whom he has
ivaporated into a shepherd, the two most naturally pathetic
verses he ever penned : —

"I hate the day because it lendeth light
To see all things, but not my love to see."*

|n the "Epithalamion" there is an epithet which has been much
Admired for its felicitous tenderness : —

" Behold, whiles she before the altar utands,
Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes
And blesseth her with his two happy hands."

Jut the purely impersonal passion of the artist had already

fuided him to this lucky phrase. It is addressed by Holiness —

dame surely as far abstracted from the enthusiasms of love as

/e can readily conceive of — to Una, who, like the visionary

[elen of Dr. Faustus, has every charm of womanhood, except

j^hat of being al ve, as Juliet and Beatrice are.

" happy earth,
Whereon thy innocent feet do ever tread ! "t

'an we conceive of Una, the fall of whose foot would be as
50ft as that of a rose-leaf upon its mates already fallen — can we

« ((

Daphuaida," 407, 408.

t "Faery Queen," B. I., c. x., 9.

n't

• !V

■ 1 ,

i 3

111

SPENSER.

conceive of her treading anything so sordid ? No it is only
on some unsubstantial floor of dream that she walks securely,
herself a dream. And it is only when Spenser has escapcil
thither, only when this glamour of fancy has rarefied his wife
lill she is grown almost as purely a creature of the imagina-
tion as the other ideal images with which he converses, that
his feeling becomes as nearly passiorinre — as nearly human, I
was on the point of saying— as with him is possible. I am so
far frum blaming this idealising property of his mind, that 1
find it admirable in him. It is his quality, not his defect.
Without some touch of it life would be unendurable prose. If
I have called the world to which he transports us a world of
unreality, I have wronged him. It is only a world of unrealism.
It is from pots and pans and stocks and futile gossip and inch-
long politics that he emancipates us, and makes us free of that
to-morrow, always coming and never come, where ideas shall
reign supreme.* But I am keeping my readers from the sweetest
idealisation that love ever wrought : —

" Unto this place wlienas the elfin knight
Approached, him seemed that the merry soud''
Of a shrill pipe, he playing heard on height,
And many feet fast thumping ^he hollow ground,
That through the woods their echo did rebound ;
He niglier drew to wit what '": mote be.
There he a troop of ladies dancing found
Full merrily and nipping gladful glee ;

And in the midst a shepherd piping he did see.

" He durst not enter into the open green
For dread of them unwares to be descried,
For breaking of their dance, if he were seen ;
But in the covert of the wood did bide
Beholding all, yet of them unespied ;
There he did see that pleased so much his sight

■'•■ Strictly taken, perhaps his Avorld is not much more imaginary than
ttat of other epic poets, Homer (in the Iliad) included. lie wlio is
fair iliar with mediiuval epics will be extremely cautious in drawin,'
inferences as to contemporary manners from Homer. He evidently
archaises like the rest.

SPENSER.

No it is only
walks securely,
IX has escajjcil
I re fie d his wife
)f the imagina-
converses, that
learly human, I
sible. I am so
is mind, that I
not his defect,
•able prose. If
; us a world of
Id of unrealism.
Dsslp and inch-

us free of that
lere ideas shall
om the sweetest

SOUP';

:lit,

ground,
bouud ;

see.

;eii;

re imaginary than
uded. lie who is
itious in drawing
er. He evidently

That even he himself his eyes envied,
A hundred naked maidens lily-white,
All ranged in a ring and dancing in delight.

" All they without were ranged in a ring,
And danced round ; but in the midst of them
Three other ladies did both dance and sing.
The while the rest them round about did hem.
And like a garland did in compass stem.
And in the midst of these same three was placed
Another damsel, as a })recious gem
Amidst a ring most richly well enchased,

That with her goodly presence all the rest much graced.

" Look how the crown which Ariadne wove
Upon her ivory forehead that same day,
Tliat Theseus her unto his bridal bore
(When the bold Cantaurs made that bloody fray,
"With t^.ie fierce Lapithes, that did them dismay),
Being now placed in the firmament,
Through the bright heaven doth her beams display,
And is unto the stars an ornament.

Which round about her move in order excellent ;

" Such was the beauty of this goodly band.
Whose sundry parts were here too long to tell,
But she that in the midst of them did stand,
Seemed all the rest in beauty to excel,
Crowned with a rosy garland that right well
Did her beseem. And, ever as the crew
About her danced, .«jv,'ceu flowers that far did smell,
And fragrant odours they upon her threw ;

3ut most of all those three did her with gifts endue.

" Those were the graces, Daughters of Delight,
Handmaids of Venus, which are wont to haunt
Upon this hill and dance there, day and night;
Those three to men all gifts of grace do grant
And all that Venus in herself doth vaunt
Is borrowed of them ; but that fair one
That in the midst was placed paravant,
Was she to whom that shepherd piped alone,

That niade him pipe so merrily, as never none.

■ S'

V .1

V **

72 SPENSER.

" She V VH, to wcet, that jolly shci»lKrtVs las8
Which piped there unto that merry rout ;
Tliat joiiy shepherd that there piped was
Poor Colin Clout (who knows not Colin Clout ? ) ;
He piped apace while they him danced about ;
Pipe, jolly shepherd, pipe thou now apace,
Unto thy love that made thee low to lout ;
Thy love is present there with thee in place,

Thy love is there advanced to be another Grace." *

Is there any passage in any poet that so ripples and sparkles
with simple delight as this ? It is a sky of Italian April, full of
sunshine and the hidden ecstasy of larks. And we like it all
the more that it reminds us of that passage in his friend
Sidney's Arcadia^ where the shepherd-boy pipes "at; if he
would never be old." If we compare it with the mystical scene
in Dante,t of which it is a reminiscence, it will seem almost
like a bit of real life ; but taken by itself, it floats as unconcerned
in our cares and sorrows and vulgarities as a sunset cloud.
The sound of that pastoral pipe seems to come from as far
away as Thessaly, when Apollo was keeping sheep there.
Sorrow, the great idealiser, had had the portrait of Beatrice on
her easel for years, and every touch of her penci' transfigured
the woman more and more into the glorified saint. But
Elizabeth Nagle was a solid thing of fiesh and blood, who
would sit down at meat with the poet on the very day when he
had thus beatified her. As Dante was drawn upward from
heaven to heaven by the eyes of Beatrice, so was Spenser lifted
away from the actual by those of that ideal Beauty whereof his
mind had conceived the lineaments in its solitary musings over
Plato, but of whose haunting presence the delicacy of his senses
had already prcmonished him. The intrusion of the real
world upon this supersensual mood of his wrought an instant
disenchantment : —

" Much wondered Calidore at •'.his strange sight
Whose like before his eye had never seen,

* " Faery Queen," B. VI., c. x., 10-16. f Pmgatorio, XXIX., XXX.

), XXIX., XXX.

SPENSER 73

And, standing long astonished in sprite
And rapt with pleasance, wist not what to weon,
Whether it were the train of Beauty's Queen,
Or Nymphs, or Fairies, or enchanted show
With wliich his eyes might liave deluded been,
Tlierefore resolving what it was to know,
Out of the woods he rose and toward them di'T go.

" But soon as he appeared to their view
They vanished all away out of his sight
And clean were gone, which way he never knew,
All save the shepherd, who, for fell despite
Of that displeasure, broke his bagpipe quite."

[Ben Jonson said that "he had consumed a whole night
>king to his great toe, about which he had seen Tartars and
irks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination ;"
id Coleridge has told us how his " eyes made pictures when
5y were shut." This is not ujiccmmon, but I fancy that
tenser was more habitually poisessed by his imagination
m is usual even with poets. His visions must have accom-
bied him "in glory and in joy" along the common thorough-
res of life, and seemed to him, it may be suspected, more
il than the men and women he met there. His " most fine
^irit of sense " would have tended to keep him in this exalted
bod. I must give an example of the sensuousness of which
(have spoken : —

" And in the midst of all a fountain stood
Of richest substance that on earth might be,
So pure and shiny that the crystal flood
Through every channel ninning one might see ;
Most goodly it with curious imagery
Was overwrought, and shapes of naked boys.
Of which some seemed with lively jollity
To fly about, playing their wanton toys,

Whilst others did themselves embay in liquid joys.

" And over all, of purest gold was spread
A trail of ivy in his native hue ;
For the rich metal was so coloured
That he who did not well avised it view

\ ;

i w

\ .

«.- -Tt,,t .

^y^

■

! 'I ii]

1 }'

ft r

: f

I '

i'.> f

i!'

74 SPENSEIi.

Would 8ur«ly deem it to bo ivy true ;
Low his lascivious iiriiis adown did creep
TliJit themselves dijjping in the silver dew
Tlieir fleecy flowers they tenderly di<l steep,
Wldch drops of crystal seemed for wantonness to weep.

" Infinite streams continually did well
C it of this fountain, sweet and fair to ser,
Th » which into an ti^uple la-'er fell,
/i nd shortly grew to so great quantity
ITiat like a little lake it seemed to be
'»V'.9se depth exceeded not three cubits* height,
I'h.a 'hrough the waves one might tlie bottom u^i
All paved beneath with jasper shining bright.

That seemed the fountain in that sea did sad upright.

' ' And all the margent round about was set
With shady laurel-trees, thence to defend
The sunny beams which on the billows l)et.
And those which therein bathed mote oft'end.
As Guyon happened by the sama to wend,
Two naked Damsels he therein espied,
Which therein bathing seemed to contend
And wrestle wantonly, ne cared to hide

'i'heir dainty parts from view of any which them eyed.

" Sometimes the one would lift the other quite
Above the waters, and then down again
Her plunge, as overmastered by might,
Where both awhile would covered remain,
And each the other from to rise restrain ;
The whiles their snowy limbs, as through a veil,
So through the crystal waves appeared plain :
Then suddenly both would themselves unhele,

And the amorous sweet spoils to greedy eyes reveal.

" As that fair star, the messenger of morn.
His dewy face out of the sea doth rear ;
Or as the Cyprian goddess, newly born
Of the ocean's fruitful froth, did first appear ;
Such seemed they, and so their yellow hear
Crystalline humour dropped down apace.
Whom such when Guyon saw, he drew him r'^ar,
And somewhat gaii relent his earnest pace ;

His stubborn breast gan secret pleasance to embrace.

SPENSER.

*' The vanton MaUens him espying, stood
Gazii " awliile at Ins unwonted ,[,'uise ;
Then the one hernelf low ducktd in the flood,
Ahiished that her ; stranger did avise ;
But the otlu-r r; .ncr higher did arise,
And her two lily i)a)).s aloft displayed,
And all that might ins melting lieart entice
To her delights, she unto him bewrayed ;

The rest, hid underneath, him more desirous nuido.

" With that the other likewise up arose,
And her fair locks, which formerly were bound
Ui» in one knot, she low adown did loose,
Which Mowing long and thick her clotlied ar-^. uc^.
And the ivory in golden mantle gowned :
So that fair spectacle from him was reft,
Yet that which relt it no less fair was found "
Ho hid in lock? and waves from lookers' +'ieft.

Naught but her lovely face she for his loo' • ;; 1,

ft.

*' Withal she laughed, and she blushed withal.
That blushing to her laughter gave more grace,
And laxighter to her blushing, as did fall.

• • • • •

Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound,
Of all that mote delight a dainty ear.
Such as at once might not on living ground,
Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere :
Eight hard it was for wight which did it hear
To read what manner music that mote be ;
For all that pleasing is to living ear
Was there consorted in one harmony ;
Birds, voices, instruments, winds, waters, all agree.

" The joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade.
Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet ;
The angelical soft trembling voices made
To the instruments divine respondence mete ;
The silver-sounding instruments did meet
With the base murmur of the Avater's fall ;
The water's fall with ditierenco discreet.
Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call ;

The gentle warbling wind low answered to all."

;

•t :

^''

IWIi

SPENSER.

?/' !

A--

,! t

Spenser, in one of his letters to Harvey, had said, " Why
a God's name, may not we, as else the Greeks, have th
kingdom of our own language ?'* This is in the tone of IJclla,
as is also a great deal of what is said in the epistle prefixed ;
the " Shepherd's Calendar." He would have been wiser had!'
followed more closely Bellay's advice about the introduction c
novel words : " Fear not, then, to innovate somewhat, partite
larly in a long poem, with modesty, however, with analog;;
and judgment of ear ; and trouble not thyself as to who m
think it good or bad, hoping that posterity will approve it— sb
who gives liaith to doubtful, light to obscure, novelty to antiqu;
usage to unaccustomed, and sweetness to harsh and rut;
things." Spenser's innovations were by no means alway
happy, as not always according with the genius of the la:
guage, and they have, therefore, not prevailed. He fom.
English words out of French or Italian ones, sometimes,
think, on a misapprehension of their true meaning ; nay, t
sometimes makes new ones by unlawfully grafting a scion c
Romance on a Teutonic root His theory, caught from Bella
of rescuing good archaisms from unwarranted oblivion, wi
excellent ; not so his practice of being archaic for the me;
sake of escaping from the common and familiar. A permissib
archaism is a word or phrase that has been supplanted t
something less apt, but has not become unintelligible ; ac
Spenser's often needed a glossary, even in his own day.* B
he never endangers his finest passages by any experiments
this kind. There his language is living, if ever any, and of o:
substance with the splendour of his fancy. Like all masters :
speech, he is fond of toying with and teasing it a little ; and
may readily be granted that he sometimes " hunted the lette:
as it was called, out of all cry. But even where his alliteratic
is tempted to an excess, its prolonged echoes caress the ei
like the fading and gathering reverberations of an Alpine hor.

* I find a goodly number of Yankeeisms in him, such as idee (c
as a rhyme) ; but the oddest is his twice spelling dew deow, wliicL
just as one would spell it who wished to phonetise its sound in lu:

New England.

had said, " Wh
J reeks, have ili
le tone of Bella;
pistle prefixed ;
been wiser had h
.16 introduction c
jmewhat, partic.
er, with analog;
ilf as to who ma
11 approve it— sh
lovelty to antique
harsh and ruci
10 means alwav
genius of the la:
ailed. He fonr.
nes, sometimes,
meaning ; nay, I
;rafting a scion (
lught from Bella
ited oblivion, wi
laic for the me;
lar. A permissib;
len supplanted 1:
nintelligible ; ai
s own day.* B.
my experiments :
er any, and of o:
Like all masters (
g it a little ; and
hunted the lette:
ere his alliteratic
loes caress the e^
of an Alpine hor.

pi, sucU as idee

dew deow,
e its sound

■svliicl.
in I'li:

SPENSER.

Id one can find in his heart to forgive even such a debauch of
Itial assonances as

** Kftsooiics her shallow ship away cUd sliilo,
More swil't than swallow Hhears the liquid sky."

^nerally, he scatters them at adroit intervals, reminding us of

arrangement of voices in an ancient catch, where one voice
tes up the phrase another has dropped, and thus seems

give the web of harmony a firmer and more continuous
ktuie.

Ither poets have held their mirrors up to nature, n.irrors
U differ very widely in the truth and beauty of the images
ty reflect ; but Spenser's is a magic glass in which we see
shr.dows cast back from actual life, but visionary shapes
fjjured up by the wizard's art from some confusedly remem-
red past or some impossible future. It is like one of those
pools of mediaeval legend which covers some sunken city
fche antique world — f. reservoir in which all our dreams seem
fhave been gathered. As we float upon it, we see that it
ttures faithfully enough the summer-clouds that drift over it,

trees that grow about its margin ; but in the midst of these
idowy echoes of actuality we catch faint tones of bells that
^m blown to us from beyond the horizon of time, and looking

m into the clear depths, catch glimpses of towers and far-

|ning knights and peerless dames that waver and are gone.

it a world that ever was, or shall be, or can be, or but a

jusion ? Spenser's world, real to him, is real enough for us

(take a holiday in, and we may well be content with it when

earth we dwell on is so often too real to allow of such vaca-
js. It is the same kind of world that Petrarca's Laura has
jlked in for five centuries, with all ears listening for the music
iher footfall.

'he land of Spenser is the land of Dream, but it is also the
id of Rest. To read him is like dreaming awake, without
;n the trouble of doing it yourself, but letting it be done for

by the finest dreamer that ever lived, who knows how to
lour his dreams like life, and make them move before you in

■ It

:I '

K
1 fr

\' n>

■ I

^ ^/

SPENSEK.

music. They seem singing to you as the sirens to Guyon, an;
wc linj^cr lilcc him : —

"O, thou fair son of f,'«'ntlo Faery
That art in iniLjhty arms most iiia,t,'nifi«'d
AIjovo all knights that ever buttU; ti ioil,
O, turn thy rudder liithtTward uwhile,
Here may thy storm-beat vessel safely ride,
This is the port of rest from troublous toil,

The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil.*

" With that the rolling sea, resounding swift

In his big bass, them fitly answnred,

And on the rock the waves, breaking aloft,

A solemn mean unto them measured,

The whiles sweet Zephyrus loud whistelcd

His treble, a strange kind of harmony

Whifh Guyon's senses softly tickelid

That he the boatnum bade row easily
And let him hear some part of their rare melody."

Despite Spenser's instinctive tendency to ideaUse, and
habit of distilling out of the actual an ethereal essence ;:!
which very little of the possible seems left, yet his mind, al
is generally true of great poets, was founded on a solid basis ai
good-sense. I do not know where to look for a more cogerj
and at the same time picturesque confutation of Socialism thi
in the Second Canto of the Fifth Book. If I apprehend rightljj
his words and images, tliere is not only subtile but profouncj
thinking here. The French Revolution is prefigured in tliij
well-meaning but too theoretic giant, and Rousseau's fallacie
exposed two centuries in advance. Spenser was a consciooJ
Englishman to his inmost fibre, and did not lack the sound

* This song recalls that in Dante's Purgatorio (xix., 19-24), in wliia
the Italian tongue puts forth all its siren allurements. Browne's b(\iuti]
ful verses ("Turn, hither turn your winged pines") were suggested b|
these of Spenser. It might almost seem as if Spenser had here, iu
usual way, exi)anded the swee«; old verses : —

" Merry sungen the monks binnen Ely
When Knut king rew thereby ;
* Roweth kniphtes near the lend,
That 1 may hear these monkes song.'"

SPENSER,

i to Guyon, an

iLrmcnt in politics which hclongs to his race. He was the
lore KhkIis'i for living in Ireland, and there is something that
[ovcs us deeply in the exile's passionate cry :—

«' Dear C'oimtry ! liow dearly dear
OiiKlit tl>y nMuciiibraiuu! mid iierpi'tiial It.int^
IJo to tliy foster-cliild thut from thy hand
Did common breath and nouritnre receive I
IIow brutish Ls it not to understand
How much to lier wo owe that all us gave,
That gave unto us all whatever good we have I "

His race shows itself also where he tells us that
" cliiclly skill to ride seem.s a science
Proper to gentle blood,"

Ihich reminds one of Lord Herbert of Chcrbury's saying that
le finest sight God looked down on was a fine man on a fine
)rsc.

Wordsworth, in the supplement tohia preface, tells us that the

iFaery Queen" "faded before" Sylvester's translation of Du

(artas. But Wordsworth held a brief tor himself in this case,

k1 is no exception to the proverb about men who are their own

Uorncys. His statement i'< wholly unfounded. Both poems, no

)ubt, so far as popularity is concerned, yielded to the graver

iterests of the Civil War. But there is an appreciation much

kightier than any that is implied in mere popularity, and the

(itality of a poem is to be measured by the kind as well as the

[iiount of influence it exerts. Spenser has coached more poets

id more eminent ones than any other writer of English verse.

need say nothing of Milton, nor of professed disciples hke

Irowne, t^ e two Fletchers, and More. Cowley tells us that he

^ccame " ir -^ecoverably a poet " by reading the *' Faery Queen"

^hen a boy. Dryden, whose case is particularly in point because

^e confesses Having been seduced by Du Bartas, tells ns that

jpenser had been his master in English. He regret*;, indeed,

^omically enough, that Spenser could not have read ';tici rules of

Jossu, but adds that " no man was ever born witb .i greater

([enius or more knowledge to support it." Pope says, " There

something in Spenser that pleases one as strongly in one's

SPENSEI^.

i X 1

old age as it did in one's youth. I read the * Faery Queen
when I was about twelve with a vast deal of delight ; and 1
think it gave me as much when I read it over about a year o:
two ago." Thomson wrote the most delightful of his poems in
the measure of Spenser ; Collins, Gray, and Akenside shov,
traces of him ; and in our own day his influence reappears ir,
Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Landor is, I believe,
the only poet who ever found him tedious. Spenser's mere
manner has not had so many imitators as Milton's, but nc
other of our poetr has given an impulse, and in the righ;
direction also, to so many and so diverse minds ; above all, no
other has given to so many young souls a consciousness o:
their wings and a delight in the use of them. He is a standing
protest against the tyranny of Commonplace, and sows the
seeds of a noble discontent with prosaic views of life and the
dull uses to which it may be put.

Three of Spenser's own verses best characterise the feelinj
his poetry gives us : —

" Among wide waves set like a little nest,"
" "Wrapt in eternal silence far from enc^mies,"
" The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil."

We are wont to apologise for the grossness ot our favouritel
authors sometimes by saying that their age was to blame ancl
not they ; and the excuse is a good one, for often it is the fraril;|
word that shocks us while we tolerate the thing. Spense:|
needs no such extenuations. No man can read the "Faen|
Queen" and be anything but the better for it. Through tha:|
rude age, when Maids of Honour drank beer for breakfast ancl
Hamlet could say a gross thing to Ophelia, he passes serenely^
abstracted and high, the Don Quixote of poets. Whoever cai|
endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painti
ing and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thouglii
and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, le:|
him read in the " Faery Queen." There is the land of pun^
heart's ease, where no ache or sorrow of spirit can enter.

jrise the feelinj

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

T may be doubted whether any language be rich enough to
maintain more than one truly great poet — and whether
iere be more than one period, and that very short, in the life
^' a language, when such a phenomenon as a great poet is

)ssible. It may be reckoned one of the rarest pieces of good-

ick that ever fell to the share of a race, that (as was true of

fhakespeare) its most rhythmic genius, its acutest intellect, its

rofoundest imagination, and its healthiest understanding

lould have been combined in one man, and that he should

ive arrived at the full development of his powers at the
loment when the material in which he was to work — that
^onderful composite called English, the best result of the
mfusion of tongues — was in its freshest perfection. The
English-speaking nations should build a monument to the
lisguided enthusiasts of the Plain of Shinar ; for, as the
jixture of many bloods seems to have made them the most
igorous of modern races, so has the mingling of divers

)eeches given them a language which is perhaps the noblest
|i^hicle of poeiic thought that ever existed.

Had Shakespeare been born fifty years earlier, he would

Lve been cramped by a book-language not yet flexible enough
^r the demands of rhythmic emotion, not yet sufficiently

)pularised for the natural and familiar expression cf supreme
jought, not yet so rich in metaphysical phrase as to render

)ssible that ideal representation of the great passions which
the aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice and

ineral consent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to

ise and congruity of metrical arrangement. Had he been

)rn fifty years later, his ripened manhood would have found

556

:. I

,^li?n

I /

\ f

ii.

} 1

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

itself in an En[(land absorbed and angry with the solution 0:
political and rcligiotis problems, from which his whole naiur;
was averse, instead of in that Elizabethan social system
ordered and planetary in functions and degrees as the angel;.
hierarchy of the Areopagite, where his contemplative eye coul:
crowd itself with various and brilliant picture, and whence h::
impartial brain — one lobe of which seems to have beer.
Normanly refined and the other Saxo: ly sagacious — cou.l
draw its morals of courtly and wOiidly wisdom, its lessons 0:
prudence and magnanimity. In estimating Shakespeare, i.
should never be forgotten, that, like Goethe, he was essentially
observer and artist, and incapable of partisanship. Tht
passions, actions, sentiments, wdiose character and results h
delighted to watch and to reproduce, are those of man in socie;
as it existed ; and it no more occurred to him to question tli:
right of that society to exist than to criticise the divin:
ordination of the seasons. His business was with men as the
were, not with man as he ought to be — with the human so:
as it is shaped or twisted into character by the complex expcr
ence of life, not in its abstract essence, as something to b:
saved or lost. During the first half of the seventeenth centur
the centre of intellectual interest was rather in the other woiv
than in this — rather in the region of thought and principle a;.
conscience than in actual life. It was a generation in which th:!
poet was, and felt himself, out of place. Sir Thomas Brownell
our most in)aginative mind since Shakespeare, found breathin, 1
room, for a time, among the "(9 altitudmes /" of religioi;. J
speculation, but soon descended to occupy himself with th; 1
exactitudes of science. Jeremy Taylor, who half a centiri
earlier would have been Fletcher's rival, compels his clippe: ^
fancy to the conventual discipline of prose (Maid Marian turnei^
nun), and waters his poetic wine with doctrinal eloquenttl
Milton is saved from making total shipwreck of his lai-jje-l
utteranced genius on the desolate Noman's Land ot a religioul
epic only by the lucky help of Satan and his colleagues, \vit:|
whom, as foiled rebels and republicans, he cannot conceal lii|
sym.pathy. As purely poet, Shakespeare would have come to

11'

RE,

the solution o:
is whole naiun
social system,
i as the arige'i,:
)lative eye coui:
and whence h;:
to have heer.
a spacious — cou'.i
n, its lessons o;
Shakespeare, i.
^ was essentially
rtisanship. Ths
: and results V
)f man in socle;.
Li to question tk
icise the divine
,vith men as the;
the human sc:
complex expcr
something to b:
^nteenth centur
the other wor.c
nd principle an:
ion in which th:
'homas Brown;
found breathln,
■^/" of religioc
limself with th:
half a centur
ipels his clippe
d Marian turnei
rinal eloquence
ck of his large
nd of a religion:
colleagues, wit'
;mot conceal hi
have come to;

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

ite, had his lot fallen in that generation. In mind and tempera-
lent too exoteric for a mystic, his imagination could not have
[t once illustrated the influence of his epoch and escaped from
t, like that of Browne ; the equilibrium of his judgment, essen-
tial to him as an artist, but equally removed from propagandism,
Whether as enthusiast or logician, would have unfitted him for
J^c pulpit ; and his intellectual being was too sensitive to the
fonder and beauty of outward life and Nature to have found
latisfaction, as Mihon's could (and perhaps only by reason of his
)]indness), in a world peopled by purely imaginary figures.
Sv might fancy him becoming a great statesman, bu" he
ickcd the social position which could have opened that caieer
him. What we mean when we say Shakespeare^ is some-
jing inconceivable either during the reign of Henry the
Eighth, or the Commonwealth, and which would have been
ipossible after the Restoration.

All favourable stars seem to have been in conjunction at his
|ativity. The Reformation had passed the period of its vinous
irmentation, and its clarified reeults remained as an element
If intellectual impulse and exhilaration ; there were small signs
[et of the acetous and putrefactive stages which were to follow
the victory and decline cf Puritanism. Old forms of belief
|nd worship still lingered, all the more touching to Fancy,
jerhaps, that they were homeless and attainted ; the light of
:eptic day was baffled by depths of ^orest where superstitious
lapes still cowered, creatures of immemorial wonder, the raw
laterial of Imagination. The invention of printing, without
^et vulgarising letters, had made the thought and history of the
[ntire past contemporaneous ; while a crowd of translators put
[very man who could read in inspiring contact with the select
[ouls of all the centuries. A new world was thus opened to
Ucllectual adventure at the very trnie when the keel of
/olumbus had turned the first daring furrow of discovery in
lat unmeasured ocean which still girt the known earth with a
Reckoning horizon of hope and conjecture, which was still fed
^y rivers that flowed down out of primeval silences, and
^iiich still washed the shores of Dreamland. Under a wise,

1 » (

1/ i'

i I

■f

' n

i i

I i

i ^

i in

' I

i^i

, '

I' ■

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

cultivated, and firm-handed monarch, also, the national feelin
of England grew rapidly more homogeneous and intense, the
rather as the womanhood of the sovereign stimulated a more
chivalric loyalty ; while the new religion, of which she was the
defender, helped to make England morally, as it was geo-
graphically, insular to the continent of Europe.

If circumstances could ever make a great national poet, here
were all the elements mingled at melting-heat in the alembic,
and the lucky moment of projection wi.s clearly come. If a
great national poet could ever avail himself of circumstances,
this was th;^ occasion — and, fortunately, Shakespeare was equal
to it. Above all, we may esteem it lucky that he found word.^
ready to his use, original and untarnished — types of though;
whose sharp edges were unworn by repeated impressions. In
reading Hakluyt's Voyages^ we are almost startled now and
then to find that even common sailors could not tell the story of
their wanderings without rising to an almost Odyssean strain,
and habitually used a diction that we should be glad to buy
back from desuetude at any cost. Those who look upor.
language only as anatomists of its structure, or who regard it a-
only a means of conveying abstract truth from mind to mind, a:
if it were so many algebraic formulae, are apt to overlook the
fact that its being alive is all that gives it poetic value. We d:
not mean what is technically called a living language— the
contrivance, hollow as a speaking-trumpet, by which breathin.
and moving bipeds, even now, sailing o'er life's solemn mair
are enabled to hail each other and make known their mutiia
shortness of mental stores — but one that is still hot from tb
hearts and brains of a people, not hardened yet, but molten!;
ductile to new shapes of sharp and clear relief in tht moulds c:
new thought. So soon as a language has become literary, s
soon as there is a gap between the speech of books and that i
life, the language becomes, so far as poetry is concerned, almo:
as dead as Latin, and (as in writing Latin verses) a mind ::
itself essentially original becomes in the use of such a mediu;:
of utter, ;nce unconsciously reminiscential and reflective^ lui:
and not solar, in expression and even in thought. For wore

?^.

lational feeling
id intense, the
lulated a more
:h she was the
as it was geo-

onal poet, here
in the alembic,
rly come. If a
' circumstances,
oeare was equa!
he found word;
^pes of thou^lv.
mpressions. In
artled now and
: tell the story ot
Ddyssean strain,
be glad to buy
who look upor.
who regard it a-
nind to mind, a;
to overlook tliE
c value. Wedc

language— the
which breathinr
i's solemn mair,
wn their mutua
till hot from tht
yet, but moltenlj
in tht moulds c;
come literary, s:
jooks and that e
:oncerned, almo;:
erses) a mind ;:
if such a mediui;

reflective^ hi^
ight. For wora

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

tnd thoughts have a much more intimate and genetic relation,
fenc rtith the other, than most men have any notion of; and it
Ib one thing to use our mother-tongue as if it belonged to us,
%nd another to be the puppets of an overmastering vocabulary.
f Ye know not," says Ascham, "what hurt ye do to Learning,
Ihat care not for Words, but for Matter, and so make a Divorce
|>et\vixt the Tongue and the Heart." Lwi^ua Toscana in bocca
■^omana is the Italian proverb ; and that of poets should be,
■■The iongue of the people in the mouth of the scholar. I imply
liere no assent to the early theory, or, at any rate, practice, of
l^'ordsworth, who confounded plebeian modes of thought with

istic forms of phrase, and then atoned for his blunder by
Ibsconding into a diction more Latinised than that of any poet
If his century.

Shakespeare was doubly fortunate. Saxon by the father and
iKonnan by the mother, he was a representative Englishman.
|i country boy, he learned first the rough and ready English of
rustic mates, who knew how to make nice verbs and

Ijectives courtesy to their needs. Going up to London, he
Icquired the lins;ua aulica precisely at the happiest moment,
1st as it was becoming, in the strictest sens of the word,
wdcrn~]\x^\. as it had recruited itself, by fresh impressments
[cm the Latin and Latinised languages, with new words to
cpress the new ideas of an enlarging intelligence ^vhich printing
id translation were fast making cosmopolitan N'ords which,

propoition to their novelty, and to the fact . the mother-
mgue and the foreign had not yet wholly mir ^d, must have
|een used with a more exact appreciation of 'heir meaning.*

was in London, and chiefly by means of :. stage, that a
lorough amalgamation of the Saxon, Norn^an, and scholarly
lemcnts of English was brought about. Ai/eady, Puttenham,

his Arte of English Poesy^ declares that the practice of the
ipital and the country within sixty miles of it \ as the standard

correct diction, the jus ei norma loquendi. Already Spenser
id almost re-created English poetry — and it is interesting to

' * As where Ben Jonson is able to say —

"Men may securely sin, but safely never."

1 1

' IJ

' I ! I

...tf*5?^f'8

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

' ij

observe that, scholar as he was, the archaic words which he waj
at first over-fond of introducing are often provincialisms of
purely English original. Already Marlowe had brought the
English unrhymed pentameter (which had hitherto justified bui
half its name, by being always blank and never verse) to a
perfection of melody, harmony, and variety which has neve;
been surpassed. Shakespeare, then, found a language already
to 2. certain extent established^ but not yc: fetlocked by
dictionary and grammar mongers — a vers'fication harmonised,
but which had not yet exhausted all its modulations, nor bee,.
set in the stocks by critics who deal judgment on refractory
feet, that will dance to Orphean measures of which their judf;e:
are insensible. That the language was established is proved by
its comparative uniformity as used by the dramatists, \vh(
wrote for mixed audiences, as well as by Ben Jonson's satire
upon Marston's neologisms ; that it at the same time admittec
foreign words to the rights of citizenship on easier terms thar.
now is in good measure equally true. What was of greate:
import, no arbitrary line had been drawn between high word:
and low ; vulgar then meant simply what was common ; poetry
had not been aliened from the people by the establishment c:
an Upper House of vocables, alone entitled to move in th:
stately ceremonials of verse, and privileged from arrest whl:
they forever keep the promise of meaning to the ear and brea-
it to the sense. The hot conception of the poet had no time:
cool while he was debating the comparative respectability c
this phrase or that ; but he snatched what word his instinc
prompted, and saw no indiscretion in making a king speak a:
his country nurse might have taught him.* It was Waller wli;
first learned in France that to talk in rhyme alone compoite;
with the state of royalty. In the t'me of Shakespeare, tht
living tongue resembled that tree which Father Hue saw i:
Tartary, whose leaves were languaged — and every hidden roo;

* "Vulgarem locutionem appellamns c<am qua mfantes adsuefiunt
adsisteiitibus cum priniitus distinguere voces incipiuut : vel, quod Itnvi
dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus quam sine omni reni-'
nutricem inutantes aecepimus" — Dante sc?e Vulg. Eloqitio, Lib. I,, cap. i

i /

'<f

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

)f thought, every subtilest fibre of feeling, was mated by new
jho(jts and leafage of expression, fed from those unseen sources
In the common earth of human nature.
The Cabalists had a notion, that whoever found out the

lystic word for anything attained to absolute mastery over that
Ihing. The reverse of this is certainly true of poetic expres-
sion ; for he who is thoroughly possessed of his thought, who
Imaginatively conceives an idea or image, becomes master of
|he word that shall most amply and fitly uiter it. Heminge
ind Condell tell us, accordingly, that there was scarce a blot
In the manuscripts they received from Shakespeare ; and this
|s the natural corollary from the fact that such an imagination
IS his is as unparalleled as the force, variety, and beauty
)f the phrase in which it embodied itself.* We believe
that Shakespeare, like all other great poets. Instinctively
ised the dialect which he found current, and that his words
ire not more wrested from their or'''"»^ary meaning than
followed necessarily from the unwon •:({ weight of thought
)r stress of passion they were called on to support.
He needed not to mask familiar thoughts in the weeds
)f unfainiliar phraseology ; for the life that was in his

lind could transfuse the language of every day with an
intelligent vivacity, that makes it seem lambent with fiery
)ur]jose, and at each new reading a new creation. He could

Gray, liiinself a painful corrector, told Nicliolls tliat "notliing was

lone so well as at the first concoction" — adding, as a reason, "We tldnk

\\\ words." Ben Jonson said, it was a pity Shakespeare had not blotted

poie, for that he sometimes wrote nonsense — and cited in proof of it the

ircrse.

•' Cajsar did never wrens but with lust cause."

rill' last four words do not appear in the passage as it now stands, and

'lolL'Ssor Craik suggest;^ that they were stricken out in consecpience of

iii>nu's criticism. This is very probable ; but we suspect that the pen

til. it Ijlotted them was in the haml of Master Heminge or his colleague.
Ik' moral confusion m the idea was surely admirably characteristic of the

jt neral who had just accomplished a successful oni]) o'etat, the condemna-

ti"!i or which he would fancy that he read in tlie face of every honest man
I- met, and which he w-'iild tberefore be forever indirectly palliating.

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

say with Dante, that "no word had ever forced him to say
what he would not, though he had forced many a word to say
what it would not " — but only in the sense that the mighty
magic of his imagination had conjured out of it its uttermost
secret of power or pathos. When I say that Shakespeare used
the current language of his day, I mean only that he habitually
employed such language as was universally comprehensible—
that he was not run away with by the hobby of any theory as
to the fitness of this or that component of English for expres-
sing certain thoughts or feelings. That the artistic value ot a
choice and noble diction was quite as well understood in his
day as in ours is evident from the praises bestowed by
his contemporaries on Drayton, and by the epithet "well-
languaged " applied to Daniel, whose poetic style is as mouern
as that of Tennyson ; but the endless ^absurdities about the
comparative merits of Saxon and Norman-French, vented by
persons incapable of distinguishing one tongue from the other,
were as yet unheard of. Hasty generalisers are apt to over-
look the fact, that the Saxon was never, to any great extent, -
literary language. Accordingly, it held its own very well in the
names of common things, but failed to answer the demands of
complex ideas, derived from them. The author of " Piers
Ploughman " wrote for the people — Chaucer for the court.
We open at random and count the Latin * words in ten verses
of the "Vision" and ten of the " Romaunt of the Rose" a
translation from the French), and find the proportion to be
sevp.i in the former and five in the latter.

The organs of the Saxon have always been unwilling and stiff
in learning languages. He acquired only about as many
British words as we have Indian ones, and I believe that more
French and Latin was introduced through the pen and the eye
than through the tongue and the ear. For obvious reasons, the
question is one that must be decided by reference to prose-
writers, and not poets ; and it is, we think, pretty well settled
that more words of Latin original were brought into the

* We use the word Latin here to express words derived either mediately
or immediately from that language.

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

! IS as modern

lling and stiff
ut as many
3ve that more
n and the eye
s reasons, the
ice to Diose-
y well settled
ht into tht

ither mediately

mguage in the century between 1550 and 1650 than in the
ifhole period before or since— and for the simple reason, that
Ihcy were absolutely needful to express new modes and com-
>inations of thought.* The language has gained immensely,
)y the infusion, in richness of synonyme and in the power of

^pressing nice shades of thought and feeling, but more than all
light-footed polysyllables that trip singing to the music of
reisc. There are certain cases, it is true, where the vulgar
Jaxon word is refined, and the refined Latin vulgar, in poetry —
Is in sweat d.x\6. perspiration; but there are vastly more in which
jhe Latin bears the bell. Perhaps there might be a question

jtween the old English again-rising and resurrection; but

iere can be no d\ ubt that conscience is better than inwit^ and
\emorse than again-bih, vShould we translate the title of Words-
irorth's famous ode, *"• Intimations of Immortality," into " Hints
^f Ueathlessness," it would hiss like an angry gander. If,

istead of Shakespeare's

" Age cannot wither her,
Nor custom stale her infinite variety,"

re should say, "her boundless manifoldness," the sentiment
lid suffer in exact proportion with the music. What
)me-bred English could ape the high Roman fashion of such
)gated words as —

" The multitudinous sea iucarnadine " —

i'here the huddling epithet implies the tempest-tossed soul of
khe speaker, and at the san.e time pictures the wallowing waste
)f ocean more vividly than the famous phrase of i^schylus does
|ts rippling sunshine ? Again, sailor is less poetical than
mariner^ as Campbell felt, when he wrote,

" Ye mariners of England,"

ind Coleridge, when he chose

'* It was an ancient mariner,"
tther than

" It was an elderly seaman ; "

The prose of Chaucer (1390) and of Sir Thomas Malory (translating
rom the Frenrh, 1470) is less Latinised than that of Bacon, Browne,

:;-y«»t"Ni

■i..mm}

SHAKESPEARE Oi\CE MORE.

for it is as much the charm of poetry that it suggest a ccrtair,
remoteness and stranj;encss as familiarity ; and it is essential
not only that we feel at once the meaninj,^ of the words in |
themselves, but also their melodic meaning in relation to cacli
other, and to the sympathetic variety of the verse. A word I
once vulgari'^ed can rover be rehabilitated. We might sayj
now a buxofn lass, ci that a chambermaid was biixom^ but we*
could not use the term, as Milton did, in its original sense •
boivsomc — that is, liihc^ gracefully bcniiirii^*

But the secret of force in writing lies not so much in the
pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having J

'r\

, I

Taylor, or Milton. The glossary to Spenser's "Slieplicrd'a Calendar" (I'j'li
explains words of Teutonic and lionianic root in about equal proimr-j
tions. The parallel but independent development of Scotch is nottob«j
forgotten.

* I believe that for the last two centuries the Latin radical" of Engli^lj
have been more familiar and homelike to those who nse th^in than tliej
Teutonic. Even so accomplislied a person as Professor Craik, in liiij
English of Shakatpcare, derives head, tlirough tlie fierman haiipt, from tl:?j
Latin caput / I trust tliat its genealogy is nobler, and tliat it is oi' ki:.|
with ca'liinitueri, rather than with the Greek KecpaXri, if Suidas be rigliti[|
tracing the origin of that to a word meaning vacuity. Mr. Craik suggest'T
also, that quick and wicked may be etymologically identicali because liJ
fancies a relationship between busy and the German bijse, though ^richMiX
evidently the participial form of A.-S. loucan (German wcichcn), to him
to yield, meaning ime who has given 11 ay to temptation, while quick seeni;!
as clearly related to wegan, meaning to move, a different word, even I'l
radically the same. In the Limdnn Literary Gazette for November \%\
1858, 1 lind an extract from Miss Millington's Heraldry iru History, Podri
and Romance, in which, speaking of the motto of the Prince of Walt-,
Depar Houmout ich diene, she says : — " The precise meaning of the foriiit;^
word {^lloumonf] has not, I think, been ascertained." The word is plaiil;
the German Ilochmuth, and the whole would read, Depar (Aus) Hochm<i'l\
ich diene — *' Out of magnanimity I serve." So entirely lost is the Saxo
meaning of the word knave (A.-S. cnava, German knabe), that the uai;;t|
ncvvie, assumed by railway-labourers, has been transmogrified iiitj
navigator. I believe that more people could tell why the month of Jiilj|
was ^;o called than could explain the origin of the names for our days of tl;-
week, and that it is oftener the Saxon than the French words in Cli;nK.;|
that puzzle the modern reader.

A '

i I

kvl

• i'

"iE.

;gcst a CO I tain
it is essentia
the words i
'lation to cac!
'crse. A woi
kVe might sa
biixom^ but wf
iginal sense <i

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

isonuiliing ibat you believe in to say, and making the parts of
jpctcii vividly conscious of it. It is when expression becomes
in act of mcmc»ry, instead of an unconscious necessity, that
[diction takes the place of warm and hearty speech. It is not
iafo to attribute special virtues (as Hosworth, for example, does
to the Saxon) to words of whatever derivation, at least in
ipoiiiy. Because Lear's "oak-cleaving thunderbolts," and "the
lall-chcaded thunder-stone" in " Cymbeline," are so fine, we
[would not give up Milton's Virgilian " fulmined over (keece,"
Iwhcre the verb in English conveys at once the idea of flash and
[reverberation, but avoids that of riving and shattering. In the
experiments made for casting the great bell for the Westminster
howcr, it was found that the superstition which attributed the
remarkable sweetness and purity of tone in certain old bells to
the larger mixture of silver in their composition had no founda-
tion in fact. It was the cunning proportion in which the
ordinary metals were balanced against each other, the
perfection of form, and the nice gradations of thickness, that
wrought the miracle. And it is precisely so with the language of
poetry. The genius of the poet will tell him what word to use
(else what use in his being poet at all ?) ; and even then, unless
the proportion and form, whether of parts or whole, be all that
Art requires and the most sensitive taste finds satisfaction in,
he will have failed to make what shall vibrate through all its
parts with a silvery unison — in other words, a poem.

I think the component parts of English were in the latter
I years of Elizabeth thus exquisitely proportioned one to the
other. Yet Bacon had no faith in his mother-tongue, trans-
lating the works on which his fame was to rest into what he
called "the universal language," and affirming that "English
would bankrupt all our books." He was deemed a master of it,
nevertheless ; and it is curious that Ben Jonson applies to him
in prose the same commendation which he gave Shakespeare
in verse, saying, that he " performed that in our tongue which
may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or
hail i^hiy Rome ;'''* and he adds this pregnant sentence: "In
short, within his view and about his time were all the wits born

«'

! 4

vj4;i

IMAGE EVALUATION
TEST TARGET (MT-3)

1.0

1.1

■tt lU 12.2
Sf l£& 12.0

Photographic

Sciences

Corporalion

■1>'

' '"^L

^^V

^:*^% ""

33 WIST MAIN STRHT

WnSTIR.N.Y. MSM

(716)S72-4S03

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

that could honour a language or help study. Now things daily
fall : wits grow downwards, eloquence grows backwards." Ben
had good reason for what he said of the wits. Not to speak of
science, of Galileo and Kepler, the sixteenth century was a
spendthrift of literary genius. An attack of immortality in a
family might have been looked for then as scarlet-fever would
be now. Montaigne, Tasso, and Cervantes were born within
fourteen years of each other ; and in England, while Spenser
was still delving over the propria qua maribus, and Raleigh
launching paper navies, Shakespeare was stretching his baby
hands for the moon, and the little Bacon, chewing on his coral,
had discovered that impenetrability was one quality of matter.
It almost takes one's breath away to think that *' Hamlet" and
the "Novum Organon" were at the risk of teething and
measles at the same time. But Ben was right also in thinking
that eloquence had grown backwards. He lived long enough
to see the language of verse become in a measure traditionary
and conventional. It was becoming so, partly from the neces-
sary order of events, partly because the most natural and
intense expression of feeling had been in so many ways
satisfied and exhausted— but chiefly because there was no man
left to whom, as to Shakespeare, perfect conception gave
perfection of phrase. Dante, among modern poets, his only
rival in condensed force, says : " Optimis conceptionibus optima
loquela conveniet ; sed optimae conceptiones non possunt esse
nisi ubi scientia et ingenium est ; . . . et sic non omnibus
Tersificantibus optima loquela convenit, cum plerique sine
scientii et ingenio versificantur." *

Shakespeare must have been quite as well aware of the
provincialism of English as Bacon was ; but he knew that
great poetry, being universal in its appeal to human nature,
can make any language classic, and that the men whose

* De VvXgari Eloquio, Lib. II., cap. i., adfinem. I quote this treatise
as Dante's, because the thoughts seem manirestly his ; though I believe
that in its present form it is an abridgment by some transcriber, who
sometimes copies textually, and sometimes substitntes his own language
for that of the original. ,

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

appreciation is immortality will mine through any dialect to
get at an original soul. He had as much confidence in his
home-bred speech as Bacon had want of it, and exclaims : —

" Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

He must have been perfectly conscious of his genius, and of
the great trust which he imposed upon his native tongue as the
enibodier and perpetuator of it. As he has avoided obscurities
in his sonnets, he would do so a fortiori in his plays, both for
the purpose of immediate effect on the stage and of future
appreciation. Clear thinking makes clear writing, and he who
has shown himself so eminently capable of it in one case is not
to be supposed to abdicate intentionally in others. The
difficult passages in the plays, then, are to be regarded either
as corruptions, or else as phenomena in the natural history of
Imagination, whose study will enable us to arrive at a clearer
theory and better understanding of it.

While I believe that our language had two periods of
culmination in poetic beauty— one of nu.ure, simplicity, and
truth, in the ballads, which deal only with narrative and feeling
—another of Art (or Nature as it is ideally reproduced through
the imagination), of stately amplitude, of passionate intensity
and elevation, in Spenser and the greater dramatists — and that
Shakespeare made use of the latter as he found it, I by no
means intend to say that he did not enrich it, or that any
inferior man could have dipped the same words out of the great
poet's inkstand. But he enriched it only by the natural
expansion and exhilaration of which it was conscious, in
yielding to the mastery of a genius that could turn and wind it
like a fiery Pegasus, making it feel its life in every limb. He
enriched it through that exquisite sense of music (never
approached but by Marlowe), to which it seemed eagerly
obedient, as if every word said to him,

" Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear,"

as if every latent harmony revealed itself to him as the gold to
Brahma, when he walked over the earth where it was hidden,

•'f^

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

HI \

\ I

crying, " Here am I, Lord ! do with me what thou wilt !" That
he used language with that intimate possession of its meaning
possible only to the most vivid thought is doubtless true ; but
that he wantonly strained it from its ordinary sense, that he
found it too poor for his necessities, and accordingly coined
new phrases, or that, from haste or carelessness, he violated
any of its received proprieties, I do not believe. I have said that
it was fortunate for him that he came upon an age when our
language was at its best ; but it was fortunate also for us, because
our costliest poetic phrase is put beyond reach of decay in the
gleaming precipitate in which it united itself with his thought.

That the propositions I have endeavoured to establish have a
direct bearing in various ways upon the qualifications of
whoever undertakes to edit the works of Shakespeare will, 1
think, be apparent to those who consider the matter. The hold
which Shakespeare has acquired and maintained upon minds so
many and so various, in so many vital respects utterly unsym-
pathetic and even incapable of sympathy with his own, is one of
the most noteworthy phenomena in the history of literature.
That he has had the most inadequate of editors, that, as his own
Falstaff was the cause of the wit, so he has been the cause of
the foolishness that was in other men (as where Malone
ventured to discourse upon his metres, and Dr. Johnson on his
imagination), must be apparent to every one— and also that his
genius and its m.milestations are so various, that there is no
commentator but has been able to illustrate him from his own
peculiar point of viev/, or from the results of his own favourite
studies. But to show that he was a good common lawyer, that
he understood the theory of colours, that he was an ccuraie
botanist, a master of the science of medicine, especially in its
relation to mental disease, a profound metaphysician, and of
great experience and insight in politics — all these, while they
may very well form the staple of separate treatises, and prove
that, whatever the extent of his learning, the range and
accuracy of his knc "ledge were beyond precedent or later
parallel, are really outside the province of an editor.

We doubt if posterity owe a greater debt to any two men

SueSi

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

living in 1623 than to the two obscure actors who in that year
published the first folio edition of Shakespeare's plays. But for
them, it is more than likely that such of his works as had
remained to that time unprinted would have been irrecoverably
lost, and among them were "Julius Caesar," "The Tempest,"
and " Macbeth." But are we to believe them v/hen they assert
that they present to us the plays which they reprinted from
stolen and surreptitious copies "cured and perfect of their
limbs," and those which are original in their edition "absolute
in their numbers as he [Shakespeare] conceived them?" Alas,
ve have read too many theatrical announcements, have been
taught too often that the value of the promise was in an inverse
ratio to the generosity of the exclamation-marks, too easily to
believe that I Nay, we have seen numberless processions of
healthy kine enter our native village unheralded save by the
lusty shouts of drovers, while a wretched calf, cursed by step-
dame Nature with two heads, was brought to us in a triumphal
car, avant-couriered by a band of music as abnormal as itself,
and announced as the greatest wonder of the age. If a double
allowance of vituline brains deserve such honour, there are few
commentators on Shakespeare that would have gone afoot, and
the trumpets of Messieurs Heminge and Condell call up in our
minds too many monstrous and deformed associations.

What, then, is the value of the first folio as an authority?
For eighteen of the plays it is the only authority we have, and
the only one also for four others in their complete form. It
is admitted that in several instances Heminge and Condell
reprinted the earlier quarto impressions with a few changes,
sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse ; and it is
most probable that copies of those editions (whether surrep-
titious or not) had taken the place of the original prompter's
books, as being more convenient and legible. Even in these
cases it is not safe to conclude that all or even any of the
variations were made by the hand of Shakespeare himself.
And where the players printed from manuscript, is it likely to
have been that of the author ? The probability is small that a
writer so busy as Shakespeare must have been during his

\'\

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

I'tl

productive period should have copied out their parts for the
actors himself, or that one so indiflferent as he seems to have
been to the immediate literary fortunes of his works should
have given much care to the correction of copies, if made by
others. The copies exclusively in the hands of Heminge and
Condell were, it is manifest, in some cases, very imperfect,
whether we account for the fact by the burning of the Globe
Theatre or by the necessary wear and tear of years, and (what
is worthy of notice) they are plainly more defective in some
parts than in others. " Measure for Measure" is an example of
this, and we are not satisfied with being told that its ruggedness
of verse is intentional, or that its obscurity is due to the fact
that Shakespeare grew more elliptical in his style as he grew
older. Profounder in thought he doubtless became ; though in
a mind like his, we believe that this would imply only a more
absolute supremacy in expression. But, from whatever original
v«re suppose either the quartos or the first folio to have been
printed, it is more than questionable whether the proof-sheets
had the advantage of any revision other than that of the
printing-office. Steevens was of opinion that authors in the
time of Shakespeare never read their own proof-sheets ; and
Mr. Spedding, in his recent edition of Bacon, comes inde-
pendently to the same conclusion.* We may be very sure that
Heminge and Condell did not, as vicars, take upon themselves
a disagreeable task which the author would have been too
careless to assume.
Nevertheless, however strong a case may be made out against

* Vol. iii., p. 348, note. He grounds his belief, not on the misprinting
Of words, but on the misplacing of whole paragraphs. We were struck
With the same thing in the original edition of Chapman's BirorCs Coti'
epiracy and Tragedy. And yet, in comparing two copies of this edition,
I have found corrections which only the author could have made. One
of the misprints which Mr. Spedding notices affords both a hint and a
warning to the conjectural emendator. In the edition of The Advance-
ment of Learning, printed in 1605, occurs the word dusinesse. In a later
edition thia was conjecturtilly changed to bimness ; but the occurrence of
vertigine in the Latin translation enables Mr. Spedding to print rightly,
diztinesa.

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

ade out against

the Folio of 1623, whatever sins of omission wc may lay to tho
churge of Hcminge and Condell, or of commission to that of the
printers, it remains the only text we lave with any claims
whatever to authenticity. It should be deferred to as authority
in all cases where it does not make Shakespeare write bad
sense, uncouth metre, or false grammar, of all which we believe
him to have been more supremely Incapable than any other
man who ever wrote English. Yet we would not speak unkindly
even of the blunders of the Folio. They have put bread into
the mouth of many an honest editor, publisher, and printer for
the last century and a half ; and he who loves the comic side of
lunnan nature will find the serious notes of a variorum edition
of Shakespeare as funny reading as the funny ones are serious.
Scarce a commentator of them all, for more than a hundred
years, but thought, as Alphonso of Castile did of Creation, that,
if he had only been at Shakespeare's elbow, he could have
given valuable advice ; scarce one who did not know off-hand
that there was never a sea-port in Bohemia — as if Shakespeare's
world were one which Mercator could have projected ; scarce
one but was satisfied that his ten finger-tips were a sufficient key
to those astronomic wonders of poise and counterpoise, of
planetary law and cometary seeming-exception, in his metres ;
scarce one but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that
intuition whose edging shallows may have been sounded, but
whose abysses, stretching down amid the sunless roots of Being
and Consciousness, mock the plummet ; scarce one but could
speak with condescending approval of that prodigious intelli-
gence so utterly without congener that our baffled language
must coin an adjective to qualify it, and none is so audacious as
to say Shakesperian of any other. And yet, in the midst of our
impatience, we cannot help thinking also of how much healthy
mental activity this one man has been the occasion, how much
good he has indirectly done to society by withdrawing men to
investigations and habits of thought that secluded them from
baser attractions, for how many he has enlarged the circle of
study and reflection ; since there is nothing in history or
politics, nothing in art or science, nothing in physics or

557

z^rrvm's^-

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

metaphysics, that is not sooner or later taxed for his illustration
This is partially true of all great minds, open and sensitive lo
truth and beauty through any large arc of their circumference ;
but it is true in an unexampled sense of Shakespeare, the vast
round of whose balanced nature seems to have been equatorial,
and to have had a southward exposure and a summer sympathy
at every point, so that life, society, statecraft, serve us at last ))ut
as commentaries on him, and whatever we have gathered of
thought, of knowledge, and of experience, confronted with iiis
marvellous page, shrinks to a mere foot-note, the stepping-
stone to some hitherto inaccessible verse. We admire in
Homer the blind, placid mirror of the world's young manhood,
the bard who escapes from his misfortune in poeuis all memory,
all life and bustle, adventure and picture ; we revere in Dante
that compressed force of lifelong passion which could make a
private experience cosmopolitan in its reach and everlasting in
its significance ; we respect in Goethe the Aristotelian poet,
wise by weariless observation, witty with intention, the stately
Geheimerrath of a provincial court in the empire of Nature.
As we study these, we seem in our limited way to penetrate into
their consciousness, and to measure and master their methods ;
but with Shakespeare it is just the other way — the more we
have familiarised ourselves with the operations of our own
consciousness, the more do we find, in reading him, that he has
been beforehand with us, and that, while we have been vainly
endeavouring to find the door of his being, he has searched
every nook and cranny of our own. While other poets and
dramatists embody isolated phases of character and work
inward from the phenomenon to the special law which it
illustrates, he seems in some strange way unitary with human
nature itself, and his own soul to have been the law and life-
giving power of which his creations are only the phenomena.
We justify or criticise the characters of other writers by our
memory and experience, and pronounce them natural or
unnatural ; but he seems to have worked in the very stuff of
which memory and experience are made, and we recognise his
truth to Nature by an innate and unacquired sympathy, as if he

i «

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

nlonc possessed the secret of the ''ideal fonn and universal
mouid," (ind embodied generic types rather than individuals.
In tills Cervantes alone has approached him ; and Don Quixote
and Sancho, like the men and women of Shakespeare, are the
contemporaries of every generation, because they are not
products of an artificial and transitory society, but because they
arc animated by the primeval and unchanging forces of that
humanity which underlies and survives the forever-fickle creeds
and ceremonials of the parochial comers which we who dwell in
them sublimely call The World.

That Shakespeare did not edit his own works must be
attributed, we suspect, to his premature death. That he should
not have intended it is inconceivable. Is there not something
of self-consciousness in the breaking of Prospcro's wand and
burying his book — a sort of sad prophecy, based on self-
knowledge of the nature of that man who, after such
thaumaturgy, could go down to Stratford and live there for
years, only collecting his dividends from the Globe Theatre,
lending money on mortgage, and leaning over his gate to chat
and bandy quips with neighbours ? His mind had entered into
every phase of human life and thought, had embodied all of
them in living creations ; — had he found all empty, and come
at last to the belief that genius and its work were as phantas-
magoric as the rest, and that fame was as idle as the rumour of
the pit ? However this may be, his works have come down to
us in a condition of manifest and admitted corruption in some
portions, while in others there is an obscurity which may be
attributed either to an idiosyncratic use of words and condensa-
tion of phrase, to a depth of intuition for a proper coalescence
with which ordinary language is inadequate, to a concentration
of passion in a focus that consumes the lighter links which
bind together the clauses of a sentence, or of a process of
reasoning in common parlance, or to a sense of music which
mingles music and meaning without essentially confounding
them. We should demand for a perfect editor, then, first, a
thorough glossological knowledge of the English contemporary
with Shakespeare ; second, enough logical acuteness of mind

'/I

<"'

I 4

(

lOO

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MOR^.

and metaphysical training to enable him to follow recondite
processes of thought ; third, such a conviction of the supremacy
of his author as always to prefer his thought to any theory ul
his own ; fourth, a feeling for music, and so much knowledge of
the practice of other poets as to understand that Shakespeare's
versification differs from theirs as often in kind as in degree ;
fifth, an acquaintance with the world as well as with books ;
<ind last, what is, perhaps, of more importance than all, so gre.it
a familiarity with the working of the imaginative faculty in
general, and of its peculiar operation in the mind of Shake-
speare, as will prevent his thinking a passage dark with excess
of light, and enable him to understand fully that the Gothic
Shakespeare often superimposed upon the slender column of a
single word, that seems to twist under it, but does not — like
the quaint shafts in cloisters— a weight of meaning which
the modern architects of sentences would consider wholly
unjustfiable by correct principle.

Many years ago, while yet Fancy claimed that right in mc
which Fact has since, to my no small loss, so successfully
disputed, I pleased myself with imagining the play of " Hamlet"
published under some aiiaSy and as the work of a new candidate
in literature. Then I playedy as the children say, that it came
in regular course before some well-meaning doer of criticisms,
who had never read the original (no very wild assumption, as
things go), and endeavoured to conceive the kind of way in
which he would be likely to take it. I put myself in his place,
and tried to write such a perfunctory notice as I thought would
be likely, in filling his column, to satisfy his conscience. But it
was a tour de force quite beyond my power to execute without
grimace. I could not arrive at that artistic absorption in my
own conception which would enable me to be natural, and found
myself, like a bad actor, continually betraying my self-con-
sciousness by my very endeavour to hide it under caricature.
The path of Nature is indeed a narrow one, and it is only the
immortals that seek it, and, when they find it, do not find
themselves cramped therein. My result was a dead failure-
satire instead of comedy. I could not shake ofT that strange

'(•

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

lOI

y, that it came

arrumulation which we call self, and report honestly what I saw
and felt even to myself, much less to others.

Vet I have often thought, that, unless we can so far free
ourselves from our own prepossessions as to be capable of
hiitv^ing to a work of art some freshness of sensation, and
lerf iving from it in turn some new surprise of sympathy and
admiration— some shock even, it may be, of instinctive distaste
and repulsion— though we may praise or blame, weighing our
pros and cons in the nicest balances, sealed by proper authority,
yet we shall not criticise in the highest sense. On the other
Iiand, unless we admit certain principles as fixed beyond ques-
tion, we shall be able to render no adequate judgment, but
only to record our impressions, which may be valuable or not,
according to the greater or less ductility of the senses on which
they are made. Charles Lamb, for example, came to the old
Knj^lish dramatists with the feeling of a discoverer. He brought
with him an alert curiosity, and everything was delightful
simply because it was strange. Like other early adventurers,
he sometimes mistook shining s.ind for gold ; but he had the
great advantage of not feeling himself responsible for the
manners of the inhabit.ints he found there, and not thinking it
needful to make them square with any Westminster Catechism
of .'L'sthelics. Best of all, he did not feel compelled to compare
them with the Greeks, about whom he knew little, and cared
less. He took them as he found them, described them in a few
pregnant sentences, and displayed his specimens of their growth
and manufacture. When he arrived at the dramatists of the
Restoration, so far from being shocked, he was charmed with
their pretty and unmoral ways ; and what he says of them
reminds us of blunt Captain Dampicr, who, in his account of the
island of Timor, remarks, as a matter of no consequence, that
the natives " take as many wives as they can maintain, and as
for religion, they have none."

