EN MEME.IAM 
 Chester Harvey Rowell 
 
 
 ! 
 
Camelot Classics, 
 
 EDITED BY ERNEST BUYS. 
 
 MY STUDY WINDOWS. 
 
iff- 
 
 MY STUDY WINDOWS, 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 V 
 
 WITH INTRODUCTION 
 
 BY RICHARD GARNETT, LL.D. 
 
 
 LONDON: 
 WALTER SCOTT, 24 WARWICK LANE, 
 
 PATERNOSTER ROW. 
 
 1886. 
 
fl 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION . . vii 
 
 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE .... I 
 
 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER . . . .21 
 
 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS . 48 
 
 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER . . . -73 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN . . . . . . IOI 
 
 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL . 125 
 
 THOREAU . . . . . . .137 
 
 EMERSON THE LECTURER , . , . .152 
 
 CARLYLE . . . . . . . l6l 
 
 SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES . . . . .191 
 
 CHAUCER . . . . . . .205 
 
 DRYDEN . , . , - 262 
 
 POPE ..... . 335 
 
Jntro&uctfon, 
 
 HILE, as a rule, it is impossible to speak with 
 too high appreciation of the busy, restless, 
 inquisitive intellect of ancient Greece, there is 
 one point in which it signally disappoints 
 reasonable expectation. It was incurious 
 respecting the literature of foreign nations. 
 The monuments of Egypt excited the wonder of Herodotus ; 
 the social condition of this nation and of Babylonia aroused 
 his intelligent interest ; we are infinitely indebted to him for 
 the facts which he has observed and recorded : and if his 
 survey of the history of these countries is inaccurate and 
 uncritical, it at least proves that he deemed the subject worthy 
 of his attention. But we should hardly have learned from him 
 that Egypt and Babylonia possessed a literature. If Plato really 
 sought the East in quest of mystic knowledge, his intercourse 
 with the Oriental mind was merely oral. Megasthenes spent 
 years in the industrious investigation of the natural conditions 
 and products of India, but he never gave a thought to Sanscrit, 
 about which the modern Italian traveller, Delia Valle, inquires 
 intelligently as soon as he sets foot in the country. Some 
 excuse may be made for this want of interest in strange speech 
 and unfamiliar thought ; but what can be said of the 
 phenomenon of Greeks dwelling for centuries under the 
 dominion of a kindred people, whose language is nearly akin to 
 theirs, whose literature is modelled upon and partly derived 
 from their own, in whose temples they may worship, whose 
 laws they must obey, whosa families they instruct, with whose 
 public and private life they are in daily contact, while yet their 
 literature is almost destitute of allusion to any evidence of 
 intellectual life among their rulers, pupils, and intimates? 
 
viii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Had Greek literature perished, its renown would have left 
 abundant traces in the literature of Rome. If Latin literature 
 had disappeared, we should hardly have been aware of the loss. 
 How infinitely would our knowledge be extended if Greece had 
 played the part of an active and busy critic, if we had 
 known what a Greek Quintilian thought of a Latin Homer or 
 Thucydides, and been able to read a Caesar with the eyes of 
 an Arrian ! 
 
 This strange insensibility is at this day a thing of the past. 
 Every civilised nation now takes a warm interest in the 
 literature of its sister peoples, and each is more or less able to 
 see itself in its literary aspect as it is seen by others. The rapid 
 conquest which Russian and Norwegian novels have recently 
 made of the circulating libraries of all nations is one of the 
 phenomena of the age, and an Italian critic has just awarded 
 the palm of contemporary love poetry to a Portuguese. Differ 
 ences of national taste and habit form, of course, serious 
 obstacles to adequate recognition. We English necessarily 
 suffer from our insularity, the cheap price of our independence. 
 Some of our great writers have indeed beaten down all 
 opposition, and made good their place in universal literature. 
 But we have still to deplore that the Continent which has 
 accepted Shakespeare, Scott, and Byron, and is slowly 
 familiarising itself with Wordsworth and Shelley, which has 
 adopted Dickens and Thackerary and tries to digest George 
 Eliot, remains as a whole deaf and blind to Keats, Browning, 
 and Landor ; to Borrow and De Quincey and Patmore ; accords 
 no welcome to the young genius of a Shorthouse or a Jefferies, 
 and adds the last sensational tales of the day to its cheap 
 reprints with as much satisfaction as it includes a Bronte or a 
 Meredith. This scarcely seems the case with any other country. 
 Elsewhere the success of the national author among foreigners 
 appears fairly proportioned to the recognition he has obtained at 
 home. We alone complain that the fame of much of our best 
 authorship is local, or at least should have to make that com 
 plaint, but for a circumstance which turns the balance in our 
 favour. 
 
INTRODUCTION. ix 
 
 This circumstance is, that the wide dissemination of our 
 race over the western and the northern continents is raising up 
 new centres of culture which derive their tone from England, 
 which provide her men of letters with a public destined to 
 become more ample than Europe could afford, were Europe 
 English, and which promises to afford them, at no distant date, 
 all the advantages of exterior criticism, unwarped by having 
 had to pass through a foreign medium. When Australia shall 
 have become more thoroughly differentiated from the mother 
 country than is now the case, the capability of impressing an 
 Australian audience will be no bad test of the merit of an 
 English author. At present she is too much a reproduction of 
 England, and has too little indigenous literature of worth to 
 inspire confidence in her critical deliverances. American 
 culture seems almost venerable in comparison, and has had 
 time to develop literary types which entitle it to an independent 
 rank among intellectual civilisations. Though far more 
 intimately connected with the culture of the parent country 
 than the Roman was with the Greek, being much more of an 
 offshoot than of a copy, it renders English letters the same 
 service as Rome rendered to the Greeks, in subjecting them to 
 the criticism of an intelligent and impartial opinion, and greatly 
 extending their circulation and usefulness. Thanks to America, 
 the preservation of English literature, so far as already existing, 
 is assured, and the prospect of its continued existence is 
 indefinitely strengthened. What the mother country has 
 already produced of excellent is safe, and the stimulus to future 
 production is rendered infinitely more active. The English 
 author now speaks to an audience of a hundred millions, soon 
 to be doubled and trebled, even apart from the reasonable 
 anticipation that it may ere very long include the cultivated 
 classes of India and Japan, if not even of China. In presence 
 of such a majestic fact, European criticism, however welcome 
 and valuable, is not essential. The imprimatur of Paris or 
 Berlin is not wanted ; and the time is arriving when the 
 Continental writer who would rise to cosmopolitan fame must 
 captivate the Anglo-American public. From this point of view 
 
x INTRODUCTION. 
 
 it would almost seem that while superior excellence of produc 
 tion may long remain the attribute of England, the decisive 
 voice in criticism may pass to America. In proportion as 
 literature becomes, as it is becoming, cosmopolitan, as the great 
 author is received as the common heritage of all nations, the 
 more liberal and universal taste must supplant the narrower 
 and more exclusively national. While indigenous American 
 literature, the only native article which has no help from a 
 protective tariff, struggles as hopelessly with the foreigner as 
 British corn contends with American, and for the same reason ; 
 the affluence of importation, mischievous in many respects, 
 fosters that width of view and freedom from conventional 
 prejudice which distinguishes American judgment in literary as 
 in other matters. Americans far surpass us English in the 
 prompt recognition of excellence. Carlyle, De Quincey, 
 Coventry Patmore, James Martineau, found their first consider 
 able audiences across the Atlantic. Americans are quicker to 
 discover the merits of a foreign author, more thorough in 
 naturalising him, and demand a higher standard of excellence 
 in the translation of his works. Hence they are better fitted 
 than we to assign a writer his proper place without unreasonable 
 delay, and to recommend him to the world. All the novels of 
 Marie Schwarz have been translated in America ; in England 
 scarcely one. Turgeneff, Bjorson, Jonas Lie, are almost as much 
 household words as Hawthorne or Henry James. At the same 
 time, writers of that peculiarly intense nationalism which 
 circumscribes itself within the limits of a district, such as Cable 
 and Egbert Craddock, are no less popular. This flexibility and 
 catholicity of taste will invest American criticism with especial 
 authority, as it becomes more generally recognised. It 
 admirably fits America to do for England what Greece might 
 have done for Rome to win an entrance for her literature into 
 nations hitherto repelled by her insularity, or, failing that, to 
 make her independent of them. 
 
 Two natural and inevitable developments may be remarked 
 in American criticism. There is first the classical, conservative, 
 cautious school of the Irvings and Channings and Ticknors, 
 
INTRODUCTION. xi 
 
 and of the old North American Review in general ; a school 
 consciously under the influence of the old country. There is 
 also a younger school consciously aiming at originality, at 
 evolving a national type, and occupying a position in criticism 
 akin to Bret Harte s in production. This is undoubtedly the 
 school of the future, destined to prevail more and more as 
 America becomes more and more differentiated from Europe. 
 It embodies all the specifically American characteristics, which 
 are, however, precisely such as require to be kept in check by 
 the refinement and moderation of the older school, and it will 
 be ill for it if, in effacing its predecessor, it fails to absorb the 
 latter s qualities. 
 
 Mr. Russell Lowell is, in a sense, the most perfect represent 
 ative of American criticism to be found, for he occupies a 
 central position between the old school and the new. An 
 exemplar of the highest New England culture, his poetry either 
 emulated English models, or attained a classic finish, admir 
 able as such, but excluding any marked individuality of style. 
 Suddenly, as it were at a bound, he became the leader of a new 
 departure, and placed himself in the first rank of native 
 humorists. There had seemed neither the " promise " nor the 
 " potency " of the Fable for Critics or the Biglow Papers in Sir 
 Launfal ; but circumstances had given him something to say 
 which the ordinary style was incapable of expressing : with 
 true insight he discerned the fact, and with happy flexibility 
 created a new literary form to meet the demand. The Fable 
 for Critics, indeed, is rather the revelation of an unsuspected 
 talent than of a novel style. But the Biglow Papers is a That 
 in Worten. It not merely struck a new vein of humour which 
 has ever since gushed like a Virginian oil-spring : but it was a 
 revelation to European readers of the sound healthy instincts of 
 the American people, when not perverted by speculation or 
 misguided by professional politicians. It showed there was a 
 love of righteousness to which the high-minded statesman 
 might confidently appeal, and it foreshadowed the sacrifices 
 and triumphs of the great civil war. It was the more effective 
 as being itself the product of a deep moral indignation, stung 
 
xii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 into energy by Texan annexations, Mexican wars, Fugitive 
 Slave Bills, and the other too abundant evidences of subserviency 
 to the slave power and general political demoralisation, so rife 
 at that unhappy period. At the same time, there was nothing 
 in Mr. Lowell in the slightest degree tasteless, absurd, or 
 fanatical. He impressed the conviction that he was not only 
 much better than the professional politicians of his day, but 
 also much wiser. The same sanity characterises his deliver 
 ances as a critic. He is original to a much higher degree than 
 the Irvings and the Ticknors, and his originality is of a dis 
 tinctively national type. But he has not that disengagement 
 from all traditional and conventional influences sometimes real, 
 sometimes affected which characterises or is assumed by 
 younger men. He is free from their extravagance, but he does 
 not succeed so often in setting old things in a new light. 
 Hence the English reader will find him less suggestive and 
 stimulating than a Greek might have found a Roman, if he had 
 condescended to study the latter. He is like an English fruit 
 transplanted, racy, it may be said, of the new soil, but not 
 endowed with the full flavour of an indigenous product. 
 
 As his own Fable for Critics foreshadowed what might come 
 of satire applied to politics : so his criticisms hint what service 
 American culture may render to English letters when it has 
 obtained an entirely independent point of view. That it has 
 not yet done so is recognised by Mr. Lowell himself in his 
 essay on Josiah Quincy, in language perhaps even stronger 
 than altogether justified by the circumstances. It may almost 
 be suggested that he writes as a New Englander, and that a 
 citizen of the Great West, while allowing with him that America 
 "must submit herself to the European standard of intellectual 
 weights and measures," would claim that she had earned the 
 right to apply them in her own way to the estimate of other 
 nations products and her own. Such intellectual standards are 
 in a measure elastic. There is but one manner of weighing tea 
 all the world over, but the literary balance, though graduated on 
 the same principles, must inevitably yield various results. 
 
 The essay from which this quotation is taken belongs to the 
 
INTRODUCTION. xiii 
 
 group of Mr. Lowell s essays dealing with American persons 
 and things, and is one of the most characteristic. Thomas 
 Quincy, " the great public character," belongs to a type in one 
 sense almost extinct in the United States, in another, it is to 
 be hoped, multiplying. The vast development of population, 
 industry, and foreign immigration, leaves no room for the 
 quasi-aristocracy represented by Mr. Quincy. The old patri- 
 cianship of Massachusetts and Virginia, worthy in many 
 respects of the best days of the Roman Republic, cannot exist 
 in so numerous and so thoroughly democratised a community, 
 any more than the Roman Senate could retain its influence 
 when the franchise had been extended to all the citizens of the 
 empire. But democracy has not proved incapable of producing 
 honest men and bearing them to office, and the new type of 
 homely, practical citizen, like the present Chief Magistrate, if 
 less imposing than that expressed by the stately Quincy, 
 appears to reproduce its virtues. In an essay of kindred sub 
 ject and spirit, Mr. Lowell sketches, with singular felicity, the 
 character of a great man who in a measure united the type of 
 Quincy and the type of Cleveland. Any less aristocratic per 
 sonality than Abraham Lincoln s could not, indeed, well be 
 conceived ; but the dignity of his nature, once recognised, 
 produced much the same effect as dignity of birth or bearing, 
 while his homely good sense won him the confidence which 
 might have failed to accompany mere respect. The whole 
 character is peculiarly and intensely American, and Mr. Lowell s 
 faithful and sympathetic analysis, rising to eloquence at the 
 close, is a most valuable contribution to the understanding of 
 American affairs, and a most dignified rebuke to the narrow- 
 minded stupidity of average foreign critics. It is more profitable 
 reading every way than the remonstrance, " On a certain 
 condescension in Foreigners," worthy as this is of attention 
 on the part of all travellers who would refrain from wantonly 
 or inadvertently wounding a hospitable people. But it shows 
 temper to a degree unusual with Mr. Lowell, and it does not do 
 justice to the foreigner s case. Belonging to the most cultivated 
 circles of New England, Mr. Lowell has perhaps hardly realised 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION. 
 
 how much the traveller may have to put up with elsewhere. The 
 picture of Washington society in " Democracy," the work of an 
 American author, is even more unpleasing, if less agonising, than 
 that delineated by the hapless M. de Bacourt forty years ago ; 
 and the most unreasonable carping of the most exacting and 
 self-sufficient European tourist can hardly be more lamentably 
 peevish than the pages devoted to England by no less an 
 American than Hawthorne. Political prejudice on both sides 
 has also a good deal to do with the occasional acerbity of 
 criticism, which is, however, much ameliorated since Mr. 
 Lowell wrote. 
 
 Passing by the pretty " Garden Acquaintance " and " Good 
 Word for Winter," we come to another class of Mr. Lowell s 
 American essays those devoted to American men of letters. 
 Of these there are three in this volume those treating of 
 Percival, Thoreau, and Emerson as a lecturer. Mr. Lowell is 
 always at his best when most genial, and the subjects of the 
 first two of these do not allow his geniality scope. He cannot 
 put up with the incompetence of Percival, and the poverty of 
 the literary productiveness that was pleaded as its excuse. 
 Genius itself does not get absolution for its dulcia vitia as easily 
 as it used ; still, when genius is undeniably present, forgiveness 
 is seldom very remote. But the luckless Percival wanted to 
 exemplify all the errors of genius, and to be petted and admired 
 on the strength of them, without complying with the indispens 
 able condition of being a genius. This positively cannot be 
 allowed. Mr. Lowell s estimate of Percival as a poet through 
 all his life, and as a man for the first half of it, is undeniably 
 sound ; but he fails to render justice to him in his peculiar and 
 almost unique character of a pseudo-genius reformed. Mock 
 Byrons usually come to such bad ends, that when we find one of 
 them, in his maturer years, hammer in hand, actually rendering 
 first-rate service to his country as a geologist, one is inclined to 
 exclaim, Meliiis sic poenituisse quam non errasse ! Thoreau is 
 altogether a different sort of person, open, it may be, to the 
 contrary charge of having made a trade of self-reliance, as Per 
 cival did of helplessness. The essayist half reveals a suspicion 
 
INTRODUCTION. xv 
 
 that the apostle of nature may have been something of a char 
 latan. "This egotism of his is a Stylites pillar after all, a 
 seclusion which keeps him in the public eye. He squatted on 
 another man s land ; he borrows an axe ; his boards, his nails, 
 his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his 
 plough, his hoe all turn state s evidence against him as an 
 accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilisation which alone 
 rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau 
 should exist at all." Yet, having so fairly hit this blot, Mr. 
 Lowell reconciles himself to his author, and dismisses him with 
 a benediction. "Emerson the Lecturer" helps one, in some 
 degree, to understand the magnetism exercised by Emer 
 son on men who, as is evidently the case with Mr. Lowell 
 himself, had but slight intellectual affinity with him. Without 
 being precisely told so, we are made to understand that, for a 
 large class of highly-cultivated minds, Emerson was rather a 
 great personality than a great teacher ; while it is not denied 
 that to many, differently constituted, he was the bearer of a 
 gospel. 
 
 Carlyle naturally succeeds Emerson, and forms a connecting 
 link between the young genius of America and the classic 
 poetry of England which forms the theme of most of Mr. 
 Lowell s remaining essays. The circumstances under which 
 this particular disquisition was penned were unpropitious both 
 for author and subject. Carlyle had certainly been most unfor 
 tunate in his treatment of the American Civil War. Everything 
 had conspired to put him wrong. He was prejudiced against 
 philanthropy, he was prejudiced against popular institutions, he 
 was merciless to shiftlessness and incapacity. Philanthropy and 
 liberalism were undoubtedly for the North, and, misled by the 
 English newspapers and the unreasonable complaints of the 
 Federalists themselves, Carlyle early adopted the welcome 
 theory that the South had a monopoly of wisdom and valour. 
 For a champion of the North, for a man absorbed heart and 
 soul in the great struggle, Mr. Lowell s reply is wonderfully 
 moderate. From the point of view of a purely objective criti 
 cism, it is much too severe. To retort effectively upon Carlyle 
 
xvi INTRODUCTION. 
 
 involves the necessity of much carping and cavilling, fair 
 enough in literary warfare, but hardly worthy of a first-class 
 literary judge. We must hope that this will not be Mr. 
 Lowell s last word on Carlyle, whose errors in the point under 
 discussion Time has made so patent that they no longer need 
 Mr. Lowell s pillory, but of whose deserts he might find much 
 more to say. 
 
 There remain Mr. Lowell s essays on the classical poets of 
 England, of whom Chaucer, Dryden, and Pope find place in 
 this volume. They all illustrate the favourable position occu 
 pied by competent American critics, sufficiently remote from 
 English traditional opinion for complete independence, and yet 
 not estranged from their subjects by differences of language or 
 of manners. The bard of the fourteenth century is manifestly 
 as near to the modern American as to the modern Englishman. 
 One great qualification of Mr. Lowell s for the treatment of 
 Chaucer, which an equally intelligent judge might easily have 
 missed, is his extensive knowledge of the Italian and French 
 literature of Chaucer s age. Dante is equally familiar to him, 
 and is the subject of another essay not included in this collec 
 tion. The critique on Dryden is perhaps the writer s master 
 piece, thoroughly sound and appreciative, and teeming with 
 terse and luminous observations. Pope, less of a favourite 
 with the writer than Dryden, deserved a fuller treatment than 
 he has received. The space given to the "Rape of the Lock" is 
 somewhat disproportionate, though not excessive if the general 
 scale had been more ample. It is startling to be told that 
 Pope s fame as a poet is principally founded upon the "Essay on 
 Man," though the poem undoubtedly ranks among his chief 
 works, and Mr. Lowell s strictures upon it strike us as.) rather 
 hypercritical. But Pope s literary character as a whole could 
 not be better summed up than in the concluding sentence : 
 " Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be 
 found wanting ; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivalled." 
 
MY STUDY WINDOWS. 
 
 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 NE of the most delightful books in nay father s 
 library was White s Natural History of 
 Selborne. For me it has rather gained in 
 charm with years. I used to read it without 
 knowing the secret of the pleasure I found in 
 it, but as I grow older I begin to detect some 
 of the simple expedients of this natural magic. Open the 
 book where you will, it takes you out of doors. In our 
 broiling July weather one can walk out with this genially 
 garrulous Fellow of Oriel, and find refreshment instead of 
 fatigue. You have no trouble in keeping abreast of him as 
 he ambles along on his hobby-horse, now pointing to a pretty 
 view, now stopping to watch the motions of a bird or an 
 insect, or to bag a specimen for the Honourable Dairies 
 Barrington or Mr. Pennant. In simplicity of taste and 
 natural refinement he reminds one of Walton ; in tender 
 ness toward what he would have called the brute creation, of 
 Cowper. I do not know whether his descriptions of 
 scenery are good or not, but they have made me familiar 
 with his neighbourhood. Since I first read him, I have 
 walked over some of his favourite haunts, but I still see 
 them through his eyes rather than by any recollection of 
 actual and personal vision. The book has also the delight- 
 
 129 
 
3 MY GARDEN A CQ UATNTANCE. 
 
 fulness of absolute leisure. Mr. White seems never to have 
 had any harder work to do than to study the habits of his 
 feathered fellow-townsfolk, or to watch the ripening of his 
 peaches on the wall. His volumes are the journal of Adam 
 in Paradise, 
 
 Annihilating all that s made 
 To a green thought in a green shade." 
 
 It is positive rest only to look into that garden of his. It 
 is vastly better than to 
 
 " See great Diocletian walk 
 In the Salonian garden s noble shade," 
 
 for thither ambassadors intrude to bring with them the 
 noises of Home, while here the world has no entrance. No 
 rumour of the revolt of the American Colonies seems to 
 have reached him. " The natural term of an hog s life " has 
 more interest for him than that of an empire. Burgoyne 
 may surrender and welcome \ of what consequence is thai 
 compared with the fact that we can explain the odd 
 tumbling of rooks in the air by their turning over " to 
 scratch themselves with one claw ? " All the couriers in 
 Europe spurring rowel-deep make no stir in Mr. White s 
 little Chartreuse ; but the arrival of the house-martin a day 
 earlier or later than last year is a piece of news worth 
 sending express to all his correspondents. 
 
 Another secret charm of this book is its inadvertent 
 humour, so much the more delicious because unsuspected 
 by the author. How pleasant is his innocent vanity in 
 adding to the list of the British, and still more of the Sel- 
 bornian, fauna ! I believe he would gladly have consented 
 to be eaten by a tiger or a crocodile, if by that means the 
 occasional presence within the parish limits of either of 
 these anthropophagous brutes could have been established. 
 He brags of no fine society, but is plainly a little elated by 
 " having considerable acquaintance with a tame brown owl." 
 Most of us have known our share of owls, but few can boast 
 
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 3 
 
 of intimacy with a feathered one. The great events of Mr. 
 White s life, too, have that disproportionate importance 
 which is always humorous. To think of his hands having 
 actually been thought worthy (as neither Willoughby s nor 
 Bay s were) to hold a stilted plover, the Charadrius himan- 
 topus, with no back toe, and therefore " liable, in speculation, 
 to perpetual vacillations ! " I wonder, by the way, if meta 
 physicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the 
 acquaintance in Sussex of " an old family tortoise," which 
 had then been domesticated for thirty years. It is clear 
 that he fell in love with it at first sight. We have no means 
 of tracing the growth of his passion, but in 1780 we find 
 him eloping with its object in a post-chaise. " The rattle 
 arid hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it that, when I 
 turned it out in a border, it walked twice down to the 
 bottom of my garden." It reads like a Court Journal : 
 "Yesterday morning H.E/.H. the Princess Alice took an 
 airing of half-an-hour on the terrace of Windsor Castle." 
 This tortoise might have been a member of the Royal 
 Society, if he could have condescended to so ignoble an 
 ambition. It had but just been discovered that a surface 
 inclined at a certain angle with the plane of the horizon 
 took more of the sun s rays. The tortoise had always 
 known this (though he unostentatiously made no parade of 
 it), and used accordingly to tilt himself up against the 
 garden-wall in the autumn. He seems to have been more 
 of a philosopher than even Mr. White himself, caring for 
 nothing but to get under a cabbage-leaf when it rained, or 
 the sun was too hot, and to bury himself alive before frost 
 a four-footed Diogenes, who carried his tub on his back. 
 
 There are moods in which this kind of history is infinitely 
 refreshing. These creatures whom we affect to look down 
 upon as the drudges of instinct are members of a common 
 wealth whose constitution rests on immovable bases. Never 
 any need of reconstruction there ! They never dream of 
 settling it by vote that eight hours are equal to ten, or that 
 one creature is as clever as another and no more. They do 
 not use their poor wits in regulating God s clocks, nor think 
 
4 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 they cannot go astray so long as they carry their guide- 
 board about with them a delusion we often practise upon 
 ourselves with our high and mighty reason, that admirable 
 finger-post which points every way and always right. It is 
 good for us now and then to converse with a world like Mr. 
 White s, where Man is the least important of animals. But 
 one who, like me, has always lived in the country and 
 always on the same spot, is drawn to his book by other 
 occult sympathies. Do we not share his indignation at that 
 stupid Martin who had graduated his thermometer no 
 lower than 4 above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in the 
 coldest weather ever known the mercury basely absconded 
 into the bulb, and left us to see the victory slip through our 
 fingers just as they were closing upon it ? No man, I 
 suspect, ever lived long in the country without being bitten 
 by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to be hotter 
 and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have 
 more trees and larger blown down than his neighbours. 
 With us descendants of the Puritans especially, these 
 weather-competitions supply the abnegated excitement of 
 the race-course. Men learn to value thermometers of the 
 true imaginative temperament, capable of prodigious elations 
 and corresponding dejections. The other day (July 5) I 
 marked 98 in the shade, my high-water mark, higher by 
 one degree than I have ever seen it before. I happened to 
 meet a neighbour ; as we mopped our brows at each other, 
 he told me that he had just cleared 100, and I went home 
 a beaten man. I had not felt the heat before, save as a 
 beautiful exaggeration of sunshine ; but now it oppressed 
 me with the prosaic vulgarity of an oven. What had been 
 poetic intensity became all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I 
 might suspect his thermometer (as indeed I did, for we 
 Harvard men are apt to think ill of any graduation but our 
 own) ; but it was a poor consolation. The fact remained 
 that his herald Mercury, standing a-tiptoe, could look down 
 on mine. I seem to glimpse something of this familiar 
 weakness in Mr. White. He, too, has shared in these 
 mercurial triumphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt that he 
 
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 5 
 
 had a true country-gentleman s interest in the weathercock ; 
 that his first question on coming down of a morning was, 
 like Barabas s 
 
 11 Into what quarter peers my halcyon s bill ? " 
 
 It is an innocent and healthful employment of the mind, 
 distracting one from too continual study of himself, and 
 leading him to dwell rather upon the indigestions of the 
 elements than his own. " Did the wind back round, or go 
 about with the sun?" is a rational question that bears not 
 remotely on the making of hay and the prosperity of crops. 
 I have little doubt that the regulated observation of the 
 vane in many different places, and the interchange of results 
 by telegraph, would put the weather, as it were, in our 
 power, by betraying its ambushes before it is ready to give 
 the assault. At first sight, nothing seems more drolly 
 trivial than the lives of those whose single achievement is 
 to record the wind and the temperature three times a day. 
 Yet such men are doubtless sent into the world for this 
 special end, and perhaps there is no kind of accurate obser 
 vation, whatever its object, that has not its final use and 
 value for some one or other. It is even to be hoped that 
 the speculations of our newspaper editors and their myriad 
 correspondents upon the signs of the political atmosphere 
 may also fill their appointed place in a well-regulated 
 universe, if it be only that of supplying so many more 
 jack-o -lanterns to the future historian. Nay, the observa 
 tions on finance of an M. C. whose sole knowledge of the 
 subject has been derived from a lifelong success in getting 
 a living out of the public without paying any equivalent 
 therefor, will perhaps be of interest hereafter to some 
 explorer of our cloaca maxima, whenever it is cleansed. 
 
 For many years I have been in the habit of noting down 
 some of the leading events of my embowered solitude, such 
 as the coming of certain birds and the like, a kind of 
 memoires pour servir, after the fashion of White, rather 
 than properly digested natural history. I thought it not 
 impossible that a few simple stories of my winged acquaint- 
 
6 MY GARDEN A CQ UAINTANCE. 
 
 ances might be found entertaining by persons of kindred 
 taste. 
 
 There is a common notion that animals are better 
 meteorologists than men, and I have little doubt that in 
 immediate weather-wisdom they have the advantage of our 
 sophisticated senses (though I suspect a sailor or shepherd 
 would be their match), but I have seen nothing that leads 
 me to believe their minds capable of erecting the horoscope 
 of a whole season, and letting us know beforehand whether 
 the winter will be severe or the summer rainless. I more 
 than suspect that the clerk of the weather himself does not 
 always know very long in advance whether he is to draw 
 an order for hot or cold, dry or moist, and the musquash is 
 scarce likely to be wiser. I have noted but two days 
 difference in the coming of the song-sparrow between a 
 very early and a very backward spring. This very year I 
 saw the linnets at work thatching, just before a snow-storm 
 which covered the ground several inches deep for a number 
 of days. They struck work and left us for a while, no 
 doubt in search of food. Birds frequently perish from 
 sudden changes in our whimsical spring weather of which 
 they had no foreboding. More than thirty years ago, a 
 cherry-tree, then in full bloom, near my window, was 
 covered with humming-birds benumbed by a fall of mingled 
 rain and snow, which probably killed many of them. It 
 should seem that their comiiig was dated by the height of 
 the sun, which betrays them into unthrifty matrimony ; 
 
 " So nature pricketh them in their corages ; " 
 
 but their going is another matter. The chimney-swallows 
 leave us early, for example, apparently so soon as their 
 latest fledglings are firm enough of wing to attempt the 
 long rowing-match that is before them. On the other 
 hand, the wild-geese probably do not leave the North till 
 they are frozen out, for I have heard their bugles sounding 
 southward so late as the middle of December. What may 
 be called local migrations are doubtless dictated by the 
 
M Y GARDEN A CQ UAINTANCE. ? 
 
 chances of food. I have once been visited by large flights 
 of cross-bills ; and whenever the snow lies long and deep 
 on the ground, a flock of cedar-birds comes in midwinter to 
 eat the berries on my hawthorns. I have never been quite 
 able to fathom the local, or rather geographical partialities 
 of birds. Never before this summer (1870) have the king 
 birds, handsomest of flycatchers, built in my orchard; 
 though I always know where to find them within half a 
 mile. The rose-breasted grosbeak has been a familiar bird 
 in Brookline (three miles away), yet I never saw one here 
 till last July, when I found a female busy among my rasp 
 berries, and surprisingly bold. I hope she was prospecting 
 with a view to settlement in our garden. She seemed, on 
 the whole, to think well of my fruit, and I would gladly 
 plant another bed if it would help to win over so delightful 
 a neighbour. 
 
 The return of the robin is commonly announced by the 
 newspapers, like that of eminent or notorious people to a 
 watering-place, as the first authentic notification of spring. 
 And such his appearance in the orchard and garden 
 undoubtedly is. But, in spite of his name of migratory 
 thrush, he stays with us all winter, and I have seen him 
 when the thermometer marked 15 degrees below zero of 
 Fahrenheit, armed impregnably within, like Emerson s 
 Titmouse, and as cheerful as he. The robin has a bad 
 reputation among people who do not value themselves less 
 for being fond of cherries. There is, I admit, a spice of 
 vulgarity in him, and his song is rather of the Bloomfield 
 sort, too largely ballasted with prose. His ethics are of 
 the Poor Richard school, and the main chance which calls 
 forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He never 
 has those fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, 
 the catbird and the mavis, are apt to fall. But for a that, 
 and twice as muckle s a that, I would not exchange him 
 for all the cherries that ever came out of Asia Minor. 
 With whatever faults, he has not wholly forfeited that 
 superiority which belongs to the children of nature. He 
 has a finer taste in fruit than could be distilled from 
 
8 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 many successive committees of the Horticultural Society, 
 and he eats with a relishing gulp not inferior to Dr. 
 Johnson s. He feels and freely exercises his right of 
 eminent domain. His is the earliest mess of green peas 
 his all the mulberries I had fancied mine. But if he gets 
 also the lion s share of the raspberries, he is a great planter, 
 and sows those wild ones in the woods that solace the 
 pedestrian and give a momentary calm even to the jaded 
 victims of the White Hills. He keeps a strict eye over 
 one s fruit, and knows to a shade of purple when your 
 grapes have cooked long enough in the sun. During the 
 severe drought a few years ago, the robins wholly vanished 
 from my garden. I neither saw nor heard one for three 
 weeks. Meanwhile a small foreign grape-vine, rather shy 
 of bearing, seemed to find the dusty air congenial, and, 
 dreaming perhaps of its sweet Argos across the sea, 
 decked itself with a score or so of fair bunches. I watched 
 them from day to day till they should have secreted sugar 
 enough from the sunbeams, and at last made up my mind 
 that I would celebrate my vintage the next morning. But 
 the robins too had somehow kept note of them. They must 
 have sent out spies, as did the Jews into the promised land, 
 before I was stirring. When I went with my basket, at 
 least a dozen of these winged vintagers bustled out from 
 among the leaves, and alighting on the nearest trees 
 interchanged some shrill remarks about me of a derogatory 
 nature. They had fairly sacked the vine. Not Welling 
 ton s veterans made cleaner work of a Spanish town ; not 
 Federals or Confederates were ever more impartial in the 
 confiscation of neutral chickens. I was keeping my grapes 
 a secret to surprise the fair Fidele with, but the robins 
 made them a profounder secret to her than I had meant. 
 The tattered remnant of a single bunch was all my harvest- 
 home. How paltry it looked at the bottom of my basket, 
 as if a humming-bird had laid her egg in an eagle s nest ! 
 I could not help laughing ; and the robins seemed to join 
 heartily in the merriment. There was a native grape-vine 
 closo by, blue with its less refined abundance, but my 
 
MY GA RDEN A CQ UAINTANCE. g 
 
 cunning thieves preferred the foreign flavour. Could I tax 
 them with want of taste ? 
 
 The robins are not good solo singers, but their chorus, as, 
 like primitive fire-worshippers, they hail the return of light 
 and warmth to the world, is unrivalled. There are a 
 hundred singing like one. They are noisy enough then, 
 and sing, as poets should, with no afterthought. But when 
 they come after cherries to the tree near my window, they 
 muffle their voices, and their faint pip, pip, pop ! sounds far 
 away at the bottom of the garden, where they know I shall 
 not suspect them of robbing the great black-walnut of its 
 bitter-rinded store.* They are feathered Pecksniffs, to be 
 sure, but then how brightly their breasts, that look rather 
 shabby in the sunlight, shine in a rainy day against the 
 dark green of the fringe-tree ! After they have pinched 
 and shaken all the life out of an earthworm, as Italian 
 cooks pound all the spirit out of a steak, and then gulped 
 him, they stand up in honest self-confidence, expand their 
 red waistcoats with the virtuous air of a lobby member, 
 and outface you with an eye that calmly challenges inquiry. 
 " Do / look like a bird that knows the flavour of raw 
 vermin? I throw myself upon a jury of my peers. Ask 
 any robin if he ever ate anything less ascetic than the 
 frugal berry of the juniper, and he will answer that his 
 vow forbids him." Can such an open bosom cover such 
 depravity 1 Alas, yes ! I have no doubt his breast was 
 redder at that very moment with the blood of my rasp 
 berries. On the whole, he is a doubtful friend in the 
 garden. He makes his dessert of all kinds of berries, and 
 is not averse from early pears. But when we remember 
 how omnivorous he is, eating his own weight in an 
 incredibly short time, and that Nature seems exhaust- 
 less in her invention of new insects hostile to vegetation, 
 perhaps we may reckon that he does more good than harm. 
 
 * The screech-owl, whose cry, despite his ill name, is one of the 
 sweetest sounds in nature, softens his voice in the same way with the 
 most beguiling mockery of distance. 
 
10 My GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 For my own part, I would rather have his cheerfulness and 
 kind neighbourhood than many berries. 
 
 For his cousin, the catbird, I have a still warmer regard. 
 Always a good singer, he sometimes nearly equals the brown 
 thrush, and has the merit of keeping up his music later in the 
 evening than any bird of my familiar acquaintance. Ever 
 since I can remember, a pair of them have built in a 
 gigantic syringa, near our front door, and I have known 
 the male to sing almost uninterruptedly during the even 
 ings of early summer till twilight duskened into dark. 
 They differ greatly in vocal talent, but all have a delightful 
 way of crooning over, and, as it were, rehearsing their song 
 in an undertone, which makes their nearness always unob 
 trusive. Though there is the most trustworthy witness to 
 the imitative propensity of this bird, I have only once, 
 during an intimacy of more than forty years, heard him 
 indulge it. In that case, the imitation was by no means so 
 close as to deceive, but a free reproduction of the notes of 
 some other birds, especially of the oriole, as a kind of 
 variation in his own song. The catbird is as shy as the 
 robin is vulgarly familiar. Only when his nest or his 
 fledglings are approached does he become noisy and almost 
 aggressive. I have known him to station his young in a 
 thick cornel-bush on the edge of the raspberry-bed, after 
 the fruit began to ripen, and feed them there for a week or 
 more. In such cases he shows none of that conscious guilt 
 which makes the robin contemptible. On the contrary, he 
 will maintain his post in the thicket, and sharply scold the 
 intruder who ventures to steal his berries. After all, his 
 claim is only for tithes, while the robin will bag your entire 
 crop if he get a chance. 
 
 Dr. Watts s statement that "birds in their little nests 
 agree," like too many others intended to form the infant 
 mind, is very far from being true. On the contrary, the 
 most peaceful relation of the different species to each other 
 is that of armed neutrality. They are very jealous of 
 neighbours. A few years ago, I was much interested in 
 the housebuilding of a pair of summer yellow-birds. They 
 
MY GA RDEN A CQ UAINTANCE. i i 
 
 had chosen a very pretty site near the top of a tall white 
 lilac, within easy eye-shot of a chamber window. A very 
 pleasant thing it was to see their little home growing with 
 mutual help, to watch their industrious skill interrupted 
 only by little flirts and snatches of endearment, frugally 
 cut short by the common sense of the tiny housewife. 
 They had brought their work nearly to an end, and had 
 already begun to line it with fern-down, the gathering of 
 which demanded more distant journeys and longer absences. 
 But, alas ! the syringa, immemorial manor of the catbirds, 
 was not more than twenty feet away, and these " giddy 
 neighbours" had, as it appeared, been all along jealously 
 watchful, though silent, witnesses of what they deemed an 
 intrusion of squatters. No sooner were the pretty mates 
 fairly gone for a new load of lining, than 
 
 "To their unguarded nest these weasel Scots 
 Came stealing." 
 
 Silently they flew back and forth, each giving a vengeful 
 dab at the nest in passing. They did not fall-to and 
 deliberately destroy it, for they might have been caught at 
 their mischief. As it was, whenever the yellow-birds came 
 back, their enemies were hidden in their own sight-proof 
 bush. Several times their unconscious victims repaired 
 damages, but at length, after counsel taken together, they 
 gave it up. Perhaps, like other unlettered folk, they came 
 to the conclusion that the Devil was in it, and yielded to 
 the invisible persecutions of witchcraft. 
 
 The robins, by constant attacks and annoyances, have 
 succeeded in driving off the blue-jays who used to build in 
 our pines, their gay colours and quaint noisy ways making 
 them welcome and amusing neighbours. I once had the 
 chance of doing a kindness to a household of them, which 
 they received with very friendly condescension. I had had 
 my eye for some time upon a nest, and was puzzled by a 
 constant fluttering of what seemed full-grown wings in it 
 whenever I drew nigh. At last I climbed the tree, in spite 
 of angry protests from the old birds against my intrusion. 
 
12 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 The mystery had a very simple solution. In building the 
 nest, a long piece of packthread had been somewhat loosely 
 woven in. Three of the young had contrived to entangle 
 themselves in it, and had become full-grown without being 
 able to launch themselves upon the air. One was 
 unharmed ; another had so tightly twisted the cord about 
 its shank that one foot was curled up and seemed para 
 lysed ; the third, in its struggles to escape, had sawn 
 through the flesh of the thigh and so much harmed itself 
 that I thought it humane to put an end to its misery. 
 When I took out my knife to cut their hempen bonds, the 
 heads of the family seemed to divine my friendly intent. 
 Suddenly ceasing their cries and threats, they perched 
 quietly within reach of my hand, and watched me in my 
 work of manumission. This, owing to the fluttering terror 
 of the prisoners, was an affair of some delicacy ; but ere 
 long I was rewarded by seeing one of them fly away to a 
 neighbouring tree, while the cripple, making a parachute of 
 his wings, came lightly to the ground, and hopped off as well 
 as he could with one leg, obsequiously waited on by his 
 elders. A week later I had the satisfaction of meeting him 
 in the pine-walk, in good spirits, and already so far 
 recovered as to be able to balance himself with the lame 
 foot. I have no doubt that in his old age he accounted for 
 his lameness by some handsome story of a wound received at 
 the famous Battle of the Pines, when our tribe, overcome 
 by numbers, was driven from its ancient camping-ground. 
 Of late years the jays have visited us only at intervals ; 
 and in winter their bright plumage, set off by the snow, 
 and their cheerful cry, are especially welcome. They 
 would have furnished JEsop with a fable, for the feathered 
 crest in which they seem to take so much satisfaction is 
 often their fatal snare. Country boys make a hole with 
 their finger in the snow-crust just large enough to admit 
 the jay s head, and, hollowing it out somewhat beneath, 
 bait it with a few kernels of corn. The crest slips easily 
 into the trap, but refuses to be pulled out again, and he who 
 came to feast remains a prey. 
 
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 13 
 
 Twice have the crow-blackbirds attempted a settlement in 
 my pines, and twice have the robins, who claim a right of 
 pre-emption, so successfully played the part of border- 
 ruffians as to drive them away, to my great regret, for 
 they are the best substitute we have for rooks. At Shady 
 Hill (now, alas ! empty of its so long loved household) they 
 build by hundreds, and nothing can be more cheery than 
 their creaking clatter (like a convention of old-fashioned 
 tavern-signs) as they gather at evening to debate in mass 
 meeting their windy politics, or to gossip at their tent-doors 
 over the events of the day. Their port is grave, and their 
 stalk across the turf as martial as that of a second-rate 
 ghost in Hamlet. They never meddled with my corn, so 
 far as I could discover. 
 
 For a few years I had crows, but their nests are an 
 irresistible bait for boys, and their settlement was broken 
 up. They grew so wonted as to throw off a great part of 
 their shyness, and to tolerate my near approach. One very 
 hot day I stood for some time within twenty feet of a 
 mother and three children, who sat on an elm bough over 
 my head, gasping in the sultry air, and holding their wings 
 half-spread for coolness. All birds during the pairing 
 season become more or less sentimental, and murmur soft 
 nothings in a tone very unlike the grinding organ repetition 
 and loudness of their habitual song. The crow is very 
 comical as a lover, and to hear him trying to soften his 
 croak to the proper Saint Preux standard has something 
 the effect of a Mississippi boatman quoting Tennyson. 
 Yet there are few things to my ear more melodious than 
 his caw of a clear winter morning as it drops to you filtered 
 through five hundred fathoms of crisp blue air. The 
 hostility of all smaller birds makes the moral character of 
 the crow, for all his deaconlike demeanour and garb, some 
 what questionable. He could never sally forth without 
 insult. The golden robins, especially, would chase him as 
 far as I could follow with my eye, making him duck 
 clumsily to avoid their importunate bills. I do not believe, 
 however, that he robbed any nests hereabouts, for the 
 
14 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 refuse of the gas-works, which, in our free-and-easy com 
 munity, is allowed to poison the river, supplied him with 
 dead alewives in abundance. I used to watch him making 
 his periodical visits to the salt-marshes and coming back 
 with a fish in his beak to his young savages, who, no doubt, 
 like it in that condition which makes it savoury to the 
 Kanakas and other corvine races of men. 
 
 Orioles are in great plenty with me. I have seen seven 
 males flashing about the garden at once. A merry crew of 
 them swing their hammocks from the pendulous boughs. 
 During one of these latter years, when the canker-worms 
 stripped our elms as bare as winter, these birds went to the 
 trouble of rebuilding their unroofed nests, and chose for the 
 purpose trees which are safe from those swarming vandals, 
 such as the ash and the button-wood. One year a pair (dis 
 turbed, I suppose, elsewhere) built a second nest in an elm, 
 within a few yards of the house. My friend, Edward E. 
 Hale, told me once that the oriole rejected from his web all 
 strands of brilliant colour, and I thought it a striking 
 example of that instinct of concealment noticeable in many 
 birds, though it should seem in this instance that the nest 
 was amply protected by its position from all marauders but 
 owls and squirrels. Last year, however, I had the fullest 
 proof that Mr. Hale was mistaken. A pair of orioles built 
 on the lowest trailer of a weeping elm, which hung within 
 ten feet of our drawing-room window, and so low that I 
 could reach it from the ground. The nest was wholly woven 
 and felted with ra veilings of woollen carpet in which scarlet 
 predominated. Would the same thing have happened in 
 the woods ? Or did the nearness of a human dwelling 
 perhaps give the birds a greater feeling of security ? They 
 are very bold, by the way, in quest of cordage, and I have 
 often watched them stripping the fibrous bark from a honey 
 suckle growing over the very door. But, indeed, all my 
 birds look upon me as if I were a mere tenant at will, and 
 they were landlords. "With shame I confess it, I have been 
 bullied even by a humming-bird. This spring, as I was 
 cleansing a pear-tree of its lichens, one of these zigzagging 
 
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 15 
 
 blurs came purring toward me, couching his long bill like a 
 lance, his throat sparkling with angry fire, to warn me off 
 from a Missouri-currant whose honey he was sipping. And 
 many a time he has driven me out of a flower-bed. This 
 summer, by the way, a pair of these winged emeralds 
 fastened their mossy acorn-cup upon a bough of the same elm 
 which the orioles had enlivened the year before. We watched 
 all their proceedings from the window through an opera-glass, 
 and saw their two nestlings grow from black needles with a 
 tuft of down at the lower end, till they whirled away on their 
 first short experimental flights. They became strong of wing 
 in a surprisingly short time, and I never saw them or the male 
 bird after, though the female was regular as usual in her 
 visits to our petunias and verbenas. I do not think it 
 ground enough for a generalisation, but in the many times 
 when I watched the old birds feeding their young, the 
 mother always alighted, while the father as uniformly 
 remained upon the wing. 
 
 The bobolinks are generally chance visitors, tinkling 
 through the garden in blossoming-time, but this year, owing 
 to the long rains early in the season, their favourite 
 meadows were flooded, and they were driven to the upland. 
 So I had a pair of them domiciled in my grass-field. The 
 male used to perch in an apple-tree, then in full bloom, and, 
 while I stood perfectly still close by, he would circle away, 
 quivering round the entire field of five acres, with no break 
 in his song, and settle down again among the blossoms, to 
 be hurried away almost immediately by a new rapture of 
 music. He had the volubility of an Italian charlatan at a 
 fair, and, like him, appeared to be proclaiming the merits 
 of some quack remedy. Opodeldoc-opodeldoc-try- Doctor- 
 Lincolris-opodeldoc ! he seemed to repeat over and over 
 again, with a rapidity that would have distanced the deftest- 
 tongued Figaro that ever rattled. I remember Count 
 Gurowski saying once, with that easy superiority of 
 knowledge about this country which is the monopoly of 
 foreigners, that we had no singing birds ! Well, well, Mr. 
 Hepworth Dixon has found the typical America in Oneida 
 
16 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 and Salt Lake City. Of course, an intelligent European : 
 the best judge of these matters. The truth is, there ai 
 more singing-birds in Europe because there are fewer forest 
 These songsters love the neighbourhood of man becaus 
 hawks and owls are rarer, while their own food is moi 
 abundant. Most people seem to think, the more trees th 
 more birds. Even Chateaubriand, who first tried th 
 primitive-forest-cure, and whose description of the wildernej 
 in its imaginative effects is unmatched, fancies the " peop] 
 of the air singing their hymns to him." So far as my ow 
 observation goes, the farther one penetrates the sombt 
 solitudes of the woods, the more seldom does he hear th 
 voice of any singing-bird. In spite of Chateaubriand 
 minuteness of detail, in spite of that marvellous reverben 
 tion of the decrepit tree falling of its own weight, which h 
 was the first to notice, I cannot help doubting whether h 
 made his way very deep into the wilderness. At any rat( 
 in a letter to Fontanes, written in 1804, he speaks c 
 mes chevaux paissant d, quelque distance. To be sur 
 Chateaubriand was apt to mount the high horse, and thi 
 may have been but an after-thought of the grand seigneui 
 but certainly one would not make much headway on horse 
 back toward the druid fastnesses of the primeval pine. 
 
 The bobolinks build in considerable numbers in a meadow 
 within a quarter of a mile of us. A houseless lane passe 
 through the midst of their camp, and in clear wester! 
 weather, at the right season, one may hear a score of ther 
 singing at once. When they are breeding, if I chance t 
 pass, one of the male birds always accompanies me like 
 constable, flitting from post to post of the rail-fence, with : 
 short note of reproof continually repeated, till I am fairl 
 out of the neighbourhood. Then he will swing away int 
 the air and run down the wind, gurgling music withou 
 stint over the unheeding tussocks of meadow-grass and dar] 
 clumps of bulrushes that mark his domain. 
 
 We have no bird whose song will match the nightingale 
 in compass, none whose note is so rich as that of tin 
 European blackbird; but for mere rapture I have neve 
 
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 17 
 
 heard the bobolink s rival. But his opera-season is a short 
 one. The ground and tree-sparrows are our most constant 
 performers. It is now late in August, and one of the latter 
 sings every day and all day long in the garden. Till within 
 a fortnight, a pair of indigo-birds would keep up their lively 
 duo for an hour together. While I write, I hear an oriole 
 gay as in June, and the plaintive may-be of the goldfinch 
 tells me he is stealing my lettuce-seeds. I know not what 
 the experience of others may have been, but the only bird I 
 have ever heard sing in the night has been the chip-bird. 
 I should say he sang about as often during the darkness as 
 cocks crow. One can hardly help fancying that he sings in 
 his dreams. 
 
 " Father of light, what sunnie seed, 
 What glance of day hast thou confined 
 Into this bird ? To all the breed 
 This busie ray thou hast assigned ; 
 Their magnetism works all night, 
 And dreams of Paradise and light." 
 
 On second thought, I remember to have heard the cuckoo 
 strike the hours nearly all night with the regularity of a 
 Swiss clock. 
 
 The dead limbs of our elms, which I spare to that end, 
 bring us the flicker every summer, and almost daily I hear 
 his wild scream and laugh close at hand, himself invisible. 
 He is a shy bird, but a few days ago I had the satisfaction 
 of studying him through the blinds as he sat on a tree 
 within a few feet of me. Seen so near and at rest, he 
 makes good his claim to the title of pigeon-woodpecker. 
 Lumberers have a notion that he is harmful to timber, 
 digging little holes through the bark to encourage the 
 settlement of insects. The regular rings of such perfora 
 tions which one may see in almost any apple-orchard seem 
 to give some probability to this theory. Almost every 
 season a solitary quail visits us, and, unseen among the 
 currant-bushes, calls Bob White, Bob White, as if he were 
 playing at hide-and-seek with that imaginary being. A 
 
 130 
 
18 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 rarer visitant is the turtle-dove, whose pleasant coo (some 
 thing like the muffled crow of a cock from a coop covered 
 with snow) I have sometimes heard, and whom I once had 
 the good luck to see close by me in the mulberry-tree. The 
 wild-pigeon, once numerous, I have not seen for many 
 years.* Of savage birds, a hen-hawk now and then 
 quarters himself upon us for a few days, sitting sluggish 
 in a tree after a surfeit of poultry. One of them once 
 offered me a near shot from my study-window one drizzly 
 day for several hours. But it was Sunday, and I gave him 
 the benefit of its gracious truce of God. 
 
 Certain birds have disappeared from our neighbourhood 
 within my memory. I remember when the whippoorwill 
 could be heard in Sweet Auburn. The night-hawk, once 
 common, is now rare. The brown thrush has moved 
 farther up country. For years I have not seen or heard 
 any of the larger owls, whose hooting was one of my boyish 
 terrors. The cliff-swallow, strange emigrant, that eastward 
 takes his way, has come and gone again in my time. The 
 bank-swallows, well-nigh innumerable during my boyhood, 
 no longer frequent the crumbly cliff of the gravel-pit by the 
 river. The barn-swallows, which once swarmed in our 
 barn, flashing through the dusty sunstreaks of the mow, 
 have been gone these many years. My father would lead 
 me out to see them gather on the roof, and take counsel 
 before their yearly migration, as Mr. White used to see 
 them at Selborne. Eheu, fugaces / Thank fortune, the 
 swift still glues his nest, and rolls his distant thunders 
 night and day in the wide-throated chimneys, still sprinkles 
 the evening air with his merry twittering. The populous 
 heronry in Fresh Pond meadows has been well-nigh broken 
 up, but still a pair or two haunt the old home, as the 
 gypsies of Ellangowan their ruined huts, and every evening 
 fly over us riverwards, clearing their throats with a hoarse 
 hawk as they go, and, in cloudy weather, scarce higher 
 than the tops of the chimneys. Sometimes I have known 
 one to alight in one of our trees, though for what purpose 
 * They made their appearance again this summer (1870). 
 
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 19 
 
 I never could divine. Kingfishers have sometimes puzzled 
 me in the same way, perched at high noon in a pine, 
 springing their watchman s rattle when they flitted away 
 from my curiosity, and seeming to shove their top-heavy 
 heads along as a man does a wheel-barrow. 
 
 Some birds have left us, I suppose, because the country 
 is growing less wild. I once found a summer duck s nest 
 -within a quarter of a mile of our house, but such a trouvaille 
 would be impossible now as Kidd s treasure. And yet the 
 mere taming of the neighbourhood does not quite satisfy me 
 as an explanation. Twenty years ago, on my way to bathe 
 in the river, I saw every day a brace of woodcock, on the 
 miry edge of a spring within a few rods of a house, and 
 constantly visited by thirsty cows. There was no growth 
 of any kind to conceal them, and yet these ordinarily shy 
 birds were almost as indifferent to my passing as common 
 poultry would have been. Since bird-nesting has become 
 scientific, and dignified itself as oology, that, no doubt, is 
 partly to blame for some of our losses. But some old friends 
 are constant. Wilson s thrush comes every year to remind 
 me of that most poetic of ornithologists. He flits before 
 me through the pine-walk like the very genius of solitude. 
 A pair of pewees have built immemorially on a jutting 
 brick in the arched entrance to the ice-house. Always on 
 the same brick, and never more than a single pair, though 
 two broods of five each are raised there every summer. 
 How do they settle their claim to the homestead ? By what 
 right of primogeniture 1 Once the children of a man 
 employed about the place oologized the nest, and the 
 pewees left us for a year or two. I felt towards those boys 
 as the messmates of the Ancient Mariner did towards him 
 after he had shot the albatross. But the pewees came back 
 at last, and one of them is now on his wonted perch, so 
 near my window that I can hear the click of his bill as he 
 snaps a fly on the wing with the unerring precision a 
 stately Trasteverina shows in the capture of her smaller 
 deer. The pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the morning ; 
 and during the early summer he preludes his matutinal 
 
20 MY GARDEN A CQ UAINTANCE. 
 
 ejaculation of pewee with a slender whistle, unheard at any 
 other time. He saddens with the season, and, as summer 
 declines, he changes his note ekeu, pewee / as if in lamenta 
 tion. Had he been an Italian bird, Ovid would have had a 
 plaintive tale to tell about him. He is so familiar as often 
 to pursue a fly through the open window into my library. 
 
 There is something inexpressibly dear to me in these old 
 friendships of a lifetime. There is scarce a tree of mine but 
 has had, at some time or other, a happy homestead among 
 its boughs, to which I cannot say, 
 
 1 Many light hearts and wings, 
 "Which now be dead, lodged in thy living bowers." 
 
 My walk under the pines would lose half its summer charm 
 were I to miss that shy anchorite, the Wilson s thrush, nor 
 hear in haying-time the metallic ring of his song, that 
 justifies his rustic name of scythe-whet. I protect my game 
 as jealously as an English squire. If anybody had oologized 
 a certain cuckoo s nest I know of (I have a pair in my 
 garden every year), it would have left me a sore place in 
 my mind for weeks. I love to bring these aborigines back 
 to the mansuetude they showed to the early voyagers, and 
 before (forgive the involuntary pun) they had grown 
 accustomed to man and knew his savage ways. And they 
 repay your kindness with a sweet familiarity too delicate ever 
 to breed contempt. I have made a Penn-treaty with them, 
 preferring that to the Puritan way with the natives, which 
 converted them to a little Hebraism and a great deal of 
 Medford rum. If they will not come near enough to me 
 (as most of them will), I bring them close with an opera- 
 glass a much better weapon than a gun. I would not, if 
 I could, convert them from their pretty pagan ways. The 
 only ones I sometimes have savage doubts about is the red 
 squirrel. I think he oologizes. I know he eats cherries 
 (we counted five of them at one time in a single tree, the 
 stones pattering down like the sparse hail that preludes a 
 storm), and that he gnaws off the small end of pears to get 
 at the seeds. He steals the corn from under the noses of 
 
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 21 
 
 my poultry. But what would you have ? He will come 
 down upon the limb of the tree I am lying under till he is 
 within a yard of me. He and his mate will scurry up and 
 down the great black-walnut for my diversion, chattering 
 like monkeys. Can I sign his death-warrant who has 
 tolerated me about his grounds so long ? Not I. Let them 
 steal, and welcome. I arn sure I should, had I had the 
 same bringing up and the same temptation. As for the 
 birds, I do not believe there is one of them but does more 
 good than harm ; and of how many featherless bipeds can 
 this be said *? 
 
 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 
 
 " MEN scarcely know how beautiful fire is," says Shelley ; 
 and I am apt to think there are a good many other things 
 concerning which their knowledge might be largely increased 
 without becoming burdensome. Nor are they altogether 
 reluctant to be taught not so reluctant, perhaps, as unable 
 and education is sure to find one fulcrum ready to her 
 hand by which to get a purchase on them. For most of us, 
 I have noticed, are not without an amiable willingness to 
 assist at any spectacle or entertainment (loosely so called) 
 for which no fee is charged at the door. If special tickets 
 are sent us, another element of pleasure is added in a sense 
 of privilege and pre-eminence (pitiably scarce in a demo 
 cracy), so deeply rooted in human nature that I have seen 
 people take a strange satisfaction in being near of kin to 
 the mute chief personage in a funeral. It gave them a 
 moment s advantage over the rest of us whose grief was 
 rated at a lower place in the procession. But the words 
 "admission free" at the bottom of a handbill, though 
 holding out no bait of inequality, have yet a singular charm 
 for many minds, especially in the country. There is some 
 thing touching in the constancy with which men attend 
 
22 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 
 
 free lectures, and in the honest patience with which they 
 listen to them. He who pays may yawn and shift testily 
 in his seat, or even go out with an awful reverberation of 
 criticism, for he has bought the right to do any or all 
 of these and paid for it. But gratuitous hearers are 
 anaesthetised to suffering by a sense of virtue. They are 
 performing perhaps the noblest, as it is one of the most 
 difficult, of human functions in getting Something (no 
 matter how small) for Nothing. They are not pestered by 
 the awful duty of securing their money s worth. They are 
 wasting time, to do which elegantly and without lassitude 
 is the highest achievement of civilisation. If they are 
 cheated, it is, at worst, only of a superfluous hour which was 
 rotting on their hands. Not only is mere amusement made 
 more piquant, but instruction more palatable, by this 
 universally relished sauce of gratuity. And if the philo 
 sophic observer finds an object of agreeable contemplation 
 in the audience, as they listen to a discourse on the 
 probability of making missionaries go down better with the 
 Feejee-Islanders by balancing the hymn-book in one pocket 
 with a bottle of Worcestershire in the other, or to a plea 
 for arming the female gorilla with the ballot, he also takes 
 a friendly interest in the lecturer, and admires the wise 
 economy of Nature who thus contrives an ample field of 
 honest labour for her bores. Even when the insidious hat 
 is passed round after one of these eleemosynary feasts, the 
 relish is but heightened by a conscientious refusal to disturb 
 the satisfaction s completeness with the rattle of a single 
 contributory penny. So firmly persuaded am I of this 
 gratis-instinct in our common humanity, that I believe I 
 could fill a house by advertising a free lecture on Tupper 
 considered as a philosophic poet, or on my personal recol 
 lections of the late James K. Polk. This being so, I have 
 sometimes wondered that the peep-shows which Nature 
 provides with such endless variety for her children, and to 
 which we are admitted on the bare condition of having 
 eyes, should be so generally neglected. To be sure, eyes are 
 not so common as people think, or poets would be plentier, 
 
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 23 
 
 and perhaps also these exhibitions of hers are cheapened in 
 estimation by the fact that in enjoying them we are not 
 getting the better of anybody else. Your true lovers of 
 nature, however, contrive to get even this solace ; and 
 Wordsworth, looking upon mountains as his own peculiar 
 sweethearts, was jealous of anybody else who ventured 
 upon even the most innocent flirtation with them. As if 
 such fellows, indeed, could pretend to that nicer sense 
 of what-d ye-call-it which was so remarkable in him ! 
 Marry come up ! Mountains, no doubt, may inspire a 
 profounder and more exclusive passion, bub on the whole 
 I am not sorry to have been born and bred among more 
 domestic scenes, where I can be hospitable without a pang. 
 I am going to ask you presently to take pot-luck with me at 
 a board where Winter shall supply whatever there is of 
 cheer. 
 
 I think the old fellow has hitherto had scant justice clone 
 him in the main. We make him the symbol of old age or 
 death, and think we have settled the matter. As if old 
 age were never kindly as well as frosty ; as if it had no 
 reverend graces of its own as good in their way as the 
 noisy impertinence of childhood, the elbowing self-conceit 
 of youth, or the pompous mediocrity of middle life. As if 
 there were anything discreditable in death, or nobody 
 had ever longed for it ! Suppose we grant that Winter 
 is the sleep of the year, what then ? I take it upon me 
 to say that his dreams are finer than the best reality of 
 his waking rivals. 
 
 "Sleep, Silence child, the father of soft Rest," 
 
 is a very agreeable acquaintance, and most of us are 
 better employed in his company than anywhere else. For 
 my own part, I think Winter a pretty wide-awake old 
 boy, and his bluff sincerity and hearty ways are more 
 congenial to my mood, and more wholesome for me, 
 than any charms of which his rivals are capable. 
 Spring is a fickle mistress, who either does not know 
 her own mind, or is so long in making it up, whether 
 
24 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 
 
 you shall have her or not have her, that one gets tired 
 at last of her pretty miffs and reconciliations. You go 
 to her to be cheered up a bit, and ten to one catch her in 
 the sulks, expecting you to find enough good humour for 
 both. After she has become Mrs. Summer she grows a 
 little more staid in her demeanour, and her abundant table, 
 where you are sure to get the earliest fruits and vegetables 
 of the season, is a good foundation for steady friendship ; 
 but she has lost that delicious aroma of maidenhood, and 
 what was delicately rounded grace in the girl gives more 
 than hints of something like redundance in the matron. 
 Autumn is the poet of the family. He gets you up a 
 splendour that you would say was made out of real sunset ; 
 but it is nothing more than a few hectic leaves, when all is 
 done. He is but a sentimentalist, after all; a kind cf 
 Lamartine whining along the ancestral avenues he has made 
 bare timber of, and begging a contribution of good spirits 
 from your own savings to keep him in countenance. But 
 Winter has his delicate sensibilities too, only he does not 
 make them as good as indelicate by thrusting them forever 
 in your face. He is a better poet than Autumn, when he 
 has a mind, but, like a truly great one as he is, he brings 
 you down to your bare manhood, and bids you understand 
 him out of that, with no adventitious helps of association, 
 or he will none of you. He does not touch those melancholy 
 chords on which Autumn is as great a master as Heine. 
 Well, is there no such thing as thrumming on them and 
 maundering over them till they get out of tune, and you 
 wish some manly hand would crash through them and leave 
 them dangling brokenly for ever? Take Winter as you 
 find him, and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow, 
 with no nonsense in him, and tolerating none in you, which 
 is a great comfort in the long run. He is not what they 
 call a genial critic, but bring a real man along with you, 
 and you will find there is a crabbed generosity about the 
 old cynic that you would not exchange for all the creamy 
 concessions of Autumn. " Season of mists and mellow 
 fruitfulness," quotha? That s just it; Winter soon blows 
 
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 25 
 
 your head clear of fog and makes you see things as they are. 
 I thank him for it ! The truth is, between ourselves, I 
 have a very good opinion of the whole family, who always 
 welcome me without making me feel as if I were too much 
 of a poor relation. There ought to be some kind of distance, 
 never so little, you know, to give the true relish. They are 
 as good company, the worst of them, as any I know, and I 
 am not a little flattered by a condescension from any one of 
 them ; but I happen to hold Winter s retainer this time, 
 and, like an honest advocate, am bound to make as good a 
 showing as I can for him, even if it cost a few slurs upon 
 the rest of the household. Moreover, Winter is coming, 
 and one would like to get on the blind side of him. 
 
 The love of Nature in and for herself, or as a mirror for 
 the moods of the mind, is a modern thing. The fleeing to 
 her as an escape from man was brought into fashion by 
 Rousseau ; for his prototype Petrarch, though he had a 
 taste for pretty scenery, had a true antique horror for the 
 grander aspects of nature. He got once to the top of 
 Mount Yentoux, but it is very plain that he did not enjoy 
 it. Indeed, it is only within a century or so that the search 
 after the picturesque has been a safe employment. It is not 
 so even now in Greece or Southern Italy. Where the Anglo- 
 Saxon carves his cold fowl, and leaves the relics of his picnic, 
 the ancient or mediaeval man might be pretty confident 
 that some ruffian would try the edge of his knife on a 
 chicken of the Platonic sort, and leave more precious bones 
 as an offering to the genius of the place. The ancients were 
 certainly more social than we, though that, perhaps, was 
 natural enough, when a good part of the world was still 
 covered with forest. They huddled together in cities as 
 well for safety as to keep their minds warm. The Romans 
 had a fondness for country life, but they had fine roads, and 
 Rome was always within easy reach. The author of the 
 Book of Job is the earliest I know of who showed any 
 profound sense of the moral meaning of the outward world ; 
 and I think none has approached him since, though 
 Wordsworth comes nearest with the first two books of the 
 
26 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 
 
 " Prelude." But their feeling is not precisely of the kind I 
 speak of as modern, and which gave rise to what is called 
 descriptive poetry. Chaucer opens his Clerk s Tale with a 
 bit of landscape admirable for its large style, and as well 
 composed as any Claude. 
 
 " There is right at the west end of Itaille, 
 Down at the root of Vesulus the cold, 
 A lusty plain abundant of vitaille, 
 Where many a tower and town thou mayst behold, 
 That founded were in time of fathers old, 
 And many an other delectable sight ; 
 And Saluces this noble country hight." 
 
 What an airy precision of touch there is here, and what 
 a sure eye for the points of character in landscape ! But 
 the picture is altogether subsidiary. No doubt the works 
 of Salvator Rosa and Caspar Poussin show that there must 
 have been some amateur taste for the grand and terrible in 
 scenery ; but the British poet Thomson (" sweet-souled " is 
 Wordsworth s apt word) was the first to do with words 
 what they had done partially with colours. He was turgid, 
 no good metrist, and his English is like a translation from 
 one of those poets who wrote in Latin after it was dead ; 
 but he was a man of sincere genius, and not only English, 
 but European literature is largely in his debt. He was the 
 inventor of cheap amusement for the million, to be had of 
 All-out-doors for the asking. It was his impulse which uncon 
 sciously gave direction to Rousseau, and it is to the school 
 of Jean Jacques that we owe St. Pierre, Cowper, Chateau 
 briand, Wordsworth, Byron, Lamartine, George Sand, 
 Rusldn the great painters of ideal landscape. 
 
 So long as men had slender means, whether of keeping 
 out cold or checkmating it with artificial heat, Winter was 
 an unwelcome guest, especially in the country. There he 
 was the bearer of a lettre de cachet, which shut its victims 
 in solitary confinement with few resources but to boose 
 round the fire and repeat ghost-stories, which had lost 
 all their freshness and none of their terror. To go to bed 
 v/as to lie awake of cold, with an added shudder of fright 
 
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 27 
 
 whenever a loose casement or a waving curtain chose to 
 give you the goose-flesh. Bussy Rabutin, in one of his 
 letters, gives us a notion how uncomfortable it was in the 
 country, with green wood, smoky chimneys, and doors and 
 windows that thought it was their duty to make the wind 
 whistle, not to keep it out. With fuel so dear, it could not 
 have been much better in the city, to judge by Menage s 
 warning against the danger of our dressing-gowns taking 
 fire, while we cuddle too closely over the sparing blaze. 
 The poet of Winter himself is said to have written in bed, 
 with his hand through a hole in the blanket ; and we may 
 suspect that it was the warmth quite as much as the 
 company that first drew men together at the coffee-house. 
 Coleridge, in January 1800, writes to Wedgewood : "I am 
 sitting by a fire in a rug greatcoat. ... It is most barbar 
 ously cold, and you, I fear, can shield yourself from it only 
 by perpetual imprisonment." This thermometrical view of 
 winter is, I grant, a depressing one ; for I think there is 
 nothing so demoralising as cold. I know of a boy who, 
 when his father, a bitter economist, was brought home 
 dead, said only, "Now we can burn as much wood as we 
 like." I would not off-hand prophesy the gallows for that 
 boy. I remember with a shudder a pinch I got from the 
 cold once in a railroad-car. A born fanatic of fresh air, 
 I found myself glad to see the windows hermetically sealed 
 by the freezing vapour of our breath, and plotted the 
 assassination of the conductor every time he opened the 
 door. I felt myself sensibly barbarising, and would have 
 shared Colonel Jack s bed in the ash-hole of the glass- 
 furnace with a grateful heart. Since then I have had more 
 charity for the prevailing ill-opinion of winter. It was 
 natural enough that Ovid should measure the years of his 
 exile in Pontus by the number of winters. 
 
 " Ut sumus in Ponto, ter frigore constitit Ister. 
 Facta est Euxini dura ter unda maris " 
 
 " Thrice hath the cold bound Ister fast, since I 
 In Pontus was, thrice Euxine s wave ma<!c hard," 
 
28 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 
 
 Jubinal has printed an Anglo-Norman piece of doggerel in 
 which Winter and Summer dispute which is the better 
 man. It is not without a kind of rough and inchoate 
 humour, and I like it because old Whitebeard gets tolerably 
 fair play. The jolly old fellow boasts of his rate of living, 
 with that contempt of poverty which is the weak spot in 
 the burly English nature. 
 
 " Jk Dieu ne place que me avyenge 
 Que ne face pins honour 
 Et plus despenz en un soul jour 
 Que vus en tote vostre vie : " 
 
 " Now God forbid it hap to me 
 That I make not more great display, 
 And spend more in a single day 
 Than you can do in all your life." 
 
 The best touch, perhaps, is Winter s claim for credit as a 
 mender of the highways, which was not without point when 
 every road in Europe was a quagmire during a good part of 
 the year unless it was bottomed on some remains of Roman 
 engineering. 
 
 " Je su, fet-il, seignur et mestre 
 Et h bon droit le dey estre, 
 Quant de la bowe face cauce 
 Par un petit de geele : " 
 
 " Master and lord I am, says he, 
 And of good right so ought to be, 
 Since I make causeys, safely crost, 
 Of mud, with just a pinch of frost. 1 
 
 But there is no recognition of Winter as the best of out-door 
 company. 
 
 Even Emerson, an open-air man, and a bringer of it, if 
 ever any, confesses, 
 
 " The frost-king ties my fumbling feet, 
 Sings in my ear, my hands are stones, 
 Curdles the blood to the marble bones, 
 Tugs at the heartstrings, numbs the sense, 
 And hems in life with narrowing fence." 
 
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 29 
 
 Winter was literally " the inverted year," as Thomson 
 called him ; for such entertainments as could be had must 
 be got within doors. What cheerfulness there was in 
 brumal verse was that of Horace s dissolve Jrigus ligna 
 super foco large reponens, so pleasantly associated with the 
 cleverest scene in Roderick Random. This is the tone of 
 that poem of Walton s friend Cotton, which won the praise 
 of Wordsworth : 
 
 "Let us home, 
 
 Our mortal enemy is come ; 
 
 Winter and all his blustering train 
 
 Have made a voyage o er the main. 
 
 Fly, fly, the foe advances fast, 
 Into our fortress let us haste, 
 Where all the roarers of the north 
 Can neither storm nor starve us forth. 
 
 There underground a magazine 
 Of sovereign juice is cellared in, 
 Liquor that will the siege maintain 
 Should Phcehus ne er return again. 
 
 Whilst we together jovial sit 
 Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit, 
 Where, though bleak winds confine us home, 
 Our fancies round the world shall roam." 
 
 Thomson s view of Winter is also, on the whole, a hostile 
 one, though he does justice to his grandeur. 
 
 "Thus Winter falls, 
 
 A heavy gloom oppressive o er the world, 
 Through Nature shedding influence malign." 
 
 He finds his consolations, like Cotton, in the house, though 
 
 more refined : 
 
 11 While without 
 
 The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat 
 Between the groaning forest and the shore 
 Beat by the boundless multitude of waves, 
 A rural, sheltered, solitary scene, 
 Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join 
 To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit 
 And hold high converse with the mighty dead," 
 
30 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 
 
 Doctor Akenside, a man to be spoken of with respect, 
 follows Thomson. With him, too, "Winter desolates the 
 year," and 
 
 "How pleasing wears the wintry night 
 Spent with the old illustrious dead ! 
 While by the taper s trembling light 
 I seem those awful scenes to tread 
 "Where chiefs or legislators lie," etc. 
 
 Akenside had evidently been reading Thomson. He had 
 the conceptions of a great poet with less faculty than many 
 a little one, and is one of those versifiers of whom it is 
 enough to say that we are always willing to break him off 
 in the middle with an etc., well knowing that what follows 
 is but the coming-round again of what went before, march 
 ing in a circle with the cheap numerosity of a stage-army. 
 In truth, it is no wonder that the short days of that cloudy 
 northern climate should have added to winter a gloom 
 borrowed of the mind. We hardly know, till we have 
 experienced the contrast, how sensibly our winter is 
 alleviated by the longer daylight and the pellucid atmos 
 phere. I once spent a winter in Dresden, a southern 
 climate compared with England, and really almost lost my 
 respect for the sun when I saw him groping among the 
 chimney-pots opposite my windows as he described his 
 impoverished arc in the sky. The enforced seclusion of the 
 season makes it the time for serious study and occupations 
 that demand fixed incomes of unbroken time. This is why 
 Milton said " that his vein never happily flowed but from 
 the autumnal equinox to the vernal," though in his 
 twentieth year he had written, on the return of spring, 
 
 " Fallor ? an et nobis redeunt in carmina vires 
 Ingeniumque mihi munere veris adest ? " 
 
 " Err I ? or do the powers of song return 
 To me, and genius too, the gifts of Spring ? " 
 
 Goethe, so far as I remember, was the first to notice the 
 
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 31 
 
 cheerfulness of snow in sunshine. His Harz-reise im Winter 
 gives no hint of it, for that is a diluted reminiscence of 
 Greek tragic choruses and the Book of Job in nearly equal 
 parts. In one of the singularly interesting and character 
 istic letters to Frau von Stein, however, written during the 
 journey, he says : "It is beautiful indeed ; the mist heaps 
 itself together in light snow-clouds, the sun looks through, 
 and the snow over everything gives back a feeling of 
 gaiety." But I find in Cowper the first recognition of a 
 general amiability in Winter. The gentleness of his 
 temper, and the wide charity of his sympathies, made it 
 natural for him to find good in everything except the 
 human heart. A dreadful creed distilled from the darkest 
 moments of dyspeptic solitaries compelled him against his 
 will to see in that the one evil thing made by a God whose 
 goodness is over all His works. Cowper s two walks in the 
 morning and noon of a winter s day are delightful, so long 
 as he contrives to let himself be happy in the graciousness 
 of the landscape. Your muscles grow springy, and your 
 lungs dilate with the crisp air as you walk along with him. 
 You laugh with him at the grotesque shadow of your legs 
 lengthened across the snow by the just-risen sun. I know 
 nothing that gives a purer feeling of out-door exhilaration 
 than the easy verses of this escaped hypochondriac. But 
 Cowper also preferred his sheltered garden-walk to those 
 robuster joys, and bitterly acknowledged the depressing 
 influence of the darkened year. In December 1780 he 
 writes : " At this season of the year, and in this gloomy, 
 uncomfortable climate, it is no easy matter for the owner of 
 a mind like mine to divert it from sad subjects, and to fix 
 it upon such as may administer to its amusement." Or was 
 it because he was writing to the dreadful Newton ? Perhaps 
 his poetry bears truer witness to his habitual feeling, for it 
 is only there that poets disenthral themselves of their 
 reserve and become fully possessed of their greatest charm 
 the power of being franker than other men. In the 
 Third Book of "The Task" he boldly affirms his preference 
 of the country to the city even in winter : 
 
32 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 
 
 " But are not wholesome airs, though unperfumed 
 By roses, and clear suns, though scarcely felt, 
 And groves, if inharmonious, yet secure 
 From clamour, and whose very silence charms, 
 To be preferred to smoke ? . . . 
 They would be, were not madness in the head 
 And folly in the heart ; were England now 
 What England was, plain, hospitable, kind, 
 And undebauched." 
 
 The conclusion shows, however, that he was thinking 
 mainly of fireside delights, not of the blusterous companion 
 ship of nature. This appears even more clearly in the 
 Fourth Book : 
 
 " Winter, ruler of the inverted year ; " 
 
 but I cannot help interrupting him to say how pleasant it 
 always is to track poets through the gardens of their pre 
 decessors and find out their likings by a flower snapped off 
 here and there to garnish their own nosegays. Cowper had 
 been reading Thomson, and " the inverted year " pleased 
 his fancy with its suggestion of that starry wheel of the 
 zodiac moving round through its spaces infinite. He 
 could not help loving a handy Latinism (especially with 
 elision beauty added) any more than Gray, any more 
 than Wordsworth on the sly. But the member for Olney 
 has the floor : 
 
 " Winter, ruler of the inverted year, 
 Thy scattered hair with sleet-like ashes filled, 
 Thy breath congealed upon thy lips, thy cheeks 
 Fringed with a beard made white with other snows 
 Than those of age, thy forehead wrapt in clouds, 
 A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne 
 A sliding car, indebted to no wheels, 
 But urged by storms along its slippery way, 
 I love thee all unlovely as thou seem st, 
 And dreaded as thou art ! Thou hold st the sun 
 A prisoner in the yet undawning east, 
 Shortening his journey between morn and noon, 
 And hurrying him, impatient of his stay, 
 Down to the rosy west, but kindly still 
 Compensating his loss with added hours 
 Of social converse and instructive ease, 
 
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 33 
 
 And gathering at short notice, in one group, 
 The family dispersed, and fixing thought, 
 Not less dispersed by daylight and its cares. 
 I crown thee king of intimate delights, 
 Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness, 
 And all the comforts that the lowly roof 
 Of undisturbed Retirement, and the hours 
 Of long uninterrupted evening know." 
 
 I call this a good human bit of writing, imaginative, too 
 not so flushed, not so ... highfaluting (let me dare the 
 odious word !) as the modern style since poets have got 
 hold of a theory that imagination is common-sense 
 turned inside out, and not common-sense sublimed 
 but wholesome, masculine, and strong in the simplicity 
 of a mind wholly occupied with its theme. To me Cowper 
 is still the best of our descriptive poets for every-day wear. 
 And what unobtrusive skill he has ! How he heightens, 
 for example, your sense of winter-evening seclusion, 
 by the twanging horn of the postman on the bridge ! That 
 horn has rung in my ears ever since I first heard it, during 
 the consulate of the second Adams. "Wordsworth strikes a 
 deeper note ; but does it not sometimes come over one (just 
 the least in the world) that one would give anything for a 
 bit of nature pure and simple, without quite so strong a 
 flavour of W. W. ? W. W. is, of course, sublime and all 
 that but ! For my part, I will make a clean breast of it, 
 and confess that I cannot look at a mountain without 
 fancying the late laureate s gigantic Roman nose thrust 
 between me and it, and thinking of Dean Swift s profane 
 version of Romanos rerum dominos into Roman nose / a 
 rare un/ dom your nose ! But do I judge verses, then, by 
 the impression made on me by the man who wrote them ? 
 Not so fast, my good friend, but, for good or evil, the 
 character and its intellectual product are inextricably 
 interfused. 
 
 If I remember aright, Wordsworth himself (except in his 
 magnificent skating scene in the " Prelude ") has not much 
 to say for winter out of doors. I cannot recall any picture 
 by him of a snow-storm. The reason may possibly be that 
 
34 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 
 
 in the Lake Country even the winter storms bring rain 
 rather than snow. He was thankful for the Christmas 
 visits of Crabb Robinson, because they " helped him through 
 the winter." His only hearty praise of winter is when, as 
 General Fevrier, he defeats the French : 
 
 " Humanity, delighting to behold 
 A fond reflection of her own decay, 
 Hath painted Winter like a traveller old, 
 Propped on a staff, and, through the sullen day, 
 In hooded mantle, limping o er the plain 
 As though his weakness were disturbed by pain: 
 Or, if a juster fancy should allow 
 An undisputed symbol of command, 
 The chosen sceptre is a withered bough 
 Infirmly grasped within a withered hand. 
 These emblems suit the helpless and forlorn ; 
 But mighty Winter the device shall scorn." 
 
 The Scottish poet Grahame, in his " Sabbath," says 
 manfully : 
 
 " Now is the time 
 To visit Nature in her grand attire ;" 
 
 and he has one little picture which no other poet has 
 surpassed : 
 
 " High -ridged the whirled drift has almost reached 
 The powdered keystone of the churchyard porch : 
 Mute hangs the hooded bell ; the tombs lie buried." 
 
 Even in our own climate, where the sun shows his winter 
 face as long and as brightly as in central Italy, the seduction 
 of the chimney-corner is apt to predominate in the mind 
 over the severer satisfactions of muffled fields and penitential 
 woods. The very title of Whittier s delightful " Snow- 
 Bound " shows what he was thinking of, though he does not 
 vapour a little about digging out paths. The verses of 
 Emerson, perfect as a Greek fragment (despite the archaism 
 of a dissyllabic fire), which he has chosen for his epigraph, 
 tell us too how the 
 
 " Housemates sit 
 
 Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed 
 In a tumultuous privacy of storm." 
 
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 35 
 
 They are all in a tale. It is always the tristis Hiems of 
 Virgil. Oatch one of them having a kind word for old 
 Barbe Fleurie, unless he whines through some cranny, like 
 a beggar, to heighten their enjoyment while they toast their 
 slippered toes. I grant there is a keen relish of contrast 
 about the bickering flame as it gives an emphasis beyond 
 Gherardo della Notte to loved faces, or kindles the gloomy 
 gold of volumes scarce less friendly, especially when a 
 tempest is blundering round the house. Wordsworth has a 
 fine touch that brings home to us the comfortable contrast 
 of without and within, during a storm at night, and the 
 passage is highly characteristic of a poet whose inspiration 
 always has an undertone of bourgeois : 
 
 " How touching, when, at midnight, sweep 
 Snow-muffled winds, and all is dark, 
 To hear, and sink again to sleep !" 
 
 J. H., one of those choice poets who will not tarnish their 
 bright fancies by publication, always insists on a snow-storm 
 as essential to the true atmosphere of whist. Mrs. Battles, 
 in her famous rule for the game, implies winter, and would 
 doubtless have added tempest, if it could be had for the 
 asking. For a good solid read also, into the small hours, 
 there is nothing like that sense of safety against having 
 your evening laid waste, which Euroclydon brings, as he 
 bellows down the chimney, making your fire gasp, or rustles 
 snow flakes against the pane with a sound more soothing 
 than silence. Emerson, as he is apt to do, not only hit the 
 nail on the head, but drove it home, in that last phrase of 
 the " tumultuous privacy." 
 
 But I would exchange this, and give something to boot, 
 for the privilege of walking out into the vast blur of a 
 north-north-east snow-storm, and getting a strong draught 
 on the furnace within, by drawing the first furrows through 
 its sandy drifts. I love those 
 
 " Noontide twilights which snow makes 
 With tempest of the blinding flakes." 
 
36 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 
 
 If the wind veer too much toward the east, you get the 
 heavy snow that gives a true Alpine slope to the boughs of 
 your evergreens, and traces a skeleton of your elins in white ; 
 but you must have plenty of north in your gale if you want 
 those driving nettles of frost that sting the cheeks to a 
 crimson manlier than that of fire. During the great storm 
 of two winters ago, the most robustious periwig-pated fellow 
 of lato years, I waded and floundered a couple of miles 
 through the whispering night, and brought home that 
 feeling of expansion we have after being in good company. 
 " Great things doeth He which we cannot comprehend ; for 
 He saith to the snow, Be thou on the earth. " 
 
 There is admirable snow scenery in Judd s " Margaret," 
 but some one has confiscated my copy of that admirable 
 book, and, perhaps, Homer s picture of a snow-storm is the 
 best yet in its large simplicity : 
 
 " And as in winter-time, when Jove his cold sharp javelins throws 
 
 Amongst us mortals, and is moved to white the earth with snows, 
 
 The winds asleep, he freely pours till highest prominents, 
 
 Hill-tops, low meadows, and the fields that crown with most contents 
 
 The toils of men, seaports and shores, are hid, and every place, 
 
 But floods, that fair snow s tender flakes, as their own brood, embrace." 
 
 Chapman, after all, though he makes very free with him, 
 comes nearer Homer than anybody else. There is nothing 
 in the original of that fair snow s tender flakes, but neither 
 Pope nor Cowper could get out of their heads the Psalmist s 
 tender phrase, " He giveth his snow like wool," for which 
 also Homer affords no hint. Pope talks of " dissolving 
 fleeces," and Cowper of a "fleecy mantle." But David is 
 nobly simple, while Pope is simply nonsensical, and Cowper 
 pretty. If they must have prettiness, Martial would have 
 supplied them with it in his 
 
 "Densum tacitarum vellus aquarum," 
 
 which is too pretty, though I fear it would have pleased 
 Dr. Donne. Eustathius of Thessalonica called snow 
 
 woolly water, which a poor old French poet, Godeau, 
 has amplified into this : 
 
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 37 
 
 " Lorsque la froidure inhumaine 
 De leur verd orneraent depouille les forets 
 Sous une neige epaisse il couvre les guerets, 
 Et la neige a pour eux la chaleur de la lame." 
 
 In this, as in Pope s version of the passage in Homer, there 
 is, at least, a sort of suggestion of snow-storm in the blind 
 ing drift of words. But, on the whole, if one would know 
 what snow is, I should advise him not to hunt up what the 
 poets have said about it, but to look at the sweet miracle 
 itself. 
 
 The preludings of Winter are as beautiful as those of 
 Spring. In a grey December day, when, as the farmers 
 say, it is too cold to snow, his numbed fingers will let fall 
 doubtfully a few star-shaped flakes, the snowdrops and 
 anemones that harbinger his more assured reign. Now, 
 and now only, may be seen, heaped on the horizon s eastern 
 edge, those " blue clouds " from forth which Shakespeare 
 says that Mars " doth pluck the masoned turrets." Some 
 times also, when the sun is low, you will see a single cloud 
 trailing a flurry of snow along the southern hills in a 
 wavering fringe of purple. And when at last the real 
 snow-storm comes, it leaves the earth with a virginal look 
 on it that no other of the seasons can rival, compared with 
 which, indeed, they seem soiled and vulgar. 
 
 And what is there in nature so beautiful as the next 
 morning after such confusion of the elements 1 Night has 
 no silence like this of busy day. All the batteries of noise 
 are spiked. We see the movement of life as a deaf man 
 sees it, a mere wraith of the clamorous existence that 
 inflicts itself on our ears when the ground is bare. The. 
 earth is clothed in innocence as a garment. Every wound 
 of the landscape is healed ; whatever was stiff has been 
 sweetly rounded as the breasts of Aphrodite ; what was 
 unsightly has been covered gently with a soft splendour, as 
 if, Cowley would have said, Nature had cleverly lot fall her 
 handkerchief to hide it. If the virgin (Notre Dame de la 
 neige) were to come back, here is an earth that would not 
 bruise her foot nor stain it. It is 
 
38 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 
 
 11 The fanned snow 
 
 That s bolted by the northern blasts twice o er," 
 " Soffiata e stretta dai venti Schiavi, 
 Winnowed and packed by the Sclavonian winds," 
 
 packed so hard sometimes on hill-slopes that it will bear 
 your weight. What grace is in all the curves, as if every 
 one of them had been swept by that inspired thumb of 
 Phidias s journeyman. 
 
 Poets have fancied the footprints of the wind in those 
 light ripples that sometimes scurry across smooth water 
 with a sudden blur. But on this gleaming hush the aerial 
 deluge has left plain marks of its course; and in gullies 
 through which it rushed torrent-like, the eye finds its bed 
 irregularly scooped like that of a brook in hard beach-sand, 
 or, in more sheltered spots, traced with outlines like those 
 left by the sliding edges of the surf upon the shore. The 
 air, after all, is only an infinitely thinner kind of water, 
 such as I suppose we shall have to drink when the state 
 does her whole duty as a moral reformer. Nor is the wind 
 the only thing whose trail you will notice on this sensitive 
 surface. You will find that you have more neighbours and 
 night visitors than you dreamed of. Here is the dainty 
 footprint of a cat ; here a dog has looked in on you like an 
 amateur watchman to see if all is right, slumping clumsily 
 about in the mealy treachery. And look ! before you were 
 up in the morning, though you were a punctual courtier at 
 the sun s levee, here has been a squirrel zigzagging to and 
 fro like a hound gathering the scent, and some tiny bird 
 searching for unimaginable food, perhaps for the tinier 
 creature, whatever it is, that drew this slender continuous 
 trail like those made on the wet beach by light borderers of 
 the sea. The earliest autographs were as frail as these. 
 Poseidon traced his lines, or giant birds made their mark, 
 on pre- Adamite sea-margins ; and the thunder-gust left the 
 tear-stains of its sudden passion there ; nay ; we have the 
 signatures of delicatest fern-leaves on the soft ooze of aeons 
 that dozed away their dreamless leisure before consciousness 
 came upon the earth with man. Some whim of nature 
 
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 39 
 
 locked them fast in stone for us after-thoughts of creation. 
 Which of us shall leave a footprint as imperishable as that 
 of the ornithorhyncus, or much more so than that of these 
 Bedouins of the snow-desert 1 Perhaps it was only because 
 the ripple and the rain-drop and the bird were not thinking 
 of themselves, that they had such luck. The chances of 
 immortality depend very much on that. How often have 
 we not seen poor mortals, dupes of a season s notoriety, 
 carving their names on seeming-solid rock of merest beach- 
 sand, whose feeble hold on memory shall be washed away 
 by the next wave of fickle opinion ! Well, well, honest 
 Jacques, there are better things to be found in the snow 
 than sermons. 
 
 The snow that falls damp comes commonly in larger 
 flakes from windless skies, and is the prettiest of all to 
 watch from under cover. This is the kind Homer had in 
 mind; and Dante, who had never read him, compares the 
 dilatate falde, the flaring flakes, of his fiery rain, to those of 
 snow among the mountains without wind. This sort of 
 snowfall has no fight in it, and does not challenge you to a 
 wrestle like that which drives well from the northward, 
 with all moisture thoroughly winnowed out of it by the 
 frosty wind. Burns, who was more out of doors than most 
 poets, and whose bare-foot Muse got the colour in her cheeks 
 by vigorous exercise in all weathers, was thinking of this 
 drier deluge when he speaks of the " whirling drift," and 
 tells how 
 
 " Chanticleer 
 Shook off the pouthery snaw." 
 
