FRED M. DEW ITT BOOKSELLER 1000 TELKGRAPH AVE. OAKLAND, ( STUDIES, LITERARY AND SOCIAL: BY RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. SECOND SERIES. INDIANAPOLIS: THE BOWEN MERRILL CO. 1892. Copyright, 1892, BY RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 472TOO CONTENTS. EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER i BENJAMIN D ISRAELI, THE JEW 24 A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE . . 44 A MARTYR TO SCIENCE 69 SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS . . 95 THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE 119 IRISH LYRIC POETRY .138 THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER . . .167 THE AUDACITY OF GOETHE 185 KING HENRY VIII . . . . 205 CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS 222 PREFACE. When the manuscript of these "Studies" was first sub mitted to the publishers, it was with expectation of printing in one volume; but as this would have been inconveniently large, it was decided to issue in two series. The kindly noti ces which have been accorded to the First led the author to hope for like indulgence to its successor. EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. "This I consider to be the principal use of annals, that instances of virtue may be recorded; and that by the dread of future infamy and the censures of posterity men may be deterred from depravity in word and deed. But such was the pestilential character of those times, so contaminated with adulation, that not only the first nobles, whose obnoxious splendor found protection only in obsequiousness, but all who had been consuls, a great part of such as had been prae tors, and even many of the inferior senators strove for priority in the fulsomeness and extravagance of their votes. There is a tradition that Tiberius, as often as he went out of the Senate, was wont to cry out in Greek, How fitted for slavery are these men! Yes, even Ti berius, the enemy of public liberty, nauseated the crouching tame- ness of his slaves." ^PHIS lesson, taught by the virtuous Tacitus in * his "Annals," has often been neglected. Not always do men, even those most gifted with fore sight, profit by the experiences of others when following on the very lines that led to disaster. With the vicious it is easier to hope for impunity than to turn themselves from evil ways. That Ti berius and his minions should have cared not enough for the judgment of posterity was unfortu nate notwithstanding the doubts of that age regard ing a future life. For good men, even of heathen nations, have ever been wont to hope that ;*. : ; ; JJDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. their names and memories would live in the favora ble speeches of survivors. But what shall we think of such disregard among Christian peoples, among a people who were not only Christian, but who had taken upon themselves to reform the whole Christian Charch with allega tions that it had dishonored its Founder; among a people who had been unmolested in their work of reformation for one hundred and fifty years, in the last twenty of which those who had been most pro nounced in their denunciations of Christian con duct of every kind, in high places, had slain a wicked king and in the commonwealth built upon his ruin made laws for the suppression of every species of iniquity, and then, as if fatigued with their own work and responsibilities, called back the exiled son of their deceased ruler with invocations of the blessings of God? The period of the Restoration is in some respects the most interesting in British history. Indeed in all history can hardly be found more rapid and eventful changes in some of the most important elements of a nation s being. Recalled because the people had been made sick nigh unto death under Puritan rule, without genius for empire, incapable, apparently not desirous to become a warrior or a statesman, Charles II. took the crown which had been offered to him, and entered upon a career that EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. 3 was singularly eventful. There was an opportun ity for a beneficent ruler, if he could have been surrounded by ministers wise, patriotic and coura geous, who would have led him to avoid the mis takes of his -ancestors. With a monarch not more inclined to shed blood for the violence done to the dynasty of his family, it seems curious that obsequi ousness in courtiers was as base as ever it had been under the rule of the worst Roman emperors. The House of Commons, composed mainly of Dissen ters, in a body must make haste to prostrate them selves before their gracious master, declare that words were inadequate to express their sense of the heinousness of the sins which had been committed against sacred majesty, and after obtaining forgive ness for themselves clamor for a more condign punishment than that which he seemed inclined to inflict upon others who had been as guilty, but less abject. The Prime Minister was a man formed by nature for a noble work. In different circumstances he might have achieved what would have made him be numbered among the greatest statesmen. First an opposer of the most arbitrary measures of Charles L, having joined in the impeachment of the Earl of StrafTord, he turned at length from the violent party of the people, followed into exile the son, was his chief counsellor during that period, returned 4 EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. with him when called back to his fathers throne, and led the administration until his ungrateful master gave him up to the clamors of new favorites and drove him into a second exile wherein he was to die. During this last period he got what solace was possible in writing his "History of the Great Rebellion" and the "Account of His Own Life." The latter work we propose now to consider briefly, particularly the part referring to the marriage of his daughter Anne. Behavior like that of which Edward Hyde, then Lord Clarendon, wrote with his own hand it would not be easy to find in the biography of any parent, at least one approximating his rank. Whoever reads of this, as well in the father s own "Account," as in the concurrent memoirs of those times, must have, we should suppose, opinions concerning King James II. somewhat different from those generally held. It the father of Anne Hyde was not sincere in the feeling which he expressed on first hearing of the connection between her and the Duke of York, his utterances were sufficiently base. If he was sincere, it would be hardly more than justice to characterize him as the most shamelessly unnatural of all fathers of whom history has transmitted account. There is something in feminine honor that ever has seemed to call from the male sex an amount of EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. 5 tender respect, and of the taking of risks for its defence, that are required by no other human con dition. Particularly has this been the case with maidens. The dishonor of wives, indeed, has always been regarded with horror, but to all man ful minds that of daughters has seemed yet more appalling. Mankind praised the suicide of the high born Lucretia for enduring the insult of Tarquinius; but higher was the laudation for the humble centu rion who, by making himself childless, saved his daughter from outrage by the proud Decemvir. The world holds in scorn the husband who condones the ruin of his wife; but there is no depth to its de testation for the parent who tolerates, much less connives at, that of his daughter. We are now contemplating, it is true, a period wherein social and domestic virtues, especially among the highest circles, were as low, or almost as low, as they have ever been among any people of whom we have pub lished accounts. Yet among all the evil examples which that notable period has transmitted, the case of Anne Hyde to us appears the worst. In order to mitigate as much as possible her father s conduct, and bring it to that degree wherein it may seem the conduct at least of a human being, not of a devil, we must assume (what indeed is most probable) that the father was acting through out a part of unmixed duplicity, and that the last 6 EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. results, though following so contrary to his counsels and pretended wishes, were such as he had long pre meditated and eagerly hoped to see attained. Such assumptions must be taken and allowed sometimes in order to make certain things credible. For there be some things, as Horace warned the young Pisos, which are so monstrous that a person of ordi nary virtue and credulity cannot forbear, while lis tening to their recital, to exclaim, "Incredulus odi!" Yet, let it be remarked that this assumption is ta ken in spite of the fact that the "Account" was drawn up ten years after the occurrences described, and while the father was languishing in exile in a foreign country. There is much in the first appointment of Anne Hyde in the household of the Princess of Orange that "sounds of fraud." To the suggestion of O Xeil that he should apply in her behalf for the place, "Hyde answered" (as said in the "Account") "that he had but one daughter, who was all the comfort and company her mother had in her melan cholic retirement, and therefore he was resolved not to separate theni, nor to dispose his daughter to a court life." Yet, when the family-friend s inte rest had prevailed, and an offer was made by the Princess and the King, her brother, the father, though still professing disinclination, left the de cision to the mother, who quickly enough accepted. EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. 7 A father apprehensive of the influence of court life upon an only daughter soon had reason to feel more so from the praise everywhere bestowed upon her. In a few months after her appointment the Queen of Bohemia wrote : "We had a Royaltie, though not upon twelf night, at Teiling. Mrs. Hide was a shepardess, and I assure you was verie handsome in it. None but her mis tress looked better than she did. I believe my lady Hide and the Chancellour will not be sorie to heare it". And afterwards: "I pray remember me to Mr. Chancellour, and tell him his ladie and my favorit, his daughter, came hither upon Saturday, and are gone this day to Teiling. I finde my favorit grow- en everie way to her advantage. " In spite of anxieties which must have been sharpened by such glowing accounts of the gifts of the new maid of honor in public impersonations of poetic characters, there seemed never to have been as much as a thought of withdrawing her and she was suffered to continue "growen everie way to her advantage. " Anne Hyde was not a beauty; but she had the understanding, culture, and manners that often cap tivate more than beauty of person. These on the occasion of a visit paid by the Princess to the Queen mother at Paris, attracted the Duke of York, to whose suit she lent a willing, but entirely honorable 8 EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. consent, and, upon the return to Breda, signed with him a contract of marriage which after the Res toration was secretly ratified at Worcester House, her father s residence, the bride having been given away by the Lord Ossory. Some circumstances there were, not necessary to be mentioned here, that would seem to have made it impossible for the Chancellor not to know the relations of Anne to the Duke.* However we shall see how he admits to have behaved when the latter demanded of his brother the right to publish his marriage, and the Chancellor, Lord Ormcnd and Southampton had been summoned for consultation touching the demand. It would be not easy, we believe, to match the following extracts from an autobiography: "The first matter of general and public importance, and which resulted not from any debate in Parlia- *Things far less significant than many which must have come constantly within the Chancellor s observation had raised sus picion outside of his family. In Locke s" Memoirs of Lord Shafts- bury" occurs the following: "Soon after the Restoration of King Charles II., the Earl of Southampton and Sir Anthony Ashley Coop er, having dined together at the Chancellor s, as they were returning home, Sir A. said to my Lord Southampton, Yonder Mrs Anne Hyde is certainly married to one of the "Brothers." The Earl who was a friend to the Chancellor treated this as a chimera, and asked how so wild a fancy got into his head. Assure yourself (replied he) it is so. A concealed respect (however suppressed) showed itself so plainly in the looks, voice, and manner wherewith her mother carv ed to her, or offered her of every dish, that it is impossible but it must be so. My Lord S., who thought it a groundless conceit then, was not long after convinced, by the Duke of York s owning of her that Lord Alislcy was no bad guesser," EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. 9 ment was the discovery of a great affection the Duke had for the Chancellor s daughter, who was a maid of honor to the King s sister, the Princess Royal of Orange, and of a contract of marriage be tween them, with which nobody was so surprised and confounded as the Chancellor himself, who, be ing of a nature far from jealousy and very confident of an entire affection and obedience from all his children, and particularly from that daughter whom he had loved dearly, never had in the least degree suspected any such thing, though he knew after wards that the Duke s affection and kindness had been much spoken of beyond seas, but without the least suspicion in any body that it could ever tend to marriage But now upon this discovery and the consequence thereof, he looked upon him self as a ruined person, and that the King s indigna tion ought to fall upon him as a contriver ot that indignity to the crown, which on himself from his soul be abhorred, and would have had the presump tion of his daughter punished with the utmost seve rity, so he believed the whole kingdom would be in fluenced by the punishment of it and to prevent the dishonor which might result from it. And the least calamity that he expected upon himself and his family, how innocent soever, was an everlasting banishment out of the kingdom and to end his days in foreign parts in poverty and misery io EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. "The manner of the Chancellor receiving this advertisement made it evident enough that he was struck with it to the heart, and had never had the least jealousy or apprehension of it. He broke out into a very immoderate passion at the wickedness of his daughter, and said with all imaginable earnest ness that as soon as he came home he would turn her out of his house as " But some of his words were too shocking to be transcribed upon a clean page. The other lords in council, it seems, endeavored to mitigate somewhat this mighty indignation, and called his attention to the fact that the Duke had admitted the marriage, and that the business in hand was not for devising how it might be prevented, but of what was to be done in existing circumstances. The monstrousness of such a mesalliance on honorable terms at first had seemed incredible to the outraged parent, who, we must conclude from his own words, could easily bear that the grandson who was shortly to appear should come with the mark of ineffaceable infamy upon his innocent front, but not that one so low born should enter among the possibilities of an eventual wearing of the crown. When the awful fact of marriage was mentioned, what must he do? He told what he did, and he told it long afterwards when himself was an exile, and that same daughter was in the enjoyment of wifehood and motherhood EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. n obtained by faithful compliance with every behest of honor and religion. "Whereupon he fell into new commotions and said, if that were true, he were well prepared to advise what was to be done." It makes one shudder to read what he says as to what in this daughter s case he would prefer than for that mighty dynasty to be dishonored and en dangered by a public acknowledgement of such a marriage. Any disgrace upon himself and his fam ily he could endure, but none inflicted upon those in whom was the divine right. "The indignity to himself he would submit to the good pleasure of God. But if there were any reason to suspect the other, he was ready to give a positive judgment in which he hoped their lordships would concur with him, that the King should immediately cause the woman to be sent to the Tower, and to be cast into a dun geon under so strict a guard that no person living should be permitted to come to her; and then that an act of Parliament should be immediately passed for the cutting off her head, to which hewould not only give his consent, but would be very willingly the first man that should propose it. And whoso knew the man will believe that he said this very heartily. . . I had rather submit and bear this disgrace with all humility than that it should be repaired by making her his wife, the thought whereof I do so much EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. abominate that I would rather see her dead with all the infamy that is due to her presumption." Even the consoling words of the king, which could not be restrained at sight of the injured father s "swollen eyes from whence a flood of tears were fallen," were answered with chidings for his too great clemency. "Your Majesty is too easy and gentle a nature, to contend with those rough affronts which the iniquity and license of the late times is like to put upon you before it be subdued and reformed." We will believe, for the honor of fatherhood, that these horribly unnatural words, and others worse which we cannot transcribe, were, simply the grossest lies, uttered tor the purpose of hiding his joy at the consummation of hopes that were the fondest he had ever indulged. It must have been gratifying to the family and friends that, not long afterwards, the sorrowful wailer was able to lift his head, if only a trifle, when the king put into his hands, privately, a gift of twenty thousand pounds. "This bounty, flowing from the king at such a melancholic junc ture, and of which nobody could have notice, could not but raise the spirits of the Chancellor." If ever a man was sorely tempted to use the op portunities extended for putting away his wife, it surely was the Duke of York. The repugnance of the king, that, more trying still, of the Princess of Orange and the Queen mother, the condemnation of Hyde by his enemies in spite of his disclaiming EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. 13 of complicity, above all, the audacious plot of Sir George Berkeley, his master of horse, with Jermyn, Talbot,Killigrew, and Lord Arran, to disgust him by blackening his wife s name with charges of fa miliarities of which themselves had been recipients all these shook his resolution; but only for a brief time. To the good fortune of the innocent woman, the man by whom she had been espoused, whatever were his infirmities and however he may have been supposed to tire of her society, held the marriage bond to be indissoluble, except by the act of God. Fortunate, also, it was that the stories of her infidel ities were told with circumstantialities so manifest ly absurd that they were obliged to be discredited. For a time, indeed, the duke was perplexed in the extreme by painful doubts. For a husband, if he doubts, or if, to his knowledge, others doubt of the honor that is most precious to him, suffers as a manful spirit can suffer from no other cause. But his incertitude happily was of brief duration. The very grossness of the charges dispelled all suspicion, and the sooner brought about the public acknowl edgment, every day s delay of which added to the injuries of a woman whose innocence was her only possession that had made her capable to en dure them. A graphic account was given of this by the Due de Grammont, in his Memoires. With a pleas- 14 EDWARD HYDES DAUGHTER. antry of a looker-on at events which only amused him, he speaks of the accusers as "tous gens d hon- neur, mais qui preferoient infiniment celui du Due de York a celui de Mademoiselle Hyde. " After re citing the foul calumnies, and the summons, almost immediately after this utterance, received by Lord Ossory and Sir George Berkeley to attend the Duke at the residence of the Lord Chancellor, he thus concludes : "Us trouve rent a leur marquee son Altesse dans la chambre de Mademoiselle Hyde, ses yeux par- oissoient mouilles de quelques larmes qu elle s ef- for9oit de retenir. Le Chancelier, appuye contre la muraille, leur parut bouffi de quelque chose. Us ne douterent point que ce ne fut de rage et de desespbir. Ex Le Due d York leur dit, de cet air content et serein dont on annonce les bonnes nouvelles, Com- mes vous etes les deux hommes de la Cour que j esteme le plus, je veux que vous ayez les premie res 1 honneur de saluer la Duchesse d York. La voila. " Small place, either in histories or contemporary memoirs, was given to the young woman who had been so sorely tried. That she suffered keenly, we cannot doubt. For there are some injuries that, upon the innocent, inflict anguish which the guilty never feel, even under the hardest blows. Yet, in the midst of her sorrow in secret silence the hope must have been strong in her breast that the deliv- EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. 15 erance she prayed for would come in the good time of God. Not yet being, not yet daring to be, a Catholic herself, she yet could not fail to know the solemn, the awful inviolability in which the church of her husband held the bond of marriage. In the inconstancy of his sex, in the fears concerning her honor by which he had been racked, he might suffer her to fall a victim under the act which her unnatu ral father was ready to propose in Parliament; but she knew that she could never be a repudiated wife of him to whom she had given her entire self; and so she waited with the patience by which Heaven supports the pure in heart, whom, with purposes wise and merciful, it sometimes allows to be afflicted and persecuted. Her behavior, after this public recognition, was like what we have read in the lives of saints, and nowhere else. Forgiveness is a solemn duty, and when practised without grudge or reservation, a great virtue. But there was something almost more than human in that extended to those false witnesses by the woman whom they had so foully wronged. At least, it went to the extremest human possibili ties, not only when they were all forgiven by the husband and the wife, but when the wife bestowed praise upon conduct which, as she graciously said, had been acted solely in the cause of the safety of her dearest lord. For the knight, Sir George Berke- 1 6 EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. ley, destined for yet higher honors, had so pleaded in justification of his confessed perjuries. There can be little doubt that these assertions of C^ icellor Hyde about his preferring the death and disgrace of his only daughter to her becoming the acknowledged wife of the Duke of York, were wholly false. Their sincerity would have been monstrous, even if his fears of the ruin that the marriage would bring upon himself had been well founded. There might have been something, we must hope there was, in a father s instinct to shield his offspring from threatened condign punishment by himself taking the lead in damnatory epithets to a degree that sometimes diverts the vengeance in pursuit and leaves open a way for pity towards a victim so entirely friendless. But such conduct, pardonable in some cases, was wholly unnecessary in the case of one who knew, as this man must have known, the extent of his power and influence. This is apparent from what he wrote of the hostility of the Queen mother to the match, so fiercely pro nounced at first, but destined soon to subside into a most proper motherly affection. There is much sarcasm, covert as it tried to keep itself, in rehears ing the speech of the Queen, who, in hot haste, had come over from Paris, to put her foot upon the ne farious alliance, that "whenever that woman should be brought into Whitehall by one door, her majesty EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. 17 would go out of it at another door, and never come into it again," and how, afterwards, she received from Cardinal Mazarin a significant warn wig, "that she would not receive a good welcome* n fl > France if she left her sons in her displeasure, and professed an animosity against those ministers who were most trusted by the king." This intimation, in briefest time, wrought a change in the bearing of the offended Henrietta Maria. On the day before that set for her return, the Duke presented his wife, when, as reported by the gossipy Pepys, "the Queen is said to receive her now with much respect and love." The duplicity of the great minister appears to have been chronic. He was yet only Chancellor Hyde. The King had several times proposed a peerage, telling him, as he says, "he was assured by many of the lords that it was most necessary for his service in the Parliament." Eagerly as he desired this honor, -his instinctive caution made him de cline then; but he gave his promise that he would accept at some future time, a promise which he faithfully kept. The bride who, through so many difficulties, had risen so high, was destined to bear many children, to see four of them die in childhood and to meet an early death herself. Doubtless she never so much as dreamed that two of her surviving off- 1 8 EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. spring would succeed their father on the English throne. It seemed like one of the dispositions of Nemesis, that when the last of these should decease, those of her high born successor should see the di adem revert through two generations to a kinsman not only distant but a foreigner. From the time of his daughter s marriage the rise of Hyde was rapid. Under a virtuous and courageous sovereign such a minister could have done well for his country. His tastes and his feel ings were sincerely against the disgusting immorali ties of the court and the age. It must have been painful to him very often to feel obliged to connive at actions that shocked his moral sense; yet he was too fond ot power even to insist upon those which would have been for the honor and glory of the na tion. He could not but have foreseen how that first secret borrowing of money from the French monarch would result in a dependency that would forever disgrace a reign in which, next to the sov ereign, he was enacting the leading part. Then not only his moral sense, but that of his manhood, must have revolted at the brutalities inflicted upon the unhappy Catharine of Braganza from the very beginning to the very end of her married life. He did, indeed, feebly remonstrate against the King s action in making the infamous Lady Castlemaine a maid of the bedchamber of the pious woman whom EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. 19 he had lately married. Of her, shortly after his marriage, the King had written thus, after much in delicate but hearty praise of her personal attract iveness: "I thinke myself very happy, for I am confident our two humors will agree very well to gether," and "I cannot easily tell you how happy I thinke myself; and I must be the worst man living (which I hope I am not) if I be not a good husband. " Yet one month was sufficient to cloy him who had no relish for happiness honorably obtained. Let us see how he can write after one month to the minis ter who had humbly counselled against the course which he had already shown his intention to pursue. "I forgott when you were heere last, to desire you to give Brod- ericke* good counsell not to meddle any more with what concerns my I>ady Castlemaine, and to let him have a care how he is the authorre of any scandalous reports; for if I nnde him guilty of any such thing, I will make him repent it to the last moment of his life. And now I am entered on this matter, I thinke it very necessary to give you a little good counsell in it, least you may thinke that by making a further stirr in the business you may diverte me from my resolution, which all the world shall never do; and I wish I may be unhappy in this world and in the world to come, if I faile in the least degree what I have resolved; which is of making my Lady Castle maine of my wives bedchamber; and whosoever I findeuse any en deavour to hinder this resolution of myne (except it be only to my- selfe), I will be his enemy to the last moment of my life. You know what a true friende I have been to you. If you will oblige me etern ally, make this business as easy as you can of what opinion soever you are of; for I am resolved to go through with this matter lett what will come on it; which againe I solemnly sweare before Almighty God. Therefore, if you desire to have the continuance of my friend- *Sir Alan Broderick, Com. of Irish Affairs and M. P. for Dungar- van. 20 EDWARD HYDE ? S DAUGHTER. ship, meddle no more with this businesse excepte it be tobeare down all false and scandalous reports, and to facilitate what I am sure my honour is so much concerned in; and whosoever I finde to be my Lady Castlemaine s enimy in this matter, I do promise upon my word, to be his enimy as long as I live. You may show this letter to my I-d. Lnt., and if you have both a minde to oblige me cary your selves like friends to me in this matter. CHARLES R." If the limits of a review article would allow such a diversion, we should like to notice, if only in brief, the career of that poor queen; how her atten dants who had followed her from Portugal were one by one driven from her service; how her sense of wifehood at first revolted at the relations with Lady Castlemaine proposed by her husband, and she was forced to yield to the Chancellor s entreaties which his base servility made him employ;* how her sub mission made her no new friends, but lost to her some of her old; how she was rescued from the criminations of Gates, yet with no more feeling than would have been bestowed upon the lowest woman *In his "Account" he writes how with the King he urged "the hard-heartedness and cruelty in laying such a command upon the Queen which flesh and blood could not comply with;" how his course had already "lost him some ground," and how its continuance "would break the hearts of all his friends, and be only grateful to those who wished for the destruction of monarchy." Yet in a month after this he writes thus to the Duke of Ormond: "I have likewise twice spoken with the Qtieene. The Lady hath beene atCourte, and kissed her hande, and returned that night. I cannot tell you ther was no discomposure. I am not out of hope, and that is all I can yett say. I shall send this by Sir All. Brodericke, and so shall not neede to use cypher; but hereafter I shall always use cypher upon this ar gument, and I believe rarely xipon any other; and therefore you must take the paynes still to dischyfer yourselfe." EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. 21 of England who was known to be guiltless. It might be interesting to follow the Lady Castle- maine, now become Dutchess of Cleveland, in her ons and offs with her royal lover in her persistent and finally successful endeavors to ruin the Lord Chancellor after the sale of Dunkirk and the disas ters of a war against the undertaking of which he had striven in vain. But we must make an end with that of the statesman whom we have been con sidering. He died hard. Beyond measure it sur prised and pained him that his servile compliances with things which his judgment and his conscience alike had condemned, had lost for him both the confidence of the people and the friendship of the court. It was pitiful to see how tenaciously he clung to power, even after he must have known that his hold upon it was forever broken, how he resisted every intimation to resign, how angui sh ingly he received the orders for his disgrace, and how in his exile he was ever praying and hoping for pardon and permission to return. Among the very last letters written by him were those ad dressed to his daughter and his son-in-law regarding the reports of her conversion to the Roman Catho lic faith. In these was shown his accurate knowl edge of the temper of the English nation upon this subject. After some discussion ot the theolog ical points, he insinuated a caution which, had 22 EDWARD HYDE*S DAUGHTER. James been a more politic man, might have been heeded, that if the reported defection from the English Church were true, "it might very probably raise a greater storm against the Roman Catholics in general than modest men can wish." Even in banishment he seemed to hold to the idea that action in matters of most vital importance should be determined upon with views of personal security. His remonstrances had no effect. His daughter died in the consolations of that faith from which, in the want of maternal guidance, her surviving daugh ters were destined to become estranged. There is much pathos in the last appeal made by Clarendon a few months before his death at Rouen. In June (1671) he had written to the King and en treated "that an old man who had served the Crown above thirty years in some trust and in seme accep tation, might be allowed to end his days in the society of his children," and in the hope that so humble a petition would not be refused, he had be gun to give directions for some changes and repairs for his former country estate. No answer being received, he wrote again in August. "Seven years," he said "was a time prescribed and limited by God himself for the extirpation of some of his greatest judgments; and it is full that time since I have, with all possible humility, sustained the insupportable weight of the King s displeasure. Since it will be EDWARD HYDE S DAUGHTER. 23 in nobody s power long to keep me from dying, me- thinks the desiring a place to die in should not be thought a great presumption, nor unreasonable for me to beg leave to die in my own country and among my own children." No attention was given to this last appeal, and three months afterwards he died in that country in which he had spent so many years in a former exile, and to which he had not even endeavored to save his own from paying dishonorable tribute. To the gratitude which he so humbly prayed to be paid for long, laborious, patient services, many of which had been rendered in pandering to gratifications not only unworthy of a king, but most unmanly and vicious, it must have been anguishing to feel, if he did feel, that he was not entitled. Little affection appears to have been between him and his son-in-law. Probably it is that the latter felt and exhibited contempt for his want of sincerity and courage, qualities which this last of the Stuart kings possessed to a higher degree than any other of that house. BENJAMIN D ISRAELI THE JEW. A German professor, whose religion, like that of ** many of his contemporaries and more of his successors, was of an uncertain kind, was reported to have said once to his class: Gentleman a Jew is a Jew; he always was a Jew, and he always will be a Jew; and then the savant instanced and com mented humorously upon the pleadings of the great Patriarch in behalf of the wicked Sodom, and his Jewing diOVfici infinite justice itself, from fifty to ten righteous men, who were required to be found in order to save it from destruction. Not admitting the propriety of an illustration that treated with lev ity an instance of such exalted charitableness in an ancient saint, yet we cannot fail, sometimes, to admire anew the patient persistence of this singu lar people, and the magnitude of the successes with which, in individual cases, this persistence has been rewarded. The more thoughtful and kindly the understand ing of any Christian man, the more interest he takes in the marvellously eventful history of the Hebrew nation. How melancholy always! The elect of God, BENJAMIN D ISRAELI THE JEW. 25 how have they been led to study the lessons of suf fering! Those strange lessons, the full value of which so few mortals have learned sufficiently to feel the transports of gratitude that such learning imparts. Public and domestic treasons, partings, exiles, assassinations, wars, pestilences, wearinesses with excesses of prosperity, even the palling upon the taste of consummate earthly wisdom! And then the great sin, the mightiest and deadliest, the denial of their long promised King, followed by their limitless dispersions, and the ever-continuing iterations of the misfortunes belonging to their melancholy heritage. Unhappiest of all, their prophets, who along with contemporaneous circum stances, prosperous and adverse, had to endure fature disasters these no longer exist because of the Fulness of time. The Jew, no longer collective, pursues each his individual way, and longs and dreams for the good predicted by those who, be cause they predicted evil also, were stoned by their ancestors. What longings and what dreams! For oft nest th unhappy have their desires: But in dreams. Neither age nor lowly condition hinders as much as it leads to dreams, sleeping or waking. Was not Isaac born when Sarai was past the age? Was not Saul summoned from his searching for the 26 BENJAMIN D ISRAELI THE JEW. asses colts, and David from the sheepfolds? Among all the daughters of Jerusalem, of whatever tongue or condition, what dreams are there not for the maternity of the Messias, whom they believe to be yet lingering in His coming! Towards the Holy City according as their estate is the more lonely and unhappy, their eyes are turned with fonder yearnings and hopes for the Captivity s return. Therefore, the Jew is patient and persevering. If he fails today, he hopes to win tomorrow. No less hopeful is the aged than the young. Even the dy ing, in the midst of the sad retrospect of his own poor career, lifts up his heart with visions of a better for those whom he leaves behind him. Conversion to Christianity changes their national traits only in kind. The heart of the converted Jew, although with different purposes, yet yearns for the city builded upon a hill. Like Paul, his heart s desire is for Israel. Thoughts like these have been in our mind of late, while contemplating the career of that Isra elite, who lately occupied the most conspicuous place among living men. Illustrious as Benjamin D Israeli became, it is not so much in the capacity of author and politician that he impresses us, as in that of a Jew, both as author and politician. What his ancestors had endured in the days of perse cution, more than their brethren in the South, we BENJAMIN DISRAELI THE JEW. 27 need not enquire; nor what, if any, intensifica tion of Hebrew characteristics either preceded or followed the change of their family to the national name; nor how cordial may have been their con version to Christianity. A Jew he was, and a Jew he continued to be. Proud of a descent from those who had direct intercourse with the King of kings, whose angels they entertained, and whose Spirit led their armies to innumerable victories, this Jew, when yet a child, loved to muse upon the ancient glories of Israel; their land flowing with milk and honey, their boundless tributes of gold, and sil ver, and precious stones, and wealth of every kind brought from subjugated heathendom : their heroes and poets, and prophets, all so grand, and the grander because so remote, so extending back, as it \vere, to the very beginning of time and the very gates of heaven. If he was proud of his late exal tation, it was not higher than, in his childhood, he hoped to reach; and to his mind it was lower than the eminences on which many a Hebrew had stood during the golden days of his people. As an author D Israeli exhibited the national characteristics most prominently. Beginning with Vivian Grey and ending with Lothair, his most in teresting creations are of the Jewish type, and show how fond he is of the serene and solemn majesties of the East, above the bustling activities of the 28 BENJAMIN D lSRAELI THE JEW. West. It is not a European who describes those majestic processions and assemblages, those gor geous apparels, those displays of numberless price less jewels; nor are they Europeans who march and are clad in such array. The characters thus de scribed may be European in name, and the author a Christian, so-called; but they are Asiatic of the ancient type, and he a very Hebrew of the Hebrews. Orientalism abounds even among his creations which are avowedly European. But occasionally, as in Tancred, and the Wondrous Tale of Alroy, he is in the very midst of the great East, and, especially in the latter, seems to feel as if there was no earth outside