Lamb had the great advantage of seeing the elder dramatists
as tliey were ; it did not lie within his province to point out
what they were not. Himself a fragmentary writer, he had
more sympathy with imagination where it gathers into the

109

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

'H'

intense focus of passionate phrase than with that higher form
of it, where it is the faculty that shapes, gives unity of design,
and balanced gravitation of parts. And yet it is only this
higher form of it which can unimpeachably assure to any work
the dignity and permanence of a classic ; for it results in that
exquisite something called Style, which, like the grace of per-
fect breeding, everywhere pervasive and nowhere emphatic,
makes itself felt by the skill with which it effaces itself, and
masters us at last with a sense of indefmable completeness.
On a lower plane we may detect it in the structure of a sen-
tence, in the limpid expression that implies sincerity of thought ;
but it is only where it combines and organis' s, where it eludes
observation in particulars to give the rarer delight of perfection
as a whole, that it belongs to art. Then it is truly ideal, the
forma mentis {sterna^ not as a passive mould into which the
thought is poured, but as the conceptive energy which finds all
material plastic to its preconceived design. Mere vividness of
expression, such as makes quotable passages, comes of the com-
plete surrender of self to the impression, whether spiritual or
sensual, of the moment. It is a quality, perhaps, in which the
young poet is richer than the mature, his very inexperience
making him more venturesome in those leaps of language
that startle us with their rashness only to bewitch us the more
with the happy ease of their accomplishmeiit. For this there
are no existing laws ot rhetoric, for it is from such felicities that
the rhetoricians deduce and codify their statutes. It is sonic-
thing which cannot be improved upon or cultivated, for it is
immediate and intuitive. But this power of expression is sub-
sidiary, and goes only a little way toward the making of a great
poet. Imagination, where it is truly creative, is a faculty, and
not a quality ; it looks before and after, it gives the form that
makes all the parts work together harmoniously toward a given
end, its seat is in the higher reason, and it is efficient only as a
servant of the will. Imagination, as it is too often misunder-
stood, is mere fantasy, the image-making power, common to all
who have the gift of dreams, or v/ho can afford to buy it in a
vulgar drug as De Quincey bought it*

SHAKESPFARE ONCE MORE.

103

The true poetic imagination is of one quality, whether it bo
ancient or modem, and equ.illy subject to those laws of grace,
of proportion, of design, in whose free service, and in that alone,
it can become art. Those laws are something which do not

*' Alter when tliey nltorntion find,
And bond with tho remover to remove."

And they are more clearly to be deduced from the eminent
examples of Greek literature than from any other source. It
is the advantage of this select company of ancients that their
works are defecated of all turbid mixture of contemporaneous-
ness, and have become to us pure literature^ our judgment and
enjoyment of which cannot be vulgarised by any prejudices of
time or place. This is why the study of them is fitly called a
liberal education, because it emancipates the mmd from every
narrow provincialism, whether of egoism or tradition, and is
tlic apprenticeship that every one must serve before becoming
a free brother of the guild which passes the torch of life from
age to age. There would be no dispute about the advantages
of that Greek culture which Schiller advocated with such
generous eloquence, if the great authors of antiquity had not
been degraded from teachers of thinking to drillers in grammar,
and made the ruthless pedagogues of root and inflection,
instead of companions for whose society the mind must put on
her highest mood. The discouraged youth too naturally
transfers the epithet of dead^xova the langua.<?es to the authors
that wrote in them. What concern have we with the shades ot
dialect in Homer or Th' critus, provided they speak the
spiritual lint^ua franca thai abolishes all alienage of race, and
makes whatever shore of time we land on hospitable and home-
like? There is much that is deciduous in books, but all that
gives them a title to rank as literature in the highest sense is
perennial. Their vitality is the vitality not of one or another
blood or tongue, but of human nature ; their truth is not
topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation ; and thus
all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but
of whoever reads thein, growing wiser with him as he grow§

104

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

I 'I

wise, and unlocking to him one secret after another as his own
life and experience give him the key, but on no other condition.
Their meaning is absolute, not conditional ; it is a property of
theirs^ quite irrespective of mjinners or creed ; for the highest
culture, the development of the individual by observation,
reflection, and study, leads to one result, whether in Athens
or in London. The more we know of ancient literature, the
more we are struck with its modernness, just as the more we
study the maturer dramas of Shakespeare, the more we feel
his nearness in certain primary qualities to the antique and
classical. Yet even in saying this, I tacitly make the admission
that it is the Greeks who must furnish us with our standard of
comparison. Their stamp is upon all the allowed measures
and weights of aesthetic criticism. Nor does a consciousness
of this, nor a constant reference to it, in any sense reduce us to
the mere copying of a bygone e.'cellence ; for it is the test of
excellence in. any department of art, that it can never be
bygone ; and it is not mere difference from antique models,
but the way in which that difference is shown, the direction it
takes, that we are to consider in our judgment of a modern
work. The model is not there to be copied merely, but that
the study of it may lead us insensibly to the same processes of
thought by which its purity of outline and harmony of parts
were attained, and enable us to feel that strength is consistent
with repose, that multiplicity is not abundance, that grace is
but a more refined form of power, and that a thought is
none the less profound that the limpidity of its expression
allows us to measure it at a glance. To be possessed with
this conviction gives us at least a determinate point of view,
and enables us to appeal a case of taste to a court of
final judicature, whose decisions are guided by immutable
principles. When we hear of certain productions, that they
are feeble in design, but masterly in parts, that they are
incoherent, to be sure, but have great merits of style, we
know that it cannot be true ; for in the highest examples we
have, the master is revealed by his plan, by his power of making
rill accessories, each in its due relation, subordinate to it, and

t:smm

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

105

that to limit style to ibe rounding of a period or a distich is
wholly to misapprehend its truest .and highest function. Donne
is full of salient verses that would take the rudest March winds
of criticism with their beauty, of thoughts that first tease us like
charades and then delight us -. ith the felicity of their solution ;
but these have not saved him. He is exiled to the limbo of the
formless and the fragmentary. To take a more recent instance
—Wordsworth had, in some respects, a deeper insight, and a
more adequate utterance of it, than any man of his generation.
But it was a piece-meal insight and utterance ; his imagination
was feminine, not masculine, receptive, and not creative. His
lonj^cr poems are Egyptian sand-wastes, with here and there an
oasis of exquisite greenery, a grand image. Sphinx-like, half
buried in drifting commonplaces, or the solitary Pompey's Pillar
of some towering thought. But what is the fate of a poet who
owns the quarry, but cannot build the poem ? Ere the century
is out he will be nine parts dead, and immortal only in that
tentii part of him which is included in a thin volume of
"beauties." Already Moxon has felt the need of extracting this
essential oil of him ; and his memory will be kept alive, if at
all, by the precious material rather than the workmanship of
the vase that contains his heart. And what shall we forebode of
so many modern poems, full of splendid passages, beginning
everywhere and leading nowhere, reminding us of nothing so
much as the amateur architect who planned his own house, and
forgot the staircase that should connect one floor with another,
pulling it as an afterthought on the outside?

Lichtenberg says somewhere, that it was the advantage of
the ancients to write before the great art of writing ill had been
invented ; and Shakespeare may be said to have had the good
luc': of coming after Spenser (to whom the debt of English
poetry is incalculable) had reinvented the art of writing well.
lUit Shakespeare arrived at a mastery in this respect which sets
him above all other poets. He is not only superior in degree,
but he is also different in kind. In that less purely artistic
sphere of style which concerns the matter rather than the form
his charm is often unspeakable. How perfect his style is may

Hwa

io6

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

\ \

be judged frc m the fact that it never curdles into mannerism,
and thus absolutely eludes imitation. Though here, if any-
where, the style is the man, yet it is noticeable only, like the
images of Brutus, by its absence, so thoroughly is he absorbed
in his work, while he fuses thought and word indissolubly
together, till all the particles cohere by the best virtue of each.
With perfect truth he has said of himself that he writes

" All one, ever the same,
Putting invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell his name."

And yet who has so succeeded in imitating him as to remind us
of him by even so much as the gait of a single verse ?♦ Those
magnificent crystallisations of feeling and phrase, basaltic
masses, molten and interfused by the primal fires of passion, are
not to be reproduced by the slow experiments of the laboratory
striving to parody creation with artifice. Mr. Matthew Arnold
seems to think that Shakespeare has damaged English poetry.
I wish he had ! It is true he lifted Dryden above himself in "All
for Love ;" but it was Dryden who said of him, by instinctive
conviction rather than judgment, that within his magic circle
none dared tread but he. Is he to blame for the extravagances
of modern diction, which are but the reaction of the brazen age
against the degeneracy of art into artifice, that has characterised
the silver period in every literature .? We see in them only the
futile effort of misguided persons to torture out cf language the
secret of that inspiration which should be in themselves. We
do not find the extravagances in Shakespeare himself. We
never saw a line in any modern poet that reminded us of him,
and will venture to assert that it is only poets of the second
class that find successful imitators. And the reason seems to

* "At first sight, Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists seem to
write in styles much alike ; nothing so easy as to fall into that of Massinger
and the others ; whilst no one has ever yet produced one scene conceived
and expressed in the Shakespearian idiom. I suppose it is because
Shakespeare is universal, and, in fact, has no manner." — Coleridge's
Table-talk, 214.

3 mannerism,

ion seems to

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

107

us a very plain one. The genius of the great poet seeks repose
in the expression of itself, and finds it at last in style, which is
the establishment of a perfect mutual understanding between
the worker and his material.* The secondary intellect, on the
other hand, seeks for excitement in expression, and stimulates
itself into mannerism, which is the wilful obtrusion of self, as
style is its unconscious abnegation. No poet of the first class
has ever left a school, because his imagination is incommuni-
cable ; while, just as surely as the thermometer tells of the
neighbourhood of an iceberg, you may detect the presence of a
genius of the second class in any generation by the influence of
his mannerism, for that, being an artificial thing, is capable of
reproduction. Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, left no heirs either
to the form or mode of their expression ; while Milton, Sterne,
and Wordsworth left behind them whole regiments uniformed
with all their external characteristics. We do not mean that
great poetic geniuses may not have influenced thought (though
we think it would be difficult to show how Shakespeare had
done so, directly and wilfully), but that they have not infected
contemporaries or followers with mannerism. The quality in
him which makes him at once so thoroughly English and so
thoroughly cosmopolitan is that aeration of the understanding
by the imagination which he has in common with all the
greater poets, and which is the privilege of genius. The
modem school, which mistakes violence for intensity, seems to
catch its breath when it finds itself on the verge of natural
expression, and to say to itself, " Good heavens I I had almost
forgotten I was inspired 1 " But of Shakespeare we do not even
suspect that he ever remembered it. He does not always speak
in that intense way that flames up in Lear and Macbeth through
the rifts of a soil volcanic with passion. He allows us here and
there the repose of a commonplace character, the consoling
distraction of a humorous one. He knows how to be equable
and grand without effort, so that we forget the altitude of

* Phc'idias said of one of liis pnpils that he had an inspired thumb,
because the modelling-clay yielded to its careless sweep a grace of curve
which it refused to the utmost pains of others,

' Hit

lo8

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

«i/

thought to which he has led us, because the slowly receding
slope of a mountain stretching downward by ample gradations
gives a less startling impression of height than to look over the
edge of a ravine that makes but a wrinkle in its flank.

Shakespeare has been sometimes taxed with the barbarism of
profuseness and exaggeration. But this is to measure him by
a Sophoclean scale. The simplicity of the antique tragedy is
by no means that of expression, but is of form merely. In the
utterance of great passions, something must be indulged to
the extravagance of Nature ; the subdued tones to which
pathos and sentiment are limited cannot express a tempest of
the soul. The range between the piteous "no more but so,"
in which Ophelia compresses the heart-break whose com-
pression was to make her mad, and that sublime appeal of
Lear to the elements of Nature, only to be matched, if matched
at all, in the " Prometheus," is a wide one, and Shakespeare is
as truly simple in the one as in the other. The simplicity of
poetry is not thit of prose, nor its clearness that of ready
apprehension merely. To a subtile sense, a sense heightened
by sympathy, those sudden fervours of phrase, gone ere one can
say it lightens, that show us Macbeth groping among the com-
plexities of thought in his conscience-clouded mind, and reveal
the intricacy rather than enlighten it, while they leave the eye
darkened to the literal meaning of the words, yet make their
logical sequence, the grandeur of the conception, and its truth
to Nature clearer than sober daylight could. There is an
obscurity of mist rising from the undrained shallows of the
mind, and there is the darkness of thunder-cloud gathering its
electric masses with passionate intensity from the clear element
of the imagination, not at random or wilfully, but by the
natural processes of the creative faculty, to brood those flashes
of expression that transcend rhetoric, and are only to be
apprehended by the poetic instinct.

In that secondary ofifice of imagination, where it serves the
artist, not as the reason that shapes, but as the interpreter of
his conceptions into words, there is a distinction to be noticed
between the higher and lower mode in which it performs its

' 4!

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

109

;■ :! '

funclion. It may be either creative or pictorial, may body forth
the thought or merely image it forth. With Shakespeare, for
example, imagination seems immanent in his very conscious-
ness ; with Milton, in his memory. In the one it sends, as if
without knowing it, a fiery life into the verse,

•' Sei die Brunt das Wort,
IBrautigam der Geist ; "

in the other it elaborates a certain pomp and elevation. Accord-
ingly, the bias of the former is toward over-intensity, of the
latter toward over-diffuseness. Shakespeare's temptation is to
push a willing metaphor beyond its strength, to make a passion
over-inform its tenement of words ; Milton cannot resist run-
ning a simile on into a fugue. One always fancies Shakespeare
/;/ his best verses, and Milton at the key-bo? rd of his organ.
Shakespeare's language is no longer the mere vehicle of
thought, it has become part of it, its very flesh and blood. The
pleasure it gives us is unmixed, direct, like that from the smell
of a flower or the flavour of a fruit. Milton sets everywhere his
little pitfalls of bookish association for the memory. I know
that Milton's manner is very grand. It is slow, it is stately,
moving as in triumphal procession, with music, with historic
banners, with spoils from every time and every region, and
captive epithets, like huge Sicambrians, thrust their broad
shoulders between us and the thought whose pomp they
decorate. But it is manner, nevertheless, as is proved by the
ease with which it is parodied, by the danger it is in of
degenerating into mannerism whenever it forgets itself. Fancy
a parody of Shakespeare — I do not mean of his words, but of
his tone^ for that is what distinguishes the master. You might
as well try it with the Venus of Melos. In Shakespeare it is
always the higher thing, the thought, the fancy, that is pre-
eminent J it is Caesar that draws all eyes, and not the chariot in
which he rides, or the throng which is but the reverberation of
his supremacy. If not, how explain the charm with which he
dominates in all tongues, even under the disenchantment of
translation? Among the most alien races he is as solidly at

k I j

.'!

V '

I ' ''

110

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

1 {

i /

home as a mountain seen from different sides by many lands,
itself superbly solitary, yet the companion of all thoughts and
domesticated in all imaginations.

In description Shakespeare is especially great, and in that
instinct which gives the peculiar quality of any object of con-
templation in a single happy word that colours the impression
on the sense with the mood of the mind. Most descriptive
poets seem to think that a hogshead of water caught at the
spout will give us a livelier notion of a thunder-shower than the
sullen muttering of the first big drops upon the roof. They
forget that it is by suggestion, not cumulation, that profound
impressions are made upon the imagination. Milton's paisi*
mony (so rare in him) makes the success of his

" Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops
Wept at completion of the mortal sin."

Shakespeare understood perfectly the charm of indirectness,
of making his readers se**m to discover for themselves what he
means to show them. It he wishes to tell that the leaves of the
willow are grey on the under side, he does not make it a
mere fact of observation by bluntly saying so, but makes it
picturesquely reveal itself to us as it might in Nature : —

" There is a willow grows athwart the flood,
That shows his Iwar leaves in the glassy stream."

Where he goes to the landscape for a comparison, he does not
ransack wood and field for specialties, as if he were gathering
simples, but takes one image, obvious, familiar, and makes it
new to us either by sympathy or contrast with his own imme-
diate feeling. He always looked upon Nature with the eyes of
the mind. Thus he can make the melancholy of autumn or the
gladness of spring alike pathetic : —

" That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or few, or none, do hang
Upon those boughs that shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang."

.-.■ — «l(fc*' ■^tvt^' "•

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

Vlilton's pax si-

he does not

Or again :—

" From thoo have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hnth put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturu leaped and laughed with him."

But as dramatic poet, Shakespeare goes even beyond this,
entering oo perfectly into the consciousness of the characters he
himself has created, that he sees everything through their
peculiar mood, and makes every epithet, as if unconsciously,
echo and re-echo it. Theseus asks Hermi»—

*' Can you endure the livtry of a nun,
For aye to be in shady cloister mewed,
To live a barren sister all your life,
Chanting faint hymns to the cold/ruitlesa moon ? "

When Romeo must leave Juliet, the private pang of the lovers,
becomes a property of Nature herself, and

" Envious streakj?
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east."

But even more striking is the following instance from
"Macbeth":—

** The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal euterance of Duncan
Under your battlements."

Here Shakespeare, with his wonted tact, makes use of a vulgar
superstition, of a type in which mortal presentiment is already
embodied, to make a common ground on which the hearer and
Lady Macbeth may meet. After this prelude we are prepared
to be possessed by her emotion more fully, to feel in her
ears the dull tramp of the blood that seems to make the
raven's croak yet hoarser than it is, and to betray the stealthy
advance of the mind to its liell purpose. For Lady Mac-
beth hears not so much the voice of the bodeful bird as of
her own premeditated murder, and we are thus made her
shuddering accomplices before the fact. Every image receives
the colour of the mind, every word throbs with the pulse of

T""^" ■-*»

Its

Shakespeare once more.

' ;fl

III' \\\

one controlling passion. The epithet fatal makes us feel the
implacable resolve of the speaker, and shews us that she is
tampering with her conscience by putting off the crime upon
the prophecy of the Weird Sisters to which she alludes. In
the word battlements^ too, not only is the fancy led up to the
perch of the raven, but a hostile image takes the place of a
hospitable ; for men commonly speak of receiving a guost
under their roof or within their doors. That this is not over-
ingenuity, seeing what is not to be seen, nor meant to be
seen, is clear to me from what follows. When Duncan and
Banquo arrive at the castle, their fancies, free from all su^j-
gestion of evil, call up only gracious and amiable images.
The raven was but the fantastical creation of Lady Macbcth's
overwrought brain.

" This oastlo huth ii plciwaut sent, tlio air
Nimbly uud sweetly doth comiiieud itself
Uuto our gentle souses.

This <jiiest of sunimet;
The temple-haunting martlet, cloth approve
By liis loved mansioriry tliat the heaven's breath
Smells wooinylij liere ; no jutty, frieze,
]inttress, or eoigue of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procrcant eradle."

The contrast here cannot but be as intentional as it is marked.
Every image is one of welcome, security, and confidence.
The summer, one may well fancy, would be a very different
hostess* from her whom we have just seen expecting them.
And why temple-haunting^ unless because it suggests sanc-
tuary ? O immaginativa, che si ne rubi delle cose di fuor^ how
infinitely more precious are the inward ones thou givest in
return I If all this be accident, it is at least one of those
accidents of which only this man was ever capable. I divine
something like it now and then in ^schylus, through the
mists of a language which will not let me be sure of what
I see, but nowhere else Shakespeare, it is true, had, as I
have said, as respects English, the privilege which only first-
comers enjoy. The language was still fresh from those sources

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

at too {^reat a distance from which it becomes fit only for the
service of prose. Wherever he dipped, it came up clear and
sparkling, undcfilcd as yet by the drainage of literary factories,
or of those dye-houses where the machine-woven fabrics of
shnm culture are coloured up to the last desperate style of
sham sentiment. Those who criticise his diction as sometimes
exiravagant should remember that in poetry langu.ige is
something more than merely the vehicle of thought, that it
is meant to convey the sentiment as much as the sense, and
that, if th- e is a beauty of use, there is often a higher use
of beauty.

What kind of culture Shakespeare had is uncertain ; how
much he had is disputed ; that he had as much as he wanted,
and of whatever kind he wanted, must be clear to whoever
considers the question. Dr. Farmer has proved, in his
entertaining essay, that he got everything at second-hand
from translations, and that, where his translator blundered,
he loyally blundered too. But Goethe, the man of widest
acquirement in modern times, did precisely the same thing.
In his character of poet he set as little store by useless learning
as Shakespeare did. He learned to write hexameters, not
from Homer, but from Voss, and Voss found them faulty ;
yet somehow Hermann unci Dorothea is more readable than
Luise. So far as all the classicism then attainable was
concerned, Shakespeare got it as cheap as Goethe did, who
always bought it ready-made. For such purposes of mere
jesthetic nourishment Goethe always milked other minds —
if minds those ruminalors and digesters of antiquity into asses'
milk may be called. There were plenty of professors who
were forever assiduously browsing in vales of Enna and on
Pentelican slopes among the vestiges of antiquity, slowly
secreting lacteous facts, and not one of them would have
raised his head from that exquisite pasturage, though Pan
had made music through his pipe of reeds. Did Goethe
wish to work up a Greek theme ? He drove out Herr Bottiger,
for example, among that fodder delicious to him for its very
dryness, that sapless Arcadia of scholiasts, let him graze,

ti i

V-

•^m

'i!

I !

;

ill, 1 ;il /

114

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

ruminate, and go through all other needful processes of the
antiquarian organism, then got him quietly into a corner
and milked him. The product, after standing long enough,
mantled over with the rich Goethean cream, from which a
butter could be churned, if not precisely classic, quite as
good as the ancients could have m.ide out of the same material.
But who has ever read the Achilleis^ correct in all ««essential
particulars as it probably is ?

It is impossible to conceive that a man, who, in other
respects, made such booty of the world around him, whose
observation of manners was so minute, and whose insight into
character and motives, as if he had been one of God's spies,
was so unerring th.at we accept it without question, as we do
Nature herself, and find it more consoling to explain his
confessedly immense superiority by attributing it to a happy
instinct rather than to the conscientious perfecting of
exceptional powers till practice made them seem to work
independently of the will which still directed them — it is
impossible that such a man should not also have profited by
the converse of the cultivated and quick-witted men in whose
familiar society he lived, that he should not have over and over
again discussed points of criticism and art with them, that he
should not have h'^d his curiosity, so alive to everything else,
excited about those incients whom university men then, no
doubt, as now, extoll 3d without too much knowledge of what
they really were, that he should not have heard too much rather
than too little of Aristotle's Poetics^ Quinctilian's Rhetoric^
Horace's Art of Poetry^ and the Unities^ especially from Ben
Jonson — in short, that he who speaks of himself as

" Desbing this man's art and that man's scope,
With what he most enjoyed contented least,"

and who meditated so profoundly on every other topic of human
concern, should never have turned his thought to the principles
of that art which was both the delight and business of his life,
the bread-winner alike for soul and body. Was there no
harvest of the e^r for him whose eye had stocked its garners

•w

■tsszu

--■•I

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

i»5

so full ns wcll-nigh to forestall all after-comers ? Did he who
could so counsel the practisers of an art in which he never
arrived at eminence, as in Hamlet's advice to the players, never
take counsel with himself about that other art in which the
instinct of the crowd, no less than the judgment of his rivals,
awarded him an easy pre-eminence ? If he had little Latin
and less Greek, might he not have had enough of both for
every practical purpose on this side pedantry? The most
extraordinary, one might almost say contradictory, attainments
have been ascribed to him, and yet he has been supposed
incapable of what was within easy reach of every boy at
Westminster School. There is a knowledge that comes of
sympathy as living and genetic as that which comes of mere
learning is sapless and unprocreant, and for this no profound
study of the languages is needed.

If Shakespeare did not know the ancients, I think they were
at least as unlucky in not knowing him. But is it incredible
that he may have laid hold of an edition of the Greek
tragedians, Graecl et Latin^y and then, with such poor wits
as he was master of, contrived to worry some considerable
meaning out of them ? There are at least one or two
coincidences which, whether accidental or not, are curious,
and which I do not remember to have seen noticed. In the
Electra of Sophocles, which is almost identical in its leading
motive with Hamlet^ the Chorus consoles Electra for the
supposed death of Orestes in the same commonplace way
which Hamlet's uncle tries with him.

QvifTQv iritpvKas irarpos, 'HX^fcrpo, <f>p6vei*
Qurp-bs 5* 'OpiaTtjs ' Gjare fi^ \lav arivf^
Ilacd' yhp Tf^uv toOt iipetXeTOi iradeTv,

" Your father lost a father ;
That father lost, lost his. . . .

But to pers6ver
In obstmate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness. . . .

'T is common ; all that live must die."

^mt

Ii6

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

' V -i

H '1

Shakespeare expatiates somewhat more largely, but the
•entiment in both cases is almost verbally identical. The
resemblance is prob<ibIy a chance one, for commonplace and
consolation were always twin sisters, whom always to escape is
given to no man ; but it is nevertheless curious. Here is
another, from the (Edipus Coloneus : —

" Toff TOi dtAo/m* xw ^pox«^f VKK^ /i^^ai',"
" Thrice is he armed tliat hatli his quarrel just."

Hamlet's " prophetic soul " may be matched with the wpSfiafnt
$vfi6i of Pelcus (Eurip. Androm.y 1075), and his "sea of
troubles " with the KaKwv WXayot of Theseus in the Hippolytus^
or of the Chorus in the Hercules Furens. And, for manner and
tone, compare the speeches of Pheres in the AlccstiSy and
Jocasta in the PhicMissa^ with those of Claud io in Measure for
Measure^ and Ulysses in Troilus and Cr ssida.

The Greek dramatists were somewhat fond of a trick of
words in which there is a reduplication of sense as well as of
assonance, as in the Elecira : —

""AXfKT^ yijpdffKovffav AvvfjL^paid re."

So Shakespeare : —

" Unhouscled, disappointed, unaneled ; "

and Milton after him, or, more likely, after the Greek : —

" Unrespited, unpitied, unreprievod."*

I mention these trifles, in passing, because they have
interested me, and therefore may interest others. I lay no

♦ The best instance I remember is in the "Frogs," where Bacchus pleads
his inexperience at the oar, and says he is

" Aireipos, ddaXdrruyros, daoKafjUptos,**

which might be rendered,

" Unskilled, nnsea-soned, and un-Sa1amised.

BMkCia

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

stress upon them, for, if once the conductors of Shakespeare's
intelligence had been put in connection with those Attic
brains, he would have reproduced their message in a form of
his own. They would have inspired, and not enslaved him.
Mis resemblance to them is that of consanguinity, more
striking in expression than in mere resemblance of feature.
The likeness between the Clytemnestra — 7vrai«6f dy8p6fiov\o¥
iXrltof Kiap—oi i^schylus and the Lady Macbeth of Shake-
speare was too remarkable to have escaped notice. That
between the two poets in their choice of epithets is as grrat,
though more difficult of proof. Yet I think an attentive student
of Shakespeare cannot fail to be reminded of something familiar
to him in such phrases as ** flame-eyed 6re," "flax-winged
ships," " star-neighbouring peaks," the rock Salmydessus,

" Rude jaw of the sea,
Harsh hostess ofthe seaman, stepmother
Of ships,"

and the beacon with its " speaking eye of fire." Surely there
is more than a verbal, there is a genuine, similarity between
the dp-fipidfioif yiXaafjM and '*the unnumbered beach" and
"multitudinous sea." iEschylus, it seems to me, is willing,
just as Shakespeare is, to risk the prosperity of a verse upon
a lucky throw of words, which may come up the sices of
hardy metaphor or the ambsace of conceit. There is such
a difference between far-reaching and far-fetching 1 Poetry,
to be sure, is always that daring one step beyond, which
' brings the right man to fortune, but leaves the wrong one
in the ditch, and its law is. Be bold once and again, yet
be not over-bold. It is true, aiso, that masters of language
are a little apt to play with it But whatever fault may be
found with Shakespeare in this respect will touch a tender
spot in ^schylus also. Does he sometimes overload a word, so
that the language not merely, as Dry den says, bends under him,
but fairly gives way, and lets the reader's mind down with the
shock as of a false step in taste ? He has nothing worse than
viXayoi ivdoOv yexpois. A criticism, shallow in human nature,

ii8

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

ti '

1 (

t tn

»< It

^!ll

,'i . Sl-

! i

1 1

however deep in Campbell's Rhetoric, has blamed him for
making persons, under great excitement of sorrow, or whatever
other emotion, parenthesise some trifling play upon words in the
very height of their passion. Those who make such criticisms
have either never felt a passion or seen one in action, or else
they forget the exaltation of sensibility during such crises, so
that the attention, whether of the senses or the mind, is arrested
for the moment by what would be overlooked in ordinary moods.
The more forceful the current, the more sharp the ripple from
any alien substance interposed. A passion that looks forward,
like revenge or lust or greed, goes right to its end, and is
straightforward in its expression ; but a tragic passion, which is
in its nature unavailing, like disappointment, regret of the
inevitable, or remorse, is reflective, and liable to be continually
diverted by the suggestions of fancy. The one is a concen-
tration of the will, which intensifies the character and the phrase
that expresses it ; in the other, the will is helpless, and, as in
insanity, while the flow of the mind sets imperatively in one
direction, it is liable (CO almost ludicrous interruptions and
diversions upon the most trivial hint of involuntary association.
I am ready to grant that Shakespeare sometimes allows his
characters to spend time, that might be better employed, in
carving some cherry-stone of a quibble ;* that he is sometimes
tempted away from the natural by the quaint ; that he some-
times forces a partial, even a verbal, analogy between the
abstract thought and the sensual image into an absolute
identity, giving us a kind of serious pun. In a pun our pleasure
arises from a gap in the logical nexus too wide for the reason,
but which the ear can bridge in an instant. " Is that your own
hare, or a wig ?" The fancy is yet more tickled where logic is
treated with a mock ceremonial of respect.

* So Euripides (copied by Theocritus, Id., xxvii.) : —

IIcj'^ei)s S'Sttwj ith) irivdos eiaoiffei 86fioiS, {BaccAa, 363.)
'^<ru<pp6vr)ff€v ovk ?xou(ra fftatppoveiv. i^Hippol.^ 1037.)

So Calderon : " Y apeuas llega, cuando llega 4 penas."

med him for
V, or whatever

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE, 119

" His head was turned, aiid so he chewed
His pigtail till he died."

Now when this kind of thing is done in earnest, the result is
one of those ill-distributed syllogisms which in rhetoric are
called conceits.

" Hard was the liaiid that struck the blow,
Soft was the heart that bled."

I have seen this passage from Warner cited for its beauty,
though I should have thought nothing could be worse, had I
not seen General Morris's

** Her heart and morning broke together
In tears."

Of course, I would not rank with these Gloucester's

" What ! will the aspiring blood of Lancaster
Sink in the ground ? I thought it would have mounted ; "

though as mere rhetoric it belongs to the same class.* It might
be defended as a bit of ghastly humour characteristic of the
speaker. But at any rate it is not without precedent in the two
greater Greek tragedians. In a chorus of the " Seven against
Thebes " we have : —

iv d^ yaiq.

MifJUKTai, K d prad* elo* 6 jxai ftoi.

And does not Sophocles make Ajax in his despair quibble upon
his own name quite in the Shakespearian fashion, under similar
circumstances ? Nor does the coarseness with which our great
poet is reproached lack an -/Eschylean parallel. Even the Nurse
in "Romeo and Juliet" would have found a true gossip in her
cf the " Agamemnon," who is so indiscreet in her confidences

* I have taken the first passage in point that occurred to my memory.
It may not be Shakespeare's, though probably his. The question of
authorship is, I think, settled, so far as criticism can do it, in Mr.
Grant White's admirable essay appended to the Second Part of Henry VL

I.,

I20

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

concerning the nursery life of Orestes. Whether Raleigh is right
or not in warning historians against following truth too close
upon the heels, the caution is a good one for poets as respects
truth to Nature. But it is a mischievous fallacy in historian or
critic to treat as a blemish of the man what is but the common
tincture of his age. It is to confound a spatter of mud with a
moral stain.

But I have been led away from my immediate purpose. I
did not intend to compare Shakespeare with the ancients, much
less to justify his defects by theirs. Shakespeare himself has
left us a pregnant satire on dogmatical and categorical aesthetics
(which commonly in discussion soon lose their ceremonious
tails and are reduced to the internecine dog and cat of their
bald first syllables) in the cloud-scene between Hamlet and
Polonius, suggesting exquisitely how futile is any attempt at a
cast-iron definition of those perpetually metamorphic impressions
of the beautiful whose source is as much in the man who looks
as in the thing he sees. In the fine arts a thing is either good
in itself or it is nothing. It neither gains nor loses by having it
shown that another good thing was also good in itself, any more
than a bad thing profits by comparison with another that is
worse. The final judgment of the world is intuitive, and is
based, not on proof that a work possesses some of the qualities
of another whose greatness is acknowledged, but on the
immediate feeling that it carries to a high point of perfection
certain qualities proper to itself. One does not flatter a fine
pear by comparing it to a fine peach, nor learn what a fine
peach is by tasting ever so many poor ones. The boy who
makes his first bite into one does not need to ask his father if or
how or why it is good. Because continuity is a merit in some
kinds of writing, shall we refuse ourselves to the authentic
charm of Montaigne's want of it? I have heard people
complain of French tragedies because they were so very French.
This, though it may not be to some particular tastes, and may
from one point of view be a defect, is from another and far
higher a distinguished merit. It is their flavour, as direct a
tell-tale of the soil whence they draw it as that of French wines

M i l I IIII W — IU

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

121

is. Suppose we should tax the Elgin marbles with being too
Greek ? When will people, nay, when will even critics, get over
this self-defrauding trick of cheapening the excellence of one
thing by that of another, this conclusive style of judgment
which consists simply in belonging to the other parish ? As one
grows older, one loses many idols, perhaps comes at last to
have none at all, though he may honestly enough uncover in
deference to the worshippers before any shrine. But for the
seeming loss the compensation is ample. These saints of
literature descend from their canopied remoteness to be even
more precious as men like ourselves, our companions in field
and street, speaking the same tongue, though in many dialects,
and owing one creed under the most diverse masks of form.

Much of that merit of structure which is claimed for the
ancient tragedy is due, if I am not mistaken, to circumstances
external to the drama itself — to custom, to convention, to the
exigencies of the theatre. It is formal rather than organic.
The "Prometheus'' seems to me one of the few Greek tragedies in
which the whole creation has developed itself in perfect
proportion from one central germ of living conception. The
motive of the ancient drama is generally outside of it, while in
the modern (at least in the English) it is necessarily within.
Goethe, in a thoughtful essay,* written many years later than
his famous criticism of Hamlet in Wilhebn Meister^ says that
the distinction between the two is the difference between sollen
and wo Hen — that is, between must and would. He means that
in the Greek drama the catastrophe is foreordained by an
inexorable Destiny, while the element of Free-will, and con-
sequently of choice, is the very axis of the modem. The
definition is conveniently portable, but it has its limitations.
Goethe's attention was too exclusively fixed on the Fate
tragedies of the Greeks, and upon Shakespeare among the
moderns. In the Spanish drama, for example, custom, loyalty,
honour, and religion are as imperative and as inevitable as
doom. In the " Antigone," on the other hand, the crisis lies in
the character of the protagonist. In this sense it is modern,
* " Shakespeare und keiu Ende."

l:^

ii *

'! .

123

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

l;ii

■U

itS

and is the first example of true character-painting in tragedy.
But, from whatever cause, that exquisite analysis of complex
motives, and the display of them in action and speech, which
constitute for us the abiding charm of fiction, were quite
unknown to the ancients. They reached their height in
Cervantes and Shakespeare, and, though on a lower plane, still
belong to the upper region of art in Le Sage, Moli^re, and
Fielding. The personages of the Greek tragedy seem to be
commonly rather types than individuals. In the modern
tragedy, certainly in the four greatest of Shakespeare's tragedies,
there is still something very like Destiny, only the place of it is
changed. It is no longer above man, but in him ; yet the
catastrophe is as sternly foredoomed in the characters of Lear,
Othello, Macbeth, and Hamlet as it could be by an infallible
oracle. In " Macbeth," indeed, the Weird Sisters introduce an
element very like Fate ; but generally it may be said that with
the Greeks the character is involved in the action, while with
Shakespeare the action is evolved from the character. In the
one case, the motive of the play controls the personages ; in the
other, the chief personages are in themselves the motive to
which all else is subsidiary. In any comparison, therefore,
of Shakespeare with the ancients, we are not to contrast him
with them as unapproachable models, but to consider whether
he, like them, did not consciously endeavour, under the
circumstances and limitations in which he found himself, to
produce the most excellent thing possible, a model also in its
own kind — whether higher or lower in degree is another
question. The only fair comparison would be between him and
that one of his contemporaries who endeavoured to anachronise
himself, so to speak, and to subject his art, so far as might be,
to the laws of classical composition. Ben Jonson was a great
man, and has sufficiently proved that he had an eye for the
external marks of character ; but when he would make a whole
of them, he gives us instead either a bundle of humours or an
incorporated idea. With Shakespeare the plot is an interior
organism, in Jonson an external contrivance. It is the
difference between man and tortoise. In the one the osseous

•wnHHi

• surtfaMltr»^rt'i«vi.>iBiM*<l«i^i5BS

,*rl

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

123

;on, therefore,

ir, under the

structure is out of sight, indeed, bui sustains the flesh and blood
that envelop it, while the other is boxed up and imprisoned in
his bones.

I have been careful to confine myself to what may be called
Sliakespeare's ideal tragedies. In the purely historical or
chronicle plays, the conditions are different, and his imagination
submits itself to the necessary restrictions on its freedom of
movement. Outside the tragedies also, the " Tempest " makes
an exception worthy of notice. If I read it rightly, it is an
example of how a great poet should write allegory — not
embodying metaphysical abstractions, but giving us ideals
abstracted from life itself, suggesting an under-meaning every-
where, forcing it upon us nowhere, tantalising the mind with
hints that imply so much and tell so little, and yet keep the
attention ail eye and ear with eager, if fruitless, expectation.
Here the leading characters are not merely tyj.. .al, but
symbolical — that is, they do not illustrate a class of persons,
they belong to universal Nature. Consider the scene of the
play. Shakespeare is wont to take some familiar story, to lay
his scene in some place the name of which, at least, is familiar
—well knowing the reserve of power that lies in the familiar as
a background, when things are set in front of it under a new
and unexpected light. But in the "Tempest" the scene is laid
nowhere, or certainly in no country laid down on any map.
Nowhere, then ? At once nowhere and anywhere — for it is in
the soul of man, that still vexed island hung between the upper
and the nether world, and liable to incursions from both.
There is scarce a play of Shakespeare's in which there is such
variety of character, none in which character has so little to do
in the carrying on and development of the story. But consider
for a moment if ever the Imagination has been so embodied as
in Prosper©, the Fancy as in Ariel, the brute Understanding as
in Caliban, who, the moment his poor wits are warmed with the
glorious liquor of Stephano, plots rebellion against his natural
lord, the higher Reason. Miranda is mere abstract Woman-
hood, as truly so before she sees Ferdinand as Eve before she
was wakened t > consciousness by the echo of her own nature

124

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

coming back to her, the same, and yet not the same, from that
of Adam. Ferdinand, again, is nothing more than Youth,
compelled to drudge at something he despises, till the sacrifice
of will and abnegation of self win him his ideal in Miranda.
The subordinate personages are simply types : Sebastian and
Antonio, of weak character and evil ambition ; Gonzalo, of
average sense and honesty ; Adrian and Francisco, of the
walking gentlemen who serve to fill up a world. They are not
characters in the same sense with lago, Falstaff, Shallow, or
Leontius ; and it is curious how every one of them loses his
way in this enchanted island of life, all the victims of one
illusion after another, except Prospero, whose ministers are
purely ideal. The whole play, indeed, is a succession of
illusions, winding up with those solemn words of the great
enchanter who had summoned to his service every shape of
merriment or passion, every figure in the great tragi-comedy of
life, and who was now bidding farewell to the scene of his
triumphs. For in Prospero shall we not recognise the Artist
himself —

" That did not better for his life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds,
Whence comes it that his name receives a brand " —

who has forfeited a shining place in the world's eye by devotion
to his art, and who, turned adrift on the ocean of life in the
leaky carcass of a boat, has shipwrecked on that Fortunate
Island (as men always do who find their true vocation) where
he is absolute lord, making all the powers of Nature serve him,
but with Ariel and Caliban as special ministers ? Of whom else
could he have been thinking, when he says —

" Graves, at my command,
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth,
By my so potent art ? "

Was tills man, so extraordinary from whatever side we look at
him, who ran so easily through the whole scale of human senti-
ment, from the homely common-sense of, " When two men ride

. «***^iill^WMBPp'"

mmmm

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

»25

of one horse, one must ride behind," to the transcendental
subtilty of—

" No, Time, thou slialt not boast that I «lo change ;
Tliy pyranjids, built up with newer might,
To nie are nothing novel, nothing strange ;
Tliey are but dressings of a former sight " -

was he alone so unconscious of powers, some part of whose
magic is recognised by all mankind, from the school-boy to the
philosopher, that he merely sat by and saw them go without
the least notion what they were about ? Was he an inspired
idiot, votre bizarre Shakespeare? a vast, irregular genius? a
simple rustic, warbling his native wood-notes wild — in other
words, insensible to the benefits of culture? When attempts
have been made at various times to prove that this singular
and seemingly contradictory creature, not one, but all mankind's
epitome, was a musician, a lawyer, a doctor, a Catholic, a Pro-
testant, an atheist, an Irishman, a discoverer of the circulation of
the blood, and finally, that he was not himself, but somebody
else, is it not a little odd that the last thing anybody should have
thought of proving him was an artist ? Nobody believes any
longer that immediate inspiration is possible in modern times
(as if God had grown old) — at least, nobody believes it of the
prophets of those days, of John of Leyden, or Reeves, or
MuT^gleton — and yet everybody seems to take it for granted
of this one man Shakespeare. He, somehow or other, without
knowing it, was able to do what none of the rest of them,
though knowing it all too perfectly well, could begin to do.
Everybody seems to get afraid of him in turn. Voltaire plays
gentleman usher for him to his countrymen, and then, per-
ceiving that his countrymen find a flavour in him beyond that
of Zaire or Mahomety dicovers him to be a Sauvage ivre, sans
le moindre Hincelle de bon gout^ et sans le fnoindre connoissance
des rlgles. Goethe, who tells us that Gotz von Berlichingen was
written in the Shakespearian manner — and we certainly should
not have guessed it, if he had not blabbed — comes to the final
conclusion, that Shakespeare was a poet, but not a dramatist.

ap"

126

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

i IS

'^U

i:^

Chateaubriand thinks that he has corrupted art. " If, to
attain," he says, " the height of tragic art, it be enough to heap
together disparate scenes without order and without connection,
to dovetail the burlesque with the pathetic, to set the water-
carrier beside the monarch and the huckster-wench beside the
queen, who may not reasonably flatter himself with being the
rival of the greatest masters? "^Vhoever should give himself
the trouble to retrace a single one of his days, ... to keep
a journal from hour to hour, would have made a drama in the
fashion of the English poet." But there are journals and journals,
as the French say, and what goes into them depends on the
eye that gathers for them. It is a long step from St. Simon to
Dangeau, from Pepys to Thoresby, from Shakespeare even to
the Marquis de Chateaubriand. M. Hugo alone, convinced
that, as founder of the French Romantic School, there is a kind
of family likeness between himself and Shakespeare, stands
boldly forth to prove the father as extravagant as the son.
Calm yourself, M. Hugo, you are no more a child of his than
Will Davenant was I But, after all, is it such a great crime to
produce something alsolutely new in a world so tedious as ours,
and so apt to tell its old stories over again ? I do not mean
new in substance, but in the manner of presentation. Surely
the highest ofifice of a great poet is to show us how much
variety, freshness, and opportunity abides in the obvious and
familiar. He invents nothing, but seems rather to r^-discover
the world about him, and his penetrating vision gives to things
of daily encounter something of the strangeness of new creation.
Meanwhile the changed conditions of modern life demand a
change in the method of treatment. The ideal is not a strait-
waistcoat. Because Alexis and Dora is so charming, shall we
have no Paul and Virginia? It was the idle endeavour to
reproduce the old enchantment in the old way that gave us the
pastoral, sent to the garret now with our grandmothers' achieve-
ments of the same sort in worsted. Every age says to its poets,
like a mistress to her lover, " Tell me what I am like j" and he
who succeeds in catching the evanescent expression that reveals
character — which is as much as to say, what is intrinsically

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

127

human— will be found to have caught someihing as imperish-
able as human nature itself. Aristophanes, by the vital and
essential qualities of his humorous satire, is already more nearly
our contemporary than Moli^re ; and even the Trotn^reSy care-
less and trivial as they mostly are, could fecundate a great poet
like Chaucer, and are still delightful reading.

The Attic tragedy still keeps its hold upon the loyalty of
scholars through their imagination, or their pedantry, or their
feeling of an exclusive property, as may happen, and, however
alloyed with baser matter, this loyalty is legitimate and well
bestowed. But the dominion of the Shakespearian is even
wider. It pushes forward its boundaries from year to year, and
moves no landmark backward. Here Alfieri and Lessing own
a common allegiance ; and the loyalty to him is one not of
guild or tradition, but of conviction and enthusiasm. Can this
be said of any other modern ? of robust Corneille ? of tender
Racine ? of Calderon even, with his tropical warmth and vigour
of production ? The Greeks and he are alike and alone in this,
and for the same reason, that both are unapproachably the
highest in their kind. Call him Gothic, if you like, but the
inspiring mind that presided over the growth of these clustered
masses of arch and spire and pinnacle and buttress is neither
Greek nor Gothic — it is simply genius lending itself to embody
the new desire of man's mind, as it had embodied the old.
After all, to be delightful is to be classic, and the chaotic never
pleases long. But manifoldness is not confusion, any more
than formalism is simplicity. If Shakespeare rejected the
unities, as I think he who complains of "Art made tongue-tied
by Authority" might very well deliberately do, it was for the
sake of an imaginative unity more intimate than any of time
and place. The antique in itself is not the ideal, though its
remoteness from the vulgarity of every-day associations helps
to make it seem so. The true ideal is not opposed to the real,
nor is it any artificial heightening thereof, but lies in it, and
blessed are the eyes that find it I It is the mens divinior which
hides within the actual, transfiguring matter-of-fact into matter-
of-meaning for him who has the gift of second-sight. In this

■^mmmmmmm

- »

I V

138

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

sense Hogarth is often more truly ideal than Raphael, Shake-
speare often more truly so than the Greeks. I think it is a more
or less conscious perception of this ideality, as it is a more or
less well-grounded persuasion of it as respects the Greeks, that
assures to him, as to them, and with equal justice, a permanent
supremacy over the minds of men. This gives to his characters
their universality, to his thought its irradiating property, while
the artistic purpose running through and combining the endless
variety of scene and character will alone account for his power
of dramatic effect. Goethe affirmed, that, without Schroder's
prunings and adaptations, Shakespeare was too undramatic for
the German theatre — that, if the theory that his plays should be
represented textually should prevail, he would be driven from
the boards. The theory has prevailed, and he not only holds
his own, but is acted oftener than ever. It is not irregular
genius that can do this, for surely Germany need not go abroad
for what her own Werners could more than amply supply her
with.

But I would much rather quote a fine saying than a bad
prophecy of a man to whom I owe so much. Goethe, in one of
the moii' perfect of his shorter poems, tells us that a poem is
like a painted window. Seen from without (and he accordingly
justifies the Philistine, who never looks at them otherwise), they
seem dingy and confused enough ; but enter, and then

" Da ist's auf einmal farbig helle,
Geschicht' und Zierath glanzt in Schnelle."

With the same feeling he says elsewhere in prose, that " there
is a destructive criticism and a productive. The former is very
easy ; for one has only to set up in his mind any standard, any
model, however narrow" (let us say the Greeks), "and then
boldly assert that the work under reviev/ does not match with
it, and therefore is good for nothing — the matter is settled, and
one must at once deny its claim. Productive criticism is a great
deal more difficult ; it asks, What did the author propose to
himself? Is what he proposes reasonable and comprehensible?
and how far has he succeeded in carrying it out?" It is in

aB5S<i

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

x«9

applyinjj this latter kind of criticism to Shakespeare that the
Germans have set us an example worthy of all commendation.
If they have been sometimes over-subtile, they at least had th;
merit of first looking at his works as wholes, as something that
very likely contained an idea, perhaps conveyed a moral, if we
could get .It it. The illumination lent us by most of ihe
English commentators reminds us of the candles which guides
hold up to show us a picture in a dark place, the smoke of
which gradually makes the works of the artist invisible under
its repeated layers. Lessing, as might have been expected,
opened the first glimpse in the new direction ; Goethe followed
with his famous exposition of Hamlet ; A. W. Schlegel took a
more comprehensive view in his Lectures, which Coleridge
worked over into English, adding many fine criticism.s of his
own on single passages ; and finally, Gervinus has devoted
four volumes to a comment on the plays, full of excellent matter,
though pushing the moral exegesis beyond all reasonable
bounds.* With the help of all these, and especially of the last,
I shall apply this theory of criticism to Hamlet, not in the hope
of saying anything new, but of bringing something to the
support of the thesis, that, if Shakespeare was skilful as a play-
wright, he was even greater as a dramatist — that, if his
immediate business was to fill the theatre, his higher object was
to create something which, by fulfilling the conditions and
answering the requirements of modern life, should as truly
deserve to be called a work of art as others had deserved it by
doing the same thing in former times and under other circum-
stances. Supposing him to have accepted — consciously or not
is of little importance — the new terms of the problem which
makes character the pivot of dramatic action, and consequently
the key of dramatic unity, how far did he succeed ?

Before attempting my analysis, I must clear away a little
rubbish. Are such anachronisms as those of whicl. Voltaire
accuses Shakespeare in " Hamlet," such as the introduction of
cannon before the invention of gunpowder, and making Christians

* I do not mention Ulrici's book, for it seems to me unwieldy and dull-
zeal without knowledge.

559

130

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

\ I

ii.

(•

of the Danes three centuries too soon, of the least bearing}
aesthetically ? I think not ; but as they are of a piece with i
great many other criticisms upon the great poet, it is worth
while to dwell upon them a moment.

The first demand we make upon whatever claims to be a
work of art (and we have a right to ma.kt it) is that it shall be
in keeping. Now this propriety is of two kinds, cither extrinsic
or intrinsic. In the first I should class whatever relates ratlier
to the body than the soul of the work, such as fidelity to the
facts of history (wherever that is important), congruity of
costume, and the like — in short, whatever might come under
the head of picturesque truth, a departure from which would
shock too rudely our preconceived associations. I have seen
an Indian chief in French boots, and he seemed to me almost
tragic ; but, put upon the stage in tragedy, he would have been
ludicrous. Lichtenberg, writing from London in 1775, tells us
that Garrick played Hamlet in a suit of the French fashion,
then commonly worn, and that he was blamed for it by some of
the critics ; but, he says, one hears no such criticism during the
play, nor on the way home, nor at supper afterwards, nor indeed
till the emotion roused by the great actor has had time to
subside. He justifies Garrick, though we should not be able to
endure it now. Yet nothing would be gained by trying to make
Hamlet's costume true to the assumed period of the play, for
the scene of it is laid in a Denmark that has no dates.

In the second ^nd more important category, I should put,
first, co-ordination of character, that is, a certain variety in
harmony of the personages of a drama, as in the attitudes and
colouring of the figures in a pictorial composition, so that, while
mutually relieving and setting off each other, they shall combine
in the total impression ; second, that subordinate truth to
Nature which makes each character coherent in itself; and,
third, such propriety of costume and the like as shall satisfy the
superhistoric sense, to which, and to which alone, the higher
drama appeals. All these come within the scope oiitnaginativt
truth. To illustrate my third head by an example. Tieck
criticises John Kemble's dressing for Macbeth in a modern

mmmm

SHAKESPEARE OJVCE MORE.

131

n 1775, tells us

Highland costume, as being ungraceful without any counter-
vailing merit of historical exactness. I think a deeper reason
lor his dissatisfaction might be found in the fact, that his garb,
with its purely modem and British army associations, is out of
j)lacc on Forres Heath, and drags the Weird Sisters down with
it from iheir proper imaginative remoteness in the gloom of the
past to the disenchanting glare of the foot-lights. It is not ihe
antiquarian, but the poetic conscience, that is wounded. To
tiiis, exactness, so far as concerns ideal representation, may not
only not be truth, but may even be opposed to it. Anachron-
i'jms and the hke are in themselves of no account, and become
important only when they make a gap too wide for our illusion
to cross unconsciously, that is, when they are anacoluthons
to the imagination. The aim of the artist is psychologic,
not historic truth. It is comparatively easy for an author
to get up any period with tolerable minuteness in externals,
but readers and audiences find more difficulty in getting them
down, though oblivion swallows scores of them at a gulp.
The saving truth in such matters is a truth to essential
and permanent characteristics. The Ulysses of Shakespeare,
like the Ulysses of Dante and Tennyson, more or less
harmonises with our ideal conception of the wary, long-con-
sidering, though adventurous son of Laertes, yet Simon Lord
Lovat is doubtless nearer the original type. In " Hamlet,"
though there is no Denmark of the ninth century, Shakespeare
has suggested the prevailing rudeness of manners quite enough
for his purpose. We see it in the single combat of Hamlet's
father with the elder Fortinbras, in the vulgar wassail of the
kin^r, in the English monarch being expected to hang
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of hand merely to oblige
his cousin of Denmark, in Laertes, sent to Paris to be made a
gentleman of, becoming instantly capable of any the most
barbarous treachery to glut his vengeance. We cannot fancy
Ragnar Lodbrog or Eric the Red matriculating at Wittenberg,
but it was essential that Hamlet should be a scholar, and
Shakespeare sends him thither without more ado. All through
the play we get the notion of a state of society in which a

13*

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

'/ ? ^

savage nature has disguised itself in the externals of civilisa-
tion, like a Maori deacon, who has only to strip and he
becomes once more a tattooed pagan with his mouth watering
for a spare-rib of his pastor. Historically, at the date of
" Hamlet," the Danes were in the habit of burning their enemies
alive in their houses, with as much of their family about them
as might be to make it comfortable. Shakespeare seems
purposely to have dissociated his play from history by changing
nearly every name in the original legend. The motive of the
play — revenge as a religious duty — belongs only to a social
state in which the traditions of barbarism are still operative,
but, with infallible artistic judgment, Shakespeare has chosen,
not untamed Nature, as he found it in history, but the period of
transition, a period in which the times are always out of joint,
and thus the irresolution which has its root in Hamlet's own
character is stimulated by the very incompatibility of that
legacy of vengeance he has inherited from the past with the
new culture and refinement of which he is the representative.
One of the few books which Shakespeare is known to have
possessed was Florio's Montaigne^ and he might well have
transferred the Frenchman's motto. Que sqais jef to the front
of his tragedy ; nor can I help fancying something more than
accident in the fact that Hamlet has been a student at Witten-
berg, whence those new ideas went forth, of whose results in
unsettling men's faith, and consequently disqualifying them for
promptness in action, Shakespeare had been not only an eye-
witness, but which he must actually have experienced in himself.
One other objection let me touch upon here, especially as it
has been urged against Hamlet, and that is the introduction of
low characters and comic scenes in tragedy. Even Garrick,
who had just assisted at the Stratford Jubilee, where Shake-
speare had been pronounced divine, was induced by this absurd
outcry for the proprieties of the tragic stage to omit the
grave-diggers' scene from Hamlet. Leaving apart the fact that
Shakespeare would not have been the representative poet he is
if he had not given expression to this striking tendency of the
Northern races, which shows itself constantly, not only in their

mmmm

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

»33

literature, but even in their mythology and their architecture,
the grave-diggers' scene always impresses me as one of the
most pathetic in the whole tragedy. That Shakespeare
introduced such scenes and characters with deliberate inten<
tion, and with a view to artistic relief and contrast, there can
hardly be a doubt. We must take it for granted that a man
whose works show everywhere the results of judgment some-
times acted with forethought I find the springs of the
profoundest sorrow and pity in this hardened indifference of
the grave-diggers, in their careless discussion as to whether
Ophelia's death was by suicide or no, in their singing and
jesting at their dreary work.

" A pickaxe and a spade, a spade,
For — and a shrouding-sheet :
0, a pit of clay for to be made
For such a guest is meet ! "

We know who is to be the guest of this earthen hospitality —
how much beauty, love, and heartbreak are to be covered in
that pit of clay. All we remember of Ophelia reacts upon us
with tenfold force, and we recoil from our amusement at the
ghastly drollery of the two delvers with a shock of horror.
That the unconscious Hamlet should stumble on this grave of
all others, that it should be here that he should paus^ to muse
humorously on death and decay— all this prepares us for the
revulsion of passion in the next scene, and for the frantic
confession —

" I loved Ophelia ; forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum ! "

And it is only here that such an asseveration would be true even
to the feeling of the moment ; for it is plain from all we know of
Hamlet that he could not so have loved Ophelia, that he was
incapable of the self-abandonment of a true passion, that he
would have analysed this emotion as he does all others, would
have peeped and botanised upon it till it became to him a mere

134

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

f !

:,)

matter of scientific interest. All this force of contrast, and this
horror of surprise, were necessary so to intensify his remorseful
regret that he should believe himself for once in earnest The
speech of the King, " O, he is mad, Laertes," recalls him to
himself, and he at once begins to rave :—

" Zounds ! show me what thou'lt do !
Woul't weep ? woul't fight ? woul't fast ? woul't tear thyself?
Woul't drink up eysil ? eat a crocodile ? "

It is easy to see that the whole plot hinges upon the character
of Hamlet, that Skakespeare's conception of this was the ovum
out of which the whole organism was hatched. And here let
me remark, that there is a kind of genealogical necessity in the
character — a thing not altogether strange to the attentive reader
of Shakespeare. Hamlet seems the natural result of the
mixture of father and mother in this temperament, the resolu-
tion and persistence of the one, like sound timber worm-holed
and made shaky, as it were, by the other's infirmity of will and
discontinuity of purpose. In natures so imperfectly mixed it is
not uncommon to find vehemence of intention the prelude and
counterpoise of weak performance, the conscious nature striving
to keep up its self-respect by a triumph in words all the more
resolute that it feels assured beforehand of inevitable defeat in
action. As in such slipshod housekeeping men are their own
largest creditors, they find it easy to stave otT utter bankruptcy
of conscience by taking up one unpaid promise with another
larger, and at heavier interest, till such self-swindling becomes
habitual and by degrees almost painless. How did Coleridge
discount his own notes of this kind with less and less specie as
the figures lengthened on the paper ! As with Hamlet, so it is
with Ophelia and Laertes. The father's feebleness comes up
again in the wasting heartbreak and gentle lunacy of the
daughter, while the son shows it in a rashness of impulse and
act, a kind of crankiness, of whose essential feebleness we are
all the more sensible as contrasted with a nature so steady on
its keel, and drawing so much waler, as that of Horatio — the
foil at once, in different ways, to both him and Hamlet. It was

Ir*

.^m^smta^S^^

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

135

natural, also, that the daughter of self-conceited old Polonius
should have her softness stiffened with a fibre of obstinacy ; for
there are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks, and that
which bends. Ophelia's is of the former kind ; Hero is her
counterpart, giving way before calamity, and rising again so
soon as the pressure is removed.

I find two passages in Dante that contain the exactest
possible definition of that habit or quality of Hamlet's mind
which justifies the tragic turn of the play, and renders it natural
and unavoidable from the beginning. The first is from the
second canto of the Inferno : —

" E quale e quel clie disvuol ci6 cho voile,
E per nuovi pensier cangia proposta,
Si che del cominciar tutto si telle ;
Tal mi fee' io in quella oscura costa :
Perche pensando consumai la impresa
Olie fu nel cominciar cotanto tofita."

.V'

" And like the man who unwills what he willed,
And for new thoughts doth change his first intent,
So that he cannot anywhere begin,
Such became I upon that slope obscure,
Because with thinking I consumed resolve,
That was so ready at the setting out."

Again, in the fifth of the Purgatorio : —

" Che sempre 1' uomo in cui pensier rampoglia
Sovra pensier, da &k dilunga 11 segno,
Perche la foga 1' un uell' altro insoU?"

" For always he in whom one thought buds forth
Out of another farther puts the goal,
, For each has only force to mar the othar."

Dante was a profound metaphysician, and as in the first
passage he describes and defines a certain quality of mind, so
in the other he tells us its result in the character and life,

136

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

•\

^\ '

namely, indecision and failure—the goal farther off at the end
than at the beginning. It is remarkable how close a resem-
blance of thought, and even of expression, there is between the
former of these quotations and a part of Hamlet's famous
soliloquy : —

Thus conscience [t.e., consclonsness] doth make cowards of us all ;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action t "

It is an inherent peculiarity of a mind like Hamlet's that it
should be conscious of its own defect. Men of his type are for-
ever analysing their own emotions and motives. They cannot
do anything, because they always see two ways of doing it.
They cannot determine on any course of action, because they
are always, as it were, standing at the cross-roads, and see too
well the disadvantages of every one of them. It is not that
they are incapable of resolve, but somehow the band between
the motive power and Ae operative faculties is relaxed and
loose. The engine works, but the machinery it should drive
stands still. The imagination is so much in overplus, that
thinking a thing becomes better than doing it, and thought,
with its easy perfection, capable of everything, because it can
accomplish everything with ideal means, is vastly more attrac-
tive and satisfactory than deed, which must be wrought at best
with imperfect instruments, and always falls short of the
conception that went before it. " If to do," says Portia in the
" Merchant of Venice" — " if to do were as easy as to know what
'twere good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's
cottages princes' palaces." Hamlet knows only too well what
'twere good to do, but he palters with everything in a double
sense : he sees the grain of good there is in evil, and the grain
of evil there is in good, as they exist in the world, and, finding
that he can make those feather-weighted accidents balance

,».,

'~'^^:S£3S&ffiaiMHB

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

137

wards of us all ;

each other, infers that there is little to choose between the
essences themselves. He is of Montaigne's mmd, and says
expressly that " there is nothing good or ill, but thinking makes
it so." He dwells so exclusively in the world of ideas that the
world of facts seems trifling, nothing is worth the while ; and
he has been so long objectless and purposeless, so fur as actual
life is concerned, that, when at last an object and an aim are
forced upon him, he cannot deal with them, and gropes about
vainly for a motive outside of himself that shall marshal his
thoughts for him and guide his faculties into the path of action.
He is the victim not so much of feebleness of will as of an
intellectual indifference that hinders the will from working long
in any one direction. He wishes to will, but never wills. His
continual iteration of resolve shows that he has no resolution.
He is capable of passionate energy where the occasion presents
itself suddenly from without, because nothing is so irritable as
conscious irresolution with a duty to perform. But of deliberate
energy he is not capable ; for there the impulse must come
from within, and the blade of his analysis is so subtile that it
can divide the finest hair of motive 'twixt north and northwest
side, leaving him desperate to choose between them. The very
consciousness of his defect is an insuperable bar to his repairing
it ; for the unity of purpose, which infuses every fibre of the
character with will available whenever wanted, is impossible
where the mind can never rest till it has resolved that unity
into its component elements, and satisfied itself whi :h on the
whole is of greater value. A critical instinct so insatiable that it
must turn upon itself, for lack of something else to hew and hack,
becomes incapable at last of originating anything except
indecision. It becomes infallible in what not to do. How easily
he might have accomplished his task is shown by the conduct
of Laertes. When he has a death to avenge, he raises a mob,
breaks into the palace, bullies the king, and proves how weak
the usurper really was.