 But the damper and more deliberate falls have a choice 
 knack at draping the trees ; and about eaves of stone walls 
 wherever, indeed, the evaporation is rapid, and it finds a 
 chance to cling it will build itself out in curves of 
 wonderful beauty. I have seen one of these dumb waves, 
 thus caught in the act of breaking, curl four feet beyond 
 the edge of my roof and hang there for days, as if Nature 
 were too well pleased with her work to let it crumble from 
 
40 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 
 
 its exquisite pause. After such a storm, if you are lucky 
 enough to have even a sluggish ditch for a neighbour, be 
 sure to pay it a visit. You will find its banks corniced 
 with what seems to be precipitated light, and the dark 
 current down below gleams as if with an inward lustre. 
 Dull of motion as it is, you never saw water that seemed 
 alive before. It has a brightness like that of the eyes of 
 some smaller animals, which gives assurance of life, but of 
 a life foreign and unintelligible. 
 
 A damp snow-storm often turns to rain, and, in our 
 freakish climate, the wind will whisk sometimes into the 
 north-west, so suddenly as to plate all the trees with crystal 
 before it has swept the sky clear of its last cobweb of cloud. 
 Ambrose Philips, in a poetical epistle from Copenhagen to 
 the Earl of Dorset, describes this strange confectionery of 
 Nature, for such, I am half ashamed to say, it always 
 seems to me, recalling the "glorified sugar-candy " of Lamb s 
 first night at the theatre. It has an artificial air, altogether 
 beneath the grand artist of the atmosphere, and besides 
 does too much mischief to the trees for a philodendrist to 
 take unmixed pleasure in it. Perhaps it deserves a poet 
 like Philips, who really loved Nature, and yet liked her to 
 be mighty fine, as Pepys would say, with a heightening of 
 powder and rouge : 
 
 " And yet but lately have I seen e en here 
 The winter in a lovely dress appear. 
 Ere yet the clouds let fall the treasured snow, 
 Or winds begun through hazy skies to blow, 
 At evening a keen eastern breeze arose, 
 And the descending rain unsullied froze. 
 Soon as the silent shades of night withdrew, 
 The ruddy noon disclosed at once to view 
 The face of Nature in a rich disguise, 
 And brightened every object to my eyes ; 
 For every shrub, and every blade of grass, 
 And every pointed thorn, seemed wrought in glass ; 
 In pearls and rubies rich the hawthorns show, 
 And through the ice the crimson berries glow ; 
 The thick-sprung reeds, which watery marshes yield, 
 Seem polished lances in a hostile field ; 
 
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 41 
 
 The stag in limpid currents with surprise 
 
 Sees crystal branches on his forehead rise : 
 
 The spreading oak, the beech, the towering pine, 
 
 Glazed over in the freezing ether shine ; 
 
 The frighted birds the rattling branches shun, 
 
 "Which wave and glitter in the distant sun, 
 
 When, if a sudden gust of wind arise, 
 
 The brittle forest into atoms flies, 
 
 The crackling wood beneath the tempest bends, 
 
 And in a spangled shower the prospect ends." 
 
 It is not uninstructive to see how tolerable Ambrose is, so 
 long as he sticks manfully to what he really saw. The 
 moment he undertakes to improve on Nature he sinks into 
 the mere court poet, and we surrender him to the jealousy 
 of Pope without a sigh. His "rattling branches" and 
 " crackling forest " are good, as truth always is, after a 
 fashion ; but what shall we say of that dreadful stag which, 
 there is little doubt, he valued above all the re&t, because it 
 was purely his own ? 
 
 The damper snow tempts the amateur architect and 
 sculptor. His Pentelicus has been brought to his very 
 door, and if there are boys to be had (whose company beats 
 all other recipes for prolonging life), a middle-aged Master 
 of the Works will knock the years off his account and 
 make the family Bible seem a dealer in foolish fables, by a 
 few hours given heartily to this business. First comes the 
 Sisyphean toil of rolling the clammy balls till they refuse 
 to budge farther. Then, if you would play the statuary, 
 they are piled one upon the other to the proper height ; or 
 if your aim be masonry, whether of house or fort, they 
 must be squared and beaten solid with the shovel. The 
 material is capable of very pretty effects, and your young 
 companions meanwhile are unconsciously learning lessons 
 in aesthetics. From the feeling of satisfaction with which 
 one squats on the damp floor of his extemporised dwelling, 
 I have been led to think that the backwoodsman must get 
 a sweeter savour of self-reliance from the house his own 
 hands have built than Bramante or Sansovino could ever 
 give. Perhaps the fort is the best thing, for it calls out 
 
42 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 
 
 more masculine qualities and adds the cheer of battle with 
 that dumb artillery which gives pain enough to test pluck 
 without risk of serious hurt. Already, as I write, it is 
 twenty odd years ago. The balls fly thick and fast. The 
 uncle defends the waist-high ramparts against a storm of 
 nephews, his breast plastered with decorations like another 
 Radetzky s. How well I recall the indomitable good- 
 humour under fire of him who fell in the front at Ball s 
 Bluff, the silent pertinacity of the gentle scholar who got 
 his last hurt at Fair Oaks, the ardour in the charge of the 
 gallant gentleman who, with the death-wound in his side, 
 headed his brigade at Oedar Creek ! How it all comes 
 back, and they never come ! I cannot again be the Yauban 
 of fortresses in the innocent snow, but I shall never see 
 children moulding their clumsy giants in it without longing 
 to help. It was a pretty fancy of the young Vermont 
 sculptor to make his first essay in this evanescent material. 
 Was it a figure of Youth, I wonder ? Would it not be well 
 if all artists could begin in stuff as perishable, to melt away 
 when the sun of prosperity began to shine, and leave 
 nothing behind but the gain of practised hands ? It is 
 pleasant to fancy that Shakespeare served his apprentice 
 ship at this trade, and owed to it that most pathetic of 
 despairing wishes, 
 
 11 0, that I were a mockery-king of snow, 
 Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke, 
 To melt myself away in water-drops ! " 
 
 I have spoken of the exquisite curves of snow surfaces. 
 Not less rare are the tints of which they are capible the 
 faint blue of the hollows, for the shadows in snow are 
 always blue, and the tender rose of higher points, as you 
 stand with your back to the setting sun and look upward 
 across the soft rondure of a hill-side. I have seen within a 
 mile of home effects of colour as lovely as any iridescence 
 of the Silberhorn after sundown. Charles II., who never 
 said a foolish thing, gave the English climate the highest 
 praise when he said that it allowed you more hours out of 
 
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 43 
 
 doors than any other, and I think our winter may fairly 
 make the same boast as compared with the rest of the year. 
 Its still mornings, with the thermometer near zero, put a 
 premium on walking. There is more sentiment in turf, 
 perhaps, and it is more elastic to the foot ; its silence, too, 
 is well-nigh as congenial with meditation as that of fallen 
 pine tassel ; but for exhilaration there is nothing like a stiff 
 snow-crust that creaks like a cricket at every step, and com 
 municates its own sparkle to the senses. The air you 
 drink is frappe, all its grosser particles precipitated, and 
 the dregs of your blood with them. A purer current 
 mounts to the brain, courses sparkling through it, and 
 rinses it thoroughly of all dejected stuff. There is nothing 
 left to breed an exhalation of ill-humour or despondency, 
 They say that this rarefied atmosphere has lessened the 
 capacity of our lungs. Be it so. Quart-pots are for mud 
 dier liquor than nectar. To me, the city in winter is 
 infinitely dreary the sharp street-corners have such a chill 
 in them, and the snow so soon loses its maidenhood to 
 become a mere drab "doing shameful things," as Steele 
 says of politicians, " without being ashamed." I pine for 
 the Quaker purity of my country landscape. I am speak 
 ing, of course, of those winters that are not niggardly of 
 snow, as ours too often are, giving us a gravelly dust 
 instead. Nothing can be unsightlier that those piebald 
 fields where the coarse brown hide of Earth shows through 
 the holes of her ragged ermine. But even when there is 
 abundance of snow, I find as I grow older that there are 
 not so many good crusts as there used to be. When I first 
 observed this, I rashly set it to the account of that general 
 degeneracy in nature (keeping pace with the same melan 
 choly phenomenon in man) which forces itself upon the 
 attention and into the philosophy of middle life. But hap 
 pening once to be weighed, it occurred to me that an arch 
 which would bear fifty pounds could hardly be blamed for 
 giving way under more than three times the weight. I 
 have sometimes thought that if theologians would remember 
 this in their arguments, and consider that the man may 
 
44 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 
 
 slump through, with no fault of his own, where the boy 
 would have skimmed the surface in safety, it would be 
 better for all parties. However, when you do get a crust 
 that will bear, and know any brooklet that runs down a 
 hill-side, be sure to go and take a look at him, especially if 
 your crust is due, as it commonly is, to a cold snap follow 
 ing eagerly on a thaw. You will never find him so cheerful. 
 As he shrank away after the last thaw, he built for himself 
 the most exquisite caverns of ice to run through, if not 
 "measureless to man" like those of Alph, the sacred river, 
 yet perhaps more pleasing for their narrowness than those 
 for their grandeur. What a cunning silversmith is Frost ! 
 The rarest workmanship of Delhi or Genoa copies him but 
 clumsily, as if the fingers of all other artists were thumbs. 
 Fernwork and lacework and filagree in endless variety, and 
 under it all the water tinkles like a distant guitar, or 
 drums like a tambourine, or gurgles like the Tokay of an 
 anchorite s dream. Beyond doubt there is a fairy proces 
 sion marching along those frail arcades and translucent 
 corridors. 
 
 " Their oaten pipes blow wondrous shrill, 
 The hemlock small blow clear." 
 
 And hark ! is that the ringing of Titania s bridle, or the 
 bells of the wee, wee hawk that sits on Oberon s wrist 1 
 This wonder of Frost s handiwork may be had every winter, 
 but he can do better than this, though I have seen it but 
 once in my life. There had been a thaw without wind or 
 rain, making the air fat with grey vapour. Towards sun 
 down came that chill, the avant-courier of a north-westerly 
 gale. Then, though there was no perceptible current in the 
 atmosphere, the fog began to attach itself in frosty roots 
 and filaments to the southern side of every twig and grass- 
 stem. The very posts had poems traced upon them by this 
 dumb minstrel. Wherever the moist seeds found lodgment 
 grew an inch-deep moss fine as cobweb, a slender coral-reef, 
 argentine, delicate, as of some silent sea in the moon, such 
 as Agassiz dredges when he dreams. The frost, too, can 
 
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 45 
 
 wield a delicate graver, and in fancy leaves Piranesi far 
 behind. He covers your window-pane with Alpine etchings, 
 as if m memory of that sanctuary where he finds shelter 
 even in midsummer. 
 
 Now look down from your hill-side across the valley. 
 The trees are leafless, but this is the season to study their 
 anatomy, and did you ever notice before how much colour 
 there is in the twigs of many of them ? And the smoke 
 from those chimneys is so blue, it seems like a feeder of the 
 sky into which it flows. Winter refines it, and gives it 
 agreeable associations. In summer it suggests cookery or 
 the drudgery of steam-engines, but now your fancy (if it 
 can forget for a moment the dreary usurpation of stoves) 
 traces it down to the fireside and the brightened faces of 
 children. Thoreau is the only poet who has fitly sung it. 
 The wood-cutter rises before day, and 
 
 "First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad 
 His early scout, his emissary, smoke, 
 The earliest, latest pilgrim from his roof, 
 To feel the frosty air ; . . . 
 And, while he crouches still beside the hearth, 
 Nor musters courage to unbar the door, 
 It has gone down the glen with the light wind 
 And o er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath, 
 Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill, 
 And warmed the pinions of the early bird ; 
 And now, perchance, high in the crispy air, 
 Has caught sight of the day o er the earth s edge, 
 And greets its master s eye at his low door 
 As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky." 
 
 Here is very bad verse and very good imagination. He 
 had been reading Wordsworth, or he would not have made 
 tree-tops an iambus. In the Moretum of Virgil (or, if not 
 his, better than most of his) is a pretty picture of a peasant 
 kindling his winter-morning fire. He rises before dawn, 
 
 " Sollicitaque manu tenebras explorat inertes 
 Vestigatque focum Isesus quern denique sensit. 
 Parvulus exusto remanebat stipite fumus, 
 Et cinis obductse celabat lumina prunse. 
 Admovet his pronam submissa fronte lucernam, 
 
46 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 
 
 Et producit acu stupas humore carentes, 
 Excitat et crebris languentem flatibus ignem ; 
 Tandem concepto tenebrse fulgore recedunt, 
 Oppositaque manu lumen defendit ab aura." 
 
 " With cautious hand he gropes the sluggish dark, 
 Tracking the hearth which, scorched, he feels erelong. 
 In burnt-out logs a slender smoke remained, 
 And raked-up ashes hid the cinders eyes ; 
 Stooping, to these the lamp outstretched he nears, 
 And, with a needle loosening the dry wick, 
 With frequent breath excites the languid flame. 
 Before the gathering glow the shades recede, 
 And his bent hand the new-caught light defends." 
 
 Ovid heightens the picture by a single touch : 
 
 " Ipse genu posito flammas exsuscitat aura." 
 11 Kneeling, his breath calls back to life the flames." 
 
 If you walk down now into the woods, you may find a 
 robin or a blue-bird among the red-cedars, or a nuthatch 
 scaling deviously the trunk of some hardwood tree with an 
 eye as keen as that of a French soldier foraging for the pot- 
 au-jeu of his mess. Perhaps a blue-jay shrills cah cah in his 
 corvine trebles, or a chickadee 
 
 " Shows feats of his gymnastic play, 
 Head downward, clinging to the spray." 
 
 But both him and the snow-bird I love better to see, tiny 
 fluffs of feathered life, as they scurry about in a driving mist 
 of snow, than in this serene air. 
 
 Coleridge has put into verse one of the most beautiful 
 phenomena of a winter walk : 
 
 " The woodman winding westward up the glen 
 At wintry dawn, where o er the sheep-track s maze 
 The viewless snow-mist weaves a glistening haze, 
 Sees full before him, gliding without tread, 
 An image with a halo round its head." 
 
 But this aureole is not peculiar to winter. I have noticed it 
 often in a summer morning, when the grass was heavy with 
 dew, and even later in the day, when the dewless grass was 
 still fresh enough to have a gleam of its own. 
 
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 47 
 
 For my own part I prefer a winter walk that takes in the 
 nightfall and the intense silence that erelong follows it. 
 The evening lamps look yellower by contrast with the snow, 
 and give the windows that hearty look of which our 
 secretive fires have almost robbed them. The stars seem 
 
 " To hang, like twinkling winter lamps, 
 Among the branches of the leafless trees," 
 
 or, if you are on a hill-top (whence it is sweet to watch the 
 home-lights gleam out one by one), they look nearer than in 
 summer, and appear to take a conscious part in the cold. 
 Especially in one of those stand-stills of the air that forebode 
 a change of weather, the sky is dusted with motes of fire of 
 which the summer-watcher never dreamed. Winter, too, is, 
 on the whole, the triumphant season of the moon, a moon 
 devoid of sentiment, if you choose, but with the refreshment 
 of a purer intellectual light the cooler orb of middle life. 
 Who ever saw anything to match that gleam, rather 
 divined than seen, which runs before her over the snow, a 
 breath of light, as she rises on the infinite silence of winter 
 night ? High in the heavens also she seems to bring out 
 some intenser property of cold with her chilly polish. The 
 poets have instinctively noted this. When Goody Blake 
 imprecates a curse of perpetual chill upon Harry Gill, she 
 has 
 
 " The cold, cold moon above her head ; " 
 and Coleridge speaks of 
 
 " The silent icicles, 
 Quietly gleaming to the quiet moon." 
 
 As you walk homeward, for it is time that we should 
 end our ramble, you may perchance hear the most 
 impressive sound in nature, unless it be the fall of a 
 tree in the forest during the hush of summer noon. It 
 is the stifled shriek of the lake yonder as the frost 
 throttles it. Wordsworth has described it (too much, I 
 fear, in the style of Dr. Armstrong) : 
 
 " And, interrupting oft that eager game, 
 From under Esthwaite s splitting fields of ice, 
 
48 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 
 
 The pent-up air, struggling to free itself, 
 Gave out to meadow-grounds and bills a loud 
 Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves 
 Howling in troops along the Bothnic main." 
 
 Thoreau (unless the English lakes have a different 
 dialect from ours) calls it admirably well a " whoop." 
 But it is a noise like none other, as if Demogorgon were 
 moaning inarticulately from under the earth. Let us get 
 within doors, lest we hear it again, for there is something 
 bodeful and uncanny in it. 
 
 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN 
 FOREIGNERS. 
 
 WALKING one day toward the Village, as we used to call 
 it in the good old days when almost every dweller in the 
 town had been born in it, I was enjoying that delicious 
 sense of disenthralment from the actual which the deepen 
 ing twilight brings with it, giving, as it does, a sorb of 
 obscure novelty to things familiar. The coolness, the 
 hush, broken only by the distant bleat of some belated 
 goat, querulous to be disburthened of her milky load, the 
 few faint stars, more guessed as yet than seen ; the sense 
 that the coming dark would so soon fold me in the secure 
 privacy of its disguise all things combined in a result 
 as near absolute peace as can be hoped for by a man 
 who knows that there is a writ out against him in the 
 hands of the printer s devil. For the moment I was 
 enjoying the blessed privilege of thinking without being 
 called on to stand and deliver what I thought to the small 
 public who are good enough to take any interest therein. 
 I love old ways, and the path I was walking felt kindly 
 to the feet it had known for almost fifty years. How many 
 fleeting impressions it had shared with me ! How many 
 times I had lingered to study the shadows of the leaves 
 mezzotinted upon the turf that edged it by the moon, of 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 49 
 
 the bare boughs etched with a touch beyond Rembrandt 
 by the same unconscious artist on the smooth page of 
 snow ! If I turned round, through dusky tree-gaps came 
 the first twinkle of evening lamps in the dear old home 
 stead. On Corey s hill I could see these tiny pharoses of 
 love and home and sweet domestic thoughts flash out one 
 by one across the blackening salt-meadow between. How 
 much has not kerosene added to the cheerfulness of our 
 evening landscape ! A pair of night-herons flapped heavily 
 over me toward the hidden river. The war was ended. I 
 might walk townward without that aching dread of 
 bulletins that had darkened the July sunshine, and twice 
 made the scarlet leaves of October seemed stained with 
 blood. I remembered with a pang, half proud, half 
 painful, how so many years ago I had walked over the 
 same path and felt round my finger the soft pressure of 
 a little hand that was one day to harden with faithful 
 grip of sabre. On how many paths, leading to how many 
 homes where proud Memory does all she can to fill up 
 the fireside gaps with shining shapes, must not men be 
 walking in just such pensive mood as I ? Ah, young 
 heroes, safe in immortal youth as those of Homer, you 
 at least carried your ideal hence untarnished ! It is locked 
 for you beyond moth or rust in the treasure-chamber of 
 Death. 
 
 Is not a country, I thought, that has had such as they in 
 it, that could give such as they a brave joy in dying for it, 
 worth something, then ? And as I felt more and more the 
 soothing magic of evening s cool palm upon my temples, as 
 my fancy came home from its reverie, and niy senses, with 
 reawakened curiosity, ran to the front windows again from 
 the viewless closet of abstraction, and felt a strange charm 
 in finding the old tree and shabby fence still there under 
 the travesty of falling night, nay, were conscious of an 
 unsuspected newness in familiar stars and the fading 
 outlines of hills my earliest horizon, I was conscious of an 
 immortal soul, and could not but rejoice in the unwaning 
 goodliness of the world into which I had been born without 
 
 132 
 
50 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 
 
 any merit of my own. I thought of dear Henry Vaughan s 
 rainbow, u Still young and fine ! " I remembered people who 
 had to go over to the Alps to learn what the divine silence 
 of snow was, who must run to Italy before they were 
 conscious of the miracle wrought every day under their 
 very noses by the sunset ; who must call upon the Berk 
 shire hills to teach them what a painter autumn was, while 
 close at hand the Fresh Pond meadows made all oriels 
 cheap with hues that showed as if a sunset cloud had been 
 wrecked among their maples. One might be worse off than 
 even in America, I thought. There are some things so 
 elastic that even the heavy roller of democracy cannot 
 flatten them altogether down. The mind can weave itself 
 warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts and dwell a 
 hermit anywhere. A country without traditions, without 
 ennobling associations, a scramble of parvenus, with a 
 consciousness of shoddy running through politics, manners, 
 art, literature, nay, religion itself ? I confess it did not 
 seem so to me there in that illimitable quiet, that serene 
 self-possession of nature, where Collins might have brooded 
 his " Ode to Evening," or where those verses on Solitude in 
 Dodsley s Collection, that Hawthorne liked so much, might 
 have been composed. Traditions ? Granting that we had 
 none, all that is worth having in them is the common 
 property of the soul an estate in gavel-kind for all the sons 
 of Adam and, moreover, if a man cannot stand on his two 
 feet (the prime quality of whoever has left any tradition 
 behind him), were it not better for him to be honest about 
 it at once, and go down on all-fours ? And for associations, 
 if one have not the wit to make them for himself out of his 
 native earth, no ready-made ones of other men will avail 
 him much. Lexington is none the worse to me for not 
 being in Greece, nor Gettsyburg that its name is not 
 Marathon. " Blessed old fields," I was just exclaiming to 
 myself, like one of Mrs. Kadcliffe s heroes, " dear acres, 
 innocently secure from history, which these eyes first 
 beheld, may you be also those to which they shall at last 
 slowly darken 1 " when I was interrupted by a voice which 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 5 1 
 
 asked me in German whether I was the Herr Professor, 
 Doctor, So and-So ? The "Doctor" was by brevet or 
 vaticination, to make the grade easier to my pocket. 
 
 One feels so intimately assured that he is made up, in 
 part, of shreds and leavings of the past, in part of the 
 interpolations of other people, that an honest man would be 
 slow in saying yes to such a question. But " my name is 
 So-and-So " is a safe answer, and I gave it. While I had 
 been romancing with myself, the street lamps had been 
 lighted, and it was under one of these detectives that have 
 robbed the Old Road of its privilege of sanctuary after 
 nightfall that I was ambushed by my foe. The inexorable 
 villain had taken my description, it appears, that I might 
 have the less chance to escape him. Dr. Holmes tells us 
 that we change our substance, not every seven years, as was 
 once believed, but with every breath we draw. Why had I 
 not the wit to avail myself of the subterfuge, and, like 
 Peter, to renounce my identity, especially as, in certain 
 moods of mind, I have often more than doubted of it 
 myself? When a man is, as it were, his own front door, 
 and is thus knocked at, why may he not assume the right 
 of that sacred wood to make every house a castle, by 
 denying himself to all visitations ? I was truly not at 
 home when the question was put to me, but had to recall 
 myself from all out-of-doors, and so piece my self- 
 consciousness hastily together as well as I could before 
 I answered it. 
 
 I knew perfectly well what was coming. It is seldom 
 that debtors or good Samaritans waylay people under gas 
 lamps in order to force money upon them, so far as I have 
 seen or heard. I was also aware, from considerable experi 
 ence, that every foreigner is persuaded that, by doing this 
 country the favour of coming to it, he has laid every native 
 thereof under an obligation, pecuniary or other, as the case 
 may be, whose discharge he is entitled to on demand duly 
 made in person or by letter. Too much learning (of this 
 kind) had made me mad in the provincial sense of the word. 
 I had begun life with the theory of giving something to every 
 
52 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 
 
 beggar that came along, though sure of never finding a 
 native-born countryman among them. In a small way, I 
 was resolved to emulate Hatem Tai s tent, with its three 
 hundred and sixty-five entrances, one for every day in the 
 year I know not whether he was astronomer enough to 
 add another for leap-years. The beggars were a kind of 
 German silver aristocracy ; not real plate, to be sure, but 
 better than nothing. Where everybody was overworked, 
 they supplied the comfortable equipoise of absolute leisure, 
 so aesthetically needful. Besides, I was but too conscious 
 of a vagrant fibre in myself, which too often thrilled me in 
 my solitary walks with the temptation to wander on into 
 infinite space, and by a single spasm of resolution to 
 emancipate myself from the drudgery of prosaic serfdom to 
 respectability and the regular course of things. This 
 prompting has been at times my familiar demon, and I 
 could not but feel a kind of respectful sympathy for men 
 who had dared what I had only sketched out to myself as a 
 splendid possibility. For seven years I helped maintain 
 one heroic man on an imaginary journey to Portland as 
 fine an example as I have ever known of hopeless loyalty to 
 an ideal. I assisted another so long in a fruitless attempt 
 to reach Mecklenburg-Schwerin, that at last we grinned in 
 each other s faces when we met, like a couple of augurs. 
 He was possessed by this harmless mania as some are by 
 the North Pole, and I shall never forget his look of regretful 
 compassion (as for one who was sacrificing his higher life to 
 the fiesh-pots of Egypt) when I at last advised him some 
 what strenuously to go to the D , whither the road was 
 
 so much travelled that he could not miss it. General Banks, 
 in his noble zeal for the honour of his country, would confer 
 on the Secretary of State the power of imprisoning, in case 
 of war, all these seekers of the unattainable, thus by a 
 stroke of the pen annihilating the single poetic element in 
 our humdrum life. Alas ! not everybody has the genius to 
 be a Bobbin-Boy, or doubtless all these also would have 
 chosen that more prosperous line of life i But moralists, 
 sociologists, political economists, and taxes have slowly 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 53 
 
 convinced me that my beggarly sympathies were a sin 
 against society. Especially was the Buckle doctrine of 
 averages (so nattering to our free-will) persuasive with me ; 
 for as there must be in every year a certain number who 
 would bestow an alms on these abridged editions of the 
 Wandering Jew, the withdrawal of my quota could make 
 no possible difference, since some destined proxy must 
 always step forward to fill my gap. Just so many mis 
 directed letters every year, and no more. Would it were as 
 easy to reckon up the number of men on whose backs fate 
 has written the wrong address, so that they arrive by 
 mistake in Congress and other places where they do not 
 belong ! May not these wanderers of whom I speak have 
 been sent into the world without any proper address at all? 
 Where is our Bead-Letter Office for such 1 And if wiser 
 social arrangements should furnish us with something of the 
 sort, fancy (horrible thought !) how many a working man s 
 friend (a kind of industry in which the labour is light and 
 the wages heavy) would be sent thither because not called 
 for in the office where he at present lies ! 
 
 But I am leaving my new acquaintance too long under 
 the lamp-post. The same Gano which had betrayed me 
 to him revealed to me a well-set young man of about half 
 my own age, as well dressed, so far as I could see, as I was, 
 and with every natural qualification for getting his own 
 livelihood, as good, if not better, than my own. He had 
 been reduced to the painful necessity of calling upon me by 
 a series of crosses beginning with the Baden Revolution 
 (for which, I own, he seemed rather young but perhaps 
 he referred to a kind of revolution practised every season 
 at Baden-Baden), continued by repeated failures in business, 
 for amounts which must convince me of his entire 
 respectability, and ending with our Civil War. During the 
 latter he had served with distinction as a soldier, taking a 
 main part in every important battle, with a rapid list of 
 which he favoured me, and no doubt would have admitted 
 that, impartial as Jonathan Wild s great ancestor, he had 
 been on both sides, had I baited him with a few hints of 
 
54 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 
 
 conservative opinions on a subject so distressing to a 
 gentleman wishing to profit by one s sympathy, and un 
 happily doubtful as to which way it might lean. For all 
 these reasons, and, as he seemed to imply, for his merit in 
 consenting to be born in Germany, he considered himself 
 my natural creditor to the extent of five dollars, which he 
 would handsomely consent to accept in greenbacks, though 
 he preferred specie. The offer was certainly a generous one, 
 and the claim presented with an assurance that carried 
 conviction. But, unhappily, I had been led to remark a 
 curious natural phenomenon. If I was ever weak enough 
 to give anything to a petitioner of whatever nationality, it 
 always rained decayed compatriots of his for a month after. 
 Post hoc ergo propter hoc may not be always safe logic, but 
 here I seemed to perceive a natural connection of cause and 
 effect. Now, a few days before I had been so tickled with 
 a paper (professedly written by a benevolent American 
 clergyman) certifying that the bearer, a hard-working 
 German, had long "sofered with rheumatic paints in his 
 limps," that, after copying the passage into my note-book, I 
 thought it but fair to pay a trifling honorarium to the 
 author. I had pulled the string of the shower-bath ! It 
 had been running shipwrecked sailors for some time, but 
 forthwith it began to pour Teutons, redolent of lager-bier. 
 I could not help associating the apparition of my new 
 friend with this series of otherwise unaccountable pheno 
 mena. I accordingly made up my mind to deny the debt, 
 and modestly did so, pleading a native bias towards 
 impecuniosity to the full as strong as his own. s He took a 
 high tone with me at once, such as an honest man would 
 naturally take with a confessed repudiator. He even 
 brought down his proud stomach so far as to join himself 
 to me for the rest of my townward walk, that he might give 
 me his views of the American people, and thus inclusively 
 of myself. 
 
 I know not whether it is because I am pigeon-livered 
 and lack gall, or whether it is from an overmastering 
 sense of drollery, but I am apt to submit to such bastings 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 55 
 
 with a patience which afterwards surprises me, being not 
 without my share of warmth in the blood. Perhaps it is 
 because I so often meet with young persons who know vastly 
 more than I do, and especially with so many foreigners whose 
 knowledge of this country is superior to my own. How 
 ever it may be, I listened for some time with tolerable 
 composure as my self-appointed lecturer gave me in detail 
 his opinions of my country and its people. America, he 
 informed me, was without arts, science, literature, culture, 
 or any native hope of supplying them. We were a people 
 wholly given to money-getting, and who, having got it, 
 knew no other use for it than to hold it fast. I am fain to 
 confess that I felt a sensible itching of the biceps, and that 
 my fingers closed with such a grip as he had just informed 
 me was one of the effects of our unhappy climate. But 
 happening just then to be where I could avoid temptation 
 by dodging down a bye-street, I hastily left him to finish 
 his diatribe to the lamp-post, which could stand it better 
 than I. That young man will never know how near he 
 came to being assaulted by a respectable gentleman of 
 middle age, at the corner of Church Street. I have never 
 felt quite satisfied that I did all my duty by him in not 
 knocking him down. But perhaps he might have knocked 
 me down, and then *? 
 
 The capacity of indignation makes an essential part of 
 the outfit of every honest man, but I am inclined to doubt 
 whether he is a wise one who allows himself to act upon 
 its first hints. It should be rather, I suspect, a latent 
 heat in the blood, which makes itself felt in character, a 
 steady reserve for the brain, warming the ovum of thought 
 to life, rather than cooking it by a too hasty enthusiasm in 
 reaching the boiling-point. As my pulse gradually fell 
 back to its normal beat, I reflected that I had been uncom 
 fortably near making a fool of myself a handy salve of 
 euphuism for our vanity, though it does not always make a 
 just allowance to Nature for her share in the business. 
 What possible claim had my Teutonic friend to rob me of 
 my composure ? I am not, I think, specially thin-skinned 
 
$6 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 
 
 as to other people s opinions of myself, having, as I conceive, 
 later and fuller intelligence on that point than anybody 
 else can give me. Life is continually weighing us in very 
 sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what 
 his real weight is to the last grain of dust. Whoever at 
 fifty does not rate himself quite as low as most of his 
 acquaintance would be likely to put hira, must be either a 
 fool or a great man, and I humbly disclaim being either. 
 But if I was not smarting in person from any scattering 
 shot of my late companion s commination, why should I 
 grow hot at any implication of my country therein 1 
 {Surely her shoulders are broad enough, if yours or mine 
 are not, to bear up under a considerable avalanche of this 
 kind. It is the bit of truth in every slander, the hint of 
 likeness in every caricature, that makes us smart. " Art 
 thou there, old Truepenny 1 " How did your blade know 
 its way so well to that one loose rivet in our armour ? I 
 wondered whether Americans were over sensitive in this 
 respect, whether they were more touchy than other folks. 
 On the whole, I thought we were not. Plutarch, who at 
 least had studied philosophy, if he had not mastered it, 
 could not stomach something Herodotus had said of 
 Boeotia, and devoted an essay to showing up the delightful 
 old traveller s malice and ill-breeding. French editors 
 leave out of Montaigne s "Travels" some remarks of his 
 about France, for reasons best known to themselves. 
 Pachydermatous Deutschland, covered with trophies from 
 every field of letters, still winces under that question 
 which Pere Bouhours put two centuries ago, Si un Allemand 
 peut etre bel-esprit ? John Bull grew apoplectic with angry 
 amazement at the audacious persiflage of Piickler-Muskau. 
 To be sure, he was a prince but that was not all of it, for 
 a chance phrase of gentle Hawthorne sent a spasm through 
 all the journals of England. Then this tenderness is not 
 peculiar to us ? Console yourself, dear man and brother; 
 whatever you may be sure of, be sure at least of this, that 
 you are dreadfully like other people. Human nature has 
 a much greater genius for sameness than for originality, 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 57 
 
 or the world would be at a sad pass shortly. The 
 surprising thing is that men have such a taste for this 
 somewhat musty flavour, that an Englishman, for example, 
 should feel himself defrauded, nay, even outraged, when he 
 comes over here and finds a people speaking what he 
 admits to be something like English, and yet so very 
 different from (or, as he would say, to) those he left at 
 home. Nothing, I am sure, equals my thankfulness when 
 I meet an Englishman who is not like every other, or, I 
 may add, an American of the same odd turn. 
 
 Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should be as 
 nice about his country as about his sweetheart, and who ever 
 heard even the friendliest appreciation of that unexpressive 
 she that did not seem to fall infinitely short 1 Yet it would 
 hardly be wise to hold every one an enemy who could not 
 see her with our own enchanted eyes. It seems to be 
 the common opinion of foreigners that Americans are too 
 tender upon this point. Perhaps we are ; and if so, there 
 must be a reason for it. Have we had fair play 1 Could 
 the eyes of what is called Good Society (though it is so 
 seldom true either to the adjective or noun) look upon a 
 nation of democrats with any chance of receiving an undis- 
 torted image 1 ? Were not those, moreover, who found in 
 the old order of things an earthly paradise, paying them 
 quarterly dividends for the wisdom of their ancestors, with 
 the punctuality of the seasons, unconsciously bribed to 
 misunderstand if not to misrepresent us ? Whether at war 
 or at peace, there we were, a standing menace to all earthly 
 paradises of that kind, fatal underminers of the very credit 
 on which the dividends were based, all the more hateful and 
 terrible that our destructive agency was so insidious, work 
 ing invisible in the elements, as it seemed, active while they 
 slept, and coming upon them in the darkness like an armed 
 man. Could Laius have the proper feelings of a father 
 towards QEdipus, announced as his destined destroyer by 
 infallible oracles, and felt to be such by every conscious 
 fibre of his soul ? For more than a century the Dutch were 
 the laughing-stock of polite Europe. They were butter- 
 
58 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 
 
 firkins, swillers of beer and schnaps, and their vrouivs, from 
 whom Holbein painted the ail-but loveliest of Madonnas, 
 Rembrandt the graceful girl who sits immortal on his knee 
 in Dresden, and Rubens his abounding goddesses, were the 
 syiionymes of clumsy vulgarity. Even so late as Irving 
 the ships of the greatest navigators in the world were repre 
 sented as sailing equally well stern-foremost. That the 
 aristocratic Venetians should have 
 
 Riveted with gigantic piles 
 Thorough the centre their new-catched miles," 
 
 was heroic. But the far more marvellous achievement of 
 the Dutch in the same kind was ludicrous even to republican 
 Marvell. Meanwhile, during that very century of scorn, 
 they were the best artists, sailors, merchants, bankers, 
 printers, scholars, jurisconsults, and statesmen in Europe, 
 and the genius of Motley has revealed them to us, earning 
 a right to themselves by the most heroic struggle in human 
 annals. But, alas ! they were not merely simple burghers 
 who had fairly made themselves high mightinesses, and 
 could treat on equal terms with anointed kings, but their 
 commonwealth carried in its bosom the germs of democracy. 
 They even unmuzzled, at least after dark, that dreadful 
 mastiff, the Press, whose scent is, or ought to be, so keen 
 for wolves in sheep s clothing and for certain other animals 
 in lions skins. They made fun of sacred majesty, and, 
 what was worse, managed uncommonly well without it. 
 In an age when periwigs made so large a part of the 
 natural dignity of man, people with such a turn of mind 
 were dangerous. How could they seem other than vulgar 
 and hateful ? 
 
 In the natural course of things we succeeded to this unen 
 viable position of general butt. The Dutch had thriven 
 under it pretty well, and there was hope that we could at 
 least contrive to worry along. And we certainly did in a 
 very redoubtable fashion. Perhaps we deserved some of 
 the sarcasm more than our Dutch predecessors in office. 
 We had nothing to boast of in arts or letters, and were 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 59 
 
 given to bragging overmuch of our merely material pros 
 perity, due quite as much to the virtue of our continent 
 as to our own. There was some truth in Carlyle s sneer 
 after all. Till we had succeeded in some higher way than 
 this, we had only the success of physical growth. Our 
 greatness, like that of enormous Russia, was greatness on 
 the map barbarian mass only ; but had we gone down, 
 like that other Atlantis, in some vast cataclysm, we should 
 have covered but a pin s point on the chart of memory, 
 compared with those ideal spaces occupied by tiny Attica 
 and cramped England. At the same time, our critics 
 somewhat too easily forgot that material must make ready 
 the foundation for real triumphs, that the arts have no 
 chance in poor countries. But it must be allowed that 
 democracy stood for a great deal in our shortcoming. The 
 Edinburgh Review never would have thought of asking, 
 " Who reads a Russian book 1 " and England was satisfied 
 with iron from Sweden without being impertinently 
 inquisitive after her painters and statuaries. Was it that 
 they expected too much from the mere miracle of Freedom 1 
 Is it not the highest art of a Republic to make men of 
 flesh and blood, and not to make marble ideals of such 1 It 
 may be fairly doubted whether we have produced this 
 higher type of man yet. Perhaps it is the collective, not 
 the individual, humanity that is to have a chance of nobler 
 development among us. We shall see. We have a vast 
 amount of imported ignorance, and still worse, of native 
 ready-made knowledge, to digest before even the prelim 
 inaries of such a consummation can be arranged. We 
 have got to learn that statesmanship is the most com 
 plicated of all arts, and to come back to the apprenticeship- 
 system too hastily abandoned. At present, we trust a man 
 with making constitutions on less proof of competence than 
 we should demand before we gave him our shoe to patch. 
 We have nearly reached the limit of the reaction from the 
 old notion, which paid too much regard to birth and station 
 as qualifications for office, and have touched the extreme 
 point in the opposite direction, putting the highest of 
 
60 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 
 
 human functions up at auction to be bid for by any 
 creature capable of going upright on two legs. In some 
 places, we have arrived at a point at which civil society is 
 no longer possible, and already another reaction has begun, 
 not backwards to the old system, but towards fitness either 
 from natural aptitude or special training. But will it 
 always be safe to let evils work their own cure by becoming 
 unendurable? Every one of them leaves its taint in the 
 constitution of the body-politic, each in itself, perhaps, 
 trifling, yet altogether powerful for evil. 
 
 But whatever we might do or leave undone, we were not 
 genteel, and it was uncomfortable to be continually 
 reminded that, though we should boast that we were the 
 Great West till we were black in the face, it did not bring 
 us an inch nearer to the world s West-End. That sacred 
 enclosure of respectability was tabooed to us. The Holy 
 Alliance did not inscribe us on its visiting-list. The Old 
 World of wigs and orders and liveries would shop with us, 
 but we must ring at the area-bell, and not venture to 
 awaken the most august clamours of the knocker. Our 
 manners, it must be granted, had none of those graces that 
 stamp the caste of Vere de Yere, in whatever museum of 
 British antiquities they may be hidden. In short, we were 
 vulgar. 
 
 This was one of those horribly vague accusations, the 
 victim of which has no defence. An umbrella is of no 
 avail against a Scotch mist. It envelops you, it penetrates 
 at every pore, it wets you through without seeming to wet 
 you at all. Vulgarity is an eighth deadly sin, added to 
 the list in these latter days, and worse than all the others 
 put together, since it perils your salvation in this world, far 
 the more important of the two in the minds of most men. 
 It profits nothing to draw nice distinctions between 
 essential and conventional, for the convention in this case 
 is the essence, and you may break every command in the 
 decalogue with perfect good-breeding, nay, if you are not 
 adroit, without losing caste. We, indeed, had it not to lose, 
 for we had never gained it. "How am I vulgar?" asks 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 61 
 
 the culprit, shudderingly. " Because thou art not like unto 
 Us," answers Lucifer, Son of the Morning, and there is no 
 more to be said. The god of this world may be a fallen 
 angel, but he has us there ! We were as clean, so far as 
 my observation goes, I think we were cleaner, morally and 
 physically, than the English, and therefore, of course, than 
 anybody else. But we did not pronounce the diphthong ou 
 as they did, and we said eether and not eyther, following 
 therein the fashion of our ancestors, who unhappily could 
 bring over no English better than Shakespeare s ; and we 
 did not stammer as they had learned to do from the 
 courtiers, who in this way nattered the Hanoverian king, a 
 foreigner among the people he had come to reign over. 
 Worse than all, we might have the noblest ideas and the 
 finest sentiments in the world, but we vented them through 
 that organ by which men are led rather than leaders, though 
 some physiologists would persuade us that Nature furnishes 
 her captains with a fine handle to their faces that Oppor 
 tunity may get a good purchase on them for dragging them 
 to the front. 
 
 This state of things was so painful that excellent people 
 were not wanting who gave their whole genius to repro 
 ducing here the original Bull, whether by gaiters, the cut 
 of their whiskers, by a factitious brutality in their tone, or 
 by an accent that was for ever tripping and falling flat over 
 the tangled roots of our common tongue. Martyrs to a 
 false ideal, it never occurred to them that nothing is more 
 hateful to gods and men than a second-rate Englishman, 
 and for the very reason that this planet never produced a 
 more splendid creature than the first-rate one, witness 
 Shakespeare and the Indian Mutiny. Witness that truly 
 sublime self-abnegation of those prisoners lately among the 
 bandits of Greece, where average men gave an example of 
 quiet fortitude for which all the stoicism of antiquity can 
 show no match. If we could contrive to be not too unob 
 trusively our simple selves, we should be the most delightful 
 of human beings, and the most original ; whereas, when 
 the plating of Anglicism rubs off, as it always will in points 
 
62 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 
 
 that come to much wear, we are liable to very unpleasing 
 conjectures about the quality of the metal underneath. 
 Perhaps one reason why the average Briton spreads himself 
 here with such an easy air of superiority may be owing to 
 the fact that he meets with so many bad imitations as to 
 conclude himself the only real thing in a wilderness of 
 shams. He fancies himself moving through an endless 
 Bloom sbury, where his mere apparition confers honour as 
 an avatar of the court-end of the universe. Not a Bull of 
 them all but is persuaded he bears Europa upon his back. 
 This is the sort of fellow whose patronage is so divertingly 
 insufferable. Thank heaven, he is not the only specimen of 
 cater-cousinship from the dear old mother island that is 
 shown to us ! Among genuine things, I know nothing 
 more genuine than the better men whose limbs were made 
 in England. So manly-tender, so brave, so true, so war 
 ranted to wear, they make us proud to feel that blood is 
 thicker than water. 
 
 But it is not merely the Englishman ; every European 
 candidly admits in himself some right of primogeniture in 
 respect to us, and pats this shaggy continent on the back 
 with a lively sense of generous unbending. The German 
 who plays the bass-viol has a well-founded contempt, which 
 he is not always nice in concealing, for a country so few of 
 whose children ever take that noble instrument between 
 their knees. His cousin, the Ph.D. from Gottingen, cannot 
 help despising a people who do not grow loud and red over 
 Aryans and Turanians, and are indifferent about their 
 descent from either. The Frenchman feels an easy mastery 
 in speaking his mother tongue, and attributes it to some 
 native superiority of parts that lifts him high above us bar 
 barians of the West. The Italian prima donna sweeps a 
 courtesy of careless pity to the over-facile pit which unsexes 
 her with the bravo ! innocently meant to show a familiarity 
 with foreign usage. But all without exception make no 
 secret of regarding us as the goose bound to deliver them a 
 golden egg in return for their cackle. Such men as Agassiz, 
 Guyot, and Goldwin Smith come with gifts in their hands ; 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 63 
 
 but since it is commonly European failures who bring hither 
 their remarkable gifts and acquirements, this view of the 
 case is sometimes just the least bit in the world provoking. 
 To think what a delicious seclusion of contempt we enjoyed 
 till California and our own ostentatious parvenus, flinging 
 gold away in Europe that might have endowed libraries at 
 home, gave us the ill repute of riches ! What a shabby 
 downfall from the Arcadia which the French officers of our 
 Revolutionary War fancied they saw here through Rousseau- 
 tinted spectacles ! Something of Arcadia there really was, 
 something of the Old Age ; and that divine provincialism 
 were cheaply repurchased could we have it back again in 
 exchange for the tawdry upholstery that has taken its 
 place. 
 
 For some reason or other, the European has rarely been 
 able to see America except in caricature. Would the first 
 Review of the world have printed the niaiseries of Mr. 
 Maurice Sand as a picture of society in any civilised coun 
 try 1 Mr. Sand, to be sure, has inherited nothing of his 
 famous mother s literary outfit, except the pseudonyme. 
 But since the conductors of the Revue could not have pub 
 lished his story because it was clever, they must have 
 thought it valuable for its truth. As true as the last cen 
 tury Englishman s picture of Jean Orapaud ! We do not 
 ask to be sprinkled with rose-water, but may perhaps fairly 
 protest against being drenched with the rinsings of an 
 unclean imagination. The next time the Revue allows such 
 ill-bred persons to throw their slops out of its first-floor 
 windows, let it honestly preface the discharge with a gare 
 de I eau/ that we may run from under in season. And 
 Mr. Duvergier d Hauranne, who knows how to be enter 
 taining ! I know le Francois est plutot indiscret que confiant, 
 and the pen slides too easily when indiscretions will fetch so 
 much a page ; but should we not have been tant-soit-peu 
 more cautious had we been writing about people on the 
 other side of the Channel ? But then it is a fact in the 
 natural history of the American long familiar to Europeans, 
 that he abhors privacy, knows not the meaning of reserve, 
 
64 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 
 
 lives in hotels because of their greater publicity, and is 
 never so pleased as when his domestic affairs (if he may be 
 said to have any) are paraded in the newspapers. Barnum, 
 it is well known, represents perfectly the average national 
 sentiment in this respect. However it be, we are not 
 treated like other people, or perhaps I should say like 
 people who are ever likely to be met with in society. 
 
 Is it in the climate? Either I have a false notion of 
 European manners, or else the atmosphere affects them 
 strangely when exported hither. Perhaps they suffer from 
 the sea- voyage like some of the more delicate wines. 
 During our Civil War an English gentleman of the highest 
 description was kind enough to call upon me, mainly, as it 
 seemed, to inform me how entirely he sympathised with the 
 Confederates, and how sure he felt that we could never 
 subdue them, " they were the gentlemen of the country, 
 you know." Another, the first greetings hardly over, asked 
 me how I accounted for the universal rneagreness of my 
 countrymen. To a thinner man than I, or from a stouter 
 man than he, the question might have been offensive. The 
 Marquis of Hartington* wore a secession badge at a public 
 ball in New York. In a civilised country, he might have 
 been roughly handled ; but here, where the bienseances are 
 not so well understood, of course nobody minded it. A 
 French traveller told me he had been a good deal in the 
 British colonies, and had been astonished to see how 
 soon the people became Americanised. He added, with 
 delightful bonhomie, and as if he were sure it would 
 charm me, that " they even began to talk through their 
 noses, just like you ! " I was naturally ravished with this 
 testimony to the assimilating power of democracy, and 
 could only reply that I hoped they would never adopt our 
 
 * One of Mr. Lincoln s neatest strokes of humour was his treatment 
 of this gentleman when a laudable curiosity induced him to be 
 presented to the President of the Broken Bubble. Mr. Lincoln 
 persisted in calling him Mr. Partington. Surely the refinement of 
 good-breeding could go no further. Giving the young man his real 
 name (already notorious in the newspapers) would have made his visit 
 an insult. Had Henri IV. done this, it would have been famous. 
 
CONDES CESSION IN FOREIGNERS. 6 5 
 
 democratic patent-method of seeming to settle one s honest 
 debts, for they would find it paying through the nose in the 
 long run. I am a man of the New World, and do not 
 know precisely the present fashion of May Fair, but I 
 have a kind of feeling that if an American (mutato 
 nomine, de te is always frightfully possible) were to do 
 this kind of thing under a European roof, it would induce 
 some disagreeable reflections as to the ethical results of 
 democracy. I read the other day in print the remark of 
 a British tourist who had eaten large quantities of our salt, 
 such as it is (I grant it has not the European savour), that 
 the Americans were hospitable, no doubt, but that it was 
 partly because they longed for foreign visitors to relieve 
 the tedium of their dead-level existence, and partly from 
 ostentation. What shall we do ? Shall we close our 
 doors ? Not I, for one, if I should so have forfeited the 
 friendship of L. S., most lovable of men. He somehow 
 seems to find us human at least, and so did Clough, whose 
 poetry will one of these days, perhaps, be found to have 
 been the best utterance in verse of this generation. And 
 T. H., the mere grasp of whose manly hand carries with it 
 the pledge of frankness and friendship, of an abiding 
 simplicity of nature as affecting as it is rare ! 
 
 The fine old Tory aversion of former times was not hard 
 to bear. There was something even refreshing in it, as in 
 a north-easter to a hardy temperament. When a British 
 parson, travelling in Newfoundland while the slash of our 
 separation was still raw, after prophesying a glorious future 
 for an island that continued to dry its fish under the aegis of 
 Saint George, glances disdainfully over his spectacles in 
 parting at the U, S. A., and forebodes for them a " speedy 
 relapse into barbarism," now that they have madly cut 
 themselves off from the humanising influences of Britain, I 
 smile with barbarian self-conceit. But this kind of thing 
 became by degrees an unpleasant anachronism. For mean 
 while the young giant was growing, was beginning indeed 
 to feel tight in his clothes, was obliged to let in a gore here 
 and there in Texas, in California, in New Mexico, in 
 
 133 
 
66 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 
 
 Alaska, and had the scissors and needle and thread ready 
 for Canada when the time came. His shadow loomed like 
 a broken-spectre over against Europe, the shadow of what 
 they were coming to, that was the unpleasant part of it. 
 Even in such misty image as they had of him, it was pain 
 fully evident that his clothes were not of any cut hitherto 
 fashionable, nor conceivable by a Bond Street tailor ; and 
 this in an age, too, when everything depends upon clothes ; 
 when, if we do not keep up appearances, the seeming solid- 
 frame of this universe, nay, your very God, would slump 
 into himself, like a mockery king of snow, being nothing, 
 after all, but a prevailing mode. From this moment the 
 young giant assumed the respectable aspect of a phe 
 nomenon, to be got rid of if possible, but at any rate as 
 legitimate a subject of human study as the glacial period or 
 the silurian what-d ye-call-ems. If the man of the primeval 
 drift-heaps is so absorbingly interesting, why not the man 
 of the drift that is just beginning, of the drift into whose 
 irresistible current we are just being sucked whether we 
 will or no? If I were in their place, I confess I should 
 not be frightened. Man has survived so much, and con 
 trived to be comfortable on this planet after surviving so 
 much ! I am something of a Protestant in matters of 
 government also, and am willing to get rid of vestments 
 and ceremonies and to come down to bare benches, if only 
 faith in God take the place of a general agreement to pro 
 fess confidence in ritual and sham. Every mortal man of 
 us holds stock in the only public debt that is absolutely 
 sure of payment, and that is the debt of the Maker of this 
 Universe to the Universe he has made. I have no notion 
 of selling out my stock in a panic. 
 
 It was something to have advanced even to the dignity 
 of a phenomenon, and yet I do not know that the relation 
 of the individual American to the individual European was 
 bettered by it ; and that, after all, must adjust itself com 
 fortably before there can be a right understanding between 
 the two. We had been a desert, we became a museum. 
 People came hither for scientific and not social ends. The 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 67 
 
 very cockney could not complete his education without 
 taking a vacant stare at us in passing. But the sociologists 
 (I think they call themselves so) were the hardest to bear. 
 There was no escape. I have even known a professor of 
 this fearful science to come disguised in petticoats. We 
 were cross-examined as a chemist cross-examines a new 
 substance. Human ! yes, all the elements are present, 
 though abnormally combined. Civilised 3 Hm! that needs 
 a stricter assay. No entomologist could take a more 
 friendly interest in a strange bug. After a few such 
 experiences, I, for one, have felt as if I were merely one of 
 those horrid things preserved in spirits (and very bad 
 spirits, too) in a cabinet. I was not the fellow-being of 
 these explorers ; I was a curiosity ; I was a specimen. 
 Hath not an American organs, dimensions, senses, affections, 
 passions even as a European hath 1 If you prick us, do we 
 not bleed 1 If you tickle us, do we not laugh ? I will not 
 keep on with Shylock to his next question but one. 
 
 Till after our Civil War it never seemed to enter the 
 head of any foreigner, especially of any Englishman, that 
 an American had what could be called a country, except as 
 a place to eat, sleep, and trade in. Then it seemed to 
 strike them suddenly. " By Jove, you know, fellahs don t 
 fight like that for a shop-till ! " Ko, I rather think not. 
 To Americans America is something more than a promise 
 and an expectation. It has a past and traditions of its 
 own. A descent from men who sacrificed everything and 
 came hither, not to better their fortunes, but to plant their 
 idea in virgin soil, should be a good pedigree. There was 
 never colony save this that went forth, not to seek gold, 
 but God. Is it not as well to have sprung from such as 
 these as from some burly beggar who came over with 
 Wilhelmus Conquestor, unless, indeed, a line grow better 
 as it runs farther away from stalwart ancestors 1 And for 
 history, it is dry enough, no doubt, in the books, but, for 
 all that, is of a kind that tells in the blood. I have 
 admitted that Carlyle s sneer had a show of truth in it. 
 But what does he himself, like a true Scot, admire in the 
 
68 CONDESCENSION IN FORE IGNERS. 
 
 Hohenzollerns 1 First of all, that they were canny, a 
 thrifty, forehanded race. Next, that they made a good 
 fight from generation to generation with the chaos around 
 them. That is precisely the battle which the English race 
 on this continent has been carrying doughtily on for two 
 centuries and a-half. Doughtily and silently, for you can 
 not hear in Europe " that crash, the death-song of the per 
 fect tree," that has been going on here from sturdy father 
 to sturdy son, and making this continent habitable for the 
 weaker Old World breed that has swarmed to it during the 
 last half-century. If ever men did a good stroke of work 
 on this planet, it was the forefathers of those whom you are 
 wondering whether it would not be prudent to acknowledge 
 as far-off cousins. Alas ! man of genius, to whom we owe 
 so much, could you see nothing more than the burning of a 
 foul chimney in that clash of Michael and Satan which 
 flamed up under your very eyes 1 
 
 Before our war we were to Europe but a huge mob of 
 adventurers and shopkeepers. Leigh Hunt expressed it 
 well enough when he said that ho could never think of 
 America without seeing a gigantic counter stretched all 
 along the seaboard. Feudalism had by degrees made com 
 merce, the great civiliser, contemptible. But a tradesman 
 with sword on thigh and very prompt of stroke was not 
 only redoubtable, he had become respectable also. Few 
 people, I suspect, alluded twice to a needle in Sir John 
 Hawkwood s presence, after that doughty tighter had ex 
 changed it for a more dangerous tool of the same metal. 
 Democracy had been hitherto only a ludicrous effort to 
 reverse the laws of nature by thrusting Cleon into the 
 place of Pericles. But a democracy that could light for 
 an abstraction, whose members held life and goods cheap 
 compared with the larger life which we call country, was 
 not merely unheard-of, but portentous. It was the night 
 mare of the Old World taking upon itself flesh and blood, 
 turning out to be substance and not drearn. Since the 
 Norman crusader clanged down upon the throne of the 
 porphyro-geniti, carefully-draped appearances had never 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 69 
 
 received such a shock, had never been so rudely called on 
 to produce their titles to the empire of the world. 
 Authority has had its periods not unlike those of geology, 
 and at last comes Man claiming kingship in right of his 
 mere manhood. The world of the Saurians might be in 
 some respects more picturesque, but the march of events is 
 inexorable, and it is bygone. 
 
 The young giant had certainly got out of long-clothes. 
 He had become the enfant terrible of the human household. 
 It was not and will not be easy for the world (especially 
 for our British cousins) to look upon us as grown up. The 
 youngest of nations, its people must also be young and to 
 to be treated accordingly, was the syllogism as if libraries 
 did not make all nations equally old in all those respects, 
 at least, where age is an advantage and not a defect. 
 Youth, no doubt, has its good qualities, as people feel who 
 are losing it ; but boyishness is another thing. We had 
 been somewhat boyish as a nation, a little loud, a little 
 pushing, a little braggart. But might it not partly have 
 been because we felt that we had certain claims to respect 
 that were not admitted 1 The war which established our 
 position as a vigorous nationality has also sobered us. A 
 nation, like a man, cannot look death in the eyes for four 
 years, without some strange reflections, without arriving at 
 some clearer consciousness of the stuff it is made of, with 
 out some great moral change. Such a change, or the 
 beginning of it, no observant person can fail to see here. 
 Our thought and our politics, our bearing as a people, are 
 assuming a manlier tone. We have been compelled to see 
 what was weak in democracy as well as what was strong. 
 We have begun obscurely to recognise that things do not 
 go of themselves, and that popular government is not in 
 itself a panacea, is no better than any other form except 
 as the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so, and 
 that when men undertake to do their own kingship, they 
 enter upon the dangers and responsibilities as well as the 
 privileges of the function. Above all, it looks as if we 
 were on the way to be persuaded that no government can 
 
70 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 
 
 be carried on by declamation. It is noticeable also that 
 facility of communication has made the best English and 
 French thought far more directly operative here than ever 
 before. Without being Europeanised, our discussion of 
 important questions in statesmanship, political economy, 
 in aesthetics, is taking a broader scope and a higher tone. It 
 had certainly been provincial, one might almost say local, 
 to a very unpleasant extent. Perhaps our experience 
 in soldiership has taught us to value training more than 
 we have been popularly wont. We may possibly come to 
 the conclusion, one of these days, that self-made men may 
 not be always equally skilful in the manufacture of 
 wisdom, may not be divinely commissioned to fabricate the 
 higher qualities of opinion on all possible topics of human 
 interest. 
 
 So long as we continue to be the most common-schooled 
 and the least cultivated people in the world, I suppose we 
 must consent to endure this condescending manner of 
 foreigners toward us. The more friendly they mean to be 
 the more ludicrously prominent it becomes. They can 
 never appreciate the immense amount of silent work that 
 has been done here, making this continent slowly fit for the 
 abode of man, and which will demonstrate itself, let us 
 hope, in the character of the people. Outsiders can only 
 be expected to judge a nation by the amount it has con 
 tributed to the civilisation of the world ; the amount, that 
 is, that can be seen and handled. A great place in history 
 can only be achieved by competitive examinations, nay, by 
 a long course of them. How much new thought have we 
 contributed to the common stock 1 Till that question can 
 be triumphantly answered, or needs no answer, we must 
 continue to be simply interesting as an experiment, to be 
 studied as a problem, and not respected as an attained 
 result or an accomplished solution. Perhaps, as I have 
 hinted, their patronising manner toward us is the fair 
 result of their failing to see here anything more than a poor 
 imitation, a plaster-cast of Europe. And are they not partly 
 right 1 If the tone of the uncultivated American has too 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 71 
 
 often the arrogance of the barbarian, is not that of the 
 cultivated as often vulgarly apologetic ? In the America 
 they meet with is there the simplicity, the manliness, the 
 absence of sham, the sincere human nature, the sensitive 
 ness to duty and implied obligation, that in any way 
 distinguishes us from what our orators call " the effete 
 civilisation of the Old World 1 " Is there a politician among 
 us daring enough (except a Dana here and there) to risk his 
 future on the chance of our keeping our word with the 
 exactness of superstitious communities like England ? Is 
 it certain that we shall be ashamed of a bankruptcy of 
 honour, if we can only keep the letter of our bond 1 ? I 
 hope we shall be able to answer all these questions with a 
 frank yes. At any rate, we would advise our visitors that 
 we are not merely curious creatures, but belong to the 
 family of man, and that, as individuals, we are not to be 
 always subjected to the competitive examination above-men 
 tioned, even if we acknowledged their competence as an 
 examining board. Above all, we beg them to remember 
 that America is not to us, as to them, a mere object of 
 external interest to be discussed and analysed, but in us, 
 part of our very marrow. Let them not suppose that we 
 conceive of ourselves as exiles from the graces and amenities 
 of an older date than we, though very much at home in a 
 state of things not yet all it might be or should be but 
 which we mean to make so, and which we find both whole 
 some and pleasant for men. (though perhaps not for 
 dilettanti) to live in. "The full tide of human existence" 
 may be felt here as keenly as Johnson felt it at Charing 
 Cross, and in a larger sense. I know one person who is 
 singular enough to think Cambridge the very best spot on 
 the habitable globe. " Doubtless God could have made 
 a better, but doubtless he never did." 
 
 It will take England a great while to get over her airs of 
 patronage toward us, or even passably to conceal them. 
 She cannot help confounding the people with the country, 
 and regarding us as lusty juveniles. She has a conviction 
 that whatever good there is in us is wholly English, when the 
 
72 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 
 
 truth is that we are worth nothing except so far as \ve have 
 disinfected ourselves of Anglicism. She is especially con 
 descending just now, and lavishes sugar-plums on us as if 
 we had not outgrown them. I am no believer in sudden 
 conversions, especially in sudden conversions to a favourable 
 opinion of people who have just proved you to be mistaken 
 in judgment, and therefore unwise in policy. I never 
 blamed her for not wishing well to democracy, how should 
 she? but Alabamas are not wishes. Let her not be too 
 hasty in believing Mr. Reverdy Johnson s pleasant words. 
 Though there is no thoughtful man in America who would 
 not consider a war with England the greatest of calamities, 
 yet the feeling towards her here is very far from being 
 cordial, whatever our minister may say in the effusion 
 that comes after ample dining. Mr. Adams, with his 
 famous " My lord, this means war," perfectly represented 
 his country. Justly or not, we have a feeling that 
 we have been wronged, not merely insulted. The only 
 sure way of bringing about a healthy relation between the 
 two countries, is for Englishmen to clear their minds of the 
 notion that we are always to be treated as a kind of 
 inferior and deported Englishman whose nature they per 
 fectly understand, and whose back they accordingly stroke 
 the wrong way of the fur with amazing perseverance. 
 Let them learn to treat us naturally on our merits as 
 human beings, as they would a German or a Frenchman, 
 and not as if we were a kind of counterfeit Briton whose 
 crime appeared in every shade of difference, and before long 
 there would come that right feeling which we naturally 
 call a good understanding. The common blood, and still 
 more the common language, are fatal instruments of 
 misapprehension. Let them give up trying to understand 
 us, still more thinking that they do, and acting in various 
 absurd ways as the necessary consequence, for they will 
 never arrive at that devoutly-to-be-wished consummation, 
 till they learn to look at us as we are and not as they 
 suppose us to be. Dear old long-estranged mother-in-law, 
 it is a great many years since we parted. Since 1660, 
 
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 73 
 
 when you married again, you have been a step-mother to 
 us. Put on your spectacles, dear madam. Yes, we have 
 grown, and changed likewise. You would not let us 
 darken your doors if you could help it. We know that 
 perfectly well. But pray, when we look to be treated as 
 men, don t shake that rattle in our faces, nor talk baby to 
 us any longer. 
 
 " Do, child, go to it grandam, child ; 
 Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will 
 Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig ! " 
 
 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER* 
 
 IT is the misfortune of American biography that it must 
 needs be more or less provincial, and that, contrary to what 
 might have been predicted, this quality in it predominates 
 in proportion as the country grows larger. Wanting any 
 great and acknowledged centre of national life and thought, 
 our expansion has hitherto been rather aggregation than 
 growth ; reputations must be hammered out thin to cover 
 so wide a surface, and the substance of most hardly holds 
 out to the boundaries of a single state. Our very history 
 wants unity, and down to the Revolution the attention is 
 wearied and confused by having to divide itself among 
 thirteen parallel threads, instead of being concentred 011 
 a single clue. A sense of remoteness and seclusion comes 
 over us as we read, and we cannot help asking ourselves, 
 " Were not these things done in a corner ?" Notoriety may 
 be achieved in a narrow sphere, but fame demands for its 
 evidence a more distant and prolonged reverberation. To 
 the world at large we were but a short column of figures in 
 the corner of a blue-book, New England exporting so much 
 salt fish, timber, and Medford rum, Virginia so many 
 hogsheads of tobacco, and buying with the proceeds a 
 certain amount of English manufactures. The story of 
 * The Life of Josiah Quincy by his son. 
 
74 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 
 
 our early colonisation had a certain moral interest, to be 
 sure, but was altogether inferior in picturesque fascination 
 to that of Mexico or Peru. The lives of our worthies, like 
 that of our nation, are bare of those foregone and far- 
 reaching associations with names, the divining-rods of 
 fancy, which the soldiers and civilians of the Old World 
 get for nothing by the mere accident of birth. Their 
 historians and biographers have succeeded to the good-will, 
 as well as to the long-established stand, of the shop of 
 glory. Time is, after all, the greatest of poets, and the 
 sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs 
 of Fame. The philosophic poet may find a proud solace 
 in saying, 
 
 " Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante 
 Trita solo ; " 
 
 but all the while he has the splendid centuries of Greece 
 and Rome behind him, and can begin his poem with 
 invoking a goddess from whom legend derived the planter 
 of his race. His eyes looked out on a landscape saturated 
 with glorious recollections ; he had seen Caesar, and heard 
 Cicero. But who shall conjure with Saugus or Cato Four 
 Corners, with Israel Putnam or Return Jonathan Meigs ? 
 We have been transplanted, and for us the long hierarchical 
 succession of history is broken. The Past has not laid its 
 venerable hands upon us in consecration, conveying to us 
 that mysterious influence whose force is in its continuity. 
 We are to Europe as the Church of England to her of 
 Rome. The latter old lady may be the Scarlet Woman, or 
 the Beast with ten horns, if you will ; but hers are all the 
 heirlooms, hers that vast spiritual estate of tradition, 
 nowhere yet everywhere, whose revenues are none the 
 less fruitful for being levied on the imagination. We 
 may claim that England s history is also ours, but it is a 
 dejure, and not a de facto property that we have in it, 
 something that may be proved indeed, yet is a merely 
 intellectual satisfaction, and does not savour of the reality. 
 Have we not seen the mockery crown and sceptre of the 
 exiled Stuarts in St. Peter s 1 the medal struck so lately as 
 
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 75 
 
 1784 with its legend, HEN IX. MAG BRIT ET HIB REX, 
 whose contractions but faintly typify the scantness of 
 the fact ? 
 
 As the novelist complains that our society wants that 
 sharp contrast of character and costume which comes of 
 caste, so in the narrative of our historians we miss what 
 may be called background and perspective, as if the events 
 and the actors in them failed of that cumulative interest 
 which only a long historical entail can give. Relatively, 
 the crusade of Sir William Pepperell was of more conse 
 quence than that of St. Louis, and yet forgive us, injured 
 shade of the second American baronet, if we find the 
 narrative of Joinville more interesting than your despatches 
 to Governor Shirley. Relatively, the insurrection of that 
 Daniel whose Irish patronymic Shea was euphonised into 
 Shays, as a set-off for the debasing of French chaise into 
 shay, was more dangerous than that of Charles Edward ; 
 but for some reason or other (as vice sometimes has the 
 advantage of virtue) the latter is more enticing to the 
 imagination, and the least authentic relic of it in song or 
 story has a relish denied to the painful industry of Minot. 
 Our events seem to fall short of that colossal proportion 
 which befits the monumental style. Look grave as we will, 
 there is something ludicrous in Counsellor Keane s pig being 
 the pivot of a revolution. We are of yesterday, and it is to 
 no purpose that our political augurs divine from the flight of 
 our eagles that to-morrow shall be ours, and flatter us with 
 an all-hail hereafter. Things do really gain in greatness by 
 being acted on a great and cosmopolitan stage, because 
 there is inspiration in the thronged audience, and the 
 nearer match that puts men on their mettle. Webster was 
 more largely endowed by nature than Fox, and Fisher 
 Ames not much below Burke as a talker ; but what a 
 difference in the intellectual training, in the literary culture 
 and associations, in the whole social outfit, of the men who 
 were their antagonists and companions ! It should seem 
 that, if it be collision with other minds and with events 
 that strikes or draws the fire from a man, then the quality 
 
76 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 
 
 of those might have something to do with the quality of 
 the fire whether it shall be culinary or electric. We have 
 never known the varied stimulus, the inexorable criticism, 
 the many-sided opportunity of a great metropolis, the 
 inspiring reinforcement of an undivided national conscious 
 ness. In everything but trade we have missed the invigora- 
 tion of foreign rivalry. We may prove that we are this 
 and that and the other our Fourth of July orators have 
 proved it time and again the census has proved it ; but 
 the Muses are women, and have no great fancy for statistics, 
 though easily silenced by them. We are great, we are rich, 
 we are all kinds of good things ; but did it never occur to 
 you. that somehow we are not interesting, except as a 
 phenomenon ? It may safely be affirmed that for one 
 cultivated man in this country who studies American, 
 there are fifty who study European history, ancient or 
 modern. 
 
 Till within a year or two we have been as distant and 
 obscure to the eyes of Europe as Ecuador to our own. 
 Every day brings us nearer, enables us to see the Old 
 World more clearly, and by inevitable comparison to judge 
 ourselves with some closer approach to our real value. This 
 has its advantage so long as our culture is, as for a long 
 time it must be, European; for we shall be little better 
 than apes and parrots till we are forced to measure our 
 muscle with the trained and practised champions of that 
 elder civilisation. We have at length established our claim 
 to the noblesse of the sword, the first step still of every 
 nation that would make its entry into the best society of 
 history. To maintain ourselves there, we must achieve an 
 equality in the more exclusive circle of culture, and to that 
 end must submit ourselves to the European standard of 
 intellectual weights and measures. That we have made the 
 hitherto biggest gun might excite apprehension (were there 
 a dearth of iron), but can never exact respect. That our 
 pianos and patent reapers have won medals does but con 
 firm us in our mechanic and material measure of merit. We 
 must contribute something more than mere contrivances 
 
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 77 
 
 for the saving of labour, which we have been only too 
 ready to misapply in the domain of thought and the higher 
 kinds of invention. In those Olympic games where nations 
 contend for truly immortal wreaths, it may well be 
 questioned whether a mowing-machine would stand much 
 chance in the chariot-races whether a piano, though made 
 by a chevalier, could compete successfully for the prize of 
 music. 
 
 We shall have to be content for a good while yet with 
 our provincialism, and must strive to make the best of it. 
 In it lies the germ of nationality, and that is, after all, the 
 prime condition of all thoroughbred greatness of character. 
 To this choicest fruit of a healthy life, well rooted in native 
 soil, and drawing prosperous juices thence, nationality gives 
 the keenest flavour. Mr. Lincoln was an original man, and 
 in so far a great man ; yet it was the Americanism of his 
 every thought, word, and act which not only made his 
 influence equally at home in East and West, but drew the 
 eyes of the outside world, and was the pedestal that lifted 
 him where he could be seen by them. Lincoln showed that 
 native force may transcend local boundaries, but the growth 
 of such nationality is hindered and hampered by our 
 division into so many half-independent communities, each 
 with its objects of county ambition, and its public men 
 great to the borders of their district. In this way our 
 standard of greatness is insensibly debased. To receive any 
 national appointment, a man must have gone through 
 precisely the worst training for it ; he must have so far 
 narrowed and belittled himself with State politics as to be 
 acceptable at home. In this way a man may become 
 chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs because he 
 knows how to pack a caucus in Catawarapus County, or be 
 sent ambassador to Barataria because he has drunk bad 
 whiskey with every voter in Wildcat City. Should \ve 
 ever attain to a conscious nationality, it will have the 
 advantage of lessening the number of our great men, and 
 widening our appreciation to the larger scale of the two or 
 three that are left if there should be so many. Meanwhile 
 
78 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 
 
 we offer a premium to the production of great men in a 
 small way, by inviting each State to set up the statues of 
 two of its immortals in the Capitol. What a niggardly 
 percentage ! Already we are embarrassed, not to find the 
 two, but to choose among the crowd of candidates. Well, 
 seventy odd heroes in about as many years is pretty well 
 for a young nation. We do not envy most of them their 
 eternal martyrdom in marble, their pillory of indiscrimina 
 tion. We fancy even native tourists pausing before the 
 greater part of the effigies, and, after reading the names, 
 asking desperately, " Who was he ? " Nay, if they should 
 say, " Who the devil was he ? " it were a pardonable 
 invocation, for none so fit as the Prince of Darkness to act 
 as cicerone among such palpable obscurities. We recall the 
 court-yard of the Ufnzj at Florence. That also is not free 
 of parish celebrities; but Dante, Galileo, Michael Angelo, 
 Macchiavelli shall the inventor of the sewing machine, 
 even with the button-holing improvement, let us say, match 
 with these, or with far lesser than these ? Perhaps he was 
 more practically useful than any one of these, or all of them 
 together, but the soul is sensible of a sad difference some 
 where. These also were citizens of a provincial capital ; so 
 were the greater part of Plutarch s heroes. Did they have 
 a better chance than we moderns than we Americans? 
 At any rate they have the start of us, and we must confess 
 that 
 
 By bed and table they lord it o er us, 
 Our elder brothers, but one in blood." 
 
 Yes, one in blood ; that is the hardest part of it. Is our 
 provincialism then in some great measure due to our 
 absorption in the practical, as we politely call it, meanin^ 
 the material to our habit of estimating greatness by the 
 square mile and the hundredweight ? Even during our war, 
 in the midst of that almost unrivalled stress of soul, were 
 not our speakers and newspapers so enslaved to the vulgar 
 habit as to boast ten times of the thousands of square miles 
 it covered with armed men, for once that they alluded to 
 
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 79 
 
 the motive that gave it all its meaning and its splendour ? 
 Perhaps it was as well that they did not exploit that passion 
 of patriotism as an advertisement in the style of Barnum or 
 Perham. " I scale one hundred and eighty pounds, but 
 when I m mad I weigh two ton," said the Kentuckian, with 
 a true notion of moral avoirdupois. That ideal kind of 
 weight is wonderfully increased by a national feeling, 
 whereby one man is conscious that thirty millions of men 
 go into the balance with him. The Roman in ancient, and 
 the Englishman in modern times, have been most conscious 
 of this representative solidity, and wherever one of them 
 went there stood Rome or England in his shoes. We have 
 made some advance in the right direction. Our civil war, 
 by the breadth of its proportions and the implacability of 
 its demands, forced us to admit a truer valuation, and gave 
 us ; in our own despite, great soldiers and sailors, allowed 
 for such by all the world. The harder problems it 
 has left behind may in time compel us to have great 
 statesmen, with views capable of reaching beyond the 
 next election. The criticism of Europe alone can 
 rescue us from the provincialism of an over or false 
 estimate of ourselves. Let us be thankful, and not angry, 
 that we must accept it as our touchstone. Our stamp has 
 so often been impressed upon base metal, that we cannot 
 expect it to be taken on trust, but we may be sure that true 
 gold will be equally persuasive the world over. Real 
 manhood and honest achievement are nowhere provincial, 
 but enter the select society of all time on an even footing. 
 
 Spanish America might be a good glass for us to look 
 into. Those Catharine-wheel republics, always in revolu 
 tion while the powder lasts, and sure to burn the fingers of 
 whoever attempts intervention, have also their great men, 
 as placidly ignored by us as our own by jealous Europe. 
 The following passage from the life of Don Simon Bolivar 
 might allay many motus animorum, if rightly pondered. 
 Bolivar, then a youth, was travelling in Italy, and his 
 biographer tells us that, " near Castiglione he was present 
 at the grand review made by Napoleon of the columns 
 
So A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 
 
 defiling into the plain large enough to contain sixty thou 
 sand men. The throne was situated on an eminence that 
 overlooked the plain, and Napoleon on several occasions 
 looked through a glass at Bolivar and his companions, who 
 were at the base of the hill. The hero Ca3sar could not 
 imagine he beheld the liberator of the world of Columbus ! " 
 And small blame to him, one would say. We are not, 
 then, it seems, the only foundling of Columbus, as we are 
 so apt to take for granted. The great Genoese did not, as 
 we supposed, draw that first star-guided furrow across the 
 vague of waters with a single eye to the future greatness of 
 the United States. And have we not sometimes, like the 
 enthusiastic biographer, fancied the Old World staring 
 through all its telescopes at us, and wondered that it did 
 not recognise in us what we were fully persuaded we were 
 going to be and do 1 
 
 Oar American life is dreadfully barren of those elements 
 of the social picturesque which give piquancy to anecdote. 
 And without anecdote, what is biography, or even history, 
 which is only biography on a larger scale ? Clio, though 
 she takes airs on herself, and pretend to be " philosophy 
 teaching by example," is, after all, but a gossip who has 
 borrowed Fame s speaking-trumpet, and should be figured 
 with a tea-cup instead of a scroll in her hand. How much 
 has she not owed of late to the tittle-tattle of her gillflirt 
 sister Thalia ? In what gutters has not Macaulay raked 
 for the brilliant bits with which he has put together his 
 admirable mosaic picture of England under the last two 
 Stuarts 1 Even Mommsen himself, who dislikes Plutarch s 
 method as much as Montaigne loved it, cannot get or give a 
 lively notion of ancient Rome, without running to the 
 comic poets and the anecdote-mongers. He gives us the 
 very beef-tea of history, nourishing and even palatable 
 enough, excellently portable for a memory that must carry 
 her own packs, and can afford little luggage ; but for our 
 own part, we prefer a full, old-fashioned meal, with its side- 
 dishes of spicy gossip, and its last relish, the Stilton of scan 
 dal, so it be not too high. One volume of contemporary 
 
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 81 
 
 memoirs, stuffed though it be with lies (for lies to be 
 good for anything must have a potential probability, must 
 even be true so far as their moral and social setting is 
 concerned) will throw more light into the dark backward of 
 time than the gravest Camden or Thuanus. If St. Simon is 
 not accurate, is he any the less essentially true? No 
 history gives us so clear an understanding of the moral 
 condition of average men after the restoration of the 
 Stuarts as the unconscious blabbings of the Puritan tailor s 
 son, with his two consciences, as it were an inward, still 
 sensitive in spots, though mostly toughened to India- 
 rubber, and good rather for rubbing out old scores than 
 retaining them, and an outward, alert, and termagantly 
 effective in Mrs. Pepys. But we can have no St. Simons 
 or Pepyses till we have a Paris or London to delocalise our 
 gossip and give it historic breadth. All our capitals are 
 fractional, merely greater or smaller gatherings of men, 
 centres of business rather than of action or influence. 
 Each contains so many souls, but is not, as the word 
 " capital " implies, the true head of a community and seat 
 of its common soul. 
 
 Has not life itself perhaps become a little more prosaic 
 than it once was ? As the clearing away of the woods 
 scants the streams, may not our civilisation have dried 
 up some feeders that helped to swell the current of 
 individual and personal force? We have sometimes 
 thought that the stricter definition and consequent 
 seclusion from each other of the different callings in 
 modern times, as it narrowed the chance of developing and 
 giving variety to character, lessened also the interest of 
 biography. Formerly arts and arms were not divided by 
 so impassable a barrier as now. There was hardly such a 
 thing as a pekin. Caesar gets up from writing his Latin 
 Grammar to conquer Gaul, change the course of history, 
 and make so many things possible among the rest our 
 English language and Shakespeare. Horace had been a 
 colonel ; and from ^schylus, who fought at Marathon, to 
 Ben Jonson, who trailed a pike in the Low Countries, the 
 
 134 
 
82 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 
 
 list of martial civilians is a long one. A man s education 
 seems more complete who has smelt hostile powder from a 
 less Eesthetic distance than Goethe. It raises our confidence 
 in Sir Kenelm Digby as a physicist, that he is able to 
 illustrate some theory of acoustics in his Treatise of Bodies 
 by instancing the effect of his guns in a sea-fight off Scari- 
 deroon. One would expect the proportions of character to 
 be enlarged by such variety and contrast of experience. 
 Perhaps it will by-and-by appear that our own Civil War 
 has done something for us in this way. Colonel Higginson 
 comes down from his pulpit to draw on his jackboots, and 
 thenceforth rides in our imagination alongside of John 
 Bunyan and Bishop Compton. To have stored moral 
 capital enough to meet the drafts of Death at sight must 
 be an unmatched tonic. We saw our light-hearted youth 
 come back with the modest gravity of age, as if they had 
 learned to throw out pickets against a surprise of any weak 
 point in their temperament. Perhaps that American shifti 
 ness, so often complained of, may not be so bad a thing, if, 
 by bringing men acquainted with every humour of fortune 
 and human nature, it puts them in fuller possession of 
 themselves. 
 
 But with whatever drawbacks in special circumstances, 
 the main interest of biography must always lie in the 
 amount of character or essential manhood which the sub 
 ject of it reveals to us, and events are of import only as 
 means to that end. It is true that lofty and far-seen 
 exigencies may give greater opportunity to some men, 
 whose energy is more sharply spurred by the shout of a 
 multitude than by the grudging Well done ! of conscience. 
 Some theorists have too hastily assumed that, as the power 
 of public opinion increases, the force of private character, 
 or what we call originality, is absorbed into and diluted by 
 it. But we think Horace was right in putting tyrant and 
 mob on a level as the trainers and tests of a man s solid 
 quality. The amount of resistance of which one is capable 
 to whatever lies outside the conscience is of more con 
 sequence than all other faculties together ; and democracy, 
 
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 83 
 
 perhaps, tries this by pressure in more directions, and with 
 a more continuous strain, than any other form of society. 
 In Josiah Quincy we have an example of character trained 
 and shaped, under the nearest approach to a pure de 
 mocracy the world has ever seen, to a firmness, unity, and 
 self-centred poise that recall the finer types of antiquity, in 
 whom the public and private man was so wholly of a piece 
 that they were truly everywhere at home, for the same sin 
 cerity of nature that dignified the hearth carried also a 
 charm of homeliness into the forum. The phrase "a great 
 public character," once common, seems to be going out of 
 fashion, perhaps because there are fewer examples of the 
 thing. It fits Josiah Quincy exactly. Active in civic and 
 academic duties till beyond the ordinary period of man, at 
 fourscore and ten his pen, voice, and venerable presence 
 were still efficient in public affairs. A score of years 
 after the energies of even vigorous men are declining or 
 spent, hi?, mind and character made themselves felt as in 
 their prime. A true pillar of house and state, he stood un 
 flinchingly upright under whatever burden might be laid 
 upon him. The French Revolutionists aped what was itself 
 but a parody of the elder republic, with their hair a la 
 Brutus, and their pedantic moralities a la Oato Minor, but 
 this man unconsciously was the antique Roman they 
 laboriously went about to be. Others have filled places 
 more conspicuous, few have made the place they filled so 
 conspicuous by an exact and disinterested performance 
 of duty. 
 
 In the biography of Mr. Quincy by his son there is some 
 thing of the provincialism of which we have spoken as 
 inherent in most American works of the kind. His was a 
 Boston life in the strictest sense. But provincialism is 
 relative, and where it has a flavour of its own, as in Scot 
 land, it is often agreeable in proportion to its very inten 
 sity. The Massachusetts in which Mr. Quincy s habits of 
 thought were acquired was a very different Massachusetts 
 from that in which we of later generations have been 
 bred. Till after he had passed middle life, Boston was 
 
84 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 
 
 more truly a capital than any other city in America, 
 before or since, except possibly Charleston. The acknow 
 ledged head of New England, with a population of well- 
 nigh purely English descent, mostly derived from the 
 earlier emigration, with ancestral traditions and inspiring 
 memories of its own, it had made its name familiar 
 in both worlds, and was both historically and politi 
 cally more important than at any later period. The 
 Revolution had not interrupted, but rather given a freer 
 current to the tendencies of its past. Both by its history 
 and position, the town had what the French call a 
 solidarity, an almost personal consciousness, rare anywhere, 
 rare especially in America, and more than ever since our 
 enormous importation of fellow-citizens, to whom America 
 means merely shop, or meat three times a-day. Boston has 
 been called the "American Athens." ^sthetically, the com 
 parison is ludicrous, but politically it was more reasonable. 
 Its population was homogeneous, and there were leading 
 families ; while the form of government by town-meeting, 
 and the facility of social and civic intercourse, gave great 
 influence to popular personal qualities and opportunity to 
 new men. A wide commerce, while it had insensibly 
 softened the asperities of Puritanism and imported enough 
 foreign refinement to humanise, not enough foreign luxury 
 to corrupt, had not essentially qualified the native tone of 
 the town. Retired sea-captains (true brothers of Chaucer s 
 Shipman), whose exploits had kindled the imagination of 
 Burke, added a not unpleasant savour of salt to society. 
 They belonged to the old school of Gilbert, Hawkins, 
 Frobisher, and Drake, parcel-soldiers all of them, who 
 had commanded armed ships, and had tales to tell of 
 gallant fights with privateers or pirates, truest represent 
 atives of those Vikings who, if trade in lumber or peltry 
 was dull, would make themselves Dukes of Dublin or Earls 
 of Orkney. If trade pinches the mind, commerce liberalises 
 it; and Boston was also advantaged with the neighbourhood 
 of the country s oldest College, which maintained the whole 
 some traditions of culture, where Homer and Horace are 
 
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 85 
 
 familiar there is a certain amount of cosmopolitanism and 
 would not allow bigotry to become despotism. Manners 
 were more self-respectful, and therefore more respectful of 
 others, and personal sensitiveness was fenced with more of 
 that ceremonial with which society armed itself when it 
 surrendered the ruder protection of the sword. We had 
 not then seen a Governor in his chamber at the State 
 House with his hat on, a cigar in his mouth, and his feet 
 upon the stove. Domestic service, in spite of the proverb, 
 was not seldom an inheritance, nor was household peace 
 dependent on the whim of a foreign armed neutrality in 
 the kitchen. Servant and master were of one stock ; there 
 was decent authority and becoming respect ; the tradition 
 of the Old World lingered after its superstition had passed 
 away. There was an aristocracy such as is healthful in a 
 well-ordered community, founded on public service, and 
 hereditary so long as the virtue which was its patent was 
 not escheated. The clergy, no longer hedged by the 
 reverence exacted by sacerdotal caste, were more than 
 repaid by the consideration willingly paid to superior 
 culture. What changes, many of them for the better, 
 some of them surely for the worse, and all of them 
 inevitable, did not Josiah Quincy see in that well-nigh 
 secular life which linked the war of independence to the 
 war of nationality ! We seemed to see a type of them the 
 other day in a coloured man standing with an air of 
 comfortable self-possession while his boots were brushed 
 by a youth of catholic neutral tint, but whom nature had 
 planned for white. The same eyes that looked on Gage s 
 redcoats, saw Colonel Shaw s negro regiment march out of 
 Boston in the national blue. Seldom has a life, itself 
 actively associated with public affairs, spanned so wide a 
 chasm for the imagination. Oglethorpe s offers a parallel 
 the aide-de-camp of Prince Eugene calling on John Adams, 
 American Ambassador to England. Most long lives resemble 
 those threads of gossamer, the nearest approach to nothing 
 unmeaningly prolonged, scarce visible pathway of some 
 worm from his cradle to his grave; but Quincy s was 
 
86 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 
 
 strung with seventy active years, each one a rounded 
 bead of usefulness and service. 
 
 Mr. Quincy was a Bostonian of the purest type. Since 
 the settlement of the town, there had been a colonel of the 
 Boston regiment in every generation of his family. He 
 lived to see a grandson bre vetted with the same title for 
 gallantry in the field. Only child of one among the most 
 eminent advocates of the Revolution, and who but for his 
 untimely death would have been a leading actor in it, his 
 earliest recollections belonged to the heroic period in the 
 history of his native town. With that history his life was 
 thenceforth intimately united by offices of public trust, as 
 Representative in Congress, State Senator, Mayor, and 
 President of the University, to a period beyond the 
 ordinary span of mortals. Even after he had passed 
 ninety, he would not claim to be emeritus, but came 
 forward to brace his townsmen with a courage and warm 
 them with a fire younger than their own. The legend of 
 Golonel Goffe at Deerfield became a reality to the eyes of 
 this generation. The New England breed is running out, 
 we are told ! This was in all ways a beautiful and fortunate 
 life fortunate in the goods of this world fortunate, 
 above all, in the force of character which makes fortune 
 secondary and subservient. We are fond in this country 
 of what are called self-made men (as if real success could 
 ever be other) ; and this is all very well, provided they 
 make something worth having of themselves. Otherwise 
 it is not so well, and the examples of such are at best but 
 stuff for the Alnaschar dreams of a false democracy. 
 The gist of the matter is, not where a man starts from, 
 but where he comes out. We are glad to have the 
 biography of one who, beginning as a gentleman, kept 
 himself such to the end who, with no necessity of labour, 
 left behind him an amount of thoroughly done work such as 
 few have accomplished with the mighty help of hunger. 
 Some kind of pace may be got out of the veriest jade by 
 the near prospect of oats; but the thoroughbred has the 
 spur in his blood. 
 
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 87 
 
 Mr. Edmund Quincy has told the story of his father s life 
 with the skill and good taste that might have been expected 
 from the author of " Wensley." Considering natural 
 partialities, he has shown a discretion of which we are 
 oftener reminded by missing than by meeting it. He has 
 given extracts enough from speeches to show their bearing 
 and quality from letters, to recall bygone modes of thought 
 and indicate rnany-sided friendly relations with good and 
 eminent men ; above all, he has lost no opportunity to 
 illustrate that life of the past, near in date, yet alien in 
 manners, whose current glides so imperceptibly from one 
 generation into another that we fail to mark the shif tings 
 of its bed or the change in its nature wrought by the 
 affluents that discharge into it on all sides here a stream 
 bred in the hills to sweeten, there the sewerage of some 
 great city to corrupt. We cannot but lament that Mr. 
 Quincy did not earlier begin to keep a diary. " Miss not 
 the discourses of the elders," though put now in the 
 Apocrypha, is a wise precept, but incomplete unless we add, 
 " Nor cease from recording whatsoever thing thou hast 
 gathered therefrom " so ready is Oblivion with her fatal 
 shears. The somewhat greasy heap of a literary rag-and- 
 bone-picker, like Atheneeus, is turned to gold by time. 
 Even the Virgilium vidi tantum of Dryden about Milton, 
 and of Pope again about Dryden, is worth having, and 
 gives a pleasant fillip to the fancy. There is much of this 
 quality in Mr. Edmund Quincy s book, enough to make us 
 wish there were more. We get a glimpse of President 
 Washington, in 1795, who reminded Mr. Quincy " of the 
 gentlemen who used to come to Boston in those days to 
 attend the General Court from Hampden or Franklin 
 County, in the western part of the western State. A little 
 stiff in his person, not a little formal in his manners, not 
 particularly at ease in the presence of strangers. He had 
 the air of a country gentleman not accustomed to mix much 
 in society, perfectly polite, but not easy in his address and 
 conversation, and not graceful in his gait and movements." 
 Our figures of Washington have been so long equestrian, 
 
88 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 
 
 that it is pleasant to meet him dismounted for once. In 
 the same way we get a card of invitation to a dinner of 
 sixty covers at John Hancock s, and see the rather light- 
 weighted great man wheeled round the room (for he had 
 adopted Lord Chatham s convenient trick of the gout) to 
 converse with his guests. It another place we are presented, 
 with Mr. Merry, the English Minister, to Jefferson, whom 
 we find in an unofficial costume of studied slovenliness, 
 intended as a snub to haughty Albion. Slippers down at 
 heel and a dirty shirt become weapons of diplomacy and 
 threaten more serious war. Thus many a door into the 
 past, long irrevocably shut upon us, is set ajar, and we of 
 the younger generation on the landing catch peeps of 
 distinguished men, and bits of their table-talk. We drive 
 in from Mr. Lyman s beautiful seat at Walthara (unique 
 at that day in its stately swans and half shy, half familiar 
 deer) with John Adams, who tells us that Dr. Priestley 
 looked on the French monarchy as the tenth horn of the 
 Beast in Revelation a horn that has set more sober wits 
 dancing than that of Huon of Bordeaux. Those were days, 
 we are inclined to think, of more solid and elegant 
 hospitality than our own the elegance of manners, at once 
 more courtly and more frugal, of men who had better uses 
 for wealth than merely to display it. Dinners have more 
 courses now, and like the Gascon in the old story, who 
 could not see the town for the houses, we miss the real 
 dinner in the multiplicity of its details. We might seek 
 long before we found so good cheer, so good company, or 
 so good talk as our fathers had at Lieutenant-Governor 
 Winthrop s or Senator Cabot s. 
 