of it. In his younger days the critics often derided inventions so foreign, so ancient, and so un known in European life; but this patient toiler and dreamer toiled on and dreamed on ; and even when long past his youth, and a leader in the politics of England, he invented other tales in the intervals of rest from political labors, and from India, and Ara bia, and all the East, he brought the gold, and the myrrh, and the pearls, and the jewels, and the rich woven vestments, and the pomp and the circum stance, and along with these the voluptuous languor of those to whom such possessions had come down through forty centuries of ancestors. Now why did a man so gifted, and a man so am bitious for power and fame as an Englishman, write BENJAMIN DISRAELI THE JEW. 29 such things as the Wondrous Tale of Alroy, in which his dreaminess led him almost to oblivion of his native tongue, and into adoption, with no change except the employment of English words, of the measured prose of Asiatic nations? It is pleasing, yet it is sad to speculate why. This strange man seems to us to have been a kind of double man. He was an Englishman, and he was a Jew. An Englishman, he was modern, active, bold, combatant; a Jew he mused, and brooded, and suffered, and dreamed, and waited. To the English people, who, in spite of their devotion to business, have imagina tion he on whom heaven, among other gifts, be stowed that of poesy, recited pleasing tales; not mirthful, but tales in which memories of the best ages are awakened : when kings were patriarchs, and subjects, their children and kinsmen, to whom the world s wealth belonged. Pleasing as. such tales might be to his countrymen to read, they were far more so to him to invent. Sweeter than words could express, were the illusions which the Jew could thus bring over his own mind, as, along with these personages of his own fancy, he mingled among the splendid but solemn pageants of olden Hebrew story. The true poet, like the true prophet is often, unhappy. But the poet, unlike the prophet, can gather consolation, and sometimes exquisite happi ness from illusions. Out of the discordant elements 30 BENJAMIN D ISRAELI THE JEW. of this life he can make new creations, imparting to them the blessed destiny of his own fancy, and so console his own disappointments with the splendid triumphs of his own begotten. To the imaginative Jew, far more than to the practical and the toiling, the memories of his ancestors are unutterably dear. He may not speak with his own mouth to the stranger of these memories. He may refuse to take down his harp from the willow, and sing the songs of Zion in a strange land to the ears of insolent curiosity. Yet, the more gifted he is, the more mu sical his heart, the sweeter are these unforgotten songs, and the more he feels like repeating the exe cration of him who invoked it when he exclaimed, Ir I forget thee, O Jerusalem ! if I prefer not Jeru salem above my chief joy. To him who carefully studies the literary works of D Israeli, ideas like those we have briefly described must frequently occur. And these ideas, we believe, must tend to enhance appreciation of him, both as an author and as a man. Having always been em inently prosperous in the matters of mere material welfare, the inheritor of a competent fortune, trained and educated in the midst of easy, and even felicitous surroundings, yet adhering with fond sadness to the traditions of his people, and con stantly re-presenting to his own mind, and to a not very appreciative public in his adopted land, their BENJAMIN D ISRAELI THE JEW. 31 ancient glories or things intended to remind of those ancient glories we are touched with feelings of delicate sympathy for the unspoken, but the deep, the honorable, the patriotic grief which such conduct betokens. The stories of D Israeli s lovers are the more in teresting when we know how faithful and single was his own only passion. The attachment which the Christian woman gave to him, is said to have in spired a reciprocation almost unique in its fidelity. For conjugal love, as in the days when the sons of God fell in love with the daughters of men, breaks down the barriers of nations and races. Doubtless he loved his wife the more, because in her prefer ence for him of a hated race, he imagined himself to perceive a cordiality of union beyond what might have been attained, where no such barriers were to be overleaped. At all events, it has been often remarked, that this gifted woman, besides being his wife, was his guide, philosopher, and friend : and when rising towards the acme of re nown, in the old age of both, and a peerage was offered to him, he at first declined the offer, with the request that it should be bestowed upon her. Most loving and most knightly conduct ! It would be difficult to find its parallel. Early as D Israeli was to begin to rise in author ship, and late in politics, it was in the latter that 32 BENJAMIN DISRAELI THE JEW. he was to become pre-eminent. And now what contrast in the qualifications of this man for the at tainment of literary and political renown. What contrast in the methods of procedure. A traveller of eighteen years represents the images which a sojourn in the East had raised, and the youth, apparently so ardent and precocious, sees himself at twenty-two an acknowledged rival of the best names in literary circles. Few there were, if any, who then suspected that the young Israelite, so imagina tive, so languidly sensuous, thought, or even hoped to join, much less to lead, in the great struggles of political wartare. Yet, his parlimentary career even then was probably scarcely less an assur ance in his own mind, than it became when it had well begun. The patience and perseverance which he possessed beyond most of his people, joined with extraordinary genius, assured him of ultimate suc cess. It is interesting to speculate upon the feel ings with which he might afterwards recur to his first political essays and their results; his standing as a Radical for Wycombe in 1832, with a defeat; his subsequent defeat before the same constituency in 1835; yet another defeat in the same year as a Conservative, before the electors of Taunton; and finally his return in 1837, at thirty-two years of age, for Maidstone, and the hisses that forced him to his seat when he first attempted to address the BENJAMIN DISRAELI THE JEW. 33 House of Commons. Who but a Jew, a patient, persevering Jew, could have uttered those memora ble words "I have begun many things several times and have often succeeded at last: I shall sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me ? Many an ardent young man, with or without powers, has uttered, or felt like uttering such words; but in subdued tones, or in the excitement of un guarded passion. But this young Jew, who saw that he had not yet gotten in hand parliamentary usage and the temper of the House, took his seat with calmness and without resentment, assured as fully that his time would come, as that it was not already at hand. It suits not the purpose of this brief notice to consider those adroit movements by which he soon obtained the leadership of the Young England party that rose in such vigorous hostility, on the part of the aristocracy and gentry, to the relaxing protective policy of Sir Robert Peel, whom he denounced as the Great Middleman in British politics; nor the services for which, under the premiership of the latest Earl of Derby, he was rewarded first in 1852, and afterwards in 1858, with the Chancellorship of the Exchequer. In all these times, men could not but wonder that a man, whose imagination in unofficial life was prone to wander in oriental fancies, had taken 34 UKNJAMIN DISRAELI THK JEW. time to study and learn the mysteries of trade and finance, and was as familiar with the business of Lombard, and Bishopsgate, and Threadneedle streets, as he was in the traditions and the lore of the East. The alterations in those later parliamentary com bats between him and Mr. Gladstone are recent and well known. The ultimate complete overthrow of the latter, beneath which he so passionately and vainly writhed, is a theme on which we used to read in the daily morning newspapers. The irregu lar statesmanship of Mr. Gladstone, his oscillations between liberality and narrowness, in spite of his consummate eloquence and his great natural pow ers, could not fail to bring in time the result which his adversary long foresaw, and for which he so patiently waited. His conduct towards Ireland, generous as it was by comparison, seemed at last only a condescension. Though bom almost in sight of that unhappy land, it was not until Gladstone had delivered up the seals that he went to visit it, and could see for himself the traces of the miseries that several generations of his predecessors had wrought. A factioni st in religion, besides assailing the patriotism of a large number of his fellow-citi zens as incompatible with their religious faith, he wounded and alienated the most gifted and thought ful of the clergy of his own creed. Since his fall, BENJAMIN D ISRAELI THE JEW. 35 with a misplaced sympathy for the Photians of Tur key, he excused and endeavored to lead his coun trymen to admire and even co-operate with the barbarous policies of Russia, domestic and foreign and seemed as if he would have assisted that mon strous despotism in expelling from Europe the un believing Turk, even as he had hoped to cast out those of his own brethren who refused compliance with his own dogmatic ideas of the regulation of public worship. In the midst of these vagaries, the patient and persevering Jew, now ten years advanced beyond his threescore, never having either rested or hasted, found his time to have come for which he had waited, and which he had long foreseen. It did not come too late for a man who reckons time as a Jew. He quietly put on the insignia that his younger rival had been required to lay aside. With a foresight even beyond that of his kinsmen, the Rothschilds, he made haste to purchase a sufficiently controlling interest in that great canal connecting the western with the eastern seas, his eye already turned towards the Levant and the countries beyond. A felicitous thought, yet far less felicitous than that which moved him to have conferred upon his sovereign the title of Empress of India. That vast empire like the peoples of the Italian provinces before they were formally endued with Roman citi- 36 BENJAMIN D ISRAELI THE JEW. zenship, rendered to the government a reluctant obedience. But cordial subjection had never yet come to those teeming millions, because, for the most part, of a want of perfect assimilation and a recognition of equality with their fellow-sub jects of the West. The nabob whose ancestors had had an Ahasuerus and a Porus for their sovereigns, must sometimes complain, if only in secret that he was called a British subject, and his monarch en throned in a small island thousands of miles away in the German Ocean. It was therefore a sublime idea thus to divide, as well as to double the title ot sovereignty, restore a venerable throne that had fallen, and place upon it a sovereign whose ances tors could be numbered for a thousand years. Af terwards, it was money wdsely spent when the Prince of Wales, their future Emperor, was sent to visit this mighty people, and, along with their rajahs, hunted the tiger in their jungles, and exhibited himself to the multitudes in their grand processions, seated in state upon an elephant, as in the days of their ancient splendor. The idea was Asiatic, and it was Hebraistic. For did not the ships of Hiram of Tyre bring from Ophir to King Solomon gold and algum trees and precious stones? And did not his own navy fetch every third year, from Thar- shish, gold and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks? Men migjht smile and deride, and complain of what BENJAMIN D ISRAELI THE JEW. 37 they called the grossness of the foppery of a use less addition and a vain pageantry; but, wiser than them all, this descendant of Israel, years of whose youth had been spent in the East, knew all the ful ness of their significance. The Turko-Russian war broke out. He waited until the combatant nations, one ruined and the other well nigh exhausted, had come to a truce, and the conquering army lay in sight of the Bosphorus and the minarets of Constantinople. Then began, destined to progress with incredible rapidity, the most consummate statesmanship that England has seen in a hundred years. We are too near the Berlin Conference to see all the vastness of its at tendants and its results. All Europe opened its eyes, and so did all Asia, or such parts of it as had eyes that could be opened, at the announcement that Cyprus had been ceded to the British crown, and that this cession was not to be considered as among the questions that were to be discussed by the plenipotentiaries. The suddenness, the audac ity with which this feat was accomplished seemed to have astounded the world so far as to hinder it from framing and uttering a complaint, before Sir Garnett Wolseley was in possession of the purchased island, and the adventurous youth of Great Britain were already emigrating to its fertile shores. Pro phetic was this acquisition of what the great Hebrew 38 BENJAMIN D ISRAELI THE JEW. desired from the review of the treaty of San Stefano. Little concern, it is probable, had he individually for the Danubian principalities and the Turkey in Europe. It was Turkey in Asia to which his eyes, along with his heart, were turned the land of his forefathers, and the lands with which his forefathers had made wars and alliances, of the Assyrian, the Persian, the Mede, the land of the palm and cedar, the fig tree and olive. Europe might settle the West for themselves; England, now so strangely under the lead of a Hebrew, finds her share, and is content with it, in the possession of part and the protectorate of the rest of the East. And all this without war! A mighty conquest, and attained by the arts of peace. The peace of Europe, at least of eastern Europe, in all human probability, seemed to be better ascertained than it had been at any time within a century. As for the part that England has played and the aquisitions that she has made, all their magnitude can only be imagined; yet they already show some what for themselves in the wonder with which the eyes of all mankind were turned to DTsraeli. The aged Gortchacoff looked grimly to see given to another, those prizes that an expensive and mur derous war had been waged to win for himself; while Bismarck, who by material superiority had conquered for Prussia the States lying on the north, HF.NJAMIN D ISRAELI THK JEW. 39 contracted his heavy brows to think that a dog of a Jew, without blood and almost in silence, had made peaceful conquests overpassing his own, and stood before himself that day the foremost man of Europe. What Cyprus is to become under British control we may conjecture in part from what has been made of Gibraltar, and Malta, and what the great statesmen of the ages have been accustomed to make of those positions which, in the language of Philip of Macedon, are called the fetters of coun tries. We know what Cyprus was to the Phoenician, the Greek, the Persian, thirty centuries ago and downward, when its more than million people sat and languished among the almost spontaneous gifts of its corn, and wine, and oil, and where the frolic goddess, sprung from the Sea-foam, had her favorite bowers, and listened to the secrets of its large-eyed maidens. It now belongs to a civilization that will know how to develop those resources that were unknown and uninquired of by the luxurious inhab itants of Salamis, Amatteus, Paphos, Leona and Idalium. How complete, how grand that cordon of fetters which, by the acquisition of this island and the Suez Canal, now extends from Gibraltar on the western gate of the Mediterranean, to Aden on the southern extremity of the Red Sea! In this culmination, how must have felt this man, one of a long persecuted and universally exiled race ! 4O BENJAMIN 1) ISRAELI THE JEW. What did those eyes see or imagine they saw, as they looked towards the ancient city and the sepulchers of his fathers? Yes, the Jew is a Jew. Conversion to Christianity abates not, but multiplies the yearn ings for Jerusalem. Conversion to Christianity, to the objects of former ceaseless veneration, has added Gethsemane, the Mount of Crucifixion, the Holy Sepulchre; and even the ruined Temple has a new and grander attraction in the recognition, how ever late and reluctant, that its walls once re-echoed to the words of God manifest in the flesh, who had condescended to be born of a Virgin daughter of Jerusalem. We have seen with what fondness the Ratisbons are striving for the establishment of Christian institutions, and we have listened to Mendelssohn-Bartholdy s Elijah, when we needed not to be told that it was a Jew who so sang and wailed that we almost imagined we could hear the great prophet, as, having fled from Jezebel, he cast himself down beneath the juniper tree in the wilder ness, and prayed, It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life! for I am not better than my fathers. The Earl of Beaconsfield, Knight of the Garter ! For such services, so flattering to her person and so contributory to her glory, could not pass without distinguishing rewards from a gracious sovereign, Therefore BENJAMIN D ISRAELI THE JEW. 41 About, about! Search Windsor Castle, elves, within, without, Strew good luck, ouphes, on every sacred room, That it may stand till the perpetual doom, In state as wholesome, as in state tis fit; \Vorthy the owner, and the owner it. The several chairs of order look you scour \Vith juice of balm, and every precious flower; Each fair instalment, coat and several crest, With loyal blazon, ever more be blest ! And nightly, meadow-fairies, look, vou sing, Like to the Garter s compass, in a ring : The expressure that it bears, green let it be, More fertile fresh than all the field to see ; And, Honi soit qui mal y pense, write In emerald tufts, flowers purple, blue and white, Like sapphire, pearl and rich embroidery, Buckled below fair knighthood s bending knee. To others, this title and this most exalted of so cial distinctions seemed late in coming. Not so to the patient, persevering Jew. We have seen how, a few years before, he had waived a peerage in favor of his wife. For this waiver there was yet another motive besides conjugal fondness and gratitude. The acme, the highest height had not yet been attained by the commoner. He remem bered how the prestige of Pitt had been lost by a too ready acceptance of the Earldom of Chatham. When the long struggle with Mr. Gladstone was terminated, and in great part by means of his ad versary s overweening confidence, leading him to the commission of blunders too great to be retrieva ble, then, with the dignity of one who feels that he 42 BENJAMIN D lSRAELI THE JEW. is receiving his own, he took the golden prize. How serene the aged Jew in the possession of these almost unexampled honors ! Yet further, as Earl of Beaconsfield he added largely not only to the power, but to the popularity of D Israeli. The favorite of the Queen was also the idol of the the people. The Knight of the Garter in Windsor and Buckingham Palaces was adored by the poorest in Soho and Whitechapel. Yet how serene, how even alone, in the intervals of labors with the cares of power! They said of him that none but the wife of his bosom (if even she did) ever found en trance into the secrets of his interior being. In that interior being, those who knew and admired him most, if admitted there, would perhaps find little with which to sympathize. The fondest thoughts of Joseph, even while riding in the second chariot of Pharioh and dispensing the whole pOAver of Egypt, were of his kindred in the land of Canaan. Why is thy countenance sad, seeing thou art not sick? This is nothing else but sorrow of heart. Thus spake Artaxerxes, the king, to his minister Nehemiah, the son of Hachaliah. Then, said the Jew, who had not been beforetime sad in his presence, I was sore afraid. And said unto the king, Let the king live forever. Why should not my countenance be sad when the city, the place of my fathers sepulchres, lieth waste, and the gates BENJAMIN D ISRAELI THE JEW. 43 thereof are consumed with fire? The sadness of the Jew is his own, be he a convert to Christianity or an adherent to the ancient faith, be he statesman and lawgiver, be he poet and musician; only his own heart knows its own sadness, and that heart not often strives for, and perhaps less often desires, the sympathy which it knows it to be vain to expect. In contrast with this serenity, how unbecoming the passionate contestations of his late rival, that betokened a disappointment and an envy that seem to amount to anguish. We can imagine what thoughts were in his mind when, sometimes, in his Sunday readings, taking up perchance the Book of Esther, and following the narrative of Ahasuerus, which reigned from India even unto Ethiopia, over an hun dred and seven and twenty provinces, his eye light ed upon these words : If Mordecai be of the seed of the Jews, before whom thou hast begun to fall, thou shalt not prevail against him but shalt surely fall before him. And the king took off his ring which he had taken from Haman, and gave it unto Mor decai. And Mordecai went out from the presence of the king in royal apparel of blue and white, and with a great crown of gold, and with a garment of fine linen and purple : and the city of Shusha rejoiced and was glad, A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. A : S fair a sight as one can wish to indulge is that of a great man in whose presence one feels no dread to appear because of any sternness of look or deportment in the majesty that towers so loftily above him. The worshipful feeling that mankind ever have had for such is a part of the awe im parted by Heaven for the divine. In the presence of extraordinary human greatness a mind endued with this higher sensibility cannot fail to become solemnized above the even contemplation of those around him, his equals or not very far his superiors, because of that supreme Greatness to which it sus pects that such excellency looks with far clearer vision than its own, and by which it is sustained, perhaps inspired. Tyrants in time past, some with and some without thrones have availed of this tend ency to enact, often to obtain, service not due. Accidents have made great, or made so appear, a far larger number than prowess of arm or genius, and many a fantastic trick these have played with the fortunes, consciences, and lives of those whom Heaven, with meaning inscrutable to the wisest, 44 A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. 45 has allowed them to mislead and oppress. It is a temptation not easily withstood. Not only men of great parts in high positions, but officials down to the pettiest, sometimes seem to feel that they must assume forbidding manners in order to repress te merity which might venture to approach too nearly. The faculty to support greatness of any kind or de gree, whether of gifts or place, without overbearing, is rare. The precepts of Christ touching humility, as manifestly as his miracles, declared the God. They who had walked with him, and been the special recipients of his confidence, affection, and promises, must become as little children or be unfit for the mission and destiny to which he had ap pointed them. These thoughts are preliminary to a brief consid eration of Sir Thomas More, a man who, perhaps, was as near being devoid of this infirmity as any very distinguished personage that ever has lived. The characteristic which made him be so specially loved in his own and all subsequent times is here named, for want of a more significant English term, sweetness. The French have a much more expres sive word douceur. M. Olier, founder of the So ciety of St. Sulpice, in his little book entitled Intro duction a la Vie et aux Vertus Chretiennes, has an interesting chapter on the discussion of this virtue, which he styles "la consommation du Chretien, 46 A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. Car," he argues, "elle pre suppose en lui 1 anne an- tissement de tout le propre, et la mort a tout inte- ret : en sorte que ni le me pris 1 irrite, ni la perte des biens et du repos de la vie ne le tire de la douceur." In another part of the chapter he points out the two ways in which this gift so rare is imparted: one di rectly to the innocent whom God is raising for special designs, the second obtained by the natu rally perverse after violent efforts attended by pain ful fidelity; the former is by "infusion," the latter by "acquisition." History has recorded not a few instances wherein men in great estate or with great powers of understanding, by the exercise of tem perance and other discipline toward self-mortifica tion, have succeded in subduing to reasonable, sometimes admirable, control the passions that hinder the proper work and full enjoyment of exis tence. Of those to whom this gift has been impar ted by infusion, Sir Thomas More seems the most conspicuous of all mankind. Doubtless it is not so easy for a humorous as for a serious nature to lead a life of innocence. Now, More, inheriting such a nature from his father, long one of the judges of the Court of King s Bench, was even in boyhood the readiest and raciest of wits. When a page in the household of Cardinal Morton, Lord Chancellor under Henry VII., his improvised interference in the Christmas entertainments at the A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. 47 palace were such that it was said "he alone made more sport than all the players besides." While at Oxford no fun was to be compared with that aroused by him and Erasmus in the interstices of laborious college engrossments. Yet it is certain that after leaving Oxford he pondered for some time the notion of becoming a monk of the order of Franciscans. For how long his mind was thus em ployed we know not, for, unfortunately, his biog raphies make only brief allusion to it. It is known, however, that he once lived in a lodging near a Carthusian monastery, and as a lay brother practised the usual austerities. His reason for leaving this abode and giving up the intention which had led him there may have been that he feared his love of merriment might prove an obstacle to the just performance of monastic obligations, or that in the English church he saw so much of the tendency to side with the arrogant despotism of the Tudor dy nasty, which was becoming more and more defiant towards the See of Rome. At all events, he with drew, but not without taking with him his hair shirt, which he wore until his death.* Convinced that the priesthood was not his vocation (for the secular was becoming as corrupt as it was regard less of papal authority), he decided for the law. *This shirt may yet be seen in a convent at Spilsburg, near Bland- ford, in the county of Dorset. 48 A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. "God," said one of his biographers, "had allotted for him not to live solitary, but that he should be a pattern to reverend married men how they should bring up their children how they should employ their endeavors wholly for the good of their country, yet excellently perform the virtues of religious men." It was a brief courtship, wherein the only item of sentiment was of a kind unique, in the affairs of the heart. It seems curious that a young man, hand some, gifted, courteous, after finding himself in love with a girl of a family, the first he had entered since his change of mind, out of compassion for her older sister, who might repine at the younger s marriage before her own, espoused her in preference to the one who had inspired his affections, and afterwards lived with her in unalloyed happiness until her death. After a decent interval he took to wife another rustic, and, notwithstanding her rude ways, her seven years seniority, and her temper not of the best, appeared to live, if not quite as happily as before, in a reasonable contentment. It is pleasing to contemplate how such a man may live with such a family. In his house at Chelsea, which he built at the age of thirty-four and ever afterwards resided therein, besides himself and his new rather we might say his old wife, dwelt his daughters, their husbands and children. In spite of the wife s rude ness and her being given to scolding, particularly A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. 49 for her husband s want of proper ambition, the head of the family gained entire obedience, and even succeeded in inducing her to learn and practise for his entertainment on several instruments of music. Above all duties in that household were those of religion. One of the biographers wrote about the performance of these as follows: u His custom was daily (besides his private prayers with his children) to say the seven psalms, the litany and the suffrages fol lowing; so was his guise with his wife and children and household nightly, before he went to bed, to go to his chapel, and there on his knees ordinarily to say certain psalms and collects with them. 11 If ever a family man performed to perfection his domestic duties, surely it was he. An enthusiast in the love of learning, in which his family, and especially his wife, were not competent to partici pate, yet he would seldom give to it any of the time which he regarded as belonging to domes tic intercourse. In a letter written in Latin to a friend he lamented, yet without complaint, thus: "The greater part of the day is spent on other men s affairs, the remainder of it must he given to mv family at home; so that I can reserve no part to myself that is, to study. I must gossip with my wife, chat with my children, and find something to say to my serv ants; for all these things I reckon a part of my business, unless I were to become a stranger in mine own house; for with whomsoever either nature, or choice, or chance hath engaged a man in any rela tion of life, he must endeavor to make himself as acceptable to them as possible for him to be. * * * All the time which I can gain to myself is that which I can steal from my sleep and my meals, and because that is not much I have made but a slow progress." Already eminent at twenty-four as a ripe scholar, 50 A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. an eloquent lawyer, and a sheriff with judicial as well as executory powers, he was then elected to the Parliament called by Henry VII. , after seven year s intermission, in order to obtain a subsidy on the marriage of his daughter with James IV. of Scotland, and he was the very first who in that assembly became noted for eloquence, and that in opposition to the demands of the crown. The monarch having claimed a sum far in excess of what was just, More boldly spoke against and suc ceeded in dissuading the Commons from acceding to it. The punishment of this audacity first was vicarious. The culprit s visible property being too small, and his invisible dubious, his father was shut up in the Tower, until the payment of a hun dred pounds fine, on a charge of which he was noto riously innocent. It was a commentary on the treacherousness in high places and the already far- gone decline of the English hierarchy, that the Bis hop of Winchester tried to inveigle the courageous boy into a confession of offence which would have ruined him and from which he was saved through an humble priest in that dignitary s household. The death of the king prevented the punishment of More himself, which only had been delayed. How often are disappointing the goodly promises of youth! Newly come to the empire, recalling exiles, remitting exorbitant taxes, and dismissing A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. 5 I profligates from the court, the Roman people were happy, believing that Caligula had inherited all the shining qualities of Germanicus. The young Nerc, a model of condescension, affability, and merciful ness, when called upon to sign a warrant for the ex ecution of some malefactors declared that he wished he had never learned to write. So Henry VIII. , beyond all precedent complaisant and popular, was happily contrasted in men s recollections with the gross despotism and the mean penuriousness of his father. Yet from the very first he was understood by More, who, as long as he could, resisted the so licitations of him and Wolsey to give up his pro fession and take service under the government. The minister wanted him not more because of his great abilities than of his unambitious dispositions, which he believed would shut out all danger of rival- ship. His very courage recommended him to a monarch who for a season seemed as generous as he was accomplished in person and understanding. When a ship belonging to the pope had been seized in an English port for an alleged breach of inter national law, and More had pleaded with success the cause of the defendant, Henry generously com mended his demeanor. Feeling that he might be charged justly with incivism if he persistently kept himself from the service of his country, he retired from the bar, was made Master of the Recuiests, and. 52 A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. having been knighted, became member of the Privy Council. It was then that, contrary to the usage among courtiers, he removed to Chelsea, and, rent ing land adjacent to his dwelling, let his family en gage in the raising of farm products. For this home he had the love which, with sound minds in sound bodies, Heaven often bestows upon those whom especially it loves. The only instance of du plicity recorded of him was one which the straitest casuist must have forgiven. Besides the time spent at meetings of the council, the king was ever sen ding for him on holidays, and even at nights, to be entertained by his conversation on science, litera ture, divinity, "and such other faculties," but especially for the sake of his unapproachable humor. " When he perceived his pleasant conceits so much to delight them 1 (for the queen shared in this pastime) " that he could scarce once in a month get leave to go home to his wife and children, and that he could not be two days absent from the court but he must be sent for again, he, much misliking this restraint of his liberty, began there fore to dissemble his mirth, and so little by little to disuse himself that he from thenceforth at such seasons was no more so ordinarily sent for." Have we not pitied sometimes an aged clown who, more in sadness than in jest, must make his jokes, which, more than any serious things possible for him to invent or reproduce, helped to maintain him and his dependents? But the young statesman concealed his redundance of fun for the sake of so ciety far dearer than was to be found in a king s A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. 53 palace. Henry, graciously compassionating the decline of ease in the presence of so sublime maj esty, thought to reassure him by appearing occa sionally at his home in Chelsea, dining, and after wards walking with him in his garden, the while holding his arm about his neck. One day, in answer to congratulation from Roper, husband of his daughter Meg, he answered : "I thank our Lord, I find his grace my very good lord indeed, and I believe he doth as singularly favor me as any subject within this realm. Howbeit, son Roper, I may tell thee I have no cause to be proud thereof: for if my head would win him a castle in France it should not fail to go." In the Parliament summoned in the year 1523 More was made Speaker by the king and the minis ter, with expectation that he would overawe the Commons and force them to grant the full subsidy that was demanded. Yet, to the disgust of Wolsey, whom it pleased to be present on the occasion, More, without passion, resisted the exorbitance, after which the Cardinal, unexpectedly discomfited, said fretfully that he wished that he had been in Rome when he was made Speaker. Still Henry did not withdraw his confidence, especially his affection, which, perhaps, was stronger than what was felt by him for any person whatsoever. The rivalry which Wolsey counted upon having prudently forefended sprang from the very things that had seemed least minatory. The total absence of ambition in the 54 A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE- man, the most learned, eloquent and witty as he was the most honorable and devout among all the attendants upon the court, at last provoked his jealousy, and he sought to rid himself of his influ ence by having him sent as embassador to Spain. Whether it were the foresight of sore homesickness, or other dangerous malady, in such terms he besought his sovereign not to send a faithful servant to his grave that he was excused and shortly after raised to the chancellorship of the duchy of Lan caster, which he continued to hold until the fall of Wolsey. Never were two colleagues who, so similar in some respects, were so unlike in the rest. Great scholars, great politicians both. Both had served king and country with distinguished ability at home and abroad. One gloried in power, pomp, and their circumstance. The other was fondest, fond only, of his plain country home, where, with his wife, children and servants, he could render daily and nightly humble worship to the Most High, and enjoy in humble gratitude the fruits of his labors of every sort. One, a prince of the church, performed his priestly functions in state arrogant as magnifi cent, with marquises and earls for his attendants, seeming not well to remember how meek and lowly was the Lamb whose unbloody Sacrifice he was solemnizing. The other in the silence of A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. 55 eveningtide led his household into his simply ap pointed chapel, knelt in humble supplication for all that they knew it their duty to pray for, and then, after reasonable indulgence in chattings usual among simple country-folk, took such sleep as Heaven be stows upon the industrious and guileless. Wolsey was a minister of two mighty sovereigns, the pope and the king; a delayer and a caviller with one who was a lover of righteousness and a seeker of peace, and at the same time a flatterer of the other and an abetter of his ever-growing despotism. More was a faithful, efficient servant to one of these po tentates within the limits of official obligation, beyond which neither threatenings of danger nor promises of highest exaltation could present even momentarily a temptation to invade unjustly the domain of the other. Wolsey, more exalted in place, was jealous of More, who, in spite of his vir tues or because of them, was nearer to the sove reign s heart. More, never envying but compassion ating him who would regard him as a rival, kept himself as long as possible from the eminence on whose summit the other tottered between pride and apprehension, and desired only that he might be allowed to withdraw wholly from the court, to which he had come with reluctance, and, living constantly in the bosom of his family, give himself to his profession, to philosophy, and to religion. 56 A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. The real character of Henry VIII., theretofore hidden from all eyes except those of More, was de veloped when Anne Boleyn had grown up to the beauty whose attractions he could not resist. By some, only a few, writers More has been blamed for apparent dissimulation in declining at first to as sume in the matter of the king s divorce the attitude that he afterwards maintained. Yet it seems strange that this integrity, made so illustrious at the end of this case, should have been questioned by any thoughtful mind during the period through which its discussion was protracted. The learned world seemed to be divided in opinion on the legal ity of a marriage contracted as that with Queen Catherine. In the existing condition of European civilization it was not a question, if indeed it ought ever to have been, for laymen. When asking his opinion by the king he answered by referring him to the writings of the doctors of the church. The question was not as to the lawfulness of the marriage with Anne before the former had been dissolved in pursuance of the canons, on which More could never have felt a doubt; but it was a matter on which the most able and cultured minds throughout Christendom were not, or seemed not, agreed. His silence was of a part with his modest nature, which shrank from the expression of opin ions outside of his studies and official duties. Wol- A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. 