The world is the victim of splendid parts, and is slow to
accept a rounded whole, because that is something which is
longln completing, still longer in demonstrating its completion.

138

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

Pi'

We like to be surprised into admiration, and not logically con-
vinced that we ought to admire. We are willing to be delighted
with success, though we are somewhat indifferent to the homely
qualities which insure it. Our thought is so filled with the
rocket's burst of momentary splendour so far above us, that we
forget the poor stick, useful and unseen, that made its climbing
possible. One of these homely qualities is continuity of
character, and it escape^ present applause because it teils
chiefly, in the long run, in results. With his usual tact,
Shakespeare has brought in such a character as a contrast and
foil to Hamlet. Horatio is the only complete man in the play,
— solid, well-knit, and true ; a noble, quiet nature, with that
highest of all qualities, judgment, always sane and prompt ;
who never drags his anchors for any wind of opinion or fortune,
but grips all the closer to the reality of things. He seems one
of those calm, undemonstrative men whom we love and admire
without asking to know why, crediting them with the capacity
of great things, without any test of actual achievement, because
we feel that their manhood is a constant quality, and no mere
accident of circumstance and opportunity. Such men are
always sure of the presence of their highest self on demand.
Hamlet is continually drawing bills on the future, secured by
his promise of himself to himself, which he can never redeem.
His own somewhat feminine nature recognises its complement
in Horatio, and clings to it instinctively, as naturally as Horatio
is attracted by that fatal gift of imagination, the absence of
which makes the strength of his own character, as its overplus
does the weakness of Hamlet's. It is a happy marriage of two
minds drawn together by the charm of unlikeness. Hamlet
feels in Horatio the solid steadiness which he misses in him-
self ; Horatio in Hamlet that need of service and sustainment
to render which gives him a consciousness of his own value.
Hamlet fills the place of a woman to Horatio, revealing him to
himself not only in what he says, but by a constant claim upon
his strength of nature ; and there is great psychological truth in
making suicide the first impulse of this quiet, undemonstr.itire
man, after Hamlet's death, as if the very reason for his being

{

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

139

•e, with that

were taken with his friend's need of him. In his grief, he for the
first and only time speaks of himself by his loss. If this manly
reserve of Horatio be true to Nature, not less so are the
communicativeness of Hamlet, and his tendency to soliloquise.
If self-consciousness be alien to the one, it is just as truly the
happiness of the other. Like a musician distrustful of himself,
he is forever tuning his instrument, first overstraining this cord
a little, and then that, but unable to bring them into unison, or
to profit by it if he could.

We do not believe that Horatio ever thought he " was not a
pipe for Fortune's finger to pby what stop she please," till
Hamlet told him so. That was Fortune's affair, not his ; let
her try it, if she liked. He is unconscious of his own peculiar
qualities, as men of decision commonly are, or they would not
be men of decision. Whrn there is a thing to be done, they go
straight at it, and for the time there is nothing for them in the
whole universe but themselves and their object. Hamlet, on
the other hand, is always studying himself. This world and the
other, too, are always present to his mind, and there in the
corner is the little black kobold of a doubt making mouths at
him. He breaks down the bridges before him, not behind him,
as a man of action would do ; but there is something more than
ihis. He is an ingrained sceptic ; though his is the scepticism,
not of reason, but of feeling, whose root is want of faith in him-
self. In him it is passive, a malady rather than a function of
the mind. We might call him insincere ; not that he was in
any sense a hypocrite, but only that he never was and never could
oe in earnest. Never could be, because no man without
ntense faith in something ever can. Even if he only believed
in himself, that were better than nothing ; for it will carry a
man a great way in the outward successes of life — nay, will
even sometimes give him the Archimedean fulcrum for moving
the world. But Hamlet doubts everything. He doubts the
immortality of the soul, just after seeing his father's spirit, and
hearing from its mouth the secrets of the other world. He
doubts Horatio even, and swears him to secrecy on the cross of
his sword, though probably he himself has no assured belief in

140

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

) »

the sacredness of the symbol. He doubts Ophelia, and asks
her, " Are you honest ? " He doubts the ghost, after he has
had a little time to think about it, and so gets up the play to
test the guilt of the king. And how coherent the whole character
is I With what perfect tact and judgment Shakespeare, in
the advice to the players, makes him an exquisite critic 1 For
just here that part of his character which would be weak in
dealing with affairs is strong. A wise scepticism is the first
attribute of a good critic. He must not believe that the fire<
insurance offices will raise their rates of premium on Charles
River, because the new volume of poems is printing at Riverside
or the University Press. He must not believe so profoundly
in the ancients as to think it wholly out of the question that
the world has still vigour enough in its loins to beget some
one who will one of these days be as good an ancient as any of
them.

Another striking quality in Hamlet's nature is his perpetual
inclination to irony. I think this has been generally passed
over too lightly, as if it v/ere something external and accidental,
rather assumed as a mask than part of the real nature of the
man. It seems to me to go deeper, to be something innate,
and not merely factitious. It is nothing like the grave
irony of Socrates, which was the weapon of a man thoroughly
in earnest — the boomerang of argument, which one throws
in the opposite direction of what he means to hit, and which
seems to be flying away from the adversary, whu will presently
find himself knocked down by it. It is not like the irony of
Timon, which is but the wilful refraction of a clear mind
twisting awry whatever enters it — or of lago, which is the
slime that a nature essentially evil loves to trail over all beauty
and goodness to taint them with distrust : it is the half-jest,
half-earnest of an inactive temperament that has not quite made
up its mind whether life is a reality or no, whether men were
not made in jest, and T/hich amuses itself equally with finding
a deep meaning in t/'vial things and a trifling one in the
profoundest mysteries of being, because the want of earnest-
ness in its own essence infects everything else with its own

■"'w.«'aj»gsSg'JWi4j

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MOPE

141

indifference. If there be now and then an unmannerly rudeness
and bitterness in it, as in the scenes with Polonius and Osrick,
we must remember that Hamlet was just in the condition
which spurs men to sallies of this kind : dissatisfied, at one
neither with the world nor with himself, and accordingly
casting about for something out of himself to vent his spleen
upon. But even in these passages there is no hint of earnest-
ness, of any purpose beyond the moment ; they are mere
cat's-paws of vexation, and not the deep-raking ground-swell
of passion, as we see in the sarcasm of Lear.

The question of Hamlet's madness has been much discussed
and variously decided. High medical authority has pronounced,
as usual, on both sides of the question. But the induction
has been drawn from too narrow premises, being based on
a mere diagnosis of the case^ and not on an appreciation of
the character in its completeness. We have a case of pre-
ended madness in the Edgar of "King Lear ; " and it is ceitainly
true that that is a charcoal sketch, coarsely outlined, compared
with the delicate drawing, the lights, shades, and half-tints
of the portraiture in Hamlet. But does this tend to prove
that the madness of the latter, because truer to the recorded
observation of experts, is real, and meant to be real, as the
other to be fictitious? Not in the least, as it appears to me.
Hamlet, among all the "Characters of Shakespeare, is the most
eminently a metaphysician and psychologist. He is a close
observer, continually analysing his own nature and that of
others, letting fall his little drops of acid irony on all who
come near him, to make them show what they are made of.
Even Ophelia is not too sacred, Osrick not too contemptible for
experiment If such a man assumed madness^ he would play
his part perfectly. If Shakespeare himself, without going mad,
could so observe and remember all the abnormal symptoms
as to be able to reproduce them in Hamlet, why should it be
beyond the power of Hamlet to reproduce them in himself?
If you deprive Hamlet of reason, there is no truly tragic
motive left. He would be a fit subject for Bedlam, but not
for the stage. We might have pathology enough, but no

' -

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE

^ifl

i ,

\\\

pathos. Ajax first becomes tragic when he recovers his wits.
If Hamlet is irresponsible, the whole play is a chaos. That
he is not so might be proved by evidence enough, were it not
labour thrown away.

This feigned madness of Hamlet's is one of the few points
in which Shakespeare has kept close to the old story on which
he founded his play ; and as he never decided without deliber-
acion, so he never acted without unerring judgment. Hamlet
(^rifts through the whole tragedy. He never keeps on one tack
long enough to get steerage- way, even if, in a nature like
his, with those electric streamers of whim and fancy for-
ever wavering across the vault of his brain, the needle of
judgment would point in one direction long enough to strike a
course by. The scheme of simulated insanity is precisely the
one he would have been likely to hit upon, because it enabled
him to follow his own bent, and to drift with an apparent pur-
pose, postponing decisive action by the very means he adopts
to arrive at its accomplishment, and satisfying himself with the
show of doing something that he may escape so much the
longer the dreaded necessity of really doing anything at all It
enables him to play with life and duty, instead of taking them
by the rougher side, where alone any firm grip is possible — to
feel that he is on the way toward accomplishing somewhat,
when he is really paltering with his own irresolution. Nothing,
I think, could be more finely imagined than this. Voltaire
complains that he goes mad without any sutilicient object or
result. Perfectly true, and precisely what was most natural for
him to do, and, accordingly, precisely what Shakespeare meant
that he should do. It was delightful to him to indulge his
imagination and humour, to prove his capacity for something
by playing a part : the one thing he could not do was to bring
himself to aci^ unless when surprised by a sudden impulse of
suspicion — as where he kills Polonius, and there he could not
see his victim. He discourses admirably of suicide, but does
not kill himself; he talks daggers, but uses none. He puts by
the chance to kill the king with the excuse that he will not do it
while he is praying, lest his soul be saved thereby, though it is

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE,

more than doubtful wliethei le believed it himself. He allows
himself to be packed off to England, without any motive except
ih.it it would for the time take him farther from a present duty :
the more disagreeable to a nature like his because it was
present, and not a mere matter for speculative consideration.
When Goethe made his famous comparison of the acorn
planted in a vase which it bursts with its growth, and says that
in Hke manner Hamlet is a nature which breaks down under
the weight of a duty too great for it to bear, he seems to have
considered the character too much from one side. Had
Hamlet actually killed himself to escape his too onerous com-
mission, Goethe's conception of him would have been satis-
factory enough. But Hamlet was hardly a sentimentalist, like
Werther ; on the contrary, he saw things o'.ily too clearly in
the dry north-light of the intellect. It is chance that at last
brin<;s him to his end. It would appear rather that Shake-
speare intended to show us an imaginative temperament
brought face to face with actualities, into any clear relation
of sympathy with which it cannot bring itself. The very
means that Shakespeare makes use of to lay upon him the
obligation of acting — the ghost — really seems to make it al
the harder for him to act ; for the spectre but gives an
additional excitement to his imagination and a fresh topic for
his scepticism.

I shall not attempt to evolve any high moral significance from
the play, even if I thought it possible ; for that would be aside
from the present purpose. The scope of the higher drama is to
represent life, not every-day life, it is true, but life lifted above
the plane of b ead-and-butter associations, by nobler reaches
of language, by the influence at once inspiring and modulating
of verse, by an intenser play of passion condensing that misty
mixture of feeling and reflection which makes the ordinary
atmosphere of existence into flashes of thought and phrase
whose brief, but terrible, illumination prints the outworn land-
scape of every-day upon our brains, with its little motives and
mean results, in lines of tell-tale fire. The moral office of
tragedy is to show us our own weaknesses idealised in grander

144

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

I »

lli

figures and more awful results — to teach us that what we pardon
in ourselves as venial faults, if they seem to have but slight
influence on our immediate fortunes, have arms as lon^ as those
of kings, and reach forward to the catastrophe of our lives, that
they are dry-rotting the very fibre of will and conscience, so
that, if we should be brought to the test of a great temptation or
a stringent emergency, we must be involved in a ruin as sudden
and complete as that we shudder at in the unreal scene of the
theatre. But the primary object of a tragedy is not to inculcate
a formal moral, representing life, it teaches, like life, by
indirection, by those nou^ and winks that are thrown away on
us blind horses in such profusion. We may learn, to be sure,
plenty of lessons from Shakespeare. We are not likely to have
kingdoms to divide, crowns foretold us by weird sisters, a
father's death to avenge, or to kill our wives from jealousy ; but
Lear may teach us to draw the line more clearly between a wise
generosity and a loose-handed weakness of giving ; Macbeth,
how one sin involves another, and forever another, by a fatal
parthenogenesis, and that the key which unlocks forbidden
doors to our will or passion leaves a stain on the hand, that may
not be so dark as blood, but that will not out ; Hamlet, that all
the noblest gifts of person, temperament, and mind slip like
sand through the grasp of an infirm purpose ; Othello, that the
perpetual silt of some one weakness, the eddies of a suspicious
temper depositing their one impalpable layer after another, may
build up a shoal on which an heroic life and an otherwise
magnanimous nature may bilge and go to pieces. All this we
may learn, and much more, and Shakespeare was no doubt well
aware of all this and more ; but \ do not believe that he wrote
his plays with any such didactic purpose. He knew human
nature too well not to know that one thorn of experience is
worth a whole wilderness of warning — that, where one man
shapes his life by precept and example, there are a thousand
who have it shaped for them by impulse and by circumstances.
He did not mean his great tragedies for scarecrows, as if the
nailing of one hawk to the barn-door would prevent the next
from coming down souse into the hen-yard. No, it is not the

SHAKESPEARE OMCE MORE-

poor bleaching victim hung up to moult its draggled feathers in
jhe rain that he wishes to show us. He 'oves the hawk-nature
as well as the hen-nature ; and if he is unequalled in anything,
it is in that sunny breadth of view, that impregnability of reason,
that looks down all ranks and conditions of men, all fortune and
misfortune, with the equal eye of the pure artist.

Whether I have fancied anything into "Hamlet" which the
author never dreamed of putting there I do not greatly concern
myself to inquire. Poets are always entitled to a royalty on
whatever we find in their works ; for these fine creations as
truly build themselves up in the brain as they are built up with
deliberate forethought. Praise art as we will, that which the
artist did not mean to put into his work, but which found itself
there by some generous process of Nature of which he was as
unaware as the blue river is of its rhyme with the blue sky, has
somew! at in it that snatches us into sympathy with higher
things than those which come by plot and observation. Goethe
wrote his " Faust" in its earliest form without a thought of the
deeper meaning which the exposition of an age of criticism was
to find in it : without foremeaning it, he had impersonated in
Mephistopheles the genius of his century. Shall this subtract
from the debt we owe him? Not at all. If originality were
conscious of itself, it would have lost its right to be original. I
believe that Shakespeare intended to impersonate in Hamlet
not a mere metaphysical entity, but a man of flesh and blood :
yet it is certainly curious how prophetically typical the char-
acter is of that introversion of mind which is so constant a
phenomenon of these latter days, of that over-consciousness
which wastes itself in analysing the motives of action instead of
acting.

The old painters had a rule, that all compositions should be
pyramidal in form — a central figure, from which the others
slope gradually away on the two sides. Shakespeare probably
had never heard of this rule, and, if he had, would not have
been likely to respect it more than he has the so-called classical
unities of time and place. But he understood perfectly the
artistic advantages of gradation, contrast, and relief. Taking

560

146

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

1-4

i !.

"■mi

i .

Hamlet as the key-note, we find in him weakness of character,
which, on the one hand, is contrasted with the feebleness that
springs fr'^m overweening conceit in Polonius and with frailty
of temperament in Ophelia, while, on the other hand, it is
brought into fuller relief by the steady force of Horatio and the
impulsive violence of Laertes, who is resolute from thoughtless'
ness, just as Hamlet is irresolute from overplus of thought.

If we must draw a moral from Hamlet, it would seem to be,
that Will is Fate, and that. Will once abdicating, the inevitable
successor in the regency is Chance. Had Hamlet acted,
instead of musing how good it would be to act, the king might
have been the only victim. As it is, all the main actors in the
story are the fortuitous sacrifice of his irresolution. We see
how a single great vice of character at last draws to itself a^
allies and confederates all other weaknesses of the man, as in
civil wars the timid and the selfish wait to throw themselves
upon the stronger side.

*' In Life's small things be resolute and great
To keep thy muscles trained : know'st thou when Fate
Thy measure takes ? or when she'll say to thee,
* I find the« worthy, do this thing for me ? ' "

I have said that it was doubtful if Shakespeare had any
conscious moral intention in his writings. I meant only that
he was purely and primarily poet. And while he was an
English poet in a sense that is true of no other, his method was
thoroughly Greek, yet with this remarkable difference —that,
while the Greek dramatists took purely national themes and
gave them a universal interest by their mode of treatment, he
took what may be called cosmopolitan traditions, legends of
human nature, and nationalised them by the infusion of his
perfectly Anglican breadth of character and solidity of under-
standing. Wonderful as his imagination and fancy are, his
perspicacity and artistic discretion are more so. This country
tradesman's son, coming up to London, could set high-bred
wits, like Beaumont, uncopiable lessons in drawing gentlemen
such as are seen nowhei <i else but on the canvas of Titian ; he

*'Vj *,

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

147

could take Ulysses away from Homer and expand the shrewd
and crafty islander into a statesman whose words are the pith
of history. But what makes him yet more exceptional was his
utterly unimpeachable judgment, and that poise of character
which enabled him to be at once the greatest of poets and so
unnoticeable a good citizen as to leave no incidents for
biography. His material was never far-sought (it is still dis-
puted whether the fullest head of which we have record were
cultivated beyond the range of grammar-school precedent 1) ; but
he used it with a poetic instinct which we cannot parallel,
identified himself with it, yet remained always its born and
questionless master. He finds the Clown and Fool upon the
stage — he makes them the tools of his pleasantry, his satire,
and even his pathos ; he finds a fading rustic superstition, and
shapes out of it ideal Pucks, Titanias, and Ariels, in whose
existence statesmen and scholars believe forever. Always poet,
he subjects all to the ends of his art, and gives in " Hamlet" the
churchyard ghost, but with the cothurnus on — the messenger of
God's revenge against murder ; always philosopher, he traces
in "Macbeth" the metaphysics of apparitions, painting the
shadowy Banquo only on the o'erwrought brain of the
murderer, and staining the hand of his wife-accomplice
(because she was the more refin^^d and higher nature) with
the disgustful blood-spot that is not there. We say he had
no moral intention, for the reason, that, as artist, it was not
his to deal with the realities, but only with the shows of things ;
yet, with a temperament so just, an insight so inevitable as his,
it was impossible that the moral reality, which underlies the
mirage of the poet's vision, should not always be suggested.
His humour and satire are never of the destructive kind ; what he
does in that way is suggestive only — not breaking bubbles with
Thor's hammer, but puffing them away with the breath of a
Clown, or shivering them with the light laugh of a genial
cynic. Men go about to prove the existence of a God ! Was
it a bit of phosphorus, that brain whose creations are so real,
that, mixing with them, we feel as if we ourselves were but
fleeting magic-lantern shadows ?

148

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

^1.

But higher even than the genius we rate the character ot
this unique man, and the grand impersonality of what he wrote.
What has he told us of himself? In our self-exploiting nine-
teenth century, with its melancholy liver-complaint, how serene
and high he seems 1 if he had sorrows, he has made them the
woof of everlasting consolation to his kind ; and if, as poets arc
wont to whine, the outward world was :old to him, its biting
air did but trace itself in loveliest frost-work of fancy on the
many windows of that self-centred and cheerful soul.

\S'''

iA\

MILTON*

IF the biographies of literary men are to assume the bulk
which Mr. Masson is giving to that of Milton, their authors
should send a phial of elixir vitce with the first volume, that
a purchaser might have some valid assurance of surviving
to see the last. Mr. Masson has already occupied thirteen
hundred and seventy-eight pages in getting Milton to his
thirty-fifth year, and an interval of eleven years stretches
between the dates of the first and second instalments of his
published labours.t As Milton's literary life properly begins
at twenty-one, with the '* Ode on the Nativity," and as by
far the more important part of it lies between the year at
which we are arrived and his death at the age of sixty-six,
we might seem to have the terms given us by which to
make a rough reckoning of how soon we are likely to see land.
But when we recollect the baffling character of the winds
and currents we have already encountered, and the eddies
that may at any time slip us back to the reformation in
Scotland or the settlement of New England ; when we
consider, moreover, that Milton's life overlapped the grand

* The Life of John Milton : narrated ir Connection toith the Political,
Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. By DAvm Masson,
M.D., LL.D., Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the
University of Edinburgh. Vols. I., II. 1638-1643. London and New
York : Macmillan & Co. 1871. 8vo. pp. xii., 608.

TJie Poetical Works of John Miltan, edited, with Introduction, Notes,
and an Essay on Milton's English, by David Masson, M.A., LL.D.,
Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of
Edinburgh. 3 vols. 8vo. Macmillan & Co. 1874.

+ Since this essay was wrHten, the lemaining volumes have appa:ired,
aud Mr. Masson's work is now complete. — Ed.

ISO

MILTON,

t ^\

sihle of French literature, with its irresistible temptations to
digression and homily for a man of Mr. Masson's temperament,
we may be pardoned if a sigh of doubt and discouragement
escape us. We envy the secular leisures of Methusalch, and
are thankful that his biography at least (if written in the sam-^
longeval proportion) is irrecoverably lost to us. What a subject
would that have been for a person of Mr. Masson's spacious
predilections 1 Even if he himself can count on patriarchal
prorogations of existence, let him hang a print of the Countess
of Desmond in his study to remind him of the ambushes which
Fate lays for the toughest of us. For myself, I have not dared
to climb a cherry-tree since I began to read his work. Even
with the promise of a speedy third volume before me, I feel by
no means sure of living to see Mary Powell back in, her
husband's house ; for it is just at this crisis that Mr. Masson,
with the diabolical art of a practised serial writer, leaves us
while he goes into an exhaustive account of the Westminster
Assembly, and the political and religious notions of the
Massachusetts Puritans. One could not help thinking, after
having got Milton fairly through college, that he was never
more mistaken in his life than when he wrote,

" How so(m hath Time, that subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year 1"

Or is it Mr. Masson who has scotched Time's wheels ?

It is plain from the preface to the second volume that Mr.
Masson himself has an uneasy consciousness that something is
wrong, and that Milton ought somehow to be more than a mere
incident of his own biography. He tells us that, "whatever
may be thought by a hasty person looking in on the subject
from the outside, no one can study the life of Milton as it ought
to be studied without being obliged to study extensively and
intimately the contemporary history of England, and even
incidentally of Scotland and Ireland too. . , . Thus on the very
compulsion, or at least the suasion, of the biography, a history
grew on my hands. It was not in human nature to confine the
historical inquiries, once they were in progress, within the

MILTON,

1.^1

ly, a history

precise limits of their demonstrable bearing on the biography,
even had it been possible to determine these limits beforehand ;
and so the history assumed a co-ordinate importance with me,
was pursued often for its own sake, and became, though always
with a sense of organic relation to the biography, continuous
in itself." If a "hasty person" be one who thinks eleven
years rather long to have his button held by a biographer ere
he begin his next sentence, I take to myself the sting of Mr.
Masson's covert sarcasm. I confess with shame a pusillanimity
that is apt to flag if a "to be continued" do not redeem its
promise before the lapse of a quinquennium. I ould scarce
await the "Autocrat" himself so long. The heroic age of
literature is past, and even a duodecimo may often prove too
heavy {oXov vvv ppbrroC) for the descendants of men to whom the
folio was a pastime. But what does Mr. Masson mean by
"continuous"? To me it seems rather as if his somewhat
rambling history of the seventeenth century were interrupted
now and then by an unexpected apparition of Milton, who, like
Paul Pry, just pops in and hopes he does not intrude, to tell us
what he has been doing in the meanwhile. The reader,
immersed in Scottish politics or the schemes of Archbishop
Laud, is a Httle puzzled at first, but reconciles himself on being
reminded that this fair-haired young man is the protagonist of
the drama. Pars minima est ipsapuella sui.

If Goethe was right in saying that every man was a citizen of
his age as well as of his country, there can be no doubt that in
order to understand the motives and conduct of the man we
must first make ourselves intimate with the time in which he
lived. We have therefore no fault to find with the thoroughness
of Mr. Masson's " historical inquiries." The more thorough the
better, so far as they were essential to the satisfactory perform-
ance of his task. But it is only such contemporary events,
opinions, or persons as were really operative on the character of
the man we are studying that are of consequence, and we are to
familiarise ourselves with them, not so much for the sake of
explaining them as for understanding him. The biographer,
especially of a literary man, need only mark the main currents

i •■

»f

■

IS*

MILTON.

of tendency, without being officious to trace out to its marshy
source every runlet that has cast in its tiny pitcherful with the
rest. M"ch less should he attempt an analysis of the stream
and to classify every component by itself, as if each were ever
effectual singly and not in combination. Human motives cannot
be thus chemically cross-exRHr/lned, nor do we arrive at any
true knowledge uf character by such minute subdivision of its
ingredients. Nothing is so essential tu a biographer as an eye
that can distinguish at a glance between r-*al events that
are the levers of thought and action, and what Donne calls
" unconcerning things, matters of fact" — between substantial
personages, whose contact or even neighbourhood is influential,
and the supernumeraries that serve first to fill up a stage and
afterwards the interstices of a biographical dictionary.

" Time hath a wallet at his back
Wlierein he puts alms for Oblivion."

Let the biographer keep his fingers off that sacred and
merciful deposit, and not renew for us the bores of a former
generation as if we had not enough of our own. But if he
cannot forbear that unwise inquisitiveness, we may fairly com-
plain when he insists on taking us along with him in the
processes of his investigation, instead of giving us the sifted
results in their bearing on the life and character of his subject,
whether for help or hindrance. We are blinded with the dust
of old papers ransacked by Mr. Masson to find out that they
have no relation whatever to his hero. He had been wise if he
had kept constantly in view what Milton himself says of those
who gathered up personal traditions concerning the apostles:
" With less fervency was studied what Saint Paul or Saint John
had written than was listened to one that could say, ' Here he
taught, here he stood, this was his stature, and thus he went
habited ; and O, happy this house that harboured him, and that
cold stone whereon he rested, this village where he wrought
such a miracle.' . . . Thus while all their thoughts were
poured out upon circumstances and the gazing after such men
as had sat at table with the Apostles, ... by this means they

ib^aiii

MILTON,

153

lost their time and truanted on the fundamental grounds of
saving knowledge, as was seen shortly in their writings." Mr.
Masson has %o poured out his mind upon circumstances^ that his
work reminds us of Allston's picture of " Elijah iii the Wilder-
ness," where a good deal of research at last enables us to guess at
the prophet absconded like a conundrum in the landscape where
the very ravens could scarce have found him out, except by divine
commission. The figure of Milton becomes but a speck on the
enormous canvas crowded with the ..cenery through which he
may by any possibility be conjectured to have passed. I will cite
a single example of the desperate straits to which Mr. Masson is
reduced in order to hitch Milton on to his own biography. He
devotes the first chapter of his Second Book to the meeting
of the Long Parliament. " Already," he tells us, " in the earlier
part of the day, the Commons had gone through the ceremony
of hearing the writ io: the Parliament read, and the names of
the members that had been returned called over by Thomas
Wyllys, Esq., the Clerk of the Crown of Chancery. His deputy,
Agar^ Miltotis brother-in-law ^ may have been in attendance on
such an occasion. During the preceeding month or two, at all
events^ Agar and his subordinates in the Crown Office had
been unusually busy with the issue of the writs and with the
other work connected with the opening of Parliament." — (Vol.
ii. p. 156.) Mr. Masson's resolute "at all events" is very
amusing. Meanwhile,

" The hungry sheep look up and are not fed."

Augustine Thierry has a great deal to answer for, \i to him
we owe the modern fashion of writing history picturesquely.
At least his method leads to most unhappy results when
essayed by men to whom nature has denied a sense of what
the picturesque really is. The historical picturesque does not
consist, in truth of costume and similar accessories, but in the
grouping, attitude, and expression of the figures, caught when
they are unconscious that the artist is sketching them. The
moment they are posed for a composition, unless by a man
of genius, the life has gone out of them. In the hands of an

:'l'

1 ;?i

; .

I )

';!

154

MILTON,

n,:

1 1 «'i

1 \

inferior artist, who fancies that imagination is something to be
squeezed out of colour-tubes, the past becomes a phantasmagoria
of jack boots, doublets, and flap-hats, the mere property-room of
a desertf::d theatre, as if the light had been scenical and illusory,
the world an unreal thing that vanished with the foot-lights.
It is the power of catching the actors in great events at
unawares that makes the glimpses given us by contemporaries
so vivid and precious. And St Simon, one of the great
masters of the picturesque, lets us into the secret of his art
when he tells us how, in that wonderful scene of the death
of Monseigneur, he saw "^m premier coup d^oeil vivement
portly tout ce qui leur dchappoit et tout ce qri les accableroit."
It is the gift of producing this reality that almost makes us
blush, s if we had been caught peeping through a keyhole, and
had surprised secrets to which we had no right — it is this only
that c:\n jiir»tify the pictorial method of narration. Mr. Carlyle
has this power of contemporising himself with bygone times,
he cheats us to

" Play with your fancies and believe we see ; "

but we find the tableaux vivants of the apprentices who " deal
in his command without his power," and who compel us to
work very hard indeed with our fancies, rather wearisome.
The effort of weaker arms to shoot with his mighty bow has
filled the air of recent literature with more than enough fruitless
twanging.

Mr. Masson's style, at best cumbrous, becomes intolerably
awkward when he strives to make up for the want of St. Simon's
premier roup (fceil by impertinent '.^etails of what we must call
the pseudo-dramatic kind. Fcr example, does Hall profess to
have traced Milton from the University to a "suburb sink" of
London ? Mr. Masson fancies he hears Milton saying tc
himself, "A suburb sink! has Hall or his son taken the
trouble to walk all the way to Aldersgate here, to peep
up the entry where ! live, and so have an exact notion of
my whereabouts ? There has been plague in the neighbour-
hood certainly ; and I hope Jane Yates had my doorstep

'MA

MILTOI^.

155

tidy for the visit." Does Milton, answering Hall'& innuendo
that he was courting the graces of a rich widow, tell us that he
woul'i rather " choc'^e a virgin of mean fortunes honestly
bred?" Mr. Masson forthwith breaks forth in a paroxysm of
what we suppose to be picturesqueness in this wise: "What
have v/e here ? Surely nothing less, if we choose so to
construe it, than a marriage advertisement 1 Ho, all ye
virgins of England (widows need not apply), here is an oppor-
tunity such as seldom occurs : a bachelor, unattached ; age,
thirty-three years and three or four months ; height [Milton,
by the way, would have said highth\ middle or a little less ;
personal appearance unusually handsome, with fair complexion
and light auburn hair ; circumstances independent ; tastes
intellectual and decidedly musical ; principles Root-and-Branch !
Was there already any young maiden in ^ 'hose bosom, had
such an advertisement come in her way, it would have raised a
consciouii flutter ? If so, did she live near Oxford?" If there
is anything worse than an unimaginative man trying to write
imaginatively, it is a heavy man when he fancies he is being
facetious. He tramples out the last spark of cheerfulness with
the broad damp foot of a hippopotamus.

I am no advocate of what is called the dignity of history,
when it means, as it too often does, that dulness has a right of
sanctuary in gravity. Too well do I recall the sorrows of my
youth, when I was shipped in search of knowledge on the long
Johnsonian swell of the last century, favourable to anything but
the calm digestion of historic truth. I had even then an uneasy
suspicion, which has ripeneJ into certainty, that thoughts were
never draped in long skirts like babies, if they were strong
enough to go alone. But surely there should be such a thing
as good taste, above all a sense of self-respect, in the historian
liimself, that should not allow him to play any tricks with the
dignity of his subject. A halo of sacredness has hitherto
invested the figure of Milton, and our image of him has dwelt
securely in ideal remoteness from the vulgarities of life. No
diaries, no private letters, remain to give the idle curiosity of
after-times the right to force itself on the hallowed seclusion of

> I

.,' ^

»S6

MILTON.

\ X\

his reserve. That a man whose familiar epistles were written
in the language of Cicero, whose sense of personal dignity was
so great that, when called on in self-defence to speak of himself,
he always does it with an epical stateliness of phrase, and whose
self-respect even in youth was so piofound that it resembles the
reverence paid by other men to a far-off and idealised character
— that he should be treated in this ofif-hand familiar fashion by
his biographer seems to us a kind of desecration, a violation of
good manners no less than of the laws of biographic art. Milton
is the last man in the world to be slapped on the back with im-
punity. Better the surly injustice of Johnson than such presumpt-
uous friendship as this. Let the seventeenth century, at least, be
kept sacred from the insupportable foot of the interviewer !

But Mr. Masson, in his desire to be (shall I say) idiomatic,
can do something worse than what has been hitherto quoted.
He can be even vulgar. Discussing the motives of Miltons
first marriage, he says, "Did he come seeking his ;^ 500, and
did Mrs. Powell heave a daughter at him?" We have heard of
a woman throwi ig herself at a man's head, and the image is a
somewhat violent one ; but what is this to Mr. Masson's
improvement on it ? It has been sometimes affirmed that the
fitness of an image may be tested by tryin^r whether a
picture could be made of it or not. Mr. Masson hai
certainly offered a liew and striking subject to the historical
school of British art. A little further on, speaking of
Mary Powell, he says, "We have no portrait of her, nor any
account of her appearance ; but on the usual rule of the
elective affinities of opposites, Milton being fair, we will vok
her to have been dark-haired." I need say nothing of the good
^aste of this sentence, but its absurdity is heightened by the fact
that Mr. Masson himself had left us in doubt whether the
match was one of convenience or inclination. I know not how
it may be with other readers, but for myself I feel inclined to
resent this hail-fellow-well-met manner with its jaunty ^^ive will
vote." In some cases, Mr. Masson's indecorums in respect of
style may possibly be accounted for as attempts at humour by
one who has an imperfect notion of its ingredients. In such

MILT" ON,

>57

1, a violation of

experiments, to judge by the effect, the pensive element of the
compound enters in too large an excess over the hilarious.
Whether I have hit upon the true explanation, or whether the
cause lie not rather in a besetting velleity of the picturesque
and vivid, I shall leave the reader to judge by an example or
two. In the manuscript copy of Milton's sonnet in which he
claims for his own house the immunity which the memory of
Pindar and Euripides secured for other walls, the title had
originally been, " On his Door when the City expected an
Assault." Milton has drawn a line through this and substituted
" When the Assault was intended to the Cjy." Mr. Masson
fancies "a mood of jest or semi-jest in the whole affair;" but
we think rather that Milton's quiet assumption of equality with
two such famous poets was as seriously characteristic as
Dante's ranking himself sesto tra cotanto semw. Mr. Masson
takes advantage of the obliterated title to imagine one of Prince
Rupert's troopers entering the poet's study and finding some of
his "Anti-Episcopal pamphlets that had been left lying about in*
advertently. * Oho I ' the Cavalier Captain might then have said,

' Pindar and Euripides are all very well, by G 1 I've been

at college myself ; and when I meet a gentleman and scholar,
I hope I know how to treat him ; but neither Pindar nor
Euripides ever wrote pamphlets against the Church of Eng-
land, by G I It won't do, Mr. Milton ! '" This, it may be

supposed, is Mr. Masson's way of being funny and dramatic at
the same time. Good taste is shocked with this barbarous
dissonance. Could not the Muse defend her son ? Again,
when Charles I., at Edinburgh, in the autumn and winter
of 1641, fills the vacant English sees, we are told, " It was more
than an insult ; it was a sarcasm 1 It was as if the King, while
giving Alexander Henderson his hand to kiss, had winked his
royal eye over that reverend Presbyter's back ! " Now one can
conceive Charles II. winking when he took the Solemn League
and Covenant, but never his father under any circumstances.
He may have been, and I believe he was, a bad king, but
surely we may take Marvell's word for it, that
" He nothing common did or mean,"

\ \ .

'58

MILTOtf.

* ;

<v\>

upon any of the " memorable scenes " of his life. The ima^e
is, therefore, out of all imaginative keeping, and vulgarises the
chief personage in a grand historical tragedy, who, if not a
great, was at least a decorous actor. But Mr. Masson can do
worse than this. Speaking of a Mrs. Katherine Chidley, who
wrote in defence of the Independents against Thomas
Edwards, he says, " People wondered who this she-Brownist,
Katherine Chidley, was, and did not quite lose their interest
in her when they found that she was an oldish woman,
and a member of some hole-and-corner congregation in
London. Indeed, she put her nails into Mr, Edwards with
some ejffect.^^ Why did he not say at once, after the good
old fashion, that she "set her ten commandments in his
face?" In another place he speaks of "Satan standing
with his staff around him." Mr. Masson's style, a little
Robertsonian at best, naturally grows worse when forced to
condescend to every-day matters. He can no more dismount
and walk than the man in armour on a Lord Mayor's day.
"It [Aldersgate Street] stretches away northwards a full fourth
of a mil* as one continuous thoroughfare, until, crossed by
Long Lane and the Barbican, it parts with the name of Aiders-
gate Street, and, under the new names of Goswell Street and
Goswell Road, completes its tendency towards the suburbs and
fields about Islington." What a noble work might not the
Directory be if composed on this scale ! The imagination even
of an alderman might well be lost in that full quarter of a mile
of continuous thoroughfare. Mr. Masson is very great in these
passages of civic grandeur ; but he is more surprising, on the
whole, where he has an image to deal with. Speaking of
Milton's " two-handed engine " in "Lycidas," he says: "May
not Milton, whatever else he meant, have meant a coming Eng-
lish Parliament, with its two Houses ? Whatever he meant, his
prophecy had come true. As he sat among his books in Aiders-
gate Street, the two-handed engine at the door of the English
Church was on the swing. Once, twice, thrice, it had swcri^ its
arcs to gather energy ; now it was on the backmost poise, and
the blow was to descend." One cannot help wishing that Mr.

MILTON.

159

Masson would try his hand on the tenth horn of the beast in
Revelation, or on the time and half a time of Daniel. There is
something so consoling to a prophet in being told that, no
matter what he meant, his prophecy had come true, and that he
might mean " whatever else " he pleased, so long as he may
have meant what we choose to think he did, reasoning back-
ward from the assumed fulfilment I But, perhaps, there may
be detected in Mr. Masson's "swept its arcs" a little of that
prophetic hedging-in vagueness to which he allows so generous
a latitude. How if the "two-handed engine," after all, were a
broom (or besom, to be more dignified),

'* Sweeping— vehemently sweeping,
No pause admitted, no design avowed,"

like that wielded by the awful shape which Dion the Syracusan
saw? I make the suggestion modestly, though somewhat
encouraged by Mr. Masson's system of exegesis, which reminds
one of the casuists' doctrine of probables, in virtue of which a
man may be probabiliter obligaius and probabiliter deohligatus
at the same time. But, perhaps, the most remarkable ir stance
of Mr. Masson's figures of speech is where we are told that the
king might have established a bona fide government "by
giving public ascendency to the popular or Parliamentary
element in his Council, and inducing the old leaven in it either
to accept the new policy^ or to withdraw and become inactive}^
There is something consoling in the thought that yeast should
be accessible to moral suasion. It is really too bad that bread
should ever be heavy for want of such an appeal to its moral
sense as should " induce it to accept the new policy." Of Mr.
^.asson's unhappy infection with the vivid style, an instance
or two shall be given in justification of what has been
alleged against him in that particular. He says of Loudon
that " he was committed to the Tower, where for more than
two months he lay, with as near a prospect as ever prisoner
had of a chop with the executioner's axe on a scaffold on
Tower Hill." I maybe over-fastidious, but the word "chop"

i6o

MILTON,

\\\

offends my ears with its coarseness, or, if that be too strong,
has certainly the unpleasant effect of an emphasis unduly
placed. Old Auchinleck's saying of Cromwell, that "he gart
kings ken they had a lith in their necks," is a good example
of really vivid phrase, suggesting the axe and the block,
and giving one of those dreadful hints to the imagination
which are more powerful than any amount of detail, and whose
skilful use is the only magic employed by the masters of truly
picturesque writing. The sentence just quoted will serve also
as an example of that tendency to surplusage which adds to
the bulk of Mr. Masson's sentences at the cost of their
effectiveness. If he had said simply "chop on Tower Hill"
(if chop the e must be), it had been quite enough, for we all
know that the executioner's axe anc fhe scaffold are implied in
it. Once more, and I have done with the least agreeable part
of my business. Mr. Masson, after telling over again the
story of Strafford with needless length of detail, ends thus:
" On Wednesday, the I2th of May, that proud curly head, the
casket of that brain of power, rolled on the scaffold of Towei
Hill." \7hy curly ? Surely it is here a ludicrous impertinence.
This careful thrusting forward of outward and unmeaning
particulars, in the hope of giving that reality to a picture which
genius only has the art to do, is becoming a weariness in
modern descriptive writing. It reminds one of the Mrs. Jarley
expedient of dressing the waxen effigies of murderers in the
very clothes they wore when they did the deed, or with the
real halter round their necks wherewith they expiated it It is
probably very effective with the torpid sensibilities of the class
who look upon wax figures as works of art. True imaginative
power works with other material. Lady Macbeth striving to
wash away from her hands the damned spot that is all the
more there to the mind of the spectator because it is not there
at all, is a type of the methods it employs and the intensity of
their action.

Having discharged my duty in regard to Mr. Masson's faults
of manner, which I should not have dwelt on so long had they
not greatly marred a real enjoyment in the reading, and were

MIL TON.

i6i

they not the ear-mark of a school which has become unhappily
numerous, I turn to the consideration of his work as a whole.
I think he made a mistake in his very plan, or else was guilty
of a misnomer in his title. His book is not so much a life of
Milton as a collection of materials out of which a careful reader
may sift the main facts of the poet's biography. His passion
for minute detail is only to be equalled by his diffuseness on
points mainly, if not altogether, irrelevant. He gives us a
Survey of British Literature, occupying one hundred and
twenty-eight pages of his first volume, written in the main with
good judgment, and giving the average critical opinion upon
every writer, great and small, who was in any sense a con-
temporary of Milton. I have no doubt all this would be
serviceable and interesting to Mr. Masson's classes in Edin-
burgh University, and they may well be congratulated on
having so competent a teacher ; but what it has to do with
Milton, unless in the case of such authors as may be shown to
have influenced his style or turn of thought, one does not
clearly see. Most readers of a life of Milton may be presumed
to have some knowledge of the general literary history of the
time, or at any rate to have the means of acquiring it, and
Milton's manner (his style was his own) was very little affected
by any of the English poets, with the single exception, in his
earlier poems, of George Wither. Mr. Masson also has some-
thing to say about everybody, from Wentworth to the obscurest
Brownist fanatic who was so much as heard of in England
during Milton's lifetime. If this theory of a biographer's
duty should hold, our grandchildren may expect to see "A
Life of Thackeray, or who was who in England, France,
and Germany during the first Half of the Nineteenth
Century." These digressions of Mr. Masson's from what
should have been his main topic (he always seems some-
how to be "completing his te dency towards the suburbs'*
of his subject) gave him an uneasy feeling that he must get
Milton in somehow or other at intervals, if it were only to
remind the reader that he has a certain connection with the
book, He is eager even to discuss a mere hypothesis, though

5^1

l63

MILTON,

\ )

I V

I $J

'' f

an untenable one, if it will only increase the number of pages
devoted specially to Milton, and thus lessen the apparent
disproportion between the histcrical and the biographical
matter. Milton tells U5 that his mornlrg wont had been "to
read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention
be weary, or memory have his full fraught ; then with useful
and generous labours preserving the body's health and hardi-
ness, to render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish obedience to
the mind, to the cause of religion and our country's liberty when
it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover
their stations rather than see the ruin of our Protestantism and
the enforcement of a slavish life." Mr. Masson snatches at the
hint : " This is interesting," he says ; " Milton, it seems, has
for some time been practising drill ! The City Artillery Ground
was near. . . . Did Milton, among others, make a habit of
going there of mornings ? Of this more hereafter." When Mr.
Masson returns to the subject he speaks of Milton's " all but
positive statement . . . that in the spring of 1642, or a few
months before the breaking out of the Civil War, he was in the
habit of spending a part of each day in miliiary exercise some-
where not far from his house in Aldersgate Street" What he
^puts by way of query on page 402 has become downright
certainty seventy-nine pages further on. The passage from
Milton's tract makes no "statement" of the kind it pleases Mr.
Masson to assume. It is merely a Miltonian way of saying that
he took regular exercise, because he believed that moral, no less
than physical, courage demanded a sound body. And what
proof does Mr. Masson bring to confirm his theory ? Nothing
more nor less than two or three passages in " Paradise Lost,"
of which I shall quote only so much as is essential to his

argument : —

"And now

Advanced in view they stand, a hoiTid front
Of dreai'ful length and dazzling arn)s, in guise
Of warriors old with ordered spear and shield,
Awaiting v/hat command their mighty chief
Had to impose."*

Book L, 562-567.

J.! I

'm^'^mimm

MILTON,

163

lad been "to

Mr. Masson assures us that " there are touches in this descrip-
tion (as, for example, the ordering of arms at the moment of
halt, and without word of command) too exact and technical
to have occurred to a mere civilian. Again, at the same

review ...

* He now prepared
To speak ; whereat their doubled ranks they bend
From wing to wing, and half enclose him round
With all his peers ; atieniion held them mute.'^

To the present day this is the very process, or one of the
processes, when a commander wishes to address his men.
They wheel inward and stand at * attention.' " But his main
argument is the phrase ^''ported spears," in Book Fourth, on
which he has an interesting and valuable comment. He argues
the matter through a dozen pages or more, seeking to prove that
Milton must have had some practical experience of military drill.
I confess a very grave doubt whether "attention" and "ordered"
in the passages cited have any other than their ordinary mean-
ing, and Milton could never have looked on at the pike-
exercise without learning what "ported" meant. But, be this
as it may, I will venture to assert that there was not a boy in
New England, forty years ago, who did not know more of the
manual than is implied in Milton's use of these terms. Mr.
Masson's object in proving Milton to have been a proficient in
these martial exercises is to increase our wonder at his not
entering the army. " If there was any man in England of
whom one might surely have expected that he would be in
arms among the Parliamentarians," he says, "that man was
Milton." Milton may have had many an impulse to turn
soldier, as all men must in such times, but I do not believe that
he ever seriously intended it. Nor is it any matter of reproach
that he did not. It is plain, from his works, that he believed
himself very early set apart and consecrated for tasks of a very
different kind, for services demanding as much self-sacrifice
and of more enduring result. I have no manner of doubt that

* /Wtt., 615-618.

lii

164

MILTON,

\\'

:! i

I <

he, like Dante, believed himself divine^ inspired with what he
bad to utter, and, if so, why not also di .finely guided in what he
should do or leave undone? Milton wielded in the cause he
loved a weapon far more effective than a sword.

It is a necessary result of Mr. Masson's method, that a great
deal of space is devoted to what might have befallen his hero
and what he might have seen. This leaves a broad margin
indeed for the insertion -^i purely hypothetical incidents. Nay,
so desperately addicted is he to what he deems the vivid style
of writing, that he even goes out of his way to imagine what
might have happened to anybody living at the same time with
Milton. Having told us fairly enough how Shakespeare, on his
last visit to London, perhaps saw Milton " a fair child of six
playing at his father's door," he must needs conjure up an
imaginary supper at the Mermaid. " Ah ! what an evening
. . . was that ; and how Ben and Shakespeare be-tongued
each other, while the others listened and wondered ; and how,
when the company dispersed, the sleeping street heard their
departing footsteps, and the stars shone down on the old roofs."
Certainly, if we may believe the old song, the stars "had
nothing else to do," though their cb fnce of shining in the
middle of a London N-^vemoer may perhr,ps be reckoned
very doubtful. An author should consider how largely the
art of writing consists ;'.: knowing what to leave in the ink-
stand.

Mr. Masson's ' olumes contain a great deal of very valuable
matter, whatever one may think of its bearing upon ibe life of
Milton. The chapters devoted to Scottish affairs are particu-
larly interesting to a student of the Great Rebellion, its causes
and concomitants. His analyses of the two armies, of the
Parliament, and the Westminster Assembly, are sensible
additions to our knowledge. A too painful thoroughness,
indeed, is the criticism we should make on his work as a
biography. Even as a history, the reader might complain that
it confuses by the multiplicity of its details, while it wearies by
want of continuity. Mr. Masson lacks the skill of an
accomplished story-teller. A fact is to him a fact, never mind

MILTON.

165

how unessential, and he misses the breadth of truth in his
devotion to accuracy. The very order of his title-page, The
Life of MVton^ narrated in Connection with the Political^
Ecclesiastical^ and Literary History of his Time^ shows, it
should seem, a misconception of the true nature of his subject.
Milton's chief importance, it might be fairly said his only
importance, is a literary one. His place is fixed as the most
classical of our poets.

Neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics, did Milton
leave any distinguishable trace on the thought of his time or in
the history of opinion. In both these lines of his activity
circumstances forced upon him the position of a controversialist
whose aims and results are by the necessity of the case
desultory and ephemeral. Hooker before him and Hobbes
after him had a far firmer grasp of fundamental principles than
he. His studies in these matters were perfunctory and
occasional, and his opinions were heated to the temper of the
times and shaped to the instant exigencies of the forum, some-
times to his own convenience at the moment, instead of being
the slow result of a deliberate judgment enlightened by
intellectual and above all historical sympathy with his subject.
His interest was rather in the occasion than the matter of the
controversy. No aphorisms of political science are to be
gleaned from his writings as from those of Burke. His intense
personality could never so far dissociate itself from the question
at issue as to see it in its larger scope and more universal
relations. He was essentially a doctrinaij-e^ ready to sacrifice
everything to what at the moment seemed the abstract truth,
and with no regard to historical antecedents and consequences,
provided those of scholastic logic were carefully observed.
He has no respect for usage or tradition except when they
count in his favour, and sees no virtue in that power of the past
over the minds and conduct of men which alone insures the
continuity of national growth and is the great safeguard of
order and progress. The life of a nation was of less importance
to him than that it should be conformed to certain principles of
belief and conduct. Burke could distil political wisdom out of

i66

MILTON.

' I

I -

histc ry because he had a profonnd consciousness of the soul
that underlies and outlives events, and of the national character
that gives them meaning and coherence. Accordingly his
words are still living and operative, while Milton's pamphlets are
strictly occasional and no longer interesting except as they illus-
trate him. In the Latin ones especially there is an odd mixture
of the pedagogue and the public orator. His training, so far
as it was thorough, so far, indeed, as it may be called optional,
was purely poetical and artistic. A true Attic bee, he made
boot on every lip where there was a trace of truly classic
honey.

Milton, indeed, could hardly have been a match for some of
his antagonists in theological and ecclesiastical learning. But
he brought into the contest a white heat of personal conviction
that counted for much. His self-consciousness, always active,
identified him with the cause he undertook. "I conceived
myself to be now not as mine own person, but as a member
incorporate into that truth whereof I was persuaded and whereof
I had declared myself openly to be the partaker."* Accord-
ingly it does not so much seem that he is the advocate of
Puritanism, Freedom of Conscience, or the People of England,
as that all these are ^^, and that he is speaking for himself. He
was not nice in the choice of his missiles, and too often borrows
a dirty lump from the dunghill of Luther ; but now and then the
gnarled sticks of controversy turn to golden arrows of Phoebus
in his trembling hands, singing as they fly and carrying their
messages of doom in music. Then, truly, in his prose as in his
verse, his is the large utterance of the early gods, and there is
that in him which tramples all learning under his victorious
feet. From the first he looked upon himself as a man dedicated
and set apart. He had that sublime persuasion of a divine
mission which sometimes lifts his speech from personal to
cosmopolitan significance j his genius unmistakably asserts
itself from time to time, calling down fire from heaven to
kindle the sacrifice of irksome private duty, and turning the

\l>

* "Apology for Smectymnuus."

■I ;

MILTON,

167

hearthstone of an obscure man into an altar for the worship of
mnnkind. Plainly enough here was a man who had received
something other than Episcopal ordination. Myst«^rious and
awful powers had laid their unimaginable hands on that fair head
and devoted it to a nobler service. Yet it must be confessed that,
with the single exception of the " Areopagitica," Milton's tracts
are wearisome reading, and gomg through them is like a long
sea-voyage whose monotony is more than compensated for the
moment by a stripe of phosphorescence heaping before you in a
drift of star-sown snow, coiling away behind in winking disks of
silver, as if the conscious element were giving out all the moon-
light it had garnered in its loyal depths since first it gazed upon
its pallid regent. Which, being interpreted, means that his
prose is of value because it is Milton's, because it sometimes
exhibits in an inferior degree the qualities of his verse, and not
for its power of thought, of reasoning, or of statement. It is
valuable, where ii i^ best, for its inspiring quality, like the
fervencies of a Hebrew prophet. The English translation of
the Bible had to a very great degree Judaised, not the English
mind, but the Puritan temper. Those fierce enthusiasts could
more easily find elbow-room for their consciences in an ideal
Israel than in a practical England. It was convenient tO see
Amalek or Philistia in the men who met them in the field, and
one unintelligible horn or other of the Beast in their theological
opponents. The spiritual provincialism of the Jewish race
found something congenial in the EngHsh mind. Their national
egotism quintessentialised in the prophets was especially
sympathetic with the personal egotism of Milton. It was only
as an inspired and irresponsible person that he could live on
decent terms with his own self-confident individuality. There
is an intolerant egotism which identifies itself with omnipo-
tence,* and whose sublimity is its apology ; there is an
intolerable egotism which subordinates the sun to the watch in
its own lob. Milton's was of the former kind, and accordingly

* ** For liim I was not sent, nor yet to free

That people, victor once, now vile and base,
Deservedly made vassal."—/*. R., iv. 131-133.

■'I
■hi'

i68

MILTON.

^i! I

li,

i- f '

I : I

the finest passages in his prose and not the least fine in his
verse are autobiographic, and this is the more s . iking that thev
are often unconsciously so. Those fallen an^ s in utter run
and combustion hurled, are als( cavnliers fi^'ht ng against tht
Good Old Cause; Philistia is the Restor . on, nd what
Samson did, that Milton would have r'one if h coul '.

The " Areopagitica" might seT;. ai exception, but that isc
's >. plea rather than an argument, and his interest in the
nuestion is not one of abstract principle, but of personal
i "lation to himself. He was far more rhetorician than thinker.
Tht; 'onorous amplitude of his style was letter fitted to persuade
the feelings than to convince the reason. The only passages
from his prose that may be said to have survived are emotional,
not argumentative, or they have lived in virtue of their figurative
beauty, not their weight of thought. Milton's power lay in
dilation. Touched by him, the simplcc»t image, the most
obvious thought,

" Dilated stood
Like Teneriffe or Atlas . . .
. . . nor wanted in his grasp
What seemed both spear and shield."

But the thin stiletto of Macchiavelli is a more effective
weapon than these fantastic arms of his. He had not the
secret of compression that properly belongs to the political
thinker, on whom, as Hazlitt said of himself, "nothing but
abstract ideas makes any impression." Almost every aphoristic
phrase that he has made current is borrowed from some one of
the classics, like his famous

" License they mean when they cry liberty,"

from Tacitus. This is no reproach to him so far as his true
function, that of poet, is concerned. It is his peculiar glory
that literature was with him so much an art, an end and not a
means. Of his political work he has himself told us, " I should
not choose this manner of writing, wherein, knowing myself
inferior to myself (led by the genial pov. -^r of nature to another
task), I have the use, as I may account, but of my left hand."

MILTON.

169

M^ Kasson has given an excellent analysis of these writings,
selc":ting 'vith great judgment the salient passages, w r.h have
an air of blank-verse thinly disguised as prose, like t-^i. e of the
corrupted passages of Shakespeare. We are p.. ticularly
thankful to him for his extracts from the pamphlets written
against Milton, especially for such as contain criticisms on his
style. It is not a little interesting to see the most stately of
poets reproached for his use of vulgarisms and low words. We
seem to j:;ct a glimpse of the schooling of his " choiceful sense"
to that nicety which could not be content till it had made his
naf ve tongue " search all her co^^rs round " One cannot help
thinking also that his practice i jv se, especially in the long
involutions of Latin periods, he *ed n to give that variety of
pause and that majestic harm-^ >y o his blank- verse which have
made it so unapproachably bis c n. Landor, who, like Milton,
seems to have thought in J ^tin, has caught somewhat more
than others of the dignity 01 ,i\\ gait, but without his length of
stride. Wordsworth, at his finest, has perhaps approached it,
but with how long an interval ! Bryant has not seldom attained
to its serene equanimity, but never emulates its pomp. Keats
has caught something of its large utterance, but altogether fails
of its nervous severity of phrase. Cowper's muse (that moved
with such graceful ease in slippers) becomes stiff when (in his
translation of Homer) she buckles on her feet the cothurnus of
Milton. Thomson grows tumid wherever he assays the
grandiosity of his model. It is instructive to get any glimpse of
the slow processes by which Milton arrived at that classicism
which sets him apart from, if not above, all our other poets.

In gathering up the impressions made upon us by Mr.
Masson's work as a whole, we are inclined rather to regret his
copiousness for his own sake than for ours. The several parts,
though disproportionate, are valuable, his research has been
conscientious, and he has given us better means of under-
standing Milton's time than we possessed before. But how is
it about Milton himself? Here was a chance, it seems to me,
for a fine bit of portrait-painting. There is hardly a more
stately figure in literary history than Milton's, no life in some of

i^iji

!• V

I JO

MILTON,

A mt

' » i 1

its aspects more tragical, except Dante's. In both these great
poets, more than in any others, the character of tlie men makes
part of the singular impressiveness of what they wrote and of
its vitality with after times. In them the man soniohow
overtops the author. The works of both are ftill of autobio-
graphical confidences. Like Dante, Milton was forced to
become a party by himself. He stands out in marked and
solitary individuality, apart irom the great movement of the
Civil War, apart from the supine acquiescence of the Resto-
ration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting man.
Very much alive he certainly was in his day. Has Mr. Masson
made him alive to us again ? I tear not. At the same time,
while we cannot praise either the style or the method of iMr.
Masson's work, we cannot refuse to be grateful for it. It is not
so much a book ^or the ordinary reader of biography as for tne
student, and will be more likely to find its place on the library-
shelf than the centre-table. It does not in any sense belong to
light literature, but demands all the muscle ot the trained and
vigorous reader. " Truly, in respect ol itself, it is a good life ;
but in respect that it is Milton's life it is naught."

Mr. Masson's intimacy with the facts and dates of Miltons
career renders him peculiarly fit in some respects to undertake
an edition of the poetical works. His edition, accordingly, has
distinguished merits. The introductions to the several poems
are excellent, and leave scarcely anything to be desired. The
general introduction, on the other hand, contains a great deal
that might well have been omitted, and not a little that is posi-
tively erroneous. Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's English
seem o^ten to be those of a Scotsman to whom English is
in some sort a foreign tongue. It is almost wholly inconclusive,
because confined to the Miltonic verse, while the basis of any
altogether satisfactory study should surely be Miltonic prose ;
nay, should include all the poetry and prose of his own age and
of that immediately preceding it. The uses to which Mr.
Masson has put the concordance to Milton's poems tempt one
sometimes to class him with those whom the poet himself
taxed with being "the mousehunts and "".rrets of an index."

MILTOI^.

171

For example, what profits a discussion of Milton's dira{ \ey6neva^
a matter in which accident is far more influential than choice?*
What sensible addition is made to our stock of knowledj^c by
Icarniii}^' that " the word 7voman does not occur in any form in
Milton's poetry before ' Paradise Lost,' " and that it is "exactly
so with the word feffia/f f" Is it any way remarkable that such
words as Adam^ God^ Heaven^ Hell^ Paradise^ Sin^ Satan^ and
Serpent should occur "very frequently" in "Paradise I.ost?"
Would it not rather have been surprising that they should
not ? Such trifles at best come under the head of what old
Warner would have called cumber-min».'s. It is time to protest
aj^'uinst this minute style of editing and commenting great poets.
Gulliver's miscroscopic eye saw on the fair skins of the
lirobdignagian maids of honour " a mole here and there as
bro.'id as a trencher," and we shrink from a cup of the purest
Hippocrene after the critic's solar miscroscope has betrayed to
us the grammatical, syntactical, and, above all, hypothetical
monsters that sprawl in every drop of it. When a poet has
been so much edited as Milton, the temptation of whosoever
undcitakes a new edition to see what is not to be seen becomes
great in proportion as he finds how little there is that has not
been seen before.

Mr. Masson is quite right in choosing to modernise the
spelling of Milton, for surely the reading of our classics should
be made as little difficult as possible, and he is right also in
making an exception of such abnormal forms as the poet may
fairly be supposed to have chosen for melodic reasons. His
exhausLiv3 discussion of the spelling of the original editions
seems, however, to be the less called-for as he himself appears
to admit that the compositor, not the author, was supreme
in these matters, and that in nine hundred and ninety-nine
cases to the thousand Milton had no system, but spelt by
immediate inspiration. Yet Mr. Masson fills nearly four
pages with an analysis of the vowel sounds, in which, as if

* If tilings are to be scanned so micrologically, what weighty infer-
ences might not be drawn from Mr. Masson's invariably printing
d7ra| Xc7o/iei'a /

1^9

MIL TO AT.

l> >

r.!

to demonstrate the futility of such attempts so long as men's
ears differ, he tells us that the short a sound is the same in
tfian and Darby y the short o sound in God and does^ and what
he calls the long^ sound in droad and wrath. Speaking' of the
apostrophe, Mr. Masson tells us that "it is sometimes inserted,
not as a possessive mark at all, but merely as a plural mark :
heroes for heroes ^ myrtles for myrtle s^ Gorgons and Hydxh^
etc." Now, in books printed about the time of Milton's the
apostrophe was put in almost at random, and in all the
cases vited is a misprint, except in the first, where it sei-ves to
indicate that the pronunciation was not herd'is as it had formerly
been.* In the "possessive singular of nouns already ending in
f," Mr. Masson tells us, " Milton's general practice is not to
double the s; thus, Nereus wrinkled look^ Glaucus spell. The
necessities of metre would naturally constrain to such forms.
In a possessive followed by the word sake or the word side^ dis-
like to [of] the double sibilant makes us sometimes drop the
inflection. In addition to ^for righteousness sake^ such phrases
as ''for thy name sake^ and ^for mercy sake ' are allowed to
pass ; bedside is normal and riverside nearly so." The neces-
sities of metre need not be taken into account with a poet like
Milton, who never was fairly in his element till he got off the
soundings of prose and felt the long swell of his verse under
him like a steed that knows his rider. But does the dislike of
the double sibilant account for the dropping of the s in these
cases ? Is it not far rather the presence of the s already in the
sound satisfying an ear accustomed to the English slovenliness
in the pronunciation of double consonants ? It was this which
led to such forms as conscience sake and on justice side^ and

* " That you may tell heroes, when you come
To banquet with your wife."

