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A/AC. S. WAAVAE UA’AVAE’.S. WOA’A.S.
THE QUEEN MOTHER AND ROSAMOND.
FCp. 8vo. 5s. -
ATALANTA IN CALYDON. A New Edition.
Crown 8vo. 6s.
CHASTELARD : a Tragedy. Fop. 8vo. 7s.
POEMS AND BALLADS. Fop. 8vo. 9s.
WILLIAM BLAKE : a Critical Essay. 8vo. 16s.
SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE. Crown 8vo. Ios. 6d.
BOTHWELL : a Tragedy. Crown 8vo. 12s. 6d.
GEORGE CHAPMAN : an Essay. Crown 8vo. 7s.
SONGS OF TWO NATIONS: A Song of ITALY,
ODE on THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, DIRAE. Crown 8vo. 6s.
ESSAYS AND STUDIES. Crown 8vo. I23.
*
CHATTo & WINDUS, PICCADILLY, W.
ESSAYS AND STUDIES.
[Chiefty reprinted from the ForTNIGHTLY REVIEw.—For permission,
to 2-efºrzzzz zhe articles ozz BYRoN &zed Col.BRIDGE, Zhazeźs axe
date fo Messrs. Morozz & Co., and Messrs. S. Zozy & Co.,
2-espectively.] -
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ÈSĒģNĀŠŅĒģº
\\
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PY
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
PICCADILLY.
ºombon :
I875.
CHATTO AND WINDUS,


$
LON Lyo N : I*RINTED BY *
spottiswooDE AND Co., NEw-STREET sou Arrº
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
TO MY FATHER.
PR E F A C E.
THESE Essays, written at intervals during a space of seven
years, are now reissued with no change beyond the correc-
tion of an occasional error, the addition of an occasional
note, and the excision or modification of an occasional
phrase or passage. To omit or to rewrite any part would
be to forfeit the one claim which I should care to put up on
their behalf; that they give frank and full expression to
what were, at the time of writing, my sincere and deliberate
opinions. Only where I have detected a positive error
or suspected a possible injustice have I changed or Can-
celled a syllable. As I see no reason to suppress what I
have no desire to recant, I have not allowed myself to
strike out the rare allusions, which might otherwise have
been erased, to such obscure and ephemeral names or
matters as may be thought unworthy even of so slight a ,
record as the notice here conferred on them. The one
object which gives to this book whatever it may have of
unity is the study of art in its imaginative aspects. I have
desired above all things to avoid narrowness and dogma-
tism, and to say simply what I think or perceive to be
viii PREFACE.
the truth on such matters, and on Such only, as I can
claim at least to have studied with the devotion of years
to the utmost of what ability was in me. The convictions
expressed are in any case my own, and due to the inspira-
tion of no party, no stranger, and no friend. My judg-
ment has been guided whölly by my sense of the service
on which I have taken occasion to remark. I have spoken
but once or twice at the outside either of bad work
or bad criticism, of folly or of falsehood, of ineptitude or
of malignity; my chief aim, as my chief pleasure, in all
such studies as these has been rather to acknowledge and
applaud what I found noble and precious than to scrutinize
or to stigmatize what I might perceive to be worthless and
base. It is not indeed always possible to show cause for
our admiration of great men and their great work, and not
seem in passing to stigmatize by implication the base work
or the baser comments on other men's work of those who
hate and covet the greatness which they can neither injure !
nor attain, the glory which they can neither diminish nor
endure; to praise what is good in any kind is to dispraise
what is bad, and every honour done to men worthy of .
honour is an insult to men who are powerless to Confer it
and hopeless to receive. -
To any who may think it presumptuous for a labourer
in one field of art to express his opinion on work done in
another field, for a student in one line of art to pass sen-
tence on a student or it may be on a master in a different
line, I can only say that I see no reasºn which should
AAEAAEA CAE. ix
forbid such an one more than another to form or to utter
the opinion which men unpractised in any form of art
have an undisputed privilege to hold and to express. It
is certain that a man’s judgment may be shaped and
coloured by the lines of his own life and the laws of his
Own labour; that a poet for example may be as bad a
judge of painting as a painter may be of poetry, each man
looking vainly in his neighbour's work for the qualities
proper to his own ; but it does not follow that either must
of necessity be fool enough to mispraise or to dispraise a
poem or a picture for the presence or the absence of
qualities foreign to its aim. I would ask for either artist
no more than is conceded as an unquestionable right to
Critics who are clear from any charge of good or bad work
done in any but the critical line of labour : I would submit
that there is really no evident or apparent reason why he
should be less competent than his fellows to appreciate
the merit or demerit of work which lies out of the way of
his own ambition or achievement. A lifelong delight in
the glories of an art which is not my own, quickened by
the intercourse of many years with eminent artists of
different and even of opposite schools, may have failed to
make me a good critic of their art, but can hardly have
left with me less right to judge or less faculty of judging
than every writer on the subject is permitted to claim for
himself. One thing at least the cultivation of this natural
instinct or impulse of enjoyment can hardly have failed
to ensure. A student from without who enjoys all forms
and phases of an alien art as he respects all forms and
|
X PREFACE.
\
phases of his own will be unlikely to make himself the
conscious or unconscious mouthpiece of a single school
or a select coterie. So much I think may justly be
claimed for this book ; that it is not a channel for the
transmission of other men's views on art, a conduit for the
diffusion of praise or blame derived from foreign sources
or discoloured by personal feelings. Twice only have I
had occasion to review some part of the work of two
eminent poets whose friendship I had enjoyed from my
early youth : a fact which in the opinion of certain writers
is more than sufficient to disqualify me from passing any
sentence on their work that may be worthy of a moment's
attention. The accident of personal intimacy, it should
seem, deprives you of all right to express admiration of
what you might allowably have found admirable in a
stranger. I know not whether we are to infer that the
one right which remains to a man in this sad case is the
right of backbiting and belying; but it is certain that any
indiscreet attempt to vindicate his right of praising what
he finds to be praiseworthy will at once expose him to the
risk of being classed among the members of a shadowy
society which meets or does not meet for purposes Of
reciprocal adulation. In the present instance the fact of
reciprocity might at first sight seem somewhat difficult to
establish ; considering that neither the one nor the other
of the poets whom, though my friends, I have allowed
myself to admire, and though their fellow-craftsman have
permitted myself to praise, has ever published one sen-
tence or one syllable of friendly or of adverse criticism
AA’AºA'A CAE. xi
on any work of mine. How then their opinion of it can
be matter of public knowledge, or on what ground the
damning charge of “mutual admiration” can be sustained,
it, passes the modest range of my weak imagination to
conceive. Nor can it figure to itself anything more pitiful
and despicable than a society of authors, artists, or Critics
held together by a contract for the exchange of reciprocal
flattery, except a society of the same kind whose bond of
union should be a compact of detraction, a confederacy of
malignities, an alliance for the defamation of men more
honourcd than its members. On the other hand, it may
be reasonably assumed, or at least it may plausibly be
alleged, that a writer whose interest or whose admiration
is confined to the works of a single school or the effects
of a particular style in art can claim no higher place or
worthier office than that of herald or interpreter to a special
community of workmen. If, however, my critical writing
should be found liable to this charge, it will at least be ad-
mitted that the circle which confines my interest and limits
my admiration is a tolerably wide one. I have not unfre-
quently found myself accused of lax and undiscriminating
indulgence in too catholic and uncritical a taste, too wide
and erratic a range of inconsistent sympathies, by men
whose ways of work lay so far apart that they seemed to
me as unable to estimate each other aright as I to with-
hold from the work of either the tribute of my thanks.
It is impossible, I have been told, that any man of fair
culture and intelligence can sincerely and equally admire
at the same time the leaders or the followers of such
s
xii AA’AºA'4 CAE.
opposite Schools in art or letters. That must in effect
be a somewhat elastic definition which should comprise
in one term all the Subjects of my study or my praise, a
somewhat irregular process which should reduce them all
to one denomination, a somewhat vague watchword which:
should marshal them all under one standard. I think
upon the whole that having now gathered together these
divers waifs of tentative criticism I may leave the babblers
and backbiters who prate of “mutual admiration" and
the cant of a coterie absorbed in its own self-esteem and
fettered by its own passwords, to the ultimate proof or
disproof of simple fact and plain evidence. If I am in-
deed one of those unfortunates who can see nothing good
outside their own sect of partisans, it will not be denied
that the sect to which I belong must be singularly Com-
prehensive; nor will it be questioned that I am singularly
fortunate in the variety and the eminence of my supposed
allies. I would not be betrayed into any show of egotism
or recrimination; but I thought it best not to let these
reprints go forth together for the first time on their own
account without a word of remark on their object and
their scope. They are here arranged according to Scale
and subject, with the date appended when necessary; and
have now but to show for themselves whether or not they
can pretend to any more noticeable or more vital quality
than that of sincere desire and studious effort to see the /
truth and speak it.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Victor Hugo: L'Homme our RIT . & • I
VICTOR HUGO : L'ANNEE TERRIBLE . e . . I 7
THE POEMS OF T)ANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI e ºr go - f'
MoRRIS's LIFE AND DEATH OF JASON t o . . [IO
Marrºw ARNOLD's NEw POEMs. º º • as
Notes on THE TExt of SHELLEY . e - - sº
ByRON. e * * e º e º r . . 238 vº
CoLERIDGE . . . - ſº * * . . 259 h
John FoRD . . . . - º • . 276
NOTES ON DESIGNS OF THE OLD MASTERS AT FLORENCE 314.
*
- *~ }
NOTES ON somE PICTURES OF 1868. e º . 358
- **
Lºrrata,
Page 130, line 5, for sous read Son
,, 158, , 15, for overhead read overheard
,, 235, , 7 from foot, dele to at end of line
,, 326, , , 6, for this read his -
,, 331, , 2, for Fillippino's read Filippino's
341, ,, 20, dele , after 1458
Swinburne's Essays.
WCTOR AUGO. Z'HOMME QUI R/7.
Y ONCE only in my life I have seen the likeness of Victor
Hugo's genius. Crossing over when a boy from Ostend,
I had the fortune to be caught in midchannel by a
thunderstorm strong enough to delay the packet some
three good hours over the due time. About mid-
night the thundercloud was right overhead, full of in-_
cessant sound and fire, lightening and darkening so
rapidly that it seemed to have life, and a delight in its
life. At the same hour the sky was clear to the west, and
all along the sea-line there sprang and sank as to music a
restless-dance or chase of summer lightnings across the
lower sky: a race and riot of lights, beautiful and rapid
as a course of shining Oceanides along the tremulous
floor of the sea. Eastward at the same moment the
Space of clear sky was higher and wider, a splendid semi-
circle of too intense purity to be called blue; it was of
no colour nameable by man; and midway in it between
the storm and the sea hung the motionless full moon;
Artemis watching with a serene splendour of"scorn the
*º-wrº. * *
:* s. v.
B
2 V/C7 OA” HTUGO.
battle of Titans and the revel of nymphs, from her stain-
less and Olympian summit of divine indifferent light.
Underneath and about us the sea was paved with flame ;
the whole water trembled and hissed with phosphoric
fire; even through the wind and thunder I could hear the
Crackling and sputtering of the water-sparks. In the
same heaven and in the same hour there shone at once
the three contrasted glories, golden and fiery and white,
of moonlight and of the double lightnings, forked and
sheet ; and under all this miraculous heaven lay a flaming
floor of water. !
That, in a most close and exact symbol, is the best
possible definition I can give of Victor Hugo's genius.
And the impression of that hour was upon me the im-
pression of his mind; physical, as it touched the nerves
with a more vivid passion of pleasure than music or wine;
spiritual, as it exalted the spirit with the senses and
above them to the very summit of vision and delight.
It is no fantastic similitude, but an accurate likeness of
two causes working to the same effect. There is nothing
but that delight like the delight given by some of his
work. And it is because his recent book has not
seldom given it me again, that I have anything here to
say of it.
It is a book to be rightly read, not by the lamplight
of realism, but Iby the sunlight of his imagination reflected
upon ours. Only so shall we see it as it is, much less
understand it. The beauty it has, and the meaning, are
ideal; and therefore cannot be impaired by any want of
realism. Error and violation of likelihood or fact which
would damn a work of Balzac's or of Thackeray's cannot
Z'HOMME OU/ R/7. 3
even lower or lessen the rank and value of a work like
this. To put it away because it has not the great and
precious qualities of their school, but those of a school
quite different, is just as wise as it would be on the other
hand to assault the ſame of Bacon on the ground that he
has not written in the manner of Shakespeare ; or
Newton's, because he has not written like Milton. This
premised, I shall leave the dissection of names and the
anatomy of probabilities to the things of chatter and
¥ chuckle so well and scientifically defined long since by
Mr. Charles Reade as “ anonymuncules who go scribbling
about ; ” there is never any lack of them ; and it will not
greatly hurt the master poet of an age that they should
sy shriek and titter, cackle and hoot inaudibly behind his
/ heel. It is not every demigod who is vulnerable there.
This book has in it, so to say, a certain elemental
quality. It is great because it deals greatly with great
emotions. It is a play played out not by human characters
only ; wind and sea, thunder and moonlight, have their
parts too to fill. Nor is this all ; for it is itself a thing
like these things, living as it were an elemental life. It
Y pierces and shakes the very roots of passion. It catches
and bends the spirit as Pallas caught Achilles and bent;
him by the hair. Were it not so, this would be no child
of the master's ; but so, as always, it is. Here too the
birth-mark of the great race is visible.
It is not, whatever it may seem, a novel or a study,
historical or social. What touches on life or manners
we see to be accidental byplay as soon as we see what the
book is indeed ; the story of the battle of a human spirit,
first with Fate, then, with the old three subordinate
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4. VICTOR AUGO.
enemies : the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. And
here I will say where the flaw, as I think, lies; for,
like other great things, a great book may have a flaw.
The Flesh and the Devil, Josiane and Barkilphedro, are
perfect; the World is drawn wrong. And the reason is
not far to seek. We all brush daily against the Flesh
and the Devil, we must all rub shoulders and shake
hands with them, and they are always much the same at
root, only stronger and weaker with this man than with
that ; therefore it needs only the hand of a great poet to
paint them greatly, after their true and very likeness.
But the World is multiform. To paint one aright of its
many faces, you must have come close enough on that side
to breathe the breath of its mouth and see by the light-of-
its eyes. No accumulation of factupon fact gleaned and
laid up never so carefully will avail you instead. Titian
himself cannot paint without colours. Here we have
canvass and easel duly made ready, but the colours are
not to be had. In other words, here are many curious
and accurate details painfully studied and stored up for
use, but unhappily it is not seldom for misuse. Here are
many social facts rightly retailed and duly laid out side
by side, but no likeness of social life. Here are the
Mohocks of the day, for example, much as we find them
in Swift; here is often visible even a vexatious excess of
| labour in the research of Small things; useless, because
the collector of them has never applied his spirit to the
spirit of the time in which these small things played in
passing their small parts. He cannot, because that time
has no attraction for him on any one side to temper the
repulsion he feels from another side of it. Pure hate and
Z’AOMME OUT R/7. 5
scorn of an age or a people destroy the faculty of obser-
vation, much more of description, even in the historic
mind ; what then will they do in the poetic? Doubtless
there has been, as doubtless there is now, much that is
|
!
i
\
hateful and contemptible in social matters, English or
Other; much also, as certainly, that is admirable and
thankworthy. Doubtless too at one time and another
there has been more visible of evil and shameful than of
noble and good. But there can never have been a time
Of unmixed good or evil; and he only who has felt the
pulse of an age can tell us how fast or slow its heart
really beat towards evil or towards good. A man who
writes of a nation or a time, however bad and base in
the main, without any love for it, cannot write of it well.
A great English poetess has admirably said that a poet's
heart may be large enough to hold two nations." Victor
Hugo's, apart from its heroic love of man, a love match-
less except by Shelley's, holds two nations especially
close, two of the greatest; it has often been said he is
French and Spanish ; that is, he loves France and Spain,
the spirit of them attracts his spirit ; but he does not love
England. There are great Englishmen whom no man
* I know not if it has been remarked how decisive a note of the
English spirit there is in Molière, a Frenchman of the French : an
|Fnglish current, as recognisable as indefinable, passing under and
through the tide-stream of his genius. There is a more northern
flavour mixed into his mind, a more northern tone interfused, than
into any other of the great French writers, Rabelais excepted.
Villon, for instance, in so many ways So like them both, is nothing
if not Parisian. And if I am not wrong no third great French-
man has ever found such acceptance and sympathy among English- ;
men unimbued with the French spirit as Rabelais and Molière. For ;
§ them instinct breaks down the bar of ignorance.
6 - VYCZOA HUGO .
•+.
has praised more nobly than he but the spirit of historic
England has no attraction for his. Hence, far more im-
portant than any passing errors of grotesque nomen-
clature or misplaced detail, the spiritual and ingrained
error of the book, seen only from its social or historic
side. We catch nowhere for a moment the note of
English life in the reign of Anne." Those for whom I
write will know, and will see, that I do not write as a
special pleader for a country or a class, as one who will
see no spot in England or nobility. But indeed it is
an abuse of words to say that England is governed or
misgoverned by her aristocracy. A republican, studying
where to strike, should read better the blazon on his
enemy's shield. “England,” I have heard it said, “is
not ‘a despotism tempered by epigrams,’ but a plutocracy
modified by accidents.”
Enough now of the flaws and failures in this work;
“enough, with over-measure.” We have yet before us
*
ºf
the splendour of its depths and heights. Entering the
depths first, we come upon the evil spirit of the place.
Barkilphedro, who plays here the part of devil, is a
bastard begotten by Iago upon his sister, Madame de
Merteuil : having something of both, but diminished and
degraded ; wanting, for instance, the deep daemonic
calm of their lifelong patience. He has too much in-
ward heat of discontent, too much fever and fire, to
* For one instance, if a court lady had indeed insulted Swift,
she would certainly have had by way of answer something (in
De Quincey’s phrase) “too monstrously Swiftian for quotation ; ”
something so monstrous, that the Dean might thenceforth have held
the next place to Gwynplaine in her heart.
Z'HOMME QUI R/7. 7
*
*
leº,3.
*
know their perfect peace of spirit, the equable element of
their souls, the quiet of mind in which they live and
work out their work at leisure. He does not sin at rest:
there is somewhat of fume and fret in his wickedness.
Theirs is the peace of the devil, which passeth all under-
standing. He, though like them sinning for sin’s sake |
and hating for the love of hatred, has yet a too distinct
and positive quality of definable evil. He is actually un-
grateful, envious, false. Of them we cannot say that they
are thus or thus ; in them there is a purity and simplicity:
of sin, which has no sensible components ; which cannot
be resolved by analysis into this evil quality and that.
Barkilphedro, as his maker says with profound humour,
“has his faults.” We fear that a sufficient bribe might
even tempt him into virtue for a moment, seduce him to
soil by a passing slip the virginity of vice. Nevertheless,
as the evil spirit of envy rather than the devil absolute,
he is a strong spirit and worth study. The few chapters,
full of fiery eloquence and a passion bitter as blood, in .
which his evil soul is stripped and submitted to vivisec-
tion, contain, if read aright, the best commentary ever
written on Iago. We see now at last, what no scholiast
on Shakespeare could show us, how the seed may be
sown and watered which in season shall bring forth so
black a blossom, a poison so acrid and so sure.
In this poem as in the old pictures we see the ser-
pent writhing, not fangless, under the foot of an angel, Tº
and in act to bruise as of old the heel that bruises his
head. Only this time it is hardly an angel of light.
Unconscious of her office as another St. Michael, the
Angel of the Flesh treads under the unconquerable Devil.
8 t V/C7 OAQ ATC/GO:
*
• {
*
$.
*
“I
Seen but once in full, the naked glory of the Titaness
irradiates all one side of the poem with excess and
Superflux of splendour.
% / Among the fields and gardens, the mountain heights
Y and hollows, of Victor Hugo's vast poetic kingdom, there
are strange superb inmates, bird and beast of various fur
and feather ; but as yet there was nothing like this.
Balzac, working with other means, might have given us
by dint of anxious anatomy some picture of the virgin
harlot. A marvellous study we should have had, one to
burn into the brain and brand the memory for ever ;
* but rather a thing to admire than desire. The magnetism
of beauty, the effluence of attraction, he would not have
given us. But now we have her from the hands of a
poet as well as student, new-blown and actual as a
gathered flower, in warm bloom of blood and breath,
clothed with live colour, fair with significant flesh,
* passionately palpable. T his we see first and feel, and
after this the spirit. It is a strange beast that hides in
this den of roses. Such have been however, and must be.
“We are all a little mad, beginning with Venus.” Her
maker's definition is complete : “a possible Astarte
latent in an actual Diana.” She is not merely spotless in
body; she is perverse, not unclean ; there is nothing of
|
#
;
* \º
* “stainless and shameless ; ” to be unclean is common,
and her “ divine depravity” will touch nothing common
or unclean. She has seven devils in her, and upon her
not a fleck of filth. She has no more in common with
the lewd low hirelings of the baser school of realism
than a creature of the brothel and the street has in
foulness in the mystic rage of her desire. She is indeed
*'. kº
3
Z’HOMME OU/ R/7. 9
* Common with the Maenads who rent in sunder the living
limbs of Orpheus. We seem to hear about her the beat
and clash of the terrible timbrels, the music that
AEschylus set to verse, the music' that made mad, the
upper notes of the psalm shrill and strong as a sea-wind,
the “bull-voiced” bellowing under-song of those dread
choristers from somewhere out of sight, the tempest of
tambourines giving back thunder to the thunder, iſ the
fury of divine lust that thickened with human blood the
hill-streams of Cithaeron.
It is no vain vaunt of the modern master's that he
has given us in another guise one of these AEschylean
women, a monstrous goddess, whose tone of voice “gave
a sort of Promethean grandeur to her furious and amorous
Ywords,” who had in her the tragic and Titanic passion of the
women of the Eleusinian feasts “seeking the satyrs under
the stars.” And with all this fierce excess of imaginative
•eolour and tragic intonation, the woman is modern and
possible ; she might be now alive, and may be. Some of
her words have the light of an apocalypse, the tone of a
truth indubitable henceforth and sensible to all. “You
were not born with that horrible laugh on your face, were
you? no P It must be a penal mutilation. I do hope
you have committed some crime.—No one has touched
me, I give myself up to you as pure as burning fire, I see
you do not believe me, but if you only knew how little I
care ſ—Despise me, you that people despise. Degrada-
tion below degradation, what a pleasure the double
flower of ignominy | I am gathering it. Trample me
underfoot. You will like me all the better. Z know
* AEsch. Fr. 54 ('Hôwvol).
IO VICTOR Aſ UGO.
f
!
*
!
\
3.
that.—Oh ! I should like to be with you in the evening, "
while they were playing music, each of us leaning back
against the same Cushion, under the purple awning of a
golden galley, in the midst of the infinite sweetnesses of
the sea. Insult me. Beat me. Pay me. Treat me like
a street-walker. I adore you.”
The naturalism of all that is absolute ; you hear the
words pant and ring. Some might doubt whether her
wild citations of old stories that matched her case, her
sudden fantastic allusions to these at the very height of

her frenzy, were as natural : I think they are. The great
poet had a right if it pleased him to give his modern
Maenad the thought and the tongue of a Sappho with the
place and the caprice of a Cleopatra. Such a pantheress
might be such a poetess ; then between fancy and fury
we should have our Bassarid complete, only with silk for
fox-skin. And this might be ; for the type of spirit can
hardly be rare in any luxurious age. Perversity is the
fruit of weariness as weariness is the fruit of pleasure.
Charles Baudelaire has often set that theme to mystic
music, but in a minor key : his sweet and subtle lyrics
were the prelude to this grand chorus of the master's.
We have seen the soft fierce play of the incessant
summer lightnings, between the deep sky full of passing
lights and dreams, and the deep sea full of the Salt seed
of life ; and among them Venus arising, the final and
fatal flower of the mystic heaven and the ravenous sea.
* Looking now from, west to east, we may see the moon
'rise, a tender tear-blinded moon, worn thin and pure,
ardent and transparent. *
...” "“s.
A great poet can perfect his picture with strangely few
*—t
Z'HOMME QUT A/Z. II
...”
& I. tº * ~g e
fººtouches. We see Virgilia as clearly as Imogen; we see
Dea as clearly as Esmeralda. Yet Imogen pervades the
action of “Cymbeline,” Virgilia hardly speaks in crossing
f
f
the stage of “Coriolanus.” It is not easy to write at all
about the last chapters of the book; something divine is
there, impalpable and indefinable. I must steal the word
I want; they are “written as if in star-fire and immortal
tears.” Or, to take Shakespeare's words after Carlyle's,
they are “most dearly sweet and bitter.” The pathos of
AEschylus is no more like Dante's, Dante's no more like
Shakespeare's, than any of these is like Hugo's. Every
master of pathos hasſāºkey"offiis own to unlock the
source of tears, or of that passionate.and piteous pleasure
which lies above and under the region of tears. Some,
like Dante, condense the whole agony of a life into one
exquisite and bitter drop of distilled pain. Others, like
Shakespeare, translate it pang by pang into a complete
Cadence and symphony of suffering. Between Lear and
Ugolino the balance can never be struck. Charles Lamb,
we may remember, spent hours on the debate with a
friend who upheld Dante's way of work against Shake-
speare's. On which side we are to range the greatest poet
of our own age, there can be no moment of question. I
am not sure that he has ever touched the keys of sorrow
with surer hand to deeper music than here. There is
nothing in his work of a more heavenly kind; yet,
or it may be because, every word has in it the vibra-
tion of earthly emotion ; but through it rather than
above, there grows and pierces a note of divine tender-
ness, the very passion of pity that before this has made
wise men mad. Even more than the pathos of this close,
. . .3-, * ****
A4-> * ** -- .
I 2 * V/ CZOA’ AſOGO.
|
º
t,
its purity and exaltation are to be noted; nothing of
common is there, nothing of theatrical. And indeed it
needed the supreme sweetness of Dea's reappearance, a
figure translucent with divine death, a form of flesh that
the light of heaven shines through more and more as the
bodily veil wears thinner and consumes, to close with
music and the luminous vision of a last comfort a book
so full of the sound and shine of storm. With the
clamour and horror yet in our ears of that raging eloquence
in which the sufferer flings into the faces of prosperous
men the very flame and hell-fire of his suffering, it needed
no less than this to leave the mind exalted and reconciled.
But this dew of heaven is enough to quench or allay the
flames of any hell. There are words of a sweetness un-
surpassable, as these : “Tout cela S'en va, et il n'y aura
plus de chansons.” And upon all there dwells the
|
{
#.
*
measureless and nameless peace of night upon a still sea.N
To this quiet we have been led through all the thunder
and tumult of things fatal, from the tempestuous overture
of storm and whirlwind; from sea again to sea. There
is a divine and terrible harmony in this chorus of the play,
secretly and strangely sustained, yet so that on a full .
reading we feel it, though at first sight or hearing it must

be missed.
- *}
$
|
K.
# Of the master's unequalled power upon natural things,
§
Nº upon the elements we call inanimate, knowing even less
§ the laws of their life than of ours, there is happily no need,
º , , *
§ º' as surely there are no words, to speak. Part of this power
&
we may recognise as due to the subtle and deep
admixture of moral emotion and of human sentiment with
the mysterious action and passion of nature. Thus in
I. 'HOMME QU/ R/Z. I3
“Les Travailleurs de la Mer” the wind and the sea gain
strength and depth from the human figure set to fight
them ; from the depth and strength of the incarnate spirit
so doing and suffering. Thus in this book there is a new
sense and a new sublimity added to the tempest, by the
remorse of men sinking at Once under sin and storm,
drowned under a double weight of deeds and waves.
Not even in that other book is the Supreme mastery
of nature, the lordship of the forces of things, more ad-
mirable and wonderful than throughout the first part of
this. He who could think to describe might think to
rival it. But of one point I cannot but take note ; there
is nothing, even at the height of tragic horror, repellent,
ugly, hateful. It has been said there is, and will be said
again; for how should there not be distorted eyes and
envious tongues in the world P Indeed a pieuvre is no
pleasant playfellow, the “tree of man's making” bears a
fearful fruit, the monstrous maidenhood of Josiane is no
sister to the starry virginity of Dea ; but how has the
great poet handled these things? The mutilation of a
child’s face is a thing unbearable for thought to rest on ;
but have we not seen first the face of a heroic soul P Far
elsewhere than in the work of our sovereign poet must we
look for the horror which art will have none of, which
nature flings back with loathing in the bringer's face. If
not, we of this time who love and serve his art should in-
deed be in a bad case. But upon this matter we cannot
permit the blind and nameless leaders of the nameless
blind to decide for us. Let the serious and candid
student look again for himself and see. That “ fight of .
the dead with the dark,” that swinging of carrion birds
I4. VICTOR Aſ UGO.
with the swing of the gibbeted carrion, might have been
so done into words as to beget in us mere loathing; but
how is it done here? The mighty manner of Victor
Hugo has given to this ghastly matter something even of
3. horrible charm, a shocking splendour of effect. The

rhythmic horror of the thing penetrates us not with loath-
... *****wº. ſº & •.
ing, but with a tragic awe and terror as at a real piece of ;
3.t
the wind's work, an actual caprice of the night's, a portion :
i of the tempest of things. So it is always ; handle what
he may, the touch of a great poet will leave upon it a spell
to consume and transmute whatever a weaker touch would
leave in it of repulsive. -
Whether or not we are now speaking of a great poet,
of a name imperishable, is not a question which can be
gravely deliberated. I have only to record my own poor
conviction, based on some study and comparison of the
men, that precisely as we now think of those judges who
put Fletcher above Shakespeare, Cowley above Milton,
the paid poets of Richelieu beside Corneille, and I know
not whom beside Molière, will the future think of those
judges who would place any poet of his age by the side
of Victor Hugo. Nor has his age proved poor—it has
rather been singularly rich—in men and in poets really
and greatly admirable. But even had another done as
well once and again as the master himself, who has done
so well as much P Had he done but half, had he done
but a tenth of his actual work, his supremacy, being less
incontestable, would no doubt have been less contested.
A parsimonious poet Calculates well for his own time.
Had Victor Hugo granted us but one great play—say
“Marion de Lorme,” but one great lyric work—say
Z’HOMME OU/ R/7. 15
“Les Contemplations,” but one great tragic story—say
any one you please, the temptation to decry or denounce
him by comparison would have been less ; for with the
tribe of Barkilphedro the strength of this temptation grows
with the growth of the benefit conferred. And very
potent is that tribe in the world of men and of letters.
As for me, I am not careful to praise or dispraise by
Comparison at all. I am not curious to enquire what of
apparent or of actual truth there may be in any charge
brought against the doer of the greatest things done, the
giver of the greatest gifts given among men in our times.
Cocthe found his way of work mechanical and theatrical;
Milton also lived to make oblique recantation of his early
praise of Shakespeare ; we may, and should, wish this
otherwise : yet none the less are they all great men. It
may be there is perceptible in Victor Hugo something too
much of positive intention, of prepense application, of
composition and forethought : what if there were P One
question stands forth first and last ; is the work done good
work and great, or not P A lesser question is this; these
that we find to be faults, are they qualities separable from
the man's nature P could we have his work without them P
If not, and if his work be great, what will it profit us to
blame them or to regret P First, at all events, let us have
the sense to enjoy it and the grace to give thanks. What
for example if there be in this book we have spoken of
errors of language, errors historical or social P Has it f :
not throughout a mighty hold upon men and things, the
godlike strength of grasp which only a great man can have }
of them? And for quiet power of hand, for scornful
Sureness of satiric truth, what can exceed his study of the
\
|
|
I6 VICTOR H UGO.
queen of England (Anne) P Has it not been steeped in
the tears and the fire of live emotion? If the style be
overcharged and overshining with bright sharp strokes and
points, these are no fireworks of any mechanic's fashion :
these are the phosphoric flashes of the sea-fire moving on
the depth of the limitless and living sea. Enough, that
the book is great and heroic, tender and strong; full from
end to end of divine and passionate love, of holy and
ardent pity for men that suffer wrong at the hands of men;
full, not less, of lyric loveliness and lyric force; and I for
one am content to be simply glad and grateful : content
in that simplicity of spirit to accept it as one more benefit
at the hands of the Supreme singer now living among us
the beautiful and lofty life of one loving the race of men.
he serves, and of them in all time to be beloved.
1869.
17
VICTOR AUGo: Z’AAVNAEE TERA/B/A.
THE man who takes upon himself the task of commentary
on a book of this rank feels something of the same
hesitation and reluctance come upon him which fell upon
the writer at starting. He cannot at once be sure whether
he does right to go forward or not. It is not that he
too feels the rising tide of the bitter waters of shame ; it
is not that he too sees a “star grow lesser in heaven.” It
is, if I may take tip the poet's metaphor, that he sees the
Crowning star of a long night now dilated to a sun through
the thunderclouds of the morning. He knows that this
fire in heaven is indeed the fire of day; but he finds no
fitting words of welcome or thanksgiving to salute so
terrible a sunrise. Once more we receive from the hands
of our supreme poet a book full of light and music; but
a book written in tears and blood and characters of flame.
We cannot but rejoice that it has been written, and grieve
that ever it could have been. The child brought forth is
visibly of divine birth, and his blood of the immortals;
but he was brought forth with heartbreak and the pangs
of “a terrible childbed.” The delight we take in the
majesty and beauty of this “mighty line " has been dearly
purchased by the bitter occasion which evoked it. Yet
it cannot but be with delight that we receive so great a
gift as this from the chief poet of an age, and of an age
C
|
I8 VICTOR AUGO :
so full of light and storm, of high action and high passion,
as is ours. For his hand has never been firmer, his note
more clear than now ;
ëri yöp 6.e66ey karatveſet
Treið8, poxtrov
&Aká čápºputos aidºw'
and in these bitter and tragic pages there is a sweetness
surpassing that of love-songs or songs of wine, a Sweetness
as of the roll of the book spread before Ezekiel, that was
written within and without, “and there was written there-
in lamentations, and mourning, and woe.—Then did I
eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for Sweetness.”
It would be well that all students of this book should
read together with it, as Complement at Once and Com-
mentary, the memorable collection, “Actes et Paroles,
1870–1871–1872.” By the light of that precious record,
and by this light alone, can it be properly read. There
all who will may see by what right even beyond the right
"of genius the greatest poet of his great nation speaks now
to us as a prophet to his people : by what right of labour,
by what right of sorrow, by what right of pity and of scorn,
by what right of indignation and of love. None of those
disciples who most honoured him in his time of banish-
ment could have anticipated for their master a higher
} honour or a heavier suffering than those nineteen years of
exile; but in his own country there was reserved for him
a brighter crown of honour, with a deeper draught of
suffering. To defend Paris against Versailles and against
itself, and to behold it wasted on the one hand with fire
which was quenched on theother hand in blood : to cast
----eeeº-"
from him the obloquy of men who refused to hear his
L'ANNAEAE TERAE/BA. E. I 9
defence of Garibaldi for the offence of coming to their
aid, and to pass at once from the clamour of the
Assembly to the silence of sudden death, beside the
Corpse of a beloved son ; to offer shelter to his enemies,
and to be hunted from that shelter himself: these were
things he had yet to do and to endure.
The poem opens with a prelude at once prophetic and
satiric, tender and wise and full of noble scorn and
nobler pity; the verse which sets a crown on the head
of the people and a brand on the face of the mob is such
as it is given but to one man in an age to write, and that
by no means in every age. Then, for the first and ſatal
month of August 1870, we have a poem terrible as the
occasion which called it forth, fit alike to serve as pro-
logue to the poems of the months which follow or as an
epilogue to the “Châtiments” which went before. That
nothing after Sedan might be wanting to the fugitive
assassin once elect of the party of Barabbas, the scourge
of imperishable verse is added to the branding-iron of
* * * * * * * ****- -
* * *
The poems of the siege at once demand and defy
commentary; they should be studied in their order as
parts of one tragic symphony. From the overture which
tells of the old glory of Germany before turning to France
with a cry of inarticulate love, to the sad majestic epi-
logue which seals up the sorrowful record of the days of
capitulation, the various and continuous harmony flows
forward through light and shadow, with bursts of thunder |
gº * i *
and tempest. and interludes of sunshine and sweet air. \
**
^*~~swrtº"rººm
In that last poem for February we see as it were the
agony of faith; before the sight of evil inseparable from
C 2
2O V/C7'OA” Aſ UGO.
good, of good inextricable from evil, the rallying cry of
hope seems for the moment, and only for the moment
seems, to falter even on the lips which uttered that
sovereign song of resurrection, great as the greatest old
Hebrew psalm, which crowns and closes the awful roll
of the “Châtiments.” For that mighty hymn of a trans-
cendant faith in the final conscience of the world called
God, in the ultimate justice and universal vision of the
eye and heart of things, we have but the grand unanswer-
able question :- -
“Qui donc mesurera l'ombre d’un bout à l'autre,
Et la vie et la tombe, espaces inouis
Oü le monceau des jours meurt Sous l'amas des nuits,
Ou de vagues éclairs dans les ténèbres glissent,
Ot, les extrémités des lois s'évanouissent l’”
In this tragic range of poems reaching from September
to March there is an echo of all emotions in turn that the
great spirit of a patriot and a poet could suffer and ex-
press by translation of suffering into song ; the bitter cry
of invective and satire, the clear trumpet-call to defence,
the triumphal wail for those who fell for France, the
passionate sob of a son on the stricken bosom of a
mother, the deep note of thought that slowly opens into
flower of speech, and through all and after all the sweet
unspeakable music of natural and simple love. After the
voice which reproaches the priestlike soldier we hear the
voice which rebukes the militant priest : and a fire as
the fire of Juvenal is outshone by a light as the light of
Lucretius. In the verses addressed “to the Bishop who
calls me Atheist,” satire is dissolved in aspiration, and
the keenest edge of Scorn is molten in the highest ardour
ZANNAEAE TERRIAZE. 2 I
of worship. The necessity of perfect disbelief in the
incredible and ignoble for every soul that would attain
to perfect belief in the noble and credible was never more
clearly expounded or more loftily proclaimed. The fiery
love and faith of the patriot find again and ever again
Some fresh glory of speech, some new splendour of song,
in which to array themselves for everlasting; words of
hatred and horror for the greed and ravin of the enemy
and his princes
\
“who feed on gold and blood
Till with the stain their inmost souls are dyed ; ”
words of wrath and scorn for the renegade friends who
had no word of comfort and no hand for help in the hour
of the passion of France crucified, but were seen with
hands outstretched from oversea
“Shaking the bloody fingers of her foes.”
in the presence (as they thought it) of her corpse ; words
of living fire and light for love of the mother-land
despised and rejected of men whose pity goes so far as
to compassionate her children for the blush of shame
to which their bitter fortune has condemned them, for
the disgrace of being compelled to confess her for their
mother :
“Ah je voudrais,
Je voudrais n'étre pas Français pour pouvoir dire
Que je te choisis, France, et que, dans ton martyre,
Jete proclame, toi que ronge le vautour,
Ma patrie et ma gloire et mon unique amour !”.'
* I may cite here, as in echo of this cry, the noble words just
now addressed by the greatest of American voices to “the star, the
ship of France, beat back and baffled long-dim, Smitten star—star
22 W/CTOR Aſ UGO
Others who will may have the honour of that privilege,
to cast the weight of their hearts upon the losing side, to
bring tribute of love and trust and reverence rather to
failure than to success, to a republic bound in chains
of iron than to an empire bound in chains of gold; but
men who have the lineal pulse of French blood in their
veins, and the traditional memories of French kindred
and alliance in their hearts, men to whose forefathers in
exile for their faith's sake the mighty mother has once
and again opened her arms for shelter in past ages, and
fostered under her wings generation after generation as |
her children, cannot well read such words as these with-
out a thrill of the blood and a kindling of the memory
which neither the native of France nor the kinless
foreigner can wholly share. £
Side by side with the ardent denunciations of German
panting o'er a land of death—heroic land I’’ This prophecy is from
the new song of Whitman : {
“Sure, as the ship of all, the Earth itself,
Product of deathly fire and turbulent chaos,
Forth from its spasms of fury and its poisons,
Issuing at last in perfect power and beauty,
Onward, beneath the sun, following its course,
So thou, O ship of France 1 °
In the notes to his essay on “Democratic Vistas.” Whitman for one
expresses his recognition of Hugo living and Byron dead as “de-
serving so well of America ; ” which may be set against the im-
pertinences of meaner American persons. It may likewise be
remarked and remembered with pleasure that among the last printed
words of Landor were two little stanzas of tributary verse in honour
of the younger poet’s exile. Amid the countless calumnies and
insults cast upon that exile by French and English writers of the
reptile kind, it is a relief to recall the greeting sent to it by a great
English republican from the extreme verge of life, and from the
shore of the new world by the first poet of American democracy.
Z’AAVAWAEAE TERRIBA. 23
rapine and spoliation, of the hands found equally ready
to seize a province or a purse, the purblind and devout
incompetence of the defender who “would rather go with
Sir priest than sir knight,” the soldier who for all his
personal courage was “inclined to charge the saints in
heaven with the task of keeping off the danger,” is twice
and thrice chastised with bitter and burning words of
remonstrance. The keenest sarcasm however was in
store for June, when an impertinence of this man's drew
down a memorable retort on the general whose sallies
were reserved for the writer ; he was somewhat chary of
them during the time of the siege; a general who might
as well have taken the offensive against the enemy
instead.
In sharp and Sweet contrast to these stand the poems
of a finer excellence, such as the letter of January 1oth
sent by balloon from the besieged city with its bright
brave message of affection and confidence, full of the
clear light laughter of French heroism not less than of its
high and fiery faith. But for perfect delight and strong
charm of loveliness we return at each reading to the
i
domestic poems as to the Crowning splendour and wonder
of this great book. All students have always known
Victor Hugo for the supreme singer of childhood ; of its
works and ways, its gladness and sadness, its earthly weak-
ness and heavenly beauty, its indefinable attraction lying
deeper than all reason can Sound or all analysis resolve.
Even after Shakespeare's portrait of Mamillius, and the
divine cradle-songs of Blake, we are compelled to
recognise in the living master the most perfect poet of
little children. Circumstances have given to these present
24 VICTOR AUGO :
poems a colour and a pathos, a gentle glory and a
luminous tenderness, which only such a framework of
time and place could give. Out of the strong has come
forth Such Sweetness, out of the lion's mouth such honey,
as no smaller or weaker thing can breed. Assuredly,
as the Master has said himself in that majestic prose
poem inscribed with the name of Shakespeare, the
mightiest mountains can outmatch even for flowers the
valleys whose whole business is to rear them ; their
s blossoming ravines and hollows full of April can beat the
meadows at their own trade; the strongest of singers
are the sweetest, and no poet of the idyllic or elegiac
kind can rival even on his own peculiar ground, for
tender grace and delicacy of beauty, the most potent
poets of a higher order, sovereigns of lyric and of tragic.
song. It is AEschylus, and not Euripides, who fills the
litter air of the Scythian ravine with music of wings and
words more sweet than sleep to the weary, with notes of
heavenly pity and love unsubduable by fear ; who shows
us with one touch of terrible tenderness the maiden
agony of Iphigenia, Smiting with the piteous dart of her
eye each one of the ministers of sacrifice, in dumb
show as of a picture striving to speak to them ; who
throws upon the most fearful scene in all tragedy a flash
of pathos unspeakable, when Clytaemnestra bares before
the sword of her son the bosom that suckled him as he
slept. What Euripidean overflow of tears and words can
be matched for its own special and much vaunted quality
of tender and pathetic Sweetness against such instances
as these of the awful Sweetness and intensity of the pathos
of AEschylus P what wailing outcry “in the measures of .
ZANNAEAE ZERR/BZZ. 25
a hired Cissian mourner” can be likened to these brief
words that sting like tears of fire? what milder note of
the lesser gods of song has in it such penetrative and .
piercing gentleness as the softened speech of the thunder-
bearer P Where, among the poets who have never gone
up to the prophetic heights or down to the tragic depths
of thought and passion, is there one who can put forth
when he will verse of such sweet and simple perfection
as the great tragic and prophetic poet of our own age P
These are some of the first verses inscribed to the baby
grandchild whose pretty presence is ever and anon re-
Called to our mind's eye between the dark acts of the
year-long tragedy.
“Vous efites donc hier un an, ma bien-aimée.
Contente, vous jasez, comme, Sous la ramée,
Au fond du nid plus tiède ouvrant de vagues yeux,
Les Oiseaux nouveau-nés gazouillent, tout joyeux
De sentir qu’il commence à leur pousser des plumes.
Jeanne, ta bouche est rose ; et dans, les gros volumes
Dont les images font ta joie, et que je dois,
Pour te plaire, laisser chiffonner partes doigts,
On trouve de beaux vers, mais pas un quite waille
Quand tout ton petit corps en me voyant tressaille;
Les plus fameux auteurs n'ont rien écrit de mieux
Que la pensée éclose à demi dans tes yeux,
Et que ta réverie obscure, éparse, étrange,
Regardant l’homme avec l’ignorance de l’ange.”
As in the look and action of a little child, so in this
verse itself there is something of dim and divine pathos,
sensible in the very joy of its beauty; something which
touches men not too much used to the melting mood
with a smiling sense of tears, an inner pang of delight
doration before that divine
made up of Compassion and a
_--- “---
-—----- - ... ----
*
26 VICTOR HUGO :
weakness. In the next month's verses addressed to the
child in a time of sickness the pathos is more direct and
tangible ; more tender and exquisite than this it could
not be. Again, in January, we have a glimpse “between
two bombardments” of the growing and changing charm
of the newly weaned angel, now ambitious to feel its feet
on earth instead of the wings it left in heaven; on terms
of household intimacy with an actual kitten, and old
enough to laugh at angels yet unweaned.
“A chaque pas qu’il fait, l'enfant derrière lui
Laisse plusieurs petits fantômes de lui-même.
On Se Souvient de tous, on les pleure, on les aime,
Et ce seraient des morts s'il n'était vivant, lui.”
With the one eternal exception of Shakespeare, what other
poet has ever strewn the intervals of tragedy with blossoms
of such breath and colour? The very verse seems a
thing of flowerlike and childlike growth, the very body of
the song a piece of living nature like any bud that bursts
or young life that comes forth in spring. We are re-
minded of the interlude in Macbeth made by the prattle
of Macduff's child between the scenes of incantation and
of murder. Beside these the student will set in the high
places of remembrance the lines on a shell falling where
once were the Feuillantines — that garden of now
immortal blossom, of unwithering flower and fruit un-
decaying, where the grey-haired Master was once a fair-
haired child, and watched beyond the flight of doves at
sunrise the opening in heaven of the chaliced flower of
dawn—in the same heaven where now blazes over his
head the horrible efflorescence of the bursting shell.
“Here his soul flew forth singing; here before his
Z'AAVNEE 7/AR/BZE. 27
dreamy eyes sprang flowers that seemed everlästing.
Here life was one thing with light; here, under the
thickening foliage in April, walked his mother, whom he
held by the skirt of her gown.” Here the crowding
flowers “seemed to laugh as they warmed themselves
in the sun, and himself also was a flower, being a child.”
After five months of siege comes a month of mourn-
ing, and after the general agony an individual anguish.
Before this we are silent ; only there rises once more in
our ears the unforgotten music of the fourth book of the
“Contemplations,” and holds us dumb in reverence before
the renewal of that august and awful sorrow.
Then come the two most terrible months of the whole
hideous year ; the strange vision of that Commune in
which heroes were jostled by ruffians, and martyrs fell
side by side with murderers; the monstrous figure of that
Assembly on whose head lies all the weight of the blood
shed on either side, within the city as without ; the
spectral unspeakable aspect of that fratricidal agony, as of
some Dantesque wrestle between devils and lost souls in
hell. Against the madness of the besieged as against the
atrocity of the besiegers the voice of the greatest among
Frenchmen was lifted up in vain. In vain he prophesied,
when first a threat of murder was put forth against
the hostages, of the murderous reprisals which a crime
so senseless and so shameless must assuredly provoke.
In vain he reclaimed for Paris, in the face of Versailles,
the right of municipal self-government by her own
council; in vain rebuked the untimely and inopportune
haste of Paris to revindicate this right for herself in a
Season of such unexampled calamity and peril. On the
28 W/C7 OA AMOGO.
23rd of April he wrote from Brussels, where the care of
his fatherless grandchildren for the time detained him, a
letter to the A'affel, suppressed in their deaf and blind
insanity by men who would not hear and could not see 5
in this letter he traced with the keen fidelity of science
the disease to its head, and with the direct intelligence of
simple reason tracked the torrent of civil war to its source;
to the action of the majority, inspired by the terror and
ignorance which ere long were to impel them to the con-
ception and perpetration of even greater crimes than they
had already provoked from the ignorance and passion of
their antagonists. Above all, his faithful and fearless
voice was raised before both parties alike against the
accursed principle of reprisals. Now as of old, as ever,
throughout his life of glory and of good, he called upon
justice by her other name of mercy; he claimed for all
alike the equity of compassion ; he stood up to plead for
all his enemies, for all the enemies of his cause—to re-
pudiate for himself and his fellow-sufferers of past time
the use of such means as had been used against them-
selves—of banishment, imprisonment, lifelong proscrip-
'tion, murder in the mass or in detail. But the plague was
not so to be stayed ; and when the restored government
had set itself steadily to outdo in cold blood the crimes of
the conquered populace in its agony, the mighty voice
which had appealed in vain against the assassins and in-
cendiaries whose deeds had covered with just or unjust
dishonour the name of the fallen party, who had confused
in the sight of Europe their own evil works with the
noble dreams and deeds of better men, and Sullied with
the fumes of blood and fire the once sublime and stainless
ZANNEE TERRIBA E. 29
name of “commune "—this same voice was heard to
intercede for the outcasts of that party, to offer a refuge
to fugitives from the grasp of a government yet guiltier of
blood than theirs. This infamous crime had not long to
wait for its reward ; a night attack on the house of the
criminal with paving-stones and levers and threats of
instant death. The year before, in answer to his appeal
against invasion, certain bloodhounds of the press in
Germany had raised such another yell as these curs in
Belgium, bidding “hang the poet at the mast-head ;”
this time the cry was “A Za Zanterne /* Never was the
sanguinary frenzy of the men of revolution, as exemplified
in Victor Hugo, set off in stronger relief by the mild
wisdom and moderation of the men of &rder, as exem-
plified in his assailants. Moved by this consideration,
the Belgian government naturally proceeded to expel the
offender ; but with a remarkable want of logic omitted to
offer the slightest reward to the brave men who had
vindicated law and order by leading a forlorn hope
against a fortress garrisoned by an old man, four women,
and two children, one twenty months of age, one two years:
and a half. It is almost incredible that some months
later the son of a minister, who had taken a leading part
in this heroic work, was condemned to a fine of not less
than four pounds Sterling. Considering that once at
least he or another of the crew did very nearly succeed
in beating out the brains of the child in arms with a well-
aimed flint, it is simply inexplicable that no mark of
honour should have been conferred by royal or national
gratitude on so daring a champion of law, so devoted a
defender of social order against the horrors of imminent
3o V/CTOR AE/OGO
\ſ
tº:
anarchy. In a case of this pressing danger, this mortal
peril, it is not every man who would have put himself
forward at such risk to protect against a force so formid-
able the threatened safety of society ; not even the native
land of these lion-hearted men can hope always to repro-
duce a breed of patriots ready to incur such hazards
and undertake such feats as this in the sacred cause of
their country. France has her Bayards and her Dantons,
England her Sidneys and her Nelsons; these are but
common heroes, fit only to be classed with the heroes
and patriots of old time, and such as their native soil
might haply rear again at need; but the most ardent and
sanguine lover of his country in all Belgium can hardly
‘hope that his fatherland will ever again bring forth a
race of men worthy to be called the seed of such fathers
as these ; men capable of exploits unexampled in the
annals of vulgar patriotism, and from which the bravest
of those above cited would assuredly have drawn back.
It is hard to imagine those heroes of other countries
inspired with the courage requisite to make war upon
- such enemies and under such conditions as could not
suffice to daunt or divert from their purpose the heroes
of Brussels.
Thus, as once before from Jersey, was Victor Hugo
now driven from Belgium by a government which in the
year of general shame contrived to attain the supreme
crown of disgrace, to gather the final flower of ignominy;
a distinction not easy to win from so many rivals in
the infamous race ; but theft and murder, under their
magnified and multiplied forms of national robbery and
civic massacre, are too common among a certain sort of -
Z’AAVAWEAE ZERAE/BA. 31
conquerors to be marked out for such especial notice as an
act of this singular and admirable baseness. From all
unclean things, from the mouths of the priesthood and
the press, from the tongues that lap blood and the throats :
that vomit falsehood, rose the cry of mockery and hatred ; .
f
{
if the preacher of peace and righteousness, the counsellor
of justice and of mercy, were not a madman, he would
be a ruffian ; but the punctilious equity of episcopal
journals gave him the benefit of the doubt. Yet for all
this, as the poet found on leaving Brussels, it is not
everybody who can impose the doom of exile; to ex-
pulsion the foreigner may condemn you, to exile he
cannot. Exile is from the fatherland alone; a man's
own country is the only one terrible to him who is cast out.
from it. In words full of the beauty of a divine sorrow
the exile of many years has set down the difference.
From Vianden as from Brussels he continued to
fulfil the duty of intercessor; to plead for the incendiary
who could not read, for the terrible and pitiable woman
dragged in triumph through the laughing and raging
throngs of Versailles, dumb and bleeding, with foam-
flecked lips fast locked in bitterness of silence, in savage
deafness that nothing can move or shake, with the look
as of one “aweary of the sun,” with a kind of fierce
affright in her eyes. For all Such his appeal is made to
their slayers on the old sacred plea, “Forgive them ; for
they know not what they do.” Their wretchedness and
their ignorance, their great want and their little knowledge,
left them conscious of all that they suffered, unconscious
of all that they did.
Out of the darkness of these most tragic poems of all,
}
32 V/CZOA HUGO :
one stands up with the light of a great deed on it, relieved
against the rest in a glory as of sunrise. It is the poem
which places on everlasting record the heroism of a child
of twelve, Condemned to be shot after all his companions,
who asked leave to go first and take his watch home to
his mother, promising to come back in time to die in his
turn. They let him go, laughing at the infantine shallow-
ness of the pretence ; the little blackguard was afraid ;
off with you ! He went, and returned. Even the
soldiers of Thiers and Galifet could not slaughter that
boy; the officer in command gave him his life, and the
master-poet of his nation has given him immortality.
The verses in which the greater of these two gifts is
bestowed come like a draught of wine to the lips of one
sick and faint amid all the pitiful and fearful record of
evil inflicted and endured ; they refresh, rekindle, re-
illuminate the sunken spirit with a flush and thrill of
high delight.
But it is possible to meet death with another kind of
fearlessness than this, a quality which is not of the light
but of the darkness; not with divine defiance as a hero,
but with desperate indifference as a slave : nor is any
society sound or any state secure which has found out
no-way to cure this dismal readiness to be killed off, this
grim facility in dying. Upon all these to whom we have
made life so hard that old men and children alike are
ready to leave it without a word or tear, in tragic disdain,
as of men strangers to their own death, whose grave was
long since ready dug in their heart; upon all to whom
we have refused the right of the body to its meat and the
| right of the spirit to its food, to whom we have given
ZANNEE TERRIBZE. 33
neither bread nor light, corporeal nurture nor intellectual;
upon the slaughtered and the banished, the hideous pits
of quicklime into which the yet warm corpses of men and
women were huddled, and the more, hideous ships of
transport between whose decks were huddled the living
agonies of those condemned to the sufferings over which
in the first years of the fallen empire men shuddered or
wept, thinking of the innocent as well as the guilty lives
crushed and worn out in that penal passage, killed by
cold and heat and foul wretchedness—stifled in dens too
low to stand upright in, with the sense overhead of the
moving mass of the huge hurrying ship on its intolerable .
way; upon all these multitudinous miseries of all who do
and suffer wrong, the single voice of charity and of reason
invokes the equal dole and due of pity. At Vianden,
amid all the sounds and shows of summer, the banished
poet broods on the bloody problem that is not to be
solved by file-firing and massacre at haphazard; all the
light of the June days is reflected in his verse, but in
his soul there is no reflection but of graves dug in the
street for men shot down without trial, of murder feeling
its way in the dark at random, and victims dispatched
by chance instead of choice. With the intense and
subtle beauty of this June landscape, where the witness
could see no sympathy with the human trouble of the
time, we may compare that former picture of the grim
glory of a November sky after Sunset, seen from the
invested walls of Paris, when heaven did seem in harmony
with the time, and the watcher saw there a reflection of
war and mourning, from the west as white as a shroud
|
|
\,
'',|
to the east as black as a pall and alon the line of
D
34 V/CZOA” Aſ UGO .
horizon the likeness of a blood-red sword let fall from the
hand of a god after some battle with a giant of equal
| Stature.
For all this, notwithstanding, the watchword of the
poem is hope, and not despair. “All this horror has
hope in it; the ice-cold morning chills the sky-line as
with fear; at times the day begins with such a shudder
that the rising sun seems a masked attack. —The coming
wave of the unknown has but a dull and livid trans-
parence, into which the light comes but by degrees;
what it shows us, seems to float and drift in folds im-
measurable. The expansion of form and number appals
us, and it is horrible to see to-day in the darkness what
ought only to be seen to-morrow.” By the parable of the
robin's nest found in the hollow of the brazen mouth of,
the Waterloo lion, we are bidden see and hear the future
in the womb of the present, hope in the jaws of despair,
the song of peace in the very throat of war. Thus it is
but natural that the poet should hearken rather to the
higher voice than to the voice of expediency, to the
counsellor whose name is Reason, whose forename is
Interest; to the friendly admonition which reminds him
that truth which is over true is all but falsehood ; that in
seeking—the ideal you find the visionary, and become a
dreamer through being too much a thinker ; that the wise
man does not wish to be unjust, but fears on the other
hand to be too just, and seeks a middle course between
falsehood, which is the first danger, and truth, which is.
the second ; that Right in the rough is merely the ore
from which in its crude state we have to extract the pure
gold of Law ; that too much light is as sure to blind you
ZANAVEZ TAEAEA'ſ BZ.E. 35
as too much darkness, and if necessary you should not
open the shutter more than halfway ; that war and the
scaffold are detestable in theory, and practically service-
able: that the shop must be set up against the temple,
though the money-changers were once on a time driven
out of it—for the fault of Jesus was to be something too
much a God ; that in all things wisdom is moderation,
and from its quiet corner can remark and reprehend the
flaws and excesses of the universe; as for instance that
though the sun be splendid and the spring be sweet, the
one has too many beams and the other has too many roses;
this is the inconvenience of all things of the kind, and
God is by no means free from exaggeration ; to imitate
him is to fall into perfection—a grave risk; all work is
"done better after a lesser model, and God does not always
set the best example to follow. What is the use of being .
inaccessible? Jesus goes too far in declining to take the
offer of Beelzebub into consideration ; not that I say he
ought to close with it ; but it is stupid for God to be rude
when the devil is civil ; it would have been better to say,
“I’ll think it over, my good friend.” After all, man is
man ; he is not wicked, and he is not good ; by no means
white as snow, but by no means black as coal; black and
white, piebald, striped, dubious, Sceptical. Seeing that
men are small and their conscience dwarfish, the states-
man takes their measure before he ventures anything : he
astonishes them, but without any thunderclaps of genius or
daring which might make their heads giddy; he gets
them up prodigies proportioned to their size. The voice ;
p sº -
of wisdom then proceeds to recapitulate all the troubles
which a contrary line of conduct has brought on the
D 2
36 Wrczor HUGo:
scorner who still turns a deaf ear to her counsel : he has
got himself stoned out of Brussels; the rattlesnakes of
the press shake their rattles at him, the clerical and im-
perial gazettes have brought to light all his secret sins,
drunkenness, theft, avarice, inhospitality, the bad wine
and lenten fare set before his guests, and so forth ; M.
Veuillot is so witty as to call him pumpkin-head; it is all
| his own fault ; to resist evil is doubtless a good thing, but
it is a bad thing to stand alone; to rate and rebuke suc-
cess, to be rough with those who have the upper hand, is
really a blockhead's trick; all conquerors are in the right,
and all that glitters is gold : the god of the winds is God,
and the weathercock is the symbol of his worship.—And
then there is always some little admixture of positive right
in actual fact, some little residue of good discoverable in
all evil, which it should be your business to seek out. If
: Torquemadais in power you warm yourself at the stake.—
It is better to look for the real than for the true; the
reality will help you to live, the truth will be the ruin of
you ; the reality is afraid of the truth.-A man's duty is
just to make use of facts; you (says the voice of good
counsel) have read it wrong : you are like a man who
should take a star out of heaven to light him when a
candle would serve better to see the way by. To this
sound advice we see too plainly that the hearer on whom
it is wasted prefers the dictation of the voice which speaks
in answer, admitting that this low sort of light may have
its partisans, may be found excellent and may really be
useful to avoid a shock, ward off a projectile, walk well-
nigh straight by in the dark cross-roads, and find your
whereabouts among Small duties ; it serves publicans very
AAAWAVEE 7'EPA'ZAZE. 37
well as a lamp for their counters; it has on its side, very
naturally, the purblind, the clever, the cunning, the
prudent, the discreet, those who can only see things close,
those who scrutinize a spider's web. But there must be
somebody on the side of the stars | Somebody to stand
up for brotherhood, for mercy, for honour, for right, for
freedom, and for the solemn splendour of absolute truth.
With all their sublimity and serenity, flowers as they are
of Summer everlasting, the shining Constellations have
need that the world they guide should bear them witness
that they shine, and some man's voice be raised in every
age to reassure his brothers by such cry of testimony
uttered across the night ; for nothing would be so terrible
as an ultimate equality of good and evil, of light and
darkness, in the sight of the supreme and infinite un-
known world; nothing would bring so heavy an indict-
ment against God as the mad and senseless waste of
light unprofitably lost and scattered about the hollow deep
of heaven without the direction of a will. This absence
of will, this want of conscience in the world, the prophet
of belief refuses to accept as possible. In the last poem
of the book he rejects the conception of evil as triumphant
in the end, of nature as a cheat so ghastly and so base
that God ought to hide himself for shame, of a heaven
which shelters from sight a divine malefactor, of some one
hiding behind the starry veil of the abyss who pre-
meditates a crime, of man as having given all, the days
of his life, the tears of his eyes, the blood of his heart,
only to be made the august plaything of treacherous
omnipotence : it would not be worth while for the winds
to stir the stormy tide of our lives, for the morning to
38 V/CZOA A/UGO.
come forth of the sea and dazzle the blinded flowers with
broadcast seed of diamond, for the bird to sing, or for
ºfhe world to be, if fate were but a hunter on the trail of
his prey, if all man's efforts brought forth but vanity, if
the darkness were his child and his mother were the dust,
if he rowed on night and day, putting forth his will,
pouring out his blood, discovering and creating, to no
end but a frightful arrival nowhither; then might man,
nothing as he is, rise up in judgment against God and
take to witness the skies and stars on his behalf. But it
is not so ; whence morning rises, the future shall surely
rise; the dawn is a plighted word of everlasting en-
gagement ; the visible firmament is as it were a divine
promise to pay ; and the eternal and infinite God is not
bankrupt. -
In the strength of this faith a man may well despise
all insult and all falsehood thrown up at him, all railing
and mockery of his country or his creed from the unclean
lips of church pamphleteers and other such creatures of
the darkness and the dirt as in all lands alike are bred
from the obscurer and obscener parts of literature. These
are to him no more than the foul bog-water at its foot is
to the oak whose boughs are the whole forest's dome ;
than the unlovely insects of the dust that creep beneath
it are to the marble giant, august in its mutilation—to the
colossal. Sphinx of rose-tinged granite, grim and great,
that sits with hands on knees all through the night wherein
the shaken palm-trees shiver, waiting for its moment to
speak to the sunrise, and unconscious if any reptile be-
slaver its base. The god has never known that a toad
was stirring ; while a worm slides over him, he keeps in
Z’AAVAWAEE ZERAE/B/A2. 39
silence his awful mystery of hidden sound and utterance
withheld ; and the swarming of centipedes without num-
ber cannot take from Memnon, suddenly struck radiant,
the great and terrible voice that makes answer to the
Sun. Those minute and multitudinous creatures who re-
vile and defame the great—and thereby, says Blake,
“blaspheme God, for there is no other God”—have no
more power to disturb the man defamed than the judges
who try the Revolution at their bar and give sentence
against it have power to undo its work ; their wrath and
their mourning are in vain; the long festival of the
ravenous night is over, the world of darkness is in the
throes of death ; the dreadful daylight has come ; the
flitter-mouse is blind, the polecat strays about squealing,
the glowworm has lost his glory, the fox, alas, sheds tears;
the beasts that used to go out hunting in the evening at
the time when little birds go to sleep are at their last
gasp ; the desolation of the wolves fills the woods full of
howling ; the persecuted spectres know not what to do;
if this goes on, if this light persists in dazzling and dis-
maying the night-hawk and the raven, the vampire will
die of hunger in the grave; the pitiless Sunbeam catches
and consumes the dark.-It is to judge the crimes of the
sunrise that these judges sit in session.
Meantime, amid all the alternations of troubled hope
with horror and the travail of an age in labour that has
not strength to bring forth, there are present things of
comfort and reassurance. “The children we have al-
ways with us;” they are no more troubled about what we
do than the bird that twitters beneath the hornbeam, or
the star that breaks into flower of light on the black sky-
49 VICTO AE HUGO .
line; they ask God for nothing but his sun ; it is enough
for little Jeanne that the sky should be blue. Over his
son's and their father's grave the poet sees two little
figures darkened by the dim shadow and gilded by the
vague light of the dead. He speaks to them sweet and
sublime words of blessing and of prophecy; of the glad
heavenly ignorance that is theirs now, of the sad great
knowledge that must be one day theirs. With the last
and loftiest notes of that high soft music in our ears, we
will leave off our labour of citation and exposition.
“They will live to know,” he says, “how man must live
with his fate at the mercy of chance, in such fashion that
he may find hereafter the truth of things conform to his
vision of them here.” *
“Moi-même un jour, après la mort, je connaitrai
Mon destin que j’ignore,
Et je me pencherai Sur vous, tout penétré
De mystère et d’aurore.
Je saurai le secret de l’exil, du linceul
Jeté sur votre enfance,
Et pourquoi la justice et la douceur d'un seul
Semble à tous une offense.
Je comprendrai pourquoi, tandis que vous chantiez,
Dans mes branches funèbres,
Moi qui pour tous les maux veux toutes les pitiés,
J’avais tant de ténèbres.
Je Saurai pourquoi l'ombre implacable est sur moi,
Pourquoi tant d'hécatombes,
Pourquoi l'hiver Sans fin m'enveloppe, pourquoi
Je m'accroſs sur des tombes ;
Pourquoi tant de combats, de larmes, de regrets,
Et tant de tristes choses;
Et pourquoi Dieu voulut que je fusse un cyprès
Quand vous étiez des roses.”
Z’AAWAVAEAE ZERRIAZE. 4I
A poem having in it any element of greatness is likely
to arouse many questions with regard to the poetic art
in general, and certain in that case to illustrate them with
fresh lights of its own. This of Victor Hugo's at once
Suggests two points of frequent and fruitless debate
between critics of the higher kind. The first, whether
poetry and politics are irreconcilable or not ; the second,
whether art should prefer to deal with things immediate
Or with things remote. Upon both sides of either question
it seems to me that even wise men have ere now been
led from errors of theory to errors of decision. The well-
known formula of art for art's sake, opposed as it has
ever been to the practice of the poet who was so long
Credited with its authorship, has like other doctrines a
true side to it and an untrue. Taken as an affirmative,
it is a precious and everlasting truth. No work of art
has any worth or life in it that is not done on the abso-
lute terms of art ; that is not before all things and above
all things a work of positive excellence as judged by the
laws of the special art to whose laws it is amenable. If
the rules and conditions of that art be not observed, or
if the work done be not great and perfect enough to rank
among its triumphs, the poem, picture, statue, is a failure
irredeemable and inexcusable by any show or any proof
of high purpose and noble meaning. The rule of art is
not the rule of morals; in morals the action is judged by
the intention, the doer is applauded, excused, or con-
demned, according to the motive which induced his deed;
in art, the one question is not what you mean but what
you do. Therefore, as I have said elsewhere, the one
primary requisite of art is artistic worth ; “art for art's
42 V/C7 OA” Aſ UGO .
sake first, and then all things shall be added to her—or
iſ not, it is a matter of quite secondary importance; but
from him that has not this one indispensable quality of
the artist, shall be taken away even that which he has ;
whatever merit of aspiration, sentiment, sincerity, he may
naturally possess, admirable and serviceable as in other
lines of work it might have been and yet may be, is here
unprofitable and unpraiseworthy.” Thus far we are at
one with the preachers of “art for art;” we prefer for
\ example Goethe to Körner and Sappho to Tyrtaeus ; we
would give many patriots for one artist, considering that
civic virtue is more easily to be had than lyric genius,
and that the hoarse monotony of verse lowered to the
* level of a Spartan understanding, however commendable
such verse may be for the doctrine delivered and the duty
inculcated upon all good citizens, is of less than no value
to art, while there is a value beyond price and beyond
thought in the Lesbian music which spends itself upon
the record of fleshly fever and amorous malady. We
admit then that the worth of a poem has properly nothing
to do with its moral meaning or design ; that the praise
of a Caesar as sung by Virgil, of a Stuart as sung by
Dryden, is preferable to the most magnanimous invective
against tyranny which love of country and of liberty
could wring from a Bavius or a Settle; but on the other
hand we refuse to admit that art of the highest kind may
not ally itself with moral or religious passion, with the
ethics or the politics of a nation or an age. It does not
detract from the poetic supremacy of AEschylus and of
Dante, of Milton and of Shelley, that they should have
been pleased to put their art to such use; nor does it de-
ZANAVEE 7'EPA’ſ BZE. 43
tract from the sovereign greatness of other poets that they
should have had no note of song for any such theme. I*
a word, the doctrine of art for art is true in the positive
sense, false in the negative; sound as an affirmation, un-
Sound as a prohibition. If it be not true that the only
absolute duty of art is the duty she owes to herself, then
must art be dependent on the alien conditions of subject
and of aim ; whereas she is dependent on herself alone,
and on nothing above her or beneath ; by her own law
she must stand or fall, and to that alone she is respon-
sible ; by no other law can any work of art be condemned,
i
by no other plea can it be saved. But while we refuse
to any artist on any plea the license to infringe in the
least article the letter of this law, to overlook or overpass ºf
it in the pursuit of any foreign purpose, we do not refuse
to him the liberty of bringing within the range of it any
subject that under these conditions may be so brought
and included within his proper scope of work. This
liberty the men who take “art for art” as their motto,
using the words in an exclusive sense, would refuse to
concede; they see with perfect clearness and accuracy
that art can never be a “handmaid” of any “lord,” as
the moralist, pietist, or politician would fain have her be;
and therefore they will not allow that she can properly be
even so much as an ally of anything else. So on the one
side we have the judges who judge of art by her capacity
to serve some other good end than the production of
good work; these would leave us for instance King John,
but would assuredly deprive us of As You Like It ; the
national devotion and patriotic fire of King Henry V.
would suffice in their estimation to set it far above the
44 VVCTO AE ATUGO.
sceptic and inconclusive meditations of Hamlet, the point-
less and aimless beauty of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
On the other side we have the judges who would ostracise
every artist found guilty of a moral sense, of the political
faith or the religious emotion of patriots and heroes;
whose theory would raze the Persæ from the scroll of
AEschylus, and leave us nothing of Dante but the Vita
Nuova, of Milton but the Allegro and Penseroso, of
Shelley but the Skylark and the Cloud. In consistency
the one order of fanatics would expel from the poetic
commonwealth such citizens as Coleridge and Keats, the
other would disfranchise such as Burns and Byron. The
simple truth is that the question at issue between them is
that illustrated by the old child's parable of the gold and
silver shield. Art is one, but the service of art is diverse.