5 7 sey, vacillating as ambitious, pursued the double course that ruined his fortunes, embittered his life, and blasted his fame. In his integrity the unhap py Catherine never had had confidence, while of More she was accustomed to say that he was the one sound councillor in the kingdom. For Wolsey it was indeed a great day of redemption when, aged and broken, but sustained by the courage which penance and endurance had imparted, in obedience to the summons to repair to London and answer to the charge of treason, he. rose from the bed of death and, journeying as far as Leicester Abbey, lay down in peace. Not for him the glory that was shed around the sublime death of his successor; but not too far below was the resignation enjoyed when he who had " Sounded all the depths and shoals of honor" within so brief while had nothing to call his own save his " Robe And his integrity to heaven." The trust reposed in More by the king, aside from the charm of conversation and bearing that made him beloved of all, was of a kind that princes, however despotic, find it indispensable to put in subjects whose competence for public business is recognised universally, and whose integrity is un questionable. But for the sweetness of his dispo- 58 A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. sition and his cheerful religious faith he must have suffered keenly from homesickness during so many prolonged absences. An admission of this was made, though in the merriest words, in a letter to Erasmus written at Cambray, whither he had been sent as embassador to negotiate a treaty between England, France, and the emperor. On his return, after a success far beyond the highest hopes, he learned at Woodstock, where the court was then sojourning, of the destruction by fire of a part of his dwelling and all his outhouses, together with the year s crops stored therein. The letter written to his wife on this occasion is, of its kind, perhaps without an equal. A portion of it is subjoined: "Therefore, I pray you, be of good cheere, and take all the howsold with you to church, and there thank God, both for that he hath given us and for that he hath left us, which, if it please hym, he can in crease when he will. And if it please hym to leave us yet lesse, at hys pleasure be it. T pray you make some good ensearche what -rrry poore neighbours have loste, and bidde them take no thought there fore, and if I shold leave myself not a spone, there shall no poore neighbours of mine bere no losse by any chance happened in my house. I praye you be, with my children and howsold, merry in God. And devise somewhat with your friends what way wer best to take for provision to be made for corne for our howsold and sedethys yere coming, if ye thinke it good that we keepe the ground still in our hands. And whether ye think it good yit we so shall do or not, yit I think it wer not best sodenlye thus to leave it all up, and to put away our folk of our farme, till we have somewhat advised us thereon. Howbeit, if we have more nowe than we shall neede, and which can get the other maisters, ye may then discharge us of them. But I Avoid not any were sodenlye sent away he wote not nere wither." If history, outside of the Saints, can show a more A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. 59 illustrative example of cheerful pursuance in the line of the lessons of the Redeemer, we should like it to be pointed out. If Wolsey had not been a Christian and a peni tent, anguishing must have been his grief at the quick rise upon his ruin of the modest countryman of Chelsea, of whose ambitions he had lived in no dread while he was revelling in that " World of wealth he had drawn together For his own ends, indeed, to gain the popedom." Yet, when reflection had subdued him, the poet well might imagine such a dialogue as this: WOLSEY. What news abroad? CROMWELL. The heaviest and the worst Is your displeasure with the king. WOLSEY. God bless him! CROMWELL. The next is, that Sir Thomas More is chosen Lord Chancellor in your place. WOLSEY. That s somewhat sudden: But he is a learned man. May he continue Long in his highness favor, and do justice For truth s sake and his conscience; that his bones When he has run his course, and sleeps in blessings, May have a tomb of orphans tears wept on them. What more? CROMWELL. That Cranmer is returned with welcome, Install d Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. WOLSEY. That s news indeed. CROMWELL. Last, that the Lady Anne, Whom the king hath in secrecy long married. This day was received in open as his queen, Going to chapel; and the voice is now Only about her coronation. WOLSEY. There was the weight that pull d me down. The call to the lord chancellor was obeyed by 60 A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. More with much reluctance. In his speech, when installed, he said : " I have been drawn by force, as the king s majesty often professeth, to his highness service as a courtier; but to take this dignity upon me is most of all against my will; yet such is his highness benignity, such is his bounty, that he highly esteemeth the small dutifulness of his meanest subjects, and seeketh still magnificently to recompense his servants. * * * It is a burthen, not a glory; a care, not a dig nity. * * * When I look upon this seat; when I think how great and what kind ot personages have possessed this place before me; when I call to mind who he was that sat in it last of all, a man of what singular wisdom, of what notable experience, what a prosperous and favorable fortune he had for a great space, and how at last, de jected with heavy downfall, he hath died inglorious I have cause enough by my predecessor s example to think honor but slippery and this dignity not so grateful to me as it may seem to others. * * * Wherefore I ascend this seat as a place full of labor and danger void of all solid and true honor; the which by how much the higher it is, by so much greater fall I am to fear, as well in respect of the very nature of the thing itself as because lam warned by this late fearful example." Of his deportment, both as judge of Common- law courts and in Chancery, nothing ever has been said but what was in his praise. True to the be hests both of Law and Equity, yet, whenever consis tently with these, he yielded to the suggestions of compassion and charity. To poor litigants he was particularly gracious, and many times remitted to them the fees that were perquisites of his office. He was the first English judge to maintain that the dispute (never yet fully decided) between Law and Equity, might be ended by assigning to only one court adjudication of the claims of each. A man upright as he was learned could not but look with A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. 6 1 disfavor upon the continued jealousies of two tribu nals, the province of each being protection of the citizen in all of his legal rights. On this question many of the greatest minds from that period until now have differed. In furtherance of his peculiar views he often in private appealed to the Law judges to abate some of the rigor of their rulings, and whenever not able to succeed in such appeals he resolutely enjoined the execution of their judgments when to him they seemed unconscionably strict in accord with Law, which by reason of its univer sality is not adequate for every species of equita ble relief. Once he invited the judges to dine with him at Westminster, and while in the midst of excellent Gascony wine and other good cheer he proposed : "That if the justices of every court unto whom the reformation of the rigor of the law, by reason of their office, most especially apper tained would, upon reasonable considerations, by their own discretions (as they were, he thought, in conscience bound) mitigate and reform the rigor of the law themselves, there should from henceforth by him no more injunctions be granted." When they declined, after they had taken their leave he said to his son-in-law : "I perceive, son, why they like not so to do. For they see that they may, by the verdict of a jury, cast off all quarrel from them selves, and therefore am I compelled to abide the adventures of all such reports." It is curious that out of the decrees made during his chancellorship there should be but one that has 62 A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. descended to us, and that one of the parties liti gant should have been his own wife. Lady More, a good wife and stepmother, yet had her own opin ions about some things, and not unfrequently sought to enforce them, even with an ejaculation as threat ening as tilly vally! all of whose import was known, possibly, to none except herself. "It happened on a time that a beggar-woman s little dog, which she had lost, was presented for a jewel to Lady More, and she had kept some se night very carefully; but at last the beggar had notice where the dog was; and presently she came to complain to Sir Thomas, as he was sitting in his hall, that his lady withheld her dog from her. Presently my lady was sent for, and the dog brought with her; which Sir Thomas taking in his hands, caused his wife because he was she worthier person, to stand at the upper end of the hall, and the beggar at the lower end; and saying that he sat there to do every one justice, he bade each of them call the dog; which, when they did the dog went presently to the beggar forsaking mv lady. When he saw this, he bade my lady be contented, for it was none of hers; yet she, repining at the sentense of my lord chancellor, agreed with the beggar, and gave her a piece of gold which would well have bought three dogs, and so all parties were agreed; every one smil ing to see his manner of inquiring out the truth." The same sweetness was manifested in his filial as in other relations. His father continued, although past ninety years, to sit as one of the puisne judges of the King s Bench, and for him the affection of this son was just as it was when as a little child he was dandled upon his knee. It was his daily habit, when repairing to his own court, first to enter that of the King s Bench, kneel, ask, and receive the old man s blessing. When the latter died, weeping A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. 63 as a young child would have wept, he embraced his body while commending to heaven the soul that had departed. At length, as he had foreseen from the period when, grown weary of faded beauty, the king turned his eyes upon Anne, the time of trial came it cannot be called temptation, for it does not appear that at any time he hesitated what he must do when demand would be made upon him for co-operation of a kind that his conscience must condemn. When the demand came, in the kneeling suppliant before him Henry saw, and he knew it, a courage intrepid as ever fired warrior s breast upon any field. His resignation was accepted, and the subject greatest in fame, honor, learning, and genius retired to his simple home, having saved from all the avails of his various work and service a property whose income was not above one hundred pounds sterling. In one of the biographies there is a de lightful account of the merry conference had with his children who, with their consorts and children, had always dwelt with him touching the still more economical living to which they thereafter must descend when these "must be content to be contrib- utaries together." If, beginning with Lincoln Inn s fare, and, descending, they might not be able to maintain even Oxford fare "where many great, learned, and ancient fathers and doctors are con tinually conversant, * * * then may we after, with bag and wallet, 64 A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. go a begging together, hoping that for pity some good folks will give us their chanty, and at every man s door to sing a Salve Regina whereby we shall keep company and be merry together, 1 In the brief respite he enjoyed to the full the retire ment which, as was shown in his letters to Erasmus, he had always desired in order that he might live "only to God and himself." But when a committee of bishops, with twenty pounds for the purchase of a dress suitable for the occasion, brought an invita tion to attend at Anne s coronation, and it was de clined, the new queen was resolved upon his death. All the world knows how he endured her ruthless pursuit. There is to be witnessed in the midst of dangers sometimes a quality higher than the highest courage. It is the uncomplaining, almost unsuffer- ing, submission of innocence to injustice that it knows it can neither resist nor avoid. In More this virtue took on a beauty yet more exquisite from his temporary child-like apprehension of insufficiency for the ordeal before him. It makes the heart leap to be told of his joyousness while, after his appearance before Cranmer, Lord Chancellor Audley, the Duke of Norfolk, and Cromwell, a royal committee ap pointed for his trial as an accomplice with the "holy maid of Kent," he was returning home in company with Roper. Said the latter: " I trust, sir, all is well you are so merry." " It is so indeed, son, thank God! " u Are you then, sir, put out of the bill ? r A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE 65 " Would st thou know, son, why I am so joyful? " In good faith, I rejoice that I have given the devil a foul fall; because Ihave with those lords gone so far, that without great shame I can never go hack." It was the gleefulness of a child after successful essay of steps for which its young strength was doubted to be fully adequate. It was at. his own trial for high treason that ap peared the majestic courage of whose fame four centuries are full. Neither desiring nor shunning martyrdom, standing upon the right of a British subject to be condemned only after fair trial by his peers, he put the marks of everlasting infamy upon his judges and prosecutors by exposure of the gross unlawfulness of their proceedings and the au dacious falsehood of their testimony. His cross- questioning of Rich, the solicitor-general, the most infamous lawyer that ever belonged to the English bar, reads almost like a denunciation from a He brew prophet. Yet when the trial was over he lapsed again into the simple merry-heartedness that now was to be with him to the end. It appears almost preterhuman, his absolute freedom from resentment. " I believe, Meg, "he said one day to his daughter, who had come to visit him in the Tower, " they that have put me here weene they have done me a high displeasure; but I assure thee, on my faith, mine own good daughter, if it had not been for my wife and ye that be my children 1 would not have failed long ere this to have closed my self in as strait a room, and straiter too. But since I am come hither without mine own desert, I trust that God by his goodness will dis- 66 A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. charge me of my care, and, with his gracious help, supply my lack among you." So his compassionate regard for the sovereign: "And surely, daughter, it is a great pity that any Christian prince should, by a flexible council, ready to follow his affections, and bv a weak clergy lacking grace constantly to stand to their learning, with flattery be so shamefully abused." As for the vengeful woman who had been the chief leader in his persecution, the feeling indulged by him may be known by the following talk with this same daughter : u How goeth the world, Meg, and how doth the Queen Anne? " " In faith, father, never better; there is nothing else in the court but dancing and sporting." " Never better! Alas! Meg, it pitietli me to remember unto what misery, poor soul! she will shortly come. These dances of hers will prove such dances that she will spurn our heads oil like footballs; but it will not be long ere her head will dance the like dance." To the very last obedient to the king s pleasure, that he use not many words at his execution, he answered: "I did purpose to have spoken some what, but I will conform myself to the king s com mandment." And so, pronouncing on his knees the Miserere, and after giving a piece of gold and a merry word to the executioner, he laid his head upon the block. In fine, whose career among the not inspired and the unsainted shall we compare with this in the matter of the peculiar characteristic which this ar ticle has attempted to portray? If any, that of Socrates. Yet Socrates was and showed himself to be conscious of superiority to the men of his time. A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. 67 Certainly the courage of Socrates never has been outdone. Still (though not with boasting) he would tell of occasions whereon it had been exert ed. When along with others, ordered by the Thirty to bring Leon from Salamis that he might be put to death, "I made known to them," he said afterwards, "both in word and deed, that (if it be not too hard an expression) I did not care at all for death provided I did nothing unjust or unholy, which was the great object of my solicitude. The great authority of the government did not influence me to violate any Sense of right." He knew and he so said, that the calumnies heaped upon him had their main foundation in the contem plation of his superior wisdom. He had excited an tipathy long and general by refusing to speak in terms other than were deserved of the abuses and follies of his time. Before the court that tried him he stood, though without anger, as an accuser rather than as a defendant. If there was pathos there also was scorn in the words with which, after condemnation, he left the judgment-hall: "It is now time for us to go our respective ways, I to die and you to live; and which of us is going on a better voyage is known to God alone." Of such a man his loving biographer could say well: "To me as I have described him, he seemed such as the best and happiest of men would be." Outside of Christian history, without doubt he is the most illus trious example. Sir Thomas More, his equal in 68 A CHARACTERISTIC OF SIR THOMAS MORE. other gifts, had the unspeakable advantage of having and of learning, perfectly as is possible to human nature, the precept that to become fittest for the kingdom of heaven a man must be ever as a child. A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. 1T\R. Johnson once said that whenever he found *-* himself in a place where a monk of former times had been, his feeling was to kneel and kiss the ground on which he had walked. It was a bold and a startling speech for the people and the times. It is not the purpose of this article to praise the monasteries of the Middle Age, although we know now that except for them almost all of the little that was saved of the learning and wisdom of the ancients would have been lost. The historians, philosophers, and poets of Greece and Rome, such as were spared in the ravaging search by barbarians and fanatical Christians, owed their rescue to the humble, devout men who dwelt in the houses built by themselves in order, by separation from the world, to become wholly consecrated to religious and charitable uses. Of their churches at York, Dur ham, Antwerp, Amiens, Cologne, Strassburg, and elsewhere, each, like the temple of Ephesus, remains one of the wonders of the world. Yet the names of most of their builders died and were buried with them. They had raised these temples to the glory of 69 70 A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. the Master to whom all their being was devoted, and when their work, done for the most part in secrecy and silence, was ended, they were laid away in their own crypts by surviving brothers, who then at once returned to their own unfinished careers. This was all as the departed had wished; for they had looked for their rewards in a different country which they had been allowed to foresee, wherein rewards were richer, more precious than what could be be stowed by men, contemporary or to come in future ages, and they would never lose any of the prec- iousness that was to make them so ineffably dear. But, turning from the general work of these religious, a brief consideration is asked of an individual monk of that period, who in the picture-books during the childhood of the oldest among us was represented as a malignant sorcerer, but whom now all the world unites in commending not only as the great est of his class, at least in the department of earthly science, but as second, if to any, only to his name sake who came three hundred years after him. It is curious to contemplate the long, winding course taken by Greek literature after its decay in Athens, to find its way into Europe, and first in the extreme West. Having been exiled from its native country and found a temporary sojourn in Alexan dria, where it was gradually grafted by the school of Proclus on the mystic philosophy of the East, A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. 7 1 again banished by Theodosius, it was hospitably received by Mahomet and his followers, and later was as firmly fixed at Cordova as in Bagdad. Thus introduced by the Arabs into Spain, the Opydvov of Aristotle effected vast changes in the methods of Christian theological teaching and discussion. Phil osophy, termed Scholastic from the schools insti tuted by Charlemagne, became absorbed into Scho- lasticTheology. Herein was a vast change, and it was wrought necessarily by the conditions of con temporary thought. Very many great minds in the thirteenth century,, minds of extensive and varied cultivation, were among the enemies of Christianity. Learned Arabs, Greeks, and Hebrews, sometimes it was found difficult to oppose in debate by even the most gifted of the Christian clergy, because the latter were less familiar with dialectic principles. Thitherto theology had been taught mainly by ref erence to the traditions of the church, and by ap peals on disputed points to the authority of the Fathers, as those writers were styled who came next to the Apostolic Fathers who had been contem porary with the Twelve. Acquaintance with Aris totle s philosophy after its introduction by the Arabs into Spain led naturally, and in not long time, to its employment in religious controversy, and it seems curious how absorbed became not only lead ing but intellects of all degrees in its use. One 72 A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. reason doubtless was that philosophy, and particu larly occult sciences, the Arabs had studied much more than the other departments of Greek literature, because the former harmonized to some degree with their own studies of astrology and kindred subjects. While they knew Aristotle well, they had little knowledge of Homer and Sophocles. These last for a time, and a long time, must give place to the former, who had preceded them in Europe. Not that the poets were altogether neglected, but these harmless singers were submitted to harsh treatment at the universities, which the scholastics dominated to such a degree that, in Oxford especially, during a period of many years, heads were made sore by clubs and stones for no other cause than efforts to put other Greeks along by the side of the great despot of the Lyceum. Plato, for reasons of his own, would have excluded poets from his Republic. For other causes Aristotle excluded them for a strangely long period from Europe. In the mouths of disputants of all grades wrang- lings must become numerous like the sands of the sea-shore, and well-nigh as unprofitable. Roger Bacon was the first to find out clearly their absurd inutility. He had studied this philosophy first at Oxford, afterwards at Paris and when he became a Franciscan monk and returned to his native coun try, having taken his abode at the friary hard by A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. 73 the seat of the university, he set out upon that bold career which was to be attended by many anguish ing sufferings, but followed in time by undying re nown. No man of his generation so well as he knew the enormity of the evils which were to be combated, none but he foresaw the trials of the com bat, For the feeling had for philosophy by the Christian prelates had come down to them from the Greeks along with the books wherein mainly its discipline had been inscribed. With the Greeks philosophy was regarded as a something sacred, almost divine. As such, it was a desecration to employ it for mere human uses. Roger Bacon was the first to maintain, if not in the same words, in precisely the same spirit as his illustrious successor and namesake, that instead ot man having been made for philosophy, philosophy was made for man. Philosophy, indeed, had come down from heaven, but not for the purpose of being enshrined in temples before whose altars mankind must bow in adoration as to a God. But it was a gift from heaven to man to be accepted with thankfulness, and to be used, not only as a means of attaining heaven after this mor tal being shall be ended, but of increasing the con veniences and pleasures, and alleviating the burdens and sufferings, of this lower life a boon, in fine, to be made available in every sphere of man s en. deavors and hopes for the attainment of good, spir- 74 A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. itual and temporal. None but a sublime genius, and brave to audacity, could so have opposed him self to the most ancient, universal, deeply-set prej udices of the world. His courage was the more magnificent because he was too wise not to foresee the martyrdom which was to come, the sorest ele ment of which was the foreknowledge that it was to come from his own brethren. It was in the year 1240, when twenty-six years old, that, having learned all that was in Scholastic Philosophy, he left the University of Paris and re turned to Oxford. Long afterwards he spoke with deep pain of the years upon years that he had wasted in study to him barren, both at the universi ties and then with his brothers at the friary, regret ted that he had not sooner begun the search for the material good which it was the chief mission of his philosophy to teach mankind. Already he had become well cultured in languages and particularly so in mathematics. It was when he had begun with experimental philosophy that he began to speak with boldness against unquestioning subjec tion to the authority of antiquity in physics. "We are the ancients." No saying of Lord Bacon has been more highly lauded than this. Yet Roger Bacon said the same or its equivalent three hun dred years before Francis Bacon was born. The authority of the ancients, founded on the fact A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. 75 they were the ancients, was ridiculous in the mind of this young monk. In what the world calls an cient times the world was as to science yet in its infancy. We, we moderns, are the ancients. He would not discredit the achievements of man when the world was young. But the world is like man, its life as his life. It must advance and does ad vance from infancy, through childhood, youth, young manhood, mature age. A man is older than a child, and has profited, if he has not been a fool, by the experiences of childhood, and learned by those experiences to give up and turn away from its mistakes or fall into irrecoverable disasters. There is much that is touching in the solemn rever ence and the fond affectionateness with which we remember the remote past even in our own lives. The long silence of those from whom our earliest lessons came leads us sometimes to feel reluctant to vary from their teachings, even when our own ex perience has shown them to have been erroneous. Until Roger Bacon , rather until long after his time, so had mankind at every period felt towards the wise men of former periods. There seems to have been a feeling, strong like a conviction, that the teachers of remote ages were taught directly from heaven, and taught all that it was good for man kind to know, and that it behooved those who came after mainly to gather up by pious search the things ? A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. that during the lapse of time had been lost from the inspired wisdom of yore. Such a condition of the mind of humanity seems strange in this age, when inquiry has gone to the extreme of boldness; but in former times it was as if men felt that the eye of God was upon them when they even im agined calling in question the sacred wisdom which the wise of old had received immediately from his mouth. This huge, time-honored tradi tion the young monk of Ilchester was the first who dared to question. "I spent twenty years," he said, almost in anger with himself, and referring to the natural sciences, "in the study of authority!" And afterwards he wrote these audacious words: "Do you wish to know what, if I had the power, I would do with the works of Aristotle? I would burn them up!" Nothing like this had a human being ever dared to say regarding this king of men, whose reign had began with Alexander of Macedon and was destined to extend two hundred years yet longer, to the times of Cosmo de Medici. In the silence of his cell the thought had come to this Franciscan that the despotism of authority in the natural sciences must be overturned, or the world remain forever in ignorance of the things which, next to the true worship of God, it was most important to know. His studies had led him to the assurance of having found what were the A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. 77 means for this overthrow so needed for the weal of mankind. This was experimental science. In the investigations conducted in the workshop which he had built he had ascertained many natural facts, and he argued that the material world was full of such, created therein for man s uses, which philoso phy not only did not know but would have taught and commanded to ignore ; and then he wrote these memorable words: "Experimental Science does not receive verity at the hands of superior sciences. It is she who is the mistress, and the other sciences are her servants. She has the right, in effect, to give command to all the sciences, because it is she alone who certifies and consecrates their resultants. Experimental science, therefore, is the queen of the sciences and the limit of all speculation." Fully convinced as to the justice and the strength of his position, he began that system of inquiry which was to devolve the greatest part of his credit upon his countryman who was to come on long afterwards, following his ideas, but unrestrained by authority and aided by the discoveries of three cen turies which had been made mainly by accident. His first most noted endeavors were devoted to the reformation of the Julian Calendar. Julius Caesar, as all know, had reckoned the length of the year at three hundred and sixty-five days and six hours a wonderful approximation to verity in the existing 78 A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. state of astronomical science. The error of some what less than twelve minutes in the lapse of many centuries had induced a state of confusion that not only wrought much inconvenience in general, but interfered more and more seriously with the regula tions of the church respecting proper times for the observance of days of special religious obligation. That is one of the most eloquent letters ever writ ten in which Bacon appealed to Pope Clement IV. in behalf of the rectification of the calendar, whose defects he characterized as having become "intole rable to the sage, and the horror of the astronomer." In it were exhibited the solicitude of a Christian priest, the eager desire for certitude of the man of science, and the winsome courteousness of the dip lomat. It is most touching to read, after his allu sion to the infidel philosophers, Greek and Arabian, his appeal to that liberal and enlightened prince to signalize and make for ever renowned his pontif icate by an action that would be as benignly ser viceable to Christianity as to science. The hopes entertained were ended by the death of that emi nent pope, and three more centuries must go by before, under Gregory XIV., would be accomplished what Bacon so ardently had wished. It is sad to contemplate this unhappy miscarri age. That great genius had foreseen the invention of the telescope. The honor bestowed upon Gali- A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. 79 leo has been proven to belong in its greatest part to Roger Bacon, and, but for his imprisonment and other persecutions, there is little, if indeed any, doubt that he would actually have invented not only that instrument but the microscope also. In the Opus Majus submitted to Clement occur passages which clearly indicate this assumption. Having noticed the curious reflections from polished surfa ces, casting images, some greater, some smaller than what was real, he was led to conclude that contin ued experiment might produce instruments that would magnify to degrees according as human in genuity and control of metallic substances could construct them. Mankind never has had too much to say in praise of Sir Isaac Newton; yet centuries before him Roger Bacon had struck out the path in the science of Optics in the pursuit of which this philosopher attained such splendid successes. In the contemplation of the work done by this monk in the midst of circumstances so adverse to his aims and endeavors, Humboldt named him "La plus grande apparition du Moyen Age." The genius of a man who could have escaped that delusion of the "philosopher s stone" which took such long hold upon all men s minds in the Middle Age must have been preterhuman. Roger Bacon believed with the rest in the transmutation of the inferior metals into gold and silver; yet he 80 A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. was not only free from the superstitions which were indulged by some of the alchemists, but his practi cal sense rejected that infinity of fantastic imagina tions respecting the influence of the planets and other agencies in hastening or retarding the process of obtaining the lapis philosophorum a mineral substance which, by mixing with the base, would transmute them into the precious metals. He sim ply believed that the metals were compound, and that repeated experiment would lead to the dis covery of the processes employed by nature in those combinations. In all his metallurgic work, limited as it was in comparison with his other in the service of science, the mere search for gold and silver, it is most probable, was never among his thoughts, especially his desires. A devotee to ex perimental science, in what time he could get from his religious duties, he took an interest in metallur gy, as he did in other branches. If he fell into the general error respecting the convertibility of the inferior metals, the error, so far as he was concerned, was free as well from the superstitions as from the frauds into which many who dealt in such practic es were led. Partly these superstitions, mainly these frauds, are what induced the infamy which has been attached to the name of alchemy. Yet science ad_ mits that it owes much to the alchemists. To one and another of the numerous adepts among them is to be A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. 8 1 attributed not only the discovery of phosphorus but the concentrated acids; and it is almost certain that to Roger Bacon in special mankind is indebted for the invention of gunpowder. That a pious and en lightened priest enlightened far above all the men of his time should have believed in the elixir vitcn which was to abolish death is an idea too absurd to be considered for a moment in connection with him. In Sir F. Palgrave s fiction, The Merchant and the Friar, there occurs what seems a just opinion about the connection of Roger Bacon with the vagaries of the alchemists in general. He was simply dazzled, according to this writer, by his inability, on account of the existing paucity of known natural principles, to comprehend the possible extent of the wonder ful discoveries that were continually being elimina ted in his workshop, and doubtless he suffered from the impostures practised in his name by his servants and others upon the credulity and fears of the vulgar. And now let us consider briefly the penance that this illustrious man underwent for his devotion to the interest of science a penance more remarkable and more to be compassionated because he must have foreseen its coming, and that from those of his own household. That preternatural gifts in remote former times were bestowed by the Creator upon some of the hu man race, or at least that such bestowal was per- 82 A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. mitted by Him, and even in cases wherein the re cipients were ignorant of Him or hostile to Him, cannot be doubted. When Moses, who had been divinely appointed the god of Pharao, and Aaron his prophet, turned the rod into the serpent, "Pha rao called the wise men and the magicians; and they also by Egyptian enchantments and certain secrets did in like manner. And they every one cast down their rods and they became serpents."* Even as late as St Paul, Simon for a long time had "bewitched the Samaritans with his sorceries." In vain these arts were proscribed by the Roman laws as proceeding from the powers of evil. The multi tudes were credulous still, not only to those that were native, but to the practises of the Thessalian witches, the magi, the sorcerers of Egypt and Phry- gia, and other foreign nations, whose manners and opinions they were brought by continued conquests of Roman arms to learn. Christianity must oppose itself to these as to all other practises of heathen ism. St. John, in the Apocalypse (xxi. 8), we re member, devoted to the second death, in the pool burning with fire and brimstone, sorcerers along with the "fearful and unbelieving, the abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and idolaters, and all liars. " Among Christians, henceforth, arts which even heathen emperors had condemned must seem *Exochas vii. n, 12. A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. 