—Chapman's Odyssey ^ viii 336, 337.
In the fac-simile ol ilie sonnet to Fairfax I find

" Thy firm, unshak'n vertue ever brings,"
which sliows how much faith we need give to the apostrophe.

MILTON.

X73

which beguiled Ben Jonson and Drydcn into thinking, the one
that noise and the other that corps was a plural.* What does
Mr. Masson say to hillside^ Banksidey seaside^ Cheapside^
spindksidey spear side^ gospeiside (of a church), nighiside^
countrsyide^ wayside^ brookside^ and I know not how many
more ? Is the first half of these words a possessive ? Or is it
not rather a noun impressed into the service as ai adjective?
How do such words differ from hilltops townendy candUiighty
rushlight^ cityman^ and the like, where no double s can be
made the scapegoat? Certainly Milton would not have avoided
them for their sibilancy, he who wrote

" And airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wilderneyses,"

" So in his seed all nations shall be blest,"

*' And seat of Salnianasser whose success,"

verses that hiss like Medusa's head in wrath, and who was, I
think, fonder of the sound than any other of our poets.
Indeed, in compounds of the kind we always make a distinc-
tion wholly independent of the doubled s. Nobody would
boggle at mountainside J no one would dream of saying on
the fatherside or mother side.

Mr. Masson speaks of " the Miltonic forms vanquisht^ markty
lookty etc." Surely he does not mean to imply that these are
peculiar to Milton ? Chapman used them before Milton was
born, and pressed them farther, as in na^t and sa/^t for naked
and saved. He often prefers the contracted form in his prose
also, showing that the full form of the past participle in ed was

* Mr. Masson might have cited a good example of this from Drum-
niond, "whom (as a Scotchman) he is fond of quoting lor an authority in
Euglish —

*' Sleep, Silence' child, sweet fathe; of soft re<t."

The survival of horse for horses is another example. So by a reverse
process puU and shay have been vulgnrly deduced Iroru the supposed
plurals pulse and chaise.

174

MILTON,

iji

( 1

\\\ M

, .1

'i i'

passing out of fashion, though available in verse.* Indeed, I
venture to affirm that there is not a single variety of spelling or
accent to be found in Milton which is without example in his
predecessors or contemporaries. Even highth^ which is thought
peculiarly Miltonic, is common (in Hakluyt, for example), and
still often heard in New England. Mr. Masson gives an odd
reason for Milton's preference of it, "as indicating more
correctly the formation of the word by the addition of the suffix
th to the adjective high^^ Is an adjective, then, at the base of
growth^ earthy birth^ truth, and other words of this kind?
Home Tooke made a better guess than this. If Mr. Masson be
right in supposing that a peculiar meaning is implied in the
spelling dearth (" Paradise Lost," ix., 624), which he interprets
as "collective produce," though in the only other instance
where it occurs it is neither more nor less than birth, it should
seem that Miiton had hit upon Home Tooke's etymology. But
it is really solemn trifling to lay any stress on the spelling of the
original editions, after having admitted, as Mr. Masson has
honestly done, that in all likelihood Milton had nothing to do
with it. And yet he cannot refrain. On the word voutsafe he
hangs nearly a page of dissertation on the nicety of Milton's
ear. Mr. Masson thinks that Milton " must have had a reason
for it,"t and finds that reason in " his dislike to [ofj the sound

* Chapman's spelling is presumably his own. At least he looked after
his printed texts. I have two copies of his Byron's CoTispiracy, both
dated 1608, but one evidently prii^ted later than the other, for it shows
corrections. The more solemn ending iu ed was probably kept alive by
the reading of the Bible in churches. Though now dropped by the clergy,
it is essential to the right hearing of the more metrical passages in the
Old Testament, Avhich are finer and more scientific than anything iu the
language, unh^ss it be some parts of "Samson Agonistes." I remember au
old gentleman who always used the contracted form of the participh; iu
conversation, but always gave it back its embezzled syllable of reading.
Sir Thomas Erowne seems to have preferred the more solemn form. At
any rate he has the spelling empuzzeled iu prose.

t He thinks the same of the variation strook and struck, though they
were probably pronounced alike. In Marlowe's " Faustus " two consecutive
sentences (iu prose) begin with the words " Cursed be he that struck." In

' -. >

MILTON,

175

ch^ or to [of] that sound combined with j. . . . . His fine ear
taught him not only to seek for musical effects and cadences at
larj^e, but also to be fastidious as to syllables, and to avoid
harsh or difficult conjunctions of consonants, except when there
might be a musical reason for harshness or difficulty. In the
management of the letter j, the frequency of which in English
is one of the faults of the speech, he will be found, I believe,
most careful and skilful. More rarely, I think, than in Shake-
speare will one word ending in s be found followed immediately
in Milton by another word beginning with the same letter ; or,
if he does occasionally pen such a phrase as Moulds sonSy it will
be difficult to find in him, I believe, such a harsher example as
eartlCs substance^ of which many writers would think nothing.
[With the index to back him Mr. Masson could safely say this.]
The same delicacy of ear is even more apparent in his manage-
ment of the sh sound. He has it often, of course ; but it may
be noted that he rejects it in his verse when he can. He writes
Basan for Bashan^ Sittiin for Shittim^ Silo for Shiloh^ Asdod for
Ashdod. Still more, however, does he seem to have been wary
of the compound sound ch as in church. Of his sensitiveness
to this sound in excess there is a curious proof in his prose
pamphlet, entitled ' An Apology against a Pamphlet, called A
Modest Completion, etc.,' where, having occasion to quote these
hnes from one of the Satires* of his opponent. Bishop Hall,

* Teach each hollow grove to sound his love,
Wearying echo with one changeless word,'

he adds, ironiciUy, ' And so he well might, and all his auditory
besides, with iiis teach each/^" Generalisations are always

a note on the passage Mr. Dyce tells us that the old editions (there were
three) have stroke and strooke in the lirst insiance, and all agree on strucke
in till' sfoond. No inference can be drawn from such casualties.

* The lines are not "from one of the Satires," and Milton made them
worse by misquoting and bringing love jinglingly near to yrove. Hall's
verse (in his Satires) is always vigorous and often harmonious. He long
betore Milton spoke of rhyme almost in the very terms of the preface to
"Paradise Lost."

\.-

176

MILTON,

w • ■'.

f .

» ?!

•> I

risky, but when extemporised from a single hint they are
maliciously so. Surely it needed no great sensitiveness of
ear to be set on edge by Hall's echo of ^eac/t each. Did
Milton reject the h from Bashan and the rest because he
disliked the sound of sh^ or because he had found it already
rejected by the Vulgate and by some of the earlier translators
of the Bible into English ? Oddily enough, Milton uses words
beginning with sh seven hundred and fifty-four times in his
poatry, not to speak of others in which the sound occurs,
as, for instance, those ending in tion. Hall, had he lived
long enough, might have retorted on Milton his own

or his

" Manliest, resoliites^, breast,
As the magnetick hardest h-on draws,"

" What moves thy inquisition ?
Know'st thou not that my rising is thy fall,
And my promotion thy destruction ? "

With the playful controversial wit of the day he would have
hinted that too much est-est is as fatal to a blank-verse as
to a bishop, and that danger was often incurred by those
who too eagerly shunn^di it. Nay, he might even have found
an echo almost tallying with his own in

"To begirt the almighty throne
Beseeching or besieging,"

a pun worthy of Milton's worst prose. Or he might have
twitted him with "a j^^uent king who seeks.^^ As for the si
sound, a poet could hardly have found it ungracious to his
ear who wrote.

or agam,

" GnasMng for anguis/i and despite and sAame,"

"Then bursting forth
Afres/t with conscious tenors vex me round
That rest or intermissio/i none I tind.
Before mine eyes in opposi^iow. sits
Grim Death, my son."

f . Q

MILTON,

^11

And if Milton disliked the ch sound, he gave his ears
unnecessary pain by verses such as these —

*' Straight couches close ; then, rising, c/mnges oft
His couc/iant yvatch, as one who cAose his ground ; "

Still more by such a juxtaposition as " matchless chief."*

The truth is, that Milton was a harmonist rather than a
melodist. There are, no doubt, some exquisite melodies (like
"Sabrina Fair") among his earlier poems, as could hardly
fail to be the case in an age which produced or trained the
authors of our best English glees, as ravishing in their
instinctive felicity as the songs of our dramatists, but he also
showed from the first that larger style which was to be his
peculiar distinction. The strain heard in the " Nativity Ode,"
in the " Solemn Music," and in " Lycidas," is of a higher mood,
as regards metrical construction, than anything that had
thrilled the English ear before, giving no uncertain augury of
him who was to show what sonorous metal lay silent till
he touched the keys in the epical organ-pipes of our various
language, that have never since felt the strain of such prevail-
ing breath. It was in the larger movements of metre that
Milton was great and original. I have spoken elsewhere of
Spenser's fondness for dilatation as respects thoughts and images.
In Milton it extenda to the language also, and often to the

j V:

Mr. Masson goes so far as to .tonceive it possible that Milton may have
committed the vulgarism of leaving a t out of lep'st, " for ease of sound."
Yet the poet could bear boast'st and — one stares and gasps at it — doaVdst.
There is, by the way, a familiar passage in which the ch sound predom-
inates, not without a touch of sh, in a single couplet : —

" Can any mortal vcAxture of earth's mould
Breathe such divine enc/ianting ravisAment?"

*' Blotches and blains must all his t'esh emboss,"

and perhaps
might be added.

"I see his tents
Pitched about Sechem"

562

! nl

.< I)

( . ''i

i r

I il

178

MIL TON.

single words of which a period is composed. He loved phrases
of tovvcrin<j port, in which every member dilated stands like
TenerifTe or Atlas. In those poems and passages that stamp
him great, the verses do not dance interweaving to soft Lydian
airs, but march rather with resounding tread and clang of
martial music. It is true that he is cunning in alliterations, so
scattering them that they tell in his orchestra without being
obvious, but it is in the mon* scientific region of open-voweled
assonances which seem to proffer rhyme and yet withhold it
(rhyme-wraiths one might call them), that he is an artist
and a master. He even sometimes introduces rhyme with
misleading intervals between and unobviously in his
blank-verse : —

" There rest, if any rest can harbour there ;
And, reassembling onr afilicted powers,
Consult how we may hencefortli most ofTend
Our enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire calamity,
Who t reinforcement we may gain from hope,
If uot, what resolution from def^pair."*

There is one almost perfect quatrain —

" Before thy fellows, ambitious to win
From me some plume, that thy success may show
Destruction to tlie rest. This pause between
(Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know;"

and another hardly less so, of a rhyme and an assonance —

" If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge
Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft
In worst extremes and on the perilous edge
Of battle when it raged, in all assaults."

* I think Coleridge's nice ear would have blamed the nearness of enenvj
and crdaviiiy in this Y)a^H',i^c. Mr. Massou leaves out the comma after 7/
not, the pause of which is needful, I think, to the sense, and certaiuly to
keep not a little farthei apart from what (*' teach each ! ").

•I

MILTON,

179

There can be little doubt that the rhymes in the first passage
cited were intentional, and perhaps they were so in the others ;
but Milton's ear has tolerated not a few perfectly rhyming
couplets, and others in which the assonance almost becomes
rhyme, certainly a fault in blank-verse : —

" From tho Asian Kings (and Partliian among these),
From India and the Golden Cliersonese ;"

"Tliat soon refreshed him wearied, and repaired
What h\inger, if aught hnnger, had impaired;"'

"And will alike he punished, whether thou
Reign or reign not, though to that gentle brow ;"

"Of pleasure, but all pleasnre to destroy,
Save what is in destroying, other joy ;"

"Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden, and far happier days ;"

"This my long sufferance and my day of grace
Tliey Avho neglect and scorn shall never taste ;"

"So far remote with dii.iinution seen,
First in his East the glorious lamp was seen."*

These examples (and others might be adduced) serve to
show that Milton's ear was tof ousy about the larger interests
of his measures to be alw? 4 careful of the lesser. He
was a strategist rather than drill-sergeant in verse, capable,

,)oet, of putting great masses
i evolutions without clash or
^rious that every foot should be
at the same angle. In 1 aamg "Paradise Lost" one has a
feeling of vastness. You float under an illimitable sky, brimmed
with sunshine or hung with constellations ; the abysses of space
are about you ; you hear tl e cadenced surges of an unseen
ocean ; thunders mutter round the horizon : and if the scene
change, it is with an elemental movement like the shitting
of mighty winds. His im \^.ination seldom condenses, like

beyond any other English
through the most complic;
confusion, but he was not

# c«

First in his East " is not soothing to the ear.

r*~'«»«o*»««i«l(i«wt.

i8o

MILTON,

1 1

Shakespeare's, in the kindling flash of a single epithet, but loves
better to diffuse itself. Witness his descriptions, wherein he
seems to circle like an eagle bathing in the blue streams of air,
controlling with his eye broad sweeps of champaign or of sea,
and rarely fulmining in the sudden swoop of intenser expression,
He was fonder of the vague, perhaps I should rather say the
indefinite, where more is meant than meets the ear, than any
other of our poets. He loved epithets (like old and far) that
suggest great reaches, whether of space or time. This bias
shows itself already in his earlier poems, as where he hears

" The /ar o/" curfew sound
Over some widewatered shore,"

or where he fancies the shores* and sounding seas washing
Lycidas far away ; but it reaches its climax in the " Paradise
Lost." He produces his effects by dilating our imaginations
with an impalpable hint rather than by concentrating them upon
too precise particulars. Thus in a famous comparison of his,
the fleet has no definite port, but plies stemming nightly toward
the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He generalises always
instead of specifying — the true secret of the ideal treatment in
which he is without peer, and, though everwhere grandiose, he
is never turgid. Tasso begins finely with

" Chiama gli abitator dell' orabre eterne
II rauco siion della tartarea tromba ;
Treman le spaziose atre caverne
E r aei- cieco a quel rumor rimbomba,"

but soon spoils all by condescending to definite comparisons
with thunder and intestinal convulsions of the earth ; in other
words, he is unwary enough to give us a standard of measure-
ment, and the moment you furnish Imagination with a yard-
stick she abdicates in favour of her statistical poor-relatioir
Commonplace. Milton, with this passage in his memory, is too

* There seems to be something wrong in this word shores.
write shoals I

Did Miiton

te comparisons

earth ; in other

'jres. Did Miiton

MILTON.

tSi

wise to hamper himself with any statement for which he can be
brought to book, but wraps himself in a mist of looming

indefiniteness ;

"He called so loud that all the hollow deep
Of hell resounded,"

thus amplifying more nobly by abstention from his usual
method of prolonged evolution. No caverns, however spacious,
will serve his turn, because they have limits. He could practise
this self-denial when his artistic sense found it needful, whether
for variety of verse or for the greater intensity of effect to be
gained by abruptness. His more elaborate passages n^ve the
muititudinoi.s roll of thunder, dying awj.y to gather a sullen
force again from its own reverberations, but he knew that the
attention is recalled and arrested by those claps that stop short
without echo and leave us listening. There are no such vistas
and avenues of verse r 3 \^'\:^. In reading the " Paradise Lost "
one has a feeling of spaciousness such as no other poet gives.
Milton's respect for himself and for his own mind and its move-
ments rises well-nigh to veneration. He prepares the way for
his thought and spreads on the ground before the sacred feet of
his verse tapestries inwoven with figures of mythology and
romance. There is no such unfailing dignity as his. Observe
at what a reverent distance he begins when he is about to speak
of himself, as at the beginning of the Third Book and the
Seventh. His sustained strength is especially felt in his
beginnings. He seems always to start full-sail ; the wind and
tide always serve ; there is never any fluttering of the canvas.
In this he offers a striking contrast with Wordsworth, who has
to go through with a greal deal of yo-heave-ohing before he gets
under way. And though, in the didactic parts of " Paradise
Lost," the wind dies away sometimes, there is a long swell that
will not let us forget it, and ever and anon some eminent verse
iiiis its long ridge above its tamer peers heaped with stormy
memories. And the poem never becomes incoherent ; we feel
all through it, as in the symphonies of Beethoven, a great
coi lolling reason in whose-safe conduct we trust implicity.

n: '-^

X \

l82

MILTON.

> M

r *' .

Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's English are, it seems to
me, for the most part unsatisfactory. He occupies some ten
pages, for example, with a history of the gcnitival form its,
which adds nothing to our previous knowledge on the subject,
and which has no relation to Milton except for its bearing on
the authorship of some verses attributed to him against the
most overwhelming internal evidence to the contrary. Mr.
Masson is altogether too resolute to find traces of what he calls
oddly enough " recollectiveness of Latin constructions" in
Milton, and scents them sometimes in what would seem to the
uninstructed reader very idiomatic English. More than once,
at least, he has fancied them by misunderstanding the passage
in which they seem to occur. Thus, in " Paradise Lost," xi.,
520, 521,

"Tlierefoic so abject is their punishnieut,
Disfiguring not God's likeness but iheir own,"

has no analogy with eorum deforinantium^ for the context shows
that it is the punishmejit which disfigures. Indeed, Mr. Masson
so often finds constructions difficult, ellipses strange, and woifvli.
needing annotation that are common to all poetry, nay^ sonH'-
times to all English, that his notes seem not seldom to liave
been written by a foreigner. On this passage in " Coiiius " —

*' I do not think my sister so to seek
Or so unprincipled in virtue's book
And tlie sweet peace that virtue bosoms ever
As that the single want of light and noise

(Not being in danger, as I trust she is not)

Could stir the constant mood of lier calm thoughts,"

Mr. Masson tells us, that " in very strict construction, 7iot being
would cling to want as its substantive ; but the phrase passes
for the Latin ablative absolute." So on the words forestalling
ni^ht^ "z.^., anticipating. Forestall is literally to anticipate t le
market by purcnasing goods before they are brought to e
stall." In the verse,

" Thou hast immanacled while Henven sees good,"

Vi*

1? '\ •

MILTON.

183

he explains that ^^ while here has the sense oi so lo7i{( as}^ But
Mr. Masson's notes on the language are his weakest. He is
careful to tell us, for example, " that there are instances of the
use oi shine as a substantive in Spenser, Ben Jonson, and other
poets." It is but another way of spelling shcen^ and if Mr.
Masson never heard a shoeblack in the street say, " Shall I
j^ivc you a shine, sir?" his experience has been singular."* His
notes in {general are very good (though :oo long). Those on
the astionomy of Milton are particularly valuable. I think he
is sometimes a little too scornful of parallel passai^es,t for if
thei"e is one thing more striking than another in this poet, it is
'nil his great and original imagination was almost wholly
nourished by books, perhaps I should rather say set in motion
by '^^cm. It is wonderful how, from the most withered and
iuiccless hint gathered in his reading, his grand images rise like
an exhalation ; how from the most battered old lamp caught in
that huge drag-net with which he swept the waters of learning,

* liut his etymological notes are worse. For example, '■'■ recreunt^
renouncing the faith, from the old Frenclx recroire, which again is from the
nic(liii;val Latin recrcderc, to ' believe back,' or apostatise." This is pure
fancy. The word has no such meaning in either language. W- derives
screnate from scm, and says that parlc means treaty, negotiation, thougli it
is the same word as parley, had the same meanings, and was commonly
piuuuunced like it, as in Marlowe's

" What, shall we parte with this Christian ?"

It certaini> never meant treaty^ though it may have meant negotiation.
When it did it. implied the meeting face to face of the principals. On the
verses,

" And some flowers and some bays
For thy hearse to strew tiio >vays,"

he has a note to tell us that hearse is not to be taken '' in our sense of a
carriage for the dead, but in the older sense of a tomb or framework over a
tonih," though the obvious meaning is '• to strew the ways for thy hearse."
How could one do tliat for a tomb or the framework over it?

+ A passage from Dante {Inferno, xi. 9t>-105), with its reference to
Ari-l./tle, would have given liim the meaning of "Nature taught art,"
wh.rh seems to puzzle him. A study of Dante and of his earlier ct'inmeii-
Utois would also have been of great service in the astronomical notes.

184

MILTON.

,1;

» li

. I

he could conjure a tall genius to build his palaces. Whaievei
he touches swells and towers. That wonderful passage in
" Comus " of the airy tongues, perhaps the most imaginative in
suggestion he ever wrote, was conjured out of a dry sentence in
Purchas's abstract of Marco Polo. Such examples help us to
understand the: poet. When I find that Sir Thomas Browne
Lad said hofore Milton, that Adam "was the wisest of all men
since;'' i am glad to find this link between the most profound
and the most stately imagination of that age. Such parallels
sometimes give a hint also of the historical development of our
poetry, of its apostolical succession, so to speak. Every one has
noticed Milton's fondness of sonorous proper names, which have
not only an acquired imaginative value by association, and so
serve to awaken our poetic sensibilities, but have likewise a
merely musical significance. This he probably caught from
Marlowe, traces of whom are frequent in him. There is
certainly something of what afterward': came to be called
Miltonic in more than one passage of " 'i ,?mburlaine," a play in
which gigantic force seems struggling from the block, as in
Michel Angelo's " Dawn."

Mr. Masson's remarks on the versification of Milton are, in
the main, judicious, but when he ventures on particulars, one
cannot always agree with him. He seems to understand that
our prosody is accentual merely, and yet, when he comes to
what he calls variations^ he talks of the " substitution of the
Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or the Spondee, for the regular Iambus,
or of the Anapaest, the Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc., for the same."
This is always misleading. The shift of the accent in what Mr.
Masson calls " dissyllabic variations " is common to all penta-
meter verse, and, in the other case, most of the words cited as
trisyllables either were not so in Milton's day,* or were so or
not at choice of the poet, according to their place in the verse.
There is not an elision of Milton's without precedent in the

* Almost every combination of two vowels might in those days "be a
diphthong or not, at will. Milton's practice of elision was confirmed ami
sometimes (perhaps) modified by his study of the Italians, "witli whose
usage in this respect he closely confornis.

;' I

l± • M

| g |» J » lti,i!j

MILTON.

'8S

dramatists from whom he learned to write blank-verse. Milton
was a greater metrist than any of them, except Marlowe and
Shakespeare, and he employed the elision (or the slur) oftener
than they to give a faint undulation or retardation to his verse,
only because his epic form demanded it more for variety's sake.
How Milton would have read them, is another question. He
certainly often marked them by an apostrophe in his manu-
scripts. He doubtless composed according to quantity, so far
as that is possible in English, and as Cowper somewhat
extravagantly says, "gives almost as many proofs of it in his
' Paradise Lost ' as there are lines in the poem."* But when
Mr. Masson tells us that

" Self-fed and self-consumed : if this fail,"
and

" Dwells iu all Heaven charity so rare/'

are " only nine syllables," and that in

" Created liugest that swim the ocean-stream,"

" either the third foot must be read as an anapcest or the word
hugest must be pronounced as one syllable, hug'st^^ I think
Milton would have invoked the soul of Sir John Cheek. Of
course Milton read it

" Created liugest that swim th' ocean-stream,"
just as he wrote (if we may trust Mr. Masson's fac-simile)

" Thus sang the uncouth swain to th' oaks and rills,"
a verse in which both hiatus and elision occur precisely as in
the Italian poets. t " Gest that swim " would be rather a knotty
anapast, an insupportable foot indeed ! And why is even
hug'st worse than Shakespeare's

** Youngest follower of thy drum ? "
In the same way he says of

" For we have also our evening and our morn,"

* LctttT to Rev. W. Bagot, 4th January 1791.

t Ho Dante : —

" Ma sapienza e amore e virtute."
So Donne :—

" Simony and sodomy in churclimen'a lives,"

IMAGE EVALUATION
TEST TARGET (MT-3)

1.0

1.1

■ii|21 125
itt Itt 12.2

!!f ■!& 12.0

IL25 M 1.4

1.6

Photographic

Sciences

Corporalion

^O^

^"^^

33 WIST MAIN STRHT

WiUTiR,N.Y. 14SM

(71«)t7a-4S03

i86

MIL TON.

that "the metre of this line is irregular," and of the rapidly fine

" Came flying and in mid-air aloud thus cried,"
that it is "a line of unusual metre." Why more unusual than
" As being the contrary to his high will ? "

What would Mr. Masson say to these three verses from

Dckkar ?—

"And knowing so much, 1 muse thou art so poor ; "

" I fan away the (bx%tfiyin<j in mine eyes ; "

'* Fluioing o'er with court news only of you and them."

All such participles (where no consonant divided the vowels)
were nomially of one syllable, permissibly of two.* If Mr.
Masson had studied the poets who preceded Milton as he has
studied him^ he would never have said that the verse,

*' Not this rock only ; his omnipresence fills,"

was "peculiar as having a distinct syllable of over-measure.'
He retains Milton's spelling of hunderd without perceiving the
metrical reason for it, that d^ /, ^, /, e*c., followed by / or /-,
might be either of two or of three syllables. In Marlowe we
find it both ways in two consecutive verses : —

" A hundred [hundered] and fifty thousand horse,
Two hundred thousand loot, brave nieu-at-aruis."t

Mr. Masson is especially puzzled by verses ending in one or
more unaccented syllables, and even argues in his introduction
that some of them might be reckoned Alexandrines. He cites

* Mr. Masson is evidently not very familiar at first hand with the
versification to which Milton's youtliful ear had been trained, but seems
to have learned something from Abbott's Shakespearian Grammar in the
interval between writing his notes and his introduction. Walker's
Shakespeare's Versijication would have been a great help to liiiu in
deiault of original knowledge.

t Milton has a verse in "Conius" where the e is elided from the word
sister by its preceding a vowel : —

" Heaven keep my sister ! again, again, and near t"
This would have been impossible before a consonant.

9»;

MILTON,

187

I verses from

ng in one or

fjoiu the word

some lines of Spenser as confirming his theory, forgetting that
rhyme wholly changes the conditions of the case by throwing
the accent (appreciably even now, but more emphatically in
Spenser's day) on the last syllable.

" A spirit and judgment equal or superior,"

he calls " a remarkably anomalous line, consisting of twelve or
even thirteen syllables." Surely Milton's ear would never have
tolerated a dissyllabic " spirit " in such a position. The word
was then more commonly of one syllable, though it might be
two, and was accordingly spelt spreet (still surviving in sprite\
sprite and even spirt^ as Milton himself spells it in one of Mr.
Masson's fac-similes.* Shakespeare, in the verse

** Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,"

uses the word admirably well in a position where it cannot have
a metrical value of more than one syllable, while it gives a
dancing movement to the verse in keering with the sense. Our
old metrists were careful of elasticity, a quality which modern
verse has lost in proportion as our language has stiffened into
uniformity under the benumbing fingers of pedants.

This discussion of the value of syllables is not so trifling as it
seems. A great deal of nonsense has been written about
imperfect measures in Shakespeare, and of the admirable
dramatic effect produced by filling up the gaps of missing
syllables with pauses or prolongations of the voice in reading.
In rapid, abrupt, and passionate dialogue this is possible, but in
passages of continuously level speech it is barbarously absurd.
I do not believe that any of our old dramatists has knowingly
left us a single imperfect verse. Seeing in what a hap-hazard
way and in how mutilated a form their plays have mostly
reached us, we should attribute swch. faults (as a geologist would
call them) to anything rather than to the deliberate design of the
poets. Marlowe and Shakespeare, the two best metrists among
them, have given us a standard by which to measure what
Ucenses they took in versification — the one in his translations,

* So spirito and spirto in Italian, esperis and espirs in Old French.

ii».«<>»^.>.<ai»i»i;w>i>r»<Hli«i>>iii

i88

MILTON,

the other in his poems. The unmanageable verses in Milton
are very few, and all of them occur in works printed after
his blindness had lessened the chances of supervision and
increased those of error. There are only two, indeed, which
seem to me wholly indigestible as they stand. These are,

and

" Burnt after them to the bottomless pit,"
" With them from bliss to the bottomless deep."

This certainly looks like a case where a word had dropped out
or had been stricken out by some proof-reader who limited the
number of syllables in a pentameter verse by that of his
finger-ends. Mr. Masson notices only the first of these lines,
and says that to make it regular by accenting the word bottom-
less on the second syllable would be " too horrible." Certainly
not, if Milton so accented it, any more than blasphemous and
twenty more which sound oddly to us now. However that may
be, Milton could not have intended to close not only a period,
but a paragraph also, with an unmusical verse, and in the only
other passage where the word occurs it is accented as now on
the first syllable :

'■'■ With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell."

As bottom is a word which, like bosom and besom^ may be
monosyllabic or dissyllabic according to circumstances, I am
persuaded that the last passage quoted (and all three refer to
the same event) gives us the word wanting in the two others,
and that Milton wrote, or meant to write,

" Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit,"

which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of ripple that
Milton liked best.*

* Milton, however, would not have balked at th* bottomless any more
than Drayton at th' rejected or Donne at th' sea. Mr, Masson does not
seem to understand this elision^ for he corrects i' th' midst to i' the midst,

h i

/ <•

MILTON,

189

w;//, may be

Much of what Mr. Masson says in his Introduction of the

way in which the verses of Milton should be read is judicious

enough, though some of the examples he gives, of the

"comicality" which would ensue from compressing every

verse into an exact measure of ten syllables, are based on a

surprising ignorance of the laws which guided our poets just

before and during Milton's; time in the structure of their verses.

Thus he seems to think that a strict scansion would require us

in the verses.

" So he with difficulty and labour hard,"

and

"Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold,"

to pronounce diffikty and purf. Though Mr. Masson talks of
"slurs and elisions," his ear would seem somewhat insensible to
their exact nature or office. His diffikty supposes a hiatus
where none is intended, and his making purple of one syllable
wrecks the whole verse, the real slur in the latter case being an
azure or.* When he asks whether Milton required "these
pronunciations in his verse," no positive answer can be given,
but I very much doubt whether he wouM have thought that
some of the lines Mr. Masson cites "remain perfectly good
blank verse even with the most leisurely natural enunciation of
the spare syllable," and I am sure he would have stared if told
that "the number of accents" in a pentameter verse was
"variable." It may be doubted whether elisions and compres-
sions which would be thought in bad taste or even vulgar now
were more abhorrent to the ear of Milton's generation than to a
cultivated Italian would be the hearing Dante read as prose.
After all, what Mr. Masson says may be reduced to the infallible
axiom that poetry should be read as poetry.

Mr. Masson seems to be right in his main principles, but the
examples he quotes make one doubt whether he knows what a

and takes pains to mention it in a note. He might better have restored
the n in t', where it is no contraction, but merely indicates the pronun*
elation, as 0' for of and on.
* Exactly analogous to that in treasurer when it is shortened to two

syllabk'h.

\ I

■f

IQO

MTLTON.

\' I

'} I

verse is. For example, he thinks it would be a " horror," if in

the verse

" 'lliat invincible Samson far renowned,"

we should lay the stress on the first syllable of invincible. It is
hard to see why this should be worse than cdnventicle or rimon-
strafjce or stUcessor or incbmpatible (the three latter used by the
correct Daniel), or why Mr. Masson should clap an accent on
sur/i\ce merely because it comes at the end of a verse, and
deny it to invincible. If one read the verse just cited with those
that go with it, he will find that the accent must come on the
first syllable of invincible or else the whole passage becomes
choas.* Should we refuse to say obleeged with Pope because
the fashion has changed ? From its apparently greater freedom
in skilful hands, blank verse gives more scope to sciolistic
theorising and dogmatism than the rhyming pentameter coup-
let, but it is safe to say that no verse is good in the one that
would not be good in the other when handled by a master like
Dryden. Milton, like other great poets, wrote some bad verses,
and it is wiser to confess that they are so than to conjure up
some unimaginable reason why the reader should accept them
as the better for their badness. Such a bad verse is

" Rocks, caves, lakes, /(?>w, bogs, dens and shapes of death,"

which might be cited to illustrate Pope's

" And ten low words oft creep in one dull line."

Milton cannot certainly be taxed with any partiality for low
words. He rather loved them tall, as the Prussian King loved
men to be six feet high in their stockings, and fit to go into the
grenadiers. He loved them as much for their music as for
their meaning— perhaps more. His style, therefore, when it

* Milton himself has invisible, for we cannot suppose him guilty of a
verse like

"Shoots invfsible virtue ever to the deep,"

while, if read rightly, it has just one of those sweeping elisions that he
loved.

MILTON.

191

)rror," if in

3ns that he

has to deal with commoner thi.igs, is apt to grow a little
cumbrous and unwieldy. A Persian poet says that when the
owl would boast he boasts of catching mice at the edjje of a
hole. Shakespeare would have understood this. Milton would
have made him talk like an eagle. His influence is not to
be left out of account as partially contributing to that decline
toward poetic diction which was already beginning ere he died.
If it would not be fair to say that he is the most artistic, he may
be called in the highest sense the most scientific of our poets.
If to Spenser younger poets have gone to be sung to, they have
sat at the feet of Milton to be taught. Our language has no
finer poem than *' Samson Agonistes," if any so fine in the
quality of austere dignity or in the skill with which the poet's
personal experience is generalised into a classic tragedy.

Gentle as Milton's earlier portraits would seem to show him,
he had in him by nature, or bred into him by fate, something of
the haughty and defiant self-assertion of Dante and Michel
Angelo. In no other English author is the man so large a part
of his works. Milton's haughty conception of himself enters
into all he says and does. Always the necessity of this one man
became that of the whole human race for the moment. There
were no walls so sacred but must go to the ground when he
wanted elbow-room ; and he wanted a great deal. Did Mary
Powell, the cavalier's daughter, find the abode of a Roundhead
schoolmaster incompatible and leave it, forthwith the cry of the
universe was for an easier dissolution of the marriage covenant.
If ^^ is blind, it is with the excess of light, it is a divine
partiality, an overshadowing with angels' wings. Phineus and
Teiresias are admitted among the prophets because they, too,
had lost their sight, and the blindness of Homer is of more
account than his Iliad. After writing in rhyme till he was past
fifty, he finds it unsuitable for his epic, and it at once becomes
"the Invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter
and lame metre." If the structure of his mind be undramatic,
why, then, the English drama is naught, learned Jonson,
sweetest Shakespeare, and the rest notwithstanding, and he will
compose a tragedy on a Greek model with the blinded Samson

/..

■I

/ i .1

\1.

.f'^^

/•>^

199

MILTON.

for its hero, and he will compose it partly in rhyme. Plainly he
belongs to the intenser kind of men whose yesterdays are in no
way responsible for their to-morrows. And this makes him
perennially interesting even to those who hate his politics,
despise his Socinianism, and find his greatest poem a bore. A
new edition of his poems is always welcome, for, as he is really
great, he presents a fresh side to each new student, and Mr.
Masson, in his three handsome volumes, has given us, with
much that is superfluous and even erroneous, much more that
is a solid and permanent acquisition to our knowledge.

It results from the almost scornful withdrawal of Milton into
the fortress of his absolute personality that no great poet is so
uniformly self-conscious as he. We should say of Shakespeare
that he had the power of transforming himself into everything ;
of Milton, that he had that of transforming everything into him-
self. Dante is individual rather than self-conscious, and he, the
cast-iron man, grows pliable as a field of grain at the breath of
Beatrice, and flows away in waves of sunshine. But Milton
never lets himself go for a moment. As other poets are
possessed by their theme, so is he j^^-possessed, his great
theme being John Milton, and his great duty that of interpreter
between him and the world. I say it with all respect, for he
was well worthy translation, and it is out of Hebrew that the
version is made. Pope says he makes God the Father reason
" like a school-divine." The criticism is witty, but inaccurate.
He makes Deity a mouthpiece for his present theology, and had
the poem been written a few years later, the Almighty would
have become more heterodox. Since Dante, no one had stood
on these visiting terms with heaven.

Now it is precisely this audacity of self-reliance, I suspect,
which goes far toward making the sublime, and which, falling
by a hair's-breadth short thereof, makes the ridiculous. Puri-
tanism showed both the strength and weakness of its prophetic
nurture ; enough of the latter to be scoffed out of England by
the very men it had conquered in the field, enough of the former
to intrench itself in three or four immortal memories. It has
left an abiding mark in politics and religion, but its great

MILTON,

193

monuments are the prose of Bunyan and the verse of Milton.
It is a high inspiration to be the neighbour of great events ; to
have been a partaker in them, and to have seen noble purposes
by their own self-confidence become the very means of ignoble
ends, if it do not wholly depress, may kindle a passion of regret
deepening the song which dares not tell the reason of its
sorrow. The grand loneliness of Milton in his latter years,
while it makes him the most impressive figure in our literary
history, is reflected also in his maturer poems by a sublime
independence of human sympathy like that with which
mountains fascinate and rebuff us. But it is idle to talk of
the loneliness of one the habitual companions of whose mind
were the Past and Future. I always seem to see him
leaning in his blindness a hand on the shoulder of each,
sure that the one will guard the song which the other had
inspired.

563

^'^<i<M^>^<^Mi^iMi

i^i^

!/,•

II'

WORDSWORTH.

A GENERATION has now passed away since Wordsworth
was laid with the family in the churchyard at Grasmere.*
Perhaps it is hardly yet time to take a perfectly impartial
measure of his value as a poet. To do this is especially hard
for those who are old enough to remember the last shot which
the foe was sullenly firing in that long war of critics which
began when he published his manifesto as Pretender, and
which came to a pause rather than end when they flung up
their caps with the rest at his final coronation. Something of
the intensity of the odium theologicum (if indeed the astheticum
be not in these days the more bitter of the two) entered into
the conflict. The Wordsworthians were a sect, who, if they
had the enthusiasm, had also not a little of the exclusiveness
and partiality to which sects are liable. The verses of the
master had for them the virtue of religious canticles stimulant
01 zeal and not amenable to the ordinary tests of cold-blooded
criticism. Like the hymns of the Huguenots and Covenanters,
they were songs of battle no less than of worship, and the
combined ardours of conviction and conflict lent them a fire that
was not naturally their own. As we read them now, that
virtue of the moment is gone out of them, and whatever of
Dr. Waltsiness there is gives us a slight shock of disenchant-
ment. It is something like the difference between the Mar-
seillaise sung by armed propagandists on the edge of battle, or

* " I pay many little visits to the family in the churchyard at Gras-
mere," writes James Dixon (an old servant of Wordsworth) to Crabb
Robinson, with a simple, one might almost say canine, pathos, thirteen
years after his master's death. Wordsworth was always considerate and
kind with his servants, Robinson tells us.

WORDSWORTH.

»95

by Brissotins in the tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in
the closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy of Th^r^se. It
was natural in the early days of Wordsworth's career to dwell
most fondly on those profounder qualities to appreciate which
settled in some sort the mcisure of a man's right to judge of
poetry at all. But now we must admit the shortcomings, the
failures, the defects, as no less essential elements in forming a
sound judgment as to whether the seer and artist were so
united in him as to justify the claim first put in by himself and
afterwards maintained by his sect to a place beside the few
great poets who exalt men's minds, and give a right direction
and safe outlet to their passions through the imagination, while
insensibly helping them toward balance of character and
serenity of judgment by stimulating their sense of proportion,
form, and the nice adjustment of means to ends. In none of
our poets has the constant propulsion of an unbending will, and
the concentration of exclusive, if I must not say somewhat
narrow, sympathies done so much to make the original endow-
ment of nature effective, and in none, accordingly, does the
biography throw so much light on the works, nor enter so largely
into their composition as an element whether of power or of
weakness. Wordsworth never saw, and I think never wished
to see, beyond the limits of his own consciousness and exper-
ience. He early conceived himself to be, and through life was
confirmed by circumstances in the faith that he was, a " dedi-
cated spirit,"* a state of mind likely to further an intense, but at
the same time one-sided, development of the intellectual powers.
The solitude in which the greater part of his mature life was
passed, while it doubtless ministered to the passionate intensity
of his musings upon man and nature, was, it may be suspected,

• In the "Prelude" he attributes this consecration to a sunrise seen
(during a college vacation) as he walked honiuvvard from some village
festival where he had danced all night : —

•• My heart was full ; I made no yows, but vows
Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me
Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit."— Book !▼.

1 1

] J

196

WORDSWORTH,

harmful to him as an artist, by depriving him of any standard of
proportion outside himself by which to test the comparative
value of his thoughts, and by rendering him more and more
incapable of that urbanity of mind which could be gained only
by commerce with men more nearly on his own level, and which
gives tone without lessening individuality. Wordsworth never
quite saw the distinction between the eccentric and the original.
For what we call originality seems not so much anything
peculiar, much less anything odd, but that quality in a man
which touches human nature at most points of its circumference,
which reinvigorates the consciousness 0/ our own powers
by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations
and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous
imaginings, and adequate utterance to our own stammering
conceptions or emotions. The poet's oOicc is to be a Voice,
not of one crying in the wilderness to a knot of already mag-
netised acolytes, but singing amid the throng of men and lifting
their common aspirations and sympathies (so first clearly
revealed to themselves) on the wings of his song to a purer
ether and a wider reach of view. We cannot, if we would, read
the poetry ot Wordsworth as mere poetry ; at every other page
we find ourselves entangled in a problem of aesthetics. The
world-old question ot matter and form, of whether nectar is of
precisely the same flavour when served to us from a Grecian
chalice or from any jug of ruder pottery, comes up for decision
anew. The Teutonic nature has always shown a sturdy pref-
erence of the solid bone with a marrow of nutritious moral to
any shadow of the same on the flowing mirror of sense.
Wordsworth never lets us long forget the deeply rooted stock
from which he sprang — vien ben dil lui.

William Wordsworth was bom at Cockermouth in
Cumberland on the 7th of April 1780, the second of five
children. His father was John Wordsworth, an attorney-at-
law, and agent of Sir James Lowther, afterwards first Earl of
Lonsdale. His mother was Anne Cookson, the daughter of a
mercer in Penrith. His paternal ancestors had been settled

WORDSWORTH,

197

immemorially at Penistonc in Yorkshire, whence his grandfather
had emigrated to Westmoreland. His mother, a woman of
piety and wisdom, died in March 1778, being then in her
thirty-second year. His failicr, who never entirely cast otT the
depression occasioned by her deatii, survived her but five years,
dying in December 1783, when William was not quite fourteen
years old.

The poet's early childhood was passed partly at Cockcrmouth,
and partly with his maternal grandfather at Penrith. His first
teacher appears to have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of
Shcnstonc's Schoolmistress, who priictised the memory of her
pupils, teaching them chiefly by rote, and not endeavouring to
cultivate their reasoning faculties, a process by which children
are apt to be converted from n.itural logicians into impertinent
sophists. Among his schoolmates here was Mary Hutchinson,
who afterwards became his wife.

In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by Kdwin Sandys,
Archbishop of York, in the year 1585, at Hawkshead in
Lancashire. Hawkshead is a small market-town in the vale of
Esthwaite, about a third of a mile north-west of the lake. Here
Wordsworth passed nine years, among a people of simple
habits and scenery of a sweet and pastoral dignity. His
earliest intimacies were with the mountains, lakes, and streams
of his native district, and the associations with which his mind
was stored during its most impressible period were noble and pure.
The boys were br ' rdcd imong the dames of the village, thus
enjoying a freed on from scholastic restraints, which could be
nothing but beneficial in a place where the temptations were
only to sports that hardened the body, while they fostered a
love of nature in the spirit and habits of observation in the
mind. Wordsworth's ordinary amusements here were hunting
and fishing, rowing, skating, and long walks around the lake
and among the hills, with an occasional scamper on horseback.*
His life as a school-boy was favourable also to his poetic
development, in being identified with that of the people among

* " Prelude," Book ii.

f»

1 '

!i|

I9B

WORDSWORTH,

ii<

1),

whom he lived. Among men of simple habits, and where there
are small diversities of condition, the feelings and passions are
displayed with less restraint, and the young poet grew
acquainted with that primal human basis of character where \)^
Muse finds firm foothold, and to which he ever afterward
cleared his way through all the overlying drift of conven-
tionalism. The dalesmen were a primitive and hardy race who
kept alive the traditions and often the habits of a more
picturesque time. A common level of interests and social
standing fostered unconventional ways of thought and speech,
and friendly human sympathies. Solitude induced reflection, a
reliance of the mind on its own resources, and individuality of
character. Where everybody knew everybody, and everybody's
father had known everybody's f-^ther, the interest of man in man
was not likely to become a mo,tter of cold hearsay and distant
report. When death knocked at any door in the hamlet, there
was an echo from every fireside, and a wedding dropt its
white flowers at every threshold. There was not a grave in the
churchyard but had its story ; not a crag or glen or aged tree
untouched with some ideal hue of legend. It was here that
Wordsworth learned that homely humanity which gives such
depth and sincerity to his poems. Travel, society, culture,
nothing could obliterate the deep trace of that early training
which enables him to speak directly to the primitive instincts of
man. He was apprenticed early to the diflicult art of being
himself.

At school he wrote some task-verses on subjects .mposed by
the master, and also some voluntaries of his own, equally
undistinguished by any peculiar merit. But he seems to
have made up his mind as early as in his fourteenth year
to become a poet.* " It is recorded," says his biographer
vaguely, "that the poet's father set him very early to learn
portions of the best English poets by heart, so that at an

* " I to the muses have been bound,

These fourteen years, by strong indentures."

-Idiot Boy (1798).

WORDSWORTH.

199

early age he could repeat large portions of Shakespeare, Milton,
and Spenser."*

The great event of Wordsworth's school-days was the
death of his father, who left what may be called a
hypothetical estate, consisting chiefly of claims upon the
first Earl of Lonsdale, the payment of which, though their
iustice was acknowledged, that nobleman contrived in some
unexplained way to elude so long as he lived. In October
1787 he left school for St. John's College, Cambridge. He was
already, we are told, a fair Latin scholar, and had made some
progress in mathematics. The earliest books we hear of his
reading were Don Quixote^ Gil BlaSy Gulliver's Travels^ and the
Tale of a Tub; but at school he had also become familiar with
the works of some English poets, particularly Goldsmith and
Gray, of whose poems he had learned many by heart. What is
more to the purpose, he had become, without knowing it, a
lover of Nature in all her moods, and the same mental
necessities of a solitary life which compel men to an interest
in the transitory phenomena of scenery, had made him also
studious of the movements of his own mind, and the mutual
interaction and dependence of the external and internal universe.

Doubtless his early orphanage was not without its effect in

confirming a character naturally impatient of control, and his

mind, left to itself, clothed itself with an indigenous growth,

which grew fairly and freely, unstinted by the shadow of exotic

plantations. It has become a truism, that remarkable persons

have remarkable mothers ; but perhaps this is chiefly true of

such as have made themselves distinguished by their industry,

and by the assiduous cultivation of faculties in themselves ot

only an average quality. It is rather to be noted how little is

known of the parentage of men of the first magnitude^ how often

they seem in some sort foundlings, and how early an apparently

adverse destiny begins the culture of those who are to encounter

and master great intellectual or spiritual experiences.

* I think this more than doubtful, for I find no traces of the influence of
any of these poets in his earlier writings. Goldsmitli was evidently his
model in the "Descriptive Sketches " and the "Evening Walk." I speak
of them as originally printed.

]

•li

200

WORDSWORTH.

';•,»

Of his disposition as a child little is known, but that little is
characteristic. He himself tells us that he was " stiff, moody,
and of violent temper." His mother said of him that he was
the only one of her children about whom she felt any anxiety —
for she was sure that he would be remarkable for good or evil.
Once, in resentment at some fancied injury, he resolved to kill
himself, but his heart failed him. I suspect that few boys of
passionate temperament have escaped these momentary sugges-
tions ot despairing helplessness. "On another occasion," he
says, " while I was at my grandfather's house at Penrith, along
with my eldest brother Richard, we were whipping tops together
in the long drawing-room, on which the carpet was only laid
down on particular occasions. The walls were hung round
with family pictures, and I said to my brother, * Dare you strike
your whip through that old lady's petticoat?' He replied,
* No, I won't' • Then,' said I, * here goes,' and I struck my
lash through her hooped petticoat, for which, no doubt, though
I have forgotten it, I was properly punished. But, possibly
from some want ot judgment in punishments inflicted, I had
become perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and
rather proud ot it than otherwise." This last anecdote is as
happily typical as a bit of Greek mythology which always
prefrgured the lives of heroes in the stories of their childhood.
Just so do we find him afterward striking his defiant lash
through the hooped petticoat of the artificial style of poetry, and
proudly unsubdued by the punishment of the Reviewers.

Of his college life the chief record is to be found in " The
Prelude." He did not distinguish himselt as a scholar, and if
his life had any incidents, they were of that interior kind which
rarely appear in biography, though they may be of controlling
influence upon the life. He speaks of reading Chaucer,
Spenser, and Milton while at Cambridge,* but no reflection
from them is visible in his earliest published poems. The

* " Prelude," Book iii. He studied Italian also at Cambridge ; his
teacher, whose name was Isola, had formerly taught the poet Gray. It
may be pretty certainly inferred, however, that his first systematic study

WORDSWORTH.

201

greater part of his vaca»''^ns was spent in his native Lake-
country, where his oniy sister, Dorothy, was the companion of
his rambles. She was a woman of large natural endowments,
chiefly of the receptive kind, and had much to do with the
formation and tendency of the poet's mind. It was she who
called forth the shyer sensibilities of his nature, and taught an
originally harsh and austere imagination to surround itself with
fancy and feeling, as the rock fringes itself with a sun-spray
of ferns. She was his flrst public, and belonged to that class
of prophetically appreciative temperaments whose apparent
office it is to cheer the early solitude of original minds
with messages from the future. Through the greater part
of his life she continued to be a kind of poetical conscience
to him.

Wordsworth's last college vacation was spent in a foot
journey upon the Continent (1790). In January 1791 he took
his degree of B.A., and left Cambridge. During the summer of
this year he visited Wales, and, after declining to enter upon
holy orders under the plea that he was not of age for ordination,
went over to France in November, and remained during the
winter at Orleans. Here he became intimate with the
republican General Beaupuis, with whose hopes and aspirations
he ardently sympathised. In the spring of 1792 he was at
Blois, and returned thence to Orleans, which he finally quitted
in October for Paris. He remained here as long as he could
with safety, and at the close of the year went back to England,
thus, perhaps, escaping the fate which soon after overtook his
friends the Brissotins.

As hitherto the life of Wordsworth may be called a fortunate
one, not less so in the training and expansion of his faculties
was this period ot his stay in France. Born and reared in a
country where the homely and familiar nestles confidingly
amid the most savage and sublime forms of nature, he had

of English poetry was due to the copy of Anderson's British Poets, left
with him by his sailor brother John on setting out for his last voyage in
1805.

! «

i ■

■1

202

WORDSWORTH.

,'■4',

experienced whatever impulses the creative faculty can receive
from mountain and cloud and the voices of winds and waters,
but he had known man only as an actor in fireside histories and
tragedies, for which the hamlet supplied an ample stage. In
France he first felt the authentic beat of a nation's heart ; he
was a spectator at one of those dramas where the terrible
footfall of the Eumenides is heard nearer and nearer in the
pauses of the action ; and he saw man such as he can only be
when he is vibrated by the orgasm of a national emotion. He
sympathised with the hopes of France and of mankind deeply,
as was fitting in a young man and a poet ; and if his faith in
the gregarious adv;lncement of men was afterward shaken, he
only held the more firmly by his belief in the individual, and
his reverence for the human as something quite apart from the
popular and above it. Wordsworth has been unwisely blamed,
as if he had been recreant to the liberal instincts of his youth.
But it was inevitixble that a genius so regulated and metrical as
his, a mind which always compensated itself for its artistic
radicalism by an involuntary leaning toward external respecta-
bility, should recoil from whatever was convulsionary and
destructive in politics, and above all in religion. He reads the
poems of Wordsworth without understanding, who does not find
in them the noblest incentives to faith in man and the grandeur
of his destiny, founded always upon that personal dignity and
virtue, the capacity for whose attainment alone makes universal
liberty possible and assures its permanence. He was lo make
men better by opening to them the sources of an inalterable
well-being; to make them free, in a sense higher than
political, by showing them that these sources are within
them, and that no contrivance of man can permanently
emancipate narrow natures and depraved minds. His politics
were always those of a poet, circling in the larger orbit of
causes and principles, careless of the transitory oscillation of
events.

The change in his point of view (if change there was)
certainly was complete soon after his return from France, and
was perhaps due in part to the influence of Burke.

v.!

ip<|?«»i«wwii!-«i?^4«**iiiic*^

WORDSlVOIiTH, «03

" While he [Burke] forewanu, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule ; the majesty proclaims
Of institutes and laws hallowed by time ;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by custom ; and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are bom.
. . . Could a youth, and one
In ancient story versed, whose breast hath heaved
Under the weight of classic eloquence.
Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired ? "*

He had seen the French for a dozen years eagerly busy in
tearing up whatever had roots in the past, replacing the vener-
able trunks of tradition and orderly growth with liberty-poles,
then striving vainly to piece together the fibres they had broken,
and to reproduce artificially that sense of permanence and con-
tinuity which is the main safeguard of vigorous self-conscious-
ness in a nation. He became a Tory through intellectual
convictjon, retaining, I suspect, to the last, a certain radicalism
of temperament and instinct. Haydon tells us that in 1809
Sir George Beaumont said to him and Wilkie, " Wordsworth
may perhaps walk in ; if he do, I caution you both against his
terrific democratic notions ; " and it must have been many
years later that Wordsworth himself told Crabb Robinson, " I
have no respect whatever for Whigs, but I have a great deal of
the Chartist in me." In 1802, during his tour in Scotland, he
travelled on Sundays as on the other days of the week.f He
afterwards became a theoretical church-goer. "Wordsworth
defended earnestly the Church establishment. He even said
he would shed his blood for it. Nor was he disconcerted by a

* " Prelude," Book vii. Written before 1805, and referring to a still
earlier date. ** Wordsworth went in powder, and with cocked hat under
his arm, to the Marchioness of Stafford's rout." — (Southey to Miss Barker,
May 1806.)

t This was probably one reason for the long suppression of Miss
Wordsworth's journal, which she had evidently prepared for publication
as early as 1805.

iff

M :

.1 !

204

WORDSWORTIT.

laugh raised against him en account of his having confessed
that he knew not when he had been in a church in his own
country. * All our ministers are so vile,' said he. The mischief
of allowing the clergy to depend on the caprice of the
multitude he thought more than outweighed all the evils of an
establishment."*

In December 1792 Wordsworth liad returned to England,
and in the following year published "Descriptive Sketches" and
the " Evening Walk." He did this, as he says in one of his
letters, to show that, although he had gained no honours at the
University, he could do something. They met with no great
success, and he afterward corrected them so much as to destroy
all their interest as juvenile productions, without communi-
cating to them any of the merits, of maturity. In commenting,
sixty years afterward, on a couplet in one of these poems —

" And, fronting th bright west, the oak entwines
Its darkeniug boughs and leaves in stronger lines " —

he says : " This is feebly and imperfectly expressed, but I
recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me.
. . . The moment was important in my poetical history ; for I
date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural
appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age
or country, so far as I was acquainted with them, and I made a
resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency."

It is plain that Wordsworth's memory was playing him a
trick here, misled by that instmct (it may almost be called) of
consistency which leads men first to desire that their lives
should have been without break or seam, and then to believe
that they have been such. The more distant ranges of perspec-
tive are apt to run together in retrospection. How far could
Wordsworth at fourteen have been acquainted with the poets of
all ages and countries— he who to his dying day could not
endure to read Goethe and knew nothing of Calderon ? It
seems to me rather that the earliest influence traceable in him

* Crabb Robiiison, L, 250, Am. Ed.

WORDSWORTH.

205

is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cowper, and it is, perhaps,
some slight indication of its having already begun that his first
volume of "Descriptive Sketches" (1793) was put forth by
Johnson, who was Cowper's publisher. By and by the powerful
impress of Burns is seen both in the topics of his verse and the
form of his expression. But whatever their ultimate effect upon
his style, certain it is that his juvenile poems were clothed in
the conventional habit of the eighteenth century. " The first
verses from which he remembered to have received great
pleasure were Miss Carter's * Poem on Spring,' a poem in the
six-line stanza, which he was particularly fond of, and had
composed much in — for example, * Ruth.'" This is noteworthy,
for Wordsworth's lyric range, especially so far as tune is
concerned, was always narrow. His sense of melody was
painfully dull, and some of his lighter effusions, as he would
have called them, are almost ludicrously wanting in grace of
movement. We cannot expect in a modern poet the thrush-like
improvisation, the impulsively bewitching cadences, that charm
us in our Elizabethan drama, and whose last warble died with
Herrick ; but Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning have shown
that the simple pathos of their music was not irrecoverable,
even if the artless poignancy of their phrase be gone beyond
recall. We feel this lack in Wordsworth all the more keenly if
we compare such verses as

" Like an army defeated
The snow hath retreated
And now doth fare ill
On the top of the bare hill,"

with Goethe's exquisite Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh^ in which
the lines (as if shaken down by a momentary breeze of emotion)
drop lingeringly one after another like blossoms upon turf.

" The Evening Walk " and " Descriptive Sketches " show
plainly the prevailing influence of Goldsmith, both in the turn
of thought and the mechanism of the verse. They lack
altogether the temperance of tone and judgment in selection
which have made the " Traveller " and the " Deserted Village,"

) '

3o6

WORDSWORTH.

'S i

perhaps, the most truly classical poems in the language. They
bear here and there, however, the unmistakable stamp of the
maturer Wordsworth, not only in a certain blunt realism, but in
the intensity and truth of picturesque epithet. Of this realism,
from which Wordsworth never wholly freed himself, the follow-
ing verses may suffice as a specimen. After describing the fate
of a chamois-hunter killed by falling from a crag, his fancy goes
back to the bereaved wife and son : —

** Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze,
Passing his father's bones in future days,
Stai*t at the reliques of that very thigh
On which so oft ]w prattled when a boy."

In these poems there is plenty of that " poetic diction " against
which Wordsworth was to lefid the revolt nine yej.rs later.

" To wet the peak'w impracticable sides
He opens of his feet the sanguine tides,
Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes
Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies."

Both of these passages have disappeared from the revised
edition, as well as some curious outbursts of that motiveless
despair which Byron made fashionable not long after. Nor are
there wanting touches of fleshliness which strike us oddly as
coming from Wordsworth.*

" Farewell ! those forms that in thy noontide shade
Rest near their little plots of oaten glade.
Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire
To throw the * sultry ray ' of young Desire ;
Tho^e lips whose tides of fragrance come and go
Accortlant to the cheek's unquiet glow ;
Tho.>e shadowy breasts in love's soft light arrayed,
And rising by the moon of passion swayed."

* Wordsworth's purity afterwards grew sensitive almost to prudery.
The late Mr. Clough told me that he heard him at Dr. Arnold's table
denounce the first line in Keats's " Ode to a Grecian Urn" as indecent,
and Haydon records that when he saw the group of Cupid and Psyche he
exclaimed, "The dev-ils I "

WORDSWORTH,

207

The political tone is also mildened in the revision, as where he
changes "despot courts" into "tyranny." One of the altera-
tions is interesting. In the "Evening Walk" he had
originally written—

" And bids her soldier come her wars to share
Asleep on Minden's charnel hill afar."

An erratum at the end directs us to correct the second verse,
thus : —

" Asleep on Bunker's charael hill afar."*

Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for making the owl
a bodeful bird. He had himself done so in the " Evening
Walk/' and corrects his epithets to suit his later iudgment,
putting " gladsome " for " boding," and replacing

" The tremulous sob of the complaining owl '
" The sportive outcry of the mocking owl "

Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much changed in
the revision as to make the dates appended to them a mis-
leading anachronism. But there is one truly Words worthian
passage which already gives us a glimpse of that passion with
which he was the first to irradiate descriptive poetry, and which
sets him on a level with Turner.

" 'Tio 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 ;
But what a sudden burst of overpowering light I
Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form ;
Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine
The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline ;
Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,

* The whole passage is omitted in the revised edition. The original, a
quarto pamphlet, is now very rare, but fortunately Charles Lamb's copy
of it is now owned by my friend, Professor C. E. Norton.

i I ,

ao8

WORDSIVORTH,

\\\

At once to pillars turned that flame with gold ;
Behind IiIh sail the peasant trifs to .shun
The West that burns like one dilated «un,
Where in a mijj(hty crucible expire
The mountains, glowing hot like coals of Are."

Wordsworth has made only one change in these verses, and
that for the worse, by substituting "glorious" (which was
already implied in " glances " and " fire-dad ") for " wheeling."
In later life he would have found it hard to forgive the man
who should have made cHfifs recline over a lake. On the
whole, what strikes us as most prophetic in these poems is
their want ot continuity, and the purple patches of true poetry
on a texture ot unmistakable prose ; perhaps we might add,
the incongruous clothing of prose thoughts in the ceremonial
robes of poesy.

During the same year (1793) he wrote, but did not publish,
a political tract, in which he avowed himself opposed to
monarchy and to the hereditary principle, and desirous of a
republic, if it could be had without a revolution. He probably
continued to be all his lite in favour of that ideal republic
" which never was ^ n land or sea," but fortunately he gave up
politics, that he might devote himself to his own nobler calling,
to which politics are subordinate, and for which he found
freedom enough in England as it was.* Dr. Wordsworth
admits that his uncle's opinions were democratical so late as
1802. I suspect that they remained so in an esoteric way to
the end of his days. He had himself suffered by the arbitrary
selfishness of a great landholder, and he was born and bred in

* Wordsworth showed his habitual good sense in never sharing, so far
as is known, the communistic dreams of his friends Coleridge and
Southey. The latter of the two had, to be sure, renounced them
shortly after his marriage, and before his acquaintance with Wordsworth
began. But Coleridge seems to have clung to them longer. There is a
passage in one of his letters to Cottle (without date, but apparently
written in the spring of 1798) which would imply that Wordsworth
had been accused of some kind of social heresy. "Wordsworth has
been caballed against so long and so loudZy that he has found it
impossible to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden estate to let him

pl^PiWr .

WORDSWORTH,

209

a part of England where there is a greater social equality than
elsewhere. The look and manner of the Cumberland people
especially are such as recall very vividly to a Ncw-£nglandcr
the associations of fifty years ago, ere the change from New
England to New Ireland had begun. But meanwhile, Want,
which makes no distinctions of Monarchist or Republican, was
pressing upon him. The debt due to his father's estate had not
been paid, and Wordsworth was one of those real idealists who
esteem it the first duty of a friend of humanity to live for, and
not on, his neighbour. He at first proposed establishing a
periodical journal to be called The Philanthropist^ but luckily
went no further with it, for the receipts from an organ of
opinion which professed republicanism, and at the same time
discountenanced the plans of all existing or defunct republicans,
would have been necessarily scanty. There being no appearance
of any demand, present or prospective, for philanthropists, he
tried to get employment as correspondent of a newspaper.
Here also it was impossible that he should succeed ; he was
too great to be merged in the editorial We, and had too well
defined a private opinion on all subjects to be able to express
that average of public opinion which constitutes able editorials.
But so it is that to the prophet in the wilderness the birds of ill*
omen are already on the wing with food from heaven ; and
while Wordsworth's relatives were getting impatient at what
they considered his waste of time, while one thought he had
gifts enough to make a good parson, and another lamented the
rare attorney that was lost in him,* the prescient muse guided

the house after their first agreement is expired." Perhaps, after all, it
was Wordsworth's insulation of character and hahitual want of sympathy
with anything but the moods of his own mind that rendered hin^
hicapable of this copartnery of enthusiasm. He appears to have
regarded even his sister Dora (whom he certainly loved as much as it
was possible for him to love anything but his own poems) as a kind of
tributary dependency of his genius, much as a mountain might look
down on one of its ancillary spurs.