It is equally foolish to demand of a Goethe, a Keats, or
a Coleridge, the proper and natural work of a Dante, a
Milton, or a Shelley, as to invert the demand; to arraign
the Divina Commedia in the name of Faust, the Sonnet
on the Massacres in Piedmont in the name of the Ode
on a Grecian Urn, or the Ode to Liberty in the name of
Rubla Khan. I know nothing stranger in the history of
criticism than the perversity even of eminent and ex-
quisite critics in persistent condemnation of one great
artist for his deficiency in the qualities of another. It is
not that critics of the higher kind expect to gather grapes
of thorns or figs of thistles; but they are too frequently
surprised and indignant that they cannot find grapes on
a fig-tree or figs on a vine. M. Auguste Vacquerie has
remarked before me on this unreasonable expectation and
consequent irritation of the critical mind, with his usual
ZANNAEAE ZERR/BZE. 45
bright and swift sense of the truth—a quality which
we are sure to find when a good artist has occasion to
speak of his own art and the theories current with respect
to it. In this matter proscription and prescription are
alike unavailing; it is equally futile to bid an artist forego
the natural bent of his genius or to bid him assume the
natural office of another. If the spirit or genius proper
to himself move him for instance to write political poetry,
he will write it; if it bid him abstain from any such theme
and write only on personal or ideal subjects, then also
he will obey ; or if ever he attempt to force his genius
into unnatural service, constrain it to some alien duty,
the most praiseworthy purpose imaginable will not suffice
to put life or worth into the work so done. Art knows
nothing of choice between the two kinds or preference Of
the one to the other; she asks only that the artist shall
“follow his star” with the faith and the fervour of Dante,
whether it lead him on a path like or unlike the way of
Dante's work; the ministers of either tribe, the savours
of either sacrifice, are equally excellent in her sight.
The question whether past or present afford the
highest matter for high poetry and offer the noblest re-
ward to the noble workman has been as loudly and as
long debated, but is really less debateable on any rational
ground than the question of the end and aim of art. It
is but lost labour that the champions on one side summon
us to renounce the present and all its works, and return
to bathe our spirits in the purer air and living springs of
the past; it is but waste of breath for the champions of
the other party to bid us break the yoke and cast off the
bondage of that past, leave the dead to bury their dead,
|
46 VVCTO AE ATUGO .
and turn from the dust and rottenness of old-world themes,
epic or romantic, classical or feudal, to face the age where-
in we live and move and have our being, to send forth
our souls and songs in search of the wonderful and
doubtful future. Art knows nothing of time; for her
there is but one tense, and all ages in her sight are alike
present ; there is nothing old in her sight, and nothing
new. It is true, as the One side urges, that she fears not
to face the actual aspect of the hour, to handle if it please
her the immediate matters of the day; it is true, as the
other side insists, that she is free to go back when shē
will to the very beginnings of tradition and fetch her
subject from the furthest of ancient days; she cannot be
vulgarised by the touch of the present or deadened by
the contact of the past. In vain, for instance, do the first
poetess of England and the first poet of America agree
to urge upon their fellows or their followers the duty of
confronting and expressing the spirit and the secret of
their own time, its meaning and its need; such work is
worthy of a poet, but no worthier than any other work
if otherwise as good, has in it as much of this principle as
a poem of the present. If a poem cast in the mould of
classic or feudal times, of Greek drama or mediaeval
romance, be lifeless and worthless, it is not because the
subject or the form was ancient, but because the poet
was inadequate to his task, incompetent to do better than
a flat and feeble imitation ; had he been able to fill the
old types of art with new blood and breath, the remote-
ness of subject and the antiquity of form would in no
wise have impaired the worth and reality of his work; he
AAAWAVAEAE 7"E.R.A/B/A. 47
would have brought close to us the far-off loveliness and
renewed for us the ancient life of his models, not by
mechanical and Servile transcript as of a copying clerk,
but by loving and reverent emulation as of an original
fellow-craftsman. No form is obsolete, no Subject out of
date, if the right man be there to rehandle it. To the
question “Can these bones live?” there is but one
answer ; if the spirit and breath of art be breathed upon
them indeed, and the voice prophesying upon them be
indeed the voice of a prophet, then assuredly will the
bones “come together, bone to his bone ; ” and the
sinews and the flesh will come up upon them, and the
skin cover them above, and the breath come into them,
and they will live. For art is very life itself, and knows
nothing of death; she is absolute truth, and takes no
care of fact; she sees that Achilles and Ulysses are even
now more actual by far than Wellington and Talleyrand ;
not merely more noble and more interesting as types and
figures, but more positive and real ; and thus it is (as
Victor Hugo has himself so finely instanced it) “that
Trimalchio is alive, while the late M. Romieu is dead.”
Vain as is the warning of certain critics to beware of the
present and abstain from its immediate vulgarities and
realities, not less vain, however nobly meant or nobly
worded, is the counter admonition to “mistrust the poet”
who “trundles back his soul” some centuries to sing of
chiefs and ladies “as dead as must be, for the greater
part, the poems made on their heroic bones ; ” for if he
be a poet indeed, these will at once be reclothed with
instant flesh and reinspired with immediate breath, as pre-
Sent and as true, as palpable and as precious, as any-
|
48 VVCZOAe ATO/GO .
thing most near and real; and if the heroic bones be still
fleshless and the heroic poems lifeless, the fault is not in
the bones but in the poems, not in the theme but in the
singer. As vain it is, not indeed to invite the muse to
new spheres and fresher fields whither also she will surely
and gladly come, but to bid her “migrate from Greece
and Ionia, cross out those immensely overpaid accounts,
that matter of Troy, and Achilles’ wrath, and Æneas',
Odysseus' wanderings ; ” forsake her temples and castles
of old for the new quarters which doubtless also suit her
well and make her welcome ; for neither epic nor romance
of chivalrous quest or classic war is obsolete yet, or ever
can be ; there is nothing in the past extinct; no scroll is
“closed for ever,” no legend or vision of Hellenic or
feudal faith “dissolved utterly like an exhalation : ” all
that ever had life in it has life in it for ever ; those themes
only are dead which never were other than dead. “ She
has left them all, and is here ;” so the prophet of the new
world vaunts himself in vain ; she is there indeed, as he
says, “by thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle un-
dismayed—smiling and pleased, with palpable intent to
stay;” but she has not needed for that to leave her old
abodes; she is not a dependent Creature of time or place,
“servile to all the skiey influences; ” she need not climb
mountains or cross seas to bestow on all nations at once
the light of her countenance ; she is omnipresent and
eternal, and forsakes neither Athens nor Jerusalem,
Camelot nor Troy, Argonaut nor Crusader, to dwell as
she does with equal good-will among modern appliances
in London and New York. All times and all places are
one to her; the stuff she deals with is eternal, and eter-
ZANNAEAE TERRIAZE. 49
nally the same ; no time or theme is inapt for her, no
past or present preferable. !
We do not therefore rate this present book higher or
lower because it deals with actual politics and matter of
the immediate day. It is true that to all who put their
faith and hope in the republican principle it must bring
comfort and encouragement, a sense of strength and a
specialty of pleasure, quite apart from the delight in its
beauty and power; but it is not on this ground that
we would base its claim to the reverent study and thank-
ful admiration of men. The first and last thing to be
noted in it is the fact of its artistic price and poetic
greatness. Those who share the faith and the devotion
of the writer have of course good reason to rejoice that
the first poet of a great age, the foremost voice of a great
nation, should speak for them in the ears of the world ;
that the highest poetry of their time should take up the
cause they have at heart, and set their belief to music.
To have with us Victor Hugo in the present as we have
NMilton and Shelley in the past is not a matter to be
lightly prized. Whether or not we may be at one with
the master-singer on all points is a matter of less weight;
whether we have learnt to look to Rome or to Paris,
regenerate and redeemed from imperial or Sacerdotal
damnation, for the future light and model of republican
Europe, we can receive with equal sympathy the heroic
utterance of the greatest Frenchman's trust in the country
and the city of the Revolution. Not now, after so many
days of darkness, after so many stages of terror and pity,
can any lover of France be inclined to cavil at the utmost
expression of loyalty, the utmost passion of worship,
E
5o V/CTOR HUGO .
which the first of her sons may offer in the time of her
sore need. All men's mouths were opened against the
sins and shames of Paris; stricken of her enemies,
forsaken of her friends, the great city was naked to all
assault of hostile hands or tongues ; she was denied and
renounced of Europe ; it was time for the poet to take
her part. We need not recall, though we cannot but
remember, the source of all her ills; the first and foulest
crime of a fruitful and baneful series, the murder of the
Roman republic by the hands of French republicans ; a
crime which naturally and perforce brought forth at once
its counterpart and its retribution in the minor though
monstrous crime of December ; which overthrew the
triumvirate in Rome, and founded the empire in Paris.
For that infamous expedition against right and freedom
the nation which perpetrated and the nations which
permitted it have since had heavily to pay. Not from
the chief criminal alone, but from all accomplices who
stood silent by to watch with folded hands the violation
of all international conscience and the consummation of .
all international treason, has time exacted the full price
of blood in blood and gold and shame. For the com-
mission by France and the condonation by Europe of
the crime which reinthralled a people and reinstalled a
priesthood, even the infliction of the second empire was
not found too costly an atonement to be exacted by the
terrible equity of fate. But that the scourge fell first and
heaviest on those Frenchmen who had protested and
struggled with all the strength of their conscience and
their soul against the sin and the shame of their Country,
men might have watched almost “with a bitter and severe
ZANNEE 7/ARIAzz. 5I
delight” the assassination in its turn of republican France
while yet red-handed from the blood of republican Rome.
But it was not for the greatest of those among her sons
who had resisted that execrable wrong, and being inno-
cent of bloodguiltiness had suffered in expiation of it for
nineteen years of exile—it was not for Hugo, and it is
not for us, to cast in her teeth the reproach of her sin
now that it has been atoned for by a heroic agony. Yet
in reading these ardent and profuse invocations of France
as prophetess and benefactress, fountain of light and
symbol of right, we must feel now and then that some
recognition of past wrong-doing, some acknowledgment
of treason and violence done against the right and the
light of the world, would have added weight and force to
the expression of a patriotism which in default of it may
be open to the enemy's charge of vulgar and uncandid
partisanship, of blind and one-sided provinciality. From
these as from all other charges of narrowness or shallow-
mess, want of culture, of judgment, and of temperance,
we would fain see the noble ardour and loving passion of
his faith as demonstrably clear in all men's eyes as in the
main it is at bottom to those who can read it aright. To
have admitted that the empire was not simply a crime
and a shame imposed on France as though by accident,
but an inevitable indemnity demanded for her sin against
her own high mission and honour, for the indulgence of
greed and envy, of the lust after mean renown and un-
righteous power which is the deformed and vicious
parody of that virtue of patriotism whose name it takes
in vain to make it hateful, of the arrogant and rancorous
jealousy which impelled her baser politicians to play the
l
E 2
52 VICTOR AUGo:
}
i
clamation. With this, and with some implied admission
i
|
|
game of the Catholic faction and let loose upon free Italy
the soldiers of the Republic as the bloodhounds of the
Church—to have avowed and noted this as the first and
strongest link in the fatal chain of cause and effect wound
up from Mentana to Sedan, could but have given fresh
point and fresh profit to the fiery proclamation of France
rearisen and redeemed. Then the philosophy and
patriotism of the poet would not have been liable to the
imputation of men who are now led to confound them
with the common Cries and conceits of that national
egotism which has led to destruction the purblind and
rapacious policy of sword-play and tongue-play. As it
is, if ever tempted to find fault with the violence of de-
votion which insists on exalting above all names the name
of Paris—Paris entire, and Paris alone—without alloy or
reserve of blame or regret for its follies and falsities,
its windy vanities and rootless restless mobility of mind,
to qualify the praise of its faith and ardour in pursuit of
the light, we may do well to consider that this hymn of
worship is raised rather to the ideal city, the archetypal
nation, the symbolic people, of which he has prophesied
in that noble dithyrambic poem in prose prefixed
originally to the book called “Paris Guide.” Whether or
not that prophecy be accepted as a prediction, the
speaker cannot fairly be accused of making his voice the
mere echo of the blatant ignorance and strident self-
assertion of the platform. Not but that some sharper
word of warning or even of rebuke might perhaps have
profitably tempered the warmth of his loyal and filial ac-
of those good as well as evil elements in the composition
I'ANNEAE TERRIAZE. 53
of the German empire and army which gave his enemies
their strength, the intellectual and historical aspect of the
poem would be complete and unassailable. From all
other points of view it stands out in perfect unity of re-
lief, as an absolute type of what poetry can do with a
tragic or epic subject of the poet's own time. For a
continuous epic or tragedy he gives us in appearance a
series of lyric episodes which once completed and
harmonized are seen to fulfil the conditions and compose
the structure of a great and single work of art. Thus
Only can such a work be done in simple and sensible
accordance with that unwritten law of right which is to
the artist as a natural and physical instinct.
We accept then without reserve this great gift, for
which the student can pay but thanks to the master
whose payment from the world is the hatred of base men
and the love of noble. In the mighty roll of his works
we recognise at Once that it must hold a high place for
ever. That intense moral passion which may elsewhere
have overflowed the bounds and “ o'er-informed the
tenement” of drama or romance has here a full vent in
its proper sphere. This sovereign quality of the pro-
phet is a glorious and dangerous quality for a poet. The
burning impulse and masterful attraction of the Soul
towards ideas of justice and mercy, which make a man
dedicate his genius to the immediate office of Consolation
and the immediate service of right, must be liable at times
to divert the course of his work and impair the pro-
cess of his art. To those who accused him of not
imitating in his plays the method of that supreme
dramatist in whom he professed his faith, Victor Hugo
54 V/C7 OA” Aſ OGO ...
has well answered that it was not his part to imitate
, Shakespeare or any man ; that the proof of vitality and
value in the modern drama was that it had a life and a
form, a body and a soul of its own. Nevertheless we may
notice, with all reverence for the glorious dramatic work
and fame of the first poet of our age, that on one point
he might in some men's judgment have done well to
follow as far as was possible to his own proper genius the
method of Shakespeare. The ideal dramatist, an arche-
type Once incarnate and made actual in the greatest of
all poets, has no visible preferences; in his capacity of
artist he is incapable of personal indignation or pre-
dilection ; as Keats with subtle truth and sovereign
insight has remarked, he “has as much delight in con-
ceiving an Iago as an Imogen.” For the time being,
throughout the limits of his design, he maintains in awful
equanimity of apparent abstraction the high indifference
of nature or of God. Evil and good, and things and men,
are in his hands as clay in the potter's, and he moulds
them to the use and purpose of his art alone. What
men are, and what their doings and their sufferings, he
shows you face to face, and not as in a glass darkly; to
you he leaves it to comment on the action and passion
set before you, to love or hate, applaud or condemn, the
agents and the patients of his mundane scheme, wide as
time and space, hell-deep and heaven-high. It is for you,
if you please, to take part with Imogen or Desdemona
against Iago or Iachimo, with Arthur or Cordelia against
\ Goneril or King John; he is for all men, inasmuch as
all are creatures and parcels of himself as artist, and of
ſ
l Lift and Letters of Johaz Keats, vol. i. p. 221, ed. 1848.
ZANAAA ZERRZAZE. 55
that art which “itself is nature; ” he is not more, for
Brutus than for Antony, for Portia or Volumnia than for
Cleopatra. This supreme office, it is evident, can
scarcely be fulfilled by a poet of whom it is possible for
his most loving disciple and the son of his adoption to
Say, as Auguste Vacquerie has said of Victor Hugo, that
all his works are acts of public virtue and charity, that his
books are consecrated to the study and the relief of all
sufferings, that his plays are dedicated to all the outcast
and disinherited of the world. It is the general presence
and predominance of this predeterminate and prepense
design which has exposed his marvellous work to the
Charge of too deliberate and mechanical preparation, too
studious premeditation of effect, too careful preoccupa-
tion of result. This in fact is the sum and sense of those
imputations of Calculated extravagance or preconcerted
pathos and puppetry of passion done to order, outer heat
of artificial fire with inner frost of spiritual cold, cast
upon him by the only two famous men, among many
infamous and obscure, who have attempted to impugn
his greatness. But the most devout believer in Goethe's
or in Heine's judgment, if not blind as well as devout,
must allow that the edge of their criticism is somewhat
blunted by the fact that in the same breath they decry
with loud and acrid violence of accent the man generally
acknowledged as chief poet of his age and country, and
extol in his place the names of such other Frenchmen as
no countryman of their own outside their private social
set or literary party could hear cited as his rivals without
a smile. If fault be found in our hearing by any critic
of general note and repute with some alleged short-
coming in the genius or defect in the workmanship of
56 V/CZOA’ AſOWGO.
Shakespeare, of Michel Angelo, or of Handel, the force
of the objection will be somewhat taken off when we find
that the eminent fault-finder proposes to exalt in their
stead as preferable objects of worship the works of
Racine, of Guido, or of Rossini; and in like manner we
are constrained to think less of the objections taken to
Hugo by the Jupiter of Weimar and the Aristophanes of
Germany, when we find that Goethe offers us as a substi-
tute for his Titanic sculptures the exquisite jewellery and
faultless carvings of Prosper Mérimée ; as though one
should offer to supplant the statuary “in that small
chapel of the dim St. Laurence,” not by that of the Pan-
athenaic series, but by the white marble shrine of Orcagna
in which the whole legend of the life of Mary is so
tenderly and wonderfully wrought in little; while Heine
would give us, for the Sun of that most active and pas-
sionate genius, its Solar strength and heat, its lightning
and its light, the intermittent twinkle of a planet now
fiery as a shooting star, now watery as a waning moon—
sweet indeed and bright for the space of its hour, and
anon fallen as an exhalation in some barren and quaking
bog; would leave to France, in lieu of the divine and
human harmony and glory of Hugo's mighty line, the
fantastic tenderness and ardent languor, the vacuous
monotonous desire and discontent, the fitful and febrile
beauty of Alfred de Musset. -
But whether or not there be reason in the objection
that even such great works as “Marion de Lorme” and
“Ruy Blas” are comparatively discoloured by this moral
earnestness and strenuous preference of good to evil, or
that besides this alleged distortion and diversion of art
Z’AAWAVAEAE TERRIBA E. 57
from its proper line of work, too much has been sacrificed
or at least subordinated to the study of stage surprises
Conveyed in a constant succession of galvanic shocks, as
though to atone for neglect or violation of dramatic duty
and the inner law of artistic growth and poetic propriety
by excess of outward and theatrical observance of effect;
whether or not these and such-like deductions may bè
made from the fame of this great poet as dramatist or as
novelist, in such a book as that now before us this quality
is glorious only and dangerous no more. The partisanship
which is the imperfection of a play is the perfection of a
war-song or other national lyric, be it of lamentation, of
exhortation, or of triumph. This book of song takes its
place beyond question beside the greatest on that lyric
list which reaches from the “Odes et Ballades” to the
“Chansons des Rues et des Bois;” such a list of labours
and triumphs as what other lyrist can show P First come
the clear boyish notes of prelude, songs of earliest faith
and fancy, royalist and romantic; then the brilliant vivid
ballads, full already of supple harmonies and potent mas-
teries of music, of passion and sentiment, force and grace;
then the auroral resonance and radiance of the luminous
“Orientales,” the high and tender cadences of the
“Feuilles d’Automne,” the floating and changing melodies
of the “Chants du Crépuscule,” the fervent and intimate
echoes of the “Voix Intérieures,” the ardent and subtle
refractions of “Les Rayons et les Ombres; ” each in es-
pecial of these two latter books of song crowned by One
of the most perfect lyrics in all the world of art for sweet-
ness and sublimity—the former by those stanzas on the
sound of the unseen sea by night, which have in them.
l
58 VZCZ'OA” Aſ UGO :
the very heart and mystery of darkness, the very music
and the very passion of wave and wind; the other by
that most wonderful and adorable poem in which all the
sweet and bitter madness of love strong as death is dis-
tilled into deathless speech, the little lyric tragedy of
Gastibelza : next, after many silent or at least Songless
years, the pealing thunders and blasting sunbeams of the
“Châtiments :” then a work yet wider and higher and
deeper than all these, the marvellous roll of the “Con-
templations,” having in it all the stored and secret
treasures of youth and age, of thought and faith, of love
and sorrow, of life and death ; with the mystery of the
stars and the sepulchres above them and beneath : then
the terrible and splendid chronicle of human evil and
good, the epic and lyric “Légende des Siècles,” with its
infinite variety of action and passion infernal and divine:
then the subtle and full-throated carols of vigorous and
various fancy built up in symmetrical modulation of
elaborate symphonies by vision or by memory among the
woods and streets: and now the sorrowful and stormy
notes of the giant organ whose keys are the months of
this “Année Terrible.” And all these make up but one
division of the work of one man's life: and we know that
in the yet unsounded depth of his fathomless genius, as
in the sunless treasure-houses of the sea, there are still
jewels of what price we know not that must in their turn
see light and give light. For these we have a prayer to
put up that the gift of them may not be long delayed.
There are few delights in any life so high and rare as the
subtle and strong delight of Sovereign art and poetry;
there are none more pure and more sublime. To have
Z’AAWAVAEAE ZERAE/B/A. 59
read the greatest works of any great poet, to have be- |
held or heard the greatest works of any great painter or
musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.
As we pity ourselves for the loss of poems and pictures
which have perished, and left of Sappho but a fragment. -
and of Zeuxis but a name, so are we inclined to pity the
dead who died too soon to enjoy the great works that we
have enjoyed. At each new glory that “swims into Our
ken " we surely feel that it is something to have lived to
see this too rise. Those who might have had such an addi-
tion to the good things of their life, and were defrauded
of it by delay, have reason to utter from the shades their -
ghostly complaint and reproach against the giver who
withheld his gift from the world till they had passed out
of it, and so made their lives less by one good thing, and
that good thing a pleasure of great price. We know that
our greatest poet living has kept back for many years
some samples of his work; and much as he has given,
we are but the more impelled by consideration of that
imperial munificence to desire and demand its perfect
consummation. Let us not have to wait longer than must
needs be for the gift of our promised treasures; for the
completion of that social and historic trilogy which has
yet two parts to accomplish ; for the plays whose names
are now to us as the names of the lost plays of Æschylus,
for the poems which are as the lost poems of Pindar;
for the light and sustenance, the glory and the joy, which
the world has yet to expect at the hands of Victor
Hugo.
1872.
6o
THE POEMS OF DAAV7 A. GAARIAE/.
A’O.S.S.A., 7777. -
WHEN fate has allowed to any man more than one great
gift, accident or necessity seems usually to contrive that
One shall encumber and impede the other. It has been
thought, rightly or wrongly, that even the work done by
Such supreme men as Michel Angelo and Leonardo was
impaired on this hand or on that by the various and eager
impatience of genius which impelled them alternately
along diverging lines of life and labour. Be that as it
may, there is no room to doubt that such a double-
natured genius as was theirs lies open to a double kind
of attack from the rancorous tribe of weaklings and
dullards. The haters of either light or of any, may say
that there cannot be sunlight and moonlight in the same
sky; that a double-gifted nature must be powerless to
beget as to bear, sterile by excess of organs as by defect,
“like that sweet marble monster of both sexes” beloved
of Shelley as of Gautier: that the time and ardour of
spirit and of hand spent on this way of work must be so
much lost to that other way; that on neither course can
the runner of a double race attain the goal, but must
needs in both races alike be caught up and resign his
torch to a runner with a single aim. Candid envy and
judicious ignorance will mutually concede something;
JDAAV7'A; GA BAE/A2/, ROSSAE 777. 6 I
the One, that he might have won the foot-race had he let
the horse-race be; the other, that he might have ridden
in first had he never tried his luck afoot. That assurance
refreshes with the restorative of a false consolation the
runners who fell impotent at starting or dropped lame at
the turning-point. Hateful as the winner of a single prize
must be to them, how can they bear—if shutting their
eyes will save them the sight—to behold the coronation
of the conqueror in all five heats P Nevertheless they
have now and then to bear it as they may : though some
take side with them who should know better, having won
each a single crown in his own field, and being loth to
admit that in that field at least they can be distanced by
the best man in another.
In every generation that takes any heed of the art,
the phrase of “greatest living poet’’ or (with a difference
of reservation) “first of his age and country” is flung
about freely and foolishly enough : but if more than mere
Caprice—be it caprice of Culture or Caprice of ignorance—
is to go to the making up of the definition, we must de-
cide what qualities are of first necessity for the best poet,
and proceed to try how far the claimant can be surely
said to possess them. Variety is a rare and high quality,
but poets of the first order have had little or none of it;
witness Keats and Coleridge; men otherwise greater than
these have had much, and yet have fallen far short of the
final place among poets held by these ; witness Byron
and Scott. But in all great poets there must be an ardent
harmony, a heat of spiritual life guiding without con-
straining the bodily grace of motion, which shall give
charm and power to their least work ; sweetness that
f
%
62 ZTA/A2 AO AEMS OA'
cannot be weak and force that will not be rough. There
, must be an instinct and a resolution of excellence which
will allow no shortcoming or malformation of thought or
word: there must also be so natural a sense of right as to
make any such deformity or defect impossible, and leave
upon the work done no trace of any effort to avoid or to
achieve. [It must be serious, simple, perfect; and it
must be thus by evident and native impulse. The mark
of painstaking as surely lowers the level of style as any
sign of negligence; in the best work there must be no *
trace of a laborious or a languid hand. - º
In all these points the style ôf Mr. Rossetti excels
that of any English poet of our day. It has the fullest
fervour and fluency of impulse, and the impulse is always
towards harmony and perfection. It has the inimitable
note of instinct, and the instinct is always high and right.
It carries weight enough to overbear the style of a weaker
man, but no weight of thought can break it, no subtlety
of emotion attenuate, no ardour of passion deface. It
can breathe unvexed in the finest air and pass unsinged
º through the keenest fire; it has all the grace of perfect
force and all the force of perfect grace. It is sinuous as
water or as light, flexible and penetrative, delicate and
rapid ; it works on its way without halt or jar or collapse.
And in plain strength and weight of sense and sound these
faultless verses exceed those of faultier workmen who
earn their effects by their defects ; who attain at times and
by fits to some memorable impression of thought upon
speech and speech upon memory, at the cost generally
of inharmonious and insufficient work. No such coarse
or cheap stuff is here used as a ground to set off the rich
ADAAWZTE GAAA’/AE/ ACOSSAE 777. 63
surprises of casual ornament and intermittent embroidery.
The woof of each poem is perfect, and the flowers that
flash out from this side or from that seem not so much
interwoven with the thread of it or set in the soil, as
grown and sprung by mere nature from the ground, under
inevitable rains and Sunbeams of the atmosphere which
bred them.
It is said sometimes that a man may have a strong.
and perfect style who has nothing to convey worth con-
veyance under cover of it. This is indeed a favourite
saying of men who have no words in which to convey the
thoughts which they have not ; of men born dumb who
express by grunts and chokes the inexpressible eloquence
which is not in them, and would fain seem to labour in
miscarriage of ideas which they have never conceived.
But it remains for them to prove as well as assert that
beauty and power of expression can accord with empti-
ness or sterility of matter, or that impotence of articulation
must imply depth and wealth of thought. This flattering
unction the very foolishest of malignants will hardly in
this case be able to lay upon the corrosive sore which he
calls his soul: the ulcer of ill-will must rot unrelieved
by the rancid ointment of such fiction. Hardly could a
fool here or a knave there fail to see or hope to deny the
fullness of living thought and subtle strength of nature
underlying this veil of radiant and harmonious words.
It is on the other side that attack might be looked
for from the more ingenious enemies of good work: and
of these there was never any lack. Much of Mr. Rossetti's
work is so intense in aim, so delicate and deep in signi-
ficance, so exuberant in offshoot and undergrowth of
'64 - 7TAZAZ AOAZA/S OF
sentiment and thought, that even the sweet lucidity and
steady current of his style may not suffice to save it from
the charges of darkness and difficulty. He is too great a
master of speech to incur the blame of hard or tortuous
expression ; and his thought is too sound and pure to be
otherwise dark than as a deep well-spring at noon may
be even where the sun is strongest and the water brightest.
In its furthest depth there is nothing of weed or of mud ;
whatever of haze may seem to quiver there is a weft of
the sun's spinning, a web not of woven darkness but of
molten light. But such work as this can be neither un-
woven nor recast by any process of analysis. The infinite
depth and wealth of life which breathes and plays among
these songs and sonnets cannot be parcelled and portioned
out for praise or comment. This “House of Life” has
in it so many mansions, so many halls of state and bowers
of music, chapels for worship and chambers for festival,
that no guest can declare on a first entrance the secret of
its scheme. Spirit and sense together, eyesight and
hearing and thought, are absorbed in splendour of sounds
and glory of colours distinguishable only by delight. But
the scheme is solid and harmonious ; there is no waste in
this luxury of genius: the whole is lovelier than its
loveliest part. Again and again may one turn the leaves
in search of some one poem or some two which may be
chosen for sample and thanksgiving ; but there is no
choice to be made. Sonnet is poured upon sonnet, and
song hands on the torch to song; and each in turn (as
another poet has said of the lark's note falling from the
height of dawn)
“Rings like a golden jewel down a golden stair.”
DANZE GABR/EZ ROSSEZ77. 65
ſ
There are no poems of the class in English—I doubt if
there be any even in Dante's Italian—so rich at Önce
and pure. Their golden affluence of images and jewel-
coloured words never once disguises the firm outline, the
justice and chastity of form. No nakedness could be
more harmonious, more consummate in its fleshly SCulp-
ture, than the imperial array and ornament of this august
poetry. Mailed in gold as of the morning and girdled
with gems of strange water, the beautiful body as of a
carven goddess gleams through them tangible and taint-
less, without spot or default. There is not a jewel here
but it fits, not a beauty but it subserves an end. There
seems no story in this sequence of sonnets, yet they hold
in them all the action and passion of a spiritual history
with tragic stages and elegiac pauses and lyric motions of
the living soul. Their earnest subtleties and exquisite
ardours recall to mind the sonnets of Shakespeare;
poems in their way unapproachable, and here in no wise
imitated. Shakespeare's have at times a far more
passionate and instant force, a sharper note of delight or
agony Or mystery, fear or desire or remorse—a keener
truth and more pungent simpleness of Sudden phrase,
A with touches of sound and flashes of light beyond all
i reach ; Mr. Rossetti's have a nobler fullness of form, a
º
more stately and shapely beauty of build: they are of a
purer and less turbid water than the others are at times,
and not less fervent when more serene than they ; the
subject-matter of them is Sweet throughout, natural always
and clear, however intense and fine in remote and delicate
intricacy of spiritual stuff. There is nothing here which
may not be felt by any student who can grasp the subtle
F
66 7TP/A2 AO AEMS OF
sense of it in full, as a just thing and admirable, fit for
the fellowship of men's feelings; if men indeed have in
them enough of noble fervour and loving delicacy, enough
of truth and warmth in the blood and breath of their souls,
enough of brain and heart for such fellow-feeling. For
something of these they must have to bring with them
who would follow the radiant track of this verse through
brakes of flowers and solitudes of sunlight, past fountains
hidden under green bloom of leaves, beneath roof-work
of moving boughs where song and silence are One music.
All passion and regret and strenuous hope and fiery Con-
templation, all beauty and glory of thought and vision,
are built into this golden house where the life that reigns
is love; the very face of sorrow is not cold or withered,
but has the breath of heaven between its fresh live lips
and the light of pure Sweet blood in its cheeks; there is
a glow of summer on the red leaves of its regrets and the
starry frost-flakes of its tears. Resignation and fruition,
forethought and afterthought, have one voice to sing with
in many keys of spirit. A more bitter sweetness of sin-
cerity was never pressed into verse than beats and burns
here under the veil and girdle of glorious words; there
are no poems anywhere of more passionate meditation or
vision more intense than those on “Lost Days,” “Vain
Virtues,” “The Sun's Shame;” none of more godlike
grace and sovereign charm than those headed “New-born
Death,” “A Superscription,” “A Dark Day,” “Known
in Vain,” “The One Hope,” And of all splendid and
profound love-poetry, what is there more luminous or
more deep in sense and spirit than the marvellous opening
V cycle of twenty-eight sonnets, which embrace and express
ZOAAWZTE G A PA2/A2Z A2O.S.S.A. ZZT/. 67
, all sorrow and all joy of passion in union, of outer love
and inner, triumphant or dejected or piteous or at peace?
No one till he has read these knows all of majesty
and melody, all of energy and emotion, all of Supple
and significant loveliness, all of tender Cunning and
exquisite strength, which our language can show at need
in proof of its powers and uses. The birth of love,
his eucharistic presence, his supreme vision, his utter
union in flesh and spirit, the secret of the sanctuary of
his heart, his louder music and his lower, his graver and
his lighter seasons; all work of love and all play, all
dreams and devices of his memory and his belief, all
fuller and emptier hours from the first which longs for
him to the last which loses, all change of lights from his
midday to his moonrise, all his foreknowledge of evil
things and good, all glad and Sad hours of his night-
watches, all the fear and ardour which feels and fights
against the advent of his difference and dawn of his
division, all agonies and Consolations that embitter and
allay the wounds of his mortal hour ; the , pains of
breach and death, the songs and visions of the wilderness
of his penance, the wood of desolation made beautiful and
bitter by the same remembrance, haunted by shadows of
the same hours for sorrow and for solace, and beyond all
the light of the unaccomplished hour which misséd its
chance in one life to meet it in another where the sun-
dered spirits revive into reunion; all these things are here
done into words and sung into hearing of men as they
never were till now. With a most noble and tender power
all forms and colours of the world without are touched
and drawn into service of the spirit; and this with no
F 2 -
68 7A/A2 AO ZA/S OA'
-W
ingenious abuse of imagery or misuse of figures, but with
such gracious force of imagination that they seem to offer
voluntary service. What interlude more radiant than that
of the “Portrait,” more gracious and joyous than the
“ Love-Letter,” more tender than the remembered “Birth-
Bond,” more fervent than the memorial “Day of Love,”
more delicate than the significance of “Love's Baubles,”
more deep and full than the bitter-sweet “Life-in-Love,”
more soft in spiritual shade of changeful colour than “The
Love-Moon,” more subtly solemn in tragic and triumphant
foresight than “The Morrow's Message,” more ardent
with finer fires and more tremulous with keener senses
than the sonnets of parting, than “Broken Music” or
“Death-in-Love,” ever varied the high delight of verse,
the sublime sustention of choral poetry through the length
of an imperial work? In the sonnet called “Love-
Sweetness” there is the very honey of pure passion, the
expression and essence of its highest thought and wis-
dom; and in that called “He and I,” the whole pain and
mystery of growing change. . Even Shelley never expressed
the inmost sense and mighty heart of music as this poet
has done in “The Monochord.” There are no lyrics in
our lyrical English tongue of sweeter power than the least
of these which follow the sonnets. The “Song of the
Bower” is sublime by sheer force of mere beauty; the
sonorous fluctuation of its measure, a full tide under a
full moon, of passion lit and led by memory to and fro
beneath fiery and showery skies of past and future, has
such depth and weight in its moving music that the echo
of it is as a sea-shell in the mind's ear for ever. Observe
the glorious change of note from the delicate colour of
JDAAV7'A' GABA’/EZ ROSSAETTY. 69
the second stanza to the passionate colour of the third;
the passage from Soft bright symbols to the actual fire of
vision and burning remembrance; from the shelter of
Soul under soul and the mirror of tears wherein heart
sees heart, to the grasp and glow of
“Large lovely arms and a neck like a tower”
growing incarnate upon the sight of memory; and again
to the deep dim witness and warning, the foresight and
regret which lighten and darken the ways of coming life.
This is perhaps, for style at once ample and simple, the
noblest song of all; yet it is but one of many noble.
Among these others I find none which clings by itself so
long and close to the mind as one outside their circle—
the song of the sea-beach, called “Even So ; ” it dies out
!
|
|
with a suppressed sigh like the last breath or heartbeat of
a yearning weak-winged wind. “A Little While ” is
heavy with all the honey of foretasted sorrow, sweeter in
its aftertaste than the joy resigned, with a murmur beyond
music in its speech. The perfect pity of the two last lines
has the touch on it of plain truth and patience;
“I’ll tell thee when the end is come
How we may best forget.”
In “Plighted Promise” and “Love-Lily” the white flame
of delight breathes and trembles in a subtler air, with a
sure and faultless charm of motion. I like the first stanza
of “Sudden Light” better than the second and third,
admirably as they are fashioned and set to the music of
the thought: they have less seeming effusion of an instant
insuppressible sense of memory; and the touches of colour
and odour and sound in it are almost too fine in their
7o THE POEMS OF
*;
harmony to be matched with any later. There is not a
more delicate note of magic nature in these poems. The
tremulous ardour of “Penumbra” is another witness to
the artist's mastery of hand; the finest nerves of life are
finely touched; the quiver and ache of soul and senses
to which all things are kindled and discoloured by half
morbid lights of emotion give a burning pulse of melody
to the verses. The same fear or doubt which here is
attired in fancies of feverish beauty finds gentler utterance,
again outside this circle, in “A New Year's Burden; ” the
tone and colour have always a fresh and Sure harmony.
Four poems in a different key from such songs are “The
Sea-Limits,” “A Young Fir-Wood,” “The Honeysuckle,”
“The Woodspurge; ” not songs, but studies of spirit and
thought, concrete and perfect. The first of these has the
solemn weight and depth in it of living water, and a
sound like the speech of the sea when the wind is silent.
The very note of that world-old harmony is caught and
cast into words. g
“Consider the sea’s listless chime :
Time’s self it is, made audible :
The murmur of the earth's own shell.”
This little verse also has the
“Secret continuance Sublime”
, which “is the sea's end ; ” it too is a living thing with an
"echo beyond reach of the sense, its chord of sound one
part of the multiform unity of mutual inclusion in which
all things rest and mix; like the sigh of the shaken shell,
it utters “the same desire and mystery " as earth through
its woods, and water through its waves, and man through
his multitudes; it too has in it a breath of the life im-
ZDA/V7'E GAAAP/AE/ ACO.S.S.A., 777. 7 I
measurable and imperishable. The other three of these
studies have something of the same air and flavour
their keen truthfulness and subtle sincerity touch the
same springs and kindle the same pulses of thought.
The passionate accuracy of sense half blunted and
half whetted by obsession and possession of pain is given
in “The Woodspurge” with a bitterly beautiful exac-
titude.
In all the glorious poem built up of all these poems
there is no great quality more notable than the Sweet and
Sovereign unity of perfect spirit and sense, of fleshly form
and intellectual fire. This Muse is as the woman praised
in the divine words of the poet himself,
** Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought
Nor Love her body from her soul.”
And if not love, how then should judgment? for love and
judgment must be one in those who would look into such
high and lovely things. N o scrutiny can distinguish nor
sentence divorce the solid spiritual truth from the bodily
beauty of the poem, the very and visible soul from the
dazzling veil and vesture of fair limbs and features.
There has been no work of the same pitch attempted
since Dante sealed up his youth in the sacred leaves of
the “Vita Nuova ; ” and this poem of his namechild and
translator is a more various and mature work of kindred
genius and Spirit. -
Other parts of his work done here have upon them *
the more instant sign of that sponsor and master of his
mind; there is a special and delicate savour of personal
interest in the sonnet on the “darkness” of Dante,
72 7A/E AEROAZA/S OA'
sacred to the fame of a father made again illustrious in
his children, which will be cherished with a warm
reverence by all heedful students. The poem of “Dante
at Verona’’ stands apart among the rest with a crown on
it of the like consecration, as perhaps the loftiest monu-
ment of all raised by the devotion of a race of genius for
two generations of noble work and love. All incidents
and traditions of the great poet's exile are welded together
in fusion of ardent verse to forge a memorial as of carven
gold. The pure plain ease and force of narrative style
melt now and then into the fire of a sad rapture, a glory
of tragedy lighting the whole vision as with a funereal
and triumphal torch. Even the words of that letter in
which Dante put away from him the base conditions of
return—words matchless among all that ever a poet found
to speak for himself, except only by those few supreme
words in which Milton replied to the mockers of his
blindness—even these are worthily recast in the mould
of English verse by the might and cunning of this work-
man's hand. Witness the original set against his
version. -
“Non est haec via redeundi ad patriam, Pater mi; sed si alia
per vos aut deinde per alios invenietur, quae famae Dantis atque
honori non deroget, illam non lentis passibus acceptabo. Quod si
per nullam talem Florentia introitur, nunquam Florentiam introibo.
Quidni P nonne Solis astrorumque specula ubique conspician P
Nonne dulcissimas veritates potero speculari ubique sub coelo, ni
prius inglorium, immo ignominiosum, populo Florentinaeque civitati
me reddam 2–Quippe nec panis deficiet.”
So wrote Dante in 1316 ; now partly rendered into
English to this effect:-
AAAV7'Aº GAAPA’/A2Z A&O.S.S.A. Z'ZZ. 73
“That since no gate led, by God’s will,
To Florence, but the one whereat
The priests and money-changers Sat,
He still would wander : for that still,
Even through the body’s prison-bars,
His soul possessed the sun and stars.”
These and the majestic lines which follow them as
Comment have the heart of that letter in them ; the letter
which we living now cannot read without the sense of a
double bitterness and sweetness in its sacred speech, so
lamentably and so gloriously applicable to the loftiest . .
heir of Dante's faith and place ; of his faith as patriot, of"
his place as exile. It seems that the same price is still
fixed for them to pay who have to buy with it the in-
heritance of sun and stars and the sweetest truths, and all
generations of time, and the love and thanks and
passionate remembrance of all faithful men for ever. f
This poem is sustained throughout at the fit height
with the due dignity ; nothing feeble or jarring dis-
turbs its equality of exultation. The few verses of bitter
ardour which brand as a prostitute the commonweal
which has become a common wrong, the common
goddess deformed into a common harlot, show a
force of indignant imagination worthy of a great poetic
satirist, of Byron and Hugo in their worst wrath. The
brief pictures of the courtly life at Verona between
women and rhymesters, jester and priests, have a living
outline and colour; and the last words have the weight
in them of time's own sentence.
“Eat and wash hands, Can Grande ;-scarce
We know their deeds now : hands which fed
Our Dante with that bitter bread ;
74 , 7"HE AEO AEMS OA'
And thou the watch-dog of those stairs
Which, of all paths his feet knew well,
Were steeper found than Heaven or Hell.”
No words could more fitly wind up the perfect weft
of a poem throughout which the golden thread of
Dante's own thought, the hidden light of his solitude at
intervals between court-play and justice-work, gleams
now and again at each turn of the warp till we feel as
though a new remnant of that great spirit's leaving had
been vouchsafed us.
Another poem bearing the national mark upon it may
be properly named with this ; the “Last Confession.” Its
tragic hold of truth and grasp of passion make it worthy
to bear witness to the writer's inheritance of patriotic
blood and spirit. Its literal dramatic power of detail and
composition is a distinctive test of his various wealth and
energy of genius. This great gift of positive reality, here
above all things requisite, was less requisite elsewhere,
and could not have been shown to exist by any proof
derivable from his other poems; though to any student
of his designs and pictures the admirable union of this
inventive fidelity to whatever of fact is serviceable to
the truth of art with the infinite affluence and gracious
abundance of imagination must be familiar enough ; the
subtle simplicity of perception which keeps sight always
of ideal likelihood and poetical reason is as evident in
his most lyrical and fanciful paintings as in Giorgione's
or Carpaccio's. Without the high instinct and fine
culture of this quality such a poem as we now have in
sight could not have been attempted. The plain heroism
of noble naked nature and coherent life is manifest from
PANTE GABA/EZ ROSSE777. 75
the first delicate detail to the last. The simple agony of
memory inflames every line with native colour. A boyish
patriot in hiding from the government finds a child for-
saken in time of famine by her parents, saves and
supports her, sets his heart towards hers more and more
with the growth of years, to find at last the taint upon
her of a dawning shame, of indifference and impurity—
the hard laugh of a harlot on her lips, and in her bearing
the dull contempt of a harlot for love and memory.
Stabbed and stung through by this sudden show of the
snake's fang as it turns upon the hand which cherished
it, he slays her ; and even in his hour of Iriartyrdom,
dying of wounds taken in a last fight for Italy, is haunted
by the lovely face and unlovely laugh of the girl he had
put out of reach of shame. But the tender truth and
grace, the living heat and movement of the tragedy
through every detail, the noble choice and use of inci-
dent, make out of this plain story a poem beyond price.
Upon each line of drawing there has been laid the strong
and loving hand of a great artist—and specially a Supreme
painter of fair women. In the study of the growing girl
the glories of sculpture and painting are melted into one,
and every touch does divine service; -
* ~ * “The underlip
Sucked in as if it strove to kiss itself; ”
the face, pale “ as when one stoops over wan water;”
the “deep-serried locks,” the rounded clinging finger-
tips, and great eyes faint with passion or quivering with
hidden springs of mirth, e
76 THE AEO EMS OF
“As when a bird flies low
Between the water and the willow-leaves,
And the shade quivers till he wins the light.”
In what poet's work shall we find a touch of more
heavenly beauty, a nobler union of truth and charm P
and in what painter's a statelier and sweeter mastery of .
nature than here P
“ Her body bore her neck as the tree's stem
Bears the top branch : and as the branch sustains
The flower of the year's pride, her high neck bore
Her face made wonderful with night and day.”
The purest pathos of all is in the little episode of the
broken figure of Love, given to the child by her pre-
server, and the wound of its dart on her hand ; nothing
in conception or in application could be tenderer or
truer; nothing more glorious in its horror than the fancy
of heaven changing at its height before the very face of a
spirit in paradise, with no reflection of him left on it :
“Like a pool that once gave back
Your image, but now drowns it and is clear
Again, or like a sun bewitched, that burns
Your shadow from you, and still shines in sight.”
Admirable as it is throughout for natural and moral
colour, the poem is completed and crowned for eternity
by the song set on the front of it as a wreath on a bride's
hair, of which I can hardly say whether the Italian or the
English form be the more divine. The miraculous faculty
of transfusion which enables the cupbearer to pour this
wine of verse from the golden into the silver cup without
spilling was never before given to man. All Mr.
Bossetti's translations bear the same evidence of a power
not merely beyond reach but beyond attempt of other
AAAWZTE GAA; AEA, AE A2 OSSAE 77/. 77
- artists in language. Wonderful as is the proof of it shown
by his versions of Dante and his fellows, of Villon's and
other ballad-songs of old France, the capacity of recast-
ing in English an Italian poem of his own seems to me
more wonderful ; and what a rare and Subtle piece of
work has been done here they only can appreciate who
have tried carefully and failed utterly to refashion in one
language a song thrown off in another. This is the kind
of test which stamps the supremacy of an artist, answer-
ing in poetry to the subtlest successes of the same hand
in painting. Whether or not there be now living a
Inaster in colours who can match the peculiar triumphs
of its touch, there is assuredly no master in words. The
melodies of these in their Italian form can never die out
of the ear and heart they have once pierced with their
keen and sovereign sweetness. This song would suffice
to redeem the whole story from the province of pain,
even though the poet had not left upon us the natural
charm of that hope which comes in with death, that the
woman grown hard and bad was indeed no less a lie, an
error, a spectral show, than the laughing ghost of her
forged by bodily pain and recollection.
By this poem we may set for contrast, in witness of
the artist's clear wide scope of work and power, the
“Burden of Nineveh;” a study of pure thought and high
meditation, perhaps for Sovereignty of language and strong
grasp of spirit the greatest of his poems. The contem-
plation that brings forth such fruit should be a cherub
indeed, having wings and eyes as an eagle's. The solemn
and splendid metre, if I mistake not, is a new instrument
of music for English hands. In those of its fashioner it
;
78 7THAE AEO EA/S OF
makes harmonies majestic as any note of the heights or
depths of natural sound. No highest verse can excel the
mighty flow and chiming force of its continuous modu-
lation, bearing on foamless waves of profound song its
flock of winged thoughts and embodied visions. We hear
in it as it were for once the sound of time's soundless
feet, feel for once the beat of his unfelt wings in their
passage through unknown places, and centuries without
form and void. Echoes and gleams come with it from
“the dark backward and abysm * of dateless days; a
sighing sound from the graves of gods, a wind through
the doors of death which opened on the early world. The
surviving shadow of the Bull-God is as the shadow of
death on past and passing ages, visible and recognis-
able by the afterlight of thought. Of the harmonious
might and majesty of imagination which sustains the
“speculative and active instrument” of song, we might
take as separate samples the verses on its old days of
worship from kings and queens, of light from lamps of
prayer or fires of ruin ; on the elder and later gods con-
fused with its confusion, “all relics here together ;” on the
cities that rose and fell before the city of its worshippers ;
of their desolation and its own in the days of Christ. The
stanza on the vision of the temptation has a glory On it as
of Milton's work. * *
“The day when he, Pride's lord and man's,
Shewed all earth's kingdoms at a glance
To Him before whose countenance
The years recede, the years advance,
And said, ‘Fall down and worship me : '-
*Mid all the pomp beneath his look
Then stirred there, haply, some rebuke
ZDAAV7/2 GAAEA2/A) / AC OSSAE 7"ZTV. 79
Where to the wind the salt pools shook,
And in those tracts, of life forsook,
That knew thee not, O Nineveh 1 °
And what more august and strenuous passion of thought
was ever clothed in purple of more imperial speech than
Consummates and concludes the poem P as, dreaming of a
chance by which in the far future this God, found again
a relic in a long ruined city, might be taken for the God
of its inhabitants, the thinker comes to find in it indeed
“the God of this world” and no dead idol, but a living
deity and very present strength ; having wings, but not to
fly with ; and eyes, but not to look up with ; bearing a
written witness and a message engraved of which he knows
not, and cannot read it; crowned, but not for honour;
brow-bound with a royal sign, of oppression only and
contraction; firm of foot, but resting the weight of its
trust on clay :— .*.*
‘‘ O Nineveh, was this thy God,
* Thine also, mighty Nineveh P”
A certain section of Mr. Rossetti's work as poet and as
painter may be classed under the head of sacred art : and
this section comprises much of his most exquisite and
especial work. Its religious quality is singular and per-
sonal in kind; we cannot properly bracket it with any
other workman's. The fire of feeling and imagination
which feeds it is essentially Christian, and is therefore
formally and spiritually Catholic. It has nothing of re-
bellious Protestant personality, nothing of the popular
compromise of sentiment which in the hybrid jargon of
a school of hybrids we may call liberalized Christianism.
The influence which plainly has passed over the writer's
8o ZHE POEMS OF
f
i
i
t
|
3.
mind, attracting it as by charm of sound or vision, by
spell of colour or of dream, towards the Christian forms
and images, is in the main an influence from the mytho-
logic side of the Creed. It is from the sandbanks of
tradition and poetry that the sacred sirens have sung to
this seafarer. This divides him at once from the passion-
ate evangelists of positive belief and from the artists upon
whom no such influence has fallen in any comparable
degree. . There are two living and leading writers of high
and diverse genius whom any student of their work—
utterly apart as their ways of work lie—may and must,
without prejudice or presumption, assume to hold fast,
with a force of personal passion, the radical tenet of
Christian faith. It is as difficult for a reasonable reader
to doubt the actual and positive adherence to Christian
doctrine of the Protestant thinker as of the Catholic
priest ; to doubt that faith in Christ as God—a tough,
hard, vital faith which can bear at need hard stress of
weather and hard thought—dictated “A Death in the
Desert” or “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” as to doubt
that it dictated the “Apologia” or “Dream of Gerontius:”
though neither in the personal creed set forth by Mr.
Browning nor in the clerical creed delivered by Dr.
Newman do we find apparent or flagrant—however they
may lurk, tacit and latent, in the last logical expression
of either man's theories—the viler forms and more
hideous outcomes of Christianity, its more brutal aspects
l
| and deadlier consequences; a happy default due rather
' ' to nobility of instinct than to ingenuity of evasion. Now
the sacred art of Mr. Rossetti, for all its Christian colour-
ing, has actually no more in common with the spirit of
DANTE GABR/EZ ROSSAE 777. 8I.
either than it has with the semi-Christianity of “ In
!
{
Memoriam” or the demi-semi-Christianity of “Dipsychus.”
It has no trace, on the other hand, of the fretful and
fruitless prurience of soul which would fain grasp and
embrace and enjoy a Creed beyond its power of posses-
sion ; no letch after Gods dead or unborn, such as vexes
the weaker nerves of barren brains, and makes pathetic
the vocal lips of sorrowing scepticism and “doubt that
deserves to believe.” As little can it be likened to an-
other form of bastard belief, another cross-breed between
faith and unfaith, which has been fostered in ages of
doubt; a ghost raised rather by fear than love; by fear
of a dead God as judge, than by love of a dead God as
comforter. The hankering and restless habit of half
fearful retrospect towards the unburied corpses of old ,
creeds which, as we need not Shelley's evidence to know,
infected the spiritual life and disturbed the intellectual
force of Byron, is a mirage without attraction for this
traveller; that spiritual calenture of Christianity is a sick-
ness unknown to his soul ; nor has he ever suffered from
the distemper of minds fretted and worried by gnatstings
and fleabites of belief and unbelief till the whole lifeblood
of the intellect is enfeebled and inflamed. In a later poet,
whose name as yet is far enough from inscription on the
canonical roll of converts, there was some trace of a
seeming recrudescence of faith not unlike yet not like
Byron's. The intermittent Christian reaction apparently
perceptible in Baudelaire was more than half of it mere
repulsion from the philanthropic optimism of sciolists in
whose eyes the whole aim or mission of things is to make
the human spirit finally comfortable. Contempt of such
G
82 7A/A2 AO AEM/S OA'
facile free-thinking, still more easy than free, took in him
at times the form of apparent reversion to cast creeds ;
as though the spirit should seek a fiery refuge in the good
old hell of the faithful from the watery new paradise of
liberal theosophy, and ultimate amiability of all things.”
Alone among the higher artists of his age, Mr. Rossetti
has felt and given the mere physical charm of Christianity,
with no admixture of doctrine or of doubt. Here as in
other things he belongs, if to any school at all, to that of
the great Venetians. He takes the matter in hand with
the thorough comprehension of Tintoretto or Veronese,
with their thorough subjection of creed and history to the
primary purpose of art and proper bearing of a picture.
He works after the manner of Titian painting his
Assumption with an equal hand whether the girl exalted
into goddess be Mary or Ariadne : but his instinct is too
masterly for any confusion or discord of colours; and
hence comes the spiritual charm and satisfaction of his
i sacred art. In this class of his poems the first place and
the fairest palm belong to the “Blessed Damozel.” This
paradisal poem, “sweeter than honey or the honeycomb,”
has found a somewhat further echo than any of its early
fellows, and is perhaps known where little else is known
of its author's. The Sweet intense impression of it must
rest for life upon all spirits that ever once received it
1 It is remarkable that Baudelaire always kept in mind that
Christianity, like other religions which have a broad principle of
popular life in them, was not and could not be a creature of philan-
thropy or philotheism, but of church and creed ; and this gives its
peculiar savour and significance to the Christian infusion in some of
his poems; for such recollection is too rare in an age and country
where semi-Christian sentiment runs loose and babbles aloud.
JDA/V7'E GAAE A*/AE / AC OSSAE 777. 83
into their depths, and hold it yet as a thing too dear and
fair for praise or price. Itself the flower of a splendid
youth, it has the special charm for youth of fresh first
work and opening love ; “the dew of its birth is of the
womb of the morning;” it has the odour and colour of
cloudless air, the splendour of an hour without spot,
The divine admixtures of earth which humanize its
heavenly passion have the flavour and bloom upon them
of a maiden beauty, the fine force of a pure first sunrise.
No poem shows more plainly the strength and wealth of
the workman's lavish yet studious hand. One sample in
witness of this wealth, and in evidence of the power of
choice and persistent search after perfection which
enhance its price, may be cited ; though no petal should
be plucked out of this mystic rose for proof of its fragrance,
The two final lines of the stanza describing the secret
shrine of God have been reformed ; and the form first
given to the world is too fair to be wholly forgotten:—
“Whose lamps tremble continually
With prayer sent up to God,
And where each meed, revealed, expects
Atº Zatient period.”
Wonderful though the beauty may be of the new ima-
gination, that the spirits standing there at length will see
their “old prayers, granted, melt each like a little cloud,”
there is so sweet a force in the cancelled phrase that some
students might grudge the loss, and feel that, though a
diamond may have supplanted it, a ruby has been plucked
out of the golden ring. Nevertheless, the complete
circlet shines now with a more solid and flawless excel-
lence of jewels and of Setting. The Sweetness and pathos
!
G 2
84 7A/A2 AO AEMS OA'
and gracious radiance of the poem have been praised by
those who have not known or noted all the noble care
spent On it in rejection and rearrangement of whatever
was crude or lax in the first cast ; but the breadth and
Sublimity which ennoble its brightness and beauty of
£ancies are yet worthier of note than these. What higher
imagination can be found in modern verse than this?
“From the fixed place of heaven she saw
Time like a Żulse shake fierce
7%rough all the worlds.”
This grandeur of scale and sweep of spirit give great-
ness of style to poetry, as well as sweetness and bright-
ness. These qualities, together with the charm of fluent
force and facile power, are apparent in all Mr. Rossetti's
work; but its height of pitch and width of scope give
, them weight and price beyond their own.
Another poem, based like this on the Christian senti-
ment of woman-worship, is worthy of a place next it. In
the hymn headed “Ave '’ the finest passage is that on the
life of the Virgin after the death of Christ; a subject
handled by the painter as well as by the poet. Indeed,
of the two versions, that in colour is even the lovelier and
more memorable to all who may have seen it for gentle
glory of treatment—for the divine worn face of the
Mother, seen piteously sacred in the light struck by the
beloved disciple, as the thick purple twilight steeping the
city roofs and the bare hill-side which saw the stations of
the cross fills with pale coloured shadows the still small
chamber where she sits at work for her Son's poor. YThe
soft fervour and faultless keeping of the poem give it that
AJAAV7'E G A PAC/A2Z A OSSAE 777. 85.
final grace of a complete unity of spirit and style which
is the seal of sacred art at its highest.
No choicer sample of Mr. Rossetti's delicate mastery
of language—of his exquisite manner of Speech, subtle
and powerful and pliant to all necessities of thought—
can be found than the verses invoking Love as the god
of sleep to guide the shadow of the lover who invokes
him to the dreams of the woman beloved. The grace of
symbol and type in this poem has something of the
passionate refinement of Shelley's. There are many
several lines and turns of phrase in this brief space of
which any least one would suffice to decide the rank of a
poet; and the fine purity of its passion gives just colour
enough to the clouds and music enough to the murmurs
of the deep dreamland in which it moves.
With this poem we may class One Sadder and as
sweet, “The Stream's Secret; ” the thread of thought is
so fine, yet woven into so full a web of golden fancies
and glowing dreams, that few will follow it at first sight;
but when once unwound and rewoven by the reader's
study of it, he will see the whole force and beauty of all
its many byway beauties and forces.
The highest form of ballad requires from a poet at
Once narrative power, lyrical, and dramatic ; it must hold
in fusion these three faculties at once, or fail of its mark:
it must condense the large loose fluency of romantic tale-
telling into tight and intense brevity; it must give as in
summary the result and extract of events and emotions,
without the exhibition of their gradual change and growth
which a romance of the older type or the newer must lay
open to us in order ; it must be swifter of step and
i
86 - ZTAZAZ AO AEA/S OF
\!
sharper of stroke than any other form of poetry. The
writer of a first-rate tragic ballad must be yet more select
in his matter and terse in his treatment of what he selects
from the heap of possible incident, than Chaucer in the
compilation of his “Knight's Tale” from the epic romance
of Boccaccio, or Morris in the sculpture of his noble
master-poem, “ The Lovers of Gudrun,” from the unhewn
rock of a half-formed history or a half-grown legend.
Ballads have been cut out of such poems as these, even
as they were carven out of shapeless chronicles. There
Can be no pause in a ballad, and no excess; nothing that
flags, nothing that overflows; there must be no waste of
a word or a minute in the course of its rapid and fiery
motion. Even in our affluent ballad literature there is
no more triumphant sample of the greatness that may be
won by a poem on these conditions than we find in the
ballad of “Sister Helen.” The tragic music of its measure,
the swift yet solemn harmonies of dialogue and burden,
hold in extract the very heart of a tragedy, the burning
essence distilled from “Hate born of Love, and blind as
he.” Higher effect was never wrought out of the old
traditions of witchcraft; though the manner of sorcery
here treated be one so well known as the form of de-
stroying a man by melting a waxen effigy of him before a
continuous flame for the space of three days and nights,
after which the dissolution of the fleshly body keeps time
to a minute with that of the waxen. A girl forsaken by
her high-born lover turns to sorcery for help in her re-
venge on him ; and with the end of the third day come
three suppliants, the father and the brothers of the be-
trayer, to whom he has shown the secret of his wasting
PANZ E GAAAIEZ AOSSAETTY, 87
agony, if haply they may bring him back not life but
forgiveness at her hands. Dying herself of anguish with
him and with the molten figure of her making, she will
remit nothing of her great revenge; body and Soul of both
shall perish in one fourfold death ; and her answers pass,
ever more and more bitter and ardent, through the harm-
less mouthpiece of a child. How the tragic effect is en-
forced and thrown out into fiery relief by this intervention
of the boy-brotherit needs no words, where none would be
adequate, to say. I account this one of the artist's very v
highest reaches of triumphant poetry; he has but once in
this book matched it for pathos, and but once for passion :
for pathos in “Jenny,” for passion in “Eden Bower.” It
is out of all sight or thought of comparison the greatest vº
bállad in modern English ; and perhaps not very far
below it, and certainly in a high place among the attempts
in that way of living Englishmen, we might class Mr.
George Meredith's pathetic and splendid poem of ,
“Margaret's Bridal-Eve.”
There is exquisite grace of colour and sweetness in
“The Staff and Scrip,” with passages that search and
sound pure depths of sentiment, and with interludes of
perfect drawing ; witness the sweet short study of the
Queen sitting by her loom ; but the air of the poem is
too remote and refined for any passionate interest.
The landscape of “Stratton Water" is as vivid and
thorough as any ballad can show ; but some may wish
it had been more or less of a compromise in style between
old and new : it is now a study after the old manner too
close to be no closer. It is not meant for a perfect and
absolute piece of work in the old Border fashion, Such as
88 ZTHAE AEO AEA/S OF
were those glorious rescripts, full of the fiery ease which is
the life of such poetry, which Surtees of Mainsforth passed
off even upon Scott as genuine; and yet it is so far a
copy that it seems hardly well to have gone so far and no
further. On this ground Mr. Morris has a firmer tread
than the great artist by the light of whose genius and
kindly guidance he put forth the firstfruits of his work, as
I did afterwards. In his first book the ballad of “Welland
River,” the Christmas carol in “The Land East of the
Sun and West of the Moon,” and that other, his most
beautiful carol, printed with music in a volume of sacred
verse, are examples of flawless work in the pure early
manner. Any less absolute and decisive revival of
mediaeval form by inspiration of returning lifeblood and
measured breath of life into the exact type and mould of
ancient art rouses some sense of failure by excess or de-
fault of resemblance. This positive note of the past is
not quite caught here, and the note struck is too like it to
take its place without discord.
There is a singular force and weight of impression in
the “Card-Dealer” which give it a distinct and eminent
place among these lesser poems. The sharpness of
symbol and solidity of incarnation with which the idea
is invested bring it so close to us that the mere type itself
assumes as it were a bodily interest over and above its
spirit and significance ; and the tragic colour and mystic
movement of the poem are fitted to the dim splendour
and vague ardour of life in it; whether the dealer be
fortune or passion or ambition, pleasure or fame or any
desire of man's, we see her mistress of the game in that
world of shadows and echoes which is hers if ours.
ZDAAV7'A' GAAEA?/EZ ROSSAE 777. 89
Without the date appended, we might have guessed that
the little cabinet poem called “My Sister's Sleep” was an
early study. It has the freshness and clearness of first
youth, with something of the hardness of growing out-
lines; the bodily form of verse has not yet learnt to melt
and flow by instinct into the right way; yet with this
slight sharpness and crudity there is a grace of keen
sincerity and direct force which gives proof of no student's
hand, but a workman's recognisable as born into the
guild of masters. The fourth and three following stanzas
have a brightness and intensity of truth, a fine and tender
vigour of sentiment, admirable at any age; and the last
have an instant weight of pathos and clear accuracy of
beauty, full of prophecy and promises. In the same
short-lived magazine into which the first flowerage of
many eminent men's work was cast with such liberal and
fruitful hands, there was another early poem of this their
leader's and best man which he might as well have
gathered into his harvest; a delicate and subtle study of
religious passion, with the colour and perfume in it of the
choral air of a cathedral, lit with latticed glories of saints,
and tremulous with low music of burning prayers; the
mystery of sense and ardour of soul in an hour made
drunken with the wine of worship were wrought into ex-
pression of bright and sensitive words, full of the fiery
peace of prayer and sightless vision of faith. This little
sacred picture of the Father Hilary should have been
here reframed, if only for the fine touches of outer things
passing by as a wind upon the fervent spirit in its dream.
Besides, it has its place and significance among the
author's studies in the Christian style, near some of those
90 7A/E PO AEA/S OA'
earlier works, so full of his special grace and spiritual
charm, which belong to the same period, if not beside the
highest of his sacred designs, such as the Passover and
Magdalene here as it were engraved and put forth in
print among the Sonnets for pictures. All these are most
noble, and give once more a magnificent proof of his
power to bend and mould, to inflame and invigorate, to
carve and colour the dead forms of words with a shaping
and animating life. Among them all the most utterly
delightful to me is that on Giorgione's divine and trans-
cendant pastoral in the Louvre : which actually attains
to the transfusion of a spirit that seemed incommunicable
from one master's hand even to another's. In the verse
as on the canvass there is the breathless breath of over-
much delight, the passion of overrunning pleasure which
quivers and aches on the very edge of heavenly tears—
“tears of perfect moan" for excess of unfathomable
pleasure and burden of inexpressible things only to be
borne by Gods in heaven; the sweet and sovereign op-
pression of absolute beauty and the nakedness of burning
life; the supreme pause of Soul and sense at the climax
of their consummate noon and high tide of being; glad
and Sad and Sacred, unsearchable and natural and strange.
Of the sonnets on the writer's own pictures and designs
I think that on Pandora to be the most perfect and ex-
alted, as the design is among his mightiest in its godlike
terror and imperial trouble of beauty, shadowed by the
smoke and fiery vapour of winged and fleshless passions
crowding from the casket in spires of flame-lit and curling
cloud round her fatal face and mourning veil of hair. The
\ Sonnets on Cassandra translate with apt and passionate
ZOAAWZTAE G A /º/e/ZZ AC OSSAE 7"ZY. 9I
choice of words the scheme of his greatest tragic design,
his fullest and most various in vital incident and high
truth of heroic life. The grand sonnet “on refusal of
aid between nations” shows yet a fresh side and a most
noble aspect of his great and manifold genius; its severe
emotion and grave loveliness of ardent anger set a mark
on it as of Dante's justice and judgment. “Autumn
Idleness” is a splendid study of landscape, for breadth of
Colour and Solemn brightness of vision worthy to stand
by those great symbolic landscapes seen in the “House
of Life,” such as “Barren Spring ” and “The Hill
Summit ; ” and in “Beauty and the Bird” we have a
Sample of the painter's gladdest colour and sweetest tone
of light. His full command of that lyric sentiment and
power which give to mediaeval poetry its clear particular
charm is plain alike from the ending given to the “old
Song” of Ophelia and from the marvellous versions of
Villon's and other French songs. The three sweetest of
that great poet's who was the third singer of the Middle
Ages and first vocal tongue of the dumb painful people
in is agony and mirth and shame and strength of heart,
are here recast in English gold of equal weight. The
very cadence of Villon's matchless ballad of the ladies of
old time is caught and returned. The same exquisite
exactitude of translation is notable in “John of Tours”—
the old provincial song long passed from mouth to mouth
and at last preserved with all its breaks and lapses of
Sweet rough metre by Gérard de Nerval. His version of
Dante's divinest episode, that of Francesca, I take to be
the Supreme triumph of translation possible ; for what,
after so many failures,—Byron's the dismallest failure of
92 7A/A2 AO AEMS OF
all, and worst imaginable instance of perversion—could
be hoped of any new attempt? But here the divine verse
seems actually to fall of itself into a new mould, the
exact shape and size of the first—to be poured from one
Cup into another without spilling one drop of nectar.