83 yet more black and diabolical, and be forbidden by yet more certain and severe restrictions. Natural, therefore, were the jealousies of the Church always of whatever might obstruct the universal prevalence of the Christian faith. We are now considering nearly the most unenlightened period of the Middle Age, a period poor in general culture yet rich in religious tervor. Ever struggling, the Church was struggling yet against the powers of darkness, and was timorous against everything that bore even the appearance of an enemy. The Mendicant orders, newly established, had lost none or little of the en ergetic devoutness of their founders. Called into being in great emergencies, they were among the chiefest supports to the Papacy, whose fortunes then were those of the whole Church. Besides, hu man infirmities belong to men in all conditions, the pious and the wicked. A very great man al ways lives in advance of his times, and is never rightly appreciated because never fully understood by his contemporaries, even those with whom he lives upon terms of most intimate relationship. Es pecially is this the case with those who, though less, are yet highly gifted, and have those aspirations that are found most often and most eager among the greatest of earth. There is no place so holy, said Thomas a Kempis, wherein temptations do not enter, and the most insidious are they which 84 A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. assail those otherwise most unassailable by evil in fluences. Leaders of multitudes next below him who towers far above them are few who, in one form or another, do not undertake to persuade their followers to drag him down from his threatening height, sometimes in order to cast him to death. Socrates nearly foresaw the Messias. At least he demonstrated the inevitable necessity of his being. In his opinion God, the great Unknown, could never become known to the world with satisfaction unless he would clothe Himself in human form, and, descending from heaven, exhibit Himself in such form before the world, so prone not only to evil deeds but evil opinions. And so, at the instigation of those who stood nearest to him in men s estima tion, his people, to whose weal his whole being had been devoted, seized upon and slew him even in the midst of those teachings which, of all that have ever fallen from human tongues not divinely in spired, were nearest to the oracles of God. Roger Bacon was too far in advance of his time not to foresee that his generation would not be led by him, and that for his persistent refusal to stay behind he must suffer the penalties common to extraordinary greatness. It may have been impru dent, but it was of a part of the integrity and bold ness with which he was in the pursuit of science not to attempt to conceal the results of any of his work. A MARTYR TO SCIENCE, ^ His brother Franciscans, timorous like the rest of the Christian world respecting the horrors of de- monology, looked upon him with suspicion and ap prehension which grew with the ever-increasing wonderful discoveries, all of which were proclaimed with the joyous readiness with which an ardent searcher for truth loves to make it known when he has found it. In time these brothers were driven to fear what outsiders had already charged upon this monk, so strangely wise, the exhibitor of such startling things that, like the sorcerers, he was possessed of demoniacal spirits, and, if not arrested, he would inflict great harm upon the Church in gen eral and the order of Franciscans in particular; and so he was ordered to communicate knowledge of his investigations to no one, under pain of impris onment and being fed upon bread and water only. The order was obeyed, most of the discoveries he had made were locked in the recesses of his own brain and partly in those manuscripts to which he gave the name of Opus Majus. Extreme penalty for his wisdom was postponed for a season by the promptness of his obedience, and in the course of time occured events which led to the hope that the ban of silence would be removed and the student be permitted to pursue the career which, if unmolested, would have added untold blessings to mankind. Guy Foulquois, a native of St. Gilles, France, came 86 A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. late to the priesthood. He had been a soldier, a distinguished lawyer, and a high official at the court of Louis IX. When his wife died, leaving him with two daughters, he left the world for the church. He had the good fortune to enjoy the in timate society of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bon- aventure. His mind, from these associations and his previous studies, had risen to a condition wherein it could note with pleasure the progress of general enlightenment. Pope Urban IV. appointed him legate to England, in order to aid in bringing about a reconciliation between King Henry III. and Simon de Montfort. Pleased with the service rendered by him, upon his return he created him Car dinal Bishop of Sabina. While sojourning in England he did, rather he tried to do, a work far more impor tant than that of conciliating to the king s interest that turbulent noble whose factious endeavors were to be ended only by the defeat at Evesham. He had heard of some of the discoveries of the Francis can monk at Oxford, and he became exceedingly anxious to be made acquainted with them. He suc ceeded to a limited extent through the connivance of his agent, Remond de Laon, who managed to evade the surveillance under which the monk was held by his brethren. Delighted with what he had obtained, for some years he could only regret that such a man should be the victim of a prejudice so A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. 87 hostile to the interests of mankind. But in the year 1265, on the death of Urban he was elected to succeed him. In vain he remonstrated with the cardinals, as a truly pious ecclesiastic must do when exalted to such eminence. He could not prevail, and on the 22d day of February of that year assumed the tiara with the title of Clement IV. It is most grateful to consider the career of this eminent pope. Pious as enlightened, humble as great, he dwelt during all of his pontificate in the town of Viterbo, never for one time entering the great Eternal City, the capital of Christendom. The members of his family, though of noble extrac tion, he kept far from him, notifying them, early after his ascension, that they were not to expect any special favors at his hands. Following his ex ample, his two daughters gave themselves to the church, becoming nuns in the Abbey of St. Saviour s at Nismes. Often had he reflected upon what he had learned of the work of the humble Franciscan, and pitied his contracted life and the ignorant fears that had constrained it within its narrow limits. Now, when he had risen to_be head of the church, he bethought him to do what was possible in the interests as well of science as of charity. Then he wrote that letter, which is still extant, in which he adjured him, by the respect which he was bound to pay to the Apostolic See, to send to him in pri- A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. vate an account of the investigations which he had made in behalf of science and their results. It seems now curious that the head of the church should use such precautionary means for the attain ment of ends so desirable and so benign. But the Franciscan Order were devoted to pious works and to the See of Rome. If he must do contrary to what they had commanded within their own socie ty, he will endeavor to do so without the notoriety that would inflict pain upon followers so devoted and otherwise so helpful to the cause of Christianity. Yet in the letter was an allusion to the restraints under which these writings had been put, and his orders were, that, however binding these were, the manuscripts must be sent notwithstanding. It was thus that the world became acquainted with that Opus Majus, without doubt the most important work in the service of the physical needs of man kind that had ever yet been done. We can only speculate what might have been done by Clement, both for science and its suffering, ablest, and most devoted votary, but for his ad vanced age and engrossment not only with the gen eral affairs of the church, but with the settlement of the Two Sicilies upon the house of Anjou. In less than four years he died, and Bacon was thus left friendless: Among the Franciscans was one Tineus, of Ales- A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. 89 siano, in the diocese of Ascoli, Italy. Of an ob scure family, he had distinguished himself by his devotion to the party who were desirous of retur ning to the stricter discipline of their founder, and who, in distinction to the Recollets were called Brothers of the Observance, sometimes Minors Ob- servantines. At the death of St. Bonaventure he became general of the order. The death of Clem ent revived the charges of sorcery against Ba con, and the hostility became so acrimonious that he was summoned to appear before a tribunal met at Paris for his trial. He was found guilty and the judgment pronounced by D Ascoli was per petual imprisonment. He was then not far from being seventy years old. So harsh a judgment it is sad to think of at any period. Yet one cannot forget the hard trials of the Church with evils so manifold that it was im possible in every instance to separate the innocent from the guilty. In vain had the laws of the em pire endeavored to suppress what were considered the worst evils that could befall mankind. The in fusion of barbaric blood from the northern regions of Europe had deepened the belief in diabolic influences. We have seen what was the judgment of St. John upon sorcerers, and we remember that St. Paul denounced Elymas as a "child of the devil." What wonder, then, that the Franciscans, an order 9 A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. in which a large party had already risen who were departing from the stern rule of the glorious Saint of Assissium, should feel it their solemn duty to shut for ever the mouth of one among them whose exper iments, with results hitherto unknown, were astound ing even more than the most audacious of all the "black art s" achievements? We wish we could know some of the incidents of this trial. What may have been the bearing of the accused, whom we know to have been as brave as he was gifted, as true to the cause of religion as that of science? He certainly did not recant, because he would not; did he defy? What was said in his defence, even with caution and timidity, by the few who hoped he might be less wicked than he seemed, or who loved him too well not to murmur some regrets that his face was to be withdrawn wholly from their sight, and its aged wearer to languish the poor remains of life in a dungeon? What affectionate tears were shed at the parting and afterwards in remembering what he was elsewhere than among those horrid implements of his satanic practises? Answers to these questions we can imagine only, and then re flect that it could not have been otherwise. He came into the world before his time, and must suffer the penalties always inflicted upon premature ad vents. The world could not take the mighty strides needed to follow in his lead. This great truth was A MARTYR TO SCIENCK. 9! felt never so sadly as by our Lord when to his di sciples he spoke these parting words: "Adhuc mult a habeo vobis die ere, sed non potestis portare modo." * He had been charged with cas ting out devils through Beelzebub. Even one of the Twelve, after the Resurrection, before believing, must lay his hand upon the prints of His wounds. No ; non possunt modo. They could not bear until another should come and by degrees lead them up the dazzling heights. So St. Paul wrote to the Cor inthians: "Lac vobis potum dedi, non escam: non- dum enim poteratis, sed nee nunc quidem potestis: adhuc enim carnales estis, " t Tineus of Ascoli was neither a bad man nor a cruel. The privations of his imprisoned brother probably were not harder than those which he vol untarily inflicted upon himself as the leader of one of the strictest of monastic orders, chosen from the straitest of its parties. A Franciscan must not only be, but to his brethren, the Church, and the world he must appear, guiltless of whatever dero gates from the solemnity of his vows. Seven years after these events this leader, on the death of Hono- rius IV., was raised to the papal throne, taking the name of Nicholas IV. This honor was due mainly to his reputation for sanctity and acquaintance with the wants of the Church, and partly to the cour- *St. John xvi. 12. f i Cor. iii. 2. 9 2 A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. age with which he had withstood the pestilence at Sabina during the sitting of the conclave after the death of his predecessor. Yet he besought the cardinals to recall their votes, and on his dying bed declared, with a simple sincerity that no one doubted, "We accepted the purple from fear of of fending our order." Nor was he hostile to learning. On the contrary and it seems like a grim mockery he not only granted large privileges to the Uni versity of Lisbon, founded by King Denis, but he founded himself that at Montpellier. Yet during his pontificate he seems never to have given a thought to the aged brother who still was lingering in the prison to which he had consigned him ten years before, and it was not until after his death that the sufferer was released and allowed to return to his native country. While he was languishing, shut out from the world, some ot the irrefragable truths which he had propounded, in such wise as could not fail to become known, made here and there impressions upon minds more cultured and liberal than the rest which induced interventions in his behalf. Besides silence, the coming on of old age, long absence, subsidence of jealousies among his own brethren, another factor in the persecutions by which he had been beset, prevailed at last. An exile of fourscore granted leave to return to his home ! What was left for him was to die. Poignant A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. 93 in the highest degree, doubtless, is the suffering of a great soul which suffers not only unjustly but while laboring for the weal of its persecutors, who inflict because they cannot rise to see its good, grand purposes. Resentment is kept in abeyance because it knows that such inflictions have not been dictat ed by cruelty but ignorance, which is as implaca ble. Sadder words never came from the mouth of a dying man than those spoken by the returned exile who, after so many years of anguish, was allowed to die in his native home:"y> me repens de m etre donne tant de peine dans rinteret de la science." The illustrious namesake who appropri ated so many of his ideas and almost all of his praise, he also made touching appeals to foreign nations and future ages to ignore the things of which never a temptation came to the humble monk to be guilty. The one anguished in the rec ollection of infirmities which it is almost incredible that such a man would not have been able to cure ; the other, having none of such sort to remember, must repent only of having been made to suffer for the time which, as it seemed to him in his dying hour, had been wasted in the interest of science. So Marcus Brutus, after his desertion by the people and after the defeat of Philippi, turned his eye re gretfully back upon the literary and philosophic pursuits of his youth and young manhood, ar.d 94 A MARTYR TO SCIENCE. wished he had never left them for the vain purpose of saving a republic that was already in ruins. Fi nally, we are reminded in this connection of the last words of Gregory VII. at Salerno: "We have loved justice and hated iniquity, and for ihis we die in exile." SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. A MONG those who have written ot mankind, Dick- ** ens knew best the world around him, especially in that class whom, being a large majority, it is most important to understand. Sprung from almost the lowest stratum, having suffered many of the pains which befall their varied conditions, even when a little child his eyes were ever looking around him, and, though unconsciously then, studying and learning them well, destined never to lose the in terest which such knowledge inspired, but to devote a hard working life to imparting it to others, among other purposes, in order to impart to them a com passion which he never ceased to feel. Never a demagogue, nor a vulgarian, nor a snob, when rich, illustrious, courted by the great, he busied himself as when poor, unknown and friendless, and died in the midst of his benign work. The recollection of some accidents of his childhood was always painful, not from shame at the contrast with established prosperity, yet not without some, a shade of bit terness in the reflection that a child so sensitive to hurt should have been subjected, sometimes unnec- 95 g SOMK HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. essarily, to such privations. Before reading the Biography of Forster we knew that to him who had written the histories of Tiny Tim and Jo of Tom- All- Alone s early sorrows had come that could not be forgotten. Such things as these, as was the case with Aken- side and Gifford, sometimes make either a satirist or a despiser of those in one s same lot. In minds except the greatest it is not unnatural for both shame and resentment to rise from such humilia ting recollections. Even among the greatest, tears must come in the eyes and a shadow be upon the heart; but these qualify them better for the histories which they are to indite. They are only the greatest also who can become just historians of the poor and humble. Of these Dickens was never an undiscriminating champion. As the best of his creations were taken from their midst, so were his worst. The latter, indeed, had become known right well in the jails and ships of transport to penal colonies. He would make known the former as well important information in a community such as London city, where, not as in country life, the social positions of the high and the low are so far apart that, passing and repassing each other every day, not only is there little accord of sentiments and feelings, but unhappily often an utter ignorance on the part of the upper of the characters of the x * t, SOMK HKROES OF CHAKI.KS DICKENS. C)J lower, their conditions, aims, and possibilities. The poor are known to be poor indeed, and many the charities that are extended. Yet money-charities are far from being the highest. Indeed, money- charities, when bestowed not from a sense of their necessity to the receiver, or from a sort of pleasant consciousness in the giver of a condescension from peculiar loftiness of mind, are sometimes bestowed for the purpose of buying one s self off from those more benignant, seeking acquaintance with the afflic ted and oppressed, and visiting them with intent to comfort and relieve. Dickens knew these classes,* their squalid poverty, their sickliness, their hopes and despairs, their desires to pull the rich out of their great houses and splendid equipages, and soil *Forster in his biography says: " That he took from the very be ginning of this Bayham-Street life his first impression of that struggling poverty which is nowhere more vividly shown than in the commoner streets of the ordinary L,ondon suburb, and which enriched his earliest writings with a freshness of original humor and quite unstudied pathos that gave them much of their sudden popularity, there cannot be a doubt. I certainly understood it, he has often said to me, quite as well then as I do now. But he was not conscious yet that he did so understand it, or of the influence it was exerting on his life even then. It seems almost too much to assert of a child, say at nine or ten years old, that his observation of everything was as close and good, or that he had as much intuitive understanding of the character and weakness of grown-up people around him, as when the same keen and wonderful faculty had made him famous among men. But my experience of him led me to put implicit faith in the assertion he unvaryingly himself made, that he had never seen any cause to correct or change what in his boyhood was his own secret impression of any boy whom he had had, as a grown man, the opportunity of testing in later years. " 98 SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. their fair garments in the dirt on which their own beds were laid, their children born, and their poor meals spread. But he knew as well their integrity, their fear of God, their unvaunting courage, their love of wives, parents, children, brothers, sisters, friends, their merry-hearted drolleries, their absurd sentimentalities. He knew all their grief and their frolic, sympathized where sympathy could be afforded, pitied where it could not, and laughed when he could laugh without the petulance that em bitters instead of sweetening mirth. It is a rare gift when one who portrays the earnest can do as well with the sportive. Scott had done so, and, to a less degree, Miss Edgeworth also; both late, because readers of books had not yet come to be profoundly interested in the multitudes. It was reserved for Dickens to bring in the satyr as he is in his native wilds. I say satyr, for in such con dition, between man and beast, the multitudes seemed long to have been regarded. By the hand of Dickens these were shown to be human beings with eyes, ears, wants, aspirations like those of the gifted and the fortunate. There is somewhat surprising in the rashness with which, when first feeling his mission, he went to its work. Yet rashness belongs to the young, and, when it succeeds, its successes are splendid. Witness the Cockney in Pickwick; in Barnaby SOME HEROES OK CHART.KS DICKENS. 99 Rudge the idiot and the raven; the pauper in Oli ver Twist \ the child of shame under a coward schoolmaster s rod in Nicholas Nickleby ; in Curi osity Shop a motherless child with no friend but God; in Bleak House another, most unhappy for not being fatherless also, and yet another, even nameless, persecuted for the sake of a secret acci dentally lodged in his, simple breast and dying in neglect, want, and exile; in Copper field a. perenni al prisoner in the Marshalsea. What reflections were to be had, what morals deduced, from these histories of the lowly? Better ment of the conditions of poor-houses and mean boarding-schools, awakening to the miseries en tailed by the endless delays, hinderings, and sell ings of Chancery decrees, and fixing regard upon other evils which had shocked him when a child, and now nigh overwhelmed him with horror to recall. The eminent success of his efforts for these super ior purposes was due, perhaps, mainly to the humor which he possessed in greater abundance than any novelist of any time. Fortunate for his own being, fortunate for us, that his spirit was so healthy. Bitterness could never rise in the heart of one who could laugh as heartily as he could weep. Not less did he pity the privations of the lowly because he could be amused by their harmless absurdities. What these were he knew not only from observa- 100 SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. tion bat experience. His "home," as he styled it had once been the Marshalsea, its inmates his pa rents, brothers, sisters, special friends and acquain tance. Suffering, unmixed, constant, dwelt not here more than pleasure unalloyed among the prosper ous. The little joys of the humble how he loved to exaggerate, in order to show how easy it was to multiply and enhance them, and thus concilliate and persuade to this humane purpose! For char ity comes from the laughers oft-times more abound ing than from the weepers. The singing girl, who in tattered garments stands upon the cold pave ment and carols a merry roundelay, will often delay some that hasten past her who lifts only the song of wailing that is known to belong to all her kind. Often it is that the mirthful man, more readily than the serious, will draw from his pockets and bestow to what has made him laugh yet another time. It is not contended herein that the mind of Dick ens was always bent mainly to the production of beneficent results; though we do believe that these were never wholly absent from it. He was intent upon describing states of existence in all their phases of lights as well as shadows. That the sportive in him predominated over the serious was a special felicity. Whoever has read Forster s Biography has been amused as heartily by the real as ever he was by the unreal. Take the following : SOME HEROES OF CHARGES 1&POHEN3. TCfa "1 was such a little fellow, with my poor white hat, little jacket, and corduroy trousers, that frequently, when I went into the bar of a strange public-house for a glass of porter or ale to wash down the saveloy and the loaf 1 had eaten in the street, they did not like to give it me. I remember, one evening (I had been somewhere for my father, and was going back to the borough over Westminster Bridge), that I went into a public-house on Parliament Street which is still there, though altered at the corner of the short street lead ing into the Cannon Row, and said to the landlord behind the bar, What is your very best the very best ale a glass? 1 For the occa sion was a festive one for some reason; I forget why. It may have been my birthday or somebody else s. Twopence, says he. Then, says I, just draw me a glass of that, if you please, with a good head to it. The landlord looked at me in return, over the bar, from head to foot, with a strange smile on his face, and, instead of drawing the beer, looked around the screen and said something to his wife, who came out from behind it with her work in her hand, and joined him in surveying me. Here we stand, all three, before me now in my study in Devonshire Terrace the landlord, in his shirt-sleeves, lean ing against the bar window-frame; his wife looking over the little half-door; and I, in some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition. They asked me a good many questions, as what my name was, how old I was, where I lived, how I was employed, etc., etc. To all of which, that I might commit nobody, I invented ap propriate answers. They served me with the ale, though I suspect it was not the strongest on the premises; and the landlord s wife, open ing the little half-door and bending down, gave me a kiss that was half-admiring and half-compassionate, but all womanly and good, I am sure." This occurred when he was about nine years of age, living on seven shillings a week, "insufficiently fed." "I know," he says, "that but for the mercy of God I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond." The man who could thus write about his own child, hood s existence showed that the droll was remem bered and dwelt upon as often as the sad. It was 7. 02 <JMK HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. a pleasure-giving smile with which he contemplated the urchin balancing his economic resources with the importance of producing effect upon the trading world. The hero of many of the children in the novels of Dickens was himself.* At one time he was Jo, *" My father had left a small collection of books in a little room up-stairs to which I had access (for it adjoined my own), and which nobody in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakeneld, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, and Robinson Cru soe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy and my hope of something bevond that place and time they and the Arabian Nights and the Tales of the Genii and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me: I knew nothing of it. It is astonishing to me now how I found time, in the midst of my porings and blunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did. It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me) by impersonating mv favorite characters in them 1 have been Torn Jones (a child s Tom Jones, a harmless creature; for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I verily believe. I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of voyages and travels I forget what now that were on those shelves; and for days and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house, armed with the centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees, the perfect realiza tion of Captain Somebody, of the Royal Navy, in danger of being beset by savages and resolved to sell his life at a great price When I think of it the picture always rises in my mind, of a sum mer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard and I sitting on my bed reading as if for life. Every barn in the neighborhood, every stone in the church, and every foot of the churchyard had some as sociation of its own, in my mind, connected with these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church steeple; I have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest himself on the wicket gat & n d I know that Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr t SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. 103 moving, ever moving before the pursuant detective; at another he was Paul Dombey looking up with awe to Mrs. Pipchin, and when alone wondering what may be the voices of the sad sea-waves; yet at another Kit honorably bent upon the fulfilment of his promise to lead his younger brother to the knowledge of "what oysters is." Childhood, in its privations, in its innocence, in its ambitions, in its dreams, no man was ever so acquainted withal, and none ever so delighted to portray it. In the case of Little Nell there was danger, for a space, that the judgment of the artist would be swayed by the feeling of the man and fall short of consumma tion of a creation so felicitously conceived. Con vinced by the reasons of a friend, who argued that the survival of sufferings of the kind undergone would not well comport with the ends of fiction, he yielded; and when the picture was finished Jeffrey said there had been nothing to compare with it since Cordelia. It is among these children that we must look for the pathos needed as well by a novel as a tragedy. The story of Jo of Tom-All- Alone s, more brief, is scarcely less touching than that of Little Nell. He whose home had been in the Marshalsea had known Jo long before his story Pickle in the parlor of our little village ale-house." Then the bi ographer adds: "Every word of this personal recollection had been written down as fact some years before it found its way into David Copperfield, " 104 SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. was to be told, and others like him. Homeless, nameless, friendless, and harmless, except that a fatal secret in a great family had been lodged by accident in his simple breast, he moves and moves till the powers of locomotion are exhausted, when a good man appears, too late for any other office than to teach him a little part of one prayer and fold his arms upon his breast. Hereat comes that outburst of indignant remonstrance against a Christ ian community wherein such things are allowed to exist : "The light is come upon the dark, benighted way. Dead! "Dead, your majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day." With self-made men who try not to forget nor conceal their lowly origin there is often the dispo sition to talk of it much, and exaggerate the hin drances which their extraordinary genius and spirit have overcome. With others the proclivity is to praise their forebears when these are so far re moved that praise, not known to be unmerited, will not be ridiculous. From both these infirmities Dickens seemed to have been uncommonly free. He neither ignored nor sought to praise. Forster tells that the original of Micawber was the novel ist s own father, and that he was quite vain of the office of an amanuensis to his son. We can well SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. 105 believe this of one whose creations so frequently were elaborated from characters whom he had well known. There are few things in literature more humorous than the intimacy between this boy of a man and little Davie. The taste of such a work it is not to the point here to discuss; it is men tioned as another proof of how closely the author had studied human life among its humblest ele ments, and with what consummate skill he could invest them with unflagging interest. Fortunate it was, we repeat, that the mind of Dickens was not embittered by the poor life of his childhood. The love and the power to write satire rise in either an unloving or a disappointed spirit. The sadness that darkened his young life was upon that of all his manhood, often drawing from his eyes floods of tears; but it was of a kind to create compassion for distress such as no English writer has ever evinced, yet a compassion tender, loving, sometimes, indeed, changing to indignation, not against individuals, nor even against society for acts of positive injustice, but for neglect or tardi ness in ascertaining the wants of the destitute mul titudes and providing for their betterment. Such a man can look upon the sportive as well as the earnest side of life among these multitudes. The more he compassionated the one the more he could be amused by the other. For, indeed, it would be 106 SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. a hard life for the poor if they had no seasons of fun and frolic, no simulations of sentimental ex periences, no harmless exaggerations of their own importance, no attempts of enacting upon their own little stages representations of the doings of the gifted and the great. Therefore merry-hearted- ness is among them as well as privations and sor rows. The poor man s holidays have a relish pe culiar to themselves, and their gushing abandon in merry-makings is one of the most pleasing things to witness, one of the most interesting themes for the study of the philosopher. In the portrayal of this side of humble life doubt less all agree that Dickens has never been equalled. From Pickwick to Drood in the great novels, the novelettes, the Christmas Stories, the brief sketches, humorous characters come on and on, making us wonder if the list is never to have an end. How many thousands have they made actually weep with laughter ! The prodigious success of these works was almost as surprising to the English public as was the geni us to construct them. Let us reflect somewhat upon this success. How was it that the man who presented characters taken from the lowly exhibited them so that we looked and listened with an inter est beyond that ever felt in contemplation of the great lords and dames in fiction heretofore? How SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. loy is it that these uncultured, poorly-fed, often home less waifs on the ocean of society, persons with whom ourselves had no previous acquaintance, de lay us as much as, even more than, Montrose, Lei cester, Osbaldiston, Bradwardine, even kings and queens of English or Scottish story? It is because the historian of those, better than any other, knew how to wake the chords of human sympathy, the emotion which when exalted to its utmost is our most powerful, our most benign, our fondest and dearest. This world is far more sympathetic than generally it seems to be. No man can live without sympathy of some sort. Even old Timon was put to shame by the philosopher pointing to his eagerness that the indifference which he pretended should be known and observed. They are few, and they not of the best, on whom neither a sad nor a hu morous story can make an impression and prompt to charitable action. One may claim to despise this world, yet he will linger and mingle in it as long as he can, and, when about to depart from it, indulge the hope that he will not be forgotten ex cept for the evil that he has done. Even the gos sip, as Carlyle says, is a lover of mankind, and backbites because the standard that she has fixed for her victims they persist in refusing to attain. Dickens was almost the first who was really great to attempt, not, indeed, a diversion of sympathy 108 SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. from any of those to whom heretofore it had been extended, but to include within its sweet influences those who needed it most. It seems like an anom aly that the course of pity should so long have been mainly upward. The tragic poets made mankind weep over the sufferings of Prometheus, Orestes, (Edipus, Medea, Lear, the Prince of Denmark; and it was beautiful how even the humblest pitied the misfortunes of the great. The multitudes who con stitute nations, who make up the world, who build cities and highways, who fight wars and defend and uphold kings and governments these had small space in books or upon the stage. In the fullness of time Richardson, a commoner, gave representa tions from among them, and even the prosperous and titled, notwithstanding the weak sentimentality of these new endeavors, felt how abundant and re freshing were the tears that came to their eyes. Then Fielding, of the blood of the Denbighs, laughed his laugh at the misdirected feeling and Tom Jones made ashamed those who had wept with Pamela and Clarissa. Scott came on, a scion of the stock of the Buccleughs, and he dwelt mainly on the sorrows of Montrose, Amy Robsart, and others of noble and gentle blood. But he was a man with a heart in his breast that could feel for men and women less than these. The most pathetic, the most admired recital that he ever made was that, in SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. 1 09 The Heart of Midlothian, of the sorrows and strug gles of the daughters of Deans, the cow-feeder. The success of these few tentative endeavors in sym pathies of the cheapest was prophetic of what was to be when a man born and reared amid the scum of mankind should have the heart, and the genius, and the opportunities to represent life therein in such forms as to enlist men s attention to all the pur poses which he had in view. At first he was thought to be interested only in the sportive side of that humble existence, and would lead men of leisure to laugh at what was baldly ludicrous and nothing more. But when he had exposed their lev ities, lest men should conclude that they had been created only to be ridiculed, he proceeded to show the serious and the respectable among those who, even as the prosperous, reflected the image of the Creator. It is very pleasing to contemplate how he strove to exhibit in some of his very humblest char acters loyalty to every behest of honorable man hood. Take the nameless Jo for whom what might not have been done but for the want of examples and opportunities? Let us hear the words of the dying little exile when they have at last driven him where he can "lie down and get a thorough good dose of sleep. " They had asked him if he knew any prayers. 110 SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. "No, sir, nothink at all. Mr. Chadbands he wos a prayin wuns at Mr. Snagsby s, and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he was a-speakin 1 to hisself and not to me. He prayed a lot, but I couldn t make out nothink on it. Different times there wos other gen l men come down Tom-all-Alone s a-prayin , but they all mostly said as the t other ones prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a-talkin to their selves, or a-passin blame on the t others, and not a-talkin to us. We never knowed nothink. I never knowed what it was all about." Yet he begged them to put in his will his mes sage to Mr. Snagsby that "Jo, what he knowed once, is a-moving on right for ards with his duty, and I ll be wery thankful." Or let us take Joe Gargery. What a limited volume of understand ing! What a blundering giant of a booby! blun dering the more ridiculously when specially striving with the proprieties of deportment and conversa tion ! How humbly triumphant at his one great es say at elegiac verse! These make us laugh until we cannot sit longer in our chairs, but must go lie down and rest our heads upon pillows. Yet how loyal was Joe to his shrew of a wife, always mak ing prominent her one great distinction, she being "a fine figger of a woman;" to his ungrateful and rather worthless brother-in-law, even while, with the delicacy of the best society-man, keeping himself aloof when his presence was embarrassing to one who had risen so far above his beginnings. Courageous as simple, manlike as humble, Joe Gargery merited the name which a true man likes most to be given him. He was a gentleman. SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. I I I To interest justly in these multitudes required pre-eminent genius and the spirit of an apostle. Dickens had both. A patriot, his love of country radiated from its central point, warming most his familiars with whom he had freely shed tears both of sorrow and of joy, and, when become renowned and powerful, striving to draw closer together the widely-separated constituents that made up the people of his native country. Faithful to the de mands of fiction, he taught more continuously than any novelist that neither the greatest good nor the most despicable evil is peculiar to any class, and that among the very humblest were characters equal to the best and equally to be respected by all mankind. It is not difficult to account for some of the ad verse criticism of Dickens (especially of late) on the ground that his characters were so much overdrawn, and therefore less faithful representatives of real life than those of Thackeray, George Eliot, and more particularly some recent novelists. The characters of Thackeray are indeed natural, often painfully so; and if the purpose of fiction were to represent life just as it is, he would be at the head of the list of artists of all times. Many women are like Rebecca Sharpe, and many men like Barnes Newcome. Many doubtless are the quarrels among the genteel in the privacy of home, and the disputants come 112 SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. forth with smiling faces and deceitful words. But is the purpose of fiction to represent this life just as it is, and worse than it is to exhibit birds in their cages at seasons when in their most revolting un- cleanness? Is it to put before our eyes men and women, boys and girls, and, tearing away the veils with which they try to hide their deformities, show us that these husbands and wives, ostensibly dis charging relative duties with reasonable fidelity, are all perfidious to solemnest obligations, accus tomed in secret to quarrelings and abusings; and that these boys and girls, even the best, apparently pliant to sweet domestic control, long to see their parents dead, and then, while clothed thickly in black, and subdued to demureness in walk and con versation, chuckling in secret at the removal of constraints and the fulfilment ot post-obit expecta tions? More than these, when such things are shown in the strongest as the weakest, must we be reminded that we are no better, we nor our children, but that we, like all gone before and all to come after us, reek with ingratitude and perfidy? No. This is not the purpose of fiction. It is to represent human life, indeed, but, in its most elab orate endeavors, to represent the extremes of good and evil and to lead each to its appropriate conse quences. The poet (and for this end the novelist is a poet) makes new concretes out of the discordant SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. 