* Speaking to one of his neighbours in 1845 he said, "that, alter
he had finished his college course, he was in great doubt as to what

564

■:. :

910

WORDSWOHTH,

1'^

.1'

'11

I (

It'

the hand of Raisley Calvert while he wrote the poet's name in
his will for a legacy of £qqo. By the death of Calvert, in 1795,
this timely help came to Wordsworth at the turning-point of his
life, and made it honest for him to write poems that will never
die, instead of theatrical critiques as ephemeral at play-bills, or
leaders that led only to oblivion.

In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his sister took up
their abode at Racedown Lodge, near Crewkeme, in Dorset-
shire. Here nearly two years were passed, chiefly in the study
of poetry, and Wordsworth to some extent recovered from the
fierce disappointment of his political dreams, and regained that
equable tenor of mind which alone is consistent with a healthy
productiveness. Here Coleridge, who had contrived to see
something more in the *^ Descriptive Sketches '' than the public
had discovered there, first made his acquaintance. The
sympathy and appreciation of an intellect like Coleridge's
supplied him with that external motive to activity which is the
chief use of popularity, and justified to him his opinio* i of his
own powers. It was now that the tragedy of **The Borderers "

hitt future employment should be. He did &ot feel himself good enough
for the Church ; he felt that his mind was not properly disciplined for
that holy office, and that the struggle between his conscience and his
impulses would have made life a torture. He also shrank from the
Law, although Southey often told him that he was well fitted for the
higher parts of the profession. He had studied military history w^th
great interest, and the strategy of war ; and he always fancied that he
had talents for command ; and he at one time thought of a military
l^fe, but then he was without connections, and he felt, if he were
ordered to the West Indies, his talents would not save him from the
yellow-fever, and he gave that wig."— {Memoirs, ii., 466.) It is curious
to fancy Wordsworth a soldier. Certain points of likeness between him
and Wellington have often struck me. They resemble each other in
practical good sense, fidelity to duty, courage, and also in a kind of
precise uprightness which made their personal character somewhat
uninteresting. But what was decorum in Wellington was piety iu
Wordsworth, and the entire absence of imagination (the great point of
dissimilarity) perhaps helped as much as anything to make Wellington a
great commander.

1L.1_,

WORDSWORTH,

211

was for the most part written, and that plan of the Lyrical
Ballads suj^gested which gave Wordsworth a clew to lead him
out of the metaphysical labyrinth in which he was entangled.
It was agreed between the two young friends, that Wordsworth
was to be a philosophic poet, and, by a good fortune uncommon
to such conspirators. Nature had already consented to the
arrangement. In July 1797 the two Wordsworths »omoved to
Allfoxden in Somersetshire, that they might be near Coleridge,
who in the meanwhile had married and settled himself at
Nether-Stowey. In November "The Borderers" was fmished,
and Wordsworth went up to London with his sister to offer it
for the st ige. The good Genius of the poet again interposing,
the play vvi*s decisively rejected, and Wordsworth went back
to All'oxden, himself the hero of that first tragicomedy so
common to young authors.

The play has fine passages, but is as unreal as Jane Eyre,
It shares with many of Wordsworth's narrative poems the
defect of being written to illustrate an abstract moral theory, so
that the Gverbearing thesis is continually thrusting the poetry
to the wall. Applied to the drama, such predestination makes
all the personages puppets, and disenables them for being
characters. Wordsworth seems to have felt this when he
published "The Borderers" in 1842, and says in a note that
it was "at first written . , . without any view to i its exhibi-
tion upon the stage." But he was mistaken. The contem-
poraneous letters of Coleridge to Cottle show that he was long
in giving up the hope of getting is accepted by some theatrical
manager.

He now applied himself to the preparation of the first volume
of the Lyrical Ballads for the press, and it was published
toward the close of 1798. The book, which contained also
"The Ancient Mariner" of Coleridge, attracted little notice,
and that in great part contemptuous. When Mr. Cottle, the
publisher, shortly after sold his copyrights to Mr. Longman,
that of the Lyrical Ballads was reckoned at zero^ and it was
at last given up to the authors. A few persons were not want-
ing, however, who discovered the dawn-streaks of a new day in

»'

i'l

('i

212

WORDSWORTH.

r 'j'

ill

'1 1

that light which the critical tire-brigade thought to extinguish
with a few contemptuous spurts of cold water.*

Lord Byron describes himself as waking one morning and
finding himself famous, and it is quite an ordinary fact, that a
blaze may be made with a little saltpetre that will be stared at
by thousands who would have thought the sunrise tedious. If
we m^y believe his biographer, Wordsworth might have said
that he awoke and found himself in-famous, for the publication
of the Lyrical Ballads undoubtedly raised him to the dis-
tinction of being the least popular poet in England. Parnassus
has two peaks — the one where improvising poets cluster; the
other where the singer ot deep secrets sits alone — a peak veiled
sometimes from the whole morning of a generation by earth-
born mists and smoke of kitchen fires, only to glow the more
consciously at sunset, and after nightfall to crown itself with
imperishable stars. Wordsworth had that self-trust which in
the man of genius is sublime, and in the man of talent
insufferable. It mattered not to him though all the reviewers
had been in a chorus of laughter or conspiracy of silence behind
him. He went quietly over to Germany to write more Lyrical
Ballads, and to begin a poem on the growth of his own mind, at
a time when there were only two men in the world (himself and
Coleridge) who were aware that he had one, or at least one
anywise differing from those mechanically uniform ones which
are stuck drearily, side by side, in the great pin-paper ot
society.

* Cottle says, "The sale was so slow and the severity of most of the
reviews so great that its progi-ess to oblivion seemed to be certain." But
the notices in the Monthly and Critical Reviews (then the most
influential) were fair, and indeed favourable, especially to Wordsworth's
share in the volume. The Monthly says, " So much genius and
originality are discovered in this publication that we wish to see another
from the same hand." The Critical, after saying that "in the whole
range of English poetry we scarcely recollect anything superior to a
passage in ' Lines written nearTintern Abbey/ " sums up thus : " Yet every
piece discovers genius ; and ill as the author has frequently employed his
talents, they certainly rank him with the best of living poets." Such
treatment cannot surely be called discouraging.

^r'^^

WORDSWORTH.

213

In Germany Wordsworth dined in company with Klopstock,
and after dinner they had a conversation, of which Wordsworth
took notes. The respectable old poet, who was passing the
evening of his days by the chimney-corner, Darby and Joan
like, with his respectable Muse, seems to have been rather
bewildered by the apparition of a living genius. The record is
of value now chiefly for the insight it gives us into Wordsworth's
mind. Among other things he said, "that it was the province
of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to
descend to theirs" — memorable words, the more memorable
that a literary life of sixty years was in keeping with them.

It would be instructive to know what were Wordsworth's
studies during his winter in Goslar. De Quincey's stat cement is
mere conjecture. It may be guessed fairly enough that he
would seek an entrance to the German language by the easy
path of the ballad, a course likely to confirm him in his theories
as to the language of poetry. The Spinosism with which he
has been not unjustly charged was certainly not due to any
German influence, for it appears unmistakably in the " Lines
composed at Tintern Abbey" in July 1798. It is more likely
to have been derived from his talks with Coleridge in 1797.*
When Emerson visited him in 1833, he spoke with loathing of
Wilhelm Meistet^ a part of which he had read in Carlyle's
translation apparently. There was some affectation in this, it
should seem, for he had read Smollett. On the whole, it
may be fairly concluded that the help of Germany in the
development of his genius may be reckoned as very small,
though there is certainly a marked resemblance both in form
and sentiment between some of his earlier lyrics and those of
Goethe. His poem of the "Thorn," though vastly more
imaginative, may have been suggested by Burger's Pfarrer's

* A very improhable story of Coleridge's in the Biographia Literaria
represents the two friends as having incurred a suspicion of treasonable
dealings with the French enemy by their constant references to a certain
"Spy Nosey." The story at least seems to show how they pronounced
the name, which was exactly in accordance with t\e usage of the last
generation in New England.

t <°i

214

WORDSWORTH.

171

1, !

Tochter von Taubenhain. The little grave drei Spannen lang^
in its conscientious measurement, certainly recalls a famous
couplet in the English poena.

After spending the winter at Goslar, Wordsworth and his
sister returned to England in the spring of 1799, and settled
at Grasmere in Westmoreland. In 1800, the first edition of
the Lyrical Ballads being exhausted, it was republished
with the addition of another volume, Mr. Longman paying
;^ioo for the copyright of two editions. The book passed
to a second edition in 1802, and to a third in 1805.* Words-
worth sent a copy of it, with a manly letter, to Mr. Fox,
particularly recommending to his attention the poems "Michael"
and "The Brothers," as displaying the strength and perman-
ence among a simple and rural population of those domestic
affections which were certain to decay gradually under the
influence of manufactories and poor-houses. Mr. Fox wrote
a civil acknowledgment, saying that his favourites among
the poems were "Harry Gill," "We are Seven," "The Mad
Mother," and "The Idiot," but that he was prepossessed
against the use of blank verse for simple subjects. Any
political significance in the poems he was apparently unable
to see. To this second edition Wordsworth prefixed an
argumentative Preface, in which he nailed to the door of
the cathedral of English song the critical theses which he was
to maintain against all comers in his poetry and his life. It
was a new thing for an author to undertake to show the
goodness of his verses by the logic and learning of his prose ;
but Wordsworth carried to the reform of poetry all that fervour
and faith which had lost their political object, and it is another
proof of the sincerity and greatness of his mind, and of that

* Wordsworth found (as other original minds have since done) a hearing
m America sooner than in England. James Humphreys, a Philadelphia
bookseller, was encouraged by a sufficient lisi of subscribers to reprint
the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads. The second English edition,
however, having been published before he had wholly completed his
reprinting, was substantially followed in the first American, which was
published in 180^,

WOUVSWORTff.

ai5

heroic simplicity which is their concomitant, that he could
do so calmly what was sure to seem ludicrous to the greater
number of his readers. Fifty years have since demon-
strated that the true judgment of one man outweighs any
counterpoise of false judgment, and that the faith of mankind
is guided to a man only by a well-founded faith in himself.
To this Defensio Wordsworth afterwards added a supplement,
and the two form a treatise of permanent value for philosophic
statement and decorous English. Their only ill effect has
been, that they have encouraged many otherwise deserving
young men to set a Sibylline value on their verses in proportion
as they were unsaleable. The strength of an argument for
self-reliance drawn from the example of a great man depends
wholly on the greatness of him who uses it ; such arguments
being like coats of mail, which, though they serve the strong
against arrow-flights and lance-thrusts, may only suffocate
the weak or sink him the sooner in the waters of oblivion.

An advertisement prefixed to the Lyrical Ballads^ as
originally published in one volume, warned the reader that
" they were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the
language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of
society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." In his
preface to the second edition, in two volumes, Wordsworth
already found himself forced to shift his ground a little (perhaps
in deference to the wider view and finer sense of Coleridge),
and now says of the former volume that "it was published as an
experiment which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain
how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement, a selection of the
real language of men in a state of vivid sensation^ that sort of
pleasure and that quantity of p^iasure may be imparted which a
poet may rationally endeavour to impart."* Here is evidence
of a retreat towards a safer position, though Wordsworth seems
to have remained unconvinced at heart, and for many years
longer clung obstinately to the passages of bald prose into

* Some of the weightiest passages in this Preface, as it is now printed,
were inserted without notice of date in the edition of 1815.

■\

3l6

WOEDSWORTH.

(■ '

which his original theory had betrayed him. In 1815 his
opinions had undergone a still further change, and an assiduous
study of the qualities of his own mind and of his own poetic
method (the two subjects in which alone he was ever a thorough
scholar) had convinced him that poetry was in no sense that
appeal to the understanding which is implied by the words
" rationally endeavour to impart." In the preface of that year
he says, " The observations prefixed to that portion of these
volumes which was published many years ago under the title of
Lyrical Ballads have so little of special application to the
greater part of the present enlarged and diversified collection,
that they could not with propriety stand as an introduction to
it.'' It is a pity that he could not have become an earlier
convert to Coleridge's pithy definition, that *' prose was words
in their best order, and poetry the best words in the best order."
But idealisation was something that Wordsworth was obliged
to learn painfully. It did not come to him naturally as to
Spenser and Shelley and to Coleridge in his higher moods.
Moreover, it was in the too frequent choice of subjects
incapable ox being idealised without a manifest jar between
theme and treatment that Wordsworth's great mistake lay.
For example, in "The Blind Highland Boy" he had originally
the following stanzas : —

" Strong is the cnrrent, but be mild,
Te waves, and spare the helpless child t
If ye in anger fret or chafe,
A bee-hive would be ship as safe
Ab that in which he sails.

" But say, what was it ? Thought of fear 1
Well may ye tremble when ye hear !
— ^A household tub like one of those
Which women use to wash their clothes,
Th's carried the blind boy."

In endeavouring to get rid of the downright vulgarity of
phrase in the last stanza, Wordsworth invents an impossible
tortoise-sh^ll} and thus robs his story of the reality which alone

WOUDSWORTH.

217

gave it a living interest. Any extemporised raft would have
floated the boy down to immortality. But Wordsworth never
quite learned the distinction between Fact, which suffocates the
Muse, and Truth, which is the very breath of her nostrils.
Study and self-culture did much for him, but they never quite
satisfied him that he was capable of making a mistake. He
yielded silently to friendly remonstrance on certain points, and
gave up, for example, the ludicrous exactness of

" I've measured it from side to side,
'Tis three feet long and two feet wide."

But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to his dying
day he could never quite shake off that hal- . of over-minute
detail which renders the narratives of uncultivated people so
tedious, and sometimes so distasteful.* " Simon Lee," after his
latest revision, still contains verses like these : —

" And ho is lean and he is sick ;
His body, dwindled and awry,
Bests upon ankles swollen and thick ;
His legs are thin and dry

• • • t •

Few months of life he has in store,
As he to you will tell,
For still, the more he works, the more
Do his weak ankles swell," —

which are not only prose, but bad prose, and moreover guilty
of the same fault for which Wordsworth condemned Dr.
Johnson's famous parody on the ballad-style — that their

* " On my alluding to the line,

* Three feet long and two feet wide,*

ftnd confessing that I dared not read them aloud in company, he said,
<They ought to be liked.'"— (Crabb Robinson, 9th May 1815.) His
ordinary answer to criticisms was that he considered the power to
appreciate the passage criticised as a test of the critic's capacity to judge
Ot poetry at all.

•II

i f

■

2l8

WORDSWORTH,

''i

^^ matter is contemptible." The sonorousness of conviction
with which Wordsworth sometimes gives utterance to common-
places of thought and trivialities of sentiment has a ludicrous
effect on the profane, and even on the faithful, in unguarded
moments. We are reminded of a passage in the "Excursion : '*—

"List! I heard
Protn yon huge breast of rock a solemn bleat,
Sent forth as if it were the mountain's voice."

In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with Lamb began, and
was thenceforward never interrupted. He continued to live at
Grasmere, conscientiously diligent in the composition of poems,
secure of finding the materials of glory within and around him ;
for his genius taught him that inspiration is no product of a
foreign shore, and that no adventurer ever found it, though he
wandered as long as Ulysses. Meanwhile the appreciation of
the best minds and the gratitude of the purest hearts gradually
centred more and more towards him. In 1802 he made a short
visit to France, in company with Miss Wordsworth, and soon
after his return to England was married to Mary Hutchinson,
on the 4th of October of the same year. Of the good fortune of
this marriage no other proof is needed than the purity and
serenity of his poems, and its record is to be sought nowhere else.

On the i8th of June 1803 his first child, John, was bom, and
on the 14th 01 August of the same year he set out with his
sister on a foot journey into Scotland. Coleridge was their
companion during a part of this excursion, of which Miss
Wordsworth kept a full diary. In Scotland he made the
acquaintance of Scott, who recited to him a part of the " Lay of
the Last Minstrel," then in manuscript. The travellers returned
to Grasmere on the 25th of September. It was during this year
that Wordsworth's intimacy with the excellent Sir George
Beaumont began. Sir George was an amateur painter of
considerable merit, and his friendship was undoubtedly of
service to Wordsworth in making him familiar with the laws
of a sister art, and thus contributing to enlarge the sympathies
of his criticism, the tendency of which was toward too great

IP^Wh

WORDSWORTH,

219

irsion : "—

exclusiveness. Sir George Beaumont, dying in 1827, did not
forego his regard for the poet, but contrived to hold his affection
in mortmain by the legacy of an annuity of ;^ioo, to defray the
charges of a yearly journey.

In March 1805 the poet's brother, John, lost his life by the
shipwreck of the Abergavenny East-Indiaman, of which he was
captain. He was a man of great purity and integrity, and
sacrificed himself to his sense of duty by refusing to leave the
ship till it was impossible to save him. Wordsworth was deeply
attached to him, and felt such grief at his death as only solitary
natures like his are capable of, though mitigated by a sense of
the heroism which was the cause of it. The need of mental
activity as affording an outlet to intense emotion may account
for the great productiveness of this and the following year. He
now completed "The Prelude," wrote "The Wagoner," and
increased the number of his smaller poems enough to fill two
volumes, which were published in 1807.

This collection, which contained some of the most beautiful
of his shorter pieces, and among others the incomparable Odes
to Duty and on Immortality, did not reach a second edition till
1 81 5. The reviewers had another laugh, and rival poets pillaged
while they scoffed, particularly Byron, among whose verses a
bit of Wordsworth showed as incongruously as a sacred vest-
ment on the back of some buccaneering plunderer of an
abbey.* There was a general combination to put him down,
but on the other hand there was a powerful party in his favour,
consisting of William Wordsworth. He not only continued in
good heart himself, but, reversing the order usual on such
occasions, kept up the spirits of his friends.t

* Byron, then in his twentieth year, wrote a review of these volumes not,
on the whole, unfair. Crabb Robinson is reported as saying that
"Wordsworth was indignant at the Edinburgh Review's attack on " Hours of
Idleness." "The young man will do something if he goes on," he said.

t The Rev. Dr. Wordsworth has encumbered the memory of his uncle
with two volumes of Memoirs, which for confused dreariness are only
matched by the Rev. Mark Noble's History of the Protectorate House of
Cromwell. It is a misfortune that his materials were not put into the

2ao

WORDSWORTH.

i >

Wordsworth passed the winter of 1806-7 in a house of Sir
George Beaumont's, at Coleorton in Leicestershire, the cottage
at Grasmere having become too small for his increased family.
On his return to the Vale of Grasmere he rented the house at
Allan Bank, where he lived three years. During this period he
appears to have written very little poetry, for which his
biographer assigns as a primary reason the smokiness of the
Allan Bank chimneys. This will hardly account for the failure
of the summer crop, especially as Wordsworth composed chiefly
in the open air. It did not prevent him from writing a
pamphlet upon the Convention of Cintra, which was published
too late to attract much attention, though Lamb says that its
effect upon him was like that which one of Milton's tracts might
have had upon a contemporary.* It was at Allan Bank that

hands of Professor Reed, whose notes to the American edition are among
the most valuable parts of it, as they certainly are the clearest. The book
contains, however, some valuable letters of Wordsworth ; and those relat-
ing to this part of his life should be read by every student of his works, for
the light they throw upon the principles which governed him in the
composition of his poems. In a letter to Lady Beaumont (May 21,
1807) he says, "Trouble not yourself upon their present reception; of
what moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny ! — ^to
console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy
happier ; to teach the young and the gracious of every age, to see, to think
and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous ; this
is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that
is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves. ... To conclude,
my ears are stone-dead to this idle buzz [of hostile criticism], and my flesh
as insensible as iron to these petty stings • and, after what I have said, I
am sure yours will be the same. I doubt not that you will share with me
an invincible confidence that my writings (and amoDg them these little
poems) will co-operate with the benign tendencies in human nature and
society wherever found ; and that they will in their degree be efficacious in
inaking men wiser, better, and happier." Here is an odd reversal of the
ordinary relation between an unpopular poet and his little public of
admirers ; it is he who keeps up their spirits, and supplies them with faith
from his own inexhaustible cistern.

• « Wordsworth's pamphlet will fail of producing any general eflfect,
because the sentences are long and involved ; and his friend De Quincey,
who corrected the press, has render£)d them more obscure by an unusual

WORDSWORTH.

221

Coleridge dictated " The Friend," and Wordsworth contributed
to it two essays, one in answer to a letter of Mathetes*
(Professor Wilson), and the other on Epitaphs, republished in
the Notes to "The Excursion." Here also he wrote his
" Description of the Scenery of the Lakes." Perhaps a truer
explanation of the comparative silence of Wordsworth's Muse
during these years is to be found in the intense interest which
he took in current events, whose variety, picturesqueness, and
historical significance were enough to absorb all the energies
of his imagination.

In the spring of i8ii Wordsworth removed to the Parsonage
at Grasmere. Here he remained two years, and here he had
his second intimate experience of sorrow in the loss of two of
his children, Catharine and Thomas, one of whom died 4th
June, and the other ist December i8i2.t Early in 181 3 he
bought Rydal Mount, and, having removed thither, changed
his abode no more during the rest of his life. In March of this
year he was appointed Distributor of Stamps for the county of
Westmoreland, an office whose receipts rendered him inde-
pendent, and whose business he was able to do by deputy, thus
leaving him ample leisure for nobler duties. De Quincey speaks
of this appointment as an instance of the remarkable good-luck
which waited upon Wordsworth through his whole life. In our
view it is only another illustration of that scripture which
describes the righteous as never forsaken. Good'luck is the
willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscien-
tious observance of duty. Wordsworth owed his nomination to

system of punctuation."— (Southey to Scott, 30th July 1809.) The tract
is, as Southey hints, heavy.
* The first essay in the third volume of the second edition.

t Wordsworth's children were : —

John, bom 18th June 1803 ; still living ; a clergyman.
Dorothy, born 16th August 1804 ; died yth July 1847.
Thomas, born 16th June 1806 ; died 1st December 1812.
Catharine, born 6th September 1808 ; died 4th June 1812.
William, born 12th May 1810 ; succeeded his father as Stamp-
Distributor.

<jl

J.'

■■:,

222

IVORDSWORTH.

the friendly exertions of the Earl of Lonsdale, who desired to
atone as far as might be for the injustice of the first Earl, and
who respected the honesty of the man more than he appreciated
the originality of the poet.* The Collectorship at Whitehaven
(a more lucrative office) was afterwards offered to Wordsworth,
and declined. He had enough for independence, and wished
nothing more. Still later, on the death of the Stamp-Distributor
for Cumberland, a part ot that district was annexed to West-
moreland, and Wordsworth's income was raised to something
more than ;^iooo a-year.

In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland, visiting Yarrow
in company with the Ettrick Shepherd. During this year " The
Excursion " was published, in an edition of five hundred copies,
which supplied the demand lor six years. Another edition of
the same number ot copies was published in 1827, and not
exhausted till 1834. In 1815 "The White Doe of Rylstone"
appeared, and in 1816 "A Letter to a Friend of Burns," in
which vTordsworth giv6s his opinion upon the limits to be
observed by the biographers of literary men. It contains many
valuable suggestions, but allows hardly scope enough for
personal details, to which he was constitutionally indifferent.t
Nearly the same dat6 may be ascribed to a rhymed translation
of the first three books of the ^neid^ a specimen of which was
printed in the Cambridge Philological Museum (1832). In
1819 "Peter Bell," written twenty years before, was published,
and, perhaps in consequence of the ridicule of the reviewers,
found a more rapid sale than any of his previous volumes.
" The Wagoner," printed in the same year, was less successful.

♦ Good luck (in the sense of Chance) seems properly to be the occrrrence
of Opportunity to one who has neither deserved nor knows how to use it.
In such hands it commonly turns to ill-luck. Moore's Eermudan appoint-
ment is an instance of it. Wordsworth had a sound common-sense and
practical conscientiousness, which enabled him to fill his office as well as
Dr. Franklin could have dene. A fitter man could not have been found in
Westmoreland.

t " I am not one who much or oft delight
In personal talk."

h.?

WORDSWORTH,

333

His next publication was the volume of Sonnets on the river
Duddon, with some miscellaneous poems, i8?o. A tour on the
Continent in 1820 furnished the subjects for another collection,
published in 1822. This was followed in the same year by the
volume of Ecclesiastical Sketches. His subsequent publica-
tions were "Yarrow Revisited," 1835, and the tragedy of "The
Borderers," 1842.

During all these years his fame was increasing slowly but
steadily, and his age gathered to itself the reverence and the
troops of friends which his poems and the nobly simple life
reflected in them deserved. Public honours followed private
appreciation. In 1838 the University of Dublin conferred upon
him the degree of D.C.L. In 1839 Oxford did the same, and
the reception of the poet (now in his seventieth year) at the
University was enthusiastic. In 1842 he resigned his office of
Stamp-Distributor, and Sir Robert Peel had the honour of
putting him upon the civil list for a pension of ;^30o. In 1843
he was appointed Laureate, with the express understanding
that it was a tribute of respect, involving no duties except such
as might be self-imposed. His only official production was an
Ode for the installation of Prince Albert as Chancellor of the
University of Cambridge. His life was prolonged yet seven
years, almost, it should seem, that he might receive that honour
which he had truly conquered for himself by the unflinching
bravery of a literary life of half-a-century, unparalleled for the
scorn with which its labours were received, and the victorious
acknowledgment which at last crowned them. Surviving
nearly all his contemporaries, he had, if ever any man had,
a foretaste of immortality, enjoying in a sort his own
posthumous renown, for the hardy slowness of its growth gave
a safe pledge of its durability. He died on the 23rd of April
1850, the anniversary of the death of Shakespeare.

We have thus briefly sketched the life of Wordsworth — a
life uneventful even for a man of letters ; a life like that of an
oak, of quiet self-development, throwing out stronger roots
toward the side whence the prevailing stonn-blasts blow, and
of tougher fibre in proportion to the rocky nature of the soil in

aa4

WORDSWORTH.

;i ii

which it grows. The life and growth of his mind, and the
influences which shaped it, are to be looked for, even more
than is the case with most poets, in his works, for he deliber-
ately recorded them there.

Of his personal characteristics little is related. He w»s
somewhat above the middle height, but, according to De
Quinccy, ut indifferent figure, the shoulders being narrow and
drooping. His finest feature was the eye, which was grey and
full of spiritual light. Leigh Hunt says, " I never beheld eyes
that looked so inspired, so supernatural. They were like fires,
half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of
regard. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had
such eyes." Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and
Haydon that he had none of form. The best likeness of him,
in De Quincey's judgment, is the portrait of Milton prefixed to
Richardson's notes on " Paradise Lost." He was active in his
habits, composing in the open air, and generally dictating his
poems. His daily life was regular, simple, and frugal ; his
manners were dignified and kindly ; and in his letters and
recorded conversations it is remarkable how little that was
personal entered into his judgment of contemporaries.

The true rank of Wordsworth among poets is, perhaps, not
even yet to be .' ' ly estimated, so hard is it to escape into the
quiet hall of judgment uninflamed by the tumult of partisanship
which besets the doors.

Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great poet, at a
time when the artificial school of poetry was enthroned with all
the authority of long succession and undisputed legitimacy, it
was almost inevitable that Wordsworth, who, both by nature
and judgment was a rebel against the existing order, should
become a partisan. Unfortunately, he became not only the
partisan of a system, but of William Wordsworth as its repre-
sentative. Right in general principle, he thus necessarily
became wrong in particulars. Justly convinced that great-
ness only achieves its ends by implicitly obeying its own
instincts, he perhaps reduced the following his instincts
too much to a system, mistook his own resentments for the

WORDSWORTH.

«25

promptings of his natural genius, and, compelling principle to
the measure ol his own temperament or even of the contro-
versial exigency of the moment, fell somclimcs ' Uo the error of
making naturalness itself artificial. If a poet resolve to be
orij^'inal, it will end commonly in his being merely peculiar.

Wordsworth himself departed more and more in practice, as
he grew older, from the theories which he had laid down in his
prefaces ;* but those theories undoubtedly had a j^reat effect in
retarding the growth of his fame. He had carefully constructed
a pair of spectacles through which his earlier poems were to be
studied, and the public insisted on looking through them at his
mature works, and were consequently unable to see fairly what
required a different focus. He forced his readers to come to
his poetry with a certain amount of conscious preparation, and
thus gave them beforehand the impression of something like
mechanical artifice, and deprived them of the contented repose
of implicit faith. To the child a watch seems to be a living
creature ; but Wordsworth would not let his rc.ders be

* How far he swung backward toward tho school under whoso inlluenco
he grew up, and toward the stylo against winch he had protested so
vigorously, a few examples will show. The advocate of the language of
common life has a verse in his '* 'J'hanksgiving Ode" which, it one met with it
by itself, he would think the achievement of some later co])yi8t of Pope :—

•• While the (ub«d enffine [the organ] feels tlie inspiring blast."

And in "The Italian Itinerant" and "The Swiss Goatherd" we find a
thermometer or barometer called

'• The well-wrouRht scale
Whose sentient tube instructs to time
A purpose to a fickle c!ime."

Still worse in the " Eclipse of the Sun," 1821 :—

" High on her speculative tower
Stood Science, waiting for the iiour
When Sol was destined to endure
That darkening."

So in " The Excursion,"

" The cold March wind raised in her tender throat
Viewless obstructions."

565

226

WORDSWORTH.

i I

'/I (

children, and did injustice to himself by giving them an uneasy
doubt whether creations which really throbbed with the very
heart's blood of genius, and were alive with nature's life of life,
were not contrivances of wheels and springs. A naturalness
which I'^e are told to expect has lost the crowning grace of
nature. The men who walked in Cornelius Agrippa's visionary
gardens had probably no more pleasurable emotion than that
of a shallow wonder, or an equally shallow self-satisfaction in
thinking they had hit upon the secret of the thaumaturgy ; but to
a tree that has grown as God willed we come without a theory
and with no botanical predilections, enjoying it simply and
thankfully ; or the Imagination recreates for us its past sum-
mers and winters, the birds that have nested and sung in it,
the sheep that have clustered in its shade, the winds that have
visited it, the cloud -bergs that have drifted over it, and the
snows that have ermined it in winter. The Imagination is a
faculty that flouts at foreordination, and Wordsworth seemed
to do all he could to cheat his readers of her company by laying
out paths with a peremptory Do not step off the gravel ! at the
opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every conceivable
emotion, with guide-boards to tell each when and where it
must be caught.

But if these things stood in the way of immediate appreciation,
he had another theory which interferes more sepously with the
total and permanent effect of his poems. He was theoretically
determined not only to be a philosophic poet, but to be a great
philosophic poet, and to this end he must produce an epic.
Leaving aside the question whether the epic be obsolete or not,
it may be doubted whether the history of a single man's mind is
universal enough in its interest to furnish all the requirements
of the epic machinery, and it may be more than doubted
whether a poet's philosophy be ordinary metaphysics, divisible
into chapter and section. It is rather something which is more
energetic in a word than in a whole treatise, and our hearts
unclose themselves instinctively at its simple Open sesame!
while they would stand firm against the reading of the whole
body of philosophy. In point of fact, the one element of

WORDSWORTH,

927

greatness which "The Excursion" possesses indisputably is
heaviness. It is only the episodes that are universally read, and
the effect of these is diluted by the connecting and accom-
panying lectures on metaphysics. Wordsworth had his epic
mould to fill, and, like Benvenuto Cellini in casting his " Per-
seus," was forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal, lest
it should run short. Separated from the rest, the episodes are
perfect poems in their kind, and without example in the
language.

Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong minds, was a
good critic of the substance of poetry, but somewhat niggardly
in the allowance he made for those subsidiary qualities which
make it the charmer of leisure and the employment of minds
without definite object. It may be doubted, indeed, whether he
set much store by any contemporary writing but his own, and
whether he did not look upon poetry too exclusively as an
exercise rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the
imagination.* He says of himself, speaking of his youth : —

" In fine,
I was a better judge of thoughts than words,
Misled in estimating words, not only
By common inexperience of youth,
But by the trade in classic niceties,
The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase
From languages that want the living voice
To carry meaning to the natural heart ;
To tell us what is passion, what is truth,
What reason, what simplicity and sense." f

Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, this was always
true of him, and his thought seems often to lean upon a word
too weak to bear its weight. No reader of adequate insight can
help regretting that he did not earlier give himself to " the trade
of classic niceties." It was precisely this which gives to the
blank-verse of Landor the severe dignity and reserved force

* According to Landor, he pronounced all Scott's poetry to be " not
worth five shillings."
t " Prelude," Book vi.

<:']

228

WORDSWORTH,

Vi \

!' t

which alone among later poets recall the tune of Milton, and to
which Wordsworth never attained. Indeed, Wordsworth's
blank-verse (though the passion be profounder) is always
essentially that of Cowper. They were alike also in their love
of outward nature and of simple things. The main diiTerence
between them is one of scenery rather than of sentiment,
between the life-i'ong familiar of the mountains and the dweller
on the plain.

It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest
powers of the poetic mind were associated with a certain
tendency to the diffuse and commonplace. It is in the under-
standing (always prosaic) that the great golden veins of his
imagination are imbedded.* He wrote too much to write
always well ; for it is not a great Xerxes-army of words, but a
compact Greek ten thousand, that march safely down to
posterity. He set tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the
same as trying to make Jove's eagle do the sen'ice of a clucking
hen. Throughout "The Prelude" and "The Excursion" he
seems striving to bind the wizard Imagination with the sand-
ropes of dry disquisition , and to have forgotten the potent spell-
word which would make tlie particles cohere. There is an
arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress wearisome.
Yet with what splendours as of mountain-sursets are we
rewarded ! what golden rounds of verse do we not see stretcli-
ing heavenward with angels ascending and descending ! what
haunting harmonies hover around us deep and eternal like the
undying barytone of the iea ! and if we are compelled to fare
through sands and desert wildernesses, how often do we not
hear airy shapes that syllable our names with a startling

* This was instinctively felt, even by his admirers. Miss Martineau said
to Crabb Robinson in 1839, speaking of Wordsworth's conversation :
" Sometimes he is annoying from the pertinacity with which he dwells on
trifles ; at other times he flows on in "Lhe utmost grandeur, leaving a strong
impression of inspiration." Robinson tells us that he read " Resolution "
and ** Independence " to a lady, who was afiected by it even to tears, and
then said, ** I have not heard anything for years that so much delighted
me ; but, Offter aU, it is not poetry."

WORDSWORTH,

229

ton, and to
jrdsworth s

is always
1 their love
1 difference

sentiment,
the dweller

rery highest
h a certain
n the under-
veins of his
ich to write
words, but a
;ly down to
1 is much the
of a clucking
:xcursion" he
ith the sand-
potent spell-
There is an
;ss wearisome.
Irsets are we
»t see stretca-
^nding t what
;emal like the
ipelled to fare
jn do we not
a startling

J Martineau said

|8 conversation:

lich be dwells on

1 leaving a strong

a. "Resolution"

Cen to tears, and

Im'icli delighted

personal appeal to our highest consciousness and our noblest
aspiration, such as we w^ait for in vain in any other poet I

Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criticism cannot
but allow, and what is left will show how truly great he was.
He had no humour, no dramatic power, and his temperament
was of that dry and juiceless quality, that in all his published
correspondence you shall not find a letter, but only essays. If
we consider carefully where he was most successful, we shall
find that it was not so much in description of natural scenery, or
delineation of character, as in vivid expression of the effect
produced by external objects and events upon his own mind,
and of the shape and hue (perhaps momentary) which they in
turn took from his mood or temperament. His finest passages
are always monologues. He bad a fondness for particulars, and
there are parts of his poems which remind us of local histories
in the undue relative importance given to trivial matters. He
was the historian of Wordsworth shire. This power of particu-
larisation (for it is as truly a power as generalisation) is what
gives such vigour and greatness to single lines and sentiments
of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single thought or
sentiment. It was this that mad** him so fond of the sonnet.
That sequestered nook forced upon him the limits which his
fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was never self-denying
enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary and meditative
temper, and it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of what
was permanent in literature) liked him best. Its narrow
bounds, but fourteen paces from end to end, turn into a
virtue his too common fault of giving undue prominence
to every passing emotion. He excels in monologue, and the
law of the sonnet tempers monologue with mercy. In " The
Excursion " we are driven to the subterfuge of a French verdict
of extenuating circumstances. His mind had not that reach
and elemental movement of Milton's, which, like the trade-
wind, gathered to itself thoughts and images like stately fleets
from every quarter ; some deep with silks and spicery, some
brooding over the silent thunders of their battailous armaments,
but all swept forward in their destined track, over the long

a^o

WORDSXVOIiTJI.

M' ',

billows of his verse, every inch of canvas strained by the
unifying breath of their common epic impulse. It was an
organ that Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable
equally of the trumpet's ardours or the slim delicacy of the flute,
and sometimes it bursts forth in great crashes through his
prose, as if he touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil.
If Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to hij lips, yet he
lays it aside soon and willingly for his appropriate instrument,
the pastoral reed. And it is not one that grew by any vulgar
stream, but that which Apollo breathed through, tending the
flocks of Admetus — that which Pan endowed with every
melody of the visible universe — the same in which the soul of
the despairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her dual
nature — so that ever and anon, amid the notes of human joy or
sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone,
thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity.

Wordsworth's absolute want of humour, while it no doubt
confirmed his self-confidence by making him insensible both to
the comical incongruity into which he was often led by his
earlier theory concerning the language of poetry and to the not
unnatural ridicule called forth by it, seems to have been indica-
tive of a certain dulness of perception in other directions.*
We cannot help feeling that the material of his nature was

* Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-complacency than when
bethought it needful to rewrite the ballad of "Helen of Kirconnel" —
a poem hardly to be matched in au y language for swiftness of movement and
savage sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly.
Compare

*• Curst be the heart that thought the thought,
Ai.a curat the hand that fired the shot,
When in my arms burd Helen dropt.

That died to succour me !
O, think ye not my heart was sair
When my love dropt down and spake na mair}"

compare this with—

•' Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts
That through his brain are travelling.
And, starting up, to Bruce's heart
He launched a deadly javelin :

WORDSWORTH,

231

essentially prose, which, in his inspired moments, he had the
power of transmuting, but which, whenever the inspiration
failed or was factitious, remained obstinptely leaden. The
normal condition of many poets would seem to approach
that temperature to which Wordsworth's mind could be raised
only by the white heat of profoundly inward passion. And
in proportion to the intensity needful to make his nature
thoroughly aglow is the very high quality of his best verses.
They seem rather the productions of nature than of man, and
have the lastingness of such, delighting our age with the

Fair Ellen saw it when it came,
And, stepping forth to meet the tame.
Did with her body cover
The Youth, her chosen lover.

• • • • •

And Bruce (as soon as he had slain
The Gordon) sailed away to Spain,
And fought with rage incessant
Against the Moorish Crescent."

These are surely the verses of en attorney's clerk " penning a stanza
when he should engross." It will be noticed that Wordsworth here also
departs from his earlier theory of the language of poetry by substituting a
javelin for a bullet as less modem and familiar. Had be written —

'* And Gordon never gave a hint.
But, having somewhat picked his flint.
Let fly the fatal bullet
That killed that lovely pullet,"

it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest. He shows
the same insensibility in a note upon the "Ancient Mariner" in the second
edition of the Lyrical Ballads : " The poem of my friend has indeed
great defects ; first, that the principal person has no distinct character,
either in his profession of mariner, or as a human being who, having been
long under the control of supernatural impressions, might be supposed
himself to partake of something supernatural ; secondly, that he does not
act, but is continually acted upon ; thirdly, that the events, having no
necessary connection, do not produce each other ; and lastly, that the
imagery is somewhat laboriously accumulated." Here is an indictment, to
be sure, and drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney's clerk aforenamed.
One would think that the strange charm of Coleridge's most truly original
poems lay in this very emancipation from the laws of cause and effect.

( >

232

WORDSWORTH.

same startle of newness and beauty that pleased our youth.
Is it his thought ? It has the shifting inward lustre of diamond.
Is it his feeling ? It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil
ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed forever in immu-
table grace the most eva.isscent and intangible of our intuitions,
the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But
this intensity of mood which insures high quality is by its
very nature incapable of prolongation, and Wordsworth, in
endeavouring it, falls more below himself, and is, more even
than many poets his inferiors in imaginative quality, a poet
of passages. Indeed, one cannot help having the feeling
sometimes that the poem is there for the sake of these passages,
rather than that these are the natural jets and elations of a
mind energised by the rapidity of its own motion. In other
words, the happy couplet or gracious image seems not to
spring from the inspiration of the poem conceived as a whole,
but rather to have dropped of itself into the mind of the poet
in one of his rambles, who then, in a less rapt mood, has
patiently built up around it a setting of verse too often ungrace-
ful in form, and of a material whose cheapness may cast a
doubt on the priceless quality of the gem it encumbers.*
During the most happily productive period of his life, Words-
worth was impatient of what may be called the mechanical
portion of his art. His wife and sister seem from the first
to have been his scribes. In later years he had learned and
often insisted on the truth that poetry was an art no less than
a gift, and corrected his poems in cold blood, sometimes to
their detriment. But he certainly had more of the vision
than of the faculty divine, and was always a little numb on
the side of form and proportion. Perhaps his best poem in
these respects is the " Laodamia," and it is not uninstructive

* " A hundred times when, roving high and low,
I have been harassed with the toil of verse,
Miich pains and little progress, and at once
Sonic lovely Image in the song rose up,
Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea."

—Prelude, Book iv.

WORDSWORTH,

233

)ur youth.
f diamond.
IS of fossil
in immu-
intuitions,
leing. But
is by its
isworth, in
more even
ility, a poet
the feeling
36 passages,
lations of a
1. In other
ems not to
I as a whole,
1 of the poet
t mood, has
ten ungrace-
may cast a
encumbers.*
life. Words-
mechanical
im the first
learned and
no less than
imetimes to
\i the vision
le rumb on
lest poem in
minstructive

Z6, Book Iv.

to learn from his own lips that " it cost him more trouble than
almost anything of equal length he had ever written." His
longer poems (miscalled epical) have no more intimate bond
of union than their more or less immediate relation to his
personality. Of character other than his own he had but
a faint conception, and all the personages of "The Excursion"
that are not Wordsworth are the merest shadows of himself
upon mist, for his self-roncentrated nature was incapable
of projecting itself into the consciousness of other men and
seeing the springs of action at their source in the recesses
of individual character. The best parts of these longer
poems are bursts of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers
were always clumsy at the callida junctura. The stream
of narration is sluggish, if varied by times with pleasing
reflections {viridesque placido csguore sylvas) ; we are forced to
do our own rowing, and only when the current is hemmed in by
some narrow gorge of the poet's personal consciousness do we
feel ourselves snatched along on the smooth but impetuous rush
of unmistakable inspiration. The fact that what is precious in
Wordsworth's poetry was (more truly even than with some
greater poets than he) a gift rather than an achievement
should always be borne in mind in taking the measure of his
power. I know not whether to call it height or depth this
peculiarity of his, but it certainly endows those parts of his
v.'ork which we should distinguish as Wordsworthian with an
unexpectedness and impressiveness of originality such as we
feel in the presence of Nature herself. He seems to have been
half conscious of this, and recited his own poems to all comers
with an enthusiasm of wondering admiration that would have
been profoundly comic* but for its simple sincerity, and for the
fact that William Wordsworth, Enquire, of Rydal Mount, was
one person, and the William Wordsworth whom he so heartily

* Mr. Emerson tells us that he was at first tempted to smile, and Mr.
Ellis Yarnall (■svho saw him in his eiglitieth year) says, " These quotations
[from Ills own works] he read in a way that much impressed me ; it seemed
almost as if he were awed by the greatness of his otvn power, the gifts with
which he had been endowed," (1'he italics are mine.)

1,
1 1

234

WORDSWORTH.

reverenced quite another. We recognise two voices in him, as
Stephano did in Caliban. There are Jeremiah and his scribe
Baruch. If the prophet cease from dictating, the amanuensis,
rather than be idle, employs his pen in jotting down some
anecdotes of his master, how he one day went out and saw an
old woman, and the next day did not^ and so came home and
dictated some verses on this ominous phenomenon, and how
another day he saw a cow. These marginal annotations have
been carelessly taken up into the text, have been religiously
held by the pious to be orthodox scripture, and by dex-
terous exegesis have been made to yield deeply oracular
meanings. Presently the real prophet takes up the word
again, and speaks as one divinely inspired, the Voice of a
higher and invisible power. Wordsworth's better utterances
have the bare sincerity, the absolute abstraction from time
and place, the immunity from decay, that belong to the grand
simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more his own than
ours and every man's, the word of the inalterable Mind. This
gift of his was naturally very much a matter of temperament,
and accordingly by far the greater part of his finer product
belongs to the period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish
foot on the pedal that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.*
He did not grow as those poets do in whom the artistic sense is
predominant. One of the most delightful fancies of the

* His best poetry was written when he was under tlie immediate influ-
ence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt this, for it is evidently to
Wordsworth that he alludes when he speaks of "those who have been so well
pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills
into thdr main stream." — {Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of
S. T. C, vol. i., pp. 5, 6.) * \Vordsworth found fault with the repetition
of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees :

' The singing masons building roofs of gold.'
This, he said, 'vas a line that Milton never would have written. Keats
thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the
continued note of the singers." — {2Jeigh Hunt's Autobiography.) Words-
worth writes to Crabb Kobinson in 1837, " My ear is susceptible to the
clashing of sounds almost to disease." One cannot help thinking that his
trainmg in these niceties was begun by Coleridge.

WORDSWORTH.

235

Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is the poet Albert, who, having had
his portrait drawn by a highly-idealising hand, does his best after-
wards to look like it. Many of Wordsworth's later poems seem
like rather unsuccessful efforts to resemble his former self. They
would never, as Sir John Harrington says of poetry, " keep a
child from play and an old man from the chimney-corner."*

Chief Justice Marshall once blandly interrupted a junior
counsel who was arguing; certain obvious points of law at
needless length, by saying, " Brother Jones, there are some
things which a Supreme Court of the United States sitting in
equity may be presumed to know." Wordsworth has this fault
of enforcing and restating obvious points till the reader feels as
if his own intelligence was somewhat underrated. He is over-
conscientious in giving us full measure, and once profoundly
absorbed in the sound of his qwn voice, he knows not when to
stop. If he feel himself flagging, he has a droll way of keeping
the floor, as it were, by asking himself a series of questions
sometimes not needing, and often incapable of answer. There
are three stanzas of such near the close of the First Part of
" Peter Bell," where Peter first catches a glimpse of the dead
body in the water, all happily incongruous, and ending with one
which reaches the height of comicality : —

< ' Is \\ a fiend that to a stake
Of fire his desperate self is tetherlDg ?
Or stubboru spirit doomed to yell,
In solitary ward or cell,
Ten thousand miles from all his brethren ? "

The same want of humour which made him insensible to incon-
giuity may perhaps account also for the singular un'-onscious-
ness of disproportion which so often strikes us in his poetry.
For example, a little farther on in " Peter Bell " we find : —

" iV^o?';— lilce a tempest-shattered bark
That overwhelmed and prostrate lies,
And in a moment to the verge
Is lifted of a foaming surge —
Full suddenly the Ass doth rise I "

* In the Preface to his translation of the " Orlando Furioso."

;

! (/

! I

|i ''

( ■■ f

• I i •

236

WORDSWORTH.

And one cannot help thinking that the similes of the huj^e
stone, the sea-beast, and the cloud, noble as they are in them-
selves, are somewhat too lofty for the service to which they arc
put.*

The movement of Wordsworth's mind was too slow and his
mood to meditative for narrative poetry. He values his own
thoughts and reflections too much to sacrifice the least of them
to 'he interests of his story. Moreover, it is never action that
interests him, but the subtle motives that lead to or hinder it.
"The Wagoner" involuntarily suggests a comparison with
"Tam O'Shanter" infinitely to its own disadvantage. "Peter
Bell," full though it be of profound touches and subtle analysis,
is lumbering and disjointed. Even Lamb was forced to confess
that he did not like it. "The White Doc," the most Words-
worthian of them all in the best meaning of the epithet, is also
only the more truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. What
charms in Wordsworth and will charm forever is the

" Happy tone
Of meditation slipping in between
The beanty coming and the beauty gone."

A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their words to the
tune of our own feelings and fancies, in the charm of their
manner, indefinable as the sympathetic grace of woman, are
everything to us without our being able to say that they are
much in themselves. They rather narcotise than fortify.
Wordsworth must subject our mood to his own before he admits
us to his intimacy ; but, once admitted, it is for life, and we
find ourselves in his debt, not for what he has been to us in our
hours of relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a
reinforcement of faltering purpose and personal independence
of character. His system of a Nature-cure, first professed by
Dr. Jean Jaques and continued by Cowper, certainly breaks
down as a whole. Tha Solitary of " The Excursion,'' who has
not been cured of his scepticism by living among the medicinal
mountains, is, so far as we can see, equally proof against the

* In *' Resolution " and " Independence."

)man, are

WORDSWORTH,

lectures of Pedler and Parson. Wordsworth apparently felt
that this would be so, and accordingly never saw his way clear
to finishing the poem. But the treatment, whether a panacea
or not, is certainly wholesome inasmuch as it inculcates
abstinence, exercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure,
indeed, that the Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in
constitutions less vigorous than Wordsworth's what Milton
would call a fugitive and cloistered virtue at a dear expense of
manlier qualities. The ancients and our own Elizabethans, ere
spiritual megrims had become fashionable, perhaps made more
out of life by taking a frank delight in its action and passion
and by grappling with the facts of this world, rather than
muddling themselves over the insoluble problems of another.
If they had not discovered the picturesque, as we understand
it, they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and his destiny,
and would have seen something ludicrous, it may be suspected,
in the spectacle of a grown man running to hide his head in the
apron of the Mighty Mother whenever he had an ache in his
finger or got a bruise in the tussle for existence.

But when, as I have said, our impartiality has made all those
qualifications and deductions against which even the greatest
poet may not plead his privilege, what is left to Wordsworth is
enough to justify his fame. Even where his genius is wrapped
in clouds, the unconquerable lightning of imagination struggles
through, flashing out unexpected vistas, and illuminating the
humdrum pathway of our daily thought with a radiance of
momentary consciousness that seems like a revelation. If it be
the most delightful function of the poet to set our lives to music,
yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our maturer gratitude
if he do his part also as moralist and philosopher to purify
and enlighten ; if he define and encourage our vacillating
perceptions of duty ; if he piece together our fragmentary
apprehensions of our own life and that larger life whose
unconscious instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits of
our dissected map of experience a coherent chart. In the great
poets there is an exquisite sensibility both of soul and sense
that sympathises like gossamer sea-moss with every movement

;«

s^S

WORDSWORTH,

•■ 1,

of the element in which it floats, but which is rooted on the
solid rock of our common sympathies. Wordsworth shows less
of this finer feminine fibre of organisation than one or two of
his contemporaries, notably than Coleridge or Shelley ; but he
was a masculine thinker, and in his more characteristic pooms
there is always a kernel of firm conclusion from far-reaching
principles that stimulates thought and challenges meditation.
Groping in the dark pnssages of life, we come upon some axiom
of his, as it were a w J' that gives us our bearings and enables
us to find an outlet. Coi. pared with Goethe we feel that he
lacks that serene impartiality of ir^ind which results from
breadth of culture ; nay, he seems narrow, insular, almost
provincial. He reminds us of those saints of Dante who gather
brightness by revolving on their own axis. But through this
very limitation of range he gains perhaps in intensity and the
impressiveness which results from eagerness of personal con-
viction. If we read Wordsworth through, as I have just done,
we find ourselves changing our mind about him at ever/ other
page, so uneven is he. If we read our favourite poems or
passages only, he will seem uniformly great. And even as
regards "The Excursion" we should remember how few long
poems will bear consecutive reading. For my part I know of
but one — the " Odyssey."

None of our great poets can be called popular in any exact
sense of the word, for the highest poetry deals with thoughts
and emotions which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the
doubtful limits of that shore between our abiding divine and
our fluctuating human nature, rooted in the one, but living
in the other, seldom laid bare, and otherwise visible only at
exceptional moments of entire calm and clearness. Of no
other poet except Shakespeare have so many phrases become
household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current
more epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the
nobler praise of having defined for us, and given us for a daily
possession, those faint and vague suggestions of other-worldli-
ness of whose gentle ministry with our baser nature the hurry
and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be conscious. He

WORDSWORTH,

«39

» ' 1

has won for himself a secure immcrtality by a depth of intuition
which makes only the best minds at their best hours worthy, or
indeed capable, of his companionship, and by a homely
sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest heart.
Our language owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and
abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having
emboldened us to take delight in simple things, and to trust
ourselves to our own instincts. And he hath his reward. It
needs not to bid

" Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh
To rare Beaumond, and learned Beaumond lie
A little nearer Spenser ;"

for there is no fear of crowding in that little society with wKom
be is now enrolled as fifth in the succession of the great
English Poets.

I A

•1

if.M

Siii

KEATS.

THERE are few poets whose works contain slighter hints of
their peisonal history than those of Keats ; yet there are,
perhaps, even fewer whose real lives, or rather the conditions
upon which they lived, are more clearly traceable in what they
have written. To write the life of a man was formerly
understood to mean the cataloguing and placing of circum-
stances, ot those things which stood about the life and were
more or less related to it, but were not the life itself. But
Biography from day to day holds dates cheaper and facts
dearer. A man's life, so far as its outward events are con-
cerned, may be made for him, as his clothes are by the tailor,
of this cut or that, of finer or coarser material ; but the gait and
gesture show through, and give to trappings, in themselves
characterless, an individuality that belongs to the man himself.
It is those essential facts which underlie the life and make the
individual man that are of importance, and it is the cropping
out of these upon the surface that give us indications by which
to judge of the true nature hidden below. Every man has his
block given him, and the figure he cuts will depend very much
upon the shape of that — upon the knots and twists which
existed in it from the beginning. We were designed in the
cradle, perhaps earlier, and it is in finding out this design, and
shaping ourselves to it, that our years are spent wisely. It is
the vain endeavour to make ourselves what we are not that has
strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in
the rough.

Keats hardly lived long enough to develop a well-outlined
character, for that results commonly from the resistance made
by temperament to the many influences by which the world, as

KEATS.

241

iter hints of
2t there are,
; conditions
n what they
as formerly
r of circum-
fe and were
I itself. But
gr and facts
ints are con-
by the tailor,
the gait and
.i themselves
man himself,
tnd make the
the cropping
ons by which
man has his
id very much
twists which
jigned in the
|s design, and
wisely. It is
not that has
lives left in

well-outlined

iistance made

the world, as

it may happen then to be, endeavours to mould every one in its
own image. What his temperament was we can see clearly,
and also that it subordinated itself more and more to the
discipline of art.

John Keats, the second of four children, like Chaucer and
Spenser, was a Londoner, but, unlike them, he was certainly
not of gentle blood. Lord Houghton, who seems to have had
a kindly wish to create him gentleman by brevet, says that he
was "born in the upper ranks of the middle class." This shows
a commendable tenderness for the nerves of English society,
and reminds one of Northcote's story of the violin-player who,
wishing to compliment his pupil, George IIL, divided all
fiddlers into three classes — those who could not play at all,
those who played very badly, and those who played very well —
assuring his Majesty that he had made such commendable
progress as to have already reached the second rank. We shall
not be too greatly shocked by knowing that the father of Keats
(as Lord Houghton has told us in an earlier biography) " was
employed in the establishment of Mr. Jennings, the proprietor
of large livery-stables on the Pavement in Moorfields, nearly
opposite the entrance into Finsbury Circus." So that, after all,
it was not so bad ; for, first, Mr. Jennings was a proprietor;
second, he was the proprietor of an establishment j third, he
was the proprietor of a large establishment ; and fourth, this
large establishment was 'nearly opposite Finsbury Circus — a
name which vaguely dilates the imagination with all sorts of
potential grandeurs. It is true that Leigh Hunt asserts that
Keats " was a little too sensitive on the score of his origin,"*
but we can find no trace of such a feeling either in his poetry or
in such of his letters as have been printed. We suspect the
fact to have been that he resented with becoming pride the
vulgar Blackwood and Quarterly standard, which measured
genius by genealogies. It is enough that his poetical pedigree
is of the best, tracing through Spenser to Chaucer, and

\ '

* Hunt^s Autobiography (Am. ed.), vol. ii., p. 36.

566

242

KEATS.

that Pegasus does not stand at livery even in the largest
establishments in Moorfields.

As well as we can make out, then, the father of Keats was a
groom in the service of Mr. Jennings, and married the daughter
of his master. Thus, on the mother's side, at least, we find a
grandfather •, on the father's there is no hint of such an
ancestor, and we must charitably take him for granted. It is of
more importance that the elder Keats was a man of sense and
energy, and that his wite was a " lively and intelligent woman,
who hastened the birth of the poet by her passionate love
of amusement,'' bringing him into the world, a seven-months'
child, on the 29th October 1795, instead of the 29th .December,
as would have been conventionally proper. Lord Houghton
describes her as " tall, with a large oval face, and a somewhat
saturnine demeanour." This last circumstance does not agree
very well with what he had just before told us of her liveliness,
but he console? us by adding that " she succeeded, however^ in
inspiring her children with the profoundest affection." This
was particularly true of John, who once, when between four and
five years old, mounted guard at her chamber >or with an old
sword, when she was ill and the doctor had ordered her not to
be disturbed.*

In 1804, Keats being in his ninth year, his father was killed
by a fall from his horse. His mother seems to have been
ambitious for her children, and there was some talk of sending
John to Harrow. Fortunately this plan was thought too
expensive, and he was sent instead to the school of Mr. Clarke
at Enfield, with his brothers. A maternal uncle, who had
distinguished himself by his courage under Duncan at Camper-
down, was the hero of his nephews, and they went to school
resolved to maintain the family reputation for courage. John
was always fighting, and was chiefly noted among his school-
fellows as a strange compound of pluck and sensibility. He
attacked an usher who hac'. boxed his brother's ears j and when

* Haydou tells the story differently, but I think Lord Houghton's
version the best.

It n

the largest

Ird Houghton's

KEATS.

243

his mother died, in 18 10, was moodily inconsolable, hidinr
hi IT self for several days in a nook under the master's desk, and
refusing all comfort from teacher or friend.

He was popular at school, as boys of spirit always are, and
impressed his companions with a sense of his power. They
thought he would one day be a famous soldier, "^his may l.^ave
been owing to the stories he told them of the heroic uncle,
whose deeds, we may be sure, were properly famoused by the
boy Homer, and whom they probably took for an admiral at
the least, as it would have been well for Keats's literary
prosperity if he had been. At any rate, they thought John
would be a great man, which is the main thing, for the public
opinion of the playground is truer and more discerning than
that of the world, and if you tell us ivhat the boy was, we will
tell you what the man longs to be, however he may be
repressed by necessity or fear of the police reports.

Lord Houghton has failed to discover anything else
especially worthy of record in the school-life of Keats. He
translated the twelve books of the ^neid^ read Robinson
Crusoe and the Incas of Peru^ and looked into Shakespeare.
He left school in 18 10, with little Latin and no Greek, but he
had studied Spence's Polymetis^ Tooke's Pantheon^ and Lem-
priere's Dictionary, and knew gods, nymphs, and heroes, which
were quite as good company perhaps for him as aorists and
aspirates. It is pleasant to fancy the horror of those respect-
able writers if their pages could suddenly have become alive
under their pens with all that the young poet saw in them.*

On leaving school he was apprenticed for five years to a

* There is always some one willing to make himself a sort of accessary
after the fact in any success ; always an old woman or two, ready to
remember omens of all quantities and qualities in the childhood of persons
who have become distinguished. Accordingly, a certain " Mrs. Grafty, of
Craven Street, Fiusbury, assures Mr. George Eeats, when he tells her that
John is determined to be a poet, "that this was very odd, because when
he could just speak, instead of answering questions put to him, he would
always make a rhyme to the last word people said, and then laugh." The
early histories of heroes, like those of naticr-<, are always more or less

.10

:'«:

If I

& h

244

KEATS.

* t

t' I

i I ; . *

surgeon at Edmonton. His master was a Mr. Hammond, "of
some eminence" in his profession, as Lord Houghton takes
care to assure us. The place was of more importance than the
master, for its neighbourhood to Enfield enabled him to keep
up his intimacy with the family of his former teacher, Mr.
Clarke, and to borrow books of them. In 1812, when he was
in his seventeenth year, Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke lent him
the "Faerie Queen." Nothing that is told of Orpheus or
Amphion is more wonderful than this miracle of Spenser's,
transforming a surgeon's apprentice into a great poet. Keats
learned at once the secret of his birth, and henceforward his
indentures ran to Apollo instead of Mr. Hammond. Thus
could the Muse defend her son. It is the old story — the lost
heir discovered by his aptitude for what is gentle and knightly.
Haydon tells us " that he used sometimes to say to his brother
he feared he should never be a poet, and if he was not he
would destroy himself." This was perhaps a half-conscious
reminiscence of Chatterton, with whose genius and fate he had
an intense sympathy, it may be from an inward foreboding of
the shortness of his own career.*

Before long we find him studying Chaucer, then Shakespeare,
and afterwards Milton. But Chapman's translations had a
more abiding influence on his style both for good and evil.
That he read wisely, his comments on the " Paradise Lost" are
enough to prove. He now also commenced poet himself, but
does not appear to have neglected the study of his profession.

mythical, and I give the story for what it is worth. Doubtless there is a
gleam of intelligence in it, for the old lady pronounces it odd that any one
should determine to be a poet, and seems to have wished to hint that the
matter was determined earlier and by a higher disposing power. There
are few children who do not soon discover the charm of rhyme, and
perhaps fewer who can resist making fun of the Mrs. Grafty, of Craven
Street, Finsbury, when they have the chance. See Haydon^s Auto-
biography, vol. i., p. 361.

* " I never saw the poet Keats but once, but he then read some lines
from (I think) the * Bristowe Tragedy ' withan enthusiasm of admiration
such as could be felt only by a poet, and which true poetry only could have
excited." — J. H. C, in Notes and (Queries, 4th s. x. 157.

KEATS.