 We shall not do Mr. Edmund Quincy the wrong of 
 picking out in advance all the plums in his volume, leaving 
 to the reader only the less savoury mixture that held them 
 together a kind of filling unavoidable in books of this 
 kind, and too apt to be what boys at boarding-school call 
 stick-jaw, but of which there is no more than could not be 
 helped here, and that light and palatable. But here and 
 there is a passage where we cannot refrain, for there is a 
 
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 89 
 
 smack of Jack Homer in all of us, and a reviewer were 
 nothing without it. Josiah Quincy was born in 1772. 
 His father, returning from a mission in England, died in 
 sight of the dear New England shore three years later. 
 His young widow was worthy of him, and of the son whose 
 character she was to have so large a share in forming. 
 There is something very touching and beautiful in this 
 little picture of her which Mr. Quincy drew in his extreme 
 old age. 
 
 " My mother imbibed, as was usual with the women of 
 the period, the spirit of the times. Patriotism was not 
 then a profession, but an energetic principle beating in the 
 heart and active in the life. The death of my father, under 
 circumstances now the subject of history, had overwhelmed 
 her with grief. She viewed him as a victim in the cause of 
 freedom, and cultivated his memory with veneration, re 
 garding him as a martyr, falling, as did his friend Warren, 
 in the defence of the liberties of his country. These circum 
 stances gave a pathos and vehemence to her grief, which, 
 after the first violence of passion had subsided, sought con 
 solation in earnest and solicitous fulfilment of duty to the 
 representative of his memory and of their mutual affections. 
 Love and reverence for the memory of his father were early 
 impressed on the mind of her son, and worn into his heart 
 by her sadness and tears. She cultivated the memory of 
 my father in my heart and affections, even in my earliest 
 childhood, by reading to me passages from the poets, and 
 obliging me to learn by heart and repeat such as were best 
 adapted to her own circumstances and feelings. Among 
 others, the whole leave-taking of Hector and Andromache, 
 in the sixth book of Pope s Homer, was one of her favourite 
 lessons, which she made me learn and frequently repeat. 
 Her imagination probably found consolation in the repeti 
 tion of lines which brought to mind and seemed to typify 
 her own great bereavement. 
 
 " And think st thou not how wretched we shall be, 
 A widow I, a helpless orphan he ? 
 
 These lines and the whole tenor of Andromache s address 
 
90 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 
 
 and circumstances, she identified with her own sufferings, 
 which seemed relieved by the tears my repetition of them 
 drew from her." 
 
 Pope s Homer is not Homer, perhaps ; but how many 
 noble natures have felt its elation, how many bruised spirits 
 the solace of its bracing, if monotonous melody ! To us 
 there is something inexpressibly tender in this instinct of 
 the widowed mother to find consolation in the idealisation 
 of her grief by mingling it with those sorrows which genius 
 has turned into the perennial delight of mankind. This 
 was a kind of sentiment that was healthy for her boy, 
 refining without unnerving, and associating his father s 
 memory with a noble company unassailable by time. It 
 was through this lady, whose image looks down on us out 
 of the past, so full of sweetness and refinement, that Mr. 
 Quincy became of kin with Mr. Wendell Phillips, so justly 
 eminent as a speaker. There is something nearer than 
 cater-cousinship in a certain impetuous audacity of temper 
 common to them both. 
 
 When six years old, Mr. Quincy was sent to Phillips s 
 Academy at Andover, where he remained till he entered 
 college. His form-fellow here was a man of thirty, who 
 had been a surgeon in the Continental army, and whose 
 character and adventures might almost seem borrowed from 
 a romance of Smollett. Under Principal Pearson, the lad, 
 though a near relative of the founder of the school, seems 
 to have endured all that severity of the old a posteriori 
 method of teaching which still smarted in Tusser s memory 
 when he sang 
 
 " From Paul s I went, to Eton sent, 
 To learn straightways the Latin phrase, 
 Where fifty-three stripes given to me 
 At once I had." 
 
 The young victim of the wisdom of Solomon was boarded 
 with the parish minister, in whose kindness he found a 
 lenitive for the scholastic discipline he underwent. This 
 gentleman had been a soldier in the Colonial service, and 
 Mr. Quincy afterwards gave as a reason for his mildness. 
 
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 91 
 
 that, " while a sergeant at Castle William, he had seen 
 something of mankind." This, no doubt, would be a 
 better preparative for successful dealing with the young 
 than is generally thought. However, the birch was then 
 the only classic tree, and every round in the ladder of 
 learning was made of its inspiring wood. Dr. Pearson, 
 perhaps, thought he was only doing justice to his pupil s 
 claims of kindred by giving him a larger share of the 
 educational advantages which the neighbouring forest 
 afforded. The vividness with which this system is always 
 remembered by those who have been subjected to it would 
 seem to show that it really enlivened the attention, and 
 thereby invigorated the memory, nay, might even raise 
 some question as to what part of the person is chosen by 
 the mother of the Muses for her residence. With an 
 appetite for the classics quickened by " Cheever s Acci 
 dence," and such other preliminary whets as were then in 
 vogue, young Quiney entered college, where he spent the 
 usual four years, and was graduated with the highest 
 honours of his class. The amount of Latin and Greek 
 imparted to the students of that day was not very great. 
 They were carried through Horace, Sallust, and the De 
 Oratoribus of Cicero, and read portions of Livy, Xenophon, 
 and Homer. Yet the chief end of classical studies was 
 perhaps as often reached then as now, in giving young men 
 a love for something apart from and above the more vulgar 
 associations of life. Mr. Quiney, at least, retained to the 
 last a fondness for certain Latin authors. While he was 
 President of the College, he told a gentleman, from whom 
 we received the story, that, " if he were imprisoned, and 
 allowed to choose one book for his amusement, that should 
 be Horace." 
 
 In 1797 Mr. Quiney was married to Miss Eliza Susan 
 Morton, of New York, a union which lasted in unbroken 
 happiness for more than fifty years. His cause might be 
 cited among the leading ones in support of the old poet s 
 axiom, that 
 
 " He never loved, that loved not at first sight ; " 
 
92 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 
 
 for he saw, wooed, and won in a week. In later life he 
 tried in a most amusing way to account for this rashness, 
 and to find reasons of settled gravity for the happy inspira 
 tion of his heart. He cites the evidence of Judge Sedg- 
 wick, of Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Wolcott, of the Rev. Dr. 
 Smith, and others, to the wisdom of his choice. But it 
 does not appear that he consulted them beforehand. If 
 love were not too cunning for that, what would become of 
 the charming idyl, renewed in all its wonder and freshness 
 for every generation ? Let us be thankful that in every 
 man s life there is a holiday of romance, an illumination of 
 the senses by the soul, that makes him a poet while it lasts. 
 Mr. Quincy caught the enchantment through his ears, a 
 song of Burns heard from the next room conveying the 
 infection a fact still inexplicable to him after lifelong 
 meditation thereon, as he "was not very impressible by 
 music ! " To us there is something very characteristic in 
 this rapid energy of Mr. Quincy, something very delightful 
 in his naive account of the affair. It needs the magic of no 
 Dr. Heidegger to make these dried roses, that drop from 
 between the leaves of a volume shut for seventy years, 
 bloom again in all their sweetness. Mr. Edmund Quincy 
 tells us that his mother was " not handsome ; " but those 
 who remember the gracious dignity of her old age will 
 hardly agree with him. She must always have had that 
 highest kind of beauty which grows more beautiful with 
 years, and keeps the eyes young, as if with the partial 
 connivance of Time. 
 
 We do not propose to follow Mr. Quincy closely through 
 his whole public life, which, beginning with his thirty- 
 second, ended with his seventy-third year. He entered 
 Congress as the representative of a party privately the 
 most respectable, publicly the least sagacious, among all 
 those which under different names have divided the 
 country. The Federalists were the only proper Tories our 
 politics have ever produced, whose conservatism truly repre 
 sented an idea, and not a mere selfish interest men who 
 honestly distrusted democracy, and stood up for experience, 
 
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 93 
 
 or the tradition which they believed for such, against 
 empiricism. During his Congressional career, the Govern 
 ment was little more than an attache of the French legation, 
 and the Opposition to which he belonged a helpless revenant 
 from the dead and buried Colonial past. There are some 
 questions whose interest dies the moment they are settled ; 
 others into which a moral element enters that hinders them 
 from being settled, though they may be decided. It is hard 
 to revive any enthusiasm about the Embargo, though it 
 once could inspire the boyish muse of Bryant, or in the 
 impressment quarrel, though the Trent difficulty for a time 
 rekindled its old animosities. The stars in their courses 
 fought against Mr. Quincy s party, which was not in 
 sympathy with the instincts of the people, groping about 
 for some principle of nationality, and finding a substitute 
 for it in hatred of England. But there are several things 
 which still make his career in Congress interesting to us, 
 because they illustrate the personal character of the man. 
 He prepared himself honestly for his duties, by a thorough 
 study of whatever could make him efficient in them. It 
 was not enough that he could make a good speech ; he 
 wished also to have something to say. In Congress, as 
 everywhere else, quod voluit valde voluit ; and he threw a 
 fervour into the most temporary topic, as if his eternal 
 salvation depended upon it. He had not merely, as the 
 French say, the courage of his opinions, but his opinions 
 became principles, and gave him that gallantry of fanati 
 cism which made him always ready to head a forlorn hope 
 the more ready, perhaps, that it was a forlorn hope. 
 This is not the humour of a statesman no, unless he holds 
 a position like that of Pitt, and can charge a whole people 
 with his own enthusiasm, and then we call it genius. Mr. 
 Quincy had the moral firmness which enabled him to decline 
 a duel without any loss of personal prestige. His opposition 
 to the Louisiana purchase illustrates that Roman quality in 
 him to which we have alluded. He would not conclude the 
 purchase till each of the old thirteen States had signified its 
 assent. He was reluctant to endow a Sabine city with the 
 
94 A GREA T PUBLIC CHARACTER. 
 
 privilege of Roman citizenship. It is worth noting that, 
 while in Congress, and afterwards in the State Senate, 
 many of his phrases became the catchwords of party 
 politics. He always dared to say what others deemed it 
 more prudent only to think, and whatever he said he 
 intensified with the whole ardour of his temperament. It 
 is ^ this which makes Mr. Quincy s speeches good reading 
 still, even when the topics they discussed were ephemeral. 
 In one respect he is distinguished from the politicians, and 
 must rank with the far-seeing statesmen of his time. He 
 early foresaw and denounced the political danger with 
 which the Slave Power threatened the Union. His fears, 
 it is true, were aroused for the balance of power between 
 the old States, rather than by any moral sensitiveness 
 which would, indeed, have been an anachronism at that 
 time. But the Civil War justified his prescience. 
 
 It was as mayor of his native city that his remarkable 
 qualities as an administrator were first called into requisi 
 tion and adequately displayed. He organised the city 
 government, and put it in working order. To him we owe 
 many reforms in police, in the management of the poor, and 
 other kindred matters, much in the way of cure, still more 
 in that of prevention. The place demanded a man of 
 courage and firmness, and found those qualities almost 
 superabundantly in him. His virtues lost him his office, 
 as such virtues are only too apt to do in peaceful times, 
 where they are felt more as a restraint than a protec 
 tion. His address on laying down the mayoralty is very 
 characteristic. We quote the concluding sentences : 
 
 " And now, gentlemen, standing as I do in this relation 
 for the last time in your presence and that of my fellow- 
 citizens, about to surrender for ever a station full of 
 difficulty, of labour and temptation, in which I have been 
 called to very arduous duties, affecting the rights, property, 
 and at times the liberty of others ; concerning which the 
 perfect line of rectitude though desired was not always 
 to be clearly discerned ; in which great interests have been 
 placed within my control, under circumstances in which it 
 
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 95 
 
 would have been easy to advance private ends and sinister 
 projects ; under these circumstances, I inquire, as I have a 
 right to inquire for in the recent contest insinuations 
 have been cast against my integrity in this long manage 
 ment of your affairs, whatever errors have been committed 
 and doubtless there have been many have you found in 
 me anything selfish, anything personal, anything mercenary 1 ? 
 In the simple language of an ancient seer, I say, Behold, 
 here I am ; witness against me. Whom have I defrauded ? 
 Whom have I oppressed ? At whose hands have I received 
 any bribe ? 
 
 " Six years ago, when I had the honour first to address 
 the City Council, in anticipation of the event which has now 
 occurred, the following expressions were used : In admin 
 istering the police, in executing the laws, in protecting the 
 rights and promoting the prosperity of the city, its first 
 officer will be necessarily beset and assailed by individual 
 interests, by rival projects, by personal influences, by party 
 passions. The more firm and inflexible he is in maintaining 
 the rights and in pursuing the interests of the city, the 
 greater is the probability of his becoming obnoxious to the 
 censure of all whom he causes to be prosecuted or punished, 
 of all whose passions he thwarts, of all whose interests he 
 opposes. 
 
 " The day and the event have come. I retire as in that 
 first address I told my fellow-citizens, If, in conformity 
 with the experience of other republics, faithful exertions 
 should be followed by loss of favour and confidence, I 
 should retire * rejoicing, not, indeed, with a public and 
 patriotic, but with a private and individual joy ; for I 
 shall retire with a consciousness weighed against which all 
 human suffrages are but as the light dust of the balance." 
 
 Of his mayoralty we have another anecdote quite Roman 
 in colour. He was in the habit of riding early in the 
 morning through the various streets that he might look into 
 everything with his own eyes. He was once arrested on a 
 malicious charge of violating the city ordinance against fast 
 driving. He might have resisted, but he appeared in court 
 
96 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 
 
 and paid the fine, because it would serve as a good example 
 " that no citizen was above the law." 
 
 Hardly had Mr. Quincy given up the government of the 
 city, when he was called to that of the College. It is here 
 that his stately figure is associated most intimately and 
 warmly with the recollections of the greater number who 
 hold his memory dear. Almost everybody looks back 
 regretfully to the days of some Consul Plancus. Never 
 were eyes so bright, never had wine so much wit and 
 good-fellowship in it, never were we ourselves so capable of 
 the various great things we have never done. Nor is it 
 merely the sunset of life that casts such a ravishing light 
 on the past, and makes the western windows of those homes 
 of fancy we have left for ever tremble with a sentiment of 
 such sweet regret. We set great store by what we had, and 
 cannot have again, however indifferent in itself, and what 
 is past is infinitely past. This is especially true of college 
 life, when we first assume the titles without the responsi 
 bilities of manhood, and the President of our year is apt to 
 become our Plancus very early. Popular or not while in 
 office, an ex-president is always sure of enthusiastic cheers 
 at every college festival. Mr. Quincy had many qualities 
 calculated to win favour with the young that one above 
 all which is sure to do it, indomitable pluck. With him 
 the dignity was in the man, not in the office. He had some 
 of those little oddities, too, which afford amusement without 
 contempt, and which rather tend to heighten than diminish 
 personal attachment to superiors in station. His punctuality 
 at prayers, and in dropping asleep there, his forgetfulness 
 of names, his singular inability to make even the shortest 
 off-hand speech to the students all the more singular in a 
 practised orator his occasional absorption of mind, leading 
 him to hand you his sand-box instead of the leave of 
 absence he had just dried with it, the old-fashioned 
 courtesy of his, " Sir, your servant," as he bowed you out of 
 his study, all tended to make him popular. He had also 
 a little of what is somewhat contradictorily called dry 
 humour, not without influence in his relation with the 
 
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 97 
 
 students. In taking leave of the graduating class, he was 
 in the habit of paying them whatever honest compliment he 
 could. Who, of a certain year which shall be nameless, will 
 ever forget the gravity with which he assured them that 
 they were " the best-dressed class that had passed through 
 college during his administration ? " How sincerely kind 
 he was, how considerate of youthful levity, will always be 
 gratefully remembered by whoever had occasion to experi 
 ence it. A visitor not long before his death found him 
 burning some memoranda of college peccadilloes, lest they 
 should ever rise up in judgment against the men eminent 
 in Church and State who had been guilty of them. One 
 great element of his popularity with the students was his 
 esprit de corps. However strict in discipline, he was always 
 on our side as respected the outside world. Of his efficiency, 
 no higher testimony could be asked than that of his successor, 
 Dr. Walker. Here also many reforms date from his 
 time. He had that happiest combination for a wise vigour 
 in the conduct of affairs, he was a conservative with an 
 open mind. 
 
 One would be apt to think that, in the various offices 
 which Mr. Quincy successively filled, he would have found 
 enough to do. But his indefatigable activity overflowed. 
 Even as a man of letters, he occupies no inconsiderable 
 place. His " History of Harvard College " is a valuable 
 and entertaining treatment of a subject not wanting in 
 natural dryness. His " Municipal History of Boston," his 
 " History of the Boston Athenseum," and his " Life of 
 Colonel Shaw " have permanent interest and value. All 
 these were works demanding no little labour and research, 
 and the thoroughness of their workmanship makes them 
 remarkable as the by-productions of a busy man. Having 
 consented, when more than eighty, to write a memoir of 
 John Quincy Adams, to be published in the " Proceedings" 
 of the Massachusetts Historical Society, he was obliged to 
 excuse himself. On account of his age ? Not at all, but 
 because the work had grown to be a volume under his 
 weariless hand. Ohne Hast okne Rast, was as true of him 
 
 135 
 
98 A GREA T P UBLIC CHA RA CTER. 
 
 as of Goethe. We find the explanation of his accomplishing 
 so much in a rule of life which he gave, when president, to 
 a young man employed as his secretary, and who was a 
 little behindhand with his work : " When you have a 
 number of duties to perform, always do the most disagreeable 
 one first." No advice could have been more in character, 
 and it is perhaps better than the great German s, " Do the 
 duty that lies nearest thee." 
 
 Perhaps the most beautiful part of Mr. Quincy s life was 
 his old age. What in most men is decay, was in him but 
 beneficent prolongation and adjournment. His interest in 
 affairs unabated, his judgment undimmed, his fire unchilled, 
 his last years were indeed " lovely as a Lapland night." 
 Till within a year or two of its fall, there were no signs of 
 dilapidation in that stately edifice. Singularly felicitous 
 was Mr. Winthrop s application to him of Wordsworth s 
 verses : 
 
 " The monumental pomp of age 
 Was in that goodly personage." 
 
 Everything that Macbeth foreboded the want of, he had in 
 deserved abundance the love, the honour, the obedience, 
 the troops of friends. His equanimity was beautiful. He 
 loved life, as men of large vitality always do, but he did not 
 fear to lose life by changing the scene of it. Visiting him 
 in his ninetieth year with a friend, he said to us, among 
 other things " I have no desire to die, but also no reluct 
 ance. Indeed, I have a considerable curiosity about the 
 other world. I have never been to Europe, you know." 
 Even in his extreme senescence there was an April mood 
 somewhere in his nature " that put a spirit of youth in 
 everything." He seemed to feel that he could draw against 
 an unlimited credit of years. When eighty-two, he said 
 smilingly to a young man just returned from a foreign tour, 
 " Well, well, I mean to go myself when I am old enough to 
 profit by it." We have seen many old men whose lives 
 were mere waste and desolation, who made longevity dis 
 reputable by their untimely persistence in it ; but in Mr. 
 
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER, 99 
 
 Quincy s length of years there was nothing that was not 
 venerable. To him it was fulfilment, not deprivation ; the 
 days were marked to the last for what they brought, not 
 for what they took away. 
 
 The memory of what Mr. Quincy did will be lost in the 
 crowd of newer activities ; it is the memory of what he was 
 that is precious to us. Bonum virum facile crederes, mag 
 num libenter. If John Winthrop be the highest type of 
 the men who shaped New England, we can find no better 
 one of those whom New England has shaped than Josiah 
 Quincy. It is a figure that we can contemplate with more 
 than satisfaction a figure of admirable example in a de 
 mocracy as that of a model citizen. His courage and high- 
 mindedness were personal to him ; let us believe that his 
 integrity, his industry, his love of letters, his devotion to 
 duty, go in some sort to the credit of the society which gave 
 him birth and formed his character. In one respect he is 
 especially interesting to us, as belonging to a class of men 
 of whom he was the last representative, and whose like we 
 shall never see again. Born and bred in an age of greater 
 social distinction than ours, he was an aristocrat in a sense 
 that is good even in a republic. He had the sense of a cer 
 tain personal dignity inherent in him, and which could not 
 be alienated by any whim of the popular will. There is no 
 stouter buckler than this for independence of spirit, no 
 surer guaranty of that courtesy which, in its consideration 
 of others, is but paying a debt of self-respect. During his 
 presidency, Mr. Quincy was once riding to Cambridge in a 
 crowded omnibus. A coloured woman got in, and could 
 nowhere find a seat. The President instantly gave her his 
 own, and stood the rest of the way, a silent rebuke of the 
 general rudeness. He was a man of quality in the true 
 sense of quality not hereditary, but personal. Position 
 might be taken from him, but he remained where he was. 
 In what he valued most, his sense of personal worth, the 
 world s opinion could neither help nor hinder. We do not 
 mean that this was conscious in him ; if it had been, it 
 would have been a weakness. It was an instinct, and acted 
 
ico A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 
 
 with the force and promptitude proper to such. Let us 
 hope that the scramble of democracy will give us something 
 as good ; anything of so classic dignity we shall not look to 
 see again. 
 
 Josiah Quincy was no seeker of office ; from first to last 
 he and it were drawn together by the mutual attraction of 
 need and fitness, and it clung to him as most men cling to 
 it. The people often make blunders in their choice ; they 
 are apt to mistake presence of speech for presence of mind ; 
 they love so to help a man rise from the ranks, that they 
 will spoil a good demagogue to make a bad general ; a great 
 many faults may be laid at their door, but they are not fairly 
 to be charged with fickleness. They are constant to who 
 ever is constant to his real self, to the best manhood that is 
 in him, and not to the mere selfishness, the antica lupa so 
 cunning to hide herself in the sheep s fleece even from 
 ourselves. It is true, the contemporary world is apt to be 
 the gull of brilliant parts, and the maker of a lucky poem 
 or picture or statue, the winner of a lucky battle, gets 
 perhaps more than is due to the solid result of his triumph. 
 It is time that fit honour should be paid also to him who 
 shows a genius for public usefulness, for the achievement 
 of character, who shapes his life to a certain classic pro 
 portion, and comes off conqueror on those inward fields 
 where something more than mere talent is demanded for 
 victory. The memory of such men should be cherished as 
 the most precious inheritance which one generation can 
 bequeath to the next. However it might be with public 
 favour, public respect followed Mr. Quincy unwaveringly 
 for seventy years, and it was because he had never for 
 feited his own. In this, it appears to us, lies the lesson of 
 his life, and his claim upon our grateful recollection. It is 
 this which makes him an example, while the careers of so 
 many of our prominent men are only useful for warning. 
 As regards history, his greatness was narrowly provincial ; 
 but if the measure of deeds be the spirit in which they are 
 done, that fidelity to instant duty, which, according to 
 Herbert, makes an action fine, then his length of years 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 161 
 
 should be very precious to us for its lesson. Talleyrand, 
 whose life may be compared with his for the strange 
 vicissitudes which it witnessed, carried with him out of the 
 world the respect of no man, least of all his own ; and how 
 many of our own public men have we seen whose old age 
 but accumulated a disregard which they would gladly have 
 exchanged for oblivion ! In Quincy the public fidelity was 
 loyal to the private, and the withdrawal of his old age was 
 into a sanctuary a diminution of publicity with addition 
 of influence. 
 
 1 Conclude we, then, felicity consists 
 Not in exterior fortunes. . . . 
 Sacred felicity doth ne er extend 
 Beyond itself. . . . 
 The swelling of an outward fortune can 
 Create a prosperous, not a happy man." 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 1864. 
 
 THERE have been many painful crises since the impatient 
 vanity of South Carolina hurried ten prosperous Common 
 wealths into a crime whose assured retribution was to leave 
 them either at the mercy of the nation they had wronged, 
 or of the anarchy they had summoned but could not control, 
 when no thoughtful American opened his morning paper 
 without dreading to find that he had 110 longer a country to 
 love and honour. Whatever the result of the convulsion 
 whose first shocks were beginning to be felt, there would 
 still be enough square miles of earth for elbow-room ; but 
 that ineffable sentiment made up of memory and hope, of 
 instinct and tradition, which swells every man s heart and 
 shapes his thought, though perhaps never present to his 
 consciousness, would be gone from it, leaving it common 
 earth and nothing more. Men might gather rich crops from 
 it, but that ideal harvest of priceless associations would be 
 reaped no longer ; that fine virtue which sent up messages 
 
102 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 of courage and security from every sod of it would have 
 evaporated beyond recall. We should be irrevocably cut 
 off from our past, and be forced to splice the ragged ends of 
 our lives upon whatever new conditions chance might leave 
 dangling for us. 
 
 We confess that we had our doubts at first whether the 
 patriotism of our people were not too narrowly provincial 
 to embrace the proportions of national peril. We felt an 
 only too natural distrust of immense public meetings and 
 enthusiastic cheers. 
 
 That a reaction should follow the holiday enthusiasm 
 with which the war was entered on, that it should follow 
 soon, and that the slackening of public spirit should be 
 proportionate to the previous over-tension, might well be 
 foreseen by all who had studied human nature or history. 
 Men acting gregariously are always in extremes ; as they 
 are one moment capable of higher courage, so they are 
 liable the next to baser depression, and it is often a matter 
 of chance whether numbers shall multiply confidence or 
 discouragement. Nor does deception lead more surely to 
 distrust of men than self-deception to suspicion of principles. 
 The only faith that wears well and holds its colour in all 
 weather is that which is woven of conviction and set with 
 the sharp mordant of experience. Enthusiasm is good 
 material for the orator, but the statesman needs something 
 more durable to work in ; must be able to rely on the 
 deliberate reason and consequent firmness of the people, 
 without which that presence of mind, no less essential in 
 times of moral than of material peril, will be wanting at the 
 critical moment. Would this fervour of the Free States 
 hold out 1 ? Was it kindled by a just feeling of the value of 
 constitutional liberty ? Had it body enough to withstand 
 the inevitable dampening of checks, reverses, delays ? Had 
 our population intelligence to comprehend that the choice 
 was between order and anarchy, between the equilibrium 
 of a government by law and the tussle of misrule by 
 pronunciamiento ? Could a war be maintained without 
 the ordinary stimulus of hatred and plunder, and with 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 103 
 
 the impersonal loyalty of principle? These were serious 
 questions, and with no precedent to aid in answering them. 
 
 At the beginning of the war there was, indeed, occasion 
 for the most anxious apprehension. A President known to 
 be infected with the political heresies, and suspected of 
 sympathy with the treason, of the Southern conspirators, 
 had just surrendered the reins, we will not say of power, 
 but of chaos, to a successor known only as the represent 
 ative of a party whose leaders, with long training in opposi 
 tion, had none in the conduct of affairs ; an empty treasury 
 was called on to supply resources beyond precedent in the 
 history of finance ; the trees were yet growing and the iron 
 unmined with which a navy was to be built and armoured ; 
 officers without discipline were to make a mob into an army; 
 and, above all, the public opinion of Europe, echoed and 
 reinforced with every vague hint and every specious 
 argument of despondency by a powerful faction at home, 
 was either contemptuously sceptical or actively hostile. It 
 would be hard to over-estimate the force of this latter 
 element of disintegration and discouragement among a 
 people where every citizen at home, and every soldier in 
 the field, is a reader of newspapers. The pedlars of rumour 
 in the North were the most effective allies of the rebellion. 
 A nation can be liable to no more insidious treachery than 
 that of the telegraph, sending hourly its electric thrill 
 of panic along the remotest nerves of the community, till 
 the excited imagination makes every real danger loom 
 heightened with its unreal double. 
 
 And even if we look only at more palpable difficulties, 
 the problem to be solved by our civil war was so vast, both 
 in its immediate relations and its future consequences ; the 
 conditions of its solution were so intricate and so greatly 
 dependent on incalculable and uncontrollable contingencies j 
 so many of the data, whether for hope or fear, were, from 
 their novelty, incapable of arrangement under any of the 
 categories of historical precedent, that there were moments 
 of crisis when the firmest believer in the strength and 
 sufficiency of the democratic theory of government might 
 
104 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 well hold his breath in vague apprehension of disaster. 
 Our teachers of political philosophy, solemnly arguing from 
 the precedent of some petty Grecian, Italian, or Flemish 
 city, whose long periods of aristocracy were broken now and 
 then by awkward parentheses of mob, had always taught us 
 that democracies were incapable of the sentiment of loyalty, 
 of concentrated and prolonged effort, of far-reaching concep 
 tions ; were absorbed in material interests ; impatient of 
 regular, and much more of exceptional restraint; had no 
 natural nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but centri 
 fugal ; were always on the verge of civil war, and slunk at 
 last into the natural almshouse of bankrupt popular govern 
 ment, a military despotism. Here was a dreary outlook 
 for persons who knew democracy, not by rubbing shoulders 
 with it lifelong, but merely from books, and America only 
 by the report of some fellow-Briton, who, having eaten a 
 bad dinner or lost a carpet-bag here, had written to 
 the Times demanding redress, and drawing a mournful 
 inference of democratic instability. Nor were men wanting 
 among ourselves who had so steeped their brains in London 
 literature as to mistake Oockneyism for European culture, 
 and contempt of their country for cosmopolitan breadth of 
 view, and who, owing all they had and all they were to 
 democracy, thought it had an air of high breeding to join in 
 the shallow epicedium that our bubble had burst. 
 
 But beside any disheartening influences which might 
 affect the timid or the despondent, there were reasons 
 enough of settled gravity against any over-confidence of 
 hope. A war which, whether we consider the expanse of 
 the territory at stake, the hosts brought into the field, or the 
 reach of the principles involved, may fairly be reckoned the 
 most momentous of modern times was to be waged by a 
 people divided at home, unnerved by fifty years of peace, 
 under a chief magistrate without experience and without 
 reputation, whose every measure was sure to be cunningly 
 hampered by a jealous and unscrupulous minority, and who, 
 while dealing with unheard-of complications at home, must 
 soothe a hostile neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 105 
 
 become war. All this was to be done without warning and 
 without preparation, while at the same time a social revolu 
 tion was to be accomplished in the political condition of four 
 millions of people, by softening the prejudices, allaying the 
 fears, and gradually obtaining the co-operation of their 
 unwilling liberators. Surely, if ever there were an occasion 
 when the heightened imagination of the historian might see 
 Destiny visibly intervening in human affairs, here was a 
 knot worthy of her shears. Never, perhaps, was any system 
 of government tried by so continuous and searching a strain 
 as ours during the last three years ; never has any shown 
 itself stronger ; and never could that strength be so directly 
 traced to the virtue and intelligence of the people to that 
 general enlightenment and prompt efficiency of public 
 opinion possible only under the influence of a political frame 
 work like our own. We find it hard to understand how 
 even a foreigner should be blind to the grandeur of the 
 combat of ideas that has been going on here to the heroic 
 energy, persistency, and self-reliance of a nation proving 
 that it knows how much dearer greatness is than mere 
 power ; and we own that it is impossible for us to conceive 
 the mental and moral condition of the American who does 
 not feel his spirit braced and heightened by being even a 
 spectator of such qualities and achievements. That a steady 
 purpose and a definite aim have been given to the jarring 
 forces which, at the beginning of the war, spent themselves 
 in the discussion of schemes which could only become oper 
 ative, if at all, after the war was over ; that a popular 
 excitement has been slowly intensified into an earnest 
 national will ; that a somewhat impracticable moral senti 
 ment has been made the unconscious instrument of a 
 practical moral end ; that the treason of covert enemies, 
 the jealousy of rivals, the unwise zeal of friends, have been 
 made not only useless for mischief, but even useful for 
 good ; that the conscientious sensitiveness of England to 
 the horrors of civil conflict has been prevented from com 
 plicating a domestic with a foreign war all these results, 
 any one of which might suffice to prove greatness in a ruler, 
 
io6 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 have been mainly due to the good sense, the good-humour, 
 the sagacity, the large-minded ness, and the unselfish honesty 
 of the unknown man whom a blind fortune, as it seemed, 
 had lifted from the crowd to the most dangerous and difficult 
 eminence of modern times. It is by presence of mind in 
 untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is 
 tested ; it is by the sagacity to see, and the fearless honesty 
 to admit, whatever of truth there may be in an adverse 
 opinion, in order more convincingly to expose the fallacy 
 that lurks behind it, that a reasoner at length gains for his 
 mere statement of a fact the force of argument ; it is by a 
 wise forecast which allows hostile combinations to go so far 
 as by the inevitable reaction to become elements of his own 
 power, that a politician proves his genius for state-craft ; 
 and especially it is by so gently guiding public sentiment 
 that he seems to follow it, by so yielding doubtful points 
 that he can be firm without seeming obstinate in essential 
 ones, and thus gain the advantages of compromise without 
 the weakness of concession ; by so instinctively compre 
 hending the temper and prejudices of a people as to make 
 them gradually conscious of the superior wisdom of his 
 freedom from temper and prejudice it is by qualities such 
 as these that a magistrate shows himself worthy to be chief 
 in a commonwealth of freemen. And it is for qualities 
 such as these that we firmly believe History will rank Mr. 
 Lincoln among the most prudent of statesmen and the most 
 successful of rulers. If we wish to appreciate him, we have 
 only to conceive the inevitable chaos in which we should 
 now be weltering had a weak man or an unwise one been 
 chosen in his stead. 
 
 " Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, " without 
 brother behind it ; " and this is, by analogy, true of an 
 elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler in any critical 
 emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible resources of 
 prestige, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent 
 interest, while the new man must slowly and painfully 
 create all these out of the unwilling material around 
 him, by superiority of character, by patient singleness of 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 10? 
 
 purpose, by sagacious presentiment of popular tendencies 
 and instinctive sympathy with the national character. Mr. 
 Lincoln s task was one of peculiar and exceptional difficulty. 
 Long habit had accustomed the American people to the 
 notion of a party in power, and of a President as its 
 creature and organ, while the more vital fact, that the 
 executive for the time being represents the abstract idea of 
 government as a permanent principle superior to all party 
 and all private interest, had gradually become unfamiliar. 
 They had so long seen the public policy more or less 
 directed by views of party, arid often even of personal 
 advantage, as to be ready to suspect the motives of a chief 
 magistrate compelled, for the first time in our history, to 
 feel himself the head and hand of a great nation, and to 
 act upon the fundamental maxim, laid down by all 
 publicists, that the first duty of the government is to 
 defend and maintain its own existence. Accordingly, a 
 powerful weapon seemed to be put into the hands of the 
 Opposition by the necessity under which the administration 
 found itself of applying this old truth to new relations. 
 Nor were the Opposition his only nor his most dangerous 
 opponents. 
 
 The Republicans had carried the country upon an issue 
 in which ethics were more directly and visibly mingled with 
 politics than usual. Their leaders were trained to a 
 method of oratory which relied for its effect rather 
 on the moral sense than the understanding. Their 
 arrangements were drawn, not so much from experience as 
 from general principles of right and wrong. When the 
 war came, their system continued to be applicable and 
 effective, for here again the reason of the people was to be 
 reached and kindled through their sentiments. It was one 
 of those periods of excitement, gathering, contagious, 
 universal, which, while they last, exalt and clarify the 
 minds of men, giving to the mere words country, human 
 rights, democracy, a meaning and a force beyond that of 
 sober and logical argument. They were convictions, main 
 tained and defended by the supreme logic of passion. That 
 
108 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 penetrating fire ran in and roused those primary instincts 
 that make their lair in the dens and caverns of the mind. 
 What is called the great popular heart was awakened, that 
 indefinable something which may be, according to circum 
 stances, the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. 
 But enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into 
 anything better than cant; and phrases, when once the 
 inspiration that filled them with beneficent power has 
 ebbed away, retain only that semblance of meaning which 
 enables them to supplant reason in hasty minds. Among 
 the lessons taught by the French Revolution there is none 
 sadder or more striking than this, that you may make 
 everything else out of the passions of men except a political 
 system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly 
 and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma. 
 It is always demoralising to extend the domain of sentiment 
 over questions where it has no legitimate jurisdiction ; and 
 perhaps the severest strain upon Mr. Lincoln was in 
 resisting a tendency of his own supporters which chimed 
 with his own private desires, while wholly opposed to his 
 convictions of what would be wise policy. 
 
 The change which three years have brought about is too 
 remarkable to be passed over without comment, too weighty 
 in its lesson not to be laid to heart. Never did a President 
 enter upon office with less means at his command, outside 
 his own strength of heart and steadiness of understanding, 
 for inspiring confidence in the people, and so winning it for 
 himself, than Mr. Lincoln. All that was known of him was 
 that he was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his avail 
 ability that is, because he had no history and chosen by 
 a party with whose more extreme opinions he was not in 
 sympathy. It might well be feared that a man past fifty, 
 against whom the ingenuity of hostile partisans could rake 
 up no accusation, must be lacking in manliness of character, 
 in decision of principle, in strength of will; that a man 
 who was at best only the representative of a party, and who 
 yet did not fairly represent even that, would fail of 
 political, much more of popular, support. And certainly 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 109 
 
 no one ever entered upon office with so few resources of 
 power in the past, and so many materials of weakness in 
 the present, as Mr. Lincoln. Even in that half of the 
 Union which acknowledged him as President, there was a 
 large and at that time dangerous minority, that hardly 
 admitted his claim to the office, and even in the party that 
 elected him there was also a large minority that suspected 
 him of being secretly a communicant with the church of 
 Laodicea, All that he did was sure to be virulently 
 attacked as ultra by one side ; all that he left undone, to be 
 stigmatised as proof of lukewarmness and backsliding by 
 the other. Meanwhile he was to carry on a truly colossal 
 war by means of both; he was to disengage the country 
 from diplomatic entanglements of unprecedented peril 
 undisturbed by the help or the hindrance of either, and to 
 win from the crowning dangers of his administration, in the 
 confidence of the people, the means of his safety and their 
 own. He has contrived to do it, and perhaps none of our 
 Presidents since Washington has stood so firm ir the con 
 fidence of the people as he does after three years o stormy 
 administration. 
 
 Mr. Lincoln s policy was a tentative one, and rightly so. 
 He laid down no programme which must compel him to be 
 either inconsistent or unwise, no cast-iron theorem to which 
 circumstances must be fitted as they rose, or else be useless 
 to his ends. He seemed to have chosen Mazarin s motto, 
 Le temps et moi. The moi, to be sure, was not very promi 
 nent at first , but it has grown more and more so, till the 
 world is beginning to be persuaded that it stands for a 
 character of marked individuality and capacity for affairs. 
 Time was his prime minister, and, we began to think, at 
 one period, his general-in-chief also. At first he was so 
 slow that he tired out all those who see no evidence of pro 
 gress but in blowing up the engine; then he was so fast 
 that he took the breath away from those who think there 
 is no getting on safely while there is a spark of fire under 
 the boilers. God is the only being who has time enough ; 
 but a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can 
 
no ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs. Mr. 
 Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his career, though 
 we have sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise, 
 has always waited, as a wise man should, till the right 
 moment brought up all his reserves. Semper nocuit differre 
 paratis, is a sound axiom, but the really efficacious man will 
 also be sure to know when he is not ready, and be firm 
 against all persuasion and reproach till he is. 
 
 One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms 
 made on Mr. Lincoln s course by those who mainly agree 
 with him in principle, that the chief object of a statesman 
 should be rather to proclaim his adhesion to certain doc 
 trines than to achieve their triumph by quietly accomplish 
 ing his ends. In our opinion, there is no more unsafe 
 politician than a conscientiously rigid doctrinaire, nothing 
 more sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of 
 policy that admits of no pliability for contingencies. True, 
 there is a popular image of an impossible He, in whose 
 plastic hands the submissive destinies of mankind become 
 as wax, and to whose commanding necessity the toughest 
 facts yield with the graceful pliancy of fiction ; but in real 
 life we commonly find that the men who control circum 
 stances, as it is called, are those who have learned to allow 
 for the influence of their eddies, and have the nerve to turn 
 them to account at the happy instant. Mr. Lincoln s peril 
 ous task has been to carry a rather shaky raft through the 
 rapids, making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch 
 opportunity, and the country is to be congratulated that he 
 did not think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but 
 cautiously to assure himself with his setting-pole where the 
 main current was, and keep steadily to that. He is still 
 in wild water, but we have faith that his skill and sureness 
 of eye will bring him out right at last. 
 
 A curious, and, as we think, not inapt parallel, might be 
 drawn between Mr. Lincoln and one of the most striking 
 figures in modern history Henry IV. of France. The 
 career of the latter may be more picturesque, as that of a 
 daring captain always is ; but in all its vicissitudes there is 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 1 1 1 
 
 nothing more romantic than that sudden change, as by a 
 rub of Aladdin s lamp, from the attorney s office in a 
 country town of Illinois to the helm of a great nation in 
 times like these. The analogy between the characters 
 and circumstances of the two men is in many respects 
 singularly close. Succeeding to a rebellion rather than a 
 crown, Henry s chief material dependence was the Hugue 
 not party, whose doctrines sat upon him with a looseness 
 distasteful certainly, if not suspicious, to the more fanatical 
 among them. King only in name over the greater part of 
 France, and with his capital barred against him, it yet 
 gradually became clear to the more far-seeing even of the 
 Catholic party, that he was the only centre of order and 
 legitimate authority round which France could reorganise 
 itself. While preachers who held the divine right of kings 
 made the churches of Paris ring with declamations in 
 favour of democracy rather than submit to the heretic dog 
 of a Bearnois much as our soi-disant Democrats have 
 lately been preaching the divine right of slavery, and 
 denouncing the heresies of the Declaration of Independence 
 Henry bore both parties in hand till he was convinced 
 that only one course of action could possibly combine his 
 own interests and those of France. Meanwhile the 
 Protestants believed somewhat doubtfully that he was 
 theirs, the Catholics hoped somewhat doubtfully that he 
 would be theirs, and Henry himself turned aside remon 
 strance, advice, and curiosity alike with a jest or a proverb 
 (if a little high, he liked them none the worse), joking 
 continually as his manner was. We have seen Mr. Lincoln 
 contemptuously compared to Sancho Panza by persons 
 incapable of appreciating one of the deepest pieces of 
 wisdom in the profoundest romance ever written namely, 
 that, while Don Quixote was incomparable in theoretic and 
 ideal statesmanship, Sancho, with his stock of proverbs, 
 the ready money of human experience, made the best 
 possible practical governor. Henry IY. was as full of wise 
 saws and modern instances as Mr. Lincoln, but beneath all 
 this was the thoughtful, practical, humane, and thoroughly 
 
112 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 earnest man, around whom the fragments of France were to 
 gather themselves till she took her place again as a planet of 
 the first magnitude in the European system. In one respect 
 Mr. Lincoln was more fortunate than Henry. However 
 some may think him wanting in zeal, the most fanatical 
 can find no taint of apostasy in any measure of his, nor can 
 the most bitter charge him with being influenced by motives 
 of personal interest. The leading distinction between the 
 policies of the two is one of circumstances. Henry went 
 over to the nation ; Mr. Lincoln has steadily drawn the 
 nation over to him. One left a united France ; the other, 
 we hope and believe, will leave a reunited America. We 
 leave our readers to trace the further points of difference 
 and resemblance for themselves, merely suggesting a general 
 similarity which has often occurred to us. One only point 
 of melancholy interest we will allow ourselves to touch upon. 
 That Mr. Lincoln is not handsome nor elegant, we learn 
 from certain English tourists who would consider similar 
 revelations in regard to Queen Victoria as thoroughly 
 American in their want of bienseance. It is no concern of 
 ours, nor does it affect his fitness for the high place he so 
 worthily occupies; but he is certainly as fortunate as 
 Henry in the matter of good looks, if we may trust con 
 temporary evidence. Mr. Lincoln has also been reproached 
 with Americanism by some not unfriendly British critics ; 
 but, with all deference, we cannot say that we like him any 
 the worse for it, or see in it any reason why he should 
 govern Americans the less wisely. 
 
 People of more sensitive organisations may be shocked, 
 but we are glad that in this our true war of independence, 
 which is to free us for ever from the Old World, we have 
 had at the head of our affairs a man whom America made, 
 as God made Adam, out of the very earth, unancestried, 
 unprivileged, unknown, to show us how much truth, how 
 much magnanimity, and how much statecraft await the call 
 of opportunity in simple manhood when it believes in the 
 justice of God and the worth of man. Conventionalities 
 are all very well in their proper place, but they shrivel at 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 113 
 
 the touch of nature like stubble in the fire. The genius 
 that sways a nation by its arbitrary will seems less august 
 to us than that which multiplies and reinforces itself in the 
 instincts and convictions of an entire people. Autocracy 
 may have something in it more melodramatic than this, but 
 falls far short of it in human value and interest. 
 
 Experience would have bred in us a rooted distrust of 
 improvised statesmanship, even if we did not believe politics 
 to be a science, which, if it cannot always command men 
 of special aptitude and great powers, at least demands the 
 long and steady application of the best powers of such men 
 as it can command to master even its first principles. It is 
 curious that, in a country which boasts of its intelligence, 
 the theory should be so generally held that the most com 
 plicated of human contrivances, and one which every day 
 becomes more complicated, can be worked at sight by any 
 man able to talk for an hour or two without stopping to 
 think. 
 
 Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example of a 
 ready-made ruler. But no case could well be less in point ; 
 for, besides that he was a man of such fair-mindedness as is 
 always the raw material of wisdom, he had in his profession 
 a training precisely the opposite of that to which a partisan 
 is subjected. His experience as a lawyer compelled him 
 riot only to see that there is a principle underlying every 
 phenomenon in human affairs, but that there are always two 
 sides to every question, both of which must be fully under 
 stood in order to understand either, and that it is of greater 
 advantage to an advocate to appreciate the strength than 
 the weakness of his antagonist s position. Nothing is more 
 remarkable than the unerring tact with which, in his debate 
 with Mr. Douglas, he went straight to the reason of the 
 question ; nor have we ever had a more striking lesson in 
 political tactics than the fact, that, opposed to a man excep 
 tionally adroit in using popular prejudice and bigotry to his 
 purpose, exceptionally unscrupulous in appealing to those 
 baser motives that turn a meeting of citizens into a mob of 
 barbarians, he should yet have won his case before a jury of 
 
 136 
 
ii4 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 the people. Mr. Lincoln was as far as possible from an 
 impromptu politician. His wisdom was made up of a 
 knowledge of things as well as of men ; his sagacity resulted 
 from a clear perception and honest acknowledgment of diffi 
 culties, which enabled him to see that the only durable 
 triumph of political opinion is based, not on any abstract 
 right, but upon so much of justice, the highest attainable 
 at any given moment in human affairs, as may be had in 
 the balance of mutual concession. Doubtless he had an 
 ideal, but it was the ideal of a practical statesman to aim 
 at the best, and to take the next best, if he is lucky enough 
 to get even that. His slow, but singularly masculine, intel 
 ligence taught him that precedent is only another name for 
 embodied experience, and that it counts for even more in 
 the guidance of communities of men than in that of the 
 individual life. He was not a man who held it good public 
 economy to pull down on the mere chance of rebuilding 
 better. Mr. Lincoln s faith in God was qualified by a very 
 well-founded distrust of the wisdom of man. Perhaps it 
 was his want of self-confidence that more than anything else 
 won him the unlimited confidence of the people, for they 
 felt that there would be no need of retreat from any position 
 he had deliberately taken. The cautious, but steady, 
 advance of his policy during the war was like that of a 
 Roman army. He left behind him a firm road on which 
 public confidence could follow ; he took America with him 
 where he went; what he gained he occupied, and his 
 advanced posts became colonies. The very homeliness of 
 his genius was its distinction. His kingship was con 
 spicuous by its workday homespun. Never was ruler so 
 absolute as he, nor so little conscious of it ; for he was the 
 incarnate common-sense of the people. With all that ten 
 derness of nature whose sweet sadness touched whoever saw 
 him with something of its own pathos, there was no trace 
 of sentimentalism in his speech or action. He seems to 
 have had but one rule of conduct, always that of practical 
 and successful politics, to let himself be guided by events, 
 when they were sure to bring him out where he wished 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 115 
 
 to go, though by what seemed to unpractical minds, which 
 let go the possible to grasp at the desirable, a longer road. 
 
 Undoubtedly the highest function of statesmanship is by 
 degrees to accommodate the conduct of communities to 
 ethical laws, and to subordinate the conflicting self-interests 
 of the day to higher and more permanent concerns. But it 
 is on the understanding, and not on the sentiment, of a 
 nation that all safe legislation must be based. Voltaire s 
 saying, that " a consideration of petty circumstances is the 
 tomb of great things," may be true of individual men, but 
 it certainly is not true of governments. It is by a multi 
 tude of such considerations, each in itself trifling, but all 
 together weighty, that the framers of policy can alone 
 divine what is practicable, and therefore wise. The imputa 
 tion of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician 
 and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject him 
 self. The foolish and the dead alone never change their 
 opinion. The course of a great statesman resembles that of 
 navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble 
 bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on 
 which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and 
 marking the almost imperceptible slopes of national ten 
 dency, yet always aiming at direct advances, always 
 recruited from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes burst 
 ing open paths of progress and fruitful human commerce 
 through what seem the eternal barriers of both. It is 
 loyalty to great ends, even though forced to combine the 
 small and opposing motives of selfish men to accomplish 
 them ; it is the anchored cling to solid principles of duty 
 and action, which knows how to swing with the tide, but is 
 never carried away by it that we demand in public men, 
 and not sameness of policy, or a conscientious persistency 
 in what is impracticable. JFor the impracticable, however 
 theoretically enticing, is always politically unwise, sound 
 statesmanship being the application of that prudence to 
 the public business which is the safest guide in that of 
 private men. 
 
 No doubt slavery was the most delicate and embarrassing 
 
Ii6 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 question with which Mr. Lincoln was called on to deal, and 
 it was one which no man in his position, whatever his 
 opinions, could evade : for, though he might withstand the 
 clamour of partisans, he must sooner or later yield to the 
 persistent importunacy of circumstances, which thrust the 
 problem upon him at every turn and in every shape. 
 
 It has been brought against us as an accusation abroad, 
 and repeated here by people who measure their country 
 rather by what is thought of it than by what it is, that our 
 war has not been distinctly and avowedly for the extinction 
 of slavery, but* a war rather for the preservation of our 
 national power and greatness, in which the emancipation of 
 the negro has been forced upon us by circumstances and 
 accepted as a necessity. We are very far from denying 
 this ; nay, we admit that it is so far true that we were slow 
 to renounce our constitutional obligations even toward those 
 who had absolved us by their own act from the letter of our 
 duty. We are speaking of the government which, legally 
 installed for the whole country, was bound, so long as it 
 was possible, not to overstep the limits of orderly prescrip 
 tion, and could not, without abnegating its own very nature, 
 take the lead in making rebellion an excuse for revolution. 
 There were, no doubt, many ardent and sincere persons 
 who seemed to think this as simple a thing to do as to lead 
 off a Virginia reel. They forgot what should be forgotten 
 least of all in a system like ours, that the administration 
 for the time being represents not only the majority which 
 elects it, but the minority as well a minority in this case 
 powerful, and so little ready for emancipation that it was 
 opposed even to war. Mr. Lincoln had not been chosen as 
 general agent of an anti-slavery society, but President of the 
 United States, to perform certain functions exactly denned 
 by law. Whatever were his wishes, it was no less duty 
 than policy to mark out for himself a line of action that 
 would not further distract the country, by raising before 
 their time questions which plainly would soon enough 
 compel attention, and for which every day was making the 
 answer more easy. 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 117 
 
 Meanwhile he must solve the riddle of this new Sphinx, 
 or be devoured. Though Mr. Lincoln s policy in this critical 
 affair has not been such as to satisfy those who demand an 
 heroic treatment for even the most trifling occasion, and who 
 will not cut their coat according to their cloth, unless they 
 can borrow the scissors of Atropos, it has been at least not 
 unworthy of the long-headed king of Ithaca. Mr. Lincoln 
 had the choice of Bassanio offered him. Which of the three 
 caskets held the prize that was to redeem the fortunes of the 
 country ? There was the golden one, whose showy specious- 
 ness might have tempted a vain man ; the silver of compro 
 mise, which might have decided the choice of a merely acute 
 one ; and the leaden dull and homely-looking, as prudence 
 always is, yet with something about it sure to attract the 
 eye of practical wisdom. Mr. Lincoln dallied with his de 
 cision perhaps longer than seemed needful to those on whom 
 its awful responsibility was not to rest, but when he made it, 
 it was worthy of his cautious but sure-footed understanding. 
 The moral of the Sphinx-riddle, and it is a deep one, lies in 
 the childish simplicity of the solution. Those who fail in 
 guessing it, fail because they are over-ingenious, and cast 
 about for an answer that shall suit their own notion of the 
 gravity of the occasion and of their own dignity, rather than 
 the occasion itself. 
 
 In a matter which must be finally settled by public 
 opinion, and in regard to which the ferment of prejudice and 
 passion on both sides has not yet subsided to that equilib 
 rium of compromise from which alone a sound public 
 opinion can result, it is proper enough for the private 
 citizen to press his own convictions with all possible force 
 of argument and persuasion ; but the popular magistrate, 
 whose judgment must become action, and whose action 
 involves the whole country, is bound to wait till the senti 
 ment of the people is so far advanced toward his own point 
 of view, that what he does shall find support in it, instead 
 of merely confusing it with new elements of division. It 
 was not unnatural that men earnestly devoted to the saving 
 of their country, and profoundly convinced that slavery 
 
Ii8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 was its only real enemy, should demand a decided policy 
 round which all patriots might rally \ and this might have 
 been the wisest course for an absolute ruler. But in the 
 then unsettled state of the public mind, with a large party 
 decrying even resistance to the slaveholders rebellion as 
 not only unwise, but even unlawful ; with a majority, per 
 haps, even of the would-be loyal so long accustomed to 
 regard the Constitution as a deed of gift conveying to the 
 South their own judgment as to policy and instinct as to 
 right, that they were in doubt at first whether their loyalty 
 were due to the country or to slavery ; and with a respect 
 able body of honest and influential men who still believed 
 in the possibility of conciliation, Mr. Lincoln judged 
 wisely, that, in laying down a policy in deference to one 
 party, he should be giving to the other the very fulcrum for 
 which their disloyalty had been waiting. 
 
 It behoved a clear-headed man in his position not to yield 
 so far to an honest indignation against the brokers of treason 
 in the North as to lose sight of the materials for misleading 
 which were their stock in trade, and to forget that it is not 
 the falsehood of sophistry which is to be feared, but the 
 grain of truth mingled with it to make it specious, that it 
 is not the knavery of the leaders so much as the honesty of 
 the followers they may seduce, that gives them power for 
 evil. It was especially his duty to do nothing which might 
 help the people to forget the true cause of the war in 
 fruitless disputes about its inevitable consequences. 
 
 The doctrine of State rights can be so handled by an 
 adroit demagogue as easily to confound the distinction 
 between liberty and lawlessness in the minds of ignorant 
 persons, accustomed always to be influenced by the sound 
 of certain words, rather than to reflect upon the principles 
 which give; them meaning. For, though Secession involves 
 the manifest absurdity of denying to a State the right of 
 making war against any foreign Power while permitting it 
 against the United States ; though it supposes a compact of 
 mutual concessions and guaranties among States without 
 any arbiter in case of dissension- though it contradicts 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 119 
 
 common-sense in assuming that the men who framed our 
 government did not know what they meant when they 
 substituted Union for Confederation ; though it falsifies 
 history, which shows that the main opposition to the 
 adoption of the Constitution was based on the argument 
 that it did not allow that independence in the several States 
 which alone would justify them in seceding ; yet, as 
 slavery was universally admitted to be a reserved right, an 
 inference could be drawn from any direct attack upon it 
 (though only in self-defence) to a natural right of resistance, 
 logical enough to satisfy minds untrained to detect fallacy, 
 as the majority of men always are, and now too much 
 disturbed by the disorder of the times to consider that the 
 order of events had any legitimate bearing on the argu 
 ment. Though Mr. Lincoln was too sagacious to give the 
 Northern allies of the Rebels the occasion they desired and 
 even strove to provoke, yet from the beginning of the war 
 the most persistent efforts have been made to confuse the 
 public mind as to its origin and motives, and to drag the 
 people of the loyal States down from the national position 
 they had instinctively taken to the old level of party 
 squabbles and antipathies. The wholly unprovoked rebel 
 lion of an oligarchy proclaiming negro slavery the corner 
 stone of free institutions, and in the first flush of over-hasty 
 confidence venturing to parade the logical sequence of their 
 leading dogma, " that slavery is right in principle, and has 
 nothing to do with difference of complexion," has been 
 represented as a legitimate and gallant attempt to maintain 
 the true principles of democracy. The rightful endeavour 
 of an established government, the least onerous that ever 
 existed, to defend itself against a treacherous attack on its 
 very existence, has been cunningly made to seem the 
 wicked effort of a fanatical clique to force its doctrines on 
 an oppressed population. 
 
 Even so long ago as when Mr. Lincoln, not yet convinced 
 of the danger and magnitude of the crisis, was endeavouring 
 to persuade himself of Union majorities at the South, and 
 to carry on a war that was half peace in the hope of a peaoo 
 
120 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 that would have been all war, while he was still enfor 
 cing the Fugitive Slave Law, under some theory that 
 Secession, however it might absolve States from their 
 obligations, could not escheat them of their claims under 
 the Constitution, and that slaveholders in rebellion had 
 alone among mortals the privilege of having their cake and 
 eating it at the same time the enemies of free government 
 were striving to persuade the people that the war was an 
 Abolition crusade. To rebel without reason was proclaimed 
 as one of the rights of man, while it was carefully kept out 
 of sight that to suppress rebellion is the first duty of 
 government. All the evils that have come upon the 
 country have been attributed to the Abolitionists, though 
 it is hard to see how any party can become permanently 
 powerful except in one of two ways, either by the greater 
 truth of its principles, or the extravagance of the party 
 opposed to it. To fancy the ship of state, riding safe at 
 her constitutional moorings, suddenly engulfed by a huge 
 kraken of Abolitionism, rising from unknown depths and 
 grasping it with slimy tentacles, is to look at the natural 
 history of the matter with the eyes of Pontoppidan. To 
 believe that the leaders in the Southern treason feared 
 any danger from Abolitionism, would be to deny them 
 ordinary intelligence, though there can be little doubt that 
 they made use of it to stir the passions and excite the fears 
 of their deluded accomplices. They rebelled, not because 
 they thought slavery weak, but because they believed it 
 strong enough, not to overthrow the government, but to get 
 possession of it ; for it becomes daily clearer that they used 
 rebellion only as a means of revolution ; and if they got 
 revolution, though not in the shape they looked for, is the 
 American people to save them from its consequences at the 
 cost of its own existence ? The election of Mr. Lincoln, 
 which it was clearly in their power to prevent had they 
 wished, was the occasion merely, and not the cause, of their 
 revolt. Abolitionism, till within a year or two, was the 
 despised heresy of a few earnest persons, without political 
 weight enough to carry the election of a parish constable ; 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 121 
 
 and their cardinal principle was disunion, because they were 
 convinced that within the Union the position of slavery 
 was impregnable. In spite of the proverb, great effects 
 do not follow from small causes that is, disproportionately 
 small but from adequate causes acting under certain 
 required conditions. To contrast the size of the oak with 
 that of the parent acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all 
 costs from its slender strong-box, may serve for a child s 
 wonder; but the real miracle lies in that divine league 
 which bound all the forces of nature to the service of the 
 tiny germ in fulfilling its destiny. Everything has been at 
 work for the past ten years in the cause of anti-slavery, but 
 Garrison and Phillips have been far less successful pro 
 pagandists than the slave-holders themselves, with the 
 constantly-growing arrogance of their pretensions and 
 encroachments. They have forced the question upon the 
 attention of every voter in the Free States, by defiantly 
 putting freedom and democracy on the defensive. But, 
 even after the Kansas outrages, there was 110 wide-spread 
 desire on the part of the North to commit aggressions, 
 though there was a growing determination to resist them. 
 The popular unanimity in favour of the war three years 
 ago was but in small measure the result of anti-slavery 
 sentiment, far less of any zeal for abolition. But every 
 month of the war, every movement of the allies of slavery 
 in the Free States, has been making Abolitionists by the 
 thousand. The masses of any people, however intelligent, 
 are very little moved by abstract principles of humanity 
 and justice, until those principles are interpreted for them 
 by the stinging commentary of some infringement upon 
 their own rights, and then their instincts and passions, once 
 aroused, do indeed derive an incalculable reinforcement of 
 impulse and intensity from those higher ideas, those sublime 
 traditions, which have no motive political force till they are 
 allied with a sense of immediate personal wrong or im 
 minent peril. Then at last the stars in their courses begin 
 to fight against Sisera. Had anyone doubted before that 
 the rights of human nature are unitary, that oppression is 
 
122 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 of one hue the world over, no matter what the colour of 
 the oppressed had any one failed to see what the real 
 essence of the contest was the efforts of the advocates of 
 slavery among ourselves to throw discredit upon the funda 
 mental axioms of the Declaration of Independence and the 
 radical doctrines of Christianity, could not fail to sharpen 
 his eyes. 
 
 While every day was bringing the people nearer to the 
 conclusion which all thinking men saw to be inevitable 
 from the beginning, it was wise in Mr. Lincoln to leave the 
 shaping of his policy to events. In this country, where the 
 rough and ready understanding of the people is sure at last 
 to be the controlling power, a profound common-sense is the 
 best genius for statesmanship. Hitherto the wisdom of the 
 President s measures has been justified by the fact that they 
 have always resulted in more firmly uniting public opinion. 
 One of the things particularly admirable in the public utter 
 ances of President Lincoln is a certain tone of familiar 
 dignity, which, while it is perhaps the most difficult attain 
 ment of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of personal 
 character. There must be something essentially noble in an 
 elective ruler who can descend to the level of confidential 
 ease without losing respect, something very manly in one 
 who can break through the etiquette of his conventional 
 rank and trust himself to the reason and intelligence of 
 those who have elected him. No higher compliment was 
 ever paid to a nation than the simple confidence, the fire 
 side plainness, with which Mr. Lincoln always addresses 
 himself to the reason of the American people. This was, 
 indeed, a true democrat, who grounded himself on the 
 assumption that a democracy can think. u Come, let us 
 reason together about this matter," has been the tone of all 
 his addresses to the people ; and accordingly we have never 
 had a chief magistrate who so won to himself the love and 
 at the same time the judgment of his countrymen. To us, 
 that simple confidence of his in the right-mindedness of his 
 fellow-men is very touching, and its success is as strong an 
 argument as we have ever seen in favour of the theory that 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 123 
 
 men can govern themselves. He never appeals to any 
 vulgar sentiment, he never alludes to the humbleness of his 
 origin; it probably never occurred to him, indeed, that 
 there was anything higher to start from than manhood ; 
 and he put himself on a level with those he addressed, not 
 by going down to them, but only by taking it for granted 
 that they had brains, and would come up to a common 
 ground of reason. In an article lately printed in The 
 Nation, Mr. Bayard Taylor mentions the striking fact, 
 that in the foulest dens of the Five Points he found the 
 portrait of Lincoln. The wretched population that makes 
 its hive there threw all its votes and more against him, and 
 yet paid this instinctive tribute to the sweet humanity of 
 his nature. Their ignorance sold its vote and took its 
 money, but all that was left of manhood in them recognised 
 its saint and martyr. 
 
 Mr. Lincoln is not in the habit of saying " This is my 
 opinion, or my theory," but "This is the conclusion to 
 which, in my judgment, the time has come, and to which, 
 accordingly, the sooner we come the better for us." His 
 policy has been the policy of public opinion based on 
 adequate discussion and on a timely recognition of the 
 influence of passing events in shaping the features of 
 events to come. 
 
 One secret of Mr. Lincoln s remarkable success in capti 
 vating the popular mind is undoubtedly an unconsciousness 
 of self which enables him, though under the necessity of 
 constantly using the capital /, to do it without any 
 suggestion of egotism. There is no single vowel which 
 men s mouths can pronounce with such difference of effect. 
 That which one shall hide away, as it were, behind the 
 substance of his discourse, or, if he bring it to the front, 
 shall use merely to give an agreeable accent of individuality 
 to what he says, another shall make an offensive challenge 
 to the self-satisfaction of all his hearers, and an unwarranted 
 intrusion upon each man s sense of personal importance, 
 irritating every pore of his vanity, like a dry north-east 
 wind, to a gooseflesh of opposition and hostility. Mr. 
 
124 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 Lincoln has never studied Quinctilian ; but he has, in the 
 earnest simplicity and unaffected Americanism of his own 
 character, one art of oratory worth all the rest. He 
 forgets himself so entirely in his object as to give his / the 
 sympathetic and persuasive effect of We with the great body 
 of his countrymen. Homely, dispassionate, showing all the 
 rough- edged process of his thought as it goes along, yet 
 arriving at his conclusions with an honest every-day logic, 
 he is so eminently our representative man, that, when he 
 speaks, it seems as if the people were listening to their own 
 thinking aloud. The dignity of his thought owes nothing 
 to any ceremonial garb of words, but to the manly movement 
 that comes of settled purpose and an energy of reason that 
 knows not what rhetoric means. There has been nothing 
 of Cleon, still less of Strepsiades striving to underbid him 
 in demagogism, to be found in the public utterances of Mr. 
 Lincoln. He has always addressed the intelligence of men, 
 never their prejudice, their passion, or their ignorance. 
 
 On the day of his death, this simple Western attorney, 
 who according to one party was a vulgar joker, and whom 
 the doctrinaires among his own supporters accused of 
 wanting every element of statesmanship, was the most 
 absolute ruler in Christendom, and this solely by the hold 
 his good-humoured sagacity had laid on the hearts and 
 understandings of his countrymen. Nor was this all, for it 
 appeared that he had drawn the great majority, not only of 
 his fellow-citizens, but of mankind also, to his side. So 
 strong and so persuasive is honest manliness without a 
 single quality of romance or unreal sentiment to help it ! 
 A civilian during times of the most captivating military 
 achievement, awkward, with no skill in the lower technical 
 ities of manners, he left behind him a fame beyond that of 
 any conqueror, the memory of a grace higher than that of 
 outward person, and of a gentlemanliness deeper than mere 
 breeding. Never before that startled April morning did 
 such multitudes of men shed tears for the death of one 
 they had never seen, as if with him a friendly presence had 
 
JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 125 
 
 been taken away from their lives, leaving them colder and 
 darker. Never was funeral panegyric so eloquent as the 
 silent look of sympathy which strangers exchanged when 
 they met on that day. Their common manhood had lost a 
 kinsman. 
 
 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES 
 GATES PERCIVAL. 
 
 THIS is an interesting and in many respects instructive 
 book. Mr. Ward has done his work, as is fitting, in a 
 loving spirit ; and if he over-estimates both what Percival 
 was and what he did, he enables us to form our own judg 
 ment by letting him so far as possible speak for himself. 
 The book gives a rather curious picture of what the life of 
 a man of letters is likely to be in a country not yet ripe for 
 literary production, especially if he be not endowed with 
 the higher qualities which command and can wait for that 
 best of all successes which comes slowly. In a generation 
 where everybody can write verses, and where certain modes 
 of thought and turns of phrase have become so tyrannous 
 that it is as hard to distinguish between the productions of 
 one minor poet and another as among those of so many 
 Minnesingers or Troubadours, there is a demand for only 
 two things for what chimes with the moment s whim of 
 popular sentiment and is forgotten when that has changed, 
 or for what is never an anachronism, because it slakes or 
 seems to slake the eternal thirst of our nature for those 
 ideal waters that glimmer before us and still before us in 
 ever renewing mirage. Percival met neither of these con 
 ditions. With a nature singularly unplastic, unsympathetic, 
 and self-involved, he was incapable of receiving into his 
 own mind the ordinary emotions of men and giving them 
 back in music ; and with a lofty conception of the object 
 and purposes of poesy, he had neither the resolution nor 
 the power which might have enabled him to realise it. He 
 offers as stiiking an example as could be found of the 
 
126 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 
 
 poetic temperament unballasted with those less obvious 
 qualities which make the poetic faculty. His verse carries 
 every inch of canvas that diction and sentiment can crowd, 
 but the craft is cranky, and we miss that deep-grasping 
 keel of reason which alone can steady and give direction. 
 His mind drifts, too waterlogged to answer the helm, and 
 in his longer poems, like " Prometheus," half the voyage is 
 spent in trying to make up for a lee-way which becomes at 
 last irretrievable. If he had a port in view when he set 
 out, he seems soon to give up all hope of ever reaching it ; 
 and whenever we open the log-book, we find him running 
 for nowhere in particular, as the wind happens to lead, or 
 lying-to in the merest gale of verbiage. The truth is, that 
 Percival was led to the writing of verse by a sentimental 
 desire of the mind, and not by that concurring instinct of 
 all the faculties which is a self-forgetting passion of the 
 entire man. Too excitable to possess his subject fully, as a 
 man of mere talent may often do, he is not possessed by it 
 as the man of genius is, and seems helplessly striving, the 
 greater part of the time, to make out what, in the name of 
 common or uncommon sense, he is after. With all the 
 stock properties of verse whirling and dancing about his 
 ears puffed out to an empty show of life, the reader of 
 much of his blank verse feels as if a mob of well-draperied 
 clothes-lines were rioting about him in all the unwilling 
 ecstasy of a thunder-gust. 
 
 Percival living from 1795 to 1856, arrived at manhood 
 just as the last war with England had come to end. Poor, 
 shy, and proud, there is nothing in his earlier years that 
 might not be paralleled in those of hundreds of sensitive 
 boys who gradually get the nonsense shaken out of them in 
 the rough school of life. The length of the schooling need 
 ful in his case is what makes it peculiar. Not till after he 
 was fifty, if even then, did he learn that the world never 
 takes a man at his own valuation, and never pays money 
 for what it does not want, or think it wants. It did not 
 want his poetry, simply ~ because it was not, is not, and by 
 no conceivable power of argument can be made, interesting 
 
JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 12? 
 
 the first duty of every artistic product. Percival, who 
 would have thought his neighbours mad if they had insisted 
 on his buying twenty thousand refrigerators merely because 
 they had been at the trouble of making them, and found it 
 convenient to turn them into cash, could never forgive the 
 world for taking this business view of the matter in his 
 own case. He went on doggedly, making refrigerators of 
 every possible pattern, and comforted himself with the 
 thought of a wiser posterity, which should have learned 
 that the purpose of poetry is to cool and not to kindle. 
 His " Mind," which is on the whole perhaps the best of 
 his writings, vies in coldness with the writings of his 
 brother doctor, Akenside, whose "Pleasures of Imagina 
 tion" are something quite other than pleasing in reality. 
 If there be here and there a semblance of pale fire, it 
 is but the reflection of moonshine upon ice. Akenside is 
 respectable, because he really had something new to say, 
 in spite of his pompous, mouthing way of saying it; but 
 when Perciral says it over again, it is a little too much. In 
 his more ambitious pieces and it is curious how literally 
 the word "pieces" applies to all he did he devotes himself 
 mainly to telling us what poetry ought to be, as if man 
 kind were not always more than satisfied with anyone who 
 fulfils the true office of poet, by showing them, with the 
 least possible fuss, what it is. Percival was a professor of 
 poetry rather than a poet, and we are not surprised at the 
 number of lectures he reads us when we learn that in early 
 life he was an excellent demonstrator of anatomy, whose 
 subject must be dead before his business with it begins. 
 His interest in poetry was always more or less scientific. 
 He was for ever trying experiments in matter and form, 
 especially the latter. And these were especially unhappy, 
 because it is plain that he had no musical ear, or at best a 
 very imperfect one. His attempts at classical metres are 
 simply unreadable, whether as verse or prose. He contrives 
 to make even the Sapphic so, which when we read it in 
 Latin moves featly to our modern accentuation. Let any 
 one who wishes to feel the difference between ear and no 
 
128 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 
 
 ear compare Percival s specimens with those in the same 
 kind of Coleridge, who had the finest metrical sense since 
 Milton. We take this very experimenting to be a sufficient 
 proof that Percival s faculty, such as it was and we do not 
 rate it highly was artificial, and not innate. The true 
 poet is much rather experimented upon by life and nature, 
 by joy and sorrow, by beauty and defect, till it be found 
 out whether he have any hidden music in him that can 
 sing them into an accord with the eternal harmony which 
 we call God. 
 
 It is easy to trace the literary influences to which the 
 mind of Percival was in turn subjected. Early in life we 
 find a taint of Byronism, which indeed does not wholly 
 disappear to the last. There is among his poems " An 
 Imprecation," of which a single stanza will suffice as a 
 specimen : 
 
 " Wrapped iu sheets of gory lightning, 
 While cursed night-hags ring thy knell, 
 May the arm of vengeance bright ning, 
 O er thee wave the sword of hell ! " 
 
 If we could fancy Laura Matilda shut up tipsy in the watch- 
 house, we might suppose her capable of this melodious substi 
 tute for swearing. We confess that we cannot read it without 
 laughing, after learning from Mr. Ward that its Salmoneus- 
 thunderbolts were launched at the comfortable little city of 
 Hartford, because the poet fancied that the inhabitants 
 thereof did riot like him or his verses so much as he himself 
 did. There is something deliciously ludicrous in the concep 
 tion of night-hags ringing the orthodox bell of the Second 
 Congregational or First Baptist Meeting-house to summon 
 the parishioners to witness these fatal consequences of not 
 reading Percival s poems. Nothing less than the fear of 
 some such catastrophe could compel the perusal of the 
 greater part of them. Next to Byron comes Moore, whose 
 cloying sentimentalism and too facile melody are recalled 
 by the subject and treatment of very many of the shorter 
 lyrics of Percival. In " Prometheus " it is bhelley who is 
 
JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 129 
 
 paramount for the time, and Shelley at his worst period, 
 before his unwieldy abundance of incoherent words and 
 images, that were merely words and images without any 
 meaning of real experience to give them solidity, had been 
 compressed in the stricter moulds of thought and study. 
 In the blank verse, again, we encounter Wordsworth s tone 
 and sentiment. These were no good models for Percival, 
 who always improvised, and who seems to have thought 
 verse the great distinction between poetry and prose. 
 Percival got nothing from Shelley but the fatal copiousness 
 which is his vice, nothing from Wordsworth but that tend 
 ency to preach at every corner about a sympathy with 
 nature which is not his real distinction, and which becomes 
 a wearisome cant at second-hand. Shelley and Wordsworth 
 are both stilted, though in different ways. Shelley wreathed 
 his stilts with flowers ; while Wordsworth, protesting 
 against the use of them as sinful, mounts his solemnly at 
 last, and stalks away, conscientiously eschewing whatever 
 would serve to hide the naked wood nay, was it not Gray s 
 only that were scandalous, and were not his own, modelled 
 upon those of the sainted Oowper, of strictly orthodox pat 
 tern after all ? Percival, like all imitators, is caught by the 
 defects of what he copies, and exaggerates them. With 
 him the stilts are the chief matter ; and getting a taller 
 pair than either of his predecessors, he lifts his common 
 place upon them only to make it more drearily conspicuous. 
 Shelley has his gleams of unearthly wildfire ; Wordsworth 
 is by fits the most deeply-inspired man of his generation ; 
 but Percival has no lucid interval. He is pertinaciously 
 and unappeasably dull as dull as a comedy of Goethe. 
 He never in his life wrote a rememberable verse. We 
 should not have thought this of any consequence now, for 
 we need not try to read him, did not Mr. Ward with 
 amusing gravity all along assume that he was a great poet. 
 There was scarce timber enough in him for the making 
 of a Tiedge or a Hagedorn, both of whom he somewhat 
 resembles. 
 
 Percival came to maturity at an unfortunate time for a 
 
 137 
 
130 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL, 
 
 man so liable to self-delusion. Leaving college with so im 
 perfect a classical training (in spite of the numerous " testi 
 monials " cited by Mr. Ward) that he was capable of laying 
 the accent on the second syllable of Pericles, he seems 
 never to have systematically trained even such faculty as 
 was in him, but to have gone on to the end mistaking 
 excitability of brain for wholesome exercise of thought. 
 The consequence is a prolonged immaturity, which makes 
 his latest volume, published in 1843, as crude and as plainly 
 wanting in enduring quality as the first number of his 
 " Clio." We have the same old complaints of neglected 
 genius as if genius could ever be neglected so long as it 
 has the perennial consolation of its own divine society the 
 same wilted sentiment, the same feeling about for topics of 
 verse in which he may possibly find that inspiration from 
 without which the true poet cannot flee from in himself. 
 These tedious wailings about heavenly powers suffocating 
 in the heavy atmosphere of an uncongenial, unrecognising 
 world and Percival is profuse of them are simply an 
 advertisement to whoever has ears of some innate disability 
 in the man who utters them. Heavenly powers know very 
 well how to take care of themselves. The poor " World," 
 meaning thereby that small fraction of society which has 
 any personal knowledge of an author or his affairs, has had 
 great wrong done it in such matters. It is not, and never 
 was, the powers of a man that it neglects it could not if it 
 would but his weakness, and especially the publication of 
 them, of which it grows weary. It can never supply any 
 man with what is wanting in himself, and the attempt to 
 do it only makes bad worse. If a man can find the proof 
 of his own genius only in public appreciation still worse, 
 if his vanity console itself with taking it as an evidence of 
 rare qualities in himself that his fellow-mortals are unable 
 to see them it is all up with him. The "World" 
 resolutely refused to find Wordsworth entertaining, and it 
 refuses still, on good grounds ; but the genius that was in 
 him bore up unflinchingly, would take no denial, got its 
 claim admitted on all hands, and impregnated at last the 
 
JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 131 
 
 literature of an entire generation, though habitans in sicco, 
 if ever genius did. But Percival seems to have satisfied 
 himself with a syllogism something like this : Men of 
 genius are neglected ; the more neglect, the more genius ; 
 I am altogether neglected ergo, wholly made up of that 
 priceless material. 
 
 The truth was that he suffered rather from over-appre 
 ciation ; and " when," says a nameless old Frenchman, " I 
 see a man go up like a rocket, I expect before long to 
 see the stick come down." The times were singularly 
 propitious to mediocrity. As in Holland one had only to 
 
 Invent a shovel and be a magistrate," 
 
 so here to write a hundred blank verses was to be immortal, 
 till somebody else wrote a hundred and fifty blanker ones. 
 It had been resolved unanimously that we must and would 
 have a national literature. England, France, Spain, Italy, 
 each already had one, Germany was getting one made as 
 fast as possible, and Ireland vowed that she once had one 
 far surpassing them all. To be respectable, we must have 
 one also, and that speedily. That we were not yet, in any 
 true sense, a nation; that we wanted that literary and 
 social atmosphere which is the breath of life to all artistic 
 production ; that our scholarship, such as it was, was 
 mostly of that theological sort which acts like a prolonged 
 drought upon the brain ; that our poetic fathers were Joel 
 Barlow and Timothy D wight was nothing to the purpose; 
 a literature adapted to the size of the country was what we 
 must and would have. Given the number of square miles, 
 the length of the rivers, the size of the lakes, and you have 
 the greatness of the literature we were bound to produce 
 without further delay. If that little dribble of an Avon 
 had succeeded in engendering Shakespeare, what a giant 
 might we not look for from the mighty womb of Missis 
 sippi ! Physical geography for the first time took her 
 rightful place as the tenth and most inspiring Muse. A 
 glance at the map would satisfy the most incredulous that 
 she had done her best for us, and should we be wanting to 
 
132 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 
 
 the glorious opportunity 1 Not we indeed ! So surely a?, 
 Franklin invented the art of printing, and Fulton the 
 steam-engine, we would invent us a great poet in time to 
 send the news by the next packet to England, and teach 
 her that we were her masters in arts as well as arms. 
 
 Percival was only too ready to be invented, and he forth 
 with produced his bale of verses from a loom capable of 
 turning off a hitherto unheard-of number of yards to the 
 hour, and perfectly adapted to the amplitude of our ter 
 ritory, inasmuch as it was manufactured on the theory of 
 covering the largest surface with the least possible amount 
 of meaning that would hold words together. He was as 
 ready to accept the perilous emprise, and as loud in asserting 
 his claim thereto, as Sir Kay used to be, and with much the 
 same result. Our critical journals and America certainly 
 has led the world in a department of letters which of course 
 requires no outfit but the power to read and write, gra 
 tuitously furnished by our public schools received him with 
 a shout of welcome. Here came the true deliverer at last, 
 mounted on a steed to which he himself had given the new 
 name of "Pegasus," for we were to be original in everything 
 and certainly blowing his own trumpet with remarkable 
 vigour of lungs. Solitary enthusiasts who had long awaited 
 this sublime avatar, addressed him in sonnets which he ac 
 cepted with a gravity beyond all praise. (To be sure, even Mr 
 Ward seems to allow that his sense of humour was hardly 
 equal to his other transcendent endowments.) His path 
 was strewn with laurel of the native variety, altogether 
 superior to that of the Old World, at any rate not precisely 
 like it. Verses signed "P.," as like each other as two peas, 
 and as much like poetry as that vegetable is like a peach, 
 were watched for in the corner of a newspaper as an 
 astronomer watches for a new planet. There was never 
 anything so comically unreal since the crowning in the 
 Capitol of Messer Francesco Petrarca, Grand Sentimentalist 
 in Ordinary at the Court of King Robert of Naples. 
 Unhappily, Percival took it all quite seriously. There was 
 no praise too ample for the easy elasticity of his swallow. 
 
JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 133 
 
 He believed himself as gigantic as the shadow he cast on 
 these rolling mists of insubstantial adulation, and life-long 
 he could never make out why his fine words refused to 
 butter his parsnips for him, nay, to furnish both parsnips 
 and sauce. While the critics were debating precisely how 
 many of the prime qualities of the great poets of his own 
 and preceding generations he combined in his single genius, 
 and in what particular respects he surpassed them all a 
 point about which he himself seems never to have had any 
 doubts the public, which could read Scott and Byron with 
 avidity, and which was beginning even to taste Wordsworth, 
 found his verses inexpressibly wearisome. They would not 
 throng and subscribe for a collected edition of those works 
 which singly had been too much for them. With whatever 
 dulness of sense they may be charged, they have a remark 
 ably keen scent for tediousness, and will have none of it 
 unless in a tract or sermon, where, of course, it is to be 
 expected. Percival never forgave the public ; but it was 
 the critics he never should have forgiven, for of all the 
 maggots that can make their way into the brains through 
 the ears, there is none so disastrous as the persuasion that 
 you are a great poet. There is surely something in the 
 construction of the ears of small authors which lays them 
 specially open to the inroads of this pest. It tickles 
 pleasantly while it eats away the fibre of will, and 
 incapacitates a man for all honest commerce with realities. 
 Unhappily its insidious titillation seems to have been 
 Percival s one great pleasure during life. 
 
 We began by saying that the book before us was interest 
 ing and instructive ; but we meant that it was so not so 
 much from any positive merits of its own as by the lesson 
 which almost every page of it suggests. To those who have 
 some knowledge of the history of literature, or some 
 experience in life, it is from beginning to end a history of 
 weakness mistaking great desires for great powers. If 
 poetry, in Bacon s noble definition of it, " adapt the shows 
 of things to the desires of the mind," sentimentalism is 
 equally skilful in making realities shape themselves to the 
 
134 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 
 
 cravings of vanity. The theory that the poet is a being 
 above the world and apart from it is true of him as an 
 observer only who applies to the phenomena about him the 
 test of a finer and more spiritual sense. That he is a 
 creature divinely set apart from his fellow-men by a mental 
 organisation that makes them mutually unintelligible to 
 each other, is in flat contradiction with the lives of those 
 poets universally acknowledged as greatest. Dante, 
 Shakespeare, Cervantes, Calderon, Milton, Moliere, 
 Goethe in what conceivable sense is it true of them 
 that they wanted the manly qualities which made them 
 equal to the demands of the world in which they lived? 
 That a poet should assume, as Victor Hugo used to do, 
 that he is a reorganiser of the moral world, and that works 
 cunningly adapted to the popular whim of the time form 
 part of some mysterious system which is to give us a new 
 heaven and a new earth, and to remodel laws of art which 
 are as unchangeable as those of astronomy, can do no very 
 great harm to anyone but the author himself, who will 
 thereby be led astray from his proper function, and from 
 the only path to legitimate and lasting success. But when 
 the theory is carried a step further, and we are asked to 
 believe, as in Percival s case, that, because a man can write 
 verses, he is exempt from that inexorable logic of life and 
 circumstances to which all other men are subjected, and to 
 which it is wholesome for them that they should be, then it 
 becomes mischievous, and calls for a protest from all those 
 who have at heart the interests of good morals and healthy 
 literature. It is the theory of idlers and dilettanti, of 
 fribbles in morals and declairners in verse, which a young 
 man of real power may dally with during some fit of mental 
 indigestion, but which when accepted by a mature man, and 
 carried along with him through life, is a sure mark of 
 feebleness and of insincere dealing with himself. Percival 
 is a good example of a class of authors unhappily too 
 numerous in these latter days. In Europe the natural 
 growth of a world ill at ease with itself, and still nervous 
 with the frightful palpitation of the French Revolution, 
 
JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 135 
 
 they are but feeble exotics in our healthier air. Without 
 faith or hope, and deprived of that outward support in the 
 habitual procession of events and in the authoritative 
 limitations of thought which in ordinary times gives 
 steadiness to feeble and timid intellects, they are turned 
 inward, and forced, like Hudibras s sword, 
 
 " To eat into themselves, for lack 
 Of other thing to hew and hack." 
 
 Compelled to find within them that stay which had hitherto 
 been supplied by creeds and institutions, they learned to 
 attribute to their own consciousness the grandeur which 
 belongs of right only to the mind of the human race, slowly 
 endeavouring after an equilibrium between its desires 
 and the external conditions under which they are attainable. 
 Hence that exaggeration of the individual, and depreciation 
 of the social man, which has become the cant of modern 
 literature. Abundance of such phenomena accompanied 
 the rise of what was called Romanticism in Germany and 
 France, reacting to some extent even upon England, and 
 consequently America. The smaller poets erected them 
 selves into a kind of guild, into which all were admitted 
 who gave proof of a certain feebleness of character which 
 rendered them superior to their grosser fellow-men. It 
 was a society of cripples undertaking to teach the new 
 generation how to walk. Meanwhile, the object of their 
 generous solicitude, what with clinging to Mother Past s 
 skirts, and helping itself by every piece of household 
 furniture it could lay hands on, learned, after many a 
 tumble, to get on its legs, and to use them as other 
 generations had done before it. Percival belonged to this 
 new order of bards, weak in the knees, and thinking it 
 healthy exercise to climb the peaks of Dreamland. To the 
 vague and misty views attainable from those sublime 
 summits into his own vast interior, his reports in blank 
 verse and otherwise did ample justice, but failed to excite 
 the appetite of mankind. He spent his life, like others 
 of his class, in proclaiming himself a neglected Columbus, 
 
136 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 
 
 ever ready to start on his voyage when the public would 
 supply the means of building his ships. Meanwhile, to be 
 ready at a moment s warning, he packs his mind pell-mell 
 like a carpet bag, wraps a geologist s hammer in a shirt 
 with a Byron collar, does up Yolney s " Ruins " with 
 an odd volume of Wordsworth, and another of Bell s 
 " Anatomy " in a loose sheet of Webster s Dictionary, 
 jams Moore s poems between the leaves of Bopp s 
 Grammar and forgets only such small matters as combs 
 and brushes. It never seems to have entered his head that 
 the gulf between genius and its new world is never too wide 
 for a stout swimmer. Like all sentimentalists, he reversed 
 the process of nature, which makes it a part of greatness 
 that it is a simple thing to itself, however much of a marvel 
 it may be to other men. He discovered his own genius, as 
 he supposed a thing impossible had the genius been real. 
 Donne never wrote a profounder verse than 
 
 " Who knows his virtue s name and place, hath none." 
 
 Percival s life was by no means a remarkable one, except, 
 perhaps, in the number of chances that seem to have been 
 offered him to make something of himself, if anything were 
 possibly to be made. He was never without friends, never 
 without opportunities, if he could have availed himself 
 of them. It is pleasant to see Mr. Ticknor treating him 
 with that considerate kindness which many a young scholar 
 can remember as shown so generously to himself. But 
 nothing could help Percival, whose nature had defeat 
 worked into its very composition. He was not a real, but 
 an imaginary man. His early attempt at suicide (as Mr. 
 Ward seems to think it) is typical of him. He is not the 
 first young man who, when crossed in love, has spoken 
 of " loupin o er a linn," nor will he be the last. But that 
 anyone who really meant to kill himself should put himself 
 resolutely in the way of being prevented, as Percival did, 
 is hard to believe. Chateaubriand, the arch sentimentalist 
 of these latter days, had the same harmless velleity of 
 self-destruction, enough to scare his sister and so give him 
 
THOREAU. 137 
 
 a smack of sensation, but a very different thing from 
 the settled will which would be really perilous. 
 Shakespeare, always true to Nature, makes Hamlet dally 
 with the same exciting fancy. Alas ! self is the one thing 
 the sentimentalist never truly wishes to destroy ! One 
 remarkable gift Percival seems to have had, which may be 
 called memory of the eye. What he saw he never forgot, 
 and this fitted him for a good geological observer. How 
 great his power of combination was, which alone could have 
 made him a great geologist, we cannot determine. But he 
 seems to have shown but little in other directions. His 
 faculty of acquiring foreign tongues we do not value so 
 highly as Mr. Ward. We have known many otherwise 
 inferior men who possessed it. Indeed, the power to 
 express the same nothing in ten different languages is 
 something to be dreaded rather than admired. It gives a 
 horrible advantage to dulness. The best thing to be 
 learned from Percival s life is that he was happy for the 
 first time when taken away from his vague pursuit of the 
 ideal, and set to practical work. 
 
 THOREA U. 
 