1 13 elements of this lower world. He paints virtue with as little blemish as is possible to a fallen estate, and vice irredeemable except by repentance and aban donment. The struggle between these combatants may be fierce, sometimes appearing doubtful even to the most valiant; yet in time either victory or deliverance must come to the upright who have re fused to despair whether present triumph, like that of Nicholas Nickleby over the reprobate Ralph, or translation, like that of Little Nell or Jo of Tom- all-A tone s? It is easy, therefore, to understand why many of the great poets have been unhappy. From their efforts to rescue themselves from despair by means of the creation of better worlds than this have we gotten some of our most important lessons and sweetest consolations. For what end did God impart to a few of those fashioned in his image a portion of this his most pe culiar attribute this power to create worlds wherein the virtuous man is more surely and highly exalted, and the vicious more surely and condignly pun ished, than at the bar of this world s tribunals? Partly that we might get the benefit of examples always more efficacious than the most studied pre cepts of the wise, and partly that we might be kept from despondence, from the jarring discords around us. It is a wholesome thought that the good are better than really they be. It is hurtful to believe 114 SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. them to be worse. For our human hearts take on other forms of ambition than to surpass in goodness the best of those around us. The multitudes of mankind are not only more capable, but they prefer to follow than to lead. There is a certain degree, if not of self praise, of self gratulation when we sincerely point to one whom we admit to be supe rior not only to what we are, but what it is possible for us to become. We often assuage our remorse for failing in the practice of virtue by the hearty praise we bestow upon those whom we acknowledge it to be not possible for us to imitate, and such praise often rescues one who otherwise might lapse into despair. Let the artist, therefore the artist who is not a mere painter of portraits bestow, if he will, upon his pictures a touch here and there to render more attractive the beauty which we love to admire. Even the painter of portraits does a grace less thing when he lifts the hair or tears away the kerchief of his original, merely to show a ghastly scar whose existence we would rather have ignored. So of the sportive. When the time comes for us to laugh, let us laugh with breasts healthy, full of mirth that is as harmless as exuberant. Such as these are imparted by the characterizations of Dickens. The best things and the worst are ever in contrast and conflict. We see the saddest and the gayest, and for both tears come to our eyes, bringing the sweetest SOME HEROES OF* CHARLfeS DICKfeNS. 115 relief that the human heart ever gets from a surfeit, whether of sorrow or gladness. In reading the Biography these tears, so like and yet so dissimilar, will often flow as they flowed from his own eyes in contemplation of the varying conditions of mankind. With him humor was an antidote to the sadness which, if he had yielded to it, would have over whelmed him. In one of his letters he tells of a strange dream that he had in Italy, wherein a lately separated relative seemed to have appeared before him and advised him to seek refuge from his relig ious doubts in the Catholic faith. It is painful to contemplate how a mind in which the serious pre dominated could never find the assurance which it sought. There was some bitterness mingled with the tenderness in inditing the will of poor Jo; and herein we can tell some of the thoughts of the great writer when putting into the mouth of a dying child words humbly complaining of the insufficiency of those who undertake to guide in the Way of Life. A man so beset must often turn for relief from the severe to the lively ; and the more profound has been his sadness, the higher in hilarity will he rebound. One cause for the relegation of Dickens by some from the position he once occupied has grown out of a change in the tastes of the reading public that has led to preference for the delicate and the nice in art, literary as well as pictorial. It is the miniature Il6 SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DfCKENS. rather than the life-size that pleases now, or, if the life-size, with curious, elaborate drapery. Favorite is the mosaic, compounded, like the melancholy of Jacques, of many simples, and conjoined with mi croscopic painstaking and accuracy. The analyst of a hero s or heroine s motive for conduct more and less important, especially in genteeler circles, finds now more admirers than not only Dickens but Thackeray and George Eliot. Even the Becky Sharps and Maggie Tullivers are postponed to opu lent ladies with trains sweeping with pleasant rust ling over costly carpets, jewelled hands daintily plying fragrant fans, and tongues chattering with ex quisite modulation on somethings, and on nothings also. But such a taste will be, as its likes have ever been, of temporary duration. Genuine art will ever endure, however often it may be passed by for a brief space by those who are beguiled by new ornamentations in unimportant particulars. We remember how Cowley was for a time preferred to Milton, and the poets of the Restoration to those ot the period of Elizabeth, and how dramatic poetry in general declined with the rise of scenic decora tion. The bonanza kings, their wives and daughters; the nouveaux riches, removed from low to up-town, or from East to West End, are pleased, or believe themselves to be pleased, with witty sayings, bright dinner and tea-parties among the gentility, cunning SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. II J analyses of human motives in varying positions, and just enough of pathos and humor as may effect a pleasing sigh or an unexpected brief smile. As in the time of Richardson, even thoughtful minds have become somewhat wearied of being stirred by the thrillingly earnest and comic, and ask for repose. Writers of ability notice this condition of things in the reading public, and more or less reluctantly con form to their demands. How often does history repeat itself! In his twenty years of exile Charles II. grew to be not only not a patriot, but not even an En glishman. Restored to the throne of his ancestors, he brought to his court those tastes which the French men of letters had been forced to adopt by the lack of rhythm and melody in their language. Lord Orerry, a time-serving courtier, was the first to begin with the use of rhyme in dramatic composi tion. An interesting chapter is that which tells of the struggles of Dryden in these degenerate times. If otherwise he could have gotten his bread, "The Indian Emperor" and "The Conquest of Grenada" would never have been put into rhyme. Even as it was, he turned at length from the pursuit of things foreign to his native country, and languished in poor old Soho, with what consolation was to be had in thought of being again faithful to the behests of patriotism. It was always curious what various and often Il8 SOME HEROES OF CHARLES DICKENS. what trifling and unsubstantial causes may divert art from its legitimate purposes, and with what little complaining artists themselves real artists, with genius and feeling will work in conformity with tastes which they know and feel to be not only untrue but vicious, and prefer to an enduring fame a capricious favor whose end they cannot fail to foresee. It is so with pictorial art, as those most versed in such matters tell us. It is less sincere, less genuine than it was a score or two of years ago. But they tell us also that it is bound to return to its native simplicity and integrity. So it will be with fictitious narrative. So will it ever be with contend ing forces. The fittest shall survive. THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. "When such a one as she, such is her neighbor." As You Like It. *T^HE faculty of composing interesting concretes, * whether in verse or in prose, out of the discor dant elements of this lower life was bestowed by the Almighty for benign purposes. In this lower life good and evil, their actions and results, are often so confounded that the industrious and the honorable often seem to fail of their reward, while the indolent and the vicious triumph over and mock at them. In addition to the consoling hope of im mortality, in which good and evil are to be separ ated for ever, God has imparted a supplemental. Next and subsidiary to the preacher, whose office is to remind us constantly of the Last Judgment, is the poet, who leads our minds, inconstant enough to need such aids, to trustful expectation of that Judgment by creating from among the inhabitants of this present world those of his own in which justice is administered in ways at least approximat ing the justice of eternity. For this purpose, less, 120 THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. exalted, indeed, than that of the priesthood, we be lieve that poesy was bestowed upon mankind. In these new creations the jarring elements of human life are so joined as to appear to harmonize in some degree, or made to cease their conflict by the tri umph of the good even on this side of the grave. This is the leading, legitimate purpose of fiction to show us a more excellent way than the present in which we travel, and so to hold us from discourage ment for the irregularities and failures that we con tinually witness and experience. We have made these observations prefatory to some reflections upon satire, particularly as exhib ited in the works of Thackeray. Suggestive were the motives that impelled the first of the satirists of Greece. What might have been done by Archilochus of Paros but for the accidents in his earliest ambition we cannot say, knowing so little of his youth. But it was his lot to love the fair Neobule, daughter of Lycambes. The maid returned his passion, and her father at first gave consent to their union, but, having ascertained that the mother of the youth had been a slave, with drew it. Thereupon the lover gave vent to his dis appointment and indignation in such verses (the first of their kind) that not only Neobule but her sisters also hanged themselves. Results so tragic have not often followed the scourgings of the Par- THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. 121 ian s successors, but they sometimes have been painful and hurtful. Let us consider briefly some of those in the productions of him whom many regard the greatest of the novelists. In the drolleries of Michael Angelo Titmarsh there was a sufficiency of bitterness. The name was prophetic, and its prophecies ran along in rapid fulfilment in the Times, the New Monthly Maga zine, and Punch. Yet nothing seriously ambitious seemed to have been attempted in The Fat Con tributor, Miss Tickletoby s Lectures, Jeames 1 Diary, Mrs. Perkiris Ball, The Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo. The characters thus far created had been laughed at, and some of them despised, but none were destined to become immortal. If the artist was ever to take more thoughtful views of men and things, it was time he had begun, for he was now forty years old. So Michael Angelo Tit- marsh retired from public view, and his place was taken by William Makepeace Thackeray. Vanity Fair another prophetic name! The wisest of mankind, he who had tried every form of prosperity, riches, power, glory, love, revenge, even wisdom, had pronounced them vanity. In vain the men-singers and the women-singers; in vain the trumpet of triumphant war; in vain the sweet peace- fulness of the lute, dulcimer, and harp; in vain the soft words of wives, concubines and parasites; in 122 THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. vain the royal diadem; in vain all human knowledge. The aged king, turning his eye back upon the past and reviewing his career, could only drivel out in impotent* complaint, " Vanitas vanitatum ! " A mournful judgment to make of human life, yet not unfitted to one who had used its best things intem- perately, and who, in spite of his wisdom, in spite of his commission from" heaven to build the Temple, had turned his way from the true God and bent his knee before Baal. We are now to have a Vanity Fair exhibited by Mr. Thackeray. Well, men are fond of spectacles, even the grotesque. Invited to this Vanity Fair, although warned that we are to see deformities in stead of excellences, we accept the invitation. What have we here? Representatives of several estates a marquis, a baronet and his family, a tradesman and his family, some officers of the army, and a governess. We had been led to believe that they were a brave set of men, the peers and the knights of England. But when we see two of their representatives in the Marquis of Steync and Sir Pitt Crawley, we are made to doubt if history be not in error to assign to the ancestors of such as these the wresting from despotic kings, Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, and the Bill of Rights. But let these go. Yet we may be allowed to hope that persons in our class, without ancestral image or THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. 123 tradition, the necessarily self-reliant that some of these are worth the bread they eat, the breath they draw, and the clothes they wear; and that the lives they lead, or try to lead, may encourage us some what in efforts to walk honestly among men and reverently before God. Then who are these Os- bornes, Sedleys, Dobbins, and Sharps? Indeed, with one exception, they are vicious or contempti ble. That exception is Dobbin. Dobbin did have a heart, and therefore was made awkward and un lovable. It would not have suited the showman, who had advertised for monstrosities, that a man who had a heart should also have a proper figure and winsome manners. The only apparent purpose for which this heart had been given was that it might be wounded and trampled upon with levity and im punity. Behold what a run of loves is here. Hon est, clumsy Dobbin, risen from little beginnings, gives his single love to Amelia Sedley, who cannot endure to hear his name mentioned along with that of George Osborne, handsome, but ignorant and a scoundrel. The wife believed him glorious until Waterloo, when it was found that had he not fallen in battle he would have forsaken her and run away with Mrs Rawdon Crawley. Years afterwards, when the widow has lost youth and beauty, and been broken by solitude and privation, Dobbin, now 124 THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. high in fame and rank, comes in for the poor rem nant of what is left of her. How has it been with Rebecca Sharp? The ar tist tried his hand on her. He gave the beauty, social position, other goods to Amelia. But the things which sometimes captivate men more than these were bestowed upon the poor, plain governess. The very relation of such men as the Crawleys to each other made their pursuit more shamefully eager. What a scene was there when on the death of the old dotard s wife, reaching his withered hand to grasp the coveted prize, he found that she, not having foreseen this opportunity, had become the wife of his son! Then ensued a career which it is surprising that a most gifted man should narrate through long years of circumstantial details. We look on and watch how this wife manages to pre serve that middle place, tormenting her husband with jealousies that do not amount to full assur ances, and avoiding the disgust of other lovers by semblance of the chariness of her favors. We can not but be fascinated by a certain sort of heroism, evil as it is, and we are not too indignant when we find her at last enjoying comparative triumph, be come a snug widow, and dispensing in chanties a commendable safe part of the property so unexpect edly devolved upon her. Dowerless, without beauty, without family, without heart, without honesty, she THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. 125 fought her way, outlived most of those with whom she had to do, and, so far as the world knew, was not very far from being about as respectable as any. We have been to the show. What now are our reflections? What higher and braver thoughts have come to our minds when, wearied with toil and the witness of life s discordant realities, we turned aside to dream of the unreal? What encourage ment have we gained for efforts at well-doing by the sight of honest work and patient endurance re warded? Or what warning have we had from the contemplation of vice and intrigue overtaken by disaster, or at least by disappointment? Instead of these we have found and to some extent been ashamed to find ourselves admiring a creation that is as seductive as it is evil. Added to this we were conscious of a loss of some portion of that which it is most calamitous to lose. Woe to him who parts from his trust in mankind, who does not believe that in this world there is goodness beyond that which he has ever found in his own being the capacity to practise. In this book the artist and he was an eminently great artist seemed to have endeavored to drive mankind to their own unaided struggles, taking away from them all good examples, and leaving them to conclude that nothing is real but folly and 126 THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. perfidy. Let us read this extract, like which very many might be made : " Perhaps in Vanity Fair there are no better satires than letters. Take a bundle of your dear friend s ten years back how you clung to each other before you quarrelled about the twenty-pounds legacy! Get down the round-hand scrawls of your son, who has broken your heart since with selfish undutifulness: or a parcel, breathing 1 endless ardor and love eternal, which were sent back by your mistress when she married the Nabob your mistress for whom now you care no more than for Queen Elizabeth. Vows, loves, confidences, promises, gratitude how queerly they read after a while! There ought to be a law in Vanity Fair ordering the destruction of every written docu ment (except receipted tradesmen s bills) after a certain brief and proper interval. Those quacks and misanthropes who advertise in delible Japan ink should be made to perish along with their wicked discoveries. The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that faded utterly in a couple of days and left the page clean and blank, so that you might write on it to somebody else." Surely the Preacher himself would have been puzzled to put more strongly the case of vanitas vanitatum. In the literature of fiction there is not to be found a picture drawn more artistically than Re becca Sharp. She was of the sort upon whom it suited the author to exert his consummate powers. He painted her to the life, with pretended reluctance to evil, suspected, yet not fully known to be per- suasible to consent, demanding risk, high pay, so that the pursuit, of which, if easy, a bold lover would weary, acquired the eagerness which must not be allowed to abate. No woman could better un derstand the trick, as sung by the shepherd in Virgil, TJIE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. 127 of casting her apple and then fleeing to the covert of willows : "Malo me Galatea petit lasciva puella; Et fugit ad salices; et se cupit ante videri." It is a sad commentary on the powerlessness and hopelessness of a poor young woman without other gift then mere virtue to obtain success which appears to attend upon insidiousness and fraud. It would have been a good sight to see the lifting of such a one, even though slowly and through difficulties, where so many thousands of poor girls do rise through toil and patient waiting. In default of this the next best would have been to contem plate her driven to the frustration of every dishon orable purpose that had tempted her from the path of rectitude. Better than both of these, for the highest purposes of instruction, would have been pictures of young women who endured temptation and outrage without expecting and without receiv ing reward except such as came from the testimony of a good conscience and of suffering for the sake of Him who ennobled suffering and put it above successes, victories, and triumphs. For had there not lived in such a career Agnes and Afra, Rose and Eulalia, Lucy and Blandina? If such as these be outside of the art of the novelist, then surely he may hold up to our view young girls such as Richardson presented with generous sympathy 128 THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. to the public of his day. Alas! the eyes of that public were yet moist with tears when the prof ligate Fielding made them laugh both at them over whom they had wept and at themselves. It was such a joke to imagine it possible for as poor a girl as Pamela to marry a rich, hardened bach elor and reform him after marriage, or for an other like Clarissa to endure such trials and yet continue spotless in her virtue! No, no; Rebecca Sharp must be what she was, have a better time than even Amelia Sedley, and thus be made to ex hibit that virtue is worth not even as much as a semblance that is suspected and almost known to be false. Satire, indeed! Satire upon the men in highest society, for of the two from this class whom he exhibited one was a heartless profligate, the other a loathsome brute; satire even upon marriage, for the couple who were truest to each other were the O Dowds, whose rudeness was sufficient to make all of both sexes feel like keeping away from mar riage altogether, if this is to be considered a fair il lustration of its most honorable estate. In Pendennis Thackeray s sarcasm, if somewhat less painful because more playful, is yet more un- distinguishing. On its appearance men of letters were disposed to regard it as a satire upon the lite rary profession. The truth is that whoever reads the book, if he be one who considers himself superior THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. 129 in gifts and conditions to a rather low plane of human life, will find himself jeered at on occasions wherein he will be most surprised to find himself an object of reproach. A rtliur Pendennis lived to become a person of whom the author was proud that he was considered a gentleman to be admired. When a boy he was polite, good-looking, well cared for, of sufficient fortune and thoroughly respectable family. Such advantages naturally lead us to expect a quick ly-developed, worthy manhood. Yet very soon after first looking upon the goodly lad we are made acquainted with some little matters which, but for remembering that he is a special friend of the distinguished author of Vanity Fair, would lead us to infer that the youngster has already been sold to the devil and is destined to do faithful work for his master. He had the misfortune, when in his seventeenth year and while absent from home at a boarding-school, to lose his father, of whom he was the only child. This father, though formal in his exterior, was a devoted family man, "adored his wife, and loved and admired his son with all his heart." To the young generally death seems an awful event, and the death of one s father is cer tainly one of the most appalling of all its forms. Even when the parent has been harder than is con sistent with such relation, surely it must be seldom, except among the very worst specimens of boyhood, 13 THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. that one feels like triumphing at the very hour and in the very presence of such a death, and strutting amid the possessions which it has devolved upon him. Let us see, according to the testimony of his most intimate friend, how young Arthur be haved when, summoned from Gray Friars , he entered the room where lay the corpse of him who, in his life, had "loved and admired his son with all his heart," to whom, so says this most intimate friend, "Arthur had been his lather s pride and glory through life, and his name the last which John Pendennis had tried to articulate while IK- lay with his wife s hand clasping his own cold and clammy palm, as the flickering- spirit went out into the darkness of death, and life and the world passed away from him. "As for Arthur Pendennis, after that awful shock which the sight of his dead father must have produced on him, and the pity and feel ing which such an event no doubt occasioned, I am not sure that in the very moment of grief, and as he embraced his mother and tenderly condoled her, and promised to love her for ever, there was not springing up in his breast a feeling of secret triumph and exultation. He was chief now, and lord. He was Pendennis, and all around about him were his servants and handmaids. In the midst of the general grief and the corpse still lying above he had leisure to con clude that he would have all holidays for the future, that he wouldn t get up till he liked, or stand the bullying of the doctor, and had made a hundred such day-dreams and resolves for the future. How one s thoughts will travel, and how quickly our wishes beget them? When he, with I>aura in his hand, went into the kitchen on his way to the dog-kennel, the fowl-houses, and his other favorite haunts, all the servants assembled there in great silence with their friends, and the laboring men with their wives, and Sally Potter, who went with the post-boy to Clavering all there assembled and drinking beer on the melancholy occasion rose up on his entrance, and bowed and curtsied to him. They never used to do that last holidays, he felt at once and with indescribable pleasure. The cook cried out, O Lord!, THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. 13! and whispered, How Master Arthur do grow! Thomas, the groom, in the act of drinking put down the jug, alarmed before his master. Thomas 1 master felt the honor keenly. lie went through and looked at the pointers. As Flora put her nose up to his waistcoat, and Ponto, yelling with pleasure, hurtled at his chain, Pen patronized the dogs, and said, Poo Ponto! poo Flora! in his most condescend ing manner. And then he went and looked at Laura s hens, and at the pigs, and at the orchard, and at the dairy. Perhaps he blushed to think that it was only last holidays he had in a manner robbed the great apple-tree and been scolded by the dairy-maid for taking cream." If anything equal to this can be found in another book purporting to represent highly respectable people, imaginary or real, we do not know where. Yet this youth grew up to be a fine gentleman, a favorite of the author, an author himself, a great author, charming the best society, marry a sweet girl that is, sweet enough, we judge; the same Laura, indeed, who went tripping it along with him on that same morning, patronizing the servants, and dogs, and chickens, and pigs. Why not? What has he done that we would be above doing in the same circumstances? We are told over and over again, by the author, that we need not turn away with disgust from the sight of such things, and congratulate ourselves that we would not and could not do them. He looks us calmly in the face and asserts that we both could and would, and that we actually do them constantly. One of us may have a rosy-cheeked, full-eyed boy, in whom he may believe to see the promise of a manhood that will rise fully to the 132 THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. needs of his time. As he looks into those full eyes he may believe he sees the filial love which is desired and professed to be in the boy s breast, and that when himself shall come to die that fair son, even if yet a boy, will grieve away down in the depths of his true heart, will sometimes repair to his father s tomb to weep there, and ever afterwards remember him with pious regret. If we who are parents could not thus believe, we should pity and almost feel like cursing ourselves that God had not made us childless. Such sarcasms, the very quintessence of bitterness, abound throughout Thackeray s works, and we are sometimes made to feel how insultingly they are turned from the meanest characters and inflicted upon ourselves. He seemed to take a special pleasure in recounting the quarrels of married per sons. Bad as such things may be, we dare not ex press our disgust, because we foresee that we are to be told, almost apace, that we are not better nor happier than those whom we think we despise or compassionate; that our "silly-headed" wives, when they seem most affectionate, have least concern for us, and that all of us, husbands and wives, are but "pairs of infinite isolations, with some fellow-islands a little more or less near between us." Alas! there be some, too many, who thus outrage the holy estate of matrimony,and lose or trample upon the good in- THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. 133 fluences and the pure enjoyments which it was de signed to impart. But it is a poor lesson that such persons learn when they read in a famous book by a famous man that their own lives are but miniatures of the world around them. They have weak incen tives to amendment when they are taught by such high authority that such amendment is not only un necessary but impossible. Human nature wants supports and incentives from every source whence they can be brought. Out of harmony as is this lower life, beset with perfidies and wrong-doings of many sorts, it would be intolerable if, in the ab sence of all real, we should be forbidden to contem plate imaginary good examples. If these evils abound in us and among those we know around as, we might be allowed, at least, to hope that some where, beyond the pale of our poor acquaintance, there are some, if only a few, among whom vulgar ity and lies and perfidy have no abiding-place. Such sarcasms, therefore, even if they were just, would do harm. But they are not just. In every society there are husbands and wives who not only love but respect one another, and there are boys and girls who love and honor their parents sincerely, heartily weep when they die, and feel a sense of loss that only God can repair. Everywhere there are thousands upon thousands, of both sexes and all conditions and all ages, among whom the appear- 1 3/| THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. ances and avowals of love and friendship and honor are not mockeries and lies; and such persons be come more numerous as the world grows older and approaches the fulness of the times of God. As Thackeray grew older his writings afforded somewhat more comforting, at least less despairing, views of human life. In The Newcomes Mr. Arthur Pendennis seemed to have moderated considerably since the day when he strutted about his possessions close to the yet unfilled grave of his father. Yet in this most studied and consummate story and in Henry Esmond there are flings against society in general which show that, if the bitterness was sub dued, the lack of any confidence yet remained. The latter work, with all its splendid writing and its several instances of profound feeling, is a great, broad satire on life. Our hearts had been made sick in Vanity Fair by the contest of a father and his son for the love of the same woman, and we had strengthened ourselves, as well as we could, by reflections that such hideous montrosities were to be seen only in the ruder of the sexes; but in Hen ry Esmond this sickness returns and in more painful form when we see a young man, who has been jilted by the girl of his choice, seeking and finding consolation in the arms of that girl s mother! O shade of Sir Pitt Crawley! thoti wast defeated in that unnatural strife with thy son for the possession THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. 135 of Rebecca Sharp; but it might have subtracted somewhat from the anguish and the shame of defeat hadst thou foreseen that, in such another struggle, age in its turn would triumph, the young daughter fall down, and the mother rise upon her ruin ! We may have thought it had been enough for us to be made to contemplate the horrible history of the family of Laius of Thebes a history made in obe dience to the decrees of Fate, and which, though in a barbaric age, filled mankind with consternation, drove Jocasta to suicide, and (Edipus to tear out his eyes with his own hands. Yet now in Christian times, in high society, we are made to look upon careers not very far less revolting, entered upon and run deliberately, and not only see the runners not ashamed, but be forbidden to feel, or at least to express, shame for ourselves for being in such presence. If what we have said of the purpose of fiction be just, that it was to aid in consoling for the want of harmony and the wrong-doings in this life, then we must conclude that Mr. Thackeray, with all his pre-eminent talents, if he did not pervert and dis honor his art, at least came short of its noblest be hests. From the contemplation of his masterpieces we turn with sadder instead of more cheerful views of life, with less instead of more cordial charity for mankind, with diminished instead of enhanced con- 136 THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRF!. fidence in men and hope for ourselves, with lowered instead of exalted aspirations for the good. In that series of powerful creations by Hogarth, The Har lots Progress, we are led along in natural, inevita ble gradation from little Kate, innocent as a flower in her native Yorkshire, alighting from the old wag on at the "Bell Inn" in Cheapside, to that last scene of Dolours and Death in the garret of Drury Lane, and we turn away shuddering for the sure end of vicious living. A mournful lesson, but not without its benefits. But what if the artist had re tired her into decent widowhood, or many times worse if he had accosted us at the door of his studio, as, exhausted with horror and pity, we were making our way out, and, grinning the while at our excited state, charged us, and not only us but all the world else, with being no better than his picture, and declared that our escape thus far from a fate unhappy as that of her whom he named "the crea ture of the pest-pit and perdition" was due, and our possible escape from it hereafter would be due, either to the want of sufficient temptation or the absence of detection? Alas! that we should be al lowed to look upon no good examples, real or imag inary, and even be discouraged from making them of ourselves. ILThackeray in his work had motives which were meant to be generous, we can conceive of none other than that he believed the only way THE EXTREMITY OF SATIRE. 137 possible to amend mankind was to render everybody contemptible in the eyes of everybody else and his own besides. The latter, indeed, is in harmony with the teachings of the church, which always com mends to its children to be modest, even lowly, in mind. But the former is a dangerous method of instruction. It is, indeed, an evil disease to which the remedy to be applied is worse than itself. Nothing is more salutary than humility, but for its best uses it must be in the heart of him who "in the midst of reproaches remaineth in great peace." "Never think that thou hast made any progress until thou feel that thou art inferior to all." In order to avail of this counsel of Thomas a Kempis one must have set before him a standard of excellence of some sort, be made to believe that outside of himself there is good, and that it is attainable by persistent en deavor. Otherwise his humility must turn back upon, rend, and drive him to despair of all con ditions for the human heart the most deplorable. IRISH LYRIC POETRY. TN his Life of Agricola Tacitus wrote that the Romans, after the conquest of Great Britain, were waiting for a convenient season wherein to ac complish that of Ireland. The principal reason assigned for this intention was that the vanquished in the greater island would become more reconciled to the loss of their own independence if they could see it overthrown in the less. But throughout those four hundred years of occupation, although the Eagles went conquering into the fastnesses of the upper mountains, and even crossed to the Orkneys, Ireland was left untouched, and it remained for Rome afterwards with a different symbol to subdue and ever retain her willing submission. It is a proud history, that of this brave, suffering, constant people. In it are things of which no other among moderns more justly may boast. Its illustrious men of every period, prosperous and ad verse, in the enjoyment of freedom or writhing under oppression, have been the equals of the best elsewhere; its generals have led the armies of Eng land, its statesmen have led in the making of her 138 IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 13^ laws, its priests have carried into Europe a civiliza tion higher than what it had known before, and its music is of the oldest and sweetest in the world. It is of some characteristics of this music that it is proposed herein to treat. We say music, adopting the language of Homer, who was wont to stvle the poet MozSoS, a Singer. The poetry of Ireland for the most part has been of the lyric, and, sometimes in triumphant, more often in wailing strains, has sung of the glories and hopes, the oppressions and sufferings, of its native country. Of all the forms of poetry the lyric most fitly repre sents the conditions of our interior being. Its best songs have been its serious. In the oldest times these were serious only, and for the most part religious. Plutarch complained when the song that had been theretofore consecrate to the temple had been raised, by voices not pious, in the theatre. Not that the Greeks of a more ancient day had not sung of women and wine, but their best strains had been of gods, demigods, and heroes. Votaries had gone to the shrine and warriors to the battle-field to the sound of the flute and the lyre. The one eyed Tyrtneus, whom the Athenians in sport sent as a general to the Lacedemonians, led them to unex pected victory, and the bard was made a hero even above any who had wielded the sword, the javelin, and the spear. 