245

He was a youth of energy and purpose, and though he no
doubt penned many a stanza when he should have been
anatomising, and walked the hospitals accompanied by the
early gods, nevertheless passed a very creditable examination
in 1 817. In the spring of this year, also, he prepared to take
his first degree as poet, and accordingly published a small
volume containing a selection of his earlier essays in verse. It
attracted little attention, and the rest of tnis year seems to have
been occupied with a journey on foot in Scotland, and the com-
position of " Endymion," which was published in 1818. Milton's
" Tetrachordon " was not better abused ; but Milton's assailants
were unorganised, and were obliged each to print and pay for
his own dingy little quarto, trusting to the natural laws of
demand and supply to furnish him with readers. Keats was
arraigned by the constituted authorities of literary justice.
They might be, nay, they were Jeffrieses and Scroggses, but the
sentence was published, and the penalty inflicted before all
England. The difference between his fortune and Milton's was
that between being pelted by a mob of personal enemies and
being set in the pillory. In the first case, the annoyance
brushes off mostly with the mud ; in the last, there is no solace
but the consciousness of suffering in a great cause. This
solace, to a certain extent, Keats had ; for his ambition was
noble, and he hoped not to make a great reputation, but to be a
great poet. Haydon says that Wordsworth and Keats were the
only men he had ever seen who looked conscious of a lofty
purpose.

It is curious that men should resent more fiercely what they
suspect to be good verses, than what they know to be bad
morals. Is it because they feel themselves incapable of the one
and not of the other ? Probably a certain amount of honest
loyalty to old idols in danger of dethronement is to be taken
into account, and quite as much of the cruelty of criticism is due
to want of thought as to deliberate injustice. However it be,
the best poetry has been the most savagely attacked, and men
who scrupulously practised the Ten Commandments as if there
were never a twi in any of them, felt every sentiment of their

34^

KEATS,

I t

better nature outraged by the Lyrical Ballads, It is idle to
attempt to show that Keats did not suffer keenly from the
vulgarities of Blackwood and the Quarterly. He suffered in
proportion as his ideal was high, and he was conscious of falling
below it. In England, especially, it is not pleasant to be
ridiculous, even if you are a lord ; bu* to be ridiculous and an
apothecary at the same time is almost as bad 33 it was formerly
to be excommunicated. A priori^ there was something absurd
in poetry written by the son of an assistant in the livery-stables
of Mr. Jennings, even though they were an establishment, and
a large establishment, and nearly opposite Finsbury Circus.
Mr. Gifford, the ex-cobbler, thought so in the Quarterly^ and
Mr. Terry, the actor,* thought so even more distinctly in
Blackwood^ bidding the young apothecary "back to his
gallipots ! " It is not pleasant to be talked down upon by your
inferiors who happen to have the advantage of position, nor to
be drenched with ditch-water, though you know it to be thrown
by a scullion in a garret.

Keats, as his was a temperament in which sensibility was
excessive, could not but be galled by this treatment. He was
galled the more that he was also a man of strong sense, and
capable of understanding clearly how hard it is to make men
acknowledge solid value in a person whom they have once
heartily laughed at. Reputation is in itself only a farthing-
candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out,
but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.
Keats longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve it. To
his friend Taylor he writes, " There is but one way for me.
The road lies through study, application, and thought."
Thrilling with the electric touch of sacred leaves, he saw in
vision, like Dante, that small procession of the elder poets to
which only elect centuries can add another laurelled head. Might
he, tco, deserve from posterity the love and reverence which he
paid to those antique glories ? It was no unworthy ambition, but

* Haydoi) {Autohiography, vol. i. p. 379) says that ho "strongly
suspects " x'erry to have written the articles in Blac^cwood,

t is idle to
y from the
suffered in
,us of falling
isant to be
lous and an
vas formerly
thing absurd
ivery-stables
shment, and
bury Circus.
uarterly^ and
distinctly in
jack to his
upon by your
sition, nor to
to be thrown

pnsibility was
p»nt. He was
sense, and
make men
have once
a farthing-
y blown out,
finds merit,
serve it. To
way for me.
nd thought."
he saw in
der poets to
head. Might
nee which he
ambition, but

ho "strongly

KEATS.

247

everything was against him — birth, health, even friends, since
it was partly on their account that he was sneered at. His
very name stood in his way, for Fame loves best such syllables
as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue, like Spenserian,
Shakespearian. In spite of Juliet, there is a great deal in
names, and when the fairies come with their gifts to the cradle
of the selected child, let one, wiser than the rest, choose a
name for him from which well-sounding derivatives can be
rxiade. and, best of all, with a termination in o?t. Men judge
the current coin of opinion by the ring, and are readier to
take without question whatever is Platonic, Baconian, New-
tonian, Johnsonian, Washingtonian, Jefifersonian, Napoleonic,
and all the rest. You cannot make a good adjective out of
Keats — the more pity — and to say a thing is Keatsy is to
contemn it. Fortune likes fine names.

Haydon tells us that Keats was very much depressed by
the fortunes of his book. This was natural enough, but he
took it all in a manly way, and determined to revenge him-
self by writing better poetry. He knew that activity, and not
despondency, is the true counterpoise to misfortune. Haydon
is sure of the change in his spirits, because he would come
to the painting-room and sit silent for hours. But we rather
think that the conversation, where Mr. Haydon was, resembled
that in a young author's first play, where the other inter-
locutors are only brought in as convenient points for the
hero to hitch the interminable web of his monologue upon.
Besides, Keats had been continuing his education this year,
by a course of Elgin marbles and pictures by the great Italians,
and might very naturally liave found little to say about Mr.
Haydon's extensive works, that he would have cared to hear.
Lord Houghton, on the other hand, in his eagerness to prove
that Keats was not killed by the article in the Qua>icrly^ is
carried too far toward the opposite extreme, and more than
hints that he was not even hurt by it. This would have
been true of Wordsworth, who, by a constant companionship
with mountains, had acquired something of their manners,
biit was simply impossible to a man of Keats's temperament.

/ :

248

/i:EA TS.

On the whole, perhaps, we need not respect Keats the less
for having been gifted with sensibility, and may even say
what we believe to be true, that his health was injured by the
failure of his book- A man cannot have a i^ensuous nature and
be pachydermatous at ttie same time, and if he be imaginative
as well as sensuous, he suffers just in proportion to the amount
of his imagination. It is perfectly true that what we call the
weld, in these affairs, is nothing more than a mere Brocken
spectre, the projected shadow of ourselves ; but as long as we
do not know it, it is a v^ry passable giant. We are not without
experi'^nce of natures so purely intellectual that their bodies
had no mo'e concern in their mental doings and sufferings
than a house has with the good or ill fortune of its occupant.
But poets are not built on this plan, and especially poets like
Keats, in whom the moral seems to have so perfectly interfused
the physical man, that you might almost say he could feel
sorrow with his hands, so truly did his body, like that of
Donne's Mistress Boulstred, think and remember and forebode.
The healthiest poet of whom our civilisation has been capable
says that when he beholds

" desert a beggar born,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-ded by authority,"

alluding, plainly enough, to the Giffords of his day,
** And simple truth miscalled simplicity,"

as it was long after vvards in WordswonVs case,

" And captive Good attending Captain 111,"

that then even he, the poet to whom, of all others, life seems to
have been dearest, as it was also the fullest of enjoyment, "tir2d
of all ther-e," had nothing for it but to cry for "restful Death."

Keats, ^o all appearance, accepted his ill-fortune courageously.
He certainly did not over-estimate " Endymion," and perhaps a
sense of humour which was not wanting in him may have served
as a buffer againsc the too importunate shock of disappointment.

I i

KEATS,

249

" He made Ritchie promise," says Haydon, "he would carry his
'Endymion' to the great desert of Sahara and fling it in the
midst." On the 9th October 18 18 he writes to his publisher,
Mr. Hessey, " I cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen
who have taken my part. As for the rest, I begin to get
acquainted with my own strength and weakness. Praise or
blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of
beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own
works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without
comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could
inflict ; and also, when I feel I am right, no external praise can
give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and
ratification of what is fine. J. S. is perfectly right in regard to
'the slipshod " Endymion.'" That it is so is no fault of mine.
No 1 though it may sound a little paradoxical, it is as good as I
had power to make it by myself. Had I been nervous about its
being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice and
trembled over every page, it would not have been written ; for
it is not in my nature to fumble. I will write independently. I
have written independently inithout judgment I may write
independently and with judgment^ hereafter. The Genius of
Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. It cannot be
matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness
in itself. That which is creative must create itself. In * Endy-
mion ' I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become
better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the
rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a
silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never
afraid of failure ; for I would sooner fail than not be among the
greatest."

This was undoubtedly true, and it was naturally the side
which a large-minded person would display to a friend. This is
what he thought, but whether it was what he felt^ I think
doubtful. I look upon it rather as one of the phenomena of
that multanimous nature of the poet, which makes him for the
moment that of which he has an intellectual perception. Else-
where he says something which seems to hint at the true state

•

i ' i i

250

KEATS.

Illl

)

(fill

of the case. " I must think that difllcultics nerve the spirit of a
man : th<:y make our prime objects a reftii^e as well as a
passion." One cannot help contrasting Keats with Wordsworth
— the one altogether poet ; the other essentially a Wordsworth,
with the poetic faculty added— the one shifting from form to
form, and from style to style, and pouring his hot throbbing
life into every mould ; the other remaining o,lways the individual,
producing works, and not so much living in his poems as
nicniorially recording his life in them. When Wordsworth
ai)udes to the foolish criticisms on his writings, he speaks
serenely and generously of Wordsworth the poet, as if he
were an unbiassed third person, who takes up the argument
merely in the interest of literature. He towers into a bald
egotism which is quite above and beyond selfishness. Poesy
was his employment ; it was Keats's very existence, and he felt
the rough treatm^^nt of jiis verses as if it had been the wounding
of a limb. To Wordsworth, composing was a healthy exercise ;
iiis slow pulse and imperturbable self-trust gave him assurance
of a life so long that he could wait ; and when we read his
poems we should never suspect the existence in h* n of any
sense but that of observation, as if Wordsworth the |;oet were
a half-mad land-surveyor, accompanied by Mr. Wordsworth
the distributor of stamps, as a kind of keeper. But every one
of Keats's poems was a sacrifice of vitality ; a virtue went away
from him into every one of them ; even jet, as we turn the leaves,
they seem to warm and thrill our fingers with the flush of his fine
senses, ?.nd the flutter of his electrical nerves, and we do not
wonder he felt that what he did was to be done swiftly.

In the meantime his younger brother languished and died,
his elder seems to have been in some way unfortunate, and had
gone to America, and Keats himself showed symptoms of the
hereditary disease which caused his death at last. It is in
October 181 8 that we find the first allusion to a passion which
was, ere long, to consume him. It is plain enough beforehand,
that those were not moral or mental graces that should attract a
man like Keats. His intellect was satisfied and absorbed by his
art, his books, and his friends. He could have companionship

KEATS,

251

and appreciation from men ; what he craved of woman
was only icpose. Tliat luxurious nature, which would have
tossed uneasily on a crumpled rose-leaf, must have something
softer to rest upon than intellect, something; less ethereal than
culture. It was his body that needed to have its equ'.librium
restored, the waste of his nervous energy that must be repaired
by deep draughts of the overflowing hfe and drowsy tropical
force of an abundant and healthily poised womanhood.
Writing to his sister-in-law, he says ol this nameless person :
" She is not a Cleopatra, but is, at least, a Charmian ; she has
a rich Eastern look ; she has fine eyes and fine manners.
When she comes into a room she makes the same impression
as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious
of herself to repulse any man who may address her. From
habit, she thinks that nothing particular. I always find myself
at ease with such a woman ; the picture before me always gives me
a life and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything
inferior. I am at such times too much occupied in admiring to
be awkward or in a tremble. I forget myself entirely, because
I live in her. You will by this time think I am in love with her,
so, before I go any farther, I will tell you that I am not. She
kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart's might do. I
speak of tlie thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which
I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial
woman, the very yes and no of whose life is to me a banquet.
... I like her and her like, because one has no sensation;
what we both are is taken for granted. . . . She walks across
a room in such a manner that a man is drawn toward her with
magnetic power. ... I believe, though, she has faults, the
same as a Cleopatra or a Charmian might have had. Yet she
is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way ; for there are two
distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things — the
worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical ; and the unearthly,
spiritual, and ethereal. In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron,
and this Charmian hold the first place in our minds ; in the
latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child's cradle,
and you, my dear sister, arc the conquering feelings. As a

• I

' I

•

jjift

'\ u

ll' '

as*

KEATS.

man of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian ; as an
eternal being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to
ruin me, and I should like you to save me."

It is pleasant always to see Love hiding his head with such
pains, while his whole body is so clearly visible, as in this
extract. This lady, it seems, is not a Cleopatra, only a
Charmian ; but presently we find that she is imperial. He
does not love her, but he would just like to be ruined by her,
nothing more. This glimpse of her, with her leopardess beauty,
crossing the room and drawing men after her magnetically, is
all we have. She seems to have been still living in 1848, and,
as Lord Houghton tells us, kept the memory of the poet sacred.
" She is an East-Indian," Keats says, " and ought to be her
grandfather's heir." Her name we do not know.* It appears
from Dilke's Papers of a Critic that they were betrothed : " It

is quite a settled thing between John Keats and Miss .

God help them. It is a bad thing for them. The mother says
she cannot prevent it, and that her only hope is that it will go
off. He don't like anyone to look at her or to speak to her."
Alas, the tropical warmth became a consuming fire 1

" His passion cruel grown took on a hue
Fierce and sanguineous."

Between this time and the spring of 1820 he seems to have
worked assiduously. Of course, worldly success was of more
importance than ever. He began " Hyperion," but had given it
up in September 1819, because as he said, "there were too
many Miltonic inversions in it." He wrote " Lamia " after an
attentive study of Dryden's versification. This period also
produced the " Eve of St. Agnes," " Isabella," and the odes to
the "Nightingale" and to the "Grecian Urn." He studied
Italian, read Ariosto, and wrote part of a humorous poem,
" The Cap and Bells." He tried his hand at tragedy, and Lord
Houghton has published among his Remains^ " Otho the

* The sale at public auction of Keats's love-letters has, since tliis essay
was written, made the name known only too well. Her name was Fanny
Brawue. — [Ed,]

KEATS.

aS.I

Great," and all that was ever written of " Kinp Stephen," We
think he did unwisely, for a biographer is hardly called upon to
show how ill his bioi^raphee could do anything.

In the winter of 1820 he was chilled in riding on the top of a
stage-coach, and came home in a state of feverish ex:itement.
Me was persuaded to go to bed, and in getting between the
cold sheets coughed slightly. " That is blood in in> mouth,"
he said ; " bring me the candle ; let me see this blood." It was
of a brilliant ted, and his medical knowledge enabled him to
interpret the augury. Those narcotic odours that seem to
breathe seaward, and steep in repose the senses of the voyager
who is drifting towards the shore of the mysterious Other
World, appeared to envelop him, and, looking up with a
sudden calmness, he said, " I know the colour of that blood ; it
is arterial blood ; I cannot be deceived in that colour. That
drop is my death-warrant ; I must die."

There was a slight rally during the summer of that year, but
toward autumn he grew worse again, and it was decided that he
should go to Italy. He was accompanied thither by his friend,
Mr. Severn, an artist. After embarking, he wrote to his friend,
Mr. Brown. We give a part of this letter, which is so deeply
tragic that the sentences we take almost seem to break away
from the rest with a cry of anguish, like the branches of Dante's
lamentable wood.

" I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much.
There is one I must mention and have done with it. Even if
my body would recover of itself, this would prevent it. The
very thing which I want to live most for will be a great occasion
of my death. I cannot help it. Who can help it? Were I in
health it would make me ill, and how can I bear it in my state ?
I dare say you will be able to guess on what subject I am harp-
ing — you know what was my greatest pain during the first part
of my illness at your house. I wish for death every day and night
to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for
death would destroy even those pains, which are better than
nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separ-
ators, but Death is the great divorcer forever. When the pang

K ,

\\\

\f %

w»m

•imilwiMiJiil

t «•■■—'

J 1

'J i.

254

KEATS.

of this thought has passed through my mind, I may say the
bitterness of death is passed. I often wish for you, that you
might flatter me with the best. I think, without my mention-
ing it, for my sake, you would be a friend to Miss when

I am dead. You think she has many faults, but for my sake
think she has not one. If there is anything you can do for her
by word or deed I know you will do it. I am in a state at
present in which woman, merely as woman, can have no more
power over me than stocks and stones, and yet the difference of

my sensations with respect to Miss and my sister is

amazing — the one seems to absorb the other to a degree
incredible. I seldom think of my brother and sister in
America; the thought of leaving ?.^iss is beyond every-
thing horrible — the sense of darkness coming over me — I
eternally see her figure eternally vanishing ; some of the
phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at
Went worth Place ring in my ears. Is there another life?
Shall I awake and find all this a dream ? There must be ; we
cannot Le created for this sort of suffering."

To the same friend he writes again from Naples, ist
November 1820 : —

" The persuasion that !• shall see her no more will kill me.
My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health,
and I should have remained well. I can bear to die — I cannot
bear to leave her. O God ! God ! God ! Everything I have
in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a
spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling-cap scalds my
head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her — I see her,
J hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest
to divert me from her a moment. This was the case when I
was in England ; I cannot recollect, without shuddering, the
time that I was a prisoner at Hunt's, and used to keep my
eyes fixed on Hampstead all day. Then there was a good hope
of seeing her again — now ! — O that I could be buried near
where she lives ! I am afraid to write to her, to receive a letter
from her — to see her handwriting would break my heart. Even
to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be more

KEATS.

255

ly say the
I, that you
y mention-

. when

)r my sake
do for her
a state at
e no more
ifference of
\f sister is
) a degree
[ sister in
^ond every-
)ver me— I
)me of the
it nursing at
nother hfe?
[lust be; we

Naples, ist

will kill me.
,s in health,
lie— I cannot
|hing I have
;h me like a
.p scalds my
• — I see her,
lent interest
case when I
|ddering, the
to keep my
a good hope
buried near
eive a letter
eart. Even
uld be more

than I can bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do ? Where
can I look for consolation or ease ? If I had any chance of
recoveiy, ihis passion would kill me. Indeed, through the
whole of my illness, both at your house and at Kentish Town,
this fever has never ceased wearing me out."

The two friends went almost immediately from Naples to
Rome, where Keats was treated with great kindness by the
distinguished physician, Dr. (afterward Sir James) Clark.*
But there was no hope from the first. His disease was beyond
remedy, as his heart was beyond comfort. The very fact that
life might be happy deepened his despair. He might not have
sunk so soon, but the waves in which he was struggling looked
only the blacker that they were shone upon by the signal-torch
that promised safety and love and rest.

It is good to know that one of Keats's last pleasures was in
hearing Severn read aloud from a volume of Jeremy Taylor.
On first coming to Rome, he had bought a copy of Alfieri, bur,
finding on the second page these lines,

" Misera me ! soUievo a me non resta
Altro che 11 pianto, ed il pianto h, delitto,"

he laid down the book and opened it no more. On the 14th
February 1821 Severn speaks of a change that had taken
place in him toward greater quietness and peace. He talked
much, and fell at last into a sweet sleep, in which he seemed to
have happy dreams. Perhaps he heard the soft footfall of the
angel of Death, pacing to and fro under his window, to be his
Valentine. That night he asked to have this epitaph inscribed
upon his gravestone —

" HERE IJES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER."

On the 23rd he died, without pain and as if falling asleep. His
last words were, " I am dying ; I shall die easy ; don't be
frightened, be firm and tha^k God it has come !"

* The lodging of Keats was on the Piazza di Spagna, in the first house
on the right hand in going up the Scalinata. Mr. Severn's Studio is said
to have been in the Cancello over the garden gate of the Villa Negroni,
pleasantly familiar to all Americans as the Eoman home of their country-
man Crawford.

;}

! t

i 1 •■

aS^

KEATS.

»! ^

fil

' f

He was buried in the Protestant burial-ground at Rome, in
that part of it which is now disused and secluded from the rest.
A short time before his death he told Severn that he tiiought
his intensest pleasure in life had been to watch the growth of
flowers J and once, after lying peacefully awhile, he said, " I
feel the flowers growing over me." His grave is marked by a
little headstone, on which are carved somewhat rudely his name
and age, and the epitaph dictated by himself. No tree or
shrub has been planted near it, but the daisies, faithful to their
buried lover, crowd his small mound with a galaxy of their
innocent stars, more prosperous than those under which he
lived.

In person, Keats was below the middle height, with a head
small in proportion to the breadth of his shoulders. His hair
was brown and flne, falling in natural ringlets about a face in
which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed. Every
featui'e was delicately cut ; the chin was bold ; and about the
mouth something of a pugnacious expression. His eyes were
mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital
of a noble action or a beautiful thought they would suffuse with
tears, and his mouth trembled.t Haydon says that his eyes
had an inward Delphian look that was perfectly divine.

The faults of Keat's poetry are obvious enough, but it should
be remembered that he died at twenty-five, and that he offends
by superabundance and not poverty. That he was over-
languaged at first there can be no doubt, and in this was
implied the possibility of falling back to the perfect mean of
diction. It is only by the rich that the costly plainness, which
at once satisfies the taste and the imagination, is attainable.

* Written in 1856. irony of Time ! Ten years after the poet's death
the woman he had so loved wrote to his friend, Mr. Dilke, that "the
kindest act would be to let him rest forever in the obscurity to which
circumstances had condemned him I" (Papers of a Critic, i., 11.)
Time, the atoner ! In 1874 I found the grave planted with shrubs and
flowers, the pious homage of the daughter of our most eminent American
sculptor.

t Leigh Hunt's AiUobiograph'}/, ii, 43.

KEATS.

257

t Rome, in
m the rest,
he thought
e growth of
le said, "1
larked by a
ly his name
No tree or
hful to their
ixy of their
jr which he

with a head
s. His hair
out a face in
xed. Every
id about the
is eyes were
\t the recital
I suffuse with
hat his eyes
nne.

but it should

at he offends

was over-

in this was
feet mean of

nness, which

tainable.

Lhe poet's death
[ike, that "the
[curity to which
kc, i., 11.)
lith shrubs and
linent American

Whether Kecits was original or not, I do not think it useful to
discuss until it has been settled what originality is. Lord
Houghton tells us that this merit (whatever it is) has been
denied to Keats, because his poems take the colour of the
authors he happened to be reading at the time he wrote them.
But men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of
some one of them is for ever unexpectedly fiashing out in the
features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several
generations. In the parliament of the present every man
represents a constituency of the past. It is true that Keats has
the accent of the men from whom he learned to speak, but this
is to make originality a mere question of externals, and in this
sense the author of a dictionary might bring an action of trover
against every author who used his words. It is the man
behind the words that gives them value, and if Shakespeare
help himself to a verse or a phrase, it is with ears that have
learned of him to listen that we feel the harmony of the one,
and it is the mass of his intellect that makes the other weighty
with meaning. Enough that we recognise in Keats that
indefinable newness and unexpectedness which we call genius.
The sunset is original e\ery evening, though for thousands of
years it has built out of the same light and vapour its visionary
cities with domes and pinnacles, and its delectable mountains
which night shall utterly abase and destroy.

Three men, almost contemporaneous with each other —
Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron — were the great means of
bringing back English poetry from the sandy deserts of
rhetoric, and recovering for her her triple inheritance of
simplicity, sensuousness, and passion. Of these, Wordsworth
was the only conscious reformer, and his hostility to the
existing formalism injured hiS earlier poems by tinging them
with something of iconoclastic extravagance. He was the
deepest thinker, Keats the most essentially a poet, and Byron
the most keenly intellectual of the three. Keals had the
broadest mind, or at least his mind was open on more sides,
and he was able to understand Wordsworth and judge Byron,
equally conscious, through his artistic sense, of the greatnesses

567

:
I

Htmmmmm

t '

i ,

ifi^

ii«'

■

258

KEATS.

ill

II 1

11 1

la H

1 1 B f

of the one and the many littlenesses of the other, while
Wordsworth was isolated in a feeling of his prophetic character,
and Byron had only an uneasy and jealous instinct of con-
temporary merit. The poems of Wordsworth, as he was the
most individual, accordinely reflect the moods of his own
nature ; those of Keats, from sensitiveness of organisation, the
moods of his own taste and feeling ; and those of Byron,
who was impressible chiefly through the understanding, the
intellectual and moral wants of the time in which he lived.
Wordsworth has influenced most the ideas of succeeding
poets ; Keats, their forms ; and Byron, interesting to men of
imagination less for his writings than for what his writings
indicate, reappears no more in poetry, but presents an ideal to
youth made restless with vague desires not yet regulated by
experience nor supplied with motives by the duties of life.

Keats certainly had more of the penetrative and sympathetic
imagination which belongs to the poet, of that imagination
which identifies itself with the momentary object of its
contemplation, than any man of these later days. It is not
merely that he has studie'l the EHzabe^haiis ai^d caught their
turn of thought, but that ue really sees things y/ilh their
sovereign eye, and feels t' em with their electrified senses. His
imagination was his bliss and bane. Was he cheerful, he
"hops about the j;'avel with the sparrows ;" was he morbid, he
" would reject a Petrarchal coronation — on account of my dying
day, and because women have cancers." So impressible was
he as to say that he "had no nature," msaning character.
But he knew what the faculty was worth, and says finely, " The
imagination may be compared to Adam's dream : he awoke
and found it truth." He had an unerring instinct for the
poetic uses of things, and for him they had no other use. We
are apt to talk of the classic renaissance as of a phenomenon
long past, nor ever to be renewed, and to think the Greeks
and Romans alone had the mighty magic to work such
a miracle. To me one of the most interesting aspects of
Keats is that in him we have an example of the renaissance
going on almost under our own eyes, and that the intellectual

KEATS,

259

tier, while

character,
ct of con-
le was the
f his own
isation, the

of Byron,
mding, the
h he hved.

succeeding
f to men of
his writings

an ideal to
•egulated by

of life,
sympathetic

imagination
>bject of its
s. It is not
caught their
i .>yuh their
senses. His
cheerful, he
,e morbid, he
of my dying
iressible was
ig character,
finely, " The
he awoke
tinct for the
er use. We
phenomenon
the Greeks
o work such
[,g aspects of
e renaissance
te intellectual

ferment was in him kindled by a purely English leaven. He
had properly no scholarship, any more than Shakespeare had,
but like him he assimilated at a touch whatever could serve his
purpose. His delicate senses absorbed culture at every pore.
Of the self-denial to which he trained himself (unexampled in
one so young) the second draft of "Hyperion" as compared with
the first, is a conclusive proof. And far indeed is his "Lamia"
from the lavish indiscrimination of " Endymion." In his Odes
he showed a sense of form and proportion which we seek vainly
in almost any other English poet, and some of his sonnets
(taking all qualities into consideration) are the most perfect in
our language. No doubt there is something tropical and of
strange overgrowth in his sudden maturity, but it was maturity
nevertheless. Happy the young poet who has the savmg fault
o( exuberance, if he have also the shaping faculty that sooner or
later will amend it !

As every young person goes through all the world-old
experiences, fancying them something peculiar and personal to
himself, so it is with every new generation, whose youth always
finds its representatives in its poets. Keats rediscovered the
delight and wonder that lay enchanted in the dictionary.
Wordsworth revolted at the poetic diction which he found in
vogue, but his own language rarely rises above it, except when
it is upborne by the thought. Keats had an instinct for fine
words, which are m themselves pictures and ideas, and had
more of the power of poetic expression than any modem
English poet. And by poetic expression I do not mean merely
a vividness in particulars, but the right feeling which heightens
or subdues a passage or a whole poem to the proper tone, and
gives entireness to the effect. There is a great deal more than
is commonly supposed in this choice of words. Men's thoughts
and opinions a*-e in a great degree vassals of him who invents a
new phrase or reapplies an Did epithet. The thought or feeling
a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it
best This power of language is veiled in the old legends
which make the invisible powers the servants of some word.
As soon as we have discovered the word for our joy or sorrow

«1

'- ii ' l lftMii i i^fg Witefty^TOjtwM"

26o

KEATS.

V }u

we are no longer its serfs, but its lords. We reward the
discoverer of an anaesthetic for the body, and make him
member of all the societies, but him who finds a nepenthe for
the soul we elect into the small academy of the immortals.

The poems of Keats mark an epoch in English poetry ; for,
however often we may find traces of it in others, in them found
its most unconscious expression that reaction aj^ainst the barrel-
organ style which had been reigning by a kind of sleepy divine
right for half a century. The lowest point was indicated when
there was such an utter confounding of the common and the
uncommon sense that Dr. Johnson wiote verse and Burke
prose. The most profound gospel of criticism was, that nothing
was good poetry that could not be translated into good prose, as
if one should say that the test of sufficient moonlight was that
tallow-candles could be made of it. We find Keats at first
going to the other extreme, and endeavouring to extract green
cucumbers from the rays of tallow ; but we see also incontest-
able proof of the greatness and purity of his poetic gift in the
constant return toward equilibrium and repose in his later
poems. And it is a repose always lofty and clear-aired, like
that of the eagle balanced in incommunicable sunshine. In
him a vigorous understanding developed itself in equal measure
with the divine faculty ; thought emancipated itself from expres-
sion without becoming its tyrant ; and music and meaning
floated together, accordant as swan and shadow, on the smooth
element of his verse. Without losing its sensuousness, hiy
poetry refined itself and grew more inward, and the sensational
was elevated into the typical by the control of that finer seijse
which underlies the senses and is the spirit of them.

f . .

: i

LESSING.*

WHEN Burns's humour gave its last pathetic flicker in his
"John, don't let the awkward squad fire over me," was
he thinking of actual brother-volunteers, or of possible biog-
raphers ? Did his words betray only the rhythmic sensitive-
ness of poetic nerves, or were they a foreboding of that helpless
future, when the poet lies at the mercy of the plodder — of that
bi-voluminous shape in which dulness overtakes and revenges
itself on geniu. a last? Certainly Burns has suffered as much
as most large- natured creatures from well-meaning effoiLb to
account for him, to explain him away, to bring him into har-
mony with those well-regulated minds which, during a good
part of the last century, found out a way, through rhyme, to
snatch a prosiness beyond the reach of prose. Ni./, he has
been wronged also by that other want of true appreciation,
which deals in panegyric, and would put asunder those two
things which God has ioined — the poet and the man — as if it
were not the same rash improvidence that was the happiness of
the verse and the misfortune of the ganger. But his death-bed
was at least not haunted by the unappeasable apprehension of
a German for his biographer ; and that the fame of Lessing
should have four times survived this cunningcst assault of
oblivion is proof enough that its base is broad and deep-set.

There seems to be, in the average German mind, an inability
or a disinclination to see a thing as it really is, unless it be a

* fi. E. Lessino. Sein Leben ^cnd seine Werke. Von Adolf Stahb.
Vernieliitc unci verbesserte Volks-Ausgabe. Dritte Auflage. Berlin, 1864.

The same. Ti-anslated by E. P. Evans, Ph. D., Professor, etc., in the
University of Michigan. Boston : W. V. Spencer. 1866. 2 vols.

G. E. Lessing's Samnitliche Sehriften, herausgegeben von Karl Lach-
tiiaim. 1853- ^>7. 12 Biinde.

■In,

' -i •'■(''«■>«'• ')si« * iw it » Bij)ta !ap»~

262

LESSING.

\ '

! t

matter of science. It finds its keenest pleasur 'n divining r»
profound significance in the most trifling things, nd the num-
ber of mare's-nests that have been stared into b ' the German
Gelehrter through his spectacles passes calcula- on. ''hey are
tlie one object of contemplation that makes tha singular being
»er"ectly happy, and they seem tu oe as common as thosf, of
ill . . tork. In the dark forest of oesthetics, particularly, he finds
■, em at every turn — "fanno tutto il loco varo." If the greater
piu" of our English criticism is apt only to skim the sur-
face, the German, by way of being profound, too often
burrows in delighted darkness quite beneath its subject,
till the reader feels the ground hollow beneath him^ and is fear-
ful of caving into unknown depths of stagnant metaphysic air
at every step. The Commentary on Shakespeare of Gervinus,
a really superior man, reminds one of the K ^man Campagna,
penetrated underground in all directions by strange v-inding
caverns, the work of human borers in search of we know not
what. Above are the divine poet's larks and daisies, his incom-
municable skies, his broad prospects of life and nature ; and
meanwhile our Teutonic teredo worms his way below, and offers
to be our guide into an obscurity of his own contriving. The
reaction of language upon style, and even upon thought, by its
limitations on the one hand, and its suggestions on the other, is
so apparent to any one who has made even a slight study of com-
parative literature, that we have sometimes thought the German
tongue at least an accessory before the fact, if nothing more, in
the offences of German literature. The language has such a
fatal genius for going stern-foremost, for yawing, and for not
minding the helm without some ten minutes' notice in advance,
that he must be a great sailor indeed who can safely make it the
vehicle for anything but imperishable commodities. Vischer's
^sihetik, the best treatise on the subject, ancient or modern, is
such a book as none but a German could write, and it is written
as none but a German could have written it. The abstracts of
its sections are sometimes nearly a, long as the sections
themselves, and it is as hard to make out which head belongs
to which tail, as in a knot of snakes thawing themselves into

■■*•* rj

■4:

LESSING.

263

,ti

iivining r\
the num-
e German
"hey are
L'.ar being
s those of
ly, he finds
he greater
(1 the sur-
too often
ts subject,
ind is fear-
aphysic air
f Gervinus,
Campagna,
ge vinding
e know not
,, his incom-
lature ; and
V, and offers
iving. The
)ught, by its
the other, is
udy of com-
Ithe German
|ing more, in
has such a
and for not
in advance,
make it the
. Vischer's
ir modern, is
it is written
abstracts of
|the sections
ead belongs
selves into

sluggish individuality under a spring sun. The . v rage German
prof'^ssor spends his life in making lanterns ' to guide us
thi jugh the obscurest passages of ail the o/oj^t'rs and ysns, and
there are none in the world of such honest workmanship. Tliey
are durable, they have intensifying glasses, reflectors of the
most scientific make, capital sockets in which to set a light, and
a handsome lump of potentially illuminating tallow is thrown in.
But, in order to src by them, the explorer muit make his own
candle, supply his own cohfisive wick of common-sense, and
light it himself. And yet iie dmirable thoroughness of the
German intellect! We s' ouli ^e ungrateful indeed if we did
not acknowledge that it h.'.s upplsed the raw material in almost
every branch of science lO" Me defter wits of other nations to
work on ; yet we have a suspicion that there are certain lighter
departments of literatu 'Ti which it may be misapplied, and
turn into something very like clumsiness. Delightful as Jean
Paul's humour is, how much more so would it be if he only knew
when to stop ! Ethereally deep as is his sentiment, should we
not feel it more if he sometimes gave us a little less of it — if he
would only not always deal out his wine by beer-measure ? So
thorough is the German mind, that might it not seem now and
then to work quite through its subject, and expatiate in cheerftil
unconscioiveness on the other side thereof?

With all its merits of a higher and deeper kind, it yet seems
to us that German literature has not quite satisfactorily answered
that so long-standing question of the French Ahh6 about esprit.
Hard as it is for a German to be clear, still harder to be light, he
is more than ever awkward in his attempts to produce tliat
quality of style, so peculiarly French, which is neither wit nor
liveliness taken singly, but a mixture of the two that must be
drunk while the effervescence lasts, and will not bear exportation
into any other language. German criticism, excellent in other
respects, and immeasurably superior to that of any other nation
in its constructive faculty, in its instinct for getting at whatever
principle of life lies at the heart of a work of genius, is seldom
lucid, almost never entertaining. It may turn its light, if we
have patience, intf every obscurest cranny of its subject, onq

I!'

ttwNii

264

lESSJNG,

after another, but it never flashes light out of the subject itself,
as Sainte-BcLive, for example, so often does, and with such
unexpected charm. We should be inclined to put Julian
Schmidt at the head of living critics in all the more essential
elements of his outfit ; but with him is not one conscious at too
frequent intervals of the professorial grind — of that German
tendency to bear on too heavily, where a F>ench critic would
touch and go with such exquisite measure? The Great Nation,
as it rhecrfully calls itself, is in nothing greater than its talent
for saying little things agreeably, which is perhaps the very top
of mere culture, and in literature is the next best thing to the
power of saying great things as easily ns if they were little.
German learning, ''ke the elephants of Pyrrhus, is always in
danger of turning upon what it was intended to adorn and
reinforce, and trampling it ponderously to death. And yet
what do we not owe it ? Mastering all languages, all records
of intellectual man, it has been able, or has enabled otliers, to
strip away the husks of nationality and conventionalism from
the literatures of many races, and to disengage that kernel of
human truth which is the germinating principle of them all.
Nay, it has taught us to recognise also a certain value in those
very husks, whether as shelter for the unripe or food for the
fallen seed.

That the general want of style in German authors is not
wholly the fault of the language is shown by Heine (a man of
mixed blood), who can be daintily light in German ; that it is
not altogether a matter of race, is clear from the graceful
airiness of Erasmus and Reuchlin in Latin, and of Grimm in
French. The sense of heaviness which creeps over the reader
from so many German books is mainly due, we suspect, to the
language, which seems well-nigh incapable of that aerial per-
spective so delightful in first-rate French, and even English,
writing. But there must also be in the national character
an insensibility to proportion, a want of that instinctive
discretion which we call tact. Nothing «^^.ort of this will
account for the perpetual groping of German imaginative
literature after some foreign mould in which to cast its thought

H! 1,

LESSING.

265

or feeling, now trying a Lous Qautorze pattern, then something
supposed to be Shakespearian, and at last going back to
ancient Greece, or even Persia. Goethe himself, limpidly per-
fect as are many of his shorter poems, often fails in giving
artistic coherence to his longer works. Leaving deeper qualities
wholly out of the question, Wilhclm Meistcr seems a mere
aggregation of episodes if compared with such a masterpiece as
Paul and Vira^inia^ or even with a happy improvisation like the
Vicar of Wakefield. The second part of Faust, too, is rather
a reflection of Goethe's own changed view of life and man's
relation to it, than an harmonious completion of the original
conception. Full of placid wisdom and exquisite poetry it
certainly is ; but if we look at it as a poem, it seems more as if
the author had striven to get in a!l he could, than to leave out
all he miji;ht. We cannot help asking what business have paper
money and political economy and geognosy here ? We confess
that "Thales" and the "Homunculus" weary us not a little,
unless, indeed, a poem be nothing, after all, but a prolonged
conundrum. Many of Schiller's lyrical poems — though the
best of them find no match in modern verse for rapid energy,
the very axles of language kindling with swiftness — seem dis-
proportion.itely long in parts, and the thought too often has
the life well-nigh squeezed out of it in the sevenfold coils of
diction, dappled though it be with splendid imagery.

In German sentiment, which runs over so easily into senti-
mentalism, a foreigner cannot help being struck with a certain
incongruousness. What can be odder, for example, than the
rriixture of sensibility and sausages in some of Goethe's earlier
notes to " Frau von Stein," unless, to be sure, the publishing
them ? It would appear that Germans were less sensible to the
ludicrous — and we are far from saying that this may not have
its compensatory advantages — than either the English or the
French. And what is the source of this sensibility, if it
be not an instinctive perception of the incongruous and
disproportionate? Among all races, the En-lish has ever
shown itself most keenly alive to the fear of making
itself ridiculous j and among all, none has produced so

f '■

I \

1 1

}

tmim

■MmiSu

k' ..

» It

\\'.

) 1

266

LESSJNG.

many humorists, only one of them, indeed, so profound
as Cervantes, yet all masters in their several ways.
What English speaking man, except lioswell, could have
arrived at Weimar, as doethe did, in that absurd Werthef'
viontiruni^ t And where, out of Germany, ( ould he have found
a reigning Grand Duke to put his whole court into the same
sentimental livery of blue and yellow, leather breeches, boots,
and all, excepting only llerder, and that not on account of his
clerical profession, but of his a^-'e ? To be sure, it might be
asked also where else in Europe was a prince to be met with
capable of manly friendship with a man whose only decoration
was his genius? But the comicality of the other fact no less
remains. Certainly the German character is in no way so little
remarkable as for its humour. If we were to trust the evidence
of Herr Hub's dreary Deutsche komische tmd humoristische
DichtunfTy we should believe that no German had even so much
as a suspicion of what humour meant, unless the book itself, as
we are half inclined to suspect, be a joke in three volumes, the
want of fun being the real point thereof. If German patriotism
can be induced to find a grave delij^ht in it, we congratulate
Herr Hub's publishers, and for ourselves advise any sober-
minded man who may hereafter "be merry," not to "sing
psalms," but to read Hub as the more serious amusement of the
two. There are epigrams there that make life more solemn,
and, if taken in sufficient doses, would make it more precarious.
Even Jean Paul, tTie greatest of German humorous authors, and
never surpassed in comic conception or in the pathetic quality
of humour, is not to be named with his master, Sterne, as a
creative humorist. What are Siebenkas, Fixlein, Schmelzle,
and Fibcl (a single lay-figure to be draped at will with
whimsical sentiment and reflection, and put in various attitudes),
compared with the living reality of Walter Shandy and his
brother Toby, characters which we do not see merely as puppets
in the author's mind, but poetically projected from it in an
independent being of their own ? Heine himself, the most
graceful, sometim'^s the most touching, of modern poets, and
clearly the most easy of German humorists, seems to me

LESSJNG,

267

wanting in a refined perception of that inward propriety which
is only another name for poetic proportion, and shocks us
sometimes with an Uttfliithigkeit^ as at the end of liis Deutsch-
land^ wliich, if it make Germans laugh, as we should be sorry to
believe, makes other people hold their noses. Such things have
not been possible in English since Swift, and the persifleiir
Heine cannot offer the same excuse of savage cynicism that
might be pleaded for the Irishman.

I have hinted that Ilcrr Stahi-'s Life of Lcssing is not
precisely the kind of biography that would have been most
pleasing to the man who could not conceive thai an author
should be satisfied with anything more than truth in praise, or
anything less in criticism. My respect for what Lessing was,
and for what he did, is profound. In the history of literature it
would be hard to find a man so stalwart, so kindly, so sincere,*
so capable of great ideas, whether in their influence on the
intellect or the life, so unswervingly true to the truth, so free
from the common weaknesses of his class. Since Luther,
Germany has given birth to no such intellectual athlete — to no
son so German to the core. Greater poets she has had, but no
greater writer ; no nature more finely tempered. Nay, may
we not say that great character is as rare a thing as great
genius, if it be not even a nobler form of it ? For surely it is
easier to embody fine thinking, or delicate sentiment, or lofty
aspiration, in a book than in a life. The written leaf, if it be, as
some few are, a safe-keeper and conductor of celestial fire, is
secure. Poverty cannot pinch, passion swerve, or trial shake it.
But the man Lessing, harassed and striving life-long, always
poor and always hopeful, with no patron but his own right-
hand, the very shuttlecock of fortune, who saw ruin's plough-
share drive through the hearth on which his first home-fire was
hardly kindled, and who, throu<,'h rill, w.i:.; faithful to himself, to
his friend, to his duty, and to his ideal, is something more
inspiring for us than the mo:=t glorious u U ranee of merely
intellectual power. The figure of Goeviie is grand, it is

* ** If I write at all, it is not possil)le for ino to write otherwise than just
as I think and feel." — Lessing to his fatJier, 21.st DeCv'mber 1767.

i r

■

I \ 1'

' 1

rfSBHTf^.'

1 •:

1
'i

fj I'

i'l

268

LESSING.

rightfully pre-eminent, it has something of the calm, and
something of the coldness, of the immortals ; but the Valhalla
of German letters can show one form, in its simple manhood,
statelier even than his.

Manliness and simplicity, if they are not necessary coefficients
in producing character of the purest tone, were certainly
leading elements in the Lessing who is still so noteworthy and
lovable to us when eighty-six years have passed since his
bodily presence vanished from among men. He loved clear-
ness, he hated exaggeration in all its forms. He was the first
German who had any conception of style, and who could be full
without spilling over on all sides. Herr Stahr, we think, is not
just the biographer he would have chosen for himself. His
book is rather a panegyric than a biography. There is some-
times an almost comic disproportion between the matter and
the manner, especially in the epic details of Lessing's onslaughts
on the nameless herd of German authors. It is as if Sophocles
should have given a strophe to every bullock slain by Ajax in
his mad foray upon the Grecian commissary stores. He is too
fond of striking an attitude, and his tone rises unpleasantly
near a scream, as he calls the personal attention of heaven and
earth to something which Lessing himself would have thought
a very matter-of-course affair. He who lays it down as an
axiom, that " genius loves simplicity," would hardly have
been pleased to hear the Letters on Literature called the
"burning thunderbolts of his annihilating criticism," or t'.ie
Anti-Gotze pamphlets. " the hurtling arrows that sped from the
bow of the immortal hero." Nor would he with whom
accuracy was a matter of conscience have heard patiently that
the Letters " appeared in a period distinguished for its lofty
tone of mind, and in their own towering boldness they are a
true picture of the intrepid character of the age."* If the age
was what Herr Stahr represents it to have been, where is the

* "I am sure tliut Kloist would rather liavo taken auotlier wouml witli
him luto Ills grave tliau liave such stuff jabbered over him {sich solch Zeug
nadisdixfiitwn lasscn)." — Leasing to Gleim, 6th September 1759.

ism" or tlie

LESSING.

269

great merit of Lessing ? He would liavc smiled, we suspect, a
little contemptuously, at Herr Stahr's repeatedly quoting a
certificate from the "historian of the proud Britons," that he
was " the first critic in Europe." Whether we admit or not
Lord Macaulay's competence in the matter, we are sure that
Lessing would not have thanked his biographer for this soup-
ticket to a ladleful of fame. If ever a man stood firmly on his
own feet, and asked help of none, that man was Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing.

Herr Stahr's desire to make a hero of his subject, and his
love for sonorous sentences like those we have quoted above,
are apt to stand somewhat in the way of our chance at taking a
fair measure of the man, and seeing in what his heroism really
lay. He furnishes little material for a comparative estimate
of Lessing, or forjudging of the foreign influences which helped
from time to time in making him what he was. Nothing is
harder than to worry out a date from Herr Stahr's hay-
stacks of praise and quotation. Yet dates are of special value
in tracing the progress of an intellect like Lessing's, which,
little actuated by an inward creative energy, was commonly
stirred to motion by the impulse of other minds, and struck out
its brightest flashes by collision with them. He himself tells us
that a critic should "first seek out some one with whom he can
contend," and quotes in justitlcation from one of Aristotle's
commentators, Solet Aristoteles quccrejc pugnajn in siiis libris.
This Lessing was always wont to do. He could only feel his
own strength, and make others feel it — could only call it into
full play in an intellectual wrestling-bout. He was always
anointed and ready for the ring, but with this distinction, that
he was no mere prize-fighter, or bully, for the side that would
pay him best, nor even a contender for mere sentiment, but a
self-forgetful champion for the truth as he saw it. Nor is this
true of him only as a critic. His more purely imaginative works
— his " Minna," his " Emilia," his " Nathan " — were all written,
not to satisfy the craving of a poetic instinct, nor to rid head
and heart of troublous guests by building them a lodging out-
side himself, as Goethe used to do, but to prove some thesis of

•|i

■ lIlillWIWIIIIlfMI

i 1^',

»--•

f 1

< ^

ayo

LESSING.

criticism or morals by which Truth ccild be served. His zeal
fqr her was perfectly unselfish. " Does one write, then, for the
sake of being always in the right? I think I have been as
serviceable to Truth," he says, "when I miss her, and my
failure is the occasion of another's discovering her, as if I had
discovered her myself."* One would almost be inclined to
think, from Herr Stahr's account of the matter, that Lessing
had been an autochthonous birth of the German soil, without
intellectual ancestry or helpful kindred. That this is the suffi-
cient natural history of no original mind we need hardly say,
since originality consists quite as much in the power of using to
purpose what it finds ready to its hand, as in that of producing
what is absolutely new. Perhaps we might say that it was
nothing more than the faculty of combining the separate, and
therefore inefiectual, conceptions of others, and making them
into living thought by the breath of its own organising spirit.
A great man without a past, if he be not an impossibility, will
certainly have no future. He would be like those conjectural
Miltons and Cromwells of Gray's imaginary Hamlet. The only
privilege of the original man is, that, like other sovereign
princes, he has the right to call in the current coin and reissue
it stamped with his own image, as was the practice of Lessing.

Herr Stahr's over-intensity of phrase is less offensive than
amusing when applied to Lessing's early etforts in criticism.
Speaking of poor old Gottsched, he says : " Lessing assailed
him sometimes with cutting criticism, and again with exquisite
humour. In the notice of Gottsched's poems, he says, among
other things, *The exterior of the volume is so handsome that
it will do great credit to the bookstores, and it is to be hoped
that it will continue to do so for a long time. But to give
a satisfactory idea of the interior surpasses our powers.'
And in conclusion he adds, 'These poems cost two thalers
and four groschen. The two thalers pay for the ridiculous,
and the four groschen pretty much for the useful.'" Again,
he tells us that Lessing concludes his notice of Klopstock's

* Letter to Klotz, 9th June 1768.

LESSING.

271

" Ode to God " " with these inimitably roguish words : * What
presumption to beg thus earnestly for a woman ! ' Does not
a whole book of criticism lie in these nine words?" For a
young man of twenty-two, Lessing's criticisms show a great
deal of independence and maturity of thought ; but humour
he never had, and his wit was always of the bluntest —
crushing rather than cutting. The mace, and not the scymitar,
was his weapon. Let Herr Stahr put all Lessing's "inimitably
roguish words" together, and compare them with these few
intranslatable lines from Voltaire's letter to Rousseau, thanking
him for his Discours sur VlndgaliU : " On n'a jamais employ^
tant d'esprit ci vouloir nous rendre betes ; il prend envie de
marcher h, quatre pattes quand on lit votre ouvrage." Lessing
from the first was something far better than a wit. Force was
always much more characteristic of him than cleverness.
Sometimes Herr Stahr's hero-worship leads him into positive
misstatement. For example, speaking of Lessing's preface to
the Contributions to the History and Reform of the Theatre^ he
tells us that "his eye was directed cl.iefly to the English
theatre and Shakespeare." Lessing at that time (1749) was
only twenty, and knew little more than the names of any foreign
dramatists except the French. In this very preface his English
list skips from Shakespeare to Dryden, and in the Spanish he
omits Calderon, '^ irso de Molina, and Alarcon. Accordingly,
we suspect that the date is wrongly assigned to Lessing's
translation of Toda da Vida es Suefio, His mind was hardly
yet ready to feel the strange charm of this most imaginative of
Calderon's dramas.

Even where Herr Stahr undertakes to give us light on the
sources of Lessing, it is something of the dimmest. He
attributes " Miss Sara Sampbon " to the influence of the " Mer-
chant of London," as Mr. Evans translates it literally from the
German, meaning our old friend, " George Barnwell." But we
are strongly inclined to suspect from internal evidence that
Moore's more recent " Games.er " gave the prevailing impulse.
And if Herr Stahr must needs tell us anything of the " Tragedy
of Middle-Class Life," he ought to have known that on the

i< '

i-'

r^wfip fywMmaiffWLw

«^

272

LESSING.

»'■

?' ' n

English stage it preceded "Lillo" by more than a century —
witness the " Yorkshire Tragedy " — and that something veiy
like it was even much older in France. We are inclined to
complain, also, that he does not bring out more clearly how
much Lessing owed to Diderot both as dramatist and critic,
nor give us so much as a hint of what already existing English
criticism did for him in the way of suggestion and guidance.
But though we feel it to be our duly to say so much of Herr
Stahr's positive faults and negative shortcomint^s, yet we leave
him in very good humour. While he is altogether too full upon
certain points of merely transitory importance — such as the
quarrel with Klotz — yet we are bound to thank him both for the
abundance of his extracts from Lessing, and for the judgment
he has shown in the choice of them. Any one not familiar with
his writings will be able to get a very good notion of the quality
of his mind, and the amount of his literary performance, from
these volumes ; and that, after all, is the chief matter. As to
the absolute merit of his works other than critical, Herr Stahr's
judgment is too much at the mercy of his partiality to be of
great value.

Of Mr. Evans's translation we can speak fo*- the most part
with high commendation. There are great difficulties in trans-
lating German prose ; and whatever other good things Herr
Stahr may have learned from Lessing, terseness and clearness
are not among them. We have seldom seen a translation
which read more easily, or was generally more faithful. That
Mr. Evans should nod now and then we do not wonder, nor
that he should sometimes choose the v.rong word. We have
only compared him with the original where we saw reason
for suspecting a slip ; but, though we have not found much
to complain of, we have found enough to satisfy us that
his book will gain by a careful revision. We select a
few oversights, mainly from the first volume, as exaTiples.
On page 34, comparing Lessing with Goethe on ax living
at the University, Mr. Evans, we think, obscures, if he does
not wholly lose the meaning, when he translates Lcben by
" social relations," and is altogether wrong in rendering

'.Iff:

LESSING,

273

Patrizier by "aristocrat." At the top of the next page, too,
" suspicious " is not the word for bedenklich. Had he been
writing English, he would surely have said "questionable."
On page 47, "overtrodden shoes" is hardly so good as the
idiomatic "down at the heel." On page 104, "A very
humorous representation" is oddly made to "confirm the
documentary evidence." The reverse is meant. On page 115,
the sentence beginning " the tendency in both " needs revising.
On page 138, Mr. Evans speaks of the "Poetica' Village-
younker of Destouches." This, we think, is hardly the English
of Le Polte Campagnard, and almost recalls Lieberkuhn's
theory of translation, toward which Lessing was so unrelenting
— "When I do not understand a passage, why, I translate it
word for word." On page 149, " Miss Sara Sampson " is called
" the first social tragedy of the German Drama." All tragedies
surely are social^ except the " Prometheus.' Biirgerliche
Tragodie means a tragedy in which the protagonist is taken
from common life, and perhaps cannot be translated clearly
into English except by "trnf:,'^edy of middle-class life." Soon
page 170 we find Emilia Gaiotti called a "Virginia bourgeoises^
and on page 172 a hospital becomes a lazaretto. On page 190
we have a sentence ending in this strange fashion: "in an
episode of the English ginal, which Wieland omitted
entirely, one of its charar* nevertheless appeared in the
German tragedy." On pa 205 we have the Seven Years'
War called "a bloody pro rss" This is mere carelessness, for
Mr. Evans, in the second v( me, translates it rightly '''' taw-suit J^
What English reader wo , know what " You are intriguing
me" means, on page 22 ? On page 264, vol. ii., we find a
passage inaccurately rendered, which we consider of more
consequence, because it is a quotation from Lessing. " O, out
upon the man who claims, Almighty Gcd, to be a preacher of
Thy word, and yet so impudently asserts that, in order to attain
Thy purposes, there was only one way in which it pleased Thee
to make Thyself "known to I'M ! " This is very far from 7iur den
einzigen Weg gehabt den Du Dir gef alien lassen ilim kund zu
machen I The ihm is scornfully emphatic. We hope Professor

568

'■\

',1'
'J-

'?"»'^»WB|BI3W . » W, 1 (. ^Mi-nrjur-gxi

^i^0i&i,*Mamiria^mmmmmmi ixm i m^

B fT*'

274

LESSING.

'I'Ji

) !

E\ans will go over his version for a second edition much more
carefully than we have had any occasion to do. He has done
an excellent service to our literature, for which we heartily
thank him, in choosing a book of this kind to translate, and
translating it so well. We would not look such a gift horse too
narrowly in the mouth.

Let us now endeavour to sum up the result of Lcssing's life
and labour with what success we may.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born (January 22, 1729) at
Camenz, in Upper Lusalia, the second child and eldest son of
John Gottfried Lessing, a Lutheran clergyman. Those who
believe in the persistent qualities of race, or the cumulative
property of culture, will find something to their purpose in his
Saxon blood and his clerical and juristic ancestry. It is worth
mentioning, that his grandfather, in the thesis for his doctoi-'s
degree, defended the right to entire freedom of religious belief.
The name first comes to the surface in Parson Clement Lessigk,
nearly three centuries ago, and survives o the present day
in a painter of some distinction. It has almost passed into
a proverb, that the mothers of remarkable children have
been something beyond the commcm. If there be any truth
in the theory, the case of Lessing was an exception, as might
have been inferred, perhaps, from the peculiarly masculine
type of his character and intellect. His mother was in no wise
superior, but his father Sv-^-ems to have been a man somewhat
above the pedantic average of the provincial clergymen of his
day, and to have been a scholar in the ampler meaning of
the word. Besides the classics, he had possessed himself of
French and English, and was somewhat versed in the Oriental
languages. The temper of his theology may be guessed from
his having been, as his son tells us with some pride, one of "the
earliest translators of Tillotson." We can only conjecture him
from the letters which Lessing wrote to him, from which we
should fancy him as on the whole a decided and even choleric
old gentleman, in whom the wig, though not a predominant,
was yet a notable feature, and who was, like many other fathers,
permanently astonished at the fruit of his loins. He would

LESSING.

275

mch more
e has clone
^e heartily
islate, and
t horse too

's life

jssing

J2, 1729) at
dest son of
Those who
cumulative
•pose in his
It is worth
his doctor's
gious belief.
,ent Lessigk,
present day
passed into
lildren have
)e any truth
on, as might
y masculine
\s in no wise
n somewhat
ymen of his
meaning of
d himself of
the Oriental
Liessed from
;, one of "the
njecture him
Dm which we
iven choleric
predominant,
other fathers,
He would

have preferred one of the so-called learned professions for his
son — theology above all — and svould seem to have never quite
reconciled himself to his son's distinction, as being in none of
the three careers which alone were legitimate. Lessing's
bearing towards him, always independent, is really beauiiful
in its union of respectful tenderness with unswerving self-
assertion. When he wished to evade the maternal eye, Gotthold
used in his letters to set up a screen of Latin between himself
and her ; and we conjecture the worthy Pastor Primarius
playing over again in his study at Camenz, with sorre scruples
of conscience, the old trick of Chaucer's fox : —

" Mulier est honiinis confusio ;
Madam, tlie sentence of this Latin is,
Woman Is mannes joy anil manrn'-s bliss,"

He appears to have unched a fearful and but ill-concealed joy
from the sight of the first collected edition of his son's works,
unlike Tillotson as they certainly were. Ah, had they only
been Opera I Yet were they not volumes, after all, and able to
stand on their own edges beside the immortals, if nothing
more ?

After, grinding with private-tutor Mylius the requisite time,
Lessing entered the school of Camenz, and in his thirteenth
year was sent to the higher institution at Meissen. We learn
little of his career there, except that Theophrastus, Plautus,
and Terence were already his favourite authors, that he once
characteristically distinguished himself by a courageous truth-
fulness, and that he wrote a Latin poem on the valour of the
Saxon soldiers, which his father very sensibly advised him to
shorten. In 1750, four years after leaving the school, he writes
to his father : " I believed even when I was at Meissen that one
must learn much there which he cannot make the 1-ast use of
in real life {dcr Wclt)^ and I now [after trying Leipzig and
Wittenberg] see it all the more clearly" — a melancholy
observation which many other young men have made under
similar circumstances. Sent to Leipzig in his seventeenth
year, he finds himself an awkward, ungainly lad, and sets

-' iJ i iMWIi i WP. -'H *'-— P» " " ^^ "w^ wMM

:i ;•.

276

LESSING.

<
• 1

ftl

1
t

1 '

• 1 5

> If

diligently to perfecting himself in the somewhat unscholastic
accomplishments of riding, dancing, and fencing. He also
sedulously frequents the theatre, and wrote a play, "The
Young Scholar," which attained the honour of representation.
Meanwhile his most intimate companion was a younger brother
of his old tutor Mylius, a young man of more than questionable
morals, and who had even written a satire on the elders of
Camenz, for which — over-confidently trusting himself in the
outraged city — he had been fined and imprisoned ; so little
could the German Muse, celebrated by Klopstock for her
swiftness of foot, protect her son. With this scandalous
person and with play-actors, more than probably of both sexes,
did the young Lessing share a Christmas cake sent him by
his mother. Such news was not long in reaching Camenz,
and we can easily fancy how tragic it seemed in the little
parsonage there, to what cabinet councils it gave rise in the
paternal study, to what ominous shaking of the clerical wig in
that domestic Olympus. A pious fraud is practised on th-e boy^
who hurries home thinly clad through the winter weathcir,
his ill-eaten Christmas cake wringing him with reiw>rsefel
indigestion, to receive the last blessing, if such a prodigal might
hope for it, of a broken-hearted mother. He finds the good
dame in excellent health, and softened toward him by a cold he
has taken on his pious journey. He remains at ho«ne several
months, now writing Anacreontics of such warmth that his
sister (as volunteer representative of the common hangman)
burns them in the family stove ; now composing sermons to
convince his mother thai " he could be a preacher any day " — a
theory of that sacred office unhappily not yet extinct. At
Easter, 1747, he gets back to Leipzig again, with some scant
supply of money in his pocket, but is oblij^ed to make his
escape thence between two days somewhere toward the middle
of the next year, leaving behind him some histrionic debts
(chiefly, we fear, of a certain Mademoiselle Lorenz) for w ich
he had confidingly made himself security. Stranded, by want
of floating or other capital, at Wittenberg, he enters himself,
with help from home, as a student there, but soon migrates

ischolastic

He also
ay, "The
esentation.
Tcr brother
aestionable
e elders of
self in the
I ; so little
:k for her
scandalous
both sexes,
ent him by
ng Camenz,
n the little
rise in the
srical wig in
on th-e bovs
er weathor,

reM*orse&al
)digal might
is the good
by a cold he
oiTie several
ith that his
n hangman)

sermons to
any day " — a
extinct. At

some scant
to make his

the middle

rionic debts
\z) for V ich
ded, by want
ters himself,
)on migrates

LESSING

277

again to Berlin, which had been his goal when making his
hegira from Leipzig. In Berlin he remained three years,
applying himself to his chosen calling of author at all work, by
doing whatever honest job offered itself— verse, criticism, or
translation — and profitably studious in a very wide range of
languages and their literature. Above all, he learned the great
secret, which his stalwart English contemporary, Johnson, also
acquired, of being able to " dine heartily " for threepence.

Meanwhile he continues in a kind of colonial dependence on
the parsonage at Camenz, the bonds gradually slackening,
sometimes shaken a little rudely, and always giving alarming
hints of approaching and inevitable autonomy. From the few
hon>e letters of Lessing which remain (covering the period
be\>re 1753, there are only eight in all), we are able to surmise
that a pretty constant maternal cluck and shrill paternal
warning were kept up from the home coop. We find Lessing
defending the morality of the stage and his own private morals
against charges and suspicions of his parents, and even making
the awful confession that he does not consider the Christian
religion itself as a thing " to be taken on trust," nor a Christian
by mere tradition so valuable a member of society as " one who
has prudently doubted, and by the way of examination has
arrived at conviction, or at least striven to arrive." Boyish
scepticism of the superficial sort is a common phenomenon
enough, but the Lessing variety of it seems to us sufficiently
rare in a youth of twenty. What s'rikes us mainly in the letters
of these years is not merely the maturity they show, though
that is remarkable, but the tone. We see already in them the
cheerful and never overweening self-confidence which always
so pleasantly distinguished Lessing, and that strength of tackle,
so seldom found in literary men, which brings the mind well
home to its anchor, enabling it to find holding-ground and
secure riding in any sea. " What care I to live in plenty," he
asks gaily, " if I only live?" Indeed, Lessing learned early,
and never forgot, that whoever would be life's master, and not
its drudge, must make it a means, and never allow it to become
an end. He could say more truly than Goethe, Mein Acker ist

-, .-»«iA'v*»^«»» iiiwi* »iii

278

rf:ss/Ar;.