Nay, so far beyond other men's is this poet's power of
transfusion that as though to confute the Italian proverb
against the treasons of translators he has wellnigh
achieved the glory of reproducing a few lines even of
Sappho, by welding two fragments into one song, melting
two notes into one chord of verse. But though the
Sweet life and colour be saved and renewed, no man can
give again in full that ineffable glory and grace as of
present godhead, that subtle breath and bloom of very
heaven itself, that dignity of divinity which informs the
most passionate and piteous notes of the unapproachable
poetess with Such grandeur as would seem impossible to
Such passion. Here is a delicious and living music, but
here is not—what can nowhere be—the echo of that un-
imaginable song, with its pauses and redoubled notes and
returns and falls of sound, as of honey dropping from
heaven—as of tears, and fire, and seed of life—which
though but run over and repeated in thought pervades
the spirit with “a sweet possessive pang.” That apple
“atop on the topmost twig” of the tree of life and song
remains unreachable by any second hand, untastable
by any later lip for ever ; never out of sight of men's
memory, never within grasp of man's desire ; the apple
which not Paris but Apollo gave to her whose glory has
Outlived her goddess, and whose name has been set above
hers:—
J)A/V7'E GAAEA2/A2Z Me OSS/2777. 93
“La mále Sapho, l'amante et le poète,
Plus belle que Vénus parses mornes pāleurs,
Plus belle que Vénus se dressant sur le monde l’”
Among the lesser poems of this volume “The Portrait”
holds a place of honour in right of its earnest beauty of
thought and rich simplicity of noble images. Above them
all in reach and scope of power stands the poem of
“Jenny;” great among the few greatest works of the artist.
Its plain truth and masculine tenderness are invested with
a natural array of thought and imagination which doubles
their worth and force. Without a taint on it of anything
coarse or trivial, without shadow or suspicion of any facile
or vulgar aim at pathetic effect of a tragical or moral kind,
it cleaves to absolute fact and reality closer than any
common preacher or realist Could come ; no side of the
study is thrown out or thrown back into false light or
furtive shadow; but the purity and nobility of its high
and ardent pathos are qualities of a moral weight and
, beauty beyond reach of any rivalry. A divine pity fills
it, or a pity something better than divine; the more just
and deeper compassion of human fellowship and fleshly
brotherhood. Here is nothing of sickly fiction or
theatrical violence of tone. No spiritual station of com-
mand is assumed, no vantage-ground of Outlook from
hills of holiness or heights of moral indifference or
barriers of hard contempt; no unction of facile tears is
poured out upon this fallen golden head of a common
woman; no loose-tongued effusion of slippery sympathy,
to wash out shame with sentiment. And therefore is
“the pity of it” a noble pity, and worth the paying; a
genuine sin-offering for intercession, pleading with fate
Y
94 THE POEMS OF
for mercy without thought or purpose of pleading. The
man whose thought is thus gloriously done into words is
as other men are, only with a better brain and heart than
the Common, with more of mind and compassion, with
better eye to see and quicker pulse to beat, with a more
generous intellect and a finer taste of things; and his
chance companion of a night is no ruined angel or self-
immolated sacrifice, but a girl who plies her trade like
any other trade, without show or sense of reluctance or
repulsion; there is no hint that she was first made to fit
better into a smoother groove of life, to run more easily
on a higher line of being; that anything seen in prospect
or retrospect rebukes or recalls her fancy into any fairer
field than she may reach by her present road. All the
open sources of pathetic effusion to which a common
shepherd of souls would have led the flock of his readers
to drink and weep and be refreshed, and leave the medi-
cinal wellspring of sentiment warmer and fuller from
their easy tears, are here dried up. This poor hireling of
the streets and Casinos is professionally pitiable; the
world's contempt of her fellow tradeswomen is not in
itself groundless or unrighteous; there is no need to raise
any mirage about her as of a fallen star, a glorious wreck;
but not in that bitterest cry of Othello's own agony—“a
sufferance panging as Soul and body's Severing”—was
there a more divine heat of burning compassion than the
high heart of a man may naturally lavish, as in this poem,
upon such an one as she is. Iago indeed, could not
share it, nor Roderigo ; the naked understanding cannot
feel this, nor the mere fool of flesh apprehend it; but
only in one or the other of these can all sense be dead of
“the pity of it,”
ADAAV7/5 GAAA’./A. Z. At O.S.S/277/. 95
Every touch of real detail and minute colour in the
study serves to heighten and complete the finished picture
which remains burnt in upon the eyes of Our memory
when the work is done. The clock ticking, the bird
waking, the scratched pier-glass, the shaded lamp, give
new relief as of very light and present sound to the
spiritual side of the poem. How great and profound is
the scope and power of the work on that side, I can offer
no better proof than a reference to the whole; for no
sample of this can be torn off or cut out. Of the might
of handiwork and simple sovereignty of manner which
make it so triumphant a witness of what English speech
can do, this one excerpt may stand in evidence :-
“Except when there may rise unsought
Haply at times a passing thought
Of the old days which seem to be
Much older than any history
That is written in any book;
When she would lie in fields and look
Along the ground through the blown grass,
And wonder where the city was,
Far out of sight, whose broil and bale
They told her then for a child’s tale.
“Jenny, you know the city now.
A child can tell the tale there, how
Some things, which are not yet enrolled
In market-lists, are bought and sold
Even till the early Sunday light,
When Saturday night is market-night
Everywhere, be it dry or wet,
And market-night in the Haymarket.”
The simple sudden Sound of that plain line is as great
and rare a thing in the way of verse, as final and superb
a proof of absolute poetic power upon words, as any
96 7A7A. AEO EA/S O.A.'
man's work can show. As an imaginative instance of
positive and perfect nature, the whole train of thought
evolved in the man's mind as he watches the head asleep
On his knee is equal and incomparable ; the thought of
a pure honest girl, in whom the same natural loves and
likings shall run straight and bear fruit to honour, that in
this girl have all run to seed of shame; the possible
changes of chance that in their time shall bring fresh
proof of the sad equality of nature and tragic identity of
birthmark as of birthright in all souls born, the remote
conceivable justice and restitution that may some day
strike the balance between varying lots and lives; the
delicately beautiful and pitiful fancy of the rose pressed
in between the pages of an impure book; and the
mightier fancy So grandly cast in words, of lust, alone,
aloof, immortal, immovable, outside of death in the dark
of things everlasting ; self-secluded in absorption of its
own desire, and walled up from love or light as a toad
in its stone wrapping; and last, with the grey penetration
of London dawn, the awakening of mind into live day-
light of work, and farewell taken of the night and its
follies, not without pity or thought of them.
The whole work is worthy to fill its place for ever as
one of the most perfect and memorable poems of an age
or generation. It deals with deep and common things;
with the present hour, and with all time; with that which
is of the instant among us, and that which has a message
for all souls of men ; with the outward and immediate
matter of the day, and with the inner and immutable
ground of human nature. Its plainness of speech and
Subject gives it power to touch the heights and sound the
AXAAV7'A' G A PAC/A2/. At OSSAE 7777. 97
depths of tragic thought without losing the force of its
hold and grasp upon the palpable truths which men often
seek and cry out for in poetry, without knowing that these
are only good when greatly treated, and that to artists who
can treat them greatly all times and all truths are equal,
and the present, though assuredly no worse, yet assuredly
no better topic than the past. All the ineffably foolish
jargon and jangle of criticasters about classic subjects
and romantic, remote or immediate interests, duties of
the poet to face and handle this thing instead of that or
his own age instead of another, can only serve to darken
counsel by words without knowledge: a poet of the first
order raises all subjects to the first rank, and puts the
life-blood of an equal interest into Hebrew forms or
Greek, mediaeval or modern, yesterday or yesterage.
| Thus there is here just the same life-blood and breath of
poetic interest in this episode of a London street and
lodging as in the song of “Troy Town” and the song of
* Eden Bower ; ” just as much, and no jot more. These
two songs are the masterpieces of Mr. Rossetti's magni-
ficent lyric faculty. Full of fire and music and move-
ment, delicate as moonlight and passionate as Sunlight,
fresh as dawn and fine as air, Sonorous as the motion of
deep waters, the infallible verse bears up the spirit safe
and joyous on its wide clear way. There is a strength
and breadth of style about these poems also which en-
nobles their sweetness and brightness, giving them a per-
fume that savours of no hotbed, but of hill-flowers that
face the sea and the Sunrise; a colour that grows in no
greenhouse, but such as comes with morning upon the
mountains. They are good certainly, but they are also
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great; great as no other man's work of the same age and
country. Out of the beautiful old tradition of Helen,
which tells of her offering on a shrine at Sparta of a Cup
modelled upon the mould of her own breast, the poet has
carved a graven image of song as tangible and lovely as
the oblation itself; and this cup he has filled with the
wine of love and fire of destruction, so that in the Spartan
temple we feel a forecast of light and heat from the future
Trojan flame. These two poems have the fiery concen-
tration and condensation of the ballad; but they have a
higher rapture of imagination, a more ardent affluence of
colour and strenuous dilation of spirit, than a ballad can
properly contain ; their wings of words beat and burn at
fuller expansion through a keener air. The song of Lilith
has all the beauty and glory and force in it of the splendid
creature so long worshipped of men as god or dreaded
as devil; the voluptuous swiftness and strength, the
supreme luxury of liberty in its measured grace and lithe
melodious motion of rapid and revolving harmony; the
subtle action and majestic recoil, the mysterious charm
as of soundless music that hangs about a serpent as it
stirs or springs. Never was nobler blood infused into the
veins of an old legend than into this of the first wife of
Adam, changing shapes with the Snake her lover, that in
his likeness she may tempt the mother of men. The
passion of the cast-off temptress, in whose nets of woven
hair all the souls are entangled of her rival’s sons through
all their generations, has such actual and instant flame of
wrath and brilliance of blood and fragrance of breath in
it, that we feel face to face the very vision of the old tale,
and no symbol or shadow, but a bodily shape and a
ZOAAWZTAE G A PAE/AE Z ROSSAE 7'7"/. 99
fleshly charm, dominant in ear and eye. The tragic
might of the myth, its fierce and keen significance, strikes
through us sharpest at the end, as with the Supreme
sting of triumph and final fang of the transfigured
Serpent.
Had I time and room and skill, to whom all these
are wanting, I would here at length try to Say some
passing word illustrative of the more obvious and the
more intimate relations of this artist's work in verse and
his work in painting; between the poem of “Jenny ”
and the design called “Found,” where at early dawn the
driver of a country cart finds Crouching in London streets
the figure of a girl once his betrothed, and stoops to lift
with tender strength of love, and surprise of simple pity
startled into freshness of pain, the shuddering abased
head with the golden ruin of its rich soiled hair, which
cowers against a graveyard wall away from the light that
rises beyond the paling lamps on bridge and river ; be-
tween the song of “Troy Town " and the picture of
Helen, with Parian face and mouth of ardent blossom, a
keen red flower-bud of fire, framed in broad gold of wide-
spread locks, the Sweet Sharp Smile of power set fast on
her clear curved lips, and far behind her the dull flame of
burning towers and light from reddened heaven on dark
sails of lurid ships ; between the early sacred poems and
the early sacred designs of the author's Christian era, as
for instance the “Ave '' and the “Girlhood of the Virgin,”
with its young grace and sincere splendour of spirit, the
“Staff and Scrip” and the design of “Fra Pace,” the
“Blessed Damozel ” and the “Dream of Dante,” all
clothed in colours of heaven, with raiment dyed and
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spun in the paradise of trust and thought ; between the
romantic poems and the romantic designs, as for example
“Sister Helen” and the “Tune of ‘Seven Towers,’”
which have the same tone and type of tragic romance in
their mediaeval touches and notes of passionate fancy;
between the poems of richer thought and the designs of
riper form, works of larger insight and more strong de-
cision, fruits of the mind at its fullest and the hand at its
mightiest, as the “Burden of Nineveh” and the “Sybil"
or “Pandora.” The passage from a heaven of mere
angels and virgins to the stronger vision of Venus Verti-
cordia, of Helen äAétroXic, of Lilith and Cassandra, is a
type of the growth of mind and hand to the perfect power
of mastery over the truth and depth of nature, the large
laws of spirit and body, the mysteries and the majesties
of very life ; whither the soul that has attained perceives,
though it need reject no first faith and forsake no first
love, though rather it include in a larger comprehension
of embrace those old with these new graces, those creeds
with this belief, that any garden of paradise on earth or
above earth is but a little part of a great world, as every
fancy of man’s faith is a segment of the truth of his nature,
a splintered fragment of universal life and spirit of thought
everlasting ; since what can he conceive or believe but
it must have this of truth in it, that it is a veritable pro-
duct of his own brain and outcome for the time of his
actual being, with a place and a reason of its own for
root and support to it through its due periods of life and
change and death P But to trace the passage from light
into light and strength into strength, the march from work
on to work and triumph on to triumph, of a genius so full
AXAAV7'E G A PA2/ZZ A&O.S.S/277/. IO I
of life and growth and harmonious exuberance of expan-
sion, SO loyal to rule of instinct and that natural Order of
art and thought whose service is perfect freedom ; to lay
out a chart of its progress and mark down the lines of
its advance ; this, high as the office would be and worthy
the ambition, is not a possible task for criticism ; though
what manner of rank a man may hold and what manner
of work he may have to do in that rank, it is the business
of Criticism to see and say. e
In every age there is some question raised as to its
wants and powers, its strength and weakness, its great or
Small worth and work ; and in every age that question is
waste of time and speech—of thought usually there is no
waste, for the questioners have none to expend. There
has never been an age that was not degenerate in the eyes
of its own fools ;ſ the yelp of curtailed foxes in every
generation is the same.) To a small soul the age which
has borne it can appear only as an age of small souls;
the pigmy brain and emasculate spirit can perceive in its
Own time nothing but dwarfishness and emasculation.
That the world has ever seen spirits of another sort, the
poor heart of such creatures would fain deny and dares
not ; but to allow that the world does now is insufferable ;
at least they can “swagger themselves out of their owneyes”
into the fond belief that they are but samples of their
puny time, overtopped in spiritual stature by the spirits
of times past alone. But not by blustering denial or
blustering assertion of an age's greatness will the question
be decided whether the age be great or not. Each century
has seemed to some of its children an epoch of decadence
and decline in national life and spiritual, in moral or
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material glory ; each alike has heard the cry of degeneracy
raised against it, the wail of emulous impotence set up
against the weakness of the age ; Dante's generation and
Shakespeare's, Milton's and Shelley's, have all been ages
of poetic decay in their turn, as the age of Hugo is now ;
there as here no great man was to be seen, no great
work was to be done, no great cry was to be heard, no
great impulse was to be felt, by those who could feel
nothing, hear nothing, do nothing, and see nothing. To
them the poor present has always been pitiable or damn-
able, the past which bore it divine. And other men than
these have swelled the common cry of curs : Byron, him-
Self in his better moments a witness against his own
words, helped the fools of his hour to decry their betters
and his own, by a pretence of wailing over the Augustan
age of Anne, when “it was all Horace with us; it is all
Claudian now.” His nozeſ has become our then, and the
same whine is raised in its honour ; for the cant of irrita-
tion and insincerity, hungry vanity and starving spite, can
always be caught up and inherited by those who can in-
herit nothing of a strong man's but his weakness, of a
wise man's but his folly ; who can gather at a great man’s
board no sustenance from the meats and wines, but are
proud to pilfer the soiled napkins and cracked platters
from under his side-table. Whether there be any great
work doing in Our time, or any great man living, it is not
worth while to debate ; but if there be not, it is certain
that no man living can know it ; for to pass judgment
worth heeding on any age and give sentence that shall
last on any generation, a man must himself be great ; and
if no man on earth be great in Our day, who on earth can
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JOAAV7/2 GAA; AC/A2/, AEOSSAE ZZY Io.3
be great enough to know and let us know it on better
authority than a pigmy's P Such champions as please may
fight out on either side their battle of the Sandbags and
windbags between this hour and the next ; I am content
to assume, and am not careful to dispute in defence of
the assumption, that the qualities which make men great
and the work of men famous are now what they were, and
will be what they are : that there is no progress and no
degeneracy traceable from AEschylus to Shakespeare, from
Athenian sculptors to Venetian painters ; that the gifts of
genius are diverse, but the quality is one ; and—though
this be a paradox—that this quality does not wait till a
man be dead to descend on him and belong to him ;
that his special working power does not of necessity
begin with the cessation of it, and that the dawn of his
faculty cannot reasonably be dated from the hour of its
extinction. If this paradox be not utterly untenable, it
follows that dead men of genius had genius even when
yet alive, and did not begin to be great men by ceasing
to be men at all ; and that so far we have no cause to
distrust the evidence of reason which proves us the great-
ness of men past when it proves to us by the same pro-
cess of testimony the greatness of men present.
Here for example in the work of Mr. Rossetti,
besides that particular colour and flavour which distin-
guishes each master’s work from that of all other masters,
and by want of which you may tell merely good work
from wholly great work, the general qualities of all great
poetry are separately visible and divisible ; strength,
Sweetness, affluence, simplicity, depth, light, harmony,
variety, bodily grace and range of mind and force of soul
IO4. 7A/A2 AO AEA/S OF
-
and ease of flight, the scope and sweep of wing to impel
the might and weight of thought through the air and light
of speech with a motion as of mere musical impulse; and
not less the live bloom of perfect words, warm as breath
and fine as flower-dust, which lies light as air upon the
parting of lyric leaves that open into song ; the rare and
ineffable mark of a Supreme singing power, an element
too subtle for solution in any crucible of analysis, though
its presence or absence be patent at a first trial to all who
have a sense of taste. All these this poet has, and the
mastery over all these which melts and fuses all into form
and use ; the Cunning to turn his own gifts to service which
is the last great apanage of great workmen. Colour and
sound are servants of his thought, and his thought is ser-
vant of his will; in him the will and the instinct are not
two forces, but one strength; are not two leaders, but one
guide; there is no shortcoming, no pain or compulsion
in the homage of hand to soul. The subject-matter of
his work is always great and fit ; nothing trivial, nothing
illicit, nothing unworthy the workmanship of a master-
hand, is to be swept up from any corner of the floor;
there is no misuse or waste of good work on stuff too
light or hard to take the impression of his noble style.
He builds up no statues of snow at the bidding of any
fool, with the hand that can carve itself a godlike model
in ivory or gold; not though all the fools of the place
and hour should recommend snow as the best material,
for its softness and purity. Time and work and art are
too precious to him and too serious to be spent on any-
thing less than the best. An artist worthy of the highest
work will make his least work worthy of himself. In
DAWZE GABR/EZ ROSSE 777. 105
each line of labour which his spirit may strike into he will
make his mark, and set his stamp on any metal he may
take in hand to forge ; for he can strike into no wrong
line, and take in hand no base metal. So equal a
balance of two great gifts as we find in the genius of this
artist is perhaps the greatest gift of all, as it is certainly
the most singular. We cannot tell what jewels were lost
to the treasure-house of time in that century of sonnets
which held “ the bosom-beats of Raffael ; ” we can but
guess that they had somewhat, and doubt how nearly they
had all, of his perfect grace and godhead of heavenly
humanity. Even of the giant-god his rival we cannot be
sure that his divine faculties never clashed or crossed
each other to their mutual hindrance.
But here, where both the sister powers serve in the
temple of one mind and impel the work of One hand,
their manner of service is smooth, harmonious, perfect ;
the splendid quality of painting and the subtle faculty of
verse gain glory from each other without taking, reign
side by side with no division of empire, yet with no con-
fusion of claims, with no invasion of rights. No tongue-
less painter or handless poet could be safer from the
perils of mixed art ; his poems are not over pictorial or
his pictures over poetical ; his poetry has not the less
depth and reach and force and height of spirit proper to
poetry, his painting has not the less might and skill, the
less excellence of form and colour or masterdom of design
and handiwork proper to painting, for the double glory of
V
his genius. Which of the two great men in him, the painter
or the poet, be the greater, only another artist equal to
him on either hand and taintless of jealousy or misconceit
Ioé . 7A7A2 AO AEMS OF
could say with authority worth a hearing ; and such a
judge he is not likely to find. But what is his relative
rank among other men it needs no such rare union of
faculties to perceive. His place among the painters of his
century may be elsewhere debated and determined ; but
here and now the materials lie before us for decision as
to his place among its poets. Of these there is but one
alive whose name is already unamenable to any judg-
ment of the hour's; whose supremacy, whether it be or
be not a matter of question between insular and pro-
vincial circles of parasites or sectarians, is no more de-
bateable before any graver tribunal than the motion of
the earth round the Sun. Upon him, as upon two or
three other of the leaders of men in time past, the verdict
of time has been given before his death. In our com-
parison of men with men for worse or better we do not
now take into reckoning the name of Victor Hugo. The
Small gatherings or swollen assemblies of important
ephemerals who met to dispute the respective claims and
merits of Shakespeare and Jonson, Milton and Waller,
Shelley and Byron, have on the whole fallen duly dumb :
the One Supreme figure of each time is as generally and
as need be desired. To sit in the seat of such disputants
can be no present man's ambition. It Ought to be, if it
be not, superfluous to set down in words the assurance that
we claim for no living poet a place beside the Master;
that we know there is no lyrist alive but one who could
have sung for us the Cradle-song of death, the love-song
of madness, the Sea-Song of exile, the hunting-song of
revolution ; that since the songs of Gretchen in “Faust”
JOA /WZTE G A PA’/AEA, ROSSAE ZTV. , Io?
and Beatrice in the “Cenci,” there have been no such
Songs heard among men as the least of these first four
among all his lyrics that rise to recollection at the moment.
Fantine's song or Gastibelza's, the “Adieu, patrie l’’ or
the “Chasseur Noir,” any one of these by itself would
suffice to establish, beyond debate and beyond accla-
mation, the absolute sovereignty of the great poet whose
glory could dispense even with any of these.
The claims to precedence of other men who stand in
the vanguard of their time are open matters for the discus-
Sion of judgments to adjust or readjust. Among English-
speaking poets of his age I know of none who can
reasonably be said to have given higher proof of the
highest qualities than Mr. Rossetti; if the qualities we
rate highest in poetry be imagination, passion, thought,
harmony and variety of singing power. Each man who
has anything has his own circle of work and realm of
rule, his own field to till and to reign in ; no rival can
Overmatch for firm completion of lyric line, for pathos
made perfect and careful melody of high or of intimate
emotion, “New-Year's Eve " or “The Grandmother,”
“OEnone" or “Boadicea,” the majestic hymn or the rich
lament for love won and lost in “Maud ; ”
emulate the fiery subtlety and sinuous ardour of spirit which
penetrates and lights up all secret gulfs and glimmering
heights of human evil and good in “The Ring and the
Book,” making the work done live because “the soul of
man is precious to man : ” none can “blow in power”
again through the notched reed of Pan by the river, to
detain the sun on the hills with music; none can outrun
that Smooth speed of gracious strength which touched its
1) Oſle C3Il
Io8 7A/E A2O/2A/S OAZ
Grecian goal in “Thyrsis” and the “Harp-player;” none
can light as with fires or lull as with flutes of magic the
reaches of So full a stream of story as flows round the
“Earthly Paradise” with ships of heroes afloat on it.
But for height and range and depth, for diversity and
perfection of powers, Mr. Rossetti is abreast of elder poets
not less Surely than of younger. Again I take to witness
four singled poems; “The Burden of Nineveh,” “Sister
l
Helen,” “Jenny,” and “Eden Bower.” Though there
were not others as great as these to cite at need, we might
be content to pass judgment on the strength of these
only; but others as great there are. If he have not the
full effluence of romance or the keen passion of human
science that give power on this hand to Morris and on
that to Browning, his work has form and voice, shapeli-
ness and Sweetness, unknown to the great analyst; it has
weight and heat, gravity and intensity, wanting to the less
serious and ardent work of the latest master of romance.
Neither by any defect of form nor by any default of force
does he ever fall short of either mark or fight with either
hand “as one that beateth the air.” In sureness of
choice and scope of interest, in solidity of subject and
Sublimity of object, the general worth of his work excels
the rate of other men's ; he wastes no breath and mis-
takes no distance, sets his genius to no tasks unfit for it,
and spends his strength in the culture of no fruitless fields.
What he would do is always what a poet should, and what
he would do is always done. Born a light-bearer and
leader of men, he has always fulfilled his office with readi-
ness and done his work with might. Help and strength
and delight and fresh life have long been gifts of his
JOAAV7'E G A PAE/F / ACO.S.SETZTV. Io9
giving, and freely given as Only great gifts can be. And now
that at length we receive from hands yet young and strong
this treasure of many years, the gathered flower of youth
and ripe firstlings of manhood, a fruit of the topmost branch
“more golden than gold,” all men may witness and assure
themselves what manner of harvest the life of this man
was to bear ; all may see that although, in the perfect
phrase of his own sonnet, the last birth of life be death,
as her three first-born were love and art and song, yet
two of these which she has borne to him, art namely and
song, cannot now be made subject to that last ; that life
and love with it may pass away, but very Surely no death
that ever may be born shall have power upon these for
eVēT.
1870.
I IO
MORRISS LIFE AND DEATH OF 9,450M.
THE hardest work and the highest that can be done by a
critic studious of the right is first to discern what is good,
and then to discover how and in what way it is so. To
do this office for any man during his life is a task always
essentially difficult, sometimes seemingly ungracious. We
demand of the student who stands up as a judge to show us
as he best may how and why this man excels that, what
are the stronger and what the weaker sides of his
attempted or achieved work when set fairly by the work
of others. For if in some one point at least it does not
exceed theirs, it is not work of a high kind, and worthy of
enduring study. Who is to say this, who is to prove it,
we have first to find out ; and found out it must be, if
criticism is to be held of more account than the ephemeral
cackle of Casual praisers and blamers; if it is to be
thoughtful and truthful, worthy the name of an art, hand-
maid of higher arts. Now, as a rule, men are mistrustful
of one who takes leave to judge the work of a fellow-
workman. And not without reason or show of reason ;
for no verdicts more foolish or more false have been
delivered than some of those passed by poet upon poet,
by painter upon painter. Nor need this be taken as
proof of anything base or partial or jealous in the
MORAE/S'S Z/AE AND DEATH OF AASOAV. I 11
speaker's mind. It is not easy to see at Once widely and
well. For example, could Byron and Wordsworth have
judged better of each other's work, each might have lost
something of fitness for his own. It is a hard law, but a
law it is. Against this, however, a counter truth not less
grave than this must be weighed. We do not appeal to
men ignorant of politics for a verdict on affairs of state,
to men unskilled in science on a scientific question. And
no matter of science or of state is more abstruse and
hard to settle than a question of art; nor is any more
needful to have settled for us in good time, if only .
lest accident or neglect, ignorance or violence, rob us
unaware of some precious and irrecoverable thing, not
known of or esteemed while safely with us. Consider
what all men have lost already and for ever, merely by
such base means as these ; how much of classic work and
mediaeval, how much of Greece, of Italy, of England, has
gone from us that we might have kept. For this and
other reasons it may be permissible, or pardonable at
least, for a student of art to speak now and then on art ;
so long only as he shall speak honestly and carefully,
without overmuch of assumption or deprecation. -
Over the first fortunes of a newly-born work of art
accident must usually preside for evil or for good. Over
the earliest work of the artist whom we are here to take
note of, that purblind leader of the blind presided on the
whole for evil. Here and there it met with eager recog-
nition and earnest applause ; nowhere, if I err not, with
just praise or blame worth heeding. It seems to have
been now lauded and now decried as the result and ex-
pression of a school rather than a man, of a theory or
:
II 2 A/OA’A2/S’S Z/ZºZº. AAV/O
tradition rather than a poet or student. Those who so
judged were blind guides of the purblind ; reversing thus
the undivine office of their god Accident. Such things
as were in this book are taught and learnt in no school
but that of instinct. Upon no piece of work in the world
was the impress of native character ever more distinctly
stamped, more deeply branded. It needed no excep-
tional acuteness of ear or eye to see or hear that this poet
held of none, stole from none, clung to none, as tenant
or as beggar or as thief. Not as yet a master, he was
assuredly no longer a pupil. -
A little later than this one appeared another volume
of poems, not dissimilar in general choice of stories and
subjects, perfect where this was imperfect, strong where
this was weak; but strong and perfect on that side alone.
All that was wanting here was there supplied, but all that
was here supplied was wanting there. In form, in struc-
ture, in Composition, few poems can be more faultless
than those of Mr. Tennyson, few faultier than those of
Mr. Morris, which deal with the legend of Arthur and
Guenevere. I do not speak here of form in the abstract
and absolute sense ; for where this is wanting, all is
wanting; without this there can be no work of art at all.
I speak of that secondary excellence always necessary to
the perfection, but not always indispensable to the exist-
ence of art. These first poems of Mr. Morris were not
malformed ; a misshapen poem is no poem ; as well
might one talk of unnatural nature or Superhuman man-
hood ; but they are not well clad ; their attire now and
then has been huddled on ; they have need sometimes
of combing and trimming. Take that One for example
DEATH OF 9 ASON: II.3
called “King Arthur's Tomb.” It has not been con-
structed at all ; the parts hardly hold together ; it has
need of joists and screws, props and rafters. Many able
writers of verse whom no miracle could endow with Com-
petence to do such work would have missed the faults as
surely as the merits; would have done something where
the poet has cared to do nothing. There is scarcely
connection here, and scarcely composition. There is
hardly a trace of narrative power or mechanical arrange-
ment. There is a perceptible want of tact and practice,
which leaves the poem in parts indecorous and chaotic.
But where among other and older pocts of his time and
country is one comparable for perception and expression
of tragic truth, of subtle and noble, terrible and piteous
things P where a touch of passion at once so broad and
so sure? The figures here given have the blood and
breath, the shape and step of life ; they can move and
suffer ; their repentance is as real as their desire ; their
shame lies as deep as their love. They are at once
remorseful for the sin and regretful of the pleasure that is
past. The retrospective vision of Launcelot and of
Guenevere is as passionate and profound as life. Riding
towards her without hope, in the darkness and the heat of
the way, he can but divert and Sustain his spirit by recollec-
tion of her loveliness and her love, seen long since asleep
and waking, in another place than this, on a distant
night.
“Pale in the green sky were the stars, I ween,
Because the moon shone like a tear she shed
When she dwelt up in heaven a while ago
And ruled all things but God.”
I
II.4. MoRRIS's ZIFE AND
Retrospect and vision, natural memories and spiritual,
here coalesce; and how exquisite is the retrospect, and
how passionate the vision, of past light and colour in the
sky, past emotion and conception in the soul! Not in
the idyllic school is a chord ever struck, a note ever
sounded, so tender and subtle as this. Again, when
Guenevere has maddened herself and him with wild
words of reproach and remorse, abhorrence and at-
traction, her sharp and sudden memory of old sights and
sounds and splendid irrevocable days finds word and
form not less noble and faithful to fact and life. The
first words of Arthur bidding her cherish the knight
“whom all the land called his banner, sword, and shield;”
the long first pressure of Launcelot's lips on her hand; the
passionate and piteous course of love here ended (if ended
at all) above the king's grave dug in part and unwittingly
by their wrong-doing ; the solitary sound of birds singing
in her gardens, while in the lists the noise went on of
spears and shouts telling which knight of them all rode
here or there; the crying of ladies' names as men and
horses clashed one against another, names that bit like
the steel they impelled to its mark; the agony of anger
and horror which gives edge and venom to her
memory—
‘‘ Banner of Arthur—with black-bended shield
“Sinister-wise across the fair gold ground !
Here let me tell you what a knight you are,
O sword and shield of Arthur ! you are found
A crooked sword, I think, that leaves a scar
** On the bearer’s arm so be he thinks it straight—
Twisted Malay's crease, beautiful blue-grey,
Poisoned with sweet fruit—as he found too late,
My husband Arthur, on some bitter day !
DEATH OF 9:ASON. II5
“O sickle cutting harvest all day long,
That the husbandman across his shoulder hangs,
And going homeward about evensong,
Dies the next morning, struck through by the fangs I’’’
—all these points and phases of passion are alike truly
and nobly rendered. I have not read the poem for
years, I have not the book at hand, and I cite from
memory ; but I think it would be safe to swear to the
accuracy of my citation. Such verses are not forgetable.
They are not, indeed,—as are the “Idylls of the King”
—the work of a dexterous craftsman in full practice:
Little beyond dexterity, a rare eloquence, and a laborious
patience of hand, has been given to the one or denied to
the other.” These are good gifts and great ; but it is
better to want clothes than limbs.
The shortcomings of this first book are nowhere
traceable in the second now lying before us. A nine
* Perhaps in all this noble passage of poetry there is nothing
nobler than this bitter impulse of irony, this fiery shame and rage .
of repentance, which here impels Guenevere to humiliate herself
through her lover, and thus consummate the agony of abasement.
‘‘False and fatal as banner, or shield, or sword, wherein is he better
than a peasant’s dangerous and vulgar implement, as fatal to him
it may be, by carelessness or chance, as a king's weapon to the
king if handled amiss?” And yet for all this she cannot but cleave
to him ; through her lover she scourges herself; it is suicide in her
to slay him ; but even so his soul must needs be saved—“so as by
fire.” No poet about to start on his course ever saw for himself or
showed to others a thing more tragic and more true than this study
of noble female passion, half selfless and half personal, half mad
and half sane. -
* The comparison here made is rather between book and book
than between man and man. Both poets have done better else-
where, each after his kind; and except by his best work no work-
man can be fairly judged. A critic who should underrate either
would be condemnable on both hands.
I 2
II6 MOACA’/S’S Z/AA. AAVZ)
years' space does not lie between them in vain; enough
has been learned and unlearned, rejected and attained.
Here indeed there is not the stormy variety, the lyric
ardour of the first book; there is not the passion of the
ballads, the change of note and diversity of power, all
that fills with life and invigorates with colour the artist's
earlier designs; for not all of this is here needed. Of
passion and humour, of impulse and instinct, he had
given noble and sufficient proof in manifold ways. But
this “ Jason” is a large and coherent poem, completed as
conceived ; the style throughout on a level with the in-
vention. In direct narrative power, in clear forthright
manner of procedure, not seemingly troubled to select, to
pick and sift and winnow, yet never superfluous or
verbose, never straggling or jarring ; in these high
qualities it resembles the work of Chaucer. Even against
the great master his pupil may fairly be matched for
simple sense of right, for grace and speed of step, for
purity and justice of colour. In all the noble roll of our
poets there has been since Chaucer no second teller of }
tales, no second rhapsode comparable to the first, till the
advent of this one. As with the Greeks, so with us; we
have had in lieu of these a lyric and a tragic school ; we
have also had the subordinate schools, gnomic and
idyllic, domestic and didactic. But the old story-singers,
the old “Saga-men,” we have no more heard of. As
soon might we have looked for a fresh Odyssey from
southward, a fresh Njala from northward. And yet no
higher school has brought forth rarer poets than this.
“But,” it is said, “this sort of poetry is a March flower,
a child of the first winds and Suns of a nation; in May
Z)/2A7H OF 9 ASOAV. II 7
even, much more in August, you cannot have it except by
forcing ; and forcing it will not bear. A late romance is
a hothouse daffodil.” And so indeed it must usually be.
But so it is not here; and the proof is the poem. It could
not be done, no doubt, only it has been. Here is a
poem sown of itself, sprung from no alien seed, cast after
no alien model ; fresh as wind, bright as light, full of the :
spring and the Sun. It shares of course the conditions
of its kind; it has no time for the subtleties and hardly
room for the ardours of tragic poetry. Passion in ro-
mance is of its nature subordinate to action; the flowing
stream of story hushes and lulls the noise of its gurgling
and refluent eddies with a still predominance of sound.
To me it seems that there has here been almost too
much of this. Only by rare and brief jets does the poet
let out the fire of a potent passion which not many others
can kindle and direct. For the most part, the river of
romance flows on at full, but keeping well to its channel,
unvexed by rains and undisturbed by whirlpools. In a
word, through great part of this poem there is no higher
excellence attempted than that of adventurous or ro-
mantic narrative couched in the simplest and fittest
forms of poetry. This abstinence is certainly not due to
impotence, possibly not to intention, more probably to
distaste. Mr. Morris has an English respect for tem-
perance and reserve ; good things as drags, but not as
clogs. He is not afraid to tackle a passion, but he will
not move an inch from his way to tackle it. Tragedy
can never be more than the episode of a romance, and
romance is rather to his taste than naked tragedy. He
reminds us of the knight in Chaucer cutting sharply short
118 MORRISS Z/FE AND
the monk’s tragic histories as too piteous for recital, or
the very monk himself breaking off the detail of Ugolino's
agony with a reference to Dante for those who can en-
dure it.
The descriptive and decorative beauties of this romance
of “Jason ’’ are excellent above all in this, that number-
less though they be they are always just and fit. Not a
tone of colour, not a note of form, is misplaced or dis-
pensable. The pictures are clear and chaste, Sweet and
lucid, as early Italian work. There are crowds and pro-
cessions, battle-pieces and merry-makings, worthy of
Benozzo or Carpaccio ; single figures or groups of lovers
in flowery watery land, worthy of Sandro or Filippo. The
sea-pieces are like the younger Lippi's ; the best possible
to paint from shore. They do not taste salt or sound
wide; but they have all the beauty of the beach. The
romance poets have never loved the sea as have the
tragic poets; Chaucer simply ignores it with a shiver;
even Homer's men are glad to be well clear of it. Ulysses
has no sea-king's impulse; he fights and beats it, and is
glad, and there an end; necessity alone ever drives him
off shore. But AEschylus loves the Oceanides; and
Shakespeare, landsman though he were, rejoices in the
roll and clash of breakers.
For examples of the excellences we have noted—the
chastity of colour and noble justice of composition, the
fruitful and faithful touches of landscape incident—almost
any page of the poem might be turned up. Compare the
Hesperian with the Circean garden, the nameless northern
desert lands with the wood of Medea's transformation, or
the seaward bent where Jason “died strangely.” No
DEAZA OF 5. AsON. 119
flower of the landscape is slurred, but no flower is obtru-
sive; the painting is broad and minute at once, large and
sure by dint of accuracy. And there are wonderful
touches on it of fairy mystery; weird lights pass over it
and wafts of mystical wind; as here — -
“There comes a murmur from the shore,
And in the place two fair streams are, A
Drawn from the purple hills afar,
Drawn down unto the restless sea,
The hills whose flowers ne'er fed the bee,
The shore no shift has ever seen,
Still beaten by the billows green,
Whose murmur comes unceasingly
Unto the place for which I cry.”
All this song of a nymph to Hylas is full of the melody
which involves colour and odour, but the two lines marked
have in them the marvel and the music of a dream. Nor
is any passage in the poem pitched in a higher and clearer
key than the first hymn of Orpheus as Argo takes the
sea. As noble is the song of triumph at p. 217, which
should be set by the side of this, to which it is in Some
sort antiphonal.
But the root of the romance lies of course in the cha-
racter of Medea ; and here, where it was needfullest to do
well, the poet has done best. At her first entrance the
poem takes new life and rises out of the atmosphere of
mere adventure and incident. The subdued and delicate
ardour of the scene in Jason's chamber, following as it
does on the ghastly beauty of that in the wood of the
Three-formed, is proof enough and at once with how
strong and soft a touch the picture will be completed.
Her incantations, and her flight with Jason, have no less
I 2 O A/OACA2/S’,S Z/AA. AAV/D
of fanciful and tender power. The fifteenth book, where
she beguiles Pelias to death at the hands of his daughters,
is a sample of flawless verse and noble imagination un-
surpassed by any here. For dramatic invention and
vivid realism of the impossible, which turns to fair and
sensible truth the wildest dreams of legend, there has
been no poet for centuries comparable. But the very
flower and crest of this noble poem is the final tragedy at
Corinth. Queen, sorceress, saviour, she has sunk or
risen to mere woman; and not in vain before entering
the tragic lists has the poet called on that great poet's
memory who has dealt with the terrible and pitiful passion
of women like few but Shakespeare since.
Worthy, indeed, even of the master-hand is all that
follows. Let the student weigh well the slight but great
touches in which the fitful fury and pity and regret of the
sufferer are given ; so delicate and accurate that only by
the entire and majestic harmony of tragedy will he discern
the excellence and justice of every component note. To
come upon this part of the poem is as the change from
river to sea (Book XII.), when wind and water had a
larger Sävour in lip and nostril of the Argonauts. Note
well the new and piteous beauty of this :—
“Kindly I deal with thee, mine enemy;
Since swift forgetfulness to thee I send.
But thou shalt die—his eyes shall see thine end—
Ah! if thy death alone could end it all !
“But ye—shall Z čehold you when leazes fall,
An some sad evening of the autumn-tide #
Or shall I have you sitting by my side
Amidst the feast, so that folk stare and say,
*Sure the grey wolf has seen the queen to-day’?
Z)ZATH OF 9 ASOAV. I2 I
What! when I kneel in temples of the Gods
Must I bethink me of the upturned sods,
And hear a voice say: ‘Mother, wilt thou come
And see us resting in our new-made home,
Since thou wert used to make us lie full soft,
Smoothing our pillows many a time and oft?
O mother, now no dainty food we need,
Whereof of old thou usedst to have such heed.
O mother, now we need no gown of gold;
Nor in the winter time do we grow cold ;
Thy hands would bathe us when we were thine own,
Now doth the rain wash every shining bone.
No pedagogue we need; for surely heaven
Lies spread above us, with the planets seven,
To teach us all its lore.’”
Rarely but in the ballad and romance periods has
such poetry been written, so broad and sad and simple,
so full of deep and direct fire, certain of its aim, without
finish, without fault. The passion from hence fills and
burns to a close ; the verse for a little is as the garment
of Medea steeped in strange moisture as of tears and
liquid flame to be kindled by the sun.
“O sons, with what sweet counsels and what tears
Would I have hearkened to the hopes and fears
Of your first loves : what rapture had it been
Your dear returning footsteps to have seen
Amidst the happy warriors of the land;
Aztá 7zozº—ázat 7zozº—this is a little hand,
Zoo often Åissed since love did first begin
Zºo win satch curses as it yet shall win,
When after all Óad deeds there comes a zworse ;
Araise to the God's A ye Āzzow not how to curse.”
It should now be clear, or never, that in this poem a
new thing of great price has been cast into the English
treasure-house. Nor is the cutting or the setting of the
E 22 MOAEAAS’S 9.4|SOAV.
jewel unworthy of it; art and instinct have wrought
hand in hand to its perfection. Other and various fields
await the workman who has here approved himself a
master, acceptable into the guild of great poets on a
footing of his own to be shared or disputed by no
other. Strained clear and guided straight as now, his
lofty lyrical power must keep all its promise to us. Dif-
fusion is in the nature of a romance, and it cannot be
said that here the stream has ever overflowed into marsh-
land or stagnated in lock or pool. Therefore we do not
blame the length and fullness of so fair a river; but some-
thing of barrier or dam may serve to concentrate and Con-
dense the next. Also, if we must note the slightest ripples
of the water-flies that wrinkle it, let us set down in
passing that there are certain slight laxities or perversities
of metre which fret the ear and perplex the eye, noticeable
only as the least shortcoming is noticeable in great work.
Elision, for example, is a necessity, not a luxury, of metre.
This law Chaucer, a most loyal versifier, never allows
himself to slight after the fashion of his follower. But
into these straits of technical art we need not now steer.
So much remains unremarked, so much unsaid ; so much
of beauty slighted, of uncommended excellence ; that I
close these inadequate and hurried notes with a sense of
grave injustice done. To the third book of Mr. Morris
we look now, not for the seal of our present judgment,
but for the accomplishment of our highest hopes; for a
fresh honour done to English art, a fresh delight to us,
and a fresh memory for the future. -
1867.
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S WEW POEMs.
(1867.)
THERE are two things which most men begin by hating
until they have won their way, and which when combined
are more than doubly hateful to all in whose eyes they
are not doubly admirable : perfection of work, and
personality in the workman. As to perfection, it must be
seen to be loved, and few have eyes to see it. To none
but these few can it be acceptable at first; and only because
these few are the final legislators of opinion, the tacit and
patient lawgivers of time, does it ever win acceptance.
A strong personal tone of character stamped and in-
grained into a man's work, if more offensive at first to the
mass, is likelier to find favour before long in the sight of
Some Small body or sect of students. If not repulsive, it
must be attractive and impressive ; and there are always
mental cripples in plenty to catch at a strong man's staff
and cut it down into a crutch for themselves. But the
more love a man has for perfection, the more faith in
form, the more instinct for art, the fewer will these early
believers be, and the better worth having; the process of
winning their suffrages will be slower, and surer the hold
of them when won. 4
For some years the immediate fame of Mr. Matthew
Arnold has been almost exclusively the fame of a prose
124 MATTHE W A RAWOLZ)'S AVE W POEMS.
writer. Those students could hardly find hearing—they
have nowhere of late found expression that I know of
who, with all esteem and enjoyment of his essays, of their
clearness, candour, beauty of sentiment and style, retained
the opinion that if justly judged he must be judged by his
verse and not by his prose; certainly not by this alone;
that future students would cleave to that with more of
Care and of love; that the most memorable quality about
him was the quality of a poet. Not that they liked the
prose less, but that they liked the verse more. His best
essays Ought to live longer than most, his best poems can-
not but live as long as any, of their time. So it seemed
to some who were accordingly more eager to receive and
more careful to study a new book of his poems than most
books they could have looked for ; and since criticism of
the rapid and limited kind possible to contemporaries can
be no more than the sincere exposition of the writer's
belief and of his reasons for it, I, as one of these, desire,
with all deference but with all decision, to say what I
think of this book, and why. For the honour of criticism,
if it is to win or to retain honour at all, it must be well
for the critic to explain clearly his personal point of view,
instead of fighting behind the broad and crestless shield
of a nameless friend or foe. The obscurest name and
blazon are at least recognisable; but a mere voice is
mere wind, though it affect to speak with the tongues
and the authority of men and of angels.
First on this new stage is the figure of an old friend
and teacher. Mr. Arnold says that the poem of “Empe-
docles on Etna" was withdrawn before fifty copies of the
first edition were sold. I must suppose then that one
\
\
MA 7'7"HE W AAEAVOZZ) 'S MAE W POEMS. 125
of these was the copy I had when a schoolboy — how
snatched betimes from the wreck and washed across my
way I know not ; but I remember well enough how then
as now the songs of Callicles clove to my ear and memory.
Early as this was, it was not my first knowledge of the
poet; the “Reveller,” the “Merman,” the “New Sirens,”
I had mainly by heart in a time of childhood justignorant of
teens. I do not say I understood the latter poem in a literal
or logical fashion, but I had enj oyment enough of its
music and colour and bright sadness as of a rainy sunset
or sundawn. A child with any ear or eye for the attraction
of verse or art can dispense with analysis and rest content
to apprehend it without comprehension; it were to be
wished that adults equally incapable would rest equally
content. Here I must ask, as between brackets, if this
beautiful poem is never to be reissued after the example
of its younger?" No poet could afford to drop or destroy
it; I might at need call into court older and better judges
to back my judgment in this; meantime “I hope here
be proofs" that, however inadequate may be my estimate
of the poet on whom I am now to discourse, it is not in-
adequate through want of intimacy with his work. At
the risk of egotism, I record it in sign of gratitude; I can-
not count the hours of pure and high pleasure, I cannot
reckon the help and guidance in thought and work, which
I owe to him as to all other real and noble artists whose
influence it was my fortune to feel when most susceptible
of influence, and least Conscious of it, and most in want.
In one of his books, where he presses rather hard upon
2”
* A question which I still regret should be yet unanswered in its
favour (1875). *
I 26 MA 7'7"HE W AA’AWO/C/D'S AVAE W AOA.M.S.
our School as upon one wholly void of spiritual or imagina-
tive Culture, he speaks of his poems as known to no large
circle—implies this at least, if I remember: he will not
care to be assured that to some boys at Eton Sohrab and
Rustum, Tristram and Iseult, have been close and common
friends, their stream of Oxus and bays of Brittany familiar
almost as the well-loved Thames weirs and reaches. How-
ever, of this poem of “Empedocles” the world it seems
was untimely robbed, though I remember on searching
to have found a notice of it here and there. Certain
fragments were then given back by way of dole, chiefly in
the second series of the author's revised poems. But
one, the largest if not the brightest jewel, was withheld;
the one long and lofty chant of Empedocles. The reasons
assigned by Mr. Arnold in a former preface for cancelling
the complete poem had some weight : the subject-matter
is oppressive, the scheme naked and monotonous; the
blank verse is not sonorous, not vital and various enough ;
in spite of some noble interludes, it fails on the whole to
do the work and carry the weight wanted; its simplicity
is stony and grey, with dry flats and rough whinstones.
To the lyrics which serve as water-springs and pastures
I shall have to pay tribute of thanks in their turn;
but first I would say something of that strain of choral
philosophy which falls here “as the shadow of a great
rock in a weary land.” It is a model of grave, clear,
solemn verse; the style plain and bare, but sufficient and
strong ; the thought deep, lucid, direct. We may say of
it what the author has himself said of the wise and sublime
verses of Epictetus, that “the fortitude of that is for the
strong, for the few ; even for them, the spiritual atmo-
MA 7'7"HE W A RAWOZZ)'S AVAE W POEMS. 127
sphere with which it surrounds them is bleak and grey;”
but the air is higher and purer, the ground firmer, the
view clearer ; we have a surer foothold on these cold
hills of thought than in the moist fragrance of warmer
air which steeps the meadows and marshes of sentiment
and tradition.
“Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow,
And faint the city gleams;
Rare the lone pastoral huts; marvel not thou !
The solemn peaks but to the stars are known,
But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams;
Alone the sun arises, and alone
Spring the great streams.”
These noble verses of another poem clipped from
*Mr. Arnold's first book, and left hanging in fragments
about one's memory—I here make my protest against its
excision —may serve as types of the later, the more im-
mediate and elaborate discourse of thought here embodied
and attired in words of stately and simple harmony. It
is no small or common comfort, after all the delicate and
ingenious shuffling of other English poets about the edge
of deep things, to come upon one who speaks with so
large and clear and calm an utterance; who begins at
the taproot and wellspring of the matter, leaving others
to wade ankle-deep in still waters and weave river-flags
or lake-lilies in lieu of stemming the stream. Nothing
in verse or out of verse is more wearisome than the de-
livery of reluctant doubt, of half-hearted hope and half
* It has since been replaced, with the final stanza wholly re-
written. For its recovery I believe that I may take some credit to
myself, and claim in consequence some thanks from all serious
students of contemporary poetry.
*.
|
I 28 MA 7'7"HAE W AM&AWO/C/D'S AWE W POZMS.
incredulous faith. A man who suffers from the strong
desire either to believe or disbelieve something he cannot
may be worthy of sympathy, is certainly worthy of pity,
until he begins to speak; and if he tries to speak in verse,
he misuses the implement of an artist. We have had
evidences of religion, aspirations and suspirations of all
kinds, melodious regrets and tortuous returns in favour
or disfavour of this creed or that—all by way of poetic
work; and all within the compass and shot-range of a
single faith; all, at the widest, bounded north, south, east,
and west by material rivers or hills, by an age or two
since, by a tradition or two ; all leaving the spirit cramped
and thirsty. We have had Christian sceptics, handcuffed
fighters, tongue-tied Orators, plume-plucked eagles; be-
lievers whose belief was a sentiment, and free-thinkers
who saw nothing before Christ or beyond Judaea. To
get at the bare rock is a relief after acres of such quaking
ground.
A French critic has expressed this in words which I
may quote here, torn out from their context —“Le côté
fort du caractère d’un peuple fait souvent le côté faible de
Sa poésie. Ces poètes anglais pèchent du cótá de la
raison religieuse. Ce n'est pas que les anglais soient
effectivement ou trop religieux ou trop raisonnables.
C'est qu'ils ont la manie de vouloir réconcilier les choses
irréconciliables. On voit cela partout, dans la politique,
dans les beaux arts, dans lavie pratique, danslavie idéale.
Leur république est juchée sur des échasses féodales,
attifee des guenilles étincelantes d'une royauté usee
jusqu’à la Corde; tout le bric-à-brac monarchique lui
plait ; ses parfums rances, ses lambris dédorés, Sa
MATTHE W ARAVOZ D'S AVE W POEMS. 129
défroque rapiécée ; elle n'ose se montrer sans mettre son
masque de reine, sans rajuster ses jupons de pairesse.
Pourquoi se donne-t-elle cette peine ? quel profit espère-t-
elle en retirer ? c'est ce qu'un anglais même ne saurait
dire ;! tout en répondant que Dieu le sait, il est permis de
douter que Dieu le sache. Venons aux arts ; que veut-on
d'un peintre ? de la peinture ? fi donc ! Il nous faut un
peu de morale, un peu d'intention, le beau vrai, le vrai
beau, l'idée actuelle, l'actualité idéale, mille autres choses
très-recommandables dans ce genre-là. C'est ce malin
esprit, très-peu spirituel, qui est venu souffler aux poëtes
la belle idée de se poser en apôtres réconciliatcurs entre
le croyant et le libre penseur. L'un d'eux fait foudroyer
M. Renan par Saint Jean expirant en pleine odeur de
philosophie, écrase sous son talon le pauvre évêque
Colenso, et démontre que si le Christ n'est pas * le Dieu
incommensurable,' il doit être tout bonnement un homme
* perdu’(c'est son mot) ; vu que d'après la tradition de sa
parole écrite plusieurs millions de gens plus ou moins
honnêtes sont morts dans cette foi, et que voilà apparem-
ment le seul Dieu, et que voilà la seule religion, qui ait
jamais produit un effet pareil. Sous des vers plus
* This is a strange and sad instance of the ignorance and perver-
sity as foreign to Englishmen as they are natural to foreigners. Any
one could have answered him, and at any length. Envy doubtless
as well as error must have inspired this blasphemy against the Con-
stitution once delivered to the saints-that august result ofa plenary
inspiration above the reach of human wisdom, sent down direct from
heaven, and vouchsafed alone to this chosen nation, this peculiar
people ; to which, as to Tyre or Jerusalem in time past, the Supreme
Powers have said by the sweet voices of their representative elect—
elect ofgods and men—** Thou sealest up the sum ; full of wisdom,
and perfect in beauty.'' •
K.
13o MATTHEW ARNOZ D'S WE W POEMS.
soigneusement limés, plus coquettement ajustés, nous ne
trouverons qu'une plus profonde stérilité de raisonnement.
Voici une belle âme de poëte qui pleure, qui cherche, qui
envisage la mort, le néant, l'infini ; qui veut peser les
faits, trier les croyances, vanner la foi ; et voici setts
dernier mot : Croyons, afin de moins souffrir ; tâchons
au moins de nous faire accroire à nous-mêmes que nous
Croyons à quelque chose de consolant. Il est douloureux
de ne pas croire qu'on doit revivre un jour, revoir ses amis
morts, accomplir de nouveaux destins. Posons donc que
cela est, que ccla doit êtrc, qu'il faut absolument y croire,
ou du moins faire semblant à ses propres yeux d'y croire, se
persuader, se réitérer à haute voix que cela est. La vie
sans avenir est impossible. Plus de raisonnements d'in-
crédule. Le coeur se lève comme un homme irrité et
répond ; J'ai senti ! Vous manquez de foi, dites-vous,
vous manquez de preuves, mais il suffit que vous ayez eu
des sensations. À ce compte-là, il vaut bien la peine
de faire rouler le wagon poétique sur les rails de la
philosophie, de s'embourber les roues dans les ornières
de la théologie. Aimez, souffrez, sentez, c'est très-bien ;
vous êtes là dans votre droit. Cela ne prouve rien,
mais cela est fort joli, mis en de beaux vers. On
perd un objet aimé, on désire le revoir, on épreuve des
émotions douloureuses à songer qu'on ne le reverra
point. Après ? La mort, la douleur, l'oubli, la misère,
voilà sans doute des choses pénibles, et que l'on voudrait
éviter ; il est clair que nous ferions tous notre possible
pour y échapper. Cela prouve-t-il que Ces choses-là
n'existent pas ? On est tenté de répondre une bonne
fois à ces bonnes gens : Messieurs, vous raisonnez en
poëtes, vous poétisez en raisonneurs. De grâce, soyez
MATTHEW ARNOZZ)'S NEW POEMS. 131
l'un ou l'autre : ou bien, si vous avez les deux dons
réunis, raisonnez en raisonneurs, poétisez en poëtes.
Faites-nous grâce en attendant de cette poésie démontée,
de cette philosophie déraillée.
· · * Encore un mot. La poésie n'a que faire de tout
cela. Il n'y a pas de religion possible dont elle ne sache
prendre son parti. Toute croyance qui émeut, qui fait
vibrer, résonner, tressaillir une seule corde intérieure-
| toute véritable religion, sombre ou radieuse, tragique ou
riante, est une chose essentiellement poétique. Partout
où puisse aller la passion, l'émotion, le sentiment qui fait
les martyrs, les prophètes, les vierges mystérieuses, les
apôtres effrayants du bien ou du mal, partout où puis-
sent pénétrer les terreurs mystiques, les joies énormes,
les élans obscurs de la foi, il y a pour les poëtes un
milieu respirable. Vénus ou Moloch, Jésus ou Brahma,
n'importe. Un poëte enfermé chez lui peut être le
meilleur chrétien du monde, ou bien le plus affreux
païen ; ce sont là des affaires de foyer où la critique n'a
rien à voir ; mais la poésie propre ne sera jamais ni ceci
ni cela. Elle est tout, elle n'est rien. . .. Toute émo-
tion lui sert, celle de l'anachorète ni plus ni moins que
celle du blasphémateur. Pour la morale, elle est
mauvaise et bonne, chaste et libertine ; pour la religion,
elle est incrédule et fidèle, soumise et rebelle. Mais
l'impuissance religieuse ou morale, mais la pensée qui
boite, l'esprit qui louche, l'âme qui a peur et de se sou-
mettre et de se révolter, la foi manquée qui pleure des
larmes sceptiques, les effluves fades, tristes, nauséabonds,
de la caducité spirituelle, les plantes étiolées, les sources
desséchées, les pousses sans sève d'une époque douteuse
- K 2 -
132 MATTHAE W A RAVOZ D'S VE W POEMS.
et crépusculaire-que voulez vous qu'elle fasse de tout
cela ? Pour elle, la négation même n'est pas stérile ;
chez elle, Lucrèce a sa place comme Moïse, Omar*
· comme Job ; mais elle ne saurait où glisser les petites
questions d'évidence, les petites tracasseries théologiques.
Même en cette époque cependant nous ne manquons pas
de poëtes qui sachent manier des choses hautes et
sombres. Nous ne renverrons pas des écrivains anglais
au sixième livre des Contemplations, aux sommets pour eux
inabordables de la poésie actuelle, où la lumière se
1I1êle au vertige ; sans citer le grand maître, nous pour-
rions leur indiquer un des leurs qui a mieux fait qu'eux.º
Here follows the reference to Mr. Arnold's poem and
to the exact passages supposed to bear upon the matter
at issue. * Ce monologue lyrique est d'une ampleur,
d'une droiture poétique dont on ne saurait ailleurs re-
trouver une trace. C'est un rude évangile qu'on vient
là nous prêcher ; on sent dans cette cratère des flammes
éteintes ; c'est lugubre pour les âmes faibles, pour les
esprits à l'œil chassieux ; c'est une poésie froide et ferme
et forte. Voici enfin quelqu'un qui a le regard haut, le
pied sûr, la parole nette, la vue large; on sait ce qu'il nous
veut. Sa philosophie âpre, escarpée, impassible, est après
tout meilleure consolatrice que la théologie douteuse,
pleureuse, tracassière de ses rivaux.** In spite of his
" Far better than in the long literal version of Omar Khayyám
which is all that the French language can show, may the soul and
spirit of his thought be tasted in that most exquisite English
translation, sovereignly faultless in form and colour of verse, which
gives to those ignorant of the East a relish of the treasure and a
delight in the beauty of its wisdom.
* There are varieties of opinion in this world ; and the British
critic's fond faith in the British thinker will not soon be shaken by
MA 7'7"HE W A RAWOZZ)’S AWE W POZMS. 133
flippancy and violence of manner, I am disposed in
part to agree with this Critic.
Elsewhere, in minor poems, Mr. Arnold also has now
and then given signs of an inclination for that Sad task of
sweeping up dead leaves fallen from the dying tree of
belief; but has not wasted much time or strength on Such
sterile and stupid work. Here, at all events, he has
wasted none; here is no melodious whine of retrospective
and regretful scepticism; here are no cobwebs of plea
and counterplea, no jungles of argument and brakes of
analysis. “Ask what most helps when known; ” let be
the oracular and the miraculous, and vex Inol the Soul
about their truth or falsehood; the soul, which oracles
and miracles can neither make nor mar, can neither slay
#1OT S2.VC.
“Once read thy own breast right,
And thou hast done with fears.
Man gets no other light,
Search he a thousand years.
Sink in thyself; there ask what ails thee, at that shrine.”
This is the gospel of airápkéta, the creed of self-suffi-
cience," which sees forman no clearer or deeper duty than
the adverse verdict of any French heretic. Witness the words of a
writer whom I once fell in with, heaven knows where; who, being far
above the shallow errors of foolish “Greeks" and puerile “pagans,”
takes occasion to admonish their disciples that “our philosophers and
poets will tell you that they have got far beyond this stage. The
riddles they have to unravel involve finer issues” (and among these
perhaps they might deign to expound what manner of thing may be
the involution of an issue); no doubt, in a word, but they are the
people, and wisdom shall die with them. They may tell us so,
certainly ; thought and speech are free, and for aught I know they
may be fully capable of the assertion. But it is for us to choose
what amount of belief it may please us to accord them.
* I take leave to forge this word, because “self-sufficingness"
134 MATTHEW ARNOLD'S NEW POEMS.
that of intellectual self-reliance, self-dependence, self-
respect; an evangel not to be cancelled or supplanted
by any revelation of mystic or prophet or saint. Out of
this counsel grows the exposition of obscure and afflictive
things. Man's welfare—his highest sphere and state of
spiritual well-doing and well-being—this indeed is his true
aim ; but not this is the aim of nature : the world has
other work than this to do; and we, not it, must submit;
submit, not by ceasing to attempt and achieve the best
we can, but by ceasing to expect subservience to our own
ends from all forces and influences of existing things; it is
no reason or excuse for living basely instead of nobly, that
we must live as the sons and not as the lords of nature.
“To tunes we did not call our being must keep chime; ”
but this bare truth we will not accept. Philosophy, as
forcibly and clearly as religion, indicates the impediments
of sin and self-will; “we do not what we ought, what we
ought not we do ;” but there religion stops, as far as
regards this world, and passes upward into a new world
and life; philosophy has further to go without leaving
her hold upon earth. Even were man pure, just, wise,
instead of unwise, unjust, and impure, this would not
affect the “other existences that clash with ours.”
is a compound of too barbaric sound, and “self-sufficiency” has
fallen into a term of reproach. Archbishop Trench has pointed out
how and why a word which to the ancient Greek signified a noble
virtue came to signify to the modern Christian the base vice of pre-
Sumption. I do not see that human language has gained by this
change of meaning, or that the later mood of mind which dictated
this debasement of the word is at all in advance of the older, or
indicative of any spiritual improvement ; rather the alteration seems
to me a loss and a discredit, and the tone of thought which made the
quality venerable more sound and wise than that which declares it
vile.
}
MAZTHE W A RAWOZZ)'S NEW POEMS. 135
“Like us, the lightning fires
Love to have scope and play ;
The stream, like us, desires
An unimpeded way;
Ilike us, the Libyan wind delights to roam at large,
“Streams will not curb their pride
The just man not to entomb,
Nor lightnings go aside
To leave his virtues room ;
Nor is that wind less rough which blows a good man’s barge,
“Nature, with equal mind,
Sees all her sons at play;
Sees man control the wind,
The wind sweep man away :
Allows the proudly-riding and the founder'd bark.”
Again, there are “the ill-deeds of other men” to fill
up the account against us of painful and perilous things.
And we, instead of doing and bearing all we can under
our conditions of life, must needs “cheat our pains” like
children after a fall who “rate the senseless ground:”
* So, loth to suffer mute,
We, peopling the void air,
Make gods to whom to impute
The ills we ought to bear ;
With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily.
“Yet grant—as sense long miss'd
Things that are now perceiv'd,
And much may still exist
Which is not yet believ’d—
Grant that the world were full of Gods we cannot see ;
“All things the world which fill
Of but one stuff are spun,
That we who rail are still,
- With what we rail at, one ;
One with the o'er-labour’d Power that through the breadth and
length
136 MAZTHEW ARWOZD's NEW POEMS.
“Of earth, and air, and sea,
In men, and plants, and stones,
Hath toil perpetually,
- And struggles, pants, and moans;
Fain would do all things well, but sometimes fails in strength.
“And, patiently exact,
This universal God
Alike to any act
Proceeds at any nod,
And quietly declaims the cursings of himself.
“This is not what man hates,
Yet he can curse but this.
Harsh Gods and hostile Fates
Are dreams; this only is ;
Is everywhere; sustains the wise, the foolish elf.”
Again, we must have comfortable Gods to bless, as
well as these discomfortable to curse; “kind Gods who
perfect what man vainly tries; ” we console ourselves for
long labour and research and failure by trust in their sole
and final and sufficient knowledge. Then comes the ma-
jestic stroke of reply to rebuke and confute the feeble
follies of inventive hope, the futile forgeries of unprofitable
comfort; scornful and solemn as the forces themselves of
Inature.
“ Fools that in man’s brief term
He cannot all things view,
Affords no ground to affirm
- That there are Gods who do;
Nor does being weary prove that he has where to rest.”
In like manner, when pleasure-seekers fail of pleasure
in this world, they turn their hearts Godward, and thence
in the end expect that joy which the world could not
give; making sure to find happiness where the foiled
student makes Sure to find knowledge. . Again the re-
MAZZZZZ W AAEAVOZZ)'S MAE W FOZMS. 137
sponse from natural things unseen, or from the lips of
their own wisest, confronts their fancies as before.
** Fools l that so often here
Happiness mocked our prayer,
I think, might make us fear
A like event elsewhere ;
Make us, not fly to dreams, but moderate desire.”
Nor finally, when all is said, need the wise despair or re-
pine because debarred from dreams of a distant and
dubious happiness in a world outside of ours.
“Is it so small a thing
To have enjoyed the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done?”
The poorest villager feels that it is not so small a
thing that he should not be loth to lose the little that life
can yield him. Let the wiser man, like him, trust with-
out fear the joys that are; life has room for effort and
enjoyment, though at sight of the evil and sorrow it
includes one may have abjured false faith and foolish
hope and fruitless fear.
The majesty and composure of thought and verse,
the perfect clearness and competence of words, distinguish
this from other poetry of the intellect now more approved
and applauded. The matter or argument is not less deep
and close than clear and even in expression ; although
this lucidity and equality of style may diminish its material
value in eyes used to the fog and ears trained to the
clatter of the chaotic school. But a poem throughout so
flowerless and pallid would miss much of the common
charm of poetry, however imbued with the Serene and
138 MA 7'7"HE W A RAWOZD’S NEW POEMS.
severe splendour of snows and stars. And the special
crown and praise of this one is its fine and gentle alter-
nation of tone and colour. All around the central peak,
bathed in airs high as heaven and cloven with craters
deep as hell, the tender slopes of hill and pasture close
up and climb in gradual grace of undulation, full of Sun-
beams and murmurs, winds and birds. The lyricinterludes
of the “Empedocles” are doubtless known by heart to
many ignorant of their original setting, in which they are
now again enchased. We have no poet comparable for
power and perfection of landscape. This quality was
never made more of by critics, sought after by poets
with so much care; and our literature lies in full flower-
age of landscape, like Egypt after the reflux of the Nile.