 WHAT contemporary, if he was in the fighting period of his 
 life (since Nature sets limits about her conscription for 
 spiritual fields, as the state does in physical warfare), will 
 ever forget what was somewhat vaguely called the " Tran 
 scendental Movement " of thirty years ago 1 Apparently 
 set astirring by Carlyle s essays on the " Signs of the 
 Times," and on " History," the final and more immediate 
 impulse seemed to be given by "Sartor Kesartus." At 
 least the republication in Boston of that wonderful 
 Abraham a Sancta Clara sermon on Lear s text of the 
 miserable forked radish gave the signal for a sudden mental 
 and moral mutiny. Ecce nunc tempus acceptabile I was 
 shouted on all hands with every variety of emphasis, and by 
 
138 THOREAU. 
 
 voices of every conceivable pitch, representing the three 
 sexes of men, women, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagues. 
 The nameless eagle of the tree Ygdrasil was about to sit at 
 last, and wild-eyed enthusiasts rushed from all sides, each 
 eager to thrust under the mystic bird that chalk egg from 
 which the new and fairer Creation was to be hatched in due 
 time. Redeunt Saturnia regna so far was certain, though 
 in what shape, or by what methods, was still a matter of 
 debate. Every possible form of intellectual and physical 
 dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. Bran had its prophets, 
 and the presartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, tailored 
 impromptu from the tar-pot by incensed neighbours, and 
 sent forth to illustrate the " feathered Mercury," as defined 
 by Webster and Worcester. Plainness of speech was carried 
 to a pitch that would have taken away the breath of George 
 Fox ; and even swearing had its evangelists, who answered 
 a simple inquiry after their health with an elaborate 
 ingenuity of imprecation that might have been honourably 
 mentioned by Marlborough in general orders. Everybody 
 had a mission (with a capital M) to attend to everybody- 
 else s business. No brain but had its private maggot, which 
 must have found pitiably short commons sometimes. Not 
 a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money (unless 
 earned by other people), professing to live on the internal 
 revenues of the spirit. Some had an assurance of instant 
 millennium so soon as hooks and eyes should be substituted 
 for buttons. Communities were established where every 
 thing was to be common but common-sense. Men renounced 
 their old gods, and hesitated only whether to bestow their 
 furloughed allegiance on Thor or Budh. Conventions were 
 held for every hitherto inconceivable purpose. The belated 
 gift of tongues, as among the Fifth Monarchy men, spread 
 like a contagion, rendering its victims incomprehensible to 
 all Christian men ; whether equally so to the most distant 
 possible heathen or not was unexperimented, though many 
 would have subscribed liberally that a fair trial might be 
 made. It was the pentecost of Shinar. The day of utter 
 ances reproduced the day of rebuses and anagrams, and 
 
THOREA U. 139 
 
 there was nothing so simple that uncial letters and the 
 style of Diphilus the Labyrinth could not turn into a riddle. 
 Many foreign revolutionists out of work added to the 
 general misunderstanding their contribution of broken 
 English in every most ingenious form of fracture. All 
 stood ready at a moment s notice to reform everything but 
 themselves. The general motto was : 
 
 "And we ll talk with them, too, 
 And take upon s the mystery of things 
 As if we were God s spies." 
 
 Nature is always kind enough to give even her clouds a 
 humorous lining. We have barely hinted at the comic side 
 of the affair, for the material was endless. This was the 
 whistle and trailing fuse of the shell, but there was a very 
 solid and serious kernel, full of the most deadly explosive- 
 ness. Thoughtful men divined it, but the generality 
 suspected nothing. The word " transcendental," then, was 
 the maid-of-all-work for those who could not think, as 
 " Pre-Raphaelite " has been more recently for people of the 
 same limited housekeeping. The truth is, that there was a 
 much nearer metaphysical relation and a much more distant 
 aesthetic and literary relation between Carlyle and the 
 Apostles of the Newness, as they were called in New 
 England, than has commonly been supposed. Both repre 
 sented the reaction and revolt against Pkilisterei, a renewal 
 of the old battle begun in modern times by Erasmus and 
 Ileuchlin, and continued by Lessing, Goethe, and, in a far 
 narrower sense, by Heine in Germany, and of which Field 
 ing, Sterne, and Wordsworth in different ways have been 
 the leaders in England. It was simply a struggle for fresh 
 air, in which, if the windows could not be opened, there 
 was danger that panes would be broken, though painted 
 with images of saints and martyrs. Light coloured by 
 these reverend effigies was none the more respirable for 
 being picturesque. There is only one thing better than 
 tradition, and that is the original and eternal life out of 
 which all tradition takes its rise. It was this life which 
 
i^o THOREAU. 
 
 the reformers demanded, with more or less clearness of 
 consciousness and expression, life in politics, life in litera 
 ture, life in religion. Of what use to import a gospel from 
 Judsea, if we leave behind the soul that made it possible, 
 the God who keeps it for ever real and present ? Surely 
 Abana and Pharpar are better than Jordan, if a living 
 faith be mixed with those waters and none with these. 
 
 Scotch Presbyterianism as a motive of spiritual progress 
 was dead ; New England Puritanism was in like manner 
 dead ; in other words, Protestantism had made its fortune 
 and no longer protested ; but till Oarlyle spoke out in the 
 Old World and Emerson in the New, no one had dared to 
 proclaim, Le roi est mart: vive le roil The meaning of 
 which proclamation was essentially this : the vital spirit 
 has long since departed out of this form once so kingly, 
 and the great seal has been in commission long enough ; 
 but meanwhile the soul of man, from which all power 
 emanates and to which it reverts, still survives in undimin- 
 ished royalty ; God still survives, little as you gentlemen of 
 the Commission seem to be aware of it nay, may possibly 
 outlive the whole of you, incredible as it may appear. The 
 truth is, that both Scotch Presbyterianism and New 
 England Puritanism made their new avatar in Carlyle and 
 Emerson, the heralds of their formal decease, and the 
 tendency of the one toward Authority and of the other 
 toward Independency might have been prophesied by 
 whoever had studied history. The necessity was not so 
 much in the men as in the principles they represented and 
 the traditions which overruled them. The Puritanism of 
 the past found its unwilling poet in Hawthorne, the rarest 
 creative imagination of the century, the rarest in some 
 ideal respects since Shakespeare ; but the Puritanism that 
 made New England what it is, and is destined to make 
 America what it should be, found its voice in Emerson. 
 Though holding himself aloof from all active partnership in 
 movements of reform, he has been the sleeping partner who 
 has supplied a great part of their capital. 
 
 The artistic range of Emerson is narrow, as every well- 
 
THOREAU. 141 
 
 read critic must feel at once ; and so is that of JEschylus, 
 so is that of Dante, so is that of Montaigne, so is that of 
 Schiller, so is that of nearly every one except Shakespeare ; 
 but there is a gauge of height no less than of breadth, of 
 individuality as well as of comprehensiveness, and, above 
 all, there is the standard of genetic power, the test of the 
 masculine as distinguished from the receptive minds. 
 There are staminate plants in literature, that make no fine 
 show of fruit, but without whose pollen, quintessence of 
 fructifying gold, the garden had been barren. Emerson s 
 mind is emphatically one of these, and there is no man to 
 whom our aBsthetic culture owes so much. The Puritan 
 revolt had made us ecclesiastically, and the Revolution 
 politically independent, but we were still socially and intel 
 lectually moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the 
 cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of 
 blue water. No man young enough to have felt it can forget, 
 or cease to be grateful for, the mental and moral nudge which 
 he received from the writings of his high-minded and brave- 
 spirited countryman. That we agree with him, or that he 
 always agrees with himself, is aside from the question ; but 
 that he arouses in us something that we are the better for 
 having awakened, whether that something be of opposition 
 or assent, that he speaks always to what is highest and 
 least selfish in us, few Americans of the generation younger 
 than his own would be disposed to deny. His oration 
 before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, some 
 thirty years ago, was an event without any former 
 parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always 
 treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its 
 inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what 
 windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of 
 approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent ! It was 
 our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard 
 parallel to the last public appearances of Schelling. 
 
 We said that the Transcendental Movement was the 
 Protestant spirit of Puritanism seeking a new outlet and 
 an escape from forms and creeds which compressed rather 
 
142 THOREAU. 
 
 than expressed it. In its motives, its preaching, and its 
 results, it differed radically from the doctrine of Carlyle. 
 The Scotchman, with all his genius, and his humour gigan- 
 tesque as that of Rabelais, has grown shriller and shriller 
 with years, degenerating sometimes into a common scold, and 
 emptying very unsavoury vials of wrath on the heads of the 
 sturdy British Socrates of worldly common-sense. The 
 teaching of Emerson tended much more exclusively to self- 
 culture and the independent development of the individual 
 man. It seemed to many almost Pythagorean in its 
 voluntary seclusion from commonwealth affairs. Both 
 Cariyle and Emerson were disciples of Goethe, but Emer 
 son in a far truer sense ; and while the one, from his bias 
 toward the eccentric, has degenerated more and more into 
 mannerism, the other has clarified steadily toward perfec 
 tion of style exquisite fineness of material, unobtrusive 
 lowness of tone and simplicity of fashion, the most high 
 bred garb of expression. Whatever may be said of his 
 thought, nothing can be finer than the delicious limpidness 
 of his phrase. If it was ever questionable whether demo 
 cracy could develop a gentleman, the problem has been 
 affirmatively solved at last. Carlyle, in his cynicism and 
 his admiration of force in and for itself, has become at last 
 positively inhuman ; Emerson, reverencing strength, seek 
 ing the highest outcome of the individual, has found that 
 society and politics are also main elements in the attain 
 ment of the desired end, and has drawn steadily manward 
 and worldward. The two men represent respectively those 
 grand personifications in the drama of .ZEschylus, Bta and 
 
 Among the pistillate plants kindled to fruitage by the 
 Emersonian pollen, Thoreau is thus far the most remarkable ; 
 and it is something eminently fitting that his posthumous 
 works should be offered us by Emerson, for they are straw 
 berries from his own garden. A singular mixture of 
 varieties, indeed, there is ; alpine, some of them, with the 
 flavour of real mountain air ; others wood, tasting of sunny 
 roadside banks or shy openings in the forest ; and not a few 
 
THOREAU. 143 
 
 seedlings swollen hugely by culture, but lacking the fine 
 natural aroma of the more modest kinds. Strange books 
 these are of his, and interesting in many ways, instructive 
 chiefly as showing how considerable a crop may be raised on 
 a comparatively narrow close of mind, and how much a man 
 may make of his life if he will assiduously follow it, though 
 perhaps never truly finding it at last. 
 
 We have just been renewing our recollection of Mr. 
 Thoreau s writings, and have read through his six volumes 
 in the order of their production. We shall try to give an 
 adequate report of their impression upon us both as critic 
 and as mere reader. He seems to us to have been a man 
 with so high a conceit of himself that he accepted without 
 questioning, and insisted on our accepting, his defects and 
 weaknesses of character as virtues and powers peculiar to 
 himself. Was he indolent, he finds none of the activities 
 which attract or employ the rest of mankind worthy of him. 
 Was he wanting in the qualities that make success, it is 
 success that is contemptible, and not himself that lacks 
 persistency and purpose. Was he poor, money was an 
 unmixed evil. Did his life seem a selfish one, he condemns 
 doing good as one of the weakest of superstitions. To be 
 of use was with him the most killing bait of the wily 
 tempter Uselessness. He had 110 faculty of generalisation 
 from outside of himself, or at least no .experience which 
 would supply the material of such, and he makes his 
 own whim the law, his own range the horizon of the 
 universe. He condemns a world, the hollowness of whose 
 satisfactions he had never had the means of testing, and 
 we recognise Apemantus behind the mask of Timon. 
 He had little active imagination ; of the receptive he 
 had much. His appreciation is of the highest quality ; 
 his critical power, from want of continuity of mind, 
 very limited and inadequate. He somewhere cites a 
 simile from Ossian, as an example of the superiority of 
 the old poetry to the new, though, even were the historic 
 evidence less convincing, the sentimental melancholy of 
 those poems should be conclusive of their modernness. 
 
144 THOREAU. 
 
 He had no artistic power such as controls a great work 
 to the serene balance of completeness, but exquisite 
 mechanical skill in the shaping of sentences and paragraphs, 
 or (more rarely) short bits of verse for the expression 
 of a detached thought, sentiment, or image. His works 
 give one the feeling of a sky full of stars, something 
 impressive and exhilarating certainly, something high 
 overhead and freckled thickly with spots of isolated 
 brightness; but whether these have any mutual relation 
 with each other, or have any concern with our mundane 
 matters, is for the most part matter of conjecture, 
 astrology as yet, and not astronomy. 
 
 It is curious, considering what Thoreau afterwards 
 became, that he was not by nature an observer. He 
 only saw the things he looked for, and was less poet 
 than naturalist. Till he built his Walden shanty, he 
 did not know that the hickory grew in Concord. Till 
 he went to Maine, he had never seen phosphorescent 
 wood, a phenomenon early familiar to most country boys. 
 At forty he speaks of the seeding of the pine as a new 
 discovery, though one should have thought that its gold- 
 dust of blowing pollen might have earlier drawn his eye. 
 Neither his attention nor his genius was of the spontaneous 
 kind. He discovered nothing. He thought everything a 
 discovery of his own, from moonlight to the planting of 
 acorns and nuts by squirrels. This is a defect in his 
 character, but one of his chief charms as a writer. 
 Everything grows fresh under his hand. He delved in his 
 mind and nature ; he planted them with all manner of 
 native and foreign seeds, and reaped assiduously. He was 
 not merely solitary, he would be isolated, and succeeded at 
 last in almost persuading himself that he was autochthonous. 
 He valued everything in proportion as he fancied it to be 
 exclusively his own. He complains in " Walden," that there 
 is 110 one in Concord with whom he could talk of Oriental 
 literature, though the man was living within two miles of 
 his hut who had introduced him to it. This intellectual 
 selfishness becomes sometimes almost painful in reading 
 
THOREAU. 145 
 
 him. He lacked that generosity of " communication " which 
 Johnson admired in Burke. De Quincy tells us that 
 Wordsworth was impatient when any one else spoke of 
 mountains, as if he had a peculiar property in them. And 
 we can readily understand why it should be so ; no one is 
 satisfied with another s appreciation of his mistress. But 
 Thoreau seems to have prized a lofty way of thinking (often 
 we should be inclined to call it a remote one) not so much 
 because it was good in itself as because he wished few to 
 share it with him. It seems now and then as if he did not 
 seek to lure others up " above our lower region of turmoil," 
 but to leave his own name cut on the mountain peak as the 
 first climber. This itch of originality infects his thought 
 and style. To be misty is not to be mystic. He turns 
 commonplaces end for end, and fancies it makes something 
 new of them. As we walk down Park Street, our eye is 
 caught by Dr. Windship s dumb-bells, one of which bears 
 an inscription testifying that it is the heaviest ever put up 
 at arm s length by any athlete ; and in reading Mr. 
 Thoreau s books we cannot help feeling as if he sometimes 
 invited our attention to a particular sophism or paradox, 
 as the biggest yet maintained by any single writer. He 
 seeks, at all risks, for perversity of thought, and revives the 
 age of concetti while he fancies himself going back to a pre- 
 classical nature. " A day," he says, " passed in the society 
 of those Greek sages, such as described in the Banquet of 
 Xenophon, would not be comparable with the dry wit of 
 decayed cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the 
 moss-beds." It is not so much the True that he loves as the 
 Out-of-the-way. As the Brazen Age shows itself in other 
 men by exaggeration of phrase, so in him by extravagance 
 of statement. He wishes always to trump your suit and to 
 ruff when you least expect it. Do you love Nature because 
 she is beautiful 1 He will find a better argument in her 
 ugliness. Are you tired of the artificial man 1 ? He 
 instantly dresses you up an ideal in a Penobscot Indian, 
 and attributes to this creature of his otherwise-mindedness 
 as peculiarities things that are common to all woodsmen, 
 
 138 
 
U6 THOREA U. 
 
 white or red, and this simply because he has not studied the 
 pale-faced variety. 
 
 This notion of an absolute originality, as if one could 
 have a patent-right in it, is an absurdity. A man cannot 
 escape in thought, any more than he can in language, from 
 the past and the present. As no one ever invents a word, 
 and yet language somehow grows by general contribution 
 and necessity, so it is with thought. Mr. Thoreau seems 
 to us to insist in public on going back to flint and steel, 
 when there is a match-box in his pocket which he knows 
 very well how to use at a pinch. Originality consists in 
 power of digesting and assimilating thought, so that they 
 become part of our life and substance. Montaigne, for 
 example, is one of the most original of authors, though he 
 helped himself to ideas in every direction. But they turn 
 to blood and colouring in his style, and give a freshness of 
 complexion that is for ever charming. In Thoreau much 
 seems yet to be foreign and unassimilated, showing itself in 
 symptoms of indigestion. A preacher-up of Nature, we 
 now and then detect under the surly and stoic garb some 
 thing of the sophist and the sentimentaliser. We are far 
 from implying that this was conscious on his part. But it 
 is much easier for a man to impose on himself when he 
 measures only with himself. A greater familiarity with 
 ordinary men would have done Thoreau good, by showing 
 him how many fine qualities are common to the race. The 
 radical vice of his theory of life was, that he confounded 
 physical with spiritual remoteness from men. One is far 
 enough withdrawn from his fellows if he keep himself clear 
 of their weaknesses. He is not so truly withdrawn as 
 exiled, if he refuse to share in their strength. " Solitude," 
 says Oowley, "can be well fitted and set right but upon a 
 very few persons. They must have enough knowledge of 
 the world to see the vanity of it, and enough virtue to 
 despise all vanity." It is a morbid self-consciousness that 
 pronounces the world of men empty and worthless before 
 trying it, the instinctive evasion of one who is sensible of 
 some innate weakness, and retorts the accusation of it 
 
THOREAU. 147 
 
 before any has made it but himself. To a healthy mind, 
 the world is a constant challenge of opportunity. Mr. 
 Thoreau had not a healthy mind, or he would not have been 
 so fond of prescribing. His whole life was a search for the 
 doctor. The old mystics had a wiser sense of what the 
 world was worth. They ordained a severe apprenticeship 
 to law, and even ceremonial, in order to the gaining of 
 freedom and mastery over these. Seven years of service 
 for Rachel were to be rewarded at last with Leah. Seven 
 other years of faithfulness with her were to win them at 
 last the true bride of their souls. Active Life was with 
 them the only path to the Contemplative. 
 
 Thoreau had no humour, and this implies that he was a 
 sorry logician. Himself an artist in rhetoric, he confounds 
 thought with style when he undertakes to speak of the 
 latter. He was for ever talking of getting away from the 
 world, but he must always be near enough to it, nay, to the 
 Concord corner of it, to feel the impression he makes there. 
 He verifies the shrewd remark of Sainte-Beuve, " On touche 
 encore a son temps et tresfort, meme quand on le repousse." 
 This egotism of his is a Stylites pillar after all, a seclusion 
 which keeps him in the public eye. The dignity of man is 
 an excellent thing, but therefore to hold one s self too 
 sacred and precious is the reverse of excellent. There is 
 something delightfully absurd in six volumes addressed to 
 a world of such " vulgar fellows " as Thoreau affirmed his 
 fellow-men to be. We once had a glimpse of a genuine 
 solitary who spent his winters one hundred and fifty miles 
 beyond all human communication, and there dwelt with 
 his rifle as his only confidant. Compared with this, the 
 shanty on Walden Pond has something the air, it must be 
 confessed, of the Hermitage of La Chevrette. We do not 
 believe that the way to a true cosmopolitanism carries one 
 into the woods or the society of musquashes. Perhaps the 
 narrowest provincialism is that of Self ; that of Kleinwinkel 
 is nothing to it. The natural man, like the singing birds, 
 comes out of the forest as inevitably as the natural bear 
 and the wild-cat stick there. To seek to be natural implies 
 
143 THOREAU. 
 
 a consciousness that forbids all naturalness for ever. It is 
 as easy and no easier to be natural in a salon as in a 
 swamp, if one do not aim at it, for what we call unnatural- 
 ness always has its spring in a man s thinking too much 
 about himself. "It is impossible," said Turgot, "for a 
 vulgar man to be simple." 
 
 We look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism 
 about Nature as a mark of disease. It is one more symptom 
 of the general liver-complaint. To a man of wholesome 
 constitution the wilderness is well enough for a mood or a 
 vacation, but not for a habit of life. Those who have most 
 loudly advertised their passion for seclusion and their 
 intimacy with nature, from Petrarch down, have been 
 mostly sentimentalists, unreal men, misanthropes on the 
 spindle side, solacing an uneasy suspicion of themselves by 
 professing contempt for their kind. They make demands 
 on the world in advance proportioned to their inward 
 measure of their own merit, and are angry that the world 
 pays only by the visible measure of performance. It is 
 true of Rousseau, the modern founder of the sect, true of 
 Saint Pierre, his intellectual child, and of Chateaubriand, 
 his grandchild, the inventor, we might almost say, of the 
 primitive forest, and who first was touched by the solemn 
 falling of a tree from natural decay in the windless silence 
 of the woods. It is a very shallow view that affirms trees 
 and rocks to be healthy, and cannot see that men in com 
 munities are just as true to the laws of their organisation 
 and destiny ; that can tolerate the puffin and the fox, but 
 not the fool and the knave ; that would shun politics 
 because of its demagogues, and snuff up the stench of tho 
 obscene fungus. The divine life of Nature is more wonder 
 ful, more various, more sublime in man than in any other of 
 her works, and the wisdom that is gained by commerce with 
 men, as Montaigne and Shakespeare gained it, or with one s 
 own soul among men, as Dante, is the most delightful, as it 
 is the most precious, of all. In outward nature it is still 
 man that interests us, and we care far less for the things 
 seen than the way in which poetic eyes like Wordsworth s 
 
THOREA U. 149 
 
 or Thoreau s see them, and the reflections they cast there. 
 To hear the to-do that is often made over the simple fact 
 that a man sees the image of himself in the outward world, 
 one is reminded of a savage when he for the first time 
 catches a glimpse of himself in a looking-glass. " Venerable 
 child of Nature," we are tempted to say, " to whose science 
 in the invention of the tobacco-pipe, to whose art in the 
 tattooing of thine undegenerated hide not yet enslaved by 
 tailors, we are slowly striving to climb back, the miracle 
 thou beholdest is sold in my unhappy country for a 
 shilling ! " If matters go on as they have done, and every 
 body must needs blab of all the favours that have been 
 done him by roadside and river brink and woodland walk, 
 as if to kiss and tell were no longer treachery, it will be a 
 positive refreshment to meet a man who is as superbly 
 indifferent to nature as she is to him. By and by we 
 shall have John Smith, of No. 12, 12th Street, advertising 
 that he is not the J. S. who saw a cow-lily on Thursday 
 last, as he never saw one in his life, would not see one if 
 he could, and is prepared to prove an alibi on the day in 
 question. 
 
 Solitary communion with Nature does not seem to have 
 been sanitary or sweetening in its influence on Thoreau s 
 character. On the contrary, his letters show him more 
 cynical as he grew older. While he studied with respectful 
 attention the minks and woodchucks, his neighbours, he 
 looked with utter contempt on the august drama of destiny 
 of which his country was the scene, and on which the 
 curtain had already risen. He was converting us back 
 to a state of nature " so eloquently," as Voltaire said of 
 Rousseau, " that he almost persuaded us to go on all fours," 
 while the wiser fates were making it possible for us to walk 
 erect for the first time. Had he conversed more with his 
 fellows, his sympathies would have widened with the 
 assurance that his peculiar genius had more appreciation, 
 and his writings a larger circle of readers, or at least a 
 warmer one, than he dreamed of. We have the highest 
 
ISO THOREAU. 
 
 testimony* to the natural sweetness, sincerity, and noble- 
 ness of his temper, and in his books an equally irrefragable 
 one to the rare quality of his mind. He was not a strong 
 thinker, but a sensitive feeler. Yet his mind strikes us as 
 cold and wintry in its purity. A light snow has fallen 
 everywhere in which he seems to come on the track of the 
 shier sensations that would elsewhere leave no trace. We 
 think greater compression would have done more for his 
 fame. A feeling of sameness comes over us as we read so 
 much. Trifles are recorded with an over-minute punctuality 
 and conscientiousness of detail. He records the state of 
 his personal thermometer thirteen times a day. We cannot 
 help thinking sometimes of the man who 
 
 " Watches, starves, freezes, and sweats 
 To learn but catechisms and alphabets 
 Of unconcerning things, matters of fact," 
 
 and sometimes of the saying of the Persian poet, that 
 " when the owl would boast, he boasts of catching mice at 
 the edge of a hole." We could readily part with some of 
 his affectations. It was well enough for Pythagoras to say, 
 once for all, " When I was Euphorbus at the siege of Troy;" 
 not so well for Thoreau to travesty it into " When I was a 
 shepherd on the plains of Assyria." A naive thing said 
 over again is anything but naive. But with every excep 
 tion, there is no writing comparable with Thoreau s in kind, 
 that is comparable with it in degree where it is best ; where 
 it disengages itself, that is, from the tangled roots and dead 
 leaves of a second-hand Orientalism, and runs limpid and 
 smooth and broadening as it runs, a mirror for whatever is 
 grand and lovely in both worlds. 
 
 George Sand says neatly, that " Art is not a study of 
 positive reality " (actuality were the fitter word), " but a 
 seeking after ideal truth." It would be doing very inade 
 quate justice to Thoreau if we left it to be inferred that 
 this ideal element did not exist in him, and that too in 
 
 * Mr. Emerson, in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the 
 "Excursions." 
 
THOREAU. 151 
 
 larger proportion, if less obtrusive, than his nature-worship. 
 He took nature as the mountain-path to an ideal world. 
 If the path wind a good deal, if he record too faithfully 
 every trip over a root, if he botanise somewhat wearisomely, 
 he gives us now and then superb outlooks from some jutting 
 crag, and brings us out at last into an illimitable ether, 
 where the breathing is not difficult for those who have any 
 true touch of the climbing spirit. His shanty-life was a 
 mere impossibility, so far as his own conception of it goes, 
 as an entire independency of mankind. The tub of Dio 
 genes had a sounder bottom. Thoreau s experiment actually 
 presupposed all that complicated civilisation which it theo 
 retically abjured. He squatted on another man s land ; he 
 borrows an axe ; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, 
 his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all 
 turn state s evidence against him as an accomplice in the 
 sin of that artificial civilisation which rendered it possible 
 that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all. 
 Magnis to/men excidit ausis. His aim was a noble and a use 
 ful one, in the direction of " plain living and high thinking." 
 It was a practical sermon on Emerson s text that " things 
 are in the saddle and ride mankind," an attempt to solve 
 Oarlyle s problem (condensed from Johnson) of " lessening 
 your denominator." His whole life was a rebuke of the 
 waste and aimlessness of our American luxury, which is an 
 abject enslavement to tawdry upholstery. He had " fine 
 translunary things" in him. His better style as a writer 
 is in keeping with the simplicity and purity of his life. We 
 have said that his range was narrow, but to be a master is 
 to be a master. He had caught his English at its living 
 source, among the poets and prose-writers of its best days ; 
 his literature was extensive and recondite; his quotations 
 are always nuggets of the purest ore : there are sentences 
 of his as perfect as anything in the language, and thoughts 
 as clearly crystallised ; his metaphors and images are always 
 fresh from the soil ; he had watched Nature like a detective 
 who is to go upon the stand ; as we read him, it seems as 
 if all out-of-doors had kept a diary and become its own 
 
152 EMERSON THE LECTURER. 
 
 Montaigne ; we look at the landscape as in a Claude Lorraine 
 glass; compared with his, all other books of similar aim, 
 even White s "Selborne," seem dry as a country clergy 
 man s meteorological journal in an old almanack. He 
 belongs with Donne and Browne and Novalis ; if not with 
 the originally creative men, with the scarcely smaller class 
 who are peculiar, and whose leaves shed their invisible 
 thought-seed like ferns. 
 
 EMERSON THE LECTURER. 
 
 IT is a singular fact that Mr. Emerson is the most steadily 
 attractive lecturer in America. Into that somewhat cold- 
 waterish region adventurers of the sensational kind come 
 down now and then with a splash, to become disregarded 
 King Logs before the next season. But Mr. Emerson 
 always draws. A lecturer now for something like a third 
 of a century, one of the pioneers of the lecturing system, 
 the charm of his voice, his manner, and his matter has 
 never lost its powers over his earlier hearers, and con 
 tinually winds new ones in its enchanting meshes. What 
 they do not fully understand they take on trust, and listen, 
 saying to themselves, as the old poet of Sir Philip 
 Sidney : 
 
 "A sweet, attractive, kind of grace, 
 A full assurance given by looks, 
 Continual comfort in a face, 
 The lineaments of gospel books." 
 
 We call it a singular fact, because we Yankees are thought 
 to be fond of the spread-eagle style, and nothing can be more 
 remote from that than his. We are reckoned a practical 
 folk, who would rather hear about a new air-tight stove 
 than about Plato ; yet our favourite teacher s practicality is 
 not in the least of the Poor Richard variety. If he have 
 any Buncombe constituency, it is that unrealised common 
 wealth of philosophers which Plotinus proposed to establish ; 
 
EMERSON THE LECTURER. 153 
 
 and if he were to make an almanack, his directions to 
 farmers would be something like this : " OCTOBER : Indian 
 /Summer; now is the time to get in your early Vedas." 
 What, then, is his secret 1 Is it not that he out- Yankees 
 us all ? that his range includes us all ? that he is equally at 
 home with the potato-disease and original sin, with pegging 
 shoes and the Over-soul 1 that, as we try all trades, so has 
 he tried all cultures ? and above all, that his mysticism 
 gives us a counterpoise to our super-practicality ? 
 
 There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of 
 us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebted 
 ness for ennobling impulses none whom so many cannot 
 abide. What does he mean ? ask these last. Where is his 
 system? What is the use of it all 1 What the deuce have we 
 to do with Brahma 1 I do not propose to write an essay on 
 Emerson at this time. I will only say that one may find 
 grandeur and consolation in a starlit night without caring 
 to ask what it means, save grandeur and consolation ; one 
 may like Montaigne, as some ten generations before us have 
 clone, without thinking him so systematic as some more 
 eminently tedious (or shall we say tediously eminent 1) 
 authors } one may think roses as good in their way as 
 cabbages, though the latter would make a better show in the 
 witness-box, if cross-examined as to their usefulness ; and as 
 for Brahma, why, he can take care of himself, and won t 
 bite us at any rate. 
 
 The bother with Mr. Emerson is that, though he writes 
 in prose, he is essentially a poet. If you undertake to para 
 phrase what he says, and to reduce it to words of one 
 syllable for infant minds, you will make as sad work of it 
 as the good monk with his analysis of Homer in the 
 " Epistolse Obscurorum Virorum." We look upon him as 
 one of the few men of genius whom our age has produced, 
 and there needs no better proof of it than his masculine 
 faculty of fecundating other minds. Search for his 
 eloquence in his books and you will perchance miss it, but 
 meanwhile you will find that it has kindled all your 
 thoughts. For choice and pith of language he belongs to a 
 
154 EMERSON THE LECTURER. 
 
 better age than ours, and might rub shoulders with Fuller 
 and Browne though he does use that abominable word 
 reliable. His eye for a fine, telling phrase that will carry 
 true is like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle ; and he will 
 dredge you up a choice word from the mud of Cotton 
 Mather himself. A diction at once so rich and so homely 
 as his I know not where to match in these days of writing 
 by the page ; it is like homespun cloth-of-gold. The many 
 cannot miss his meaning, and only the few can find it. It 
 is the open secret of all true genius. It is wholesome to 
 angle in those profound pools, though one be rewarded with 
 nothing more than the leap of a fish that flashes his freckled 
 side in the sun and as suddenly absconds in the dark and 
 dreamy waters again. There is keen excitement, though 
 there be no ponderable acquisition. If we carry nothing 
 home in our baskets, there is ample gain in dilated lungs 
 and stimulated blood. What does he mean, quotha ? He 
 means inspiring hints, a diving-rod to your deeper nature. 
 No doubt, Emerson, like all original men, has his peculiar 
 audience, and yet I know none that can hold a promiscuous 
 crowd in pleased attention so long as he. As in all original 
 men, there is something for every palate. " Would you 
 know," says Goethe, " the ripest cherries f l Ask the boys 
 and the blackbirds." 
 
 The announcement that such a pleasure as a new course 
 of lectures by him is coming, to people as old as I am, is 
 something like those forebodings of spring that prepare us 
 every year for a familiar novelty, none the less novel, when 
 it arrives, because it is familiar. We know perfectly well 
 what we are to expect from Mr. Emerson, and yet what he 
 says always penetrates and stirs us, as is apt to be the case 
 with genius, in a very unlooked-for fashion. Perhaps genius 
 is one of the few things which we gladly allow to repeat 
 itself one of the few that multiply rather than weaken the 
 force of their impression by iteration ! Perhaps some of us 
 hear more than the mere words, are moved by something 
 deeper than the thoughts ? If it be so, we are quite right, 
 for it is thirty years and more of " plain living and high 
 
EMERSON THE LECTURER. 155 
 
 thinking " that speak to us in this altogether unique lay- 
 preacher. We have shared in the beneficence of this varied 
 culture, this fearless impartiality in criticism and speculation, 
 this masculine sincerity, this sweetness of nature which rather 
 stimulates than cloys, for a generation long. If ever there 
 was a standing testimonial to the cumulative power and value 
 of Character (and we need it sadly in these days), we have it 
 in this gracious and dignified presence. What an antiseptic 
 is a pure life ! At sixty-five (or two years beyond his 
 grand climacteric, as he would prefer to call it) he has that 
 privilege of soul which abolishes the calendar, and presents 
 him to us always the unwasted contemporary of his own 
 prime. I do not know if he seem old to his younger 
 hearers, but we who have known him so long wonder at 
 the tenacity with which he maintains himself even in the 
 outposts of youth. I suppose it is not the Emerson of 
 1868 to whom we listen. For us the whole life of the man 
 is distilled in the clear drop of every sentence, and behind 
 each word we divine the force of a noble character, the 
 weight of a large capital of thinking and being. We do 
 not go to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear 
 Emerson. Not that we perceive any falling-off in anything 
 that ever was essential to the charm of Mr. Emerson s 
 peculiar style of thought or phrase. The first lecture, to 
 be sure, was more disjointed even than common. It was as 
 if, after vainly trying to get his paragraphs into sequence 
 and order, he had at last tried the desperate expedient of 
 shuffling them. It was chaos come again, but it was a 
 chaos full of shooting-stars, a jumble of creative forces. 
 The second lecture, on " Criticism and Poetry," was quite 
 up to the level of old times, full of that power of strangely- 
 subtle association whose indirect approaches startle the 
 mind into almost painful attention, of those flashes of 
 mutual understanding between speaker and hearer that are 
 gone ere one can say it lightens. The vice of Emerson s 
 criticism seems to be, that while no man is so sensitive to 
 what is poetical, few men are less sensible than he of what 
 makes a poem. He values the solid meaning of thought 
 
156 EMERSON THE LECTURER. 
 
 above the subtler meaning of style. He would prefer 
 Donne, I suspect, to Spenser, and sometimes mistakes the 
 queer for the original. 
 
 To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, 
 gift of life ; yet there are some of us who would hardly 
 consent to be young again, if it were at the cost of our 
 recollection of Mr. Emerson s first lectures during the con 
 sulate of Van Buren. We used to walk in from the 
 country to the Masonic Temple (I think it was), through 
 the crisp winter night, and listen to that thrilling voice of 
 his, so charged with subtle meaning and subtle music, as 
 shipwrecked men on a raft to the hail of a ship that came 
 with unhoped-for food and rescue. Cynics might say what 
 they liked. Did our own imaginations transfigure dry 
 remainder-biscuit into ambrosia 1 ? At any rate, he brought 
 us life, which, on the whole, is no bad thing. Was it all 
 transcendentalism ? magic-lantern pictures on mist 1 As 
 you will. Those, then, were just what we wanted. But it 
 was not so. The delight and the benefit were that he put 
 us in communication with a larger style of thought, 
 sharpened our wits with a more pungent phrase, gave us 
 ravishing glimpses of an ideal under the dry husk of our 
 New England ; made us conscious of the supreme and ever 
 lasting originality of whatever bit of soul might be in any 
 of us } freed us, in short, from the stocks of prose in which 
 we had sat so long that we had grown well-nigh contented 
 in our cramps. And who that saw the audience will ever 
 forget it, where everyone still capable of fire, or longing to 
 renew in them the half-forgotten sense of it, was gathered ? 
 Those faces, young and old, agleam with pale intellectual 
 light, eager with pleased attention, flash upon me once 
 more from the deep recesses of the years with an exquisite 
 pathos. Ah, beautiful young eyes, brimming with love 
 and hope, wholly vanished now in that other world we call 
 the Past, or peering doubtfully through the pensive gloam 
 ing of memory, your light impoverishes these cheaper days ! 
 I hear again that rustle of sensation, as they turned to 
 exchange glances over some pithier thought, some keener 
 
EMERSON THE LECTURER. 157 
 
 flash of that humour which always played about the horizon 
 of his mind like heat-lightning, and it seems now like the 
 sad whisper of the autumn leaves that are whirling around 
 me. But would my picture be complete if I forgot that 
 
 ample and vegete countenance of Mr. R of W 
 
 how, from its regular post at the corner of the front 
 bench, it turned in ruddy triumph to the profaner audience, 
 as if he were the inexplicably appointed fugleman of 
 appreciation? I was reminded of him by those hearty 
 cherubs in Titian s Assumption, that look at you as who 
 should say, " Did you ever see a Madonna like that ? 
 Did you ever behold one hundred and fifty pounds of 
 womanhood mount heavenward before like a rocket 1 " 
 
 To some of us that long-past experience remains as the 
 most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emerson 
 awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. It 
 is the sound of the trumpet that the young soul longs 
 for, careless what breath may fill it. Sidney heard it in 
 the ballad of " Chevy Chase," and we in Emerson. Nor 
 did it blow retreat, but called to us with assurance of 
 victory. Did they say he was disconnected ? So were 
 the stars, that seemed larger to our eyes, still keen with 
 that excitement, as we walked homeward with prouder 
 stride over the creaking snow. And were they not knit 
 together by a higher logic than our mere sense could 
 master 1 Were we enthusiasts ? I hope and believe we 
 were, and am thankful to the man who made us worth 
 something for once in our lives. If asked what was 
 left 1 what we carried home "? we should not have been 
 careful for an answer. It would have been enough if 
 we had said that something beautiful had passed that way. 
 Or we might have asked in return what one brought away 
 from a symphony of Beethoven ? Enough that he had set 
 that ferment of wholesome discontent at work in us. There 
 is one, at least, of those old hearers, so many of whom are now 
 in the fruition of that intellectual beauty of which Emerson 
 {rave them both the desire and the foretaste, who will always 
 love to repeat : 
 
158 EMERSON THE LECTURER. 
 
 " Che in la mente m e fitta, ed or m accuora 
 La cara e buona immagine paterna 
 Di voi, quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora 
 M insegnavaste come 1 uom s eterna." 
 
 I am unconsciously thinking, as I write, of the third 
 lecture of the present course, in which Mr. Emerson gave 
 some delightful reminiscences of the intellectual influences 
 in whose movement he had shared. It was like hearing 
 Goethe read some passages of the " Wahrheit aus seinem 
 Leben." Not that there was not a little Dichtung, too, 
 here and there, as the lecturer built up so lofty a pedestal 
 under certain figures as to lift them into a prominence of 
 obscurity, and seem to mast-head them there. Everybody 
 was asking his neighbour who this or that recondite great 
 man was, in the faint hope that somebody might once have 
 heard of him. There are those who call Mr. Emerson cold. 
 Let them revise their judgment in presence of this loyalty 
 of his that can keep warm for half a century, that never 
 forgets a friendship, or fails to pay even a fancied obligation 
 to the uttermost farthing. This substantiation of shadows 
 was but incidental, and pleasantly characteristic of the man 
 to those who know and love him. The greater part of the 
 lecture was devoted to reminiscences of things substantial 
 in themselves. He spoke of Everett, fresh from Greece and 
 Germany ; of Channing ; of the translations of Margaret 
 Fuller, Ripley, and D wight : of the Dial and Brook Farm. 
 To what he said of the latter an undertone of good-humoured 
 irony gave special zest. But what every one of his hearers 
 felt was that the protagonist in the drama was left out. 
 The lecturer was no j^Sneas to babble the quorum magna 
 parsfui, and, as one of his listeners, I cannot help wishing 
 to say how each of them was commenting the story as 
 it went along, and filling up the necessary gaps in it from 
 his own private store of memories. His younger hearers 
 could not know how much they owed to the benign 
 impersonality, the quiet scorn of everything ignoble, the 
 never-sated hunger of self-culture, that was personified in 
 the man before them. But the older knew how much the 
 
EMERSON THE LECTURER. 159 
 
 country s intellectual emancipation was due to the stimulus 
 of his teaching and example, how constantly he had kept 
 burning the beacon of an ideal life above our lower region 
 of turmoil. To him more than to all other causes together 
 did the young martyrs of our civil war owe the sustaining 
 strength of thoughtful heroism that is so touching in every 
 record of their lives. Those who are grateful to Mr. 
 Emerson, as many of us are, for what they feel to be most 
 valuable in their culture, or perhaps I should say their 
 impulse, are grateful not so much for any direct teachings 
 of his as for that inspiring lift which only genius can give, 
 and without which all doctrine is chaff. 
 
 This was something like the caret which some of us older 
 boys wished to fill up on the margin of the master s lecture. 
 Few men have been so much to so many, and through so 
 large a range of aptitudes and temperaments, and this 
 simply because all of us value manhood beyond any or all 
 other qualities of character. We may suspect in him, here 
 and there, a certain thinness and vagueness of quality ; but 
 let the waters go over him as they list, this masculine 
 fibre of his will keep its lively colour and its toughness of 
 texture. I have heard some great speakers and some 
 accomplished orators, but never any that so moved and 
 persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertow in that 
 rich baritone of his that sweeps our minds from their 
 foothold into deeper waters with a drift we cannot and 
 would not resist. And how artfully (for Emerson is a long- 
 studied artist in these things) does the deliberate utterance, 
 that seems waiting for the fit word, seem to admit us 
 partners in the labour of thought, and make us feel as if 
 the glance of humour were a sudden suggestion, as if the 
 perfect phrase lying written there on the desk were as 
 unexpected to him as to us ! In that closely-filed speech of 
 his at the Burns centenary dinner every word seemed to 
 have just dropped down to him from the clouds. He looked 
 far away over the heads of his hearers, with a vague kind 
 of expectation, as into some private heaven of invention, 
 and the winged period came at last obedient to his spell. "My 
 
160 EMERSON THE LECTURER. 
 
 dainty Ariel ! " he seemed murmuring to himself as he cast 
 down his eyes as if in deprecation of the frenzy of approval, 
 and caught another sentence from the Sibylline leaves that lay 
 before him ambushed behind a dish of fruit and seen only 
 by nearest neighbours. Every sentence brought down the 
 house as I never saw one brought down before and it is 
 not so easy to hit Scotsmen with a sentiment that has no 
 hint of native brogue in it. I watched, for it was an 
 interesting study, how the quick sympathy ran flashing 
 from face to face down the long tables, like an electric 
 spark thrilling as it went, and then exploded in a thunder 
 of plaudits. I watched till tables and faces vanished, for I, 
 too, found myself caught up in the common enthusiasm, and 
 my excited fancy set me under the bema listening to him 
 who fulmined over Greece. I can never help applying to 
 him what Ben Jonson said of Bacon : " There happened in 
 my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his 
 speaking. His language was nobly censorious. No man 
 ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or 
 suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. 
 No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. 
 His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, 
 without loss. He commanded where he spoke." Those 
 who heard him while their natures were yet plastic, and 
 their mental nerves trembled under the slightest breath of 
 divine air, will never cease to feel and say : 
 
 " Was never eye did see that face, 
 
 Was never ear did hear that tongue, 
 Was never mind did mind his grace, 
 
 That ever thought the travail long ; 
 But eyes, and ears, and every thought, 
 Were with his sweet perfections caught" 
 
CARLYLE. 161 
 
 CARL VLB* 
 
 A FEELING of comical sadness is likely to come over the 
 mind of any middle-aged man who sets himself to recollect 
 ing the names of different authors that have been famous, 
 and the number of contemporary immortalities whose end 
 he has seen since coming to manhood. Many a light, 
 hailed by too careless observers as a fixed star, has proved 
 to be only a short-lived lantern at the tail of a newspaper 
 kite. That literary heaven which our youth saw dotted 
 thick with rival glories, we find now to have been a stage- 
 sky merely, artificially enkindled from behind } and the 
 cynical daylight which is sure to follow all theatrical 
 enthusiasms shows us ragged holes where once were 
 luminaries, sheer vacany instead of lustre. Our earthly 
 reputations, says a great poet, are the colour of grass, and 
 the same sun that makes the green bleaches it again. But 
 next morning is not the time to criticise the scene-painter s 
 firmament, nor is it quite fair to examine coldly a part of 
 some general illusion in the absence of that sympathetic 
 enthusiasm, that self-surrender of the fancy, which made it 
 what it was. It would not be safe for all neglected authors 
 to comfort themselves in Wordsworth s fashion, inferring 
 genius in an inverse proportion to public favour, and a high 
 and solitary merit from the world s indifference. On the 
 contrary, it would be more just to argue from popularity a 
 certain amount of real value, though it may not be of that 
 permanent quality which insures enduring fame. The con 
 temporary world and Wordsworth were both half right. 
 He undoubtedly owned and worked the richest vein of his 
 period ; but he offered to his contemporaries a heap of gold- 
 bearing quartz where the baser mineral made the greater 
 show, and the person must do his own crushing and smelting, 
 with no guaranty but the bare word of the miner. It was 
 not enough that certain bolder adventurers should now and 
 then show a nugget in proof of the success of their venture. 
 
 * Apropos of his " Frederick the Great. " 
 
 139 
 
1 62 CARLYLE. 
 
 The gold of the poet must be refined, moulded, stamped 
 with the image and superscription of his time, but with 
 a beauty of design and finish that are of no time. The 
 work must surpass the material. Wordsworth was wholly 
 void of that shaping imagination which is the highest 
 criterion of a poet. 
 
 Immediate popularity and lasting fame, then, would 
 seem to be the result of different qualities, and not of 
 mere difference in degree. It is safe to prophesy a certain 
 durability of recognition for any author who gives evidence 
 of intellectual force, in whatever kind, above the average 
 amount. There are names in literary history which are 
 only names; and the works associated with them, like Acts 
 of Congress already agreed on in debate, are read by their 
 titles and passed. What is it that insures what may be 
 called living fame, so that a book shall be at once famous 
 and read < \ What is it that relegates divine Cowley to that 
 remote, uncivil Pontus of the "British Poets," and keeps 
 garrulous Pepys within the cheery circle of the evening 
 lamp and fire ? Originality, eloquence, sense, imagination, 
 not one of them is enough by itself, but only in some happy 
 mixture and proportion. Imagination seems to possess in 
 itself more of the antiseptic property than any other single 
 quality ; but, without less showy and more substantial 
 allies, it can at best give only deathlessness, without the 
 perpetual youth that makes it other than dreary. It were 
 easy to find examples of this Tithonus immortality, setting 
 its victims apart from both gods and men ; helpless dura 
 tion, undying, to be sure, but sapless and voiceless also, 
 and long ago deserted by the fickle Hemera. And yet 
 chance could confer that gift on Glaucus, which love and 
 the consent of Zeus failed to secure for the darling of the 
 Dawn. Is it mere luck, then ? Luck may, and often does, 
 have some share in ephemeral successes, as in a gambler s 
 winnings spent as soon as got, but not in any lasting 
 triumph over time. Solid success must be based on solid 
 qualities and the honest culture of them. 
 
 The first element of contemporary popularity is undoubt- 
 
CARLYLE. 163 
 
 edly the power of entertaining. If a man have anything 
 to tell, the world cannot be expected to listen to him unless 
 he have perfected himself in the best way of telling it. 
 People are not to be argued into a pleasurable sensation, 
 nor is taste to be compelled by any syllogism, however 
 stringent. An author may make himself very popular, 
 however, and even justly so, by appealing to the passion of 
 the moment, without having anything in him that shall 
 outlast the public whim which he satisfies. Churchill is a 
 remarkable example of this. He had a surprising extem 
 porary vigour of mind ; his phrase carries great weight of 
 blow ; he undoubtedly surpassed all contemporaries, as 
 Cowper says of him, in a certain rude and earth-born 
 vigour ; but his verse is dust and ashes now, solemnly 
 inurned, of course, in the Chalmers columbarium, and with 
 out danger of violation. His brawn and muscle are fading 
 traditions, while the fragile, shivering genius of Cowper is 
 still a good life on the books of the Critical Insurance 
 Office. " Is it not, then, loftiness of mind that puts one by 
 the side of Virgil 1 " cries poor old Cavalcanti at his wits 
 end. Certainly not altogether that. There must be also 
 the great Mantuan s art ; his power, not only of being 
 strong in parts, but of making those parts coherent in an 
 harmonious whole, and tributary to it. Gray, if we may 
 believe the commentators, has not an idea, scarcely an 
 epithet, that he can call his own, and yet he is, in the best 
 sense, one of the classics of English literature. He had 
 exquisite felicity of choice } his dictionary had no vulgar 
 word in it, no harsh one, but all culled from the luckiest 
 moods of poets, and with a faint but delicious aroma of 
 association ; he had a perfect sense of sound, and one idea 
 without which all the poetic outfit (si absit prudentia) is of 
 little avail, that of combination and arrangement, in 
 short, of art. The poets from whom he helped himself 
 have no more claim to any of his poems as wholes, than the 
 various beauties of Greece (if the old story were true) to 
 the Venus of the artist. 
 
 Imagination, as we have said, has more virtue to keep a 
 
164 CARLYLE. 
 
 book alive than any other single faculty. Burke is rescued 
 from the usual doom of orators because his learning, his 
 experience, his sagacity are rimmed with a halo by this 
 bewitching light behind the intellectual eye from the 
 highest heaven of the brain. Shakespeare has impreg 
 nated his common sense with the steady glow of it, and 
 answers the mood of youth and age, of high and low, 
 immortal as that dateless substance of the soul he 
 wrought in. To have any chance of lasting, a book 
 must satisfy, not merely some fleeting fancy of the day, 
 but a constant longing and hunger of human nature ; 
 and it needs only a superficial study of literature to 
 be convinced that real fame depends rather on the sum 
 of an author s powers than on any brilliancy of special 
 parts. There must be wisdom as well as wit, sense 
 no less than imagination, judgment in equal measure with 
 fancy, and the fiery rocket must be bound fast to the poor 
 wooden stick that gives it guidance if it would mount and 
 draw all eyes. There are some who think that the brooding 
 patience which a great work calls for belonged exclusively 
 to an earlier period than ours. Others lay the blame on our 
 fashion of periodical publication, which necessitates a sensa 
 tion and a crisis in every number, and forces the writer to 
 strive for startling effects, instead of that general lowness of 
 tone which is the last achievement of the artist. The sim 
 plicity of antique passion, the homeliness of antique pathos, 
 seem not merely to be gone out of fashion, but out of being 
 as well. Modern poets appear rather to tease their words 
 into a fury, than to infuse them with the deliberate heats of 
 their matured conception, and strive to replace the rapture 
 of the mind with a fervid intensity of phrase. Our reaction 
 from the decorous platitudes of the last century has no doubt 
 led us to excuse this, and to be thankful for something like 
 real fire, though of stubble ; but our prevailing style of 
 criticism, which regards parts rather than wholes, which 
 dwells on the beauty of passages, and, above all, must have 
 its languid nerves pricked with the expected sensation at 
 whatever cost, has done all it could to confirm us in our evil 
 
CARLYLE. 165 
 
 way. Passages are good when they lead to something, when 
 they are necessary parts of the building, but they are not 
 good to dwell in. This taste for the startling reminds us of 
 something which happened once at the burning of a country 
 meeting-house. The building stood on a hill, and, apart 
 from any other considerations, the fire was as picturesque 
 as could be desired. When all was a black heap, licking 
 itcelf here and there with tongues of fire, there rushed up a 
 farmer, gasping anxiously, " Hez the bell fell yit ^ " An 
 ordinary fire was no more to him than that on his hearth 
 stone; even the burning of a meeting-house, in itself a 
 vulcanic rarity (so long as he was of another parish), could 
 not tickle his out-worn palate ; but he had hoped for a 
 certain tang in the downcome of the bell that might recall 
 the boyish flavour of conflagration. There was something 
 dramatic, no doubt, in this surprise of the brazen sentinel 
 at his post, but the breathless rustic has always seemed to 
 us a type of the prevailing delusion in aesthetics. Alas ! if 
 the bell must fall in every stanza or every monthly number, 
 how shall an author contrive to stir us at last, unless with 
 whole Moscows, crowned with the tintinnabulary crash of 
 the Kremlin 1 ? For ourselves, we are glad to feel that we 
 are still able to find contentment in the more conversational 
 and domestic tone of our old-fashioned wood-fire. No doubt 
 a great part of our pleasure in reading is unexpectedness, 
 whether in turn of thought or of phrase ; but an emphasis 
 out of place, an intensity of expression not founded on 
 sincerity of moral or intellectual conviction, reminds one of 
 the underscorings in young ladies letters, a wonder even to 
 themselves under the colder north-light of matronage. It 
 is the part of the critic, however, to keep cool under what 
 ever circumstances, and to reckon that the excesses of an 
 author will be at first more attractive to the many than that 
 average power which shall win him attention with a new 
 generation of men. It is seldom found out by the majority, 
 till after a considerable interval, that he was the original 
 man who contrived to be simply natural the hardest lesson 
 in the school of art, and the latest learned, if, indeed, it be 
 
166 CARLYLE. 
 
 a thing capable of acquisition at all. The most winsome 
 and wayward of brooks draws now and then some lover s 
 foot to its intimate reserve, while the spirt of a bursting 
 water-pipe gathers a gaping crowd forthwith. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle is an author who has now been so long before 
 the world that we may feel toward him something of the 
 unprejudice of posterity. It has long been evident that he 
 has no more ideas to bestow upon us, and that no new turn 
 of his kaleidoscope would give us anything but some 
 variation of arrangement in the brilliant colours of his 
 style. It is perhaps possible, then, to arrive at some not 
 wholly inadequate estimate of his place as a writer, and 
 especially of the value of the ideas whose advocate he makes 
 himself, with a bitterness and violence that increase, as it 
 seems to us, in proportion as his inward conviction of their 
 truth diminishes. 
 
 The leading characteristics of an author who is in any 
 sense original, that is to say, who does not merely reproduce, 
 but modifies the influence of tradition, culture, and contem 
 porary thought upon himself by some admixture of his own, 
 may commonly be traced more or less clearly in his earliest 
 works. This is more strictly true, no doubt, of poets, 
 because the imagination is a fixed quantity, not to be 
 increased by any amount of study and reflection. Skill, 
 wisdom, and even wit are cumulative ; but that diviner 
 faculty, which is the spiritual eye, though it may be trained 
 and sharpened, cannot be added to by taking thought. 
 This has always been something innate, unaccountable, to 
 be laid to a happy conjunction of the stars. Goethe, the 
 last of the great poets, accordingly takes pains to tell us 
 under what planets he was born ; and in him it is curious 
 how uniform the imaginative quality is from the beginning 
 to the end of his long literary activity. His early poems 
 show maturity, his mature ones a youthful freshness. The 
 apple already lies potentially in the blossom, as that may be 
 traced also in the ripened fruit. With a mere change of 
 emphasis, Goethe might be called an old boy at both ends 
 of his career. 
 
CARLYLE. 167 
 
 In the earliest authorship of Mr. Carlyle we find some not 
 obscure hints of the future man. Nearly fifty years ago he 
 contributed a few literary and critical articles to the Edin 
 burgh Encyclopaedia. The outward fashion of them is that 
 of the period ; but they are distinguished by a certain 
 security of judgment remarkable at any time, remarkable 
 especially in one so young. British criticism has been 
 always more or less parochial ; has never, indeed, quite 
 freed itself from sectarian cant, and planted itself honestly 
 on the aesthetic point of view. It cannot quite persuade 
 itself that truth is of immortal essence, totally independent 
 of all assistance from quarterly journals or the British army 
 and navy. Carlyle, in these first essays, already shows the 
 influence of his master, Goethe, the most widely receptive 
 of critics. In a compact notice of Montaigne, there is not 
 a word as to his religious scepticism. The character is 
 looked at purely from its human and literary sides. As 
 illustrating the bent of the author s mind, the following 
 passage is most to our purpose : " A modern reader will 
 not easily cavil at the patient and good-natured, though 
 exuberant egotism which brings back to our view the 
 form and pressure of a time long past. The habits and 
 humours, the mode of acting and tanking, which character 
 ized a Gascon gentleman in the sixteenth century, cannot fail 
 to amuse an inquirer of the nineteenth ; while the faithful 
 delineation of human feelings, in all their strength and 
 weakness, will serve as a mirror to every mind capable of 
 self-examination" We find here no uncertain indication of 
 that eye for the moral picturesque, and that sympathetic 
 appreciation of character, which within the next few years 
 were to make Carlyle the first in insight of English critics 
 and the most vivid of English historians. In all his earlier 
 writing he never loses sight of his master s great rule, Den 
 Gegenstandfest zu halten. He accordingly gave to English 
 men the first humanly possible likeness of Voltaire, Diderot, 
 Mirabeau, and others, who had hitherto been measured by 
 the usual British standard of their respect for the geognosy 
 of Moses and the historic credibility of the Books of 
 
i68 CARLYLE. 
 
 Chronicles. What was the real meaning of this phenome 
 non ? what the amount of this man s honest performance in 
 the world 1 and in what does he show that family likeness, 
 common to all the sons of Adam, which gives us a fair hope 
 of being able to comprehend him 1 These were the questions 
 which Carlyle seems to have set himself honestly to answer 
 in the critical writings which fill the first period of his life 
 as a man of letters. In this mood he rescued poor Boswell 
 from the unmerited obloquy of an ungrateful generation, 
 and taught us to see something half-comically beautiful in 
 the poor, weak creature, with his pathetic instinct of 
 reverence for what was nobler, wiser, and stronger than 
 himself. Everything that Mr. Carlyle wrote during this 
 first period thrills with the purest appreciation of whatever 
 is brave and beautiful in human nature, with the most 
 vehement scorn of cowardly compromise with things base ; 
 and yet, immitigable as his demand for the highest in us 
 seems to be, there is always something reassuring in the 
 humorous sympathy with mortal frailty which softens 
 condemnation and consoles for shortcoming. The remark 
 able freature of Mr. Carlyle s criticism (see, for example, 
 his analysis and exposition of Goethe s " Helena ") is the 
 sleuth-hound instinct with which he presses on to the matter 
 of his theme never turned aside by a false scent, regardless 
 of the outward beauty of form, sometimes almost con 
 temptuous of it, in his hunger after the intellectual nourish 
 ment which it may hide. THe delicate skeleton of 
 admirably articulated and related parts which underlies 
 and sustains every true work of art, and keeps it from 
 sinking on itself a shapeless heap, he would crush remorse 
 lessly to come at the marrow of meaning. With him the 
 ideal sense is secondary to the ethical and metaphysical, 
 and he has but a faint conception of their possible unity. 
 
 By degrees the humorous element in his nature gains 
 ground, till it overmasters all the rest. Becoming always 
 more boisterous and obtrusive, it ends at last, as such 
 humour must, in cynicism. In " Sartor Resartus " it is 
 ptill kindly, still infused with sentiment] and the book, 
 
CARLYLE. 169 
 
 with its mixture of indignation and farce, strikes one as 
 might the prophecies of Jeremiah, if the marginal comments 
 of the Rev. Mr. Sterne in his wildest mood had by some 
 accident been incorporated with the text. In " Sartor " 
 the marked influence of Jean Paul is undeniable, both in 
 matter and manner. It is curious for one who studies the 
 action and reaction of national literatures on each other, to 
 see the humour of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after 
 filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge 
 of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeas 
 ing, as the case may be, to the English mind. Unhappily 
 the bit of mother from Swift s vinegar-barrel has had 
 strength enough to sour all the rest. The whimsicality of 
 " Tristram Shandy," which, even in the original, has too 
 often the effect of forethought, becomes a deliberate artifice 
 in Richter, and at last a mere mannerism in Carlyle. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle in his critical essays had the advantage of a 
 well-defined theme, and of limits both in the subject and in 
 the space allowed for its treatment, which kept his natural 
 extravagance within bounds, and compelled some sort of 
 discretion and compactness. The great merit of these essays 
 lay in a criticism based on wide and various study, which, 
 careless of tradition, applied its standard to the real and not 
 the contemporary worth of the literary or other performance 
 to be judged, and in an unerring eye for that fleeting expres 
 sion of the moral features of character, a perception of 
 which alone makes the drawing of a coherent likeness 
 possible. Their defect was a tendency, gaining strength 
 with years, to confound the moral with the aesthetic 
 standard, and to make the value of an author s work 
 dependent on the general force of his nature rather than on 
 his special fitness for a given task. In proportion as his 
 humour gradually overbalanced the other qualities of his 
 mind, his taste for the eccentric, amorphous, and violent in 
 men became excessive, disturbing more and more his per- 
 peption of the more commonplace attributes which give 
 consistency to portraiture. His " French Revolution " is a 
 series of lurid pictures, unmatched for vehement power, in 
 
1 70 CARLYLE. 
 
 which the figures of such sons of earth as Mirabeau and 
 Danton loom gigantic and terrible as in the glare of an 
 eruption, their shadows swaying far and wide, grotesquely 
 awful. But all is painted by eruption-flashes in violent 
 light and shade. There are no half-tints, no gradations, 
 and we find it impossible to account for the continu 
 ance in power of less Titanic actors in the tragedy like 
 Robespierre, on any theory, whether of human nature or of 
 individual character, supplied by Mr. Carlyle. Of his suc 
 cess, however, in accomplishing what he aimed at, which 
 was to haunt the mind with memories of a horrible 
 political nightmare, there can be no doubt. 
 
 Goethe says, apparently thinking of Richter, " the 
 worthy Germans have persuaded themselves that the 
 essence of true humour is formlessness." Heine had not 
 yet shown that a German might combine the most airy 
 humour with a sense of form as delicate as Goethe s own, 
 and that there was no need to borrow the bow of 
 Philoctetes for all kinds of game. Mr. Carlyle s own 
 tendency was toward the lawless, and the attraction of 
 Jean Paul made it an overmastering one. Goethe, we 
 think, might have gone farther, and affirmed that nothing 
 but the highest artistic sense can prevent humour from 
 degenerating into the grotesque, and thence downwards to 
 utter anarchy. Rabelais is a striking example of it. The 
 moral purpose of his book cannot give it that unity which 
 the instinct and forethought of art only can bring forth. 
 Perhaps we owe the masterpiece of humorous literature to 
 the fact that Cervantes had been trained to authorship in a 
 school where form predominated over substance, and the 
 most convincing proof of the supremacy of art at the 
 highest period of Greek literature is to be found in 
 Aristophanes. Mr. Carlyle has no artistic sense of form or 
 rhythm, scarcely of proportion. Accordingly he looks on 
 verse with contempt as something barbarous a savage 
 ornament which a higher refinement will abolish, as it has 
 tattooing and nose-rings. With a conceptive imagination 
 vigorous beyond any in his generation, with a mastery of 
 
CARLYLE. 171 
 
 language equalled only by the greatest poets, he wants 
 altogether the plastic imagination, the shaping faculty, 
 which would have made him a poet in the highest sense. 
 He is a preacher and a prophet anything you will but 
 an artist he is not, and never can be. It is always the 
 knots and gnarls of the oak that he admires, never the 
 perfect and balanced tree. 
 
 It is certainly more agreeable to be grateful for what 
 we owe an author, than to blame him for what he cannot 
 give us. But it is sometimes the business of a critic to trace 
 faults of style and of thought to their root in character and 
 temperament to show their necessary relation to, and 
 dependence on, each other and to find some more trust 
 worthy explanation than mere wantonness of will for the 
 moral obliquities of a man so largely moulded and gifted as 
 Mr. Carlyle. So long as he was merely an exhorter or 
 dehorter, we were thankful for such eloquence, such 
 humour, such vivid or grotesque images, and such 
 splendour of illustration as only he could give ; but when 
 he assumes to be a teacher of moral and political philosophy, 
 when he himself takes to compounding the social panaceas 
 he has made us laugh at so often, and advertises none as 
 genuine but his own, we begin to inquire into his qualifica 
 tions and his defects, and to ask ourselves whether his 
 patent pill differs from others except in the larger amount 
 of aloes, or has any better recommendation than the 
 superior advertising powers of a mountebank of genius. 
 Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic 
 defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed. 
 Had Mr. Carlyle been fitted out completely by nature as an 
 artist, he would have had an ideal in his work which would 
 have lifted his mind away from the muddier part of him, 
 and trained him to the habit of seeking and seeing the 
 harmony rather than the discord and contradiction of 
 things. His innate love of the picturesque (which is only 
 another form of the sentimentalism he so scoffs at, perhaps 
 as feeling it a weakness in himself) once turned in the 
 direction of character, and finding its chief satisfaction 
 
172 CARLYLE. 
 
 there, led him to look for that ideal of human nature in 
 individual men which is but fragmentarily represented in 
 the entire race, and is rather divined from the aspiration, 
 for ever disenchanted to be for ever renewed, of the 
 immortal part in us, than found in any example of actual 
 achievement. A wiser temper would have found something 
 more consoling than disheartening in the continual failure 
 of men eminently endowed to reach the standard of this 
 spiritual requirement, would perhaps have found in it an 
 inspiring hint that it is mankind, and not special men, that 
 are to be shaped at last into the image of God, and that the 
 endless life of the generations may hope to come nearer that 
 goal of which the short-breathed threescore years and ten 
 fall too unhappily short. 
 
 But Mr. Carlyle has invented the Hero-cure, and all who 
 recommend any other method, or see any hope of healing 
 elsewhere, are either quacks and charlatans or their victims. 
 His lively imagination conjures up the image of an impos 
 sible he, as contradictorily endowed as the chief personage 
 in a modern sentimental novel, and who, at all hazards, 
 must not lead mankind like a shepherd, but bark, bite, and 
 otherwise worry them toward the fold like a truculent 
 sheep-dog. If Mr. Carlyle would only now and then 
 recollect that men are men, and not sheep nay, that the 
 farther they are from being such, the more well grounded 
 our hope of one day making something better of them ! It 
 is indeed strange that one who values Will so highly in the 
 greatest, should be blind to its infinite worth in the least of 
 men ; nay, that he should so often seem to confound it with 
 its irritable and purposeless counterfeit, Wilfulness. The 
 natural impatience of an imaginative temperament, which 
 conceives so vividly the beauty and desirableness of a 
 nobler manhood and a diviner political order, makes him 
 fret at the slow moral processes by which the All-Wise 
 brings about his ends and turns the very foolishness of men 
 to his praise and glory. Mr. Carlyle is for calling down 
 fire from Heaven whenever he cannot readily lay his hand 
 on the match-box. No doubt it is somewhat provoking 
 
CARLYLE. 173 
 
 that it should be so easy to build castles in the air, and so 
 hard to find tenants for them. It is a singular intellectual 
 phenomenon to see a man, who earlier in life so thoroughly 
 appreciated the innate weakness and futile tendency of the 
 " storm and thrust " period of German literature, constantly 
 assimilating, as he grows older, more and more nearly to its 
 principles and practice. It is no longer the sagacious and 
 moderate Goethe who is his type of what is highest in 
 human nature, but far rather some Gotz of the Iron Hand, 
 some assertor of the divine legitimacy of Faustrecht. It is 
 odd to conceive the fate of Mr. Carlyle under the sway of 
 any of his heroes how Cromwell would have scorned him 
 as a babbler more long-winded than Prynne, but less clear 
 and practical how Friedrich would have scoffed at his 
 tirades as dummes Zeug not to be compared with the 
 romances of Crebillon fits, or possibly have clapped him in 
 a marching regiment as a fit subject for the cane of the 
 sergeant. Perhaps something of Mr. Carlyle s irritability is 
 to be laid to the account of his early schoolmastership at 
 Ecclefechan. This great booby World is such a dull boy, 
 and will not learn the lesson we have taken such pains in 
 expounding for the fiftieth time. Well, then, if eloquence, 
 if example, if the awful warning of other little boys who 
 neglected their accidence and came to the gallows, if none of 
 these avail, the birch at least is left, and we will try that. 
 The dominie spirit has become every year more obtrusive 
 and intolerant in Mr. Carlyle s writing, and the rod, instead 
 of being kept in its place as a resource for desperate cases, 
 has become the alpha and omega of all successful training, 
 the one divinely-appointed means of human enlightenment 
 and progress in short, the final hope of that absurd animal 
 who fancies himself a little lower that the angels. Have 
 we feebly taken it for granted that the distinction of man 
 was reason 1 Never was there a more fatal misconception. 
 It is in the gift of unreason that we are unenviably dis 
 tinguished from the brutes, whose nobler privilege of 
 instinct saves them from our blunders and our crimes. 
 But since Mr. Carlyle has become possessed, with the 
 
174 CARLYLE. 
 
 hallucination that he is head-master of this huge boys 
 school which we call the world, his pedagogic birch has 
 grown to the taller proportions and more ominous aspect of 
 a gallows. His article on Dr. Francia was a panegyric of 
 the halter, in which the gratitude of mankind is invoked 
 for the self-appointed dictator who had discovered in 
 Paraguay a tree more beneficent than that which produced 
 the Jesuit s bark. Mr. Oarlyle seems to be in the condition 
 of a man who uses stimulants, and must increase his dose 
 from day to day as the senses become dulled under the 
 spur. He began by admiring strength of character and 
 purpose, and the manly self-denial which makes a humble 
 fortune great by steadfast loyalty to duty. He has gone 
 on till mere strength has become such washy weakness that 
 there is no longer any titillation in it ; and nothing short 
 of downright violence will rouse his nerves now to the 
 needed excitement. At first he made out very well with 
 remarkable men ; then, lessening the water and increasing 
 the spirit, he took to Heroes ; and now he must have 
 downright inhumanity, or the draught has no savour; so 
 he gets on at last to Kings, types of remorseless Force, 
 who maintain the political views of Berserkers by the legal 
 principles of Lynch. Constitutional monarchy is a failure, 
 representative government is a gabble, democracy a birth of 
 the bottomless pit \ there is no hope for mankind except in 
 getting themselves under a good driver who shall not spare 
 the lash. And yet, unhappily for us, these drivers are 
 providential births not to be contrived by any cunning of 
 ours, and Friedrich II. is hitherto the last of them. Mean 
 while the world s wheels have got fairly stalled in mire and 
 other matter of every vilest consistency and disgustful 
 smell. What are we to do 1 ? -Mr. Carlyle will not let us 
 make a lever with a rail from the next fence, or call in the 
 neighbours. That would be too commonplace and cowardly, 
 too anarchical. No ; he would have us sit down beside 
 him in the slough, and shout lustily for Hercules. If that 
 indispensable demigod will not or cannot come, we can find 
 a useful and instructive solace, during the intervals of 
 
CARLYLE. 175 
 
 shouting, in a hearty abuse of human nature, which, at the 
 long last, is always to blame. 
 
 Since "Sartor Resartus" Mr. Carlyle has done little but 
 repeat himself with increasing emphasis and heightened 
 shrillness. Warning has steadily heaten toward denuncia 
 tion, and remonstrance soured toward scolding. The image 
 of the Tartar prayer-mill, which he borrowed from Richter 
 and turned to such humorous purpose, might be applied to 
 himself. The same phrase comes round and round, only 
 the machine, being a little crankier, rattles more, and the 
 performer is called on for a more visible exertion. If there 
 be not something very like cant in Mr. Carlyle s later 
 writings, then cant is not the repetition of a creed after it 
 has become a phrase by the cooling of that white-hot con 
 viction which once made it both the light and warmth of 
 the soul. We do not mean intentional and deliberate 
 cant, but neither is that which Mr. Carlyle denounces 
 so energetically in his fellow-men of that conscious 
 kind. We do not mean to blame him for it, but 
 mention it rather as an interesting phenomenon of human 
 nature. The stock of ideas which mankind has to work 
 with is very limited, like the alphabet, and can at best have 
 an air of freshness given it by new arrangements and com 
 binations, or by application to new times and circumstances. 
 Montaigne is but Ecclesiastes writing in the sixteenth 
 century, Voltaire but Lucian in the eighteenth. Yet both 
 are original, and so certainly is Mr. Carlyle, whose borrow 
 ing is mainly from his own former works. But he does 
 this so often and so openly that we may at least be sure 
 that he ceased growing a number of years ago, and is a 
 remarkable example of arrested development. 
 
 The cynicism, however, which has now become the pre 
 vailing temper of his mind, has gone on expanding with 
 unhappy vigour. In Mr. Carlyle it is not, certainly, as in 
 Swift, the result of personal disappointment, and of the 
 fatal eye of an accomplice for the mean qualities by which 
 power could be attained that it might be used for purposes 
 as mean. It seems rather the natural corruption of his 
 
1 76 CARLYLE. 
 
 exuberant humour. Humour in its first analysis is a per 
 ception of the incongruous, and, in its highest development, 
 of the incongruity between the actual and the ideal in men 
 and life. With so keen a sense of the ludicrous contrast 
 between what men might be, nay, wish to be, and what 
 they are, and with a vehement nature that demands the 
 instant realisation of his vision of a world altogether 
 heroic, it is no wonder that Mr. Carlyle, always hoping for 
 a thing and always disappointed, should become bitter. 
 Perhaps if he expected less he would find more. Saul 
 seeking his father s asses found himself turned suddenly 
 into a king ; but Mr. Carlyle, on the look-out for a king, 
 always seems to find the other sort of animal. He sees 
 nothing on any side of him but a procession of the Lord of 
 Misrule in gloomier moments, a Dance of Death, where 
 everything is either a parody of whatever is noble, or an 
 aimless jig that stumbles at last into the annihilation of the 
 grave, and so passes from one nothing to another. Is a 
 world, then, which buys and reads Mr. Carlyle s works 
 distinguished only for its "fair, large ears?" If he who 
 has read and remembered so much would only now and 
 then call to mind the old proverb, Nee deus, nee lupus, sed 
 homo ! If he would only recollect that, from the days of 
 the first grandfather, everybody has remembered a golden 
 age behind him ! 
 
 The very qualities, it seems to us, which came so near 
 making a great poet of Mr. Carlyle, disqualify him for the 
 office of historian. The poet s concern is with the appear 
 ances of things, with their harmony in that whole which 
 the imagination demands for its satisfaction, and their 
 truth to that ideal nature which is the proper object of 
 poetry. History, unfortunately, is very far from being 
 ideal, still farther from an exclusive interest in those heroic 
 or typical figures which answer all the wants of the epic 
 and the drama and fill their utmost artistic limits. Mr. 
 Carlyle has an unequalled power and vividness in painting 
 detached scenes, in bringing out in their full relief the 
 oddities or peculiarities of character; but he has a far 
 
CARLYLE. 177 
 
 feebler sense of those gradual changes of opinion, that 
 strange communication of sympathy from mind to mind, 
 that subtile influence of very subordinate actors in giving a 
 direction to policy or action, which we are wont somewhat 
 vaguely to call the progress of events. His scheme of 
 history is purely an epical one, where only leading figures 
 appear by name and are in any strict sense operative. He 
 has no conception of the people as anything else than an 
 element of mere brute force in political problems, and 
 would sniff scornfully at that unpicturesque common-sense 
 of the many, which comes slowly to its conclusions, no 
 doubt, but compels obedience even from rulers the most 
 despotic when once its mind is made up. His history of 
 Frederick is, of course, a Fritziad ; but next to his hero, 
 the cane of the drill-sergeant and iron ramrods appear to be 
 the conditions which to his mind satisfactorily account for 
 the result of the Seven Years War. It is our opinion, 
 which subsequent events seem to justify, that, had there 
 not been in the Prussian people a strong instinct of nation 
 ality, Protestant nationality too, and an intimate conviction 
 of its advantages, the war might have ended quite other 
 wise. Frederick II. left the machine of war which he 
 received from his father even more perfect than he found 
 it, yet within a few years of his death it went to pieces 
 before the shock of French armies animated by an idea. 
 Again a few years, and the Prussian soldiery, inspired once 
 more by the old national fervour, were victorious. Were 
 it not for the purely picturesque bias of Mr. Carlyle s 
 genius, for the necessity which his epical treatment lays 
 upon him of always having a protagonist, we should be 
 astonished that an idealist like him should have so little 
 faith in ideas and so much in matter. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle s manner is not so well suited to the 
 historian as to the essayist. He is always great in single 
 figures and striking episodes, but there is neither gradation 
 nor continuity. He has extraordinary patience and con 
 scientiousness in the gathering and sifting of his mate 
 rial, but is scornful of commonplace facts and characters, 
 
 140 
 
178 CARLYLE. 
 
 impatient of whatever will not serve for one of his clever 
 sketches, or group well in a more elaborate figure-piece. 
 He sees history, as it were, by flashes of lightning. A 
 single scene, whether a landscape or an interior, a single 
 figure or a wild mob of men, whatever may be snatched 
 by the eye in that instant of intense illumination, is 
 minutely photographed upon the memory. Every tree and 
 stone, almost every blade of grass ; every article of furniture 
 in a room ; the attitude or expression, nay, the very buttons 
 and shoe-ties of a principal figure ; the gestures of moment 
 ary passion in a wild throng, everything leaps into vision 
 under that sudden glare with a painful distinctness that 
 leaves the retina quivering. The intervals are absolute 
 darkness. Mr. Carlyle makes us acquainted with the 
 isolated spot where we happen to be when the flash comes, 
 as if by actual eyesight, but there is no possibility of a 
 comprehensive view. No other writer compares with him 
 for vividness. He is himself a witness, and makes us 
 witnesses of whatever he describes. This is genius beyond 
 a question, and of a very rare quality, but it is not history. 
 He has not the cold-blooded impartiality of the historian ; 
 and while he entertains us, moves us to tears or laughter, 
 makes us the unconscious captives of his ever-changeful 
 mood, we find that he has taught us comparatively little. 
 His imagination is so powerful that it makes him the con 
 temporary of his characters, and thus his history seems to 
 be the memoirs of a cynical humorist, with hearty likes 
 and dislikes, with something of acridity in his partialities 
 whether for or against, more keenly sensitive to the 
 grotesque than the simply natural, and who enters in his 
 diary, even of what comes within the range of his own 
 observation, only so much as amuses his fancy, is congenial 
 with his humour, or feeds his prejudice. Mr. Carlyle s 
 method is accordingly altogether pictorial, his hasty temper 
 making narrative wearisome to him. In his Friedrich, for 
 example, we get very little notion of the civil administra 
 tion of Prussia ; and when he comes, in the last volume, to 
 his hero s dealings with civil reforms, he confesses candidly 
 
CARLYLE. 179 
 
 that it would tire him too much to tell us about it, even if 
 he knew anything at all satisfactory himself. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle s historical compositions are wonderful prose 
 poems, full of picture, incident, humour, and character, 
 where we grow familiar with his conception of certain 
 leading personages, and even of subordinate ones, if they 
 are necessary to the scene, so that they come out living 
 upon the stage from the dreary limbo of names ; but this is 
 no more history than the historical plays of Shakespeare. 
 There is nothing in imaginative literature superior in its 
 own way to the episode of Voltaire in the Fritziad. It is 
 delicious in humour, masterly in minute characterisation. 
 We feel as if the principal victim (for we cannot help 
 feeling all the while that he is so) of this mischievous 
 genius had been put upon the theatre before us by some 
 perfect mimic like Foote, who had studied his habitual 
 gait, gestures, tones, turn of thought, costume, trick of 
 feature, and rendered them with the slight dash of caricature 
 needful to make the whole composition tell. It is in such 
 things that Mr. Carlyle is beyond all rivalry, and that we 
 must go back to Shakespeare for a comparison. But the 
 mastery of Shakespeare is shown perhaps more strikingly 
 in his treatment of the ordinary than of the exceptional. 
 His is the gracious equality of Nature herself. Mr. Carlyle s 
 gift is rather in the representation than in the evolution of 
 character ; and it is a necessity of his art, therefore, to 
 exaggerate slightly his heroic, and to caricature in like 
 manner his. comic parts. His appreciation is less psycho 
 logical than physical and external. Grimm relates that 
 Garrick, riding once with Preville, proposed to him 
 that they should counterfeit drunkenness. They rode 
 through Passy accordingly, deceiving all who saw them. 
 When beyond the town Pr6ville asked how he had suc 
 ceeded. "Excellently," said Garrick, "as to your body; 
 but your legs were not tipsy." Mr. Carlyle would be as 
 exact in his observation of nature as the great actor, and 
 would make us see a drunken man as well ; but we doubt 
 whether he could have conceived that unmatchable scena 
 
i So CARLYLE. 
 
 in Antony and Cleopatra, where the tipsiness of Lepidus 
 pervades the whole metaphysical no less than the physical 
 part of the triumvir. If his sympathies bore any propor 
 tion to his instinct for catching those traits which are 
 the expression of character, but not character itself, we 
 might have had a great historian in him instead of a 
 history-painter. But that which is a main element in 
 Mr. Carlyle s talent, and does perhaps more than any 
 thing else to make it effective, is a defect of his nature. 
 The cynicism which renders him so entertaining precludes 
 him from any just conception of men and their motives, 
 and from any sane estimate of the relative importance 
 of the events which concern them. We remember a 
 picture of Hamon s, where before a Punch s theatre 
 are gathered the wisest of mankind in rapt attention. 
 Socrates sits on a front bench, absorbed in the spectacle, 
 and in the corner stands Dante making entries in his note 
 book. Mr. Carlyle as an historian leaves us in somewhat 
 such a mood. The world is a puppet-show, and when we 
 have watched the play out, we depart with a half-comic con 
 sciousness of the futility of all human enterprise, and the 
 ludicrousness of all man s action and passion on the stage 
 of the world. Simple, kindly, blundering Oliver Goldsmith 
 was after all wiser, and his Vicar, ideal as Hector and not 
 less immortal, is a demonstration of the perennial beauty and 
 heroism of the homeliest human nature. The cynical view 
 is congenial to certain moods, and is so little inconsistent 
 with original nobleness of mind, that it is not seldom the 
 acetous fermentation of it ; but it is the view of the satirist, 
 not of the historian, and takes in but a narrow arc in the 
 circumference of truth. Cynicism in itself is essentially dis 
 agreeable. It is the intellectual analogue of the truffle ; and 
 though it may be very well in giving a relish to thought for 
 certain palates, it cannot supply the substance of it. Mr. 
 Carlyle s cynicism is not that polished weariness of the out- 
 sides of life which we find in Ecclesiastes. It goes much 
 deeper than that, to the satisfactions, not of the body or the 
 intellect, but of the very soul itself. It vaunts itself j it ia 
 
CARLYLE. 181 
 
 noisy and aggressive. What the wise master puts into the 
 mouth of desperate ambition, thwarted of the fruit of its 
 crime, as the fitting expression of passionate sophistry, seems 
 to have become an article of his creed. With him 
 
 "Life is a tale 
 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
 Signifying nothing." 
 
 He goes about with his Diogenes dark-lantern, professing to 
 seek a man, but inwardly resolved to find a monkey. He 
 loves to flash it suddenly on poor human nature in some 
 ridiculous or degrading posture. He admires still, or keeps 
 affirming that he admires, the doughty, silent, hard-working 
 men who, like Cromwell, go honestly about their business ; 
 but when we come to his later examples, we find that it is 
 not loyalty to duty or to an inward ideal of high-mindedness 
 that he finds admirable in them, but a blind unquestioning 
 vassalage to whomsoever it has pleased him to set up for a 
 hero. He would fain replace the old-feudalism with a 
 spiritual counterpart, in which there shall be an obligation 
 to soul-service. He who once popularised the word flunkey 
 by ringing the vehement changes of his scorn upon it, is at 
 last forced to conceive an ideal flunkeyism to squire the 
 hectoring Don Belianises of his fancy about the world. Fail 
 ing this, his latest theory of Divine government seems to be 
 the cudgel. Poets have sung all manner of vegetable loves: 
 Petrarch has celebrated the laurel, Chaucer the daisy, and 
 Wordsworth the gallows-tree ; it remained for the ex-peda 
 gogue of Ecclefechan to become the volunteer laureate of 
 the rod, and to imagine a world created and directed by a 
 divine Dr. Busby. We cannot help thinking that Mr. Carlyle 
 might have learned something to his advantage by living a 
 few years in the democracy which he scoffs at as heartily 
 a priori as if it were the demagogism which Aristophanes 
 derided from experience. The Hero, as Mr. Carlyle under 
 stands him, was a makeshift of the past ; and the ideal of 
 manhood is to be found hereafter in free communities, where 
 the state shall .at length sum up and exemplify in itself 
 all those qualities which poets were forced to imagine 
 
182 CARLYLE. 
 
 and typify because they could not find them in the actual 
 world. 
 
 In the earlier part of his literary career, Mr. Carlyle 
 was the denouncer of shams, the preacher up of sincerity, 
 manliness, and of a living faith, instead of a droning ritual. 
 He had intense convictions, and he made disciples. With a 
 compass of diction unequalled by any other public performer 
 of the time, ranging as it did from the unbooked freshness of 
 the Scottish peasant to the most far-sought phrase of literary 
 curiosity, with humour, pathos, and eloquence at will, it was 
 no wonder that he found eager listeners in a world longing 
 for a sensation, and forced to put up with the West-End 
 gospel of " Pelham." If not a profound thinker, he had what 
 was next best he felt profoundly, and his cry came out of 
 the depths. The stern Calvinism of his early training was 
 rekindled by his imagination to the old fervour of Wishart 
 and Brown, and became a new phenomenon as he reproduced 
 it subtilised by German transcendentalism and German cul 
 ture. Imagination, if it lays hold of a Scotsman, possesses 
 him in the old demoniac sense of the word, and that hard 
 logical nature, if the Hebrew fire once gets fair headway in it, 
 burns unquenchable as an anthracite coal-mine. But to 
 utilise these sacred heats, to employ them, as a literary man 
 is always tempted, to keep the domestic pot a-boiling is such 
 a thing possible 1 ? Only too possible, we fear; and Mr. 
 Carlyle is an example of it. If the languid public long for 
 a sensation, the excitement of making one becomes also a 
 necessity of the successful author, as the intellectual nerves 
 grow duller and the old inspiration that came unbidden to 
 the bare garret grows shier and shier of the comfortable 
 parlour. As he himself said thirty years ago of Edward 
 Irving, " Unconsciously, for the most part in deep uncon 
 sciousness, there was now the impossibility to live neglected 
 to walk on the quiet paths where alone it is well with us. 
 Singularity must henceforth succeed singularity. foulest 
 Circean draught, thou poison of Popular Applause 1 madness 
 is in thee and death ; thy end is Bedlam and the grave." 
 Mr. Carlyle won his first successes as a kind of preacher in 
 
CARLYLE. 183 
 
 print. His fervour, his oddity of manner, his pugnacious 
 paradox, drew the crowd ; the truth, or, at any rate, the 
 faith that underlay them all, brought also the fitter audience, 
 though fewer. But the curse was upon him ; he must 
 attract, he must astonish. Thenceforth he has done nothing 
 but revamp his telling things ; but the oddity has become 
 always odder, the paradoxes more paradoxical. No very 
 large share of truth falls to the apprehension of any one 
 man ; let him keep it sacred, and beware of repeating it till 
 it turn to falsehood on his lips by becoming ritual. Truth 
 always has a bewitching savour of newness in it, and 
 novelty at the first taste recalls that original sweetness to 
 the tongue ; but alas for him who would make the one a 
 substitute for the other ! We seem to miss of late in Mr. 
 Carlyle the old sincerity. He has become the purely 
 literary man, less concerned about what he says than 
 about how he shall say it to best advantage. The muse 
 should be the companion, not the guide, says he whom Mr. 
 Carlyle has pronounced "the wisest of this generation." 
 What would be a virtue in the poet is a vice of the most 
 fatal kind in the teacher, and, alas that we should say it ! 
 the very Draco of shams, whose code contained no penalty 
 milder than capital for the most harmless of them, has 
 become at last something very like a sham himself. Mr. 
 Carlyle continues to be a voice crying in the wilderness, 
 but no longer a voice with any earnest conviction behind it. 
 Hearing him rebuke us for being humbugs and impostors, 
 we are inclined to answer, with the ambassador of Philip 
 II., when his master reproached him with forgetting 
 substance in ceremony, "Your Majesty forgets that you 
 are only a ceremony yourself." And Mr. Carlyle s teaching, 
 moreover if teaching we may call it belongs to what the 
 great German, whose disciple he is, condemned as the 
 " literature of despair." An apostle to the Gentiles might 
 hope for some fruit of his preaching ; but of what avail an 
 apostle who shouts his message down the mouth of the pit 
 to poor lost souls, whom he can positively assure only that 
 it is impossible to get out? Mr. Carlyle lights up the 
 
184 CARLYLE. 
 
 lanterns of his Pharos after the ship is already rolling 
 between the tongue of the sea and the grinders of the reef. 
 It is very brilliant, and its revolving flashes touch the 
 crests of the breakers with an awful picturesqueness ; but 
 in so desperate a state of things, even Dr. Syntax might be 
 pardoned for being forgetful of the picturesque. The 
 Toryism of Scott sprang from love of the past ; that of 
 Carlyle is far more dangerously infectious, for it is logically 
 deduced from a deep disdain of human nature. 
 
 Browning has drawn a beautiful picture of an old king 
 sitting at the gate of his palace to judge his people in the 
 calm sunshine of that past which never existed outside 
 a poet s brain. T.t is the sweetest of waking dreams, this of 
 absolute power and perfect wisdom in one supreme ruler ; 
 but it is as pure a creation of human want and weakness, as 
 clear a witness of mortal limitation and incompleteness, as 
 the shoes of swiftness, the cloak of darkness, the purse of 
 Fortunatus, and the elixir vitce. It is the natural refuge of 
 imaginative temperaments impatient of our blunders and 
 shortcomings, and, given a complete man, all would submit 
 to the divine right of his despotism. But alas ! to every 
 the most fortunate human birth hobbles up that malign 
 fairy who has been forgotten with her fatal gift of 
 imperfection ! So far as our experience has gone, it has 
 been the very opposite of Mr. Carlyle s. Instead of finding 
 men disloyal to their natural leader, nothing has ever 
 seemed to us so touching as the gladness with which they 
 follow him, when they are sure they have found him 
 at last. But a natural leader of the ideal type is not to 
 be looked for nisi dignus vindice nodus. The Divine 
 Forethought had been cruel in furnishing one for every 
 petty occasion, and thus thwarting in all inferior men that 
 priceless gift of reason, to develop which, and to make it 
 one with free-will, is the highest use of our experience on 
 earth. Mr. Carlyle was hard bestead and very far gone 
 in his idolatry of mere pluck, when he was driven to choose 
 Friedrich as a hero. A poet and Mr. Carlyle is nothing 
 else is unwise who yokes Pegasus to a prosaic theme 
 
CARLYLE. 185 
 
 which no force of wing can lift from the dull earth. 
 Charlemagne would have been a wiser choice, far enough in 
 the past for ideal treatment, more manifestly the Siegfried 
 of Anarchy, and in his rude way the refounder of that 
 empire which is the ideal of despotism in the Western 
 world. 
 
 Friedrich was doubtless a remarkable man, but surely 
 very far below any lofty standard of heroic greatness. He 
 was the last of the European kings who could look upon 
 his kingdom as a private patrimony ; and it was this estate 
 of his, this piece of property, which he so obstinately and 
 successfully defended. He had no idea of country as it 
 was understood by an ancient Greek or Roman, as it is 
 understood by a modern Englishman or American ; and 
 there is something almost pitiful in seeing a man of genius 
 like Mr. Carlyle fighting painfully over again those battles 
 of the last century which settled nothing but the continu 
 ance of the Prussian monarchy, while he saw only the 
 "burning of a dirty chimney" in the war which a great 
 people was waging under his very eyes for the idea of 
 nationality and orderly magistrature, and which fixed, 
 let us hope for ever, a boundary-line on the map of 
 history and man s advancement toward self-conscious and 
 responsible freedom. The true historical genius, to our 
 thinking, is that which can see the nobler meaning of 
 events that are near him, as the true poet is he who 
 detects the divine in the casual ; and we somewhat 
 suspect the depth of his insight into the past who cannot 
 recognise the godlike of to-day under that disguise in which 
 it always visits us. Shall we hint to Mr. Carlyle that a man 
 may look on an heroic age, as well as an heroic master, 
 with the eyes of a valet, as misappreciative certainly, 
 though not so ignoble ? 
 