V I

II /

I (

(ft'e Zei7, since he not only sowed in it tlic seed of thoii<,dit for
other men and other times, but cropijcd it for his daily bread.
Above all, we find Lessinj; even thus early endowed with the
power of keeping his eyes wide open to what he was after, to
wh.;t would help or hinder him — a much more singular gift
than is commonly supposed. Among other jobs of this first
Berlin period, he had undertaken to anangc the library of a
certain Herr Riidiger, getting therefor his meals and " other
receipts," whatever they may have been. His father seems to
hpve heard with anxiety that this arrangement had ceased, and
Lessing writes to him : " I never wished to have anything to
do with this old man longer than u/i//7 I had made myself
thoroughly acquainted with his great library. This is now
accomplished, and we have accordingly parted." This was in
his twenty-first year, and wc have no cloul-'t, from the range of
scholarship which Lessing^ had at commaud so young, that it
was perfectly true. All through his life he was thoroughly
German in this respect also, th;>.t he never quite smelted his
knowledge clear from some slag of learning.

In the early part of the first Berlin residence. Pastor
Primarius Lessing, hearing that his son meditated a move-
ment on Vienna, was much exercised with fears of the
temptation to Popery he would be exposed to in that capital.
We suspect that the attraction thitherward had its source in
a perhaps equally catholic, but less theological magnet — the
Mademoiselle Lorenz above mentioned. Let us remember
the perfectly innocent passion of Mozart for an actress, and
be comforted. There is not the slightest evidence that
Lessing's life at this time, or any other, though careless, was
in any way debauched. No scandal was ever coupled with
his name, nor is any biographic chemistry needed to bleach
spots out of his reputation. What cannot be said of Wieland,
of Goethe, of Schiller, of Jean Paul, may be safely affirmed
of this busy and single-minded man. The parental fear of
Poi)ery brought him a seasonable supply of money from home,
which enabled him to clothe himself decently enough to push
his literary fortunes, and put on a bold front with publishers.

\\\

thought for

daily bread.
vcd with the
was after, to
singular ^\(t
; of this first
J library of a
5 and "other
her seems to
d ceased, and
c anything to
' /natfe myself

This is now

This was in

11 the rani^e of

young, that it
as thoroughly
'tc smelted his

.idence, Pastor
[tatcd a move-
fears of the
in that capital.
I its source in
il magnet— the
us remember
tti actress, and
evidence that
careless, was
r coupled with
;ded to bleach
,id of Wieland,
safely affirmed
arental fear of
key from home,
bnough to push
[vith publishers.

LESSING.

279

Poor enouj^h he often was, but never in so shabby a pass
that he was forced to write Ijchind a screen, like Johnson.

It was during- this first stay in Berlin that Lcssing was
brou;4lit into personal relations with Voltaire. Through an
acquaintance with the great man's secretary, Richicr, he was
employed as translator in the scandalous Hirschel lawsuit,
so dramatically set forth by Carlylc in h\s Life of Frederick^
though Lessing's share in it seems to have been unknown to
him. The service could hardly have been other than distaste-
ful to him ; but it must have been with some thrill of the
ivtihe to ! kind that the poor youth, just fleshing his maiden
pen in criticism, stood face to face with the famous author,
with whose name all Europe rang from side to side. This
was in February 175 1. Young as he was, we fancy those
cool eyes of his making some strange discoveries as to the
real nature of that lean nightmare of Jesuits and dunces.
Afterwards the same secretary lent him the manuscript of
the Sihle dc Louis XIV.^ and Lessing thoughtlessly taking
it into the country with him, it was not forthcoming when
called for by the author. Voltaire naturally enough danced
with rage, screamed all manner of unpleasant things about
robbery and the like, cashiered the secretary, and was, we
see no reason to doubt, really afraid of a pirated edition. This
time his cry of wolf must have had a quaver of sincerity in
it. Herr Stahr, who can never keep separate the Lessing
as he then was and the Lessing as he afterwards became,
takes fire at what he chooses to consider an unwortliy sus-
picion of the Frenchman, and treats himself to some rather
cheap indignation on the subject. For ourselves, we think
Voltaire altogether in the right, and we respect Lessing's
honesty too much to suppose, with his biographer, that it
was this which led him, years afterwards, to do such severe
justice to " Merope," and other tragedies of the same author.
The affair happened in December 1751, and a year later
Lcssing calls Voltaire "a great man," and says of his "Amalie,"
that "it has not only beautiful passages, it is beautiful through-
out, and the tears of a reader of feeling will justify our

"■■B^iiSSK-.

HPBH

ssma?

IMAGE EVALUATION
TEST TARGET (MT-3)

1.0 ^1^1^

^^ §22
2.0

I.I

HlOtOgFSf^C

Scifflices
Corporalion

23 WfST MAIN STMIT

WfBSTIt.N.Y. USm

(716)t72-4S03

28o

LESSING.

• '*

judgment." Surely there is no resentment here. Our only
wonder would be at its being written after the Hirschel
business. At any rate, we cannot allow Herr Stahr to shake
our faith in the sincerity of Lessing's motives in criticism —
he could not in the soundness of the criticism itself— by
tracing it up to a spring at once so petty and so personal.

During a part of 1752* Lessing was at Wittenberg again as
student of medicine, the parental notion of a strictly pro-
fessional career of some kind not having yet been abandoned.
We must give his father the credit of having done his best, in a
well-meaning paternal fashion, to make his son over again in
his own image, and to thwart the design of r>i»ure by coaxing
or driving him into the pinfold of a prosperous obscurity. But
Gotthold, vyith all his gifts, had no talent whatever for contented
routine. His was a mind always in solution, which the divine
order of things, as it is called, could not precipitate into any of
the traditional forms of crystallisation, and in which the time to
come was already fermenting. The principle of growth was in
the young literary hack, and he must obey it or die. He was to
the last a natura naturans^ never a naturata. Lessing seems
to have done what he could to be a dutiful failure. But there
was something in him stronger and more sacred than even
filial piety ; and the good old pastor is remembered now only
as the father of a son who would have shared the benign
oblivion of his own theological works, if he could only have had
his wise way with him. Even after never so many biog-
raphies and review articles, genius continues to be a mar-
vellous and inspiring thing. At the same time, considering the
then condition of what was pleasantly called literature in

• Herr Stahr heads the fiftli chapter of his Second Book, "Lessing at
Wittenberg. December 1751 to November 1752." But we never feel quite
sure of his dates. The Richier aiTair puts Lessing in Berlin in December
1751, and he took his Master's degree at Wittenberg, 29th April 1752. We
are told that ho fiually left Wittenberg " toward the end " of that year.
He himself, writing from Berlin in 1754, says that he has been absent from
that city nur ein halbes Jdhr since 1748. There is only one letter for 1752,
dated at Wittenberg, 9th June.

LESSING,

281

.'.»

Germany, there was not a little to be said on the paternal side of
the question, though it may not seem now a very heavy mulct
to give up one son out of ten to immortality — at least the Fates
seldom decimate in this way. Lessing had now, if we accept
the common standard in such matters, " completed his educa-
tion," and the result may be summed up in his own words to
Michaelis, i6th October 1754 : "I have studied at the Fiirsten-
schule at Meissen, and after that at Leipzig and Wittenberg.
But I should be greatly embarrassed if I were asked to tell
what" As early as his twentieth year he had arrived at some
singular notions as to the uses of learning. On the 20th of
January 1749 he writes to his mother : " I found out that books,
indeed, would make me learned, but never make me a man.**
Like most men of great knowledge, as distinguished from mere
scholars, he seems to have been always a rather indiscriminate
reader, and to have been fond, as Johnson was, of ** browsing"
in libraries. Johnson neither in amplitude of literature nor
exaciness of scholarship could be deemed a match for Lessing ;
but iliey were alike in the power of readily applying whatever
they had learned, whether for purposes of illustration or argu-
ment. They resemble each other, also, in a kind of absolute
common-sense, and in the force with which they could plant
a direct blow with the whole weight both of their training and
their temperament behind it. As a critic, Johnson ends where
Lessing begins. The one is happy in the lower region of the
understanding : the other can breathe freely in the ampler air
of reason alone. Johnson acquired learning, and stopped short
from indolence at a certain point. Lessing assimilated it, and
accordingly his education ceased only with his life. Both had
something of the intellectual sluggishness that is apt to go with
great strength ; and both had to be baited by the antagonism
of circumstances or opinions, not only into the exhibition, but
into the possession of their entire force. Both may be more
properly called original men than, in the highest sense, original
writers.

From 1752 to 1760, with an interval of something over two
years spent in Leipzig to be near a good theatre, Lessing was

I ,.

' n

T ;

28:

LESSING.

i I

settled in Berlin, and gave himself wholly and earnestly to the
life of a man of letters. A thoroughly healthy, cheerful nature
he most surely had, with something at first of the careless light-
heartedness of youth. Healthy he was not always to be, not
always cheerful, often very far from light-hearted, but manly
from first to last he eminently was. Downcast he could never
be, for his strongest instinct, invaluable to him also as a critic,
was to see things as they really are. And this not in the sense
of a cynic, but of one who measures himself as well as his
circumstances — who loves truth as the most beautiful of all
things and the only permanent possession, as being of one
substance with the soul. In a man like Lessing, whose
character is even more interesting than his works, the tone and
turn of thought are what we like to get glimpses of. And for
this his letters are more helpful than those of most authors, as
might be expected of one who said of himself, that, in his more
serious work, " he must profit by his first heat to accomplish
anything." He began, we say, light-heartedly. He did not
believe that "one should thank God only for good things."
*'• He who is only in good health, and is willing to work, has
nothing to fear ir the world." " What another man would call
want, I call comfort." " Must not one often act thoughtlessly,
if one would provoke Fortune to do something for him ?" In
his first inexperience, the life of " the sparrow on the house-
top" (which we find oddly translated "roof") was the one he
would choose for himself. Later in life, when he wished to
marry, he was of another mind, and perhaps discovered that
there was something in the oh\ father's notion of a fixed position.
" The life of the sparrow on the house-top is only right good if
one need not expect any end to it. If it cannot always last,
every day it lasts too long" — he writes to Ebert in 1770. Yet
even then he takes the manly view. " Everything in the world
has its time, everything maybe overlived and overlooked, if one
only have health." Nor let any one suppose that Lessing, full
of courage as he was, found professional authorship a garden of
Alcinous. From creative literature he continually sought
refuge, and even repose, in the driest drudgery of mere scholar-

LESSING.

>83

tly to the
ful nature
less light-
o be, not
>ut manly
uld never
IS a critic,
the sense
II as his
ful of all
of one
ig, whose
\ tone and
And for
authors, as
I his more
ccomplish
I did not
i things."
work, has
would call
ightlessly,
im?» In
he house-
le one he
ivished to
^ered that
1 position.
It good if
ivays last,
770. Yet
the world
ed, if one
ssing, full
garden of
y sought
} scholar-

ship. On the 26th of April 1768 he writes to his brother with
something of his old gaiety : " Thank God, the lime will soon
come when I cannot call a penny in the world my own but
I must first earn it. I am unhappy if it must be by writing."
And again in May 1771 : "Among all the wretched, I think
him the most wretched who must work with his head, even
if he is not conscious of having; one. But what is the good of
complaining?" Lessing's life, if it is a noble example, so far
as it concerned himself alone, is also a warning when another
is to be asked to share it. He too would have profited had he
earlier learned and more constantly borne in mind the pro-
foundest wisdom of that old saying. Si sit pnidcntia. Let the
young poet, however he may believe of his art that " all other
pleasures are not worth its pains," consider well what it is to
call down fire from heaven to keep the pot boiling, before he
commit himself to a life of authorship as something fine and
easy. That fire will not condescend to such office, though it
come without asking on ceremonial days to the free service
of the altar.

Lessing, however, never would, even if he could, have so
desecrated 1 is better powers. For a bare livelihood, he a%ays
went sturdily to the market of hack-work, where his learn-
ing would fetch him a price. But it was only in extremest
need that he would claim that benefit of clergy. "I am
worried," he writes to his brother Karl, 8th April 1773, "and
work because working is the only means to cease being, so. But
you and Voss are very mucli mistaken if you think that it could
ever be indifferent to me, under such circumstances, on what I
work. Nothing leas true, whether as respects the work itself or
the principal object wherefor I work. I have been in my life
before now in very wretched circumstances, yet never in such
that I would have written for bread in the true meaning of the
word. I have begun my 'Contributions' because this work
helps me ... to live from one day to another." It is plain
that he does not call this kind of thing in any high sense
writing. Of that he had far other notions ; for though he
honestly disclaimed the title, yet his dream was always to be a

t :l

^HKSfSfHSffT'.

li" \

t if

284

LESS/NO.

poet. But he was willing to work, as he claimed to be, because
he had one ideal higher than that of being a poet — namely, to
be thoroughly a man. To Nicolai he writes in 1758 — "All ways
of earning his bread are alike becoming to an honest man,
whether to split wood or to sit at the helm of state. It does
not concern his conscience how useful he is, but how useful
he would be." Goethe's poetic sense was the Minotaur to
which he sacrificed everything. To make a study, he would
soil the maiden petals of a woman's soul ; to get the delicious
sensation of a reflex sorrow, he would wring a heart. All
that saves his egoism from being hateful is, that, with its
immense reaches, it cheats the sense into a feeling of some-
thing like sublimity. A patch of sand is unpleasing ; a desert
has all the awe of ocean. Lessing also felt the duty of self-
culture ; but it was not so much for the sake of feeding fat this
or that faculty as of strengthening character — the only soil in
which real mental power can root itself and find sustenance.
His advice to his brother Karl, who was beginning to write
for the stage, is two parts moral to one literary. " Study
ethics diligently, learn to express yourself well and correctly,
and cultivate your own character. Without that I cannot
conceive a good dramatic author." Marvellous counsel this
will seem to those who think that wisdom is only to be found in
the fool's paradise of Bohemia I

We said that Lessing's dream was to be a poet In com-
parison with success as a dramatist, he looked on all other
achievement as inferior in kind. In 1767 he writes to Gleim
(speaking of his call to Hamburg) — " Such circumstances were
needed to rekindle in me an almost extinguished love for the
theatre. I was just beginning to lose myself in other studies
which would have made me unfit for any work of genius.
My Laocoon is now a secondary labour." And yet he never
fell into the mistake of overvaluing what he valued so highly.
His unflinching common-sense would have saved him from
that, as it afterwards enabled him to see that something was
wanting in him which must enter into the making of true
poetry, whose distinction from prose is an inward one of

LESSING.

«85

nature, and not an outward one of form. While yet under
thirty, be assures Mendelssohn that he was quite right in
neglecting poetry for philosophy, because "only a part of our
youth should be given up to the arts of the beautiful. We
must practise ourselves in weightier things before we die.
An old man, who lifelong has done nothing but rhyme, and
an old man who lifelong has done nothing but pass his breath
through a stick with holes in it — I doubt much whether such an
old man has arrived at what he was meant for."

This period of Lessing's life was a productive one, though
none of its printed results can be counted of permanent value,
except his share in the Letters on German Literature. And
even these must be reckoned as belonging to the years of his
apprenticeship and training for the master- workman he after-
wards became. The small fry of authors and translators were
hardly fitted to call out his full strength, but his vivisection of
them taught him the value of certain structural principles. "To
one dissection of the fore quarter of an ass," says Haydon in
his diary, " I owe my information." Yet even in his earliest
criticisms we are struck with the same penetration and steadi-
ness of judgment, the same firm grasp of the essential and per-
manent, that were afterwards to make his opinions law in the
courts of taste. For example, he says of Thomson, that, " as a
dramatic poet, he had the fault of never knowing when to leave
off; he lets every character talk so long as anything can be
said ; accordingly, during these prolonged conversations, the
action stands still, and the story becomes tedious." Of
Roderick Random^ he says that "its author is neither a
Richardson nor a Fielding ; he is one of those writers of whom
there are plenty among the Germans and French." We cite
these merely because their firmness of tone seems to us uncom-
mon in a youth of twenty-four. In the Letters^ the range is
much wider, and the application of principles more consequent.
He had already secured for himself a position among the
literary men of that day, and was beginning to be feared for
the inexorable justice of his criticisms. His Fables and his
" Miss Sarah Sampson " had been translated into French, and

I'i

\ff:

286

LESSING.

\ !

had attracted the attention of Grimm, who says of them
(December 1754): "These Fables commonly contain in a few
lines a new and profound moral meaning. M. Lessing has
much wit, genius, and invention ; the dissertations which follow
the Fables prove moreover that he is an excellent critic." In
Berlin, Lessing made friendships, especially with Mendelssohn,
Von Kleist, Nicolai, Gleim, and Ramler. For Mendelssohn
and Von Kleist he seems to have felt a real love; for the others
at most a liking, as the best material that could be had. It
certainly was not of the juiciest. He seems to have worked
hard and played hard, equally at home in his study and
Baumann's wine-cellar. He was busy, poor, and happy.

But he was restless. We suspect that the necessity of
forever picking up crumbs, and their occasional scarcity, made
the life o» the sparrow on the house-top less agreeable than
he had expected. The imagined freedom was not quite so
free after all, for necessity is as short a tether as dependence,
or oflficial duty, or what not, .ind the regular occupation of
grub-hunting is as tame and wearisome as another. More-
over, Lessing had probably by this time sucked his friends dry
of any intellectual stimulus they could yield him ; and when
friendship reaches that pass, it is apt to be anything but
inspiring. Except Mendelssohn and Von Kleist, they were not
men capable of rating him at his true value ; and Lessing was
one of those who always bum up the fuel of life at a fearful
rate. Admirably dry as the supplies of Ramler and the rest no
doubt were, they had not substance enough to keep his mind
at the high temperature it needed, and he would soon be driven
to the cutting of green stuff from his own wood-lot, more rich
in smoke than fire. Besides this, he could hardly have been at
ease among intimates, most of whom could not even conceive
of that intellectual honesty, that total disregard of all personal
interests where truth was concerned, which was an innate
quality of Lessing's mind. Their theory of criticism was,
Truth, or even worse, if possible, for all who do not belong to
our set : for us, that delicious falsehood which is no doubt a
slow poison, but then so very slow. Their nerves were unbraced

i — ^ — ^^VA.-j;-I-:»--l

LESSING.

287

by that fierce democracy of thought, trampling on all prescrip-
tion, all tradition, in which Lessing loved to shoulder his way
and advance his insupportable foot. " What is called a
heretic," he says in his Preface to Bcrengarius^ " has a very
good side. It is a man who at least wishes to see with his own
eyes." And again, " I know not if it be a duty to offer up for-
tune and life to the truth ; . . but I know it is a duty, if one
undertake to teach the truth, to teach the whole of it, or none
at all." Such men as Gleim and Ramler were mere dilettanti^
and could have no notion how sacred his convictions are to a
militant thinker like Lessing. His creed as to the rights of
friendship in criticism might be put in the words of Selden, the
firm tread of whose mind was like his own : " Opinion and
affection extremely differ. Opinion is something wherein I go
about to give reason why all the world should think as ! think.
Affection is a thing wherein I look after the pleasing of myself."
How little his friends were capable of appreciating this view of
the matter is plain from a letter of Ramler to Gleim, cited by
Herr Stahr. Lessing had shown up the weaknesses of a cer-
tain work by the Abb<? Batteux (long ago gathered to his
literary fathers as conclusively as poor old Ramler himself),
without regard to the important fact that the Abba's book had
been translated by a friend. Horrible to think of at best,
thrice horrible when the friend's name was Ramler ! The
impression thereby made on the friendly heart may be con-
ceived. A ray of light penetrated the rather opaque substance
of Herr Ramler's mind, and revealed to him the dangerous
character of Lessing. " I know well," he says, " that Herr
Lessing means to speak his own opinion, and" — what is the
dreadful inference? — "and, by suppressing others, to gain air,
and make room for himself. This disposition is not to be
overcome."* Fortunately not, for Lessing's opinion always
meant something, and was worth having. Gleim no doubt
sympathised deeply with the sufferer by this treason, for he, too,

* *• Ramler," writes Georg Forster, " ist die Ziererei, die Eigenliebe, die
Eitelkeit in eigener Person."

i;.

{

?f!

988

LESSING,

had been shocked at some disrespect for La Fontaine, as a
disciple of whom he had announced himself.

Berlin was hardly the place for Lessing, if he could not take
a step in any direction without risk of treading on somebody's
gouty foot. This was not the last time that he was to have
experience of the fact that the critic's pen, the more it has of
truth's celestial temper, the more it is apt to reverse the miracle
of the archangel's spear, and to bring out whatever is toadlike
in the nature of him it touches. We can well understand the
sadness with which he said—

•• Der Blick des Forscher's fand
Nicht selten mehr als er zu finden wUnschte."

Here, better than anywhere, we may cite something which
he wrote of himself to a friend of Klotz. Lessing, it will
be remembered, had literally " suppressed " Klotz. " What
do you apprehend, then, from me? The more faults and
errors you point out to me, so much the more I shall learn
of you ; the more I learn of you the more thankful
shall I be. . . . I wish you knew me more thoroughly. If
the opinion you have of my learning and genius {Gsist)
should perhaps suffer thereby, yet I am sure the idea I
would like you to form of my character would gain. I
am not the insufferable, unmannerly, proud, slanderous man
Herr Klotz proclaims me. It cost me a great deal of trouble
and compulsion to be a little bitter against him."* Ramler and
the rest had contrived a nice little society for mutual admira-
tion, much like that described by Goldsmith, if, indeed, he did
not convey it from the French, as was not uncommon with him.
" * What, have you never heard of the admirable Brandellius or
the ingenious Mogusius, one the eye and the other the heart of
our University, known all over the world ?' * Never,' cried the
traveller ; * but pray inform me what Brandellius is particularly
remarkable for.' *You must be little acquainted with the
republic of letters,* said the other, * to ask such a question.

* Lessing to Von Marr, 25th November 1768.
worth reading.

The whole letter is well

LESSING,

189

line, as a

letter is well

Brandellius has written a most sublime panegyric on Mogusius.'
* And, prithee, what has Mogusius done to deserve so great a
favour ? ' * He has written an excellent poem in praise of
Brandellius.'" Lessing was not the man who could narrow
himself to the proportions of a clique ; lifelong he wai the
terror of the Brandcllii and Mogusii, and, at the signal given

by him,

" They, but now who seemed
In bigness to surp.-iHS Earih'H giant sons,
Now less than sniallust dwarfs in narrow room
Throng uumberlcst)."

Besides whatever other reasons Lessing may have had for
leaving Berlin, we fancy that his having exhausted whatever
means it had of helping his spiritual growth was the chief.
Nine years later, he gave as a reason for not wishing to stay
long in Brunswick, " Not that I do not like Brunswick, but
because nothing comes of being long in a place which one
likes."* Whatever the reason, Lessing, in 1760, left Berlin for
Breslau, where the post of secretary had been offered him
under Frederick's toUgh old General Tauentzien. " I wiii '>pin
myself in for a while like an ugly worm, that I may be able to
come to light again as a brilliant winged creature," says his
diary. Shortly after his leaving Berlin, he was chosen a
member of the Academy of Sciences there. Herr Stahr, who
has no little fondness for the foot-light style of phrase, says,
" It may easily be imagined that he himself regarded his
appointment as an insult rather than as an honour." Lessing
himself merely says that it was a matter of indifference to him,
which is much more in keeping with his character and with the
value of the intended honour.

The Seven Years' War began four years before Lessing took
up his abode in Breslau, and it may be asked how he, as a
Saxon, was affected by it. We m\^^\\\ answer, hardly at all.
His position was that of armed neutrality. Long ago at

• A favourite phrase of his, which Egbert has preserved for us with its
Saxon accent, was, Es komnU dock nischt dahey heraus, implying that one
nii^^ht do something better for a con.->taiicy than shearing swine.

• I

smm

390

LFSsmo

1 1

Leipzig he had been accused of Prussian leanings ; now in
Berlin he was thought too Saxon. Thou^^h he disclaimed any
such sentiment as patriotism, and called himself a cosmopolite,
it is plain enough that his position was simply that of a
German. Love of country, except in a very narrow parochial
way, was as impossible in Germany then as in America during
the Colonial period. Lessing himself, in the latter years of his
life, was librarian of one of those petty princelets who sold their
subjects to be shot at in America— creatures strong enough to
oppress, too weak to protect their people. Whoever would
have found a Germany to love must have pieced it together as
painfully as Isis did the scattered bits of Osiris. Yet he says
that '*lhe true patriot is by no means extinguished" in him.
It was the noisy ones that he could not abide ; and, writing to
Gleim about his *' Grenadier " verses, he advises him to soften
the tone of them a little, he himself being a *' declared enemy
of imprecations," which he would leave altogether to the clergy.
We think Herr Stahr makes too much of these anti-patriot
flings of Lessing, which, with a single exception, occur in his
letters to Gleim, and with reference to a kind of verse that could
not but be distasteful to him, as needing no more brains than a
drum, nor other inspiration than serves a trumpet. Lessing
undoubtedly had better uses for his breath than to spend it in
shouting for either side in this " bloody lawsuit," as he called
it, in which he was not concerned. He showed himself German
enough, and in the right way, in his persistent warfare against
the tyranny of French taste.

He remained in Breslau the better part of five years, studying
life in new phases, gathering a library, which, as commonly
happens, he afterwards sold at great loss, and writing his
Minna and Laocoon. He accompanied Tauentzien to the siege
of Schweidnitz, where Frederick was present in person. He
seems to have lived a rather free-and-easy life during his term
of office, kept shockingly late hours, and learned, among other
things, to gamble— a fact for which Herr Stahr thinks it
needful to account in a high philosophical fashion. We prefer
io think that there are some motives to which remarkable men

immmm

.KSSING

dQl

ikable men

are liable in common with the rest of mankind, and that th"*/
may occasionally do a thing merely because it is pleasant,
without forethought of medicinal benefit to the mind. Lessing's
friends (whose names were tiof^ an the reader might be tempted
to suppose, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar) expected him to make
something handsome out of his office ; but the pitiful result of
those five years of opportunity was nothing moro than <in
immortal book. Unthrifty Lessing, to have been so nice about
your fingers (and so near the mint, too), when your general was
wise enough to make his fortime I As if ink-stuins were the
only ones that would wash out, and no others had ever been
covered with white kid from the sight of all reasonable men I
In July 1764 he had a violent fever, which he turned to account
in his usual cheerful way — "The serious epoch of my life is
drawing nigh. I am beginning to become a man, and flatter
myself that in this burning fever I have raved away the last
remains of my youthful follies. Fortunate illness 1" He had
never intended to bind himself to an official career. To his
father he writes — " I have more than once declared that ♦* "
present engagement could not continue long, that I have .. '
given up my old plan of living, and that I am mor^^ thrn ever
resolved to withdraw from any service that is not >vliolIy to my
mind. I have passed the middle of my life, ana can think of
nothing that could compel me to make myself a slave for the
poor remainder of it. I write you this, dearest father, and n^ust
write you this, in order that you may not be astonished if, before
long, you should see me once more very far removed from all
hopes of, or claims to, a settled prosperity, as it is called."
Before the middle of the next year he was back in Berlin again.

There he remained for nearly two years, t»ying the house-top
way of life again, but with indifferent succcis, as we have
reason to think. Indeed, when the metaphor resolves itself
into the plain fact of living just on the other side of the roof —
in the garret, namely— and that from hand to mouth, as was
Lessing's case, we need not be surprised to find him gradually
beginning to see something more agreeable in a fixirtes Gliick
than lie had once been willing to allow. At any rate, he was

: I

'. I!

;;

292

LESSING,

willing, and even heartily desirous, that his friends should
succeed in getting for him the place of royal librarian. But
Frederick, for some unexplained reason, would not appoint
him. Herr Stahr thinks it had something to do with the old
Siicie manuscript business. But this seems improbable, for
Voltaire's wrath was not directed against Lessing ; and even if
it had been, the great king could hardly have carried the name
of an obscure German author in his memory through all those
anxious and warlike years. Whatever the cause, Lessing early
in 1767 accepts the position of Theatrical Manager at Ham-
burg, as usual not too much vexed with disappointment, but
quoting gaily —

" Quod non dant proceres, dabit histrio."

Like Burns, he was always " contented wi' little and canty wi'
mair." In connection with his place as Manager he was to
write a series of dramatic essays and criticisms. It is to this
we owe the Dramaturgie — next to the Laocoon the most
valuable of his works. But Lessing— though it is plain that he
made his hand as light as he could, and wrapped his lash in
velvet — soon found that actors had no more taste for truth than
authors. He was obliged to drop his remarks on the special
merits or demerits of players, and to confine himself to those
of the pieces represented. By this his work gained in value ;
and the latter part of it, written without reference to a particular
stage, and devoted to the discussion of those general principles
of dramatic art on which he had meditated long and deeply, is
far weightier than the rest. There are few men who can put
forth all their muscle in a losing race, and it is characteristic of
Lessing that what he wrote under the dispiritment of failure
should be the most lively and vigorous. Circumstances might
be against him, but he was incapable of believing that a cause
could be lost which had once enlisted his conviction.

The theatrical enterprise did not prosper long ; but Lessing
had meanwhile involved himself as partner in a publishing
business which harassed him while it lasted, and when it
failed, as was inevitable, left him hampered with debt. Help

sMe

;nds should
rarian. But
not appoint
with the old
)robable, for
and even if
ed the name
ugh all those
.essing early
[er at Ham-
>intment, but

ind canty wi'
;r he was to
It is to this
in the most
plain that he
;d his lash in
or truth than
the special
self to those
led in value ;
3 a particular
ral principles
nd deeply, is
who can put
racteristic of

nt of failure
tances might

that a cause
n.

but Lessing

I publishing
md when it

debt. Help

LESSING.

a93

came in his appointment (1770) to take charge of the Duke
of Brunswick's library at Wolfenbiittel, with a salary of six
hundred thalers a-year. This was the more welcome, as he
soon after was betrothed with Eva Konig, widow of a rich
manufacturer.* Her husband's affairs, however, had been left
in confusion, and this, with Lessing's own embarrassments, pre-
vented their being married till October 1776. Eva Konig was
every way worthy of him. Clever, womanly, discreet, with just
enough coyness of the will to be charming when it is joined
with sweetness and good sense, she was the true helpmate of
such a man — the serious companion of his mind and the play-
fellow of his affections. There is something infinitely refreshing
to me in the love-letters of these two persons. Without wanting
sentiment, there is such a bracing air about them as breathes
from the higher levels and strongholds of the soul. They show
that self-possession which can alone reserve to love the power of
new self-surrender — of never cloying, because never wholly
possessed. Here is no invasion and conquest of the weaker
nature by the stronger, but an equal league of souls, each in its
own realm still sovereign. Turn from such letters as these to
those of St. Preux and Julie, and you are stifled with the heavy
perfume of a demirep's boudoir — to those of Herder to his
Caroline, and you sniff no doubtful odour of professional unction
from the sermon-case. Manly old Dr. Johnson, who could be
tender and true to a plain woman, knew very well what he
meant when he wrote that single poetic sentence of his — " The

* I find surprisingly little about Lessiug in such of the contemporary
correspondence of German literary men as I have read. A letter of Bole
to Merck (10th April 1775) gives us a glimpse of him. " Do you know
that Lessing will probably marry Reiske's widow and come to Dresden in
place of Hagedorn ? The restless spirit ! How he will get along with the
artists, half of them, too, Italians, is to be seen. . . . Lifiert and he have
met and parted good friends. He has worn ever since on his finger the
ring with the skeleton and butterfly which Liffert gave him. He is
reported to be much dissatisfied with the theatrical filibustering of Goethe
and Lenz, especially with the remarks on the drama in which so little
respect is shown for his ' Aristotle,' and the Leipzig folks are said to be
greatly rejoiced at getting such an ally."

, V

! 11

ennap

•\

I &

294

LESSING.

shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found
him to be a native of the rocks."

In January 1778 Lessing's wife died from the effects of a
difficult childbirth. The child, a boy, hardly survived its birth.
The few words wrung out of Lessing by this double sorrow are
to me as deeply moving as anything in tragedy. " I wished for
once to be as happy (es so gut haben) as other men. But it has
gone ill with me ! " " And I was so loath to lose him, this
son I " " My wife is dead ; and I have had this experience
also. I rejoice that I have not many more such experiences
left to make, and am quite cheerful." " If you had known her I
But they say that to praise one's wife is self-praise. Well, then,
I say no more ot her 1 But if you had known her 1 ^ Quite
cheerful I On the loth of August he writes to Elise Reimarus
—he is writing to a woman now, an old friend oi his and
his wife, and will be less restrained :—'* I am left here all
alone. I have not a single friend to whom I can wholly confide
myself. . . . How often must I curse my ever wishing to be
for once as happy as other men 1 How often have I wished
myself back again in my old, isolated condition — to be nothing,
to wish nothing, to do nothing, but what the present moment
brings with it ! . . . Yet I am too proud to think myselt
unhappy. I just grind my teeth, and let the boat go as pleases
wind and waves. Enough that I will not overset it myself." It
is plain from this letter that suicide had been in his mind, and,
with his antique way of thinking on many subjects, he would
hardly have looked on it as a crime. But he was too brave a
man to throw up the sponge to fate, and had work to do yet.
Within a few days of his wife's death he wrote to Eschenburg :
" I am right heartily ashamed if my letter betrayed the least
despiir. Despair is not nearly so much my failing as levity,
whicli often expresses itself with a little bitterness and misan-
thrcpy." A stoic, not from insensibility or cowardice, as so
manv are, but from stoutness of heart, he blushes at a moment's
abdication of self-command. And he will not roil the clear
memory of his love with any tinge of the sentimentality so
much the fashion, and to be had so cheap, in that generation.

mmmmtmm

amtttmm

LESSIMG.

295

There is a moderation of sincerity peculiar to Lessing in the
epithet of the following sentence : " How dearly must I pay for
the single year I have lived with a sensible wife 1 " Werther
had then been published four years. I.essing's grief has that
pathos which he praised in sculpture— he may writhe, but he
must not scream. Nor is this a new thing with him. On the
death of a younger brother, he wrote to his father, fourteen
years before : " Why should those who grieve communicate
their grief to each other purposely to increase it ? . . . Many
mourn in death what they loved not living. I will love in life
what Nature bids me love, and after death strive to bewail it as
little as I can."

We think Herr Stahr is on his stilts again when he
speak3 of Lessing's position at Wolfenbiittell. He calls it
an "assuming the chains of feudal service, being buried in
a comer, a martyrdom that consumed the best powers of his
mind and crushed him in body and spirit forever." To crush
forever is rather a strong phrase, Herr Stahr, to apply to
the spirit, if one must ever give heed to the sense as well as
the sound of what one is writing. But eloquence has no
bowels for its victims. We have no doubt the Duke of Bruns-
wick meant well by Lessing, and the salary he paid him was
as large as he would have got from the frugal Frederick. But
one whose trade it was to be a Duke could hardly have had
much sympathy with his librarian after he had once found
out what he really was. For even if he was not, as Herr
Stahr affirms, a republican, and we doubt very much if he
was, yet he was not a man who could play with ideas in the
light French fashion. At the ardent touch of his sincerity,
they took fire, and grew dangerous to what is called the social
fabric. The logic of wit, with its momentary flash, is a very
different thing from that consequent logic of thought, pushing
forward its deliberate sap day and night with a fixed object,
which belonged to Lessing. The men who attack abuses
are not so much to be dreaded by the reigning house of Super-
stition as those who, as Dante says, syllogise hateful truths.
As for "the chains of feudal service," they might serve a

1 1(

■('.

2g6

LESSING.

k ,; ■

{■

\ i

Fenian Head-Centre on a pinch, but are wholly out of place
here. The slavery that Lessing had really taken on him was
that of a great library, an Alcina that could always too easily
witch him away from the more serious duty of his genius.
That a mind like his could be buried in a comer is mere
twaddle, and of a kind that has done great wrong to the
dignity of letters. Wherever Lessing sat, was the head of
the table. That he suffered at Wolfenbuttel is true ; but was
it nothing to be in love and in debt at the same time, and
to feel that his fruition of the one must be postponed for
uncertain years by his own folly in incurring the other? If
the sparrow-life must end, surely a wee bush is better than
nae beild. One cause of Lessing's occasional restlessness
and discontent Herr Stahr has failed to notice. It is evident
from many passages in his letters that he had his share of
the hypochondria which goes with an imaginative tempera-
ment. But in him it only serves to bring out in stronger
relief his deep-rooted manliness. He spent no breath in that
melodious whining which, beginning with Rosseau, has hardly
yet gone out of fashion. Work of some kind was his medi-
cine for the blues — if not always of the kind he would have
chosen, then the best that was to be had ; for the useful, too,
had for him a sweetness of its own. Sometimes he found a
congenial labour in rescuing, as he called it, the memory
of some dead scholar or thinker from the wrongs of ignorance
or prejudice or falsehood ; sometimes in fishing a manuscript
out of the ooze of oblivion, and giving it, after a critical cleans-
ing, to the world. Now and then he warmed himself and kept
his muscle in trim with buffeting soundly the champions
of thait shallow artificiality and unctuous wordiness, one of
which passed for orthodox in literature, and the other in
theology. True religion and creative genius were both so
beautiful to him that he could never abide the mediocre
counterfeit of either, and he who put so much of his own
life into all he wrote could not but hold all scripture
sacred in which a divine soul had recorded itself. It would
be doing Lessing great wrong to confound his controversial

<\-

to i l- | l | illiffM <M> i l WM i a i H «li>Ml V < ''*W i'm' ■■

LESSING.

«97

writing with the paltry quarrels of authors. His own
personal relations enter into them surprisingly little, for his
quarrel was never with men, but with falsehood, cant, and
misleading tradition, in whomsoever incarnated. Save for
this, they were no longer readable, and might be relegated
to that herbarium of Billingsgate gathered by the elder
Disraeli.

So far from being "crushed in spirit" at Wolfenbiittel, the
years he spent there were among the most productive of his
life. *' Emilia Galotti," begun in 1758, was finished there and
published in 1771. The controversy with Gotze, by far the
most important he was engaged in, and the one in which he
put forth his maturest powers, was carried on thence. His
"Nathan the Wise" (1779), by which almost alone he is known
as a poet outside of Germany, was conceived and composed there.
The last few years of his life were darkened by ill-health and
the depression which it brings. His " Nathan " had not the
success he hoped. It is sad to see the strong, self-sufficing
man casting about for a little sympathy, even for a little praise.
"It is really needful to me that you should have some small
good opinion of it [* Nathan '], in order to make me once more
contented with myself," he writes to Elise Reimarus in May
1779. That he was weary of polemics, and dissatisfied with
himself for letting them distract him from better things, appears
from his last pathetic letter to the old friend he loved and
valued most — Mendel sshon. "And in truth, dear friend, I
sorely need a letter like yours from time to time, if I am not to
become wholly out of humour. I think you do not know me as
a man that has a very hot hunger for praise. But the coldness
with which the world is wont to convii ce certain people that
they do not suit it, if not deadly, yet stiffens one with chill. I
am not astonished that all I have written lately docs not please
you. ... At best, a passage here and there may have cheated
you by recalling our better days. I, too, was then a sound,
slim sapling, and am now such a rotten, gnarled trunk ! " This
was written on the igih of December 1780 ; and on the 15th of
February 1781 Lessing died, not quite fifty-two years old.

li 1

» ;

' h

i :

!■<

■!'

■

li'

298

LESSING.

Goethe was then in his thirty-second year, and Schiller ten
years younger.

Of Lessing's relation to metaphysics the reader will find
ample discussion in Herr Stahr's volumes. We are not
particularly concerned with them, because his interest in such
questions was purely speculative, and because he was more
concerned to exercise the powers of his mind than to analyse
them. His chief business, his master impulse always, was to
be a man of letters in the narrower sense of the term. Even
into theology he only made occasional raids across the border,
as it were, and that not so much with a purpose of reform as in
defence of principles which applied equally to the whole domain
of thought. He had even less sympathy with heterodoxy than
with orthodoxy, and, so far from joining a party or wishing ^o
form one, would have left belief a matter of choice to the
individual conscience. " From the bottom of my heart I hate
11 those people who wish to found sects. For it is not
error, but sectarian error, yes, even sectarian truth, that
makes men unhappy, or would do so if truth would found
a sect."* Again he says, that in his theological controversies
he is "much less concerned about theology than about sound
common-sense, and only therefore prefer the old orthodox (at
bottom tolerant) theology to the new (at bottom intolerant\
because the former openly conflicts with sound common-sense,
while the latter would fain corrupt it. I reconcile myself with
my open enemies in order the better to be on my guard against
my ser-et ones."t At another time he tells his brother that he
has a wholly false notion of his (Lessing's) relation to ortho-
doxy. " Do you suppose I grudge the world that anybody
should seek to enlighten it ? — that I do not heartily wish that
every one should think rationally about religion ? I should
loathe myself if even in my scribblings I had any other end
than to help forward those great views. But let me choose my

* To his brother Karl, 20th April 1774.
t To the same, 20th March 1777,

LESSJNG.

299

cwn way, which I think best for this purpose. And what is
simpler than this way? I would not have the impure water,
which has long been unfit to use, preserved ; but I would not
have it thrown away before we know whence to get purer. . . .
Orthodoxy, thank God, we were pretty well done with j a par-
tition-wall had been built between it and Philosophy, behind
which each could go her own way without troubling the other.
But what are they doing now ? They are tearing down this
wall, and, under the pretext of making us rational Christians,
are making us very irrational philosophers. . . . We are
agreed that our old religious system is false ; but I cannot say
with you that it is a patchwork of bunglers and half-philo-
sophers. I know nothing in the world in which human acute-
ness has been more displayed or exercised than m that."*
Lessing was always for freedom, never for looseness, of thought,
still less for laxity of principle. But it must be a real freedom,
and not that vain struggle to become a majority, which, if it
succeed, escapes from heresy only to make heretics of the other
side. Abire ad plures would with him have meant, not bodily
but spiritual death. He did not love the fanaticism of innova-
tion a whit better than that of conservatism. To his sane
understanding, both were equally hateful, as different masks of
the same selfish bully. Coleridge said that toleration was
impossible till indifference made it worthless. Lessing did not
wish for toleration, because that implies authority, nor could his
earnest temper have conceived of indifference. But he thought
it as absurd to regulate opinion as the colour of the hair. Here,
too, he would have agreed with Selden, that " it is a vain thing
to talk of an heretic, for a man for his heart cannot think any
otherwise than he does think." Herr Stahr's chapters on this
point, bating a little exakation of tone, are very satisfactory ;
though, in his desire to make a leader of Lessing, he almost
represents him as being what he shunned — the founder of a
sect. The fact is, that Lessing only formulated in his own way
a general movement of thought, and what mainly interests us is

* To the same, 2nd February 1774,

.! t.

! I >

I'l

300

LESSING,

that in him we see a layman, alike indifferent to clerisy and
heresy, giving energetic and pointed utterance to those opinions
of his class which the clergy are content to ignore so long as
they remain esoteric. At present the world has advanced to
where Lessing stood, while the Church has done its best to
stand stock-still ; and it would be a curious were it not a
melancholy spectacle, to see the indifference with which the
laity look on while theologians thrash their wheatless straw,
utterly unconscious that there is no longer any comr^on term
possible that could bring their creeds again to any point of
bearing on the practical life of men. Fielding never made a
profounder stroke of satire than in Squire Western's indignant
" Art not in the pulpit now 1 When art got up there, I never
mind what dost say."

As an author, Lessing began his career at a period when we
cannot say that German literature was at its lowest ebb, only
because there had not yet been any flood-tide. That may be
said to have begun with him. When we say German literature,
we mean so much of it as has any interest outside of Germany.
That part of the literary histories which treats of the dead waste
and middle of the eighteenth century reads like a collection of
obituaries, and were better reduced to the conciseness of
epitaph, though the authors of them seem to find a melancholy
pleasure, much like that of undertakers, in the task by which
they live. Gottsched reigned supreme on the legitimate throne
of dulness. In Switzerland, Bodmer essayed a more republican
form of the same authority. At that time a traveller reports
eight hundred authors in Ziirich alone ! Young aspirants for
lettered fame, in imagination clear away the lichens from their
forgotten headstones, and read humbly the " As I am, so thou
must be," on all I Everybody remembers how Goethe, in the
seventh book of his autobiography, tells the story of his visit
to Gottsched. He enters by mistake an inner room at the
moment when a frightened servant brings the discrowned
potentate a periwig large enough to reach to the elbows.
That awful emblem of pretentious sham seems to be the best
type of the literature then predominant. We always fancy it

LESSING,

301

set upon a pole, like Gessler's hat, with nothing in it that was
not wooden, for all men to bow down before. The periwig
style had its natural place in the age of Louis XIV., and there
were certainly brains under it. But it had run out in France,
as the tic-wig style of Pope had in England. In Germany it
was the mere imitation of an imitation. Will it be believed
tha* Gottsched recommends his Art 0/ Poetry to beginners, in
preference to Breitingcr's, because it ^^ will enable them to pro-
duce every species of poem in a correct style^ while out of that no
one can learn to make an ode or a cantata ? " " Whoever," he
says, " buys Breitinger's book in order to learn how to make
poemSf will too late regret his money."* Gottsched, perhaps,
did some service even by his advocacy of French models, by
calling attention to the fact that there was such a thing as style,
and that it was of some consequence. But not one of the
authors of that time can be said to survive, nor to be known
even by r.ame except to Germans, unless it be Klopstock,
Herder, Wieland, and Gellert. And the latter's immortality,
such as it is, reminds us somewhat of that Lady Gosling's,
whose obituary stated that she was ** mentioned by Mrs.
Barbauld in her Life of Richardson ' under the name of Miss
M., afterwards Lady G.'" Klopstock himself is rather
remembered for what he was than what he is— an immortality
of unreadableness ; and we much doubt if many Germans put
the " Oberon " in their trunks when they start on a journey.
Herder alone survives, if not as a contributor to literature,
strictly so called, yet as a thinker and as part of the intellectual
impulse of the day. But at the time, though there were two
parties, yet within the lines of each there was a loyal reciprocity
of what is called on such occasions appreciation. Wig ducked
to wig, each blockhead had a brother, and there was a universal
apotheosis of the mediocrity of our set. If the greatest happi-
ness of the greatest number be the true theory, this was all that
could be desired. Even Lessing at one time looked up to
Hagedorn as the German Horace. If Hagedorn were pleased,

• l!

O'ervinus, iv. G2.

D' \

fli'

!'
1 1

30a

LESSING.

what mattered it to Horace ? Worse almost than this was the
universal pedantry. The solemn bray of one pedagogue was
taken up and prolonged in a thousand echoes. There was not
only no originality, but no desire for it — perhaps even a dread
of it, as something that would break the entente cordiale of
placid mutual assurance. No great writer had given that tone
of good-breeding to the language which- would gain it entrance
to the society of European literature. No man of genius had
made it a necessity of polite culture. It was still as rudely
provincial as the Scotch of Allan Ramsay. Frederick the Great
was to be forgiven if, with his practical turn, he gave himself
wholly to French, which had replaced L?itin as a cosmopolitan
tongue. It had lightness, ease, fluency, ele.^ance — in short, all
the good qualities that German lacked. The study of French
models was perhaps the best thing for German literature before
it got out of long-clothes. It was bad only when it became
a tradition and a tyranny. Lessing did more than any other
man to overthrow this foreign usurpation when it had done its
work.

The same battle had to be fought on English soil also, and
indeed is hardly over yet. For the renewed outbreak of the
old quarrel between Classical and Romantic grew out of
nothing more than an attempt of the modem spirit to free
itself from laws of taste laid down by the Grand Sihle. But
we must not forget the debt which all modern prose literature
owes to France. It is true that Machiavelli was the first to
write with classic pith and point in a living language ; but he is,
for all that, properly an ancient. Montaigne is really the
first modern writer — the first who assimilated his Greek and
Latin, and showed that an author might be original and
charming, even classical, if he did not try too hard. He is also
the first modern critic, and his judgments of the writers of
antiquity are those of an equal. He made the ancients his
servants, to help him think in Gascon French ; and, in spite of
his endless quotations, began the crusade against pedantry.
It was not, however, till a century later that the reform became
complete in France, and then crossed the Channel. Milton is

LESSING,

303

still a pedant in his prose, and not seldom even in his great
poem. Dryden was the first Englishman who wrote perfectly
easy prose, and he owed his style and turn of thought to his
French reading. His learning sits easily on him, and has a
modem cut. So far, the French influence was one of unmixed
good, for it rescucil us from pedantry. It must have done
something for Germany in the same direction. For its etfect
on poetry we cannot say as much ; and its traditions had
themselves become pedantry in another shape when Lcssing
made an end of it. He himself certainly learned to write prose
of Diderot ; and whatever Herr Stahr may think of it, his share
in the Letters on German Literature got its chief inspiration
from France.

It is in the Dramaturgie that Lessing first properly enters as
an influence into European literature. He may be said to have
begun the revolt from pseudo-classicism in poetry, and to have
been thus unconsciously the founder of romanticism. Wieland's
translation of Shakespeare had, it Is true, appeared in 1762;
but Lessing was the first critic whose profound knowledge of
the Greek drama and apprehension of its principles gave weight
to his judgment, whr recognised in what the true greatness of
the poet consisted, and found him to be really nearer the
Greeks than any other modern. This was because Lessing
looked always more to the life than the form — because he knew
the classics, and did not merely cant about them. But if the
authority of Lessing, by making people feel easy in their
admiration for Shakespeare, perhaps increased the influence of
his works, and if his discussions of Aristotle had given a
new starting-point to modern criticism, it may be doubted
whether the immediate eflfect on literature of his own critical
essays was so great as Herr Stahr supposes. Surely "Gotz"
and "The Robbers" are nothing like what he would have
called Shakespearian, and the whole Sturm und Drano
tendency would have roused in him nothing but antipathy.
Fixed principles in criticism are useful in helping us to form a
judgment of works already produced, but it is questionable
whether they are not rather a hindrance than a help to living

j,
II

304

LESSING.

production. Den Jonson was a fine critic, intimate with the
cltissics .IS few men have either the leisure or the strength of
mind to be in this age of many books, and built regular plays
long before they were heard of in France. But he continually
trips and falls flat over his metewand of classical propriety, his
personages are abstractions, and fortunately neither his precepts
nor his practice influenced any one of his greater coevals.* In
brc.idth of understanding, and the gravity of purpose that comes
of it, he was far above PMctcher or Webster, but how far below
either in the subtler, the incalculable, qualities of a dramatic
poet I Yet Ben, with his principles off, could soar and sing
with the best of them ; and there are strains in his lyrics which
Herrick, the most Catullian of poets since Catullus, could
imitate, but never match. A const.int reference to the statutes
which taste has codified would only bewilder the creative
instinct. Criticism can at best teach writers without genius
what is to be avoided or imitated. It cannot communicate
life ; and its eflfect, when reduced to rules, has commonly been
to produce that correctness which is so praiseworthy and so
intolerable. It cannot give taste, it can only demonstrate who
has had it. Lessing's essays in this kind were of service to
German literature by their manliness of style, whose example
was worth a hundred treatises, and by the stimulus there is in
all original thinking. Could he have written such a poem as
he was capable of conceiving, his influence would have been
far greater. It is the living soul, and not the metaphysical
abstraction of it, that is genetic in literature. If to do were as
easy as to know what were good to be done ! It was out of his

* It should be coiisiiU'red, by those sagucioim persons who thiuk that
the most marvellous intelktt of which we have auy record could not
master so much Latin and Greek as would serve a sophomore, that
Shakespeare must througli conversation have possessed himself of what-
ever i^rinciples of art Ben Jonson and the other university men had been
able to deduce from their study of tlie classics. That they sliould not
have discussed these matters over their sack at the Mermaid is
incredible ; that Shakesjieare, who left not a droji in auy orange he
squeezed, could not also have got all the juice out of this one, is even
r.iorc S3.

LESSING.

30s

I with the
trcngth of
;ular plays
:ontinuaUy
>priety, his
is precepts
:vals.* In
that comes
' far below
a dramatic
r and sinj;
y^rics which
lUus, could
he statutes
le crejitive
lout genius
>mmunicate
monly been
rthy and so
nstrate who
service to
se example
there is in
a poem as
have been
etaphysical
do were as
Is out of his

U think that
[rd could not
Ihomore, that
]self of what-
lien had been
^y slioidd not

Merniaid is
|iy orange he

one, is evcil

own failures to reach the ideal he saw so clearly, that LessinR
drev« the wisdom which made him so admirable a critic.
Even here, too, genius can profit by no experience but its
own.

For, in spite of Herr Stahr's protest, wc r:>ust acknowledge
the truth of Lessing's own characteristic confession, that he
was no poet. A man of genius he unquestionably was, if
genius may be claimed no less for force than fineness of mind
— for the intensity of conviction that inspires the understand-
ing as much as for that apprehension of beauty which gives
energy of will to imagination — but a poetic genius he was
not His mind kindled by friction in the process of thinking,
not in the flash 01 conception, and its delight is in demon-
stration, not in bodying forth. His prose can leap and run, his
verse is always thinking of its feet. Yet in his " Minna" and
his " Emilia,"* he shows one faculty of the dramatist, that of
construction, in a higher degree than any other German.t

* In "Minna" and "Emilia" Leasing followed the leail of Diderot.
In tbo Preface to tlie second edition of Diderot's Thfdtre, he says : " I am
very conscious that my caote, without Diderot's example and teaching,
would have taken quite another direction. Perhaps one more my own, yet
hardly one with which my understanding would in the long run have been
so well content" Diderot's choice of prose was dictated and justiQed by
the accentual poverty of his mother-tongue. Leasing certainly revised his
judgment on this point (for it was not equally applicable to German), and
wrote his maturer " Nathan" in what he took for blank vers*. There was
much kindred between the minds of the two men. Diderot always seems
to us a kind of deboshed Lessing. Leasing was also indebted to Burke,
Hume, the two Wartons, and Hurd, among other English writers. Not
that he borrowed anything of them but the quickening of his own thought.
It should be remembered that Rousseau was seventeen, Diderot and Sterne
sixteen, and Winckelmann twelve years older than Lessing. Wieland waH
four years younger.

t Goethe's appreciation of Lessing grew with his years. He writes to
Lavater, 18th March 1781: "Lessing's death has greatly depressed me.
I had much pleasure m him and much hope of hiir," This is a little
patronising in tone. But in the last year of his life, talking with
Eckermann, he naturally antedates his admiration, as reminiscence is
wont to do: "You can conceive what an eflfect this piece ('Minna') had

5
1'

V -^ -«-• ■

i i

h:i

306

ZESSING,

Here his critical deductions served him to some purpose. The
action moves rapidly, there is no speechifying, and the parts are
coherent. Both plays act better than anything of Goethe or
Schiller. But it is the story that interests us, and not the
characters. These are not, it is true, the incorporation of
certain ideas, or, still worse, of certain dogmas, but they
certainly seem something like machines by which the motive of
the play is carried on ; and there is nothing of that interplay of
plot and character which makes Shakespeare more real in the
closet than other dramatists, with all the helps of the theatre.
It is a striking illustration at once of the futility of mere critical
insight and of Lessing's want of imagination, that in the
"Emilia" he should have thought a Roman motive consistent
with modern habits of thought, and that in "Nathan" he should
have been guilty of anachronisms which violate not only the
accidental truth of fact, but the essential truth of character.
Even if we allowed him imagination, it must be only on the
lower plane of prose ; for of verse as anything more than so
many metrical feet he had not the faintr .it notion. Of that
exquisite sympathy with the movement of tiie mind, with every
swifter or slower pulse of passion, which proves it another
species from prose, the very d,<ppodlTri xal \vpa of speech, and not
merely a higher one, he wanted the fineness of sense to
conceive. If we compare the prose of Dante or Milton, though
both are eloquent, with their verse, we see at once which was
the most congenial to them. Lessing has passages of freer and
more harmonious utterance in some of his most careless prose
essays, than can be found in his " Nathan " from the first line to
the last. In the numeris lege solutis he is often snatched
beyond himself, and becomes truly dithyrambic ; in his
pentameters the march of the thought is comparatively
hampered and irresolute. His best things are not poetically

upon us young people. It yras, in fact, a shining meteor. It made us
aware that something higher existed than anything whereof that feehle
literary epoch liad a notion. The first two acts are tnily a masterpiece of
exposition, from which one learned much and can always learr,"

*•»>><'•«•«»«*"•

. 'H.«.wtiMMMwaifMMiaMMM

LESSING.

307

delicate, but have the tougher fibre of proverbs. Is it not
enough, then, to be a great prose-writer ? They are as rare as
great poets, and if Lessing have the gift to stir and to dilate
that something deeper than the mind which genius only can
reach, what matter if it be not done to music ? Of his minor
poems we need say little. Verse was always more or less
mechanical with him, and his epigrams are almost all stiff, as if
they were bad translations from the Latin. Many of them are
shockingly coarse, and in liveliness are on a level with those of
our Elizabethan period. Herr Stahr, of course, cannot bear to
give them up, even though Gervinus be willing. The prettiest
of his shorter poems (" Die Namen") has been appropriated by
Coleridge, who has given it a grace which it wants in the
original. His " Nathan," by a poor translation of which he is
chiefly known to English readers, is an Essay on Toleration
in the form of a dialogue. As a play, it has not the interest of
" Minna" or " Emilia," though the Germans, who have a praise-
worthy national stoicism where one of their great writers is
concerned, find in seeing it represented a grave satisfaction,
like that of subscribing to a monument. There is a sober
lustre of reflection in it that makes it very good reading ; but it
wants the molten interfusion of thought and phrase which only
imagination can achieve.

As Lessing's mind was continually advancing — always open
to new impressions, and capable, as very few are, of apprehend-
ing the many-sidedness of truth — as he had the rare quality of
being honest with himself— his works seem fragmentary, and
give at first an impression of incompleteness. But one learns at
length to recognise and value this very incompleteness as char-
acteristic of the man who was growing lifelong, and to whom
the selfish thought that any share of truth could be exclusively
his was an impossibility. At the end of the ninety-fifth number
of the Dramaturgie he says : — " I remind my readers here that
these pages are by no means intended to contain a dramatic
system. I am accordingly not bound to solve all the difficulties
which I raise. I am quite willing that my thoughts should seem
to want connection — r ay, even to contradict each other — if only

tummt^ifiK

5o8

LESSING.

there are thoughts in which they [my readers] 6nd material for
thinking themselves. I wish to do nothing more than scatter
the fermenta cognitionis!^ That is Lessing's great praise, and
gives its chief value to his works — a value, indeed, imperishable,
and of the noblest kind. No writer can leave a more precious
legacy to posterity than this ; and beside this shining merit all
mere literary splendours look pale and cold. There is that life
in Lessing's thought which engenders life, and not only thinks
for us, but makes us think. Not sceptical, but forever testing
and inquiring, it is out of the cloud of his own doubt that the
flash comes at last with sudden and vivid illumination Flashes
they indeed are, his finest intuitions, and of very different
quality from the equable north-light of the artist. He felt it,
and said it of himself, " Ever so many flashes of lightning do
noi. make daylight." We speak now of those more remember-
able passages where his highest individuality reveals itself in
what may truly be called a passion of thought. In the Laocoon
there is daylight of the serenest temper, and never was there a
better example of the discourse of reason, though even that is
also a fragment.

But it is as a nobly original man, even more than as an
original thinker, that Lessing is precious to us, and that he is so
considerable in German literature. In a higher sense, but in
the same kind, he is to Germans what Dr. Johnson is to us —
admirable for what he was. Like Johnson's, too, but still from
a loftier plane, a great deal of his thought has a direct bearing
on the immediate life and interests of men. His genius was
not a St. Elmo's fire, as it so often is with mere poets — as it was
in Shelley, for example, playing in ineffectual flame about the
points of his thought — but was interfused with his whole nature
and made a part of his very being. To the Germans, with their
weak nerve of sentimentalism, his brave common-sense is a far
wholesomer tonic than the cynicism of Heine, which is, after all,
only sentimentalism soured. His jealousy for maintaining the
just boundaries, whether of art or speculation, may warn them to
check with timely dikes the tendency of their thought to diffuse
inundation. Their fondness in aesthetic discussion for a nomen-

LESSING.

309

clature subtile enough to split a hair at which even a Thomist
would have despaired, is rebuked by the clear simplicity of his
style.* But he is no exclusive property of Germany. As a
complete man, constant, generous, full of honest courage, as a
hardy follower of Thought wherever she might lead him ; above
all, as a confessor of that Truth which is forever revealing itself
to the seeker, and is the more loved because never wholly
revealable, he is an ennobling possession of mankind. Let his
own striking words characterise him : —

" Not the truth of which anyone is, or supposes himself to be,
possessed, but the upright endeavour he has made to arrive at
truth, makes the worth of the man. For not by the possession,
but by the investigation, of truth are the powers expanded,
wherein alone his ever-growing perfection consists. Possession
makes us easy, indolent, proud.

" If God held all truth shut in his right hand, and in his left
nothing but the ever-restless instinct for truth, though with the
condition of for ever and ever erring, and should say to me.
Choose ! I should bow humbly to his left hand, and say. Father,
give ! pure truth is for Thee alone 1 "

It is not without reason that fame is awarded only after
death. The dust-cloud of notoriety which follows and envelops
the men who drive with the wind bewilders contemporary
judgment. Lessing, while he lived, had little reward for his
labour but the satisfaction inherent in uU work faithfully done ;
the highest, no doubt, of which human nature is capable, and
yet, perhaps, not so sweet as that sympathy of which the
world's praise is but an index. But if to perpetuate herself
beyond the grave in healthy and ennobling influences be the
noblest aspiration of the mind, and its fruition the only reward
she would have deemed worthy of herself, then is Lessing to be
counted thrice fortunate. Every year since he was laid prema-
turely in the earth has seen his power for good increase, and
made him more precious to the hearts and intellects of men.

'IL

i u

• Nothing can be droller than the occasional translation by Visclier of a
sentence of L issiug into his own jargon.

!/ 1

1 '■'

310

LESSING.

** Lessing/' said Goethe, " would have declined the lofty title of
a Genius ; but his enduring influence testifies against himself.
On the other hand, we have in literature other and indeed
important names of men who, while they lived, were esteemed
great geniuses, but whose influence ended with their lives, and
who, accordingly, were less than they and others thought. For,
as I have said, there is no genius without a productive power
that continues forever operative."*

* Eckermaan, OesprUche mit Goethe, ill., 229«

\ r

ROUSSEAU
AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS.

" VVTE have had the great professor and founder of the
▼^ philosophy of Vanity in England. As I had good
opportunities of knowing his proceedings almost from day to
day, he left no doubt ^a my mind that he entertained no
principle either to influence his heart or to guide his under-
standing but vanity ; with this vice he was possessed to a
degree little short of madness. Benevolence to the whole
species, and want of feeling for every individual with whom the
professors come in contact, form the character of the new
philosophy. Setting up for an unsocial independence, this
their hero of vanity refuses the just price of common labour,
as well as the tribute which opulence owes to genius, and
which, when paid, honours the giver and the receiver, and then
pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He melts with
tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest
relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a
sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours,
and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The
bear loves, licks, and forms her young ; but bears are not
philosophers."