140 IRISH LYRIC POETRY. The indvvellers of such a country as Ireland must be patriotic; and if they are brave they must be poetic. Like Greece, exceeding beautiful, giv ing birth to the gifted, the sentiments most dear to the heart must find oft expression in song. In the Ireland of remote foretime the harp was to be seen more often, perhaps, than in any other country, an cient or modern. It was in nearly every household; if not for the use of the inmates, for that of the guest, to whom the hospitality that was denied to none was extended with greater cordiality according as he touched it more deftly to the lays, especially those in honor of deity and national heroes. When the Gospel was first preached in the island, its teach ings were accepted without the shedding of blood. Not that the Bards at first did not demur to the announcement that there had been, and that there were, those who were greater than the greatest whom they had sung; but the wise Patrick was not long in subduing their jealousies, and afterwards the monasteries which he founded became the chief centres of Irish poetry. Monastic legends fondly tell of the interest evinced by heavenly spirits in the new music of the Irish harp; "and this," said Montalembert, "explains the reason why the harp of the Bards has continued the symbol and emblazonry of Catholic Ireland. " One of the characteristics of this poetry is the IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 141 ardent love of country by which it is inspired. This love sometimes has been only sweet, sometimes highly passionate, but always most fond. Sometimes it is evinced for the whole country, sometimes for a whole district or county, and yet sometimes for one specially dear spot, as in St. Columba s "Song of Derry :" "My Derrv, my fair oak grove, My dear little cell and dwelling-. Beloved are Burrow and Derry, Beloved is Kaphoe the pure, Beloved the fertile Drumhome, Beloved are Swords and Kells: But sweeter and fairer to me The salt sea where the sea-gulls cry; \Vhen I come to Derry from far, It is sweeter and dearer to me. Sweeter to me." This special fondness for the place where were sit uate his "dear little cell and dwelling," though not forgotten, was merged, when in exile, in the greater regrets for the whole of which it was a part. The banishment that was allowed of Heaven, and en dured for the sake of the great mission to lona and Caledonia, instead of subtracting from his patriotism, made it only more general, constant, and heartfelt. Few things are more touching than the words set down when he was an old man, and around him were a thousand evidences of the bles sings that had been bestowed upon his missionary 142 IRISH LYRIC POETRY. labors. In the midst of his visions of heaven, and the rewards coming on his speedy ascension thither, the longing for his native land remained as in the time of his young manhood, and thus he wrote: There is a gray eye which ever turns to Erinn; but never in this life shall it see Erinn, nor her sons, nor her daughters. I look over the sea, and great tears are in my eye. " There was told a pretty stcry of a stork that, having come from Ireland and de scended, in order to rest her wings, near the spot where the exile was sitting, he had her cared for with tenderness; and when, with renewed strength, she rose, he knew that she would return whence she had come, to "her dear native country where she was born where I, too, was born. " The harp, so sad in the hands of Columbkill, had been struck long before his day to mournful notes. Among a people brave and gifted, wherein were many independent chieftains emulous in the con tinuance and extension of power, the death and the exile of many a hero must be sung. Since the time of this poet-priest Irish poetry has been mainly sad. Sufferings, national, tribal, family, and indi vidual, have been the principal themes for its ex pression. Occasionally this sadness takes on a self-reprehending tone, when, after indulging one fond personal regret, the singer pauses to reflect either upon the greater sorrows common to the whole IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 143 country, or the coming of old age, which ought to put an end to such regrets, since they have been, shown to be vain; as in Duhallow, " an ode trans lated by Clarence Mangan. The poet, an exile in Gal way. has been singing of the good old times once spent in Duhallow, and he then concludes as follows ; But my hopes, like my rhymes, Are consumed and expended; What s the use of old times When our time is ended? Drop the talk Death will come For the debt that we all owe, And the grave is a home Quite as old as Duhallow, Sometimes the bard seeks to console the warrior who has fled, or whom he is urging to flee from in vasion that it is impossible to resist, and from exactions that he foresees will be impossible to be endured- There is much pathos in such consolation (in "The Parting from Slemish") as offered by Tur- lough, the harper, to O Niell, one of the princes of Claneboy, on the night of his crossing the Bann, which at that time was the boundary of the English Pale. After some most affectionate praise of his hero, whom he styles Owen Bawn Con, he briefly mentions some of the exactions of the successful invader: " They tell me the stranger has given command That crommeal and coolun shall cease in the land; 144 IRISH LYRIC POETRY. That all our youth s tresses of yellow be shorn, And bonnets, instead, of a new fashion worn; Thai mantels like Owen Bawn s shield us no more That hunting and fishing henceforth we give o er That the net and the arrow aside must be laid For hammer and trowel, and mattock and spade; " That the echoes of music must sleep in their caves That the slave must forget his own tongue for a slave s, That the sounds of our lips must be strange in our ears, And our bleeding hands toil in the dew of our tears. Then he offers his counsel that they both retire to Tyrone, and the mingling of sorrow and hope is exquisitely touching : " C) sweetheart and comfort! with tliee by my side I could love and live happy whatever betide; But thou, in such bondage, wou d die ere a day Away to Tir-oen, then, Owen, away! "There are wild woods and mountains, ami streams deep and There are rocks in Tir-oen as lovely as here; [clear, There are silver harps ringing in Yellow Hugh s hall, And a bower by the forest side sweetest of all. " \Ve will dwell by the sunshiny skirts of the brake, AVliere the sycamore shadows grow deep in the lake, And the snowy swan, stirring the deep shadows there Afloat on the water, seems floating in air. " Farewell, then, black Slemish! green Collon, adieu! My heart is a-breaking at thinking of you; But tarry we dare not when freedom hath gone Away to Tir-oen, then, Owen Bawn Con. " Away to Tir-oen, then, Owen, away! We will leave them the dust from our feet as a prey, And our dwelling in ashes and flames for a spoil [Foyle." Twill be long when they quench them with streams from the IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 145 It is interesting to notice always the devotion evinced by the bard to his chieftain, living or dead. His affection was as tender as his pride was exul tant, and at his fall he wept with a grief that is to hardly be found in any other poetry. We know not where to go in order to look for a more touching lamentation than in the "Kinkora" of the bard Mac Liag, translated, as the one just quoted, by Man- gan. It was composed after the battle of Clontarf (A. D. 1014), m which the great Brian Boru, with many of his auxiliary chiefs, was slain. After com memorating and lamenting Morogh, Donogh (Brian s son), and Conaing, and Kian, and Core, and Dur- lann, and others, he thus concludes: u They are gone, those heroes of royal birth, Who plundered no churches and broke no trust; Tis weary for me to be living on earth When they, O Kinkora,* lie low in the dust! Low, O Kinkora! "Oh! dear are the images my memory calls up Of Brian Boru how he never would miss To give me at banquet the first bright cup. Ah! why did he heap on me honor like this? Why, O Kinkora? "I am Mac Liag, and my home is on the lake: Thither oft to that palace whose beauty is fled Came Brian to ask me, and I went for his sake. O my grief! that I should live, and Brian be dead! Dead, O Kinkora!" Of the odes addressed to individual heroes we *Kinkora, the name of Brian s palace. 146 fkisn LVktc f>o?kY. cannot refrain from quoting a few stanzas from one whose grief is as profound, yet is tempered by re ligious meditations and hopes. It is a translation (again by Mangan) from the "Lament for the Prin ces of Tyrone and Tyrconnell," composed by Owen Roe, the bard of the O Donnells, and addressed to Nuala, the earl s sister. It was written some time after the death of these princes in Rome, whither with several of their kinsmen and families they had repaired (in 1607) to avoid being taken to Lon don, by the orders of the English government, to answer charges which have since been proven to have been wholly without foundation. "The youths whose relics moulder here* Were sprung from Hugh, high prince and lord Of Aileach s lands: Thy noble brothers justly dear, Thy nephew long to be deplored By Ulster s bands. Theirs were not souls wherein dull time Could domicile decay or house Decrepitude! They passed from earth ere manhood s prime, Ere years had power to dim their brows Or chill their blood. * And who can marvel o er thy grief, Or who can blame thy .flowing tears, That knows their source? O Donnell, Dunnasava s chief, Cut oflF amid his vernal years^ Lies here a corse Beside his brother Cathbar, whom *They were buried in one grave on St. Peter s Hill. IRISH LYRIC POETRV. 147 Tirconnel of the Helmets mourns In deep despair, For valor, truth, and comely bloom, For all that greatens and adorns A peerless pair." The concluding stanzas of this fine ode show an other marked characteristic of the lyric poetry of Ireland a never-faltering trust in God that he in His own time will bring deliverance to the beloved land. After singing what mournings would have been had these chiefs fallen in battle, he ends thus: " What do I say? Ah, woe is me! Already we bewail in vain Their fatal fall! And Erin, once the great and free, Now vainly mourns her breakless chain And iron thrall! Then, daughter of O Donnell! dry Thine overflowing eyes, and turn Thy heart aside; For Adam s race is born to die, And sternly the sepulchral urn Mocks human pride! "Look not, nor sigh, for earthly throne, Nor place thy trust in arm of clay; But on thy knees Uplift thy soul to God alone, For all things go their destined way As he decrees. Embrace the faithful crucifix } And seek the path of pain and prayer Thy Saviour trod; Nor let thy spirit intermix With earthly hope and worldly care Its groans to God! 148 IRISH LYRIC POETRY. And thou ? O mighty Lord! whose ways Are far above our feeble minds To understand, Sustain us in these doleful days, And render light the chain that binds Our fallen land! Look down upon our dreary state, And through the ages that may still Roll sadly on Watch thou o er hapless Erin s fate, And shield at least from darker ill The blood of Conn." It is interesting to contemplate in Irish poetry the love and fidelity to country, clan, and chief. If those clans had been united and so remained, sub ject only and with reasonable willing relation to one lord paramount, their country never could have been subdued. But as it was with Ireland, so it had been with Greece, similarly prolific of heroes, who each had his following of the bravest of the brave. Yet the glories of Greece have suffered no diminution of lustre because of the internal strifes that led to her fall. Leuctra is not less famous than Marathon, but Ireland has often been re proached for yielding to Grecian example, and gone unpitied for the loss of what otherwise she might have kept. This is one of the saddest things in her history. In the midst of those lamentations sung by the bards for the ruin of whatever was dear, the most sorrowful are those that were poured for the whole country, the mother of all her clans. It IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 149 was said that when Lysander had taken the city of Athens, he ordered, and his orders were obeyed, that its walls be demolished at the sound of its na tive flute-players. How different the conduct of the Irish bards, who shared in the fate of lords and country, and who, when invited with offers of great indulgence and great pay to sing in honor of Eliz abeth, despised the bribe, and, with harps in hands, repaired to their hiding-places, to come forth in the intervals of security and strike them again, whether in sorrow for the past or in hope of a happier fu ture. It was vain that the minions of power broke to pieces wherever found the instruments of nation al music and forbade to those who touched them even the necessaries of life. Persecution served but to make it more loved and sacred in the island, and some of its songs six hundred years after the fall of Irish independence were as bold and inspiriting as when Tara was in the flushest of its glory. That pride of ancestry, patriotism, and ever-strug gling but never-dying hopefulness should have stayed among the Irish so long is one of the won ders of history. If ever a whole people have illus trated the blessedness of suffering they have. The deep abjectness of this suffering has served to keep it unknown to all except themselves and God; and so they have writhed for the most part in silence and secrecy, and, receiving little sympathy from 150 IRISH LYRIC POETRY. mankind, have clung the closer to the compassion of Heaven and striven to wait its deliverance. Un til only of late the sufferings of the Irish people have gone with less pity from the outside world than those of any people who have been sorely op pressed. After they had civilized Europe, their subjugation, followed by well-nigh as hard exactions as were ever put upon the vanquished, has been lit tle considered when compared with Poland, Greece, and others that have fallen before or been threatened with ruin by stronger powers. Not because the world is wanting in compassion, but that these cen turies of writhings have been unknown to it. The prisoner with the Iron Mask languished unpitied because unknown even to those who dwelt hard by the battlements wherein he was confined, and whence he was drawn forth only to be assassinated. So with Ireland. The chains that were riveted upon her were so binding that her very longings to break them were kept from the world, and every endeavor thereto punished with a silent rigor which it seems strange that a magnanimous victor, however power ful, would have had the heart to inflict. To the English people the Irishman has been made to ap pear fit only to wield the mattock and the spade, and the Irishwoman to be intended by Heaven mainly as a maid foi the chamber or a scullion for the kitchen; and the cheerfulness which, because IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 151 of their religious faith, they have been able to main tain in these lowly conditions, has been construed into evidence of a lack of the sensibility that would render them worthy of freedom. Even in this gen eration essayists in English reviews and literary magazines, while contributing articles upon matters of present or past concern in the condition of Ire land, would calmly write of the ignorance of the English people touching Irish affairs an ignorance admitted to be as great as it was in the times of the oldest Plantagenets. As for its language and literature, these were not known as well as those of the Sanscrit. Indeed, until the coming of Thomas Moore the outside world knew not, and hardly be lieved it worth while to inquire, if Ireland ever had a literature or a language beyond that common to all savage peoples for the expression of necessary wants. The idea of Europe seems to have been that Ireland ought to submit resignedly, as in time it must, to the destiny which had rendered vain her obsolete traditions, and fall in with the line of march on the new fields of national endeavor. By the na tion of whom she has been the spoil she has been regarded with a sentiment that conceived itself to be contempt, and this has been partaken in some part by the rest of the world. The greater power has seemed not only indifferent to the advancement of civilization in the less, but hostile to it. The 152 IRISH LYRIC POETRY. ing of colonists upon confiscated lands, the re strictions upon commerce, industry and education, all seemed to have been intended to repress all hope and eventually suppress all desire, of independence. The Irish people have not seemed important enough for serious attempts for their welfare. They have been suffered to till the ground under the su pervision of middlemen who were robbers both of the tenantry and the absentee landlords, and, in obedience to their habitude to chastity, multiply and overrun and migrate to other lands. Ever holding their religious faith, from which nothing has been strong enough to force them to part, the ruling country has done little except by penal laws for their conversion. For, with the average English mind, they may worship Baal or a stone, provided only that they will keep the peace. We were read ing lately The State of Ireland, by Edmund Spen ser. The gentle poet, for want of more honest re ward for his verse, accepted the castle of Kilcolman on the Mulla. Here he appealed for "learned, pi ous and faithful preachers that would have out- preached and outlived the Irish priests in holy and godly conversation," and he pleaded, with what boldness his meek nature could employ, "that it be not sought forcibly to be impressed into them with terrors and sharp penalties, as now is the manner, but rather delivered and intimated with mildness IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 153 and gentleness, so as it may not be hated before it is understood, and its professors despised and re jected. " With much sadness he further on calls attention to the difference between the clergy of the established and those of the proscribed faith: " Wherein it is a great wonder to see the odds which is between the zeal of popish priests and the ministers of the Gospel. For they spare not to come out of Spain, from Rome, and from Rheims, by long toil and dangerous travelling, hither, where they know peril of death awaiteth them, and no reward of riches is to be found, only to draw the people into the Church of Rome. Whereas some of our idle ministers, having a way for credit and estimation opened to them, and having the livings of the country offered to them without pains and without peril, will neither for the same, nor any love of God, nor zeal of religion, nor for all the good they may do by winning souls to Christ, be drawn from their warm nests." Burnet, in his Life of Bishop Bedell, wrote: "Bedel!, then Bishop of Kilmore,had fifteen Protestant clergy, all English, unable to speak the tongue of the people or converse with them, which is no small cause of the continuance of the people in popery still. The bishop observed with much regret that the English had all along neglected the Irish, as a nation not only conquered but indisciplinable, and that the clergy had scarce considered them as a part of their charge, but had left them wholly in the hands of their own priests, without taking any other care of them but the making them pay their tithes." That was a curious kind of religious missionary work when the clergy who were sent out to those whom they assumed to be worse and more needy than the heathen, not only neglected to learn the language of those to whom they were sent, but openly were guilty of conduct whose atrocity was the greater in that it did not seek to be concealed. 154 IRISH LYRIC POETRY. In the reports of Irish matters made by Strafford daring the reign of Charles I., among other enumer ated things are the following: " The people untaught through the non-residence of the clergy, occasioned by the unlimited shameful numbers of spiritual pnomo- tions with cure of souls which they hold by commendams; the rites of the church run over without all decency of habit, order, or gravity in the course of the service; the possessions of the church to a great proportion in lay hands ; the bishops aliening their verv principal houses and demesnes to their children and strangers, farm ing out their jurisdictions to mean and unworthy persons; the popish titulars the whilst obeying a foreign jurisdiction much greater than theirs." It seemed to have been a maxim with the con quering power, obtaining through centuries, that it was important, not that Ireland should be devel oped and cultivated, and made prosperous and happy, but that it should be kept in subjugation, poverty and despair. The bard must be persecuted like the lord whom he had served and sung. The legislation done in pursuance of this policy was as effectually comprehensive as the human understand ing was ever able to accomplish. If ever a work done on such a line deserves praise for the sagacity which rendered it complete for its purposes to re press instead of to exalt, it was this. The poverty of resources, born as much of neglect as from the resolution to hinder their improvement, served to keep from Ireland not only sympathy with its condi tion, but acquaintance with it and even its former- history and literature, IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 155 But within this century over the minds of the na tions has come a change, and it has been wrought in great part by the revival of Irish lyric poetry, partly new, but chiefly translations of the old. It is not suitable in this connection to speak of the struggles of Irish statesmen like Tone, and Emmet, and O Donnell, and O Brien, and others such. It is necessary to say of them only that they were free to acknowledge how much they owed to the Irish harp for the support that the cause they advo cated received at home and abroad. The "Irish Melodies" of Thomas Moore drew to his native country the minds of cultivated people all over the world. Doubtless this result was accomplished the more easily because they were composed away from that native country by a poet who, having narrowly escaped suffering, when a boy, for the in terest taken by him in the movement of the United Irishmen, gave up his revolutionary ideas when all hope of their success had disappeared, and threw his lot among those from whom it had appeared to be vain to effect a separation. Moore was a true patriot; but he was not one to be made a martyr. The great Erasmus said that not all and not many are adequate for the endurance of martyrdom. Yet there is a love of truth, and country, and freedom, and every good that is as pure, though it may not be as courageous and as daring, as that of those 156 IRISH LYRIC POETRY. who are willing to suffer for it, and to fight for it with unswerving eagerness even when defeat and death are unmistakably seen at the end of the con flict. Moore was not like Pindar, but like Anac- reon. Pindar, secure in Thebes, could boldly cele brate the heroes of his choice, and even admonish Hiero, Arcesilaos, and other princes of his time. Anacreon, an exile first from his native Teos, and afterwards from Abdera and Samos, must console his griefs as he might with light songs in honor of wine, beauty, and youth. Yet he was far from being the sensualist that he often has been regarded. The pious Plato commended him well, and by Athenaeus he was styled vf]q>&v nal ayaQ6$ sober and honorable. Beneath his outward levity was a profound sense of the seriousness which an exile can never forbear to feel. It subtracts little from this argument that so many of his verses are addressed to Chloe, Pyrrha, and other women; for all who are familiar with the poets know the wont of those whose muse is fettered to sing, under one or another maiden name, the perfections of their native lands. Without country and home, instead of resigning himself to useless regrets he would mingle in the sportive throng to whom "measured cups" were to be brought, and so ever be striving to live "Warm in heart, but wisely gay." We cannot doubt that sometimes in his breast IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 157 were thoughts like those that inspired the poet who has been likened to him as when he wrote : "Then blame not the bard if in pleasure s soft dream He should try to forget what he never can heal; Oh! give but a hope, let a vista but gleam Through the gloom ot his country, and mark how he ll feel! That instant his heart at her shrine would lay down Every passion it nursed, every bliss it adored, While the myrtle, now idly entwined with his crown, Like the wreath of Harmodius, should cover his sword." In England, Moore was in exile, knowing it and feeling it. But his was not the soul to rouse others to things impossible ; and so he submitted and bore part in a government that he could not hope to overthrow, laughed and jested among the gay and cultured; but, when alone, yielding to patriotic memories or fired with patriotic pride, mused upon and put into song the noble deeds of his ancestors of the far-distant time. His songs begat an interest in his native country that was felt everywhere, and the world was surprised and pleased to find that the people whom they had despised or ignored had so glorious a history, and that their bards, unknown for six centuries, were superior to those of which any European nation could boast. Throughout these poems runs a vein of sadness whose pathos has touched, even to the shedding of tears, many a heart outside as well as inside of Ireland. The laments for the braves of old times, the illustrious and the humble, the soul-felt praise of 15 IRISH LYRIC POETRY. their never-outdone prowess, even the songs of love, especially when unrequited or otherwise disappointed of its hopes of fruition, are such as lead one to melancholy that seeks its most comforting relief in tears. For we know, I repeat, that the bards, in making their songs of devotion to their native country, used to substitute for its dear name that of a maiden. This name was generally one or an other of the daughters of hereditary chiefs, such as Grace O Malley, or Cecilia O Gara, or Kathleen NyHoulahan, or Sabia, daughter of the great Bri an Boru. The amount of good done by Moore to his coun try can never be calculated. But better than him the Irish people of to-day love Mangan, and Davis, and McGee, and others poets who knew not them selves to be poets until the risings of forty years back inspired them to strike the neglected harp in unison with the brave efforts made by some Irishmen who, conscious of not being inferior to the men who fought in the days of old, were re solved to strive to rival their deeds. It is interest ing, but it is most sad to contemplate the brief, ever-struggling careers of these patriotic singers. The Irish cause, at the establishment of the Nation, its journal, demanded songs, and men who had never sung, and knew not that they could sing, answered to the call. In poverty, sickness, abscond- IkISM LYRIC POETRY. 1 59 ings from officers of English laws, they sang their songs, some old, some new; and the world marvelled, as it could not but pause and listen to strains so in spiriting proceeding from the mouths of young men who poured them forth in obedience to an inspira tion as instantaneous as exalted. Their season was brief. McGee-was driven into exile, Davis died of overwork and a broken heart, and Mangan, worn out with disease and the contemplation of his glo rious work, which seemed to have been done in vain, was found dead in his poor abode, where, in his tattered hat, they found, on soiled scraps of pa per, fragmentary parts of other verses upon which he had been employed to the last in endeavors to weave them into songs for further incitement to the cause for which he had died. Some of the lyrics of these young men may be compared safely with the best in any tongue, such as "The battle of Fontenoy," "The Sack of Balti more," "The True Irish King," and others of Thomas Davis. Of the kind we know not where to seek for better than the verses entitled "My Grave." After answering "Oh! no, oh! no," to questions re garding various spots in one of which it might be digged, he thus gives directions: " No! on an Irish green hillside, On an opening lawn, but not too wide! For I love the drip of the wetted trees; I love not the sales, but the gentle breeze, 160 IRISH LYRIC POETRY. To freshen the turf. Put no tombstone there, But green sods decked with daisies fair; Nor sods too deep, but so that the dew The matted grass-roots may trickle through. Be my epitaph writ on my country s mind, He served his country and loved his kind. " Oh! twere merry unto the grave to go, If one were sure to be buried so." These were written by a young man of twenty- eight, who wrote only because the endeavors made by the leading spirits of his country "required of him a song." He answered with a humility less only than his genius. Two years afterwards he died. John Mitchell said of him: "He, more than any one man, inspired, created and molded the strong national feeling that possessed the Irish people in 1843, made O Connell a true uncrowned king, and " Placed the strength of all the land Like a falchion in his hand. " But to our minds James Clarence Mangan must rise superior to Davis and outlive him. It was he who did more than any other to call out of oblivion the music of Ireland s foretime. An invalid, almost a dwarf, inadequate to the big dangers on the open field, his cheeks grew white as the hair that prema turely had bleached in comparing existing condi tions of his country with those when she was the educator of all Europe and her chiefs admitted to be the flushest flower of chivalry. Unable to carry IRISH LYRIC POETRY. l6l a gun or proclaim before the multitude, he searched for and brought forth the songs of his ancestors, he put them in the publicly-spoken language of the time, and the Irish people, as the rest of mankind, were surprised to know how fertile their native country had been both in great deeds and in the records made of them by contemporary bards. A melancholy man ; for ever melancholy has been the Irish bard. Sometimes, but not often, into the great deep of his country s sorrow he pours his own; but he warns against the despondency that has fallen upon his heart, and tries to extol the suffer ings that God sends most abundantly upon those who are His best beloved. Let us listen to these verses from "Have Hope:" " The wise, the thoughtful know full well That God doth naught in vengeful ire; But this deep truth all ages tell He purifies his own by fire. Woe to the man who. knows not woe, Who never felt his soul grow dim! Him threateneth dreadful overthrow; Heaven s love and care are not for him. I too have sorrows, unseen, alone: My own deep griefs, griefs writ on sand, Until my heart grew like a stone; I struck it, and it hurt my hand. My bitter bread was steeped in tears; Another Cain s mark marred my brow; I wept for long my wasted years: Alas! too oft I weep them now!" 1 62 IRISH LYRIC POETRY. Mangan had studied the history of other strug gling peoples, and he loved to sing of what their bravest had done, and hold them up as examples; as in the following from "The Highway of Freedom," when, after praising the brave Winkelried, he breaks forth: " We want a man like this, with power To rouse the world with one word; We want a chief to meet the hour, And march the masses onward. But, chief or none, through blood and fire, My Fatherland, lies thy way; The men must fight who dare desire For Freedom s course a highway." Of all peoples since the establishment of Chris tianity the Irish people, though they have been the most sorely tried, are most free of that sin, num bered among those called by the church mortal, of despairing of the mercy of God. It is this freedom from despair that has upheld them throughout so many vicissitudes, all of which were unhappy, and made them cling with unfaltering devotion to their country and the religious faith of their ances tors. They have always felt that deliverance, how ever long delayed, must come in the times of God, if, uncomplaining to him, they will persevere in endurance, striving, and prayer. This truth is well illustrated in the following, the last quotation from Irish lyric poetry which this article will allow. Among many names given by the bards to Ire- IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 163 land that of Banba was one especially dear. The verses following are from "The Lament for Banba." They were translated from the Irish by Mangan: "As a tree in its prime Which the axe layeth low, Didst them fall, O unfortunate land! Not by Time, nor thy crime, Came the shock and the blow: They were given by a false felon hand! Alas, and alas, and alas For the once proud people of Banba! " Oh! my grief of all griefs Is to see how thy throne Is usurped, whilst thyself art in thrall! Other lands have their chiefs, Have their kings; thou alone Art a wife, yet a widow withal! Alas, and alas, and alas For the once proud people of Banba! " The high house of O Neill Is gone down to the dust. The O Brien is clanless and banned; And the steel, the red steel, May no more be the trust Of the faithful and brave in the land! Alas, and alas, and alas For the once proud people of Banba! " But the bard, even if he feels, must admonish against despair; for God ** He made his prophets poets," and he can not but foretell in tuneful measures the balmy morning that will come when the night of darkness is overpast; and so he concludes: 164 IRISH LYRIC POETRY. tk But, no more! This our doom, \Vhile our hearts yet are warm, Let us not over-weakly deplore, For the hour soon may loom When the Lord s mighty hand Shall be raised for our rescue once more; And our grief shall be turned into joy For the still proud people of Banba." This is at last the most distinguishing character istic of the lyric poetry of Ireland its unshaken trust, amid innumerable sufferings, in God. The Irish patriot often may feel like crying out with the Hebrew: "How long, O Lord! how long?" but this avails not to hinder his ever-during confidence in the ultimate deliverance of his country through agencies that will be of divine appointment. Important have been the results of these attempts at the revival and the imitation of the old Irish lyric poetry. Not only are the other nations coming to understand and sympathize with the suf ferings of Ireland, but the English, the last, who ought to have been first, are being led thus to un derstand and sympathize. The cause of Ireland has become the foremost of all causes. Its espousal by Mr. Gladstone is the most important gain that till now it has achieved. In the late efforts of this great man in behalf of Ireland there is a pathos not less striking than their grandeur. We would, and we cannot help from imagining that he would, that he could "return to the days of his youth," and IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 165 have again the opportunity of spending his giant strength for the cause which so sorrowfully and so rightfully appeals for the justice that has been with held so long. Mr. Gladstone is generous as he is great. But in his youth who knew or cared to know anything about Ireland? Or if he knew, and if he cared, there was the dread of casting away the ambitions which, to young statesmen, it seems so important to regard. Like the son of Gedeon, they must forbear on account of their youth: "And he said unto Jether, his first-born, Up and slay them (Zebee and Salmana). But the youth drew not his sword; for he feared be cause he was yet a youth." What might he not have done if, when young and strong, he had given his powerful support to this cause, instead of waiting to crown his splendid career by an act of justice that now, when on the verge of the grave, he sees to have been due long, long ago? He has fallen because of extreme age, and because not yet, not quite yet, is the English mind prepared to admit its mistakes and correct them, and so yield to what all the world outside foresees to be inevitable. Yet this instance of his magnanimity, more than all his other achievements, will contribute to make resplendent and enduring the glory that shall be around his name. Mean while the Muse of Ireland, always sad but never despairing, and now more hopeful than at any time 1 66 IRISH LYRIC POETRY. since the beginning of her travail, yet prays Him whom, though often sorely tempted, she has never distrusted, "To cast a look of pity on Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan." THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. \I 7ITHIN these last three centuries the histories * " have spoken of the times between the fifth and fifteenth centuries as the Dark Ages. This habit has led a large portion of mankind to con clude that, during those thousand years, the Al mighty, disgusted with the failure of his purposes and the thwarting of His predictions and promises, withdrew the light of His countenance from the world and left it to grope its way as it could amidst dark ness. Even yet there are many most excellent per sons who believe that in those centuries nothing good was produced, for the want both of talent and virtue. Such persons, concluding that there was nothing worth knowing therein, study with com mendable zeal the histories of ancient times down to the fall of the Empire in the West, and then, skipping over the intervening centuries, dwell with fondness upon what has been done since. But within the last fifty years honest minds have been traveling a good deal over what had long been considered execrated ground, and many an old 167 I 68 THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. error has been dispelled. This is not exactly the occasion to speak of the attitude of the church during that period, although it is beginning to be known that it was eminently distinguished for intel ligence and zeal, for founding civilizations and producing saints. We are now to speak of litera ture, especially as it was in Germany in the very middle of that long night. Some writer who, we do not remember just now in contrasting the Germans with the French and the English especially, mused about thus: To the French nature assigned the land, to the English the water. Land-locked on the east, the west, the south, and mostly so on the north, the German, having dominion only of the air, separated from the rest of mankind, has lived mainly upon his own resources, and living thus, he has become the most thoughtful of men, the most earnest, the most sensi tive, the most tender and faithful in his loves,and, in the times whereof we write, the most religious. Another writer* thus speaks : "The proper germ of the romantic is the German heart, the pro found sentiment, that love under many forms, which was introduced into life as well as into art by the Germans first and displaced the antique, unsentimental mode of living and thinking, which regarded the senses and the understanding only, and wavered between pas sion and philosophy. The consecration of woman, and of love itself, by adoration of the earthly beloved object, is purely of Ger man origin, and I might call this the leading trait of the romantic." *Wolfgang Menzel. THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. 169 We are not quite sure that this may not be re garded as the most distinguishing mark of romanti cism the single, the sentimental, and the honorable love of women. If so the Germans are to be cred ited with the highest place in its original, for they are the first people who paid to woman the devo tion due as to the friend of man in all the purposes of his creation. In the times when other peoples regarded their women quasi slaves, to be kept or parted from at pleasure, the wild Germans treated theirs with consideration and tenderness unknown elsewhere. These followed their husbands, lovers, brothers and sons to the wars, often determined the occasions of battle, and in the times of defeat perished along with their beloved, preferring death to survival for whatever fortune might be offered by the victors. Love and chastity were common pos sessions to these barbarians when the latter es pecially was little known elsewhere. They seemed to feel that the female sex were not only to be loved and defended, but to some degree, reverenced also. Such sentiments led them to adopt, almost without questioning, the Christian faith and the veneration of the Blessed Virgin, whom they celebrated in songs as sweet as mortal ears have ever heard. English scholars have always known of the beau tiful literature of the Trouveres and the Troubadours, 176 THE MINNESINGER AND MEfST ERSINGER. themes of which were the legends of Arthur and the deeds of Charlemagne and his Paladins. But they have known little, until lately, of how the spirit, that produced it, spreading eastward and northward penetrated into Germany, where it found a purer, more felicitous expression in the Minnesong. During the twelfth century among the princes of Germany the Hohenstaufens of Swabia were emi nently distinguished in all qualities becoming rulers of a generous people. Under their benignant sway Swabian manners and speech became the standard for all Germans, and originated a poetry which, if it had been preceded, has certainly not been suc ceeded, by a better in its kind. As poetry is older than prose, so the old poetry, in some of the chief- est purposes for which poesy was given to mankind for the subduing of their evil and the solacement of their griefs, has been better than the new. It is probable that the poems of Homer were invented before the author had learned to write. It is cer tain that the most gifted, if not all, of the Minne singer could neither read nor write, and that their songs, like their forerunners in Greece in the mouths of the rhapsodists, owed their preservation to that exquisite sweetness which led them to be memo rized by a whole people and carried down by fondest tradition throughout the ages of the relig ious faith by which they were mainly inspired. The THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. 