We have galleries full of beautiful and ingenious studies,
and an imperial academy of descriptive poets. The
supreme charm of Mr. Arnold's work is a sense of right
resulting in a spontaneous temperance which bears no
mark of curb or snaffle, but obeys the hand with imper-
ceptible submission and gracious reserve. Other and
older poets are to the full as vivid, as incisive and im-
pressive; others have a more pungent colour, a more
trenchant outline; others as deep knowledge and as
fervid enjoyment of natural things. But no one has in
like measure that tender and final quality of touch which
tempers the excessive light and suffuses the refluent
shade ; which as it were washes with soft air the sides of
the earth, steeps with dew of quiet and dyes with colours
of repose the ambient ardour of noon, the fiery affluence
of evening. His verse bathes us with fresh radiance and
light rain, when weary of the violence of summer and
MA77 AEW ARMOZZ)'S MAE W POEMS. 139
winter in which others dazzle and detain us; his spring
wears here and there a golden waif of autumn, his autumn
a rosy stray of spring. His tones and effects are pure,
lucid, ačrial; he knows by some fine impulse of temper-
ance all rules of distance, of reference, of proportion;
nothing is thrust or pressed, upon our eyes, driven or
beaten into our ears. For the instinctive selection of
simple and effectual detail he is unmatched among
English poets of the time, unless by Mr. Morris, whose
landscape has much of the same quality, as clear, as
noble, and as memorable—memorable for this especially,
that you are not vexed or fretted by mere brilliance of
point and sharpness of stroke, and such intemperate
excellence as gives astonishment the precedence of
admiration: such beauties as strike you and startle and
go out. Of these it is superfluous to cite instances from
the ablest of our countrymen's works; they are taught
and teach that the most remote, the most elaborate, the
most intricate and ingenious fashions of allusion and detail
make up the best poetical style ; they fill their verse with
sharp-edged prettinesses, with shining surprises and
striking accidents that are anything, but casual ; upon
every limb and feature you see marks of the chisel and
the plane : there is a conscious complacency of polish
which seems to rebuke emulation and challenge improve-
ment. It is otherwise with the two we have named ;
they are not pruned and pared into excellence, they have
not so much of pungency and point; but they have breadth
and ease and purity, they have largeness and Sureness of
eyesight ; they know what to give and to withhold,
what to express and to suppress. Above all, they have
14o MATTHE W AAEAVOZZD’S AWE W POEMS.
air; you can breathe and move in their landscape, nor
are you tripped up and caught at in passing by intrusive
and singular and exceptional beauties which break up and
distract the simple charm of general and single beauty,
the large and musical unity of things. Their best verse is
not brought straight or worked right ; it falls straight
because it cannot fall awry; it comes right because it
cannot go wrong. And this wide and delicate sense of
right makes the impression of their work so durable.
The effect is never rubbed off or worn out ; the hot
suffering eastern life of “The Sick King in Bokhara ; ”
the basking pastures and blowing pines about the
“Church of Brou ;” the morning field and midday moor-
land so fondly and fully and briefly painted in “Resigna-
tion ; ” above all, to me at least, the simple and perfect
sea-side in the “Merman *-* the sandy down where the
sea-stocks bloom,” the white-walled town with narrow
paved streets, the little grey church with rain-worn stones
and small leaded panes, and blown about all the breath
of wind and sound of waves—these come in and remain
with us ; these give to each poem the form and colour
and attire it wants, and make it a distinct and complete
achievement. The description does not adorn or decorate
i the thought ; it is part of it ; they have so grown into
each other that they seem not welded together, but indi-
visible and twin-born.
Of the five songs of Callicles—whom we have left
somewhat too long midway on Etna—that of Marsyas
seems to me the highest and Sweetest in tone, unless the
first place be rather claimed for that of Cadmus and
Harmonia. Others may prefer the first for its exquisite
MATTHEW ARMOZZ)'S MAE W POEMS. 141
grace of scenery, or the last for its fresh breath and light,
shed on softer places than the fiery Cone of Etna—for its
sweetness and calm, subduing, after all, the force of flames
and darkness with the serenity of stars and song ; but
how fine in each one alike is the touch which relieves the
scenery with personal life, Chiron's or Typho's or the
sleeping shepherds' and passing Muses'. We have no
word but the coarse and insufficient word taste to express
that noble sense of harmony and high poetic propriety
shown in the arrangement and composition of these
lyrics; the first, full of the bright moist breath of well-
watered glen and well-wooded ford, serving as prelude
with its clear soft notes to the high monotone of 'Em-
pedocles; the second, when that has ceased upon the
still keen air, rising with fuller sweetness from below.
Nothing can be more deep and exquisite in poetical tact
than this succession of harmonies, diverse without a
discord. For the absolute loveliness of sound and
colour in this and the next song there are no adequate
words that would not seem violent ; and violence is too
far from this poetry to invade even the outlying province
of commentary. It must be accepted as the “warm, bay
among the green Illyrian hills" accepts the sunlight, as
the frame of maiden flowers and enclosure of gentle grass
accept the quiet presence of the sacred snakes. No ear
can forget the cadence, no eye the colour; I am half
shaken in my old preference of the next ode until I recall
it from end to end :
“That triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre,
That famous, final victory,
When jealous Pan with Marsyas did conspire;
142 MAZZZZZ W AAAWOZZ)’S AWE W POZMS.
When, from far Parnassus’ side,
Young Apollo, all the pride
Of the Phrygian flutes to tame,
To the Phrygian highlands came.”
Verse stately as the step and radiant as the head of
Apollo ; not “like to the night” this time, but coming as
the morning to the hills. How clear it makes the distance
between Parnassus and Phrygia, the beautiful scorn and
severe youth of the God, leaving for these long reed-beds
and rippled lakes and pine-clad ridges of hill the bays
and olives of his Greece ; how clear the presence of the
listening Muses, the advent of the hurrying Maenads, the
weeping Olympus, and the implacable repose of Apollo.
No poet has ever come so near the perfect Greek ; he
has strung with a fresh chord the old Sophoclean lyre;
he has brought back the Muses from Phrygia even to
Colonus ;
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he has watered afresh the fruitful foliage of that unfooted
grove of the God, sunless and stormless in all seasons of
wind or Sun ; and for him the sleepless wellsprings of
Cephisus are yet unminished and unfrozen,
oùöè Movorów
Xopol viv šareottºymarav, où6’ &
Xpword vios 'Appočíra.
Even after his master, the disciple of Sophocles holds his
high place ; he has matched against the Attic of the
Gods this Hyperborean dialect of ours, and has not
earned the doom of Marsyas. Here is indeed the triumph
MATTHE W ARAVOLD'S MAE W POZMS. 143
of the lyre ; and he has had to refashion it for himself
among a nation and in an age of flute-players and horn-
blowers.
For the rest, the scheme of this poem is somewhat
meagre and inefficient. Dramatic or not, the figure of
Empedocles as here conceived is noble, full of a high and
serene interest ; but the figure as here represented is a
ghost, without form and void ; and darkness is upon the
face of the deep in which his life lies stagnant ; and we
look in vain for the spirit to move upon the face of the
waters. Dimly and with something of discomfort and
depression we perceive the shadow of the poet’s design ;
we discern in rough and thin outline the likeness of the
wise world-wearied man, worn down and worsted in the
º
struggle of spirit against unwisdom and change and ,
adverse force of men and things. But how he stands
thus apart among the Saints and sophists, whence and
whither he comes and goes, what ruin lies behind or what
revolution before, we hardly see at all. Not only do we
contemplate a disembodied spirit, but a spirit of which we
cannot determine how it was once embodied, what forms
of thought or sense it once put on, what labour and what
life it once went through. There is a poetry of the
bodiless intellect, which without touching with finger-tip
OT wing-tip the edge of actual things may be wise and
sweet and fruitful and sublime ; but at least we must see
the light and feel the air which guides forward and buoys
upward the naked fleshless feet of the spirit. Grant that
we want no details of bodily life and terrene circum-
stance, no touch of local or temporal colour; we want at
least an indication of the spiritual circumstance, the
|
|
;
f
144 MAZTHEW ARNOLD'S NEW PoEMS.
W
spiritual influence, without which this poetry would have
no matter to work, upon. “Il fallait nous faire sentir
l'entourage, l'habillement, le milieu respirable de cette
àme nuageuse, de cet esprit fatigué.” After the full
effusion of spirit in his one great utterance, Empedocles
has little to bring forth but fragments and relics of the
soul, shadows of thin suggestion and floating complaint.
The manliness and depth, the clearness and sufficiency of
thought have passed from him; he is vague and weak,
dissatisfied much as the commonest thinker is dissatisfied
with whom all things have not gone well, to whom all
things are visibly imperfect and sensibly obscure. Now
the prophet of nature who spoke to us and to Pausanias in
the solemn modulation of his lyric speech was more than
that. There needs no ghost come from the grave—there
needs no philosopher scale the summit of Etna—to tell
us this that we find here : that a man had better die than
live who can neither live with other men as they do nor
wholly suffice to himself; that power and cunning and
folly are fellows, that they are lords of life in ages of
men with minds vulgar and feeble, and overcome the
great and simple servants of justice and the right; that
the lord of our spirit and our song, the god of all singers
and all seers, is an intolerable and severe god, dividing and
secluding his elect from full enjoyment of what others
enjoy, in the stress and severity of solitude—sacrificing *
the weaker and sequestering the strong ; that men on
whom all these things beat and bear more heavily than
they need can find no fullness of comfort or communion
in the eternal elements made of like matter with us, but
better made, nor in any beauty nor in any life of the
MA77 AEW ARWOZZ)'S NEW POEMS. 145
laborious and sleepless soul of things; that even when all
other components of our transient nature are duly and
happily resolved into those durable elements, the insoluble
and inevitable riddle of mind and thought must vex us to
the last as at the first.
“We know all this, we know !
Cam’st thou from heaven, O child
Of light ! but this to declare 2
Alas ! to help us forget
Such barren knowledge awhile,
God gave the poet his song.”
Not that such barren knowledge is ignoble or inade-
quate matter for poetry ; only it must assume something
of the dramatic form and circumstance which here are
scantily supplied. Less scanty is the supply of noble
verses such as these:
“But we received the shock of mighty thoughts
On simple minds with a pure natural joy; ”
verses in the highest tone of Wordsworth's, as clear and
grave as his best, as close and full and majestic. The
good and evil influence of that great poet, perverse
theorist, and incomplete man, upon Mr. Arnold's work
is so palpable and so strong as to be almost obtrusive in
its effects. He is the last worth reckoning whom the
“Excursion ” is ever likely to misguide. The incalculable
power of Wordsworth on certain minds for a certain time
could not but be and could not but pass over. Part of
this singular power was doubtless owing to the might of
will, the solid individual weight of mind, which moulded
his workinto the form he chose for it ; part to the strong
assumption and high self-reliance which grew in him so
close to Self-confidence and presumption ; part to the
L
146 MAZTHE W ARAVOZZ)'S MAE W POEMS.
sublimity and Supremacy of his genius in its own climate
and proper atmosphere—one which forbids access to all
others and escape to him, since only there can he breathe
and range, and he alone can breathe and range there ;
part to the frequent vapour that wraps his head and the
frequent dust that soils his feet, filling the simpler sort
with admiration of One so lofty at once and so familiar ;
and part, I fear, to the quality which no other great poet
ever shared or can share with him, to his inveterate and
invincible Philistinism, his full community of spirit and
faith, in certain things of import, with the vulgarest
English mind—or that which with the Philistine does
duty for a mind. To those who like Shelley and Landor
could see and mark this indomitable dullness and thick-
ness of sense which made him mix with magnificent and
flawless verse the “enormous folly” of “those stupid
staves,” his pupils could always point out again the
peculiar and unsurpassable grandeur and splendour of
his higher mood ; and it was vain to reply that these
could be seen and enjoyed without condonation or excuse
of his violent and wearisome perversities. This is what
makes his poetry such unwholesome and immoral reading
for Philistines ; they can turn round upon their rebukers,
and say, “Here is one of us who by your own admission
is also one of the great poets; ” and no man can give
them the lie ; and the miserable men are confirmed in
their faith and practice by the shameful triumph.
It will be a curious problem for the critics of another
age to work at, and if they can to work out, this influ-
ence of men more or less imbued with the savour and
spirit of Philistia upon the moral Samson who has played
MAZZ"HEW AAAWOZZO’S AVA. W. POEMS. 147
\
for our behoof the part of Agonistes or protagonist in the
new Gaza where we live. From the son of his father and
the pupil of his teacher none would have looked for such
efficient assault and battery of the Philistine Outworks;
none but those who can appreciate the certain and
natural force, in a strong and well-tempered spirit, of
loyal and unconscious reaction. I say reaction, and not
revolt; he has assuredly nothing of the bad, perhaps not
enough of the good stuff, which goes to make a rebel.
He is loyal, not to a fault, but to the full ; yet no man's
habit of mind or work can be less like that which men
trained in other schools expect from a scholar of Rydal
or of Rugby. A profane alien in my hearing once defined
him as “David the son of Goliath ; ” and when rebuked
for the flat irreverence, avowed himself unable to under-
stand how such a graft could have ever been set by the
head gardener of the main hotbed of Philistine saplings
now flourishing in England. It is certain that the opinion
put forth with such flippant folly of phrase is common to
many of the profane, and not explicable by mere puerile
prejudice or sentiment ; and that students of Rugby or of
Rydal, vocal and inarticulate, poetic and prosaic, are not
seldom recognisable through certain qualities which, if
any be, are undeniably Philistine. Whatever these
schools have of good, their tendency is to cultivate all
the merits recognised and suppress all the merits un-
recognised in Ascalon or in Gath. I will not call up
witnesses past or present from the realms of prose or
verse, of practice or theory: it would be a task rather
invidious than difficult.
Son of Goliath or son of Jesse, this David or Samson
ſ
L 2
148 MATTHEW ARNOLD’S, AVE W POEMS.
or Jephthah of our days, the man who has taught our
hands to war and our fingers to fight against the
Philistines, must as a poet have sat long and reverently
at the feet of their Gamaliel. And as when there is a
high and pure genius on either side a man cannot but
get good from the man he admires, and as it was so in
this case if ever in any, he must have got good from that
Source over and above the certain and common good
which the sense of reverence does to us all. The joy of
worship, the delight of admiration, is in itself so excellent
and noble a thing that even error cannot make it unvener-
able or unprofitable ; no one need repent of reverence,
, though he find flaws or cavities in his idol; it has done
him good to worship, though there were no godhead
behind the shrine. To shut his eyes upon disproof and
affirm the presence of a god found absent, this indeed is
evil ; but this is not an act of reverence or of wor-
ship ; this is the brute fatuity of cowardice, the violent
impotence of fear; wanting alike what is good and
fruitful in belief and what is heroic and helpful in
disbelief; witness (for the most part) the religious and
political, moral and aesthetic scriptures of our own time,
the huge canonical roll of the Philistine. Nothing can
be more unlike such ignoble and sluggardidolatry than the
reWerence In OW expressed and now implied by Mr. Arnold
for the doctrine and example of Wordsworth. His
memorial verses at Once praise and judge the great poet
then newly dead better than any words of other men ;
they have the still clear note, the fresh breath as of the
first fields and birds of spring awakened in a serene dawn,
which is in Wordsworth's own verse. With wider eyes
MATTHEW AAAWOZZ)’S NEW POZMS. 149
and keener, he has inherited the soothing force of speech | g
and simple stroke of hand with which Wordsworth as-f
suaged and healed the weariness and the wounds of his
time ; to his hands the same appeasing spells and Sacred
herbs that fell from the other's when they relaxed in
death have been committed by the gods of healing song.
The elder physician of souls had indeed something too
much of Æsculapius in him, something too little of
Apollo his father ; nevertheless the lineal and legitimate
blood was apparent.
This elegy and the poem headed “Resignation ” are
in my eyes the final flower of Mr. Arnold's poems after
Wordsworth—as I take leave to qualify a certain division
of his work. The second of these is an unspotted and
unbroken model of high calm thought couched in pure
and faultless words; the words more equal and the vision
more clear than his old teacher's, more just in view and
more sure in grasp of nature and life. Imbued with the
old faith at once in the necessity of things and in the en-
durance of man, it excels in beauty and in charm the
kindred song of Empedocles ; from first to last there
rests upon it a serene spell, a sad Supremacy of still music
that softens and raises into wisdom the passionless and
gentle pain of patience ; the charm of earth and sorrow-
ful magic of things everlasting ; the spell that is upon
the patient hills and immutable rocks, at work and asleep
in “the life of plants and stones and rain’’; the life to
which we too may subdue our souls and be wise. At
times he writes simply as the elder poet might have
written, without sensible imitation, but with absolute,
identity of style and sentiment; at times his larger tone
150 MAZZIZEW ARWOZD'S NEW POEMS.
of thought, his clearer accent of speech, attest the differ-
ence of the men. So perfect and sweet in speech, so
sound and lucid in thought as the pupil is at his best,
the master seldom was ; and at his best the pupil is
nó more seen, and in his stead is a new master. He
has nothing of Wordsworth's, spirit of compromise with
the nature of things, nothing of his moral fallacies and
religious reservations; he can see the face of facts and
read them with the largé and frank insight of ancient
poets ; none of these ever had a more profound and
serene sense of fate. But he has not grasped, and no
man I suppose will ever grasp, the special and imperial
sceptre of his elder. The incommunicable, the immiti-
gable might of Wordsworth when the god has indeed
fallen upon him cannot but be felt by all, and can but be
felt by any ; none can partake or catch it up. There are
many men greater than he ; there are men much greater ;
but what he has of greatest is his only. His concentra-
tion, his majesty, his pathos have no parallel ; some have
gone higher, many lower, none have touched precisely
the same point as he ; some poets have had more of all
these qualities, and better ; none have had exactly his
gift. His pathos for instance cannot be matched against
any other man's ; it is trenchant, and not tender ; it is an
iron pathos. Take for example the most passionate of
his poems, the “Affliction of Margaret ; ” it is hard and
fiery, dry and persistent as the agony of a lonely and a
common soul which endures through life, a suffering
which runs always in one groove without relief or shift.
Because he is dull and dry and hard, when set by the
side of a great lyrist or dramatist; because of these faults
MA 7THE W AA’AWOL D’S AVAE W PQEMS. 151
and defects, he is so intense and irresistible when his
iron hand has hold of some chord which it knows how to
play upon. How utterly unlike his is the pathos of
Homer or Æschylus, Chaucer or Dante, Shakespeare or
Hugo ; all these greater poets feel the moisture and
flame of the fever and the tears they paint ; their pathos
when sharpest is full of sensitive life, of subtle tenderness,
of playing pulses and melting colours ; his has but the
downright and trenchant weight of swinging steel; he
strikes like the German headsman, one stroke of a loaded
sword. This could not be done even by the poets who
could do more and better than this. His metre too is
sublime, his choice or chance of language casual or
chosen has miraculous effects in it, when he feels his
foot firm on ground fit for him ; otherwise his verse is
often hard as wood and dry as dust and weak as water.
In this as in other ways his influence has been now good
and now bad. The grave Cadence of Such a poem as
the “Resignation,” in this point also one of Mr. Arnold's.
most noble and effective, bears with it a memory and a
resonance of the master's music, such as we find again
in the lovely single couplets and lines which now and then
lift up the mind or lull it in the midst of less excellent
verse; such for instance as these, which close a scale of
lower melodies, in a poem not wholly or equally pleasur-
able: but these are faultless verses and full of the com-
fort of music, which tell us how, wafted at times from the
far-off verge of the soul, - s
“As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.”
152 MAZZAEW ARNOLD's NEW PoEMS
These have a subtle likeness to Wordsworth's purer notes,
a likeness undefined and unborrowed ; the use of words
usually kept back for prose (such as “convey”) is a trick
of Wordsworth's which either makes or mars a passage;
here the touch, it may be by accident, strikes the exact
chord wanted, elicits the exact tone. ^,
t But indeed, as with all poets of his rank, so with Mr.
i Arnold, the technical beauty of his work is one with the spi-
ritual ; art, a poet's art above all others, cannot succeedin
this and failin that. Success or achievement of an exalted
kind on the spiritual side ensures and enforces a like ex- +
ecutive achievement or success; if the handiwork be
flawed, there must also have been some distortion or
defect of spirit, a shortcoming or a misdirection of spiritual
supply. There is no such thing as a dumb poet or a
handless painter. The essence of an artist is that he
should be articulate. It is the mere impudence of weak-
ness to arrogate the name of poet or painter with no
other claim than a susceptible and impressible sense of
outward or inward beauty, producing an impotent desire
to paint or sing. The poets that are made by nature
are not many; and whatever “vision” an aspirant may
possess, he has not the “faculty divine” if he cannot use
his vision to any poetic purpose. There is no cant more
pernicious to such as these, more wearisome to all other
men, than that which asserts the reverse. It is a drug
which weakens the feeble and intoxicates the drunken;
which makes those Swagger who have not learnt to walk,
and teach who have not been taught to learn. Such talk
as this of Wordsworth's, is the poison of poor souls like
MATTHEW ARAVOZZO'S MAEW POEMS. 153
;
David Gray’s.” Men listen, and depart with the belief
that they have this faculty or this vision which alone,
they are told, makes the poet ; and once imbued with
that belief, soon pass or slide from the inarticulate to the
articulate stage of debility and disease. Aspiration
foiled and impotent is a piteous thing enough, but friends
and teachers of this sort make it ridiculous as well. A
man can no more win a place among poets by dreaming
of it or lusting after it than he can win by dream or
desire a woman's beauty or a king's command ; and
those encourage him to fill his belly with the east wind
1 This was a poor young Scotchman who may be remembered
as having sought and found help and patronage at the hands first of
Mr. Dobell and afterwards of Lord Houghton. In some of his
'sonnets there are touches of Sweet and sincere emotion ; but the
most remarkable points in his poor little book, and those which
should be most memorable to other small poets of his kind (if at
least the race of them were capable of profiting by any such lesson),
are first the direct and seemingly unconscious transference of some .
of the best known lines or phrases from such obscure authors as
Shakespeare and Wordsworth into the somewhat narrow and barren
field of his own verse, and secondly the incredible candour of ex-
pression given in his correspondence to such flatulent ambition and
such hysterical self-esteem as the author of “Balder” must have
regarded, I should think, with a sorrowful sense of amusement. I
may add that the poor boy's name was here cited with no desire to
confer upon it any undeserved notoriety for better or for worse, and
assuredly with no unkindlier feeling than pity for his poor little
memory, but simply as conveying the most apt and the most flagrant
as well as the most recent instance I happened to remember of the
piteous and grievous harm done by false teaching and groundless
encouragement to spirits not strong enough to know their own
weakness. It was a kindly but uncritical reference in Mr. Arnold's
kindly but uncritical essay on Maurice de Guérin-an essay of which
I have said a few words further on—that upon this occasion for once
recalled the name to my mind, and supplied me with the illustration
required.
%
154 MA 7THE W A RAWOZZ9'S NEW POEMS.
who feign to accept the will for the deed, and treatinarti-
culate or inadequate pretenders as actual associates in art.
The Muses can bear children and Apollo can give crowns
to those only who are able to win the crown and beget .
the child ; but in the school of theoretic sentiment it is
apparently believed that this can be done by wishing.
Small things suffice to give immediate proof or dis-
proof of the requisite power. In music or in painting all
men admit this for a truth; it is not less certain in poetry.
There is nothing in either of the poets I speak of more
distinctive and significant than the excellence of their
best sonnets. These are almost equally noble in style ;
though the few highest of Wordsworth's remain out of
reach of emulation, not out of sight of worship. Less
adorable and sublime, not less admirable and durable,
Mr. Arnold's hold their own in the same world of poetry
with these. . All in this new volume are full of beauty,
sound and sweet fruits of thought and speech that have
ripened and broughtforth together ; the poetry of religious
thought when most pure and most large has borne no
fairer than that one on the drawing in the Catacombs of
the Good Shepherd bearing the young, not of a sheep,
but of a goat ; or that other on the survival of grace-and
spirit when the body of belief lies dead; but all, I repeat,
have a singular charm and clearness. I have used this
word already more than once or twice ; it comes nearest
of all I can find to the thing I desire to express; that
natural light of mind, that power of reception and reflec-
tion of things or thoughts, which I most admire in so
much of Mr. Arnold's work. I mean by it much more
than mere facility or transparency; more than brilliance,
MA 77HEW ARWOzzy'S MAEW POEMS. 155
more than ease or excellence of style. It is a quality
begotten by instinct upon culture; one which all artists of
equal rank possess in equal measure. w
There are in the English language three elegiac
poems so great that they eclipse and efface all the elegiac
poetry we know ; all of Italian, all of Greek. It is only
because the latest born is yet new to us that it can seem
strange or rash to say so. The “Thyrsis” of Mr. Arnold
makes a third with “Lycidas” and “Adonais.” It is
not so easy as those may think who think by rote and
praise by prescription to strike the balance between
them. The first however remains first, and must remain ;
its five opening lines are to me the most musical in all
known realms of verse; there is nothing like them ; and
it is more various, more simple, more large and sublime
than the others; lovelier and fuller it cannot be.
“The leader is fairest,
But all are divine.”
The least pathetic of the three is “Adonais,” which
indeed is hardly pathetic at all ; it is passionate, subtle,
splendid ; but “Thyrsis,” like “Lycidas,” has a quiet and
tender undertone which gives it something of sacred.
Shelley brings fire from heaven, but these bring also “the ,
meed of some melodious tear.” There is a grace ineffable,
a sweet sound and sweet savour of things past, in the .
old beautiful use of the language of shepherds, of flocks
and pipes; the spirit is none the less sad and sincere
because the body of the poem has put on this dear
familiar raiment of romance; because the crude and
naked sorrow is veiled and chastened with soft shadows
156 MAZTHE WARAVOZD’S NEW POEMS.
*
and sounds of a “land that is very far off?” ; because the
verse remembers and retains a perfume and an echo of
Grecian flutes and flowers,
“Renews the golden world, and holds through all
The holy laws of homely pastoral,
Where flowers and founts, and nymphs and semi-gods,
And all the Graces find their old abodes.”
Here, as in the “Scholar Gipsy,” the beauty, the
delicacy and affluence of colour, the fragrance and the
freedom as of wide wings of winds in summer over
meadow and moor, the freshness and expansion of the
light and the lucid air, the spring and the stream as of
flowing and welling water, enlarge and exalt the pleasure
and power of the whole poem. Such English-coloured
verse no poet has written since Shakespeare, who chooses
his field-flowers and hedgerow blossoms with the same
sure and loving hand, binds them in as simple and sweet
an order. All others, from Milton downward to Shelley
and onward from him, have gathered them singly or have
mixed them with foreign buds and alien bloom. No
poem in any language can be more perfect as a model of
style, unsurpassable certainly, it may be unattainable.
Any couplet, any line proves it. No Countryman of ours
such faultless folds and forms of harmonious line. He is
the most efficient, the Surest-footed poet of our time, the
most to be relied on ; what he does he is the safest to do
well; more than any other he unites personality and
perfection; others are personal and imperfect, perfect
and impersonal ; with them you must sometimes choose
between inharmonious freedom and harmonious bond-
MAZZZZZ W A RAWOZZ)'S AVAE W AOZMS. 157
age. Above all, he knows what as a poet he should do, |
and simply does that ; the manner of his good work is
never more or less than right; his verse Comes clean
and full out of the mould, Cast at a single jet ; placed
beside much other verse of the time, it shows like a
sculptor's work by an enameller's. With all their wealth
and warmth of flowers and lights, these two twin poems
are solid and pure as granite or as gold. Their sweet
sufficiency of music, so full and calm, buoys and bears up
throughout the imperial vessel of thought. Their sadness
is not chill or sterile, but as the sorrow of summer pausing
with laden hands on the middle height of the year, the
watershed that divides the feeding fountains of autumn.
and of spring ; a grave and fruitful Sadness, the triumphant
melancholy of full-blown flowers and souls full-grown.
The stanzas from the sixth to the fourteenth of “Thyrsis,”
and again from the sixteenth to the twentieth, are if
possible the most lovely in either poem ; the deepest in
tone and amplest in colour; the choiceness and sweet-
ness of single lines and phrases most exquisite and
frequent.
“O easy access to the hearer's grace,
When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine !
For she herself had trod Sicilian fields,
She knew the Dorian water's gush divine,
She knew each lily white which Enna yields,
Each rose with blushing face;
She loved the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain.
But, ah I of our poor Thames she never heard
Her foot the Cumnor cowslips never stirred ;
And we should tease her with our plaint in vain.”
She has learnt to know them now, the river and the river-
meadows, and access is as easy for an English as a Dorian
158 MATTHEW ARNOLD'S MAEW POEMS.
prayer to the most gentle of all worshipped gods. It is a
triumphal and memorial poem, a landmark in the high
places of verse to which future travellers studious of the
fruits and features of the land may turn and look up and
see what English hands could rear.
This is probably the highest point of Mr. Arnold's
i poetry, though for myself I cannot wholly resign the old
preference of things before familiar ; of one poem in
especial, good alike for children and men, the “Forsaken
Merman ; ” which has in it the pathos of natural things,
the tune of the passion we fancy in the note of crying birds
or winds weeping, shrill and Sweet and estranged from
us; the swift and winged wail of something lost midway
between man's life and the life of things soulless, the wail
overhead and caught up by the fitful northern fancy, filling
with glad and sad spirits the untravelled ways of nature ;
the clear cry of a creature astray in the world, wild and
gentle and mournful, heard in the sighing of weary waters
before dawn under a low wind, in the rustle and whistle
and whisper of leaves or grasses, in the long light breaths
of twilight air heaving all the heather on the hills, in the
coming and going of the Sorrowful strong seas that bring
delight and death, in the tender touch and recoil of the
ripple from the sand ; all the fanciful pitiful beauty of
dreams and legends born in grey windy lands on shores
and hill-sides whose life is quiet and wild. No man's hand
has pressed from the bells and buds of the moors and
downs by cape or channel of the north a sweeter honey
than this. The song is a piece of the sea-wind, a stray
breath of the air and bloom of the bays and hills: its
mixture of mortal sorrow with the strange wild sense of a
MAZTHEW ARNOLD'S MA. W. POEMS. 159
life that is not after mortal law—the childlike moan after
lost love mingling with the pure outer note of a song not
human—the look in it as of bright bewildered eyes with
tears not theirs and alien wonder in the watch of them—
the tender, marvellous, simple beauty of the poem, its
charm as of a sound or a flower of the sea—set it and save
it apart from all others in a niche of the memory. This
has all the inexplicable inevitable sweetness of a child's or
a bird's in its note ; “Thyrsis" has all the accomplished
, and adult beauty of a male poem. In the volume which
it crowns there is certainly no new jewel of equal water.
“Palladium ” is a fresh sample of the noble purity and
clearness which we find always and always praise in his
reflective poetry; its cool aerial colour like that of a quiet
sky between full sunset and full moonrise, made ready
for the muster of the stars, swept clean of cloud and flame,
and laved with limpid unruffled air from western green to
eastern grey ; a sky the cenotaph of unburied sunlight,
the mould of moonlight unborn. “A Southern Night”
is steeped in later air, as gentle and more shining; the
stanzas on the Grande Chartreuse are stamped with the
impression of a solemn charm, and so the new verses on
Obermann," the new verses on Marguerite, strange to read
* Among these the stanzas on the advent of Christianity, of “the
Mother with the Child,” and their enduring life while only faith in
them endured, recall the like passage, more thoughtful and fruitful
still, in that wise and noble poem, Mr. W. B. Scott’s “Year of the
World'; a poem to whose great qualities and affluent beauties of
letter and of spirit the requisite and certain justice of time remains
hitherto a debt unpaid. Its author must divide with Mr. Arnold
the palm of intellectual or philosophic poetry, the highest achieved
in England since Wordsworth, and in many things of moment
higher than his.
160 iſ 477AA W. ARMOZD'S NEW PoEMS.
for those who remember reading the first at the time when
all the loves we read of assume a form and ascend a throne
in our thoughts, the old and the new side by side, so that
now this poem comes under our eyes like a new love-song
of Petrarca to Laura or Coleridge to Geneviève. It is
fine and high in tone, but not such as the famous verses,
cited and admired even by critics sparing of their priceless
praise, beginning -
“Yes, in this sea of life enisled—.”
These in their profound and passionate calm strike deeper
and sound fuller than any other of the plaintive dejected
songs of Switzerland. “Dover Beach " marks another
high point in the volume ; it has a grand choral cadence
as of steady surges, regular in resonance, not fitful or gusty
but antiphonal and reverberate. But nothing of new verse
here clings closer to the mind than the overture of that
majestic fragment from the chorus of a “Dejaneira.”
“O frivolous mind of man,
Light ignorance, and hurrying, unsure thoughts,
Though man bewails you not,
How I bewail you !”
We must hope to have more of the tragedy in time;
that must be a noble statue which could match this massive
fragment. The story of Merope, though dramatic enough
in detail, is upon the whole more of a narrative romance
than a tragic subject ; in Mr. Arnold's poem the deepest
note is that struck by the tyrant Polyphontes, whose
austere and patient figure is Carved with Sophoclean
skill of hand. It is a poem which Milton might have
praised, an august work, of steady aim and severe success ;
but this of Dejaneira has in it a loftier promise and a
MA 7THE W AAAWOLD'S NEW POEMS. 161
larger chance. Higher matter of tragedy there can be
none ; none more intense and impressive, none fuller of
keen and profound interest, none simpler and statelier;
none where the weight and gravity, the Sweetness and
shapeliness of pure thought, could be better or closelier
allied with the warmth and width of common tenderness
and passion. We must all hope that the poet will keep
to this clear air of the ancient heights, more natural and
wholesome for the spirit than the lowlands of depression
and dubiety where he has set before now a too frequent
foot. This alone I find profitless and painful in his work;
this occasional habit of harking back and loitering in mind
among the sepulchres. Nothing is to be made by an
artist out of scepticism, half-hearted or double-hearted
doubts or creeds; nothing out of mere dejection and
misty mental weather. Tempest or Calm you may put to
use, but hardly a flat fog. In not a few of his former
poems, in some reprinted here, there is a sensible and
stagnant influence of moist vapour from those marshes of
the mind where weaker souls paddle and plunge and dis-
appear. Above these levels the Sunnier fields and fresher
uplands lie wide and warm ; and there the lord of the
land should sit at peace among his good things. If a
spirit by nature clear and high, a harmonious and a shining
soul, does ever feel itself “immured in the hot prison of
the present,” its fit work is not to hug but break its chain ;
and only by its own will or weakness can it remain ill at
ease in a thick and difficult air. Of such poetry I would
say what Joubert, as cited by Mr. Arnold, says of all coarse
and violent literature: it may be produced in any amount
of supply to any excess of effect, but it is no proper
M
|•
I62 MA 7'7"HE W AA’AWO/C/D'S AVAE W AOAA/S.
r
; matter of pure art, and “the soul says all the while, You
hurt me.” Deep-reaching doubt and “large discourse”
are poetical ; so is faith, so are sorrow and joy ; but’so
are not the small troubles of spirits that nibble and quibble
about beliefs living or dead ; so are not those sickly moods
which are warmed and weakened by feeding on the sullen
drugs of dejection ; and the savour of this disease and its
medicines is enough to deaden the fresh air of poetry.
Nothing which leaves us depressed is a true work of art.
We must have light though it belightning, and air though
it be storm. ^
Where the thought goes wrong, the verse follows after
it. In Mr. Arnold's second book there was more of weak
or barren matter, and more therefore of feeble or faulty
* metre. Rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in
English ; a rhymeless lyric is a maimed thing, and halts
and stammers in the delivery of its message. There are
some few in the language as good as rare ; but the habit
, or rule is bad. The fragments of his “Antigone” and
“Dejaneira " no reader can wish other than they are ;
and the chorus for example in “Merope” which tells of
Arcas and Callisto is a model of noble form and colour;
but it does not fasten at once upon the memory like a
song of Callicles, or like the “Merman,” or like any such
| other. To throw away the natural grace of rhyme from
a modern song is a wilful abdication of half the power
and half the charm of verse. It is hard to realise and
hopeless to reproduce the musical force of classic metres
so recondite and exquisite as the choral parts of a Greek
play. Even Milton could not ; though with his godlike
instinct and his godlike might of hand he made a kind
MA 7THE W A RAWOZZ)'S AWE W POEMS. 163
of strange and enormous harmony by intermixture of as-
sonance and rhyme with irregular blank verse, as in that
last Titanic chorus of Samson which utters over the fallen
Philistines the trumpet-blast and thunder of its triumph.
But Milton, it may be said, even if he knew them, did not
obey the laws of the choral scheme, and so forfeited the
legitimate condition of its music. Who then has observed
those laws and obtained that success which he did not P
I scarcely think that Mr. Arnold has ; and if ever man
was qualified for the work it is he only. I have never
seen other attempts at rhymeless choral metre which were
not mere amorphous abortions of misshapen prose, halting
on helpless broken limbs and feet. A poet of Mr. Arnold's
high station cannot of Course but write in verse, and in
good verse as far as the kind will allow ; but that is not *
far enough to attain the ultimate goal, to fill up the final
measure of delight. We lose something of the glory and
the joy of poetry, of which he has no reason and no right
to defraud us. It is in no wise a question of scholarship,
or in the presence of a scholar I should be silent ; as it
is, I must say how inexplicable it seems to me that Mr.
Arnold, of all men, should be a patron of English hex-
ameters. His own I have tried in vain to reduce by
scansion into any metrical feet at all; they look like
nothing on earth, and Sound like anapaests broken up and
driven wrong; neither by ear nor by finger can I bring
them to any reckoning. I am sure of one thing, that
some of them begin with a pure and absolute anapaest;
and how a hexameter can do this it passes my power to
cönceive. And at best what ugly bastards of verse are
these self-styled hexameters how human tongues or
M 2
164 MA 7'7"HEW AAAWOZZ) 'S AVAE W AOA.M.S.
hands could utter or could write them except by way of
burlesque improvisation I could never imagine, and never
shall. Once only, to be candid—and I will for once show
all possible loyalty and reverence to past authority—once
only, as far as I know, in Dr. Hawtrey's delicate and
fluent verse, has the riddle been resolved ; the verses are
faultless, are English, are hexametric ; but that is simply
a graceful interlude of pastime, a well-played stroke in a
game of skill played with language. Such as pass else-
where for English hexameters I do hope and suppose
impossible to Eton. Mr. Clough's I will not presume
to be serious attempts or studies in any manner of metre ;
|
they are admirable studies in graduated prose, full of fine
sound and effect. Even Mr. Kingsley’s “Andromeda,”
the one good poem extant in that pernicious metre, for
all its spirit and splendour, for all the grace and glory
and exultation of its rushing, and ringing words, has not
made possible the impossible thing. Nothing but loose
rhymeless anapaests can be made of the language in that
way ; and we hardly want these, having infinite command
and resource of metre without them, and rhyme thrown
in to turn the overweighted scale. I am unwilling to set
| my face against any doctrine or practice of a poet such
as Mr. Arnold, but on this matter of metre I was moved
{
}
W
{
to deliver my soul.
This is not the only example in his writings of some
quality which seems to me intrusive and incoherent with
his full general accuracy and clearness. These points of
view and heads of theory which in my eyes seem out of
perspective do indeed cohere each with the other ; but
hardly with his own high practice and bright intuition of
MAZTHEW ARNOLD'S MA. W. POEMS. 165
the best thing. His alliance is so precious against the
mailed and gowned array of the Philistines, that the least
defection, the least error of movement, imperils more
than his own position; a whole regiment may be misled
into ruin by the general, while the heat and burden of ,
the day lie before us yet. No man has done so much to
|
exalt and to correct men's view of the higher criticism and
its office. Wherever therefore in things great or small he
outruns or falls short of the immediate goal of a just
judgment, the instant aim of a pure argument, it is
worth while to take note of the slippery or oblique
reasoning, or at least to sift and strain it, on the chance
'that here may be some error. “The light of the body is
the eye ; ” he is the eye of English criticism ; and if ever
for some passing purblind minute the light that is in that
body be darkness, how great indeed is that darkness
Dark however he properly never is, but I think at times
oblique or drowsy. He has smitten the Janus of Philis-
tine worship on one face ; under the other, if he has not
himself burnt a pinch or two of adulterate incense, he
has encouraged or allowed others to burn. At the portal
by which English devotees press thickest into the
temple of Dagon he has stood firm as in a breach, and
done good service ; but he has left unguarded other
points of entrance. All that is said in his essays on the
religious tradition and the religious idea, as opposed to
Philistine demolition or to Philistine edification, I accept
and admire as truth, excellent if not absolute, and sugges-
tive if not final ; but from his own vantage ground of
meditation and idea I start my objection to this inference
and that. Protestantism, conservative and destructive,
I66 MA 7'7"HE W A RAWO/C/D 'S AVE W AOAZA/S.
is the form in which the enemy has appeared to him ;
such in his eyes has been the banner, such the watch-
word under which they serve. All Philistia for him is
resumed in the English Philistine ; who may probably be
the most noisome example in the world, but is assuredly
not the only one. I do not say that marriage dissoluble :
only in an English divorce court is a lovely thing or a
venerable ; I do say that marriage indissoluble except by
Papal action is not. It is irrelevant and unfair for a
soldier of light to ally himself with Philistine against
Philistine. From the ideal point of meditation to which
he would recall us, where the pure justice and the naked
beauty of thought are alone held Sacred, I cannot “find
the marriage theory of Catholicism refreshing and ele-
ºvating ” merely because the Protestant theory, which
“neither makes divorce impossible nor makes it decent,”
has assumed in English law-courts a gross and hideous
incarnation. What is anomalous, what is unjust, cannot
surely be beautiful to purged eyes looking from “the
ideal sphere.” Of course the idea of a lifelong union has
its beauty and significance; so has the idea of liberty and
sincerity of action. Faith is good, and freedom is good ;
the office of the idea is to give free play and full justice to
both. The Philistines on either side would fain draw
sharper and harder the lines of demarcation and division 5
the thinkers on neither side would fain not reject but
reconcile. g
Again, it is doubtless the best and most direct service
that a critic can do his countrymen to strip and smite
their especial errors, to point out and fence off their
peculiar pitfalls ; and this Mr. Arnold has done for his
MATTHE W ARAVOZZ)'S NEW POEMS. 167
English not once or twice only. I doubt if he has ever
assailed or advised them without due cause : in one
point above all he has done them most loyal and liberal
service ; he has striven to purge them of the pestilence
of provincial thought and tradition, of blind theory and
brute opinion, of all that hereditary policy of prejudice
which substitutes self-esteem for self-culture, self-worship
for self-knowledge ; which clogs and encrusts all powers
and all motions of the mind with a hard husk of
mechanical conceit. And here, heaven knows, in his
dull dumb way the Briton stands ahead of all men,
towers above all men in stolid and sublime solitude, a
massive, stupid, inarticulate god and priest in one ; his
mute and majestic autolatry is a deeper and more radical
religion than the self-love of other nations, the more .
vocal vanities of France or America. In the stone walls
and iron girders of this faith our champion has done what .
a man may to make a breach ; and the weapon was
well chosen, the brand of provinciality, wherewith to
stamp and mark that side of the double-faced head of
Dagon which looks towards us with English features.
But, to use his own term, there are two notes of pro-
vinciality perceptible, one or other, in most criticism
of foreign things; error in praise and error in dispraise.
He could have prescribed for the soul-sick British Philis-
tine, “sick of self-love,” no better method of cure than
study and culture of the French spirit, of its flexible
intelligence and critical ambition, its many-sided faith in
perfection, in possible excellence and ideal growth out-
ward and upward, and the single-hearted love of all these
which goes hand in hand with that faith. Faith in light
168 MA 7'7"HAE W A RAWOZ D’S AWE W FOZMS.
and motion is what England has not and France has ; often
a blind, erring, heretical faith, often perverse and fanati-
cal, a faith which kills its prophets and stones its proto-
martyrs; but in art as in politics, in literature as in ethics,
an active and a living faith. To show this to English
eyes and impress upon English ears its truth and its im-
portance is to do a good work; but to pass from general
doctrine to example and detail is hard and unsafe for a
| foreign preacher. Those who deserve gratitude at our
; hands deserve also candour ; and I must in candour say
º that Mr. Arnold is not a sure guide over French ground.
He does not know quite how the land lies : he turns
down this declivity or stops short by that well-head,
where a native guide would hardly bid one halt. With a
large and fine appreciation of the beauties and capacities
of the national character, with a justice and strength of
insight into these which compared with an average
English judgment are wonderful and admirable, he has
not the eyes and the nerves of one to the manner born,
the sudden and sensitive intuition of an innate instinct :
he thinks right, but he feels wrong; some men are right
without being reasonable, he is reasonable without being
right. He sets up a rational argument to prove why
France should be, and why she is, weak in poetry and
strong in prose ; a very keen and clear argument, only
the facts are all against it. Of classic verse Mr. Arnold
"is so much more competent to speak than I am that I
dare not press the debateable question of choric metre ;
but of French verse I must have leave to say that he is not
competent to speak. His touch has in it no pulse or
play of French blood; his fine ear is deaf on that side.
MAZTHEW ARNOLD'S NEW POEMS. 169
It would clearly be impossible to show him, to make him
feel, the silent horror and wonder with which other ears
receive such utterances from him as from the Common
Briton we expect and accept with all composure.
Whether it be “the German paste in his composition”
which so far thickens and deadens his subtle sense of
song, I cannot say ; but I can say that in that Case it
would be well for him to get quit of it. The cadence
and impulse of harmonies in French verse are of course
unlike those in English verse or Italian, and the laws
which are their outgrowth are unlike too ; but the one is
not more sure and satisfying than the other : only there
must be the right hands to play and the right ears to hear.
Mr. Arnold says that a Frenchman born with the faculty
or instinct of poetry finds in prose a fuller and easier ex-
pression than in verse. As justly might a French critic
say this of an Englishman. In either case, the man who
is a poet or nothing must be judged by his power of
writing verse. If he can neither do that well nor do any
other work, whatever his charm of aspiration and senti-
ment and sincerity may be, he slips into the second
rank as surely if French as if English. Imagine that
Frenchman’s tone of mind, or his tone of ear, who should
proclaim the inadequacy of a language which has sufficed
for all the great lyric poets of France, all the copious and
glorious roll from François Villon and Charles of Orleans
to Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier, but is now con-
victed of inaptitude to render in full the sentiments of a
Maurice de Guérin The English poet is here hope-
lessly at sea without oar or rudder, haven or guiding-star.
He cannot even be trusted to speak of the academic
17o MAZZZZEW AAEAVOZZ) 'S MAE W AOZMS.
poets, easier though they are of access and apprehension
even to the run of Englishmen. The thin, narrow,
shallow, but very real melodies of Racine are as inaudible
to him as the mightier symphonies of the great school;
this perhaps, as he says, is natural in a foreigner. But
no such excuse will serve for the confusion of judgment
which places on a level the very best man of his kind,
Pope, and Boileau, the very worst. Perhaps their re-
spective Odes on St. Cecilia's Day and the Siege of
Namur may be allowed to pair off as the shamefullest
two lyrical poems in the world ; but compare for a
moment their general work, their didactic and satirical
verse the comparison is an insult too absurd to affect
the Englishman. He is the finest, Boileau the dullest
Craftsman of their age and school.
It is singular and significant that Mr. Arnold, himself
established and acknowledged as a poet standing in the
first rank among his own people, has chosen for special
praise and patronage men who have tried their hands at
his work and failed, men who have fallen back baffled
from the cliff-side he has climbed. Again I cite the evi-
dence of his French critic ; who naturally feels that he has
paid the French but a poor compliment in praising as
their best men those who fall short of their own aim and
his achievement : “Il y a quelque chose de louche, de
suspect, dans les louanges que prodigue aux poètes
manqués un poète réussi. Or, parmitous les nôtres c'est
à M. Sainte-Beuve, poète manqué dont le temps a fait un
critique réussi, que le poète anglais adresse son hommage
respectueux. Il a eu mille fois raison d'étudier, d'appré-
cier, de louer Cet illustre écrivain ; il n'a peut-être pas eu
MATTHEW ARNOZ D'S NEW POEMS 171
tort de le suivre les yeux fermés lorsqu'il s'envole à tire
d'ailes dans les nuages du paradoxe, de le croire sur
parole quand il affirme qu'on peut être grand poëte tout
en échouant dans le champ poétique : pour moi, je
préfère, soit dit en passant, les peintres qui sachent
peindre, les médecins qui sachent guérir, les poètes qui
font des vers. Passons-lui ces spécialités ; ce n'est pas
une raison d'affirmer qu'il ne saurait être en France de
meilleurs poëtes que ces prosateurs, de plus forts travail-
leurs que ces lutteurs étiques, que ces génies tronqués.
Quand on dénonce chez autrui les jugements saugrenus,
les bêtises réciproques de l'esprit insulaire et provincial,
il faudrait se garder par exemple de ranger au niveau des
grands poëtes les talents délicats, de prendre pour des
Keats les Maurice de Guérin, pauvres belles âmes étiolées,
douces et frêles petites fleurs effeuillées en pleine
éclosion. Ces roses pâles, ces pousses maladives, ont
bien leur charme et leur parfum, valent bien la peine
qu'on les arrose et les recueille; mais on ne tresse point
avec celles-là les grandes couronnes poétiques."
The gentle pupil of Lamennais is to Mr. Arnold
what the lesser celandine was to Wordsworth : he has
unearthed a new favourite, and must have some three or
four who will love his little flower. It were churlish and
foolish to refuse ; the small petals are fresh and dewy,
the slim stem bends and sways with a sylvan grace. But
it is something too much to hold up a bit of pilewort as
the rose of Sharon ; it provokes one to deny the poor
blossom a place among flowers at all : it is indecorous
and ludicrous. The * Centaur" is really so fine and
graceful a little study, there are really such delicate and
172 MAZTHE W AAAWOZZ)'S MAE IV POZMS.
distinctive touches of expression and feeling, such traces
of a bright clear sense of beauty and charm and meaning
in nature, that it was but just, when the man was well
dead and could get no good of it and no harm, to praise
him without grudging and pick up his leavings as a
windfall. A place in the cabinet of M. Sainte-Beuve was
no more than his desert. But the place which Mr.
Arnold assigns him is reserved for men far other than
this tender dreamer: five minutes of their life outweigh
five centuries of such lives as his ; one breath of the
common air of their spirit would burn up the little
tremulous soul as with fire. No tender Semele, but the
queen of heaven alone, can face and enjoy the lightning
of heaven. Of the contact of mortal and immortal, ashes
are the only fruits. In Keats there was something of the
spirit and breath of the world, of the divine life of things;
in Guérin there was hardly a soft breathless pulse of flut-
tering sympathy ; here was the anima mundi, made flesh
once more in the body of a divine interpreter such as all
great poets must be after their kind ; there was the
animula vaguſa, Ö/andu/a, of a tentative, sensitive, im-
pressible nature; full of little native pieties and sincere
little sensibilities, amiable and laudable enough. But the
demigods of our kind are not cast in such clay as that.
M. Sainte-Beuve knew better than Mr. Arnold what was
the rank and what the kindred of their foster-child when
he called him a latter-day Lakist. If we must needs
find him kinsmen among English poets, he may take his
stand as a subordinate in the school of Gray' or the
* I am here reminded to ask in passing how Mr. Arnold, who
says of Gray that he never used the popular metre of his century,
.#
MA 7'7"HEW ARAVOZZ)'S NEW POEMS. 173
household of Cowper. With them he had some good
things in common; his letters, if less worth reading than
the best of theirs, have the same frank delicacy and
gentle play of personal sentiment applied to the landscape
or the hearthside, and couched sometimes in choice and
excellent words. But Keats, of all men born the ablest |
to hold his own with nature, and translate her gods into *
verbal incarnation ; Keats, who was at once the lyrist
and the lyre of that nature, the priest and the altar of
those gods ; more than all other poets receptive and,
passive of her influences and forces, and more than all
other poets able and active to turn them all to a divine
use, to transfigure them without transformation, to attune
all colours and attemper all harmonies; whose power
upon these things, whose gift of transfusion and expres-
sion, places him apart from all in his sovereign command
&
of nature, able to do for nature what in his own day
Shelley could not achieve nor Wordsworth attempt;
above all Greece and all Italy and all England in his own
line and field of work; to push forward as a competitor
with him in that especial field of work where all the giants
and all the gods of art would fail to stand against him for
“an hour, a man who in his own craft could not use
the tools that lay ready to his hand—who was nothing
(it seems) if not a poet, and could not as much as prove
came to forget his admirable fragment of a didactic poem in the ten-
syllable couplet; and tempted, while on this grouñd, to appeal
against the judgment which ranks him as a poet above Collins, the
man of all his age, it seems to me, who had most in him of the pure
and high and durable spirit of poetry. The overture of his Ode to
Liberty is worthy of Coleridge or Shelley; Gray's best ode by its
side is somewhat hard and thin.
174 M477HA iſ ARNOLD'S NEW PožMS
himself a poet by writing passable verse at all; this is a
madness of mistake explicable and excusable only as the
error of a foreign and provincial judgment. Any stanza of
“Thyrsis,” any fragment of “Callicles,” would outweigh
in point of “natural magic” all Guérin's work, even were
his thoughts clothed in the beauty of verse instead of the
prettiness of prose ; to weigh against it the entire work
of Keats, or any such single poem as the “Ode to
Psyche” or that “on a Grecian Urn"—poems which for
perfect apprehension and execution of all attainable in
their own sphere would weigh down all the world of
poetry—is inexpressibly impossible.
Sweeping aside all this accumulated panegyric, we
may discern the modest attraction of Guérin's little plot
of ground with its borders of Crocus and Snowdrop ;
though the gardeners have done their best to kill them with
hothouse fumes and water-pipes and bell-glasses. As to
his first posthumous patroness—he belongs to the breed
of those suckling poets who live on patronage premature
even when posthumous—I must say with another critic,
“Madame Sand n'est vraiment pas heureuse en poètes ; ”
great and excellent as she is, their contact is not good
for her. Assuredly the one aspiration of Guérin, his one
desire that “a stronger soul would bow down to his
weaker spirit,” has since his death been somewhat too
much fulfilled. A niche in the Sainte-Beuve collection is
| his due ; but not the homage of George Sand and Mat-
(thew Arnold. His sister and he had in effect a certain
: distinction, they had graceful tastes and tunable minds :
i without distinction there cannot be genius, but there Can-
not be genius with nothing else; a man cannot live on air)
MATTHE W ARAVOZD’S AVE W POEMS. 175
because he cannot live without it. Mr. Arnold would set
them as stars in heaven, /l/cida sidera ; their little lights
will hardly burn the night out, but meantime they shine
well enough for children to watch them twinkle and
“wonder what they are.” Without a glimpse of genius,
without more light or strength of spirit than many others
unknown, Mlle. de Guérin shows always a beautiful and
admirable soul; her diary and her letters have more than
usual of the lovely and loving qualities of good women, true
sisters and gentle wives, faithful and fervent and worthy to
receive again the lavish love they give ; they never would
come forward, they need never be thrust forward, as genius
or as saint. The immortal women in either kind—St.
Theresa, St. Catherine, Vittoria Colonna, Mrs. Browning,
Miss Christina Rossetti—belong to a different world and . .
scheme of things. With one verse or one word of theirs
any one of these could have absorbed and consumed her
as a sunbeam of the fiery heaven a dewdrop of the
dawning earth.' Nor, to repass for an instant from the
personal to the religious question started from this cover
by Mr. Arnold, is it just or rational to oppose to her
delicate provincial piety the coarsest and ugliest form of
* If you would see the note of distinction between religious genius
and religious talent, compare with any of Mlle. de Guérin's idyllic
effusions of gracious piety, fresh and Sweet in their small way as the
dusk and the dew, the great new-year hymn of Miss Rossetti,
“Passing away, saith the world, passing away,”
so much the noblest of sacred poems in our language that there is
none which comes near it enough to stand Second ; a hymn touched
as with the fire and bathed as in the light of Sunbeams, tuned as to
chords and cadences of refluent sea-music beyond reach of harp and
organ, large echoes of the serene and Sonorous tides of heaven.
176 MAZZZZZ W A RAWOZZ) 'S AWE W POEMS.
English faith. There are graceful as well as loathsome
forms of Protestantism, loathsome as well as graceful
forms of Catholicism : probably the balance is about
even. The Christ of Clapham is an ungracious god
enough ; the time is not fruitful of gods in any degree
adorable ; but the Christ of Montrouge? Exeter Hall is
not a wise or lovely oracle ; but what of Saint-Acheul?
Is there any more of grace, of light, of culture or sweet-
ness, under the banner of M. Veuillot than on the staff
of the A’ecord 2 There lies the question ; not between
Languedoc and Margate. Against the best of one creed
it is but fair to set the best of another, against the worst
the worst. As to culture, sanity, power of grasp and re-
ception, Mlle. de Guérin hesitating at the brink of Hugo
it assuredly as pitiable as any Puritan shuddering on the
verge of Shakespeare. ...?
Again, Mr. Arnold has a fond faith in the French
Academy and in the Revue des Deux Mondes which is
nothing short of pathetic ; he seems actually to take them
at their own valuation. The too outspoken critic before
cited ventures to express in ribald phrase his wonder that
such a pair of “hoarse and haggard old temptresses *
(vieilles ſentatrices hôves et rauques) should play the part
of Delilah to the scourger of Philistines. Not, as he
adds, that he would impugn the venerable maiden re-
putation of their hoary hairs ; but such as they are,
“ces étranges séductrices ont failli couper de leurs
ciseaux émoussés les cheveux au Samson anglais. Déjà
son engouement a manqué l'aveugler. Aux yeux de M.
Arnold, l'amour a reſait a l'Académie une virginité; il est
tout prêt à épouser Sa Marion, a próner ses quelques
MAZZZZEW ARMOZZ) 'S MAE W POEMS. 177
appas €mérites, a faire Courber toutes les tétes anglaises
devant cette Dulcinée à quarante. Il est l'amant fou-
gueux du bon sens, l’apôtre échauffe de la froide raison,
l'avocat furibond du goût sain.” This is not a fair or
clear judgment; it is indigested and violent and deformed
in expression; but it shows as in a cracked and blurred
mirror the reflection thrown upon other minds by Mr.
Arnold’s act of homage in the outer courts of the
Philistine temple: for thither he has unwittingly turned,
and there has bent his knee, as no Frenchman could have
done who was not a Philistine born and baptised and
branded to the bone with the signet of the sons of Dagon.
We may grant that the real office of an Academy should
be—what the nominal office of this Academy is—culture
and perfection of intelligence, elevation of the general
standard of work, the averageºof mind and taste and
sense which precludes absurdity or aberration and ensures
Something of care and conscience among the craftsmen of
literature. Greater work an ideal Academy could hardly
undertake, for greater work would require the vivid and
personal advent of genius; and that, I presume, it could
hardly undertake to supply. But has the actual Academy
done this P. Whom has it controlled, whom has it im-
pelled, who but for such influence would either have
gone wrong or failed to go right? whom at least among
men really memorable and precious? Has it constantly
done homage to the best P has it constantly rejected or
rebuked the worst P Is it to the Academy that we owe
the sound judgment, taste, temperance of the French
prose classics whom Mr. Arnold eloquently extols P
Did not the great Richelieu, its founder, set in motion
N
178 MATTHEW ARMOZZ) 'S MAEW POEMS.
_
^y
the still virgin machinery of his engine against the greater
Corneille P What was Molière in its eyes? and what
was not Boileau ? Where now are its great men, in an
age for France so fruitful of literary greatness? IDoes it
include one of high and fine genius besides Mérimée P
and do the rest of the sacred forty respect in him the
official antiquary or the faultless writer on whose dawn
Goethe looked out and prophesied overmuch P There
are names indeed still greater on its roll, but you do
not see appended to them the academic title. Once
for all, waiving its mere theories and reserving its mere
pretensions, let us inquire if in effect it now does, if
it ever has done, if it ever will do, any real and good
service whatever to pure literature ? The advice which
Mr. Arnold gives by implication to his English audience,
while preaching on the text of academies is precious
and necessary in itself, if the mass of English lite-
rature now current or floating is ever to be in any
measure elevated or purified ; but the selection of text
is merely fantastic, the process of deduction vicious
and baseless. This double impression was made on me
by the lecture when I heard it delivered at Oxford ; I
have read it since more than once, and the impression is
strengthened and deepened. It is possible to start from
(some incongruous orignorant assumption and yet proceed
to speak words of truth and soberness; the sermon may
be useful and noble though the text be strained and mis-
applied. For the Æezue des ZDeux Mondes I have as
earnest a respect as Mr. Arnold ; so far from regarding it
with the eyes of irreverence and ribaldry, as an old lady
of pleasure, a Delilah of dangerously gay repute, the ideas
MATTHE W ARAVOZZ) 'S MAEW POEMS. 179
name so justly venerated, a fame so sºund and round and
solid. Rather would I regard it, as the author of
“Mademoiselle de Maupin” used to regard virtue in the
days which found him unambitious of academic eminence,
with such eyes as turn towards a fond and watchful grand-
mother. It is dangerous to ruffle the robe of that dowager.
But I cannot regard her bosom as a safe pillow for the yet
unshorn head of a Nazarite champion. Too many of the
uncircumcised Philistines lie in wait for him slumbering in
of pleasure or gaiety are the last I º associate with a
the lap of M. Buloz. Are there not giants among them,
and the sons of the old giant, all of them children of
uncircumcision ? and the least of these has twice the theys
and seven times the wits of the heavy-headed horny-eyed
English Philistine. Some of them there are that sleep
with their father Goliath, and some abide to this day;
and the acts of them past and present, and all that they
did, and their might, are they not written in the books of
the Revue des Deux Mondes 2 There is M. Gustave
Planche, the staff of whose spear was so very like a
weaver's beam ; there is M. Armand de Pontmartin, a
man of great moral stature, having on every hand six
fingers to fight with, if haply he may give the flesh of
poets to the fowls of the air and to the beasts of the field;
there is M. Louis Etienne, who lately laid lance in rest
against me unoffending in championship of the upper
powers. Since the time of Goliath it has been a holy
habit and tradition with the Philistines to curse “by their
gods”—which indeed seems the chief utility of those
divine beings.
The comparative culture and relative urbanity of
N 2
180 MAZZZZZW AAEAVOZZ)'S MAE W AOZMS.
responsible Criticism—qualities due to no prescription of
academic authority, but in part to natural sense and self-
respect, in part to the code of habitual honour which
rather impels than compels a man to avow his words and
his works—these qualities, which preserve from mere
contempt even the Philistines of French literature when
we turn from them to their English fellow-soldiers, have I
suspect blinded Mr. Arnold to thereal colours under which
they also serve. As yet however they have not made a
prey of him ; Delilah has merely woven the seven locks
of the champion's head with the web and fastened it with
the pin ; he has but to awake out of his sleep and go away
with the pin of the beam and with the web. But next
time he goes to Gaza and sees there the Academy he
must beware of going in unto that siren, or in the morning
he may find the gates too heavy to carry off. We may
trust indeed never to find him there eyeless at the mill
with slaves; but it is no good sign that he should ever be
blind of this eye or deaf of that ear—blind to infirmities
on this side, or deaf to harmonies on that. I write not
as a disciple of the dishevelled School, “ romantique à.
tous crins; ” all such false and foolish catchwords as the
names of classic and romantic I repudiate as 'senseless,
and revere form or harmony as the high one law of all art.
It is because, both as poet and Critic, Mr. Arnold has
done the service he has in the front rank of an army
which finds among us few enough of able recruits, that I
grudge in him the least appearance of praise or dispraise
unworthy of his rank and office. Otherwise he would be
as welcome for me as another Englishman to deny the
power and variety, the supple Sweetness and the superb re-
sources of French verse in its depths and heights of song;
MATTHEW ARNOLD's NEW PoEMS. 18,
as welcome to ignore the higher and enhance the minolº
merits of a foreign literature; to mistake for the causes th
effects of these minor merits, which in their turn become
(as in this case of the Academy) causes of grave error
and defect, weakening where they should strengthen the
hands and eyes they have in training. But in a child and
champion of the light the least obliquity or obscurity of
vision is to be noted as dangerous. If to any one these
seem things of minor moment, to a poet such as he is
they cannot ; to him they must be more serious than to
another. We owe him too much to keep silence here,
though we might allow as harmless such graceful errors of
pastime or paradox as the faith in Oxford which will not
allow that she has ever “given herself to the Philistines;”
the beauty of the valley of Sorek has surely blinded him
to the nation and nature of the Gazites and Ascalonites
who have dwelt there now and again as surely as have
many of their betters. Both here and in the Academy
there may be a profession, a tradition of culture, of sweet-
ness, urbanity, loyalty to the light ; but where, we may
too often have had to ask, are the things themselves?
By their fruits ye shall know them ; and what are these P
In them both, if not of them, there may be good men
and great; have such been always their leaders? or were
ever such their types P
“ Not here, O Apollo 1
Are haunts meet for thee;
But where Helicon breaks down
In cliff to the Sea.”
There, and not in the academies or the market-places of
the Philistines, for peace or war ; there, where all airs are
full of the breath and all fields of the feet of the gods;
182 MAZTHEW ARWOZD'S NEW PoEMS.
where the sea-wind that first waved the wet hair of Venus
moves now only the ripples that remember her rising
limbs; where the Muses are, and their mother. There
is his place, who in such a place long since found Circe
feasting and heard Apollo play; there, below the upper
glens and wellsprings of the Centaurs, above the scooped
sea-shelves and flushing sands of the Sirens. Whatever
now he say or do, he has been and will remain to us a
lover and a giver of light; unwittingly, by impulse, for
pure love of it; and such lead further and lighten other-
wise than they know. All conscious help or guidance
serves us less than unconscious leadership. In his best
words there is often a craft and a charm ; but in his best
work there is always rest, and air, and a high relief; it
satisfies, enlarges, refreshes with its cool full breath and
serenity. On some men's nerves the temperature strikes
somewhat cold ; there are lungs that cannot breathe but
in the air of a hothouse or a hospital. There is not much
indeed of heat or flame in the Vestal or lunar light that
shines from this hearth ; but it does not burn down. His
poetry is a pure temple, a white flower of marble, un-
fretted without by intricate and grotesque traceries, un-
vexed within by fumes of shaken censers or intoning of
hoarse choristers ; large and clear and cool, with many
chapels in it and outer courts, full of quiet and of music.
In the plainest air played here there is a sound of sincerity
and skill ; as in one little Réguiescaí, which without show
of beauty or any thought or fancy leaves long upon the .
ear an impressure of simple, of earnest, of weary melody,
wound up into a sense of rest. We do not always want to
bathe our spirit in overflowing waters or flaming fires of
MA 7THE W AAEAVOZZ)'S AVA. W. POEMS. 183
f
!,
imagination ; pathos and passion and aspiration and desire
are not the only Springs we seek for song. Sorrows and
joys of thought or sense meet us here in white raiment
and wearing maiden Crowns. In each court or chapel
there is a fresh fragrance of early mountain flowers which
bring with them the wind and the Sun and a sense of
space and growth, all of them born in high places, washed
and waved by upper airs and rains. Into each alike there
falls on us as we turn a conscience of Calm beauty, of cool
and noble repose, of majestic work under melodious and
lofty laws ; we feel and accept the quiet sovereignties of
happy harmony and loyal form, whose service for the
artist is perfect freedom ; it is good for us to be here.
Nor are all these either of modern structure or of Greek ;
here is an Asiatic Court, a Scandinavian there. And
everywhere is the One ruling and royal quality of classic
work, an assured and equal excellence of touch. Whether
for Balder dead and the weeping gods in Asgard, or for
the thought-sick heart-Sore king of a weary land far east,
blinded and vexed in Spirit with the piteous pains and
wrongs of other men, the same good care and wise charm
of right words are used to give speed of wing and sureness
of ſoot to the ministering verse. The stormy northern
world of water and air and iron and Snow, the mystic op-
pression of eastern light and cruel colour in fiery continents
and cities full of sickness and splendour and troubled
tyrannies, alike yield up to him their spirit and their secret,
to be rendered again in just and full expression. These
are the trophies of his work and the gifts of his hand;
through these and such as these things, his high and distinct
seat is assured to him among English poets.
AVC 7'E'S OW THE ZTEXT OF SAE/A2ZZAZ V.
[1869.]
IT is seldom that the work of a scholiast is so soon
wanted as in Shelley's case it has been. The first col-
lected edition of his works had many gaps and errors
patent and palpable to any serious reader. His text is
already matter for debate and comment, as though he
were a classic newly unearthed. Certain passages begin
to be famous as crucial subjects for emendation ; and the
master-singer of our modern poets shares with his own
masters and models the least enviable proof of fame—
that given by corrupt readings and diverse commentaries.
Awaiting the appearance, now long looked for, of a surer
and carefuller text, I have but a word to say in passing, a
hand to lend in this humble service of verbal emendation.
One poet only of late times, and that but once, has suf-
fered more than Shelley from the negligence and dullness
of those to whose hands the trust of his text was com-
mitted. The last relics of Landor came before us dis-
torted and deformed in every page by this shameful
neglect; and the value is thus impaired of Some among
the most precious and wonderful examples extant of
great genius untouched by great age, full of the grace, the
MOZAS ON THE ZEx7 OF SAEEZZEY. 185
strength, the clear light and harmony of noon unclouded
by the night at hand.
I take at random a few of the disputed or disputable
passages in the text of Shelley, keeping before me the
comments (issued in Moſes and Queries and elsewhere) of
Mr. Garnett, Mr. Palgrave, Mr. Rossetti, and others.
In March and April 1868, the critic last named rut forth
a series of short papers on proposed or required Smenda.
tions of passages evidently or apparently defective or
corrupt. The first is that crucial verse in the famous
“Stanzas written in dejection near Naples—”
“The breath of the moist air is light.”
Another reading is “earth’’ for “air ; ” which at first
sight may seem better, though the “unexpanded buds.”
in the next line might be called things of air as well as of
earth, without more of literal laxity or inaccuracy than
Shelley allows himself elsewhere. As to the question
whether “light” (adjective) be legitimate as a rhyme to
“light” (substantive), it may be at once dismissed.
The license, if license it be, of perfection in the echo
of a rhyme is forbidden only, and wrongly, by English
critics. The emendation “slight” for “light” is absurd.
In the eighteenth stanza of the first part of the
“Sensitive Plant” there is a line impossible to reduce
to rule, but not obscure in its bearing. The plant, which
could not prove by produce of any blossom the love it
felt, received more of the light and odour mutually shed
upon each other by its neighbour flowers than did any
One among these, and thus, though powerless to show it,
yet
186 AVO7'E'S OW 7A/E TEX7" OA' SAMAZZZZY.
-- “Loved more than ever,
Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver : ”
in other words, felt more love than the flower which gave
it gifts of light and odour could feel, having nothing to
give back, as the others had, in return; all the more
thankful and loving for the very barrenness and impotence
of requital which made the gift a charity instead of an ex-
change. This license of implication, this inaccuracy of
structure, which would include or involve a noun in its
cognate verb (the words “loved more ” being used as ex-
actly equivalent to the words “felt more love”), is
certainly not imitable by others, even if defensible in
Shelley ; but the change proposed in punctuation and
construction makes the passage dissonant and tortuous,
throws the sense out of keeping and the sound out of
tline. -
In the eighth stanza of the third part the following .
line seems to me right as it stands—
“Leaf after leaf, day by day—”
if the weight and fall of the sound be properly given.