This was Burke's opinion of the only contemporary who can
be said to rival him in fervid and sustained eloquence, to
surpass him in grace and persuasiveness of style. Perhaps we
should have been more thankful to him if he had left us instead

* Histoire dee Ideee Mwales et Politiques en France au XVIIIme SUde.
— Par M. Jules Barni, Professeiir a rAcadeiuie de Geneve. Tome ii.
Paris, 1867.

i
1)

M .

312

liOUSSEAU.

a record of those " proceedings almost from day to day " which
he had such " good opportunities of knowing," but it probably
never entered his head that posterity might care as much about
the doings of the citizen of Geneva as about the sayings of even
a British Right Honourable. Vanity eludes recognition by its
victims in more shapes, and more pleasing, than any other
passion, and perhaps had Mr. Burke been able imaginatively
to translate Swiss Jean Jacques into Irish Edmund, he would
have found no juster equivalent for the obnoxious trisyllable
than " righteous self-esteem." For Burke was himself also, in
the subtler sense of the word, a sentimentalist, that is, a man
who took what would now be called an aesthetic view of morals
and politics. No man who ever wrote English, except perhaps
Mr. Ruskin, more habitually mistook his own personal likes
and dislikes, tastes and distastes, for general principles, and
this, it may be suspected, is the secret of all meiely eloquent
writing. He hints at madness as an explanation of Rousseau,
and it is curious enough that Mr. Buckle was fain to explain
him in the same way. It is not, we confess, a solution that we
find very satisfactory in this latter case. Burke's fury against
the French Revolution was nothing more than was natural to a
desperate man in self-defence. It was his own life, or, at least,
all that made life dear to him, that was in danger. He had all
that abstract political wisdom which may be naturally secreted
by a magnanimous nature and a sensitive temperament,
absolutely none of that rough-and-tumble kind which is so
needful for the conduct of affairs. Fastidiousness is only
another form of egotism ; and all men who know not where to
look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own
image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking.
Burke's hatred of Rousseau was genuine and instinctive. It
was so genuine and so instinctive as no hatred can be but that
of self, of our own weaknesses as we see them in another man.
But there was also something deeper in it than this. There
was mixed with it the natural dread in the political diviner of
the political logician — in the empirical, of the theoretic states-
man. Burke, confounding the idea of society with the form of

..a»ifcv^-.,-,ii»»t^vi

hnnii>iiairiiiftu»>niftiutfr--'<iBI

ROUSSEAU.

3»3

IS. a man

it then existing, would have preserved that as the only specific
against anarchy. Rousseau, assuming that society as it then
existed was but another name for anarchy, would have recon-
stituted it on an ideal basis. The one has left behind him some
of the profoundest apl.orisms of political wisdom ; the other,
some of the clearest principles of political science. The one,
clinging to Divine right, found in the fact that things were, a
reason that they ought to be ; the other, aiming to solve the
problem of the Divine order, would deduce from that ab-
straction alone the claim of anything to be at all. There seems
a mere oppugnancy of nature between the two, and yet both
were, in different ways, the dupes of their own imaginations.

Now let us hear the opinion of a philosopher who was a bear,
whether bears be philosophers or not. Boswell had a genuine
relish for what was superior in any way, from genius to claret,
and of course he did not let Rousseau escape him. " One
evening at the Mitre, Johnson said sarcastically to me, ' It
seems, sir, you have kept very good company abroad —
Rousseau and Wilkes ! ' I answered with a smile, * My dear sir,
you don*t call Rousseau bad company ; do you really think ///;//
a bad man?' Johnson. 'Sir, if you are talking jestingly of
this, I don't talk with you. If you mean to be serious, I think
him one of the worst of men, a rascal who ought to be hunted
out of society, as he has been. Three or four nations have
expelled him, and it is a shame that he is protected in this
country. Rousseau, sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner
sign a sentence for his transportation than that of any felon
who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I
should like to have him work in the plantations.' " We were
the plantations then, and Rousseau was destined to work there
in another and much more wonderful fashion than the gruff old
Ursa Major imagined. However, there is always a refreshing
heartiness in his growl, a masculine bass with no snarl in it
The Doctor's logic is of that fine old crusted Port sort, the
native manufacture of the British conservative mind. Three or
four nations kave^ therefore England ought. A few years later,
had the Doctor been living, if three or four nations had treated

) .

^ :

1 ,

ROUSSEAU.

M.I

■' V

their kings as France did hers, would he have thought the ergo
a very stringent one for England ?

Mr. Burke, who could speak with studied respect of the
Prince of Wales, and of his vices with that charity which
thinketh no evil and can afford to think no evil of so important
a living member of the British Constitution, surely could
have had no unmixed moral repugnance for Rousseau's
"disgustful amours." It was because they were his that
they were so loathsome. Mr. Burke was a snob, though an
inspired one. Dr. Johnson, the friend of that wretchedest of
lewd fellows, Richard Savage, and of that gay man about
town, Topham Beauclerk — himself sprung from an amour
that would have been disgustful had it not been royal —
must also have felt something more in respect of Rousseau
than the mere repugnance of virtue for vice. We must some-
times allow to personal temperament its right of peremptory
challenge. Johnson had not that fine sensitiveness to the
political atmosphere which made Burke presageful of com-
ing tempest, but both of them felt that there was something
dangerous in this man. Their dislike has in it somewhat of the
energy of fear. Neither of them had the same feeling toward
Voltaire, the man of supreme talent, but both felt that what
Rousseau was possessed by was genius, with its terrible force
either to attract or repel.

" By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes."

Burke and Johnson were both of them sincere men, both of
them men of character as well as of intellectual force ; and we
cite their opinions of Rousseau with the respect which is due to
an honest conviction which has apparent grounds for its adop-
tion, whether we agree with it or no. But it strikes us as a
little singular that one whose life was so full of moral incon-
sistency, whose character is so contemptible in many ways, in
some we might almost say so revolting, should yet have
exercised so deep and lasting an influence, and on minds
so various, should still be an object of minute and earnest

If « I < i Mi'> ttt M immmmmmmmt

ROUSSEAU,

315

discussion — that he should have had such vigour in his intellec-
tual loins as to have been the father of Chateaubriand, Byron,
Lamartine, George Sand, and many more in literature, in
politics of Jefferson and Thomas Paine— that the spots he had
haunted should draw pilgrims so unlike as Gibbon and Napo-
leon, nay, should draw them still, after the lapse of near a
century. Surely there must have been a basis of sincerity in
this man seldom matched, if it can prevail against so many
reasons for repugnance, aversion, and even disgust. He could
not have been the mere sentimentalist and rhetorician for
which the rough-and-ready understanding would at first glance
be inclined to condemn him. In a certain sense he was both of
these, but he was something more. It will bring us a little
nearer the point we are aiming at if we quote one other and
more recent English opinion of him.

Mr. Thomas Moore, returning pleasantly in a travelling-car-
riage from a trip to Italy, in which he had never forgotten the
poetical shop at home, but had carefully noted down all the
pretty images that occurred to him for future use — Mr. Thomas
Moore, on his way back from a visit to his noble friend Byron,
at Venice, who had there been leading a life so gross as to be
talked about, even amid the crash of Napoleon's fall, and who
was just writing " Don Juan " for the improvement of the world
— Mr. Thomas Moore, fresh from the reading of Byron's
Memoirs^ which were so scandalous that, by some hocus-pocus,
three thousand guineas afterward found their way into his own
pocket for consenting to suppress them — Mr. Thomas Moore,
the ci-devant friend of the Prince Regent, and the author of
Lit le's Poems^ among other objects of pilgrimage visits Les
Charmettes, where Rousseau had lived with Madame de
Warens. So good an opportunity for occasional verses was
not to be lost, so good a text for a little virtuous moralising not
to be thrown away ; and acC(>rdingly Mr, Moore pours out
several pages of octosyllabic disgust at the sensuality of the
dead man of genius. There was no horror for Byron. Toward
him all was suavity and decorous biens^ar.ce. That lively sense
of benefits to be received made the Irish Anacreon wink with

111 *'■

li. <

316

KOUSSEAU.

both his little eyes. In the judgment of a liberal like Mr.
Moore, were not the errors of a lord excusable ? Dut with poor
Rousseau the case was very different, "^he son of a watch*
maker, an outca;:t from boyhood up, always on the perilous
edge of poverty — what right had he to indulge himself in any
immoralities? So it is always with the sentimentalists. It is
never the thing in itself that is bad or good, but the thing in its
relation to some conventional and mostly selfish standard.
Moore could be a moralist, in this case, without any trouble,
and with the advantage of winning Lord Lansdowne's approval;
he could write some graceful verses which everybody would
buy, and for the rest it is not hard to be a stoic in eight-syllable
measure and a travelling-carriage. The next dinner at Bowood
will taste none the worse. Accordingly he speaks of

" The mire, the strife
And vanities of this man's life,
Who more than all that e'er have glowed
With fancy's flame (and it wan his
In fullest warmth and radiance) showed
What an impostor Genius is ;
How, with that strong mimetic art
Which forms its liie and soul, it takes
All shapes of thought, all hues of heart,
Nor feels itself one throb it wakes ;
How, like a gem, its light may shine,
O'er the dark path by mortals trod,
Itself as mean a worm the while
As crawls at midnight o'er the sod ;

• • • • ' •

How, with the pencil hardly dry

From colouring up such scenes of love

And beauty as make young hearts sigh,

And dream and think through heaven they rove," etc., etc.

Very spirited, is it not ? One has only to overlook a little
threadbareness in the similes, and it is very good oratorical
verse. But would we believe in it, we must never read Mr.
Moore's own journal, and find out how thin a piece of veneering
his own life was — how he lived in sham till his very nature had
become subdued to it, till he could persuade himself tliat a

WWMaMilliaiOllrliil .

ROUSSEAU.

3>7

sham could be written into a reality, and actually made
experiment thereof in his Diar/.
One verse in this diatribe deserves a special comment —

'• What an impostor Genius Is i'

In two respects there is nothing to be objected to in it. It is of
eight syllables, .'\nd '*is" rhymes unexceptionnbly with "his."
But is there the least filament of truth in it ? We venture to
assert, not the least. It was not Rousseau's genius that was an
impostor. It was the one thing in him that was always true.
We grant that, in allowing that a man has genius. Talent is
that which is in a man's power ; genius is that in whose power
a man is. That is the very difference between them. We
might turn the tables on Moore, the man of talent, and say
truly enough, What an impostor talent is I Moore talks of the
mimetic power with a total misapprehension of what it really is.
The mimetic power had nothing whatever to do with the affair.
Rousseau had none of it ; Shakespeare had it in excess ; but
what difference would it make in our judgment of Hamlet or
Othello if a manuscript of Shakespeare's memoirs should turn
up, and we should find out that he had been a pitiful fellow ?
None in the world ; for he is not a professed moralist, and his
life does not give the warrant to his words. But if Demosthenes,
after all his Philippics, throws away his shield and runs, we feel
the contemptibleness ot the contradiction. With genius itself we
never find any fault. It would be an over-nicety that would do
that. We do not get invited to nectar and ambrosia so often
that we think of grumbling and saying we have better at home.
No ; the same genius that mastered him who wrote the poem
masters us in reading it, and we care for nothing outside the
poem itself. How the author lived, what he wore, how he
looked — all that is mere gossip, about which we need not
trouble ourselves. Whatever he was or did, somehow or
other God let him be worthy to write this^ and that is
enough for us. We forgive everything to the genius ; we
are inexorable to the man. Shakespeare, Goethe, Bums —
what have their biographies to do with us? Genius is not a

\ .

3i8

ROUSSEAU.

question of character. It may be sordid, like the lamp of
Aladdin, in its externals ; what care wc, while the touch of
it builds palaces for us, makes us rich as only men in dream-
land are rich, and lords to the utmost bound of imagination ?
So, when people talk of the ungrateful way in which the
world treats its geniuses, they speak unwisely. There is no
work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind,
no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have
not, sooner or later, responded. But the man whom the genius
takes possession of for its pen, for its trowel, for its pencil,
for its chisel, him the world treats according to his deserts.
Does Burns drink? It sets him to gauging casks of gin.
For, remember, it is not to the practical world that the genius
appeals ; it is the practical world which judges of the man's
fitness for its uses, and has a right so to judge. No amount
of patronage could have made distilled liquors less tooth-
some to Robbie Burns, as no amount of them could make
a Burns of the Ettrick Shepherd.

There is an old story in the Gesta Romanorum of a priest
who was found fault with by one of his parishioners because
his life was in painful discordance with his teaching. So one
day he takes his critic out to a stream, and, giving him to
drink of it, asks him if he does not find it sweet and ''pure
water. The parishioner, having answered that it was, is taken
to the source, and finds that what had so refreshed him flowed
from between the jaws of a dead dog. " Let this teach thee,"
said the priest, "that the very best doctrine may take its
rise in a very impure and disgustful spring, and that excellent
morals may be taught by a man who has no morals at all."
It is easy enough to see the fallacy here. Had the man
known beforehand from what a carrion fountain-head the
stream issued, he could not have drunk of it without loathing.
Had the priest merely bidden him to look at the stream and
see how beautiful it was, instead of tasting it, it would have
been quite another matter. And this is precisely the diflference
between what appeals to our zesthetic and to our moral sense,
between what is judged of by the taste and the conscience.

' tM^ i ^'^iM iltmiikiimmKmamiiimmiati

ROUSSEAU,

3»9

lamp of
touch of
n dream-
^rinalion ?
hich the
ere is no
mankind,
soul have
he genius
ts pencil,
is deserts.
:s of gin.
;he genius
the man's
[o amount
ess tooth-
)uld make

af a priest
rs because
So one
g him to
and 'pure
5, is taken
lim flowed
ach thee,"
take its
excellent
lis at all."
the man
head the
loathing,
ream and
uld have
Idifference
ral sense,
ence.

It is when the sentimentalist turns preacher of morals that
we investigate his character, and are justified in so doing.
He may express as many and as delicate shades of feeling
as he likes— for this the sensibility of his organisation perfectly
fits him, no other perso.i could d it so well — but the moment
he undertakes to establish his feeling as a rule of conduct
we ask at once how far are his own life and deeds in accordance
with what he prenches ? For every man feels instinctively
that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than
a single lovely action ; and that while tenderness of feeling
and susceptibility to generous emotions are accidents of tem-
perament, goodness is an achievement of the will and a quality
of the life. Fine words, says our homely old proverb, butter
no parsnips ; and if the question be how to render those
vegetables palatable, an ounce of butter would be worth
more than all the orations of Cicero. The only conclusive
evidence of a man's sincerity is that ht give himself {or a
principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively
easy to give away ; but when a man makes a gift of his daily
life and practice, it is plain that the truth, whatever it may
be, has taken possession of him. From that sincerity his
words gain the force and pertinency of deeds, and his money
is no longer the pale drudge 'twixt man and man, but, by
a beautiful magic, what erewhile bore the image and super-
scription of Caesar seems now to bear the image and
superscription of God. It is thus that there is a genius for
goodness, for magnanimity, for self-sacrifice, as well as for
creative art ; and it is thus that by a more refined sort of
Platonism the Infinite Beauty dwells in and shapes to its own
likeness the soul which gives it body and individuality. But
when Moore charges genius with being an impostor, the con-
fusion of his ideas is pitiable. There is nothing so true, so
sincere, so downright and forthright, as genius. It is always
truer than the man himself is, greater than he. If Shakespeare
the man had been as marvellous a creature as the genius that
wrote his plays, that genius so comprehensive in its intelli'^ence,
so wise even in its play, that its clowns are moralists and

3*0

ROUSSEAU,

V !

philosophers, so penetrative that a single one of its phrases
reveals to us the secret of our own character, would his contem-
poraries have left us so wholly without record of him as they
have done, distinguishing him in no wise from his fellow-
players ?

Rousseau, no doubt, was weak, nay, more than that, was
sometimes despicable, but yet is not fairly to be reckoned
among the herd of sentimentalists. It is shocking that a man
whose preaching made it fashionable for women of rank to nurse
their own children should have sent his own, as soon as born,
to the foundling hospital, still more shocking that, in a note to
his Discours sur rJndgaliti^ he should speak of this crime as
one of the consequences of our social system. But for all that
there was a faith and an ardour of conviction in him that distin-
guish him from most of the writers of his time. Nor were his
practice and his preaching always inconsistent. He contrived
to pay regularly, whatever his own circumstances were, a
pension of one hundred livres a-year to a maternal aunt who
had been kind to him in childhood. Nor was his asceticism a
sham. He might have turned his gift into laced coats and
chdteaux as easily as Voltaire, had he not held it too sacred to
be bartered away in any such losing exchange.

But what is worthy of especial remark is this — that in nearly
all that he wrote his leading object was the good of his kind,
and that through all the vicissitudes of a life which illness,
sensibility of temperament, and the approaches of insanity
rendered wretched — the associate of infidels, the foundling
child, as it were, of an age without belief, least of all in itself —
he professed and evidenty felt deeply a faith in the goodness
both of man and of God. There is no such thing as scoffing in
his writings. On the other hand, there is no stereotyped
morality. He does not ignore the existence of scepticism ; he
recognises its existence in his own nature, meets it frankly face
to face, and makes it confess that there are things in the
teaching of Christ that are deeper than its doubt. The influence
of his early education at Geneva is apparent here. An intellect
so acute as his, trained in the school of Calvin in a republic

£WiMiMtMKMMIMtMMlMaiMiwn«

ROUSSEAU,

3*1

where theological discussion was as much the amusement of the
people as the opera was at Paris, could not fail to be a good
logician. He had the fortitude to follow his logic wherever it
led him. If the very impressibility of character which quickened
his perception of the beauties of nature, and made him alive to
the charm of music and musical expression, prevented him from
being in the highest sense an original writer, and if his ideas
were mostly suggested to him by books, yet the clearness, con-
secutiveness, and eloquence with which he stated and enforced
them made them his own. There was at least that original fire
in him which could fuse them and run them in a novel mould.
His power lay in this very ability of manipulating the thoughts
of others. Fond of paradox he doubtless was, but he had a way
of putting things that arrested attention and excited thought.

It was, perhaps, this very sensibility of the surrounding
atmosphere of feeling and speculation, which made Rousseau
more directly influential on contemporary thought (or perhaps
we should say sentiment) than any writer of his time. And this
is rarely consistent with enduring greatness in literature. It
forces us to remember, against our will, the oratorical character
of his works. They were all pleas, and he a great advocate,
with Europe in the jury-box. Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm,
eloquence produces conviction for the moment, but it is only by
truth to nature and the everlasting intuitions of mankind that
those abiding influences are won that enlarge from generation
to generation. Rousseau was in many respects — as great
pleaders always are — a man of the day, who must needs become
a mere name to posterity, yet he could not but have had in him
some not inconsiderable share of that principle by which man
eternises himself. For it is only to such that the night cometh
not in which no man shall work, and he is still operative both
in politics and literature by the principles he formulated or
the emotions to which he gave a voice so piercing and so
sympathetic.

In judging Rousseau, it would be unfair not to take note of
the malarious atmosphere in which he grew up. The con-
stitution of his mind was thus early infected with a feverish

571

I '

322

ROUSSEAU.

taint that made him shiveringly sensitive to a temperature
which hardier natures found bracing. To him this rough world
was but too literally a rack. Good-humoured Mother Nature
commonly imbeds the nerves of her children in a padding of
self-conceit that serves as a buffer against the ordinary shocks
to which even a life of routine is liable, and it would seem at
first sight as if Rousseau had been better cared for than usual
in this regard. But as his self-conceit was enormous, so was
the reaction from it proportionate, and the fretting suspicious-
ness of temper, sure mark of an unsound mind, which rendered
him incapable of intimate friendship, while passionately longing
for it, became inevitably, when turned inward, a tormenting
self-distrust To dwell in unrealities is the doom of the senti-
mentalist ; but it should not be forgotten that the same fitful
intensity of emotion which makes them real as the means of
elation, gives them substance also for torture. Too irritably
jealous to endure the rude society of men, he steeped his senses
in the enervating incense that women are only too ready to
burn. If their friendship be a safeguard to the other sex, their
homage is fatal to all but the strongest, and Rousseau was
weak both by inheritance and early training. His father was
one of those feeble creatures for whom a fine phrase could
always satisfactorily fill the void that non-performance leaves
behind it. If he neglected duty, he made up for it by that
cultivation of the finer sentiments of our common nature which
waters flowers of speech with the brineless tears of a flabby
remorse, without one fibre of resolve in it, and which im-
povarisiies the character in proportion as it enriches the
vocabulary. He was a very Apicius in that digestible kind of
woe which makes no man leaner, and had a favourite receipt
for cooking you up a sorrow cL la douleur inassouvie that had
just enough delicious sharpness in it to bring tears into the eyes
by tickling the palate. '* When he said to me, * Jean Jacques,
let us speak of thy mother,' I said to him, * Well, father, we are
going to weep, then,' and this word alone drew tears from him.
* Ah I ' said ne, groaning, * give her back to me, console me for
her, fiU the void she has left in my soul I '" Alas ! in such cases,

ROUSSEAU,

the void she leaves is only that sl.e found. The grief that seeks
any other than its own society will ere long want an object.
This admirable parent allowed his son to become an outcast at
sixteen, without any attempt to reclaim him, in order to enjoy
unmolested a petty inheritance to which the boy was entitled in
right of his mother. " This conduct," Rousseau tells us, " of a
father whose tenderness and virtue were so well known to me
caused me to make reflections on myself which have not a little
contributed to make my heart sound. I drew from it this great
maxim of morals, the only one perhaps serviceable in practice,
to avoid situations which put our duties in opposition to our
interest, and which show us our own advantage in the wrong of
another, sure that in such situations, however sincere may be
one*s love of virtue^ it sooner or later grows weak v/ithout our
perceiving it, and that we become unjust and wicked in .^..j.t
withott having ceased to be just and good in souV^

This maxim may do for that " fugitive and cloistered virtue,
unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks its
adversary," which Milton could not praise — that is, for a man-
hood whose distinction it is not to be manly — but it is chiefly
worth notice as being the characteristic doctrine of senti-
mentalism. This disjoining of deed from will, of practice from
theorv; 'S tc put asunder what God has joined by an indissoluble
sacrament. The soul must be tainted before the action become
corrupt ; and there is no self-delusion more fatal than that
which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty
sentiments, while the life is grovelling and sensual — witness
Coleridge. In his case we feel something like disgust. But
where, as in his son Hartley, there is hereditary infirmity,
where the man sees the principle that might rescue him slip
from the clutch of a nerveless will, like a rope through the
fingers of a drowning wan, and the confession of fr^jtn is the
moan of despair, there is room for no harsher feeling than pity.
Rousseau showed through life a singular proneness for being
convinced by his own eloquence ; he was always his own first
convert ; and this reconciles his power as a writer with his
weakness as a man. He and all like him mistake emotion for

3«4

ROUSSEAU,

■ 1

conviction, velleity for resolve, the brief eddy of sentiment for
the mid-current of ever-gathering faith in duty that draws to
itself all the affluents of conscience and will, and gives con-
tinuity of purpose to life. They are like men who love the
stimulus of being under conviction, as it is called, who, forever
getting religion, never get capital enough to retire upon and
spend for their own need and the common service.

The sentimentalist is the spiritual hypochondriac, with whom
fancies become facts, while facts are a discomfort because they
will not be evaporated into fancy. In his eyes. Theory is too
fine a dame to confess even a country-cousinship with coarse-
handed Practice, whose homely ways would disconcert her
artificial world. The very susceptibility that makes him quick
to feel, makes him also incapable of deep and durable feeling.
He loves to think he suffers, and keeps a pet sorrow, a blue-
devil familiar, that goes with him everywhere, like Paracelsus's
black dog. He takes good care, however, that it shall not be
the true sulphurous article that sometimes takes a fancy to fly
away with his conjurer. Rend says : " In my madness I had
gone so far as even to wish I might experience a misfortune,
so that my suffering might at least have a real object"
But no ; selfishness is only active egotism, and there is
nothing and nobody, with a single exception, which this sort
of creature will not sacrifice, rather than give any other
than an imaginary pang to his idol. Vicarious pain he is not
unwilling to endure, nay, will ever, commit suicide by proxy,
like the German poet who let his wife kill herself to give him a
sensation. Had young Jerusalem been anything like Goethe's
portrait of him in Werther, he would have taken very good care
not to blow out the brains which he would have thought only
too precious. Real sorrows are uncomfortable things, but
purely aesthetic ones are by no means unpleasant, and I have
always fancied the handsome young Wolfgang writing those
distracted letters to Auguste Stolberg with a looking-glass in
front of him to give back an image of his desolation, and finding
it rather pleasant than otherwise to shed the tear of sympathy
with self that would seem so bitter to his fair correspondent.

ROUSSEAU,

325

The tears that have real salt in them will keep ; they are the
difficult) ipanly tears that are shed in secret ; but the pathos
soon evaporates from that fresh-water with which a man can
bedew a dead donkey in public, while his wife is having a good
cry over his neglect of her at home. We do not think the
worse of Goethe for hypotheticaliy desolating himself in the
fashion aforesaid, for with many constitutions it is as purely
natural a crisis as dentition, which the stronger worry through,
and turn out very sensible, agreeable fellows. But where there
is an arrest of development, and the heartbreak of the patient
is audibly prolonged through life, we have a spectacle which
the toughest heart would wish to get as far away from as
possible.

We would not be supposed to overlook the distinction, too
often lost sight of, between sentimentalism and sentiment, the
latter being a very excellent thing in its way, as genuine things
are apt to be. Sentiment is intellectualised emotion, emotion
precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy. This is
the delightful staple of the poets of social life like Horace .:~d
Bdranger, or Thackerary, when he too rarely played with verse.
It puts into words for us that decorous average of feeling to the
expression of which society can consent without danger of being
indiscreetly moved. It is excellent for people who are willing
to save their souls alive to any extent that shall not be
discomposing. It is even satisfying till some deeper exptrience
has given us a hunger which what we so glibly call " the world "
cannot sate, just as a water-ice is nourishment enough to a man
who has had his dinner. It is the sufficing lyrical interpreter
of those lighter hours that should make part o^ every healthy
man's day, and is noxious only when it palls men's appetite for
the truly profound poetry which is very passion of very soul
sobered by afterthought and embodied in eternal types by
imagination. True sentiment is emotion ripened by a slow
ferment of the mind and qualified to an agreeable temperance
by that taste which is the conscience of polite society. But the
sentimentalist always insists on taking his emotion neat, and,
as his sense gradually deadens to the stimulus, increases his

"""••'^"'•'"•'^'*'-~

326

ROUSSEAU,

dose till he ends in a kind of moral deliquium. At first the
debaucher, he becomes at last the victim of his sensations.

Among the ancients we find no trace of sentimentalism.
Their masculine mood both of body and mind left no room for
it, and hence the bracing quality of their literature compared
with that of recent times, its tonic property, that seems almost
too astringent to palates relaxed by a daintier diet. The first
great example of the degenerate modern tendency was Petrarch,
who may be said to have given it impulse and direction. A
more perfect specimen of the type has not since appeared. An
intellectual voluptuary, a moral dilettante^ the first instance
of that character, since too common, the gentleman in search
of a sensation, seeking a solitude at Vaucluse because it made
him more likely to be in demand at Avignon, praising
philosophic poverty with a sharp eye to the next rich benefice
in the gift of his patron, commending a good life but careful
first of a good living, happy only in seclusion but making a
dangerous journey to enjoy the theatrical show of a coronation
in the Capitol, cherishing a fruitless passion which broke his
heart three or four times a year, and yet could not make an end
of him till he had reached the ripe age of seventy and survived
his mistress a quarter of a century — surely a more exquisite
perfection of inconsistency would be hard to find.

When Petrarch returned from his journey into the North of
Europe in 1332, he balanced the books of his unrequited
passion, and, finding that he had now been in love seven years,
thought the time had at last come to call deliberately on Death.
Had Death taken him at his word, he would have protested that
he was only in fun. For we find him always taking good care of
an excellent constitution, avoiding the plague with commend-
able assiduity, and in the very year when he declares it
absolutely essential to his peace of mind to die for good and
all, taking refuge in the fortress of Capranica, from a whole-
some dread of having his throat cut by robbers. There is such
a difference between dying in a sonnet with a cambric handker-
chief at one's eyes, and the prosaic reality of demise certified in
the parish register ! Practically it is inconvenient to be dead.

ROUSSEAU,

3*7

Among other things, it puts an end to the manufacture of
sonnets. But there seems to have been an excellent under-
standing between Petrarch and Death, for he was brought to
that grisly monarch's door so often, that, otherwise, nothing
short of a miracle or the nine lives of that animal whom love
also makes lyrical could have saved him. "I consent," he
cries, "to live and die in Africa among its serpents, upon
Caucasus, or Atlas, if, while I live, to breathe a pure air, and
after my death a little corner of earth where to bestow my
b dy, may be allowed me. This is all I ask, but this I cannot
obtain. Doomed alwtiys to wander, and to be a stranger
everywhere, O Fortune, Fortune, fix me at last to some one
spot I I do not covet thy favours. Let me enjoy a tranquil
poverty, let me pass in this retreat the few days that remain to
me ! " The pathetic stop of Petrarch's poetical organ was one
he could pull out at pleasure — and indeed we soon learn to
distrust literary tears, as the cheap subterfuge for want of real
feeling with natures of this quality. Solitude with him was but
the pseudonyme of notoriety. Poverty was the archdeaconry
of Parma, with other ecclesiastical pickings. During his retreat
at Vaucluse, in the very height of that divine sonneteering love
of Laura, of that sensitive purity which called Avignon
Babylon, and rebuked the sinfulness of Clement, he was
himself begetting that kind of children which we spell with a
b. We believe that, if Messer Francesco had been present
when the woman was taken in adultery, he would have flung
the first stone without the slightest feeling of inconsistency,
nay, with a sublime sense of virtue. The truth is, that it made
very little difference to him what sort of proper sentiment he
expressed, provided he couid do it elegantly and with unction.

Would any one feel the difference between his faint
abstractions and the Platonism of a powerful nature fitted
alike for the withdrawal of ideal contemplation and fur breast-
ing the storms of life — would any one know how wide a depth
divides a noble friendship based on sympathy of pursuit and
aspiration, on that mutual help which souls capable of self-
sustainment are the readiest to give or to take, and a simulated

'iti^tgttiiiif(:' :-~' ' --v.

328

ROUSSEAU.

passion, true neither to the spiritual nor the sensual part of
man — let him compare the sonnets of Petrarch with those
which Michel Angelo addressed to Vittoria Colonna. In
them the airiest pinnacles of sentiment and speculation are
buttressed with solid mason-work of thought, and of an actual,
not fancied, experience, and the depth of feeling is measured
by the sobriety and reserve of expression, while in Petrarch's
all ingenuousness is frittered away into ingenuity. Both are
cold, but the coldness of the one is self-restraint, while the
other chills with pretence of warmth. In Michel Angelo's, you
feel the great architect ; in Petrarch's, the artist who can best
realise his conception in the limits of a cherry-stone. And yet
this man influenced literature longer and more widely than
almost any other in modern times. So great is the charm
of elegance, so unreal is the larger part of what is written 1

Certainly I do not mean to say that a work of art should be
looked at by the light of the artist's biography, or measured
by our standard of his character. Nor do I reckon what was
genuine in Petrarch — his love of letters, his refinement, his skill
in the superficial graces of language, that rhetorical art by
which the music of words supplants their meaning, and the
verse moulds the thought instead of being plastic to it — after
any such fashion. I have no ambition for that character of
valet de chambre which is said to disenchant the most heroic
figures into mere everyday personages, for it implies a mean
soul no less than a sert^ile condition. But we have a right to
demand a certain amount of reality, however small, in the
emotion of a man who makes it his business to endeavour at
exciting our own. We have a privilege of nature lo shiver
before a painted flame, how cunningly soever the cc lours be
laid un. Yet our love of minute biographical detail, our desire
to make ourselves spies upon the men of the past, seems so
much of an instinct in us, that we must look for the spring of
it in human nature, and that somewhat deeper than mere
curiosity or love of gossip. It should seem to arise from what
must be considered on the whole a creditable feeling — namely,
that we value character more than any amount of talent — the

ROUSSEAU,

329

il part of
^ith those
>nna. In
[at ion are
\r\ actual,
measured
Petrarch's
Both are
whilie the
elo's, you
I can best
And yet
lely than
e charm
en 1

hould be
neasured
ivhat was
, his skill
1 art by
and the
it— after
-acter of
It heroic
a mean
right to
, in the
avour at
) shiver
ours be
r desire
3ems so
pring of
n mere
m what
namely,
nt— the

skill to be something, above that of doing anything but the best
of its kind. The highest creative genius, and that only, is
privileged from arrest by this personality, for there the thing
produced is altogether disengaged from the producer. But in
natures incapable of this escape from themselves, the author is
inevitably mixed with his work, and we have a feeling that the
amount of his sterling character is the security for the notes he
issues. Especially we feel so when truth to self, which is
always self-forgetful, and not truth to nature, makes an essential
part of the value of what is offered us ; as where a man
undertakes to narrate personal experience or to enforce a
dogma. This is particularly true as respects sentimentalists,
because of their intrusive self-consciousness ; for there is no
more universal characteristic of human nature than the instinct
of men to apologise to themselves for themselves, and to justify
personal failings by generalising them into universal laws. A
man would be the keenest devil's advocate against himself,
were it not that he has always taken a retaining fee for the
defence ; for we think that the indirect and mostly unconscious
pleas in abatement which we read between the lines in the
works of many authors are oftener written to set themselves
right in their own eyes than in those of the world. And in the
real life of the sentimentalist it is the same. He is under the
wretched necessity of keeping up, at least in public, the
character he has assumed, till he at last reaches that last shift
of bankrupt self-respect, to play the hypocrite with himself.
Lamartine, after passing round the hat in Europe and America,
takes to his bed from wounded pride when the French senate
votes him a subsidy, and sheds tears of humiliation. Ideally
he resents it ; in practical coin, he will accept the shame
without a wry face.

George Sand speaking of Rousseau's Confessions^ says that an
autobiographer always makes himself the hero of his own novel,
and cannot help idealising, even if he would. But the weak point
of all sentimentalists is that they always have been, and always
continue under every conceivable circumstance to be, their own
ideals, whether they are writing their own lives or no. Rousseau

330

nOUSSEAU,

opens his book with the statement : •* I am not made like any of
those I have seen ; I venture to beheve myself unlike any that
exists. If I am not worth more, at least I am different." O
exquisite cunning of self-flattery I It is this very imagined
difference that makes us worth more in our own foolish sight.
For while all men are .apt to think, or to persuade themselves that
they think, all other men their accomplices in vice or weakness,
they are not difficult of belief that they are singular in any quality
or talent on which they hug themselves. More than this ; people
who are truly original are the last to find it out, for the moment
we become conscious of a virtue it has left us or is getting
ready to go. Originality does not consist in a fidgety assertion
of selfhood, but in the faculty of getting rid of it altogether, that
the truer genius of the man, which commerces with universal
nature and with other souls through a common sympathy with
that, may take all his powers wholly to itself — and the truly
original man could no more be jealous of his peculiar gift, than
the grass could take credit to itself for being green. What is
the reason that all children are geniuses (though they contrive
so soon to outgrow that dangerous quality), except that they
never cross-examine themselves on the subject ? The moment
that process begins, their speech loses its gift of unexpectedness,
and they become as tediously impertinent as the rest of us.

If there never was anyone like him, if he constituted a genius
in himself, to what end write confessions in which no other
human being could ever be in a condition to take the least
possible interest? All men are interested in Montaigne in
proportion as all men find more of themselves in him, and all
men see but one image in the glass which the greatest of poets
holds up to nature, an image which at once startles and charms
them with its familiarity. Fabulists always endow their
animals with the passions and desires of men. But if an ox
could dictate his confessions, what glimmer of understanding
should we find in those bovine confidences, unless on some
theory of pre-existence, some blank misgiving of a creature
moving about in wor'ds not realised? The truth is, that we
recognise the common humanity of Rousseau in the very

ROUSSEAU.

33«

nkness that betrayed him into this conceit of himself; we
Hnd he is just iilce the rest of us in this very assumption of
essential difference, for among all animals man is the only one
who tries to pass for more than he is, and so involves himself in
the condemnation of seeming less.

But it would be sheer waste of time to hunt Rousseau
through all his doublings of inconsistency, and run him to
earth in every new paradox. His first two books attacked, one
of them literature, and the other society. But this did not
prevent him from being diligent with his pen, nor from availing
himself of his credit with persons who enjoyed all the
advantages of that inequality whose evils he had so pointedly
exposed. Indeed, it is curious how little practical communism
there has been, how few professors it has had who would not
have gained by a general dividend. It is perhaps no frantic
effort of generosity in a philosopher with ten crowns in his
pocket when he offers to make common stock with a neighbour
who has ten thousand of yearly income, nor is it an uncommon
thing to see such theories knocked clean out of a man's head by
the descent of a thumping legacy. But, consistent or not,
Rousseau remains permanently interesting as the highest and
most perfect type of the sentimentalist of genius. His was
perhaps the acutest mind that was ever mated with an organisa-
tion so diseased, the brain most far-reaching in speculation that
ever kept itself steady and worked out its problems amid such
disordered tumult of the nerves.* His letter to the Archbishop
of Paris, admirable for its lucid power and soberness of tone,
and his Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques^ which no man can read
and believe him to have been sane, show him to us in his
strength and weakness, and give us a more charitable, let us
hope therefore a truer, notion of him than his own apology for
himself. That he was a man of genius appears unmistakably in
his impressibility by the deeper meaning of the epoch in which
he lived. Before an eruption, clouds steeped through and
through with electric life gather over the crater, as if in

Perhaps we should except Newton.

33 »

JiOUSSEAU.

sympathy and expectation. As the mountain heaves and cracks,
these vapoury masses are seamed with fire, as if they felt and
answered the dumb agony that is struggling for utterance below.
Just such flashes of eager sympathetic fire break continually
from the cloudy volumes of Rousseau, the result at once and the
warning of that convulsion of which Paris was to be the crater
and all Europe to feel the spasm. There are symptoms enough
elsewhere of that want of faith in the existing order which made
the Revolution inevitable — even so shallow an observer as
Horace Walpole could forebode it so early as 1765— but
Rousseau more than all others is the unconscious expression
ot he groping after something radically new, the instinct for a
change that should be organic and pervade every fibre of the
social and political body. Freedom of thought owes far more to
the jester Voltaire, who also had his solid kernel of earnest, than
to the sombre Genevese, whose earnestness is of the deadly
kind. Yet, for good or evil, the latter was the lather of
modern democracy, and without him our Declaration of
Independence would have wanted some of those sentences
in which the immemorial longings of the poor and the
dreams of solitary enthusiasts were at last afHrmed as
axioms in the manif^^sto of a nation, so that all the world
might hear.

Though Rousseau, like many other fanatics, had a remarkable
vein of common-sense in him (witness his remarks on duelling,
on landscape-gardening, on French poetry, and much of his
thought on education), we cannot trace many practical results to
his teaching, least of all in politics. For the great difficulty
with his system, if system it may be called, is, that, while it
professes tc follow nature, it not only assumes as a starting-
point that the individual man may be made over again, but
proceeds to the conclusion that man himself, that human
nature, must be made over again, and governments remodelled
on a purely theoretic basis. But when something like an
experiment in this direction was made in 1789, not only did
it fail as regarded man in general, but even as regards the
particular variety of man that inhabited France. The Revolution

JiOUSSEAU.

333

accomplished many changes, and beneficent ones, yet it left
France peopled, not by a new race without traditions, but by
Frenchmen. Still, there could not but be a wonderful force in
the words of a man who, above all others, had the secret of
making abstractions glow with his own fervour ; and his ideas
— dispersed now in the atmosphere of thought— have influenced,
perhaps still continue to influence, speculative minds, which
prefer swift and sure generalisation to hesitating and doubtful
experience.

Rousseau has, in one respect, been utterly misrepresented and
misunderstood. Even Chateaubriand most unfllially classes
him and Voltaire together. It appears to mc that the inmost
core of his being was religious. Had he remained in the
Catholic Church he might have been a saint. Had he come
earlier, he might have founded an order. His was precisely
the nature on which religious enthusiasm takes the strongest
hold — a temperament which finds a sensuous delight in spiritual
things, and satisfies its craving for excitement with celestial
debauch. He had not the iron temper of a great reformer and
organiser like Knox, who, true Scotchman that he was, found a
way to weld this world and the other together in a cast-iron
creed ; but he had as much as any man ever had that gift of a
great preacher to make the oratorical fervour which persuades
himself while it lasts into the abiding conviction of his hearers.
That very persuasion of his, that the soul could remain pure
while he life was corrupt, is not unexampled among men who
have left holier names than he. His Confessions^ also, would
assign him to that class with whom the religious sentiment is
strong, and the moral nature weak. They are apt to believe
that they may, as special pleaders say, confess and avoid.
Hawthorne has admirably illustrated this in the penance of Mr.
Dimmesdale. With all the soil that is upon Rousseau, I cannot
help looking on him as one capable beyond any in his gener-
ation of being divinely possessed ; and if it happened otherwise,
when we remember the much that hindered and the little that
helped in a life and time like his, we shall be much readier
to pity than to condemn. It was his very fitness for being

334

ROUSSEAU,

something better that makes him able to shock us so with whac in
too many respects he unhappily was. Less gifted, he had been
less hardly judged. More than any other of the sentimentalists,
except possibly Sterne, he had in him a staple of sincerity.
Compared with Chateaubriand, he is honesty, compared with
Lamartine, he is manliness itself. His nearest congener in our
own tongue is Cowper.

In the whole school there is a sickly taint. The strongest
mark which Rousseau has left upon literature is a sensibility to
the picturesque in Nature, not with Nature as a strengthener
and consoler, a wholesome tonic for a mind ill at ease with
itself, but with Nature as a kind of feminine echo to the mood,
flattering it with sympathy rather than correcting it with rebuke
or lifting it away from its unmanly depression, as in the whole-
somer fellow-feeling of Wordsworth. They seek in her an
accessory, and not a reproof. It is less a sympathy with
Nature than a sympathy with ourselves as we compel her to
reflect us. It is solitude, Nature for her estrangement from
man, not for her companionship with him — it is desolation and
ruin. Nature as she has triumphed over man — with which this
order of mind seeks communion, and in which it flnds solace.
It is with the hostile and destructive power of matter, and not
with the spirit of life and renewal that dwells in it, that they ally
themselves. And in human character it is the same. St.
Preux, Ren^, Werther, Manfred, Quasimodo — they are all
anomalies, distortions, ruins ; so much easier is it to carica-
ture life from our own sickly conception of it, than to paint
it in its noble simplicity ; so much cheaper is unreality than
truth.

Every man is conscious that he leads two lives— the one
trivial and ordinary, the other sacred and recluse ; one which
he carries to society and the dinner-table, the other in which his
youth and aspiration survive for him, and which is a confidence
between himself and God. Both may be equally sincere, and
there need be no contradiction between them, any more than
in a healthy man between soul and body. If the higher life be
real and earnest, its result, whether in literature or affairs, will

ROUSSEAU,

335

be real and earnest too. But no man can produce great things
who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself, who
would not exchange the finest show for the poorest reality, who
does not so love his work that he is not only glad to give him-
self for it, but finds rather a gain than a sacrifice in the sur-
render. The sentimentalist does not think of what he does
so much as of what the world will think of what he does. He
translates should into would, looks upon the spheres of duty
and beauty as alien to each other, and can never learn how life
rounds itself to a noble completeness between these two opposite
but mutually sustaining poles of what we long for and what we
must.

Did Rousseau, then, lead a life of this quality? Perhaps,
when we consider the contrast which every man who looks
backward must feel between the life he planned and the life
which circumstance within him and without him has made for
him, we should rather ask. Was this the life he meant to lead ?
Perhaps, when we take into account his faculty of self-deception
— it may be no greater than our own — we should ask. Was this
the life he believed he led ? Have we any right to judge this
man after our blunt English fashion, and condemn him, as we
are wont to do, on the finding of a jury of average house-
holders ? Is French reality precisely our reality ? Could we
tolerate tragedy in rhymed alexandrines, instead of blank verse ?
The whole life of Rousseau is pitched on this heroic key, and
for the most trivial occasion he must be ready with the sublime
sentiments that are supposed to suit him rather than it. It is
one of the most curious features of the sentimental ailment,
that, while it shuns the contact of men, it courts publicity. In
proportion as solitude and communion with self lead the
sentimentalist to exaggerate the importance of his own person-
ality, he comes to think that the least event connected with it is
of consequence to his fellow-men. If he change his shirt, he
would have mankind aware of it. Victor Hugo, the greatest
living representative of the class, considers it necessary to let
the world know by letter from time to time his opinions on
every conceivable subject about which it is not asked nor is of

33^

ROUssEAr;.

i" '

the least value unless we concede to him an immediate
inspiration. We men of colder blood, in whom self-conscious-
ness takes the form of pride, and who have deified mauvatse
honte as if our defect were our virtue, find it especially hard to
understand that artistic impulse of more southern races to pose
themselves properly on every occasion, and not even to die
without some tribute of deference to the taste of the world they
are leaving. Was not even mighty Caesar's last thought of his
drapery ? Let us not condemn Rousseau for what seems to us
the indecent exposure of himself in his Confessions.

Those who allow an oratorical and purely conventional side
disconnected with our private understanding of the facts, and
with life, in which everything has a wholly parliamentary
sense where truth is made subservient to the momentary
exigencies of eloquence, should be charitable to Rousseau.
While we encourage a distinction which establishes two kinds
of truth, one for the world, and another for the conscience,
while we take pleasure in a kind of speech that has no relation
to the real thought of speaker or hearer, but to the rostrum
only, we must not be hastv to condemn a sentimentalism which
we do our best to foster. Ve listen in public with the gravity
of augurs to what we smile at v/hen we meet a brother adept.
France is the native land of eulogy, of truth padded out to the
size and shape demanded by comme-il-faut. The French
Academy has, perhaps, done more harm by the vogue it has
given to this style, than it has done good by its literary purism ;
for the best purity of a language depends on the limpidity of its
source in veracity of thought. Rousseau was in many respects
a typical Frenchman, and it is not \.u be wondered at if he too
often fell in with the fashion of saying what was expected of
him, and what he thought due to the situation, rather than
what would have been true to his inmost consciousness.
Perhaps we should allow something also to the influence of a
Calyinistic training, which certainly heips men who have the
least natural tendency towards it to set faith above works, and
to persuade themselves of the etiicacy of an inward grace to
offset an outward and visible defection from it

ROUSSEAU.

337

As the sentimentalist always takes a far.cUul, sometimes an
unreal, life for an ideal one, it would be too much to say that
Rousseau was a man of earnest convictions. But he was a man
of fitfully intense ones, as suited so mobile a temperament, and
his writings, more than those of any other of his tribe, carry
with them that persuasion that was in him while he wrote. In
them at least he is as consistent as a man who admits new
ideas can ever be. The children of his brain he never aban<
doned, but clung to them with paternal fidelity. Intellectually
he was true and fearless ; constitutionally, timid, contradictory,
and weak ; but never, if we understand him rightly, false. He
was a little too credulous of sonorous sentiment, but he was
never, like Chateaubriand or Lamartine, the lackey of fine
phrases. If, as some fanciful physiologists have assumed,
there be a masculine and feminine lobe of the brain, it would
seem that in men of sentimental turn the masculine half fell in
love with and made an idol of the other, obeying and admiring
all the pretty whims of this folle du iogis. In Rousseau the
mistress had some noble elements of character, and less taint
of the de)ni-monde than is visible in more recent cases of the
same illicit relation.

PrifUed by Walter Scott, Felling.^ Newcasi/e-upon- Tyns*

572

Monthly Shillins^ Volumes. Clothe cut or uncut ed^s.
EDITED BY PROFESSOR E. S. ROBERTSON.

TRE FOLLOWING VOLUMES ARE NOW READY.

LIFE OF IiONGFELLOW. By Professor Eric S. Robertson.

" A most readable little work, brightened by fancy, and enriched by poetic
ffoling/' — Liverpool Mercury.
LIFE OF COLERIDGE. By Hall Caine.

" Briuf and vigorous, written throughout with spirit and great literary
skill, often rising into eloquence."— .Scof«man.
LIFE OF DICKENS. By Frank T. Marzials.

'We should, u^til we came across this volume, have been at a loss to
recommend any popular life of England's moht popular novelist as being
really satisfactory."— /I (/leHceum.
LIFE OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. By Joseph Knight.

" Mr. Kinight's picture \,l the great poet and painter is the fullest and best
yet presented to tlie public."— TAe Qraphic.
LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. By Colonel F. Grant.

" Colonel Grant has performed his task with diligence, sound judgment,
good taste, and accuracy."— /Mtts<rrtfed London News.
LIFE OF DARWIN, By G. T. Bettany.

"Mr. G. T. Bettany's Life of Darwin is a sound and conscientious work."
— Saturday Review.
LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE. By Augustine Birrell.

" Tiiose who know much of Charlotte Bronte will learn more, and those
who know nothing about her will find all that is best worth learning in Mr.
Birrell'spleasant book."— St. James' Gazette.
LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. By Richard Garnett, LL.D.

" This is an admirable book. Nothin;,' could be more felicitous and fairer
than the way in which he takes us through Carlyle's life and works." — PaU
Mall Gazette.
LIFE OF ADAM SMITH. By R. B. Haldane, M.P.

" Written throughout with a perspicuity seldom exemplified when dealing
with economic science." — Scotsman.
LIFE OF KEATS. By W. M. Rossetti.

" Valuable for the ample information which it contains."— Cam!>n'd^«
Independent.
LIFE OF SHELLEY. By William Sharp.

"Another fit memorial of a beautiful soul."— The Academy.
LIFE OF SMOLLETT. By David Hannay.

"An exceptionally manly and capable record." — Saturday Review.
LIFE OF GOLDSMITH. By Austin Dobson.
LIFE OF SCOTT. By Professor Yonge.
LIFE OF BURNS. By Professor Blackie.
LIFE OF VICTOR HUGO. By Frank T. Marzials.
LIFE OF EMERSON. Bv Richard Garnett, LL.D.
LIFE OF GOETHE. By .Tames Sime.
LIFE OF CONGREVE. By Edmund Gosse.
LIFE OF BUNYAN. By Canon Venables.
LIFE OF CRABBE. By T. E. Kebbel, M.A.
LIFE OF HEINE. By William Sharp. [Ready October 25tk.

Complete Bibliography to each volume, by J. P. Anderson, British Museum.

LIBRARY EDITION OF "GREAT WRITERS.'-P'inted on

large paper of extra quality, in handsome binding, Demy 8vo, price 2s. 6d.

London : WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.

Monthly Shilling^ Volutnes. Clothe cut or uncut edqes,

THE CAMELOT SERIES.

Edited by Ernest Rhys.

TffE FOLLOWING VOLUMES ARE NOW READY,

ROMANCE OP KING ARTHUR. Edited by E. Rhys.
THORBAU'S WALDBN. Edited by W. H. Dircks.

ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. Edited by William Sharp.
LANDOR'S CONVERSATIONS. Edited by H. Ellis.
PLUTARCH'S LIVES. Edited by B. J. Snell, M,A.

RELiaiO MEDICI, etc. Edited by J. A. Symonds.

SHELLEY'S LETTERS. Edited by Ernest Rhys.

PROSE WRITINGS OP SWIPT. Edited by W. Lewin.
MY STUDY WINDOWS. Edited by R. Gamett, LL.D.
GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS. Edited by W. Sharp.
LORD BYRON'S LETTERS. Edited by M. Blind.

ESSAYS BY LEIGH HUNT. Edited by A. Symons.

LONGFELLOW'S PROSE. Edited by W. Tirebuck.

GREAT MUSICAL COMPOSERS. Edited by E. Sharp.
MARCUS AURBLIUS. Edited by Alice Zimmern.

SPECIMEN DAYS IN AMERICA. By Walt Whitman.
WHITE'S NATURAL HISTORY of SBLBORNB.

Edited, with Introduction, by Richard Jefferies.
DEPOES CAPTAIN SINGLETON.

Edited, with Introduction, by H. Halliday Sparling.
MAZZINI'S ESSAYS. Edited by William Clarke.

THE PROSE WRITINGS OP HEINRICH HEINE.

Edited, with Introduction, by Havelock Ellis.
REYNOLDS' DISCOURSES. Edited by Helen Zimmern.
THE LOVER, and other Papers of Steele and Addison.

Edited, with Introduction, by Walter Lewin.
BURNS'S LETTERS. Edited by J. Logic Robertson, M.A.
VOLSUNGA SAGA. Edited by H. H. Sparling.

SARTOR RBSARTUS Edited by Ernest Rhys.

WRITINGS OP EMERSON. Edited by Percival Chubb.
SENECA'S MORALS. -----

DEMOCRATIC VISTAS.
LIFE OP LORD HERBERT.
ENGLISH PROSE.
THE PILLARS OP SOCIETY, and other Plays.

By Henrik Ibsen. • Edited by Havelock Ellis.
PAIRY AND POLK TALES. Edited by W. B. Yeats.
THE TEACHING OP BPICTETUS.

Edited by T. W. Rolleston.
ESSAYS ON THE ENGLISH POETS.

By Tames Russell Lowell.

London : WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.

Edited by Walter Clode.
By Walt Whitman.
Edited by Will H. Dircks.
Edited by Arthur Gallon.

<olleston.

TLe C^iil^rtury Poel5.

Edited by William Sharp,
with introductory notices by various contributors

In SHILLING- Monthly Volumes, Square 8vo.
Well printed on fine toned paper, with Red-line
Border, and strongly bound in Cloth. Each Volume
contains from 300 to 350 pagres.

Cloth, Red Edges - Is.
Clothe Utuut Edges - Is.

Red Roan, Gilt Edges 2s. 6d.
Pad. Morocco^ Gilt Edges • 5s.

THE FOLLOWIA'O VOLUMES ARE NOW READY.

CHRISTIAN YEAR.

By Ilev. John Keble.
COLERIDGE. Ed. by J. Skipsey.
liONOFELIiOW. Ed. by E. Hope.
CABIPBELIi. Edited by J. Hogbsn.
SHELLEY. Edited by J. Skipsey.
WORDSWORTH.

Edited by A. J. Symington.
BLAKE Edited by Joseph Skipsey.
WHITTIER. Edited by Eva Hope.
POE. Edited by o oseph Skipsey.
CHATTERTON.

Edited by John Richmond.
BURNS. Poems. \ Editetlby
BURNS. Songs. /Joseph Skipsey.
MARLOWE.

Edited by P. E. Pinkerton.
KEATS. Edited by John Hogben.
HERBERT. Edited by E. Rhys.
VICTOR HUGO.

Translatedby Dean Carrington.
COWPBR. Edited by Eva llope.
SHAKESPEARE.

Songs, Pooms, and Sonnets.

Edited by William Sharp.
EMERSON. Edited by W. Lewin.
SONNETS of this CIUYTURY.

Edited by William Sharp.
WHITMAN. Edited by E. Rhys.
SCOTT. Marmion, etc.
SCOTT. Lady of the Lake, etc.

Edited by William Sharp.
PRAED. Edited by Fred. Coooer.
HOGG.ByhisDaughter,Mrs Garaen.
GOLDSMITH. Ed. by W. Tirebuck.
MACKAY'S LOVE LETTERS.
SPENSER. Edited by Hon. B. Noel.
CHILDREN OF THE POETS.
Edited by Eric S. Robertson.
JONSON. Edited by J. A. Symonds.
BYRON (2 Vols.)

Edited by Mathilde Blind.

THE SONNETS OF EUROPE.

Edited by S. Waddiugton.
RAMSAY. Ed. by J. L. Robertson.
DOBELL. Edited by Mrs. DobeU
DAYS OF THE YEAR.

With Introduction by Wm. Sharp.
POPE. Edited by John ilogben.
HEINE. Edited by Mrs. Kroeker.
BEAUMONT & FLETCHER

Edited by J. S. Fletcher.
BOWLES. LAMB. &o.

Edited by William Tirebuck.
EARLY ENGLISH POETRY.
Edited by H. Macaulay Eitzgibbon.
SEA BIUSIC. Edited by Mra Sharp.
HERRICK. Edited by EmeatKhys.
BALLADES AND RONDEAUS
Edited by J. Gleeson White.
IRISH MINSTRELSY.

Edited by H. HaUiday Sparling.
MILTON'S PARADISE LOST.
Edited bv J. Bradahaw, M.A., LL.D.
JACOBITE BALLADS.

Edited by O. S. Macquoid.
AUSTRALIAN BALLADS.

Edited by D. B. W. Sladen, B.A.
MOORE. Edited by John Dorruin.
BORDER BALLADS.

Edited by Graham R. Tomson.
SONG-TIDE. By P. B. Marston.
ODES OF HORACE.

Translations by Sir S. de Vere, Bt.
OSSIAN. Edited by G. E. Todd.
ELFIN MUSIC.

Edited by Arthur Edward Waite.
SOUTHEY. Ed. byS. R. Thompson.
CHAUCER. Edited by F. N. Paton.
POEMS OF WILD LIFE.
Edited by Chas. G. D. Roberts, M.A.
PARADISE REGAINED.
Edited by J. Bradshaw, M.A., LL.D.

London : WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.

VOLS. I. TO XIII. NOW READY.

i«'

({E-ISSUE 1)1 MONTI{LY VOLUMES, PqiCE ONE SlflLLING E^CH,

STRONGLY BOUND IN OLOTH,
Uniform in size and style >Arith the Camelot Series,

WILSON'S

TALES OF THE BORDERS

AND OF SCOTLAND:
HISTORICAL, TRADITIONARY, AND IMAGINATIVE.

REVISED BY ALEXANDER LEIGHTON.

No collection of tales published in a serial form ever enjoyed so
great a oopularity as " Thf. Tales of the Borders ; " and
the seciet of their success lies in the fact that they r.re stories
in the truest sense of the word, illustrating in a graphic and
natural style the manners and customs, trials and sorrows,
sins and backslidings, of the men and women of whom they
treat. The heroes and heroines of these admirable stories belong
to every rank of life, from the king and noble to the humble
peasant.

"The Tales of the Borders" have always been immensely
popular with the young, and whether we view them in their
moral aspect, or as vehicles for instruction and amusement, the
collected series forms a repertory of healthy and interesting
literature unrivalled in the language.

The Scotsman says: — "Those who have read the tales in the
unwieldy tomes in which they are to be found in the libraries will
welcome the publication of this neat, handy, and well-printed edition."

The Dundee ^lave^-iiser sa.y^ : — "Considering how attractive are these
tales, whether regarded as illustrating Scottish life, or as entertaining
items of romance, there can be no doubt of their continued popularity.
We last read them in volumes the size of a family Bibl.;, and we are
glad to have an opportunity to renew our acquaintance with them in a
form so muc'"*. more handy and elegant."

EACH VOLUME WILL BE COMPLETE IN ITSELF.

London: Walter Scott, 24 Wnrwick Lane, Paternoster Row.

THE NOVOOASTRIAN SERIES.

Square Svo. Price One Shilling each.

POLICE SERGEANT C 21:

THE STORY OF A CRIME.

By REGINALD BARNETT.

"Tlie Plot is ingenious, the interest is well sustained tluoughout, and the
■tyle is distinctly above that of the ordinary 'shillinji shocker.' At times,
indeed, Mr. Barnett reminds us of <<ahoriau, whose M. Lecoq (as M. Lecoq was
in his younger days) the policeman-hero resembles in a considerable degree."—
Qrayhic.

JACK DUDLEY'S WIFE.

By E. M. DAVY, Author of " A Prince of Como," &c.

"The tale is written with excellent skill, and succeeds in holding the interest
well up from first to last."— 5co<»m«n.

Oal^-Bougli and Wattle-Blossom

STORIES AND SKETCHES BY AUSTRALIANS IN ENGLAND.

Edited by A. PATCHETT MARTIN.

Ymie'siieiitioicliiiUiiciiiiioiiiiiiice

By WALTER MILBANK.
•• The story is capitally told."— 5?co<»man.

The Policeman's Lantern:

STRANGE STORIES OF LONDON LIFE.

By JAMES GREENWOOD, "The Arnateur Casual."

London : WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.

VOL. 1 READY OCTOBER 25th.
Crown 8vo, about 350 pp. eaot), Cloth Cover, 28. 6d. per Vol.

Half Polished Morocco, gilt top, 5/-.

COUNT TOLSTOI'S WORKS.

MR. WALTER SCOTT has the pleasure to announce that
he has made arran^j^ements to publish, in Monthly
Volumes, a series of translations of works by the eminent
Russian novelist. Count Lyof N. Tolstoi. These trans-
lations, direct from the Russian, are by Mr. Nathan Haskell
Dole, and admirably reproduce the spirit and style of the
original. The English reading public will be introduced to an
entirely new series of works by one who is probably the
greatest living master of fiction in Europe, and one upon whose
personality and opinions, — social, ethical, and religious, — a
unique attention is concentrated. To those unfamiliar with the
charm of Russian fiction, and especially with the works of
Count Tolstoi, these volumes will come as a new revelation
of power.

The Series % ill bee^n with: —

A RUSSIAN PROPRIETOR,

AND OTHtr.^ STORIES.

By Count LYOF N. TOLSTOif.

This volume, which is representative of Count Tolstoi's literary
activity between 1852 and 1859, will fittingly serve as a prelude and
introduction to those which follow. Besides its own interest, much of
it has the interest of disguised autobiography ; Prince Nekhliudof, the
' Russian Proprietor,* suggests the youthful figure of Count Tolstoi
himself in one of his early experiences ; the * Recollections of a
Scorer,' and * Two Hussars,' are regarded as reminiscent of Count
Tolstoi's gambling days. Both must have been suggested by some such
terrible experience as that told of the Count's gambling-debt in the
Caucasus. 'Lucerne' and 'Albert,' two other stories of the volume,
are also evidently transcripts from the author's own experience. The
strange young protector of the wandering singer in the one, the
shadowy Prince Nekhliudof in the other, are both Count Tolstoi himself
in phases quite distinct from those in which he is familiar at present.
* Albert,* in its peculiar realism and pathos, is one of Count Tolstoi's
most exquisite sketches, and a striking example of his literary method.

London: WALTER SCOTT, ?4 Warwick Lane.

i>V

"<r-"^.

. per Vol.

KS.

unce that

Monthly

eminent

le trans-

i Haskell

e of the

ed to an

tably the

on whose

gious,-~a

with the

works of

evelation

OR,

's literary
elude and
;, much of
liudof, the
it Tolstoi
ions of a
of Count
some such
ibt in the
e volume,
ice. The
one, the
:oi himself
t present.
Tolstoi's
method.

^AN£»