 What Coethe says of a great poet, that he must be a 
 citizen of his age as well as of his country, may be said 
 inversely of a great king. He should be a citizen of his 
 country as well as his age. Friedrich was certainly the 
 latter in its fullest sense ; whether he was, or could have 
 
i86 CARLYLE. 
 
 been, the former, in any sense, may be doubted. The man 
 who spoke and wrote French in preference to his mother- 
 tongue, who, dying when Goethe was already drawing 
 toward his fortieth year, Schiller toward his thirtieth, and 
 Lessing had been already five years in his grave, could yet 
 see nothing but barbarism in German literature, had little 
 of the old Teutonic fibre in his nature. The man who pro 
 nounced the Nibelungen Lied not worth a pinch of priming, 
 had little conception of the power of heroic traditions in 
 making heroic men, and especially in strengthening that 
 instinct made up of so many indistinguishable associations 
 which we call love of country. Charlemagne, when he 
 caused the old songs of his people to be gathered and 
 written down, showed a truer sense of the sources of 
 national feeling and a deeper political insight. This want 
 of sympathy points to the somewhat narrow limits of 
 Friedrich s nature. In spite of Mr. Carlyle s adroit state 
 ment of the case and the whole book has an air of being 
 the plea of a masterly advocate in mitigation of sentence 
 we feel that his hero was essentially hard, narrow, and 
 selfish. His popularity will go for little with any one who 
 has studied the trifling and often fabulous elements that 
 make up that singular compound. A bluntness of speech, 
 a shabby uniform, a frugal camp equipage, a timely 
 familiarity, may make a man the favourite of an army 
 or a nation above all, if he have the knack of success. 
 Moreover, popularity is much more easily won from above 
 downward, and is bought at a better bargain by kings and 
 generals than by other men. We doubt if Friedrich would 
 have been liked as a private person, or even as an unsuc 
 cessful king. He apparently attached very few people to 
 himself, fewer even than his brutal old Squire Western of a 
 father. His sister Wilhelmina is perhaps an exception. 
 We say perhaps, for we do not know how much the 
 heroic part he was called on to play had to do with the 
 matter, and whether sisterly pride did not pass even 
 with herself for sisterly affection. Moreover she was 
 far from him ; and Mr. Carlyle waves aside, in his 
 
CARLYLE. 187 
 
 generous fashion, some rather keen comments of hers on 
 her brother s character when she visited Berlin after he 
 had become king. Indeed, he is apt to deal rather con 
 temptuously with all adverse criticism of his hero. We 
 sympathise with his impulse in this respect, agreeing 
 heartily as we do in Chaucer s scorn of those who " gladlie 
 demen to the baser end " in such matters. But we are not 
 quite sure if this be a safe method with the historian. He 
 must doubtless be the friend of his hero if he would under 
 stand him, but he must be more the friend of truth if he 
 would understand history. Mr. Carlyle s passion for truth 
 is intense, as befits his temper, but it is that of a lover for 
 his mistress. He would have her all to himself, and has a 
 lover s conviction that no one is able, or even fit, to 
 appreciate her but himself. He does well to despise the 
 tittle-tattle of vulgar minds, but surely should not ignore 
 all testimony on the other side. For ourselves, we think it 
 not unimportant that Goethe s friend Knebel, a man not 
 incapable of admiration, and who had served a dozen years 
 or so as an officer of Friedrich s guard, should have bluntly 
 called him " the tyrant." 
 
 Mr. Carlyle s history traces the family of his hero down 
 from its beginnings in the picturesque chiaro-scuro of the 
 Middle Ages. It was an able, and, above all, a canny 
 house, a Scotch version of the word able, which implies 
 thrift and an eye to the main chance, the said main chance 
 or chief end of man being altogether of this world. Fried- 
 rich, inheriting this family faculty in full measure, was 
 driven, partly by ambition, partly by necessity, to apply it 
 to war. He did so, with the success to be expected where 
 a man of many expedients has the good luck to be opposed 
 by men with few. He adds another to the many proofs 
 that it is possible to be a great general without a spark of 
 that divine fire which we call genius, and that good fortune 
 in war results from the same prompt talent and unbending 
 temper which lead to the same result in the peaceful pro 
 fessions. Friedrich had certainly more of the temperament 
 of genius than Marlborough or Wellington ; but not to go 
 
1 88 CARLYLE. 
 
 beyond modern instances, he does not impress us with the 
 massive breadth of Napoleon, nor attract us with the climb 
 ing ardour of Turenne. To compare him with Alexander 
 or Csesar were absurd. The kingship that was in him, and 
 which won Mr. Carlyle to be his biographer, is that of will 
 merely, of rapid and relentless command. For organisation 
 he had a masterly talent ; but he could not apply it to the 
 arts of peace, both because he wanted experience and 
 because the rash decision of the battle-field will not serve 
 in matters which are governed by natural laws of growth. 
 He seems, indeed, to have had a coarse, soldier s contempt 
 for all civil distinction, altogether unworthy of a wise king, 
 or even of a prudent one He confers the title of Hofrath 
 on the husband of a woman with whom his General Wai- 
 rave is living in what Mr. Carlyle justly calls "brutish 
 polygamy," and this at "Walrave s request, on the ground 
 that "a general s drab ought to have a handle to her name." 
 Mr. Carlyle murmurs in a mild parenthesis that " we rather 
 regret this ! " (Vol. iii. p. 559.) This is his usual way of 
 treating unpleasant matters, sidling by with a deprecating 
 shrug of the shoulders. Not that he ever wilfully sup 
 presses anything. On the contrary, there is no greater 
 proof of his genius than the way in which, while he seems 
 to paint a character with all its disagreeable traits, he con 
 trives to win our sympathy for it, nay, almost our liking. 
 This is conspicuously true of his portrait of Friedrich s 
 father ; and that he does not succeed in making Friedrich 
 himself attractive is a strong argument with us that the 
 fault is in the subject and not the artist. 
 
 The book, we believe, has been comparatively unsuccess 
 ful as a literary venture. Nor do we wonder at it. It is 
 disproportionately long, and too much made up of those 
 descriptions of battles to read which seems even more 
 difficult than to have won the victory itself, more dis 
 heartening than to have suffered the defeat. To an Ameri 
 can, also, the warfare seemed Lilliputian in the presence of 
 a conflict so much larger in its proportions and significant 
 in its results. The interest, moreover, flags decidedly 
 
CARLYLE. 189 
 
 toward the close, where the reader cannot help feeling that 
 the author loses breath somewhat painfully under the effort 
 of so prolonged a course. Mr. Carlyle has evidently 
 devoted to his task a labour that may be justly called pro 
 digious. Not only has he sifted all the German histories 
 and memoirs, but has visited every battle-field, and describes 
 them with an eye for country that is without rival among 
 historians. The book is evidently an abridgment of even 
 more abundant collections, and yet as it stands the matter 
 overburdens the work. It is a bundle of lively episodes 
 rather than a continuous narrative. In this respect it con 
 trasts oddly with the concinnity of his own earlier Life of 
 Schiller. But the episodes are lively, the humour and 
 pathos spring from a profound nature, the sketches of 
 character are masterly, the seizure of every picturesque 
 incident infallible, and the literary judgments those of a 
 thorough scholar and critic. There is, of course, the usual 
 amusing objurgation of Dryasdust and his rubbish-heaps, 
 the usual assumption of omniscience, and the usual certainty 
 of the lively French lady of being always in the right ; yet 
 we cannot help thinking that a little of Dryasdust s plod 
 ding exactness would have saved Fouquet eleven years of 
 the imprisonment to which Mr. Carlyle condemns him, 
 would have referred us to St. Simon rather than to Voltaire 
 for the character of the brothers Belle-He, and would have 
 kept clear of a certain ludicrous etymology of the name 
 Antwerp, not to mention some other trifling slips of the 
 like nature. In conclusion, after saying, as honest critics 
 must, that " The History of Friedrich II. called Frederick 
 the Great " is a book to be read in with more satisfaction 
 than to be read through, after declaring that it is open to 
 all manner of criticism, especially in point of moral purpose 
 and tendency, we must admit with thankfulness, that it has 
 the one prime merit of being the work of a man who has 
 every quality of a great poet except that supreme one of 
 rhythm which shapes both matter and manner to harmo 
 nious proportion, and that where it is good, it is good as 
 only genius knows how to be. 
 
igo CARLYLE. 
 
 With the gift of song, Carlyle would have been the 
 greatest of epic poets since Homer. Without it, to modu 
 late and harmonise and bring parts into their proper 
 relation, he is the most amorphous of humourists, the most 
 shining avatar of whim the world has ever seen. Beginning 
 with a hearty contempt for shams, he has come at length to 
 believe in brute force as the only reality, and has as little 
 sense of justice as Thackeray allowed to women. We say 
 brute force, because, though the theory is that this force 
 should be directed by the supreme intellect for the time 
 being, yet all inferior wits are treated rather as obstacles to 
 be contemptuously shoved aside than as ancillary forces to 
 be conciliated through their reason. But, with all deduc 
 tions, he remains the profoundest critic and the most 
 dramatic imagination of modern times. Never was there a 
 more striking example of that ingenium perfervidum long 
 ago said to be characteristic of his countrymen. His is one 
 of the natures, rare in these latter centuries, capable of 
 rising to a white heat ; but once fairly kindled, he is like a 
 three-decker on fire, and his shotted guns go off, as the glow 
 reaches them, alike dangerous to friend or foe. Though he 
 seems more and more to confound material with moral 
 success, yet there is always something wholesome in his 
 unswerving loyalty to reality, as he understands it. History, 
 in the true sense, he does not and cannot write, for he looks 
 on mankind as a herd without volition, and without moral 
 force ; but such vivid pictures of events, such living con 
 ceptions of character, we find nowhere else in prose. The 
 figures of most historians seem like dolls stuffed with bran, 
 whose whole substance runs out through any hole that 
 criticism may tear in them ; but Carlyle s are so real in 
 comparison, that, if you prick them, they bleed. He seems 
 a little wearied, here and there, in his Friedrich, with the 
 multiplicity of detail, and does his filling-in rather shabbily ; 
 but he still remains in his own way, like his hero, the Only, 
 and such episodes as that of Yoltaire would make the fortune 
 of any other writer. Though not the safest of guides in 
 politics or practical philosophy, his value as an inspirer and 
 
SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 191 
 
 awakener cannot be over-estimated. It is a power which 
 belongs only to the highest order of minds, for it is none 
 but a divine fire that can so kindle and irradiate. The 
 debt due him from those who listened to the teachings of 
 his prime for revealing to them what sublime reserves of 
 power even the humblest may find in manliness, sincerity, 
 and self-reliance, can be paid with nothing short of reveren 
 tial gratitude. As a purifier of the sources whence our 
 intellectual inspiration is drawn, his influence has been 
 second only to that of Wordsworth, if even to his. 
 
 SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 
 
 ARE we really, then, to believe the newspapers for once, 
 and to doff our critical nightcaps, in which we have com 
 fortably overslept many similar rumours and false alarms, 
 to welcome the advent of a new poet ? New poets, to our 
 thinking, are not very common, and the soft columns of 
 the press often make dangerous concessions, for which the 
 marble ones of Horace s day were too stony-hearted. In 
 deed, we have some well-grounded doubts whether England 
 is precisely the country from which we have a right to ex 
 pect that most precious of gifts just now. There is hardly 
 enough fervour of political life there at present to ripen 
 anything but the fruits of the literary forcing-house, so fair 
 outwardly and so flavourless compared with those which 
 grow in the hardier open air of a vigorous popular senti 
 ment. Mere wealth of natural endowment is not enough ; 
 there must be also the co-operation of the time, of the 
 public genius roused to a consciousness of itself by the 
 necessity of asserting or defending the vital principle on 
 which that consciousness rests, in order that a poet may 
 rise to the highest level of his vocation. The great names 
 of the last generation Scott, Wordsworth, Byron repre 
 sent moods of national thought and feeling, and are there 
 fore more or less truly British poets; just as Goethe, in 
 whose capacious nature, open to every influence of earth 
 
192 SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 
 
 and sky, the spiritual fermentation of the eighteenth 
 century settled and clarified, is a European one. A sceptic 
 might say, we think, with some justice, that poetry in 
 England was passing now, if it have not already passed, 
 into one of those periods of mere art without any intense 
 convictions to back it, which lead inevitably, and by no 
 long gradation, to the mannered and artificial. Browning, 
 by far the richest nature of the time, becomes more 
 difficult, draws nearer to the all-for-point fashion of the 
 concettisti, with every poem he writes ; the dainty trick of 
 Tennyson cloys when caught by a whole generation of 
 versifiers, as the style of a great poet never can be ; and we 
 have a foreboding that Clough, imperfect as he was in 
 many respects, and dying before he had subdued his sensi 
 tive temperament to the sterner requirements of his art, 
 will be thought a hundred years hence to have been the 
 truest expression in verse of the moral and intellectual 
 tendencies, the doubt and struggle towards settled con 
 victions, of the period in which he lived. To make beauti 
 ful conceptions immortal .by exquisiteness of phrase, is to 
 be a poet, no doubt ; but to be a new poet is to feel and to 
 utter that immanent life of things without which the utmost 
 perfection of mere form is at best only wax or marble. He 
 who can do both is the great poet. 
 
 Over " Chastelard, a Tragedy," we need not spend much 
 time. It is at best but the school exercise of a young poet 
 learning to write, and who reproduces in his copy-book, 
 more or less travestied, the copy that has been set for him 
 at the page s head by the authors he most admires. Grace 
 and even force of expression are not wanting, but there is 
 the obscurity which springs from want of definite intention; 
 the characters are vaguely outlined from memory, not 
 drawn firmly from the living and the nude in actual ex 
 perience of life; the working of passion is an a priori 
 abstraction from a scheme in the author s mind ; and there 
 is no thought, but only a vehement grasping after thought. 
 The hand is the hand of Swinburne, but the voice is the 
 voice of Browning. With here and there a pure strain of 
 
SWINBURNE* S TRAGEDIES. 193 
 
 sentiment, a genuine touch of nature, the effect of the 
 whole is unpleasant with the faults of the worst school of 
 modern poetry the physically intense school, as we should 
 be inclined to call it, of which Mrs. Browning s " Aurora 
 Leigh " is the worst example, whose muse is a fast young 
 woman with the lavish ornament and somewhat overpower 
 ing perfume of the demi-monde, and which pushes expres 
 sion to the last gasp of sensuous exhaustion. They forget 
 that convulsion is not energy, and that words, to hold fire, 
 must first catch it from vehement heat of thought, while 
 no artificial fervours of phrase can make the charm work 
 backward to kindle the mind of writer or reader. An over 
 mastering passion no longer entangles the spiritual being of 
 its victim in the burning toils of a retribution fore-doomed 
 in its own nature, purifying us with the terror and pity of 
 a soul in its extremity, as the great masters were wont to 
 set it before us ; no, it must be fleshly, corporeal, must 
 " bite with small white teeth " and draw blood, to satisfy 
 the craving of our modern inquisitors, who torture lan 
 guage instead of wooing it to confess the secret of its witch 
 craft. That books written on this theory should be 
 popular, is one of the worst signs of the times ; that they 
 should be praised by the censors of literature shows how 
 seldom criticism goes back to first principles, or is even 
 aware of them how utterly it has forgotten its most 
 earnest function of demolishing the high places where the 
 unclean rites of Baal and Ashtaroth usurp on the worship 
 of the one only True and Pure. 
 
 " Atalanta in Calydon " is in every respect better than 
 its forerunner. It is a true poem, and seldom breaks from 
 the maidenly reserve which should characterise the higher 
 forms of poetry, even in the keenest energy of expression. 
 If the blank verse be a little mannered and stiff, reminding 
 one of Landor in his attempts to reproduce the antique, 
 the lyrical parts are lyrical in the highest sense, graceful, 
 flowing, and generally simple in sentiment and phrase. 
 There are some touches of nature in the mother s memories 
 of Althea, so sweetly pathetic that they go as right to the 
 
 141 
 
T94 SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 
 
 heart as they caine from it, and are neither Greek nor 
 English, but broadly human. And yet, when we had read 
 the book through, we felt as if we were leaving a world of 
 shadows, inhabited by less substantial things than that 
 nether realm of Homer where the very eidolon of Achilles 
 is still real to us in its longings and regrets. These are not 
 characters, but outlines after the Elgin marbles in the thin 
 nest manner of Flaxman. There is not so much blood in 
 the whole of them as would warm the little finger of one of 
 Shakespeare s living and breathing conceptions. We could 
 not help thinking of those exquisite verses addressed by 
 Schiller to Goethe, in which, while he expresses a half- 
 truth so eloquently as almost to make it seem a whole one, 
 he touches unconsciously the weak point of their common 
 striving after a Grecian instead of a purely human ideal. 
 
 " Doch leicht gezimmert nur ist Thespis Wagen, 
 Und er ist gleich dem acheront schen Kahn ; 
 Nur Schatten und Idole kann er tragen, 
 Und drangt das rohe Leben sicli heran, 
 So droht das leichte Fahrzeug umzusclilagen 
 Das nur die flucht gen Ceister fassen kann ; 
 Der Scheiu soil nie die Wirklichkeit erreichen 
 Und siegt Natur, so muss die Kunst entweichen." 
 
 The actors in the drama are unreal and shadowy, the 
 motives which actuate them alien to our modern modes of 
 thought and conceptions of character. To a Greek, the 
 element of Fate, with which his imagination was familiar, 
 while it heightened the terror of the catastrophe, would 
 have supplied the place of that impulse in mere human 
 nature which our habit of mind demands for its satisfac 
 tion. The fulfilment of an oracle, the anger of a deity, 
 the arbitrary doom of some blind and purposeless power 
 superior to man, the avenging of blood to appease an injured 
 ghost, any one of these might make that seem simply 
 natural to a contemporary of Sophocles which is intelligible 
 to us only by study and reflection. It is not a little curious 
 that Shakespeare should have made the last of the motives 
 we have just mentioned, and which was conclusive for 
 
SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 195 
 
 Orestes, insufficient for Hamlet, who so perfectly typifies 
 the introversion and complexity of modern thought as 
 compared with ancient, in dealing with the problems of life 
 and action. It was not perhaps without intention (for who 
 may venture to assume a want of intention in the world s 
 highest poetic genius at its full maturity 1) that Shakespeare 
 brings in his hero fresh from the University of Wittenberg, 
 where Luther, who entailed upon us the responsibility of 
 private judgment, had been Professor. The dramatic 
 motive in the " Electra " and " Hamlet " is essentially the 
 same, but what a difference between the straightforward 
 bloody-mindedness of Orestes and the metaphysical punc 
 tiliousness of the Dane ! Yet each was natural in his 
 several way, and each would have been unintelligible to the 
 audience for which the other was intended. That Fate which 
 the Greeks made to operate from without, we recognise at 
 work within in some vice of character or hereditary predis 
 position. Hawthorne, the most profoundly ideal genius of 
 these latter days, was continually returning, more or less 
 directly, to this theme ; and his " Marble Faun," whether 
 consciously or not, illustrates that invasion of the sesthetic 
 by the moral which has confused art by dividing its 
 allegiance, and dethroned the old dynasty without as yet 
 firmly establishing the new in an acknowledged legitimacy. 
 " Atalanta in Calydon," shows that poverty of thought 
 and profusion of imagery which are at once the defect 
 and the compensation of all youthful poetry, even of 
 Shakespeare s. It seems a paradox to say that there can 
 be too much poetry in a poem, and yet this is a fault with 
 which all poets begin, and which some never get over. But 
 "Atalanta" is hopefully distinguished, in a rather remark 
 able way, from most early attempts, by a sense of form and 
 proportion, which, if seconded by a seasonable ripening of 
 other faculties, as we may fairly expect, gives promise of 
 rare achievement hereafter. Mr. Swinburne s power of 
 assimilating style, which is, perhaps, not so auspicious a 
 symptom, strikes us as something marvellous. The argu 
 ment of his poem, in its quaint archaism, would not need 
 
196 SfrlNBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 
 
 the change of a word or in the order of a period to have 
 been foisted on Sir Thomas Malory as his own composition. 
 The choosing a theme which JEschylus had handled in one 
 of his lost tragedies is justified by a certain -<9Eschylean 
 flavour in the treatment. The opening, without deserving to 
 be called a mere imitation, recalls that of the " Agamemnon," 
 and the chorus has often an imaginative lift in it, an ethereal 
 charm of praise, of which it is the highest praise to say that 
 it reminds us of him who soars over the other Greek 
 tragedians like an eagle. 
 
 But in spite of many merits, we cannot help asking our 
 selves, as we close the book, whether "Atalanta" can be 
 called a success, and if so, whether it be a success in the 
 right direction. The poem reopens a question which in 
 some sort touches the very life of modern literature. We 
 do not mean to renew the old quarrel of Fontenelle s day 
 as to the comparative merits of ancients and moderns. 
 That is an affair of taste, which does not admit of any 
 authoritative settlement. Our concern is about a principle 
 which certainly demands a fuller discussion, and which is 
 important enough to deserve it. Do we show our apprecia 
 tion of the Greeks most wisely in attempting the mechanical 
 reproduction of their forms, or by endeavouring to compre 
 hend the thoughtful spirit of full-grown manhood in which 
 they wrought, to kindle ourselves by the emulation of it, 
 and to bring it to bear with all its plastic force upon our 
 wholly new conditions of life and thought 1 It seems to us 
 that the question is answered by the fact, patent in the 
 history of all the fine arts, that every attempt at reproduc 
 ing a bygone excellence by external imitation of it, or even 
 by applying the rules which analytic criticism has formu 
 lated from the study of it, has resulted in producing the 
 artificial, and not the artistic. That most subtile of all 
 essences in physical organisation, which eludes chemist, 
 anatomist, and microscopist, the life, is in aesthetics not less 
 shy of the critic, and will not come forth in obedience to 
 his most learned spells ; for the very good reason that it 
 cannot, because in all works of art it is the joint product of 
 
SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 197 
 
 the artist and of the time. Faust may believe he is gazing 
 on " the face that launched a thousand ships," but 
 Mephistopheles knows very well that it is only shadows 
 that he has the skill to conjure. He is not merely the 
 spirit that ever denies, but the spirit also of discontent with 
 the present, that material in which every man shall work 
 who will achieve realities and not their hollow semblance. 
 The true anachronism, in our opinion, is not in Shake 
 speare s making Ulysses talk as Lord Bacon might, but in 
 attempting to make him speak in a dialect of thought utterly 
 dead to all present comprehension. Ulysses was the type 
 of long-headedness; and the statecraft of an Ithacan cateran 
 would have seemed as childish to the age of Elizabeth and 
 Burleigh as it was naturally sufficing to the first hearers of 
 Homer. Ulysses, living in Florence during the fifteenth 
 century, might have been Macchiavelli ; in France, during 
 the seventeenth, Cardinal Richelieu ; in America, during 
 the nineteenth, Abraham Lincoln, but not Ulysses. Truth 
 to nature can be reached ideally, never historically ; it 
 must be a study from the life, and not from the scholiasts. 
 Theocritus lets us into the secret of his good poetry, when 
 he makes Daphnis tell us that he preferred his rock with a 
 view of the Siculian Sea to the kingdom of Pelops. 
 
 It is one of the marvels of the human mind, this sorcery 
 which the fiend of technical imitation weaves about his 
 victims, giving a phantasmal Helen to their arms, and mak 
 ing an image of the brain seem substance. Men still pain 
 themselves to write Latin verses, matching their wooden 
 bits of phrase together as children do dissected maps, and 
 measuring the value of what they have done, not by any 
 standard of intrinsic merit, but by the difficulty of doing 
 it. Petrarch expected to be known to posterity by his 
 "Africa." Gray hoped to make a Latin poem his monu 
 ment. Goethe, who was classic in the only way it is now 
 possible to be classic, in his "Hermann and Dorothea," 
 and at least Propertian in his " Roman Idyls," wasted his 
 time and thwarted his creative energy on the mechanical 
 mock-antique of an unreadable " Achilleis." Landor prized 
 
198 SWINBURA?E>S TRAGEDIES. 
 
 his waxen "Gebirus Rex" above all the natural fruits of 
 his mind ; and we have no doubt that, if some philosopher 
 should succeed in accomplishing Paracelsus s problem of an 
 artificial homunculus, he would dote on this misbegotten 
 babe of his science, and think him the only genius of the 
 family. We cannot over-estimate the value of some of the 
 ancient classics, but a certain amount of superstition about 
 Greek and Latin has come down to us from the revival of 
 learning, and seems to hold in mortmain the intellects of 
 whoever has, at some time, got a smattering of them. 
 Men quote a platitude in either of those tongues with a 
 relish of conviction as droll to the uninitiated as the knight 
 hood of freemasonry. Horace Walpole s nephew, the Earl 
 of Orford, when he was in his cups, used to have Statius 
 read aloud to him every night for two hours by a tipsy 
 tradesman, whose hiccupings threw in here and there a 
 kind of csesural pause, and found some strange mystery of 
 sweetness in the disquantitied syllables. So powerful is 
 this hallucination that we can conceive of festina lente as 
 the favourite maxim of a Mississippi steamboat captain, 
 and apurrov plv vSup cited as conclusive by a gentleman for 
 whom the -bottle before him reversed the wonder of the 
 stereoscope, and substituted the Gascon v for the b in 
 binocular. 
 
 Something of this singular superstition has infected the 
 minds of those who confound the laws of conventional 
 limitation which governed the practice of Greek authors in 
 dramatic composition laws adapted to the habits and 
 traditions and preconceptions of their audience with that 
 sense of ideal form which made the Greeks masters in art 
 to all succeeding generations. Aristophanes is beyond 
 question the highest type of pure comedy, etherealising 
 his humour by the infusion, or intensifying it by the 
 contrast of poetry, and deodorising the personality of his 
 sarcasm by a sprinkle from the clearest springs of fancy. 
 His satire, aimed as it was at typical characteristics, is as 
 fresh as ever ; but we doubt whether an Aristophanic 
 drama, retaining its exact form, but adapted to present 
 
SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 199 
 
 events and personages, would keep the stage as it is kept 
 by "The Rivals," for example, immeasurably inferior as 
 that is in every element of genius except the prime one of 
 liveliness. Something similar in purpose to the parabasis 
 was essayed in one, at least, of the comedies of Beaumont 
 and Fletcher, and in our time by Tieck ; but it took, of 
 necessity, a different form of expression, and does not seem 
 to have been successful. Indeed, the fact that what is 
 called the legitimate drama of modern times in England, 
 Spain, and France has been strictly a growth, and not a 
 manufacture, that in each country it took a different form, 
 and that, in all, the period of its culminating and beginning 
 to decline might be measured by a generation, seems to 
 point us toward some natural and inevitable law of human 
 nature, and to show that, while the principles of art are 
 immutable, their application must accommodate itself to 
 the material supplied them by the time and by the national 
 character and traditions. The Spanish tragedy inclines 
 more toward the lyrical, the French toward the epical, the 
 English toward the historical, in the representation of real 
 life ; the Spanish and English agree in the Teutonic 
 peculiarity of admitting the humorous offset of the clown, 
 though in the one case he parodies the leading motive of 
 the drama, and represents the self-consciousness of the 
 dramatist, while in the other he heightens the tragic effect 
 by contrast (as in the grave-digging scene of " Hamlet "), 
 and suggests that stolid but wholesome indifference of the 
 general life of what, for want of a better term, we call 
 Nature to the sin and suffering, the weakness and mis 
 fortunes of the individual man. All these nations had the 
 same ancient examples before them, had the same reverence 
 for antiquity, yet they involuntarily deviated, more or less 
 happily, into originality, success, and the freedom of a 
 living creativeness. The higher kinds of literature, the 
 only kinds that live on because they had life at the start, 
 are not, then, it should seem, the fabric of scholarship, of 
 criticism, diligently studying and as diligently copying the 
 best models, but are much rather born of some genetic 
 
260 SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 
 
 principle in the character of the people and the age which 
 produce them. One drop of ruddy human blood puts more 
 life into the veins of a poem than all the delusive aurum 
 potabile that can be distilled out of the choicest library. 
 
 The opera is the closest approach we have to the ancient 
 drama in the essentials of structure and presentation ; and 
 could we have a libretto founded on a national legend and 
 written by one man of genius, to be filled out and accom 
 panied by the music of another, we might hope for some 
 thing of the same effect upon the stage. But themes of 
 universal familiarity and interest are rare " Don 
 Giovanni " and " Faust," perhaps, most nearly, though not 
 entirely, fulfilling the required conditions and men of 
 genius rarer. The oratorio seeks to evade the difficulty 
 by choosing Scriptural subjects, and it may certainly be 
 questioned whether the day of popular mythology, in the 
 sense of which it subserves the purposes of epic or dramatic 
 poetry, be not gone by for ever. Longfellow is driven to 
 take refuge among the red men, and Tennyson in the 
 Cambro-Breton cyclus of Arthur ; but it is impossible that 
 such themes should come so intimately home to us as the 
 semi-fabulous stories of their own ancestors did to the 
 Greeks. The most successful attempt at reproducing the 
 Greek tragedy, both in theme and treatment, is the 
 " Samson Agonistes," as it is also the most masterly piece 
 of English versification. Goethe admits that it alone, 
 among modern works, has caught life from the breath of 
 the antique spirit. But he failed to see, or at least to give, 
 the reason of it ; probably failed to see it, or he would 
 never have attempted the " Iphigenia." Milton not only 
 subjected himself to the structural requirements of the 
 Attic tragedy, but with the true poetic instinct availed 
 himself of the striking advantage it had in the choice of a 
 subject. No popular tradition lay near enough to him for 
 his purpose ; none united in itself the essential requisites 
 of human interest and universal belief. He accordingly 
 chose a Jewish mythus, very near to his own heart as a 
 blind prisoner, betrayed by his wife, among the Philistines 
 
SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 201 
 
 of the Restoration, and familiar to the earliest associations 
 of his hearers. This subject, and this alone, met all the 
 demands both of living poetic production and of antique 
 form the action grandly simple, the personages few, the 
 protagonist at once a victim of Divine judgment and an 
 executor of Divine retribution, an intense personal sym 
 pathy in the poet himself, and no strangeness to the 
 habitual prepossessions of those he addressed to be over 
 come before he could touch their hearts or be sure of aid 
 from their imaginations. To compose such a drama on 
 such a theme was to be Greek, and not to counterfeit 
 it ; for Samson was to Milton traditionally just what 
 Herakles was to Sophocles, and personally far more. The 
 "Agonistes" is still fresh and strong as morning, but 
 where are " Oaractacus " and "Elfrida?" Nay, where is 
 the far better work of a far abler man where is 
 "Merope?" If the frame of mind which performs a 
 deliberate experiment were the same as that which produces 
 poetry vitalised through and through by the conspiring 
 ardours of every nobler passion and power of the soul, then 
 " Merope " might have had some little space of life. But 
 without colour, without harmonious rhythm of movement, 
 with less passion than survived in an average Grecian 
 ghost, and all this from the very theory of her creation, 
 she has gone back, a shadow, to join her shadowy Italian 
 and French namesakes in that limbo of things that would 
 be and cannot be. Mr. Arnold but retraces, in his Preface 
 to " Merope," the arguments of Mason in the letters 
 prefixed to his classical experiments, What finds defenders, 
 but not readers, may be correct, classic, right in principle, 
 but it is not poetry of that absolute kind which may and 
 does help men, but needs no help of theirs ; and such surely 
 we have a right to demand in tragedy, if nowhere else. 
 We should not speak so unreservedly if we did not set a 
 high value on Mr. Arnold and his poetic gift. But 
 "Merope " has that one fault against which the very gods, 
 we are told, strive in vain. It is dull, and the seed of this 
 dulness lay in the system on which it was written. 
 
202 &WIN&URN&S TRAGEDIES. 
 
 Pseudo-classicism takes two forms. Sometimes, as Mr. 
 Landor has done, it attempts truth of detail to ancient 
 scenery and manners, which may be attained either by hard 
 reading and good memory, or at a cheaper rate from such 
 authors as Becker. The " Moretum," once attributed to 
 Virgil, and the idyl of Theocritus lately chosen as a text by 
 Mr. Arnold, are interesting, because they describe real 
 things ; but the mock-antique, if not true, is nothing ; and 
 how true such poems are likely to be we can judge by 
 " Punch s " success at Yankeeisms, by all England s accurate 
 appreciation of the manners and minds of a contemporary 
 people one with herself in language, laws, religion, and 
 literature. The eye is the only note-book of the true poet \ 
 but a patchwork of second-hand memories is a laborious 
 futility, hard to write and harder to read, with about as 
 much nature in it as a dialogue of the Deipnosophists. 
 Alexander s bushel of peas was a criticism worthy of 
 Aristotle s pupil. We should reward such writing with the 
 gift of a classical dictionary. In this idyllic kind of poetry 
 also we have a classic, because Goldsmith went to nature 
 for his " Deserted Village," and borrowed of tradition 
 nothing but the poetic diction in which he described it. 
 This is the only method by which a poet may surely reckon 
 on ever becoming an ancient himself. When we heard it 
 said once that a certain poem might have been written by 
 Simonides, we could not help thinking that, if it were so, 
 then it was precisely what Simonides could never have 
 written, since he looked at the world through his own eyes, 
 not through those of Linus or Hesiod, and thought his own 
 thoughts, not theirs, or we should never have had him to 
 imitate. 
 
 Objections of the same nature, but even stronger, lie 
 against a servile copying of the form and style of the Greek 
 tragic drama, and yet more against the selection of a Greek 
 theme. As we said before, the life we lead, and the views 
 we take of it, are more complex than those of men who 
 lived five centuries before Christ. They may be better or 
 worse, but, at any rate, they are different, and irremediably 
 
SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 203 
 
 so. The idea and the form in which it naturally embodies 
 itself, mutually sustaining and invigorating each other, 
 cannot be divided without endangering the lives of both. 
 For in all real poetry the form is not a garment, but a body. 
 Our very passion has become metaphysical, and speculates 
 upon itself. Their simple and downright way of thinking 
 loses all its savour when we assume it to ourselves by an 
 effort of thought. Human nature, it is true, remains 
 always the same, but the displays of it change ; the habits 
 which are a second nature modify it inwardly as well as 
 outwardly, and what moves it to passionate action in one 
 age may leave it indifferent in the next. Between us and 
 the Greeks lies the grave of their murdered paganism, 
 making our minds and theirs irreconcilable. Christianity 
 as steadily intensifies the self-consciousness of man as the 
 religion of the Greeks must have turned their thoughts 
 away from themselves to the events of this life and the 
 phenomena of nature. We cannot even conceive of their 
 conception of Phoibos with any plausible assurance of 
 coming near the truth. To take lesser matters, since the 
 invention of printing and the cheapening of books have 
 made the thought of all ages and nations the common pro 
 perty of educated men, we cannot so dis-saturate our minds 
 of it as to be keenly thrilled in the modern imitation with 
 those commonplaces of proverbial lore in which the chorus 
 and secondary characters are apt to indulge, though in the 
 original they may interest us as being natural and charac 
 teristic. In the German-silver of the modern we get 
 something of this kind, which does not please us the more 
 by being cut up into single lines that recall the outward 
 semblance of some pages in Sophocles. We find it cheaper 
 to make a specimen than to borrow one. 
 
 " CHORUS. Foolish who bites off nose, his face to spite. 
 
 OTJTIS. Who fears his fate, him Fate shall one day spurn. 
 
 CHORUS. The gods themselves are pliable to Fate. 
 
 OUTIS. The strong self-ruler dreads no other sway. 
 
 CHORUS. Sometimes the shortest way goes most about. 
 
 OUTIS. Why fetch a compass, having stars within ? 
 
 CHORUS. A shepherd once, I know that stars may set 
 
204 SWINBURNR S TRAGEDIES. 
 
 OUTIS. That thou led st sheep fits not for leading men. 
 CHORUS. To sleep-sealed eyes the wolf-dog barks in vain." 
 
 We protest that we have read something very like this, we 
 will not say where, and we might call it the battledore and 
 shuttlecock style of dialogue, except that the players do not 
 seem to have any manifest relation to each other, but each 
 is intent on keeping his own bit of feathered cork continually 
 in the air. 
 
 The first sincerely popular yearning toward antiquity, the 
 first germ of Schiller s " Gotter Griechenland s," is to be 
 found in the old poem of Tanhauser, very nearly coincident 
 with the beginnings of the Reformation. And if we might 
 allegorise it, we should say that it typified precisely that 
 longing after Venus, under her other name of Charis, which 
 represents the relation in which modern should stand to 
 ancient art. It is the grace of the Greeks, their sense of 
 proportion, their distaste for the exaggerated, their exquisite 
 propriety of phrase, which steadies imagination without 
 cramping it it is these that we should endeavour to 
 assimilate without the loss of our own individuality. We 
 should quicken our sense of form by intelligent sympathy 
 with theirs, and not stiffen it into formalism by a servile 
 surrender of what is genuine in us to what was genuine in 
 them. " A pure form," says Schiller, " helps and sustains, 
 an impure one hinders and shatters." But we should 
 remember that the spirit of the age must enter as a 
 modifying principle, not only into ideas, but into the best 
 manner of their expression. The old bottles will not 
 always serve for the new wine. A principle of life is the 
 first requirement of all art, and it can only be communicated 
 by the touch of the time and a simple faith in it ; all else is 
 circumstantial and secondary. The Greek tragedy passed 
 through the three natural stages of poetry the imaginative 
 in -ffischylus, the thoughtfully artistic in Sophocles, the 
 sentimental in Euripides and then died. If people could 
 only learn the general applicability to periods and schools 
 of what young Mozart says of Gellert, that " he had written 
 no poetry since his death 1 " No effort to raise a defunct 
 
CHAUCER. 
 
 205 
 
 past has ever led to anything but just enough galvanic 
 twitching of the limbs to remind us unpleasantly of life. 
 The romantic movement of the school of German poets 
 which succeeded Goethe and Schiller ended in extravagant 
 unreality, and Goethe himself, with his unerring common- 
 sense, has given us, in the second part of "Faust," the 
 result of his own and Schiller s common striving after a 
 Grecian ideal. Euphorion, the child of Faust and Helen, 
 falls dead at their feet ; and Helen herself soon follows him 
 to the shades, leaving only her mantle in the hands of her 
 lover. This, he is told, shall lift him above the earth. We 
 fancy we can interpret the symbol. Whether we can or 
 not, it is certainly suggestive of thought that the only 
 immortal production of the greatest of recent poets was 
 conceived and carried out in that Gothic spirit and form 
 from which he was all his life struggling to break loose. 
 
 CHA UCER* 
 
 WILL it do to say anything more about Chaucer ? Can 
 anyone hope to say anything, not new, but even fresh, on a 
 topic so well worn ? It may well be doubted ; and yet one 
 is always the better for a walk in the morning air a 
 medicine which may be taken over and over again without 
 any sense of sameness, or any failure of its invigorating 
 quality. There is a pervading wholesomeness in the 
 writings of this man a vernal property that soothes and 
 
 * Publications of the Chaucer Society. London. 1869-70. 
 
 Etude sur G. Chaucer consid6r6 comme imitateur des Trouveres. Par 
 E. G. SANDRAS, Agrege de 1 Universite. Paris : Auguste Dusand. 
 1859. 8vo. pp. 298. 
 
 Geoffrey Chaucer s Canter bury-Geschichten, ubersetzt in den Vers- 
 massen der Urschrift, und durch Einleitung und AnmerTcungen erlautert. 
 Von WIHLELM HERTZBERG. Hildburghausen. 1866. 12mo. pp. 674. 
 
 Chaucer in seinen Beziehungen zur italienischen Literatur. 
 Inaugural- Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doctorwilrde. Von ALFONS 
 KISSNER, Bonn. 1867. 8vo. pp. 81. 
 
206 CHAUCER. 
 
 refreshes in a way of which no other has ever found the 
 secret. I repeat to myself a thousand times 
 
 " Whan that April e with his showres sote 
 The droughte of March hath perced to the rote, 
 And bathed every veine in swich licour 
 Of which vertue engendered is the flour, 
 When Zephyrus eek with his swete breth 
 Enspired hath in every holt and heth 
 The tender croppes, and the yonge sonne 
 Hath in the ram his halfe cors yronne, 
 And smale foule s maken melodie," 
 
 and still at the thousandth time a breath of uncontaminate 
 springtide seems to lift the hair upon my forehead. If here 
 be not the largior ether, the serene and motionless atmos 
 phere of classical antiquity, we find at least the seclusum 
 nemus, the domos placidas, and the oubliance, as Froissart 
 so sweetly calls it, that persuade us we are in an Elysium 
 none the less sweet that it appeals to our more purely 
 human, one might almost say domestic, sympathies. We 
 may say of Chaucer s muse, as Overbury of his milkmaid, 
 " her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of 
 June like a new-made haycock." The most hardened roue 
 of literature can scarce confront these simple and winning 
 graces without feeling somewhat of the unworn sentiment 
 of his youth revive in him. Modern imaginative literature 
 has become so self-conscious, and therefore so melancholy, 
 that Art, which should be " the world s sweet inn," 
 whither we repair for refreshment and repose, has become 
 rather a watering-place, where one s own private touch of 
 the liver-complaint is exasperated by the affluence of other 
 sufferers whose talk is a narrative of morbid symptoms. 
 Poets have forgotten that the first lesson of literature, no 
 less than of life, is the learning how to burn your own 
 smoke ; that the way to be original is to be healthy ; that 
 the fresh colour, so delightful in all good writing, is won 
 by escaping from the fixed air of self into the brisk atmos 
 phere of universal sentiments; and that to make the 
 common marvellous, as if it were a revelation, is the test 
 
CHAUCER. 207 
 
 of genius. It is good to retreat now and then beyond 
 earshot of the introspective confidences of modern literature, 
 and to lose ourselves in the gracious worldiness of Chaucer. 
 Here was a healthy and hearty man, so genuine that he need 
 not ask whether he was genuine or no, so sincere as quite 
 to forget his own sincerity, so truly pious that he could be 
 happy in the best world that God chose to make, so 
 humane that he loved even the foibles of his kind. Here 
 was a truly epic poet, without knowing it, who did not 
 waste time in considering whether his age were good or 
 bad, but quietly taking it for granted as the best that ever 
 was or ever could be for him, has left us such a picture of 
 contemporary life as no man ever painted. "A perpetual 
 fountain of good-sense," Dryden calls him ; yes, and of 
 good-humour, too, and wholesome thought. He was one of 
 those rare authors whom, if we had met him under a porch 
 in a shower, we should have preferred to the rain. He 
 could be happy with a crust and spring-water, and could 
 see the shadow of his benign face in a flagon of Gascon 
 wine without fancying Death sitting opposite to cry 
 Supernaculum I when he had drained it. He could look to 
 God without abjectness, and on man without contempt. 
 The pupil of manifold experience scholar, courtier, soldier, 
 ambassador, who had known poverty as a housemate and 
 been the companion of princes his was one of those happy 
 temperaments that could equally enjoy both halves of 
 culture, the world of books and the world of men. 
 
 " Unto this day it doth mine herte boote, 
 That I have had my world as in my time ! " 
 
 The portrait of Chaucer, which we owe to the loving regret 
 of his disciple Occleve, confirms the judgment of him which 
 we make for his works. It is, I think, more engaging than 
 that of any other poet. The downcast eyes, half sly, half 
 meditative, the sensuous mouth, the broad brow, drooping 
 with weight of thought, and yet with an inexpugnable 
 youth shining out of it as from the morning forehead of a 
 boy, are all noticeable, and not less so their harmony of 
 
208 CHAUCER. 
 
 placid tenderness. We are struck, too, with the smooth 
 ness of the face as of one who thought easily whose phrase 
 flowed naturally, and who had never puckered his brow 
 over an unmanageable verse. 
 
 Nothing has been added to our knowledge of Chaucer s 
 life since Sir Harris Nicolas, with the help of original 
 records, weeded away the fictions by which the few facts 
 were choked and overshadowed. We might be sorry that 
 no confirmation has been found for the story, fathered on 
 a certain phantasmal Mr. Buckley, that Chaucer was 
 "fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet 
 Street," if it were only for the alliteration ; but we refuse 
 to give up the meeting with Petrarch. All the probabilities 
 are in its favour. That Chaucer, being at Milan, should 
 not have found occasion to ride across so far as Padua, for 
 the sake of seeing the most famous literary man of the 
 day, is incredible. If Froissart could journey on horse 
 back through Scotland and Wales, surely Chaucer, whose 
 curiosity was as lively as his, might have ventured what 
 would have been a mere pleasure- trip in comparsion. I 
 cannot easily bring myself to believe that he is not giving 
 some touches of his own character in that of the Clerk of 
 Oxford : 
 
 " For him was liefer have at his bed s head 
 A twenty bookes clothed in black and red 
 Of Aristotle and his philosophic 
 Than robes rich, or riddle or psaltrie : 
 But although that he were a philosopher, 
 Yet had he but a little gold in coffer : 
 Of study took he moste care and heed ; 
 Not one word spake he more than was need: 
 All that he spake it was of high prudence, 
 And short and quick, and full of great sentence ; 
 Sounding in moral virtue was his speech, 
 And gladly would he learn and gladly teach." 
 
 That, himself as plump as Horace, he should have 
 described the Clerk as being lean, will be no objection to 
 those who remember how carefully Chaucer effaces his own 
 personality in his great poem. Our chief debt to Sir Harris 
 
CHAUCER. 209 
 
 Nicolas is for having disproved the story that Chaucer, 
 imprisoned for complicity in the insurrection of John of 
 Northampton, had set himself free by betraying his accom 
 plices. That a poet, one of whose leading qualities is his 
 good sense and moderation, and who should seem to have 
 practised his own rule, to 
 
 " Fly from the press and dwell with soothfastness ; 
 Suffice thee thy good though it be small." 
 
 should have been concerned in any such political excesses, 
 was improbable enough ; but that he should add to this the 
 baseness of broken faith was incredible except to such as in 
 a doubtful story 
 
 " Demen gladly to the badder end." 
 
 Sir Harris Nicolas has proved by the records that the fabric 
 is baseless, and we may now read the poet s fine verse, 
 
 " Truth is the highest thing a man may keep," 
 
 without a pang. We are thankful that Chaucer s shoulders 
 are finally discharged of that weary load, " The Testament 
 of Love."* The later biographers seem inclined to make 
 Chaucer a younger man at his death in 1400 than has hitherto 
 been supposed. Herr Hertzberg even puts his birth so late 
 as 1340. But, till more conclusive evidence is produced, 
 we shall adhere to the received dates as on the whole more 
 consonant with the probabilities of the case. The monu 
 ment is clearly right as to the year of his death, and the 
 chances are at least even that both this and the date of 
 birth were copied from an older inscription. The only 
 counter-argument that has much force is the manifestly 
 unfinished condition of the " Canterbury Tales." That a 
 
 * Tyrwhitt doubted the authenticity of " The Flower and the Leaf" 
 and "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale." To these Mr. Bradshaw 
 (and there can be no higher authority) would add "The Court of 
 Love," "The Dream," "The Praise of Woman," and "The Romaunt 
 of the Rose," and several of the shorter poems. To these doubtful 
 productions there is strong ground, both moral and aesthetic, for adding 
 The Parson s Tale." 
 
 342 
 
216 CHAUCER. 
 
 man of seventy odd could have put such a spirit of youth 
 into those matchless prologues will not, however, surprise 
 those who remember Dryden s second spring-time. It is 
 plain that the notion of giving unity to a number of discon 
 nected stories by the device which Chaucer adopted was an 
 afterthought. These stories had been written, and some of 
 them even published, at periods far asunder, and without 
 any reference to connection among themselves. The pro 
 logues, and those parts which internal evidence justifies us 
 in taking them to have been written after the thread of 
 plan to string them on was conceived, are in every way 
 more mature in knowledge of the world, in easy mastery 
 of verse and language, and in the overpoise of sentiment 
 by judgment. They may with as much probability be 
 referred to a green old age as to the middle-life of a man 
 who, upon any theory of the dates, was certainly slow in 
 ripening. 
 
 The formation of a Chaucer Society, now four centuries 
 and a-half after the poet s death, gives suitable occasion for 
 taking a new observation of him, as of a fixed star, not only 
 in our own, but in the European literary heavens, " whose 
 worth s unknown although his height be taken." The 
 admirable work now doing by this Society, whose establish 
 ment was mainly due to the pious zeal of Mr. Furnivall, 
 deserves recognition from all who know how to value the 
 too rare union of accurate scholarship with minute exact 
 ness in reproducing the text. The six-text edition of the 
 " Canterbury Tales," giving what is practically equivalent 
 to six manuscript copies, is particularly deserving of grati 
 tude from this side the water, as it for the first time affords 
 to Americans the opportunity of independent critical study 
 and comparison. This beautiful work is fittingly inscribed 
 to our countryman, Professor Child, of Harvard, a lover of 
 Chaucer, "so proved by his wordes and his werke," who 
 lias done more for the great poet s memory than any man 
 since Tyrwhitt. We earnestly hope that the Society may 
 find enough support to print all the remaining manuscript 
 
CHAUCER. 2il 
 
 texts of importance, for there can hardly be any one of 
 them that may not help us to a valuable hint. The works of 
 M. Sandras and Herr Hertzberg show that this is a matter 
 of interest not merely or even primarily to English scholars. 
 The introduction to the latter is one of the best essays on 
 Chaucer yet written, while the former, which is an investi 
 gation of the French and Italian sources of the poet, sup 
 plies us with much that is new and worth having as 
 respects the training of the poet, and the obstacles of 
 fashion and taste through which he had to force his way 
 before he could find free play for his native genius or even 
 so much as arrive at a consciousness thereof. M. Sandras 
 is in every way a worthy pupil of the accomplished M. 
 Victor Leclerc, and, though he lays perhaps a little too 
 much stress on the indebtedness of Chaucer in particulars, 
 shows a singularly intelligent and clear-sighted eye for 
 the general grounds of his claim to greatness and origin 
 ality. It is these grounds w r hich I propose chiefly to 
 examine here. 
 
 The first question we put to any poet, nay, to any so-called 
 national literature, is that which Farinata addressed to 
 Dante Chi fur li maggior tui ? Here is no question of 
 plagiarism, for poems are not made of words, and thoughts, 
 and images, but of that something in the poet himself which 
 can compel them to obey him and move to the rhythm of 
 his nature. Thus it is that the new poet, however late 
 he come, can never be forestalled, and the shipbuilder who 
 built the pinnace of Columbus has as much claim to the 
 discovery of America as he who suggests a thought by 
 which some other man opens new worlds to us has to a 
 share in that achievement by him unconceived and incon 
 ceivable. Chaucer undoubtedly began as an imitator, 
 perhaps as mere translator, serving the needful apprentice 
 ship in the use of his tools. Children learn to speak by 
 watching the lips and catching the words of those who 
 know how already, and poets learn in the same way from 
 their elders. They import their raw material from any and 
 everywhere, and the question at last comes down to this 
 
212 CHAUCER. 
 
 whether an author have original force enough to assimilate 
 all he has acquired, or that be so over-mastering as to 
 assimilate him. If the poet turn out the stronger, we 
 allow him to help himself from other people with wonderful 
 equanimity. Should a man discover the art of transmuting 
 metals, and present us with a iHmp of gold as large as 
 an ostrich-egg, would it be in human nature to inquire too 
 nicely whether he had stolen the lead ? 
 
 Nothing is more certain than that great poets are not 
 sudden prodigies, but slow results. As an oak profits by the 
 foregone lives of immemorial vegetable races that have 
 worked-over the juices of earth and air into organic life out 
 of whose dissolution a soil might gather fit to maintain that 
 nobler birth of nature, so we may be sure that the genius of 
 every remembered poet drew the forces that built it up out 
 of the decay of a long succession of forgotten ones. Nay, 
 in proportion as the genius is vigorous and original will its 
 indebtedness be greater, will its roots strike deeper into the 
 past and grope in remoter fields for the virtue that must 
 sustain it. Indeed, if the works of the great poets teach 
 anything, it is to hold mere invention somewhat cheap. It 
 is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out 
 of it after it is found, that is of consequence. Accordingly, 
 Chaucer, like Shakespeare, invented almost nothing. 
 Wherever he found anything directed to Geoffrey 
 Chaucer, he took it and made the most of it. It was 
 not the subject treated, but himself, that was the new 
 thing. Cela m appartient de droit, Moliere is reported to 
 have said when accused of plagiarism. Chaucer pays that 
 " usurious interest which genius," as Coleridge says, " always 
 pays in borrowing." The characteristic touch is his own. 
 In the famous passage about the caged bird, copied from 
 the " Romaunt of the Rose," the " gon eten wormes " was 
 added by him. We must let him, if he will, eat the heart 
 out of the literature that had preceded him, as we sacrifice 
 the mulberry-leaves to the silkworm, because he knows how 
 to convert them into something richer and more lasting. 
 The question of originality is not one of form, but of 
 
CHAUCER. 213 
 
 substance; not of cleverness, but of imaginative power. 
 Given your material, in other words the life in which you 
 live, how much can you see in it*? For on that depends 
 how much you can make of it. Is it merely an arrange 
 ment of man s contrivance, a patchwork of expediencies for 
 temporary comfort and convenience, good enough if it last 
 your time \ or is it so much of the surface of that ever- 
 flowing deity which we call Time, wherein we catch such 
 fleeting reflection as is possible for us, of our relation to 
 predurable things ? This is what makes the difference 
 between j^schylus and Euripides, between Shakespeare 
 and Fletcher, between Goethe and Heine, between literature 
 and rhetoric. Something of this depth of insight, if not in 
 the fullest, yet in no inconsiderable measure, characterises 
 Chaucer. We must not let his playfulness, his delight in 
 the world as mere spectacle, mislead us into thinking that 
 he was incapable of serious purpose or insensible to the 
 deeper meanings of life. 
 
 There are four principal sources from which Chaucer may 
 be presumed to have drawn for poetical suggestion or 
 literary culture the Latins, the Troubadours, the Trouveres, 
 and the Italians. It is only the two latter who can fairly 
 claim any immediate influence in the direction of his 
 thought or the formation of his style. The only Latin 
 poet who can be supposed to have influenced the spirit of 
 mediaeval literature is Ovid. In his sentimentality, his love 
 of the marvellous and the picturesque, he is its natural 
 precursor. The analogy between his Fasti and the versified 
 legends of saints is more than a fanciful one. He was cer 
 tainly popular with the poets of the thirteenth and four 
 teenth centuries. Virgil had well-nigh become mythical. 
 The chief merit of the Provengal poets is in having been 
 the first to demonstrate that it was possible to write with 
 elegance in a modern dialect, and their interest for us is 
 mainly as forerunners, as indications of tendency. Their 
 literature is prophecy, not fulfilment. Its formal sentiment 
 culminated in Laura, its ideal aspiration in Beatrice. 
 Shakespeare s hundred and sixth sonnet, if, for the 
 
214 CHAUCER. 
 
 imaginary mistress to whom it was addressed, we substitute 
 the muse of a truer conception and more perfected utterance, 
 represents exactly the feeling with which we read Provengal 
 poetry : 
 
 " When in the chronicle of wasted Time 
 I see descriptions of the fairest wights, 
 And beauty making beautiful old rhyme 
 In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, 
 
 I see their antique pen would have expressed 
 
 Even such a beauty as you master now ; 
 
 So all their praises are but prophecies 
 
 Of this our time, all you prefiguring, 
 
 And, for they looked but with divining eyes, 
 
 They had not skill enough your worth to sing. " 
 
 It is astonishing how little of the real life of the time we 
 learn from the Troubadours, except by way of inference and 
 deduction. Their poetry is purely lyric in its most narrow 
 sense, that is, the expression of personal and momentary 
 moods. To the fancy of critics who take their cue from 
 tradition, Provence is a morning sky of early summer, out 
 of which innumerable larks rain a faint melody (the sweeter 
 because rather half divined than heard too distinctly) over 
 an earth where the dew never dries and the flowers never 
 fade. But when we open Raynouard it is like opening the 
 door of an aviary. We are deafened and confused by a 
 hundred minstrels singing the same song at once, and more 
 than suspect that the flowers they welcome are made of 
 French cambric, spangled with dewdrops of prevaricating 
 glass. Bernard de Yentadour and Bertrand de Born are 
 well-nigh the only ones among them in whom we find an 
 original type. Yet the Troubadours undoubtedly led the 
 way to refinement of conception and perfection of form. 
 They were the conduit through which the failing stream of 
 Roman literary tradition flowed into the new channel which 
 medieval culture was slowly shaping for itself. Without 
 them we could not understand Petrarca, who carried the 
 manufacture of artificial bloom and fictitious dewdrop to a 
 
CHAUCER. 215 
 
 point of excellence where artifice, if ever, may claim the 
 praise of art. Without them we could not understand 
 Dante, in whom their sentiment for woman was idealised 
 by a passionate intellect and a profound nature, till Beatrice 
 becomes a half human, half divine abstraction, a woman 
 still to memory and devotion, a disembodied symbol to the 
 ecstasy of thought. The Provengal love-poetry was as 
 abstracted from all sensuality as that of Petrarca, but ifc 
 stops short of that larger and more gracious style of treat 
 ment which has secured him a place in all gentle hearts and 
 refined imaginations for ever. In it also woman leads her 
 servants upward, but it is along the easy slopes of conven 
 tional sentiment, and no Troubadour so much as dreamed of 
 that loftier region, native to Dante, where the woman is 
 subtilised into das Ewig- Weibliche, type of man s finer con 
 science and nobler aspiration made sensible to him only 
 through her. 
 
 On the whole, it would be hard to find anything more 
 tediously artificial than the Provengal literature, except the 
 reproduction of it by the Minnesingers. The Tedeschi 
 lurchi certainly did contrive to make something heavy as 
 dough out of what was at least light, if not very satisfying, 
 in the canarous dialect of Southern Gaul. But its doom 
 was inevitably predicted in its nature and position, nay, in 
 its very name. It was, and it continues to be, a strictly 
 provincial literature, imprisoned within extremely narrow 
 intellectual and even geographical limits. It is not race or 
 language that can inflict this leprous isolation, but some 
 defect of sympathy with the simpler and more universal 
 relations of human nature. You cannot shut up Burns in 
 a dialect bristling with archaisms, nor prevent Be>anger 
 from setting all pulses a-dance in the least rhythmic and 
 imaginative of modern tongues. The healthy temperature 
 of Chaucer, with its breadth of interest in all ranks and 
 phases of social life, could have found little that was 
 sympathetic in the evaporated sentiment and rhetorical 
 punctilios of a school of poets which, with rare exceptions, 
 began and ended in courtly dilettantism. 
 
216 CHAUCER. 
 
 The refined formality with which the literary product of 
 Provence is for the most part stamped, as with a trademark, 
 was doubtless the legacy of Gallo-Roman culture, itself at 
 best derivative and superficial. I think, indeed, that it may 
 well be doubted whether Roman literature, always a half- 
 hardy exotic, could ripen the seeds of living reproduction. 
 The Roman genius was eminently practical, and far more apt 
 for the triumphs of politics and jurisprudence than of art. 
 Supreme elegance it could and did arrive at in Virgil, but, 
 if I may trust my own judgment, it produced but one 
 original poet, and that was Horace, who has ever since 
 continued the favourite of men of the world, an apostle to 
 the Gentiles of the mild cynicism of middle-age and an after- 
 dinner philosophy. Though in no sense national, he was, 
 more truly than any has ever been since, till the same 
 combination of circumstances produced B6ranger, an urbane 
 or city poet. Rome, with her motley life, her formal 
 religion, her easy morals, her spectacles, her luxury, her 
 suburban country-life, was his muse. The situation was 
 new, and found a singer who had wit enough to turn it to 
 account. There are a half-dozen pieces of Catullus unsur 
 passed (unless their Greek originals should turn up) for 
 lyric grace and fanciful tenderness. The sparrow of Lesbia 
 still pecks the rosy lips of his mistress, immortal as the eagle 
 of Pindar. One profound imagination, one man, who with 
 a more prosperous subject might have been a great poet, 
 lifted Roman literature above its ordinary level of tasteful 
 common-sense. The invocation of Venus, as the genetic 
 force of nature, by Lucretius, seems to me the one sunburst 
 of purely poetic inspiration which the Latin language can 
 show. But this very force, without which neque Jit Icetum 
 neque amabile quicquam, was wholly wanting in those poets 
 of the post-classic period, through whom the literary 
 influences of the past were transmitted to the romanised 
 provincials. The works of Ausonius interest us as those 
 of our own Dwights and Barlows do. The " Conquest of 
 Canaan" and the "Columbiad" were Connecticut epics 
 no doubt, but still were better than nothing in their day. 
 
CHAUCER. 217 
 
 If not literature, they were at least memories of literature, 
 and such memories are not without effect in reproducing 
 what they regret. The provincial writers of Latin devoted 
 themselves with a dreary assiduity to the imitation of 
 models which they deemed classical, but which were 
 truly so only in the sense that they were the more 
 decorously respectful of the dead form in proportion as the 
 living spirit had more utterly gone out of it. It is, I 
 suspect, to the traditions of this purely rhetorical influence, 
 indirectly exercised, that we are to attribute the rapid 
 passage of the new Provengal poetry from what must have 
 been its original popular character to that highly artificial 
 condition which precedes total extinction. It was the 
 alienation of the written from the spoken language (always, 
 perhaps, more or less malignly operative in giving Roman 
 literature a cool-blooded turn as compared with Greek), 
 which, ending at length in total divorce, rendered Latin 
 incapable of supplying the wants of new men and new 
 ideas. The same thing, I am strongly inclined to think, 
 was true of the language of the Troubadours. It had 
 become literary, and so far dead. It is true that no 
 language is ever so far gone in consumption as to be 
 beyond the great-poet-cure. Undoubtedly a man of genius 
 can out of his own superabundant vitality compel life into 
 the most decrepit vocabulary. But it is by the infusion of 
 his own blood, as it were, and not without a certain sacrifice 
 of power. No such rescue came for the langue d oc, which, 
 it should seem, had performed its special function in the 
 development of modern literature, and would have 
 perished even without the Albigensian war. The position 
 of the Gallo-Romans of the South, both ethical and geo 
 graphical, precluded them from producing anything really 
 great or even original in literature, for that must have its 
 root in a national life, and this they never had. After the 
 Burgundian invasion their situation was in many respects 
 analogous to our own after the Revolutionary War. They 
 had been thoroughly romanised in language and culture, but 
 the line of their historic continuity had been broken. The 
 
218 CHAUCER. 
 
 Roman road, which linked them with the only past they 
 knew, had been buried under the great barbarian land-slide. 
 In like manner we, inheriting the language, the social usages, 
 the literary and political traditions of Englishmen, were 
 suddenly cut adrift from our historical anchorage. Very 
 soon there arose a demand for a native literature, nay, it 
 was even proposed that, as a first step toward it, we should 
 adopt a lingo of our own to be called the Columbian or 
 Hesperian. This, to be sure, was never accomplished, 
 though our English cousins seem to hint sometimes that we 
 have made very fair advances toward it ; but if it could 
 have been, our position would have been precisely that of 
 the Provencals when they began to have a literature of 
 their own. They had formed a language which, while it 
 completed their orphanage from their imperial mother, 
 continually recalled her, and kept alive their pride of line 
 age. Such reminiscences as they still retained of Latin 
 culture were pedantic and rhetorical,* and it was only 
 natural that out of those they should have elaborated a 
 code of poetical jurisprudence with titles and subtitles 
 applicable to every form of verse and tyrannous over 
 every mode of sentiment. The result could not fail 
 to be artificial and wearisome, except where some man 
 with a truly lyrical genius could breathe life into the rigid 
 formula and make it pliant to his more passionate feeling. 
 The great service of the Provengals was that they kept in 
 mind the fact that poetry was not merely an amusement, 
 but an art, and long after their literary activity had ceased 
 their influence had reacted beneficially upon Europe 
 through their Italian pupils. They are interesting as 
 showing the tendency of the Romanic races to a scientific 
 treatment of what, if it be not spontaneous, becomes a 
 fashion and ere long an impertinence. Fauriel has endeav 
 oured to prove that they were the first to treat the 
 mediaeval heroic legends epically, but the evidence is 
 strongly against him. The testimony of Dante on this 
 
 * Fauriel s Histoire de la Gaule Meridionale, vol. i. passim. 
 
CHAUCER. 219 
 
 point is explicit,* and moreover, not a single romance of 
 chivalry has come down to us in a dialect of the pure 
 Provengal. 
 
 The Trouveres, on the other hand, are apt to have some 
 thing nai ve and vigorous about them, something that 
 smacks of race and soil. Their very coarseness is almost 
 better than the Troubadour delicacy, because it was not an 
 affectation. The difference between the two schools is that 
 between a culture pedantically transmitted and one which 
 grows and gathers strength from natural causes. Indeed, 
 it is to the North of France and to the Trouveres that we 
 are to look for the true origins of our modern literature. I 
 do not mean in their epical poetry, though there is something 
 refreshing in the mere fact of their choosing native heroes 
 and legends as the subjects of their song. It was in their 
 Fabliaux and Lais that, dealing with the realities of the 
 life about them, they became original and delightful in spite 
 of themselves. Their Chansons de Geste are fine specimens 
 of fighting Christianity, highly inspiring for men like Peire 
 de Bergerac, who sings 
 
 " Bel m es can aug lo resso 
 Que fai 1 ausbercs ab 1 arso, 
 Li bruit e il crit e il masan 
 Que il corn e las trombas fan ; " f 
 
 but who, after reading them even the best of them, the Song 
 of Roland can remember much more than a cloud of 
 
 * Allegat ergo pro se lingua Oil quod propter sui faciliorem et 
 delcctabiliorem vulgaritatem, quicquid redactum sive inventum est 
 ad vulgare prosaicum, suum est ; videlicet biblia cum Trojanorum, 
 Roraanorumque gestibus compilata et Arturi regis ambages pul- 
 cherrimre et quamplures alise historic ac doctriiife. That Dante by 
 prosaicum did not mean prose, but a more inartificial verse, numeros 
 lege solutos, is clear. Cf. Wolf, Ueber die Lais, pp. 92 seq. and 
 notes. It has not, I think, been remarked that Dante borrows 
 his faciliorem et delectabiliorem from the plus dilctable et comune 
 of his master Brunette Latini. 
 
 t " My ears no sweeter music know 
 
 Than hauberk s clank with saddlebow, 
 The noise, the cries, the tumult blown 
 From trumpet and from clarion. 
 
220 CHA UCER. 
 
 battle-dust, through which the paladins loom dimly gigantic, 
 and a strong verse flashes here and there like an angry 
 sword? What are the Roman d avantures, the cycle of 
 Arthur and his knights, but a procession of armour and 
 plumes mere spectacle, not vision like their Grecian 
 antitype, the Odyssey, whose pictures of life, whether 
 domestic or heroic, are among the abiding consolations of 
 the mind 1 An element of disproportion, of grotesqueness,* 
 earmark of the barbarian, disturbs us, even when it does not 
 disgust, in them all. Except the fioland, they all want 
 adequate motive, and even in that we may well suspect a 
 reminiscence of the Iliad. They are not without a kind of 
 dignity, for manliness is always noble, and there are 
 detached scenes that are striking, perhaps all the more so 
 from their rarity, like the combat of Oliver and Fierabras, 
 and the leave-taking of Parise la Duchesse. But in point 
 of art they are far below even Firdusi, whose great poem is 
 of precisely the same romantic type. The episode of 
 Sohrab and Rustem as much surpasses the former of the 
 passages just alluded to in largeness and energy of treat 
 ment, in the true epical quality, as the lament of Tehmine 
 over her son does the latter of them in refined and natural 
 pathos. In our revolt against pseudo-classicism we must 
 not let our admiration for the vigour and freshness which 
 are the merit of this old poetry tempt us to forget that our 
 direct literary inheritance comes to us from an ancestry who 
 would never have got beyond the Age of Iron but for the 
 models of graceful form and delicate workmanship which 
 they found in the tombs of an earlier race. 
 
 I recall but one passage (from Jourdain de Blaivies) 
 which in its simple movement of the heart can in any way 
 be compared with Chaucer. I translate it freely, merely 
 changing the original assonance into rhyme. Eremborc, to 
 save the son of her leige-lord, has passed off her own child 
 for his, only stipulating that he shall pass the night before 
 his death with her in the prison where she is confined by 
 
 * Compare Floripar in Fierabras with Nausikaa, for example. 
 
CHAUCER. 221 
 
 the usurper Fromond. The time is just as the dreaded 
 dawn begins to break. 
 
 " Gamier, fair son, the noble lady said, 
 To save thy father s life must thou be dead ; 
 And mine, alas, must be with sorrow spent, 
 Since thou must die, albeit so innocent 1 
 Evening thou shalt not see that see st the morn ! 
 Woe worth the hour that I beheld thee born, 
 Whom nine long months within my side I bore ! 
 Was never babe desired so much before, 
 Now summer will the pleasant days recall 
 When I shall take my stand upon the wall 
 And see the fair young gentlemen thy peers 
 That come and go, and, as beseems their years, 
 Run at the quintain, strive to pierce the shield, 
 And in the tourney keep their sell or yield ; 
 Then must my heart be tearswoln for thy sake, 
 That twill be marvel if it do not break. 
 At morning, when the day began to peer, 
 Matins rang out from minsters far and near, 
 And the clerks sang full well with voices high. 
 God, said the dame, thou glorious in the sky, 
 These lingering nights were wont to tire me so ! 
 And this, alas, how swift it hastes to go ! 
 These clerks and cloistered folk, alas, in spite 
 So early sing to cheat me of my night ! " 
 
 The great advantages which the langue d oil had over its 
 sister dialect of the South of France were its wider dis 
 tribution, and its representing the national and unitary 
 tendencies of the people as opposed to those of provincial 
 isolation. But the Trouveres had also this superiority, 
 that they gave a voice to real and not merely conventional 
 emotions. In comparison with the Troubadours their 
 sympathies were more human, and their expression more 
 popular. While the tiresome ingenuity of the latter busied 
 itself chiefly in the filigree of wire-drawn sentiment and 
 supersubtilised conceit, the former took their subjects 
 from the street and the market as well as from the chateau. 
 In the one case language had become a mere material for 
 clever elaboration ; in the other, as always in live literature, 
 it was a soil from which the roots of thought and feeling 
 unconsciously drew the colouring of vivid expression. The 
 
222 CHAUCER. 
 
 writers of French, by the greater pliancy of their dialect and 
 the simpler forms of their verse, had acquired an ease which 
 was impossible in the more stately and sharply-angled 
 vocabulary of the South. Their octosyllabics have not 
 seldom a careless facility not unworthy of Swift in his best 
 mood. They had attained the highest skill and grace in 
 narrative, as the lays of Marie de France and the Lai de 
 rOiselet bear witness.* Above all, they had learned how 
 to brighten the hitherto monotonous web of story with the 
 gayer hues of fancy. 
 
 It is no improbable surmise that the sudden and sur 
 prising development of the more strictly epical poetry in 
 the North of France, and especially its growing partiality 
 for historical in preference to mythical subjects, were due 
 to the Normans. The poetry of the Danes was much of it 
 authentic history, or what was believed to be so ; the heroes 
 of their Sagas were real men, with wives and children, with 
 relations public and domestic, on the common levels of life, 
 and not mere creatures of imagination, who dwell apart 
 like stars from the vulgar cares and interests of men. If 
 we compare Havelok with the least idealised figures of 
 Carlovingian or Arthurian romance, we shall have a keen 
 sense of this difference. Manhood has taken the place of 
 caste, and homeliness of exaggeration. Havelok says, 
 
 " Godwot, I will with thee gang 
 For to learn some good to get ; 
 Swinken would I for my meat ; 
 It is no shame for to swinken." 
 
 This Dane, we see, is of our own make and stature, a being 
 much nearer our kindly sympathies than his compatriot 
 Ogier, of whom we are told, 
 
 " Dix pies de lone avoit le chevalier." 
 
 But however large or small share we may allow to the 
 Danes in changing the character of French poetry and 
 supplanting the Romance with the Fabliau, there can be 
 little doubt either of the kind or amount of influence which 
 
 * If internal evidence may be trusted, the Lai de VEspine is not hers. 
 
CHAUCER. 223 
 
 the Normans must have brought with them into England. 
 I am not going to attempt a definition of the Anglo-Saxon 
 element in English literature, for generalisations are apt to 
 be as dangerous as they are tempting. But as a painter 
 may draw a cloud so that we recognise its general truth, 
 though the boundaries of real clouds never remain the 
 same for two minutes together, so amid the changes of 
 feature and complexion brought about by commingling of 
 race, there still remains a certain cast of physiognomy 
 which points back to some one ancestor of marked and 
 peculiar character. It is toward this type that there is 
 always a tendency to revert, to borrow Mr. Darwin s 
 phrase, and I think the general belief is not without some 
 adequate grounds which in France traces this predominant 
 type to the Kelt, and in England to the Saxon. In old and 
 stationary communities, where tradition has a chanee to 
 take root, and where several generations are present to the 
 mind of each inhabitant, either by personal recollection or 
 transmitted anecdote, everybody s peculiarities, whether of 
 strength or weakness, are explained and, as it were, 
 justified upon some theory of hereditary bias. Such and 
 such qualities he got from a grandfather on the spear or a 
 great-uncle on the spindle side. This gift came in a right 
 line from So-and-so ; that failing came in by the dilution of 
 the family blood with that of Such-a-one. In this way 
 a certain allowance is made for every aberration from some 
 assumed normal type, either in the way of reinforcement or 
 defect, and that universal desire of the human mind to 
 have everything accounted for which makes the moon 
 responsible for the whimsies of the weathercock is cheaply 
 gratified. But as mankind in the aggregate is always 
 wiser than any single man, because its experience is derived 
 from a larger range of observation and experience, and 
 because the springs that feed it drain a wider region both 
 of time and space, there is commonly some greater or 
 smaller share of truth in all popular prejudices. The 
 meteorologists are beginning to agree with the old women 
 that the moon is an accessory before the fact in our 
 
224 CHAUCER. 
 
 atmospheric fluctuations. Now, although to admit this notion 
 of inherited good or ill to its fullest extent would be to abolish 
 personal character, and with it all responsibility, to abdicate 
 free-will, and to make every effort at self-direction futile, 
 there is no inconsiderable alloy of truth in it, nevertheless. 
 No man can look into the title-deeds of what may be called 
 his personal estate, his faculties, his predilections, his 
 failings whatever, in short, sets him apart as a capital I 
 without something like a shock of dread to find how much 
 of him is held in mortmain by those who, though long ago 
 mouldered away to dust, are yet fatally alive and active in 
 him for good or ill. What is true of individual men is 
 true also of races, and the prevailing belief in a nation as 
 to the origin of certain of its characteristics has something 
 of the same basis in facts of observation as the village 
 estimate of the traits of particular families. Interdum 
 vulgus rectum videt. 
 
 We are apt, it is true, to talk rather loosely about our 
 Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and to attribute to them in a vague 
 way all the pith of our institutions and the motive power 
 of our progress. For my own part, I think there is such a 
 thing as being too Anglo-Saxon, and the warp and woof 
 of the English national character, though undoubtedly two 
 elements mainly predominate in it, is quite too complex for 
 us to pick out a strand here and there, and affirm that the 
 body of the fabric is of this or that. Our present concern 
 with the Saxons is chiefly a literary one ; but it leads to a 
 study of general characteristics. What, then, so far as we 
 can make it out, seems to be their leading mental feature ? 
 Plainly, understanding, common-sense a faculty which 
 never carries its possessor very high in creative literature, 
 though it may make him great as an acting and even think 
 ing man. Take Dr. Johnson as an instance. The Saxon, 
 as it appears to me, has never shown any capacity for art, 
 nay, commonly commits ugly blunders when he is tempted 
 in that direction. He has made the best working institu 
 tions and the ugliest monuments among the children of men. 
 He is wanting in taste, which is as much as to say that he 
 
CHAUCER. 225 
 
 has no true sense of proportion. His genius is his solidity 
 an admirable foundation of national character. He is 
 healthy, in no danger of liver-complaint, with digestive 
 apparatus of amazing force and precision. He is the best 
 farmer and best grazier among men, raises the biggest crops 
 and the fattest cattle, and consumes proportionate quanti 
 ties of both. He settles and sticks like a diluvial deposit 
 on the warm, low-lying levels, physical and moral. He has 
 a prodigious talent, to use our Yankee phrase, of staying 
 put. You cannot move him ; he and rich earth have a 
 natural sympathy of cohesion. Not quarrelsome, but with 
 indefatigable durability of fight in him, sound of stomach, 
 and not too refined in nervous texture, he is capable of 
 indefinitely prolonged punishment, with a singularly obtuse 
 sense of propriety in acknowledging himself beaten. Among 
 all races perhaps none has shown so acute a sense of the 
 side on which its bread is buttered, and so great a repug 
 nance for having fine phrases take the place of the buty- 
 raceous principle. They invented the words " humbug," 
 "cant," "sham," "gag," " soft-sodder," "flapdoddle," and 
 other disenchanting formulas, whereby the devil of falsehood 
 and unreality gets his effectual apage Satana ! 
 
 An imperturbable perception of the real relations of 
 things is the Saxon s leading quality no sense whatever, 
 or at best small, of the ideal in him. He has no notion 
 that two and two ever make five, which is the problem the 
 poet often has to solve. Understanding, that is, equilibrium 
 of mind, intellectual good digestion, this, with unclogged 
 biliary ducts, makes him mentally and physically what we 
 call a very fixed fact ; but you shall not find a poet in a 
 hundred thousand square miles in many prosperous cen 
 turies of such. But one element of incalculable importance 
 we have not mentioned. In this homely nature, the idea 
 of God, and of a simple and direct relation between the 
 All-Father and his children, is deeply-rooted. There, above 
 all, will he have honesty and simplicity ; less than anything 
 else will he have the sacramental wafer that beautiful 
 emblem of our dependence on Him who giveth the daily 
 
 M3 
 
226 CHAUCER. 
 
 bread ; less than anything will he have this smeared with 
 that Barmecide butter of fair words. This is the lovely 
 and noble side of his character. Indignation at this will 
 make him forget crops and cattle : and this, after so many 
 centuries, will give him at last a poet in the monk of Eisle- 
 ben, who shall cut deep on the memory of mankind that 
 brief creed of conscience " Here am I : God help me : I 
 cannot otherwise." This, it seems to me, with dogged 
 sense of justice both results of that equilibrium of thought 
 which springs from clear-sighted understanding makes the 
 beauty of the Saxon nature. 
 
 He believes in another world, and conceives of it without 
 metaphysical subtleties as something very much after the 
 pattern of this, but infinitely more desirable. Witness the 
 vision of John Bunyan. Once beat it into him that his 
 eternal well-being, as he calls it, depends on certain con 
 ditions, that only so will the balance in the ledger of 
 eternity be in his favour, and the man who seemed wholly 
 of this world will give all that he has, even his life, with a 
 superb simplicity and scorn of the theatric, for a chance in 
 the next. Hard to move, his very solidity of nature makes 
 him terrible when once fairly set agoing. He is the man 
 of all others slow to admit the thought of revolution ; but 
 let him once admit it, he will carry it through and make it 
 stick a secret hitherto undiscoverable by other races. 
 
 But poetry is not made out of the understanding ; that is 
 not the sort of block out of which you can carve wing-footed 
 Mercuries. The question of common- sense is always, " What 
 is it good for ? " a question which would abolish the rose 
 and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage. The danger 
 of the prosaic type of mind lies in the stolid sense of 
 superiority which blinds it to everything ideal, to the use of 
 anything that does not serve the practical purposes of life. 
 Do we not remember how the all-observing and all-fathom 
 ing Shakespeare has typified this in Bottom, the weaver 1 
 Surrounded by all the fairy creations of fancy, he sends one 
 to fetch him the bag of a humble-bee, and can find no better 
 employment for Mustard-seed than to help Cavalero Cobweb 
 
CHAUCER. 227 
 
 scratch his ass s head between the ears. When Titania, 
 queen of that fair ideal world, offers him a feast of beauty, 
 he says he has a good stomach to a pottle of hay ! 
 
 The Anglo-Saxons never had any real literature of their 
 own. They produced monkish chronicles in bad Latin, and 
 legends of saints in worse metre. Their earlier poetry is 
 essentially Scandinavian. It was that gens inclytissima 
 Northmannorum that imported the divine power of imagina 
 tion that power which, mingled with the solid Saxon 
 understanding, produced at last the miracle of Stratford. 
 It was to this adventurous race, which found America 
 before Columbus, which, for the sake of freedom of thought, 
 could colonise inhospitable Iceland, which, as it were, 
 typifying the very action of the imaginative faculty itself, 
 identified itself always with what it conquered, that we owe 
 whatever aquiline features there are in the national 
 physiognomy of the English race. It was through the 
 Normans that the English mind and fancy, hitherto pro 
 vincial and uncouth, were first infused with the lightness, 
 grace, and self-confidence of Romance literature. They 
 seem to have opened a window to the southward in that 
 solid and somewhat sombre insular character, and it was a 
 painted window all aglow with the figures of tradition and 
 poetry. The old Gothic volume, grim with legends of 
 devilish temptation and satanic lore, they illuminated with 
 the gay and brilliant inventions of a softer climate and 
 more genial moods. Even the stories of Arthur and his 
 knights, toward which the stern Dante himself relented so 
 far as to call them gratissimas ambages most delightful 
 circumlocutions though of British origin, were first set 
 free from the dungeon of a barbarous dialect by the French 
 poets, and so brought back to England, and made popular 
 there by the Normans. 
 
 Chaucer, to whom French must have been almost as truly 
 a mother tongue as English, was familiar with all that had 
 been done by Troubadour or Trouvere. In him we see the 
 first result of the Norman yeast upon the home-baked 
 Saxon loaf. The flour had been honest, the paste well 
 
228 CHA UCER. 
 
 kneaded, but the inspiring leaven was wanting till the 
 Norman brought it over. Chaucer works still in the solid 
 material of his race, but with what airy lightness has he not 
 infused it ? Without ceasing to be English, he has escaped 
 from being insular. But he was something more than this ; 
 he was a scholar, a thinker, and a critic. He had studied 
 the Divina Commedia of Dante, he had read Petrarca and 
 Boccaccio, and some of the Latin poets. He calls Dante 
 the great poet of Italy, and Petrarch a learned clerk. It is 
 plain that he knew very well the truer purpose of poetry, 
 and had even arrived at the higher wisdom of comprehend 
 ing the aptitudes and limitations of his own genius. He 
 saw clearly and felt keenly what were the faults and what 
 the wants of the prevailing literature of his country. In 
 the " Monk s Tale " he slily satirises the long-winded 
 morality of Gower, as his prose antitype Fielding was to 
 satirise the prolix sentimentality of E/ichardson. In the 
 rhyme of Sir Thopas he gives the coup de grace to the 
 romances of Chivalry, and in his own choice of a subject he 
 heralds that new world in which the actual and the popular 
 were to supplant the fantastic and the heroic. 
 
 Before Chaucer, modern Europe had given birth to one 
 great poet, Dante; and contemporary with him was one 
 supremely elegant one, Petrarch. Dante died only seven 
 years before Chaucer was born, and, so far as culture is 
 derived from books, the moral and intellectual influences 
 they had been subjected to, the speculative stimulus that 
 may have given an impulse to their minds there could 
 have been no essential difference between them. Yet there 
 are certain points of resemblance and of contrast, and those 
 not entirely fanciful, which seem to me of considerable 
 interest. Both were of mixed race, Dante certainly, 
 Chaucer presumably so. Dante seems to have inherited on 
 the Teutonic side the strong moral sense, the almost nervous 
 irritability of conscience, and the tendency to mysticism 
 which made him the first of Christian poets first in point 
 of time and first in point of greatness. From the other 
 side he seems to have received almost in overplus a feeling 
 
CHA UCER. 229 
 
 of order and proportion, sometimes well-nigh hardening into 
 mathematical precision and formalism a tendency which 
 at last brought the poetry of the Romanic races to a dead 
 lock of artifice and decorum. Chaucer, on the other hand, 
 drew from the South a certain airiness of sentiment and 
 expression, a felicity of phrase, and an elegance of turn 
 hitherto unprecedented and hardly yet matched in our 
 literature, but all the while kept firm hold of his native 
 soundness of understanding, and that genial humour which 
 seems to be the proper element of worldly wisdom. With 
 Dante, life represented the passage of the soul from a state 
 of nature to a state of grace ; and there would have been 
 almost an even chance whether (as Burns says) the Divina 
 Commedia had turned out a song or a sermon, but for the 
 wonderful genius of its author, which has compelled the 
 sermon to sing and the song to preach, whether they would 
 or no. With Chaucer, life is a pilgrimage, but only that 
 his eye may be delighted with the varieties of costume and 
 character. There are good morals to be found in Chaucer, 
 but they are always incidental. With Dante the main 
 question is the saving of the soul, with Chaucer it is the 
 conduct of life. The distance between them is almost that 
 between holiness and prudence. Dante applies himself to 
 the realities and Chaucer to the scenery of life, and the 
 former is consequently the more universal poet, as the 
 latter is the more truly national one. Dante represents the 
 justice of God, and Chaucer his loving-kindness. If there 
 is anything that may properly be called satire in the one, it 
 is like a blast of the Divine wrath, before which the 
 wretches cower and tremble, which rends away their cloaks 
 of hypocrisy and their masks of worldly propriety, and 
 leaves them shivering in the cruel nakedness of their shame. 
 The satire of the other is genial with the broad sunshine of 
 humour, into which the victims walk forth with a delightful 
 unconcern, laying aside of themselves the disguises that 
 seem to make them uncomfortably warm, till they have 
 made a thorough betrayal of themselves so unconsciously 
 that we almost pity while we laugh. Dante shows us the 
 
230 CHAUCER. 
 
 punishment of sins against God and one s neighbour, in order 
 that we may shun them, and so escape the doom that awaits 
 them in the other world. Chaucer exposes the cheats of 
 the transmuter of metals, of the begging friars, and of the 
 pedlars of indulgences, in order that we may be on our 
 guard against them in this world. If we are to judge of 
 what is national only by the highest and most characteristic 
 types, surely we cannot fail to see in Chaucer the true 
 forerunner and prototype of Shakespeare, who, with an 
 imagination of far deeper grasp, a far wider reach of thought, 
 yet took the same delight in the pageantry of the actual 
 world, and whose moral is the moral of worldly wisdom 
 only heightened to the level of his wide-viewing mind, and 
 made typical by the dramatic energy of his plastic nature. 
 
 Yet if Chaucer had little of that organic force of life 
 which so inspires the poem of Dante that, as he himself 
 says of the heavens, part answers to part with mutual 
 interchange of light, he had a structural faculty which 
 distinguishes him from all other English poets, his con 
 temporaries, and which indeed is the primary distinction of 
 poets properly so called. There is, to be sure, only one 
 other English writer coeval with himself who deserves in 
 any way to be compared with him, and that rather for 
 contrast than for likeness. 
 
 With the single exception of Langland, the English poets, 
 his contemporaries, were little else than bad versifiers of 
 legends classic or mediaeval, as happened, without selection 
 and without art. Chaucer is the first who broke away from 
 the dreary traditional style, and gave not merely stories, 
 but lively pictures of real life as the ever-renewed substance 
 of poetry. He was a reformer, too, not only in literature, 
 but in morals. But as in the former his exquisite tact 
 saved him from all eccentricity, so in the latter the 
 pervading sweetness of his nature could never be betrayed 
 into harshness and invective. He seems incapable of 
 indignation. He mused good-naturedly over the vices and 
 follies of men, and, never forgetting that he was fashioned 
 of the same clay, is rather apt to pity than condemn. There 
 
CHAUCER. 231 
 
 is no touch of cynicism in all he wrote. Dante s brush 
 seems sometimes to have been smeared with the burning 
 pitch of his own fiery lake. Chaucer s pencil is dipped in 
 the cheerful colour-box of the old illuminators, and he has 
 their patient delicacy of touch, with a freedom far beyond 
 their somewhat mechanic brilliancy. 
 
 English narrative poetry, as Chaucer found it, though it 
 had not altogether escaped from the primal curse of long- 
 windedness so painfully characteristic of its prototype, the 
 French Romance of Chivalry, had certainly shown a feeling 
 for the picturesque, a sense of colour, a directness of phrase, 
 and a simplicity of treatment, which give it graces of its 
 own and a turn peculiar to itself. In the easy knack of 
 story-telling, the popular minstrels cannot compare with 
 Marie de France. The lightsomeness of fancy, that leaves 
 a touch of sunshine and is gone, is painfully missed in them 
 all. Their incidents enter dispersedly, as the old stage 
 directions used to say, and they have not learned the art of 
 concentrating their force on the key-point of their hearers 
 interest. They neither get fairlv hold of their subject, nor, 
 what is more important, does it get hold of them. But 
 they sometimes yield to an instinctive hint of leaving-off at 
 the right moment, and in their happy negligence achieve 
 an effect only to be matched by the highest successes of art. 
 
 " That lady heard his mourning all 
 Right under her chamber wall, 
 In her oriel where she was, 
 Closed well with royal glass ; 
 Fulfilled it was with imagery 
 Every window, by and by ; 
 On each side had there a gin 
 Sperred with many a divers pin ; 
 Anon that lady fair and free 
 Undid a pin of ivory 
 And wide the window she open^set, 
 The sun shone in at her closet." 
 
 It is true the old rhymer relapses a little into the habitual 
 drone of his class, and shows half a mind to bolt into their 
 common inventory style when he comes to his gins and 
 
232 CHAUCER. 
 
 jrins, but he withstands the temptation manfully, and his 
 sunshine fills our hearts with a gush as sudden as that 
 which illumines the lady s oriel. Coleridge and Keats 
 have each in his way felt the charm of this winsome 
 picture, but have hardly equalled its hearty honesty, its 
 economy of material, the supreme test of artistic skill. I 
 admit that the phrase " had there a gin " is suspicious, and 
 suggests a French original, but I remember nothing alto 
 gether so good in the romances from the other side of the 
 Channel. One more passage occurs to me, almost incom 
 parable in its simple straightforward force and choice of 
 the right word. 
 
 " Sir Graysteel to his death thus tliraws, 
 He welters [wallows] and the grass updraws ; 
 
 A little while then lay he still, 
 (Friends that saw him liked full ill) 
 And bled into his armour bright." 
 
 The last line, for suggestive reticence, almost deserves to be 
 put beside the famous 
 
 " Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante " 
 
 of the great master of laconic narration. In the same 
 poem* the growing love of the lady, in its maidenliness of 
 unconscious betrayal, is touched with a delicacy and tact as 
 surprising as they are delightful. But such passages, 
 which are the despair of poets who have to work in a 
 language that has faded into diction, are exceptional. 
 They are to be set down rather to good luck than to art. 
 Even the stereotyped similes of these fortunate alliterates, 
 like "weary as water in a weir," or "glad as grass is of the 
 rain," are new, like nature, at the thousandth repetition. 
 Perhaps our palled taste overvalues the wild flavour of 
 these wayside treasure-troves. They are wood-strawberries, 
 prized in proportion as we must turn over more leaves ere 
 we find one. This popular literature is of value in helping 
 
 * Sir Eger a?id Sir Grine in the Percy Folio. The passage quoted 
 is from Ellis. 
 
CHAUCER. 233 
 
 us toward a juster estimate of Chaucer by showing what 
 the mere language was capable of, and that all it wanted 
 was a poet to put it through its paces. For though the 
 poems I have quoted be, in their present form, later than he, 
 they are, after all, but modernised versions of older copies, 
 which they doubtless reproduce with substantial fidelity. 
 