Mr. Rossetti would slip in the word “and ;” were it there,
I should rather wish to excise it. -
In the twenty-second stanza of the “Adonais” I may
remark that in Shelley's own Pisan edition the reading of
the fourth line runs as it should, thus—
“A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs.”
I do not understand wherein can be the objection to the
“magic mantles” of the thirteenth stanza. It is the best
word, the word most wanted to convey, by one such
AVOTES ON THE TEXT OF SAEZZZY. 187
light and great touch as only a great workman can give,
the real office and rank of the divine “shepherds,” to dis-
tinguish Apollo from the run of Admetus's herdsmen.
The reading “tragic” would be by Comparison insignifi-
cant, even were there any ground of proof or likelihood
to sustain it. In the fourth stanza of this poem Shelley
calls Milton “the third among the sons of light.” It
has been asked who were the two first : it has been ob-
jected that there were at least three—Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare. I should be slow to doubt that Shelley had
in view the first and the last names only. To him Dante
could scarcely have seemed a type of Spiritual illumination,
a son of light elect above other poets; of this we might be
sure without the evidence we have. No man, not even
Landor, has laid upon the shrine of Dante a thank-
offering of more delicate and passionate praise, has set a
deeper brand of abhorrence upon the religion which
stained his genius. Compare the twenty-second of
Shelley's collected letters with the “Pentameron " of
Landor—who has Surely said enough, and said it with
all the matchless force and charm of his most pure and
perfect eloquence, in honour of Dante, to weigh against
the bitterness of his blame. Had I the right or the
strength to defend the name of one great man from
the charge of another, to vindicate with all reverence the
fame of Landor even against the verdict of Mazzini, I
would appeal to all fellow-students whether Landor has
indeed spoken as one “infirm in mind” or tainted with
injustice—as one slow of speech or dull of sense to ap-
preciate the divine qualities of the founder of all modern
poetry. He has exalted his name above wellnigh every
188 AVOTES ON THE TEXT OF SAEZZZY.
name on record, in the very work which taxes him with
the infection of a ferocity caught from contact with the
plague-Sores of religion. It is now hoped and suggested
that a spirit and a sense wholly unlike their outer habit
may underlie the written words of Dante and of Milton."
That may be ; but the outer habit remains, the most
hateful creed in all history; uglier than the faith of
Moloch or of Kali, by the hideous mansuetude, the
devilish loving-kindness of its elections and damnations.
Herein perhaps only do these two great poets fall below
the greater, below Homer and Æschylus, Sophocles and
Shakespeare ; the very skirts of whose thought, the very
hems of whose garments, are clean from the pollution of
this pestilence. Their words as well as their meanings,
their sound not less than their sense, we can accept as wise
and sweet, fruitful and fresh to all time ; but the others
have assumed the accent with the raiment of Dominic and
Calvin—mighty men too, it may be, after their kind, but
Surely rather sons of fire than sons of light. At the same
time it may be plausibly if not reasonably alleged that
Shelley and Landor were both in some measure disquali-
fied by their exquisite Hellenism of spirit to relish duly
the tone and Savour of Dante's imagination.
There are at least two passages in the “Ode to Liberty”
* Of the poet of the English commonwealth Shelley has else-
where said, “The sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a
republican, and a bold inquirer into morals and religion; ” a passage
which may serve as comment on this of the “Adonais.” On the
other hand, Shelley in the “Defence of Poetry” does certainly
place Dante, “the second epic poet,” between Homer and Milton;
and so far he would seem to be referred to here also as second
“among the sons of light.” But where then is Shakespeare, who
surely had the most “light” in him of all?
AVOTES ON 7:HE TEXT OF SHEZZE Y. 189
where either the meaning, or the reading is dubious and
debateable. In the thirteenth stanza, having described,
under the splendid symbol of a summons sent from
Vesuvius to Etna across the volcanic islets of Stromboli.
(the “AEolian isles” of old), how Spain calls England, by
example of revolution, to rivalry of resurrection (in 1820,
be it observed), the poet bids the two nations, “twins of
a single destiny,” appeal to the years to come. So far
all is plain sailing. Then we run upon what seems a
sudden shoal or hidden reef. What does this mean?
| “Impress us from a seal, -
All ye have thought and done ! Time cannot dare conceal.”
The construction is at once loose and intricate; the
sentence indeed limps on both feet ; but I am not sure
that here is not rather oversight than corruption. The
sense at starting is clearly—“Impress us with all ye
have thought or done, which time cannot dare conceal ; ”
or, “Let all ye have thought and done impress us,” and
so forth. The construction runs wild and falls to pieces;
we found and we must leave it patchwork; for no violence
of alteration, were such permissible, could force it into
coherence. When Shelley's grammar slips or trips, as it
seems to do at times, the fault is a fault of hasty laxity,
not of ignorance, of error, of defective sense or taste such
as Byron's ; venial at worst, not mortal.
We start our next question in the fifteenth stanza.
Whose or what is “ the impious name "so long and so
closely veiled under the discreet and suggestive decency
of asterisks? It was at once assumed and alleged to be
the name of which Shelley had already said, through the
196 NOTES ON THE ZEx7 OF SAEZZZY.
º
lips of Prometheus, that “it had become a curse: ” the
name of Christ.' I for one could hardly bring myself to
doubt that the reviewer of the moment had read aright.
No other word indeed will give so adequate a sense, fit in
so fairly with the context. It should surely be a creed, a
form of faith, upon which the writer here sets his foot.
What otherwise shall we take to be “the snaky knot of
this foul gordian word”—a word which, “weak itself as
stubble,” serves yet the turn of tyrants to bind together the
rods and axes of their rule P If this does not mean a faith
of some kind, and a living faith to this day, then it would
seem at first sight that words have no meaning—that the
whole divine fabric of that intense and majestic stanza
crumbles into sparkling dust, dissolves into Sonorous
jargon. Any such vaguer substitute as “priest” or “king”
* When this passage was written I was of course not ignorant
that in an extant manuscript of this poem Shelley had himself filled
up the gap with the word “king; ” but this certainly did not
appear to me a sufficient assurance that such could have been the
original reading, aware, as I was of the excisions and alterations to
which Shelley was compelled by stress of friends or publishers to
submit his yet unpublished or half-published poems. I am now,
however, all but convinced that the antithesis intended was between
the “king” of this stanza and the “priest” of the next; though
I still think that the force and significance of the phrase are grievously
impaired if we are to assume that the “foul gordian word” is
simply the title of king, and not (as so much of the context would
appear to imply) a creed or system of religion which might at the
time have appeared to the writer wholly or mainly pernicious. And
this, with all his reverence for the divine humanity of Christ, we
1.now that the creed of historical Christianity did always appear to
Shelley. In this adoration of the personal Jesus, combined as it
was with an equal abhorrence of Christian theology, it is now perhaps
superfluous to remark how thoroughly Shelley was at one with
; Blake—the only poet or thinker then alive with whom he had so
i much in common.
* NOTES ON THE TEXT OF SAEZZZY. 191
weakens not one verse only, but makes the rest compara-
tively feeble and pointless, even if it can be said to leave
them any meaning at all ; and why any such word should
be struck out upon revision of the text by any fool or coward
who might so dare, none Surely can guess ; for such words
recur at every turn as terms of reproach. Then comes
the question whether Shelley in 1820 would have used
so bitter and violent a phrase to express his horror and
hatred of the evil wrought in the world by the working
of the Christian religion. It may help us to decide if we
take into account with how terrible and memorable a
Iname he had already branded it in the eighth stanza of
this very poem. That he did to the last regard it as by
all historical evidence the invariable accomplice of
tyranny—as at once the constant shield and the ready
spear of force and of fraud—his latest letters show as
clearly as that he did no injustice to “the sublime human
character” of its founder. The word “Christ,” if received
as the true reading, would stand merely as equivalent to
the word “Christianity;” the blow aimed at the creed
would imply nothing of insult or Outrage to the person.
Next year indeed Shelley wrote that famous chorus in the
“Hellas” which hails the rising of “the folding star of
JBethlehem,” as with angelic salutation, in sweeter and
more splendid words than ever fell from any Christian
lyrist. But when that chorus was written Shelley had not
changed or softened his views of history and theology.
His defence of Grecian cross against Turkish crescent did
not imply that he took for a symbol of liberty the ensign
of the Christian faith, the banner of Constantine and of
Torquemada, under which had fought and Conquered such
192 NOTES OW THE TEXT OF SAEZZZY.
ſ
recruits, and with such arms, as the “paramour” of
Dante's Church, who begot on the body of that bride no
less hopeful and helpful an offspring than the Holy Inqui-
sition. Such workings of the Creed, such developments
of the faith, were before Shelley’s eyes when he wrote ; he
had also about him the reek of as foul an incense going
up from the priests of that day to their Ferdinand or their
George as those of ours have ever sent up to Bonaparte
or to Bourbon of their own, mixing with the smell of battle-
smoke and blood the more fetid fumes of prayer and praise;
and wide as is the gap between his first and his last man-
ner, great as is the leap from “ Queen Mab "to “ Hellas,”
the passage of five years had not transformed or worn out
the “philanthropist, democrat, and atheist” of 1816. For
thus he signed himself in the Swiss album, not merely as
â0soc ; and the cause or provocation is clear enough ; for
on the same leaf there appears just above his signature an
entry by some one who saw fit here to give vent to an
outbreak of overflowing foolery, flagrant and fervid with .
the godly grease and rancid religion of a conventicle ;
some folly about the Alps, God, glory, beneficence,
witness of nature to this or that divine thing or person,
and such-like matter. A little below is the name of
Shelley, with this verse attached — -
“eiul (pixáv0patros 6muokpárticós T' &0eós Te.”
I copy the spelling with all due regret and horror, but
not without rejoicing on his account that Shelley was
clear of Eton when he committed this verse, and had
* “L’amoroso drudo
Della ſede cristiana.” Aaradiso, xii. 55.
MozAS OW THE ZEx7 OF SAEZZZY. 193
now for critic or commentator a Gifford only in place of
a Keate." The remarks on this entry added by Christian
pilgrims who came after are, in the phrase of the archetypal
Pecksniff, “very soothing.” One of these, I think,
observes, with a pleasant pungency of originality, that
the fool hath said in his heart—we have seen what.
Most of the emendations or solutions offered by Mr.
Rossetti of corrupt or obscure passages in the “Revolt of
Islam ” seem to me probable and sound ; but in this
Veſse—
“Gestures and looks, such as in whirlwinds bore,
Which might not be withstood’—
I take the verb to be used in the absolute not the active
sense—“bore onward or forward; ” this use of the word
here is a somewhat ungraceful sign of haste, but makes
clear a passage otherwise impracticably dense and chaotic.
Before passing from this poem, I have to express a hope
that a final edition of Shelley's works will some day, rather
sooner than later, restore to it the proper title and the
genuine text. Every change made in it was forced upon
the author by pressure from without ; and every change is
for the worse. Has no reader ever asked himself what can
be the meaning of the second title? What is the revolt
of Islam? Islam is not put forward as the sole creed of
A reference to the Eton Lists has shown me the truth of what I
had long suspected, that the school-days of Shelley must have ended
before the beginning of Dr. Keate’s reign as Head Master. In
effect, I find that Shelley, then a fifth form boy, left in 1808, and
that the Head Mastership of Dr. Keate began in 1809. The jocu-
larities, therefore, of Mr. Hogg as to the mutual relations of
Shelley and the “Old Boy” prove to be like most of his other jests
—as baseless as they are pointless.
O
194 NOTES ON THE TEXT OF SAF//EY.
the tyrants and slaves who play their parts here with such
frank ferocity ; Persian and Indian, Christian and Ma-
h9metan mythologies are massed together for attack.
And, certainly Islam is not, as the rules of language
would imply, the creed of the insurgents." Could the
phrase “revolt of the Christians” be taken to signify a .
revolt against the Christians? There is at least meaning
in the first title—“Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution
of the Golden City.” Readers may prefer a text which
makes hero and heroine strangers in blood, but the fact
remains that Shelley saw fit to make them brother and
sister, and to defend their union as essentially innocent
even if socially condemnable. The letters printed in the
“Shelley Memorials” show with what staunch resolution
he clung to this point, when beaten upon by remonstrance
from all sides. This most singular of his social and
ethical heresies was indeed never quite thrown over.
“Incest,” he wrote in 1819 to Mrs. Gisborne, with
reference to Calderon's tragic treatment of the story of
Amnon and Tamar, “ is, like many other incorrect things,
a very poetical circumstance. It may be the excess of
love or hate. It may be the defiance of everything for
the sake of another, which clothes itself in the glory of the
highest heroism ; or it may be that cynical rage which,
* It may be objected that the creed from which the insurgent
population has been delivered by the preaching of Laon and Cythma
was that of Islam, and that the word is here used to express not
the doctrine itself, but the mass of men or nations reared in the
belief or tradition of that doctrine. This use may doubtless be per-
missible, and does afford a reasonable sense to the later title of the
poem ; but the original title as well as the original text still seems
to me preferable.
AVOTES ON Z HE ZEXT OF SAEZZZY. 195
\
confounding the good and bad in existing opinions,
breaks through them for the purpose of rioting in selfish-
ness and antipathy;” the one he had painted in “Laon
and Cythna,” the other in the “Cenci.” And in that
absurd abortion of a book which would discredit any
man's boyhood, not to speak of Shelley's—“St. Irvyne,
or the Rosicrucian’’—the unfledged and half-hatched bird
of paradise had uttered a weak note to the same tune.
The only thing our memory carries away after that
rubbish has been handled and sifted is the proof given in
one passage that Shelley felt thus early some attraction to
this subject; which is indeed suggestive and fruitful
enough of possible tragic effect. It is noticeable that he
has never cited or referred to the magnificent masterpiece
of Ford's genius. Those who please may deplore or may
applaud this proclivity; but the student must at any rate
accept and take account of it, for the influence permeates
much of Shelley's verse with a thin but clear under-
current of feeling and allusion. The rarity of the can-
celled edition of “Laon and Cythna’’ has been exagge-
rated by fraudulent or ignorant assertions. Besides my
own copy, I have known of others enough at least to refute
the fiction that there are but three in the world. I give
but one proof among many of the injury done to the poem
by minor changes of reading. In the thirtieth stanza of
the twelfth canto we now read,
“Therefore ye shall behold
How those who love, yet fear not, dare to die; ”
where the languid tautology of this verse impairs the
force of a noble passage ; the genuine reading is this :
O 2
196 NOTES ON THE ZEXZ OF SAEZZE Y.
“Therefore ye shall behold 4
How Atheists and Republicans can die.” "
Such throughout was the process by which the more
outspoken verses of a poem Outspoken enough through-
out were weakened and disfigured. Remembering by
what forcible extortion of assent a reluctant admission of
these changes was wrung from the poet, we must hope
now to have back his own fresher and clearer words in
their first fullness and freedom.
The passage cited from “Alastor” is, I believe,
corrupt, but I cannot accept the Critic's proposed change
of punctuation. Here are the words disputed:—
“On every side now rose
Rocks which in unimaginable forms
Lifted their black and barren pinnacles
In the light of evening, and its precipice
Obscuring the ravine disclosed above
"Mid toppling stones, black gulfs, and yawning streams,” &c.
Mr. Rossetti in evident desperation would rearrange the
last lines thus : —
“And—its precipice.
Obscuring—the ravine disclosed above,” &c.
“ i.e.” (he adds), “the rocks, obscuring the precipice (the
precipitous descent) of the ravine, disclosed said ravine
Overhead.”
This I must say is intolerable, and impossible. If the
words could be wrenched and racked into such a meaning,
* This reading among others has been restored by Mr. Rossetti
in the only critical edition of Shelley which has yet been given to
the world; and the gain in every such instance is so manifest that
we are more than ever impelled to demand a full and final restoration
of the complete and uncorrupted text as it came from the hands of
the author. - -
MOZA'S OW ZZZZ ZZX7" OA' SAMEZZZY. 197
we should have here from one of the mightiest masters of
language the most monstrous example on record of verbal
deformity, of distorted and convulsed inversion or per-
version of words. I suspect the word “its * to be wrong,
and either a blind slip of the pen or a printer's error. If
it is not, and we are to assume that there is any break in
the sentence, the parenthesis must surely extend thus far—
“its precipice obscuring the ravine”—i.e., the rocks
opened or “disclosed" where the precipice above the
ravine obscured it. But I take “disclosed” to be the
participle; “its precipice darkened the ravine (which was)
disclosed above.” Then the sentence is left hanging loose
and ragged, short by a line at least, and never wound up
to any end at all. Such a sentence we too certainly find
Once at least in the “Prometheus Unbound” (II. 4):—
“Who made that sense which, when the winds of spring
In rarest visitation, or the voice
Of one beloved heard in youth alone,
(A line waſzążng)
Fills the faint eyes with falling tears?” &c.
It is waste of time to attempt any patching or furbish-
ing of this passage by excision or substitution. Perhaps
the author never observed what a gap was left in sense and
grammar. As it is, we can. Only note the Omission or
oversight and pass on ; unless we should please or dare
to slip in by way of complement some verse of our own
devising ; which happily no one has done or is like to do.
The “Prometheus Unbound” has this among other
and better things in common with its AEschylean models,
that we want now and then a scholiast for interpreter,
having at times to read it as we might read for instance
198 NOTES ON THE ZEx7 OF SHEZZZY.
the “Suppliants,” and lacking a critic to “cure the halt
and maimed,” as Mr. Browning says of that glorious and
hapless poem whose godlike grace and heroic beauty So
many readers have more or less passed over with half a
recognition, for no fault but its misfortune. I shall touch
but on one or two points of dispute in the text as we find
it; and first on this (II. 4):—
‘‘Till marble grew divine,
And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see
Reflected in their race, behold, and perish.”
The simplest explanation here possible is, I believe,
the right. Women with child gazing on statues (say on
the Venus of Melos) bring forth children like them—
children whose features reflect the passion of the gaze
and perfection of the sculptured beauty; men, seeing,
are consumed with love ; “perish’ meaning simply
“deperire ; ” compare Virgil's well-worn version, “Ut
vidi, ut perii.” I do not think there is any hint of
contrast between transient flesh and immortal marble.
In another passage Mr. Rossetti, with the touch of
true and keen criticism, has given us at least a reasonable
reading in place of one barely explicable. As the text has
hitherto stood, Prometheus says to the Earth-Spirit (I. 1),
“I only know that thou art moving near
And love. How cursed I him 2 °
This I always assumed to mean merely—“That thou art
moving near, and dost love (me),” finding elsewhere
such laxities of remiss writing or printing as that of
“love” for “lovest; ” nor am I now sure that this was
* Landor has noted one instance of this error. Having set a
mark against Milton's use of “empowered” for “empoweredst,”
MoTBS OW THE ZEx7 of SHELLEY 199
not meant, for the “scorn” of Earth and her sons for
Prometheus, of which he has lately complained, is not
even in his eyes real ; he says only that to refuse his re-
quest looks as though they scorned their Saviour. But
this new reading shows keen Critical power and a quick-
eyed ingenuity; -
“And jove—how cursed I him *
though it may be objected that the sentence preceding
comes to an abrupt and feeble close with the close of the
verse; and this I think is conclusive proof that the sug-
gestion, however ingenious, must be decisively rejected.
No conjectural emendation of a great poet's text is ad-
missible which corrects a loose or faulty phrase by the
substitution of one more accurate, but also more feeble
and prosaic. When in the same act the Furies are de-
scribed as
“Blackening the air of night with countless wings,
And hollow underneath like death,”
the critic would take the word “hollow ’’ as an epithet of
“cast” for “castedst,” he adds, “I find the same fault, where I
am as much surprised to find it, in Shelley :
‘7%oat lovest, but ne'er Azeezy love's sad satiety.’”
While at work on the text of Milton, he has given us a rule which
all editors and commentators would be wise to lay to heart in
Shelley's case : “It is safer and more reverential to correct the
punctuation of a great poet than his slightest word.” Mr. Palgrave's
proposal of “sea-girt’” for “Sun-girt city’’ (‘‘Lines written among
the Euganean Hills”) may look plausible, but the new epithet is
feeble, inadequate, inaccurate. Venice is not a sea-girt city; it is
interlaced and interwoven with sea, but not girdled ; pierced through
with water, but not ringed about. Seen by noon from the Euganean
heights, clothed as with the very and visible glory of Italy, it might
seem to Shelley a city girdled with the sunlight, as some Nereid
with the arms of the sun-god.
2 oo AWOZTES OZV ZAZZZ 7'EX 7" OA' SAMAZZZZZY.
the wings, “with wings countless and hollow ; ” wrongly,
as I think. These Furies of Shelley are “phantasms,”
hollow and shadowy emanations of “the all-miscreative
brain : ” guadame simulacra modis fa//entia miris.
The difficult passage at the end of the third act I can
only explain by some such paraphrase as this: “the
thrones, altars, and prisons of the past were now like those
barbaric and monumental figures carved or engraved on
obelisks, which survive the decay of laters structures
raised by their conquerors, tombs and prisons built by
kings of a dynasty more recent than the race which had
reared them ; these they see mouldering round them,
built since their date in honour of the religion and the
pride of past kings and priests, and are themselves now
merely looked on as wonders ; ” thus only, and awk-
wardly, can I make anything of the involved and long-
drawn sentence, unless with Mr. Rossetti we put a full
period after the words “mouldering round,” and start
afresh in this fashion; “those monuments imaged (i.e.,
did image; but I take imaged to be the participle) a dark
faith, to the satisfaction and pride of kings and priests. . .
and are now blit an astonishment.” This again seems to
me inadmissible : I fear the passage must be left more or
less in confusion, the parenthesis being so long between
the two main verbs which prop the sentence (“which look
forth . . . and are now,” &c.); but in fact these large and
stately structures of massive and majestic verse do seem
too often to need more help of clamps and girders, if the
main stones and joists of the fabric are to hold together.
At the close of that transcendant interlude of anti-
phonal music in the fourth act, the Earth takes up and
AWOZTAES OZV ZAZAZ ZTEX 7" OA' SAE/EZZA. V. 2 or
gives back the last notes of the Moon's chant before re-
suming a graver and deeper strain :
(“When the sunset sleeps
Upon its Snow.
THE EARTH.
And the weak day weeps
That it should be so.”)
Mr. Rossetti would add these two last short lines to the
song of the Moon, and make the Earth's part begin at
the words “O gentle Moon, the voice of thy delight,”
&c.; to me there has always seemed to be a sweet and
subtle miracle of music in the text as it stands; but how
much of this effect may be the mere impression of habit
and fancy, the mere fruit of the fondness of years for
these verses as I have always known them, I cannot of
Course judge ; though of course, too, I incline to take
the verdict of my own delight in them."
It may be worth notice that the earliest editions of
Shelley's poems are sometimes accurate in small points
where all others have gone wrong; for example, the first
line of the speech closing the “Prometheus” runs
rightly thus in the first edition —
“This is the day, which down the void abysm,”
while from every later copy in the collected works the
* Here again I must make some partial recantation of the
judgment given in my text. Exquisite as would be the echo of the
parting song of the Moon given back by the deeper tone of the
music of the Earth, I think now that the fantastic beauty of that
single repercussive note would perhaps be out of tune with the
supreme and equable harmony of the whole; and there seems full
reason to attribute this probable misprint to a misreading of the in-
terpolation of these two lines in the manuscript of Shelley.
292 wo.TES ow THE TEx7 of SHELLEY.
word “is” has dropped off. So in the “Cenci" (II. I.)
the Livornese edition of 1819 reads:—
“Then it was I whose inarticulate words -
Fell from my lips, and who with tottering steps
Fled from your presence,” &c.
The later copies drop the word and, thus breaking down
the metre. But this genuine edition reads (IV. 4) with
the later text— f
“Guilty who dares talk of guilt? My lord,” &c.,
giving no authority for the insertion of “to " before
“talk,” which indeed rather weakens the force of em-
phasis in this sudden outbreak of passionate protest.
But in the speech of Marzio (V. 2) it again brings us
right :- -
“Oh, dart,
The terrible resentment of those eyes
On the dead earth !”
In the “Works” we find dread printed in place of dead,
which Mr. Rossetti knew by instinct for the right reading.
Again, at the end of the third act, Shelley's Italian edition,
runs thus –
w ‘‘ ORSINO.
When next we meet—
GIACOMO.
May all be done—and all
Forgotten ; Oh, that I had never been l’”
Surely a better than the current version—
“ORSINO.
When next we meet may all be done
GIACOMO.
And all
Forgotten,” &c.
AWOTES ON 7A/A. ZZXT OF SAFZZZY. 203
The first English edition alone reads (I. I.)—
“Respited me from hell ! So may the devil,” &c.
All others, from the Livornese onward, have let fall, the
word me. These slight things, so tedious to dwell upon,
all help us—and they only can help us—towards a true
text of our greatest modern poet. In the case of AEschylus
or of Shakespeare, such light crumbs and dry husks would
be held precious as grains of gold. I have but a few
more to glean and reserve or reject as they seem worth.
I would certainly not agree to alter without authority
that admirable verse in the fragment on Leonardo's
“Medusa ; ” -
“Below, far lands are seen tremblingly ; ”
the intense effect of sound and accent is too rare a thing
to lose or change. To shift the stress of a verse and
elongate an elided syllable must prove either a triumph of
musical instinct or a dissonant and hateful failure. Here
the triumphant skill and subtle sense of Shelley's ear for
metre give special charm to the delicate daring of his
verse, which would be lost were we to read “the far
lands,” even did this not make the line otherwise im-
metrical. In some other cases cited by Mr. Rossetti
there may be room and reason for cutting out or slipping
in a syllable or so. His corrections of text in the im-
perfect “Triumph of Life” seem to me worthy of all
grateful acceptance : but the suggestion of “mouthless”
for “monthless,” in the fragment of a stanza rejected from
the “Adonais,” is somewhat grotesque. “Time's month-
less torrent,” if these were indeed Shelley's deliberate
word; must mean the eternal course of time without end
204 Mozes ow THE ZEx7 of SHEZZZY
or beginning, which passes without taking account as we
do of years or months, days or hours. The last stanza of
the “Medusa " is a mere sketch, not ripe for criticism or
correction; so is the fragment of a dirge—“Rough wind,
that moanest loud.”
In the second line of the ninety-seventh stanza of the
translated “Hymn to Mercury,”
“Thus King Apollo loved the child of May
In truth, and Jove covered them with love and joy,”
for “covered” we ought evidently to read “clothed.”
In the translation of the “Cyclops,” the semichorus
(v. 495–502 of the Greek text) is confused and inaccu-
rate as we now read it, and the change of “ those ’’ and
“there” into “thou” is in each case a clear gain as far
as the English text is concerned, though it brings us no
nearer to the Greek ; which runs literally thus:—
“Happy he who shouts his song
To the grape's dear fountain-springs,
For a revel laid along,
Close in arms a loved man grasping,
And on spread couch-coverings
Some soft woman-blossom clasping,
Sleek, with love-locks oiled all o'er,
Who, he cries, will often me her door 3'
Shelley, working from an uncorrected text, has taken
£av06v (the old reading for üv6oc or káA\oc) as adjective
to 360 rpvyov, and has washed off from the woman's hair
the sweet oil poured over the man's curls. His version,
were it admissible in the eyes of more critical editors,
would add grace to the charm of a most graceful strophe—
that is, up to the last line, here simply misconstrued ;
but he has strayed again somewhat too far in his render-
AVOTES OW THE ZEXT OF SHEZZEY. 205.
ing of the semichorus antiphonal to this ; when Ulysses,
hailed by the Cyclops, follows him out with the wine-skin,
and the Chorus, secretly reassured and slily hopeful, sings.
to this ambiguous effect:-
“Fair, with fair looks prosperous,
Comes he from the halls inside;
One good friend is friends with us.
For thy body fair the lamp *
Waits alight—come, tender bride—
In the caverns dewy-damp :
And thine head shall soon be bound
Not with single-coloured garlands round.”
I translate from Dindorf's text; that given by Mr.
Paley might run thus in English :—
** There awaits thy flesh a lamp
Of fierce fire, no tender bride,” &c.
The “lamp" would then be, of course, the firebrand
prepared to blind Polyphemus, and the two last lines, in
the words of the editor (vol. iii. p. 509), “mean that in
the place of a crown of myrtle and roses a ring of gory
hue shall encircle his brows.” In either case I suppose
the ironic allusions to the torch of marriage and the
marriage-wreath of divers colours must be the same.
There is no gap in the translation at v. 675, and the
asterisks inserted after the words “Nowhere, O Cyclops,”
would be better away. The passage describing the
cookery of Polyphemus (vv. 390–395) is difficult and
debateable enough, but less hard than the desperate
version of Shelley, who in his note “confesses that he
does not understand this.” The reading “four amphorae,”
just above, is a misprint or slip of the pen for “ten ; ” the
next few words are curiously tumbled together and mis-
206 WoZES ON THE ZEx7 OF SAEZZZY.
construed. Shelley has not distinguished the drinking-
can or cup (akūqoc) wrought of ivy-wood, or carved round
with ivy-leaves, from the ninety-gallon bowl (sparip) into
which the Cyclops had just milked his cows. Read :-
“Then he milked the cows,
And, pouring in the white milk, filled a bowl
That might have held ten amphorae ; and by it
He set himself an ivy-carven cup—
Three cubits wide and four in depth it seemed—
[And set a brass pot on the fire to boil]"
And spits made out of blackthorn shoots, with tips
Burnt hard in fire, and planed in the other parts
Smooth with a pruning-hook ; and huge blood-bowls
AEtnaean, set for the axe's edge to fill.” &
Or if a paysia can mean the axes themselves, and
yvá6ovg be read for yvá001c ;
“And the under-jaws
Of axes, huge AEtnaean slaughtering-tools.”
I do not see the meaning of those asterisks marking
Omission where omission is none, between the opening
speech of Silenus and the parode. Of this Shelley has
only translated the strophe and the latter part of the
epode. Why the intervening verses were omitted it is
impossible to say. In default of the better version he
has begrudged us. I offer this by way of makeshift, follow-
ing the exact order and cadence of rhymes observed by
Shelley. After the call to the she-goat” (which he
* This line seems misplaced here, and has been marked as such
by later editors. • ,
* Shelley seems to have overlooked the sex of the goat whom
the Satyrs are calling back to give suck to her young. In his text
the words “he of race divine,” and “father of the flocks,” should
be altered to “she” and “mother.”
MozAS ow THE ZEx7 of SHEZZZY. 207
translates “Get along;" it should rather be “Come,” as
the shout is not meant to scare, but to reclaim) the song
continues—a literal goat-song for Once :-
“ Ease your udders milk-distent,
Take the young ones to the teat,
Left in yearlings' penfolds pent ;
Now the sleepy midday bleat
Of your sucklings calls you home ;
Come to fold then, will you ? come
From the full-flowered pasture-grasses
Up in AEtna's rock-strewn passes.
Here no Bacchus, no dance comes
Here, nor Maenads thyrse-bearing,
Nor glad clang of kettledrums,
Nor by well or running spring
Drops of pale bright wine; nor now
With the nymphs on Nysa’s brow
An Iacchic melody
To the golden Aphrodite
AXo I lift,” &c.
|Read do for will, which stands in Shelley's text
through mere misreading of the passage ; it was doubt-
less wrongly pointed in the copy by which he worked.
There is another omission after verse 165, more
accountable than this ; whether any part of Shelley's
version was struck out or not in the printing we have not
‘been told. Perhaps the passage, essential as it is to the
continuity of the scene, may be borne with in this
reduced and softened form. After the verse—“I would
give All that the Cyclops feed upon their mountains,”—
add :
“And pitch into the brine off some white cliff,
Having got once well drunk and cleared my brows.
208 NOTES ON 7:HE ZEx7 of SHEzzzy.
How mad is he whom drinking makes not glad ' '
For drink means strength renewed for love-making,
º: +: + 3: <& 4:
+ .# *; aye, dancing too,
Aye, and forgetfulness of ills. What then,
Shall I not buy me” such a drink, and bid
Fool Cyclops with his one mid eye go hang?” .
In this laudable frame of mind the Falstaff of Olympus
makes off on his sheep-stealing errand; and the Chorus,
which hitherto has modestly stood aside and left the
talking to him, now first addresses the new-comer :-
“Hear you, Ulysses, we would talk with you.
ULysses. *
Well, on then, as you come like friends to a friend.
CHORUS.
Ye have taken Troy, and laid your hands on Helen P
ULYSSES. -
And utterly destroyed the race of Priam.”
- CHORUS.
Well, when ye had got the girl then, did ye not
All of you take your sport with her in turn,
Seeing she delights in marrying many men P
Tae wanton wretch | * &c.
* Rabelais gives an admirable version of this line (Book iv. ch.
65): ‘‘Veritablement, il est escript par vostre beau Euripides, et le
dict Silenus, beuveur memorable ;
Furieux est, de bon sens ne jouist,
Quiconques boyt et ne s'en resjouist.”
* Or, if we retain the reading oi kvvigoual instead of admitting
this of oil, &phorouai, x -
“Shall I not worship such a drink,” &c.,
for we are told to take Kvvely here in the sense of Tpogkvveiv, or I
should render it simply,
; “Shall I not kiss a drink like this P”
* These two lines are in Shelley's text.
MOZZS OW ZHAE ZEXT OF SHEZZZY. 209
After this discussion of Helen by the satyrs, Silenus
returns with his plunder ; his speech begins (v. 188) “See,
here are sheep,” &c. Shelley, following the older editions,
puts into his mouth all this last answer of the Chorus to
Ulysses, with its exquisite satyric moralising on feminine
levity. At the entrance of the Cyclops there is some
misconstruction:—
‘‘SILENUS. 2^
What ho assistance, comrades, haste, assistance 1
CYCLOPS.
What is this tumult?”
The line given to Silenus belongs to the Cyclops
as he bursts in upon the stage, and might rather be
rendered:—
“Hold hard, let’s see here, lend a hand : what's this?
What sloth 2 what rioting P”
At verse 220 there is another break; Silenus has
said, “Anything you like, only don’t drink me up ; ” and
the Cyclops, as delicate a monster as Caliban, replies:–
“By no means, for you’d be the death of me
Then, tumbling in my belly, with your tricks.”
At verse 345, read, to fill up the gap at the end of the
Cyclops' speech —
“So creep in quick, to stand about the shrine
O' the god o' the cave and feast me fairly full.”
The god of the cave is explained to be, as above,
“Myself
And this great belly, first of deities.”
Half a line is missed at v. 381 :-—
P
aro woTES ON THE ZEx7 of SHEZZZY.
- “ Unhappy man
How was it with you, then, ſaring like this?”
The next break is at v. 439; if the verses here omitted
be spurious, there is no need to retain the asterisks.
Anyhow they can only be given thus trimmed for trans-
lation and curtailed into decency; the satyrs, though
perforce living virtuously in a state of servitude, retain
their natural amativeness. Read :-
“And leave for ever
. The impious Cyclops : for this long time now
Our poor dear flesh has lived a widower's life
Toward women, as we can’t give ſlim the slip.”
At v. 585 there is a point of interrogation missed, and
the dialogue has not all its original briskness and ease of
motion. Here the Cyclops—now, in Trinculo's phrase,
“a howling monster ; a drunken monster”—shows his
affection for Silenus, as Caliban in the like case shows
his adoration of Stephano. The parallel would be closer
if Caliban had met Falstaff, but the humour of the two
scenes is much alike. It must be remembered that “the
poor monster's in drink; an abominable monster | *
Read — -
“No, I’ll no kissing ; let the Graces tempt me ;
I can do well enough with Ganymede here,
Gloriously, by the Graces ! where are women
Worth such sweet youths as this now P”
SILENUS.
Polypheme,
Am Z Jove's Ganymede, then P
* “A most ridiculous monster to make a wonder of a poor
drunkard.” (Tempesi, ii. 2.)
But poor old Silenus is now as sober or semi-sober as Trinculo.
AVOTES ON THE TEXT OF SAEZZEY. 211
CYCLOPS.
Yes, by Jove
And thus I snatch you off from Dardanus.
SILENUS.
I’m done for, boys, I’m come to fearſul grief.
CHORUS.
What I wrangle and flout your lover when he's drunk?
SILENUS.
Alack I’m like to find it bitter drink.”
I know that he who ventures to touch the text of
Shelley should keep always before his eyes the fate of
Uzza, and the curse denounced on him who adds to or
takes from the sacred writings so much as a word ; if I
too have laid a presumptuous hand upon the ark,
tampered rashly with the inspired canon of scripture, I
can only put forward the plea found in that former case
unavailing, that I meant but to prop the shaken vessel,
to clear the blotted records, which contain the divine
treasure; putting my trust in judges of more than Jewish
or godlike tolerance. Were it for me to pass sentence, I
would say of the very rashest of possible commentators
that his errors, though they were many, should be forgiven,
if he loved much. While revising the version of the
“Cyclops.” I have felt again, and more keenly, the old
delight of wonder at its matchless grace of unapproachable
beauty, its strength, ease, delicate simplicity and suffi-
ciency; the birthmark and native quality of all Shelley's
translations. I have retouched nothing but one or two
Confused lines ; for who can hope, even though there be
here and there a slip in the rendering, to supply anything
as good in place of a cancelled verse of his P What I have
IP 2
212 AWOTES ON 7"HE 7"EX7" OA' SAMEZZA. V.
ventured to retranslate in full, I never designed to supplant
the text, but merely to elucidate. These small and slow
labours of verbal criticism are the best returns we can
make, the best tribute we can pay to a great man’s work ;
and no man need think that a waste of his time, which
so often employed the hours and the minds of Milton and
of Landor. It is easier to dilate at length on the excel-
lence of a man’s genius than to sift and test it by proof
of syllable and letter, that so the next student may at least
find a clear and certain text to study, without the trouble
of deciphering a faded palimpsest or refitting a broken
puzzle. And we have especial need of accuracy and
fullness of text when the text is Shelley's. His mark is
burnt in more deeply and more durably upon men's minds
than that of any among the great poets of his day. Of
these, Coleridge and Keats set no such mark on the spirit
of their readers; they left simple and perfect examples
of work absolutely faultless, visibly unsurpassable, self-
resumed and self-content. Byron was first to stamp with
his signet the thought and feeling of one kind of men ;
then Wordsworth in turn set his mark on a different kind.
But the one for want of depth and sense and harmony,
the other for want of heat and eyesight and lifeblood,
and both for want of a truer force and a truer breadth of
spirit, failed to impress upon all time any such abiding
sign of their passage and their power, any such inevitable
* Coleridge's personal influence as preacher or professor of
ghostly dialectics and marshlight theosophy (brighter indeed than
the bedroom rushlights about it, but no star or Sun) was a thing
distinct from his doings as a poet. There was no more direct work
done by his mere verse than by the mere verse of Keats.
AWOTES ON 7HAE ZZXT OF SHEZZEy. 213
and ineffaceable mark to bear witness of their work, as
Dante or Milton, Goethe or Shelley, each in his special
fashion.
It is no bad way of testing an opinion held vaguely
but sincerely to take it up and rub it, as it were, against
the opinion of some one else, who is clearly worth
agreeing with or disagreeing. Mr. Arnold, with whose
clear and critical spirit it is always good to come in con-
tact, as disciple or as dissenter, has twice spoken of Shelley,
each time, as I think, putting forth a brilliant error, shot
through and spotted with glimpses of truth. Byron and
Shelley, he says, “two members of the aristocratic class,”
alone in their day, strove “to apply the modern spirit” to
English literature. “Aristocracies are, as such, naturally
impenetrable by ideas; but their individual members
have a high Courage and a turn for breaking bounds ; and
a man of genius, who is the born child of the idea, happen-
ing to be born in the aristocratic ranks, chafes against the
obstacles which prevent him from freely developing it.”
To the truth of this he might have cited a third witness;
for of the English poets then living, three only were
children of the social or political idea, strong enough to
breathe and work in the air of revolution, to wrestle with
change and hold fast the new liberty, to believe at all in
the godhead of people or peoples, in the absolute right
and want of the world, equality of justice, of work and
truth and life ; and these three came all out of the same
rank, were all born into one social sect, men of historic
blood and name, having nothing to ask of revolution,
nothing (as the phrase is now) to gain by freedom, but
leave to love and serve the light for the light's sake.
|
214 AWOTES OW ZZZZ 7'EX7" OA' SAMEZZZY.
Landor, who died last, was eldest, and Shelley, who died
first, was youngest of the three. Each stood alike apart
; from the rest, far unlike as each was to the other two ; not, .
like Coleridge, blind to the things of the time, nor, like
- Keats, practically alien to all things but art; and leaving
to Southeyor Wordsworth the official laurels and loyalties
of courtly content and satisfied compliance. Out of their
rank the Georges could raise no recruits to beat the drum
of prose or blow the bagpipes of verse in any royal and
constitutional procession towards nuptial or funereal
goal."
So far we must go with Mr. Arnold ; but I cannot
follow him when he adds that Byron and Shelley failed in
their attempt; that the best “literary creation * of their
time, work “ far more solid and complete than theirs,” was
; due to men in whom the new spirit was dead or was un-
born ; that, therefore, “their names will be greater than
their writings.” First, I protest against the bracketing of
the two names. With all reserve of reverence for the
noble genius and memory of Byron, I can no more accept
him as a poet equal or even akin to Shelley on any side
* The one kindly attempt of Landor to fill Southey’s place for
him when disabled could scarcely have proved acceptable to his.
friend's official employers.
“But since thou liest sick at heart
And worn with years, some little part
Of thy hard office let me try,
Tho' inexpert was always I
7% toss the Zitter of Westphalianz swine *
Arom under human to above divine.”—(Works, vol. ii. p. 654.)
“Call you that backing of your friends "–when they happen to
be laureates?
AWOZES ON THE TEXT OF SHEZZEy. 215
º
but one, than I could imagine. Shelley endowed with the |
various, fearless, keen-eyed, and triumphant energy which
makes the greatest of Byron's works so great. With all
his glory of ardour and vigour and humour, Byron was a
singer who could not sing; Shelley outsang all poets on
record but some two or three throughout all time ; his
depths and heights of inner and outer music are as divine
as nature's, and not sooner exhaustible. He was alone
the perfect singing-god ; his thoughts, words, deeds, all
Sang together. This between two singing-men is a dis-
tinction of some significance ; and must be, until the in-
articulate poets and their articulate outriders have put
down singing-men altogether as unrealities, inexpedient
if not afflictive in the commonwealth of M. Proudhon and
IMr. Carlyle. Till the dawn of that “most desired hour,
more loved and lovely than all its sisters,” these un-
blessed generations will continue to note the difference,
and take some account of it. Again, though in some
sense a “child of the idea,” Byron is but a foundling or
bastard child; Shelley is born heir, and has it by birth-
right ; to Byron it is a charitable nurse, to Shelley a
natural mother. All the more praise, it may be said, to
Byron for having seen so much as he did and served so
loyally. Be it so then ; but let not his imperfect and
intermittent service, noble and helpful now, and now
alloyed with baser temper or broken short through sloth
or spite or habit, be set beside the flawless work and
perfect service of Shelley. His whole heart and mind,
his whole soul and strength, Byron could not give to the
idea at all ; neither to art, nor freedom, nor any faith
whatever. His life's work therefore falls as short of the
!
216 AWOTES OAV ZAZA, ZTAEX 7" OA' SAE/AE///º V.
standard of Shelley's as of Goethe's work. To compare
“Cain’’ with “Prometheus,” the “Prophecy of Dante”
with the “Ode to Naples,” is to compare “Manfred”
with “Faust.” Shelley was born a son and soldier of
light, an archangel winged and weaponed for angel's work.
Byron, with a noble admixture of brighter and purer
blood, had in him a cross of the true Philistine breed.
There is no other word than this yet devised which
will carry the exact weight of meaning wanted. The use
of it is however, it seems, offensive to certain persons;
one writer has actually signed his name to an article in
which he asserts that Mr. Matthew Arnold and I after
him use or abuse it as a reproachful synonym for the
name of Christian. Anonymous fiction of this kind no
man will notice who respects the truth or himself; but
some exposition of the meaning of words may be per-
missible and serviceable for the correction of an error
or the exposure of a falsehood. It is not the correction
of an error that is for the minute my task. This writer,
whose article was signed with the name of Peter Bayne,
undertakes the defence of his gods in heaven above and
on earth beneath against Mr. Arnold and myself with
engines and artillery of a somewhat shaky and explosive
kind. For myself, it appears that I, “who am refined ”
(fesſe Bayne) “in my language, and have quite the manners
of a gentleman’’ (this I fear is the scathing expression of
a pungent irony), have denounced the whole race of
“Christians” at one fell swoop as “noisome Philistines;”
exceeding Mr. Arnold by the addition of an epithet. I
am not concerned to dispute the degrees of gentility with
a falsifier of the sense of words, to question the breeding
AWOTES ON THE TEXT OF SAEZZE Y. 217
$:
or pass sentence on the manners of a public and self-
exposed libeller. I would only remark that when the
reader is led or driven off the bare highway of truth it is
but fair to afford him some morsel of slander so spiced
and Sauced that it may perhaps slip glibly down some
one's gullet without sticking, some palatable and digest-
ible condiment of calumny, some pleasanter pasture, at
least, than a twice-cooked and twice-chewed mess of
thistles: for it cannot be certain that he will by some
divine inborn instinct prefer that diet to any other. Mr.
Dayne's Calumnies are somewhat dry, a little flat and
hard; Crabtree, in this revival of Sheridan's play, moves
clumsily in the coarse livery of slanderin undress, without
the brocade and perfume of Backbite, the genial grace of
Mrs. Candour, or the sinewy and flexible facility of Snake.
His crude fiction wants breadth, delicacy, sureness of
touch ; Tartuffe would scarcely have taken him on trial
as a fellow-servant with Laurent. In one point he is
liker another once famous figure in the drama. The valet
in Farquhar's comedy knew when people were talking of
him, “they laughed so consumedly.” Mr. Peter Bayne
has sounded a baser string of humility than the valet.
When he does but scent or suspect anywhere a contemp-
tuous allusion, he knows “they must be talking,” not of
him, but of the gods of his worship. Scrub knew his own
place ; but Mr. Bayne knows the place of his gods ; and
indeed, if we judge of a deity by his worshippers, he may
be right in thinking that what he adores must be naturally
liable to men's contempt. He remarks, with cruelly
satirical reference to my alleged heresies and audacities in .
the choice of guides and teachers not chosen to his mind,
…”
§ {
218 MOZA'S OW THE TEXT OF SAEZZEy.
that my “years and achievements make it fitting” for me
“to £oint the ſinger of scorn at ” figures enthroned in the
pantheon of his moral mythology. What may be the
years and what the achievements of Mr. Peter Bayne I
know not ; but I do know that the years of Nestor and
the achievements of Napoleon would not suffice to ex-
* tenuate fatuity on the one hand and false witness on
the other.
. A slandered man may, if he please, claim leave to
ke (though he may not care to make) occasion in
passing to set a mark on the calumniator; but he will
hardly care to take into his hands the hangman's Office of
applying the iron or the lash. I have done, and return
without apology from mean to higher matters. Of the
relation between Shelley and Byron I have here no more .
to say ; but before ending these notes I find yet another
point or so to touch upon. Perhaps to every student of
any one among the greater poets there seems to be some-
* thing in his work not yet recognised by other students,
some secret power or beauty reserved for his research. I
do not think that justice has yet been done to Shelley as
to some among his peers, in all details and from every
side. Mr. Arnold, in my view, misconceives and mis-
judges him not less when set against Keats than when
bracketed with Byron. Keats has indeed a divine magic
of language applied to nature ; here he is unapproachable ;
this is his throne, and he may bid all kings of song come
bow to it. But his ground is not Shelley's ground ; they
do not run in the same race at all. The “Ode to Autumn,”
among other such poems of Keats, renders nature as no
man but Keats ever could. Such poems as the “Lines
AVOTES ON THE TEXT OF SHAEZZZY. 219
written among the Euganean Hills” cannot compete with
it. But do they compete with it? The poem of Keats,
Mr. Arnold says, “renders Nature; ” the poem of Shelley
“fries ſo render her.” It is this that I deny. What
Shelley tries to do he does; and he does not try to do.
the same thing as Keats. The comparison is as empty
and profitless as one between the sonnets of Shakespeare
and the sonnets of Milton. Shelley never in his life wrote
a poem of that exquisite contraction ańd completeness,
within that round and perfect limit. This poem of th
Euganean Hills is no piece of spiritual sculpture or
painting after the life of natural things. I do not pretend
to assign it a higher or a lower place; I say simply that
its place is not the same. It is a rhapsody of thought and
feeling coloured by contact with nature, but not born of
the contact; and such as it is all Shelley's work is, even
when most vague and vast in its elemental scope of
labour and of aim. A soul as great as the world lays
hold on the things of the world ; on all life of plants, and "
beasts, and men ; on all likeness of time, and death, and
good things and evil. His aim is rather to render the
effect of a thing than a thing itself; the Soul and spirit
of life rather than the living form, the growth rather
than the thing grown. And herein he too is un-
approachable.
Other and lesser critics than Mr. Arnold have taxed
Shelley with a want of dramatic power upon the cha-
racters and passions of men. While writing these notes
I have come across the way of such an One, who bids
us notice how superior in truth and subtlety is Mr.
Browning's study of Guido Franceschini to Shelley's of
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i.
!
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220 AWOZTAS OW ZEATE 7'EX7" OA' Sazzzzy'
Count Cenci. Here again a comparison is patched up
between two things utterly unamenable to the same rule.
The wonderful figure so cunningly drawn and coloured
by Mr. Browning is a model of intense and punctilious
realism." Every nerve of the mind is touched by the
patient scalpel, every vein and joint of the subtle ānd in-
tricate spirit divided and laid bare. A close and dumb
soul compelled into speech by mere struggle and stress
of things labours in literal translation and accurate agony
at the lips of Guido. This scientific veracity which
unbuilds and rebuilds the whole structure of spirit,
, thought by thought and touch by touch, till "the final
splendour of solution is achieved, and the consummate
labour made perfect from key-stone to coping-stone, is so
- ºriumphant a thing that on its own ground it can be
matched by no poet ; to match it we must look back to
Balzac. Shelley worked by other rules to another end :
with the sculptor's touch rather than the anatomist's.
But his figure of Cenci is not the less accurate for its
breadth of handling. We might as well consign Manon
Lescaut to a place below Emma Bovary, because Prévost
wrought out his immortal study with broader lines and
fewer colours than Flaubert. A figure may be ideal and
- yet accurate, realistic and yet untrue, as a fact not
thoroughly fathomed may be in effect a falsehood.
There is a far stronger cross of the ideal in the realism of
* The word realism has a higher and a baser sense ; there is the
grand spiritual realism of Balzac or Browning, as well as the crude
and facile realism, or vulgarism rather, of writers wanting alike in
spirit and in form. It is so often used as a term of reproach on one
side, on the other as a boastful watchword, that when taken as a
simple term of definition it may perhaps be misconstrued.
- ***
, AWOZTAES O/V ZTAZAZ ZTEXT OA' SAMAZZ, ZAZ V. 22 I
AEschylus or Shakespeare than runs through the work of
the great modern realists. What was the latent breadth
or depth of Shelley's dramatic genius we cannot say, as
he had not time himself to know. It is incomplete in
the “Cenci; ” for example, in the figure of Orsino the
lines are not cut sharp and deep enough ; he is drawn too
apé easily,and lightly ; the picture looks thin and shadowy
beside the vivid image we get from the old report of the
Cenci trial. That sketch of Monsignor Guerra, the tall
delicate young priest, with long curls and courtly graces,
playing on Crime as on a lute with fine fingers used to
music-making, might have been thrown out in keen
relief against the great figure of Cenci; a Caponsacchi
turned ignoble instead of noble, and as well worth
drawing had the hand been there to draw. As it is, he s-
plays but a poor part, borne up only by the sweet strength
of Shelley's verse. But is Cenci himself the mere and
monstrous embodiment of evil made flesh, the irrational
and soulless mask of lust and cruelty, that critics have
called him? Is he in effect as inanimate and unreal as
Guido is real and alive? To me, putting aside the dif-
ference' of handling between the schools of which
Shakespeare and Balzac are respectively the heads, the
One seems as true as the other. Cenci, as we see him, is
the full-blown flower, the accomplished result of a life
absolute in its luck, in power and success and energetic
enjoyment. His energy is insatiable of emotions, and
has few left to make trial of ; the conscience of this
sharpens and exasperates the temper of his will.
Something within him, born as much of the spirit as the
flesh, is ravenous and restless as fire. To feel his power
t:
222 No.72s ow. THE ZEx7 of SHEZZZY
by dint of hard use is a need of his nature; “his soul,
which is a scourge,” must needs smite to know itself alive
and taste its strength : too strong for Satiety or collapse,
while life endures his nature must bite and burn as surely
as steel must or flame. What he is, good fortune has
made him—“Strength, health, and pride, and lust, and
length of days.” What Guido Franceschini is, he has
been made by ill fortune. Fed with good things from
his birth, the evil nature in him might have swollen into
the likeness of Cenci's ; as Cenci, crossed and cramped at
every turn of life, with starved energies and shrivelled
lusts, might have shrunk into the shape of Guido, a
pained and thwarted spirit of self-suffering evil. The
one, though drawn with less detail of growth from seed
to fruit, is surely not less conceivable than the other;
but Cenci's is the stronger spirit, the more solid and
rounded nature: he was not one to struggle or fail.
Shelley has made his ruling appetite the lust of strength,
of self-conscious and spiritual power : he has not added
the fleshly lust of pain and subtle animal relish of the
pungent infliction, which was doubtless interfused with
Cenci's sensuous cruelty. But the august and horrible
figure is painted as naturally as nobly ; his rage and his
religion, the loathing that underlies his lust, and the
lust that inflames his loathing ; his hungry abhorrence of
his daughter's beauty of body and soul—(“Beast that
*hou art | *)—his faith in God and fury against good, his
splendid exaltation of Spirit into a passionate and winged
rapture of ardent hatred or of fiery joy, consummate in
that last outbreak as of all the fumes and flames of hell
at once, are no more alien from nature or each other
AWOTES ON 7//E TEXT OF SA/A2ZZA. V. 223
than Guido's subtle Crossings and windings of soul through
backstairs and byways of brute Craft and baser pride,
of barren anger and greed and pain. This is evidence
enough that if Shelley had lived the “Cenci” would not
now be the one great play written in the great manner
of Shakespeare's men that our literature has seen since
the time of these. The proof of power is here as sure
and as clear as in Shelley’s lyric work; he has shown
himself, what the dramatist must needs be, as able to
face the light of hell as of heaven, to handle the fires of
evil as to brighten the beauties of things. This latter work
indeed he preferred, and wrought at it with all the grace
and force of thought and word which give to all his lyrics
the light of a divine life ; but his tragic truth and excel-
lence are as certain and absolute as the sweetness and
the glory of his songs. The mark of his hand, the trick
of his voice, we can always recognise in their clear cha-
racter and individual charm ; but the range is various
from the starry and heavenly heights to the tender and
flowering fields of the world wherein he is god and lord :
with here such a flower to gather as the spinners' song of
Beatrice, and there such a heaven to ascend as the
Prologue to Hellas, which the zealous love of Mr.
Garnett for Shelley has opened for us to enter and
possess for ever; where the pleadings of Christ and
Satan alternate as the rising and setting of stars in the
abyss of luminous sound and Sonorous light. We havč
now but to await the final gift of a perfect and critical
edition of the whole works, the supreme tribute of love ,
and worship yet owing to the master singer of our
modern race and age ; to the poet beloved above all
{
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224 NOTES ON THE ZEXT OF SHEZZZY.
other poets, being beyond all other poets—in one word,
and the only proper word—divine.
NOTE.
Shortly after the publication of these slight and rapid
notes, the appearance of the edition whose advent was
here hopefully invoked gave a fresh impulse and opened
a wider way to the study of Shelley. The ardour and
labour expended on his glorious task by Mr. W. M.
Rossetti must link his name for ever in honourable
association with that of the poet to whom he has done
such loyal and noble service. He has lightened the
darkness that perplexed us at so many turns of a
labyrinth which others had done their best to darken ; he
has delivered all students from the bondage of Medwin
and Hogg : at those muddy springs no future “mental
traveller’” will ever need again to slake or to cheat his
thirst for some dubious drop of information as to how
the god of song might have appeared on earth to the
shepherds or the swineherds of Admetus. He has done
much more than this ; he has had the glory of giving to
the world fresh verse of Shelley's. Whole poems and
priceless fragments, fresh instalments of imperfect but im-
perishable work, we owe to the labour of his love. Often
too he has found means to elucidate and to rectify much
that was corrupt and obscure. For all these benefits he
deserves all the gratitude that can be given by lovers of
Shelley whose love has borne no such fruit and done
no such service as his. Outside the precincts of Grubstreet
NOTES ON THE TEXT OF SHEZZEY 225
no dullness could ignore and no malignity deny the
value of the service done, the greatness of the benefits
conferred. On the other hand, I am impelled, however
unwillingly, to enter my protest against the general prin-
ciple on which the text has been recast and rearranged.
The very slightest change of reading, though it should
be but a change in punctuation, ought never to be offered
without necessity, as it can never be received without
reluctance. To throw over for some new version, though
never so rational or plausible, the text we have by heart, the
words which line by line and letter by letter have grown
as it were apart of ourselves, have worked their way (so to
speak) into the very lifeblood of our thought, the very
core and conscience of our memory, cannot but be
pain and grief to any faithful and loving student. But in
this revision, so far from showing any tenderness or
respect for such feelings as he might have been supposed
to share, Mr. Rossetti has too often handled Shelley, I
will not say as Milton was handled by Bentley, but I
must say as Shakespeare was handled by Steevens. The
punctilious if not pedantic precision which has reformed
the whole scheme of punctuation, doubtless often loose
enough in the original editions, compels us to remark
that the last state of this text is worse than the first.
This edition is beyond praise and beyond price as a book
of reference ; but no One, I should imagine, will ever
read in it for pleasure, while he can procure instead the
loosest and most incorrect of those previously printed.
Throughout the whole five acts of the “Cenci" the reader
is incessantly irritated by such Small but significant
vexations as the substitution of “you” for “thou” or
-- Q
226 NOTES ON THE ZEx7 OF SAEZZEy.
“ thee" for “you,” on some rigid system of regulation to
which the editor himself does not pretend to suppose
that his author ever proposed to conform. Now I cannot
but think that a lesser poet than Shelley might reasonably
be presumed to know better than his editor what he
meant to say, and by what rule or what instinct his hand
was guided as he wrote. To me the tact or instinct
which even in these small matters directed the hand and
determined the choice of Shelley seems so nearly in-
fallible in its exquisite and subtle delicacy, that even if
for once my own taste would have rejected the turn of a
sentence or a phrase which to his taste has seemed
preferable I should undoubtedly consider that he was
likelier to be right than I—at least with regard to his own
work. Of this readjustment of the words “you” and
“thou’ six instances are acknowledged and the principle
of reformation is vindicated in a note; but for the
sentences broken up and recast, the interpolated periods
which make two or three Curt inharmonious sentences
out of one most harmoniously prolonged through natural
pauses to its natural end—for these and other vexatious
pedantries or petty rigidities of rule, it does not seem
that any defence or apology has been thought needful.
Yet a skilful and able student or master of language
such as Mr. Rossetti cannot surely need to be told
that these superfluous breaks and changes in the punctu-
ation deform and destroy the fine perfection of the
metre ; that the harmony of a whole speech or a whole
stanza may be shattered by the intrusion or suppression
of a colon or a comma ; that a false pointing in English
verse is as bad as a false quantity in Latin. There is no
AVOTES OW THE TEXT OF SHEZZEy. 227
man living, in my mind, who might be trusted to correct
\
}
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the metre of Shelley; and among all past poets of his
own rank I know of none who might have been so
trusted but Milton. And it is no less an enterprise than
this that Mr. Rossetti has taken upon himself. Surely,
too, his scholarship was somewhat at fault when he
likened to the English of Mrs. Gamp the use of an
Obsolete and doubtless a licentious construction in
“Rosalind and Helen”—
“My Lionel, who, as every strain
Grew fainter but more sweet, his mien
Sunk—”
here altered by the excision of the word zwho and the
substitution of a period for a comma, which compels us
to begin a fresh sentence with the following words. Even
were the Original reading a mere solecism, it would be
preferable to such drawing and quartering of a poet's
text as this. But it is simply a revival—indefensible
indeed in my eyes, and probably due to mere haste—of a
lax usage permitted to elder writers both in verse and
prose. If all texts are to be regulated after this pedagogic
fashion, neither Shakespeare nor even Milton will be
secure against correction. The poem in which this
passage occurs, certainly the least precious example we
have of Shelley's mature work, was, as we know, resumed
and completed at the desire of Mrs. Shelley after it had
been cast aside as not worth completion ; and we may
well suppose that the task was executed rapidly and with
little of the passionate pleasure that impels and informs
the execution of work into which the workman can put
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228 NOTES ON THE ZEx7. OA' SA/A. Z.Z.A. Y.
his whole heart. A much more real and grave solecism
in “Julian and Maddalo” has been left not only uncor-
rected but unnoticed—“One blessing which thou ne'er
didst imprecate for on me.” Even such a positive
blunder as this I should not myself have presumed to
correct by any process of suppression and substitution;
but it is singular that an editor who has never scrupled
to apply this process when he thought fit should have
abstained from applying it in this really flagrant instance
of bad English. Against another example of this inter-
ference I must also protest for the sake of my own and
all ears that have been trained on the music of Shelley;
I refer to the change made in the last verses of the
overture to the “Lines written among the Euganean
Hills.” If the editor finds the license of such a
phrase as
“Every little living nerve
* 3: 4: 33. 33- 3:
Are like sapless leaflets now *
f
too “annoying ” to be endured by a scholastic sense of
propriety, the annoyance is far keener which will be in-
flicted on others by his substituted reading—“Is like a
sapless leaflet now.” Here again Shelley has indulged
; in a loose and obsolete construction which may or may
not be defensible ; I should not at the present day
permit it to myself, or condone it in another; and had
the editor been engaged in the revision of a Schoolboy's
theme, he would certainly have done right to Correct such
a phrase, and as certainly would not have done wrong to
add such further correction as he might deem desirable ;
but the task here undertaken is not exactly comparable
AWOZTES ON THE TEXT OF SA/EZZZY 229
to the revision of a schoolboy's theme. Nor are these
grammatical castigations the worst examples of the singular
freedom with which so true and studious an enthusiast
for the fame of Shelley has thought it allowable to handle
the text of his greatest poems. Under the pernicious
guidance of professors and pedagogues dead and living
he has been induced to dismember and disfigure such
samples of lyric verse as touch the very highest top of
possible perfection—songs that might have been envied
by Simonides and praised by Sappho. By one of these
blind (and deaf) guides he has been led to deface two
stanzas of the “Skylark” after a fashion only to be
paralleled, I should hope, in Bentley's Milton; to displace
the pause in the second stanza, so as at Once to deform
the meaning and destroy the music; and in the third to
supplant “an unbodied” by “an embodied joy.” Even
this is not the very worst of all. If there is one verse in
Shelley or in English of more divine and sovereign
sweetness than any other, it is that in the “Lament”—
“Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar.”
The music of this line taken with its context—the melo-
dious effect of its exquisite inequality —I should have
* If any man of human ear can want further evidence than his
own sense of harmony in support of the true and hitherto undisputed
reading, he may find one instance among others of the subtle and
wonderful use to which Shelley would sometimes put a seeming
imperfection of this kind in the verses to Emilia Viviani :
“Is it with thy kisses or thy tears?”
Here the same ineffable effect of indefinable sweetness is produced
by an exact repetition (but let no aspiring “poet-ape” ever think
to reproduce it by imitation) of the same simple means—the suppres-
|sion, namely, of a single syllable. And I cannot but wonder as
23o AWOTES ON 7"HE ZEX7" OAF SHEZZZY
-
ſ
thought was a thing to thrill the veins and draw tears to
the eyes of all men whose ears were not closed against
all harmony by some denser and less removable ob-
struction than shut out the song of the Sirens from the
hearing of the crew of Ulysses. Yet in this edition (vol. ii.
p. 274) the word “autumn " is actually foisted in after
the word “summer.” Upon this incredible Outrage I
really dare not trust myself to comment. The only
parallel I know to it within the memory of man is the
repainting of Giotto's portrait of Dante by an Italian
hireling at the bidding of his Austrian masters, who
desired to efface from the poet's berretta the sacred.
national colours of hope and faith and love. That is
irreparable; but the outrage offered to the text of Shelley
happily is not. For the conception of this atrocity the
editor is not responsible ; for its adoption he is. A
thousand years of purgatorial fire would be insufficient
expiation for the criminal on whose deaf and desperate.
head must rest the original guilt of defacing the text of
Shelley with this most damnable corruption. To such
earless and soulless Commentators, strong only in finger-
Counting and figure-casting, the ghost of their divine
victim, whether Shakespeare or Shelley, might say with
Paulina— -
“Do not repent these things. 3: + +3.
* + 3: * A thousand knees
Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,
well as rejoice that no pedant whose ears are at the ends of his.
fingers should ever yet have proposed to correct and complete the
verse by reading
“Say, is it with thy kisses,” &c.
NOTES ON THE ZEXT OF SHEZZEY. 231
Upon a barren mountain, and still winter
In storm perpetual, could not move the gods
To look that way thou wert.”
At least we may be assured that no such penance,
though multiplied beyond the calculation of all arith-
meticians who ever made use of their science as a lead-
line to sound the depths of song, as a key to unlock the
Secrets of harmony, could ever move the righteous judge
of Marsyas to look with pity on the son of Midas who
had thus abused the text of one so dear to him as
Shelley. The race of his old enemy, we perceive, has
degenerated since the date of the Phrygian king; the
regal and paternal ears are indeed hereditary, but as surely
as the touch of the father turned all things to gold, so
surely the touch of his children turns all things to lead.
I shall merely notice the single remaining instance
of perversion which I feel bound not to pass over in
silence; the false pointing of one of the noblest passages.
in the “Prometheus Unbound *—
“Heap on thy head, by virtue of this curse,
Ill deeds, then be thou damned, beholding good.”
I should really have thought it impossible to mistake
the simple and obvious meaning of these and the glorious
verses which follow; namely, that the curse invoked on
the almighty tyrant was to do evil and behold good.
The idea is of course not original; few lines have been
oftener quoted, and few have better deserved their fame,
than the majestic verse in which Persius has invoked
upon tyrants a deeper damnation than ever priest con-
ceived—
“Virtutem videant intabescantgue relictā.”
232 AWOTES ON THE ZEXT OF SAEZZZY.
|
What indeed, compared to this, are the gross and brutish
threats of theological materialism P what is the ice
or fire of Dante, the burning marl of Milton P But by
the application of this supreme curse to the supreme
oppressor Shelley has transfigured the noble moral
thought of the Stoic poet into the splendour of an idea
too sublime for the conception of one so much lesser
than himself. It is utterly inexplicable to me how an
editor of Mr. Rossetti's high and rare intelligence in
matters of art and imagination can here for once have
failed to follow the track of Shelley's thought, to see with
Shelley's eyes this vision of the two infinities of good and
evil; of the evil deeds wrought by omnipotence and the
good deeds wrought by suffering—both of these infinite
as God himself, as the world he torments, as the solitude
which is at once the condition and the chastisement of
his omnipotence. The sequence of ideas is so natural
and logical, so coherent with the whole scheme and
subject of the poem, that I cannot understand by what
strange aberration the editor should have lost his way
through so plain and open a tract of country, and thought
it necessary to shatter at once the harmony, the sense,
and the grammar of so simple and Superb a passage in
order to patch up an explanation as forced, unnatural,
and improbable as the more obvious interpretation was
clear, consistent, and sufficient. I should add that as
|Mr. Rossetti, with his habitual candour and generous
good sense, has since published a note which may be
taken as equivalent to a recantation of the error which
led him to cast aside the previous text for the dissonant
and incongruous version produced by a change of pointing,
AWOTES ON 7A/F TEXT OF SA/A/ZZY. 233
I should not have given even this passing notice to the
matter had the passage been less important, the per-
version less flagrant, or the mistake already Cancelled.
I have now, to adopt a pedagogic formula which might
beseem the lips of a commentator in the heat of Correction,
discharged a painful duty, but one which I felt to be in-
cumbent on me; and I may add, in the same professional
style and spirit, that I hope I may never be compelled to
undertake it again. It should also be noted by those
who may feel most keenly the indignity offered to Shelley
by such perversions and corruptions of his meaning and
his music as those on which I have here had to remark,
that no little service has been done to the text in other
places by the simple correction of many such obvious
and indubitable misprints as deform the penultimate
stanza of “The Revolt of Islam; ” where, to take but a
single instance, the words “one line” had in all previous
editions been allowed to stand in defiance of sense and
metre, both of which for more than half a century had
been crying aloud for the restoration of the right reading
—“ on a line.”
I have but one other fault to find with this first
critical edition of Shelley; and in this instance I am
confident of having with me, I had wellnigh said all
lovers of his fame, but that this would exclude at least
one name which must always be counted among those of
|\,
|
his most loving disciples—that of the editor himself. To
reprint in an appendix the monstrous mass of doggrel
which has been pitilessly preserved by the evil fidelity of
Mr. Hogg, and to add even the metrical Sweepings of
“St. Irvyne,” is an offence on which I believe that the
f
|
!
234 AWOZA'S OW ZZZZ ZZX7" OA' SZZZZZY
verdict of all competent critics has been unanimous.