171 devout knightly princes who ruled during a century over those regions along the Rhine and the moun tain land of Germany gave generous encourage ment to this literature. The Minnesinger were so called from their being devoted entirely to love, when love as never before nor since seized upon, and occupied, and thrilled, and purified, and ennobled the heart of man. Whatever there was upon earth to be loved these tuneful brethren sang in strains as freshly, gushingly sweet as have ever been heard in this world. They sang of the brooks and woods, the flowers and lakes, the hills and valleys, and their songs were inspired by woman s love, and their best and fond est were in honor of Mary, the Blessed Virgin, Mother of God. Now, the greatest wonder about this poetry is that the most of it was produced by those who knew not letters. The lover made his song in his heart and his head, and then recited it. It was so enchanting that all who heard would commit to memory. When a bard made a song in honor of his mistress it was in the fashion following that it was communicated to her in confidence : He taught it first to a trusted boy, who, when he had learned it well, hied to where the lady dwelt, and, after she had learned to recite, ate the piece of cake and drank the glass of wine which she gave, and took 172 THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. back the message which she might deign to send to the poet, his master. There is a story of a lady who sent her response by letter, and quite a time elapsed before the lover could find a friend who could read and tell him the glad news it contained. These poems were constructed with an artfulness of rhythm and such arrangement of stanzas as no poets of modern times have been able to equal. The varieties among these are as numerous as are those of the songs themselves. For there seemed to have been an understanding, not only among the poets, but of every one with himself, that no two songs should be alike in rhythm. Some rhymes are in immediate sequence at the ends of lines, some at alternate, some in the midst, some begin nings rhyming with endings, and endings rhyming with beginnings. It must be enchanting to one who knows well the German language to hear these poems in the original. A German-English scholar* some years ago translated some of them into English, and suc ceeded often in preserving the rhymes employed in the original. Speaking of them, the translator says : "We have minnesongs wherein every word of every line rhymes with the other, while the lines again rhyme in the usual way amongst themselves; poems wherein the last word of the line is rhymed by the first of the next line; poems wherein the last word of the strophe *A. E. Kroeg-er, " The Minnesinger of Germany." Boston: THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. 173 rhymes with its first word; poems built in strophes of twenty and more rhymes; poems of grammatical rhyme in the most various pos sibilities; poems of word-playing rhymes, etc.; and in most cases the fundamental rhythmical beauty reigns supreme and makes the ornamentation seem natural outgrowth." Let us listen to the following rhymes of endings with following initials, and endings with beginning words in stanzas, and then conjecture how they must sound in the original: " Rosy-colored meadows To shadows we see vanish everywhere. Woodbirds warbling dieth: Sore trieth them the snow of wintry year. Woe! woe! what red mouth s glow- Hovers now o er the valley? Ah! ah! the hours of woe! Lovers it doth rally No more; yet, its caress seems cosy. " Ever her sweet greeting, When meeting, my dear love stirs wondrous joy. As she walks so airy. The fairy, look! my heart leaps wondrous high. Woe! woe! what red mouth s glow Hovers now o er the valley? Ah! ah! the hours of woe! Lovers it doth rally No more; yet I shall leave it never. "Pleasure, sweet and steady, My lady scatters with her red mouth s smile, And her eyes sweet beaming My dreaming, venturous thoughts with bliss beguile. Woe! woe! what red mouth s glow Hovers now o er the valley? Ah! ah! the hours of woe! Lovers it doth rally No more, and 1 regrets must treasure. 1 174 THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. Fine as this is, the author is not known. The following, yet finer, is from Ulricht von Lichtenstein : "Blessed the feeling That taught me the lesson thou hearest, Gently appealing: To love thee the longer the dearest, And hold thee nearest; Yea, as a wonder From yonder, that bearest Rapture the wildest, Thou mildest, thou purest, thou clearest. "I faint, I die, love, With ecstasy sweetest and rarest, When thou draw st nigh, love, And me thy sweet pity declarest. Then, as thou sharest, Love, oh! I ll sing thee, And bring thee bonairest Redress, and over Thee hover, thou sweetest, thou fairest. " My hands I fold, love. And stay at thy feet, humbly kneeling, Till, like Isolde, love, Thou yield to the passionate feeling O er thy heart stealing; Till thy behavior s Sweet favors reach healing My heart, and tender Love s splendor to thee be revealing. "I pray but send me A hope ere my locks shall turn gray, love; Thou wilt befriend me, And 1 of thy grace catch a ray, love. To light my way, love, Thine eyes were fated And mated: their swav, love, My soul beguiling, Shall smiling revive me for aye, love," THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. 175 Amatory as is this poetry, it is amongst the most pure. One notices that the names of the mistresses of these lovers are never or seldom mentioned, being supposed to be known only to themselves and the boy who went between. In this respect the Minne singer were superior to the Troubadours : " The Troubadour was gay, thoughtless, and licentious, and the Minnesinger were tender and plaintive, spiritual and lofty. The former sings of love and chivalry, and of the various incidents of love and "courtoisie;" the latter, although many Minnesinger had been with the Crusaders to Palestine, seldom, if ever, alludes to the adventures of chivalry and romance. He dwells principally upon the inward feelings of the soul, upon the refined sentiments and pang of the tender passion. His strains are chaste and melancholy; they are marked by a disdain of sensuality and of the corruptions of the world, with allusions to the contemporary history of Germany, and occasional aspirations after the purer joys of another world and the sublime visions of eternity."* Such delicacy was a most fitting quality in the heart of a poet who would essay to celebrate the excellence of the Blessed Virgin. Of the number less poems in her honor are the Lay by Walther von der Vogelweide; "The Golden Smithy" of Con rad von Wurzburg; and the "Great Hymn" that has been assigned to Gottfried von Strassburg. Of all these the Hymn of Gottfried is at the head. It is wonderful how many images of exquisite beauty rose to the mind of the bard in contemplating the matchless excellence of the Mother of our Lord, comparing, or trying to compare, with her all beau- *" Foreign Quarterly Review," xx. 71. 176 THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. tiful things and all combinations of beautiful things upon earth. We think, when we have read many of these, that the singer must soon end his song from exhaustion of all that we remember to have seen that was most fair; but it continuously rises in fervor in new and fresher images, through pages and pages, with such as these : " Thou bloom of rose, thou lily grace, Thou glorious queen in that high place, Where ne er the face Of woman shone before thee. " Thou rosy vale, thou violet plain. u Thou lovely, golden flower-glow, Thou bloom st on every maiden s brow; And glory s glow E en like a robe floats on thee. Thou art the blooming heaven-branch AVhich blooming blooms in many a grange. Great care and strange God lavishes, maid, upon thee. "Thou sheen of flowers through clover-place. u O beauty o er all beauty s birth! Never rare stone, or herb, or earth, Or man bring forth Such wondrous beauty, maiden " and many, many more as beautiful, until, as if rec ognizing, late, reluctant, that his song must come to an end, he pours out this last fond praise : " Thou of pure grace a clear, fair vase! Of steady virtue an adamas, A mirror glass Of bliss to bliss surrendered. THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. 177 Thou fortune s and salvation s host, Thou love-seed of the Holy Ghost; To all sin lost Thy image was engendered On sacred place, where at God s call God s Son sank down from heaven. Like on the flowers sweet rain doth fall, Such gentle sweetness He to all Whom reached his call, Early and late hath given." E en now it appears that he could not have ceased except to rise to a loftier theme " Oh sweet, fair Christ." Those of us who do not know the German language well may be excused for some envy for those who do, when Kroeger s translation sounds with such rapturous sweetness in our ears. Von der Hagan, a German critic, speaking of this hymn, says : " It is the verv glorification of love (minne) and of minnesong; it is the heavenly bridal song, the mysterious Solomon s Song-, which mirrors its miraculous object in a stream of deep and lovely images, linking them all together into an imperishable wreath; yet even here, in its profundity and significance of an artistic and numerously rhymed construction, always clear as crystal, smooth, and graceful." Except the earliest bards of ancient Greece, the Minnesinger are the most wonderful that are known to history. They illustrate what may be done by a gifted, loyal, devout people in a country whose rul ers they love and ought to love. During a period of one hundred and fifty years these unlettered min strels poured forth a music that had not been heard since the days of Alcaeus and Sappho. 178 THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. The Swabian dynasty passed away and the house of Hapsburg under Rudolph, came to the throne. The increase of power and wars among them, dis couraged both religion and song. To gentle influences succeeded the rude manners of the war rior, and the Minnesinger laid aside the cithern. Heretofore poesy dwelt in the country, in the woods and fields, by the margins of lakes and streams, on the sides of hills and mountains, near to the church or monastery where the Blessed Virgin inspired its best endeavors. Henceforward the muse forsook these sylvan retreats and took up its abode in towns, such as Mentz, Augsburg, Strassburg, and Nuremberg. Yet, assuming to be moral and seri ous, if not devout, the new poets, in some things more learned than the old, for the unlicensed, ever- varying, yet ever-sweet rhythm of their songs substi tuted those arbitrary rules which took away most of the sweetness from German poetry. Their very dis dain of the Minnesinger showed their unworthiness to be their successors. Henceforth song must en ter upon a new career. The tenderness, the fresh ness of love withered away, and a music insipid came on after one that was unapproachably delic ious. This was the music of the Meistersinger. It is undoubtedly true that the best poets have been from the country, either born therein or there in dwelling, and fond of country existence. On THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. 179 the increase of the importance of the German barons, and the constant feuds and wars risen among them, poetry left the fields of strife and carnage and sought the security needed for one free, simple, gentle of spirit, within the walls of fortified towns. The merchant, the artisan, the inventors of paper and the printing-press, the builders of houses, horse- shoers, cobblers these took up the lyre at the gates where the Minnesinger had dropped it in his flight from scenes of violence and his grief for the de cline of the child-like devoutness of his country men. It is a curious commentary upon the poetry of the Meistersinger that its culmination took place in the person of one who stood among the hum blest classes of artisans. Yet Hans Sachs, the shoemaker, was a great genius. Had he lived a century or two before, had he been an indweller of a home remote from towns, had he had the ancient simple love of his countrymen for the good, the simple, the innocent, he would have been one of the greatest of the bards. Except Lope ie Vega, he is the most voluminous of writers. For years upon years this artisan of the town plied his talent for verse-making, and Germany was flooded with his productions on the endless varieties of themes which he sang. Though not without his seasons of feeling, deep and intense, yet we look to him in vain for the chivalrousness, the gallantry, the de- l8o THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. vout fervor of the minnesong. The music he made was not for high-born maiden in bower or captivity, nor for the benign Queen of Saints, nor even for simple damsel of the valley, but mainly for those of his own class in the streets, and taverns, and wine-houses of the town. Of his six thousand poems the far greater part has been lost, and his celebrity rests mainly on his having been the great est of that class which came in with the new depar ture of German literature. Henceforward was a marked declension from the gentle manners of the Swabian dynasty. Among the makers of the earlier songs were many of that old German aristocracy who, though unlearned in books, were most gifted in courtly graces and in the training of the heart to the behests of honor and religion. Poetry, descending from lords and knights to tradesmen and artisans, lost most of its warmth and tenderness and accommodated itself to their un- romantic lives. Germany was now engaged more in working for the future than in meditating upon and praising the past. Towns and cities were to be multiplied, and enlarged, and fortified, trade and commerce extended the practical to supplant the poetical. To the undoubting docility and obedi ence to religious authority was to succeed a sullen in dependence in harmony with the wordly spirit of the age among a people who, notwithstanding all their THE MINNESINGER AND MEIST ERSINGER. l8i vicissitudes, have ever been noted for thoughtfulness and earnestness of purpose beyond every other. For it is to the earnest thoughtfulness of Germans that are to be attributed those religious conflicts more fierce, more disastrous than have been known to other peoples. Long before Luther the simple faith of the times of the Minnesinger had been giving way to another. That other was as serious as its predecessor more serious, indeed; for the former, without questioning, accepted the teachings of the Church as a child takes its first lessons from its mother, and the adult Christian did not lose in that primeval time the faith and the tenderness of childhood. In the development of arts and science, and trade and politics, that German in tellect, always earnest, began to subject the dogmas of religion to the same tests of investigation that accompanied that of sublunary affairs. The poetry of Germany in the hands of the Meistersinger must follow in that march of trade, and mechanics, and politics. The gentle songsters of the foretime had sung of female loveliness mainly, and after that perfect type set by Mary the Immac ulate. It was a poetry unconfined by critical rules of verse or rhythm, pouring itself joyous, tender, irregular, just as love and devoutness find sponta neous expression from one and another loving, overflowing heart. And now frequenters of shops 1&2 THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. and taverns, without depth of sentiment of any sort, unsimple, hilarious with wine, emulous of wealth, measured their verses as they measured their cloths and their boards, and, instead of the bird, the purling stream, the gentle wind, made their song keep time to the watchman s beat, the ham mer, and the anvil. We do not mean by such comparison to deny that there was a considerable part of the new form of poetry that was good. Some of it was very good, a small portion excellent. The writer in the For eign Quarterly Review before quoted speaks thus of the popular songs and ballads : "They were of many sorts: religious songs; there were ballads for the different trades and callings of life, such as the fisherman s, the hunter s, the shepherd s, the husbandman s, of which the melody as well as the words are imitative of the sounds and scenes familiar to each. The fisherman s song is distinguished by a monotonous, hollow tune resembling the moaning of the wave striking against the shore. That of the hunter is shrill and wild; that of the shep herd soft and calm. The songs of the husbandman are varied, some for each season, adapted to the various works of the field. In several towns and villages in Germany, towards the beginning of the spring, winter, represent by a jack-straw, is driven out by the children amidst joyous clamors. The wine-dresser s song is like those of old, satirical and somewhat licentious. The miner s lays are among the best. They are marked by a sort of religious awe, as his labor is among the mysteries of the subterraneous creation; they tell of sylphs and other genii which guard the treasures concealed in the bowels of the earth." Some of the religious ballads and songs have much depth of feeling. They are without the sweetness and the joyousness of the minnesong, THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSlNGER. 183 but in great part are hymns upon the mysteries of Christianity faith, eternity, etc. Long before Lu ther, we repeat, the earnest, deeply religious mind of the Germans had grown restive under the con straints of the Church, and, because of the very simplicity of her teachings, been gaining habits of questioning and doubting that were destined, under a bold leader, to culminate in revolt and war. Lu ther was a man of eminent gifts. He was an orator and he was a poet two gifts that seldom unite in an individual. Not that he was a great poet, nor great as an orator. His poetry is hard, severe ; but much of it is deep, melancholy and wonderfully impressive. Then he was a statesman, and could have been a warrior. We have seen that the mind of Germany had been already growing restive with thoughts of independence. Upon this current of change the young monk, more fitted for the forum and the field than for the altar and the cloister, found himself drifting. The consciousness of ex traordinary powers to lead and control mankind, courage that no danger seemed to daunt, a will changeless as the course of the stars, a temper that burned with the fierceness of a furnace seven times heated, he led that career the culmination of which himself, with all his powers, did not clearly foresee. With the advent of Luther came on a wonderful change in the prose literature of Germany. Hith- I&4 THE MINNESINGER AND MEISTERSINGER. erto it was almost entirely worthless, the great prose writers employing the Latin tongue. The lead of Luther excited the nation throughout to all its bor ders. The Meistersinger, almost the only poets who then existed, lent their art, such as it was, to the new doctrines. The German nation became dispu tants with tongue, and pen, and sword. When men s minds are occupied mainly with thoughts and discussions upon the forms of religious worship and the dogmas of conflicting faiths, the muses, averse to such conflicts, absent themselves from earth and leave mankind to wrangle out their lives in such language as they can find without inspiration from them. Already had poesy drooped her wings when she was taken from the fountain and the hill-side, the meadow and the lake, and made to dwell in walled towns and mingle in the business of the streets and the workshops. But now, when she was called upon for rhymes upon free-will, justifica tion by faith, the worthlessness of works, and such like themes, she ceased to soar at all, and retired, to be again invoked in another age. THE AUDACITY OF GOETHE. THE revolution produced in Germany by the movement known as the "Reformation" was most discouraging to polite literature. The song, devout and cheerful as it had been, was hushed, and German imagination for a hundred years brooded in silence or gave utterance to its dreams in verses worse even than those of the Meistersinger. Those minds, always thoughtful, yearned for they knew not precisely what, and must come at length to let other peoples direct their aspirations and give them strange tongues. It is most remarkable what, in the midst of this season of inactivity and discouragement, the other nations of Europe did for Germany. The Saxon period, so named from the native home of Luther, was essentially prose, but it did wonders in developing German intellect and lan guage. The fierceness with which Luther warred, his mighty influence among his countrymen, aroused within them a new impulse both to read and to write, and the German language became one of the richest in Europe for the discussion of the serious concerns 85 1 86 THE AUDACITY OF GCETHE. of man, mortal and eternal. But it is tiresome and it is sad to read the literature of that period, its gloomy complainings, its unrelenting warrings, its gradual, inevitable descent into the depths of mys ticism and doubt, which have made faithless and godless so many of that gifted and naturally most religious people. To the influences of these in ternal struggles were added, among others less impor tant, those of the Thirty Years War, similar in du ration and disastrous consequences to the Wars of the Roses. No people fight like the Germans, es pecially when they fight with one another. So brave, so serious, the German knows not to yield, except to superior physical force, and when he yields at length to that, it is a sullen submission that waits for other times and other opportunities to renew the conflict. In these terrific wars of many kinds German litera ture, poor as it had become for the soothing, sweet behests of poetry, seemed destined to return into the barbarism of the past, until finally, ashamed, disgusted with its own doings, and discouraged with the possibilities of its endeavors, the German mind sought, as it seemed, to ignore what it had known, to yield its individuality, and engraft upon itself a foreign existence. It is interesting to contemplate that continuous travelling hither and thither, during the latter part of the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth cen- THE AUDACITY OF GOETHE. 1 87 turies, in search of foreign sentiments and foreign forms of expression. It reminds one of the mis sions of the first rude Romans, seeking amid cultured peoples for laws with which to control and guide their ignorant and lawless populace. Fortunately for German literature, no single foreign nationality could please universally. Fierce were the struggles among the different invaders who had been invited the Greeks, the French, the Dutch, the English. Of these the French under the lead first of Opitz, and afterwards and especially of Voltaire, seemed as if they must prevail; and the German nation ap peared as if anxious to give themselves up entirely to the people who in all respects were least similar to themselves. The German, naturally simple, thoughtful, tender, in the times whereof we write seemed to have grown ashamed of himself for being such, and endeavored to become gay, supple, affec ted. "German simplicity of manners, nay, the very language itself, disappeared from the court and from the castles of the nobility. The higher literati, the public officials, even the richer burghers, ceased to speak their mother-tongue."* Menzel says that French influence extended even to the habits of physical life: "Paleness came into favor; a lady without the vapors belonged not to good so ciety. The hearty daughters of German country *Metcalf s "German Literature." I 88 THE AUDACITY OF GCETHE. gentlemen, sound to the core, painted themselves white, starved themselves thin, and drank vinegar, in order to get up the genuine invalid look. " What was to become of the patriotism and the morals of a people thus habituated was plain to foresee. We have made these observations preliminary to a brief study of that man who. belonging not specially to any of the various schools, employed the ideas and the discipline of each as it hap pened to suit his purposes or his whims. There has never lived a man about whom have been more conflicting opinions than Goethe. Not as to his claims to be regarded as a great genius. On these there has been and can be but one opin ion. It is the most illustrious name in the litera ture of Europe since Shakespeare. In some re spects Goethe went beyond even him. For not only was he a great poet, but he was a scientist and a discoverer in science. He was conversant with art. From his youth, even his childhood, to old age, far-advanced old age, the possession of health, pecuniary means, all good opportunities, combined with sleepless industry in study and in work all these allowed him to do his very best in the various fields of his endeavors. An aristocrat, or at least of aristocratic ambitions and pretensions sympathizing only with the aristocracy or other fortunates who, like the rich Persicus of Juvenal, THE AUDACITY OF GCKTHE. 189 during an insignificant misfortune are wont to re ceive contributions that compensate over and over for all losses, real and imaginary he became a trimmer in literature as in politics. The distin guishing characteristic of Goethe s being was selfish ness. He was the most exquisitely, imperturbably, continuously selfish mortal that has ever lived in this world, at least among those of, or in approxi mation to, his own social and intellectual rank. Some years ago we read his Autobiography, which, instead of an apologia, a name usually given by modest men to such a work, he styled "Poetry and Truth." We have been sometimes sorry that we read it. In this book it is wonderful to notice the coldness with which he alludes to the various love- passages he had with young girls; how he trifled with their affections; how little he cared for their disappointments, their sense of humiliation, and how he seemed to have neither remorse nor regret for the unhappiness that resulted from changes of his purposes and violations of his pledges. It was suf ficient, in his mind, for them to remember that such changes and violations had been done by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, to whom all mankind owed too much gratitude for service upon various fields to let him be disturbed by remembrance of what, in hours of youthful levity, he may have said and done in the society of a few individual girls and 19 THE AUDACITY OF GCETHE. women. Not that even in this world he did not have to pay for such things, and in ways poignant and humiliating. In an age of despotism a selfish man will ever be a time-server. This was an age of despotism man ifold, not only political, as Prussia has ever wielded but religious and literary. French literature first and most powerful, Greek literature next, English literature last. Lessing, single-minded, combative, heroic, had to fight single-handed, and died reeking with the sweat of battle before he could raise or hear a shout of victory. Had he been joined by Goethe, whom without a pang he would have been ready to acknowledge and follow as leader, the war would sooner and easily have been ended. Yet this man, in whose intellect were characteristics of the most gifted of all ages, ancient and modern, gave himself to the management of the political affairs of a German duke, and in hours of leisure humored and flattered and tantalized these several despotisms, according to the individual caprices and whims of each. In this various work the things which he did are among the wonders of the world. Yet of all wonders connected with them this is the chiefest: that none of them were done by actuation of love of country, love of mankind, or love of God. Not that Goethe was not a man of feeling. So much the worse, and he pursued that THE AUDACITY OF GCETHE. 191 role of the great poet in creating concrete exist ences out of his own heart s experiences. He had loved the lithe little Gretchen, and her he immortal ized in Faust. He knew all that is to be felt by an ardent nature. In the case of Margaret in Faust, that one of the most powerful of the productions of the human intellect, it is piteous to witness how soon and how far one heretofore innocent may fall when tempted beyond endurance by the evil spirit. Mephistoph- eles, who at first is represented as sufficiently reprobate and hideous, has already grown, by the time he has first seen this poor child of fifteen years, to feel apparently some pity, and he avows that such perfect innocence is beyond his power to corrupt. To Faust, who has pointed her out to him, he says : " She there? She s coming from confession, Of every sin absolved; for I Behind her chair was listening nigh. So innocent is she, indeed, That to confess she had no need. I have no power o er souls so green."* Yet he is held to his compact, and, to satisfy the eager lover, that very night begins the attack by placing a casket of jewels on a press in the child s chamber. Preparing herself for her couch, singing the while "There was a king in Thule," and notic- * Scene vii., Bayard Taylor s translation. 192 THE AUDACITY OF GCKTHE. ing the casket, it appears that the evil one has found at once the weakness it will be most prom ising to assail. After adorning herself with the jewels and getting before her poor mirror, how mournful these words which she utters: u Were but the ear-rings mine alone! One has at once another air. What helps one s beauty, youthful blood? One may possess them well and good; But none the more do others care. They praise us half in pity, sure: To gold still tends, On gold depends, All, all! Alas, we poor! * Never was a tale of ruin more pitifully told. The pinching of the \vants of a poor estate, harsh do mestic rule, notice, attentions, and devotions from a young man handsome, aristocratic, courtly, and wealthy; then native innocence, habitual piety, ab horrence of dishonor, wickedness, and shame, wail- ings, and prayers before and after her fall these fill one s heart with a sympathy that brings frequent tears to one s eyes : " My peace is gone, My he art is sore; I never shall find it, Ah! never more. "f "Incline, O Maiden, Thou sorrow-laden, Thy gracious countenance upon my pain! * Scene xv. { Ib., scene viii. THE AUDACITY OF GCETHE. 193 The sword thy heart in, With anguish smarting, Thou lookest up to where thy Son is slain." * That by her spinning-wheel at home, this in the donjon cell to an image of the Mater Dolorosa fixed in a shrine in a niche of the wall. Of these lyrics Bayard Taylor says: "If the reverie at the spinning-wheel be a sigh of longing, this is a cry for help equally wonderful in words and metre, yet with a character equally elusive when we attempt to reproduce it in another language." The slaying of Margaret s brother Valentine by Faust, the un intentional death of her mother produced by the daughter, the discovery of her shame, the charge of infanticide when these have brought insanity, we should have to search long to find a scene so heart rending as that in prison the night before her exe cution, when the seducer, who appears to be more disconcerted than remorseful, essays her rescue. When she has recognized him at last, refusing his persuasions, though without reproach, she tells him: * Now I ll tell thee the graves to give us. Thou must begin to-morrow The work of sorrow! The best place give to my mother, Then close at her side my brother, And me a. little away, But not too very far, I pray! And here, on my right breast, my baby lay! Nobody else will lie beside me!"f *Scene xviii. f Scene xxv. THE AUDACITY OF fJCK Now, one reading this poem for the first time might suppose that this miner of female innocence Would remain and share her fate, or live to be con sumed of remorse and be for ever lost. Not he. When Mephistopheles, at the dawning of the day, cries petulantly and threateningly to him: "Come! or I ll leave her in the lurch and thee," not another word from Faust of sympathy, counsel or remon strance. What is worse, and what seems incredi ble, the poet, departing from the legend, leaves us to infer that he, too, like the poor penitent girl, has escaped the perdition of the soul. The Ger man historian before quoted, speaking of Goethe s habitual compounding with vices, even those the most hideous and revolting, writes thus. " Goethe did not shrink from playing this part even into the next life. His Faust was meant to show that the privilege of the aristo cratic voluptuary extended beyond the grave. This, F^aust may offend against every moral feeling, against fidelity and honor; he may constantly silence the voice of conscience, neglect every duty, gratify his effeminate love of pleasure, his vanity, and his caprices, even at the expense and the ruin of others, and sell himself to the very devil; he goes to heaven notwithstanding, for he is a gentleman, he is of the privileged class. In his youth Goethe had paid some slight respect if not to religion, at least to the regard that all communities have or profess to have for morality and decency. But by the times wherein Faust, 2 he Elective Affinities and Wilhelm Meister s Ap prenticeship were produced the new religion that THE AUDACITY OF GCETHE. 195 he had invented, a Neo-Platonism founded after long studies of Paracelsus and Boer-haave, had de veloped to his satisfaction; and the founder being leader at the court of Weimar, at the head of the literature of Germany, having watched not only without pain but with pleasure the growing demor alization among all ranks of his countrymen, henceforth his lovers, loving whom and how they may, are to receive no punishment, not only from the municipal laws and from public opinion, but even from remorse and from hell ! It was, indeed, a humiliated state of domestic society when mar riages "under the apron," as they were called, were common, whereat clergymen were required, without much urging thereto by the dukes and barons on whom they depended, to take in wedlock country girls and housemaids whom ///<?>> had wearied of. In such a society a man gifted, rich, powerful may do and say about as he pleases, and, instead of losing, continue to gain more and more in influence upon opinions and habits. Then the exquisite pathos, the delicate tenderness, the marvellous dramatic interest of many portions of these works, inter spersed often with lyrical verses of almost une qualled excellence, serve to lead even virtuous and pious minds to withhold much of that condemnation which as a whole they deserve. In Wilhelm Meis- tcr the old harper and the child Mignon cannot but 196 THE AUDACITY OF GfKTHE. be remembered with a tender sadness that it is grate ful to feel. Let us notice this extract from book ii. chapter xi., at the conclusion of the previous play ing and singing that the old man had rendered before Meister and his motley suite of women: " The old harper remained silent; his fingers wandered carelessly among the chords of his instrument; finally he struck them more boldly and sang as follows: " What sounds are those which from the wall And o er the bridge I hear? Those strains should echo through this hall, And greet a monarch s ear. So spake the king; the page retires: His answer brought, the king desires The minstrel to appear. " Hail, sire! and hail, each gallant knight! Fair dames, I greet ye well! Like heaven, this hall with stars is bright. But who your names may tell? What matchless glories round me shine! But tis not now for eyes like mine On scenes like these to dwell. "The minstrel raised his eyes inspired, And struck a thrilling strain: Each hero s heart is quickly fired, Each fair one thrills with pain; The king enchanted with the bard, His magic talent to reward, Presents his golden chain. " Oh! deck me with no chain of gold; Such gift becomes the knight, Before whose warrior eyes so bold The rushing squadrons fight. Or let the glittering bauble rest Upon your chancellor s honored breast He ll deem the burden light. THE AUDACITY OF GCETHE. 197 " I sing but as the young- bird That carols in the tree; The rapture of the music brings Its own reward to me. Yet would I utter one request, That of your wine one cup the best- Be given to-day by thee. "The cup is brought; the minstrel quaffed. He thrills with joy divine. Thrice happy home, where such a draught Is given, and none repine! When fortune smiles, then think of me, And thank kind Heaven, as I thank thee, For such a cup of wine. " When the harper, at the conclusion of the song, seized a goblet of wine that stood before him, and turning towards his benefactors^ quaffed it off with a look of thankfulness, a shout of joy rose from the whole assembly." Touching as this is, the one following, from book iii. chapter i., is more so. Mignon, yet a child in years, though now grown towards womanhood in heart from sorrow, the fruit of a love not only for bidden but revolting in its kind, had been spirited away from Italy, her native country, and had been made to promise, amid circumstances most impres sive upon her sensitive nature, never to divulge the fact of her expulsion, nor the place, nor even the country, of her birth. The softness of the manners of Meister had served to draw her affections towards him, and, longing ever for the home of her childhood she hoped that this young man, who seemed so good, and was so kind, might eventually carry her there. But, remembering her promise, the little outcast 198 THE AUDACITY OF GCETHE. could only strive to make known by innuendo the place whither she yearned to go. Taught by the master of a troop of strolling players to sing and play upon the cithern, one day she sang before Meister this song: Know st thou the land where the lemon-tree blows, Where deep in the bower the gold orange grows? \Vhere zephyrs from Heaven die soltly away, And the laurel and myrtle tree never decay? Know st thou it? Thither, oh! thither with thee, My dearest, my fondest! with thee would I flee. " Know st thou the hall with its pillared arcades, Its chambers So vast and its long colonnades, Where the statutes of marble with features so mild Ask, Why have they used thee so harshly my child? Know st thou it? Thither, oh! thither with thee, My dearest, my fondest! with thee would I flee. " Know st thou the Alp which the vapor enshrouds, Where the bold muleteer seeks his way through the clouds? In the cleft of the mountain the dragon abides, And the rush of the stream tears the rock from its sides. Know st thou it? Thither, oh! thither with thee, Leads our way, father; then come, let us flee. "She commenced each verse in a solemn, measured tone, as if she had intended to direct attention to something wonderful and had some important secret to communicate. At the third line her voice became lower and fainter; the words Know st thou it? were pro nounced with a mysterious, thoughtful expression, and the Thith er, oh! thither was uttered with an irresistible feeling of longing, and at every repetition of the words Let us flee! she changed her intonation. At one time she seemed to entreat and to implore, and at the next to become earnest and pursuasive. After having sung the song- the second time she paused for a moment, and, atten tively surveying Wilhelm, she asked hin^ Know st thou the land? It must be Italy, he replied; but where did you learn the sweef little song? Italy! observed Mignon thoughtfully; if you are THE AUDACITY OF GCETHE. 199 going thither, take me with you. 1 am too cold here. Have you ever been there, darling? asked Wilhelm; but Mignon made no reply, and could not be induced to converse further." Now, would it not be supposed that the hero of a tale in which there are such as these was one of heroic spirit indeed, fit for the achievement of heroic action? He was scholarly as he was conde scending to such as the harper and Mignon. Among other things in that line he has studied what one might style the sphynx of literature, Shakespeare s Hamlet, and come nearer than any other critic before or since, in interpreting its sub tle, multifold meanings. On the contrary, this Wilhelm Meister, for any manly purpose, was not worth, not only the salt he ate, but the air he breathed. He had been created, it seemed, merely to show with what unlicensed liberty a young man of education and means to keep himself from ser vile work might disport himself with any pleasure to whicn his selfish, indolent being might have a fancy. Then in Elective Affinities, as if to put down in history and show to coming generations how lost to religious obligation, how fallen from common decency, was that in which he lived, Gcethe composed, though in forms most singularly attractive, a history of loves whose equals, every thing considered, in sinfulness, and nastiness, man kind have never known, at least in books, It is 200 THE AUDACITY OF GCPLTHE. simply diabolical, this history of the love of Ed ward and Ottilie for each other, and that between the former s wife and his friend. Surely there was no belief in God in the man who, at the death of this false husband, following soon after that of her whom he foolishly, forbiddenly loved, whose body was so placed by the side of hers that no other could be put with them in the same vault, concludes thus : "So lie the lovers, sleeping side by side. Peace hovers above their resting place. " Goethe seemed to have regarded himself as the poet for the aristocrat and the voluptuary. It is strange that in a Christian age its greatest intellect should have so outraged, in his published works, the ideas of honor and religion; stranger that such out rages should have been commended by a majority of the great, the titled, the wealthy, and the culti vated of his countrymen. There were, and are, those who suspect that Goethe had no belief in God, or at least none in a fature state of punishment and reward. At all events, he must have been among those, now so numerous, who regard what Christians call the Bible as a book of man s crea tion, containing fond allegories and fables in the midst of narratives fit only for primers of school children or Sunday evening readings of ignorant aged crones, who must have, and ought to be kindly afforded, some little light, genuine or spurious, as THE AUDACITY OF GCETHE. 