 It is commonly assumed that Chaucer did for English 
 what Dante is supposed to have done for Italian and 
 Luther for German, that he, in short, in some hitherto 
 inexplicable way, created it. But this is to speak loosely 
 and without book. Languages are never made in any such 
 fashion, still less are they the achievement of any single 
 man, however great his genius, however powerful his indi 
 viduality. They shape themselves by laws as definite as 
 those which guide ^nd limit the growth of other living 
 organisms. Dante, indeed, has told us that he chose to 
 write in the tongue that might be learned of nurses and 
 chafferers in the market. His practice shows that he knew 
 perfectly well that poetry has needs which cannot be 
 answered by the vehicle of vulgar commerce between man 
 and man. What he instinctively felt was, that there was 
 the living heart of all speech, without whose help the brain 
 were powerless to send will, motion, meaning, to the limbs 
 and extremities. But it is true that a language, as respects 
 the uses of literature, is liable to a kind of syncope. No 
 matter how complete its vocabulary may be, how thorough 
 an outfit of inflections and case-endings it may have, it is a 
 mere dead body without a soul till some man of genius set 
 its arrested pulses once more athrob, and show what wealth 
 of sweetness, scorn, persuasion, and passion lay there 
 awaiting its liberator. In this sense it is hardly too much 
 to say that Chaucer, like Dante, found his native tongue a 
 dialect and left it a language. But it was not what he did 
 with deliberate purpose of reform, it was his kindly and 
 plastic genius that wrought this magic of renewal and 
 inspiration. It was not the new words he introduced,* 
 but his way of using the old ones, that surprised them into 
 * I think he tried one now and then, like "eyen columbine." 
 
234 CHAUCER. 
 
 grace, ease, and dignity in their own despite. In order to 
 feel fully how much he achieved, let any one subject him 
 self to a penitential course of reading in his contemporary, 
 Gower, who worked in a material to all intents and pur 
 poses the same, or listen for a moment to the barbarous 
 jangle which Lydgate and Occleve contrive to draw from 
 the instrument their master had tuned so deftly. Gower 
 has positively raised tediousness to the precision of science, 
 he has made dulness an heirloom for the students of our 
 literary history. As you slip to and fro on the frozen 
 levels of his verse, which give no foothold to the mind, as 
 your nervous ear awaits the inevitable recurrence of his 
 rhyme, regularly pertinacious as the tick of an eight-day 
 clock, and reminding you of Wordsworth s 
 
 " Once more the ass did lengthen out 
 The hard, dry, seesaw of his horrible bray," 
 
 you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this 
 indefatigable man. He is the undertaker of the fair 
 mediaeval legend, and his style has the hateful gloss, the 
 seemingly unnatural length, of a coffin. Love, beauty, pas 
 sion, nature, art, life, the natural and theological virtues, 
 there is nothing beyond his power to disenchant, nothing 
 out of which the tremendous hydraulic press of his allegory 
 (or whatever it is, for I am not sure if it be not something 
 even worse) will not squeeze all feeling and freshness and 
 leave it a juiceless pulp. It matters not where you try 
 him, whether his story be Christian or pagan, borrowed 
 from history or fable, you cannot escape him. Dip in at 
 the middle or the end, dodge back to the beginning, the 
 patient old man is there to take you by the button and go 
 on with his imperturbable narrative. You may have left 
 off with Clytemnestra, and you may begin again with 
 Samson; it makes no odds, for you cannot tell one from 
 t other. His tediousness is omnipresent, and like Dogberry 
 he could find in his heart to bestow it all (and more if he 
 had it) on your worship. The word lengthy has been 
 charged to our American account, but it must have been 
 
CHAUCER. 235 
 
 invented by the first reader of Gower s works, the only 
 inspiration of which they were ever capable. Our 
 literature had to lie by and recruit for more than four 
 centuries ere it could give us an equal vacuity in Tupper, 
 so persistent a uniformity of commonplace in the t( Recrea 
 tions of a Country Parson." Let us be thankful that the 
 industrious Gower never found time for recreation ! 
 
 But a fairer as well as more instructive comparison lies 
 between Chaucer and the author of " Piers Ploughman." 
 Langland has as much tenderness, as much interest in 
 the varied picture of life, as hearty a contempt for hypocrisy, 
 and almost an equal sense of fun. He has the same easy 
 abundance of matter. But what a difference ! It is the 
 difference between the poet and the man of poetic tempera 
 ment. The abundance of the one is a continual fulness 
 within the fixed limits of good taste ; that of the other is 
 squandered in overflow. The one can be profuse on 
 occasion ; the other is diffuse whether he will or no. The 
 one is full of talk ; the other is garrulous. What in one is 
 the refined bonhomie of a man of the world, is a rustic 
 shrewdness in the other. Both are kindly in their satire, 
 and have not (like too many reformers) that vindictive love 
 of virtue which spreads the stool of repentance with thistle- 
 burrs before they invite the erring to seat themselves 
 therein. But what in "Piers Ploughman" is sly fun, has 
 the breadth and depth of humour in Chaucer ; and it is plain 
 that while the former was taken up by his moral purpose, 
 the main interest of the latter turned to perfecting the form 
 of his work. In short, Chaucer had that fine literary sense 
 which is as rare as genius, and, united with it, as it was in 
 him, assures an immortality of fame. It is not merely what 
 he has to say, but even more the agreeable way he has of 
 saying it, that captivates our attention and gives him an 
 assured place in literature. Above all, it is not in detached 
 passages that his charm lies, but in the entirety of expres 
 sion and the cumulative effect of many particulars working 
 toward a common end. Now though ex ungue leonem be 
 a good rule in comparative anatomy, its application, except 
 
236 CHAUCER. 
 
 in a very limited way, in criticism is sure to mislead ; for 
 we should always Lear in mind that the really great writer 
 is great in the mass, and is to be tested less by his cleverness 
 in the elaboration of parts than by that reach of mind which 
 is incapable of random effort, which selects, arranges, 
 combines, rejects, denies itself the cheap triumph of 
 immediate effects, because it is absorbed by the controlling 
 charm of proportion and unity. A careless good-luck of 
 phrase is delightful ; but criticism cleaves to the teleological 
 argument, and distinguishes the creative intellect, not so 
 much by any happiness of natural endowment as by the 
 marks of design. It is true that one may sometimes discover 
 by a single verse whether an author have imagination, or may 
 make a shrewd guess whether he have style or no, just as by 
 a few spoken words you may judge of a man s accent ; but 
 the true artist in language is never spotty, and needs no 
 guide-boards of admiring italics, a critical method introduced 
 by Leigh Hunt, whose feminine temperament gave him 
 acute perceptions at the expense of judgment. This is the 
 Boeotian method, which offers us a brick as a sample of the 
 house, forgetting that it is not the goodness of the separate 
 bricks, but the way in which they are put together, that 
 brings them within the province of art, and makes the 
 difference between a heap and a house. A great writer 
 does not reveal himself here and there, but everywhere. 
 Langland s verse runs mostly like a brook, with a beguiling 
 and well-nigh slumberous prattle, but he, more often than 
 any writer of his class, flashes into salient lines, gets inside 
 our guard with the home-thrust of a forthright word, and 
 he gains if taken piece-meal. His imagery is naturally and 
 vividly picturesque, as where he says of Old Age, 
 
 " Eld the hoar 
 
 That was in the vauntward, 
 And bare the banner before death, 
 
 and he softens to a sweetness of sympathy beyond Chaucer 
 when he speaks of the poor or tells us that Mercy is "sib of 
 all sinful ; " but to compare " Piers Ploughman " with the 
 " Canterbury Tales " is to compare sermon with song. 
 
CHAUCER. 237 
 
 Let us put a bit of Langland s satire beside one of 
 Chaucer s. Some people in search of Truth meet a pilgrim 
 and ask him whence he comes. He gave a long list of 
 holy places, appealing for proof to the relics on his hat : 
 
 " I have walked full wide in wet and in dry 
 And sought saints for my soul s health. 
 Know st thou ever a relic that is called Truth ? 
 Couldst thou show us the way where that wight dwelleth ? 
 * Nay, so God help me," said the man then, 
 1 1 saw never palmer with staff nor with scrip 
 Ask after him ever till now in this place. " 
 
 This is a good hit, and the poet is satisfied ; but, in what 
 I am going to quote from Chaucer, everything becomes 
 picture, over which lies broad and warm the sunshine of 
 humorous fancy. 
 
 " In olde dayes of the King Artour 
 Of which that Britouns speken gret honour, 
 All was this lond fulfilled of fayerie : 
 The elf-queen with her joly compaignie 
 Danced ful oft in many a grene mede : 
 This was the old opinion as I rede ; 
 I speke of many hundrid yer ago : 
 But now can no man see none elves mo, 
 For now the grete charite and prayeres 
 Of lymytours and other holy freres 
 That sechen every lond and every streem, 
 As thick as motis in the sormebeam, 
 Blessyng halles, chambres, kitchenes, and bourcs, 
 Citees, and burghes, castels hihe and toures, 
 Thorpes and bernes, shepnes and dayeries, 
 This makith that ther ben no fayeries. 
 For ther as wont to walken was an elf 
 There walkith none but the lymytour himself, 
 In undermeles and in morwenynges, 
 And sayth his matyns and his holy thingcs, 
 As he goth in his lymytatioun. 
 Wommen may now go saufly up and doun ; 
 In every bush or under every tre 
 There is none other incubus but he, 
 And he ne wol doon hem no dishon6ur." 
 
 How cunningly the contrast is suggested here between the 
 Elf -queen s jolly company and the unsocial limiters, thick as 
 
238 CHAUCER. 
 
 motes in the sunbeam, yet each walking by himself ! And 
 with what an air of innocent unconsciousness is the deadly 
 thrust of the last verse given, with its contemptuous 
 emphasis on the Tie that seems so well-meaning! Even 
 Shakespeare, who seems to come in after everybody has 
 done his best with a " Let me take hold a minute and show 
 you how to do it," could not have bettered this. 
 
 " Piers Ploughman " is the best example I know of 
 what is called popular poetry of compositions, that is, 
 which contain all the simpler elements of poetry, but 
 still in solution, not crystallised around any thread of 
 artistic purpose. In it appears at her best the Anglo- 
 Saxon Muse, a first cousin of Poor Richard, full of pro 
 verbial wisdom, who always brings her knitting in her 
 pocket, and seems most at home in the chimney-corner. It is 
 genial ; it plants itself firmly on human nature with its rights 
 and wrongs ; it has a surly honesty, prefers the downright to 
 the gracious, and conceives of speech as a tool rather than a 
 musical instrument. If we should seek for a single word 
 that would define it most precisely, we should not choose 
 simplicity, but homeliness. There is more or less of this in 
 all early poetry, to be sure ; but I think it especially proper 
 to English poets, and to the most English among them, like 
 Cowper, Orabbe, and one is tempted to add Wordsworth 
 where he forget s Coleridge s private lectures. In reading 
 such poets as Langland, also, we are not to forget a certain 
 charm of distance in the very language they use, making it 
 unhackneyed without being alien. As it is the chief func 
 tion of the poet to make the familiar novel, these fortunate 
 early risers of literature, who gather phrases with the dew 
 still on them, have their poetry done for them, as it were, 
 by their vocabulary. But in Chaucer, as in all great poets, 
 the language gets its charm from him. The force and 
 sweetness of his genius kneaded more kindly together the 
 Latin and Teutonic elements of our mother tongue, and 
 made something better than either. The necessity of 
 writing poetry, and not mere verse, made him a reformer 
 whether he would or no ; and the instinct of his finer ear 
 
CHAUCER. 239 
 
 was a guide such as none before him or contemporary with 
 him, nor indeed any that came after him, till Spenser, could 
 command. Gower had no notion of the uses of rhyme 
 except as a kind of crease at the end of every e ghth 
 syllable, where the verse was to be folded over ag&in into 
 another layer. He says, for example, 
 
 " This maiden Canacee was Light, 
 Both in the day and eke by night," 
 
 as if people commonly changed their names at dark. And 
 he could not even contrive to say this without the clumsy 
 pleonasm of both and eke. Chaucer was put to no such 
 shifts of piecing out his metre with loose -woven bits of 
 baser stuff. He himself says, in the " Man of Law s 
 Tale," 
 
 " Me lists not of the chaff nor of the straw 
 To make so long a tale as of the corn." 
 
 One of the world s three or four great story-tellers, he was 
 also one of the best versifiers that ever made English trip 
 and sing with a gaiety that seems careless, but where every 
 foot beats time to the tune of the thought. By the skilful 
 arrangement of his pauses he evaded the monotony of the 
 couplet, and gave to the rhymed pentameter, which he made 
 our heroic measure, something of the architectural repose 
 of blank verse. He found our language lumpish, stiff, 
 unwilling, too apt to speak Saxonly in grouty monosyllables ; 
 he left it enriched with the longer measure of the Italian 
 and Provengal poets. He reconciled, in the harmony of 
 his verse, the English bluntness with the dignity and 
 elegance of the less homely Southern speech. Though he 
 did not and could not create our language (for he who writes 
 to be read does not write for linguisters), yet it is true that 
 he first made it easy, and to that extent modern, so that 
 Spenser, two hundred years later, studied his method and 
 called him master. He first wrote English ; and it was a 
 feeling of this, I suspect, that made it fashionable in Eliza 
 beth s day to " talk pure Chaucer." Already we find in his 
 
240 CHA UCER. 
 
 works verses that might pass without question in Milton or 
 even Wordsworth, so mainly unchanged have the language 
 of poetry and the movement of verse remained from his day 
 to our own. 
 
 "Thou Polymnia 
 
 On Pernaso, that, with* thy sisters glade, 
 By Helicon, not far from Cirrea, 
 Singest with voice memorial in the shade, 
 Under the laurel which that may not fade. 
 
 And downward from a hill under a bent 
 There stood the temple of Mars omnipotent 
 Wrought all of burned steel, of which th entree 
 Was long and strait and ghastly for to see : 
 The northern light in at the doores shone 
 For window in the wall ne was there none 
 Through which men mighten any light discerne ; 
 The dore was all of adamant eterne." 
 
 And here are some lines that would not seem out of place 
 in the " Paradise of Dainty Devises : " 
 
 11 Hide, Absolom, thy gilte [gilded] tresses clear, 
 Esther lay thou thy meekness all adown. 
 
 Make of your wifehood no comparison ; 
 Hide ye your beauties Ysoude and Elaine, 
 My lady cometh, that all this may distain." 
 
 When I remember Chaucer s malediction upon his scrivener, 
 and consider that by far the larger proportion of his verses 
 (allowing always for change of pronunciation) are perfectly 
 accordant with our present accentual system, I cannot 
 believe that he ever wrote an imperfect line. His ear 
 would never have tolerated the verses of nine syllables, 
 with a strong accent on the first, attributed to him by Mr. 
 Skeate and Mr. Morris. Such verses seem to me simply 
 impossible in the pentameter iambic as Chaucer wrote it. 
 A great deal of misapprehension would be avoided in dis 
 cussing English metres, if it were only understood that 
 quantity in Latin and quantity in English mean very 
 different things. Perhaps the best quantitative verses in 
 
 * Commonly printed hath. 
 
CHAUCER. 241 
 
 our language (better even than Coleridge s) are to be found 
 in Mother Goose, composed by nurses wholly by ear and 
 beating time as they danced the baby on their knee. I 
 suspect Chaucer and Shakespeare would be surprised into a 
 smile by the learned arguments which supply their halting 
 verses with every kind of excuse except that of being 
 readable. When verses were written to be chanted, more 
 licence could be allowed, for the ear tolerates the widest 
 deviations from habitual accent in words that are sung, 
 Segnius irritant demissa per aurem. To some extent the 
 same thing is true of anapa?stic and other tripping measures, 
 but we cannot admit it in marching tunes like those of 
 Chaucer. He wrote for the eye more than for the voice, 
 as poets had begun to do long before.* Some loose talk of 
 Coleridge, loose in spite of its affectation of scientific 
 precision, about " retardations " and the like, has misled 
 many honest persons into believing that they can make 
 good verse out of bad prose. Coleridge himself, from 
 natural fineness of ear, was the best metrist among modern 
 English poets, and, read with proper allowances, his 
 remarks upon versification are always instructive to who 
 ever is not rhythm-deaf. But one has no patience with the 
 dyspondseuses, the pseon primuses, and what not, with 
 which he darkens verses that are to be explained only by 
 
 * Froissart s description of the book of traites amoureux et de 
 moralite, which he had engrossed for presentation to Richard II. 
 in 1394, is enough to bring tears to the eyes of a modern author. 
 "Et lui plut tres grandement ; et plaire bien lui devoit, car il etoit 
 enlumine, ecrit et historie et couvert de vermeil velours & dis cloux 
 d argent dores d or, et roses d or an milieu, et k deux grands fremaulx 
 dores et richement ouvres au milieu de rosiers d or." How lovingly 
 he lingers over it, hooking it together with et after et! But two 
 centuries earlier, while the jongleurs were still in full song, poems 
 were also read aloud. 
 
 " Pur remembrer des ancessours 
 Les faits et les dits et les mours, 
 Deit Ten les livres et les gestes 
 Et les estoires lire afestes." Roman du Eon, 
 
 But Chaucer wrote for the private reading of the closet. 
 
 144 
 
242 CHAUCER. 
 
 the contemporary habits of pronunciation. Till after the 
 time of Shakespeare we must always bear in mind that it 
 is not a language of books but living speech that we have 
 to deal with. Of this language Coleridge had little know 
 ledge, except what could be acquired through the ends of 
 his fingers as they lazily turned the leaves of his haphazard 
 reading. If his eye was caught by a single passage that 
 gave him a chance to theorise, he did not look farther. 
 Speaking of Massinger, for example, he says, " When a 
 speech is interrupted, or one of the characters speaks aside, 
 the last syllable of the former speech and first of the suc 
 ceeding Massinger counts for one, because both are supposed 
 to be spoken at the same moment. 
 
 " And felt the sweetness oft 
 
 How her mouth runs over. " 
 
 Now fifty instances may be cited from Massinger which tell 
 against this fanciful notion, for one that seems, and only 
 seems, in its favour. Anyone tolerably familiar with the 
 dramatists knows that in the passage quoted by Coleridge, 
 the how being emphatic, "how her" was pronounced how r. 
 He tells us that Massinger is fond of the anapaest in the 
 first and third foot, as : 
 
 " To your more | than mas | culine rea | son that | commands ern.H " 
 
 Likewise of the second paeon (^__ v_x_) in the first foot, 
 followed by four trochees ( ^-), as : 
 
 " So greedily | I5ng for, | know their | titill | ations." 
 
 In truth, he was no fonder of them than his brother 
 dramatists who, like him, wrote for the voice by the ear. 
 " To your " is still one syllable in ordinary speech, and 
 " masculine " and " greedily " were and are dissyllables or 
 trisyllables according to their place in the verse. Coleridge 
 was making pedantry of a very simple matter. Yet he has 
 said with perfect truth of Chaucer s verse, " Let a few 
 plain rules be given for sounding the final e of syllables, 
 and for expressing the terminations of such words as ocean 
 and nation, etc., as dissyllables, or let the syllables to be 
 
CHAUCER. 243 
 
 sounded in such cases be marked by a competent metrist. 
 This simple expedient would, with a very few trifling 
 exceptions, where the errors are inveterate, enable anyone 
 to feel the perfect smoothness and harmony of Chaucer s 
 verse." But let us keep widely clear of Latin and Greek 
 terms of prosody ! It is also more important here than 
 even with the dramatists of Shakespeare s time to remem 
 ber that we have to do with a language caught more from 
 the ear than from books. The best school for learning 
 to understand Chaucer s elisions, compressions, slurrings- 
 over and runnings-together of syllables is to listen to the 
 habitual speech of rustics with whom language is still 
 plastic to meaning, and hurries or prolongs itself accord 
 ingly. Here is a contraction frequent in Chaucer, and still 
 common in New England : 
 
 "But me were lever than [lever n] all this town, quod he." 
 
 Let one example suffice for many. To Coleridge s rules 
 another should be added by a wise editor ; and that is to 
 restore the final n in the infinitive and third person plural 
 of verbs, and in such other cases as can be justified by the 
 authority of Chaucer himself. Surely his ear could never 
 have endured the sing-song of such verses as 
 
 " I couthe telle for a gowne-cloth," 
 or 
 
 "Than ye to me schuld breke youre trouthe." 
 
 Chaucer s measure is so uniform (making due allowances) 
 that words should be transposed or even omitted where the 
 verse manifestly demands it, and with copyists so long 
 and dull of ear this is often the case. Sometimes they 
 leave out a needful word : 
 
 " But er [the] thunder stynte, there cometh rain, 
 When [that] we ben y flattered and ypraised, 
 Tak [ye] him for the greatest gentleman." 
 
 Sometimes they thrust in a word or words that hobble the 
 verse : 
 
244 CHAUCER. 
 
 11 She trowed he were yfel in [some] maladie, 
 Ye faren like a man [that] had lost his wit, 
 Then have I got of you the maystrie, quod she, 
 (Then have I got the maystery, quod she) 
 And quod the juge [also] thou must lose thy head." 
 
 Sometimes they give a wrong word identical in meaning : 
 
 " And therwithal he knew [couthe] mo proverbes." 
 Sometimes they change the true order of the words : 
 
 " Therefore no woman of clerkes is [is of clerkes] praised 
 His felaw lo, here he stont [stont he] hool on live." 
 
 " He that coveteth is a pore wight 
 
 For he wold have that is not in his might ; 
 
 But he that nought hath ne coveteth nought to have." 
 
 Here the "but" of the third verse belongs at the head of 
 the first, and we get rid of the anomaly of " coveteth " 
 differently accented within two lines. Nearly all the 
 seemingly unrnetrical verses may be righted in this way. 
 I find a good example of this in the last stanza of " Troilus 
 and Creseide." As it stands, we read 
 
 " Thou one, two, and three, eterne on live 
 That raignast aie in three, two and one." 
 
 It is plain that we should read " one and two " in the first 
 verse, and " three and two " in the second. Remembering, 
 then, that Chaucer was here translating Dante, I turned 
 (after making the correction) to the original, and found as 
 I expected 
 
 " Quell* uno e due e tre che sempre vive, 
 E regna sempre in tre e due ed uno." (Par. xiv. 28, 29.) 
 
 In the stanza before this we have 
 
 11 To thee and to the philosophical strode, 
 To vouchsafe [vouchesafe] there need is, to correct ; 
 
 and further on 
 
 " With all mine herte of mercy ever I pray 
 And to the Lord aright thus I speake and say, * 
 
CHA UCER. 245 
 
 where we must either strike out the second " I," or put it 
 after " speake." 
 
 One often finds such changes made by ear justified by 
 the readings in other texts, and we cannot but hope that 
 the Chaucer Society will give us the means of at last 
 settling upon a version which shall make the poems of one 
 of the most fluent of metrists at least readable. Let any 
 one compare the " Franklin s Tale " in the Aldine edition* 
 with the text given by Wright, and he will find both sense 
 and metre clear themselves up in a surprising way. A 
 careful collation of texts, by the way, confirms one s 
 confidence in Tyrwhitt s good taste and thoroughness. 
 
 A writer in the "Proceedings of the Philological So 
 ciety" has lately undertaken to prove that Chaucer did not 
 sound the final or medial e, and throws us back on the old 
 theory that he wrote "riding-rime," that is, verse to the 
 eye and not the ear. This he attempts to do by showing 
 that the Anglo-Norman poets themselves did not sound 
 the e, or, at any rate, were not uniform in so doing. It 
 should seem a sufficient answer to this merely to ask whence 
 modern French poetry derived its rules of pronunciation so 
 like those of Chaucer, so different from those of prose. But 
 it is not enough to prove that some of the Anglo-Norman 
 rhymers were bad versifiers. Let us look for examples in 
 the works of the best poet among them all, Marie de 
 France, with whose works Chaucer was certainly familiar. 
 What was her practice ? I open at random and find 
 enough to overthrow the whole theory : 
 
 " Od sa fillet ke le cela 
 Tut li curages li fremi 
 Di mei, fet-ele par ta fei 
 La Dameisele 1 aporta 
 Ear ne li sembla mie boeris 
 La dame 1 aveit apelee 
 Et la mere 1 areisuna." 
 
 * One of the very worst, be it said in passing. 
 
 t Whence came, pray, the Elizabethan commandement clmpelain, 
 surety, and a score of others ? Whence the Scottish bonny, and so 
 many English words of Romance derivation ending in y 1 
 
246 CHA UCER. 
 
 But how about the elision ? 
 
 11 Le pali esgarde sur le lit 
 Et ele est devant li alee 
 Bele amie [of. mie, above] ne il me celcz. 
 La dame ad sa fille amenee." 
 
 These are all on a single page,* and there are some to spare. 
 How about the hiatus ? On the same page I find 
 
 " Ear 1 Erceveske i estoit 
 Pur eus beneistre e euseiner. 
 
 What was the practice of Wace 1 Again I open at random. 
 
 " N osa remaindre en Normandie, 
 Maiz, quant la guerre fu fiiiio, 
 Od sou herneiz en Puille #la 
 Gil de Baienes lunge ment 
 Ne il nes pout par force prendre 
 Dune la vile mult amendout, 
 Prisons e preie s amenout. "t 
 
 Again we have the sounded final e, the elision, and the 
 hiatus. But what possible reason is there for supposing 
 that Chaucer would go to obscure minstrels to learn the 
 rules of French versification 1 Nay, why are we to suppose 
 that he followed them at all ? In his case as in theirs, as 
 in that of the Italians, with the works of whose two greater 
 poets he was familiar, it was the language itself and the 
 usuges of pronunciation that guided the poet, and not 
 arbitrary laws laid down by a synod of versemakers. 
 Chaucer s verse differs from that of Gower and Lydgate 
 precisely as the verse of Spenser differs from that of 
 Gascoigne, and for the same reason that he was a great 
 poet, to whom measure was a natural vehicle. But 
 admitting that he must have formed his style on the French 
 poets, would he not have gone for lessons to the most 
 famous and popular among them the authors of the 
 " Roman de la Rose ? " Wherever you open that poem, 
 
 * Poesies de Marie de France, tome i. p. 168. 
 t Le Roman de la Rose, tome ii. p. 390. 
 
CHAUCER. 247 
 
 you find Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung following 
 precisely the same method a method not in the least 
 arbitrary, but inherent in the material which they wrought. 
 The e sounded or absorbed under the same conditions, the 
 same slurring of the diphthongs, the same occasional hiatus, 
 the same compression of several vowels into one sound 
 where they immediately follow each other. Shakespeare 
 and Milton would supply examples enough of all these 
 practices that seem so incredible to those who write about 
 versification without sufficient fineness of sense to feel the 
 difference between Ben Jonson s blank verse and Marlowe s. 
 Some men are verse-deaf as others are colour-blind Messrs, 
 Malone and Guest, for example. 
 
 I try Rutebeuf in the same haphazard way, and chance 
 brings me upon his " Pharisian." This poem is in stanzas, 
 the verses of the first of which have all of them masculine 
 rhymes, those of the second feminine ones, and so on in 
 such continual alternation to the end, as to show that it 
 was done with intention to avoid monotony. Of feminine 
 rhymes we find ypocrisie, fame, justice, mesure, yglise. But 
 did Kutebeuf mean so to pronounce them ? I open again 
 at the poem of the Secrestain, which is written in regular 
 octosyllabics, and read 
 
 " Envie fet home tuer, 
 Et si fait bonne remuer 
 Envie greve , envie blece, 
 Envie con font charite 
 Envie ocist humility 
 Estoit en ce pais en vie 
 Sanz orgueil ere et sanz envie 
 La glorieuse, dame, chiere ."* 
 
 Froissart was Chaucer s contemporary. What was his usage? 
 
 " J avoie fait en ce voiaige 
 Et je li di, Ma dame s ai-je 
 Pour vous eu maint souvenir ; 
 Mais je ne sui pas bien hardis 
 
 * Rutebeuf, tome i. pp. 203 seqq. 304 
 
248 CHAUCER. 
 
 De vous remonstrer, dame chier, 
 Par quel art ne par quel maniere, 
 J ai eu ce comencement 
 De 1 amourous atouchement." 
 
 If we try Philippe Mouskes, a mechanical rhymer, if ever 
 there was one, and therefore the surer not to let go the 
 leading-strings of rule, the result is the same. 
 
 But Chaucer, it is argued, was not uniform in his practice. 
 Would this be likely ? Certainly with those terminations 
 (like courtesie) which are questioned, and in diphthongs 
 generally. Dante took precisely the same liberties. 
 
 Facea le stelle a noi parer prh radi, 
 Ne fu per fantasia giamnuw compreso, 
 Poi piovve dentro all alta fantasia, 
 Solea valor e cortesia trovarsi, 
 Che ne nvogliava amor e cortesia." 
 
 Here we have fantasi and fantasia, cortesl and cortesid. 
 Even Pope has promiscuous, obsequious, as trisyllables, 
 individual as a quadrisyllable, and words like tapestry, 
 opera, indifferently as trochees or dactyls according to their 
 place in the verse. Donne even goes so far as to make 
 Cain a monosyllable and dissyllable in the same verse : 
 
 " Sister and wife to Cain, Cain that first did plough." 
 
 The csesural pause (a purely imaginary thing in accentual 
 metres) may be made to balance a line like this of Donne s, 
 
 11 Are they not like | singers at doors for meat," 
 
 but we defy anyone by any trick of voice to make it supply 
 a missing syllable in what is called our heroic measure, so 
 mainly used by Chaucer. 
 
 Enough and far more than enough on a question about 
 which it is as hard to be patient as about the authorship of 
 Shakespeare s plays. It is easy to find all manner of bad 
 metres among these versifiers, and plenty of inconsistencies, 
 many or most of them the fault of careless or ignorant 
 transcribers, but whoever has read them thoroughly, and 
 
CHA UCER. 249 
 
 with enough philological knowledge of cognate lang uges 
 to guide him, is sure that they at least aimed at regularity, 
 precisely as he is convinced that Raynouard s rule about 
 singular and plural terminations has plenty of evidence to 
 sustain it, despite the numerous exceptions. To show what 
 a bad versifier could make out of the same language that 
 Chaucer used, I copy one stanza from a contemporary poem. 
 
 "When Phebus fresh was in chare resplendent, 
 In the moneth of May erly in a morning, 
 I hard two lovers prefer this argument 
 In the yeere of our Lord a M. by rekening, 
 CCCXL. and YIIL yeere following 
 potent princesse conserve true lovers all 
 And grant them thy region and blisse celestial. * 
 
 Here is riding-rhyme, and on a very hard horse too ! Can 
 any one be insensible to the difference between such stuff as 
 this and the measure of Chaucer 1 Is it possible that with 
 him the one halting verse should be the rule, and the 
 twenty musical ones the exception *{ Let us take heed to 
 his own words : 
 
 "And, for there is so great diversite 
 In English, and in writing of our tong, 
 So pray I Godt that non miswrite the 
 Ne the mismetre for defaut of tong, 
 And redde whereso thou be or elles song 
 That thou be understood God I beseech." 
 
 Yet more. Boccaccio s ottava rima is almost as regular 
 as that of Tasso. Was Chaucer unconscious of this ? It 
 will be worth while to compare a stanza of the original 
 with one of the translation : 
 
 " Era cortese Ettore di natura 
 Pero vedendo di costei il gran pianto, 
 Ch era piu bella ch altra creatura, 
 Con pio parlare comfortolla alquanto, 
 Dicendo, lascia con la ria ventura 
 
 * From the "Craft of Lovers," attributed by Ritson to Lydgate, 
 but too bad even for him. 
 
 t Here the received texts give "So pray I to God." Cf. "But 
 Reason said him." T. & C, 
 
250 CHAUCER. 
 
 Tuo padre andar che tutti ha offeso tanto, 
 
 E tu, sicura e lieta, senza noia, 
 
 Mentre t aggrada, con noi resta in Troia." * 
 
 " Now was this Hector pitous of nature, 
 And saw that she was sorrowful begon 
 And that she was so faire a creature, 
 Of his goodnesse he gladed her anon 
 And said [saide] let your father s treason gon 
 Forth with mischance, and ye yourself in joy 
 Dwelleth with us while [that] you list in Troy." 
 
 If the Italian were read with the same ignorance that has 
 wreaked itself on Chaucer, the riding-rhyme would be on its 
 high horse in almost every line of Boccaccio s stanza. The 
 same might be said of many a verse in Donne s satires. 
 Spenser in his eclogues for February, May, and September 
 evidently took it for granted that he had caught the 
 measure of Chaucer, and it would be rather amusing, as 
 well as instructive, to hear the maintainers of the hop-skip- 
 and-jump theory of versification attempt to make the elder 
 poet s verses dance to the tune for which one of our greatest 
 metrists (in his philological deafness) supposed their feet to 
 be trained. 
 
 I will give one more example of Chaucer s verse, again 
 making my selection from one of his less mature works. 
 He is speaking of Tarquin : 
 
 "And ay the more he was in despair 
 The more he coveted and thought her fair ; 
 His blinde lust was all his coveting. 
 On morrow when the bird began to sing 
 Unto the siege he cometh full privily 
 And by himself he walketh soberly 
 The image of her recording alway new : 
 Thus lay her hair, and thus fresh was her hue, 
 Thus sate, thus spake, thus span, this was her cheer, 
 Thus fair she was, and this was her manere. 
 All this conceit his heart hath new ytake, 
 And as the sea, with tempest all toshake, 
 That after, when the storm is all ago, 
 Yet will the water quap a day or two, 
 Right so, though that her forme were absent, 
 The pleasance of her forme was present." 
 
 * Corrected from Kissner, p. 18. 
 
CHAUCER. 251 
 
 And this passage leads me to say a few words of Chaucer 
 as a descriptive poet; for I think it a great mistake to 
 attribute to him any properly dramatic power as some have 
 done. Even Herr Hertzburg, in his remarkably intelligent 
 essay, is led a little astray on this point by his enthusiasm. 
 Chaucer is a great narrative poet ; and, in this species of 
 poetry, though the author s personality should never be 
 obtruded, it yet unconsciously pervades the whole, and 
 communicates an individual quality a kind of flavour of 
 its own. This very quality, and it is one of the highest in 
 its way and place, would be fatal to all dramatic force. The 
 narrative poet is occupied with his characters as a picture, 
 with their grouping, even their costume, it may be, and he 
 feels for and with them instead of being they for the moment, 
 as the dramatist must always be. The story-teller must 
 possess the situation perfectly in all its details, while the 
 imagination of the dramatist must be possessed and 
 mastered by it. The latter puts before us the very 
 passion or emotion itself in its utmost intensity; the 
 former gives them, not in their primary form, but in that 
 derivative one which they have acquired by passing through 
 his own mind and being modified by his reflection. The 
 deepest pathos of the drama, like the quiet " no more but 
 so 1 " with which Shakespeare tells us that Ophelia s heart 
 is bursting, is sudden as a stab, while in narrative it is more 
 or less suffused with pity a feeling capable of prolonged 
 sustention. This presence of the author s own sympathy is 
 noticeable in all Chaucer s pathetic passages, as, for instance, 
 in the lamentation of Constance over her child in the " Man 
 of Law s Tale." When he comes to the sorrow of his story, 
 he seems to croon over his thoughts, to sooth them and 
 dwell upon them with a kind of pleased compassion, as a 
 child treats a wounded bird which he fears to grasp too 
 tightly, and yet cannot make up his heart wholly to let go. 
 It is true also of his humour that it pervades his comic tales 
 like sunshine, and never dazzles the attention by a sudden 
 flash. Sometimes he brings it in parenthetically, and 
 insinuates a sarcasm so slyly as almost to slip by without 
 
252 CHAUCER. 
 
 our notice, as where he satirises provincialism by the 
 cock, 
 
 " Who knew by nature each ascension 
 Of the equinoctial in his native town." 
 
 Sometimes he turns round upon himself and smiles at a 
 trip he has made into fine writing : 
 
 11 Till that the brighte sun had lost his hue, 
 For th orisont had reft the sun his light, 
 (This is as much to sayen as * it was night. ") 
 
 Nay, sometimes it twinkles roguishly through his very 
 tears, as in the 
 
 " Why wouldest thou be dead/ these women cry, 
 Thou haddest gold enough and Emily ? " 
 
 that follows so close upon the profoundly tender despair of 
 Arcite s farewell : 
 
 " What is this world ? What asken men to have ? 
 Now with his love now in the colde grave 
 Alone withouten any company ! " 
 
 The power of diffusion without being diffuse would seem 
 to be the highest merit of narration, giving it that easy 
 flow which is so delightful. Chaucer s descriptive style is 
 remarkable for its lowness of tone for that combination 
 of energy with simplicity which is among the rarest gifts in 
 literature. Perhaps all is said in saying that he has style 
 at all, for that consists mainly in the absence of undue 
 emphasis and exaggeration, in the clear uniform pitch 
 which penetrates our interest and retains it, where mere 
 loudness would only disturb and irritate. 
 
 Not that Chaucer cannot be intense, too, on occasion; 
 but it is with a quiet intensity of his own, that comes in as 
 it were by accident. 
 
 11 Upon a thicke palfrey, paper- white, 
 With saddle red embroidered with delight, 
 Sits Dido : 
 
 And she is fair as is the brighte morrow 
 That healeth sicke folk of nightes sorrow. 
 
CHAUCER. 253 
 
 Upon a courser startling as the fire, 
 jEneas sits." 
 
 Paiidarus, looking at Troilus, 
 
 " Took up a light and found his countenance 
 As for to look upon an old romance." 
 
 With Chaucer it is always the thing itself and not the de 
 scription of it that is the main object. His picturesque 
 bits are incidental to the story, glimpsed in passing ; they 
 never stop the way. His key is so low that his high lights 
 are never obtrusive. His imitators, like Leigh Hunt, and 
 Keats in his " Endymion," missing the nice gradation with 
 which the master toned everything down, become streaky. 
 Hogarth, who reminds one of him in the variety and 
 natural action of his figures, is like him also in the subdued 
 brilliancy of his colouring. When Chaucer condenses, it is 
 because his conception is vivid. He does not need to per 
 sonify Revenge, for personification is but the subterfuge of 
 unimaginative and professional poets ; but he embodies the 
 very passion itself in a verse that makes us glance over our 
 shoulder as if we heard a stealthy tread behind us : 
 
 " The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak.* " 
 
 And yet how unlike is the operation of the imaginative 
 faculty in him and Shakespeare ! When the latter de 
 scribes, his epithet simply leaves always an impression on the 
 moral sense (so to speak) of the person who hears or sees. 
 The sun " flatters the mountain-tops with sovereign eye ; " 
 the bending " weeds lacquey the dull stream ; " the shadow 
 of the falcon " coucheth the fowl below ; " the smoke is 
 " helpless ; " when Tarquin enters the chamber of Lucrece 
 " the threshold grates the door to have him heard." His 
 outward sense is merely a window through which the 
 metaphysical eye looks forth, and his mind passes over at 
 once from the simple sensation to the complex meaning of 
 it feels with the object instead of merely feeling it. His 
 imagination is for ever dramatising. Chaucer gives only 
 
 * Compare this with the Mumbo-Jumbo Revenge in Collins s Ode. 
 
254 CHAUCER. 
 
 the direct impression made on the eye or ear. He was the 
 first great poet who really loved outward nature as the 
 source of conscious pleasurable emotion. The Troubadour 
 hailed the return of spring ; but with him it was a piece of 
 empty ritualism. Chaucer took a true delight in the new 
 green of the leaves and the return of singing birds a 
 delight as simple as that of Robin Hood : 
 
 " In summer when the shaws be sheen, 
 
 And leaves be large and long, 
 It is full merry in fair forest 
 To hear the small birds song." 
 
 He has never so much as heard of the " burthen and the 
 mystery of all this unintelligible world." His flowers and 
 trees and birds have never bothered themselves with Spinoza. 
 He himself sings more like a bird than any other poet, because 
 it never occurred to him, as to Goethe, that he ought to do so. 
 He pours himself out in sincere joy and thankfulness. When 
 we compare Spenser s imitations of him with the original 
 passages, we feel that the delight of the later poet was more 
 in the expression than in the thing itself. Nature with him 
 is only good to be transfigured by art. We walk among 
 Chaucer s sights and sounds ; we listen to Spenser s musical 
 reproduction of them. In the same way, the pleasure which 
 Chaucer takes in telling his stories has in itself the effect of 
 consummate skill, and makes us follow all the windings of his 
 fancy with sympathetic interest. His best tales run on like 
 one of our inland rivers, sometimes hastening a little and 
 turning upon themselves in eddies that dimple without re 
 tarding the current ; sometimes loitering smoothly, while 
 here and there a quiet thought, a tender feeling, a pleasant 
 image, a golden-hearted verse, opens quietly as a water-lily, 
 to fioat on the surface without breaking it into ripple. The 
 vulgar intellectual palate hankers after the titillation of 
 foaming phrase, and thinks nothing good for much that does 
 not go off with a pop like a champagne cork. The mellow 
 suavity of more precious vintages seems insipid : but the 
 taste in proportion as it refines, learns to appreciate the 
 indefinable flavour, too subtile for analysis. A manner has 
 
CHAUCER. 255 
 
 prevailed of late in which every other word seems to be 
 underscored as in a school-girl s letter. The poet seems 
 intent on showing his sinew, as if the power of the slim 
 Apollo lay in the girth of his biceps. Force for the mere 
 sake of force ends like Milo, caught and held mockingly fast 
 by the recoil of the log he undertook to rive. In the race 
 of fame, there are a score capable of brilliant spurts for one 
 who comes in winner after a steady pull with wind and 
 muscle to spare. Chaucer never shows any signs of effort, 
 and it- is a main proof of his excellence that he can be so 
 inadequately sampled by detached passages by single lines 
 taken away from the connection in which they contribute to 
 the general effect. He has that continuity of thought, that 
 evenly prolonged power, and that delightful equanimity, 
 which characterise the higher orders of mind. There is 
 something in him of the disinterestedness that made the 
 Greeks masters in art. His phrase is never importunate. 
 His simplicity is that of elegance, not of poverty. The 
 quiet unconcern with which he says his best things is 
 peculiar to him among English poets, though Goldsmith, 
 Addison, and Thackeray have approached it in prose. 
 He prattles inadvertently away, and all the while, like the 
 princess in the story, lets fall a pearl at every other word. 
 It is such a piece of good luck to be natural ! It is the good 
 gift which the fairy godmother brings to her prime favourites 
 in the cradle. If not genius, it is alone what makes genius 
 amiable in the arts. If a man have it not, he will never find 
 it, for when it is sought it is gone. 
 
 When Chaucer describes anything, it is commonly by one 
 of those simple and obvious epithets or qualities that are so 
 easy to miss. Is it a woman ? He tells us she is fresh; that 
 she has glad eyes ; that " every day her beauty newed : " that 
 
 "Methought all fellowship as naked 
 Withouten her that I saw once, 
 As a coroiie without the stones." 
 
 Sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as where 
 the Friar, before setting himself softly down, drives away 
 
256 CHAUCER. 
 
 the cat. We know without need of more words that he has 
 chosen the snuggest corner. In some of his early poems he 
 sometimes, it is true, falls into the catalogue style of his 
 contemporaries ; but after he had found his genius he never 
 particularises too much a process as deadly to all effect as 
 an explanation to a pun. The first stanza of the " Clerk s 
 Tale " gives us a landscape whose stately choice of objects 
 shows a skill in composition worthy of Claude, the last artist 
 who painted nature epically : 
 
 " There is at the west ende of Itaile, 
 
 Down at the foot of Vesulus the cold, 
 
 A lusty plain abundant of vitaile, 
 
 Where many a tower and town thou may st behold 
 
 That founded were in time of fathers old, 
 
 And many another delitable sight ; 
 And Skluces this noble country hight" 
 
 The Pre-Raphaelite style of landscape entangles the eye 
 among the obtrusive weeds and grass-blades of the foreground 
 which, in looking at a real bit of scenery, we overlook ; but 
 what a sweep of vision is here ! and what happy generalisa 
 tion in the sixth verse as the poet turns away to the business 
 of his story ! The whole is full of open air. 
 
 But it is in his characters, especially, that his manner is 
 large and free ; for he is painting history, though with the 
 fidelity of portrait. He brings out strongly the essential 
 traits, characteristic of the genus rather than of the indi 
 vidual. The Merchant who keeps so steady a countenance 
 that 
 
 " There wist no wight that he was e er in debt," 
 
 the Sergeant at Law, " who seemed busier than he was," 
 the Doctor of Medicine, whose " study was but little on 
 the Bible," in all these cases it is the type and not the 
 personage that fixes his attention. William Blake says 
 truly, though he expresses his meaning somewhat clumsily, 
 " the characters of Chaucer s Pilgrims are the characters 
 which compose all ages and nations. Some of the names 
 and titles are altered by time, but the characters remain for 
 ever unaltered, and consequently they are the physiognomies 
 
CHAUCER. 257 
 
 and lineaments of universal human life, beyond which 
 Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. 
 As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linnaeus num 
 bered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of 
 men." In his outside accessories, it is true, he sometimes 
 seems as minute as if he were illuminating a missal. 
 Nothing escapes his sure eye for the picturesque the cut 
 of the beard, the soil of armour on the buff jerkin, the rust 
 on the sword, the expression of the eye. But in this he 
 has an artistic purpose. It is here that he individualises, 
 and, while every touch harmonises with and seems to com 
 plete the moral features of the character, makes us feel 
 that we are among living men, and not the abstract images 
 of men. Crabbe adds particular to particular, scattering 
 rather than deepening the impression of reality, and mak 
 ing us feel as if every man were a species by himself; but 
 Chaucer, never forgetting the essential sameness of human 
 nature, makes it possible, and even probable, that his 
 motley characters should meet on a common footing, while 
 he gives to each the expression that belongs to him, the 
 result of special circumstance or training. Indeed, the 
 absence of any suggestion of caste cannot fail to strike any 
 reader familiar with the literature on which he is supposed 
 to have formed himself. No characters are at once so 
 broadly human and so definitely outlined as his. Belong 
 ing, some of them, to extinct types, they continue contem 
 porary and familiar for ever. So wide is the difference 
 between knowing a great many men and that knowledge of 
 human nature which comes of sympathetic insight and not 
 of observation alone. 
 
 It is this power of sympathy which makes Chaucer s 
 satire so kindly more so, one is tempted to say, than the 
 panegyric of Pope. Intellectual satire gets its force from 
 personal or moral antipathy, and measures offences by some 
 rigid conventional standard. Its mouth waters over a gall 
 ing word, and it loves to say Thou, pointing out its victim 
 to public scorn. Indiynatio facit versus, it boasts, though 
 they might as often be fathered on envy or hatred. But 
 
258 CHAUCER. 
 
 imaginative satire, warmed through and through with the 
 genial leaven of humour, smiles half sadly and murmurs 
 We. Chaucer either makes one knave betray another, 
 through a natural jealousy of competition, or else expose 
 himself with a naivete of good-humoured cynicism which 
 amuses rather than disgusts. In the former case the butt 
 has a kind of claim on our sympathy ; in the latter, it 
 seems nothing strange if the sunny atmosphere which floods 
 that road to Canterbury should tempt anybody to throw oiF 
 one disguise after another without suspicion. With per 
 fect tact, too, the Host is made the choragus in this diverse 
 company, and the coarse jollity of his temperament explains, 
 if it does not excuse, much that would otherwise seem out 
 of keeping. Surely nobody need have any scruples with 
 him. 
 
 Chaucer seems to me to have been one of the most purely 
 original of poets, as much so in respect of the world that is 
 about us as Dante in respect of that which is within us. 
 There had been nothing like him before, there has been 
 nothing since. He is original, not in the sense that he 
 thinks and says what nobody ever thought and said before, 
 and what nobody can ever think and say again, but because 
 he is always natural ; because, if not always absolutely 
 new, he is always delightfully fresh, because he sets before 
 us the world as it honestly appeared to Geoffrey Chaucer, 
 and not a world as it seemed proper to certain people 
 that it ought to appear. He found that the poetry 
 which had preceded him had been first the expression 
 of individual feeling, then of class feeling as the vehicle 
 of legend and history, and at last had well-nigh lost 
 itself in chasing the mirage of allegory. Literature 
 seemed to have passed through the natural stages which 
 at regular intervals bring it to decline. Even the lyrics 
 of the jongleurs were all run in one mould, and the Pas- 
 tourelles of Northern France had become as artificial as 
 the Pastorals of Pope. The Romances of chivalry had been 
 made over into prose, and the Melusine of his contemporary 
 Jehan d Arras is the forlorn hope of the modern novel. 
 
CHAUCER. 250 
 
 Arrived thus far in their decrepitude, the monks endeav 
 oured to give them a religious and moral turn by allegorising 
 them. Their process reminds one of something Ulloa tells 
 us of the fashion in which the Spaniards converted the 
 Mexicans : " Here we found an old man in a cavern so 
 extremely aged as it was wonderful, which could neither see 
 nor go because he was so lame and crooked. The Father, 
 Friar Raimund, said it were good (seeing he was so aged) to 
 make him a Christian ; whereupon we baptised him." The 
 monks found the Romances in the same stage of senility, 
 and gave them a saving sprinkle with the holy water of 
 allegory. Perhaps they were only trying to turn the enemy s 
 own weapons against himself, for it was the free-thinking 
 " Romance of the Rose " that more than anything else had 
 made allegory fashionable. Plutarch tells us that an allegory 
 is to say one thing where another is meant, and this might 
 have been needful for the personal security of Jean de 
 Meung, as afterwards for that of his successor, Rabelais. 
 But, except as a means of evading the fagot, the method has 
 few recommendations. It reverses the true office of poetry 
 by making the real unreal. It is imagination endeavouring 
 to recommend itself to the understanding by means of cuts. 
 If an author be in such deadly earnest, or if his imagination 
 be of such creative vigour as to project real figures when it 
 meant to cast only a shadow upon vapour ; if the true spirit 
 come, at once obsequious and terrible, when the conjuror has 
 drawn his circle and gone through with his incantations 
 merely to produce a proper frame of mind in his audience, 
 as was the case with Dante, there is no longer any question 
 of allegory as the word and thing are commonly understood. 
 But with all secondary poets, as with Spenser for example, 
 the allegory does not become of one substance with the 
 poetry, but is a kind of carven frame for it, whose figures 
 lose their meaning, as they cease to be contemporary. It 
 was not a style that could have much attraction for a nature 
 so sensitive to the actual, so observant of it, so interested by 
 it as that of Chaucer. He seems to have tried his hand at 
 all the forms in vogue, and to have arrived in his old age at 
 
266 CHAUCER. 
 
 the truth, essential to all really great poetry, that his own 
 instincts were his safest guides, that there is nothing deeper 
 in life than life itself, and that to conjure an allegorical 
 significance into it was to lose sight of its real meaning. 
 He of all men could not say one thing and mean another, 
 unless by way of humorous contrast. 
 
 In thus turning frankly and gaily to the actual world, 
 and drinking inspiration from sources open to all ; in turning 
 away from a colourless abstraction to the solid earth and to 
 emotions common to every pulse; in discovering that to 
 make the best of nature, and not to grope vaguely after 
 something better than nature, was the true office of Art ; 
 in insisting on a definite purpose, on veracity, cheerfulness, 
 and simplicity, Chaucer shows himself the true father and 
 founder of what is characteristically English literature. He 
 has a hatred of cant as hearty as Dr. Johnson s, though he 
 has a slyer way of showing it ; he has the placid common- 
 sense of Franklin, the sweet, grave humour of Addison, the 
 exquisite taste of Gray ; but the whole texture of his mind, 
 though its substance seem plain and grave, shows itself at 
 every turn iridescent with poetic feeling like shot silk. 
 Above all, he has an eye for character that seems to have 
 caught at once not only its mental and physical features, 
 but even its expression in variety of costume an eye, indeed, 
 second only, if it should be called second in some respects, 
 to that of Shakespeare, 
 
 I know of nothing that may be compared with the prologue 
 to the "Canterbury Tales," and with that to the story of the 
 " Chanon s Yeoman," before Chaucer. Characters and por 
 traits from real life had never been drawn with such 
 discrimination, or with such variety, never with such bold 
 precision of outline, and with such a lively sense of the 
 picturesque. His Parson is still unmatched, though Dryden 
 and Goldsmith have both tried their hands in emulation of 
 him. And the humour also in its suavity, its perpetual 
 presence and its shy unobtrusiveness, is something wholly 
 new in literature. For anything that deserves to be called 
 like it in English we must wait for Henry Fielding. 
 
CHAUCER. 261 
 
 Chaucer is the first great poet who has treated To-day as 
 if it were as good as Yesterday, the first who held up a 
 mirror to contemporary life in its infinite variety of high 
 and low, of humour and pathos. But he reflected life in its 
 large sense as the life of men, from the knight to the plough 
 man the life of every day as it is made up of that curious 
 compound of human nature with manners. The very form 
 of the " Canterbury Tales " was imaginative. The garden 
 of Boccaccio, the supper-party of Grazzini, and the voyage 
 of Giraldi make a good enough thread for their stories, but 
 exclude all save equals and friends, exclude consequently 
 human nature in its wider meaning. But by choosing a 
 pilgrimage, Chaucer puts us on a plane where all men are 
 equal, with souls to be saved, and with another world in 
 view that abolishes all distinctions. By this choice, and by 
 making the Host of the Tabard always the central figure, he 
 has happily united the two most familiar emblems of life 
 the short journey and the inn. We find more and more as 
 we study him that he rises quietly from the conventional to 
 the universal, and may fairly take his place with Homer in 
 virtue of the breadth of his humanity. 
 
 In spite of some external stains, which those who have 
 studied the influence of manners will easily account for 
 without imputing them to any moral depravity, we feel 
 that we can join the pure-minded Spenser in calling him 
 "most sacred, happy spirit." If character may be divined 
 from works, he was a good man, genial, sincere, hearty, 
 temperate of mind, more wise, perhaps, for this world than 
 the next, but thoroughly humane, and friendly with God 
 and men. I know not how to sum up what we feel about 
 him better than by saying (what would have pleased most 
 one who was indifferent to fame) that we love him more 
 even than we admire. We are sure that here was a true 
 brother-man so kindly that in his " House of Fame," after 
 naming the great poets, he throws in a pleasant word for 
 the oaten pipes 
 
 11 Of the little herd-grooms 
 That keepen beasts among the brooms." 
 
262 DRYDEN. 
 
 No better inscription can be written on the first page of his 
 works than that which he places over the gate in his 
 " Assembly of Fowls," and which contrasts so sweetly with 
 the stern lines of Dante from which they were imitated : 
 
 " Through me men go into the blissful place 
 Of the heart s heal and deadly woundes" cure ; 
 Through me men go unto the well of Grace, 
 Where green and lusty May doth ever endure, 
 This is the way to all good aventure ; 
 Be glad, thou Reader, and thy sorrow offcast, 
 All open am I, pass in, and speed thee fast ! " 
 
 DRYDEN* 
 
 BEXVENUTO CELLINI tells us that when, in his boyhood, he 
 saw a salamander come out of the fire, his grandfather 
 forthwith gave him a sound beating, that he might the 
 better remember so unique a prodigy. Though perhaps in 
 this case the rod had another application than the auto- 
 biographer chooses to disclose, and was intended to fix in the 
 pupil s mind a lesson of veracity rather than of science, the 
 testimony to its mnemonic virtue remains. Nay, so 
 universally was it once believed that the senses, and 
 through them the faculties of observation and retention, 
 were quickened by an irritation of the cuticle, that in 
 France it was customary to whip the children annually at 
 the boundaries of the parish, lest the true place of them 
 
 * The Dramatick Works of JOIIN DRYDEN, Esq. In six volumes. 
 London : Printed for Jacob Tonson, in the Strand. MDCCXXXV. 
 18mo. 
 
 The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of JOHN DRYDEX, now 
 first collected. With Notes and Illustrations. An account of the 
 Life and Writings of the Author, grounded on Original and 
 Authentick Documents ; and a Collection of his Letters, the greatest 
 Part of which has never before been published. By EDMUND 
 MALONE, Esq. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, in the Strand. 
 4 vols. 8vo. 
 
 The Poetical Works of JOHN DRYDEN. (Edited by MITFORD.) 
 London : W. Pickering. 1832. 5 vols. 18mo. 
 
DRYDEN. 263 
 
 might ever be lost through neglect of so inexpensive a mor 
 dant for the memory. From this practice the older school of 
 critics would seem to have taken a hint for keeping fixed the 
 limits of good taste, and what was somewhat vaguely called 
 classical English. To mark these limits in poetry, they set 
 up as Hermse the images they had made to them of Dryden, 
 of Pope, and later of Goldsmith. Here they solemnly 
 castigated every new aspirant in verse, who in turn 
 performed the same function for the next generation, thus 
 helping to keep always sacred and immovable the ne plus 
 ultra alike of inspiration and the vocabulary. Though no 
 two natures were ever much more unlike than those of 
 Dryden and Pope, and again of Pope and Goldsmith, and 
 no two styles, except in such externals as could be easily 
 caught and copied, yet it was the fashion, down even to the 
 last generation, to advise young writers to form themselves, 
 as it was called, on these excellent models. Wordsworth 
 himself began in this school ; and though there were 
 glimpses, here and there, of a direct study of nature, yet 
 most of the epithets in his earlier pieces were of the 
 traditional kind so fatal to poetry during great part of the 
 last century ; and he indulged in that alphabetic personifica 
 tion which enlivens all such words as Hunger, Solitude, 
 Freedom, by the easy magic of an initial capital. 
 
 11 Where the green apple shrivels on the spray, 
 And pines the unripened pear in summer s kindliest ray, 
 Even here Content has fixed her smiling reign 
 With Independence, child of high Disdain. 
 Exulting mid the winter of the skies, 
 Shy as the jealous chamois, Freedom flies, 
 And often grasps her sword, and often eyes." 
 
 Here we have every characteristic of the artificial method, 
 even to the triplet, which Swift hated so heartily as "a 
 vicious way of rhyming wherewith Mr. Dryden abounded, 
 imitated by all the bad versifiers of Charles the Second s 
 reign." Wordsworth became, indeed, very early the leader of 
 reform ; but, like Wesley, he endeavoured a reform within 
 the Establishment, Purifying the substance, he retained 
 
264 DRYDEN. 
 
 the outward forms with a feeling rather than conviction 
 that, in poetry, substance and form are but manifestations 
 of the same inward life, the one fused into the other in the 
 vivid heat of their common expression. Wordsworth could 
 never wholly shake off the influence of the century into 
 which he was born. He began by proposing a reform of 
 the ritual, but it went no further than an attempt to get 
 rid of the words of Latin original where the meaning was 
 as well or better given in derivatives of the Saxon. He 
 would have stricken out the " assemble " and left the " meet 
 together." Like Wesley, he might be compelled by neces 
 sity to a breach of the canon ; but, like him, he was never 
 a willing schismatic, andTris singing robes were the full and 
 flowing canonicals of the church by law established. Inspi 
 ration makes short work with the usage of the best authors 
 and ready-made elegances of diction; but where Words 
 worth is not possessed by his demon, as Moliere said of 
 Corneille, he equals Thomson in verbiage, out-Miltons Mil 
 ton in artifice of style, and Latinises his diction beyond 
 Dryden. The fact was, that he took up his early opinions 
 on instinct, and insensibly modified them as he studied the 
 masters of what may be called the Middle Period of Eng 
 lish verse.* As a young man, he disparaged Yirgil (" We 
 talked. a great deal of nonsense in those days," he said when 
 taken to task for it later in life) ; at fifty-nine he translated 
 three books of the ^neid, in emulation of Dryden, though 
 falling far short of him in everything but closeness, as he 
 seems, after a few years, to have been convinced. Keats 
 was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the true founder of 
 the modern school, which admit no cis-Elizabethan authority 
 save Milton, whose own English was formed upon those 
 earlier models. Keats denounced the authors of that 
 style which came in toward the close of the seventeenth 
 century, and reigned absolute through the whole of the 
 eighteenth, as 
 
 * His "Character of a Happy Warrior" (1806), one of his noblest 
 poems, has a dash of Dryden in it, still more his " Epistle to Sir 
 George Beaumont" (1811). 
 
DRYDEN. 265 
 
 " A schism, 
 
 Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, 
 . . who went about 
 Holding a poor decrepit standard out, 
 Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in largo 
 The name of one Boileau 1 " 
 
 But Keats had never then* studied the writers of whom he 
 speaks so contemptuously, though he might have profited by 
 so doing. Boileau would at least have taught him that 
 flimsy would have been an apter epithet for the standard 
 than for the mottoes upon it. Dryden was the author of 
 that schism against which Keats so vehemently asserts the 
 claim of the orthodox teaching it had displaced. He was 
 far more just to Boileau, of whom Keats had probably 
 never read a word. " If I would only cross the seas," he 
 says, " I might find in France a living Horace and a 
 Juvenal in the person of the admirable Boileau, whose 
 numbers are excellent, whose expressions are noble, whose 
 thoughts are just, whose language is pure, whose satire is 
 pointed, and whose sense is just. What he borrows from 
 the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as 
 good and almost as universally valuable." f 
 
 Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a hundred and 
 seventy years ; in the second class of English poets perhaps 
 no one stands, on the whole, so high as he ; during his life 
 time, in spite of jealousy, detraction, unpopular politics, 
 and a suspicious change of faith, his pre-eminence was con 
 ceded ; he was the earliest complete type of the purely 
 literary man, in the modern sense; there is a singular 
 unanimity in allowing him a certain claim to greatness which 
 would be denied to men as famous and more read, to Pope 
 or Swift, for example ; he is supposed, in some way or 
 other, to have reformed English poetry. It is now about 
 half a century since the only uniform edition of his works 
 was edited by Scott. No library is complete without him, 
 
 * He studied Dryden s versification before writing his " Lamia," 
 t On the Origin and Progress of Satire. See Johnson s counter 
 opinion in his life of Dryden, 
 
266 DRYDEN. 
 
 no name is more familiar than his, and yet it may be 
 suspected that few writers are more thoroughly buried in 
 that great cemetery of the "British Poets." If contem 
 porary reputation be often deceitful, posthumous fame may 
 be generally trusted, for it is a verdict made up of the 
 suffrages of the select men in succeeding generations. This 
 verdict has been as good as unanimous in favour of Dryden. 
 It is, perhaps, worth while to take a fresh observation of 
 him, to consider him neither as warning nor example, but 
 to endeavour to make out what it is that has given so lofty 
 and firm a position to one of the most unequal, inconsistent, 
 and faulty writers that ever lived. He is a curious 
 example of what we often remark of the living, but rarely 
 of the dead, that they get credit for what they might be 
 quite as much as for what they are, and posterity has 
 applied to him one of his own rules of criticism, judging 
 him by the best rather than the average of his achievement, 
 a thing posterity is seldom wont to do. On the losing side 
 in politics, it is true of his polemical writings as of Burke s, 
 whom in many respects he resembles, and especially in 
 that supreme quality of a reasoner, that his mind gathers 
 not only heat, but clearness and expansion by its own 
 motion, that they have won his battle for him in the 
 judgment of after times. 
 
 To us, looking back at him, he gradually becomes a 
 singularly interesting and even picturesque figure. He is 
 in more senses than one, in language, in turn of thought, in 
 style of mind, in the direction of his activity, the first of 
 the moderns. He is the first literary man who was also a 
 man of the world, as we understand the term. He 
 succeeded Ben Jonson as the acknowledged dictator of 
 wit and criticism, as Dr. Johnson, after nearly the same 
 interval, succeeded him. All ages are, in some sense, ages 
 of transition ; but there are times when the transition is 
 more marked, more rapid ; and it is, perhaps, an ill fortune 
 for a man of letters to arrive at maturity during such a 
 period, still more to represent in himself the change that is 
 going on ? and to be an efficient cause in bringing it about. 
 
DRYDEN. 267 
 
 Unless, like Goethe, he is of a singularly uncontempo- 
 raneous nature, capable of being tutta in se romita, and of 
 running parallel with his time rather than be sucked into 
 its current, he will be thwarted into that harmonious 
 development of native force which has so much to do with 
 its steady and successful application. Dry den suffered, no 
 doubt, in this way. Though in creed he seems to have 
 drifted backward in an eddy of the general current ; yet of 
 the intellectual movement of the time, so far certainly as 
 literature shared in it, he could say, with ^neas, not only 
 that he saw, but that himself was a great part of it. That 
 movement was, on the whole, a downward one, from faith to 
 scepticism, from enthusiasm to cynicism, from the imagination 
 to the understanding. It was in a direction altogether away 
 from those springs of imagination and faith at which they of 
 the last age had slaked the thirst or renewed the vigour of 
 their souls. Dryden himself recognised that indefinable and 
 gregarious influence which we call nowadays the Spirit of 
 the Age, when he said that " every Age has a kind of uni 
 versal Genius."* He had also a just notion of that in which 
 he lived ; for he remarks, incidentally, that " all knowing 
 ages are naturally sceptic and not at all bigoted, which, if I 
 am not much deceived, is the proper character of our own."t 
 It may be conceived that he was even painfully half-aware 
 of having fallen upon a time incapable, not merely of a 
 great poet, but perhaps of any poet at all; for nothing 
 is so sensitive to the chill of a sceptical atmosphere as that 
 enthusiasm, which, if it be not genius, is at least the 
 beautiful illusion that saves it from the baffling quibbles 
 of self-consciousness. Thrice unhappy he who, born to see 
 things as they might be, is schooled by circumstances to see 
 them as people say they are, to read God in a prose 
 translation. Such was Dryden s lot, and such, for a good 
 part of his days, it was by his own choice. He who was of 
 a stature to snatch the torch of life that flashes from lifted 
 hand to hand along the generations, over the heads of 
 inferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy to the stews. 
 * Essay on Dramatick Poesy. t Life of Lucian. 
 
268 DRYDEN. 
 
 As a writer for the stage, he deliberately adopted and 
 repeatedly reaffirmed the maxim that 
 
 " He who lives to please, must please to live." 
 
 Without earnest convictions, no great or sound literature 
 is conceivable. But if Dryden mostly wanted that inspira 
 tion which comes of belief in and devotion to something 
 nobler and more abiding than the present moment and its 
 petulant need, he had, at least, the next best thing to that, 
 a thorough faith in himself. He was, moreover, a man 
 of singularly open soul, and of a temper self-confident 
 enough to be candid even with himself. His mind was 
 growing to the last, his judgment widening and deepening, 
 his artistic sense refining itself more and more. He con 
 fessed his errors, and was not ashamed to retrace his steps 
 in search of that better knowledge which the omniscience 
 of superficial study had disparaged. Surely an intellect 
 that is still pliable at seventy is a phenomenon as interest 
 ing as it is rare. But at whatever period of his life we 
 look at Dryden, and whatever, for the moment, may have 
 been his poetic creed, there was something in the nature of 
 the man that would not be wholly subdued to what it 
 worked in. There are continual glimpses of something in 
 him greater than he, hints of possibilities finer than any 
 thing he has done. You feel that the whole of him was 
 better than any random specimens, though of his best, seem 
 to prove. Incessu patet, he has by times the large stride of 
 the elder race, though it sinks too often into the slouch of 
 a man who has seen better days. His grand air may, in 
 part, spring from a habit of easy superiority to his com 
 petitors; but must also, in part, be ascribed to an innate 
 dignity of character. That this pre-eminence should have 
 been so generally admitted, during his life, can only be ex 
 plained by a bottom of good sense, kindliness, and sound 
 judgment, whose solid worth could afford that many a 
 flurry of vanity, petulance, and even error should flit 
 across the surface and be forgotten. Whatever else 
 Dryden may have been, the last and abiding impression of 
 
DRYDEN. 269 
 
 him is, that he was thoroughly manly ; and while it may 
 be disputed whether he was a great poet, it may be said of 
 him, as Wordsworth said of Burke, that "he was by far 
 the greatest man of his age, not only abounding in know 
 ledge himself, but feeding, in various directions, his most 
 able contemporaries."* 
 
 Dryden was born in 1631. He was accordingly six years 
 old when Jonson died, was neary a quarter of a century 
 younger than Milton, and may have personally known 
 Bishop Hall, the first English satirist, who was living till 
 1656. On the other side, he was older than Swift by 
 thirty-six, than Addison by forty-one, and than Pope by 
 fifty-seven years. Dennis says that " Dryden, for the last 
 ten years of his life, was much acquainted with Addison, 
 and drank with him more than he ever used to do, probably 
 so far as to hasten his end," being commonly " an extreme 
 sober man." Pope tells us that, in his twelfth year, he 
 "saw Dryden," perhaps at Will s, perhaps in the street, as 
 Scott did Burns. Dryden himself visited Milton now and 
 then, and was intimate with Davenant, who could tell him 
 of Fletcher and Jonson from personal recollection. Thus 
 he stands between the age before and that which followed 
 him, giving a hand to each. His father was a country 
 clergyman, of Puritan leanings, a younger son of an ancient 
 county family. The Puritanism is thought to have come 
 in with the poet s great-grandfather, who made in his will 
 the somewhat singular statement that he was " assured by 
 the Holy Ghost that he was elect of God." It would 
 appear from this that Dryden s self-confidence was an 
 inheritance. The solid quality of his mind showed itself 
 early. He himself tells us that he had read Polybius " in 
 English, with the pleasure of a boy, before he was ten years 
 of age, and yet even then had some dark notions of the 
 prudence with which he conducted his design"^ The con 
 cluding words are very characteristic, even if Dryden, as 
 
 * " The great man must have that intellect which puts in motion 
 the intellect of others." LANDOR, Itn. Con., Diogenes and Plato, 
 f Character of Polybius (1692). 
 
270 DRYDEN. 
 
 men commonly do, interpreted his boyish turn of mind by 
 later self-knowledge. We thus get a glimpse of him 
 browsing for, like Johnson, Burke, and the full as distin 
 guished from the learned men, he was always a random 
 reader* in his father s library, and painfully culling here 
 and there a spray of his own proper nutriment from among 
 the stubs and thorns of Puritan divinity. After such 
 schooling as could be had in the country, he was sent up to 
 Westminster School, then under the headship of the 
 celebrated Dr. Busby. Here he made his first essays in 
 verse, translating, among other school exercises of the same 
 kind, the third satire of Persius. In 1650 he was entered 
 at Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained there for 
 seven years. The only record of his college life is a dis 
 cipline imposed, in 1652, for "disobedience to the Vice- 
 Master, and contumacy in taking his punishment, inflicted 
 by him." Whether this punishment was corporeal, as 
 Johnson insinuates in the similar case of Milton, we are 
 ignorant. He certainly retained no very fond recollection 
 of his Alma Mater, for in his " Prologue to the University 
 of Oxford " he says : 
 
 " Oxford to him a dearer name shall be 
 Than his own mother university ; 
 Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage, 
 He chooses Athens in his riper age." 
 
 By the death of his father, in 1654, he came into possession 
 of a small estate of sixty pounds a-year, from which, how 
 ever, a third must be deducted, for his mother s dower, till 
 1676. After leaving Cambridge he became secretary to his 
 near relative, Sir Gilbert Pickering, at that time Cromwell s 
 chamberlain, and a member of his Upper House. In 1670 
 he succeeded Davenant as Poet Laureate,! and Ho well as 
 Historiographer, with a yearly salary of two hundred pounds. 
 
 * " For my own part, who must confess it to my shame that I never 
 read anything but for pleasure." Life of Plutarch (1683). _ 
 
 t Gray says petulantly enough that " Dryden was as disgraceful to 
 the office, from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been 
 from his verses." GRAY to MASON, 19th December, 1757. 
 
DRYDEN. 271 
 
 This place ho lost at the Revolution, and had the mortifica 
 tion to see his old enemy and butt, Shadwell, promoted to it, 
 as the best poet the Whig party could muster. If William 
 \vas obliged to read the verses of his official minstrel, Dryden 
 was more than avenged. From 1688 to his death, twelve 
 years later, he earned his bread manfully by his pen, without 
 any mean complaining, and with no allusion to his fallen 
 fortunes that is not dignified and touching. These latter 
 years, during which he was his own man again, were probably 
 the happiest of his life. In 1664 or 1665 he married Lady 
 Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. 
 About a hundred pounds a-year were thus added to his 
 income. The marriage is said not to have been a happy 
 one, and perhaps it was not, for his wife was apparently a 
 weak-minded woman; but the inference from the internal 
 evidence of Dryden s plays, as of Shakespeare s, is very 
 untrustworthy, ridicule of marriage having always been a 
 common stock in trade of the comic writers. 
 
 The earliest of his verses that have come down to us were 
 written upon the death of Lord Hastings, and are as bad as 
 they can be, a kind of parody on the worst of Donne. 
 They have every fault of his manner, without a hint of the 
 subtile and often profound thought that more than redeems 
 it. As the Doctor himself would have said, here is Donne 
 outdone. The young nobleman died of the small-pox, and 
 Dryden exclaims pathetically, 
 
 " Was there no milder way than the small-pox, 
 The very filthiness of Pandora s box ? " 
 
 He compares the pustules to " rosebuds stuck i the lily 
 skin about," and says that 
 
 11 Each little pimple had a tear in it 
 To wail the fault its rising did commit." 
 
 But he has not done his worst yet, by a great deal. What 
 follows is even finer : 
 
 " No comet need foretell his change drew on. 
 Whose corpse might seem a constellation. 
 
272 DRYDEN. 
 
 O, had lie died of old, how great a strife 
 
 Had been who from his death should draw their life ! 
 
 Who should, by one rich draught, become whate er 
 
 Seneca, Cato, Numa, Csesar, were, 
 
 Learned, virtuous, pious, great, and have by this 
 
 An universal metempsychosis ! 
 
 Must all these aged sires in one funeral 
 
 Expire ? all die in one so young, so small ? " 
 
 It is said that one of Allston s early pictures was brought 
 to him, after he had long forgotten it, and his opinion asked 
 as to the wisdom of the young artist s persevering in the 
 career he had chosen. Allston advised his quitting it forth 
 with as hopeless. Could the same experiment have been 
 tried with these verses upon Dryden, can any one doubt 
 that his counsel would have been the same ? It should be 
 remembered, however, that he was barely turned eighteen 
 when they were written, and the tendency of his style is 
 noticeable in so early an abandonment of the participial ed 
 in learned and aged. In the next year he appears again in 
 some commendatory verses prefixed to the sacred epigrams 
 of his friend, John Hoddesdon. In these he speaks of the 
 author as a 
 
 "Young eaglet, who, thy nest thus soon forsook, 
 So lofty and divine a course hast took 
 As all admire, before the down begin 
 To peep, as yet, upon thy smoother chin. " 
 
 Here is almost every fault which Dryden s later nicety 
 would have condemned. But perhaps there is no schooling 
 so good for an author as his own youthful indiscretions. 
 After this effort Dryden seems to have lain fallow for ten 
 years, and then he at length reappears in thirty-seven 
 " heroic stanzas " on the death of Cromwell. The versifica 
 tion is smoother, but the conceits are there again, though in 
 a milder form. The verse is modelled after " Gondibert." 
 A single image from nature (he was almost always happy in 
 these) gives some hint of the maturer Dryden : 
 
 " And wars, like mists that rise against the sun, 
 Made him but greater seem, not greater grow." 
 
DRYDEN. 273 
 
 Two other verses, 
 
 "And the isle, wheii her protecting genius went, 
 Upon his obsequies loud sighs conferred," 
 
 are interesting, because they show that he had been study 
 ing the early poems of Milton. He has contrived to bury 
 under a rubbish of verbiage one of the most purely 
 imaginative passages ever written by the great Puritan poet. 
 
 " From haunted spring and dale, 
 
 Edged with poplar pale, 
 The parting genius is with sighing sent." 
 
 This is the more curious because, twenty-four years after 
 wards, he says, in defending rhyme : " Whatever causes 
 he [Milton] alleges for the abolishment of rhyme, his own 
 particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his 
 talent ; he had neither the ease of doing it nor the graces 
 of it : which is manifest in his Juvenilia, , , . where 
 his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes 
 hardly from him, at the age when the soul is most pliant, 
 and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer, 
 though not a poet. 5 * It was this, no doubt, that 
 heartened Dr. Johnson to say of " Lycidas " that " the 
 diction was harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers 
 unpleasing." It is Dryden s excuse that his characteristic 
 excellence is to argue persuasively and powerfully, whether 
 in verse or prose, and that he was amply endowed with the 
 most needful quality of an advocate, to be always 
 strongly and wholly of his present way of thinking, what 
 ever it might be. Next we have, in 1660, " Astrsea 
 Redux" on the "happy restoration" of Charles II. In 
 this also we can forebode little of the full-grown Dryden 
 but his defects. We see his tendency to exaggeration, and 
 to confound physical with metaphysical, as where he says 
 of the ships that brought home the royal brothers, that 
 
 " The joyful London meets 
 The princely York, himself alone a freight, 
 The Swiftsure groans beneath great Gloster s weight 
 
 * Essay on the Origin and Progress of Satire. 
 
 146 
 
274 DRYDEN. 
 
 and speaks of the 
 
 11 Repeated prayer 
 Which stormed the skies and ravished Charles from thence." 
 
 There is also a certain everydayness, not to say vulgarity, 
 of phrase, which Dryden never wholly refined away, and 
 which continually tempts us to sum up at once against him 
 as the greatest poet that ever was or could be made wholly 
 out of prose. 
 
 " Heaven would no bargain for its blessings drive " 
 
 is an example. On the other hand, there are a few verses 
 almost worthy of his best days, as these : 
 
 " Some lazy ages lost in sleep and ease, 
 No action leave to busy chronicles ; 
 Such whose supine felicity but makes 
 In story chasms, in epochas mistakes, 
 O er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down, 
 Till with his silent sickle they are mown." 
 
 These are all the more noteworthy, that Dryden, unless in 
 argument, is seldom equal for six lines together. In the 
 poem to Lord Clarendon (1662) there are four verses that 
 have something of the "energy divine" for which Pope 
 praised his master. 
 
 "Let envy, then, those crimes within you see 
 From which the happy never must be free ; 
 Envy that does with misery reside, 
 The joy and the revenge of ruined pride." 
 
 In his " Aurengzebe" (1675) there is a passage, of which, 
 as it is a good example of Dryden, I shall quote the whole, 
 though my purpose aims mainly at the latter verses : 
 
 " When I consider life, t is all a cheat ; 
 Yet, fooled with Hope, men favour the deceit, 
 Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay ; 
 To-morrow s falser than the former day, 
 Lies worse, and, while it says we shall be blest 
 With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. 
 
DRYDEN. 275 
 
 Strange cozenage ! none would live past years again, 
 Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain, 
 And from the dregs of life think to receive 
 What the first sprightly running could not give. 
 I m tired of waiting for this chymic gold 
 Which fools us young and beggars us when old." 
 
 The "first sprightly running " of Dryden a vintage was, 
 it must be confessed, a little muddy, if not beery ; but if 
 his own soil did not produce grapes of the choicest flavour, 
 he knew where they were to be had ; and his product, like 
 sound wine, grew better the longer it stood upon the lees. 
 He tells us, evidently thinking of himself, that in a poet, 
 " from fifty to threescore, the balance generally holds, even 
 in our colder climates, for he loses not much in fancy ; and 
 judgment, which is the effect of observation, still increases. 
 His succeeding years afford him little more than the 
 stubble of his own harvest, yet, if his constitution be 
 healthful, his mind may still retain a decent vigour, and the 
 gleanings of that of Ephraim, in comparison with others, 
 will surpass the vintage of Abiezer. 5; * Since Chaucer, 
 none of our poets has had a constitution more healthful, 
 and it was his old age that yielded the best of him, In 
 him the understanding was, perhaps, in overplus for his 
 entire good fortune as a poet, and that is a faculty among 
 the earliest to mature. We have seen him, at only ten 
 years, divining the power of reason in Polybius.f The same 
 turn of mind led him later to imitate the French school of 
 tragedy, and to admire in Ben Jonson the most correct of 
 English poets. It was his imagination that needed quick 
 ening, and it is very curious to trace through his different 
 prefaces the gradual opening of his eyes to the causes of 
 the solitary pre-eminence of Shakespeare. At first he is 
 sensible of an attraction towards him which he cannot 
 explain, and for which he apologises, as if it were wrong. 
 But he feels himself drawn more and more strongly, till at 
 
 * Dedication of the Georgics. 
 
 t Dryden s penetration is always remarkable. His general judg 
 ment of Polybius coincides remarkably with that of Mommsen. 
 (Rom. Gesch. II. 448, seq.) 
 
276 DRYDEN. 
 
 last he ceases to resist altogether, and is forced to acknow 
 ledge that there is something in this one man that is not 
 and never was anywhere else, something not to be reasoned 
 about, ineffable, divine; if contrary to the rules, so much 
 the worse for them. It may be conjectured that Dryden s 
 Puritan associations may have stood in the way of his 
 more properly poetic culture, and that his early knowledge 
 of Shakespeare was slight. He tells us that Davenant, 
 whom he could not have known before he himself was 
 twenty-seven, first taught him to admire the great poet. 
 But even after his imagination had become conscious of its 
 prerogative, and his expression had been ennobled by fre 
 quenting this higher society, we find him continually drop 
 ping back into that sermo pedestris which seems, on the 
 whole, to have been his more natural element. We always 
 feel his epoch in him, that he was the lock which let our 
 language down from its point of highest poetry to its level 
 of easiest and most gently flowing prose. His enthusiasm 
 needs the contagion of other minds to arouse it ; but his 
 strong sense, his command of the happy word, his wit, 
 which is distinguished by a certain breadth and, as it were, 
 power of generalisation, as Pope s by keenness of edge and 
 point, were his, whether he would or no. Accordingly, his 
 poetry is often best and his verse more flowing where (as in 
 parts of his version of the twenty-ninth ode of the third 
 book of Horace) he is amplifying the suggestions of another 
 mind.* Viewed from one side, he justifies Milton s re 
 mark of him, that " he was a good rhymist, but no poet." 
 To look at all sides, and to distrust the verdict of a single 
 mood, is, no doubt, the duty of a critic. But how if a cer 
 tain side be so often presented as to thrust forward in the 
 memory and disturb it in the effort to recall that total 
 impression (for the office of a critic is not, though often so 
 misunderstood, to say guilt 1 }/ or not guilty of some particular 
 
 * "I have taken some pains to make it my masterpiece in English." 
 Preface to Second Miscellany. Fox said that it " was better than the 
 original." J. C. Scaliger said of Erasmus "Ex alieno ingenio poeta, 
 ex suo versificator." 
 
DRYDEN. 277 
 
 fact) which is the only safe ground of judgment ? It is 
 the weight of the whole man, not of one or the other limb 
 of him, that we want. Expende Hannibalem. Very good, 
 but not in a scale capacious only of a single quality at a 
 time, for it is their union, and not their addition, that 
 assures the value of each separately. It was not this or 
 that which gave him his weight in council, his swiftness of 
 decision in battle that outran the forethought of other men, 
 it was Hannibal. But this prosaic element in Dryden 
 will force itself upon me. As I read him, I cannot help 
 thinking of an ostrich, to be classed with flying things, and 
 capable, what with leap and flap together, of leaving the 
 earth for a longer or shorter space, but loving the open 
 plain, where wing and foot help each other to something 
 that is both flight and run at once. What with his haste 
 and a certain dash, which, according to our mood, we may 
 call florid or splendid, he seems to stand among poets where 
 Rubens does among painters, greater, perhaps, as a colourist 
 than an artist, yet great here also, if we compare him with 
 any but the first. 
 
 We have arrived at Dryden s thirty-second year, and 
 thus far have found little in him to warrant an augury that 
 he was ever to be one of the great names in English litera 
 ture, the most perfect type, that is, of his class, and that 
 class a high one, though not the highest. If Joseph de 
 Maistre s axiom, Qui ria pas vaincu a trente ans, ne vaincra 
 jamais, were true, there would be little hope of him, for he 
 has won no battle yet. But there is something solid and 
 doughty in the man, that can rise from defeat, the stuff of 
 which victories are made in due time, when we are able to 
 choose our position better, and the sun is at our back. 
 Hitherto his performances have been mainly of the obligate 
 sort, at which few men of original force are good, least of 
 all Dryden, who had always something of stiffness in his 
 strength. Waller had praised the living Cromwell in per 
 haps the manliest verses he ever wrote, not very manly, to 
 be sure, but really elegant, and, on the whole, better than 
 those in which Dryden squeezed out melodious tears. 
 
278 DRYDEN. 
 
 Waller, who had also made himself conspicuous as a 
 volunteer Antony to the country squire turned Caesar, 
 
 (" With ermine clad and purple, let him hold 
 A royal sceptre made of Spanish gold,") 
 
 was more servile than Dryden in hailing t 1 .e return of ex 
 officio Majesty. He bewails to Charles, in muffling heroics, 
 
 " Our sorrow and our < , ime 
 To have accepted life so long a time, 
 With out you here." 
 
 A weak man, put to the test by rough and angry times, 
 as Waller was, may be pitied, but meanness is nothing but 
 contemptible under any circumstances. If it be true that 
 "every conqueror creates a Muse," Cromwell was un 
 fortunate. Even Milton s sonnet, though dignified, is 
 reserved if not distrustful. Marvell s "Horatian Ode," the 
 most truly classic in our language, is worthy of its theme. 
 The same poet s Elegy, in parts noble, and everywhere 
 humanly tender, is worth more than all Carlyle s biography 
 as a witness to the gentler qualities of the hero, and of the 
 deep affection that stalwart nature could inspire in hearts 
 of truly masculine temper. As it is little known, a few 
 verses of it may be quoted to show the difference between 
 grief that thinks of its object and grief that thinks of its 
 rhymes : 
 
 " Yalour, religion, friendship, prudence died 
 At once with him, and all that s good beside, 
 And we, death s refuse, nature s dregs, confined 
 To loathsome life, alas ! are left behind. 
 Where we (so once we used) shall now no more, 
 To fetch day, press about his chamber-door, 
 No more shall hear that powerful language charm, 
 Whose force oft spared the labour of his arm, 
 No more shall follow where he spent the days 
 In war or counsel, or in prayer and praise. 
 
 I saw him dead ; a leaden slumber lies, 
 And mortal sleep, over those wakeful eyes ; 
 
DRYDEN. 279 
 
 Those gentle rays under the lids were fled, 
 
 Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed ; 
 
 That port, which so majestic was and>3trong, 
 
 Loose and deprived of vigour, stretched along, 
 
 All withered, all discoloured, pale, and wan, 
 
 How much another thing ! no more That Man ! 
 
 human glory ! vain ! death ! wings ! 
 
 worthless world ! transitory things ! 
 
 Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed 
 
 That still, though dead, greater than Death he laid, 
 
 And, in his altered face, you something feign 
 
 That threatens Death he yet will live again." 
 
 Such verses might not satisfy Lindley Murray, but they 
 are of that higher mood which satisfies the heart. These 
 couplets, too, have an energy worthy of Milton s friend : 
 
 " When up the armed mountains of Duuljar 
 He marched, and through deep Severn, ending war." 
 
 " Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse 
 Shall the English soldier, ere he charge, rehearse." 
 
 On the whole, one is glad that Dryden s panegyric on the 
 Protector was so poor. It was purely official verse-making. 
 Had there been any feeling in it, there had been baseness 
 in his address to Charles. As it is, we may fairly assume 
 that he was so far sincere in both cases as to be thankful 
 for a chance to exercise himself in rhyme, without much 
 caring whether upon a funeral or a restoration. He might 
 naturally enough expect that poetry would have a better 
 chance under Charles than under Cromwell, or any successor 
 with Commonwealth principles. Cromwell had more serious 
 matters to think about than verses, while Charles might 
 at least care as much about them as it was in his base 
 good-nature to care about anything but loose women and 
 spaniels. Dryden s sound sense, afterwards so conspicuous, 
 shows itself even in these pieces, when we can get at it 
 through the tangled thicket of tropical phrase. But the 
 authentic and unmistakable Dry den first manifests himself 
 in some verses addressed to his friend, Dr. Oharlton, in 1663. 
 We have first his common sense, which has almost the point 
 of wit, yet with a tang of prose : 
 
28o DRYDEN. 
 
 "The longest tyranny that ever swayed 
 Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed 
 Their freeborn reason to the Stagyrite, 
 And made his torch their universal light. 
 So truth, while only one supplied the state, 
 Grew scarce ahd dear and yet sophisticate. 
 Still it was bought, like cmp ric wares or charms , 
 Hard words sealed up with Aristotle s arms." 
 
 Then we have his graceful sweetness of fancy, where he 
 speaks of the inhabitants of the New World : 
 
 " Guiltless men who danced away their time, 
 Fresh as their groves and happy as their clime." 
 
 And, finally, there is a hint of imagination where " mighty 
 visions of the Danish race " watch round Charles sheltered 
 in Stonehenge after the battle of Worcester. These passages 
 might have been written by the Dryden whom we learn to 
 know fifteen years later. They have the advantage that he 
 wrote them to please himself. His contemporary, Dr. 
 Heylin, said of French cooks, that " their trade was not to 
 feed the belly, but the palate." Dryden was a great while 
 in learning this secret, as available in good writing as in 
 cookery. He strove after it, but his thorougly English 
 nature, to the last, would too easily content itself with 
 serving up the honest beef of his thought, without regard to 
 daintiness of flavour in the dressing of it.* Of the best 
 English poetry, it might be said that it is understanding 
 aerated by imagination. In Dryden the solid part too often 
 refused to mix kindly with the leaven, either remaining 
 lumpish or rising to a hasty puffiness. Grace and lightness 
 were with him much more a laborious achievement than a 
 
 * In one of the last letters he ever wrote, thanking his cousin, Mrs. 
 Steward, for a gift of marrow-puddings, he says : "A chine of honest 
 bacon would please my appetite more than all the marrow-puddings ; 
 for I like them better plain, having a very vulgar stomach." So of 
 Cowley he says : " There was plenty enough, but ill sorted, whole pyra 
 mids of sweetmeats for boys and women, but little of solid meat for 
 men." The physical is a truer antitype of the spiritual man than we 
 are willing to admit, and the brain is often forced to acknowledge 
 the inconvenient country-cousinship of the stomach. 
 
DRYDEN. 281 
 
 natural gift, and it is all the more remarkable that he should 
 so often have attained to what seems such an easy perfection 
 in both. Always a hasty writer,* he was long in forming 
 his style, and to the last was apt to snatch the readiest word 
 rather than wait for the fittest. He was not wholly and 
 unconsciously poet, but a thinker who sometimes lost him 
 self on enchanted ground and was transfigured by its touch. 
 This preponderance in him of the reasoning over the intuitive 
 faculties, the one always there, the other flashing in when 
 you least expect it, accounts for that inequality and even 
 incongruousness in his writing which makes one revise 
 his judgment at every tenth page. In his prose you come 
 upon passages that persuade you he is a poet, in spite of his 
 verses so often turning state s evidence against him as to 
 convince you he is none. He is a prose-writer, with a kind 
 of .^Eolian attachment. For example, take this bit of prose 
 from the dedication of his version of Virgil s Pastorals, 
 1694; "He found the strength of his genius betimes, and 
 was even in his youth preluding to his Georgicks and his 
 -<3Eneis. He could not forbear to try his wings, though his 
 pinions were not hardened to maintain a long, laborious 
 flight ; yet sometimes they bore him to a pitch as lofty as 
 ever he was able to reach afterwards. But when he was 
 admonished by his subject to descend, he came down 
 gently circling in the air and singing to the ground, like a 
 lark melodious in her mounting and continuing her song 
 till she alights, still preparing for a higher flight at her 
 next sally, and tuning her voice to better music." This 
 is charming, and yet even this wants the ethereal tincture 
 that pervades the style of Jeremy Taylor, making 
 it, as Burke said of Sheridan s eloquence, " neither prose 
 nor poetry, but something better than either." Let us 
 
 * In his preface to "All for Love," he says, evidently alluding to 
 himself : " If he have a friend whose hastiness in writing is his great 
 est fault, Horace would have taught him to have minced the matter, 
 and to have called it readiness of thought and a flowing fancy." And 
 in the Preface to the Fables he says of Homer : " This vehemence of 
 his, I confess, is more suitable to my temper." He makes other 
 allusions to it. 
 
282 DRYDEN. 
 
 compare Taylor s treatment of the same image : " For 
 so have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass and 
 soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get 
 to heaven and climb above the clouds ; but the poor 
 bird was beaten back by the loud sighings of an eastern 
 wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant, 
 descending more at every breath of the tempest than 
 it could recover by the libration and frequent weighing 
 of his wings, till the little creature was forced to sit 
 down and pant, and stay till the storm was over, and 
 then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing 
 as if it had learned music and motion of an angel as 
 he passed sometimes through the air about his ministries 
 here below." Taylor s fault is that his sentences too often 
 smell of the library, but what an open air is here ! How 
 unpremeditated it all seems ! How carelessly he knots 
 each new thought, as it comes, to the one before it with an 
 and, like a girl making lace! And what a slidingly 
 musical use he makes of the sibilants with which our 
 language is unjustly taxed by those who can only make 
 them hiss, not sing ! There are twelve of them in the first 
 twenty words, fifteen of which are monosyllables. We 
 notice the structure of Dryden s periods, but this grows up 
 as we read. It gushes, like the song of the bird itself, 
 
 " In profuse strains of unpremeditated art." 
 