That this wretched rubbish should exist at all in print is
vexation enough for those to whom the honour of the
greatest poets is dear; but Mr. Hogg's book is a monu-
ment likely to prove something less durable than brass,
and in its mouldering pages the evidence of Shelley's
boyish absurdities and atrocities in the way of rhyme
might have been trusted to rot unobserved save of some
rare collector of strange and worthless things. But to
have them bound up with the ripest work of the first
lyric poet of England, tied on as it were to the tail or
pinned to the back of a volume which undertakes to
give us for the first time a critical text of Shelley, is a
thing not to be endured or extenuated. The argument
or apology of the editor on behalf of this lamentable act
of Caprice has not I believe made a single convert, and
is I should hope not likely to make one. Those who
did most justice to the zealous labour and the strenuous
devotion of Mr. Rossetti, those who were the first to
recognise with all gratitude what thanks were due to his
ardour and ability, were the first to utter their protest
* An edition of Shelley which should give us a final standard of
the text would naturally relegate “Queen Mab” to its proper place
in an appendix. The strong and sincere protest of Shelley against
the piratical reissue of this poem, backed by the frank and réason-
able avowal that he was ashamed of the bad poetry contained in it,
should have sufficed to exclude it from the station at the head of his
works which it has so long been permitted to retain. Full of in-
tellectual power and promise as it is, a poem repudiated by its
author as unworthy of his maturer fame should never have been
thrust into the place which obviously belongs to “Alastor ; ” for it
is only with this later work that the real career of Shelley as a poet
may be properly said to begin. &
AVOTES ON 7HE TEXT OF SA/EZZE V: 235
against this the most unhappy and perverse example on
record of a pernicious exactitude in the collection and
preservation of all that an author would desire to efface
from his own and all men's memory. The first such
protest, if I mistake not, was expressed in earnest and
weighty words by Miss Mathilde Blind, whose admirable
essay on Shelley was one of the earliest and most notable
signs of the impulse given to the critical study of the
poet by the appearance of this edition. That essay, full
as it was of eloquent commentary and fervent thought,
is yet more precious for its many contributions to the pure
and perfect text of Shelley which we hope before long to
See ; no pedagogic emendations or professorial conjectures,
but restorations supplied from the poet's own manuscript;
and, more than all, for the completion of that faultless
poem called “The Question” by one long-lost line of
final loveliness.
It would be a pleasanter task than that of fault-finding
or protesting, to pass once more through the glorious
gallery of Shelley's works in the company of his first
Critical editor, and note down what points of consent
or dissent might occur to us in the process of comparing
opinions as to this poem or that. But time and space
forbid me to do more than register my own opinion as
to the respective value of two among the latest, and tº
express the surprise which I share with Miss Blind at the
station assigned by Mr. Rossetti to the “Witch of
Atlas,” which he deliberately ranks above the “Epipsy-
chidion.” It is indeed an exquisite exercise of sunny
and flowery fancy, which probably was designed to cover
Or convey no Such elaborate allegoric significance as the

236 AWOTES ON 7HAE ZEXT OF SAZZZZY.
editor seems willing to seek in it; the “lady witch”
Being simply an incarnation of ideal beauty and bene-
ficence, in her relations to man a spiritual patroness of
free thought and free love, in her relations to nature a
mistress or an adept of her secret rites or forces. Nor
does it seem to me that Mr. Rossetti has touched on
the one point where the “Epipsychidion” might be
plausibly represented as open to attack. Its impalpable,
and ethereal philosophy of love and life does not prevent
it from being “quite a justifiable sort of poem to write ; ”
the questionable element in it is the apparent introduction
Of such merely personal allusions as can only perplex
and irritate the patience and intelligence of a loyal
student, while they may not impossibly afford an opening
for preposterous and even offensive interpretations. In
all poetry as in all religions, mysteries must have place,
but riddles should find none. The high, sweet, mystic
doctrine of this poem is apprehensible enough to all who
look into it with purged eyes and listen with purged ears;
but the passages in which the special experience of the
writer is thrust forward under the mask and muffler of
allegoric rhapsody are not in any proper sense mysterious;
they are simply puzzling; and art should have nothing
to do with puzzles. This, and this alone, is the fault
which in my opinion may be not unreasonably found
with some few passages of the “Epipsychidion; ” and a
fault so slight and partial as merely to affect some few
passages here and there, perceptible only in the byways
and outskirts of the poem, can in no degree impair the
divine perfection of its charm, the savour of its heavenly
quality. By the depth and exaltation of its dominant
NOTES ON THE TEXT OF SHEZZE Y. 237
idea, by the rapture of the music and the glory of the
colour which clothe with sound and splendour the subtle
and luminous body of its thought, by the harmony of its
most passionate notes and the humanity of its most god-
like raptures, it holds a foremost place in the works of
that poet who has now for two generations ruled and
moulded the hearts and minds of all among his country-
men to whom the love of poetry has been more than a
fancy or a fashion ; who has led them by the light of his
faith, by the spell of his hope, by the fire of his love, on
the way of thought which he himself had followed in the
track of the greatest who had gone before him—of
AEschylus, of Lucretius, of Milton ; who has been more
to us than ever was Byron to the youth of his own brief
day, than ever was Wordsworth to the students of the
day succeeding ; and of whom, whether we class him as
second or as third among English poets, it must be in
either case conceded that he holds the same rank in lyric º
as Shakespeare in dramatic poetry—supreme, and without
a second of his race. I would not pit his name against
the sacred name of Milton ; to wrangle for the pre-
cedence of this immortal or of that can be but futile and
injurious ; it is enough that our Country may count
among her sons two of the greatest among those great
poets who have also been prophets and evangelists of
personal and national, social and spiritual freedom ; but
it is equally certain that of all forms or kinds of poetry
the two highest are the lyric and the dramatic, and that
as clearly as the first place in the one rank is held among
us by Shakespeareſthe first place in the other-is held and
will never be resigned by Shelley.
}

238
A VA’OAV.
| PREFATORY NOTE.-This, like the following essay, was
prefixed to a small volume of selections from the poems
of the author whose genius is the subject of discussion.
To the work of Coleridge this process of selection, if ade-
quately carried out, must have been, as Leigh Hunt long
since suggested, a real and great service; for his work is
distinctly divisible into good and bad, durable and perish-
able ; and it would be a clear gain to have the priceless
parts of that work detached from the worthless; but to
Byron, who rarely wrote anything either worthless or
faultless, it could not be otherwise than injurious. He
can only be judged or appreciated in the mass ; the
greatest of his works was his whole work taken alto-
gether; and to know or to honour him aright he must be
considered with all his imperfections and with all his
glories on his head.]
THE most delicate and thoughtful of English critics has
charged the present generation of Englishmen with
forgetfulness of Byron. It is not a light charge : and it
is not ungrounded. Men born when this century was
getting into its forties were baptized into another church
P VROAV. - 239
than his with the rites of another Creed. Upon their
ears, first after the cadences of elder poets, fell the
faultless and fervent melodies of Tennyson. To them,
chief among the past heroes of the younger century,
three men appeared as predominant in poetry ; Cole-
ridge, Keats, and Shelley. Behind these were effaced, on
either hand, the two great opposing figures of Byron and
Wordsworth. No man under twenty can just now be
expected to appreciate these. The time was when all
boys and girls who paddled in rhyme and dabbled in
sentiment were wont to adore the presence or the
memory of Byron with foolish faces of praise. It is of
little moment to him or to us that they have long since
ceased to cackle and begun to hiss. They have become
used to better verse and carefuller workmen ; and must
be forgiven if after such training they cannot at once
appreciate the splendid and imperishable excellence
which covers all his offences and outweighs all his
defects: the excellence of sincerity and strength.
Without these no poet can live; but few have ever had
so much of them as Byron. His sincerity indeed is
difficult to discover and define ; but it does in effect lie
at the root of all his good works: deformed by pre-
tension and defaced by assumption, masked by folly
and veiled by affectation ; but perceptible after all, and
priceless.
It is no part of my present office to rewrite the
history of a life in which every date and event that could
be given would now seem trite and stale to all possible
readers. If, after so many promises and hints, some-
thing at once new and true shall at length be unearthed
24O A VA’OAV.
or extricated, which may affect for the better or the
worse our judgment of the man, it will be possible and
necessary to rewrite it. Meantime this among other
chances “lies on the lap of the gods;” and especially
on the lap of a goddess who still treads our earth. Until
she speaks, we cannot guess what she may have to say ;
and can only pass by with reverent or with sceptical
reticence.”
Thus much however we may safely assert : that no
'man's work was ever more influenced by his character;
and that no man's character was ever more influenced by
his circumstances. Rather from things without than
from things within him did the spirit of Byron assume
colour and shape. His noblest verse leapt on a sudden
* It will be evident that these lines were written before the
appearance of the book in which Madame de Boissy thought fit to
let the world know that she had nothing to tell worth its hearing
with regard to the man whose love had made her famous, but was
not the less willing to put forth that nothing in two leaden volumes
of verbiage. The worst consequence of this miscarriage was not
the collapse of such faint hopes or surmises as we might yet have
cherished of some benefit to be received in the way of biography,
some new and kindly light to be thrown on the life and character of
Byron ; it was the opportunity given to a filthy female moralist and
novelist who was not slow to avail herself of such an occasion “to
expound her beastly mind to all.”. Evidently the laurels of Mrs.
Behn had long kept her successor from sleeping; it was not enough
to have copied the authoress of “Oroonoko” in the selection of a
sable and a servile hero; her American imitator was bent on follow-
ing her down fouler ways than this. But I feel that an apology is
due to the virtuous memory of the chaste Aphra; she was indeed
the first “nigger novelist,” and she was likewise a vendor and
purveyor of obscene fiction ; but here the parallel ends; for I am not
aware that she ever applied her unquestionable abilities in that
unlovely line of business to the defamation at second hand of the
illustrious and defenceless dead.
A VA’O/V. - 24Y
into life after the heaviest evils had fallen upon him which
even he ever underwent. From the beginning indeed he
had much to fight against ; and three impediments hung
about him at starting, the least of which would have
weighed down a less strong man : youth, and genius, and
an ancient name." In spite of all three he made his
way; and suffered for it. At the first chance given or
taken, every obscure and obscene thing that lurks for
pay or prey among the fouler shallows and thickets of
literature flew against him ; every hound and every
hireling lavished upon him the loathsome tribute of their
abuse; all nameless creatures that nibble and prowl,
upon whom the serpent's curse has fallen, to go upon his
belly and eat dust all the days of his life, assailed him
with their foulest venom and their keenest fangs. And
the promise given of old to their kind was now at least ful-
filled: they did bruise his heel. But the heads of such
Creatures are so small that it is hard to bruise them in
return ; it would first be necessary to discern them.
That Byron was able to disregard and to outlive the
bark and the bite of such curs as these is small praise
enough : the man who cannot do as much is destructible,
and therefore contemptible. He did far more than this ;
he withstood the weight of circumstances to the end ;
* That his youth and his rank were flung in his face with vulgar
insolence on the publication of his first little book it can hardly be
necessary to remind any reader of Byron ; but possibly even these
offences might have been condoned in a scribbler whose work had
given no offensive promise of greatness yet to be. In the verses on
Lochnagar at least an ominous threat or presage of something new
and splendid must have been but too perceptible to the discerning
eye of criticism.
R
f|
242 A VA’OAV.
not always without complaint, but always without mis-
giving. #is glorious Courage, his excellent contempt for
things contemptible, and hatred of hateful men, are
enough of themselves to embalm and endear his memory
in the eyes of all who are worthy to pass judgment upon
him. And these qualities gave much of their own value
to verse not otherwise or not always praiseworthy. Even
at its best, the serious poetry of Byron is often so rough
and loose, so weak in the screws and joints which hold
together the framework of verse, that it is not easy to
praise it enough without seeming to condone or to
extenuate such faults as should not be overlooked or
forgiven. No poet is so badly represented by a book of
selections. It must show something of his weakness; it
cannot show all of his strength. Often, after a noble
overture, the last note struck is either dissonant or
ineffectual. His magnificent masterpiece, which must
endure for ever among the precious relics of the world,
will not bear dissection or extraction. The merit of
“Don Juan.” does not lie in any part, but in the whole.
There is in that great poem an especial and exquisite
balance and sustenance of alternate tones which cannot
be expressed or explained by the utmost ingenuity of
Selection. Haidée is supplanted by Dudu, the ship-
wreck by the siege, the Russian court by the English
household ; and this perpetual change, this tidal variety
of experience and emotion, gives to the poem something
of the breadth and freshness of the sea. Much of the
poet's earlier work is or seems unconsciously dishonest;
this, if not always or wholly unaffected, is as honest as the
Sunlight, as frank as the sea-wind. Here, and here alone,
A VA2O/V. 243
the student of his work may recognise and enjoy the ebb
and flow of actuallife. Here the pulse of vital blood may
be felt in tangible flesh. Here for the first time the style of
ſ
i
|
%
JByron is beyond all praise or blame : a style at once
Swift and supple, light and strong, various and radiant.
Between “Childe Harold” and “Don Juan" the same
difference exists which a swimmer feels between lake-
water and sea-water: the one is fluent, yielding, inva-
riable ; the other has in it a life and pulse, a sting and
a swell, which touch and excite the nerves like fire or like
music. Across the stanzas of “ Don Juan" we swim
forward as over “the broad backs of the sea "; they
break and glitter, hiss and laugh, murmur and move,
like waves that sound or that subside. There is in them
a delicious resistance, an elastic motion, which salt water
has and fresh water has not. There is about them a
wide wholesome air, full of vivid light and constant wind,
which is only felt at sea. Life undulates and death
palpitates in the splendid verse which resumes the
evidence of a brave and clear-sighted man concerning
life and death. Here, as at sea, there is enough and too
much of fluctuation and intermission ; the ripple flags
and falls in loose and lazy lines: the foam flies wide of
any mark, and the breakers collapse here and there in
sudden ruin and violent failure. But the violence and
weakness of the sea are preferable to the smooth sound
and equable security of a lake : its buoyant and pro-
gressive impulse sustains and propels those who would
sink through weariness in the flat and placid shallows.
There are others whom it sickens, and others whom it
chills; these will do well to steer inshore.
R 2
244. A VA’O/V.
*
It is natural in writing of Byron to slide into re-
membrances of what is likest to his verse. His work and
Shelley's, beyond that of all our other poets, recall or
suggest the wide and high things of nature ; the large
likeness of the elements; the immeasurable liberty and
the stormy strength of waters and winds. They are
strongest when they touch upon these ; and it is worth
remark how few are the poets of whom this can be said.
Here, as elsewhere, Shakespeare is supreme when it
pleased him ; but it pleased him rarely. No poetry of
shipwreck and the sea has ever equalled the great scene
of “ Pericles ; ” no such note of music was ever struck
out of the clash and contention of tempestuous elements.
In Milton the sublimity is chiefly of sound ; the majesty
of melodies unsurpassed from all time wellnigh excludes
and supplants all other motives of material beauty. In
the minds of mediaeval poets there was no width or
depth to receive and contain such emotion. In Spenser,
despite his fertile and fluent ingenuity, his subtle and
sleepy graces, the effeminacy of colour no less than the
monotony of metre makes it hopeless to look for any
trace of that passionate sense of power and delight in
great outer things of which we speak here. Among later
men, Coleridge and Keats used nature mainly as a
stimulant or a sedative ; Wordsworth as a vegetable fit to
shred into his pot and pare down like the outer leaves of
a lettuce for didactic and Culinary purposes." All these
* I remember some critical cackling over this phrase when it
first appeared as over a senseless insult offered to the name and
genius of a great poet. Insult is no habit of mine ; and the term
here used implies no more than he that runs may read in the text
A VROAV. 245,
doubtless in their own fashion loved her, for her beauties, .
for her uses, for her effects; hardly one for herself.
Turn now to Byron or to Shelley. These two at
least were not content to play with her skirts and paddle
in her shallows. Their passion is perfect, a fierce and
blind desire which exalts and impels their verse into the
high places of emotion and expression. They feed upon i
nature with a holy hunger, follow her with a divine lust
as of gods chasing the daughters of men. Wind and
fire, the cadences of thunder and the clamours of the sea,
gave to them no less of sensual pleasure than of spiritual !
sustenance. These things they desired as others desire.
music or wine or the beauty of women. This outward
and indifferent nature of things, cruel in the eyes of all
but her lovers, and even in theirs not loving, became as
of Wordsworth ; in whom, after the somewhat early subsidence of
that “simple, sensuous, and passionate” delight in nature of which
in two of his most famous poems he has for ever embalmed his re-
collection, the place of this rapturous instinct of submission and
absorption, which other poets have been who never have ceased to
feel in sight of natural glory and beauty, was taken by a meditativeſ
and moralizing spirit too apt to express itself in the tone of a
preacher to whom all the divine life of things outside man is but
as raw material for philosophic or theological cookery. How far
this method of contemplating and interpreting the splendours and
terrors of nature differs from that of his greatest contemporaries it
is Surely neither irrelevant nor impertinent to point out once more.
Wide apart as lay their lines of work, it is true alike of Shelley
and of Keats that for them it was not fated, nor could it ever have
been possible, to outlive
“The hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;”
nor could Byron, while retaining as did Wordsworth the freshness
and the force of his genius, have outlived his more fiery delight in
the triumphant life of sea and cloud and storm.
246 Z3 VA’OAV.
pliant to their grasp and embrace as any Clymene or ,
Leucothea to Apollo’s. To them the large motions and
the remote beauties of space were tangible and familiar
as flowers. Of this poetry, where description melts into
passion and contemplation takes fire from delight, the
highest sample is Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.”
An imperfect mastery of his materials keeps the best
things of Byron some few degrees below an equal rank.
One native and incurable defect grew up and strength-
ened side by side with his noblest qualities: a feeble and
faulty sense of metre. No poet of equal or inferior rank
ever had so bad an ear. His smoother cadences are often
vulgar and facile; his fresher notes are often incomplete
and inharmonious. His verse stumbles and jingles,
stammers and halts, where there is most need for a swift
and even pace of musical sound. The rough sonorous.
changes of the songs in the “Deformed Transformed ”
rise far higher in harmony and strike far deeper into the
memory than the lax easy lines in which he at first in-
dulged; but they slip too readily into notes as rude and
weak as the rhymeless tuneless verse in which they are
so loosely set, as in a cheap and casual frame. The
magnificent lyric measures of “ Heaven and Earth’ are
defaced by the coarse obtrusion of short lines with jagged
edges : no small offence in a writer of verse. Otherwise
these choral scenes are almost as blameless as they are:
brilliant. The poet who above others took delight in the
sense of sounding storms and shaken waters could not.
but exult over the vision of deluge with all his strength
and breadth of wing. Tempest and rebellion and the
magnificence of anguish were as the natural food and fire
{
A VA’OAV. 247
to kindle and sustain his indomitable and sleepless spirit.
The godless martyrdom of rebels; the passion that can-
not redeem ; the Thebaid whose first hermit was Cain,
the Calvary whose first martyr was Satan ; these, time
after time, allured and inspired him. Here for once this
inner and fiery passion of thought found outer clothing
and expression in the ruin of a world. Both without and
within, the subject was made for him, and lay ready
shapen for the strong impressure of his hand. His love
of wide and tempestuous waters fills his work through-
out as with the broad breath of a sea-wind. Even the
weakest of his poems, a thing still-born and shapeless,
is redeemed and revived by one glorious verse —
“When the Poles crashed, and water was the world.”
This passion and power in dealing with the higher
things of nature, with her large issues and remote sources,
has been bestowed upon Victor Hugo alone among our
contemporaries. He also can pass beyond the idyllic
details of landscape, and put out from shore into the
wide waste places of the sea. And this of course is the
loftiest form of such poetry as deals with outward nature
and depends upon the forms of things. In Byron the
power given by this passion is the more Conspicuous
through his want of dramatic capacity. Except in the
lighter and briefer scenes of “Don Juan,” he was never
able to bring two speakers face to face and supply them
with the right words. In structure as in metre his elaborate
tragedies are wholly condemnable; filled as they are in
spirit with the overflow of his fiery energy. “Cain’’ and
“Manfred” are properly monologues decorated and set off
248 A VA2O/V.
\
*
l
ſ
by some slight appendage of Ornament or explanation. In
the later and loftier poem there is no difference percep-
tible, except in strength and knowledge, between Lucifer
and Cain. Thus incompetent to handle the mysteries and
varieties of character, Byron turns always with a fresh
delight and a fresh confidence thither where he feels him-
self safe and strong. No part of his nature was more
profound and sincere than the vigorous love of such
inanimate things as were in tune with his own spirit and
senses. His professions of contempt were too loud to
express it ; scorn is brief or silent ; anger alone finds
went in violent iteration and clamorous appeal. . He had
too much of fury and not enough of contempt; he foams
at things and creatures not worth a glance or a blow. But
when once clear of men and confronted with elements, he
casts the shell of pretence and drops the veil of habit;
then, as in the last and highest passage of a poem which
has suffered more from praise than any other from
dispraise, his scorn of men caught in the nets of nature
and necessity has no alloy of untruth ; his spirit is
mingled with the sea's, and overlooks with a superb
delight the ruins and the prayers of men.
This loftiest passage in “Childe Harold’ has been
so often mouthed and mauled by vulgar admiration that
it now can scarcely be relished. Like a royal robe worn
out, or a royal wine grown sour, it seems the worse for
having been so good. But in fact, allowing for one or
two slips and blots, we must after all replace it among
the choice and high possessions of poetry. After the
first there is hardly a weak line; many have a wonderful
vigour and melody; and the deep and glad disdain of
A VA’OAZ 249
the Sea for men and the works of men passes into the
verse in music and fills it with a weighty and sonorous
harmony grave and sweet as the measured voice of heavy
remote waves. No other passage in the fourth canto will |
bear to be torn out from the text; and this one suffers by
extraction. The other three cantos are more loosely
built and less compact of fabric; but in the first two .
there is little to remember or to praise. Much of the
poem is written throughout in falsetto ; there is a savour
in many places as of something false and histrionic.
This singular and deep defect, which defaces so much of
Byron's work, seems also to have deformed his personal
character, to have given a twist to his enmities and left
a taint upon his friendships. He was really somewhat
Sombre and sad at heart, and it pleased him to seem
sadder than he was. He was impressible and suscep-
tible of pleasure, able to command and enjoy it; and of
this also it pleased him to make the most in public.
But in fact he was neither a Harold nor a Juan ; he was
better than these in his own way, and assumed their
parts and others with a hypocrisy but half insincere.
The fault was probably in great part unconscious, and
transparent as a child's acting. To the keen eye and
Cool judgment of Stendhal it was at once perceptible.
Byron's letter to him in defence of Scott was doubtless
not insincere; yet it is evident that the writer felt him-
Self to be playing a graceful part to advantage. This
fretful and petulant appetite for applause, the proper
apanage of small poets and lowly aspirants, had in
Byron's Case to wrestle with the just pride of place and
dignity of genius; no man ever had more of these; yet
250 B VA’OAV.
j
they did not always support him; he fell even into follies
and vulgarities unworthy of a meaner name than his. In
effect, when his errors were gravest, he erred through
*
humility and not through pride. Pride would have sus-
tained him far above the remarks and reviews of his day,
the praise or dispraise of his hour. As it was, he was
vulnerable even by creeping things; and at times their
Small stings left a poison behind which turned his blood.
The contagion of their touch infected him ; and he
strove under its influence to hiss and wound as they.
Here and there in his letters and reflections, in the loose
records of his talk and light fragments of his work, the
traces of infection are flagrant.
But these defects were only as scars on the skin,
superficial and removable ; they are past and done with ;
while all of him that was true and good remains, as it will
to all time. Justice cannot be done to it here or now.
It is enough if after careful selection as little injustice be
done as possible. His few sonnets, unlike Shelley's, are
all good; the best is that on Bonnivard, one of his
noblest and completest poems. The versified narratives
which in their day were so admirable and famous have
yielded hardly a stray sheaf to the gleaner. They have
enough of vigour and elasticity to keep life in them yet;
but once chipped or broken their fabric would crumble
and collapse. The finest among them is certainly either
the “Giaour” or the “Siege of Corinth ; ” the weakest is
probably either “Parisina” or the “Bride of Abydos.”
But in none of these is there even a glimpse of Byron's
higher and rarer faculty. All that can be said for them is
that they gave tokens of a talent singularly fertile, rapid
A YRON. § 25 I
and vivid; a certain power of action and motion which
redeems them from the complete stagnation of dead
verses; a command Over words and rhymes never of the
best and never of the worst. In the “Giaour,” indeed,
there is something of a fiery sincerity which in its suc-
cessors appears diluted and debased."
The change began in Byron when he first found out
his comic power, and rose at once beyond sight or shot
of any rival. His early satires are wholly devoid of
humour, wit, or grace; the verse of “Beppo,” bright and
Soft and fluent, is full at once of all. The sweet light
music of its few and low notes was perfect as a prelude
to the higher harmonies of laughter and tears, of scorn
and passion, which as yet lay silent in the future. It is.
mere folly to seek in English or Italian verse a precedent
or a parallel. The scheme of metre is Byron's alone; i
no weaker hand than his could ever bend that bow, or .
!
|
|
ſ
ſ
* Remembering the success of these stories, we may believe that
Byron's contempt for the critical fashions of a time which extolled
his worst work was not wholly affected or assumed; and understand
how the instincts of opposition and reaction drove him back into
that open idolatry of Pope and his school which he expressed loudly
and foolishly enough. Probably at heart he did really prefer Pope
to all men. His critical faculty, if I may steal one phrase from a
treasury that may well spare me the loan, was ‘‘zero, or even a
frightful minus quantity;” his judgment never worth the expense
of a thought or a word. Besides, he had striven to emulate or at
least to copy the exquisite manner of Pope in his satires, and must
have seen how great and impassable a gulf lay between the master
and his pupil. This would naturally lead him to over-estimate what
he could not attain: the delicate merit, the keen perfection, the
equable balance of force and finish, of sense and style, which raised
his favourite so high among writers, if they left him somewhat low
among poets ; and having himself so bad an ear for metre, he may
even have imagined that Pope's verse was musical.
252 ByRoy.
ever will. Even the Italian poets, working in a language
more flexible and ductile than ours, could never turn
their native metre to such uses, could never handle their
national weapon with Such grace and strength. The
terza rima remains their own, after all our efforts to adapt
it; it bears here only forced flowers and crude fruits;"
but the offaza rima Byron has fairly conquered and
wrested from them. Before the appearance of “Beppo ’’’
no one could foresee what a master's hand might make
of the instrument ; and no one could predict its further
use and its dormant powers before the advent of “Don
Juan.” In the “Vision of Judgment” it appears finally
perfected; the metre fits the sense as with close and
pliant armour, the perfect panoply of Achilles. A poem
so short and hasty, based on a matter so worthy of brief
contempt and long oblivion as the funeral and the fate
of George III., bears about it at first sight no great sign
or likelihood of life. But this poem which we have by
us stands alone, not in Byron's work only, but in the
work of the world. Satire in earlier times had changed her
rags for robes; Juvenal had clothed with fire, and Dryden
with majesty, that wandering and bastard Muse. Byron
gave her wings to fly with, above the reach even of these.
* I do not of course forget that our own time has produced two
noble poems in this foreign and alien metre ; but neither “Casa
guidi Windows” nor ‘‘ The Defence of Guenevere” will suffice to
establish its general excellence or fitness. The poets have done so
well because they could do no less; but there may be at once good
material and good workmanship without good implements. Neither
of them has done more to give footing in England to the metre of
their poems than did Byron himself by his “Prophecy of Dante.”
They have done better than this ; but this they have not done.
A VAQOAV. 253
Others have had as much of passion and as much of 4.
humour; Dryden had perhaps as much of both combined. —
But here and not elsewhere a third quality is apparent: 3
the sense of a high and clear imagination. The grave
and great burlesque of King George and St. Peter is re-
lieved and sustained by the figures of Michael and Satan.
These two, confronted and corresponding as noon and
night, lift and light up the background of satire, blood-
red or black according to the point of view. Above all,
the balance of thought and passion is admirable; human
indignation and divine irony are alike understood and
expressed : the pure and ſiery anger of men at sight of
wrong-doing, the tacit inscrutable derision of heaven.
Upon this light and lofty poem a commentary might be
written longer than the text and less worth reading ; but
here it shall not be. Those who read it with the due
delight, not too gravely and not too lightly, will under-
stand more than can now be set down; those who read
it otherwise will not understand anything. Even these
can hardly fail to admire the vigour and variety of scorn,
the beauty and the bitterness of verse, which raise it i
beyond comparison with any other satire. There is
enough and too much of violence and injustice in the
lines on Southey ; but it must be remembered that he
was the first to strike, and with an unfair weapon. A
poet by profession, he had assaulted with feeble fury
another poet, not on the fair and open charge of bad
verses, but under the impertinent and irrelevant plea
, that his work was an affliction or an Offence to religion
and morality—the most susceptible, as the most intangible,
among the creatures of metaphor. A man less irritable
t
254 .* A VA2O/V.
º
and less powerful than Byron might be forgiven for any
reprisals; and the excellence of his verses justifies their
injustice. But that Southey, who could win and retain
for life the love and the praise of Landor, was capable
of conscious baseness or falsity, Byron himself in sober
moments should hardly have believed. Between official
adoration and not less official horror—between George
deified and Byron denounced—the Laureate's position
was grotesque enough. It was almost a good office to
pelt him with the names of hireling and apostate; these
charges he could reject and refute. The facts were surely
sufficient : that, as to religion, his “present Deity” was
the paltriest maniac among kings and Caesars ; as to
morality, his feelings or his faith obliged him to decry
as pernicious the greatest work of his opponent.
Side by side with the growth of his comic and satiric
power, the graver genius of Byron increased and flourished.
As the tree grew higher it grew shapelier; the branches
it put forth on all sides were fairer of leaf and fuller of
fruit than its earlier offshoots had promised. But from
these hardly a stray bud or twig can be plucked off by
way of sample. No detached morsel of “Don Juan,” no
dismembered fragment of “Cain,” will serve to show or to
suggest the excellence of either. These poems are co-
herent and complete as trees or flowers; they cannot be
split up and parcelled out like a mosaic of artificial -
jewellery, which might be taken to pieces by the same
artisan who put it together. It must then be remembered
that any mere selection from the verse of Byron, however
much of care and of goodwill be spent upon the task, must
perforce either exclude or impair his very greatest work.
A VA2O/V. 255
\
*
%*
Cancel or select a leaf from these poems, and you will
injure the whole framework equally in either case. It is
not without reluctance that I have given any extracts
from “Don Juan ; ” it is not without a full sense of the
damage done to these extracts by the very act of ex-
traction. But I could only have left them untouched
with a reluctance even greater; and this plea, if it can,
must excuse me. As fragments they are exquisite and
Inoble, like the broken hand or severed foot of a Greek
statue ; but here as much is lost as there. Taken with
their context, they regain as much of beauty and of force
as the sculptured foot or hand when, reunited to the
perfect body, they resume their place and office among
its vital and various limbs. This gift of life and variety
is the supreme quality of Byron's chief poem ; a quality
which cannot be expressed by any system of extracts.
Little can here be given beyond a sample or two of tragic
and serious work. The buoyant beauty of surrounding
verse, the “innumerable laughter” and the profound
murmur of its many measures, the fervent flow of stanzas
now like the ripples and now like the gulfs of the sea,
can no more be shown by process of selection than
any shallow salt pool left in the sand for sunbeams to
drain dry can show the depth and length of the receding
tide.
It would be waste of words and time here to enlarge
at all upon the excellence of the pure comedy of “Don
Juan.” From the first canto to the sixteenth ; from the
defence of Julia, which is worthy of Congreve or Molière,
to the study of Adeline, which is worthy of Laclos or
Balzac ; the elastic energy of humour never falters or
\
256 A VA2O/V.
flags. English criticism, with a mournful murmur of
unanimous virtue, did at the time, and may yet if it please,
appeal against the satire which strikes home and approve
the satire that flies abroad. It was said, and perhaps is
still said, that the poem falls off and runs low towards
the end. Those who can discover where a change for the
worse begins might at least indicate the landmark, imper-
ceptible to duller eyes, which divides the good from the
bad. Others meantime will retain their belief that this cry
was only raised because in these latter cantos a certain
due amount of satire fell upon the false and corrupt parts
of English character, its mealy-mouthed vices and its
unsound virtues. Had the scene been shifted to Italy or
France, we might have heard little of the poet's failing
power and perverse injustice.
It is just worth a word of notice that Byron, like
Fielding before him, has caught up a well-known name
and prefixed it to his work, without any attempt or desire
to retain the likeness or follow the tradition attached to
it. With him Don Juan is simply a man somewhat
handsomer and luckier than others of his age. This
hero is not even a reduced copy of the great and terrible
figure with which he has nothing in common but a name.
The Titan of embodied evil, the likeness of sin made
flesh, which grew up in the grave and bitter imagination
of a Spanish poet, steeped in the dyes and heated by the
flames of hell, appears even in the hands of Molière
diminished, and fallen as it were from Satan to Belial ;
but still splendid with intellect and courage that tower
above the meaner minds and weaker wills of women and
of men; still inflexible to human appeal and indomitable
BYRON. 257
by divine anger. To crush him, heaven is compelled to
use thunder and hell-fire; and by these, though stricken,
he is not subdued. The sombre background of a
funereal religion is not yet effaced ; but it tasked the
whole strength of Molière, gigantic as that strength was,
to grapple with the shadow of this giant, to transfigure
upon a new stage the tragic and enormous incarnation of
supreme sin. As it is, even when playing with his debtors
or his peasants, the hero of Molière retains always some
feature of his first likeness, some shadow of his early
shape. But further than France the terrible legend has
never moved. Rigid criticism would therefore say that
the title of Byron's masterpiece was properly a misnomer :
which is no great matter after all, since the new Juan can
never be confounded with the old.
Of Byron's smaller poems there is less to say, and less
space to say it. Their splendid merits and their visible
defects call neither for praise nor blame. Their place and
his, in the literature of England, are fixed points : no
critical astronomy of the future can lower or can raise
them : they have their own station for all time among
the greater and the lesser stars. As a poet, Byron was
surpassed, beyond all question and all comparison, by
three men at least of his own time; and matched, if not
now and then overmatched, by one or two others. The
verse of Wordsworth, at its highest, went higher than his ;
the verse of Landor flowed clearer. But his own ground,
where none but he could set foot, was lofty enough, fertile
and various. Nothing in Byron is so worthy of wonder
and admiration as the scope and range of his power. New
fields and ways of work, had he lived, might have given
S
".%
258 A YA’OAV.
room for exercise and matter for triumph to “that most fiery
spirit.” As it is, his work was done at Missolonghi; all
of his work for which the fates could spare him time.
A little space was allowed him to show at least a heroic
purpose, and attest a high design ; then, with all things
unfinished before him and behind, he fell asleep after
many troubles and triumphs. Few can ever have gone
wearier to the grave; none with less fear. He had done
enough to earn his rest. Forgetful now and set free for
ever from all faults and foes, he passed through the door-
way of no ignoble death out of reach of time, out of sight
of love, out of hearing of hatred, beyond the blame of
England and the praise of Greece. In the full strength
of spirit and of body his destiny overtook him, and made
an end of all his labours. He had seen and borne and
achieved more than most men on record. “He was a
greatman, good at many things, and now he has attained
this also, to be at rest.”
* The noble verses of Shelley are fitter to be spoken over Byron
than over any first or last Napoleon. To no other man could they
be so well applied : for the world indeed took more of warmth
from the fire of his spirit while alive than from any other then
kindled :- -
“What alive and so bold, O Earth 2
Art thou not over-bold 2
What! leapest thou forth as of old
In the light of thy morning mirth,
The last of the flock of the starry fold 2
* #: 3: * +: 3:
Thou wert warming thy fingers old
O'er the embers covered and cold
Of that most fiery spirit, when it fled : &
What, Mother, do you laugh now he is dead?”
COZERIDGE.
THE great man of whom I am about to speak seems to
me a figure more utterly companionless, more incom-
parable with others, than any of his kind. Receptive at
once and communicative of many influences, he has
received from none and to none did he communicate any
of those which mark him as a man memorable to all
students of men. What he learnt and what he taught
are not the precious things in him. He has founded
no school of poetry, as Wordsworth has, or Byron, or
Tennyson; happy in this, that he has escaped the plague
of pupils and parodists. Has he founded a school of
philosophy? He has helped men to think; he has
touched their thought with passing colours of his own
thought; but has he moved and moulded it into new and
durable shapes? Others may judge better of this than
I, but to me, set beside the deep direct work of those
thinkers who have actual power to break down and build
up thought, to construct faith or destroy it, his work seems
not as theirs is. And yet how very few are even the
great names we could not better afford to spare, would
not gladlier miss from the roll of “famous men and our
fathers that were before us.” Of his best verses I venture
S 2
26o CO/CAER/ZDG E.
{
to affirm that the world has nothing like them, and can
never have : that they are of the highest kind, and of
their own. They are jewels of the diamond's price,
flowers of the rose's rank, but unlike any rose or diamond,
known. In all times there have been gods that alighted
and giants that appeared on earth; the ranks of great
men are properly divisible, not into thinkers and workers,
but into Titans and Olympians. Sometimes a supreme
poet is both at once : such above all men is AEschylus ;
so also Dante, Michel Angelo, Shakespeare, Milton,
Goethe, Hugo, are gods at once and giants; they have
the lightning as well as the light of the world, and in hell
they have command as in heaven; they can see in the
night as by day. As godlike as these, even as the
divinest of them, a poet such as Coleridge needs not the
thews and organs of any Titan to make him greater.
Judged by the justice of other men, he is assailable and
condemnable on several sides; his good work is the
scantiest in quantity ever done by a man so famous in so
long a life; and much of his work is bad. His genius
is fluctuant and moonstruck as the sea is, and yet his
mind is not, what he described Shakespeare's to be, “an
oceanic mind.” His plea againstall accusers must be that
of Shakespeare, a plea unanswerable: - -
“I am that I am ; and they that level \
At my abuses reckon up their own.” g?
* . *
“I am that I am ; ” it is the only solid and durable reply.
to any impertinence of praise or blame. We hear too
much and too often of circumstances or accidents which
extenuate this thing or qualify that ; and such, no doubt,
CO/A2/2//DGA2. 261
there always may be ; but usually—at least it seems so to
me—we get out of each man what he has in him to give.
Probably at no other time, under no other conditions,
would Coleridge for example have done better work or
g * e * > tº & }
more. His flaws and failures are as much ingrained in
him as his powers and achievements.
For from the very first the two sides of his mind are
visible and palpable. Among all verses of boys who
were to grow up great, I remember none so perfect, so
sweet and deep in Sense and Sound, as those which he is
said to have written at School, headed “Time, Real and
Imaginary.” And following hard on these come a score
or two of “poems” each more feeble and more flatulent
than the last. Over these and the like I shall pass with
|
all due speed, being undesirous to trouble myself or any
possible reader with the question whether “Religious
Musings” be more damnable than “Lines to a Young
Ass,” or less damnable. Even when clear of these
brambles, his genius walked for some time over much
waste ground with irregular and unsure steps. Some
poems, touched with exquisite grace, with clear and pure
harmony, are tainted with somewhat of feeble and sickly
which impairs our relish ; “Lewti’ for instance, an
early sample of his admirable melody, of tender colour
and dim grace as of clouds, but effeminate in build, loose-
hung, weak of eye and foot. Yet nothing of more
precious and rare sweetness exists in verse than that
stanza of the swans disturbed. His style indeed was a
plant of strangely slow growth, but perfect and wonderful
in its final flower. Even in the famous verses called
“Love” he has not attained to that strength and solidity
\
262 COZERIDGE.
of beauty which was his special gift at last. For melody
rather than for harmony it is perfect; but in this oenomel
there is as yet more of honey than of wine. . —
Coleridge was the reverse of Antæus; the contact of
earth took all strength. out of him. He could not handle
to much purpose any practical creed; his political verse
is most often weak of foot and hoarse of accent. There
is a graceful Asiatic legend cited by his friend Southey of
“the footless birds of Paradise” who have Only wings to
sustain them, and live their lives out in a perpetual flight
through the clearest air of heaven. Ancient naturalists,
Cardan and Aldrovandus, had much dispute and disser-
tation as to the real or possible existence of these birds,
as to whether the female did in effect lay her eggs in a
hollow of the male's back, designed by nature to that
end ; whether they could indeed live on falling dew.;
and so forth. These questions we may presume to be
decided; but it is clear and certain enough that men
have been found to live in much this fashion. Such a
footless bird of Paradise was Coleridge; and had his
wings always held out it had been well for him and us.
Unhappily this winged and footless creature would
perforce too often furl his wings in mid air and try his
footing on earth, where his gait was like a swan's on shore.
Of his flight and his song when in the fit element, it
is hard to speak at all, hopeless to speak adequately. It
is natural, that there should be nothing like them dis-
coverable in any human work; natural that his poetry at
its highest should be, as it is, beyond all praise and all
words of men. He who can define it could “ unweave a 3
rainbow ; ” he who could praise it aright would be such
COZERIDGE 263
another as the poet. The “Christabel,” the “Kubla
Khan,” with one or two more, are outside all law and
jurisdiction of ours. When it has been said that such
melodies were never heard, such dreams never dreamed,
such speech never spoken, the chief thing remains unsaid,
and unspeakable. There is a charm upon these poems
which can only be felt in silent submission of wonder.
Any separate line has its own heavenly beauty, but to
cite separate lines is intolerable. They are to be re-
ceived in a rapture of silence ; such a silence as Chap-
man describes ; silence like a god “peaceful and young,”
which
“Left so free mine ears,
That I might hear the music of the spheres,
And all the angels singing out of heaveſz.”
More amenable to our judgment, and susceptible
of a more definite admiration, the “Ancient Mariner,”
and the few other poems cast in something of a
ballad type which we may rank around or below it,
belong to another class. The chief of these is so well
known that it needs no fresh comment. Only I will say
that to some it may seem as though this great sea-piece
might have had more in it of the air and savour of the sea.
Perhaps it is none the worse; and indeed any one
speaking of so great and famous a poem must feel and
know that it cannot but be right, although he or another
may think it would be better if this were retrenched or
that appended. And this poem is beyond question one
of the supreme triumphs of poetry. Witness the men who
brought batteries to bear on it right and left. Literally: for
l Euthymia Raptus; The Tears of Peace (1609).
264 CO/AFAC/DGAE.
one critic said that the “moral sentiment” had impaired
the imaginative excellence; another, that it failed and
fell through for want of a moral foothold upon facts.
Remembering these things, I am reluctant to proceed—
but desirous to praise, as I best may. Though I doubt
if it be worth while, seeing how the “Ancient Mariner’”
—praised or dispraised—lives and is like to live for the
delight equally of young boys and old men; and seeing
also that the last critic cited was no less a man than Haz-
litt. It is fortunate—among many misfortunes—that for
Coleridge no warning word was needed against the
shriek of the press-gang from this side or that. He
stooped once or twice to spurn them ; but he knew that
he stooped. His intense and overwrought abstraction
from things of the day or hour did him no ill service here.
| The “Ancient Mariner” has doubtless more of
breadth and space, more of material force and motion,
than anything else of the poet's. And the tenderness of
sentiment which touches with significant colour the pure
white imagination is here no longer morbid or languid, as
in the earlier poems of feeling and emotion. It is soft
and piteous enough, but womanly rather than effeminate;
and thus serves indeed to set off the strange splendours
and boundless beauties of the story. For the execution,
I presume no human eye is too dull to see how perfect it
is, and how high in kind of perfection. Here is not the
speckless and elaborate finish which shows everywhere
the fresh rasp of file or chisel on its smooth and spruce
excellence; this is faultless after the fashion of a flower or
-a tree. Thus it has grown : not thus has it been carved.
Nevertheless, were we compelled to the choice, I for
ſ
COZAEAE ZZ)GAE. 265
one would rather preserve “Kubla Khan’ and “Christa-
\
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... '
|
bel” than any other of Coleridge's poems. It is more
conceivable that another man should be born capable of
writing the “Ancient Mariner” than one capable of
writing these. The former is perhaps the most wonder-
ful of all poems. In reading it we seem rapt into that pa-
radise revealed to Swedenborg, where music and colour
and perfume were one, where you could hear the hues
and see the harmonies of heaven. For absolute melody
and splendour it were hardly rash to call it the first poem
in the language. An exquisite instinct married to a
subtle science of verse has made it the supreme model of
music in our language, a model unapproachable except
by Shelley. All the elements that compose the perfect
form of English metre, as limbs and veins and features
a beautiful body of man, were more familiar, more sub-
ject as it were, to this great poet than to any other.
How, for instance, no less than rhyme, assonance and
alliteration are forces, requisite components of high and
ample harmony, witness once for all the divine passage'
which begins—
“Five miles meandering with a mazy motion,” &c.
All these feast details and delicacies of work are
worth notice when the result of them is so transcendent.
Every line of the poem might be subjected to the like
scrutiny, but the student would be none the nearer to the
\
* Witness also the matchless fragments of metrical criticism in
Coleridge’s “Remains,” which prove with what care and relish the
most sweet and perfect melodist among all our poets would set
himself to examine and explain the alternations and sequences of
sound in the noblest verse of others.
|
266 r CO/CAER/ZDG. A.
master's Secret. The spirit, the odour in it, the cloven
tongue of fire that rests upon its forehead, is a thing
neither explicable nor communicable.
Of all Coleridge's poems the loveliest is assuredly
“Christabel.” It is not so vast in scope and reach of
2
imagination as the “Ancient Mariner;” it is not so
miraculous as “Kubla Khan;” but for simple charm of
inner and Outer sweetness it is unequalled by either.
The very terror and mystery of magical evil is imbued
with this sweetness ; the witch has no less of it than the
maiden ; their contact has in it nothing dissonant or
disfiguring, nothing to jar or to deface the beauty and
harmony of the whole imagination. As for the melody,
here again it is incomparable with any other poet's.
Shelley indeed comes nearest; but for purity and
volume of music Shelley is to Coleridge as a lark to a
nightingale; his song heaven-high and clear as heaven,
but the other's more rich and weighty, more passionately
various, and warmer in effusion of sound..! On the other
hand, the nobler nature, the clearer spirit of Shelley,
fills his verse with a divine force of meaning, which
Coleridge, who had it not in him, could not affect to
give. That sensuous fluctuation of soul, that floating
fervour of fancy, whence his poetry rose as from a
shifting sea, in faultless completion of form and charm,
had absorbed—if indeed there were any to absorb—all
* From this general rule I except of course the transcendent
antiphonal music which winds up the “Prometheus” of Shelley,
and should perhaps except also the “Ode to the West Wind,” and
the close of the “Ode to Naples.” Against “Christabel” it would
for example be fairer to set “The Sensitive Plant” for compariso
of harmonies. & --.
COZAZ/º/Z)G F. - 267
emotion of love or faith, all heroic beauty of moral
passion, all inner and Outer life of the only kind possible
to such other poets as Dante or Shelley, Milton or Hugo.
This is neither blameable nor regrettable; none of these
could have done his work; nor could he have done it
had he been in any way other or better than he was.
Neither, for that matter, could we have had a Hamlet or
a Faust from any of these, the poets of moral faith and
passion, any more than a “Divina Commedia " from
Shakespeare, a “Prometheus Unbound” from Goethe.
Let us give thanks for each after their kind to nature
and thc fatcs.
Alike by his powers and his impotences, by his
capacity and his defect, Coleridge was inapt for dramatic
poetry. It were no discredit to have fallen short of
Shelley on this side, to be overcome by him who has
written the one great English play of modern times; but
here the very comparison would seem a jest. There is
little worth praise or worth memory in the “Remorse”
except Süch casual fragments of noble verse as may
readily be detached from the loose and friable stuff in
which they lie imbedded. In the scene of the incanta-
tion, in the scene of the dungeon, there are two such
pure and precious fragments of gold. In the part of
Alhadra there are lofty and sonorous interludes of
declamation and reflection. The characters are flat and
shallow ; the plot is at once languid, violent, and heavy.
To touch the string of the spirit, thread the weft of evil
and good, feel out the way of the Soul through dark
places of thought and rough places of action, was not
given to this the sweetest dreamer of dreams. In
--
268 - CO ZAZAC//DGE.
“Zapolya” there are no such patches of imperial
purple sewn on, but there is more of air and motion ;
little enough indeed of high dramatic quality, but a
native grace and ease which give it something of the
charm of life. In this lighter and more rapid work,
the song of Glycine flashes out like a visible sunbeam;
it is one of the brightest bits of music ever done into
words.
The finest of Coleridge's odes is beyond all doubt the
“Ode to France.” Shelley declared it the finest of
modern times, and justly, until himself and Keats had
written up to it at least. It were profitless now to
discuss whether it should take or yield precedence when
weighed with the “Ode to Liberty” or the “Ode to
Naples.” There is in it a noble and loyal love of
freedom, though less fiery at once and less firm than
Shelley's, as it proved in the end less durable and deep.
The prelude is magnificent in music, and in sentiment
and emotion far above any other of his poems; nor are
the last notes inadequate to this majestic overture.
Equal in force and sweetness of style, the “Ode on
Dejection” ranks next in my mind to this one; some
may prefer its vaguer harmonies and Sunset colours to
the statelier movement, the more august and solemn
passion of the earlier ode."
* Some time later, when France, already stripped of freedom and
violated by treason, was openly paraded in her prostitution to the
first Buonaparte, Coleridge published his “Ode to Tranquillity,”
beginning with two stanzas since retrenched. Having unearthed
them in the “Annual Register for 18OI’’ (vol. xliii., p. 525), I set
them down here as better worth saving than most of his political
verse:–
CO/AA’/ZDG E. 269
It is noticeable that only his Supreme gift of lyrical
power could sustain Coleridge on political ground. His
attempts of the kind in blank verse are poor indeed —
“Untimely breathings, sick and short assays.”
Compare the nerveless and hysterical verses headed
“Fears in Solitude” (exquisite as is the overture, fault-
less in tone and colour, and worthy of a better sequel)
with the majestic and masculine sonnet of Wordsworth,
written at the same time on the same subject : the
lesser poet—for, great as he is, I at least cannot hold
Wordsworth, though so much the stronger and more
admirable man, equal to Coleridge as mere poet—speaks
with a calm force of thought and resolution; Coleridge
wails, appeals, deprecates, objurgates in a flaccid and
querulous fashion without heart or spirit. This debility
of mind and manner is set off in strong relief by the
loveliness of landscape touches in the same poem. The
, “What statesmen scheme, and soldiers work;
Whether the Pontiff or the Turk
Will e'er renew th’ expiring lease
Of empire; whether war or peace
Will best play off the Consul’s game;
What fancy-figures, and what name,
Half-thoughted, sensual France, a natural slave,
On those ne'er-broken chains, her self-forg’d chains, will grave;
“Disturb|s] not me ! Some tears I shed
When bow'd the Swiss his noble head;
Since then, with quiet heart have view’d
Both distant fights and treaties crude,
Whose heap'd-up terms, which fear compels,
(Live Discord’s green combustibles,
And future fuel of the funeral pyre)
Now hide, and soon, alas ! will feed the low-burnt fire.”
|
27o COZAZAC//DGA.
-
eclogue of “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter,” being lyrical,
is worthier of a great name ; it has force and motion
enough to keep it alive yet and fresh, impeded and
trammelled though it usually be by the somewhat vain
and verbose eloquence of a needlessly “Apologetic
Preface.” Blank verse Coleridge could never handle
with the security of conscious skill and a trained
strength; it grows in his hands too facile and feeble to
carry the due weight or accomplish the due work. I
have not found any of his poems in this metre retouched
and reinvigorated as a few have been among his others.
One such alteration is memorable to all students of his
art; the excision from the “Ancient Mariner ” Of a
stanza (eleventh of the Third Part) which described the
Death-mate of the Spectre-Woman, his bones foul with
leprous Scurf and green corruption of the grave, in
contrast to the red lips and yellow locks of the fearfuller
Nightmare Life-in-Death. Keats in like manner cut off
from the “Ode on Melancholy” a first stanza preserved
for us by his biographer, who has duly noted the
delicate justice of instinct implied by this rejection of
all ghastly and violent images, however noble and
impressive in their violence and ghastliness, from a poem
full only of the subtle sorrow born of beauty. The
same keen and tender sense of right made Coleridge
reject from his work the horrors while retaining the
terrors of death. But of his studies in blank verse he
seems to have taken no such care. They remain mostly
in a hybrid or an embryonic state, with birthmarks on
them of debility or malformation. Two of these indeed
have a charm of their own, not shallow or transient: the
CO/CAER//DG E. 27I
“Nightingale” and “Frost at Midnight.” In colour
they are perfect, and not (as usual) too effusive and
ebullient in style. Others, especially some of the
domestic or religious sort, are offensive and grievous to
the human sense on that score. Coleridge had doubt-
less a sincere belief in his own sincerity of belief, a true
feeling of his own truth of feeling ; but he leaves with us
too often an unpleasant sense or taste—as it were a tepid
dilution of sentiment, a rancid unction of piety. A
singular book published in 1835 without author's name—
the work, as I find, of a Mr. Alsop, long after to be
advertised for on public placards as an accomplice in the
enterprise which clouded the fiery fame and closed the
heroic life of Felice Orsini—gives further samples of this
in “Letters, Conversations and Recollections ; ” samples
that we might well have spared." A selection from his
notes and remains, from his correspondence and the
records of his “Table-Talk,” even from such books as
Cottle's and this anonymous disciple's, would be of real
interest and value, if well edited, sifted and weeded of
tares and chaff. The rare fragments of work done or
speech spoken in his latter years are often fragments of
gold beyond price. His plastic power and flexible
charm of verse, though shown only in short flashes of
* It contains however among others one elaborate letter of some
interest and significance, in which Coleridge, not without a tone of
contempt, falls foul of the orthodox vulgarity of Wordsworth's
theism (“what Hartley,” his son, I presume, ‘‘ calls the popping
in of the old man with a beard ”) in a fashion showing how far
apart his own theosophic mysticism, though never so daintily
dressed up in cast church-clothes, had drifted from the more clear
and rigid views of a harder and sounder mind.
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272 COZER/ZDG E.
ſ
\
song, lose nothing of the old freshness and life. To the
end he was the same whose “sovereign sway and master-
dom” of music could make Sweet and strong even the
feeble and tuneless form of metre called hexameters in
English; if form of metre that may be called which has
neither metre nor form. But the majestic rush and roll
of that irregular anapaestic measure used once or twice by
this supreme master of them all, no student can follow
without an exultation of enjoyment. The “Hymn to
the Earth" has a sonorous and Oceanic strength of
harmony, a grace and a glory of life, which fill the sense
with a vigorous delight. Of Such later work as the
divine verses on “Youth and Age,” “The Garden, of
Boccaccio,” sun-bright and honey-sweet, “Work without
Hope” (what more could be left to hope for when the
man could already do such work P)—of these, and of how
many more what can be said but that they are perfect,
flawless, priceless? Nor did his most delicate and pro-
found power of criticism ever fail him or fall off. To the
perfection of that rare faculty there were but two things
wanting: self-command and the natural cunning of words
which has made many lesser men as strong as he was
weak in the matter of verbal emendation. In that line
of labour his hand was unsure and infirm. Want of self-
command, again, left him often to the mercy of a caprice
which swept him through tangled and tortuous ways of
thought, through brakes and byways of fancy, where the
solid subject in hand was either utterly lost and thrown
over, or so transmuted and transfigured that any recogni-
tion of it was as hopeless as any profit. In an essay well
worth translating out of jargon into some human lan-
CO/ASA’//DG E. 273
guage, he speaks of “the holy jungle of transcendental
metaphysics.” Out of that holy and pestilential jungle .
he emerged but too rarely into sunlight and clear air.
It is not depth of thought which makes obscure to others
the work of a thinker; real and offensive obscurity
comes merely of inadequate thought embodied in
inadequate language. What is clearly comprehended or
conceived, what is duly thought and wrought out, must
find for itself and seize upon the clearest and fullest
expression. That grave and deep matter should be
treated with the fluency and facility proper to light and
slight things, no fool is foolish enough to desire: but we
may at least demand that whatever of message a speaker
may have for us be delivered without impediment of
speech. A style that stammers and rambles and stumbles,
that stagnates here, and there overflows into waste marsh
relieved only by thick patches of powdery bulrush and
such bright flowerage of barren blossom as is bred of
the fogs and the fens—such a style gives no warrant of
depth or soundness in the matter thus arrayed and set
forth. What grains of truth or seeds of error were borne
this way or that on the perpetual tide of talk concerning
“subject and object,” “reason and understanding,” those
who can or who care may at their leisure determine with
the due precision. If to the man's critical and philosophión
faculty there had been added a formative power as perfect
as was added to his poetic faculty, the fruit might possi-)
bly have been wellnigh as precious after its kind. As it is,
we must judge of his poetic faculty by what is accom-
plished; of the other we must judge, not by what is ac-
complished, but by what is suggested. And the value of
f T
;
274 COZAZAZZZ)GAE.
this is sometimes great, though the value of that be gene
rally small : So great indeed that we cannot weigh or mea-
Sure its influence and its work. - r
Our study and our estimate of Coleridge cannot now
be discoloured or misguided by the attraction or repul-
Sion to which all contemporary students or judges of a
great man’s work cannot but be more or less liable.
Few men, I suppose, ever inspired more of either feeling
than he in his time did. To us his moral or social
qualities, his opinion on this matter and his action in
that, are nothing except in so far as they affect the
work done, the inheritance bequeathed us. With all fit
admiration and gratitude for the splendid fragments so
bequeathed of a critical and philosophic sort, I doubt
his being remembered, except by a small body of his
elect, as other than a poet. His genius was so great, and
in its greatness so many-sided, that for some studious
disciples of the rarer kind he will doubtless, seen from
any possible point of view, have always something about
him of the old magnetism and magic. FThe ardour,
delicacy, energy of his intellect, his resolute desire to get
at the roots of things and deeper yet, if deeper might be,
will always enchant and attract all spirits of like mould
and temper. But as a poet his place is indisputable. It
is high among the highest of all time. An age that
should forget or neglect him, might neglect or forget
any poet that ever lived. At least, any poet whom it
did remember such an age would remember, as some-
thing other than a poet ; it would prize and praise in
him, not the absolute and distinctive quality, but some-
thing empirical or accidental. That may be said of this
COZERIDGE. , 275
one which can hardly be said of any but the greatest
among men ; that Come what may to the world in course
of time, it will never see his place filled. Other and
stronger men, with fuller control and Concentration of
genius, may do more service, may bear more fruit ; but
such as his was they will not have in them to give. The
highest lyric work is either passionate or imaginative ; of
passion Coleridge's has nothing; but for height and
perfection of imaginative quality he is the greatest of
lyric poets. This was his special power, and this is his
special praise. *
276
YOHN FORD,
WHENEveR the name of the poet Ford comes back to us,
it comes back splendid with the light of another man's
genius. The fiery panegyric of Charles Lamb is as an
aureole behind it. That high-pitched note of critical
and spiritual enthusiasm exalts even to disturbance our
own sense of admiration ; possibly, too, even to some
after injustice of reaction in the rebound of mind.
Certainly, on the one hand, we see that the spirit of the
critic has been kindled to excess by contact and appre-
hension of the poet's ; as certainly, on the other hand,
we see the necessary excellence of that which could so
affect and so attach the spirit of another man, and of
such another man as Lamb. And the pure excess of
admiration for things indeed admirable, of delight in
things indeed delightful, is itself also a delightful and
admirable thing when expressed to such purpose by such
IIlêIl.
And this poet is doubtless a man worthy of note and
admiring remembrance. He stands apart among his
fellows, without master or follower; he has learnt little
from Shakespeare or Marlowe, Jonson or Fletcher. The
other dramatists of the great age fall naturally into classes;
thus, to take two of the greatest, Webster and Decker
* • * *
to O
•,• e tº
º
gº
A)
:
:
tº
º
:
:
:
5.of/W RoRo 277
both hold of Shakespeare; “The Duchess of Malfi.” has a
savour of his tragedies, “Old Fortunatus” of his romantic
plays; not indeed so much by force of imitation as of
affinity. These two poets were as gulfs or estuaries of
the sea which is Shakespeare. In Decker's best work we
feel an air of the “Winter's Tale”or “Midsummer Night's
Dream ;” in Webster's, of “Lear” and “Othello.” Some-
thing of the April sweetness, the dew and breath of morn-
ing, which invests the pastoral and fairy, world of the
master, gives to the one pupil’s work a not infrequent
touch of delicate life and passionate grace ; from the other
we catch the echoes of his oceanic harmonies of terror and
pity, the refractions of that lightning which strikes into
sudden sight the very depths of action and suffering, the
motive forces of utter love and hate. But the poetry of
Ford is no branch or arm of that illimitable sea ; it might
rather be likened to a mountain lake shut in by solitary
highlands, without visible outlet or inlet, seen fitlier by
starlight than by Sunlight; much such an one as the Lac
de Gaube above Cauterets, steel-blue and sombre, with
a strange attraction for the swimmer in its cold smooth
reticence and breathless calm. For nothing is more
noticeable in this poet than the passionless reason and
equable tone of style with which in his greatest works he
treats of the deepest and most fiery passions, the quiet
eye with which he searches out the darkest issues of
emotion, the quiet hand with which he notes them down.
At all times his verse is even and regular, accurate and
composed; never specially flexible or melodious, always
admirable for precision, vigour, and purity.
The fame of Ford hangs mainly upon two great
278 9:OHN FORD.
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tragedies, which happily are strong enough in structure
to support a durable reputation. Two others among his
plays are indeed excellent, and worthy a long life of
honour; but among the mighty throng of poets then at
work a leading place could hardly have been granted to the
author only of “The Lover's Melancholy” and “Perkin
Warbeck.” To the author of “’Tis Pity She's a Whore”
and “The Broken Heart” it cannot be refused.
It is somewhat unfortunate that the very title of
Ford's masterpiece should sound so strangely in the ears
of a generation “whose ears are the chastest part about
them.” For of these great twin tragedies the first-born
is on the whole the greater. The subtleties and varieties
of individual character do not usually lie well within the
reach of Ford's handling ; but in the part of Giovanni we
find more of this power than elsewhere. Here the poet
has put forth all his strength ; the figure of his protagonist
stands out complete and clear. There is more ease and
life in it than in his other sculptures; though here as
always Ford is rather a sculptor of character than a
painter. But the completeness, the consistency of design
is here all the worthier of remark, that we too often find
this the most needful quality for a dramatist wanting in
him as in other great writers of his time.
Giovanni is the student struck blind and mad by
passion; in the uttermost depths of unimaginable crime
he reflects, argues, reasons concerning the devils that
possess him. In the only other tragedy of the time
based on incestuous love, Massinger's “ Unnatural
Combat,” the criminal is old and hardened, a soul
s steeped and tempered in sin, a man of blood and iron
5*OHAW FORD. ' 279
from his youth upwards ; but upon Giovanni his own
crime falls like a Curse, sudden as lightning; he stands
before us as one plague-stricken in the prime of spiritual
health, helpless under the lash of love as Canace or
Myrrha, Phaedra or Pasiphae. The Curious interfusion
of reason with passion makes him seem but the more
powerless to resist, the more hopeless of recovery. His
sister is perhaps less finely drawn, though her ebbs and
flows of passion are given with great force, and her
alternate possession by desire and terror, repentance and
defiance, if we are sometimes startled by the rough
rapidity of the change, does not in effect impair the unity
of character, obscure the clearness of outline. She
yields more readily than her brother to the curse of
\
Venus, with a passionate pliancy which prepares us for
her subsequent prostration of mind at the feet of her
Confessor, and again for the revival of a fearless and
shameless spirit under the stroke of her husband's
violence. Nothing can be finer than the touches which
bring out the likeness and unlikeness of the two ; her
fluctuation and his steadfastness, her ultimate repentance
and his final impenitence. The sin Once committed,
there is no more wavering or flinching possible to him,
who has fought so hard against the daemoniac possession;
while she who resigned body and soul to the tempter
almost at a word remains liable to the influences of
religion and remorse. Of all the magnificent scenes
which embody their terrible story the last is (as it should i
be) the most noble ; it is indeed the finest scene in Ford.
Even the catastrophe of “The Broken Heart,”—that
“transcendent scene,” as Lamb justly called it—though
28o 5*OHN FORD.
more overpoweringly effective in poetic mechanism and
material conception, is less profoundly and subtly im-
pressive. In Ford's best work we are usually conscious
of a studious arrangement of emotion and expression, a
steady inductive process of feeling as of thought,
answering to the orderly measure of the verse. That
Swift and fiery glance which flashes at once from all
depths to all heights of the human spirit, that intuition of
an indefinable and infallible instinct which at a touch
makes dark things clear and brings distant things close,
is not a gift of his ; perhaps Webster alone of English
poets can be said to share it in some measure with
Shakespeare. Bosola and Flamineo, Vittoria Corombona
and the Duchess of Malfi, even Romelio and Leonora in
that disjointed and chaotic play “The Devil's Law-case,”
good characters and bad alike, all have this mark upon
them of their maker's swift and subtle genius ; this
sudden surprise of the soul in its remoter hiding-places
at its most secret work. In a few words that startle as
with a blow and lighten as with a flame, the naked natural
spirit is revealed, bare to the roots of life. And this
power Ford also has shown here at least ; witness the
passionate subtlety and truth of this passage, the deepest
and keenest of his writing, as when taken with the
context it will assuredly appear —
“Azamabella. Be not deceived, my brother;
This banquet is an harbinger of death
To you and me; assure yourself it is,
And be prepared to welcome it.
Giovanni. Well, them :
The schoolmen teach that all this globe of earth
Shall be consumed to ashes in a minute.
..}^OHAW FORZ). 281
Ann. So I have read too.
Gio. But ’twere somewhat strange
To see the waters burn; could I believe
This might be true, I could believe as well
There might be hell or heaven.
Azzºz. That’s most certain,
Gio. A dream, a dream else in this other world
We should know one another.
A727t. So we shall.
Gio. Have you heard so P”
All the horror of this wonderful scene is tempered into
beauty by the grace and glow of tenderness which so
suffuses it as to verify the vaunt of Giovanni—
“If ever after-times should hear
Of our fast-knit affections, though perhaps
The laws of conscience and of civil use
May justly blame us, yet when they but know
Our loves, that love will wipe away that rigour
Which would in other incests be abhorred.
Give me your hand; how sweetly life doth run
In these well-coloured veins ! how constantly
These palms do promise health ! but I could chide
With nature for this cunning flattery—
T{iss me again—forgive me.”
The soft and fervent colour of Ford's style, the
Smooth and finished measure of his verse, never fail him
throughout the nobler parts of this tragedy; but here as
elsewhere we sometimes find, instead of these, a certain
hardness of tone peculiar to him. The ferocious
nakedness of reciprocal invective in the scene where
Soranzo discovers the pregnancy of Annabella has no
parallel in the works of his great compeers. M. Taine
has translated the opening passages of that scene in the
division of his history of English literature which treats
of our great dramatists. He has done full justice to the
282 5*OHAV PORD.
force and audacity of Ford’s realism, which indeed he
seems to rate higher than the depth and pathos, the
Sweet and subtle imagination, of other poets, if not than
the more fender and gracious passages of Ford himself.
He has dwelt, it appears to me, with especial care and
favour upon three men of high genius, in all of whom
this quality or this defect is conspicuous, of hardness too
often deepening into brutality. A better and keener
estimate of Ford, of Dryden, and of Swift can hardly be
found than M. Taine's. Their vigorous and positive
genius has an evident attraction for his critical spirit,
which enjoys and understands the tangible and definable
forces of mind, handles the hard outline, relishes the
rough savour of the actual side of things with which
strength of intellect rather than strength of imagination
has to deal. As with Swift and Dryden among their
fellows, so with Ford among his, the first great quality
that strikes a student is the force of grasp, the precision
of design, the positive and resolute touch with which all
things are set down. A dramatic poet of Ford's high
quality cannot of course be wanting in beauty and
tenderness, in delicacy and elevation, unknown to men,
whose mightiest gift was that of noble satire, though the
genius, so applied were as deep and wide and keen, the
spirit so put to service as swift and strong and splendid,
as that of the two great men just mentioned. Not only
the lovely lines above cited, but the very names of
Calantha and Penthea, bear witness at Once in our
memory to the grace and charm of their poet's work at
its best. The excess of tragic effect in his scenes, his
delight in “fierce extremes” and volcanic eruptions of
5*OHN FORD. 283
character and event, have in the eyes of some critics
obscured the milder side of his genius. They are not
without excuse. No one who has studied Ford throughout
with the care he demands and deserves can fail to feel
the want of that sweet and spontaneous fluency which
belongs to the men of Shakespeare's school—that bird-
like note of passionate music which vibrates in their
verse to every breath of joy or sorrow. There is some-
thing too much now and then of rule and line, something"
indeed of hard limitation and apparent rigidity of method.
I say this merely by comparison; set against the drama-
tists of any later, SQhool, he will appear as natural and
instinctive a singer as any bird of the Shakespearian choir.
But of pure imagination, of absolute poetry as distinguished
from intellectual force and dramatic ability, no writer of
his age except Massinger has less. Yet they are both
poets of a high class, dramatists of all but the highest.
They both impress us with a belief in their painstaking
method of work, in the care and conscience with which
their scenes, were wrought out. Neither Ford nor Mas-
singer could have ventured to indulge in the slippery
style and shambling license which we pardon in Decker
for the sake of his lyric note and the childlike delicacy
!
!