 Let us now take a specimen of Dryden s bad prose from one 
 of his poems. I open the " Annus Mirabilis " at random, 
 and hit upon this : 
 
 " Our little fleet was now engaged so far, 
 That, like the swordfish in the whale, they fought : 
 The combat only seemed a civil war, 
 Till through their bowels we our passage wrought." 
 
 Is this Dryden, or Sternhold, or Shadwell, those Toms who 
 made him say that "dulness was fatal to the name of 
 Tom ? " The natural history of Goldsmith in the verse of 
 
DRYDEN. 283 
 
 Pye ! His thoughts did not " voluntary move harmonious 
 numbers." He had his choice between prose and verse, and 
 seems to be poetical on second thought. I do not speak 
 without book. He was more than half conscious of it 
 himself. In the same letter to Mrs. Steward, just cited, he 
 says, " I am still drudging on, always a poet and never a 
 good one ; " and this from no mock-modesty, for he is 
 always handsomely frank in telling us whatever of his own 
 doing pleased him. This was written in the last year of 
 his life, and at about the same time he says elsewhere : 
 " What judgment I had increases rather than diminishes, 
 and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast 
 upon me that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject, 
 to run them into verse or to give them the other harmony 
 of prose ; I have so long studied and practised both, that 
 they are grown into a habit and become familiar to me."* 
 I think that a man who was primarily a poet would hardly 
 have felt this equanimity of choice. 
 
 I find a confirmation of this feeling about Dryden in 
 his early literary loves. His taste was not an instinct, but 
 the slow result of reflection and of the manfulness with 
 which he always acknowledged to himself his own mistakes. 
 In this latter respect few men deal so magnanimously with 
 themselves as he, and accordingly few have been so happily 
 inconsistent. Ancora imparo might have served him for a 
 motto as well as Michael Angelo. His prefaces are a 
 complete log of his life, and the habit of writing them was 
 a useful one to him, for it forced him to think with a pen 
 in his hand, which, according to Goethe, " if it do no other 
 good, keeps the mind from staggering about." In these 
 prefaces we see his taste gradually rising from Du Bartas 
 to Spenser, from Cowley to Milton, from Oorneille to 
 Shakespeare. " I remember when I was a boy," he says in 
 his dedication of the " Spanish Friar," 1681, "I thought 
 inimitable Spenser a mean poet in comparison of Sylvester s 
 Du artas t and was rapt into an ecstacy when I read these 
 
 lines : 
 
 * Preface to the Tables. 
 
284 DRYDEN. 
 
 Now when the winter s keener breath began 
 To crystallise the Baltic ocean, 
 To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods, 
 And periwig with snow* the baldpate woods. 
 
 I am much deceived if this be not abominable fustian." 
 Swift, in his " Tale of a Tub," has a ludicrous passage in 
 this style: "Look on this globe of earth, you will find it 
 to be a very complete and fashionable dress. What is that 
 which some call land, but a fine coat faced with green ? or 
 the sea, but a waistcoat of water-tabby ? Proceed to the 
 particular works of creation, you will find how curious 
 journeyman Nature has been to trim up the vegetable 
 beaux ; observe how sparkish a periwig adorns the head of 
 a beech, and what a fine doublet of white satin is worn by 
 the birch." The fault is not in any inaptness of the images, 
 nor in the mere vulgarity of the things themselves, but in 
 that of the associations they awaken. The " Prithee, undo 
 this button " of Lear, coming where it does and expressing 
 what it does, is one of those touches of the pathetically 
 sublime, of which only Shakespeare ever knew the secret. 
 Herrick, too, has a charming poem on " Julia s petticoat," 
 the charm being that he lifts the familiar and the low to 
 the region of sentiment. In the passage from Sylvester, it 
 is precisely the reverse, and the wig takes as much from the 
 sentiment as it adds to a Lord Chancellor. So Pope s 
 proverbial verse, 
 
 "True wit is Nature to advantage drest," 
 
 unpleasantly suggests Nature under the hands of a lady s- 
 maid.f We have no word in English that will exactly 
 
 * Wool is Sylvester s word. Dryden reminds us of Burke in this 
 also, that he always quotes from memory and seldom exactly. His 
 memory was better for things than for words. This helps to explain 
 the length of time it took him to master that vocabulary at last so 
 various, full, and seemingly extemporaneous. He is a large quoter, 
 though, with his usual inconsistency, he says, "lam no admirer of 
 quotations." (Essay on Heroic Plays.) 
 
 t In the Epimetheus of a poet usually as elegant as Gray himself, 
 one s finer sense is a little jarred by the 
 
 " Spectral gleam their snow-white dresses." 
 
DRYDEN. 285 
 
 define this want of propriety in diction. Vulgar is too 
 strong, and commonplace too weak. Perhaps bourgeois 
 comes as near as any. It is to be noticed that Dryden 
 does not unequivocally condemn the passage he quotes, but 
 qualifies it with an "if I am not much mistaken," Indeed, 
 though his judgment in substantials, like that of Johnson, is 
 always worth having, his taste, the negative half of genius, 
 never altogether refined itself from a colloquial familiarity, 
 which is one of the charms of his prose, and gives that air 
 of easy strength in which his satire is unmatched. In his 
 "Royal Martyr" (1669), the tyrant Maximin says to the 
 gods : 
 
 " Keep you your rain and sunshine in the skies, 
 And I ll keep back my flame and sacrifice ; 
 Your trade of Heaven shall soon be at a stand, 
 And all your goods lie dead upon your hand" 
 
 a passage which has as many faults as only Dryden was 
 capable of committing, even to a false idiom forced by the 
 last rhyme. The same tyrant in dying exclaims : 
 
 " And after thee I ll go, 
 
 Revenging still, and following e en to th other world my blow, 
 And, shoving back this earth on which I sit, 
 I ll mount and scatter all the gods I hit." 
 
 In the "Conquest of Grenada" (1670), we have: 
 
 " This little loss in our vast body shews 
 So small, that half have never heard the news ; 
 Fame s out of breath e er she can fly so far 
 To tell em all that you have e er made war."* 
 
 * This probably suggested to Young the grandiose image in his 
 "Last Day" (B. ii.) : 
 
 " Those overwhelming armies . . . 
 Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking down 
 Roused the broad front and called the battle on." 
 
 This, to be sure, is no plagiarism ; but it should be carried to Dryden s 
 credit that we catch the poets of the next half-century oftener with 
 their hands in his pockets than in those of any one else. 
 
286 DRYDEN. 
 
 And in the same play, 
 
 " That busy thing, 
 
 The soul, is packing up, and just on wing 
 Like parting swallows when they seek the spring," 
 
 where the last sweet verse curiously illustrates that in 
 equality (poetry on a prose background) which so often 
 puzzles us in Dryden. Infinitely worse is the speech of 
 Alraanzor to his mother s ghost : 
 
 " I ll rush into the covert of the night 
 And pull thee backward by the shroud to light, 
 Or else I ll squeeze thee like a bladder there, 
 And make thee groan thyself away to air." 
 
 What wonder that Dryden should have been substituted 
 for Davenant as the butt of the " Rehearsal," and that the 
 parody should have had such a run ? And yet it was 
 Dryden who, in speaking of Persius, hit upon the happy 
 phrase of " boisterous metaphors ; "* it was Dryden who 
 said of Cowley, whom he elsewhere calls " the darling of 
 my youth,"f that he was " sunk in reputation because he 
 could never forgive any conceit which came in his way, but 
 swept, like a drag-net, great and small."! But the passages 
 
 * Essay on Satire. t Ibid. 
 
 $ Preface to Fables. Men are always inclined to revenge themselves 
 on their old idols in the first enthusiasm of conversion to a purer faith. 
 Cowley had all the faults that Dryden loads him with, and yet his 
 popularity was to some extent deserved. He at least had a theory 
 that poetry should soar, not creep, and longed for some expedient, in 
 the failure of natural wings, by which he could lift himself away from 
 the conventional and commonplace. By beating out the substance of 
 Pindar very thin, he contrived a kind of balloon, which, tumid with 
 gas, did certainly mount a little, into the clouds, if not above them, 
 though sure to come suddenly down with a bump. His odes, indeed, 
 are an alternation of upward jerks and concussions, and smack more 
 of Chapelain than of the Theban, but his prose is very agreeable, 
 Montaigne and water, perhaps, but with some flavour of the Gascon 
 wine left. The strophe of his ode to Dr. Scarborough, in which he 
 compares his surgical friend, operating for the stone, to Moses striking 
 the rock, more than justifies all the ill that Dryden could lay at his 
 door. It was into precisely such mud-holes that Cowley s Will-o -the- 
 Wisp had misguided him. Men may never wholly shake off a vice 
 but they are always conscious of it, and hate the tempter. 
 
DRYDEN, 287 
 
 I have thus far cited as specimens of our poet s coarseness 
 (for poet he surely was intus, though not always in cute) 
 were written before he was forty, and he had an odd 
 notion, suitable to his healthy complexion, that poets on the 
 whole improve after that date. Man at forty, he says, 
 " seems to be fully in his summer tropic, .... and I 
 believe that it will hold in all great poets that, though they 
 wrote before with a certain heat of genius which inspired 
 them, yet that heat was not perfectly digested." But 
 artificial heat is never to be digested at all, as is plain in 
 Dryden s case. He was a man who warmed slowly, and, 
 in his hurry to supply the market, forced his mind. The 
 result was the same after forty as before. In " CEdipus " 
 (1679) we find, 
 
 11 Not one bolt 
 
 Shall err from Thebes, but more be called for, more, 
 
 New-moulded thunder of a larger size ! " 
 
 This play was written in conjunction with Lee, of whom 
 Dryden relates! that, when some one said to him, " It is 
 easy enough to write like a madman," he replied, "No, it 
 is hard to write like a madman, but easy enough to write 
 like a fool," perhaps the most compendious lecture on 
 poetry ever delivered. The splendid bit of eloquence, 
 which has so much the sheet-iron clang of impeachment 
 thunder (I hope that Dryden is not in the Library of 
 Congress ! ) is perhaps Lee s. The following passage almost 
 certainly is his : 
 
 " Sure t is the end of all things ! Fate has torn 
 The lock of Time off, and his head is now 
 The ghastly ball of round Eternity ! " 
 
 But the next, in which the soul is likened to the pocket of 
 an indignant housemaid charged with theft, is wholly in 
 Dryden s manner : 
 
 "No ; I dare challenge heaven to turn me outward, 
 And shake my soul quite empty in your sight." 
 
 * Dedication of Georgics. t In a letter to Dennis, 1693. 
 
288 DRYDEN. 
 
 In the same style, he makes his Don Sebastian (1690) say 
 that he is as much astonished as "drowsy mortals" at the 
 last trump, 
 
 "When, called in haste, they fumble for their limbs," 
 
 and propose to take upon himself the whole of a crime 
 shared with another by asking Heaven to charge the bill 
 on him. And in " King Arthur," written ten years after 
 the Preface from which I have quoted his confession about 
 Dubartas, we have a passage precisely of the kind he 
 condemned ; 
 
 " Ah for the many souls as but this morn 
 Were clothed with flesh and warmed with vital blood, 
 But naked now, or skirted but with air." 
 
 Dryden too often violated his own admirable rule, that 
 "an author is not to write all he can, but only all he 
 ought."* In his worst images, however, there is often a 
 vividness that half excuses them. But it is a grotesque 
 vividness, as from the flare of a bonfire. They do not flash 
 into sudden lustre, as in the great poets, where the imagin 
 ations of poet and reader leap toward each other and meet 
 half-way. 
 
 English prose is indebted to Dryden for having freed it 
 from the cloister of pedantry. He, more than any other 
 single writer, contributed, as well by precept as example, to 
 give it suppleness of movement and the easier air of the 
 modern world. His own style, juicy with proverbial phrases, 
 has that familiar dignity, so hard to attain, perhaps unattain 
 able except by one who, like Dryden, feels that his position 
 is assured. Charles Cotton is as easy, but not so elegant ; 
 Walton as familiar, but not so flowing; Swift as idiomatic, 
 but not so elevated; Burke more splendid, but not so 
 equally luminous. That his style was no easy acquisition 
 (though, of course, the aptitude was innate) he himself tells 
 us. In his dedication of " Troilus and Cressida" (1679), 
 where he seems to hint at the erection of an Academy, he 
 
 * Preface to Fables. 
 
DRYDEN. 289 
 
 says that " the perfect knowledge of a tongue was never 
 attained by any single person. The Court, the College, and 
 the Town must all be joined in it. And as our English is a 
 composition of the dead and living tongues, there is required 
 a perfect knowledge, not only of the Greek and Latin, but 
 of the Old German, French, and Italian, and to help all 
 these, a conversation with those authors of our own who 
 have written with the fewest faults in prose and verse. But 
 how barbarously we yet write and speak your Lordship 
 knows, and I am sufficiently sensible in my own English.* 
 For I am often put to a stand in considering whether what I 
 write be the idiom of the tongue, or false grammar and 
 nonsense couched beneath that specious name of Anglicism, 
 and have no other way to clear my doubts but by translat 
 ing my English into Latin, and thereby trying what sense 
 the words will bear in a more stable language." Tantce 
 molls erat. Five years later : " The proprieties and 
 delicacies of the English are known to few ; it is impossible 
 even for a good wit to understand and practice them with 
 out the help of a liberal education, long reading and 
 digesting of those few good authors we have amongst us, 
 vhe knowledge of men and manners, the freedom of habitudes 
 and conversation with the best company of both sexes, and, in 
 short, without wearing off the rust which he contracted 
 while he was laying in a stock of learning." In the pas 
 sage I have italicised, it will be seen that Dryden lays some 
 stress upon the influence of women in refining language. 
 Swift, also, in his plan for an Academy, says : " Now, 
 though I would by no means give the ladies the trouble of 
 advising us in the reformation of our language, yet I cannot 
 help thinking that, since they have been left out of all 
 meetings except parties at play, or where worse designs are 
 
 * More than half a century later, Orrery, in his "Remarks" on Swift, 
 says : " We speak and we write at random ; and if a man s common 
 conversation were committed to paper, he would be startled for 
 to find himself guilty in so few sentences of so many solecisms and 
 such false English." I do not remember for to anywhere in Dryden a 
 prose. So few has long been denizened ; no wonder, since it is nothing 
 more than si peu Anglicised. 
 
290 DRYDEN. 
 
 carried on, our conversation has very much degenerated. 5 * 
 Swift affirms that the language had grown corrupt since the 
 Restoration, and that " the Court, which used to be the 
 standard of propriety and correctness of speech, was then, 
 and, I think, has ever since continued, the worst school in 
 England."! He lays the blame partly on the general 
 licentiousness, partly upon the French education of many 
 of Charles s courtiers, and partly on the poets. Dryden 
 undoubtedly formed his diction by the usage of the Court. 
 The age was a very free-and-easy, not to say a very coarse 
 one. Its coarseness was not external, like that of Eliza 
 beth s day, but the outward mark of an inward depravity. 
 What Swift s notion of the refinement of women was may 
 be judged by his anecdotes of Stella. I will not say that 
 Dryden s prose did not gain by the conversational elasticity 
 which his frequenting men and women of the world enabled 
 him to give it. It is the best specimen of every-day style 
 that we have. But the habitual dwelling of his mind in a 
 
 * Letter to the Lord High Treasurer. 
 
 t Ibid. He complains of "manglings and abbreviations." "What 
 does your Lordship think of the words drudg d, disturb d, rebuk d, 
 fledg d, and a thousand others ? " In a contribution to the " Tatler" 
 (No. 230) he ridicules the use of urn for them, and a number of slang 
 phrases, among which is mob. " The war," he says, "has introduced 
 abundance of polysyllables, which will never be able to live many 
 more campaigns." Speculations, operations, preliminaries, ambas 
 sadors, pallisadoes, communication, circumvallation, battalions, are the 
 instances he gives, and all are now familiar. No man, or body of men, 
 can dam the stream of language. Dryden is rather fond of em for 
 them, but uses it rarely in his prose. Swift himself prefers t is to it is, 
 as does Emerson still. In what Swift says of the poets, he may be 
 fairly suspected of glancing at Dryden, who was his kinsman, and 
 whose prefaces and translation of Virgil he ridicules in the " Tale of a 
 Tub." Dryden is reported to have said of him, " Cousin Swift is no 
 poet." The Dean began his literary career by Pindaric odes to 
 Athenian Societies and the like, perhaps the greatest mistake as to 
 his own powers of which an author was ever guilty. It was very 
 likely that he would send these to his relative, already distinguished, 
 for his opinion upon them. If this was so, the justice of Dryden s 
 judgment must have added to the smart. Swift never forgot or for 
 gave ; Dryden was careless enough to do the one, and large enough to 
 do the other. 
 
DRYDEN. 291 
 
 commonplace atmosphere, and among those easy levels of 
 sentiment which befitted Will s Coffee-house and the Bird 
 cage Walk, was a damage to his poetry. Solitude is as 
 needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the 
 character. He cannot always distinguish between enthusi 
 asm and extravagance when he sees them. But apart from 
 these influences which I have adduced in exculpation, 
 there was certainly a vein of coarseness in him, a want 
 of that exquisite sensitiveness which is the conscience of 
 the artist. An old gentleman, writing to the Gentleman s 
 Magazine in 1745, professes to remember "plain John 
 Dryden (before he paid his court with success to the great) 
 in one uniform clothing of Norwich drugget. I have eat 
 tarts at the Mulberry Garden with him and Madam Reeve, 
 when our author advanced to a sword and Chadreux wig."* 
 I always fancy Dryden in the drugget, with wig, lace 
 ruffles, and sword superimposed. It is the type of this 
 curiously-incongruous man. 
 
 The first poem by which Dryden won a general acknow 
 ledgment of his power was the " Annus Mirabilis," written 
 in his thirty-seventh year. Pepys, himself not altogether a 
 bad judge, doubtless expresses the common opinion when he 
 says " I am very well pleased this night with reading a 
 poem I brought home with me last night from Westminster 
 Hall, of Dryden s, upon the present war ; a very good 
 
 * Both Malone and Scott accept this gentleman s evidence without 
 question, but I confess suspicion of a memory that runs back more 
 than eighty-one years, and recollects a man before he had any claim to 
 remembrance. Dryden was never poor, and there is at Oxford a por 
 trait of him painted in 1664, which represents him in a superb periwig 
 and laced band. This was " before he had paid his court with success 
 to the great." But the story is at least ben trovato, and morally true 
 enough to serve as an illustration. Who the " old gentleman " was has 
 never been discovered. Of Crowne (who has some interest for us as a 
 sometime student at Harvard) he says "Many a cup of metheglin 
 have I drank with little starch d Johnny Crown ; we called him so, 
 from the stiff, unalterable primness of his long cravat." Crowne re 
 flects no more credit on his Alma Mater than Downing. Both were 
 sneaks, and of such a kind as, I think, can only be produced by a de 
 bauched Puritanism. Crowne, as a rival of Dryden, is contemptuously 
 alluded to by Gibber in his " Apology." 
 
292 DRYDEN. 
 
 poem."* And a very good poem, in some sort, it continues 
 to be, in spite of its amazing blemishes. We must always 
 bear in mind that Dryden lived in an age that supplied 
 him with no ready-made inspiration, and that big phrases 
 and images are apt to be pressed into the service when 
 great ones do not volunteer. With this poem begins the 
 long series of Dryden s prefaces, of which Swift made such 
 excellent, though malicious, fun that I cannot forbear to 
 quote it. " I do utterly disapprove and declare against that 
 pernicious custom of making the preface a bill of fare to the 
 book. For I have always looked upon it as a high point 
 of indiscretion in monster-mongers and other retailers of 
 strange sights to hang out a fair picture over the door, 
 drawn after the life, with a most eloquent description 
 underneath ; this has saved me many a threepence. . 
 Such is exactly the fate at this time of prefaces. . . . This 
 expedient was admirable at first ; our great Dryden has 
 long carried it as far as it would go, and with incredible 
 success. He has often said to me in confidence, that the 
 world would never have suspected him to be so great a poet, 
 if he had not assured them so frequently, in his prefaces, 
 that it was impossible they could either doubt or forget it. 
 Perhaps it may be so ; however, I much fear his instruc 
 tions have edified out of their place, and taught men to 
 grow wiser in certain points where he never intended they 
 shouldn t The monster-mongers is a terrible thrust, when 
 we remember some of the comedies and heroic plays which 
 Dryden ushered in this fashion. In the dedication of the 
 " Annus" to the city of London is one of those pithy sen 
 tences of which Dryden is ever afterwards so full, and which 
 he lets fall with a carelessness that seems always to deepen the 
 meaning: "I have heard, indeed, of some virtuous persons who 
 
 * Diary, III. 390. Almost the only notices of Dryden that make 
 him alive to me I have found in the delicious book of this Polonius- 
 Montaigne, the only man who ever had the courage to keep a sincere 
 journal, even under the shelter of cipher. 
 
 t Tale of a Tub, Sect. V. Pepys also speaks of buying the 
 "Maiden Queen" of Mr. Dryden s, which he himself, in his preface, 
 seems to brag of, and indeed is a good play. 18th January 1668. 
 
DRYDEN. 293 
 
 have ended unfortunately, but never of any virtuous nation ; 
 Providence is engaged too deeply when the cause becomes so 
 general." In his "account" of the poem in a letter to Sir 
 Robert Howard he says : " I have chosen to write my poem 
 in quatrains or stanzas of four in alternate rhyme, because 
 I have ever judged them more noble and of greater dignity, 
 both for the sound and number, than any other verse in use 
 amongst us. ... The learned languages have certainly a 
 great advantage of us in not being tied to the slavery of any 
 
 rhyme But in this necessity of our rhymes, I have 
 
 always found the couplet verse most easy, though not so 
 proper for this occasion ; for there the work is sooner at an 
 end, every two lines concluding the labour of the poet." A 
 little further on : " They (the French) write in alexandrines, 
 or verses of six feet, such as amongst us is the old transla 
 tion of Homer by Chapman : all which, by lengthening their 
 chain,* makes the sphere of their activity the greater." I 
 have quoted these passages because, in a small compass, they 
 include several things characteristic of Dry den. " I have 
 ever judged," and " I have always found," are particularly 
 so. If he took up an opinion in the morning, he would 
 have found so many arguments for it before night that it 
 would seem already old and familiar. So with his reproach 
 of rhyme ; a year or two before he was eagerly defending 
 it;t again a few years, and he will utterly condemn and 
 
 * He is fond of this image. In the "Maiden Queen" Celadon 
 tells Sabina that, when he is with her rival Florimel, his heart is 
 still her prisoner, "it only draws a longer chain after it." _ Gold 
 smith s fancy was taken by it ; and everybody admires in the 
 "Traveller " the extraordinary conceit of a heart dragging a lengthen 
 ing chain. The smoothness of too many rhymed pentameters is that 
 of thin ice over shallow water ; so long as we glide along rapidly, 
 all is well ; but if we dwell a moment on any one spot, we may 
 find ourselves knee-deep in mud. A later poet, in trying to improve 
 on Goldsmith, shows the ludicrousness of the image : 
 
 " And round my heart s leg ties its galling chain." 
 To write imaginatively a man should have imagination ! 
 
 t See his epistle dedicatory to the "Rival Ladies" (1664). For 
 the other side, see particularly a passage in his "Discourse on Epic 
 Poetry" (1697)? 
 
294 DRY DEN. 
 
 drop it in his plays, while retaining it in his translations \ 
 afterwards his study of Milton leads him to think that blank 
 verse would suit the epic style better, and he proposes to 
 try it with Homer, but at last translates one book as a 
 specimen, and behold, it is in rhyme ! But the charm of 
 this great advocate is, that, whatever side he was on, he 
 could always find excellent reasons for it, and state them 
 with great force, and abundance of happy illustration. He 
 is an exception to the proverb, and is none the worse pleader 
 that he is always pleading his own cause. The blunder 
 about Chapman is of a kind into which his hasty tempera 
 ment often betrayed him. He remembered that Chapman s 
 " Iliad " was in a long measure, concluded without looking 
 that it was alexandrine, and then attributes it generally to 
 his "Homer." Chapman s "Iliad" is done in fourteen- 
 syllable verse, and his " Odyssee " in the very metre that 
 Dry den himself used in his own version.* I remark also 
 what he says of the couplet, that it was easy because the 
 second verse concludes the labour of the poet. And yet it 
 was Dryden who found it hard for that very reason. His 
 vehement abundance refused those narrow banks, first 
 running over into a triplet, and, even then uncontainable, 
 rising to an alexandrine in the concluding verse. And I 
 have little doubt that it was the roominess, rather than the 
 dignity, of the quatrain which led him to choose it. As 
 apposite to this, I may quote what he elsewhere says 
 of octosyllablic verse : " The thought can turn itself 
 with greater ease in a larger compass. When the 
 rhyme comes too thick upon us, it straightens the expres- 
 * In the same way he had two years before assumed that Shake 
 speare " was the first who, to shun the pains of continued rhyming, 
 invented that kind of writing which we call blank verse ! " Dryden 
 was never, I suspect, a very careful student of English literature. 
 He seems never to have known that Surrey translated a part of the 
 "^Eneid" (and with great spirit) into blank verse. Indeed, he was 
 not a scholar, in the proper sense of the word, but he had that 
 faculty of rapid assimilation without study, so remarkable in 
 Coleridge and other rich minds, whose office is rather to impregnate 
 than to invent. These brokers of thought perform a great office in 
 literature, second only to that of originators. 
 
DR YDEN, 295 
 
 sion : we are thinking of the close, when we should 
 be employed in adorning the thought. It makes a 
 poet giddy with turning in a space too narrow for his 
 imagination." * 
 
 Dry den himself, as was not always the case with him, 
 was well satisfied with his work. He calls it his best 
 hitherto, and attributes his success to the excellence of his 
 subject, " incomparably the best he had ever had, excepting 
 only the Royal Family" The first part is devoted to the 
 Dutch war ; the last to the fire of London. The martial 
 half is infinitely the better of the two. He altogether 
 surpasses his model, Davenant. If his poem lack the 
 gravity of thought attained by a few stanzas of " Gondi- 
 bert," it is vastly superior in life, in picturesqueness, in 
 the energy of single lines, and, above all, in imagination. 
 Few men have read " Gondibert," and almost every one 
 speaks of it, as commonly of the dead, with a certain sub 
 dued respect. And it deserves respect as an honest effort 
 to bring poetry back to its highest office in the ideal treat 
 ment of life. Davenant emulated Spenser, and if his poem 
 had been as good as his preface, it could still be read in 
 another spirit than that of investigation. As it is, it 
 always reminds me of Goldsmith s famous verse. It is 
 remote, unfriendly, solitary, and, above all, slow. Its 
 shining passages, for there are such, remind one of distress- 
 rockets sent up at intervals from a ship just about to 
 founder, and sadden rather than cheer, f 
 
 * Essay on Satire. What he has said just before this about Butler 
 is worth noting. Butler had had a chief hand in the " Rehearsal," 
 but Dryden had no grudges where the question was of giving its just 
 praise to merit. 
 
 t The conclusion of the second canto of Book Third is the best 
 continuously fine passage. Dryden s poem has nowhere so much 
 meaning in so small space as Davenant, when he says of the sense of 
 honour that, 
 
 " Like Power, it grows to nothing, growing less." 
 
 Davenant took the hint of the stanza from Sir John Davies. Wyatt 
 first used it, so far as I know, in English, 
 
296 DRYDEN. 
 
 The first part of the " Annus Mirabilis " is by no means 
 clear of the false taste of the time,* though it has some of 
 Dryden s manliest verses and happiest comparisons, always 
 his two distinguishing merits. Here, as almost everywhere 
 else in Dryden, measuring him merely as poet, we recall 
 what he, with pathetic pride, says of himself in the 
 prologue to " Aurengzebe " : 
 
 " Let him retire, betwixt two ages cast, 
 The first of this, the hindmost of the last." 
 
 What can be worse than what he says of comets ? 
 
 " "Whether they unctuous exhalations are 
 Fired by the sun, or seeming so alone, 
 Or each some more remote and slippery star 
 Which loses footing when to mortals shown." 
 
 Or than this, of the destruction of the Dutch India- 
 ships 1 
 
 " Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball, 
 And now their odours armed against them fly ; 
 Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, 
 And some by aromatic splinters die." 
 
 Dear Dr. Johnson had his doubts about Shakespeare, but 
 here at least was poetry ! This is one of the quatrains 
 which he pronounces "worthy of our author."! 
 
 But Dryden himself has said that "a man who is resolved 
 
 * Perhaps there is no better lecture on the prevailing vices of style 
 and thought (if thought this frothy ferment of the mind may be 
 called) than in Cotton Mather s "Magnalia." For Mather, like a 
 true provincial, appropriates only the mannerism, and, as is usual 
 in such cases, betrays all its weakness by the unconscious parody of 
 exaggeration. 
 
 t The Doctor was a capital judge of the substantial value of the 
 goods he handled, but his judgment always seems that of the thumb 
 and forefinger. For the shades, the disposition of colours, the beauty 
 of the figures, he has as good as no sense whatever. The critical parts 
 of his Life of Dryden seem to me the best of his writing in this kind. 
 There is little to be gleaned after him. He had studied his author, 
 which he seldom did, and his criticism is sympathetic, a thing still 
 rarer with him. As illustrative of his own habits, his remarks ow 
 Dryden s reading are curious, 
 
DRYDEN. 297 
 
 to praise an author with any appearance of justice must be 
 sure to take him on the strongest side, and where he is least 
 liable to exceptions." This is true also of one who wishes 
 to measure an author fairly, for the higher wisdom of 
 criticism lies in the capacity to admire. 
 
 " Leser, wie gefall ich dir ? 
 Leser, wie gefallst du mir ? " 
 
 are both fair questions, the answer to the first being more 
 often involved in that to the second than is sometimes 
 thought. The poet in Dryden was never more fully 
 revealed than in such verses as these : 
 
 " And threatening France, placed like a painted Jove,* 
 Kept idle thunder in his lifted hand ; " 
 
 " Silent in smoke of cannon they come on ; " 
 
 " And his loud guns speak thick, like angry men ; " 
 
 " The rigorous seaman every port-hole plies, 
 And adds his heart to every gun he fires ; " 
 
 " And, though to me unknown, they sure fought well, 
 Whom Rupert led, and who were British born." 
 
 This is masculine writing, and yet it must be said that 
 there is scarcely a quatrain in which the rhyme does not 
 
 * Perhaps the hint was given by a phrase of Corneille, monarque 
 en peinture. Dryden seldom borrows, unless from Shakespeare, without 
 improving, and he borrowed a great deal. Thus in " Don Sebastian " 
 (of suicide) : 
 
 " Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls, 
 And give them furloughs for the other world ; 
 But we, like sentries, are obliged to stand 
 In starless nights and wait the appointed hour." 
 
 The thought is Cicero s, but how it is intensified by the "starless 
 nights ! " Dryden, I suspect, got it from his favourite, Montaigne, 
 who says, " Que nous ne pouvons abandonner cette garnison du 
 monde, sans le commandement exprez de celuy qui nous y a mis." 
 (L. ii. chap. 3.) In the same play, by a very Drydenish verse, lie 
 gives new force to an old comparison : 
 
 " And I should break through laws divine and human, 
 And think em cobwebs spread for little man, 
 Which all the bulky herd of Nature breaks." 
 
298 DRYDEN. 
 
 trip him into a pla.titude, and there are too many swaggering 
 with that expression forte d un sentiment faible which 
 Voltaire condemns in Corneille, a temptation to which 
 Dryden always lay too invitingly open. But there are 
 passages higher in kind than any I have cited, because they 
 show imagination. Such are the verses in which he describes 
 the dreams of the disheartened enemy : 
 
 * In dreams they fearful precipices tread, 
 Or, shipwrecked, labour to some distant shore, 
 Or in dark churches walk among the dead ; " 
 
 and those in which he recalls glorious memories, and sees 
 where 
 
 "The mighty ghosts of our great Harries rose, 
 And armed Edwards looked with anxious eyes." 
 
 A few verses, like the pleasantly alliterative one in which 
 he makes the spider " from the silent ambush of his den," 
 " feel far off the trembling of his thread," show that he was 
 beginning to study the niceties of verse, instead of trusting 
 wholly to what he would have called his natural fougue. 
 On the whole, this part of the poem is very good war 
 poetry, as war poetry goes (for there is but one first- 
 rate poem of the kind in English, short, national, 
 eager, as if the writer were personally engaged, 
 with the rapid metre of a drum beating the charge, 
 and that is Drayton s " Battle of Agincourt,"*) but it 
 shows more study of Lucan than of Virgil, and for a long 
 time yet we shall find Dryden bewildered by bad models. 
 He is always imitating no that is not the word, always 
 emulating somebody in his more strictly poetical attempts, 
 for in that direction he always needed some external 
 impulse to set his mind in motion. This is more or less 
 true of all authors ; nor does it detract from their 
 originality, which depends wholly on their being able so 
 far to forget themselves as to let something of themselves 
 
 * Not his solemn historical droning under that title, but addressed 
 11 To the Cambrio-Britons on their harp." 
 
DRY DEN. 299 
 
 slip into what they write.* Of absolute originality we will 
 not speak till authors are raised by some Deucalion-and- 
 Pyrrha process and even then our faith would be small, 
 for writers who have no past are pretty sure of having no 
 future. Dryden, at any rate, always had to have his copy 
 set him at the top of the page, and wrote ill or well accord 
 ingly. His mind (somewhat solid for a poet) warmed 
 slowly, but, once fairly heated through, he had more of 
 that good-luck of self-oblivion than most men. He 
 certainly gave even a liberal interpretation to Moliere s 
 rule of taking his own property wherever he found it, 
 though he sometimes blundered awkwardly about what was 
 properly his ; but in literature, it should be remembered, a 
 thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus 
 makes it his own.f 
 
 Mr. Savage Landor once told me that he said to 
 Wordsworth : " Mr. Wordsworth, a man may mix poetry 
 
 * "Les poetes euxmemes s animent et s echauffent par la lecture des 
 autres poetes. Messieurs de Malherbe, Corneille, etc., se disposoient 
 an travail par la lecture des poetes qui etoient de leur gout." 
 Vigneul, Marvilliana, I. 64, 65. 
 T For example, Waller had said, 
 
 " Others may use the ocean as their road, 
 Only the English make it their abode; 
 
 We tread on billows with a steady foot," 
 
 long before Campbell. Campbell helps himself to both thoughts, 
 enlivens them into 
 
 " Her march is o er the mountain wave, 
 Her home is on the deep," 
 
 and they are his forevermore. His " leviathans afloat " lie lifted from 
 the " Annus Mirabilis ; " but in what court could Dryden sue ? Again, 
 Waller in another poem calls the Duke of York s flag 
 
 "His dreadful streamer, like a comet s hair ; " 
 
 and this, I believe, is the first application of the celestial portent to 
 this particular comparison. Yet Milton s "imperial ensign" waves 
 defiant behind his impregnable lines, and even Campbell flaunts his 
 " meteor flag" in Waller s face. Gray s bard might be sent to the 
 lock-up, but even he would find bail. 
 
 " C est imiter quelqu un que de planter des choux," 
 
300 DRYDEN. 
 
 with prose as much as he pleases, and it will only elevate 
 and enliven ; but the moment he mixes a particle of prose 
 with his poetry, it precipitates the whole/ Wordsworth, 
 he added, never forgave him. The always hasty Dryden, 
 as I think I have already said, was liable, like a careless 
 apothecary s prentice, to make the same confusion of 
 ingredients, especially in the more mischievous way. I 
 cannot leave the " Annus Mirabilis " without giving an 
 example of this. Describing the Dutch prizes, rather like 
 an auctioneer than a poet, he says that 
 
 " Some English wool, vexed in a Belgian loom, 
 And into cloth of spongy softness made, 
 Did into France or colder Denmark doom, 
 To ruin with worse ware our staple trade." 
 
 One might fancy this written by the secretary of a board 
 of trade in an unguarded moment ; but we should remember 
 that the poem is dedicated to the city of London. The 
 depreciation of the rival fabrics is exquisite ; and Dryden, 
 the most English of our poets, would not be so thoroughly 
 English if he had not in him some fibre of la nation 
 boutiquiere. Let us now see how he succeeds in attempting 
 to infuse science (the most obstinately prosy material) with 
 poetry. Speaking of "a more exact knowledge of the 
 longitudes," as he explains in a note, he tells us that, 
 
 " Then we upon our globe s last verge shall go, 
 And view the ocean leaning on the sky ; 
 From thence our rolling neighbours we shall know, 
 And on the lunar world securely pry." 
 
 Dr. Johnson confesses that he does not understand this. 
 Why should he, when it is plain that Dryden was wholly in 
 the dark himself ? To understand it is none of my business, 
 but I confess that it interests me as an Americanism. We 
 have hitherto been credited as the inventors of the 
 "jumping-off place" at the extreme western verge of the 
 world. But Dryden was beforehand with us. Though he 
 doubtless knew that the earth was a sphere (and perhaps 
 that it was flattened at the poles), it was always a flat 
 
DRYDEN. 301 
 
 surface in his fancy. In his " Amphitryon,* he makes 
 Alcmena say : 
 
 1 No, I would fly thee to the ridge of earth, 
 And leap the precipice to scape thy sight." 
 
 And in his " Spanish Friar," Lorenzo says to Elvira that 
 they "will travel together to the ridge of the world, and 
 then drop together into the next." It is idle for us poor 
 Yankees to hope that we can invent anything. To say 
 sooth, if Dryden had left nothing behind him but the 
 " Annus Mirabilis," he might have served as a type of the 
 kind of poet America would have produced by the biggest- 
 river-and-tallest-mountain recipe, longitude and latitude 
 in plenty, with marks of culture scattered here and there 
 like the carets on a proof-sheet. 
 
 It is now time to say something of Dryden as a dramatist. 
 In the thirty-two years between 1662 and 1694 he produced 
 twenty-five plays, and assisted Lee in two. I have hinted 
 that it took Dryden longer than most men to find the true 
 bent of his genius. On a superficial view, he might almost 
 seem to confirm that theory, maintained by Johnson, among 
 others, that genius was nothing more than great intellectual 
 power exercised persistently in some particular direction 
 which chance decided, so that it lay in circumstance merely 
 whether a man should turn out a Shakespeare or a Newton. 
 But when we come to compare what he wrote, regardless of 
 Minerva s averted face, with the spontaneous production of 
 his happier muse, we shall be inclined to think his example 
 one of the strongest cases against the theory in question. 
 He began his dramatic career, as usual, by rowing against 
 the strong current of his nature, and pulled only the more 
 doggedly the more he felt himself swept down the stream. 
 His first attempt was at comedy, and, though his earliest 
 piece of that kind (the "Wild Gallant," 1663) utterly failed, 
 he wrote eight others afterwards. On the 23d February 
 1663 Pepys writes in his diary : " To Court, and there saw 
 the * Wild Gallant performed by the king s house ; but it 
 was ill acted, and the play so poor a thing as I never saw in 
 
302 DRYDEfo 
 
 my life almost, and so little answering the name, that, from 
 the beginning to the end, I could not, nor can at this 
 time, tell certainly which was the Wild Gallant. The 
 king did not seem pleased at all the whole play, nor 
 anybody else." After some alteration, it was revived with 
 more success. On its publication in 1669 Dryden honestly 
 admitted its former failure, though with a kind of salvo for 
 his self-love. " I made the town my judges, and the greater 
 part condemned it. After which I do not think it my 
 concernment to defend it with the ordinary zeal of a poet 
 for his decried poem, though Oorneille is more resolute in 
 his preface before Pertharite, * which was condemned more 
 universally than this. . . . Yet it was received at Court, 
 and was more than once the divertisement of his Majesty 
 by his own command." Pepys lets us amusingly behind the 
 scenes in the matter of His Majesty s divertisement. 
 Dryden does not seem to see that in the condemnation of 
 something meant to amuse the public there can be no 
 question of degree. To fail at all is to fail utterly. 
 
 11 Touf 7 genres sontpe nnis, hws k genre entiuycux. - 
 In the reading, at least, all Dryden s comic writing for the 
 stage must be ranked with the latter class. He himself 
 would fain make an exception of the " Spanish Friar," but 
 I confess that I rather wonder at than envy those who can 
 be amused by it. His comedies lack everything that a 
 comedy should have, lightness, quickness of transition, 
 unexpectedness of incident, easy cleverness of dialogue, 
 and humorous contrast of character brought out by 
 identity of situation. The comic parts of the "Maiden 
 Queen " seem to me Dryden s best, but the merit even of 
 these is Shakespeare s, and there is little choice where even 
 the best is only tolerable. The common quality, however, 
 of all Dryden s comedies is their nastiness, the more 
 remarkable because we have ample evidence that he was 
 a man of modest conversation. Pepys, who was by no 
 * Corneillo s tragedy of 4I Pertharite " was acted unsuccessfully in 
 lbf>9. Racine made free use of it in Lis more fortunate "Audro 
 mantle." 
 
DRYDEN. 303 
 
 means squeamish (for he found " Sir Martin Marall " " the 
 most entire piece of mirth .... that certainly ever was 
 writ .... very good wit therein, not fooling "), writes in his 
 diary of the 17th June 1668: "My wife and Deb to the 
 king s playhouse to-day, thinking to spy me there, and saw 
 the new play, * Evening Love, of Dryden s, which, though 
 the world commends, she likes not." The next day he saw 
 it himself, " and do not like it, it being very smutty, and 
 nothing so good as the Maiden Queen or the * Indian 
 Emperor of Dry den s making. / was troubled at it." On 
 the 22nd he adds : " Calling this day at Herringman s,* ho 
 tells me Dryden do himself call it but a fifth-rate play." 
 This was no doubt true, and yet, though Dryden in his 
 preface to the play says, " I confess I have given [yielded] 
 too much to the people in it, and am ashamed for them as 
 well as for myself, that I have pleased them at so cheap a 
 rate," he takes care to add, " not that there is anything 
 here that I would not defend to an ill-natured judge." The 
 plot was from Calderon, and the author, rebutting the charge 
 of plagiarism, tell us that the king ( 4< without whose command 
 they should no longer be troubled with anything of mine ") 
 had already answered for him by saying, "that he only 
 desired that those who accused me of theft would always 
 steal him plays like mine." Of the morals of the play he 
 has not a word, nor do I believe that he was conscious of 
 any harm in them till he was attacked by Collier, and then 
 (with some protest against what he considers the undue 
 severity of his censor) he had the manliness to confess that 
 he had done wrong. " It becomes me not to draw my pen 
 in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it 
 for a good one."t And in a letter to his correspondent, Mrs. 
 Thomas, written only a few weeks before his death, warning 
 her against Mrs. Belm, he says, with remorseful sincerity : 
 " I confess I am the last man in the world who ought in 
 justice to arraign her, who have been myself too much a 
 libertine in most of my poems, which I should be well 
 contented 1 had time either to purge or to see them fairly 
 * Dryden s publisher. t Preface to the Fabler. 
 
304 DRY DEN, 
 
 burned." Congreve was less patient, and even Dryden, in 
 the last epilogue he ever wrote, attempts an excuse : 
 
 " Perhaps the Parson stretched a point too far, 
 "When with our Theatres he waged a war ; 
 He tells you that this very moral age 
 Received the first infection from the Stage, 
 But sure a banished Court, with lewdness fraught, 
 The seeds of open vice returning brought. 
 
 Whitehall the naked Venus first revealed, 
 Who, standing, as at Cyprus, in her shrine, 
 The strumpet was adored with rites divine. 
 
 The poets, who must live by courts or starve, 
 Were proud so good a Government to serve, 
 And, mixing with buffoons and pimps profane, 
 Tainted the Stage for some small snip of gain." 
 
 Dryden least of all men should have stooped to this 
 palliation, for he had, not without justice, said of himself : 
 " The same parts and application which have made me a 
 poet might have raised me to any honours of the gown." 
 Milton and Marvell neither lived by the Court, nor starved. 
 Charles Lamb most ingeniously defends the Comedy of the 
 Restoration as "the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted 
 casuistry," where there was no pretence of representing a 
 real world.* But this was certainly not so. Dryden again 
 and again boasts of the superior advantage which his age 
 had over that of the elder dramatists, in painting polite life, 
 and attributes it to a greater freedom of intercourse 
 between the poets and the frequenters of the Court.f We 
 shall be less surprised at the kind of refinement upon which 
 Dryden congratulated himself, when we learn (from the 
 dedication of " Marriage a la Mode ") that the Earl of 
 Rochester was its exemplar : " The best comic writers of 
 
 * I interpret some otherwise ambiguous passages in this charming 
 and acute essay by its title: "On the artificial comedy of the last 
 century." 
 
 t See especially his defence of the epilogue to the Second Part of the 
 Conquest of Granada " (1672). 
 
DRYDEN. 305 
 
 our age will join with me to acknowledge that they have 
 copied the gallantries of courts, the delicacy of expression, 
 and the decencies of behaviour from your Lordship." In 
 judging Dryden, it should be borne in mind that for some 
 years he was under contract to deliver three plays a-year, a 
 kind of bond to which no man should subject his brain 
 who has a decent respect for the quality of its products. 
 We should remember, too, that in his day manners meant 
 what we call morals^ that custom always makes a larger 
 part of virtue among average men than they are quite 
 aware, and that the reaction from an outward conformity 
 which had no root in inward faith may for a time have 
 given to the frank expression of laxity an air of honesty 
 that made it seem almost refreshing. There is no such 
 hotbed for excess of license as excess of restraint, and the 
 arrogant fanaticism of a single virtue is apt to make men 
 suspicious of tyranny in all the rest. But the riot of 
 emancipation could not last long, for the more tolerant 
 society is of private vice, the more exacting will it be of 
 public decorum, that excellent thing, so often the plausible 
 substitute for things more excellent. By 1678 the public 
 mind had so far recovered its tone that Dryden s comedy of 
 " Limberham " was barely tolerated for three nights. I 
 will let the man who looked at human nature from more 
 sides, and therefore judged it more gently than any other, 
 give the only excuse possible for Dryden : 
 
 "Men s judgments are 
 
 A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward 
 Do draw the inward quality after them 
 To suffer all alike." 
 
 Dryden s own apology only makes matters worse for 
 him by showing that he committed his offences with his 
 eyes wide open, and that he wrote comedies so wholly 
 in despite of nature as never to deviate into the comic. 
 Failing as clown, he did not scruple to take on himself 
 the office of Ohiffinch to the palled appetite of the pub 
 lic. "For I confess my chief endeavours are to delight 
 the age in which I live. If the humour of this be for low 
 
 118 
 
306 DRY DEN. 
 
 comedy, small accidents, and raillery, I will force my genius 
 to obey it, though with more reputation I could write in 
 verse. I know I am not so fitted by nature to write 
 comedy ; I want that gayety of humour which is requisite to 
 it. My conversation is slow and dull, my humour satur 
 nine and reserved : In short, I am none of those who 
 endeavour to break jests in company or make repartees. 
 So that those who decry my comedies do me no injury, 
 except it be in point of profit : Reputation in them is the 
 last thing to which I shall pretend."* For my own part, 
 though I have been forced to hold my nose in picking my 
 way through these ordures of Dryden, I am free to say that 
 I think them far less morally mischievous than that corps- 
 de-ballet literature in which the most animal of the passions 
 is made more temptingly naked by a veil of French gauze. 
 Nor does Dryden s lewdness leave such a reek in the mind 
 as the filthy cynicism of Swift, who delighted to uncover 
 the nakedness of our common mother. 
 
 It is pleasant to follow Dryden into the more congenial 
 region of heroic plays, though here also we find him making 
 a false start. Anxious to please the king,f and so able a 
 reasoner as to convince even himself of the justice of what 
 ever cause he argued, he not only wrote tragedies in 
 the French style, but defended his practice in an essay 
 which is by far the most delightful reproduction of the 
 classic dialogue ever written in English. Eugenius (Lord 
 Buckhurst), Lisideius (Sir Charles Sidley), Crites (Sir R. 
 Howard), and Neander (Dryden) are the four partakers in the 
 debate. The comparative merits of ancients and moderns, 
 of the Shakespearian and contemporary drama, of rhyme and 
 blank verse, the value of the three (supposed) Aristotelian 
 unities, are the main topics discussed. The tone of the 
 discussion is admirable, midway between bookishness and 
 
 * Defence of an Essay on Dramatick Poesy. 
 
 t "The favour which heroick plays have lately found upon our 
 theatres has been wholly derived to them from the countenance and 
 approbation they have received at Court." (Dedication of " Indian 
 Emperor " to Duchess of Monmouth.) 
 
DRYDEN. 307 
 
 talk, and the fairness with which each side of the argument 
 is treated shows the breadth of Dryden s mind perhaps 
 better than any other one piece of his writing. There are 
 no men of straw set up to be knocked down again, as there 
 commonly are in debates conducted upon this plan. The 
 " Defence " of the Essay is to be taken as a supplement to 
 Neander s share in it, as well as many scattered passages 
 in subsequent prefaces and dedications. All the inter 
 locutors agree that "the sweetness of English verse was 
 never understood or practised by our fathers," and that 
 " our poesy is much improved by the happiness of some 
 writers yet living, who first taught us to mould our thoughts 
 into easy and significant words, to retrench the superfluities 
 of expression, and to make our rhyme so properly a part of 
 the verse that it should never mislead the sense, but itself 
 be led and governed by it." In another place he shows 
 that by " living writers " he meant Waller and Denham. 
 " Rhyme has all the advantages of prose besides its own. 
 But the excellence and dignity of it were never fully 
 known till Mr. Waller taught it : he first made writing 
 easily an art; first showed us to conclude the sense, most 
 commonly in distiches, which in the verse before him runs 
 on for so many lines together that the reader is out of 
 breath to overtake it."* Dryden afterwards changed his 
 mind, and one of the excellences of his own rhymed verse 
 is, that his sense is too ample to be concluded by the 
 distich. Rhyme had been censured as unnatural in 
 dialogue ; but Dryden replies that it is no more so 
 than blank verse, since no man talks any kind of 
 verse in real life. But the argument for rhyme is of 
 another kind. " I am satisfied if it cause delight, for 
 delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy [he 
 should have said means] ; instruction can be admitted 
 but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it de 
 lights. . . . The converse, therefore, which a poet is to 
 imitate must be heightened with all the arts and ornaments 
 of poesy, and must be such as, strictly considered, could 
 * Dedication of " Rival Ladies." 
 
3 o8 DRYDEN. 
 
 never be supposed spoken by any without premeditation. 
 . . . Thus prose, though the rightful prince, yet is by 
 common consent deposed as too weak for the government of 
 serious plays, and, he failing, there now start up two com 
 petitors ; one the nearer in blood, which is blank verse ; 
 the other more fit for the ends of government, which is 
 rhyme. Blank verse is, indeed, the nearer prose, but he is 
 blemished with the weakness of his predecessor. Rhyme 
 (for I will deal clearly) has somewhat of the usurper in 
 him ; but he is brave and generous, and his dominion pleas 
 ing."* To the objection that the difficulties of rhyme will 
 lead to circumlocution, he answers in substance, that a good 
 poet will know how to avoid them. 
 
 It is curious how long the superstition that Waller was 
 the refiner of English verse has prevailed since Dryden first 
 gave it vogue. He was a very poor poet and a purely 
 mechanical versifier. He has lived mainly on the credit of 
 a single couplet, 
 
 " The soul s dark cottage, battered and decayed, 
 Lets in new light through chinks that Time hath made," 
 
 in which the melody alone belongs to him, and the conceit, 
 such as it is, to Samuel Daniel, who said, long before, that 
 the body s 
 
 " "Walls, grown thin, permit the mind 
 To look out thorough and his frailty find." 
 
 Waller has made worse nonsense of it in the transfusion. 
 It might seem that Ben Jonson had a prophetic foreboding 
 of him when he wrote " Others there are that have no 
 composition at all, but a kind of tuning and rhyming fall, 
 in what they write. It runs and slides and only makes a 
 sound. Women s poets they are called, as you have 
 women s tailors. 
 
 They write a verse as smooth, as soft, as cream, 
 In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream. 
 
 * Defence of the Essay. Dryden, in the happiness of his illustrative 
 comparisons, is almost unmatched. Like himself, they occupy a 
 middle ground between poetry and prose, they are a cross between 
 metaphor and simile. 
 
DRYDEN. 309 
 
 You may sound these wits and find the depth of them with 
 your middle-finger."* It seems to have been taken for 
 granted by Waller, as afterwards by Dryden, that our 
 elder poets bestowed no thought upon their verse. " Waller 
 was smooth/ but unhappily he was also flat, and his im 
 portation of the French theory of the couplet as a kind of 
 thought-coop did nothing but mischief, t He never com 
 passed even a smoothness approaching this description of a 
 nightingale s song by a third-rate poet of the earlier school, 
 
 " Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note 
 Through the sleek passage of her open throat, 
 A clear, unwrinkled song," 
 
 one of whose beauties is its running over into the third 
 verse. Those poets indeed 
 
 " Felt music s pulse in all her arteries ; " 
 
 and Dryden himself found out, when he came to try it, that 
 blank verse was not so easy a thing as he at first conceived 
 it, nay, that it is the most difficult of all verse, and that it 
 must make up in harmony, by variety of pause and modula 
 tion, for what it loses in the melody of rhyme. In what 
 makes the chief merit of his later versification, he but 
 rediscovered the secret of his predecessors in giving to 
 rhymed pentameters something of the freedom of blank 
 verse, and not mistaking metre for rhythm. 
 
 Yoltaire, in his Commentary on Corneille, has sufficiently 
 lamented the awkwardness of movement imposed upon the 
 French dramatists by the gyves of rhyme. But he considers 
 
 * Discoveries. 
 
 t What a wretched rhymer he could be we may see in his alteration 
 of the "Maid s Tragedy " of Beaumont and Fletcher : 
 
 " Not long since walking in the field, 
 My nurse and I, we there beheld 
 A goodly fruit ; which, tempting me, 
 I would have plucked ; but, trembling, she, 
 Whoever eat those berries, cried, 
 In less than half-an-hour died ! " 
 
 What intolerable seesaw ! Not much of Byron s " fatal facility " in 
 these octosyllabics 1 
 
310 DRYDEN. 
 
 the necessity of overcoming this obstacle, on the whole, an 
 advantage. Difficulty is his tenth and superior muse. How 
 did Dryden, who says nearly the same thing, succeed in his 
 attempt at the French manner 1 He fell into every one of 
 its vices, without attaining much of what constitutes its 
 excellence. From the nature of the language, all French 
 poetry is purely artificial, and its high polish is all that 
 keeps out decay. The length of their dramatic verse forces 
 the French into much tautology, into bombast in its 
 original meaning, the stuffing out a thought with words till 
 it nils the line. The rigid system of their rhyme, which 
 makes it much harder to manage than in English, has 
 accustomed them to inaccuracies of thought which would 
 shock them in prose. For example, in the " China " of 
 Corneille, as originally written, Emilie says to Augustus, 
 
 " Ces flammes dans nos coeurs dcs longtemps etoient nees, 
 Et ce sont des secrets de plus de qiiatre annees." 
 
 I say nothing of the second verse, which is purely prosaic 
 surplusage exacted by the rhyme, nor of the jingling together 
 of ces, des, etoient, nees, des, and secrets, but I confess that 
 nees does not seem to be the epithet that Corneille would 
 have chosen torftammes, if he could have had his own way, 
 and that flames would seem of all things the hardest to keep 
 secret. But in revising, Corneille changed the first verse 
 thus, 
 
 " Ces flammes dans nos coeurs sans wtre ordre etoient nees." 
 
 Can anything be more absurd than flames born to order ? 
 Yet Voltaire, on his guard against these rhyming pitfalls for 
 the sense, does not notice this in his minute comments on 
 this play. Of extravagant metaphor, the result of this same 
 making sound the file-leader of sense, a single example from 
 " Heraclius " shall suffice : 
 
 " La vapeur de mon sang ira grossir la foudre 
 Que Dieu tient dejk prete k le reduire en poud 
 
 re. 
 
 One cannot think of a Louis Quatorze Appollo except in a 
 full-bottomed periwig, and the tragic style of their poets is 
 
DRYDEN. 311 
 
 always showing the disastrous influence of that portentous 
 comet. It is the style perruque in another than the French 
 meaning of the phrase, and the skill lay in dressing it 
 majestically, so that, as Gibber says, " upon the head of 
 a man of sense, if it became him, it could never fail of 
 drawing to him a more partial regard and benevolence than 
 could possibly be hoped for in an ill-made one." It did not 
 become Dryden, and he left it off.* 
 
 Like his own Zimri, Dryden was " all for " this or 
 that fancy, till he took up with another. But even 
 while he was writing on French models, his judgment 
 could not be blinded to their defects. " Look upon the 
 * Cinna and the * Pompey, they are not so properly to 
 be called plays as long discourses of reason of State, and 
 1 Polieucte in matters of religion is as solemn as the long 
 stops upon our organs ; . . . their actors speak by the 
 hour-glass like our parsons. ... I deny not but this may 
 suit well enough with the French, for as we, who are a 
 more sullen people, come to be diverted at our plays, so 
 they, who are of an airy and gay temper, come thither to 
 make themselves more serious, "f With what an air of 
 innocent unconsciousness the sarcasm is driven home ! 
 Again, while he was still slaving at these bricks without 
 straw, he says : " The present French poets are generally 
 accused that, wheresoever they lay the scene, or in what 
 ever age, the manners of their heroes are wholly French. 
 Racine s Bajazet is bred at Constantinople, but his civilities 
 are conveyed to him by some secret passage from Versailles 
 into the Seraglio." It is curious that Voltaire, speaking of 
 the Berenice of Racine, praises a passage in it for precisely 
 what Dryden condemns: "II semble qu on entende Hen- 
 riette d Angleterre elle-meme parlant au marquis de Vardes. 
 La politesse de la cour de Louis XIV., 1 agrement de la 
 langue Frangaise, la douceur de la versification la plus 
 iiaturelle, le sentiment le plus tendre, tout se trouve dans 
 
 * In more senses than one. His last and best portrait shows him 
 in his own grey hair. 
 t Essay on Dramatick Poesy, 
 
312 DRYDEM 
 
 ce peu de vers." After Dryden had broken away from the 
 heroic style, he speaks out more plainly. In the Preface 
 to his "All for Love," in reply to some cavils upon "little, 
 and not essential decencies," the decision about which he 
 refers to a master of ceremonies, he goes on to say : " The 
 French poets, I confess, are strict observers of these punc 
 tilios ; ... in this nicety of manners does the excellency 
 of French poetry consist. Their heroes are the most civil 
 people breathing, but their good breeding seldom extends to 
 a word of sense. All their wit is in their ceremony ; they 
 want the genius which animates our stage, and therefore 
 t is but necessary, when they cannot please, that they should 
 take care not to offend. . . . They arc so careful not to 
 exasperate a critic that they never leave hiin any \vork, . . . 
 for no part of a poem is worth our discommending where 
 the whole is insipid, as when we have once tasted palled 
 wine we stay not to examine it glass by glass But \vhil 
 they affect to shine in trifles, they are often careless in 
 essentials. . . . For my part, I desire to be tried by the 
 laws of my own country." This is said in heat, but it is 
 plain enough that his mind was wholly changed. In his 
 discourse on epic poetry he is as decided, but more temper 
 ate. He says that the French heroic verse "runs with 
 more activity than strength.* Their language is not strung 
 with sinews like our English ; it has the nimbi eness of a 
 greyhound, but not the bulk and body of a mastiff. Our 
 men and our verses overbear them by their weight, and 
 pondere, non numero, is the British motto. The French 
 have set up purity for the standard of their language, and 
 a masculine vigour is that of ours = Like their tongue is the 
 
 * A French hen decasyllabic verse runs exactly like our ballad 
 measure ; 
 
 A cobbler there was and he lived in a stall, . . . 
 La raison, pour marcher, ria souvent qu une voye. 
 
 (Dryden s note.) 
 
 The verse is not a hendecasyllable. "Attended watchfully to her 
 re itative (Mile. Duchesnois), and find that, in nine lines out of ten, 
 A cobbler there was, etc., is the tune of the French heroics," 
 Moore s Diary, 24th April 1821. 
 
DRYDEN. 313 
 
 genius of their poets, light and trifling in comparison of 
 the English."* 
 
 Dryden might have profited by an admirable saying of 
 his own, that " they who would combat general authority 
 with particular opinion must first establish themselves a 
 reputation of understanding better than other men." He 
 understood the defects much better than the beauties of the 
 French theatre. Lessing was even more one-sided in his 
 judgment upon it.f Goethe, with his usual wisdom, studied 
 it carefully without losing his temper, and tried to profit by 
 its structural merits. Dryden, with his eyes wide open, 
 copied its worst faults, especially its declamatory sentiment. 
 He should have known that certain things can never be 
 transplanted, and that among these is a style of poetry 
 whose great excellence was that it was in perfect sympathy 
 with the genius of the people among whom it came into 
 being. But the truth is, that Dryden had no aptitude 
 whatever for the stage, and in writing for it he was 
 attempting to make a trade of his genius, an arrangement 
 from which the genius always withdraws in disgust. It 
 was easier to make loose thinking and the bad writing 
 which betrays it pass unobserved while the ear was 
 occupied with the sonorous music of the rhyme to which 
 they marched. Except in u All for Love," " the only 
 play," he tells us, " which he wrote to please himself,";}! 
 there is no trace of real passion in any of his tragedies. 
 This, indeed, is inevitable, for there are no characters, but 
 
 * " The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except 
 among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not 
 support it, differs in nothing from prose." GHAY to WEST. 
 
 t Diderot and Rousseau, however, thought their language unfit for 
 poetry, and Voltaire seems to have half agreed with them. No one 
 has expressed this feeling more neatly than Fauriel : " Nul doute 
 que Ton ne puisse dire en prose des choses eminemment poetiques, 
 tout comme il n est que trop certain que Ton peut en dire de fort 
 prosaiques en vers, et meme en excellents vers, en vers elegamment 
 tournes, et en beau langage. C est un fait dont je n ai pas besoin 
 d indiquer d exemples : aucune litterature n en fournirait autant que 
 le ndtre." Hist, de la Poesie Prove^ale, II. 237. 
 
 J Parallel of Poetry and Painting. 
 
314 DRYDEN. 
 
 only personages, in any except that. That is, in many 
 respects, a noble play, and there are few finer scenes, 
 whether in the conception or the carrying out, than that 
 between Antony and Ventidius in the first act.* 
 
 As usual, Dryden s good sense was not blind to the 
 extravagances of his dramatic style. In "Mac Flecknoe " 
 he makes his own Maximin the type of childish rant, 
 
 " And little Maximins the gods defy ; " 
 
 but, as usual also, he could give a plausible reason for his 
 own mistakes by means of that most fallacious of all 
 fallacies which is true so far as it goes. In his Prologue to 
 the " Royal Martyr " he says : 
 
 " And he who servilely creeps after sense 
 Is safe, but ne er will reach an excellence. 
 
 
 
 But, when a tyrant for his theme he had, 
 He loosed the reins and let his muse run mad, 
 And, though he stumbles in a full career, 
 Yet rashness is a better fault than fear ; 
 
 They then, who of each trip advantage take, 
 
 Find out those faults which they want wit to make. 
 
 And in the Preface to the same play he tells us : "I have 
 not everywhere observed the equality of numbers in my 
 verse, partly by reason of my haste, but more especially 
 because I would not have my sense a slave to syllables" 
 Dryden, when he had not a bad case to argue, would have 
 had small respect for the wit whose skill lay in the making 
 of faults, and has himself, where his self-love was not 
 engaged, admirably defined the boundary which divides 
 boldness from rashness. What Quintilian says of Seneca 
 applies very aptly to Dryden : " Yelles eum suo ingenio 
 dixisse, alieno judicio."t He was thinking of himself, I 
 fancy, when he makes Ventidius say of Antony, 
 
 * "II y a seulement la scene de Ventidius et d Antoine qui est 
 digne de Corneille. C est la le sentiment de milord Bolingbroke et de 
 tous les bons auteurs ; c est ainsi que pensait Addisson." VOLTAIRE 
 to M. DE FHOMONT, 15th November 1735. 
 
 t Inst. X., i. 129. 
 
DRYDEN. 315 
 
 " He starts out wide 
 
 And bounds into a vice that bears him far_ 
 From his first course, and plunges him in ills ; 
 But, when his danger makes him find his fault, 
 Quick to observe, and full of sharp remorse, 
 He censures eagerly his own misdeeds, 
 Judging himself with malice to himself, 
 And not forgiving what as man he did, 
 Because his other parts are more than man. " 
 
 But bad though they nearly all are as wholes, his plays 
 contain passages which only the great masters have 
 surpassed, and to the level of which no subsequent writer 
 for the stage has ever risen. The necessity of rhyme often 
 forced him to a platitude, as where he says, 
 
 " My love was blind to your deluding art, 
 But blind men feel when stabbed so near the heart."* 
 
 But even in rhyme he not seldom justifies his claim to the 
 title of " glorious John." In the very play from which I 
 have just quoted are these verses in his best manner : 
 
 " No, like his better Fortune I ll appear, 
 With open arms, loose veil, and flowing hair, 
 Just flying forward from her rolling sphere." 
 
 His comparisons, as I have said, are almost always happy. 
 This, from the " Indian Emperor," is tenderly pathetic : 
 
 "As callow birds, 
 
 Whose mother s killed in seeking of the prey, 
 Cry in their nest and think her long away, 
 And, at each leaf that stirs, each blast of wind, % 
 Gape for the food which they must never find." 
 
 And this, of the anger with which the Maiden Queen, striving 
 to hide her jealousy, betrays her love, is vigorous : 
 
 " Her rage was love, and its tempestuous flame, 
 Like lightning, showed the heaven from whence it came." 
 
 The following simile from the " Conquest of Grenada " is 
 as well expressed as it is apt in conception : 
 
 " I scarcely understand my own intent ; 
 But, silk-worm like, so long within have wrought, 
 That I am lost in my own web of thought." 
 * Conquest of Grenada, Second Part 
 
3i6 DRYDEN. 
 
 In the " Rival Ladies/ Angelina, walking in the dark, 
 describes her sensations naturally and strikingly : 
 
 " No noise but what my footsteps make, and they 
 Sound dreadfully and louder than by day : 
 They double too, and every step I take 
 Sounds thick, methinks, and more than one could make." 
 
 In all the rhymed plays* there are many passages which 
 one is rather inclined to like than sure he would be right 
 in liking them. The following verses from " Aurengzebe " 
 are of this sort : 
 
 " My love was such it needed no return, 
 Rich in itself, like elemental fire, 
 Whose pureness does no aliment require." 
 
 This is Cowleyish, and pureness is surely the wrong word 
 and yet it is better than mere commonplace. Perhaps 
 what oftenest turns the balance in Dryden s favour, when 
 we are weighing his claims as a poet, is his persistent 
 capability of enthusiasm. To the last he kindles and 
 sometimes almost flashes out that supernatural light which 
 is the supreme test of poetic genius. As he himself so 
 finely and characteristically says in "Aurengzebe," there 
 was no period in his life when it was not true of him that 
 
 " He felt the inspiring heat, the absent god return." 
 
 The verses which follow are full of him, and, with the 
 exception of the single word underwent, are in his luckiest 
 manner : 
 
 " One loose, one sally of a hero s soul, 
 Does all the military art control. 
 While timorous wit goes round, or fords the shore, 
 He shoots the gulf, and is already o er, 
 And, when the enthusiastic fit is spent, 
 Looks back amazed at what he underwent, "t 
 
 Pithy sentences and phrases always drop from Dryden s 
 pen as if unawares, whether in prose or verse. I string 
 together a few at random : 
 
 * In most, he mingles blank verse. t Conquest of Grenada. 
 
DRYDEN. 317 
 
 11 The greatest argument for love is love." 
 " Few know the use of life before t is past." 
 11 Time gives himself and is not valued." 
 
 " Death in itself is nothing ; but we fear 
 To be we know not what, we know not where.** 
 
 " Love either finds equality or makes it ; 
 Like death, he knows no difference in degrees." 
 
 " That s empire, that which I can give away." 
 
 " Yours is a soul irregularly great, 
 Which, wanting temper, yet abounds in heat." 
 
 " Forgiveness to the injured does belong, 
 But they ne er pardon who have done the wrong." 
 
 " Poor women s thoughts are all extempore." 
 
 * The cause of love can never be assigned, 
 T is in no face, but in the lover s mind,"f 
 
 " Heaven can forgive a crime to penitence, 
 For Heaven can judge if penitence be true ; 
 But man, who knows not hearts, should make examples." 
 
 " Kings titles commonly begin by force, 
 "Which time wears off and mellows into right." 
 
 " Fear s a large promisor ; who subject live 
 To that base passion, know not what they give.* 
 
 " The secret pleasure of the generous act 
 Is the great mind s great bribe." 
 
 11 That bad thing, gold, buys all good things." 
 " Why, love does all that s noble here below." 
 
 " To prove religion true, 
 If either wit or sufferings could suffice, 
 All faiths afford the constant and the wise." 
 
 But Pryden, as he tells us himself, 
 
 " Grew weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme ; 
 Passion s too fierce to be in fetters bound, 
 And Nature flies him like enchanted ground." 
 
 The finest things in his plays were written in blank verse, 
 * This recalls a striking verse of Alfred de Musset : 
 
 11 La muse est toujours belle, 
 Meme pour 1 insense, rnerne pour 1 impuissant, 
 Car so, bcaut^ pour nous, c est notre amour pour elle,* 
 
3i 8 DRY DEN. 
 
 as vernacular to him as the alexandrine to the French. In 
 this he vindicates his claim as a poet. His diction gets 
 wings, and both his verse and his thought become capable of 
 a reach which was denied them when set in the stocks of the 
 couplet. The solid man becomes even airy in this new 
 found freedom : Anthony says, 
 
 "How I loved, 
 
 Witness ye days and nights, and all ye hours 
 That danced away with down upon your feet." 
 
 And what image was ever more delicately exquisite, what 
 movement more fadingly accordant with the sense, than in 
 the last two verses of the following passage ? 
 
 " I feel death rising higher still and higher, 
 Within my bosom ; every breath I fetch 
 Shuts up my life within a shorter compass, 
 And, like the vanishing sound of bells, grows less 
 And less each pulse, till it be lost in air."* 
 
 Nor was he altogether without pathos, though it is rare 
 with him. The following passage seems to me tenderly 
 full of it : 
 
 "Something like 
 
 That voice, methinks, I should have somewhere heard ; 
 But floods of woe have hurried it far olf 
 Beyond my ken of soul."t 
 
 And this single verse from " Aurengzebe " : 
 " Live still ! oh live ! live even to be unkind 1 " 
 
 with its passionate eagerness and sobbing repetition, is 
 worth a ship-load of the long-drawn treacle of modern self- 
 compassion. 
 
 Now and then, to be sure, we come upon something that 
 makes us hesitate again whether, after all, Dryden was not 
 grandiose rather than great, as in the two passages that 
 next follow : 
 
 " He looks secure of death, superior greatness, 
 Like Jove when he made Fate and said, Thou art 
 The slave of my creation. "J 
 
 * Rival Ladies. t Doii Sebastian. J Ibid. 
 
DRYDEN. 319 
 
 " I m pleased with my own work ; Jove was not more 
 With infant nature, when his spacious hand 
 Had rounded this huge ball of earth and seas, 
 To give it the first push and see it roll 
 Along the vast abyss."* 
 
 I should say that Dryden is more apt to dilate our fancy 
 than our thought, as great poets have the gift of doing. 
 But if he have not the potent alchemy that transmutes 
 the lead of our commonplace associations into gold, as 
 Shakespeare knows how to do so easily, yet his sense is 
 always up to the sterling standard; and though he has not 
 added so much as some have done to the stock of bullion 
 which others afterwards coin and put into circulation, there 
 are few who have minted so many phrases that are still a 
 part of our daily currency. The first line of the following 
 passage has been worn pretty smooth, but the succeeding 
 ones are less familiar : 
 
 " Men are but children of a larger growth, 
 Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, 
 And full as craving too and full as vain ; 
 And yet the soul, shut up in her dark room, 
 Viewing so clear abroad, at home sees nothing 
 But, like a mole in earth, busy and blind, 
 Works all her folly up and casts it outward 
 In the world s open view."t 
 
 The image is mixed and even contradictory, but the 
 thought obtains grace for it. I feel as if Shakespeare 
 would have written seeing for vieiving, thus gaining the 
 strength of repetition in one verse and avoiding the sameness 
 of it in the other. Dryden, I suspect, was not much given 
 to correction, and, indeed, one of the great charms of his 
 best writing is, that everything seems struck off at a heat, 
 as by a superior man in the best mood of his talk. Where 
 he rises, he generally becomes fervent rather than imagina 
 tive ; his thought does not incorporate itself in metaphor, 
 as in purely poetic minds, but repeats and reinforces itself 
 in simile. Where he is imaginative, it is in that lower 
 sense which the poverty of our language, for want of a 
 * Cleomenes. t All for Love. 
 
32 DRYDEN. 
 
 better word, compels us to call picturesque, and even then he 
 shows little of that finer instinct which suggests so much 
 more than it tells, and works the more powerfully as it 
 taxes more the imagination of the reader. In Donne s 
 " Relic " there is an example of what I mean. He fancies 
 some one breaking up his grave and spying 
 
 " A bracelet of bright hair about the bone," 
 a verse that still shines there in the darkness of the tomb, 
 after two centuries, like one of those inextinguishable lamps 
 whose secret is lost.* Yet Dry den sometimes showed a 
 sense of this magic of a mysterious hint, as in the "Spanish 
 Friar": 
 
 " No, I confes?, you bade me not in words ; 
 The dial spoke not, but it made shrewd signs, 
 And pointed full upon the stroke of murder." 
 
 This is perhaps a solitary example. Nor is he always so 
 possessed by the image in his mind as unconsciously to 
 choose even the picturesquely imaginative word. He has 
 done so, however, in this passage from "Marriage & la 
 Mode " : 
 
 " You ne er must hope again to see your princess, 
 Except as prisoners view fair walks and streets, 
 And careless passengers going by their grates." 
 
 But after all, he is best upon a level, table-land, it is true, 
 and a very high level, but still somewhere between the 
 loftier peaks of inspiration and the plain of everyday life. 
 In those passages where he moralises he is always good, 
 setting some obvious truth in a new light by vigorous 
 phrase and happy illustration. Take this (from "CEdipus") 
 as a proof of it : 
 
 * Dryden, with his wonted perspicacity, follows Ben Jonson in 
 calling Donne "the greatest wit, though not the best poet, of our 
 nation." (Dedication of Eleonora). Even as a poet Donne 
 
 11 Had in him those brave translunary things 
 That our first poets had." 
 
 To open vistas for the imagination through the blind wall of the senses, 
 as he could sometimes do, is the supreme function of poetry. 
 
DRYDEN. 321 
 
 " The gods are just, 
 But how can finite measure infinite ? 
 Reason ! alas, it does not know itself ! 
 Yet man, vain man, would with his short-lined plummet 
 Fathom the vast abyss of heavenly justice. 
 "Whatever is, is in its causes just, 
 Since all things are by fate. But purblind man 
 Sees but a part o th chain, the nearest links, 
 His eyes not carrying to that equal beam 
 That poises all above." 
 
 From the same play I pick an illustration of that ripened 
 sweetness of thought and language which marks the natural 
 vein of Dryden. One cannot help applying the passage to 
 the late Mr. Quincy : 
 
 " Of no distemper, of no blast he died, 
 But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed long, 
 E en wondered at because he dropt no sooner ; 
 Fate seemed to wind hi.n up for fourscore years ; 
 Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more, 
 Till, like a clock worn out with eating Time, 
 The wheels of weary life at last stood still."* 
 
 Here is another of the same kind from " All for Love : " 
 
 " Gone so soon ! 
 
 Is Death no more ? He used him carelessly, 
 With a familiar kindness ; ere he knocked, 
 Ran to the door and took him in his arms, 
 As who should say, You re welcome at all hours, 
 A friend need give no warning." 
 
 With one more extract from the same play, which is in 
 every way his best, for he had, when he wrote it, been feeding 
 on the bee-bread of Shakespeare, I shall conclude. Antony 
 says, 
 
 " For I am now so sunk from what I was, 
 Thou fmd st me at my lowest water-mark. 
 The rivers that ran in and raised my fortunes 
 Are all dried up, or take another course : 
 What I have left is from my native spring ; 
 I ve a heart still that swells in scorn of Fate, 
 And lifts me to niy banks. " 
 
 * My own judgment is my sole warrant for attributing these extracts 
 from (Edipus to Dryden rather than Lee. 
 
 149 
 
322 DRYDEN. 
 
 This is certainly, from beginning to end, in what used to be 
 called the grand style, at once noble and natural. I have 
 not undertaken to analyse any one of the plays, for (except 
 in " All for Love ") it would have been only to expose their 
 weakness. Dryden. had no constructive faculty ; and in 
 every one of his longer poems that required a plot, the plot 
 is bad, always more or less inconsistent with itself, and 
 rather hitched-on to the subject than combining with it. It 
 is fair to say, however, before leaving this part of Dryden s 
 literary work, that Home Tooke thought " Don Sebastian" 
 "the best play extant."* Gray admired the plays of 
 Dryden, " not as dramatic compositions, but as poetry."f 
 "There are as many things finely said in his plays as 
 almost by anybody," said Pope to Spence. Of their rant, 
 their fustian, their bombast, their bad English, of their 
 innumerable sins against .Dryden s own better conscience 
 both as poet and critic, I shall excuse myself from giving 
 any instances.^ I like what is good in Dryden so 
 much, and it is so good, that I think Gray was justified in 
 always losing his temper when he heard "his faults 
 criticised." 
 
 It is as a satirist and pleader in verse that Dryden is best 
 known, and as both he is in some respects unrivalled. His 
 satire is not so sly as Chaucer s, but it is distinguished by 
 the same good-nature. There is no malice in it. I shall 
 not enter into his literary quarrels further than to say he 
 
 * Recollections of Eogers, p. 165. 
 
 t Nicholls s Reminiscences of Gray. Pickering s edition of Gray s 
 Works, Vol. V. p. 35. 
 
 + Let one suffice for all. In the "Royal Martyr," Porphyrius, 
 awaiting his execution, says to Maximm, who had wished him for a 
 son-in-law : 
 
 " Where er thou stand st, I ll level at that place 
 My gushing blood, and spout it at thy face ; 
 Thus not by marriage we our blood will join ; 
 Nay, more, my arms shall throw my head at thine." 
 
 " It is no shame," says Dryden himself, " to be a poet, though it is 
 to be a bad one." 
 Gray, ubl supra, p. 38. 
 
DRYDEN. 323 
 
 seems to me, on the whole, to have been forbearing, which 
 is the more striking as he tells us repeatedly that he was 
 naturally vindictive. It was he who called revenge " the 
 darling attribute of heaven." " I complain not of their 
 lampoons and libels, though I have been the public mark 
 for many years. I am vindictive enough to have repelled 
 force by force, if I could imagine that any of them had ever 
 reached me." It was this feeling of easy superiority, I 
 suspect, that made him the mark for so much jealous 
 vituperation. Scott is wrong in attributing his onslaught 
 upon Settle to jealousy because one of the latter s plays had 
 been performed at Court, an honour never paid to any of 
 Dryden s.* I have found nothing like a trace of jealousy 
 in that large and benignant nature. In his vindication of 
 the " Duke of Guise," he says, with honest confidence in 
 himself : " Nay, I durst almost refer myself to some of the 
 angry poets on the other side, whether I have not rather 
 countenanced and assisted their beginnings than hindered 
 them from rising." He seems to have been really as 
 indifferent to the attacks on himself as Pope pretended 
 to be. In the same vindication he says of the " Rehearsal," 
 the only one of them that had any wit in it, and it has a 
 great deal : " Much less am I concerned at the noble name 
 of Bayes ; that s a brat so like his own father that he 
 cannot be mistaken for any other body. They might 
 as reasonably have called Tom Sternhold Virgil, and the 
 resemblance would have held as well." In his Essay on 
 Satire he says : " And yet we know that in Christian 
 charity all offences are to be forgiven as we expect the like 
 pardon for those we daily commit against Almighty God. 
 
 * Scott had never seen Pepys s Diary when he wrote this, or he 
 would have left it unwritten : " Fell to discourse on the last night s 
 work at Court, where the ladies and Duke of Monmouth acted the 
 Indian Emperor, wherein they told me these things most remark 
 able that not any woman but the Duchess of Monmouth and Mrs. 
 Cornwallis did anything but like fools and stocks, but that these 
 two did do most extraordinary well ; that not any man did anything 
 well but Captain O Bryan, who spoke and did well, but above all 
 things did dance most incomparably." 14th January 1668. 
 
324 DRYDEN. 
 
 And this consideration has often made me tremble when I 
 was saying our Lord s Prayer ; for the plain condition of 
 the forgiveness which we beg is the pardoning of others the 
 offences which they have done to us ; for which reason I 
 have many times avoided the commission of that fault, even 
 when I have been notoriously provoked.* And in another 
 passage he says, with his usual wisdom : " Good sense 
 and good-nature are never separated, though the ignorant 
 world has thought otherwise. Good-nature, by which I 
 mean beneficence and candour, is the product of right 
 reason, which of necessity will give allowance to the 
 failings of others, by considering that there is nothing 
 perfect in mankind." In the same Essay he gives his own 
 receipt for satire : " How easy it is to call rogue and 
 villain, and that wittily ! but how hard to make a man 
 appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any 
 of those opprobrious terms ! . . . This is the mystery of 
 that noble trade. . . . Neither is it true that this fineness 
 of raillery is offensive : a witty man is tickled while he is 
 hurt in this manner, and a fool feels it not. . . . There is 
 a vast difference between the slovenly butchering of a man 
 and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from 
 the body, and leaves it standing in its place. A man may 
 be capable, as Jack Ketch s wife said of his servant, of a 
 plain piece of work, of a bare hanging ; but to make a 
 malefactor die sweetly was only belonging to her husband. 
 I wish I could apply it to myself, if the reader would be 
 kind enough to think it belongs to me. The character of 
 Zimri in my Absalom is, in my opinion, worth the whole 
 poem. It is not bloody, but it is ridiculous enough, and he 
 for whom it was intended was too witty to resent it as an 
 injury. ... I avoided the mention of great crimes, and 
 applied myself to the representing of blind sides and little 
 extravagances, to which, the wittier a man is, he is generally 
 the more obnoxious." 
 
 Dryden thought his genius led him that way. In his 
 
 * See also that noble passage in the "Hind and Panther" (1573- 
 1591), where this is put into verse. Dryden always thought in prose. 
 
DRYDEN. 325 
 
 elegy on the satirist Oldham, whom Hallam, without reading 
 him, I suspect, ranks next to Dryden,* he says : 
 
 " For sure our souls were near allied, and tliine 
 Cast in the same poetic mould with mine ; 
 One common note in either lyre did strike, 
 And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike." 
 
 His practice is not always so delicate as his theory ; but 
 if he was sometimes rough, he never took a base advantage. 
 He knocks his antagonist down, and there an end. Pope 
 seems to have nursed his grudge, and then, watching his 
 chance, to have squirted vitriol from behind a corner, 
 rather glad than otherwise if it fell on the women of those 
 he hated or envied. And if Dryden is never dastardly, as 
 Pope often was, so also he never wrote anything so mali 
 ciously depreciatory as Pope s unprovoked attack on Addi- 
 son. Dryden s satire is often coarse, but where it is 
 coarsest, it is commonly in defence of himself against 
 attacks that were themselves brutal. Then, to be sure, he 
 snatches the first ready cudgel, as in Shadwell s case, 
 though even then there is something of the good-humour of 
 conscious strength. Pope s provocation was too often the 
 mere opportunity to say a biting thing, where he could do 
 it safely. If his victim showed fight, he tried to smooth 
 things over, as with Dennis. Dryden could forget that he 
 had ever had a quarrel, but he never slunk away from any, 
 least of all from one provoked by himself.t Pope s satire 
 is too much occupied with the externals of manners, habits, 
 personal defects, and peculiarities. Dryden goes right to 
 the rooted character of the man, to the weaknesses of his 
 nature, as where he says of Burnet : 
 
 " Prompt to assail, and careless of defence, 
 Invulnerable in his impudence, 
 
 * Probably on the authority of this very epitaph, as if epitaphs were 
 to be believed even under oath ! A great many authors live because 
 we read nothing but their tombstones. Oldham was, to borrow one of 
 Dryden s phrases, " a bad or, which is worse, an indifferent poet." 
 
 t " He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compassionate, 
 easily forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and sincere recon 
 ciliation with them that had offended him." CONGREVE. 
 
326 DRYDEN. 
 
 He dares the world, and, eager of a name, 
 He thrusts about andjustles into fame. 
 So fond of loud report that, not to miss 
 Of being known (his last and utmost bliss). 
 He rather would be known for what he is." 
 
 It would be hard to find in Pope such compression of 
 meaning as in the first, or such penetrative sarcasm as 
 in the second of the passages I have underscored. Dry- 
 den s satire is still quoted for its comprehensiveness of 
 application, Pope s rather for the elegance of its finish and 
 the point of its phrase than for any deeper qualities.* I do 
 not remember that Dryden ever makes poverty a reproach, f 
 He was above it, alike by generosity of birth and mind. 
 Pope is always the parvenu, always giving himself the airs 
 of a fine gentleman, and, like Horace Walpole and Byron, 
 affecting superiority to professional literature. Dryden, 
 like Lessing, was a hack-writer, and was proud, as an 
 honest man has a right to be, of being able to get his bread 
 by his brains. He lived in Grub Street all his life, and 
 never dreamed that where a man of genius lived was not 
 the best quarter of the town. " Tell his Majesty," said 
 sturdy old Jonson, "that his soul lives in an alley." 
 
 Dryden s prefaces are a mine of good writing and judi 
 cious criticism. His obiter dicta have often the penetration, 
 and always more than the equity, of Voltaire s, for Dryden 
 never loses temper, and never altogether qualifies his judg 
 ment by his self-love. " He was a more universal writer 
 
 * Coleridge says excellently : " You will find this a good gauge or 
 criterion of genius, whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins 
 upon itself. Take Dryden s Achitophel and Zimri ; every line adds 
 to or modifies the character, which is, as it where, a-building up to 
 the very last verse ; whereas in Pope s Timon, etc., the first two or 
 three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or 
 thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of 
 jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirised." (Table- 
 Talk, ]92.) Some of Dryden s best satirical hits are let fall by seem 
 ing accident in his prose," as where he says of his Protestant assailants, 
 " Most of them love all whores but her of Bxbylon." They had first 
 attacked him on the score of his private morals. 
 
 t That he taxes Shadwell with it is only a seeming exception, as 
 any careful reader will see. 
 
DRYDEN. 327 
 
 than Voltaire," said Home Tooke, and perhaps it is true 
 that he had a broader view, though his learning was neither 
 so extensive nor so accurate. My space will not afford 
 many extracts, but I cannot forbear one or two. He says 
 of Chaucer, that " he is a perpetual fountain of good sense,"* 
 and likes him better than Ovid, a bold confession in tha* 
 day. He prefers the pastorals of Theocritus to those o^ 
 Virgil. " Virgil s shepherds are too well-read in the philo 
 sophy of Epicurus and of Plato ; " " there is a kind of 
 rusticity in all those pompous verses, somewhat of a holi 
 day shepherd strutting in his country buskins ; "+ 
 " Theocritus is softer than Ovid, he touches the passions 
 more delicately, and performs all this out of his own fund, 
 without diving into the arts and sciences for a supply. 
 Even his Doric dialect has an incomparable sweetness in 
 his clownishness, like a fair shepherdess, in her country 
 russet, talking in a Yorkshire tone."J Comparing Virgil s 
 verse with that of some poets, he says, that his " numbers 
 are perpetually varied to increase the delight of the reader, 
 so that the same sounds are never repeated twice together. 
 On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, though they write in 
 styles different from each other, yet have each of them but 
 one sort of music in their verses. All the versification and 
 little variety of Claudian is included within the compass of 
 four or five lines, and then he begins in the same tenor, 
 perpetually closing his sense at the end of a verse and that 
 verse commonly which they call golden, or two substantives 
 and two adjectives with a verb betwixt them to keep the 
 peace. Ovid, with all his sweetness, has as little variety of 
 numbers and sound as he ; he is always, as it were, upon the 
 hand-gallop, and his verse runs upon carpet-ground. " 
 What a dreary half-century would have been saved to 
 English poetry, could Pope have laid these sentences to 
 heart ! Upon translation, no one has written so much 
 and so well as Dryden in his various prefaces. Whatever 
 has been said since is either expansion or variation of what 
 
 * Preface to Fables. t Dedication of the Georgics. 
 
 J Preface to second Miscellany. Ibid. 
 
328 DRYDEN. 
 
 he had said before. His general theory may be stated as an 
 aim at something between the literalness of metaphrase and 
 the looseness of paraphrase. " Where I have enlarged," he 
 says, " I desire the false critics would not always think that 
 those thoughts are wholly mine, but either they are secretly 
 in the poet, or may be fairly deduced from him." Coleridge, 
 with his usual cleverness of assimilation, has condensed him 
 in a letter to Wordsworth : " There is no medium between 
 a prose version and one on the avowed principle of compen 
 sation in the widest sense, i.e. manner, genius, total effect."* 
 I have selected these passages, not because they are the 
 best, but because they have a near application to Dryden 
 himself. His own characterisation of Chaucer (though too 
 narrow for the greatest but one of English poets) is the best 
 that could be given of himself : " He is a perpetual fountain 
 of good sense." And the other passages show him a close 
 and open-minded student of the art he professed. Has his 
 influence on our literature, but especially on our poetry, 
 been on the whole for good or evil 1 If he could have been 
 read with the liberal understanding which he brought to the 
 works of others, I should answer at once that it had been 
 beneficial. But his translations and paraphrases, in some 
 ways the best things he did, were done, like his plays, under 
 contract to deliver a certain number of verses for a specified 
 sum. The versification, of which he had learned the art by 
 long practice, is excellent, but his haste has led him to fill 
 out the measure of lines with phrases that add only to 
 dilute, and thus the clearest, the most direct, the most 
 manly versifier of his time became, without meaning it, 
 the source (fons et origo malorum) of that poetic diction 
 from which our poetry has not even yet recovered. I do 
 not like to say it, but he has sometimes smothered the 
 childlike simplicity of Chaucer under feather-beds of 
 verbiage. What this kind of thing came to in the next 
 century, when everybody ceremoniously took a bushel- 
 basket to bring a wren s egg to market in, is only too sadly 
 familiar. It is clear that his natural taste led Dryden to 
 * Memoirs of Wordsworth, Vol. II. p. 74 (American edition). 
 
DRYDEN. 329 
 
 prefer directness and simplicity of style. If he was too 
 often tempted astray by Artifice, his love of Nature betrays 
 itself in many an almost passionate outbreak of angry 
 remorse. Addison tells us that he took particular delight 
 in the reading of our old English ballads. What he valued 
 above all things was Force, though in his haste he is willing 
 to make a shift with its counterfeit, Effect. As usual, he 
 had a good reason to urge for what he did : " I will not 
 excuse, but justify myself for one pretended crime for which 
 I am liable to be charged by false critics, not only in this 
 translation, but in many of my original poems, that I 
 Latinise too much. It is true that when I find an English 
 word significant and sounding, I neither borrow from the 
 Latin or any other language ; but when I want at home I 
 must seek abroad. If sounding words are not of our growth 
 and manufacture, who shall hinder me to import them from 
 a foreign country ? I carry not out the treasure of the 
 nation which is never to return ; but what I bring from 
 Italy I spend in England : here it remains, and here it 
 circulates ; for if the coin be good, it will pass from one 
 hand to another. I trade both with the living and the dead 
 for the enrichment of our native language. We have enough 
 in England to supply our necessity ; but if we will have 
 things of magnificence and splendour, we must get them by 
 commerce. . , . Therefore, if I find a word in a classic 
 author, I propose it to be naturalised by using it myself, 
 and if the public approve of it the bill passes. But every 
 man cannot distinguish betwixt pedantry and poetry ; every 
 man, therefore, is not fit to innovate."* This is admirably 
 said, and with Dryden s accustomed penetration to the root 
 of the matter. The Latin has given us most of our canorous 
 words, only they must not be confounded with merely 
 sonorous ones, still less with phrases that, instead of 
 supplementing the sense, encumber it. It was of Latinising 
 * A Discourse of Epick Poetry. "If the public approve." " On ne 
 pent pas admettre dans le developpement des langues aucune revolution 
 artifkielle et sciemment executee ; il n y a pour elles ni conciles, ni 
 assemblies deliberantes ; on ne les reforme pas comme une constitution 
 vicieuse." KENAN, De 1 Oiigine du Langage, p. 95. 
 
330 DRYDEN. 
 
 in this sense that Dryden was guilty. Instead of stabbing, 
 he "with steel invades the life." The consequence was 
 that by-and-by we have Dr. Johnson s poet, Savage, 
 telling us, 
 
 " In front, a parlour meets my entering view, 
 Opposed a room to sweet refection due ; " 
 
 Dr. Blacklock making a forlorn maiden say of her " dear," 
 who is out late, 
 
 " Or by some apoplectic fit deprest, 
 Perhaps, alas ! he seeks eternal rest ; " 
 
 and Mr. Bruce, in a Danish war-song, calling on the vikings 
 to " assume their oars." But it must be admitted of 
 Dryden that he seldom makes the second verse of a couplet 
 the mere train-bearer to the first, as Pope was continually 
 doing. In Dryden the rhyme waits upon the thought ; in 
 Pope and his school the thought courtesies to the tune for 
 which it is written. 
 
 Dryden has also been blamed for his gallicisms.* He 
 tried some, it is true, but they have not been accepted. 
 I do not think he added a single word to the language, 
 unless, as I suspect, he first used magnetism in its present 
 sense of moral attraction. What he did in his best writing 
 was to use the English as if it were a spoken, and not 
 merely an ink-horn language ; as if it were his own to do 
 what he pleased with it, as if it need not be ashamed of 
 itself.t In this respect, his service to our prose was greater 
 
 * This is an old complaint. Puttenham sighs over such innovation 
 in Elizabeth s time, and Carew in James s. A language grows and is 
 not made. Almost all the new-fangled words with which Jonson taxes 
 Marston in his " Poetaster " are now current, 
 
 t Like most idiomatic, as distinguished from correct writers, he 
 knew very little about the language historically or critically. His 
 prose and poetry swarm with locutions that would have made Lindley 
 Murray s hair stand on end. How little he knew is plain from his 
 criticising in Ben Jonson the use of ones in the plural, of "Though 
 Heaven should speak with all his wrath," and be "as false English 
 for are, though the rhyme hides it." Yet all are good English, and 
 I have found them all in Dry den s own writing ! Of his sins against 
 idiom I have a longer list than I have room for. And yet he is one 
 of our highest authorities for real English. 
 
DRY DEN. 331 
 
 than any other man has ever rendered. He says he formed 
 his style upon Tillotson s (Bossuet, on the other hand, 
 formed his upon Corneille s) ; but I rather think he got it 
 at Will s, for its great charm is that it has the various 
 freedom of talk.* In verse, he had a pomp which, excellent 
 in itself, became pompousness in his imitators. But he had 
 nothing of Milton s ear for various rhythm and interwoven 
 harmony. He knew how to give new modulation, sweet 
 ness, and force to the pentameter ; but in what used to be 
 called pindarics, I am heretic enough to think he generally 
 failed. His so much praised " Alexander s Feast " (in 
 parts of it, at least) has no excuse for its slovenly metre 
 and awkward expression, but that it was written for music. 
 He himself tells us, in the epistle dedicatory to " King 
 Arthur," that the numbers of poetry and vocal music are 
 sometimes so contrary, that in many places I have been 
 obliged to cramp my verses and make them rugged to the 
 reader that they may be harmonious to the hearer." His 
 renowned ode suffered from this constraint, but this is 
 no apology for the vulgarity of conception in too many 
 passages.f 
 
 Dryden s conversion to Romanism has been commonly 
 taken for granted as insincere, and has therefore left an 
 abiding stain on his character, though the other mud 
 thrown at him by angry opponents or rivals brushed off 
 so soon as it was dry. But I think his change of faith 
 susceptible of several explanations, none of them in any 
 way discreditable to him. Where Church and State are 
 
 * To see what he rescued us from in pedantry on the one hand, and 
 vulgarism on the other, read Feltham and Tom Brown if you can. 
 
 t " Cette ode mise en musique par Purcell (si je ne me trompe), 
 passe en Angleterre pour le chef-d oeuvre de la poesie la plus sublime 
 et la plus variee ; et je vous avoue que, comme je sais mieux 1 anglais 
 que le grec, j aime cent fois mieux cette ode que tout Pindare." 
 VOLTAIIIE to M. DE CHABANON, 9 mars 1772. 
 
 Dryden would have agreed with Voltaire. "When Chief-Justice 
 Marlay, then a young Templar, "congratulated him on having 
 produced the finest and noblest Ode that had ever been written in any 
 language, You are right, young gentleman (replied Dryden), a 
 nobler Ode never was produced, nor ever will. " MALONE. 
 
332 DRYDEN. 
 
 habitually associated, it is natural that minds even of a 
 high order should unconsciously come to regard religion 
 as only a subtler mode of police.* Dryden, conservative 
 by nature, had discovered before Joseph de Maistre, that 
 Protestantism, so long as it justified its name by con 
 tinuing to be an active principle, was the abettor of 
 Republicanism. I think this is hinted in more than one 
 passage in his preface to " The Hind and Panther." 
 He may very well have preferred Romanism because of 
 its elder claim to authority in all matters of doctrine, 
 but I think he had a deeper reason in the constitution 
 of his own mind. That he was "naturally inclined to 
 scepticism in philosophy," he tells us of himself in the 
 preface to the " Religio Laica"; but he was a sceptic 
 with an imaginative side, and in such characters scepticism 
 and superstition play into each other s hands. This finds a 
 curious illustration in a letter to his sons, written four years 
 before his death : " Towards the latter end of this month, 
 September, Charles will begin to recover his perfect health, 
 according to his Nativity, which, casting it myself, I am 
 sure is true, and all things hitherto have happened accord 
 ingly to the very time that I predicted them." Have we 
 forgotten Montaigne s votive offerings at the shrine of 
 Loreto ? 
 
 Dryden was short of body, inclined to stoutness, and 
 florid of complexion. He is said to have had " a sleepy 
 eye," but was handsome and of a manly carriage. He 
 " was not a very genteel man, he was intimate with 
 none but poetical rnen.f He was said to be a very good 
 man by all that knew him : he was as plump as Mr. 
 
 * This was true of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and still more of Southey, 
 who in some respects was not unlike Dryden. 
 
 t Pope s notion of gentility was perhaps expressed in a letter from 
 Lord Cobham to him : " I congratulate you upon the fine weather, 
 T is a strange thing that people of condition and men of parts 
 must enjoy it in common with the rest of the world." (Ruffhead s 
 Pope, p. 276, note.) His lordship s nai ve distinction between people 
 of condition and men of parts is as good as Pope s between genteel 
 and poetical men. I fancy the poet grinning savagely as he read it. 
 
DRYDEN. 333 
 
 Pitt, of a fresh colour and a down look, and not very 
 eonversible." So Pope described him to Spence. He 
 still reigns in literary tradition, as when at Will s his 
 elbow-chair had the best place by the fire in winter, or 
 on the balcony in summer, and when a pinch from his 
 suuff-box made a young author blush with pleasure as would 
 now-a-days a favourable notice in the Saturday Review. 
 What gave and secures for him this singular eminence ? 
 To put it in a single word, I think that his qualities and 
 faculties were in that rare combination which makes 
 character. This gave flavour to whatever he wrote, 
 a very rare quality. 
 
 Was he, then, a great poet ? Hardly, in the narrowest 
 definition. But he was a strong thinker who sometimes 
 carried common sense to a height where it catches the light 
 of a diviner air, and warmed reason till it had well-nigh the 
 illuminating property of intuition. Certainly he is not, like 
 Spenser, the poets poet, but other men have also their 
 rights. Even the Philistine is a man and a brother, and is 
 entirely right so far as he sees. To demand more of him is 
 to be unreasonable. And he sees, among other things, that 
 a man who undertakes to write should first have a meaning 
 perfectly defined to himself, and then should be able to set 
 it forth clearly in the best words. This is precisely 
 Dryden s praise,* and amid the rickety sentiment looming 
 big through misty phrase which marks so much of modern 
 literature, to read him is as bracing as a north-west wind. 
 He blows the mind clear. In ripeness of mind and bluff 
 heartiness of expression, he takes rank with the best. 
 His phrase is always a short-cut to his sense, for his 
 estate was too spacious for him to need that trick of 
 winding the path of his thought about, and planting it out 
 with clumps of epithet, by which the landscape-gardeners 
 of literature give to a paltry half -acre the air of a park. 
 In poetry, to be next-best is, in one sense, to be nothing ; 
 and yet to be among the first in any kind of writing, as 
 
 * " Nothing is truly sublime," he himself said, " that is not just and 
 proper." 
 
334 DRYDEN. 
 
 Dryden certainly was, is to be one of a very small company. 
 He had, beyond most, the gift of the right word. And if 
 he does not, like one or two of the greater masters of song, 
 stir our sympathies by that indefinable aroma so magical in 
 arousing the subtile associations of the soul, he has this in 
 common with the few great writers, that the winged seeds 
 of his thought embed themselves in the memory and 
 germinate there. If I could be guilty of the absurdity of 
 recommending to a young man any author on whom to 
 form his style, I should tell him that, next to having some 
 thing that will not stay unsaid, he could find no safer guide 
 than Dryden. 
 
 Cowper, in a letter to Mr. Unwin (5th January 1782), 
 expresses what I think is the common feeling about 
 Dryden, that, with all his defects, he had that indefinable 
 something we call Genius. " But I admire Dryden most 
 [he had been speaking of Pope], who has succeeded by mere 
 dint of genius, and in spite of a laziness and a carelessness 
 almost peculiar to himself. His faults are numberless, and 
 so are his beauties. His faults are those of a great man, 
 and his beauties are such (at least sometimes) as Pope with 
 all his touching and retouching could never equal." But, 
 after all, perhaps no man has summed him up so well as 
 John Dennis, one of Pope s typical dunces, a dull man 
 outside of his own sphere, as men are apt to be, but who 
 had some sound notions as a critic, and thus became the 
 object of Pope s fear and therefore of his resentment. 
 Dennis speaks of him as his " departed friend, whom I 
 infinitely esteemed when living for the solidity of his 
 thought, for the spring and the warmth and the beautiful 
 turn of it ; for the power and variety and fulness of his 
 harmony ; for the purity, the perspicuity, the energy of his 
 expression ; and, whenever these great qualities are required, 
 for the pomp and solemnity and majesty of his style."* 
 
 * Dennis in a letter to Tonson, 1715. 
 
POPE. 335 
 
 POPE. 
 
 IN 1675 Edward Phillips, the elder of Milton s nephews, 
 published his " Theatrum Poetarum." In his Preface and 
 elsewhere there can be little doubt that he reflected the 
 aesthetic principles and literary judgments of his now illus 
 trious uncle, who had died in obscurity the year before.* 
 The great poet who gave to English blank verse the grand 
 eur and compass of organ-music, and who in his minor 
 poems kept alive the traditions of Fletcher and Shakespeare, 
 died with no foretaste, and yet we may believe as confident 
 as ever, of that "immortality of fame" which he tells his 
 friend Diodati he was "meditating with the help of Heaven" 
 in his youth. He who may have seen Shakespeare, who 
 doubtless had seen Fletcher, and who perhaps personally 
 knew Jonson,t lived to see the false school of writers whom 
 he qualified as "good rhymists, but no poets," at once the 
 idols and the victims of the taste they had corrupted. As 
 he saw, not without scorn, how they found universal hear 
 ing, while he slowly won his audience, fit though few, did he 
 ever think of the hero of his own epic at the ear of Eve 1 
 It is not impossible ; but however that may be, he sowed in 
 his nephew s book the dragon s teeth of that long war 
 which, after the lapse of a century and a-half, was to end 
 in the expulsion of the usurping dynasty and the restoration 
 of the ancient and legitimate race whose claim rested on the 
 grace of God. In the following passage surely the voice is 
 Milton s, though the hand be that of Phillips: "Wit, 
 ingenuity, and learning in verse, even elegancy itself, 
 though that comes nearest, are one thing; true native 
 poetry is another, in which there is a certain air and spirit, 
 which, perhaps, the most learned and judicious in other arts 
 do not perfectly apprehend ; much less is it attainable by 
 
 * Tins was Thomas Warton s opinion. 
 
 t Milton, a London boy, was in his eighth, seventeenth, and 
 twenty-ninth years, respectively, when Shakespeare (1616), Fletcher 
 (1625), and B. Jonson (1637) died. 
 
336 POPE. 
 
 any art or study." The man who speaks of elegancy as 
 coming nearest, certainly shared, if he was not repeating, 
 the opinions of him who thirty years before had said that 
 " decorum " (meaning a higher or organic unity) was " the 
 grand masterpiece to observe" in poetry.* 
 
 It is upon this text of Phillips (as Chalmers has re 
 marked) that Joseph Warton bases his classification of poets 
 in the dedication to Young of the first volume of his essay 
 on the " Genius and Writings of Pope," published in 1756. 
 That was the earliest public and official declaration of war 
 against the reigning mode, though private hostilities and re 
 prisals had been going on for some time. Addison s 
 panegyric of Milton in the "Spectator" was a criticism, 
 not the less damaging because indirect, of the superficial 
 poetry then in vogue. His praise of the old ballads con 
 demned by innuendo the artificial elaboration of the draw 
 ing-room pastoral by contrasting it with the simple sincerity 
 of nature. Himself incapable of being natural except in 
 prose, he had an instinct for the genuine virtues of poetry 
 as sure as that of Gray. Thomson s " Winter " (1726) was 
 a direct protest against the literature of Good Society, 
 going as it did to prove that the noblest society was that of 
 one s own mind, heightened by the contemplation of out 
 ward nature. What Thomson s poetical creed was may be 
 surely inferred from his having modelled his two principal 
 poems on Milton and Spenser, ignoring rhyme altogether in 
 the "Seasons," and in the "Castle of Indolence" rejecting 
 the stiff mould of the couplet. In 1744 came Akenside s 
 " Pleasures of Imagination," whose very title, like a guide- 
 post, points away from the level highway of commonplace 
 to mountain-paths and less domestic prospects. The poem 
 was stiff and unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of 
 nobler births, and without it the " Lines written at Tintern 
 Abbey " might never have been. Three years later Collins 
 printed his little volume of Odes, advocating in theory and 
 exemplifying in practice the natural supremacy of the imag 
 ination (though he called it by its older name of fancy) as a 
 * In his Tractate on Education. 
 
POPE. 337 
 
 test to distinguish poetry from verse-making. The whole 
 Romantic School, in its germ, no doubt, but yet unmistak 
 ably foreshadowed, lies already in the "Ode on the Super 
 stitions of the Highlands." He was the first to bring back 
 into poetry something of the antique fervour, and found 
 again the long-lost secret of being classically elegant with 
 out being pedantically cold. A skilled lover of music,* he 
 rose from the general sing-song of his generation to a 
 harmony that had been silent since Milton, and in him, to 
 use his own words, 
 
 "The force of energy is found, 
 And the sense rises on the wings of sound." 
 
 But beside his own direct services in the reformation of 
 our poetry, we owe him a still greater debt as the inspirer 
 of Gray, whose " Progress of Poesy," in reach, variety, and 
 loftiness of poise, overflies all other English lyrics like an 
 eagle. In spite of the dulness of contemporary ears, pre 
 occupied with the continuous hum of the popular hurdy- 
 gurdy, it was the prevailing blast of Gray s trumpet that 
 more than anything else called men back to the legiti 
 mate standard. f Another poet, Dyer, whose " Fleece" was 
 
 * Milton, Collins, and Gray, our three great masters of harmony, 
 were all musicians. 
 
 t Wordsworth, who recognised forerunners in Thomson, Collins, 
 Dyer, and Burns, and who chimes in with the popular superstition 
 about Chatterton, is always somewhat niggardly in his appreciation of 
 Gray. Yet he owed him not a little. Without Gray s tune in his ears, 
 his own noblest Ode would have missed the varied modulation which is 
 one of its main charms. Where he forgets Gray, his verse sinks to 
 something like the measure of a jig. Perhaps the suggestion of one 
 of his own finest lines, 
 
 (" The light that never was on land or sea,") 
 was due to Gray s 
 
 " Orient hues nnborrowed of the sun." 
 
 I believe it has not been noticed that among the verses in Gray s 
 " Sonnet on the Death of West," which Wordsworth condemns as of 
 no value, the second 
 
 "And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fires" 
 
 is one of Gray s happy reminiscences from a poet in some respects 
 greater than either of them : 
 
 KO 
 
338 POPE. 
 
 published in 1753, both in the choice of his subject and his 
 treatment of it gives further proof of the tendency among 
 the younger generation to revert to simpler and purer 
 models. Plainly enough, Thomson had been his chief model, 
 though there are also traces of a careful study of Milton. 
 
 Pope had died in 1744, at the height of his renown, the 
 acknowledged monarch of letters, as supreme as Yoltaire 
 when the excite ment and exposure of his coronation cere 
 monies at Paris hastened his end a generation later. His 
 fame, like Voltaire s, was European, and the style which 
 he had carried to perfection was paramount throughout the 
 cultivated world. The new edition of the " Dunciad," 
 with the Fourth Book added, published the year before his 
 death, though the substitution of Gibber for Theobald 
 made the poem incoherent, had yet increased his reputation 
 and confirmed the sway of the school whose recognised 
 head he was, by the poignancy of its satire, the lucidity of 
 its wit, and the resounding, if somewat uniform march, of 
 its numbers. He had been translated into other languages 
 living and dead. Voltaire had long before pronounced 
 him " the best poet of England, and at present of all the 
 world. "* It was the apotheosis of clearness, point, and 
 
 " Jamque rubrum tremulis jubar ignibus erigere alte 
 Cum cceptat natura." Lucret. iv. 404, 405. 
 
 Gray s taste was a sensitive divining-rod of the sources whether of 
 pleasing or profound emotion in poetry. Though he prized pomp, he 
 did not undervalue simplicity of subject or treatment, if only the witch 
 Imagination had cast her spell there. Wordsworth loved solitude in 
 his appreciations as well as in his daily life, and was the readier to 
 find merit in obscurity, because it gave him the pleasure of being a 
 first discoverer all by himself. Thus he addresses a sonnet to John 
 Dyer. But Gray was one of "the pure and powerful minds" who had 
 discovered Dyer during his lifetime, when the discovery of poets is 
 more difficult. In 1753 he writes to Walpole "Mr. Dyer has more 
 poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number, but rough 
 and injudicious." Dyer has one fine verse 
 
 " On the dark level of adversity." 
 
 * MS. letter of Voltaire, cited by Warburton in his edition of Pope, 
 vol. iv. p. 38, note. The date is 15th October 1726. I do not find it 
 in Voltaire s Correspondence. 
 
POPE. 339 
 
 technical skill, of the ease that comes of practice, not of the 
 fulness of original power. And yet, as we have seen, while 
 he was in the very plenitude of his power, there was already 
 a widespread discontent, a feeling that what " comes 
 nearest," as Phillips calls it, may yet be infinitely far from 
 giving those profounder and incalculable satisfactions of 
 which the soul is capable in poetry. A movement was 
 gathering strength which prompted 
 
 " The age to quit their clogs 
 By the known rules of virtuous liberty." 
 
 Nor was it wholly confined to England. Symptoms of a 
 similar reaction began to show themselves on the Continent, 
 notably in the translation of Milton (1732) and the pub 
 lication of the " Nibelungen Lied " (1757) by Bodmer, and 
 the imitations of Thomson in France. Was it possible, 
 then, that there was anything better than good sense, 
 elegant diction, and the highest polish of style 1 Could 
 there be an intellectual appetite which antithesis failed to 
 satisfy ? If the horse would only have faith enough in his 
 green spectacles, surely the straw would acquire, not only 
 the flavour, but the nutritious properties of fresh grass. The 
 horse was foolish enough to starve, but the public is wiser. 
 It is surprising how patiently it will go on, for generation 
 after generation, transmuting dry stubble into verdure in 
 this fashion. 
 
 The school which Boileau founded was critical and not 
 creative. It was limited, not only in its essence, but by 
 the capabilities of the French language and by the natural 
 bent of the French mind, which finds a predominant satis 
 faction in phrases if elegantly turned, and can make a 
 despotism, political or a3sthetic, palatable with the pepper of 
 epigram. The style of Louis XIV. did what his armies 
 failed to do. It overran and subjugated Europe. It struck 
 the literature of imagination with palsy, and it is droll 
 enough to see Voltaire, after he had got some knowledge of 
 Shakespeare, continually endeavouring to reassure himself 
 about the poetry of the grand siecle, and all the time 
 
340 POPE. 
 
 asking himself, "Why, in the name of all the gods at once, 
 is this not the real thing 1 " He seems to have felt that 
 there was a dreadful mistake somewhere, when poetry must 
 be called upon to prove itself inspired, above all when it 
 must demonstrate that it is interesting, all appearances to 
 the contrary notwithstanding. Difficulty, according to 
 Voltaire, is the tenth Muse ; but how if there were 
 difficulty in reading as well as writing 1 It was something, 
 at any rate, which an increasing number of persons were 
 perverse enough to feel in attempting the productions of a 
 pseudo-classicism, the classicism of red heels and periwigs. 
 Even poor old Dennis himself had arrived at a kind of 
 muddled notion that artifice was not precisely art, that 
 there were depths in human nature which the most perfectly 
 manufactured line of five feet could not sound, and pas 
 sionate elations that could not be tuned to the lullaby 
 seesaw of the couplet. The satisfactions of a conventional 
 taste were very well in their own way, but were they, after 
 all, the highest of which men were capable who had 
 obscurely divined the Greeks, and who had seen Hamlet, 
 Lear, and Othello upon the stage ? Was not poetry, then, 
 something which delivered us from the dungeon of actual 
 life, instead of basely reconciling us with it ? 
 
 A century earlier the school of the cultists had established 
 a dominion ephemeral, as it soon appeared, but absolute 
 while it lasted. Du Bartas, who may, perhaps, as fairly as 
 any, lay claim to its paternity,* had been called divine, 
 and similar honours had been paid in turn to Gongora, Lilly, 
 and Marini, who were in the strictest sense contemporaneous. 
 The infection of mere fashion will hardly account satisfac 
 torily for a vogue so sudden and so widely extended. It 
 may well be suspected that there was some latent cause, 
 something at work more potent than the fascinating man 
 nerism of any single author in the rapid and almost 
 
 * Its taste for verbal affectations is to be found in the Roman de 
 la Rose, and (yet more absurdly forced) in Gauthier de Coinsy ; but in 
 Du Bartas the research of efl ect not seldom subjugates the thought as 
 well as the phrase. 
 
POPE. 341 
 
 simultaneous diffusion of this purely cutaneous eruption. 
 It is not improbable that, in the revival of letters, men 
 whose native tongues had not yet attained the precision and 
 grace only to be acquired by long literary usage, should 
 have learned from a study of the Latin poets to value the 
 form above the substance, and to seek in mere words a 
 conjuring property which belongs to them only when they 
 catch life and meaning from profound thought or powerful 
 emotion. Yet this very devotion to expression at the 
 expense of everything else, though its excesses were fatal to 
 the innovators who preached and practised it, may not 
 have been without good results in refining language and 
 fitting it for the higher uses to which it was destined. The 
 cultists went down before the implacable good sense of 
 French criticism, but the defect of this criticism was that it 
 ignored imagination altogether, and sent Nature about her 
 business as an impertinent baggage whose household loom 
 competed unlawfully with the machine-made fabrics, so 
 exquisitely uniform in pattern, of the royal manufactories. 
 There is more than a fanciful analogy between the style 
 which Pope brought into vogue and that which for a time 
 bewitched all ears in the latter half of the sixteenth 
 century. As the master had made it an axiom to avoid 
 what was mean or low, so the disciples endeavoured to 
 escape from what was common. This they contrived by 
 the ready expedient of the periphrasis. They called 
 everything something else. A boot with them was 
 
 " The shining leather that encased the limb ;" 
 coffee became 
 
 " The fragrant juice of Mocha s berry brown ; " 
 and they were as liberal of epithets as a royal christening of 
 proper names. Two in every verse, one to balance the other, 
 was the smallest allowance. Here are four successive verses 
 from " The Vanity of Human Wishes : " 
 
 " The encumbered oar scarce leaves the dreaded coast, 
 
 Through purple billows and a. floating host. 
 
 The bold Bavarian in a hiclcless hour 
 
 Tries the dread summits of Ccesarian power." 
 
342 POPE. 
 
 This fashion perished also by its own excess, but the criticism 
 which laid at the door of the master all the faults of his 
 pupils was unjust. It was defective, moreover, in over 
 looking how much of what we call natural is an artificial 
 product, above all in forgetting that Pope had one of the 
 prime qualities of a great poet in exactly answering the 
 intellectual needs of the age in which he lived, and in 
 reflecting its lineaments. He did in some not inadequate 
 sense hold the mirror up to nature. His poetry is not a 
 mountain-tarn, like that of Wordsworth ; it is not in 
 sympathy with the higher moods of the mind ; yet it 
 continues entertaining, in spite of all changes of mode. 
 It was a mirror in a drawing-room, but it gave back a 
 faithful image of society, powdered and rouged, to be sure, 
 and intent on trifles, yet still as human in its own way as 
 the heroes of Homer in theirs. 
 
 For the popularity of Pope, as for that of Marini and his 
 sect, circumstances had prepared the way. English litera 
 ture for half a century after the Restoration showed the 
 marks both of a moral reaction and of an artistic vassalage 
 to France. From the compulsory saintship and cropped 
 hair of the Puritans men rushed or sneaked, as their 
 temperaments dictated, to the opposite cant of sensuality 
 and a wilderness of periwig. Charles II. had brought back 
 with him from exile French manners, French morals, and 
 above all, French taste. Misfortune makes a shallow mind 
 sceptical. It had made the king so ; and this, at a time 
 when court patronage was the main sinew of authorship, 
 was fatal to the higher qualities of literature. That Charles 
 should have preferred the stately decorums of the French 
 school, and should have mistaken its polished mannerism for 
 style, was natural enough. But there was something also 
 in the texture of the average British mind which prepared 
 it for this subjugation from the other side of the Channel. 
 No observer of men can have failed to notice the clumsy 
 respect which the understanding pays to elegance of manner 
 and savoir-faire, nor what an awkward sense of inferiority 
 it feels in the presence of an accomplished worldliness. The 
 
POPE. 343 
 
 code of society is stronger with most persons than that of 
 Sinai, and many a man who would not scruple to thrust his 
 fingers in his neighbour s pocket would forego green peas 
 rather than use his knife as a shovel. The submission with 
 which the greater number surrender their natural likings 
 for the acquired taste of what for the moment is called the 
 World is a highly curious phenomenon, and, however 
 destructive of originality, is the main safeguard of society 
 and nurse of civility. Anyone who has witnessed the 
 torments of an honest citizen in a foreign gallery before 
 some hideous martyrdom which he feels it his duty to 
 admire, though it be hateful to him as nightmare, may well 
 doubt whether the gridiron of the saint were hotter than 
 that of the sinner. It is only a great mind or a strong 
 character that knows how to respect its own provincialism 
 and can dare to be in fashion with itself. The bewildered 
 clown with his "Am I Giles? or am I not 1 " was but a type 
 of the average man who finds himself uniformed, drilled, and 
 keeping step, whether he will or no, with the company into 
 which destiny or chance has drafted him, and which is 
 marching him inexorably away from everything that made 
 him comfortable. 
 
 The insularity of England, while it fostered pride and 
 reserve, entailed also that sensitiveness to ridicule which 
 haunts pride like an evil genius. "The English," says 
 Barclay, writing half a century before the Restoration, 
 " have for the most part grave minds, and withdrawn, as 
 it were, into themselves for counsel \ they wonderfully 
 admire themselves and the manners, genius, and spirit 
 of their own nation. In salutation or in writing they 
 endure not (unless haply imbued with foreign manners) 
 to descend to those words of imaginary servitude which 
 the refinement (blandities) of ages hath invented."* Yet 
 their fondness of foreign fashions had long been the butt of 
 native satirists. Everyone remembers Portia s merry pic 
 ture of the English lord : " How oddly he is suited ! I 
 think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in 
 * Bardaii Satyricon, p. 382. Barclay had lived in France. 
 
344 POPE. 
 
 France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behaviour every 
 where." But while she laughs at his bungling efforts to 
 make himself a cosmopolite in externals, she hints at the 
 persistency of his inward Anglicism: "He hath neither Latin, 
 French, nor Italian." In matters of taste the Anglo-Saxon 
 mind seems always to have felt a painful distrust of itself, 
 which it betrays either in an affectation of burly contempt 
 or in a pretence of admiration equally insincere. The 
 young lords who were to make the future court of Charles 
 II. no doubt found in Paris an elegance beside which the 
 homely bluntness of native manners seemed rustic and 
 underbred. They frequented a theatre where propriety 
 was absolute upon the stage, though license had its full 
 swing behind the scenes. They brought home with them 
 to England debauched morals and that urbane discipline of 
 manners which is so agreeable a substitute for discipline 
 of mind. The word " genteel " came back with them, an 
 outward symptom of the inward change. In the last 
 generation, the men whose aim was success in the Other 
 World had wrought a political revolution ; now, those whose 
 ideal was prosperity in This World were to have their turn 
 and to accomplish with their lighter weapons as great a 
 change. Before the end of the seventeenth century John 
 Bull was pretty well persuaded, in a bewildered kind of way, 
 that he had been vulgar, and especially that his efforts in 
 literature showed marks of native vigour, indeed, but of 
 a vigour clownish and uncouth. He began to he ashamed 
 of the provincialism which had given strength, if also 
 something of limitation, to his character. 
 
 Waller, who spent a whole summer in polishing the life 
 out of ten lines to be written in the Tasso of the Duchess 
 of York, expresses the prevailing belief as regarded poetry 
 in the prologue to his "improvement" of the "Maid s 
 Tragedy " of Beaumont and Fletcher. He made the play 
 reasonable, as it was called, and there is a pleasant satire in 
 the fact that it was refused a license because there was an 
 immoral king in it. On the throne, to be sure but on the 
 stage ! Forbid it, decency ! 
 
POPE. 345 
 
 " Above our neighbours our conceptions are, 
 But faultless writing is the effect of care ; 
 Our lines reformed, and not composed in haste, 
 Polished like marble, would like marble last. 
 
 Were we but less indulgent to our fau ts, 
 And patience had to cultivate our thoughts, 
 Our Muse would flourish, and a nobler rage 
 Would honour this than did the Grecian stage." 
 
 It is a curious comment on these verses in favour of careful 
 writing, that Waller should have failed even to express his 
 own meaning either clearly or with propriety. He talks of 
 " cultivating our thoughts," when he means " pruning our 
 style ; " he confounds the Muse with the laurel, or at any 
 rate makes her a plant, and then goes on with perfect 
 equanimity to tell us that a nobler " rage " (that is madness) 
 than that of Greece would follow the horticultural devices 
 he recommends. It never seems to have occurred to 
 Waller that it is the substance of what you polish, and not 
 the polish itself, that insures duration. Dryden, in his 
 rough-and-ready way, has hinted at this in his verses to 
 Congreve on the " Double Dealer." He begins by stating 
 the received theory about the improvement of English 
 literature under the new regime, but the thin ice of 
 sophistry over which Waller had glided smoothly gives way 
 under his greater weight, and he finds himself in deep water 
 ere he is aware. 
 
 " Well, then, the promised hour has come at last, 
 The present age in wit obscures the past ; 
 Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ, 
 Conquering with force of arm* and dint of wit 
 Theirs was the giant race before the Flood ; 
 And thus when Charles returned our Empire stood ; 
 Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured, 
 With rules of husbandry the rankness cured, 
 Tamed us to manners when the stage was rude, 
 And boisterous English wit with art endued ; 
 
 * Usually printed arms, but Dryden certainly wrote arm, to 
 correspond with dint, which he used in its old meaning of a downright 
 blow. 
 
346 POPE. 
 
 Our age was cultivated thus at length, 
 But what we gained in skill we lost in strength ; 
 Our builders were with want of genius curst, 
 The second temple was not like the first." 
 
 There would seem to be a manifest reminiscence of Waller s 
 verse in the half -scornful emphasis which Dryden lays on 
 "cultivated. Perhaps he was at first led to give greater 
 weight to correctness and to the restraint of arbitrary rules 
 from a consciousness that he had a tendency to hyperbole 
 and extravagance. But he afterwards became convinced 
 that the heightening of discourse by passion was a very 
 different thing from the exaggeration which heaps phrase 
 on phrase, and that genius, like beauty, can always plead 
 its privilege. Dryden, by his powerful example, by the 
 charm of his verse, which combines vigour and fluency in a 
 measure perhaps never reached by any other of our poets, 
 and above all, because it is never long before the sunshine 
 of his cheerful good sense breaks through the clouds of 
 rhetoric, and gilds the clipped hedges over which his 
 thought clambers like an unpruned vine Dryden, one of the 
 most truly English of English authors, did more than all 
 others combined to bring about the triumphs of French 
 standards in taste and French principles in criticism. But 
 he was always like a deserter who cannot feel happy in the 
 victories of the alien arms, and who would go back if he 
 could to the camp where he naturally belonged. Between 
 1660 and 1700 more French words, I believe, were directly 
 transplanted into our language than in the century and 
 a-half since. What was of more consequence, French ideas 
 came with them, shaping the form, and through that 
 modifying the spirit, of our literature. 
 
 Voltaire, though he came later, was steeped in the 
 theories of art which had been inherited as traditions of 
 classicism from the preceding generation. He had lived in 
 England, and, I have no doubt, gives us a very good notion 
 of the tone which was prevalent there in his time, an 
 English version of the criticism imported from France. He 
 tells us that Mr. Addison was the first Englishman who had 
 
POPE. 347 
 
 written reasonable tragedy. And in spite of the growling 
 of poor old Dennis, whose sandy pedantry was not without 
 an oasis of refreshing sound judgment here and there, this 
 was the opinion of most persons at that day, except, it may 
 be suspected, the judicious and modest Mr. Addison him 
 self. Voltaire says of the English tragedians and it will 
 be noticed that he is only putting, in another way, the 
 opinion of Dryden " Their productions, almost all barbar 
 ous, without polish, order, or probability, have astonishing 
 gleams in the midst of their night ; ... is seems sometimes 
 that nature is not made in England as it is elsewhere." Eh 
 bien, the inference is that we must try and make it so ! 
 The world must be uniform in order to be comfortable, and 
 what fashion so becoming as the one we have invented in 
 Paris ? It is not a little amusing that when Voltaire played 
 master of ceremonies to introduce the bizarre Shakespeare 
 among his countrymen, that other kind of nature made a 
 profounder impression on them than quite pleased him. So 
 he turned about presently and called his whilome protege a 
 buffoon. 
 
 The condition of the English mind at the close of the 
 seventeenth century was such as to make it particularly 
 sensitive to the magnetism which streamed to it from Paris. 
 The loyalty of everybody, both in politics and religion, had 
 been put out of joint. A generation of materialists, by the 
 natural rebound which inevitably follows over-tension, was 
 to balance the ultra-spiritualism of the Puritans. As always 
 when a political revolution has been wrought by moral 
 agencies, the plunder had fallen mainly to the share of the 
 greedy, selfish, and unscrupulous, whose disgusting cant had 
 given a taint of hypocrisy to piety itself. Religion, from a 
 burning conviction of the soul, had grown to be with both 
 parties a political badge, as little typical of the inward man 
 as the scallop of a pilgrim. Sincerity is impossible, unless it 
 pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the 
 very foundation of character. There seems to have been an 
 universal scepticism, and in its worst form, that is, with 
 an outward conformity in the interest of decorum and 
 
348 POPE. 
 
 order. There was an unbelief that did not believe even in 
 itself. 
 
 The difference between the leading minds of the former 
 age and that which was supplanting it went to the very 
 roots of the soul, Milton was willing to peril the success 
 of his crowning work by making the poetry of it a 
 stalking-horse for his theological convictions. What was 
 that Fame, 
 
 "Which the clear spirit doth raise 
 To scorn delights and live laborious days," 
 
 to the crown of a good preacher who sets 
 
 " The hearts of men on fire 
 To scorn the sordid world and unto heaven aspire ? " 
 
 Dean Swift, who aspired to the mitre, could write a book 
 whose moral, if it had any, was that one religion was as 
 good as another, since all were political devices, and 
 accepted a cure of souls when it was more than doubtful 
 whether he believed that his follow-creatures had any souls 
 to be saved, or, if they had, whether they were worth saving. 
 The answer which Pulci s Margutte makes to Morgante, 
 when he asked if he believed in Christ or Mahomet, would 
 have expressed well enough the creed of the majority of that 
 generation : 
 
 " To tell thee truly, 
 
 My faith in black s no greater than in azure, 
 But I believe in capons, roast-meat, bouilli, 
 
 And in good wine my faith s beyond all measure."* 
 
 It was a carnival of intellect without faith, when men 
 could be Protestant or Catholic, both at once, or by turns, 
 or neither, as suited their interest, when they could swear 
 one allegiance and keep on safe terms with the other, when 
 prime ministers and commanders-in-chief could be intel 
 ligencers of the Pretender, nay, when even Algernon Sidney 
 himself could be a pensioner of France. What morality there 
 was, was the morality of appearances, of the side that is 
 turned toward men and not toward God. The very shame- 
 lessness of Congreve is refreshing in that age of sham. 
 * Morgante xviii. 115. 
 
POPE. 349 
 
 It was impossible that anything truly great, that is, 
 great on the moral and emotional as well as the intel 
 lectual side, should be produced by such a generation. 
 But something intellectually great could be and was. 
 The French rnind, always stronger in perceptive and 
 analytic than in imaginative qualities, loving precision, 
 grace, and finesse, prone to attribute an almost magical 
 power to the scientific regulation whether of politics or 
 religion, had brought wit and fancy and the elegant arts 
 of society to as great perfection as was possible by the ct, 
 priori method. Its ideal in literature was to conjure pas 
 sion within the magic circle of courtliness, or to combine 
 the appearance of careless ease and gaiety of thought with 
 intellectual exactness of statement. The eternal watchful 
 ness of a wit that never slept had made it distrustful of the 
 natural emotions and the unconventional expression of them, 
 and its first question about a sentiment was, Will it be safe? 
 about a phrase, Will it pass with the Academy 1 The effect 
 of its example on English literature would appear chiefly in 
 neatness and facility of turn, in point and epigrammatic 
 compactness of phrase, and these in conveying conventional 
 sentiments and emotions, in appealing to good society rather 
 than to human nature. Its influence would be greatest 
 where its success had been most marked, in what was called 
 moral poetry, whose chosen province was manners, and in 
 which satire, with its avenging scourge, took the place of 
 that profounder art whose office it was to purify, not the 
 manners, but the source of them in the soul, by pity and 
 terror. The mistake of the whole school of French criticism, 
 it seems to me, Jay in its tendency to confound what was 
 common with what was vulgar, in a too exclusive deference 
 to authority at the expense of all free movement of the 
 mind. 
 
 There are certain defects of taste which correct themselves 
 by their own extravagance. Language, I suspect, is more 
 apt to be reformed by the charm of some master of it, like 
 Milton, than by any amount of precept. The influence of 
 second-rate writers for evil is at best ephemeral, for true 
 
350 POPE. 
 
 style, the joint result of culture and natural aptitude, is 
 always in fashion, as fine manners always are, in whatever 
 clothes. Perhaps some reform was needed when Quarles, 
 who had no mean gift of poesy, could write, 
 
 " My passion has BO April in her eyes : 
 I cannot spend in mists ; I cannot mizzle ; 
 My fluent brains are too severe to drizzle 
 Slight drops."* 
 
 Good taste is an excellent thing when it confines itself to 
 its own rightful province of the proprieties, but when it 
 attempts to correct those profound instincts out of whose 
 judgments the higher principles of aesthetics have been form 
 ulated, its success is a disaster. During the era when the 
 French theory of poetry was supreme, we notice a decline 
 from imagination to fancy, from passion to wit, from 
 metaphor, which fuses image and thought in one, to simile, 
 which sets one beside the other, from the supreme code of 
 the natural sympathies to the parochial by-laws of etiquette. 
 The imagination instinctively Platonises, and it is the 
 essence of poetry that it should be unconventional, that the 
 soul of it should subordinate the outward parts ; while the 
 artificial method proceeds from a principle the reverse of 
 this, making the spirit lackey the form. 
 
 Waller preaches up this new doctrine in the epilogue to 
 the " Maid s Tragedy ": 
 
 " Nor is t less strange such mighty wits as those 
 Should use a style in tragedy like prose ; 
 Well-sounding verse, where princes tread the stage 
 Should speak their virtue and describe their rage." 
 
 That it should be beneath the dignity of princes to speak in 
 
 * Elegie on Doctor Wilson. But if Quarles had been led astray by 
 the vices of Donne s mariner, he had good company in Herbert and 
 Yaughan. In common with them, too, he had that luck of simpleness 
 which is even more delightful than wit. In the same poem he says, 
 
 " Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples down 
 In Abram s bosom, in the sacred down 
 Of soft eternity." 
 
POPE. 351 
 
 anything but rhyme can only be paralleled by Mr. Puff s 
 law that a heroine can go decorously mad only in white 
 satin. Waller, I suppose, though with so loose a thinker 
 one cannot be positive, uses "describe" in its Latin sense 
 of limitation. Fancy Othello or Lear confined to this go- 
 cart ! Phillips touches the true point when he says, " And 
 the truth is, the use of measure alone, without any rime at 
 all, would give more scope and liberty both to style and 
 fancy than can possibly be observed in rime,"* But let us 
 test Waller s method by an example or two. His monarch 
 made reasonable, thus discourses : 
 
 " Courage our greatest failings does supply, 
 And makes all good, or handsomely we die. 
 Life is a thing of common use ; by heaven 
 As well to insects as to monarchs given ; 
 But for the crown, tis a more sacred thing ; 
 I ll dying lose it, or I ll live a king. 
 Come, Diphilus, we must together walk 
 And of a matter of importance talk." [Exeunt. 
 
 Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as here, merely 
 removes prose to a proper ideal distance, where it is in 
 keeping with more impassioned parts, but commonplace set 
 to this rocking-horse jog irritates the nerves. There is 
 nothing here to remind us of the older tragic style but the 
 exeunt at the close. Its pithy conciseness and the relief 
 which it brings us from his majesty s prosing give it an 
 almost poetical savour. Aspatia s reflections upon suicide 
 (or "suppressing our breath," as she calls it), in the play, 
 will make few readers regret that Shakespeare was left to 
 his own unassisted barbarism when he wrote Hamlet s 
 soliloquy on the same topic : 
 
 " Twas in compassion of our woe 
 That nature first made poisons grow, 
 For hopeless wretches such as I 
 Kindly providing means to die : 
 As mothers do their children keep, 
 So Nature feeds and makes us sleep. 
 The indisposed she does invite 
 To go to bed before tis night." 
 
 * Preface to the The.atrum. 
 
352 POPE. 
 
 Correctness in this case is but a-synonyme of monotony, 
 and words are chosen for the number of their syllables, for 
 their rubbishy value to fill-in, instead of being forced upon 
 the poet by the moaning which occupios the mind. 
 Language becomes useful for its diluting properties, rather 
 than as the medium by means of which the thought or 
 fancy precipitate themselves in crystals upon a connecting 
 thread of purpose. Let us read a few verses from Beaumont 
 and Fletcher, that we may feel fully the difference between 
 the rude and the reformed styles. This also shall be a 
 speech of Aspatia s. Antiphila, one of her maidens, is 
 working the story of Theseus and Ariadne in tapestry, for 
 the older masters loved a picturesque background and knew 
 the value of fanciful accessaries. Aspatia thinks the face of 
 Ariadne not sad enough : 
 
 " Do it by me, 
 
 Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia, 
 And you shall find all true but the wild island. 
 Suppose I stand upon the seabeach now, 
 Mine arms thus, and my hair blown with the wind, 
 Wild as that desert ; and let all about me 
 Be teacher of my story. Do my face 
 (If ever thou hadst feeling of a sorrow) 
 Thus, thus, Antiphila ; strive to make me look 
 Like sorrow s monument ; and the trees about me 
 Let them be dry and leafless ; let the rocks 
 Groan with continual surges ; and behind me 
 Make all a desolation." 
 
 What instinctive felicity of versification ! what sobbing 
 breaks and passionate repetitions are here ! 
 
 We see what the direction of the new tendency was, but 
 it would be an inadequate or a dishonest criticism that 
 should hold Pope responsible for the narrow compass of the 
 instrument which was his legacy from his immediate 
 predecessors, any more than for the wearisome thrumming- 
 over of his tune by those who came after him and who had 
 caught his technical skill without his genius. The question 
 properly stated is, How much was it possible to make of the 
 material supplied by the age in which he lived 1 and how 
 much did he make of it 1 Thus far, among the great English 
 
POPE. 353 
 
 poets who preceded him, we have seen actual life represented 
 by Chaucer, imaginative life by Spenser, ideal life by 
 Shakespeare, the interior life by Milton. But as every 
 thing aspires to a rhythmical utterance of itself, so 
 conventional life, a new phenomenon, was waiting for its 
 poet. It found or made a most fitting one in Pope. He 
 stands for exactness of intellectual expression, for perfect 
 propriety of phrase (I speak of him at his best), and is a 
 striking instance how much success and permanence of 
 reputation depend on conscientious finish as well as on 
 native endowment. Butler asks 
 
 " Then why should those who pick and choose 
 The best of all the best compose, 
 And join it by Mosaic art, 
 In graceful order, part to part, 
 To make the whole in beauty suit, 
 Not merit as complete repute 
 As those who, with less art and pain, 
 Can do it with their native brain ? " 
 
 Butler knew very well that precisely what stamps a man as 
 an artist is this power of finding out what is " the best of 
 all the best." 
 
 I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with 
 diffidence. I was brought up in the old superstition that he 
 was the greatest poet that ever lived ; and when I came to 
 find that I had instincts of my own, and my mind was 
 brought in contact with the apostles of a more esoteric 
 doctrine of poetry, I felt that ardent desire for smashing the 
 idols I had been brought up to worship, without any regard 
 to their artistic beauty, which characterises youthful zeal. 
 What was it to me that Pope was called a master of style 1 
 I felt, as Addison says in his Freeholder when answering an 
 argument in favour of the Pretender because he could speak 
 English and George I. could not, " that I did not wish to be 
 tyrannised over in the best English that ever was spoken." 
 The young demand thoughts that find an echo in their real 
 and not their acquired nature, and care very little about the 
 dress they are put in. It is later that we learn to like the 
 conventional, as we do olives. There was a time when I 
 
354 POPE. 
 
 could not read Pope, but disliked him on principle as Old 
 Roger Ascham seems to have felt about Italy, when he 
 says, " I was once in Italy myself, but I thank God my 
 abode there was only nine days." 
 
 But Pope fills a very important place in the history of 
 English poetry, and must be studied by everyone who would 
 come to a clear knowledge of it. I have since read over 
 every line that Pope ever wrote, and every letter written 
 by or to him, and that more than once. If I have not 
 come to the conclusion that he is the greatest of poets, I 
 believe that I am at least in a condition to allow him every 
 merit that is fairly his. I have said that Pope as a literary 
 man represents precision and grace of expression ; but as a 
 poet he represents something more, nothing less, namely, 
 than one of those eternal controversies of taste which will 
 last as long as the imagination and understanding divide 
 men between them. It is not a matter to be settled by any 
 amount of argument or demonstration. There are born 
 Popists or Wordsworthians, Lockists or Kantists, and there 
 is nothing more to be said of the matter. 
 
 Wordsworth was not in a condition to do Pope justice. 
 A man brought up in sublime mountain solitudes, and 
 whose nature was a solitude more vast than they, walking 
 an earth which quivered with the throe of the French 
 Revolution, the child of an era of profound mental and 
 moral movement, it could not be expected that he should be 
 in sympathy with the poet of artificial life. Moreover, he 
 was the apostle of imagination, and came at a time when 
 the school which Pope founded had degenerated into a mob 
 of mannerists who wrote with ease, and who with their 
 congenial critics united at once to decry poetry which 
 brought in the dangerous innovation of having a soul in it. 
 
 But however it may be with poets, it is very certain that 
 a reader is happiest whose mind is broad enough to enjoy 
 the natural school for its nature, and the artificial for its 
 artificiality, provided they be only good of their kind. At 
 any rate, we must allow that the man who can produce one 
 perfect work is either a great genius or a very lucky one ; 
 
POPE. 355 
 
 and so far as we who read are concerned, it is of secondary 
 importance which. And Pope has done this in the " Rape 
 of the Lock." For wit, fancy, invention, and keeping, it 
 has never been surpassed. I do not say there is in it 
 poetry of the highest order, or that Pope is a poet whom 
 anyone would choose as the companion of his best hours. 
 There is no inspiration in it, no trumpet-call, but for pure 
 entertainment it is unmatched. There are two kinds of 
 genius. The first and highest may be said to speak out of 
 the eternal to the present, and must compel its age to 
 understand it ; the second understands its age, and tells it 
 what it wishes to be told. Let us find strength and inspira 
 tion in the one, amusement and instruction in the other, 
 and be honestly thankful for both. 
 
 The very earliest of Pope s productions gave indications 
 of that sense and discretion, as well as wit, which after 
 wards so eminently distinguished him. The facility of 
 expression is remarkable, and we find also that perfect 
 balance of metre, which he afterwards carried so far as to 
 be wearisome. His pastorals were written in his sixteenth 
 year, and their publication immediately brought him into 
 notice. The following four verses from his first pastoral 
 are quite characteristic in their antithetic balance : 
 
 You that, too wise for pride, too good for power, 
 Enjoy the glory to be great no more, 
 And carrying with you all the world can boast, 
 To all the world illustriously are lost ! " 
 
 The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of that future 
 period of Pope s Correspondence with his Friends, when 
 Swift, his heart corroding with disappointed ambition at 
 Dublin, Bolingbroke raising delusive turnips at his farm, 
 and Pope pretending not to feel the lampoons which 
 imbittered his life, played together the solemn farce of 
 affecting indifference to the world by which it would have 
 agonised them to be forgotten, and wrote letters addressed 
 to each other, but really intended for that posterity whose 
 opinion they assumed to despise. 
 
356 POPE. 
 
 In these pastorals there is an entire want of nature. For 
 example, in that on the death of Mrs. Tempest : 
 
 " Her fate is whispered by the gentle breeze 
 And told in sighs to all the trembling trees ; 
 The trembling trees, in every plain and wood, 
 Her fate remurraur to the silver flood ; 
 The silver flood, so lately calm, appears 
 Swelled with new passion, and o erflows with tears ; 
 The winds and trees and floods her death deplore 
 Daphne, our grief ! our glory now no more ! " 
 
 All this is as perfectly professional as the mourning of an 
 undertaker. Still worse, Pope materialises and makes too 
 palpably objective that sympathy which our grief forces 
 upon outward nature. Milton, before making the echoes 
 mourn for Lycidas, puts our feelings in tune, as it were, and 
 hints at his own imagination as the source of this emotion 
 in inanimate things, 
 
 " But, the heavy change now thou are gone ! " 
 In " Windsor Forest" we find the same thing again : 
 
 " Here his first lays majestic Denham sung, 
 There the last numbers flowed from Cowley s tongue ; 
 early lost, what tears the river shed 
 When the sad pomp along his banks was led ! 
 His drooping swans on every note expire, 
 And on his willows hung each muse s lyre ! " 
 
 In the same poem he indulges the absurd conceit that, 
 
 " Beasts urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue, 
 And learn of man each other to undo ; " 
 
 and in the succeeding verses gives some striking instances 
 of that artificial diction, so inappropriate to poems descrip 
 tive of natural objects and ordinary life, which brought 
 verse-making to such a depth of absurdity in the course of 
 the century. 
 
 " With slaughtering guns, the unwearied fowler roves 
 Where frosts have whitened all the naked groves ; 
 Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o ershade, 
 And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade ; 
 
POPE. 357 
 
 He lifts the tube and levels with his eye, 
 Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky : 
 Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath, 
 The clamorous lapwings feel the leaden death ; 
 Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare, 
 They fall and leave their little lives in air." 
 
 Now one would imagine that the tube of the fowler was a 
 telescope instead of a gun. And think of the larks pre 
 paring their notes like a country choir ! Yet even here 
 there are admirable lines 
 
 " Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath," 
 " They fall and leave their little lives in air," 
 for example. 
 
 In Pope s next poem, the " Essay on Criticism," the wit 
 and poet become apparent. It is full of clear thoughts, 
 compactly expressed. In this poem, written when Pope 
 was only twenty-one, occur some of those lines which have 
 become proverbial, such as 
 
 " A little learning is a dangerous thing ; " 
 
 " For fools rush in where angels fear to tread ; " 
 
 "True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, 
 What oft was thought, but ne er so well expressed," 
 
 " For each ill author is as bad a friend." 
 
 In all of these we notice that terseness in which (regard 
 being had to his especial range of thought) Pope has never 
 been equalled. One cannot help being struck also with the 
 singular discretion which the poem gives evidence of. I do 
 not know where to look for another author in whom it 
 appeared so early, and, considering the vivacity of his 
 mind and the constantly besetting temptation of his wit, it 
 is still more wonderful. In his boyish correspondence with 
 poor old Wycherley, one would suppose him to be the man 
 and Wycherley the youth. Pope s understanding was no 
 less vigorous (when not the dupe of his nerves) than his 
 fancy was lightsome and sprightly. 
 
 I come now to what in itself would be enough to have 
 immortalised him as a poet, the " Rape of the Lock," in 
 
358 POPE. 
 
 which, indeed, he appears more purely as poet than in any 
 other of his productions. Elsewhere he has shown more 
 force, more wit, more reach of thought, but nowhere such a 
 truly artistic combination of elegance and fancy. His 
 genius has here found its true direction, and the very same 
 artificiality, which in his pastorals was unpleasing, heightens 
 the effect, and adds to the general keeping. As truly as 
 Shakespeare is the poet of man, as God made him, dealing 
 with great passions and innate motives, so truly is Pope 
 the poet of society, the delineator of manners, the exposer 
 of those motives which may be called acquired, whose 
 spring is in institutions and habits of purely worldly 
 origin. 
 
 The " Rape of the Lock " was written in Pope s twenty- 
 fourth year, and the machinery of the Sylphs was added at 
 the suggestion of Dr. Garth a circumstance for which we 
 can feel a more unmixed gratitude to him than for writing 
 the " Dispensary." The idea was taken from that enter 
 taining book, " The Count de Gabalis," in which Fouque 
 afterwards found the hint for his " Undine ; " but the little 
 sprites as they appear in the poem are purely the creation 
 of Pope s fancy. 
 
 The theory of the poem is excellent. The heroic is out 
 of the question in fine society. It is perfectly true that 
 almost every door we pass in the street closes upon its 
 private tragedy, but the moment a great passion enters a 
 man he passes at once out of the artificial into the human. 
 So long as he continues artificial, the sublime is a conscious 
 absurdity to him. The mock-heroic then is the only way 
 in which the petty actions and sufferings of the fine world 
 can be epically treated, and the contrasts continually sug 
 gested with subjects of larger scope and more dignified 
 treatment, makes no small part of the pleasure and sharpens 
 the point of the wit. The invocation is admirable : 
 
 " Say, what strange motive, Goddess, could compel 
 A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle ? 
 say what stranger cause, yet unexplored, 
 Could make a gentle belle reject a lord ? " 
 
POPE. 359 
 
 The keynote of the poem is here struck, and we are able to 
 put ourselves in tune with it. It is not a parody of the 
 heroic style, but only a setting it in satirical juxtaposition 
 with cares and events and modes of thought with which it 
 is in comical antipathy, and while it is not degraded, they 
 are shown in their triviality. The " clouded cane," as com 
 pared with the Homeric spear, indicates the difference of 
 scale, the lower plane of emotions and passions. The 
 opening of the action, too, is equally good : 
 
 Sol through white curtains shot a timorous ray, 
 And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day, 
 Now lapdogs give themselves the rousing shake, 
 And sleepless lovers just at twelve awake ; 
 Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground, 
 And the pressed watch returned a silver sound." 
 
 The mythology of the Sylphs is full of the most fanciful 
 wit ; indeed, wit infused with fancy is Pope s peculiar 
 merit. The Sylph is addressing Belinda : 
 
 " Know, then, unnumbered spirits round thee fly, 
 The light militia of the lower sky ; 
 These, though unseen, are ever on the wing, 
 Hang o er the box and hover round the ring. 
 As now your own our beings were of old, 
 And once enclosed in woman s beauteous mould ; 
 Think not, when woman s transient breath is fled, 
 That all her vanities at once are dead ; 
 Succeeding vanities she still regards, 
 And though she plays no more, o erlooks the cards. 
 For when the fair in all their pride expire, 
 To their first elements their souls retire ; 
 The sprites of fiery termagants in flame 
 Mount up and take a salamander s name : 
 Soft yielding nymphs to water glide away 
 And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea ; 
 The graver prude sinks downward to a gnome 
 In search of mischief still on earth to roam ; 
 The light coquettes in sylphs aloft repair 
 And sport and flutter in the fields of air." 
 
 And the contrivance by which Belinda is awakened is also 
 perfectly in keeping with all the rest of the machinery : 
 
36o POPE. 
 
 tefe said : when Shock, who thought she slept too long, 
 Leaped up and waked his mistress with his tongue ; 
 Twaa then, Belinda, if report say true, 
 Thy eyes first opened on a billet-doux." 
 
 Throughout this poem the satiric wit of Pope peeps out in 
 the pleasantest little smiling ways, as where, in describing 
 the toilet-table, he says : 
 
 " Here files of pins extend their shining rows, 
 Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux." 
 
 Or when, after the fatal lock has been severed, 
 
 " Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes, 
 And screams of horror rend the affrighted skies, 
 Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast 
 When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last ; 
 Or when rich china-vessels, fallen from high, 
 In glittering dust and painted fragments lie ! " 
 
 And so when the conflict begins : 
 
 " Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air ; 
 Weighs the men s wits against the ladies hair ; 
 The doubtful beam long nods from side to side ; 
 At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside." 
 
 But more than the wit and fancy, I think, the perfect 
 keeping of the poem deserves admiration. Except a touch 
 of grossness, here and there, there is the most pleasing 
 harmony in all the conceptions and images. The punish 
 ments which he assigns to the sylphs who neglect their 
 duty are charmingly appropriate and ingenious : 
 
 " Whatever spirit, careless of his charge, 
 His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large, 
 Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o er take his sins ; 
 Be stopped in vials or transfixed with pins, 
 Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie, 
 Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin s eye ; 
 Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain, 
 While clogged he beats his silver wings in vain ; 
 Or alum styptics with contracting power, 
 Shrink his thin essence like a rivelled flower ; 
 Or as Ixion fixed the wretch shall feel 
 The giddy motion of the whirling wheel, 
 In fumes of burning chocolate shall glow, 
 And tremble at the sea that froths below 1 " 
 
POPE. 361 
 
 The speech of Thalestris, too, with its droll climax, is 
 equally good : 
 
 " Methinks already I your tears survey, 
 Already hear the horrid things they say, 
 Already see you a degraded toast, 
 And all your honour in a whisper lost ! 
 How shall I then your helpless fame defend ? 
 Twill then be infamy to seem your friend ! 
 And shall this prize, the inestimable prize, 
 Exposed through crystal to the gazing eyes, 
 And heightened by the diamond s circling rays, 
 On that rapacious hand for ever blaze ? 
 Sooner shall grass in Hyde Park Circus grow, 
 And wits take lodging in the sound of Bow ; 
 Sooner let earth, air, sea, in chaos fall, 
 Men, monkeys, lapdogs, parrots, perish all ! " 
 
 So also Belinda s account of the morning omens : 
 
 " Twas this the morning omens seemed to tell ; 
 Thrice from my trembling hand the patch-box fell ; 
 The tottering china shook without a wind ; 
 Nay, Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind." 
 
 The idea of the goddess of Spleen, and of her palace 
 where 
 
 " The dreaded East is all the wind that blows," 
 
 was a very happy one. In short, the whole poem more 
 truly deserves the name of a creation than anything Pope 
 ever wrote. The action is confined to a world of his own, 
 the supernatural agency is wholly of his own contrivance, 
 and nothing is allowed to overstep the limitations of the 
 subject. It ranks by itself as one of the purest works of 
 human fancy ; whether that fancy be strictly poetical or 
 not is another matter. If we compare it with the " Mid 
 summer Night s Dream," an uncomfortable doubt is 
 suggested. The perfection of form in the " Rape of the 
 Lock " is to me conclusive evidence that in it the natural 
 genius of Pope found fuller and freer expression than in any 
 other of his poems. The others are aggregates of brilliant 
 passages rather than harmonious wholes. 
 
 It is a droll illustration of the inconsistencies of human 
 
362 POPE. 
 
 nature, a more profound satire than Pope himself ever wrote, 
 that his fame should chiefly rest upon the "Essay on Man." 
 It has been praised and admired by men of the most opposite 
 beliefs, and men of no belief at all. Bishops and free-thinkers 
 have met here on a common ground of sympathetic approval. 
 And, indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a droll 
 medley of inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things 
 beyond a question that Pope was not a great thinker ; and 
 that wherever he found a thought, no matter what, he could 
 express it so tersely, so clearly, and with such smoothness of 
 versification, as to give it an everlasting currency. Hobbes s 
 unwieldy Leviathan, left stranded there on the shore of the 
 last age, and nauseous with the stench of its selfishness 
 from this Pope distilled a fragrant oil with which to fill the 
 brilliant lamps of his philosophy lamps like those in the 
 tombs of alchemists, that go out the moment the healthy air 
 is let in upon them. The only positive doctrines in the poem 
 are the selfishness of Hobbes set to music, and the Pantheism 
 of Spinoza brought down from mysticism to commonplace. 
 Nothing can be more absurd than many of the dogmas 
 taught in this " Essay on Man." For example, Pope 
 affirms explicitly that instinct is something better than 
 reason : 
 
 " See him from Nature rising slow to art, 
 To copy instinct then was reason s part ; 
 Thus, then, to man the voice of nature spake ; 
 Go, from the creatures thy instructions take ; 
 Learn from the beasts what food the thickets yield ; 
 Learn from the birds the physic of the field : 
 The arts of building from the bee receive ; 
 Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave ; 
 Learn of the little nautilus to sail ; 
 Spread the thin oar, or catch the driving gale." 
 
 I say nothing of the quiet way in which the general term 
 " nature " is substituted for God, but how unutterably void 
 of reasonableness is the theory that Nature would have left 
 her highest product, man, destitute of that instinct with 
 which she had endowed her other creatures ! As if reason 
 were not the most sublimated form of instinct. The 
 
POPE. 363 
 
 accuracy on which Pope prided himself, and for which he 
 is commended, was not accuracy of thought so much as 
 of expression. And he cannot always even claim this 
 merit, but only that of correct rhyme, as in one of the 
 passages I have already quoted from the " Rape of the 
 Lock," he talks of casting shrieks to heaven a performance 
 of some difficulty, except when cast is needed to rhyme 
 with last. 
 
 But the supposition is that in the "Essay on Man" Pope 
 did not himself know what he was writing. He was only 
 the condenser and epigrammatiser of Bolingbroke a very 
 fitting St. John for such a gospel. Or, if he did know, we 
 can account for the contradictions by supposing that he 
 threw in some of the commonplace moralities to conceal his 
 real drift. Johnson asserts that Bolingbroke in private 
 laughed at Pope s having been made the mouthpiece of 
 opinions which he did not hold. But this is hardly probable 
 when we consider the relations between them. It is giving 
 Pope altogether too little credit for intelligence to suppose 
 that he did not understand the principles of his intimate 
 friend. The caution with which he at first concealed the 
 authorship would argue that he had doubts as to the 
 reception of the poem. When it was attacked on the 
 score of infidelity, he gladly accepted Warburton s cham 
 pionship, and assumed whatever pious interpretation he 
 contrived to thrust upon it. The beginning of the poem 
 is familiar to everybody : 
 
 " Awake, my St. John, leave all meaner things 
 To low ambition and the pride of kings ; 
 Let us (since life can little more supply 
 Than just to look about us and to die) 
 Expatiate free o er all this scene of man, 
 A mighty maze, but not without a plan ; " 
 
 To expatiate o er a mighty maze is rather loose writing ; but 
 the last verse, as it stood in the original editions, was, 
 
 " A mighty maze of walks without a plan ; " 
 
 and perhaps this came nearer Pope s real opinion than the 
 verse he substituted for it. Warburton is careful not to 
 
364 POPE. 
 
 mention this variation in his notes. The poem is every 
 where as remarkable for confusion of logic as it often is 
 for ease of verse and grace of expression. An instance of 
 both occurs in a passage frequently quoted : 
 
 " Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate ; 
 All but the page prescribed, their present state ; 
 From brutes what men, from men what spirits know, 
 Or who would suffer being here below ? 
 The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, 
 Had he thy reason, would he skip and play ? 
 Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, 
 And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood. 
 0, blindness to the future kindly given 
 That each may fill the circle meant by heaven ! 
 "Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, 
 A hero perish or a sparrow fall, . 
 Atoms or systems into ruin hurled, 
 And now a bubble burst, and now a world ! " 
 
 Now, if "heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate," 
 why should not the lamb " skip and play," if he had the 
 reason of man 1 Why, because he would then be able to 
 read the book of fate. But if man himself cannot, why, 
 then, could the lamb with the reason of man 1 For, if the 
 lamb had the reason of man, the book of fate would still be 
 hidden, so far as himself was concerned. If the inferences 
 we can draw from appearances are equivalent to a know 
 ledge of destiny, the knowing enough to take an umbrella 
 in cloudy weather might be called so. There is a manifest 
 confusion between what we know about ourselves and 
 about other people ; the whole point of the passage being 
 that we are always mercifully blinded to our oivn future, 
 however much reason we may possess. There is also 
 inaccuracy as well as inelegance in saying, 
 
 " Heaven, 
 
 Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, 
 A hero perish or a sparrow fall." 
 
 To the last verse "Warburton, desirous of reconciling his 
 author with Scripture, appends a note referring to Matthew 
 x. 29 : " Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing 1 and 
 one of them shall not fall to the ground without your 
 
POPE. 365 
 
 Father." It would not have been safe to have referred to 
 the thirty -first verse: "Pear ye not, therefore, ye are, of 
 more value than many sparrows." 
 
 To my feeling, one of the most beautiful passages in the 
 whole poem is that familiar one : 
 
 " Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored mind 
 Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind, 
 His soul proud science never taught to stray 
 Far as the solar walk or milky way : 
 Yet simple Nature to his hope has given 
 Behind the cloud-top hill a humble heaven ; 
 Some safer world in depth of woods embraced, 
 Some happier island in the watery waste, 
 Where slaves once more their native land behold, 
 No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. 
 To be contents his natural desire, 
 He asks no angel s wing, no seraph s fire, 
 But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, 
 His faithful dog shall bear him company." 
 
 But this comes in as a corollary to what went just before : 
 
 " Hope springs eternal in the human breast, 
 Man never is but always to be blest ; 
 The soul, uneasy, and confined from home, 
 Rests and expatiates in a life to come." 
 
 Then follows immediately the passage about the poor 
 Indian, who, after all, it seems, is contented with merely 
 being, and whose soul, therefore, is an exception to the 
 general rule. And what have the " solar walk " (as he 
 calls it) and " milky way," to do with the affair ? Does 
 our hope of heaven depend on our knowledge of astronomy 1 
 Or does he mean that science and faith are necessarily 
 hostile 1 And, after being told that it is the " untutored 
 mind" of the savage which " sees God in clouds and hears 
 him in the wind," we are rather surprised that the lesson 
 the poet intends to teach is that 
 
 " All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
 Whose body Nature is, and God the soul. 
 That, changed through all, and yet in all the same, 
 . Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame: 
 Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, 
 Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees. 
 
366 POPE. 
 
 So that we are no better off than the unturtored Indian, 
 after the poet has tutored us. Dr. Warburtoii makes a 
 rather lame attempt to ward off the charge of Spinozism 
 from this last passage. He would have found it harder to 
 show that the acknowledgment of any divine revelation 
 would not overturn the greater part of its teachings. If 
 Pope intended by his poem all that the bishop takes for 
 granted in his commentary, we must deny him what is 
 usually claimed as his first merit clearness. If he did 
 not, we grant him clearness as a writer at the expense of 
 sincerity as a man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of 
 the difficulty would be, that Pope s precision of thought 
 was no match for the fluency of his verse. 
 
 Lord Byron goes so far as to say, in speaking of Pope, 
 that he who executes the best, no matter what his depart 
 ment, will rank the highest, I think there are enough 
 indications in these letters of Byron s, however, that they 
 were written rather more against Wordsworth than for 
 Pope. The rule he lays down would make Voltaire a 
 greater poet, in some respects, than Shakespeare. Byron 
 cites Petrarch as an example; yet if Petrarch had put 
 nothing more into the sonnets than execution, there are 
 plenty of Italian sonneteers who would be his match. But, 
 in point of fact, the department chooses the man and not 
 the man the department, and it has a great deal to do with 
 our estimate of him. Is the department of Milton no 
 higher than that of Butler 1 Byron took especial care not 
 to write in the style he commended. But I think Pope 
 has received quite as much credit in respect even of execu 
 tion as he deserves. Surely execution is not confined to 
 versification alone. What can be worse than this ? 
 
 11 At length Erasmus, that great, injured name, 
 (The glory of the priesthood and the shame,) 
 Stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age, 
 And drove those holy vandals off the stage." 
 
 It would have been hard for Pope to have found a prettier 
 piece of confusion in any of the small authors he laughed at 
 than this image of a great, injured name stemming a torrent 
 
POPE. 367 
 
 and driving vandals off the stage. And in the following 
 verses the image is helplessly confused : 
 
 " Kind self-conceit to some her glass applies, 
 Which no one looks in with another s eyes, 
 But, as the flatterer or dependant paint, 
 Beholds himself a patriot, chief, or saint." 
 
 The use of the word "applies" is perfectly un-English; and 
 it seems that people who look in this remarkable glass see 
 their pictures and not their reflections. Often, also, when 
 Pope attempts the sublime, his epithets become curiously 
 unpoetical, as where he says, in the Dunciad, 
 
 " As, one hy one, at dread Medea s strain, 
 The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain. " 
 
 And not seldom he is satisfied with the music of the verse 
 without much regard to fitness of imagery ; in the " Essay 
 on Man," for example : 
 
 " Passions, like elements, though born to fight, 
 Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite ; 
 These t is enough to temper and employ ; 
 But what composes man can man destroy ? 
 Suffice that reason keep to Nature s road, 
 Subject, compound them, follow her and God. 
 Love, Hope, and Joy, fair Pleasure s smiling train, 
 Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain, 
 These mixed with Art, and to due bounds confined, 
 Make and maintain the balance of the mind." 
 
 Here reason is represented as an apothecary compounding 
 pills of "pleasure s smiling train" and the "family of pain." 
 And in the Moral Essays, 
 
 " Know God and Nature only are the same ; 
 In man the judgment shoots at flying game, 
 A bird of passage, gone as soon as found, 
 Now in the moon, perhaps, now under ground." 
 
 The "judgment shooting at flying game" is an odd image 
 enough ; but I think a bird of passage, now in the moon 
 and now underground, could be found nowhere out of 
 Goldsmith s Natural History, perhaps. An epigrammatic 
 expression will also tempt him into saying something with 
 out basis in truth, as where he ranks together "Macedonia s 
 
368 POPE. 
 
 madman and the Swede," and says that neither of them 
 " looked forward farther than his nose," a slang phrase 
 which may apply well enough to Charles XII., but certainly 
 not to the pupil of Aristotle, who showed himself capable of 
 a large political forethought. So, too, the rhyme, if correct, 
 is a sufficient apology for want of propriety in phrase, as 
 where he makes "Socrates bleed" 
 
 But it is in his Moral Essays and parts of his Satires 
 that Pope deserves the praise which he himself desired : 
 
 "Happily to steer 
 
 From grave to gay, from lively to severe, 
 Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease, 
 Intent to reason, or polite to please." 
 
 Here Pope must be allowed to have established a style of 
 his own, in which he is without a rival. One can open 
 upon wit and epigram at any page. 
 
 " Behold, if Fortune or a mistress frowns, 
 Some plunge in business, others have their crowns ; 
 To ease the soul of one oppressive weight, 
 This quits an empire, that embroils a state ; 
 The same adust complexion has impelled, 
 Charles to the convent, Philip to the field." 
 
 Indeed, I think one gets a little tired of the invariable this 
 set off by the inevitable tliat^ and wishes antithesis would 
 let him have a little quiet now and then. In the first 
 couplet, too, the conditional "frown" would have been 
 more elegant. But taken as detached passages, how admir 
 ably the different characters are drawn, so admirably that 
 half the verses have become proverbial. This of Addison 
 will bear reading again : 
 
 " Peace to all such ; but were there one whose fires 
 True genius kindles and fair fame inspires ; 
 Blest with each talent and each art to please, 
 And born to write, converse, and live with ease ; 
 Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, 
 Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne, 
 View him with scornful yet with jealous eyes, 
 And hate for arts that caused himself to rise, 
 Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, 
 And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer ; 
 
POPE 369 
 
 Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, 
 Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike, 
 Alike reserved to blame or to commend, 
 A timorous foe and a suspicious friend ; 
 Dreading e en fools, by flatterers besieged, 
 And so obliging that he ne er obliged ; 
 Like Cato give his little Senate laws, 
 And sit attentive to his own applause, 
 "While wits and templars every sentence raise, 
 And wonder with a foolish face of praise ; 
 Who but must laugh if such a man there be ? 
 Who would not weep if Atticus were he ? 
 
 With the exception of the somewhat technical image in the 
 second verse of Fame blowing the fire of genius, which too 
 much puts us in mind of the frontispieces of the day, surely 
 nothing better of its kind was ever written. How appli 
 cable it was to Addison I shall consider in another place. 
 As an accurate intellectual observer and describer of 
 personal weaknesses, Pope stands by himself in English 
 verse. 
 
 In his epistle on the characters of women, no one who 
 has ever known a noble woman, nay, I should almost 
 say no one who ever had a mother or a sister, will find 
 much to please him. The climax of his praise rather 
 degrades than elevates. 
 
 " 0, blest in temper, whose unclouded ray 
 Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day, 
 She who can love a sister s charms, or hear 
 Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear, 
 She who ne er answers till a husband cools, 
 Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules, 
 Charms by accepting, by submitting sways, 
 Yet has her humour most when she obeys ; 
 Lets fops or fortune fly which way they will, 
 Disdains all loss of tickets or codille, 
 Spleen, vapours, or small-pox, above them all, 
 And mistress of herself, though china fall." 
 
 The last line is very witty and pointed but consider what 
 an ideal of womanly nobleness he must have had, who 
 praises his heroine for not being jealous of her daughter, 
 Addison, in commending Pope s " Essay on Criticism, " 
 says, speaking of us " who live in the latter ages of the 
 
 152 
 
370 POPE. 
 
 world : " " We have little else to do left us but to represent 
 the common sense of mankind, in more strong, more 
 beautiful, or more uncommon lights." I think he has 
 here touched exactly the point of Pope s merit, and, in 
 doing so, tacitly excludes him from the position of poet, in 
 the highest sense. Take two of Jeremy Taylor s prose 
 sentences about the Countess of Carbery, the lady in 
 Milton s " Comus : " " The religion of this excellent lady 
 was of another constitution ; it took root downward in 
 humility, and brought forth fruit upward in the substantial 
 graces of a Christian, in charity and justice, in chastity and 
 modesty, in fair friendships and sweetness of society. . . . 
 And though she had the greatest judgment, and the greatest 
 experience of things and persons I ever yet knew in a 
 person of her youth and sex and circumstances, yet, as if 
 she knew nothing of it, she had the meanest opinion of 
 herself, and like a fair taper, when she shined to all the 
 room, yet round about her station she had cast a shadow 
 and a cloud, and she shined to everybody but herself." 
 This is poetry, though not in verse. The plays of the 
 elder dramatists are not without examples of weak and 
 vile women, but they are not without noble ones either. 
 Take these verses of Chapman, for example : 
 
 " Let no man value at a little price 
 A virtuous woman s counsel : her winged spirit, 
 Is feathered oftentimes with noble words 
 And like her beauty, ravishing and pure ; 
 The weaker body, still the stronger soul. 
 O, what a treasure is a virtuous wife, 
 Discreet and loving. Not one gift on earth 
 Makes a man s life so nighly bound to heaven. 
 She gives him double forces to endure 
 And to enjoy, being one with him, 
 Feeling his joys and griefs with equal sense : 
 If he fetch sighs, she draws her breath as short ; 
 If he lament, she melts herself in tears ; 
 If he be glad, she triumphs ; if he stir, 
 She moves his way, in all things his sweet ape, 
 Himself divinely varied without change. 
 All store without her leaves a man but poor, 
 And with her poverty is exceeding store." 
 
POPE. 371 
 
 Pope in the character I have read was drawing his ideal 
 woman, for he says at the end that she shall be his muse. 
 The sentiments are those of a bourgeois and of the back 
 parlour, more tha n of the poet s and the muse s bower. A 
 man s mind is known by the company it keeps. 
 
 Now it is very possible that the women of Pope s time 
 were as bad as they could be ; but if God made poets for 
 anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, 
 the holy, and the beautiful. I grant the influence of the 
 age, but there is a sense in which the poet is of no age, and 
 Beauty, driven from every other home, will never be an 
 outcast and a wanderer, while there is a poet s nature left, 
 will never fail of the tribute at least of a song. It seems 
 to me that Pope had a sense of the neat rather than of the 
 beautiful. His nature delighted more in detecting the 
 blemish than in enjoying the charm. 
 
 However great his merit in expression, I think it 
 impossible that a true poet could have written such a 
 satire as the Dunciad, which is even nastier than it is 
 witty. It is filthy even in a filthy age, and Swift himself 
 could not have gone beyond some parts of it. One s mind 
 needs to be sprinkled with some disinfecting fluid after 
 reading it. I do not remember that any other poet ever 
 made poverty a crime. And it is wholly without 
 discrimination. De Foe is set in the pillory for ever ; and 
 George Wither, the author of that charming poem, " Fair 
 Virtue," classed among the dunces. And was it not in this 
 age that loose Dick Steele paid his wife the finest 
 compliment ever paid to woman, when he said " that 
 to know her was a liberal education 1 " 
 
 Even in the " Rape of the Lock," the fancy is that of a 
 wit rather than of a poet. It might not be just to compare 
 his Sylphs with the Fairies of Shakespeare ; but contrast 
 the kind of fancy shown in the poem with that of Drayton s 
 Nymphidia, for example. I will give one stanza of it, 
 describing the palace of the Fairy : 
 
 " The walls of spiders legs were made, 
 Well mortised, and finely laid ; 
 
372 POPE. 
 
 (He was the master of his trade 
 It curiously that builded) : 
 The windows of the eyes of cats, 
 And, for the roof, instead of slats, 
 T is covered with the skins of bats, 
 "With moonshine that are gilded." 
 
 In the last line the eye and fancy of a poet are recognised. 
 
 Personally we know more about Pope than about any of 
 our poets. He kept no secrets about himself. If he did 
 not let the cat out of the bag, he always contrived to give 
 her tail a wrench so that we might know she was there. 
 In spite of the savageness of his satires, his natural disposi 
 tion seems to have been an amiable one, and his character 
 as an author was as purely factitious as his style. Dr. 
 Johnson appears to have suspected his sincerity ; but arti 
 fice more than insincerity lay at the basis of his character. 
 I think that there was very little real malice in him, and 
 that his " evil was wrought from want of thought." When 
 Dennis was old and poor, he wrote a prologue for a play to 
 be acted for his benefit. Except Addison, he numbered 
 among his friends the most illustrious men of his time. 
 
 The correspondence of Pope is, on the whole, less interest 
 ing than that of any other eminent English poet, except 
 that of Southey, and their letters have the same fault of 
 being laboured compositions. Southey s are, on the whole, 
 the more agreeable of the two, for they inspire one (as 
 Pope s certainly do not) with a sincere respect for the 
 character of the writer. Pope s are altogether too full of 
 the proclamation of his own virtues to be pleasant reading. 
 It is plain that they were mostly addressed to the public, 
 perhaps even to posterity. But letters, however carefully 
 drilled to be circumspect, are sure to blab, and those of 
 Pope leave in the reader s mind an unpleasant feeling of 
 circumspection of an attempt to look as an eminent 
 literary character should rather than as the man really was. 
 They have the unnatural constraint of a man in full dress 
 sitting for his portrait, and endeavouring to look his best. 
 We never catch him, if he can help it, at unawares. 
 Among all Pope s correspondents, Swift shows in the most 
 
POPE. 373 
 
 dignified, and, one is tempted to say, the most amiable 
 light. It is creditable to the Dean that the letters which 
 Pope addressed to him are by far the most simple and 
 straightforward of any that he wrote. No sham could 
 encounter those terrible eyes in Dublin without wincing. 
 I think, on the whole, that a revision of judgment would 
 substitute "discomforting consciousness of the public" for 
 "insincerity" in judging Pope s character by his letters. 
 He could not shake off the habits of the author, and never, 
 or almost never, in prose, acquired that knack of seeming 
 carelessness that makes Walpole s elaborate compositions 
 such agreeable reading. Pope would seem to have kept a 
 commonplace book of phrases proper to this or that occa 
 sion ; and he transfers a compliment, a fine moral sentiment, 
 nay, even sometimes a burst of passionate ardour, from one 
 correspondent to another, with the most cold-blooded im 
 partiality. Were it not for this curious economy of his, 
 no one could read his letters to Lady Wortley Montague 
 without a conviction that they were written by a lover. 
 Indeed, I think nothing short of the spretce injuria formce 
 will account for (though it will not excuse) the savage vin- 
 dictiveness he felt and showed towards her. It may be 
 suspected also that the bitterness of caste added gall to his 
 resentment. His enemy wore that impenetrable armour of 
 superior rank which rendered her indifference to his shafts 
 the more provoking that it was unaffected. Even for us 
 his satire loses its sting when we reflect that it is not in 
 human nature for a woman to have had two such utterly 
 irreconcilable characters as those of Lady Mary before 
 and after her quarrel with the poet. In any view of Pope s 
 conduct in this affair, there is an ill-savour in his attempt 
 ing to degrade a woman whom he had once made sacred 
 with his love. Spenser touches the right chord when he 
 says of the Rosalind who had rejected him 
 
 " Not, then, to her, that scorned thing so base, 
 But to myself the blame, that lookt so high ; 
 Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to grant 
 To simple swain, sith her 1 may not love, 
 
374 POPE. 
 
 Yet that I may her honor paravant 
 And praise her worth, though far my wit above , 
 Such grace shall be some guerdon of the grief 
 And long affliction which I have endured." 
 
 In his correspondence with Aaron Hill, Pope, pushed to 
 the wall, appears positively mean. He vainly endeavours to 
 show that his personalities had all been written in the 
 interests of literature and morality, and from no selfish 
 motive. But it is hard to believe that Theobald would 
 have been deemed worthy of his disgustful pre-eminence 
 but for the manifest superiority of his edition of Shake 
 speare, or that Addison would have been so adroitly 
 disfigured unless through wounded self-love. It is easy to 
 conceive the resentful shame which Pope must have felt 
 when Addison so almost contemptuously disavowed all com 
 plicity in his volunteer defence of Cato in a brutal assault 
 on Dennis. Pope had done a mean thing to propitiate 
 a man whose critical judgment he dreaded ; and the great 
 man, instead of thanking him, had resented his interference 
 as impertinent. In the whole portrait of Atticus one 
 cannot help feeling that Pope s satire is not founded on 
 knowledge, but rather on what his own sensitive suspicion 
 divined of the opinions of one whose expressed preferences 
 in poetry implied a condemnation of the very grounds 
 of the satirist s own popularity. We shall not so easily 
 give up the purest and most dignified figure of that 
 somewhat vulgar generation, who ranks with Sidney and 
 Spenser, as one of the few perfect gentlemen in our literary 
 annals. A man who could command the unswerving loyalty 
 of honest and impulsive Dick Steele could not have been a 
 coward or a backbiter. The only justification alleged by 
 Pope was of the flimsiest kind namely, that Addison 
 regretted the introduction of the sylphs in the second 
 edition of the " Rape of the Lock," saying that the poem 
 was merum sal before. Let anyone ask himself how he 
 likes an author s emendations of any poem to which his ear 
 had adapted itself in its former shape, and he will hardly 
 think it needful to charge Addison with any mean motive 
 
POPE. 375 
 
 for his conservatism in this matter. One or two of Pope s 
 letters are so good as to make us regret that he did not 
 oftener don the dressing-gown and slippers in his corres 
 pondence. One in particular, to Lord Burlington, describ 
 ing a journey on horseback to Oxford with Lintot the 
 bookseller, is full of a lightsome humour worthy of Cowper, 
 almost worthy of Gray. 
 
 Joseph Warton, in summing up at the end of his essay on 
 the genius and writings of Pope, says that the largest part 
 of his works " is of the didactic, moral, and satiric ; and, 
 consequently, not of the most poetic species of poetry ; 
 whence it is manifest that good sense and judgment were his 
 characteristical excellences rather than fancy and inven 
 tion" It is plain that in any strict definition there can be 
 only one kind of poetry, and that what Warton really 
 meant to say was that Pope was not a poet at all. This, I 
 think, is shown by what Johnson says in his " Life of Pope," 
 though he does not name Warton. The dispute on this 
 point went on with occasional lulls for more than a half- 
 century after Warton s death. It was renewed with 
 peculiar acrimony when the Rev. W. L. Bowles diffused 
 and confused Warton s critical opinions in his own 
 peculiarly helpless way in editing a new edition of Pope in 
 1806. Bowles entirely mistook the functions of an editor, 
 and maladroitly entangled his judgment of the poetry with 
 his estimate of the author s character.* Thirteen years 
 later, Campbell, in his " Specimens," controverted Mr. 
 Bowles s estimate of Pope s character and position, both as 
 man and poet. Mr. Bowles replied in a letter to Campbell 
 on what he called " the invariable principles of poetry." 
 This letter was in turn somewhat sharply criticised by 
 Gilchrist in the Quarterly Review. Mr. Bowles made an 
 
 * Bowles s Sonnets, well-nigh forgotten now, did more than his 
 controversial writings for the cause he advocated. Their influence 
 upon the coming generation was great (greater than we can well 
 account for) and beneficial. Coleridge tells us that he made forty 
 copies of them while at Christ s Hospital. Wordsworth s prefaces first 
 made imagination the true test of poetry, in its more modern sense. 
 But they drew little notice till later. 
 
376 POPE. 
 
 angry and unmannerly retort, among other things charging 
 Gilchrist with the crime of being a tradesman s son, where 
 upon the affair became what they call on the frontier a free 
 fight, in which Gilchrist, Roscoe, the elder Disraeli, and 
 Byron took part with equal relish, though with various for 
 tune. The last shot, in what had grown into a thirty years 
 war, between the partisans of what was called the Old School 
 of poetry and those of the New, was fired by Bowles in 1826. 
 Bowles, in losing his temper, lost also what little logic he 
 had, and though, in a vague way, aesthetically right, con 
 trived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made 
 worse confusion in a brain never very clear, and he had 
 neither the scholarship nor the critical faculty for a vigorous 
 exposition of his own thesis. Never was wilder hitting than 
 his, and he laid himself open to dreadful punishment, 
 especially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces 
 of polemic prose. Bowles most happily exemplified in his 
 own pamphlets what was really the turning-point of the 
 whole controversy (though all the combatants more or less 
 lost sight of it or never saw it) namely, that without clear 
 ness and terseness there could be no good writing, whether 
 in prose or verse ; in other words, that, while precision 
 of phrase presupposes lucidity of thought, yet good writing 
 is an art as well as a gift. Byron alone saw clearly that 
 here was the true knot of the question, though, as his object 
 was mainly mischief, he was not careful to loosen it. The 
 sincerity of Byron s admiration of Pope has been, it seems 
 to me, too hastily doubted. What he admired in him was 
 that patience in careful finish which he felt to be wanting 
 in himself and in most of his contemporaries. Pope s assail 
 ants went so far as to make a defect of what, rightly 
 considered, was a distinguished merit, though the amount 
 of it was exaggerated. The weak point in the case was 
 that his nicety concerned itself wholly about the phrase, 
 leaving the thought to be as faulty as it would, and that 
 it seldom extended beyond the couplet, often not beyond a 
 single verse. His serious poetry, therefore, at its best, is a 
 succession of loosely strung epigrams, and no poet more 
 
POPE. 377 
 
 often than he makes the second line of the couplet a mere 
 train-bearer to the first. His more ambitious works may be 
 denned as careless thinking carefully versified. Lessing was 
 one of the first to see this, and accordingly he tells us that 
 "his greatj I will not say greatest, merit lay in what we call 
 the mechanic of poetry."* Lessing, with his usual insight, 
 parenthetically qualifies his statement ; for where Pope, as 
 in the " Rape of the Loci," found a subject exactly level 
 with his genius, he was able to make what, taken for all in 
 all, is the most perfect poem in the language. 
 
 It will hardly be questioned that the man who writes 
 what is still piquant and rememberable, a century and a 
 quarter after his death, was a man of genius. But there are 
 two modes of uttering such things as cleave to the memory 
 of mankind. They may be said or sung. I do not think 
 that Pope s verse anywhere sings, but it should seem that 
 the abiding presence of fancy in his best work forbids his 
 exclusion from the rank of poet. The atmosphere in which 
 he habitually dwelt was an essentially prosaic one, the 
 language habitual to him was that of conversation and 
 society, so that he lacked the help of that fresher dialect 
 which seems like inspiration in the elder poets. His range 
 of associations was of that narrow kind which is always 
 vulgar, whether it be found in the village or the court. 
 Certainly he has not the force and majesty of Dry den in 
 his better moods, but he has a grace, a finesse, an art of 
 being pungent, a sensitiveness to impressions, that would 
 incline us to rank him with Voltaire (whom in many ways 
 he so much resembles), as an author with whom the gift of 
 writing was primary, and that of verse secondary. No 
 other poet that I remember ever wrote prose which is so 
 purely prose as his ; and yet, in any impartial criticism, the 
 " Rape of the Lock " sets him even as a poet far above many 
 men more largely endowed with poetic feeling and insight 
 than he. 
 
 * Briefe die neueste Litteratur betreffend, 1759, ii. Brief. See also 
 his more elaborate criticism on the "Essay on Man" (Pope ein 
 Metaphysiker), 1755. 
 
373 POPE. 
 
 A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the age in which 
 he lived, and not a little, I think, for the influence of Swift. 
 In his own province he still stands unapproachably alone. 
 If to be the greatest satirist of individual men, rather than 
 of human nature, if to be the highest expression which the 
 life of the court and the ball-room has ever found in verse, 
 if to have added more phrases to our language than any 
 other but Shakespeare, if to have charmed four generations 
 make a man a great poet, then he is one. He was the chief 
 founder of an artificial style of writing, which in his hands 
 was living and powerful, because he used it to express 
 artificial modes of thinking and an artificial state of society. 
 Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be 
 found wanting ; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivalled. 
 
 Printed ly WALTER SCOTT, Felling, Xeivcavtle-on-Tync. 
 
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