&
of his pathos, his tenderness of colour and his passionate
fancy; nor could they have dared the risk of letting their
plays drift loose and shift for themselves at large, making
the best that might be made of such rough and unhewn
plots as Cyril Tourneur’s, Middleton's, or Chapman's—
sustained and quickened by the unquenchable and burning
fire, the bitter ardour and angry beauty of Tourneur's
verse, the grace and force of Middleton's fluent and
284 9:OHAW FORZ).
exuberant invention, the weight of thought and grave re-
sonance of Chapman's gnomic lines. They could not
afford to let their work run wild; they were bound not
to write after the erratic fashion of their time. All the
work of Massinger, all the serious work of Ford, is the
work of an artist who respects alike himself, his art, and
the reader or spectator who may come to study it. There
is scarcely another dramatic poet of their time for whom
as much can be said. On the other hand, there is
scarcely another dramatic poet of their time who had not
more than they had of those “raptures” which “were all
air and fire,” of “that fine madness which rightly should
possess a poet's brain.” The just and noble eulogy of
Drayton, though appropriate above all to the father of
English tragedy, is applicable also more or less to the
successors of Marlowe, as well as to the master of the
“mighty line” himself. To Ford it is less appropriate;
to Massinger it is not applicable at all. This is said out
of no disrespect or ingratitude to that admirable dramatist,
whose graver and lighter studies are alike full of interest
and liberal of enjoyment; but the highest touch of imagi-
nation, the Supreme rapture and passion of poetry, he
has not felt, and therefore he cannot make us feel.
The story of Giovanni and Annabella was probably
based either on fact or tradition ; it may perhaps yet be
unearthed in some Italian collection of tales after the
manner of Cinthio and Bandello (with the tale of incest
in Rosset's “Histoires Tragiques” it has little in
common); but in spite of Ford's own assertion I am
inclined to conjecture that the story sculptured with
such noble skill and care in the scenes of “The Broken
f
5-OHN FORD, 285
Heart” was “all made out of the carver's brain.” In
no other play of Ford's are the subordinate figures so
studiously finished. In the preceding play all the minor
characters are mere outlines of ruffian or imbecile; here
the poet has evidently striven to give fullness of form to
all his conceptions, and fullness of life to all his forms.
Ithocles, Orgilus, Bassanes, are as thoroughly wrought
out as he could leave them ; and in effect the triumphant
and splendid ambition of the first, the sullen and subtle
persistence of the second, the impure insanity and
shameful agony of the third, are well relieved against
each other, Cspecially in those scenes where the brilliant
youth of the hero is set side by side with the sombre
youth of the man he has injured even to death. But
here again the whole weight of the action hangs upon the
two chief characters ; Calantha and Penthea stand out
alone clear in our memory for years after their story has
been read. In no play or poem are two types of cha-
racter more skilfully contrasted; and no poet ever
showed a more singular daring than Ford in killing both
heroines by the same death of moral agony. Penthea,
the weaker and more womanish of the two, dies slowly
dissolves into death with tears and cries of loud and
resentful grief; Calantha drops dead at the goal of suffer-
ing without a word, stabbed to the heart with a sudden
silent sorrow. Of all last scenes on any stage, the last
scene of this play is the most overwhelming in its unity
of outward effect and inward impression. Other, tragic
poems have closed as grandly, with as much or more of
moral and poetic force; none, I think, with such solemn
power of spectacular and spiritual effect combined. As
\
286 5*OHAW FORZ).
a mere stage show it is so greatly conceived and so
triumphantly wrought out, that even with less intense
and delicate expression, with less elaborate and stately
passion in the measure and movement of the words, it
would stamp itself on the memory as a durable thing to
admire ; deep-based as it is on Solemn and calm emotion,
built up with choice and majestic verse, this great scene
deserves even the extreme eulogy of its greatest critic.
The tragic genius of Ford takes a softer tone and
more tender colour in “The Broken Heart” than in any
of his other plays; except now and then in the part of
Bassanes, there are no traces of the ferocity and brutality
which mark in the tragedy preceding it such characters
as Soranzo, Vasques, and Grimaldi. But here too there
is something of Ford's severity, a certain rigid and
elaborate precision of work, unlike the sweet seeming
instinctiveness, the noble facility of manner and apparent
impulse of gracious or majestic speech, which imbues
and informs the very highest dramatic style; the quality
which Marlowe and Shakespeare bequeathed to their
successors, which kept fresh the verse of Beaumont and
Fletcher despite its overmuch easiness and exuberance.
of mannerism, which gave life to the roughest outlines of
Webster, Decker, Tourneur, which even Marston and
Chapman, with all their faults of crudity and pedantry,
showed when they had to rise to the height of any great
and tragic argument. The same rigidity is noticeable
to some extent in the characters: the marble majesty of
Calantha is indeed noble and proper, and gives force
and edge to the lofty passion of the Catastrophe ; but in
Penthea too there is something over hard and severe ;
5-OHN FORZ). 287
we find a vein of harshness and bitterness in her angry
grief which Shakespeare or indeed Webster would have
tempered and Sweetened. In the faultless and most ex-
quisite scene where she commits to the princess her
legacies of “three poor jewels,” this bitterness disappears,
and the sentiment is as delicate and just as the expres-
sion; while the gracious gentleness of Calantha gives a
fresh charm of warmth and sympathy to her stately
presence and office in the story. The quality of pity
here made manifest in her brings her own after suffering
within, reach of our pity. Again, in the previous inter-
view of Ithocles with Penthea, and above all in her
delirious dying talk, there is real and noble pathos,
though hardly of the most subtle and heart-piercing
kind; and in the parts of Ithocles and Orgilus there is
a height and dignity which ennoble alike the slayer and
the slain. None could give this quality better than
Ford : this, the most complete and equal of his works,
is full of it throughout. -
From the “high-tuned poem,” as he justly calls it,
which he had here put forth in evidence of his higher
and purer part of power, the fall, or collapse rather, in
his next work was singular enough. I trust that I shall
not be liable to any charge of Puritan prudery though
I avow that this play of “Love's Sacrifice” is to me
intolerable. In the literal and genuine sense of the word,
it is utterly indecent, unseemly and unfit for handling.
The conception is essentially foul because it is essentially
false; and in the sight of art nothing is so foul as false-
hood. The incestuous indulgence of Giovanni and Anna-
bella is not improper for tragic treatment; the obscene
{
288 . 5-OHAW FORD.
abstinence of Fernando and Bianca is wholly improper.
There is a coarseness of moral fibre in the whole work
which is almost without parallel among our old poets.
More than enough has been said of their verbal and
spiritual license; but nowhere else, as far as I know,
shall we find within the large limits of our early drama
such a figure as Ford's Bianca set up for admiration as
a pure and noble type of woman. For once, to my own
wonder and regret, I find myself at one with the venomous
moralist Gifford on a question of morals, when he ob-
serves of “that most innocent lady” that “she is, in
fact, a gross and profligate adulteress, and her ridiculous
reservations, while they mark her lubricity, only enhance
her shame.” The worst is, that we get no moment of
relief throughout from the obtrusion of the very vilest
elements that go to make up nature and deform it. No
height or grandeur of evil is here to glorify, no aspiration
or tenderness of afterthought is here to allay, the imbecile
baseness, the paltry villainies and idiocies, of the “treache-
rous, lecherous, kindless” reptiles that crawl in and out
before our loathing eyes. The language of course is in
the main elaborate, pure, and forcible; the verse often
admirable for its stately strength ; but beyond this we
can find nothing to plead in extenuation of uncleanness
and absurdity. The only apparent aim of the quasi-
comic interludes is to prove the possibility of producing
something even more hateful than the tragic parts. The
indecency of Ford's farcical underplots is an offence
above all things to art. How it may seem from the
preacher's point of view is no present concern of ours;
perhaps he might find it by comparison harmless and
5-OAAW FORZ). 289
powerless, as assuredly it can attract or allure the in-
tellect or the senses of no creature above the level of
apes and Swine ; but in the artist's eyes it is insufferable
and damnable. Without spirit, without humour, without
grace, it encumbers the scene as with dried and congealed
filth. In the face of much exquisite work of painter and
Sculptor, poet and humourist, which is anything but con-
ventionally decent, we cannot allow that art must needs
“lean to virtue's side,” and lend her voice or hand to
Swell the verdict or prop the pulpit of judge or moralist ;
but two things she cannot away with ; by the very law
of her life, by the very condition of her being, she is
bound to reject whatever is brutal, whatever is prurient;
Swift cannot bend her to the worship of Cloacina, Moore
* cannot teach her the lisp and leer of his toad-faced
Cupids. Great men may sin by mad violence and
brutality, like that fierce world-satirist who stood out
with lacerated heart against all bitterest infliction and
“envious wrath of man or God,” a Titan blasted by the
fires but not beaten by the strokes of heaven; but small
men only can teach their tongues the tittering accent of
a vicious valet, the wriggling prurience of such lackey's
literature as is handed round on a salver to the patrons
of drawing-room rhymesters and ante-chamber witlings.
Ford was a poet, and a poet of high mark ; he could not
therefore, even in a meaner age, have learnt the whimper
or the Smirk of sentimental or jocose prurience ; he could
never have submitted to ignoble handling the sweet or
bitter emotions and passions of sense or spirit; all torture
and all rapture of the flesh or of the soul he would
always have treated with the frank and serious freedom
U
29O 9:0///W FORD.
of the artist, never with the bragging and simpering
petulance of the social poetaster and parasitic plagiarist;
but the other inadmissible thing he has too often ad-
mitted within the precinct of his work. The dull brutality
of his lame and laborious farce is a fault quite unlike the
faults of his fellows ; his cold and dry manner makes his
buffoonery at once rancid and insipid; while the “bluff
beastliness” of Jonson's plebeian part, the overflowing
and boyish wantonness of Fletcher, the foul-mouthed
fidelity of Decker's transcripts from the low life of his
period, even the rank breadth of Marston's shameless
satire, may admit of excuse in the sight of art, the point-
less and spiritless license of Ford’s attempts at comedy
can be neither honourably excused nor reasonably ex-
plained. Of Shakespeare alone we can be sure that no
touch is wrong, no tone too broad, no colour too high for
the noble and necessary purposes of his art; but of his
followers, if excuse be needed for their errors and ex-
cesses, the most may plead in palliation either the height
of spirits and buoyancy of blood, or the passion of a
fierce sincerity, or the force and flavour of strong comic
genius, or the relief given by contrast to the high pure
beauty of the main work; all alike may plead the freedom
of the time, the freshness of young life and energy of the
dawn, working as they did when the art was new-born,
too strong a child of earth and heaven and too joyous to
keep always a guard on its ways and words, to walk
always within bounds and Speak always within compass.
But Ford is no poetic priest or spiritual witness against
evil, whose lips have been touched with the live coal of
Sacred satire, and set on fire of angry prophecy; the
5*OA/AW FORZ). 29I
wrath and scorn of Jonson, the rage of Tourneur and
the bitterness of Marston, findin him no echo of response;
and of the bright sweet flow and force of life which feed
as from a springing fountain the joyful genius of Beaumont
and Fletcher, of the gladness and grace of that wild light
Muse who sings “as if she would never grow old,” whether
her song be of men's joy or Sorrow, he has nothing to
show in excuse of worse faults than theirs; with him
“The heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble,
And waits upon the judgment.”
Massinger has been accused of the same dull and
deliberate license of speech ; but Massinger, though
poor in verbal wit, had a strong and grave humour, an
occasional breadth and warmth of Comic invention, which
redeems his defects or offences. Hartley Coleridge, in
his notice of the two poets, says that Massinger would
have been the dullest of all bad jokers, had not Ford
contrived to be still duller. But Massinger, if not
buoyant and brilliant as Fletcher, or rich with the
spiritual wealth and strong with the gigantic thews of
Jonson, has his own place of honour in pure as well as
mixed comedy ; Belgarde, Justice Greedy, Borachia,
and others, are worthy to stand, in their lower line of
humour, below the higher level of such studies as Over-
reach and Luke ; whereas, if Ford's lighter characters
are ever inoffensive for a moment, it is all that can be
said of them, and more than could be hoped. The
strength and intensity of his genius require a tragic soil
to flourish in, an air of tragedy to breathe ; its lightning
is keenest where the night of emotion and event is
U 2 -
292 5-OHN FORD.
--
wº
}
darkest in which it moves and works. In romantic drama
or mixed comedy it shines still at times with a lambent
grace and temperance of light; but outside the limit of
serious thought and feeling it is quenched at once, and
leaves but an unsavoury fume behind. Even in those
higher latitudes the moral air is not always of the
clearest ; the sanctity of Giovanni's confessor, for example,
has something of the compliant quality of Bianca's
virtue ; it sits so loosely and easily on him that, fresh
from the confession of Annabella's incest, he assists in
plighting her hand to Soranzo, and passing off on the
bridegroom as immaculate a woman whom he knows to
be with child by her brother; and this immediately after
that most noble scene in which the terror and splendour
of his rebuke has bowed to the very dust before him the
fair face and the ruined soul of his penitent. After this
we cannot quite agree with Macaulay that Ford has in
this play “assigned a highly creditable part to the friar; ”
but certainly he has the most creditable part there is to
play ; and as certainly he was designed on the whole for
a type of sincere and holy charity. The jarring and
startling effect of such moral discords weakens the poet's
hold on the reader by the shock they give to his faith
and sympathy. Beaumont and Fletcher have sinned
heavily in the same way ; and the result is that several of
their virtuous characters are more really and more justly
: offensive to the natural sense, more unsavoury to the
spiritual taste, than any wantonness of words or ex-
travagance of action can make their representative figures
of vice.
In the gallery of Ford's work, as in the gallery of
$20//W FORD. 293
Webster's, there is one which seems designed as a sample
of regular and classic form, a sedate study after a given
model. Ford’s “Perkin Warbeck” holds the same place
On his stage as “Appius and Virginia. " does on Webster's.
In both plays there is a perfect unity of action, a perfect
straightforwardness of design; all is clear, orderly, direct
to the point ; there is no outgrowth or overgrowth of
fancy, there are no byways of poetry to divert the single
progress of the story. By the side of “The Duchess of
Malfi’ or “The Broken Heart” they look rigid and bare.
Both are noble works; Webster's has of course the more
ardour and vehemence of power, Ford’s has perhaps the
more completeness of stage effect and careful composi-
tion. The firmness and fidelity of hand with which his
leading characters are drawn could only be shown by a
dissection of the whole play scene by scene. The simple
and loſty purity of Conception, the exact and delicate
accuracy of execution, are alike unimpaired by any slip
or flaw of judgment or of feeling. The heroic sincerity
of Warbeck, his high courtesy and constancy, his frank
gratitude and chivalrous confidence, give worthy proof of
Ford’s ability to design a figure of stainless and exalted
presence ; the sad strong faith of his wife, the pure and
daring devotion of the lover who has lost her, the petulant
and pathetic pride of her father, all melted at last into
stately sympathy and approval of her truth in extremity
of trial; and, more than all these, the noble mutual re-
cognition and regard of Warbeck and Dalyell in the time
of final test; are qualities which raise this drama to the
highest place among its compeers for moral tone and
effect. The two kings are faithful and forcible studies;
294 9:OAAW FOA'Z).
\
the smooth resolute equanimity and self-reliant craft of
the first Tudor sets off the shallow chivalry and passionate
unstable energy of the man of Flodden. The insolent
violence of constraint put upon Huntley in the disposal
of his daughter's hand is of a piece with the almost brutal
tone of contempt assumed towards Warbeck, when he
begins to weary of supporting the weaker cause for the
mere sake of magnanimous display and irritable self-
assertion. His ultimate dismissal of the star-crossed
pretender is “perfect Stuart” in its bland abnegation of
faith and the lofty courtliness of manner with which
engagements are flung Over and pledges waved aside ;
whether intentionally or not, Ford has touched off to the
| life the family habit of repudiation, the hereditary faculty
of finding the most honourable way to do the most dis-
honourable things. Nor is the other type of royalty less
excellently real and vivid ; the mixture of warmth and
ceremony in Katherine's reception by Henry throws into
fresh and final relief the implacable placidity of infliction
with which he marks her husband for utmost ignominy of
suffering.
Of imaginative beauty and poetic passion this play
has nothing; but for noble and equable design of
character it stands at the head of Ford’s works. There
is no clearer example in our literature of the truth of the
axiom repeated by Mr. Arnold from the teaching of the
supreme Greek masters, that “all depends upon the
subject.” There are perhaps more beautiful lines in
“Love's Sacrifice” than in “Perkin Warbeck;” yet the
former play is utterly abortive and repulsive, a monument
of discomfiture and discredit, as the latter of noble aim
9:OAAW FORD. 295
and noble success. It is the one high Sample of historic
drama produced between the age of Shakespeare and our
own; the one intervening link—a link of solid and
durable metal—which connects the first and the latest
labours in that line of English poetry; the one trium-
phant attempt to sustain and transmit the tradition of
that great tragic school founded by Marlowe, perfected by
Shakespeare, revived by the author of “Philip van
Artevelde.” The central figure of Ford’s work is not
indeed equal in stature of spirit and strength of handling
to the central figure of Sir Henry Taylor's ; there is a
broader power, a larger truth, in the character of Arte-
velde than in the character of Warbeck; but the high
qualities of interest based on firm and noble grounds, of
just sentiment and vital dignity, of weight, force, and
exaltation of thought, shown rather in dramatic expansion
and development of lofty character by lofty method than
in scenes and passages detachable from the Context as
samples of reflection and expression—these are in great
measure common to both poets. Ford, again, has the
more tender and skilful hand at drawing a woman ; his
heroines make by far the warmer and sharper impression,
on us ; this on the whole is generally his strongest point,
as it is perhaps the other's weakest; while, though we
may not think his female studies up to the mark of his
male portraits, there is certainly no English dramatist
since Shakespeare who can be matched as a student of
men, Comparable for strong apprehension and large
heroic grasp of masculine character, with the painter of
Comnenus, of Artevelde, and of Dunstan. §
The three romantic comedies of Ford have the same
296 5*OAAW FORD.
qualities and shortcomings in common ; they are studious
and often elegant in style, sometimes impressive or at
least effective in incident, generally inadequate to the
chance of excellence offered by the subject; not so much
through careless laxity and incoherence—for the sign of
labour and finish is visible upon each; they have
evidently been wrought up to the height and fullness of
his design—as through a want of Constructive power and
mastery of his own conceptions. “The Lover's Melan-
choly” is the best of the three, as having the best things
in it; two of these are exquisite ; the well-known episode
of the lute-player and nightingale, and the reunion of
Balador and Eroclea. There are touches of power and
tenderness in the part of Meleander, and the courtship
of Parthenophil by Thamasta is gracefully and skilfully
managed, without violence or offence. The winding-up
of a story ill and feebly conducted through the earlier
parts of the play is far more dexterous and harmonious
than its development ; and this is about all that need be
said of it. Between the two beautiful versions of Strada's
pretty fable by Ford and Crashaw there will always be a
diversity of judgment among readers; some must natu-
rally prefer the tender fluency and limpid sweetness of
Ford, others the dazzling intricacy and affluence in refine-
ments, the supple and cunning implication, the choice-
ness and subtlety of Crashaw.
Something better than Ford has left us might have
been made of “The Fancies Chaste and Noble” and
“The Lady's Trial.” In the former play the character
of Flavia is admirably conceived; there were excellent
5*OAAW FORD. 297
possibilities of interest and pathos in her part, and her
first interview with the husband who had sold and dis-
carded her under cover of a lie gives promise that some-
thing will come of these chances; but in effect they come
to nothing; the tragic effect of the position is evaded,
the force of the conception diluted, the outlines of .
character slurred and effaced. Again, we are led to look
for more than we get from the scenes of Castamela's
mock temptation and seeming peril, from her grave and
confident dignity in face of trial, and the spirit with which
she assumes a lifelike mask of haughty and corrupt
levity to punish the reckless weakness of a brother who
has wantonly exposed her to apparent danger ; but all
ends in futile surprise and flat insufficiency. Livio and
Romanello, the brothers of the heroines, are figures too
dull and feeble to rouse any stronger feeling than a dull
and feeble curiosity to see how they will slip or slink
out of situations which might have been full of spirit and
interest. The remaining characters are colourless and
formless. Of the brutal and brainless interludes of farce
I have no more to say than has been said above. With
more force and harmony of character the finest occasion
in the play might have been put to admirable use ; when
Livio, in hopes to rescue his sister from shame, offers her
hand to the suitor whom he formerly rejected, and finds
her in turn refused by Romanello on suspicion of dis-
honour incurred through her brother's baseness. The
presence and intercession of Romanello's own sister,
herself newly and nobly vindicated in his eyes and re-
conciled to his love, should have added to the living
f
|
298 5.of/W FORD.
interest of the scene; but between curtailed plot and
truncated underplot all such possible interest has long
since been stifled.
The same waste or misuse of good material has
marred the promise of a better play in “The Lady's
Trial.” This should have been an excellent example of
romantic or serious comedy; had Ford been content
thoroughly to work out the characters of Auria, his wife,
and her kinsman, he must have given us again a study of
high and delicate moral beauty, a group worthy to stand
beside the noble triad of Warbeck, Katherine, and Dal-
yell; but as it is, shackled perhaps by a fear of repeat-
ing himself, he has missed or thrown away this chance
also. The one scene in which the spotless and hopeless
chivalry of Malfato's love for his kinswoman is brought
into action comes too late in the play and too suddenly
to make its effect. There are two or three passages of
admirable energy and pathos in the part of Auria; but
the upshot of all is again ineffective ; the evolution of
the main story is clogged and trammelled by the utterly
useless and pointless episode of Adurni's cast mistress,
her senseless schemes of love and revenge, her equivocal
reformation and preposterous remarriage. All this en-
cumbrance of rubbish has absolutely no excuse, no aim
or reason of any kind; it serves merely to hamper the
development and distort the progress of the play, leaving
no room or time for the action to expand naturally and
move smoothly forward to a consistent end. The under-
plot of Hippolita’s attempted revenge on the lover who
has discarded her is neither beautiful nor necessary to the
main action of “’Tis Pity She's a Whore;” but it is
j
9:OAAW FORD. 299
skilfully wrought in, and so far serviceable that it
effectually cuts off Soranzo's chance of arousing such
interest or sympathy as might divert the reader's mind
from the central figures of Giovanni and Annabella ; in
this case the discarded adulteress and her cast-off husband
are mere worthless impediments which subserve no end
whatever.
Of the two plays which bear conjointly the names of
Ford and Decker, “The Sun's Darling” is evidently, as
Gifford calls it, a “piece of patchwork” hastily stitched
up for Some momentary purpose; I suspect that the two
poets did not work together on it, but that our present
text is merely a recast by Ford of an earlier masque by
Decker ; probably, as Mr. Collier has suggested, his lost
play of “Phaëton,” for which we might be glad to exchange
the “loop'd and window’d nakedness” of this ragged
version. In those parts which are plainly remnants oſ
Decker's handiwork there are some scattered lines of
great sweetness, such as these of lament for the dead
spring :—
“How cool wert thou in anger I in thy diet
How temperate and yet sumptuous! thou wouldst not waste
The weight of a sad violet in excess,
Yet still thy board had dishes numberless ;
Dumb beasts even lovèd thee; once a young lark
Sat on thy hand, and gazing on thine eyes
Mounted and sang, thinking them moving skies.”
For the latter scenes, as Gifford observes, it is clear
that Ford is in the main responsible ; the intrusion in
the fifth act of political satire and adulation is singularly
perverse and infelicitous. In the opening Scene, also,
between Raybright and the Priest of the Sun, I recognisé
3oo 5*OHN FORD.
the moral tone and metrical regulation of Ford's verse.
Whatever the original may have been—and it was pro-
bably but a thin and hasty piece of work—it has doubt-
less suffered from the incongruous matter loosely sewn
on to it ; and the masque as it stands is too lax and in-
coherent in structure to be worth much as a sample of
its slight kind, or to show if there was anything of more
significance or value in the first conception.
“The Witch of Edmonton’’ is a play of rare beauty
and importance both on poetical and Social grounds. It
is perhaps the first protest of the stage against the
horrors and brutalities of vulgar superstition ; a protest
all the more precious for the absolute faith in witchcraft
and devilry which goes hand in hand with compassion
for the instruments as well as the victims of magic.
Dr. Theodorus Plönnies himself had not a heartier belief
in the sorceries of Sidonia von Bork than the poets
appear to have in the misdeeds of Mother Sawyer ; while
neither Meinhold nor any modern writer has shown a
nobler abhorrence of the genuinely hellish follies and
cruelties which brought forth in natural and regular order
fresh crops of witches to torture and burn. Even Victor
Hugo could hardly show a more tender and more bitter
pity for the Sordid and grovelling agonies of outcast old
age and reprobate misery, than that which fills and fires
the speech of the wretched hag from the first scene where
she appears gathering sticks to warm herself, starved,
beaten, lamed and bent double with blows, pitiable and
terrible in her fierce abjection, to the last moment when
she is led to execution through the roar of the rabble.
In all this part of the play I trace the hand of Decker;
~
9:OAAW FORZ). 3OI
his intimate and familiar science of wretchedness, his
great and gentle spirit of compassion for the poor and
suffering with whom his own lot in life was so often cast,
in prison and out. The two chief soliloquies of Mother
Sawyer, her first and last invocations of the familiar, are
noble samples of his passionate dramatic power ; their
style has a fiery impulse and rapidity quite unlike the
usual manner of his colleague. Gifford was probably
right in assigning to Ford the whole of the first act; there
is no more admirable exposition of a play on the English
stage; the perfect skill and the straightforward power
with which the plan of the story is opened and the
interest of the reader fixed are made the more evident by
the direct simplicity of method and means used. Ford,
therefore, must have the credit of first bringing forward
two of the main characters in the domestic tragedy which
makes up the better part of this composite play; and
the introduction of Frank and Winnifrede gives ominous
and instant promise of the terror and pathos of their
after story. The part of Susan is one of Decker's most
beautiful and delicate studies; in three short scenes he
has given an image so perfect in its simple sweetness as
hardly to be overmatched outside the gallery of Shake-
speare's women. The tender freshness of his pathos, its
plain frank qualities of grace and strength, never showed
themselves with purer or more powerful effect than here ;
the after scene where Frank's guilt is discovered has the
same force and vivid beauty. The interview of Frank
with the disguised Winnifrede in this scene may be com-
pared by the student of dramatic style with the parting
of the same characters at the close ; the One has all the
3O2 5*OHN FORD.
l
poignant simplicity of Decker, the other all the majestic
energy of Ford. The rough buffoonery and horseplay of
the clown and the familiar we may probably set down to
Decker's account ; there is not much humour or meaning
in it, but it is livelier and less offensive than most of
Pord’s attempts in that line. The want of connection
between the two subjects of the play, Mother Sawyer's
witchcraft and Frank Thorney’s bigamy, is a defect
common to many plays of the time, noble sketches of
rough and rapid workmanship ; but in this case the
tenuity of the connecting link is such that despite the
momentary intervention of her familiar the witch is able
with perfect truth to disclaim all complicity with the
murderer. Such a communion of guilt might easily have
been managed, and the tragic structure of the poem
would have been complete in harmony of interest.
No words need here be wasted on any verse of Ford's
outside the range of his dramatic work ; and of his two
pamphlets in prose the first is an ephemeral and official
piece of compliment, somewhat too dull and stiff in style
to be a truly graceful offering “in honour of all fair ladies.”
The second “handful of discourse * has rather more worth
and dignity of moral eloquence. The examples chosen
from his own age for praise or blame add some historical
interest to his axioms and arguments ; the sketch of
Raleigh, unhappily imperfect as it is, seems from the
fragment left us to have given a vigorous and discerning
estimate of “a man known and well deserving to be
known.” The reader of this treatise will remark, with
such comic or tragic reflections as he may find appro-
priate, the passage in which Ford—having discussed and
5-OHN FORD. 3O3
dismissed as inadequate such minor epithets of eulogy as
“the Peaceable,” “the Learned,” and even “the Great”
—finally and emphatically bestows on the yet living
majesty of England the surname for all time of James the
Good. The poet is so emphatic in his disclaimer of
“servility or insinuation ” that we might imagine him
writing with an eye to the reversion of Jonson's laurel.
“Ford was of the first order of poets : ” such is the
verdict of his earliest and greatest critic. To differ from
Lamb on a matter of judgment relating to any great name
of the English drama is always hazardous ; it is a risk
never to be lightly run, never to be incurred without grave
reluctance ; and to undervalue so noble a poet as Ford,
a very early and close favourite of my own studies, must
be even further from my wish than to depreciate the
value of such a verdict in his favour. Yet perhaps it
would be more accurate to say merely that his good
qualities are also great qualities—that whenever his work
is good it is greatly good—than to say that he was alto-
gether one of the few greatest among great men who
stand in that very first Order of poets. Thus much
assuredly we may admit with all confidence and gladness
of gratitude ; that the merits he has are merits of the first
order. What these merits are no student of his poetry
|
\
can ſail to see. As to their kind there can be no dispute;
as to the relative height of rank to which they suffice of .
themselves to raise a poet, there may be. They are not
outward or superficial qualities; a somewhat more liberal
sprinkling of these would have relieved and brightened
the sombre beauties of his work. His power as a poet
is simply a moral power ; fancy he has none, and
3O4. 5*OAAW FORD.
imagination only strong to deal with tragic sentiment and
situation ; strong to dive and keen to peer into depths of
emotion and recesses of endurance “dove il sol tace,” not
Swift or light of wing, not vast or etherial of flight, not
lustrous or various of plumage ; but piercing and intense
of sight, steady and sure of stroke, solemn and profound
of strain. He gains strength with the strength of his
subject ; he wants deep water to swim well. The moral
, nature with which he is fittest to deal must be large
enough to dare or to bear things beyond all Common
measure ; resolute for any deed or any doom. Within
the usual scope of action or the ordinary limit of suffering
the energy of his spirit has hardly free play. In the
hard cast and sombre loneliness of this energy he
resembles Byron on one side—the outer side rather than
the inner faculty; though there is in both the same fixity
and insistence of purpose, the same solitary and brooding
weight of will, the same lurid force and singleness of
mind. In light, imagination, musical instinct, and all
qualities of poetry pure and simple, both are alike below.
the higher order of poets; in the verse of neither is there
that instant and sensible melody which comes only of a
secret and sovereign harmony of the whole nature, and
which comes of it inevitably and unmistakeably.
We often see the names of Webster and Ford bracketed
as equal and parallel examples of the same kind or school
of poets; to me these two great men seem to belong to
wholly different orders; I should no more venture to
set Ford by the side of Webster than Byron by the side
of Shelley. If not altogether as great in degree, the
difference is assuredly the same in kind. On this as on
5*OAAW FORD. 3O5
all grounds we must keenly regret the loss of the one play
known to us by name in which the diverse forces of these
poets were united in the treatment of a subject unsur-
passable for terror and tragic suggestion. To trace the
points of likeness and unlikeness, to distinguish the
lineaments of either man's genius, to note their various
handling of an actual and recent tragedy so fearfully
fertile of dramatic possibilities, of dark and splendid
studies, for a spirit of strength to support them ; to
measure by the terrible capacities of the workmen the
terrible capabilities of their material ; to divide in our
minds feature from feature, comparing line with line and
tone with tone ; this would have been a study of greater
profit and delight to the student of their art than the
Comparison we had lately occasion to make between
Ford and Decker. For, though dissimilar in kind as well
as in degree, there are points of resemblance between
Webster and Ford, especially in bias of mind and aim of
Contemplation, in choice of matter and sympathy of |
interest, which may well bring them together in our
thoughts and set them by themselves apart ; so that we
can conceive of them working together on a poem which
when complete should show no signs of incongruity,
nothing inharmonious or incoherent; as we certainly
could not conceive of Shelley and Byron. For the rest,
though there may be some community of poetic powers
and poetic deficiencies between Byron and Ford, neither
has any of the other's highest quality; the emotion shot
through with satire, the ardour inwoven with humour,
which heighten and sharpen each other in the keenest
and loftiest work of Byron, were as unknown to Ford as
X
306 5*OAAW FORD.
the truth of deep human passion, the fire that labours
without open rage or fury of flame at the heart's root and
centre of life itself, the ravage of spiritual waste and
agony of travăil consuming and exhausting the very
nature of the soul, which find shape and speech in the
tragic verse of Ford, were beyond the dramatic reach of
Byron. Of all men of genius Ford was probably the
. worst jester and Byron the worst playwright that ever
lived. The living spirit of wit, its poetic and imaginative
power, the force and ease of its action, the variety of
thought and form into which it enters to fill them with
life, never had a medium of expression comparable to
the verse of Byron ; in this, the compound and complex
product of serious and humorous energy, rather than in
power of any simple kind, lay the depth and width of his
genius. Ford's dominion was limited to one simple form
of power, the knowledge and mastery of passion properly
so called, the science of that spiritual state in which the
soul suffers force from some dominant thought or feeling.
The pain and labour of such imperious possession, the
strife and violence of a nature divided against itself, the
strong anguish and the strong delight of extremities, gave
the only fit field for his work and the only fruitful pasture
for his thought. His imperative and earnest genius
stamped and burnt itself into the figures and events of
his plays: his mark is set ineffaceably on characters and
circumstances, the sign-manual of his peculiar empire.
Now, of passion proper Byron has nothing; the one
radical emotion in him, deep as life and strong as death,
is that noble ardour of rage and scorn which lifts his
satire into Sublimity; otherwise his passion is skin-deep ;
<
9:OHN FORD. 3O7
f
fanfaisies et le contact de deux épidermes;” they want all
all his love-making, from the first desire to the final
Satiety, may be summed up in that famous axiom of
Chamfort which Alfred de Musset, his female page or
attendant dwarf, prefixed as a label to one of his de-
coctions of watered Byronism. Whatever he may have
known of passion, he could put into verse of a genuine
kind nothing beyond the range of the greater cynic's
memorable definition; if he tries to go further or deeper,
his verse rings hollow, his hold grows feeble, his colouring
false and his tone inflated. Facif indignatio zersum, and
admirably too ; the strength and splendour of his wrath
give to his denunciations of tyranny a stronger and
sincerer life than we find in his invocations to patriotism ;
in him Apollo was incarnate only as the dragon-slayer :
he might stand so in sculpture with King George for
Python, his arrow still quivering in the royal carrion.
Of all divine labours that was the one which fell to his
share of work ; of all the god his master's gifts that was
the one allotted him. But for positive passion, for that
absolute fusion of the whole nature in one fire of sense
and spirit which only the great dramatic students and
masters of man can give or comprehend, we must go to
poets of another kind. These have flesh and blood,
muscle and nerve enough in all conscience ; but passion
with them means something beyond “Z'échange de deux
\
!
that and more as fuel for their fires; they deal neither with
Soulless bodies nor with bodiless souls. Among them
Ford must always hold a place of high honour. Two at
least, yet perhaps only two, of his great fellow tragedians
—for Shakespeare is of no fellowship—were certainly, in
X 2
308 5*OAAW FOA'Z).
my judgment, poets of higher race and rarer quality.
These two were Marlowe and Webster. The founder of
our tragedy has in his best verse all the light and music
and colour proper to the dawn of so divine a day
as opened with his sunrise; and in Webster there
is so much of the godhead which put on perfect
humanity in Shakespeare alone, that it would scarcely
be more rational to couple for comparison “The
Broken Heart" with “The Duchess of Malfi '’ than “The
Duchess of Malfi.” with “King Lear.” In one point
Ford is excelled by others also of his age. As a
lyric poet he is not quite of the highest class in that great
lyrical school. Not that his few lyrics are unworthy the
praise they have before now received ; the best of them,
such as the noble dirge which signals with its majesty of
music the consummation of Calantha's agony, have an
august beauty and dignity of their own. The verse has
a marble stateliness and Solidity ; the grave and even
measure carries weight and sufficiency with it ; but the
pure lyric note is not in this poet. He has no such out-
breaks of birdlike or godlike song as Shakespeare's— -
“Roses, their sharp spines being gone—”
or Fletcher's- |
“Hear, ye ladies that despise—”
or Webster's—
“Hark, now everything is still—”
or Decker's—
“Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden, slumbers?”
After any of these the lyric verse of Ford strikes us as
5-O//N FORD. 309
verse ruled out in hard and rigid lines ; yet is it excellent
in its kind, and contemporary dramatists of high rank and
repute have never come near its excellence; witness
Massinger, the worst song-writer of them all.
Upon the whole then we find ample reason to assign
high rank in the highest school of tragedy to this poet.
T]ecker, with all his sweetness of natural passion, his
tenderness of moral music and freshness of pathetic
power, has left no work of such tragic strength and scope,
Such firmness of line and clearness of composition, such
general height and equality of poetic worth, as the two
masterpieces of Ford. Had Marston oſtener written at
his best, he might have matched Ford on his own ground
of energetic intensity and might of moral grasp, while ex-
celling him in the depth and delicacy of keen rare touches
or flashes of subtle nature, such as his famous epithet of
“the shuddering morn,” and other fine thoughts of colour
and strokes of pensive passion; but Marston almost
always wrote very much below his best. The character
of Andrugio in “Antonio and Mellida” is magnificent ;
but this grand figure is unequally sustained by the others;
and Superb as the part is throughout, one part can no
more make a play than one swallow can make a Summer;
not though that part were Hamlet. Set among mean and
discordant figures, without support or relief, the part of
Hamlet, the greatest single work of man, would not of
itself suffice to make a play. The noble thought and the
noble verse of Marston are never fitly framed and chased;
lying imbedded as his best work does in meaner matter,
it cannot hold its own when set beside the work of men
who could cut as well as unearth a jewel. The pure
3IO 5-OHN FORD.
simplicity of Heywood, his homely and lively fertility of
invention, his honest pathos and gentleness of feeling,
give a real charm to his sweet and clear flow of plain
verse, but not weight and force enough to support the
fame of a tragic poet of the first rank. Middleton had
more facility and freedom of hand, less height and Con-
centration of mind, than Ford ; Massinger had far more
fluency, regularity, and variety of interest, but far less
tragic depth and directness of force. Chapman's plays,
overweighted with thoughtful and majestic eloquence,
sink down and break short under the splendid burden, or
wander into empty lands and among rocky places of bar-
ren declamation ; as a tragic artist he must give place to
lesser men. With a far more genuinely dramatic gift, the
fiery spirit of Cyril Tourneur lived and laboured in such
a tempest that his work, so to speak, is blown out of all
shape ; the burning blast of his genius rages without
intermission at such stormy speed along such wild wastes
of tragedy that we have hardly time to note the fresh
beauty of a rare oasis here and there ; but for keenness
and mastery of passionate expression in Sublime and
sonorous verse he can hardly be overmatched : while for
single lines of that intense and terrible beauty which
makes incision in the memory, there is none, after
Shakespearé, to compare with him but Webster; the
grandest verses of Marston or Chapman, both great in
their use of deep and ardent words to give life and form
to moral passion, have less of cautery in their stroke.
Against his tragedies as against theirs the charge of excess
and violence may be fairly brought, and the brand of
such epithets as “spasmodic” and “horrible” may be set
‘AOA/AW APOAC/D. I I
9. - 3I.
on their choice and composition of incidents; though the
pure and strong limpidity of Tourneur's style is never
broken into the turbid froth and turgid whirlpools of tortu-
ous rant which here and there convulse and deface the
vigorous currents of Chapman's and Marston's. But the
application of any such stigmatic phrase to the work of
Webster is absurd. If it be true that his tragedies exem-
plify the old distinction of horrible from terrible, it must
be as superb instances of terrible beauty undeformed by ."
horrible detail. There is no such scene or incident in
his two great plays as the blinding of Gloster in “King ;
Lear;” nothing from which the physical sense recoils with
such a shudder of instant sickness; nothing defensible
only on the ground that where all scenes are terrible to
the utmost limit that art can endure, one scene among
them may be for once allowed to be simply horrible.
Defensible or not, the license was claimed and the experi-
ment made by Shakespeare, and not by Webster. Nor,
again, are any of the lesser poet's characters so liable to
the charge of monstrous or abnormal excess as the figures
of Goneril and Regan; the wickedness of his worst villain
never goes beyond the mark of Edmund's. To vindicate
the comparative moderation of Webster's moral painting
is not to impugn in any least degree the rectitude of
Shakespeare's ; but it is absurd for those who see no ex-
cess of horror in the incidents or of criminality in the
characters of the master poet to impeach the greatest of
his disciples for the exercise of much less liberty in his
handling of criminal and terrible matter. Simplicity and
purity mark the most tragic scenes and figures of Webster,
not less than sublimity and sweetness. Nothing on a first
3I2 - 9:0AN FORD.
study of “The Duchess of Malfi.” makes deeper impres-
sion on a capable student than this negative quality of
noble abstinence, the utter and most admirable absence
of any chaotic or spasmodic element, the chastity of a
controlling instinct which rejects as impossible all hollow
extravagance and inflation, “even in the very torrent,
tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of passion.”
For one instance, if the comparison is to be made, we
cannot but see that the curse of the Duchess on her
brothers is less intemperate in the excess and exaltation
of its rage than the curse of Lear on his daughters; which
of course is as it should be, but is not what the general
verdict of critics on Webster's art and style would have
led us to expect. The note of extravagance is far more
real and far more patent in the tragic genius of Beaumont
and Fletcher. Of their comic power there is here no
more question than of Jonson's or Massinger's or any
other's ; we are concerned merely to examine by com-
parison the rank among tragic poets of a poet who was
nothing if not tragic. In this field, then, we find “those
suns of glory, those two lights of men,” the Dioscuri of
our “heaven of invention,” to be swifter and gracefuller
runners than Ford, but neither surer of foot nor
stronger of hand. Their genius has more of flame and
light, less of fire and intensity; more of air and ease, less
of force and concentration ; more of beautiful and grace-
ful qualities, less of positive and severe capacity ; there
is more of a charm about it, and less of a spell. With
all its great and affluent beauties, “The Maid's Tragedy”
leaves a less absolute and inevitable mark upon the mind
of a student than “The Broken Heart.” No poet is less
9:0A/AW FORD. 3I3
forgetable than Ford; none fastens (as it were) the fangs
of his genius and his will more deeply in your memory.
You cannot shake hands with him and pass by ; you can-
not fall in with him and out again at pleasure; if he touch
you Once he takes you, and what he takes he keeps his
hold of; his work becomes part of your thought and
parcel of your spiritual furniture for ever; he signs him.
self upon you as with a seal of deliberate and decisive
power. His force is never the force of accident ; the
casual divinity of beauty which falls as though direct
from heaven upon stray lines and phrases of some poets
falls never by any such heavenly chance on his ; his
strength of impulse is matched by his strength of will ;
he never works more by instinct than by resolution; he
knows what he would have and what he will do, and
gains his end and does his work with full conscience of
purpose and insistence of design. By the might of a great
will seconded by the force of a great hand he won the
place he holds against all odds of rivalry in a race of rival
giants. In that gallery of monumental men and mighty
memories, among or above the fellows of his godlike craft,
the high figure of Ford stands steadily erect; his name.
is ineffaceable from the scroll of our great writers ; it is
one of the loftier landmarks of English poetry.
314 NOTES ON DES/GNS OF THE
-**
AWOTAE.S. O.W. 7) FS/GAWS OF THE O/L/O MASTERS
A7 FZORENCE.
IN the spring of 1864. I had the chance of spending many ..
days in the Uffizj on the study of its several collections.
Statues and pictures I found ranged and classed, as all
the world knows they are, with full care and excellent
sense ; but one precious division of the treasury was then,
and I believe is still, unregistered in catalogue or manual:
The huge mass of original designs, in pencil or ink or
chalk, swept together by Vasari and others, had then
been but recently unearthed and partially assorted.
TJnder former Tuscan governments this sacred deposit
had lain unseen and unclassed in the lower chambers of
the palace, heaped and huddled in portfolios by the
loose stackful. A change of rule had put the matter at
length into the hands of official men gifted with some-
thing more of human reason and eyesight. Three rooms
were filled with the select flower of the collection acquired
and neglected by past Florentine governors. Each de-
sign is framed, glazed, labelled legibly outside with the
designer's name: the arrangement is not too far from
perfect for convenience of study. As there can be no
collection of the kind more rich, more various, more
singular in interest, I supplied for myself the want of a
OZZ) MASTERS A 7" F/OREAVCAE. 31.5
register by taking hasty memorial notes of all the impor-
tant designs as they fell in my way. They are not
ranged in any order of time, nor are all a painter's draw-
ings kept together ; some have samples Scattered about
various corners of different rooms, but all accessible and
available. Space even there is bounded, and valued
accordingly. In the under chambers there still remain
piles of precious things but partially set in order. To
these the public visitor has not access; but through the
courtesy of their guardian I was offered admission and
shown by him through the better part. There are many
studies of the figure by Andrea del Sarto which deserve
and demand a public place ; others also of interest which
belong to the earlier Florentine school; many nameless
but some recognisable by a student of that time of art.
In such studies as these the collection is naturally richest;
though, as will at once be seen, not poor in Samples of
Milanese or Venetian work. The fruitful vigour, the
joyous and copious effusion of spirit and labour, which
makes all early times of awakening art dear to all students,
\
and profitable to all, has left noble fragments and relics
behind, the golden gleanings of a full harvest. In these
desultory notes I desire only to guide the attention to
what seems worthiest of notice, without more form of
Order than has been given by the framers and hangers;
taking men and Schools as they come to hand, giving
precedence and prominence only to the more precious
and significant. For guide I have but my own sense of
interest and admiration ; so that, while making the list of
|
|
3.
}
things remarkable as complete and careful as I can, I
have aimed at nothing further than to cast into some
316 NOTES ON DES/GNS OF THE
f
legible form my impression of the designs registered in
so rough and rapid a fashion ; and shall begin my tran-
script with notices of such as first caught and longest
fixed my attention.
Of Leonardo the samples are choice and few ; full of
that indefinable grace and grave mystery which belong
to his slightest and wildest work. Fair strange faces of
women full of dim doubt and faint scorn; touched by
the shadow of an obscure fate; eager and weary as it
seems at once, pale and fervent with patience or passion;
allure and perplex the eyes and thoughts of men. There
is a study here of Youth and Age meeting; it may be,
of a young man coming suddenly upon the ghostly figure
of himself as he will one day be ; the brilliant life in his
face is struck into sudden pallor and silence, the clear
eyes startled, the happy lips confused. A fair straight-
featured face, with full curls fallen or blown against the
eyelids; and confronting it, a keen, wan, mournful mask
of flesh: the wise ironical face of one made subtle and
feeble by great age. The vivid and various imagination
of Leonardo never fell into a form more poetical than in
this design. Grotesques of course are not wanting; and
there is a noble sketch of a griffin and lion locked or
dashed together in the hardest throes of a final fight,
which is full of violent beauty; and again, a study of the
painter's chosen type of woman : thin-lipped, with a fore-
head too high and weighty for perfection or sweetness of
form ; cheeks exquisitely carved, clear pure chin and
neck, and grave eyes full of a cold charm ; folded hands,
and massive hair gathered into a net; shapely and splendid,
as a study for Pallas or Artemis.
)
OZZ) MASTERS A 7" F/OREAVCAE. 317
Here, as in his own palace and wherever in Florence
the shadow of his Supreme presence has fallen and the
mark of his divine hand been set, the work of Michei
Angelo for a time effaces all thought of other men or
gods. Before the majesty of his imperious advent the
lesser kings of time seem as it were men bidden to rise
up from their thrones, to cover their faces and come
down. Not gratitude, not delight, not sympathy, is the
first sense excited in one suddenly confronted with his
designs; fear rather, oppressive reverence, and well-nigh
intolerable adoration. Their tragic beauty, their inex-
plicable strength and wealth of thought, their terrible and
exquisite significance, all the powers they unveil and all
the mysteries they reserve, all their suggestions and all
their suppressions, are at first adorable merely. Delightful
beyond words they become in time, as the subtler and
weightier work of AFschylus or Shakespeare; but like
these they first fill and exalt the mind with a strange and
violent pleasure which is the highest mood of worship ;
reverence intensified to the last endurable degree. The
mind, if then it enjoys at all or wonders at all, knows
little of its own wonder or its own enjoyment; the air
and light about it is too fine and pure to breathe or bear.
The least thought of these men has in it something in-
tricate and enormous, faultless as the formal work of
their triumphant art must be. All mysteries of good and
evil, all wonders of life and death, lie in their hands or at
their feet. They have known the causes of things, and
are not too happy. The fatal labour of the world, the
clamour and hunger of the open-mouthed all-summoning
grave, all fears and hopes of ephemeral men, are indeed
318 WOTES ON DESIGNS OF THE
made subject to them, and trodden by them underfoot;
but the sorrow and strangeness of things are not lessened
because to one or two their secret springs have been laid
bare and the courses of their tides made known; refluent
evil and good, alternate grief and joy, life inextricable
from death, change inevitable and insuperable fate. Of
the three, Michel Angelo is saddest; on his, the most
various genius of the three, the weight of things lies
heaviest. Glad or sad as the days of his actual life may
have been, his work in the fullness of its might and beauty
has most often a mournful meaning, some grave and Subtle
sorrow latent under all its life. Here in one design is
the likeness of perishable pleasure; Vain Delight with all
her children; one taller boy has drawn off a reverted and
bearded mask, on which another lays hold with one hand,
fingering it as with lust or curiosity; his other hand holds
to the mother's knee; behind her a third child lurks and
cowers; she, with a hard broad smile of dull pleasure,
feeds her eyes on the sight of her own face in a hand-
mirror. Fear and levity, cruelty and mystery, make up
their mirth; evil seems to impend over all these joyous
heads, to hide behind all these laughing features:
they are things too light for hell, too low for heaven;
bubbles of the earth, brilliant and transient and poisonous,
blown out of unclean foam by the breath of meaner
spirits, to glitter and quiver for a little under the beams
of a mortal Sun. Cruel and curious and ignorant, all
their faces are full of mean beauty and shallow delight.
Hard by, a troop of Loves haul after them, with mocking
mouths and straining arms, a live human mask, a hollow
face shorn off from the head, old and grim and sad, worn
OZZ) MASTERS A 7" FLOAAAWCAE, 319
through and through with pain and time, from the vexed
forehead to the sharp chin which grates against the
ground; the eyes and lips full of Suffering, sardonic and
helpless; the face of one knowing his own fate, who has
resigned himself sadly and scornfully to the violence of
base and light desires; the grave and great features all
hardened into suffering and self-contempt.
But in one separate head there is more tragic attrac-
tion than in these: a woman's, three times studied, with
divine and subtle care; sketched and re-sketched in
youth and age, beautiful always beyond desire and cruel
beyond words; fairer than heaven and more terrible than
hell; pale with pride and weary with wrong-doing; a
silent anger against God and man burns, white and re-
pressed, through her clear features. In One drawing she
wears a head-dress of eastern fashion rather than western,
but in effect made out of the artist's mind only; plaited
in the likeness of closely-wclicd scales as of a chrysalid
serpent, raised and waved and rounded in the likeness
of a sea-shell. In some inexplicable way all her orna-
ments seem to partake of her fatal nature, to bear upon ſ
them her brand of beauty fresh from hell; and this
through no vulgar machinery of symbolism, no serpentine
or otherwise bestial emblem: the bracelets and rings are
innocent enough in shape and workmanship ; but in
touching her flesh they have become infected with deadly
and malignant meaning. Broad bracelets divide the
shapely splendour of her arms; over the nakedness of
her firm and luminous breasts, just below the neck, there
is passed a band as of metal. Her eyes are full of proud
and passionless lust after gold and blood; her hair, close
32O AWOZTAES O/W /)/2S/GAWS OF 7A/A2
and curled, seems ready to shudder in sunder and divide
into snakes. Her throat, full and fresh, round and hard
to the eye as her bosom and arms, is erect and stately,
the head set firm on it without any droop or lift of the
chin; her mouth Crueller than a tiger's, colder than a
snake's, and beautiful beyond a woman's. She is the
deadlier Venus incarnate;
troXAh pièv év 9sotori koik &vévvuos
6ed.”
for upon earth also many names might be found for her :
Lamia re-transformed, invested now with a fuller beauty,
but divested of all feminine attributes not native to the
snake—a Lamia loveless and unassailable by the sophist,
readier to drain life out of her lover than to fade for his
sake at his side; or the Persian Amestris, watching the
only breasts on earth more beautiful than her own cut
off from her rival's living bosom; or Cleopatra, not dying
but turning serpent under the serpent's bite; or that
queen of the extreme East who with her husband marked
every day as it went by some device of a new and
wonderful cruelty. In one design, where the cruel and
timid face of a king rises behind her, this crowned and
cowering head might stand for Ahab's, and hers for that
of Jezebel. Another study is in red chalk; in this the
only ornaments are ear-rings. In a third, the Serpentine
hair is drawn up into a tuft at the Crown with two ringlets
hanging, heavy and deadly as Small tired Snakes. There
is a drawing in the furthest room at the Buonarroti Palace
which recalls and almost reproduces the design of these
three. Here also the electric hair, which looks as though
it would hiss and glitter with sparks if once touched, is
wound up to a tuft with serpentine plaits and involutions;
OZZ) MASTERS AT FZOAZAVCE, 321
all that remains of it unbound falls in one curl, shaping
itself into a snake's likeness as it unwinds, right against
a living snake held to the breast and throat. This is
rightly registered as a study for Cleopatra ; but notice
has not yet been accorded to the subtle and sublime idea
which transforms her death by the aspic's bite into a
meeting of serpents which recognise and embrace, an
encounter between the woman and the worm of Nile,
almost as though this match for death were a monstrous
łove-match, or such a mystic marriage as that painted in
the loveliest passage of “Salammbó,” between the maiden
body and the scaly coils of the serpent and the priestess
alike made sacred to the moon; so closely do the snake
and the queen of snakes caress and cling. Of this idea
Shakespeare also had a vague and great glimpse when he
made Antony “murmur, Where's my serpent of old AWiſe?”
mixing a foretaste of her death with the full sweet savour
of her supple and amorous “pride of life.” For what
indeed is lovelier or more luxuriously loving than a strong
and graceful snake of the nobler kind?
After this the merely terrible designs of Michel
|
Angelo are shorn of half their horror; even the single
face as of one suddenly caught and suddenly released
from hell, with wild drapery blown behind it by a wind
not of this world, strikes upon the sight and memory of
a student less deeply and sharply. Certain of his slight
and swift studies for damned souls and devils—designs
probably for the final work in which he has embodied
and made immortal the dream of a great and righteous
judgment between soul and soul--resemble much at first
sight, and more on longer inspection, the similar studies
Y
322 WoZES ON DESIGNS OF THE
and designs of Blake. One devil indeed recalls at once
the famous “ghost of a flea,” having much of the same
dull and liquorish violence of expression. Other sketches
in the small chamber of his palace bring also to mind
his great English disciple: the angry angel poised as in
fierce descent; the falling figure with drawn-up legs,
splendidly and violently designed ; the reverted head
showing teeth and nostrils: the group of two old men in
hell ; one looks up howling, with level face; one looks
down with lips drawn back. Nothing can surpass the
fixed and Savage agony of his face, immutable and im-
perishable. In this same room are other studies worth
record: a Virgin and Child, unfinished, but of supreme
strength and beauty; the child fully drawn, with small
strong limbs outlined in faint red, rounded and magni-
ficent; soft vigorous arms, and hands that press and
cling. There is a design of a covered... head, looking
down; mournful, with nervous mouth, with clear and
deep-set eyes; the nostril strong and curved. Another
head, older, with thicker lips, is drawn by it in the same
attitude. t
... Beside the Jezebel or Amestris of the Uffizj there is
a figure of Fortune, with a face of cold exaltation and
high clear beauty; strong wings expand behind her, or
shadows rather of vast and veiled, plumes; below, her
the wheel seems to pause, as in a lull of the perpetual
race. This design was evidently the sketch out of which
the picture of Fortune in the Corsini Palace was elabo-
rated by some pupil of the master's. In that picture, as
in the Venus and Cupid with mystic furniture of melan-
choly masks and emblems in the background, lodged
{
ozo MASTEKS 47 FZoRENCE, 323
now in the last Tuscan chamber but one of the Uffizj,
the meaner hand of the executive workman has failed to.
erase or overlay the great and fruitful thought of that
divine mind in which their first conceptions lay and
gathered form. The strong and laughing God treading
with a vigorous wantonness the fair flesh of his mother;
the goddess languid and effused like a broad-blown
flower, her soft bright side pressed hard under,his foot
and nestling heel, her large arm lifted to wrest the arrow
from his hand, with a lazy and angry mirth ; and at her
feet the shelves full of masks, sad inverted faces, heads
of men overset, blind strings of broken puppets forgotten
where they fell; all these are as clearly the device of
Michel Angelo's great sad mind as the handiwork is
clearly none of his. Near the sketch of Fortune is a
strange figure, probably worked up into some later
design. A youth with reverted head, wearing furry
drapery with plumy fringes, has one leg drawn up and
resting on a step ; the face, as it looks back, is laughing
with fear; the hysterical horror of some unseen thing is
branded into the very life of its fair features. This violent
laugh as of a child scared into madness subjects the
whole figure, brilliant and supple in youth as it seems,
to the transformation of terror. Upon this design also
much tragic conjecture of allegory or story might be
spent, and wasted.
f There are here no other sketches so terrible, except |
one of hell by Luca Signorelli, rough and slight in com-
parison: a fierce chaos of figures fighting, falling, crush-
ing and crushed together, their faces hissed at and their
limbs locked round by lithe Snakes, their eyes blasted and
A
Y 2
. 324 AWOZTAES OAV ZD ES/GAWS OF 7///E
lidless from the hot wind and heaving flame; one lost
face of a woman looks out between two curving bat's
wings, deadlier than the devils about her who plunge and
struggle and sink.
The sketches of Filippo Lippi are exquisite and few.
One above all, of Lucrezia Buti in her girlhood as the
painter found her at Prato in the convent, is of a beauty
so intolerable that the eyes can neither endure nor abstain
from it without a pleasure acute even to pain which
compels them to cease looking, or a desire which, as it
compels them to return, relapses into delight. Her face
is very young, more faultless and fresher than the first
forms and colours of morning ; her pure mouth small
and curved, cold and tender ; her eyes, set with an ex-
quisite mastery of drawing in the clear and gracious face,
seem to show actual colour of brilliant brown in their
shapely and lucid pupils, under their chaste and perfect
eyelids; her hair is deeply drawn backwards from the
sweet low brows and small rounded cheeks, heaped and
hidden away under a knotted veil whose flaps fall on either
side of her bright round throat. The world has changed
º for painters and their Virgins since the lean school of
Angelico had its day and its way in art; this study
assuredly was not made by a kneeling painter in the
intervals of prayer. More vivid, more fertile, and more
dramatic than Lippo, the great invention and various
power of Benozzo never produced a face like this. For
pure and simple beauty it is absolutely unsurpassable :
: innocent enough also for a Madonna, but pure by nature,
not chaste through religion. No creeds have helped to
compose the holiness of her beauty. The meagre and
OZD MASTERS A7 FLORENCE, 325
|
1
arid Sanctities of women ascetic by accident or abstemious
by force have nothing in common with her chastity. She
might be as well a virgin chosen of Artemis as consecra-
ted to Christ. Mystic passions and fleshless visions have
never taken hold upon her sense or faith. No flower
and no animal is more innocent ; none more capable of
giving and of yielding to the pleasure that they give.
Before the date of her immortal lover there was probably
no artist capable of painting such a thing at all: and in
none of his many paintings does the stolen nun look and
Smile with a more triumphant and serene supremacy of
beauty. , a
There are two studies of the Holy Family by Lippo
in these rooms; the one nearest this separate head of
Lucrezia is a sketch for the picture above the doorway in
the far small room filled with works of the more ancient
masters only. The St. John in this sketch is admirable
for fat strength and childish character; and the entire
group, in outline as in colour, full of that tender beauty
Combined with vigorous grace of which this great painter
never fails. The second study is more curious ; the child
lies between the mother's and a nurse's hands; a large
book lies open on a broad straw chair, and a tall boy.
leans upon the chair and watches. The attempted
realism here is as visible as in the other is a voluntary
subjection to conventional habit and the beauty of pre-
scription. Near the first group are some small studies of
separate figures; two of boys, very beautiful. One, a
Schoolboy or chorister seemingly, is seated on a form and
clothed in a long close gown ; his face, grave and of ex-
quisite male beauty, looking down as if in pain or thought;
**
326 AWOZTAES OAV Z)/2S/GAWS OF ZZZZ
from some vessel at his feet rises a thick column of lighted
Smoke. Another boy with full curled hair is drawn as
walking close behind. t
Of Sandro Botticelli the samples are more frequent;
and in these simple designs the painter is seen at no dis-
advantage. The dull and dry quality of this thin pallid
Colouring can here no longer impair the charm of his
natural grace, the merit of his strenuous labour. Many
of his single figures are worthy of praise and study : the
head of a girl with gathered hair; the figure of a yom/
raised from the dead; that of an old man with a head
like a Satyr's. Two groups not far apart may be used as
studies of his various power and fancy. The first, of two
witches loosely draped, not of the great age common to
their kind; one stirs and feeds the fire under a caldron
of antique fashion and pagan device ; one turns away
with a hard dull smile showing all her wolfish teeth.
The second, of a tuft of marsh-lilies midway on a steep
and bare hill-side; under them, where the leaves and
moistened earth are cool from the hidden well-head, a
nymph lies deeply asleep; Cupid, leaning and laughing
over her with a clear and crafty face, presses one hand
upon her bosom while the other draws out an arrow.
The design is full of fresh beauty, a sense of light and
wind and fragrant high-lying land. A Virgin with veil
bound up is among the gracefullest and purest of his
many studies in that kind. Here also is a sketch for the
single figure of Venus, seemingly the one sold in England
in 1863, with no girdle of roses round the flanks; not the
lovelier or likelier Venus of the two. Another careful
Satyr-like head suggests the suppressed leaning to gro-
OZZO MAS7AA'S A 7" F/OA&AEAVCE. 327
tesque invention and hunger after heathen liberty which
break out whenever this artist is released from the mill-
horse round of mythologic virginity and sacred child-
hood : in which at all times he worked with such singular
grace and such ingenuity of pathetic device. A sample
of his religious manner is the kneeling angel with parted
lips and soft fair face; another, the figure of St. John
wrapped in skins. Among the unregistered designs here
is one, evidently a study for the male figure in Botticelli's
beautiful and battered picture of Spring; beautiful for all
its quaintness, pallor, and deformities. The sketched
figure is slightly made, with curling hair, and One hand
resting by the hip ; the tree to which in the picture he
turns and reaches after fruit is not here given. Among
others which may belong to this painter is the sketch of
a heavy beardless mask, with fat regular features, round
chin, and open lips; an older face, three-quarters seen,
with a sick and weary look in the lips, with eyes and
cheeks depressed ; a child’s head, large, sharp though
round, studied evidently and carefully from the life; the
mouth curved, with long lips; an old profile, aquiline and
small ; and a head somewhat resembling that of Blake,
bald, but with curling hair on the temples; with pro-
tuberant brow and protrusive underlip, the chin also
prominent. In all these is the same constant and noble
effort to draw vigorously and perfectly, in many the same
faint and almost painful grace, which give a distinct
value and a curious charm to all the works of Botticelli.
The splendid and strong fertility of Filippino Lippi,
unequalled save by that of Benozzo, has here borne much
noble fruit. His numerous sketches are ranged in
|
f
)
328 AWOZTAES OAV ZDAS/GAWS OF 77A/AE
different rooms, far apart from each other, among various
samples of his own school and time ; and may be noted
at random, single figures and larger groups alike. The
artist had less gift of reproducing physical beauty, less
lyric loveliness of work, less fullness of visible and con-
tagious pleasure in his execution, than his father ; but far
more of variety, of flexible emotion, of inventive enjoy-
ment and indefatigable fancy. From the varied and
vagrant life of the elder these qualities might rather have
been expected to develope in him than in his son ; but
if Lippo is more of a painter, Lippino is more of a
dramatist. To him apparently the sudden varieties and
resources of secular art becoming visible and possible
conveyed and infused into his work a boundless energy
of delight. Much may be traced to his master Botticelli;
more to the force of a truly noble blood inherited from
the monk and nun his parents, glorious above all their
kind for beauty, for courage and genius; most of all to
the native impulse and pliancy of his talent. From his
teacher we may derive the ambition after new things, the
desire of various and liberal invention, the love of soft
hints and veiled meanings, with something now and then
of the hard types of face and form, the satisfaction appar-
ently found in dry conventional faults, which disfigure
the beauty of Botticelli's own pictures. With these types
however he was not long content ; no faces can be fuller
of a lovely life and brilliant energy than many of Lippino's;
and his father's incomparable sense of beauty could not
but have preserved from grave or continual error even a
son who had not inherited and acquired so many and
such noble powers. It is singular that some of the
OZD MASTERS AT FLORENCE, 329
faultiest and most favourite types of his master reappear
in the late frescoes of Lippino which add even to the
church of Santa Maria Novella new glory and beauty.
In those two great pictures of martyrdom and miracle
there are faces suggestive of overmuch leather and bony
outline, such as Botticelli, in the violent pursuit of realism,
too often allowed himself to design for the sake of genuine
expression and physical fidelity. Whereas in Lippino's
earlier and greater frescoes at the Carmine there is no
shortcoming of the kind. A fair sample of the somewhat
lean and fleshless beauty, worn down it seems by Some
sickness or natural trouble rather than by any ascetic or
artificial sorrow, in which Botticelli must have taught his
pupil to take pleasure, is here in the veiled head of
Simonetta, thin-faced, with small sharp features, bright
intent eyes, and rippling hair; a model, it will be remem-
bered, dear to the teacher of Lippino. Scarcely less in
the manner of his master is the figure of an angel waiting
by a door, or the group of witches and beggars, full of a
fierce tumultuous grace. Near these is the strange typical
figure of a woman holding what seems some armorial
blazon on a scroll in her hand ; her face is also thin,
fierce, and hesitating; some doubtful evil, Some mystery
of a witch’s irresolute anger, is half expressed and half
suppressed by her features and action. If indeed she was
meant simply for the presiding genius of a family or some
allegoric spirit about to proclaim their titles, the artist has
contrived to give her rather the aspect of a sorceress who
holds their house in her hand, a Sidonia ready to destroy
their hope of generation by a single spell. Especially
will she recall the heroine of Meinhold to those who have
33O NOTES ON DES/GNS of ZVIE
\
seen Mr. E. Burne Jones's nobler drawing of the young
Sidonia wearing a gown whose pattern is of branching
and knotted Snakes, black upon the golden stuff; for the
garment of this witch also is looped up and brooched
with Serpents. Not far off is the figure of a youth, tur-
baned, with both hands clasping a staff; his face that
of one suddenly startled; noticeable, as are all these
Smaller studies, for graceful and individual character.
Two larger sketches in the same room seem to be either
parts of a single story or dubious and tentative studies
taken while the artist had not made up his mind how to
work and what to work upon. In the one, Cupids dis-
Cover a knight sleeping in some dim spell-bound place ;
with soft laughter, with silent feet and swift fingers, they
draw off his armour and steal away the sword and helmet,
leaving his head bare to the dew and wind of that strange
twilight. In the other division, parted off by a mere rough
line drawn across the paper, a knight armed, and newly-
landed from a ship just inshore, finds a maiden asleep under
the sea-rocks; in the low sky behind the ship a faint fire of
dawn has risen, and touches the shadowed shore and the
dissolving clouds with growing and hesitating light. The
design was not improbably made for a picture of Bacchus
and Ariadne; it has the cold and lucid beauty of an older
legend translated and transformed into mediaeval shape.
More than any others, these painters of the early Floren-
tine school reproduce in their own art the style of thought
and work familiar to a student of Chaucer and his fellows
or pupils. Nymphs have faded into fairies, and gods
i subsided into men. A curious realism has grown up out
\
i
of that very ignorance and perversion which seemed as if
O Z/D AZA.STAEAES A 7" A.A.O.A’AºAVCAE. 33 I
it could not but falsify whatever thing it touched upon.
This study of Fiłippino's has all the singular charm of the .
romantic School which remains alike remote from pure
tradition and allegoric invention. The clear form has
gone, the old beauty dropped out of sight ; no freshness
and fervour of new significance has come to supplant it;
no memory and no desire has begun to reach back with
studious eyes and reverted hands towards it, as towards
Some purer and fuller example of art than any elsewhere
attainable ; but the mediaeval or romantic form has an
incommunicable charm of its own. False and monstrous
as are the conditions and the local colouring with which
it works, the forms and voices of women and men which
it endeavours to make us see and hear are actually audible
voices and visible forms. Before Chaucer could give us a
Pandarus or a Cressida, all knowledge and memory of the
Son of Lycaon and the daughter of Chryses must have
died out, the whole poem collapsed into romance ; but
far as these may be removed from the true tale and the
true city of Troy, they are not phantoms; they tread real
earth, and breathe real air, though it be not in Greece or
Troas. Discrowned of epic tradition, dispossessed of
divine descent, they are not yet wholly modern, not yet
degraded and deformed into base and brutish likeness by
the realism and the irony of Shakespeare. Divine they are
no longer, but not as yet merely porcine and vulpine. So
it is with such designs as this Ariadne, if Ariadne it be ;
they belong to the same age, almost to the same instant,
of transition. Two great samples exist of this school
among painters: the Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli,
the Death of Procris by Piero di Cosimo. Of Filippino's
N
332 AWOTES ON DAES/GNS OF THE
sketch the chief charm lies in a dim light of magic morn-
ing mixed with twilight and shed over strange seas and a
charmed shore. No careful and grateful student of this
painter can overlook his special fondness for sea-sides ;
the tenderness and pleasure with which he touches upon
the green opening of their chines or Coombs, the clear low
ranges of their rocks. Two admirable pictures in Florence
bear witness to this ; in the Uffizj his great Adoration of
the Magi, where beyond the furthest meadows and behind
the tallest trees far-off downs and cliffs open seaward, and
further yet pure narrow spaces intervene of gracious and
silent sea ; and in the Pitti his small similar landscape of
the Nativity, where adoring angels rain roses after roses
over mother and child; and outside a close fence of in-
terwoven rose-bushes, the sweet and various land breaks
down to a green clear shore after miles of rocky and
watery field. But that something of the same fondness is
perceptible in Botticelli (especially in the background of
his Venus, and in a very small picture at the Academia
of St. Augustine and the child-angel, where infinite quiet
capes and headlands divide bay from receding bay), it
might be imagined that with the blood of a father who
had roved and laboured perforce by sea Filippino had
inherited some salt relish of the pure wide water and
various shore unknown to the placid inland painters of
his age, content as cattle or sheep with the valley and
the field. To him therefore, rather than to Filippo, in
whom this note of preference is not so perceptible, must
on all accounts be assigned the honour—for to either it
must be an additional honour–of having painted the
Holy Family in the Corsini Palace, where children make
OZZ) MASTERS AT FZOA&AEAVCAE. 333
music on strange instruments, and in the background low
broken rocks enclose, and reveal cold inlets and quiet
reaches of the sea. The colour and manner too seem
altogether those of Lippino.
His finest study here of a single figure is in another
part of the room ; a beautiful head of a youth bent side-
ways, with curls blown back and eager joyful eyes under
lifted brows and eyelids ; the lips parted with eloquent
and vehement expression of pleasure ; his cloak is loose,
but the collar close about the round and splendid column
of his throat; the mouth seems indeed to talk, the hair
to vibrate, the cycs to glitter. Near it is a group also
noticeable, a boy seated and reaching out both arms
towards a girl hard by ; full of vivid grace and action.
Here too is a long narrow drawing for an architectural
façade; in a niche St. Martin and the beggar, who holds
the cloak for the saint to cut ; the design is active and
careful, capable of being put to noble use in fresco or
sculpture. Another slight sketch suffices to show the
power and enjoyment of a great artist ; the bull which
has borne Europa far out into mid-sea, looking back
with reverted horn and earnest eye, plunges on ahead
through a dim swell of obscure and heaving water. No
land is in sight, and no sky given ; the faint full wave of
outer sea, beyond roller or breaker, is dimly seen to
sweep and heave in continuous moving outline. A de-
sign apparently for the story of Phaethon (or more
probably, as I now think, of Hippolytus) has the same
kind of mediaeval realism as that of Ariadne ; four horses
plunge violently forward, whirling after them charioteer
and chariot ; one alone turns backwards his reinless neck
334 MWOZZS ON DES/GNS OF THE
in angry liberty; a man hard by, staff in hand, warns
eagerly ifid vainly with hopeless hand and voice. Near
this is a noble figure of Fear ; the spirit or god of this
passion attired in red, with hair loose under a cap lightly
set on ; in his hand a bow without a bow-string; the
whole form and face violently afraid, terrified even to
passion. In the second room are two other remarkable
studies assigned to Filippino; one of a woman with low
fat eyelids, round bare forehead, and cheeks with the hair
drawn well off, and a short strained throat. The other,
a composition of three figures ; One, with a cap half
covering his curls, seems to remonstrate ; one, turning
away, rests his foot sideways on a stool, showing the sole;
a third, with face and left arm raised together, grasps a
stool in his right hand. The story or the sense of this
design may be conjectured by those who have time or
taste for such guesswork.
The studies by Paolo Uccello give proof in the main
rather of his laborious care and devout desire to work
well than of his rare and vigorous fancy. Separate heads
and figures of his drawing recurin more than one division;
one at least is worth a second look ; an ancient close-
capped head, with the ear bent up as by continuous
pressure upon it of knight's helmet or citizen's bonnet';
the eye bright, and the neck thick; the mouth, with
under-lip thrust out, expressive of a sick and scornful
fatigue; a portrait seemingly of some one overworked
by thoughtful or active life; an old man of great strength
now wearing weak. Other figures, less suggestive, are
not less vigorous in design : studies of men wrestling and
sleeping, and two or three of a boy wrought evidently
OZZ) MASTERS A 7" F/O AEAAVCAE. 335
after the same model, various in grace of attitude ; now
sitting and now kneeling, and again seen froß behind
leaning on a spear, holding One foot with his hand, the
full drapery drawn with skill and labour. Among other
such academic studies we may notice that of a naked
man, bony and sinewy in build of figure. Seated on a
narrow chair and holding out at arm's length a spear or
staff. The woman resting against another chair is
singularly beautiful for an artist who seems oftener to
have painted men and animals in scenes of war or labour.
Two other women are sitting near ; another drawing of .
the same man shows him sitting on the ground and clasp-
ing his knees. There is yet another study of wrestlers,
one lifting the other back to back with a violent grace of
action. In a small drawing of a boy watching some
beast feed, which may be a rabbit or not, the boy's head
recalls a noticeable head by Benozzo in the group of
singing angels near the altar of the Riccardi chapel; a
head full-curled, open-mouthed, showing the teeth bare ;
suddenly recalling the more grotesque manner of Blake :
in the midst of those fair smooth faces of serene and
joyous angels. Two more of these sketches may here
be set down ; one of a child, swift and slight; one of the
Moorish king Balthazar bearing his gifts for Christ. All
these, however graceful and good, are simply sketched for
the sake of such draperies and postures ; elsewhere the
man’s strong fancy and freshness of invention stand more
visibly forward. His finest sketch here given is a design
which recalls Chaucer's tale of three robbers, who seek-
ing for Death to slay him are directed by an old man to
a field where lies a great, heap of treasure ; the two elder
i
336 AWOTES ON DES/GNS OF ZHE
send the youngest for wine that they may drink together
to their good luck, and when left alone devise to slay him
on his return and share the spoil ; meantime he buys
them poison for wine, being mindful of past violences,
and covetous as they of the treasure ; he returning is
stabbed, and his murderers drink and die; and thus all
three overtake the Death they sought. In this drawing of
Paolo's three men lie dead in a wide woody field; the
youngest in front, turned half over on his face as one
who has died hard ; the two others rigid and supine, with
faces upturned to the bleak heaven, as men slain by
sudden judgment. The rare trees growing in this fatal
field of blood, a barren and storm-swept Aceldama, are
bare of limb and worried with wind, blown out of shape
and vexed with violent air; not a bird or beast has here
place to feed or sing, but a grey and drifted roof of cloud
leaves dark the shaken grass and haggard trees.
Piero di Cosimo has not here more than three or four
: drawings; not however mere studies after models, but
compositions marked with the strong romantic invention,
the subtle questionable grace, which more or less dis-
tinguish at all times from his fellows the painter of Procris
and Andromeda. Here the sacred dove is seen poising
over the hcads of children at prayer, two holding an open
book, others bearing lilies; a design full of the pure blind
pleasure of worship. There a Saint enters the desolate
Thebaid with almost Smiling face, the smile controlled
by sadness and the sadness lighted by a smile ; he is
high up already in the waste land, full of storms and
streams; the pine and the poplar are wasted with wind,
the ground covered as with stones of stumbling and rocks
ozo MASTERS AZ, FLORENCE 337
of offence ; only higher yet on a ledge of the hill-side
under lee of the pine-wood a hermit's Cottage hangs over
the one barren path that winds among bleak spaces and
windy solitudes. No modern realist has excelled in \
quaint homeliness of device Piero's study of a Nativity.
The sacred group of mother, child, and angel is gathered
together in a farm-house room ; of this group the angel
supporting the new-born child in his arms is the most
graceful figure : the Ox looking on has an air of amuse-
ment, not of the reverence improper to brute nature;
amused possibly at the lodging chosen for it by an artist
whose neglect of the traditional manger is a sample of
his eccentric scorn of traditions. The window of this
room looks out on a low land at Sunrise, coldly lighted
by the clear level morning new-born with the birth of
Christ. The subject of another study I have not guessed
at. Before a judge in round cap and eastern robe stands
a girl averting her eyes from a Jew-faced man with silk
sash and high hat, who is in act (it seems) to draw a
dagger from his sleeve; her expression that of a dis-
dainful desire for death rather than shame: to her on the
other hand a plumed knight seems eagerly to appeal; his
face is distinct in character, with small sharp upper lip
and large chin. The girl may be a martyr standing before
her judge for her faith's sake, between the lover she re-
nounces and the traitor she abhors ; Or the subject may
be simply taken in full from some mediaeval legend of
adventurous constancy : it is assuredly graceful and vital
as a piece of work.
There are a few designs of either Pollajuolo ; by
Piero, a fine head, wrinkled and Sullen; a youth with
Z
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i
t
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338 AVOTES ON DAES/GNS OF THE
clasped hands in grinning agony of fear, the lips Con-
vulsed and sharpened by the rapid spasm ; by Antonio,
an angel's or virgin's head, over-sweetened into a look of
dulcet devotion, but graceful in its fashion; a lady lightly i
veiled and sharply smiling, with ringlets on the neck and
the main mass of hair plaited up behind ; groups of
Saints and virtues, chief among them. Justice and Pru-
dence with serpents emblematic of wisdom; a fight of
Centaurs and Lapithae ; male studies, possibly for his
picture of St. Sebastian in the National Gallery; one in
Thalf-length stripped naked and seeming to appeal, and
one of ruffianly feature looking upwards as though after
the flight of his arrow; and a singular allegoric design,
in which Fortune from a platform shakes gold into the
hands of an infant, borne in the arms of a man weeping
aloud and violently, while another child clings to his leg ;
a winged boy leaning on a bar looks up to the group and
laughs; his light glad spiritual scorn, the blind bright
indifference of the goddess who gives and the infant who
receives gold, the loud agony of the grown man on whom,
though bearing in his very hands the chosen of fortune,
no flake of the golden rain has fallen ; the helpless
adherence of the slighted older child; all these are
touched with rough suggestive rapidity, and share with
many others the chief charm of these studies; that gift,
namely, which they give us, of ability to see for a little
§ the passage of Swift thoughts and flying fancies across
*fruitful minds of masters whose daily work was cut out
something too much on One pattern, exclusive therefore
of new device and mobile invention. Near this is what
| seems a portrait-drawing of a boy seated, thinking hard,
unhandsome, with long mouth, powerful and grave.
OZD MASTERS 47 FZORENCE 339
Like others of the minor masters, Alessio Baldo-
vinetti shows here more capacity of thought and work in
slight studies than in large pictures, where his touch is
thin and his work sterile. His Deposition from the
Cross is fine enough to surprise at first sight, fresh and
not feeble, inventive even, as in the action of the boy
assisting. Another group by the same hand is forcible
and expressive : two men, with faces full of busy passion,
meet and exchange rapid looks; the one with hands
clasped, the other about to mount a step on which his
foot already rests, with elbow on knee and cheek on
hand ; hard by waits an attendant with a short pike, and
near him a torturer or hangman, with the tools of his
trade. This design is probably a sketch to be worked up
in some picture of martyrdom; its dramatic and distinct
intention strikes and attracts at once. By Taddeo Gaddi
is a noticeable drawing of the meeting of Elizabeth and
Mary; noticeable mainly for its background of rocky
barren highland, with lean trees rising behind the low.
quaint house whence the elder woman has come forth in
glad reverence and eager welcome. Of Mantegna there
are but few samples, grouped mainly with those of
Botticelli near the entrance of the first room ; a design
of the final death-grapple of Antaeus with Hercules; one
of Judith attended by two maids ; a mask as of one
just awakened after death in hell, fierce with perpetual
fear and violent with immortal despair; a young girl
gathering up her dress and looking back, her old nurse
near at hand—a Juliet as it were before the advent of
passion ; a youth raised from the dead, in whom mira-
culous life leaps back into a face full of dawning wonder
Z 2
34o . MOZZS ON Z)ZS/GNS OF 7//E
and departing heaviness; an old man Satyr-headed; a
kneeling Virgin, recalling to modern eyes the earliest
pictures of Mr. Rossetti—a type of clear holiness and
grave beauty. Of Francia there is one example, pretty
enough if also petty; a Virgin and Child among flowering
rose-beds. Of Benozzo Gozzoli there is merely a double
group of angels and pilgrims, not of course without
interest for those who would follow in any way of work
the trace of this Chaucer of painting ; but not so full of
labour and of life as they might hope, who had seen the
cartoon at Pisa for his lost fresco of Solomon and the
Queen of Sheba, and felt there as always the fruitful
variety and vigour of his sleepless and joyous genius.
By Ghirlandajo there is a veiled Virgin of straight and
sad profile; by Masolino, a sketch of boys disputing, and
a woman with chaplet in hand; by some pseudo-Giotto
or Giottino, a Saint Cecilia at a piano-like organ, with a
dog roughly sketched—curious and worth a look; by
Pesello, a Virgin seated between Christ and St. John, an
arm passed round either child ; their heads are merely
sketched ; her face, under a light veil of loose hair, has a
look at once pained and smiling. By Pesellino there are
Some fine studies of single figures, worth notice rather
than comment. Of Masaccio there is here less than
might be hoped ; a few single figures, and one sketch of
a crowd, strong but slight, and to which only the name
appended draws immediate attention. By Lorenzo di
Credi there is an elaborate study of a kneeling saint with
huge fan-shaped beard.
In the same room, as elsewhere, are many sketches
by hands unknown. Among these are several full of
OZZO MASTERS AT FZOA'EAVCE. 34r.
various power and fine invention. A few only can here
be noticed at random ; as these : a man’s head, three-
quarters seen, with strong brows well apart, lips open and
somewhat narrow, firm flattish nose and short neck; a
girl seen from behind, with huddled clothes and arms
violently lifted ; studies of boys by the same hand, some
sitting, one kneeling on a stool, one holding his foot ;
and again, different from this, a naked boy with foot
wounded by a thorn ; exquisite, and not copied from the
statue ; but full of grace and fair life. Elsewhere, also
unassigned, is a vigorous drawing of a monk's head with
cowl flung back: a larger design of the Virgin and certain.
saints adoring the corpse of Christ in a wilderness where
grow the palms of martyrdom; far off by the ready grave
an angel watches in wait ; on a remote hill three dim
crosses rise scarcely into light; and in another line of
distance a city is seen, and bays of sea on a varying
shore. To this is appended a note stating that the
owner in 1458,” “had it from a painter in the Borgo San
Sepolcro, named Pietro.”
By the sculptor Ghiberti there is a study for a statue
in the shrine of a virgin saint ; she stands glorified in the
grace and state of delicate work, with hair drawn upwards
round the head.
By Simone Memmi there is a finished drawing in
three divisions, as though for a triptych ; first the shep-
*
1 I am not certain whether this be not rather the date of the
painter's birth; the day of the month is added, I think the 12th or
13th of March, but cannot be sure that my hasty transcript was
accurate or complete. Of the words given in the text there is no
doubt.
342 AWOZ’ES OW Z)ZS/GAWS OF 7A/Z
herds awakened by a sudden sound of descending angels;
then the Nativity, then the Crucifixion, with a guard of
armed knights about the Cross. There is no other sample
of early Sienese work, and but one later drawing of a
Sienese artist.
Of the Venetians, early or late, there is ample and
splendid witness even in these slighter things how
supreme was their power upon all forms of beauty. The
drawings of Titian and Giorgione are indeed the chief
decorations of the place. Among the earlier of their
famous men there is a sketch by Gentile Bellini, of a
procession with lighted candles through a square with a
central well. The great painter of sacred feasts and
triumphal crowds has left one minor and separate study:
a youth reclining, who leans against a tree, his head
crowned with rich and rippling hair. Of such studies
there are many by his greater brother; one in red chalk,
a lank-haired aquiline head; a group of monks, one
kneeling as reproved, with a face of stupid shame; the
reprover, an erect ascetic figure, stands over him with
features sharpened for rebuke; two others look on, sly
and frightened. By Giovanni too there is a procession ;
the crowd swarms deep in Street and loggia, under roof
and abroad. Near this is a sketch of a poet crowned
with broad leaves of laurel, his back turned. In Bellini's
chiaroscuro drawing of the “Burial of Christ” (No. 581 in
the Uffizj Catalogue) there reappears as Nicodemus or
Joseph of Arimathea a head here separately sketched; a
head rather aging than aged, turbaned, with double tuft
of moustache, and whiskers meeting under the chin; with
strong mouth and glancing eyes. There is also a draw.
OZZ) MASTERS AZ" FLORENCE. 343
ing by the master of himself, done in red chalk : the
beautiful grave face, Sweet and strong, full of grace and
thought, is hard to mistake or to forget.
The designs of Carpaccio recall not less than these
the-painter's habit of mind and work. By him there is a
drawing of two brothers, one with sword by side and
wearing deep boots, one clothed in a full civic gown with
round balls hanging down it by way of fringe, both with
spurs on their heels. One design may be a sketch for
his Presentation of the Virgin : here in the Piazzetta of
Venice a priest receives a kneeling girl. There are
sketches besides of hags, of priests and nuns ; a dog-
headed chimaera with a fragment of sword stuck in its
neck, the knight about to despatch it with the haft; a
crowd with horses and trumpets filling the Piazza of
St. Mark, here altered in proportions, but not the less
recognisable ; studies of full-sleeved arms and hands—
One bearing keys, one a book, one an apple, and so
forth—Studiously wrought and varied ; a head that might
well serve for Shylock's, the typical Jew of Venice, with a
face of keen and vigorous cruelty; a reading priest, with
broad beard shaped like an open fan.
But the designs of Titian and Giorgione are more
precious and wonderful than these. From his sketches
alone it might be evident that Titian was the chief of all
landscape painters. The priceless samples of his work
here exhibited demand long and loving study from those
who desire to estimate them aright. They are fresher
than the merest suggestions, more perfect than the most
finished elaborations of other men. It is not by intel-
* o e e e º |
lectual weight or imaginative significance that these
344 WOTES ON DESIGNS OF THE
t
Venetians are so great. That praise is the proper
apanage of the Milanese and the Roman schools—of
Michel Angelo and Leonardo. Those had more of
thought and fancy, of meaning and motive. But since
the Greek sculptors there was never a race of artists so
humbly and so wholly devoted to the worship of beauty.
This was enough for them ; and for no other workmen.
First among these pen-and-ink landscapes of Titian
is one which gives us in full outline the likeness of a high
hill, rising over a fort; before and beyond it a wild length
of broken land expands and undulates, clothed with all
manner of trees in full beauty of blossom and leaf,
haunted by flying and settling birds. Next to this we
find a sudden sunny bank in the dim depth of a wood,
with a wolf at watch and a rabbit at wait. Next, a bay
deeply wooded to the verge of the soft sea, with low
rocks far off under the wash of the tender water. The
fourth design is traversed by a river, which curves rapidly
and roughly round the sudden steep of a broken bank,
fringed with wild herbage and foliage of untrimmed and
windy growth ; in front, where the wide water elbows its
way round a corner of grassy land, a little child is
embracing a lamb, with fat strenuous arms and intent
face; hard by is the slump of a felled tree, well-nigh
buried in rank overgrowth of deep wild grass; beyond
this the rising towers of a city watered by the further
stream, and a remote church seen among tall slim stems
of trees. Next to this we find a city set among the
sloping folds of a hill-country; full in front of the design
are two firs, rigidly clipped and pared up to the topmost
tuft; on a rise of ground beyond these a small close
OZZ) MASTERS AT FZOAAAWCAE. 345
wood, crowning as with native plumes the head of the
slanting land ; in the middle valley are sheep at pasture;
and the wooded slopes, warm with summer and Sweet at
once with life and sleep, bend and flow either way in
fruitful repose, shaped like waves of the sea after a wind,
that seem at once to move and to rest, to change and to
remain. -
Next, a sudden nook or corner of high-lying land in
some wild wood, opening at the skirt upon a fresh waste
ground, a place of broken banks fringed and feathered
with thick grasses full of the wind and the sun ; to the
right, a land of higher hills, with a city framed and
radiant among them. Then comes another such corner
of woodland, rocky, strewn with stones curiously notched
and veined ; and here too infinite summer hills open and
recede and melt into further and nearer forms in solid
undulation without change, billows of the inland crowned
not with foam but with grass, and clothed with trees, not
Inoulded out of mutable water.
Other work of Titian is here besides these seven
finished sketches ; slighter work, and not in the line of
landscape. There is a vision of Virgin and Child
appearing in a Thebaid desert to some Saint—Anthony
apparently, as the typical Swine's snout obtrudes itself
with a quaint innocent bestial expression. Note also a
lovely and vigorous group of Cupids grappling in play
with a great hound, which all they can hardly overset;
the eager laughing labour of the bare-limbed boys and
the gravely gamesome resistance of the beast are things
to see and remember, as given by the great master.
There are studies too for the famous picture of St. Peter
346 AWOZ’ÉS OW ZES/GNS OF THE
Martyr; there is a head like Michel Angelo's Brutus,
with large broad nose.
In samples of Giorgione's work the collection is not
less rich. Sixteen sketches and studies, variously
finished, bear witness for him. First, a most noble male
profile, with blunt nose, mouth fretted, and hard cheek;
a strong man weary, with tough spirit growing tired too.
Unlike this, a large priestly head, loose about the jaw,
firm in the upper part ; with a long mouth like a slit ; by
no means unlike the recognisable head of Alexander VI. ;
on the medals of the great Borgia you see just such a
strong brow of statecraft, such a resolute eye, such a
heavy lax lustful under-face. Next, three heads to-
gether; the first may be boy's or girl’s, having in it the
delicious doubt of ungrown beauty, pausing at the point
where the ways of loveliness divide ; we may give it the
typical strawberry flower (Fragoletta) and leave it to the
Loves; the second is a priest's, wearing a skull-cap, and
very like the middle musician of the three in Giorgione's
divine picture in the Pitti; the third an old man’s head,
cowled and bearded. Next a girl with a book of music;
many bend over her; two faces to the right are specially
worth notice ; a youth of that exquisite Venetian beauty
which in all these painters lifts male and female together
on an equal level of loveliness; and an older head near
him, stamped with scorn as with a brand. Next, and
slightly wrought, on a raised couch or step of a palace,
a group of revellers embracing and gazing outward;
one leans round a girl to read with her from some
joyous book. Next, a full face, wasted by time or
thought or pleasure, with a clear sardonic look left
OZD MASTERS A7 FZORENCE 347.
in it; next, a close-curled imperial head; next, a gather-
ing of counsellors, a smile on their chief man's face.
Then a very noble naked study from behind ; a figure
planted with knees apart as if bestriding, with strained.
back and muscles leaping, with curly Herculean hair;
naked down to the thighs, then draped, but finished only
to one knee. Next, one of the most perfect of these
studies, a superb head of one in pain, the face drawn and
not disfigured by suffering. Next, an infant covering its. .
mouth with its hand in a lifelike and gracious gesture.
Next, in a Thebaid, a skin-clad Saint sinking as in swoon,
all but sunken already through fasting or trance; on the
same paper are studies of hands and feet. Then a.
Virgin and Child, with an old man kneeling ; then the
figure of a youth seemingly made ready for torture, a fair
and brave martyr's face ; this and the next are figures.
about two-thirds, or three-fourths of the length of the
whole. The next I take to be a design for Lucretia ; a
naked woman, loose-haired, with the left arm raised, and
with the right hand setting as it seems a dagger under
the right breast; on the wall by her is an escútcheon,
which may indicate, if it be a serious part of the design,
some later suicide than the Roman matron's; it matters
little to the interest of the study. Apart from these is a
sketch of some pagan feast, with torchlight and blast of
trumpets ; several figures and faces are noticeable here :
a youth fallen on his knees; a boyish torch-bearer, with
blown cheeks and subtle sharp-edged eyes ; the head of
a boy who rests his hand on the shoulder of another; a
face seen behind, with rounded mouth and blowing hair:
the whole design profuse of interest and invention. In
348 MOZES ON DESIGNS OF THE
\
these light sketches, or even in these rough notes, the
vivacity and warm strength as of sunlight which dis-
tinguish the painter's imagination are traceable. With all
the deep sweet tragic colour, the divine oppression of a
delight whose eyes grow sorrowful with past thought and
future dream—“large discourse, looking before and after;”
with all the pathos of pleasure never translated as in his
pictures but once, in Keats's Ode to Melancholy ; the
adorable genius of Giorgione, like the beautiful mouth of
Chaucer's mistress, is always “most glad and sad.”
By Paolo Veronese there is one design of a feast
disturbed and breaking up ; in one corner the figure of
an old man; a girl sinking at his feet clasps him by the
ancle. In front of course is a dog, and sidelong from
under the table-cloth a dog's head peers with the bright-
eyed caution of its kind; the whole design has interest
and character. Unluckily for the affectionate students
of Bonifazio, there is but one slight sketch by that master
of all gracious and pleasant beauty; as the subject is
music-making, it might have been finished into a nobly
delightful piece of work, and significant of his love of
sweet sound and fair form met together and made one
in the sight of art. Of Tintoretto there is not much
arranged and framed above-stairs: a Doge in his quaint
|buttoned robe; a study of a knight's lance and helmet
held by his page—Gattamelata's, as I thought at first, a
design for the great portrait, but it seems doubtful. A
more important design is one, very noble and impressive
in sentiment, of the Deposition of Christ; the body is
Carried off through a steep and strait gorge between
rocky hills below Calvary; the Virgin has fallen in utter
OZZ) MASTERS AZ' FZOAEAAVCAE. 349
swoon. There is also a small Oval-faced figure of a girl
at prayer; and a noble design of four angels rushing down
to judgment, with violent wings and blowing trumpets
that betray the artist; their fierce flight and thunder
of summoning sound have roused the dead already;
Some are precipitated hellward, some aspire as on sudden
wings; three newly roused sit still and gaze upward.
Again, a naked woman startled in bed by the advent of
a witch with cap and broom. In the lower rooms, among
the unregistered masses of designs, I saw a huge port-
folio Crammed with rough figure-sketches by Tintoretto,
in his broad gigantic manner, but too slight to be of any
descriptive interest, though to him they doubtless had
their use and might have the like to an artist who should
now care to study them. -
Assigned to Raffaelle is a sketch in pen-and-ink of
a cavalcade passing a seaport fown, recognisable as the
ſirst design for one of the great series at Siena repre-
senting the life of AEneas Sylvius, in which Raffaelle is
supposed to have assisted Pinturicchio. The name of
“Messer Domenicho da Capranicha” (the Cardinal) is
scribbled on the drawing itself; and the composition is
pretty much that of the fresco; the horses turn at the
same point, the groups are massed and the line of harbour
shown in the same manner. By Giulio Romano there
are two designs for Circe; in one the sorceress lets down
an urn among her transformed beasts, holding it may be
some strange food or fume of magic drugs ; among them
are two griffins and an eagle. In the other design she
is in the act of transformation, an incarnate sorcery; two
men yet undegraded are already confounded and lost
35o NOTES OW ZXES/GNS OF THE
with their fallen fellows. Another careful sketch is that
of Daedalus building up the hollow wooden cow for
Basiphae; the strange machine is well-nigh perfect; a.
whole troop of Loves lend helping hands to the work,
sawing wood, whetting steel, doing all manner of carpentry,
with light feet and laughing faces full of their mother's
mirth. -
Of Sodoma, again, there is but one example; it may
|be that Vasari’s well-known and memorable ill-will to-
wards the great Sienese excluded others from his collec-
tion, if indeed this one came from thence. It is a beautiful
and elaborate drawing, partly coloured; a boy with full
wavy curls, crowned with leaves, wearing a red dress
banded with gold and black and fringed with speckled
fur; the large bright eyes and glad fresh lips animate the
beauty of the face; Razzi" never painted a fairer, full
..as his works are of fair forms and faces. -
I may here, as well as anywhere else among these
disconnected notes, turn to the samples of German work
in this collection; to the sketches of Durer, Holbein,
and Mabuse, which have found favour in Italian eyes.
Two studies of the Passion by Durer are noticeable; in
this Christ is bearing the cross, in that sinking under it;
the press of the crowd, the fashion of the portcullis, recall
the birthplace and the habit of the master. From his
hand we have also secular and allegoric sketches; one
a design for the famous figure of Fortune; an old man's
* Bazzi, as the last Sienese guide-book will needs have him
called ; Razzi or Bazzi, Sodoma or Sodona, the name of St.
Catherine's great painter seems doomed to remain a riddle. Happily
...the beauty of his work is no such open question, so that the name
imatters little enough. -
OZZ) MASTERS A 7" F/O RAEAVCAE. 351
|
head with heavy lips and nose, a collar tied loose round
the large throat; another head, bearded and Supine;
slight studies of man and horse and child; a Deposition
of Christ, and a Burial, with fine realistic landscape hard
by the city walls; a man beheading a woman, who in
the act grasps hard the doomed head with his unarmed
left hand. By Mabuse there is a quaint horror in the
way of martyrology ; the boiling of some saint in a vessel
like a kitchen-pot, while one tormentor scalds his head
with water or oil or molten metal out of a little bucket
at the end of a pole. Mabuse in his sketches has revelled
in the ways and works of hangmen, seen in a grim
broad light of German laughter; their quaint gestures
and quaint implements have a ludicrous and bloody
look; observe another pot with rings round it, ominous
and simple in make, and the boy staring with strained
eyes. These fine sharp caricatures of torturers might
serve a modern eye as studies for Henriet Cousin of
“Notre-Dame de Paris” or Master Hansen of “Sidonia; ”
there is a stupid funereal fun in the brute mechanism of
their aspect. He has also a really fine drawing of a
saint stepping into his own grave, made ready in a chapel
before the altar. Martin Schöngauer too has left a good
female head with ample hair, and a strong hard design
of a knight and devil in deadly grapple. A head after
|Holbein is unmistakeable; the hair is thick, the chin
long, the fine lips fretted and keen. Not far off is the
only waif of Spanish art I find here ; a head sketched in
chalk by Velasquez, with large eyes and red lips, the
upper lip thin.
I turn back to Florence for my last note ; to one of
352 AWOZTAES O/V ZDAS/GAVS OA' ZTAZZ
her dearest and noblest names, reserved with love for
this last place. With the majestic and the tragic things
of art we began, at the landmarks set by Leonardo and
Michel Angelo; and are come now, not quite at random,
to the lyric and elegiac loveliness of Andrea del Sarto.
To praise him would need sweeter and purer speech than
this of ours. His art is to me as the Tuscan April in
its temperate days, fresh and tender and clear, but lulled
and kindled by such air and light as fills the life of the
growing year with fire. At Florence only can one trace
and tell how great a painter and how various he was.
There only but surely there can the influence and pressure
of the things of time on his immortal spirit be understood;
how much of him was killed or changed, how much of
him could not be. There are the first-fruits of his
flowering manhood, when the bright and buoyant genius
in him had free play and large delight in its handiwork;
when the fresh interest of invention was still his, and the
dramatic sense, the pleasure in the play of life, the power
of motion and variety; before the old strength of sight
and of flight had passed from weary wing and clouding
eye, the old pride and energy of enjoyment had gone out
of hand and heart. How the change fell upon him, and
how it wrought, any one may see who compares his later
with his earlier work; with the series, for instance, of
outlines representing the story of St. John Baptist in the
desolate little cloister of Lo Scalzo. In these mural
designs there is such exultation and exuberance of young
power, of fresh passion and imagination, that only by the
innate grace can one recognise the hand of the master
whom hitherto we knew by the works of his after life,
OZZO MASTERS AZ' FZOAAAWCAE. 353
when the gift of grace had survived the gift of invention.
This and all other gifts it did survive; all pleasure of life
and power of mind, all the conscience of the man, his
will, his character, his troubles, his triumphs, his sin and
honour, heart-break and shame. All these his charm of
touch, his sweetness of execution, his “Elysian beauty,
melancholy grace,” outlived, and blossomed in their dust.
Turn from that cloistral series to those later pictures
painted when he was “faultless” and nothing more; and
seeing all the growth and all the gain, all the change and
all the loss, one to whom the record was unknown would
feel and foreknow his story and his sorrow. In the
cloister, what life and fullness of growing and strengthen-
ing genius, what joyous sense of its growth and the fair
field before it, what dramatic delight in character and
actionſ where St. John preaches in the wilderness and
the few first listeners are gathered together at his feet,
old people and poor, Soul-stricken, Silcmt—women with
worn still faces, and a spirit in their tired aged eyes that
feeds heartily and hungrily on his words—all the haggard
funereal group filled from the fountain of his faith with
gradual fire and white-heat of soul; or where Salome
dances before Herod, an incarnate figure of music, grave
and graceful, light and glad, the song of a bird made
flesh, with perfect poise of her sweet slight body from
the maiden face to the melodious feet; no tyrannous or
treacherous goddess of deadly beauty, but a simple
virgin, with the cold charm of girlhood and the mobile
charm of childhood; as indifferent and innocent when she
stands before Herodias and when she receives the severed
head of John with her slender and steady hands; a pure
A. A
354 AVOTES OW ZES/GAWS OF ZZZZ
bright animal, knowing nothing of man, and of life nothing
but instinct and motion. In her mother's mature and
Conscious beauty there is visible the voluptuous will of a.
harlot and a queen ; but, for herself, she has neither malice
nor pity; her beauty is a maiden force of nature, capable
of bloodshed without bloodguiltiness; the king hangs upon
the music of her movement, the rhythm of leaping life in
her fair fleet limbs, as one who listens to a tune, subdued
by the rapture of sound, absorbed in ºurity of passion.
I know not where the subject has been touched with
such fine and keen imagination as here. The time came
when another than Salome was to dance before the eyes
of the painter; and she required of him the head of no
man, but his own soul; and he paid the forfeit into her
hands. With the coming of that time upon him came
the change upon his heart and hand; * the work of an
imperious whorish woman.” Those words, set by the
prophet as a brand upon the fallen forehead of the chosen
bride, Côme back to mind as one studies in her husband's
pictures the full calm lineaments, the large and serene
beauty of Lucrezia del Fede; a predominant and placid
beauty, placid and implacable, not to be pleaded with
or fought against, Voluptuous always and slothful,
subtle at times no doubt and sweet beyond measure, full
of heavy beauty and warm slow grace, her features bear
no sign of possible love or conscience. Seen side by
side with his clear sad face, hers tells, more of the story
than any written record, even though two poets of our
age have taken it up. In the feverish and feeble melo-
drama of Alfred de Musset there is no touch of tragedy,
hardly a shadow of passionate and piteous truth ; in Mr.
O ZZO MASTE/C.S. A 7" F/O RAE/VCE. 355
ex
Browning's noblest poem—his noblest it seems to me—
the whole tragedy is distilled into the right words, the
whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh. One
point only is but lightly touched upon—missed it could
not be by an eye so sharp and skilful—the effect upon
his art of the poisonous solvent of love. How his life
was corroded by it and his soul burnt into dead ashes,
we are shown in full; but we are not shown in full what
as a painter he *as before, what as a painter he might
have been without it. This is what I think the works of
his youth and age, seen near together as at Florence,
make Imanifest to any loving and studious eye. In those
latter works, the inevitable and fatal figure of the woman
recurs with little diversity or change. She has grown
into his art, and made it even as herself; rich, mono-
tonous in beauty, calm, complete, without heart or spirit.
But his has not been always the “low-pulsed forthright
craftsman's hand” it was then. He had started on his
way towards another goal than that. Nothing now is
left him to live for but his faultless hand and her faultless
face—still and full, suggestive of no change in the steady
deep-lidded eyes and heavy lovely lips without love or
pudency or pity. Here among his sketches we find it
again and ever again the same, crowned and clothed only
with the glory and the joy and the majesty of the flesh.
When the luxurious and subtle sense which serves the
woman for a soul looks forth and speaks plainest from
those eyes and lips, she is sovereign and stately still;
there is in her beauty nothing common or unclean. We
cannot but see her for what she is; but her majestic face
makes no appeal for homage or forgiveness. Above
A A 2
356 AWOZTAES OW ZDA2S/GAWS OF 7TA/AE
stairs and below I saw many of Andrea's studies of
figure; first, a sketch of Lucrezia seated with legs bare,
perfect in shapeliness and state; in a larger drawing she
is naked, and holds a child; sitting, as I presume, for
the appropriate part of the Virgin. There is another and
most beautiful drawing on yellow paper, which gives her
full face in all its glory of form without a fault—not
heavenly, but adorable as heaven. His sketches of
landscape and studies of children are lovely and many :
round-limbed babies in red-chalk outline, with full-blown
laughter in their mouths and eyes; such flowers of flesh
and live fruits of man as only a great love and liking for
new-born children could have helped him to render.
The wonderful and beautiful make of limb and feature,
the lovely lines and warm curves of the little form, are
so tenderly and fully made the most of and caressed as
with mother's hands, that here as in his portrait you can
tell at once his fondness for them. His sad and sensi-
tive smiling face has the look of a lover of children;
the quiet and queenly beauty of his wife has not. One
superb boy-baby (in Sidney's phrase, a “heavenly fool
with most kiss-worthy face”) attempting to embrace his
round fat knees with his fat round arms, and laughing
with delight in the difficulty, is a more triumphant child
than ever painter drew before or since. A sketch of a
castle with outlying lodge is marked as “begun on the
twentieth of August, 1527.” Among other studies is one
of a cavalry skirmish among the rounded and rising
downs of a high hill-Country, with a church and castle
at hand. Among the figure drawings I took note of
these: a portrait in profile of a man still young, ill-
OZZ) MASTERS A 7" FLOAZAVCAE. 357
favoured and sullen, with sinewy neck and cruel eye,
with Snub nose and thick thrust-out lips—a portrait it
clearly is, and whose it would be worth while to know,
so careful has the artist been to reproduce the native
stamp of aspect; a naked youth, with arms doubled up
round the neck, leaning aslant on a staff, with ruffled
hair and a set face; a noble head, like Nero's, in red
chalk, with hair blown loose and rough by the wind; a
boy's figure on a step of some entrance, drawing the
curtain of a tent, with loose ribbons at the shoulder, and
with a curling plume of hair; a slender figure, thin and
graceful, the face smiling, but drawn and fixed; the
fierce aquiline head of a prophet or apostle, with upper
lip thinner than the under. These complete my roll,
and conclude these notes. They might have been fuller
and more orderly, but could never have had any value
other than that of a clear and genuine impression.
Transcribed at stray times from the roughest memorial
jottings, they may claim to give this at least. I close
as I began them with a hope that they may perhaps, in
default of a better handbook, afford some chance help
to a casual student of such unclassed relics of the old
great schools, and with a glad affectionate memory of
these and of all things in Florence.
358
AWOTES ON SOME PICTURES OF I868.
| PREFATORY NOTE.-I reprint these loose and cursory
notes almost exactly as they were first issued, with the
excision of two passages which I see now no reason to
reproduce. It is not that in either case I find anything
to unsay; that I have any palinode to sing, any retrac-
tation to offer. But in the one instance I think it no
longer worth while to prolong the recollection of what
I found feeble and futile in the work of a painter who
will give us no more of bad work or good ; and in the
other instance I should feel it somewhat more than
presumptuous, I should feel it indeed thankless and
indecorous, to make mention but once of one of the
greatest among modern artists, and then in a tone of
blame or at least of complaint rather than of praise and
thanksgiving. My opinion of his pictures exhibited in
1868 remains what it was then ; but however slight may
be the worth of that opinion, it would be unseemly to
insist on it within the limits of these notes ; limits which
preclude all possibility of touching on the many and
marvellous gifts of his regal and masterful genius. A
competent critic who should undertake the task of re-
viewing his work as a whole might permissibly note in
passing the less excellent parts of it, and set down the
AWOZZS ON SOMAE A/CZ'UAEAES OF 1868. 359
years in which, as he might think, the master's hand
had wrought more or less happily than its wont ; but
he would not desire to reissue by itself any detached
notice of such work as he might consider unworthy, of
the workman at his best]
I have been asked to note down at random my
impressions of some few among this year's pictures.
These I am aware will have no weight or value but that
which a sincere and studious love of the art can give ; so
much I claim for them, and so much only. To pass
judgment or tender counsel is beyond my aim or my
desire.
Returning from the Academy I find two pictures
impressed on my memory more deeply and distinctly
than the rest. First of these—first of all, it seems to me,
for depth and nobility of feeling and meaning—is
Mr. Watts's “Wife of Pygmalion.” The soft severity of
perfect beauty might serve alike for woman or statue,
flesh or marble; but the eyes have opened already upon
love, with a tender and grave wonder ; her curving
ripples of hair seem just warm from the touch and the
breath of the goddess, moulded and quickened by lips
and hands diviner than her sculptor's. So it seems a
Greek painter must have painted women, when Greece
had mortal pictures fit to match her imperishable statues.
Her shapeliness and state, her sweet majesty and
amorous chastity, recall the supreme Venus of Melos.
In this “translation” of a Greek statue into an English
360 AWOZTAES O/V
ſ
picture, no less than in the bust of Clytie, we see how in
the hands of a great artist painting and sculpture may
become as sister arts indeed, yet without invasion or con-
fusion ; how, without any forced alliance of form and
Colour, a picture may share the gracious grandeur of a
statue, a statue may catch something of the subtle bloom
of beauty proper to a picture. -.
The other picture of which I would speak, unlike
enough to this in sentiment or in tone, has in Common
with it the loftiest quality of beauty pure and simple.
Indeed, of all the few great or the many good painters
now at work among us, no one has so keen and clear a
sense of this absolute beauty as Mr. Albert Moore. His
painting is to artists what the verse of Théophile Gautier
is to poets; the faultless and secure expression of an
exclusive worship of things formally beautiful. That
Contents them ; they leave to others the labours and the
joys of thought or passion. The outlines of their work
are pure, decisive, distinct; its colour is of the full sun-
light. This picture of “Azaleas” is as good a type as
need be of their manner of work. A woman delicately
draped, but showing well the gentle mould of her fine
limbs through the thin soft raiment ; pale small leaves
and bright white blossoms about her and above, a few
rose-red petals fallen on the pale marble and faint-
coloured woven mat before her feet; a strange and
splendid vessel, inlaid with designs of Eastern colour;
another—clasped by one long slender hand and filled
from it, with flowers—of soft white, touched here and
there into blossom of blue : this is enough. The melody
of colour, the symphony of form is complete : one more
SO//E A/CTOWA’AºS OF 1868. 361
beautiful thing is achieved, one more delight is born into
the world ; and its meaning is beauty ; and its reason
or being is to be.
We all owe so much to Mr. Leighton for the selection
and intention of his subjects—always noble or beautiful
as these are, always worthy of a great and grave art; a
thing how inexpressibly laudable and admirable in a time
so largely given over to the school of slashed breeches
and the school of blowsy babyhood —we owe him, I
Say, so much for this that it seems ungracious to say a
word of his work except in the way of thanks and praise.
And yet I must say that I find no true touch of Greek
beauty in the watery Hellenism of his Ariadne : she is a
nobly moulded model of wax, such a figure as a mediaevał
sorceress might set to waste before a charmed fire and
burn out the life of the living woman. The “Actaea."
has the charm that a well-trained draughtsman can give
to a naked fair figure; this charm it has, and no other ;
it has also a painful trimness suggestive of vapour-baths,
of “strigil’’ and “rusma,” of the toilet labours of a
Juvenalian lady; not the fresh sweet strength of limbs
native to the sea, but the lower loveliness of limbs that
have been steamed and scraped. The picture of Acme
and Septimius is excellently illustrative of Mr. Theodore
Martin's verse ; it is in no wise illustrative of Catullus.
I doubt if Love would have sneezed approval of these
lovers either to left or to right. In his two other pic-
tures Mr. Leighton has, I think, reached his highest mark
for this year. The majestic figure and noble head of
Jonathan are worthy of the warrior whose love was won-
derful, passing the love of woman ; the features resolute,
362. AWOZTES OZV
solicitous, heroic. The boy beside him is worthy to
stand so near; his action has all the grace of mere
nature, as he stoops slightly from the shoulder to sustain
the heavy quiver. The portrait of a lady hard by has
a gracious and noble beauty, too rare even among the
abler of English workmen in this line.
I return now to the works of Mr. Watts. His little
landscape is full of that beauty which lives a dim brief
life between sunset and dusk. The faint flames and
mobile colours of the sky, the dim warm woods, the flight
of doves about the dovecote, have all their part in the
grave charm of evening, are all given back to the eye
with the grace and strength of a master's touch ; the
stacks that catch the glare and glow of low sinlight seem
crude and violent in their intense yellow colour and hard
angles of form : natural it may be, but a natural discord
that jars upon the eye. “The Meeting of Jacob and
Esau," though something too academic, has in part the
especial, the personal grandeur of Mr. Watts's larger
manner of work. In the pale Smooth worn face of Jacob
there is a shy sly shame which befits the supplanter : his
well-nigh passive action, as of one half reassured and
half abashed, bares to view the very heart and root of his
nature; and the rough strenuous figure of Esau, in its
frank grandeur of brave Sunbrowned limbs, speaks aloud
on the other side of the story, by the fervid freedom of
his impetuous embrace. Far off, between the meeting
figures, midmost of the remote cavalcade, the fair clear
face of a woman looks out, pale under folds of white,
patient and ill at ease; her one would take to be Leah.
It is noticeable that one year, not over rich in excellent
SO///º AP/CZ'OWACA.S. O/7' I 868. 363
work, should give us two admirable pictures drawn from
the Hebrew chronicles. What they call scriptural art in
England does not often bear such acceptable fruit. I
know not if even Mr. Watts has ever painted a nobler
portrait than this of Mr. Panizzi; it recalls the majestic
strength and depth of Morone's work: there is the same
dominant power of hand and keenness of eye, the same
breadth and subtlety of touch, the same noble reticence
Of colour. -
Before I pass on to speak of any other painter, I will
here interpolate what I have to say of Mr. Watts's bust of
Clytie. Not imitative, not even assimilative of Michel
Angelo's manner, it yet by some vague and ineffable
quality brings to mind his work rather than any Greek ,
sculptor's. There is the same intense and fiery sentiment,
the same grandeur of device, the same mystery of tragedy."
The colour and the passion of this work, are the work-
man's own. Never was a divinc legend translated into
diviner likeness. Large, deep-bosomed, superb in arm
and shoulder, as should be the woman growing from flesh
into flower through a godlike agony, from fairness of body
to fullness of flower, large-leaved and broad of blossom,
splendid and sad—yearning with all the life of her lips
and breasts after the receding light and the removing
love—this is the Clytie indeed whom sculptors and poets
have loved for her love of the Sun their God. The bitter
Sweetness of the dividing lips, the mighty mould of the
rising breasts, the splendour of her sorrow is divine : divine
the massive weight of carven curls bound up behind, the
heavy straying flakes of unfilleted hair below; divine the
clear cheeks and low full forehead, the strong round neck
364 AWOZTES OAV
made for the arms of a god only to clasp and bend down
to their yoke. We seem to see the lessening sunset that
she sees, and fear too soon to watch that stately beauty
slowly suffer change and die into flower, that solid sweet-
ness of body sink into petal and leaf Sculpture such as
this has actual colour enough without need to borrow of
an alien art.
The work of M. Legros is always of such a solid and
serious excellence as to require more than a passing
study. His picture of Henry VIII. and courtiers is, I
must think, an instance of absolute error; it has no finer
quality of its own, and the reminiscence of Holbein is
not fortunate. “The Refectory” makes large amends :
he has never done more perfect work than this. The
Cadence of colours is just and noble ; witness the red-
leaved book open in one monk’s hand on the white
cloth, the clear green jug on the table, the dim green
bronze of the pitcher on the floor; beside it a splendid
cat, its fur beautiful with warm black bars on an exqui-
site ground of dull grey, its expectant eye and mouth
lifted without further or superfluous motion. The figures
are noble by mere force of truth ; there is nothing of
vulgar ugliness or theatrical holiness. As good but
not so great as the celebrated “Ex-voto" of a past
year, this picture is wholly worthy of a name already
famous.
The large work of Baron Leys stands out amid the
Overflow all round it of bad and feeble attempts or pre-
tences at work in all the strength of its great quality of
robust invention. It has the interest of excellent narra-
- \ tive ; in every face there is a story. A great picture is
\
SO///7 P/ CZ"UA’AºS OA' I 868. 365
Something other than this ; but this also is a great thing
done. It is a chapter of history written in colours; a
study which may remind us of Meinhold's great romances,
though the author of “Sidonia the Sorceress” may stand
higher as a writer than Leys as a painter. All the real-
istic detail is here, but not the vital bloom and breath of
action which Meinhold had to give. Rigour of judicial
accuracy might refuse to this work the praise of a noble
picture; for to that the final imprint and seal of beauty is
requisite ; and this beauty, if a man's hand be but there
to bestow it, may be wrought out of homely or heavenly
faces, out of rare things or Common, out of Titian's women .
or Rembrandt's. It is not the lack of prettiness which
lowers the level of a picture. Here for imagination we
have but intellect, for charm of form we have but force of
thought. Too much also is matter of mere memory;
thus the clerk writing is but a bastard brother of Holbein’s
Erasmus. Form and Colour are vigorous, iſ hard also and
heavy ; and when all is said it must in the end be still
accepted as a work of high and rare power after its own
kind, and that no common kind, nor unworthy of studious
admiration and grave thanksgiving.
I have compared Albert Moore to Théophile Gautier;
I am tempted to compare Mr. Leslie to Hégésippe
Moreau. The low melodious notes of his painting have
the soft reserve of tone and still sweetness of touch which º
belong to the idyllic poet of the Voulzie. Sometimes he
almost attains the gentle grace of the other's best verse—
though I hardly remember a picture of his as exquisite for
music and meaning as the “Etrennes à la Fermière.”
His work of this year has much of tender beauty, especi-
i
366 « AWOZTAES OAV
ally the picture called “Home News;” his portraits have
always a pleasant and genuine quality of their own; and
in the picture called “The Empty Sleeve,” though trench-
ing somewhat nearly on the obvious and facile ground of
family feeling and domestic exhibition, there is enough of
truth and grace visible to keep it up on the proper level
of art. w
The “Evening Hymn" of Mr. Mason is in my mind
the finest I have seen of his works, admirable beyond all
where all are admirable. A row of girls, broken in rank
here and there, stand and sing on a rough green rise of
broken ground; behind them is a wild spare copse,
beyond it a sunset of steady and sombre fire stains red
with its sunken rays the long low space of sky; above
this broad band of heavy colour the light is fitful and pale.
The raised faces and opening mouths of the singers are
as graceful as those carved by Della Robbia or Donatello
in their choral groups; nothing visible of gape or strain,
yet the action of song is made sensible. Their fine fea-
tures are not over fine ; they have all an air of the fields
and the common country, which is confirmed in the
figures, cast in a somewhatruder mould, of the two young
peasants who stand listening. One girl stands off a little
from the rest, conning the text with eyes set fast upon her
open book; the rest sing freely at large; the middle
group of three girls is most noble and exquisite. Rich at
Once and grave in the colour, stately and sweet in the
composition, this picture is a model of happy and majestic
\ temperance. -
* Mr. Walker's picture of “Vagrants” has more of actual
h
t
º beauty than his “Bathers” of last year; more of brilliant
SOME P/CTUA’AºS OA’ 1868. 367
skill and swift sharp talent it can hardly have. The low
marsh with its cold lights of grey glittering waters here and
there; the stunted brushwood, the late and pale sky; the
figures gathering about the kindling fire, sad and wild and
worn and, untameable; the one stately shape of a girl
standing erect, her passionate beautiful face seen across
the smoke of the scant fuel; all these are wrought with
such appearance of ease and security and speed of touch,
that the whole seems almost a feat of mere skill rather
than a grave sample of work; but in effect it is no such
slight thing. -
In Mr. Armstrong’s “Daffodils” there is a still sobriety
of beatity, a quiet justice and a fine gravity of manner, far
unlike the flash and flare of obtrusive cleverness which
vexes us so often in English work of this kind. The
Sombre Sweetness of a coming twilight is poured upon
hill and field; only the yellow flowers wreathed about the
child's hat or held by the boy kneeling on the stile relicve
the tender tone of sunless daylight with soft and tempered
Colour. The action of the figures has all the grace of
simple truth and childlike nature. -
: “The Exiled Jacobite” of Mr. Lidderdale is full of
the noble sadness of the subject, excellent also as a genu-
ine picture, a work of composed harmony. The noble
worn face of the old man, stamped with the sacred seal
of patience and pain, looks seaward over the discoloured
stonework of the low wall, beyond the dull grey roofs of
a low-lying town that slope to the foreign shore. His
eyes are not upon the dusky down sweeping up behind,
the rough quaint houses and deep hollow, veiled all and
blue with the misty late air; they are set, sad and strong,
368 AWOZTAES OAV
upon things they shall never see indeed again. From the
whole figure the Spirit of the old song speaks :
“Now all is done that man can do,
And all is done in vain.”
The pathos of the picture is masculine and plain as truth;
the painter might have written under it the simple first
words of the same most noble song:
“It was a for our rightful king.”
Mr. Poynter's picture of “The Catapult” has an
admirable energy of thought and handiwork ; the force
and weight of faculty shown in it would be worthy remark
if the result were less excellent. Excellent of its kind it
is, but not delightful; Surprise and esteem it provokes,
but not the glad gratitude with which we should welcome
all great work. The labouring figures and the monstrous
engine, are worthy of wonder and praise ; but there is a
want on the whole of beauty, a want in detail of interest.
The painter's “Israel in Egypt” had more of both
qualities, though there is this year a visible growth of
power; it left upon our eyes a keen impression of
gorgeous light and cruelty and splendour and suffering ;
it had more room for the rival effects at once of fine art
and of casual sentiment.
The two pictures of Mr. Hughes show all his inevit-
able grace and tender way of work; they are full of gentle
Colour and soft significance. The Smaller is to me the
sweeter sample; but both are noticeable for their clear
soft purity and bright delicacy of thought and touch. In
the larger picture the bird singing on the sill, delicious as
it would be anywhere, has here a double charm.
SOMAE A/CTOA&AES OF 1868. 369
There is a genuine force and a quaint beauty in
Mr. Houghton's picture—portrait it can hardly be called
—of a gentleman in his laboratory. His other picture,
of a boy lifting up a younger child to smell a rose on the
tree, while a kitten bounds at his feet, is admirable for its
plain direct grace of manner.
The head of a priest by Mr. Burgess has a clear air of
truth and strength ; its Spanish manner recalls the style
of Phillip, whom the painter, it seems, has sought to
emulate. Among the few portraits worth a look or a
word, is that of Mrs. Birket Foster by Mr. Orchardson ;
though the showy simplicity be something of a knack,
and the painting of woodwork and drapery rather a trick
of trade acquired than a test of accomplished power, the
work is so well done and the action so plain and good as
to bear and to reward a second look.
The show of this year is noticeably barren in land-
scape. Nothing is here of Inchbold, nothing of Anthony.
The time which can bring forth but two such men should
have also brought forth men capable to judge them and
to enjoy. Even here however the field is not all sterile :
there are two studies of sea by Mr. H. Moore, worthy to
redeem the whole waste of a year. One of these shows
an ebbing tide before the squall comes up ; the soft low
tumult of washing waves, not yet beaten into storm and
foam, but weltering and whitening under cloud and wind,
will soon gather power and passion ; as yet there is some
broken and pallid sunlight flung over it by faint flashes,
which serve but to show the deepening trouble and
quickening turmoil of reluctant waters. The shifting and
subtle colours of the surging sea and grey blowing sky
B B
37O AWOZTAES OAV
are beautiful and true. The study of storm subsiding as
the waves beat up inshore, though vigorous and faithful,
is in parts somewhat heavy ; but the jostling breakers
muster and fight and fall with all the grace and force of
Inature. -
In these stray notes I had meant to set down nothing
in dispraise of this picture or that, but merely to say of
such as I found good the best I had to say ; passing by
of necessity many well worthy of praise or blame, and
many more not wholly worthy of either. Of these indeed
the main part of an exhibition must usually be made up ;
of mediocrities and ingenuities which art must on the
whole ignore and put aside without rebuke, though they
may not call aloud for fire to consume them. But a word
may here be said of M. Édouard Frère ; a name that
carries weight with it. He has been likened to Words-
worth; it must be a Wordsworth shorn of his beams.
In the large field of the poet there are barren and weedy
places enough ; he may at times, with relaxed hand and
bedimmed eye, drop from the hills to the quagmires, and
croak there to children, instead of singing to men; but
the qualities which at such times a great poet may have
in common with a small painter are not the qualities
which make him great. When we find in M. Frère the
majesty and music of thought, the stately strength and
high-toned harmonies, the deep sure touch and keen-
edged pathos of the poet, then only we may grant the
kinship. To the rags and tatters, the stubble and
sweepings of Wordsworth, he meantime is more than
welcome. What is there in this year's picture well con-
ceived, well composed, well painted? what of effect, of
SOME P/CTURES OF 1868. 37 I
harmony, of variety in these crude monotonous figures?
A great artist in verse or in Colour may assuredly make
some great thing Out of the Commonest unwashed group
of dull faces; but the workman must first be great ; and
this workman, without force of hand or delicacy, without
depth or grace of painting, would pass off on us, in lieu
of these, such mere trickeries of coarse and easy senti-
ment as are fit only to “milk the maudlin eyes” of
M. Prudhomme and his wife. Turn from his work to
that of M. Legros, and compare the emasculate with the
masculine side of French art.
Among the drawings here are two studies by Mr.
Sandys, both worthy of the high place held by the artist.
One is a portrait full of force and distinction, drawn as
perhaps no other man among us can draw; the other, a
woman's face, is one of his most solid and splendid
designs; a woman of rich, ripe, angry beauty, she draws
one warm long lock of Curling liair through her full and
moulded lips, biting it with bared bright teeth, which add
something of a tiger's charm to the sleepy and couching
passion of her fair face. But of that which is not here
I have also something to Say. Exclusion and suppres-
sion of certain things in the range of art are not really
possible to any academy upon earth, be it pictorial or
literary. It is natural for academies to try, when any
rare or new good thing comes before them in either kind;
witness much of academic history in England as in
France ; but the record of their ill-will has always been
the record of their impotence. Mr. Sandys’ picture of
“Medea' is well enough known by this time, wherever
there is any serious knowledge of art, to claim here some
T3 B 2
372 MOZZS OW
word of comment, not less seasonable than if it were now
put forward to grace the great show of the year. Like
Coriolanus, the painter might say if he would that it is
his to banish the judges, his to reject the “common cry”
of academics. For this, beyond all doubt, is as yet his
masterpiece. Pale as from poison, with the blood drawn
back from her very lips, agonized in face and limbs with
the labour and the fierce contention of old love with
new, of a daughter's love with a bride's, the fatal figure
of Medea pauses a little on the funereal verge of the
wood of death, in act to pour a blood-like liquid into the
soft opal-coloured hollow of a shell. The future is hard
upon her, as a Cup of bitter poison, set close to her
mouth; the furies of Absyrtus, the furies of her children,
rise up against her from the unrisen years ; her eyes are
hungry and helpless, full of a fierce and raging sorrow.
Hard by her, henbane and aconite and nightshade thrive
and grow full of fruit and death ; before her fair feet the
bright-eyed toads engender after their kind. Upon the
golden ground behind is wrought in allegoric decoration
the likeness of the ship Argo, with other emblems of the
tragic things of her life. The picture is grand alike for
wealth of symbol and solemnity of beauty.
The present year has other pictures to be proud of,
not submitted to the loose and slippery judgment of an
academy. Of one or two such I am here permitted to
make mention. The great picture which Mr. Whistler
has now in hand is not yet finished enough for any
critical detail to be possible ; it shows already promise of
a more majestic and excellent beauty of form than his
earlier studies, and of the old delicacy and melody of
SOME PZCZ'URES OF 1868. 373
ineffable colour. Of three slighter works lately painted
I may set down a few rapid notes; but no task is harder
than this of translation from colour into speech, when the
speech must be so hoarse and feeble, when the colour is
so subtle and Sublime. Music or verse might strike some
String accordant in sound to such painting, but a mere
version such as this is as a psalm of Tate's to a psalm of
David’s. In all of these the main strings touched are .
certain varying chords of blue and white, not without
interludes of the bright and tender tones of floral purple
or red. In two of the studies the keynote is an effect
of sea ; in one, a sketch for the great picture, the soft
brilliant floor-work and wall-work of a garden balcony
serve in its stead to set forth the flowers and figures
of flowerlike women. In a second, we have again
a gathering of women in a balcony ; from the unseen
flower-land below tall almond-trees shoot up their top-
most crowns of tender blossom ; beyond and far out to
west and south the warm and solemn sea spreads wide
and soft without wrinkle of wind. The dim floor-work
in front, delicate as a summer cloud in colour, is anti
phonal to the wealth of water beyond : and between
these the fair clusters of almond-blossom make divine
division. Again the symphony or (if you will) the anti-
phony is sustained by the fervid or the fainter colours
of the women's raiment as they lean out One against
another, looking far oversea in that quiet depth of plea-
sure without words when spirit and sense are filled full of
beautiful things, till it seems that at a mere breath the
charmed vessels of pleasure would break or overflow,
the brimming chalices of the senses would spill this wine
374 AWOZTAES OZV
|
of their delight. In the third of these studies the sea is
fresher, lightly kindling under a low clear wind ; at the
end of a pier a boat is moored, and women in the deli-
cate bright robes of eastern fashion and colour so dear to
the painter are about to enter it; one is already midway
the steps of the pier ; she pauses, half unsure of her
balance, with an exquisite fluttered grace of action. Her
comrades above are also somewhat troubled, their robes
lightly blown about by the sea-wind, but not too much
for light laughter and a quivering pleasure. Between the
dark wet stair-steps and piles of the pier the sweet bright
sea shows foamless here and blue. This study has more
of the delight of life than the others; which among three
such may be most beautiful I neither care to guess nor
can. They all have the immediate beauty, they all give
| the direct delight of natural things; they seem to have
grown as a flower grows, not in any forcing-house of
ingenious and laborious cunning. This indeed is in my
eyes a special quality of Mr. Whistler's genius; a fresh-
ness and fullness of the loveliest life of things, with a high .
clear power upon them which seems to educe a picture
as the sun does a blossom or a fruit.
It is well known that the painter of whom I now
propose to speak has never suffered exclusion or accept-
ance at the hand of any academy. To such acceptance
or such rejection all other men of any hote have been
and may be liable. It is not less well known that his
work must always hold its place as second in significance
and value to no work done by any painter of his time.
Among the many great works of Mr. D. G. Rossetti, I
know of none greater than his two latest. These are
+
SOME PZCZ'UAEAS OA' I 868. 375
*
types of sensual beauty and spiritual, the siren and the
sibyl. The one is a woman of the type of Adam's first
wife ; she is a living Lilith, with ample splendour of
redundant hair;
‘‘ She excels
All women in the magic of her locks; &
And when she winds them round a young man's neck
She will not ever set him free again.”
Clothed in soft white garments, she draws out through
a comb the heavy mass of hair like thick spun gold to
fullest length ; her head leans back half sleepily, superb
and satiate with its own beauty; the eyes are languid,
without love in them or hate; the sweet luxurious mouth
has the patience of pleasure fulfilled and complete, the
warm repose of passion sure of its delight. Outside, as
seen in the glimmering mirror, there is full summer; the
deep and glowing leaves have drunk in the whole strength
of the sun. The sleepy splendour of the picture is a fit
raiment for the idea incarnate of faultless fleshly beauty
and peril of pleasure unavoidable. For this serene and
sublime sorceress there is no life but of the body; with
spirit (if spirit there be) she can dispense. Were it.
worth her while for any word to divide those terrible
tender lips, she too might say with the hero of the most
perfect and exquisite book of modern times—“Made-
moiselle de Māupin"—“Je trouve laterre aussi belle que
le ciel, et je pense que la correction de la forme est la
vertu.” Of evil desire or evil impulse she has nothing;
and nothing of good. She is indifferent, equable, mag-
netic; she charms and draws down the souls of men by
pure force of absorption, in no wise wilful or malignant;
376 No.72s ow
outside herself she cannot live, she cannot even see : and,
because of this she attracts and subdues all men at once
in body and in spirit. Beyond the mirror she cares not
to look, and could not.
“Ma mia Suora Rahel mai non si smaga
Dal suo miraglio, e siede tutto 'l giorno.”
So, rapt in no spiritual contemplation, she will sit to
all time, passive and perfect: the outer light of a sweet
spring day flooding and filling the massive gold of her
hair. By the reflection in a deep mirror of fervent
foliage from without, the chief chord of stronger colour
is touched in this picture; next in brilliance and force
of relief is the heap of curling and tumbling hair on
which the sunshine strikes ; the face and head of the
siren are withdrawn from the full stroke of the light.
The other picture gives the type opposite to this;
a head of serene and spiritual beauty, severe and tender,
with full and heavy hair falling straight in grave sweet
lines, not, like Lilith's, exuberant of curl and coil; with
carven column of throat, solid and round sand flawless
as living ivory; with still and sacred eyes and pure calm
lips; an imperial votaress truly, in maiden meditation:
yet as true and tangible a woman of mortal mould, as
ripe and firm of flesh as her softer and splendid sister.
The mystic emblems in the background show her power
upon love and death to make them loyal servants to the
law of her lofty and solemn spirit. Behind this figure
of the ideal and inaccessible beauty, an inlaid wall of
alternate alabaster and black marble bears inwrought
on its upper part the rival twin emblems of love and
SOME PICTURES OF 1868. 377
death; over the bare carven skull poppies impend, and
roses over the Sweet head with bound blind eyes: in
her hand is the palm-branch, a sceptre of peace and of
power. The Cadence of colour is splendid and simple,
a double trinity of green and red, the dim red robe,
the deep red poppies, the soft red roses; and again the
green veil wound about with wild flowers, the green
down of poppy-leaves, the sharper green of rose-leaves.
An unfinished picture of Beatrice (the Beata Beatrix
of the Vita Nuova), a little before death, is perhaps the
noblest of Mr. Rossetti's many studies after Dante. This
work is wholly symbolic and ideal; a strange bird flown
earthward from heaven brings her in its beak a full-blown
poppy, the funereal flower of sleep. Her beautiful head
lies back, sad and sweet, with fast-shut eyes in a death-
like trance that is not death; over it the shadow of death
Secrls to impend, making sombre the splendour of her.
ample hair and tender faultless features. Beyond her the
city and the bridged river are seen as from far, dim and
veiled with misty lights as though already “sitting alone,
made as a widow.” Love, on one side, comes bearing
in his hand a heart in flames, having his eyes bent upon
Dante's; on the other side is Dante, looking sadly across
the way towards Love. In this picture the light is
subdued and soft, touching tenderly from behind the
edges of Beatrice's hair and raiment; in the others there
is a full fervour of daylight. -
The great picture of Venus Verticordia has now been
in great measure recast; the head is of a diviner type of
beauty; golden butterflies hover about the halo of her
hair, alight upon the apple or the arrow in her hands;
378 * AWOZTES OW
her face has the sweet supremacy of a beauty imperiał
and immortal; her glorious bosom seems to exult and
expand as the roses on each side of it. The painting of
leaf and fruit and flower in this picture is beyond my
praise or any man's ; but of one thing I will here take
note; the flash of green brilliance from the upper leaves
of the trellis against the sombre green of the trees behind.
Another work, as yet incomplete, is a study of La
Pia; she is seen looking forth from the ramparts of her
lord's castle, over the fatal lands without; her pallid
splendid face hangs a little forward, wan and white
against the mass of dark deep hair; under her hands is
a work of embroidery, hanging still on the frame un-
finished; just touched by the weak weary hands, it trails
forward across the lap of her pale green raiment, into the
foreground of the picture. In her eyes is a strange look
of wonder and sorrow and fatigue, without fear and with-
out pain, as though she were even now looking beyond
earth into the soft and sad air of purgatory: she presses
the deadly marriage-ring into the flesh of her finger, so
deep that the soft skin is bloodless and blanched from
the intense imprint of it.
Two other studies, as yet only sketched, give promise
of no less beauty; the subject of one was long since
handled by the artist in a slighter manner. It also is
taken from the Vita Nuova ; Dante in a dream behold-
ing Beatrice dead, tended by handmaidens, and Love,
with bow and dart in hand, in act to kiss her beautiful
dead mouth. The other is a design of Perseus showing
to Andromeda the severed head of Medusa, reflected
in water; an old and well-worn subject, but renewed
SOME A2/CTUAEA.S OA' 1868. 379
and reinformed with life by the vital genius of the artist.
In the Pompeian picture we see the lovers at halt beside
a stream, on their homeward way; here we see them
in their house, bending over the central cistern or im-
pluvium of the main court. The design is wonderful for
grace and force; the picture will assuredly be one of the
painter's greatest.
Wide and far apart as lie their provinces of work,
their tones of thought and emotion, the two illustrious
artists of whom I have just said a short and inadequate
word have in common one supreme quality of spirit and
of work, coloured and moulded in each by his individual
and inborn force of nature; the love of beauty for the
very beauty's sake, the faith and trust in it as in a god
indeed. This gift of love and faith, now rare enough,
has been and should be ever the common apanage of
artists. A'ien n'est wraſſ gue /e beau; this should be the
beginning and the ending of their belief, held in no small
or narrow sense, but in the largest and most liberal scope
of meaning. Beauty may be strange, quaint, terrible,
may play with pain as with pleasure, handle a horror till
she leave it a delight; she forsakes not such among her
servants as Webster or as Goya. No good art is un-
beautiful; but much able and effective work may be, and
is. Mere skill, mere thought and trouble, mere feeling
or mere dexterity, will never on earth make a man painter
or poet or artist in any kind. Hundreds of English
pictures just now have but these to boast of; and with
these even studious and able men are often now content;
forgetful that art is no more a matter of mere brain-work
than of mere handicraft. The worship of beauty, though
|
38o AWOZES ON SOME PICTURES OF 1868,
beauty be itself transformed and incarnate in shapes
diverse without end, must be simple and absolute ;
hence only must the believer expect profit or reward.
Over every building made sacred to art of any sort,
upon the hearts of all who strive after it to serve it, there
should be written these words of the greatest master now
living among us:—
“La beauté est parfaite,
La beauté peut toute chose,
La beauté est la seule chose au monde quin'existe pas à demi.”
LONDON : PRINTED BY
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