2OI they are about to immergeinto the "dark valley and the shadow of death." Honor and patriotism were words which with Goethe seemed to have been mere sounds signifying nothing. As for honor in love, wherein that noble sentiment may sometimes be made to pass over its most trying ordeal, this he treated with undisguised contempt. His most distinguished and interesting lovers were those who felt and indulged dishonora ble loves. A genuinely honorable love, inspired by that tender, faithful sentiment of the German of the foretime, mutually felt between one honest man and one honest woman, so told as to be made interes ting to readers, is not, or scarcely, to be found in all of Goethe s works. To make his lovers interesting he seemed to have believed it necessary to spice them with dishonor. He made one and another of his heroes false, treacherous, seeking the beloved object mainly because, the property of another, he could not possess her without risk and dishonor. Wifehood, upon which the blessing of Heaven might be confidently invoked, compared with love illicit and ever new, he looked at as a dammed and stagnant pool compared with the first gushings of ever-fresh waters from the fountain before reaching the channel that was made for their confined and legitimate course. Never had been such a time- server, such a flatterer of his own age, in which, 202 THE AUDACITY OF GCETHE. among those who stood in the very lead of social existence, there was no love worth feeling or none worth talking about except such as was forbidden of God and man. In fine, he, the grandest intel lect that three centuries have produced, more grossly and recklessly dishonored the best traditions of his country than any German of any age. He gazed with leering eye, and chuckling showed to the eyes of others evil as his own, sights from which his ancestor of two thousand years before, on the banks of the Danube, the Rhine, or the Weser, would have turned his face away in modesty and chaste fear. Now, what was the secret by which, in the treat ment of such themes, Gcethe so charmed and yet charms so many of mankind? It was that knowl edge of form which he possessed beyond the poets of all times. It may have been partly from the consciousness of this being his chief power that he chose to set it off with the bad, the trifling, and the contemptible in his generation. The single beau ties in his works are the greatest in their kind, and mankind, in admiration of them, have been less disgusted than they ought to have been with the general evil tendencies of the whole. The works of Gcethe are more remarkable even than those of the great artists in the classic age in this respect: that whereas these had moulded into beauty the ex cellent material in which their country and times THE AUDACITY OF GCETHE. 203 abounded, he had to work amid the gross things which he found for his plastic hand in his own coun try and his own time. He was not the seducer of his generation. No one man can ever be that. The age was already corrupt. A noble work was before him, which he selfishly neglected. Instead of lifting his age out of the slough into which it had fallen, he got down himself into this slough and took a vain, wicked pleasure in showing to his be smirched companions into what fair forms these foul elements might be shaped, fair to look upon, but frail, perishable, and easily resolvable into the things out of which they had been taken. He toyed with the Romantic, the French, the English, the Greek. He employed each and all when they suited his fancy, and calmly, coldly dominated in his autocracy even down to the last of extremest old age. Never having been a patriot, among the productions of his last endeavors was that which seemed as if intended as an apology, the best that he could devise, for the want of fidelity to Germany during the period of her humiliation. When she lay prostrate and full of sorrow before Napoleon, he had sung the praises of the conqueror. In after- times, when Germany had risen to its native man hood and had been numbered among the powers of Europe, the time-serving poet brought out his drama of "Epimenides. " It is universally admitted 204 THE AUDACITY OF GCETHE. to be his very feeblest work, and that because it was a too late rendition of what was due from one who, far from raising his hand or his tongue in the times of sorest need, had fawned and cringed be fore him, who had been the chief occasion of her longest, most sorrowful wailing, and therefore was now the very last man in Germany to be called up on to sing or pretend to rejoice in her deliverance. Here was indeed a giant a giant, however, not after the type of Christopher, the bold ferryman, sure reliance of timid travellers in stormy weather. To bear the disguised Infant over swollen waters was not after his liking. He was rather a Goliath of Gath, "a man of war from his youth," that defied the armies led by the Most High, not foreseeing the fall to which he was doomed. The men and women of his generation lauded him for his strength and his audacity, and there be many yet, who, charmed by the witchery of his words, are led into places which all benignant spirits would warn them to avoid. Than Goethe never has lived a man who employed his gifts less faithfully for the ends for which they were bestowed. KING HENRY VIII. SALUTARY are the lessons to be learned from studies of the conflicts between the English people and their kings. Looking upon the serene, benignant rule of Victoria, strange indeed seem the multitude of these conflicts, their duration, and their varying results throughout the centuries ante rior to the ascertainment of British liberty. In this article, we propose to notice briefly some of those which took place in the reign of one who, in some respects, was the most notable of all. He was born in a time favorable for the growth of the mind of a prince in the knowledge of the just pur poses of empire. The second son of Henry the Seventh, and thus, at first, without prospect of in heriting the crown, his boyhood was spent in learn ing the principles of literature, music, and religion; and it was intended and foretold that in time he would occupy the See of Canterbury. His elder brother had been married to a princess who, in wealth and family renown, was the most brilliant match to be made in Europe. The death of Arthur and his becoming heir apparent, did not seem to 205 2o6 RING HENRY VIII. cast even a shade upon the fair promise of his youth, nor hinder the pursuit of his peaceful studies. When, at eighteen years of age, he was called to the throne, the culture of his understanding, the beauty of his person, and the sweetness of his manners, led all men to expect a blessed rule. His father had not well employed his own opportunities. He was yet too fresh from the thirty years conflict of the Roses, too long imbued with the partisanism of the Lancasters, to be an entirely just sovereign, un less he had been a great and a good man. He was neither. He came to the throne when the nation, having lost the best part of its nobility and gentry, so longed for peace that they gladly postponed the superior claims of the House of York to the acci dent of Bosvvorth Field. The king s hereditary hatred for that family instead of being appeased by their fall, took on that deeper malignity which comes always with the end of warfare to mean- spirited conquerors. To silence their claims, right eous, both in the light of reason, and the loving memories of Edward IV, he married the young princess, Elizabeth, whom, although a model of vir tue and conjugal fidelity, he hated and maltreated, both because she was a York and because she was beloved by the people who rejoiced at her coronation. But Henry VII had sagacity enough to discover kiNG HENRY VIH. 2O7 what exactions might be laid upon a people ex hausted by wars. The men who were old enough to remember the Plantagenets grew sad to feel that they had been looking in vain for the return of the rule which a foreign historian, in admiration of par liamentary influence, had described as "among all the world s lordships, that where the public weal is best ordered, and where least violence reigns over the people." A Lancasterian faction helped to stretch every prerogative to the last possible limit, with no regard to that parliament without whose co operation, in the olden times, no great business of peace or war was wont to be undertaken. It suits not the scope of this article to speak of the adroitness with which he succeeded in his usur pations, and of the oppressions which, mainly to gratify his avarice, he inflicted upon his people. The security of his foreign connections, closely al lied as he was with Scotland and Spain, aided by the national dread of more domestic bloodshed, enabled him to make himself the most arbitrary monarch that had ever sat upon the English throne. In his dying hours, the remorse which, not always, but most often, comes to evil-doers, beset him sorely, and in the midst of the exactions which his ava ricious soul could not yet altogether repress, he dis tributed alms, founded religious houses, announced his desire that the wrongs which he had perpetrated 208 KING HENRY VIII. might be redressed by his successor, implored him not to consummate the espousal he had contracted with his brother s widow, and then closed, by death, his eventful reign. The new king ascended to his place with brilliant prestige. Though the son of Henry of Lancaster, he was also the son of Elizabeth of York. His de votion hitherto to mild and refining arts, his bloom ing youth, and gracious carriage attracted all hearts. When, in disregard of his dying father s injunctions, he married Katharine, Princess of Wales, it was mostly because at the age of twenty-four no fade had yet come to the cheek of the lovely daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. There were a few to shake their heads and murmur in secret at this connection; but the conscience of the bridegroom was without a shadow. Marriage bells never rang merrier. On the throne, with a queen by his side, he gave up the habits of a student in which he had been hith erto mostly employed. Yet he seemed disposed, in the exuberance of youth and felicity, not to burthen himself with the cares of empire, and, with a gener ous hand, he lavished the treasures that, for a quar ter of a century, his father had been hoarding. Fox, his aged treasurer, grew solemn and scolded his prodigality, and brought in Thomas Wolsey to assist in controlling it. Men and women shed tears of joy and gratitude at the proclamation to KING HENRY VIII. 209 all who had suffered from the extortions of his father s favorites, inviting their complaints. The pillory, the prison, and ultimately death, were their punishment. It was noticeable, however, that in the case of Empson and Dudley, the great ones on this list, most infamous of all pairs of names to be found among the instruments of tyrants, these, be cause they had acted notoriously by the permission and commands of the late king, were given over to the hangmen, not for their extortions, but upon an impossible and absurd charge of conspiracy against himself. The people, hungry for their blood, blessed the monarch who allowed them to shed it, without inquiring into the reasons, which, if they had under stood, would have made them tremble for themselves and their children. But that the limited length of this article forbids, we should like to consider Henry s foreign policy, at first so apparently generous, afterwards so wholly selfish. But we are thinking of him now mainly as an individual among the kings of England. His individual kingship speedily grew into the boldest relief. The Plantagenets, thinking of their people along with themselves, had suffered their separate individualities to become merged into theirs. Hen ry VIII soon learned to regard himself as the imper sonation of the English State; and he had not been wearing the crown but for a brief period before it 210 KING HENRY VITI. was found that, withal so frank, so gracious, so gay, he had inherited the tastes and ambitions of the most imperious of both lines of his ancestors, and that in the craft of employing and controlling men and circumstances, he was superior to them all. We spoke of the use which Fox had intended to be made of Wolsey when the latter was invested with partial power. At this late day, it is curious to reflect how adroitly the young monarch employed the transcendant talents of this man as long as they were needful for his purposes, and when these were accomplished, how easily and ruthlessly they were flung aside. The career of Wolsey was so magnifi cent that it is useless to look for its parallel in courts. "THE KING AND I." How fond had he been to write those words! How gracious his majesty to allow it ! How serious the warnings from the older councillors against the consequences of such presumption in a subject. Gifted with powers of a Roman legate, the great churchman did not, but the king did foresee that such an office in the hands of a servile subject would contribute to place the monarch above all human control and expose the subject more easily to his own ruin. With all his talents and sagacity, Wolsey did not know all the audacity in the temper of his master. The man of God had long ceased to prefer divine worship to the human; and, perhaps, his fondest KING HENRY VIII. 211 thoughts, even at the altar, were in looking upon the bowing and kneeling forms of the highest no bles of the land, who served in his ministrations. Yet, if he had studied this human master better, he might have avoided the ruin that had already been projected in the secret chambers of the palace. But for our repeated observation of the apparently trivial means by which Infinite Justice sometimes accomplishes its purposes, we should wonder at the surprise when, after the disgust with Katharine, which, in his exalted priestly office, he had not dis couraged, instead of a European princess, Anne Boleyn, a maid of the bed-chamber, was the one chosen to be exalted to the throne. His ill-con cealed contempt cost all he had won. To this day, it is curious to consider how easily he was ruined: the mockery of reluctance with which the king parted from him; the playfulness with which, as sometimes a wild beast does with his victim, he alternated between clemency and severity, and, in stead of giving him over to the headsman, suffer ing him to languish in unwholesome places, as his queen was destined to do afterwards, and die with a heart broken by failure and remorse. They are the saddest words ever uttered by one who had fal len from so exalted an office: "If I had served my God with half the zeal I served my prince, he would not have left me in mine old age." "Mv 212 KING HENRY VIII. PRINCE!" This was his service; a service which while it could not save himself from ruin, put back British liberty a hundred years. The an guish of the dying parasite was not so much that he had postponed the service of his country to that of God, as it was, that, he had magnified his prince above country and above God. Commiserate his grief as we may, we could wish, especially for the sake of literature, which he encouraged, that it had been less abject; that, in the first disappointment, he had given himself like Bacon afterwards, to studies fitted to his genius. In the intervals of hope he projected the employment of yet greater servilities. In those of despair, he must have shuddered to remember how he had contributed, by failing to consult Parliament, to destroy the influ ence of what, to his ancestors, had been the source of their loftiest pride. The oppressions and exac tions that were already overtopping those of the preceding reign were committed with greater im punity, because this bulwark of national liberty ceased to be summoned, and what courage and patriotism were yet in the land had thus no oppor tunities to coalesce for organized resistance. "The king and I" became the State. At the bidding of an adulterous woman, the first turned his eye from the second, and those who had waited for the op portunity set upon him in full cry. Crafty as cruel. KING HENRY VIII. 213 the king, as in the case of Empson and Dudley, saw to it that he should fall upon an unjust imputa tion, of having exercised legatine power in deroga tion of the rights of the prince whose service he acknowledged, on his dying bed, that he had preferred to that of God. Henry had now been upon the throne twen ty-one years. His character had taken on the hardness which unbridled indulgence could impart. With all the subserviency of Wolsey, he had a mo dicum of conscience and delicacy. Out of appre hension of what parliament might do if summoned, he had forborne to summon it. What was wanted now, was a minister Avho would summon a par- liment, but for no purpose except to demor alize, corrupt, overawe and destroy it. Such a minister was already at hand. Thomas Crom well, son of a Putney blacksmith, who had been an adventurer in many lands, an acknowledged ruffian in the Italian wars, yet a student and admi rer of Machiavelli, was the last to forsake Wolsey, in whose service he had lived. Shakespeare, it will be remembered, represents the dying cardinal charg ing his follower to fling away ambition, and thus avoid the shoals on which he had been wrecked. In the courage with which he pleaded for his mas ter, men of all parties spoke of him as "the most faithfullest servant." But among the words of this 214 KING HENRY VIIL pleading were inserted others in private that fell upon the ear of the king more gratefully than any that had ever been uttered by human lips. It was he who, having first obtained the commutation of Wolsey s punishment to the penalty of pramunire for the exercise of Roman legatine powder, afterwards suggested to the despot that the most effectual way in which to settle the matter of the divorce with the queen, was to stand upon his royal supremacy, and cut, with the sword of Alexander, the knot that others were incompetent or reluctant to untie. This proposal, so audacious, lifted the blacksmith s son to the acme of his sovereign s regard. It was too audacious to be yet practicable. The principles of the Reformation had come into England, and were growing, but this king was especially odious to the German Protestants because of his hostility to Luther, and they were a unit on the side of Queen Katharine. He would have resorted to it as it was, but that he foresaw that he could corrupt the universities, and what was of far greater signifi cance, because the whole people of England, cleri cal and lay, found, to their horror, that in submit ting to the legatine power, for the exercise of which within the realm, Wolsey had suffered, they were partners of his guilt, and liable to all the penalties cf treason. The universal terror in this conjuncture was alleviated after some delay of the king and his KING HENRY VIII. 215 minister by a free pardon of the people who were graciously presumed not to have known all the enormity of the crime and a promise of pardon to the clergy upon the payment of heavy fines, and an acknowledgment in convocation of the king to be "protector and only supreme head of the clergy and church of England." The events that followed the exaltation of Crom well constitute what is the most thrilling part of the history of modern times. What these two men perpetrated have no parallel. Their very shame- lessness was not less enormous than in the days of the worst Caesars. The repairing of Anne Boleyn to the palace while the divorce was pending, the expulsion of the queen to the sickly atmosphere of Buckden in the hope that she might die there, the denial to her of the sight of her child, the flouting gayety upon her loneliness and despair, cried aloud for the vengeance which it was strange they could not foresee. Such as these are credible; for all times have instanced what the unlawful loves of men and women may perpetrate. Credible also was the faithful courage of More, Fisher, and a few others who died for their opinions, for such examples be long to all ages of despotism. But what is almost incredible is the persistent application by this low born minister of systematic measures for the over throw of justice and liberty, religion and honor. 2l6 KING HENRY VIII. Among those who, in the history of mankind, have bowed before tyrants, there is nowhere to be found language so contemptibly mean, so abjectly unmanly as that with which the leading men of those times yielded, submitted, begged and implored. Those bishops consented to the first demand of Cromwell, almost with a smile, as if it were a pleasant joke of the king s. It grew serious when the demand came to convocation for the right of nomination, by the king, of all bishops henceforth. On the final sep aration from Rome, every clergyman in England was required, on a named day, to proclaim Henry VIII as supreme head of the Church. The words of the summons were handed to the sheriffs, who copied them for the bishops, and they, sheriffs and bishops, were required to see that the requisition was obeyed without exception. There was a profounder depth yet for this servile priesthood. Though prostrate upon their knees, they, such as were not afraid to die, had not yet been made to place their mouths upon the ground, and kiss, and bite, and feed upon the dirt. When Henry separated from Rome, the Protestant spirit of the nation looked forward to independence of private judgment. They did not yet understand the compass of his imper- iousness. This was to culminate in his demand, as head of the church, to dictate the whole religious faith of the nation. Although it is now three him- KING HENRY VIII. 2 I 7 dred and fifty years since this compliance was accorded in convocation, we cannot recall without shame the grossness of the flattery bestowed upon the minion by whose counsels it had been enslaved. "The vicar-general of England! He is worthy to be the vicar-general of the universe!" The prostitution to which Cromwell subjected the bishops in convocation was inflicted upon parlia ment and upon the courts of justice. Parliament was summoned only to ratify the acts of personal government, to extend the royal prerogative, to create new statutes and bills of attainder for the more easy, rapid and condign punishment of real and imaginary offenders, and, as if to show to the whole world, as well the English people as Europe ans, that this ancient institution, which foreign publicists had lauded so highly, was powerless hence forth for any of the benign purposes of its origin. Cromwell had gathered into his hands the whole administration of the state, foreign and domestic, political, judicial and religious. Unlike his prede cessor, free from the love of ostentation and wealth, the enormous sums which he extorted were divided among the spies who were scattered throughout the land, and he calmly looked on as he saw every sub ject of the realm in terror of his name. There was but one prominent man in England who did not pray for his fall, and that was the Archbishop of Canterbury. 2l8 KING HENRY VIII. We have not time to speak of the destruction of religious houses and the creation from their spoils of those new families, the Russels, the Cavendishes, the Fitzwilliamses, and their likes. Nor can we linger with the continued persecution of the queen to her grave, the careers of Anne Boleyn, Jane Sey mour and Katharine Howard, except to say in passing, that in going from one to another of these loves, his conduct was like that of a beast rather than of a lover and husband, licensed by the laws jof God, and the unwritten laws of gentlemen in the humblest degree. Whether the charge against Anne Boleyn was satisfactorily maintained is yet in dis pute. But it is certain that her husband did not pretend to suspect her until the charms that had seduced him had faded, and his evil eye had fallen upon the fair and fresh Jane Seymour. The noble anger of an outraged husband for the greatest grief that a man of honor can suffer he never had felt. With his huntsmen and hounds he waited in Epping Forest for the sound of the cannon which an nounced her execution, and then, with horn and halloo, he dashed across the country to Wolf Hall, in Wiltshire, where Jane Seymour, in the midst of her maidens, her flowers and gorgeous vestments, awaited the bridal of to-morrow. He was not ag grieved, as husband, at the irregularities of Katha rine Howard. As an imperious monarch he pun- KING HENRY VIII. 2IQ ished them with death, and then waited for her whom Cromwell had provided, and whom, misled by the pictures of Holbein, he believed to be beautiful. Here was the rock on which the infamous Crom well was ruined. When the king, though now grow ing old and bloated with excesses, looked upon Anne of Cleves, the new bride who had been pro vided, he cried in his wrath: "You have brought me a great Flanders mare." This was enough. Once more he turned his eye away from his minis ter and let the dogs tear him in pieces. In vain Cranmer reminded the king that Cromwell had loved him "not less than he loved God," an assur ance deemed of great value by him who, in defer ence to the royal mandate, in exchange for Lambeth palace, had given up his wife and children and sent them to their kindred in a foreign land. But it was of no avail. Cromwell heretofore had wrested from parliament that most odious of all enactments, at tainder without summons and without evidence, a curious instance of retribution, when himself was the first and the only one to suffer from its enforce ment. It was like the fate of him whom old tra dition made the inventor of the brazen bull, thought the most horrible of the punishments of ancient despotism, and who, in accordance with a caprice of the tyrant to whom it was presented, was sub jected first to its awful ordeal. 220 < KING HENRY VIII. The last years of Henry VIII are interesting mainly for the evidences of that strange impunity with which, even when prostrated in physical in firmities he persisted in his enormities. Katharine Parr escaped the fate of her predecessors only by a felicitous compliment which a timely hint enabled her to make, and by concealing, with womanly in stinct, her disgust in beholding and tending the loathsome diseases that were hurrying him to the grave. The cruelties he practiced on those who would not accept all of his Six Articles, his burning the Anabaptists for rejecting the Real Presence, these and numberless similar, were submitted to without audible complaint to the end. The very last act of his reign was the attempt to destroy the Duke of Norfolk, the mightiest lord of the realm. Even when death was upon him, the commons passed his demand for hastening the execution, and the very next morning the victim s head would have fallen, but that, in the hours of the night, the royal murderer had met his own doom, and the lieuten ant of the tower laid aside his axe. The history of mankind affords no similar exam ple of security in the life of a tyrant continuing undisturbed to the close of his rule. Around his dying bed not a single witness dared, until the very last, to warn him of his approaching death. It came upon him in the midst of his worst thoughts, KING HENRY VIII. 221 and was the only enemy against whom he had not been able to prevail. CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS T^HE friendships among mankind are themes for * frequent thoughtful speculation. The needs and obligations of other relations in this life are of sufficiently easy understanding and exposition. It is not so with friendships. The subtlety of their essence, the absence of regularity in their formation, the varieties among the strains which they will en dure, have seemed ever to hinder their reduction to ascertained terms. Husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers, sisters, and other kindred, colleagues in whatever department of endeavor, magistrate and private citizen, clergy and laity all know well what these owe among one another. But who shall say the same of friends? The poet and the philosophers have said some beautiful things and some contemptuous, and all maintain that perfect friendships are most rare. "Ramm genus!" exclaimed Cicero. Said Lilly in Endymi- 011: u Friendship! of all things the Most rare, and therefore most rare because most Excellent." CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. 223 So nigh is friendship akin to love that the Greeks, and after them the Romans, gave to it a name de rived from that dear word. English-speaking people have done differently, but neither can they, any more than could the ancients, define the boundary between the two. There is something quite interesting in reflections upon the few friendships among eminent persons that have been handed down through the literatures of the ages. Curious illustrations some of them are. Take that of Orestes and Pylades, exhibited by their becoming principal and accessory to the mur der of the mother of the one and the aunt of the other, the accessory rewarded for his part with the hand of another parricide, Electra, the tale of whose suffer ings makes up one of the greatest essays of the tragic muse. Then Theseus and Pirithous. The history of the friendship of these two heroes affords somewhat of humor, grim though it be. Plutarch, after an account of the help rendered by the former to Adrastus of Thebes, thus proceeds: "The friendship of Theseus and Pirithous is said to have com menced on this occasion. Theseus being much celebrated for his strength and valor, Pirithous was desirous to prove it, and therefore drove away his oxen from Marathon. When he heard that Theseus pursued him in arms he did not fly, but turned back to meet him. But as soon as they beheld one another each was so struck with admira tion of the other s person and courage that they laid aside all thoughts of fighting; and Pirithous, first giving Theseus his hand, bade him 224 CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. be judge in this cause himself, and he would willingly abide by his sentence. Theseus in his turn left the cause to him and desired him to be his friend and fellow-warrior. Then they confirmed their friendship with an oath." This reminds us somewhat of the inception of the alliance between Robin Hood and Little John after the scuffle on the log that lay across the stream. The historian does not record whether or not the oxen were restored, but we conclude that perhaps the robbery was treated as a harmless practical joke and that both were thankful for the happy results to which it had led. We are not informed as to the age of the king of the Lapithae at the beginning of the confederate achieve ments of these distinguished cronies; but Theseus was fifty years old, and seemed to have lost no part of the ardor which had been wont to impel him to the obtaining of wives by conquest and rape, al though foreseeing that he must wait some years longer for the fruition of his next endeavor. His comrade also, whatever may have been the number of his years and of his wives, was equally impressed by the infantile beauty that had captivated the veteran lover. Let us hear Plutarch again : u The two friends went together to Sparta, and, having seen the girl (Helen, then nine years old) dancing in the temple of Diana Orthia, carried her off and fled. The pursuers that were sent after them following no further than Tegea, they thought themselves se cure, and, having traversed Peloponnesus, they entered into an agree ment that he who should gain Helen by lot should have her to wife, but be obliged to assist in providing a wife for the other. In consc- CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. 225 quencc of these terms, the lots being cast, she fell to Theseus, who received the virgin and conveyed her, as she was not yet marriage able, to Aphidnae. Here he placed his mother with her and com mitted them to the care of his friend Aphidnus, charging him to keep them with the utmost secrecy and safety; whilst, to pay his debt of service to Pirithbus, himself travelled with him into Epirus, with a view to the daughter of Aidoneus, king- of the Molossians. This prince named his wife u Proserpine," his daughter " Core," and his dog "Cerberus." With this dog he commanded all his daughter s suitors to fight, promising her to him who should overcome him. But understanding that Pirithous came not with an intention to court his daughter, but to carry her off by force, he seized both him and his friend, destroyed Pirithous immediately by means of his dog, and shut up Theseus in close prison." These and similar friendships among the great, doubtless were in the mind of Addison when (in Cato) he wrote : " The friendships of the world are oft Confederacies in vice, or leagues of pleasure." The last was indeed costly to both; for Theseus, though delivered from prison by Hercules, was des tined for his baleful work, confederate and single, to be cast down the Scyrian promontory; and Vir gil represents him afterwards in Tartarus, ever re peating to the shades therein the admonitory words, "Discite justitiam moniti, et non temnere divos." As for the friendship of Damon and Pythias, its story would seem to have been handed down for the purpose mainly of illustrating how rarely, under the government of such a prince as Dionysius, can exist a friendship which to a less, yet a high degree is very common in modern times, particularly 226 CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. among free peoples, wherein on every business-day in every year men become sureties for the perform ance of the most difficult obligations and risk the most stringent penalties, not only in behalf of friends but of others whom they believe to have the sense of honor which alone is necessary to save from losses. The return of Damon did indeed operate as a surprise upon the despot, so great as to induce a solicitation to be admitted into a friendship so far beyond all his notions of what was possible to humanity. We cannot be too thankful for the account given by Cicero of the friendship of Scipio and Laelius. Not that we have been made familiar with any special incidents of their mutual rendering of ser vices. Yet in the mouth of the less eminent of these two were put some of the sweetest words that were ever spoken. In this treatise (De Amicitia) may be seen, we think, the justice of what was said in the beginning of this article about the subtlety that makes any definite exposition concerning friendship impossible. We know not what depth of sorrow had been felt by the survivor when death, in circumstances of special horror, took from his em brace the beloved companion in military and civic achievements; but his absence shortly afterwards from the college of augurs in the gardens of De- cms Brutus was found to have been attributed erron- CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. 227 eously to his indulgence of grief instead of being detained at home by sickness. We are led by Cicero, who lets him discourse upon the subject with his sons-in-law, to notice how different is friendship from love, how far below it indeed if measured by the feelings that arise when lovers have seen their best beloved depart from this life. "Moveor" calmly said the survivor, "sed non egeo medicina. " Indeed, it appears that he was afraid to indulge in grief to any extent. "Mcerere hoc ejus eventu vereor ne invidi magis quam amid sit." All grief has yielded to the sweetness mostly of re membering of what sort was the illustrious man whose companionship he had enjoyed so long, and partly in speculating upon the exalte d estate to which he believes him to have risen. It is very en tertaining to listen to such eloquent discourse from one in whom there seems no sorrow, almost no feeling of regret, and muse upon the reflections which this disciple of the Stoics makes upon a rela tion that left such solace on its dissolution, summing up with the conclusion that friendship friendship that is to endure throughout life (than which nothing is more difficult or more rare) can obtain only among the good. Such had been the friendship of ^Emilius and Luscinius, of Curius and Coruncanius. Yet what shall we say of the instance given, though with lofty indignation, of Blossius Cumanus and Ti- 228 CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. berius Gracchus, which survived the tomb, and was avowed by the survivor when pleading for mercy before the consuls, Laenas and Rupilius, before whom he declared that such had been his affection for the great tribune that if the latter had asked him to put the torch to the Capitol he would have complied. " Videtis quam nefaria vox!" exclaimed the aged patriot. Yet the instance disproved his theory. Here it seems apposite to remark that those friendships that have become historic have subsisted for the greater part between men who were not equals, and that the warmth of their devotion has been in inverse ratio to the inequality. But for Theseus we might never have heard of Pirithous, yet it was the latter who took the initiative in that famous alliance; and we know too much of the temper of him who had vanquished the Minotaur, the Bull of Marathon, and the Centaurs to be in much doubt how he would have behaved had the Spartan princess fallen to the other s lot. So of Py- lades, in whom the fierce blood of the Atreidai had been mingled with the un warlike of the Phocian. He became never the leader, but was ever the fol lower, both in the assassination of Clytemnestra and the expedition into Taurica Chersonesus. So of Pythias, whose name it is probable, would never have been transmitted but for his standing bail for CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. 2 29 the distinguished disciple of Pythagoras. Even of Laelius the most of what we know is from the pen of the great orator who, in his name, put forth that splendid panegyric. In this his sense of inferiority is apparent in the praise he bestowed, and a pardon able pride in having enjoyed the friendship of such a man, the recollection of which subdued most of the grief at his death. It was exquisite tact, the selection of the lesser but more devoted friend. We cannot but suspect that in the other case the most eloquent words in the discourse would have been employed upon his own and the renowned deeds of the rest of the Scipios. The same may be said, and with greater fitness, of the friendship of David and Jonathan. The in itiative is from the inferior. Not all of the pro phetic gift imparted by tasting the honey-comb at Beth-aven had been lost, and in the stripling holding in his hand the Phillistine s head he recognized a rising star before which his father s would disappear. Most pathetic is the history of this friendship, be ginning at first sight : "And Saul said to him, \Vhose son art thou, thou young man? And David answered, I am the son of thy servant, Jesse the Beth-lehemite. "And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. "Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul." It is touching to consider the ministrations in 230 CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. this alliance, all on the part of the interior, the melancholy Jonathan. Pursued by the frightened jealousy of the king, David flees from Ramah to the faithful prince, by whom he is hidden in the field. Even here protection is bespoke for himself and his house when the fugitive, his enemies being over come, shall rise to the kingdom: "And thou shalt not only while yet I live show me the kindness of the Lord, that I die not: "But also thou shalt not cut off thy kindness from my house for ever; no, not when the Lord hath cutoff the enemies of David every one of them from the face of the earth. " So Jonathan made a covenant with the house of David, saying, Let the Lord even require it at the hand of David s enemies. "And Jonathan caused David to swear again, because he loved him as he loved his own soul." Once, and once only, is it recorded that the feeling of David was the stronger. Yet even this may be attributed to gratitude for his rescue more than response to the love that at such risk had been expended upon him: "And as soon as the lad was gone, David arose out of a place towards the south, and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed him self three times: and they kissed one another, and wept with one another, until David exceeded. "And Jonathan said to David, Go in peace, forasmuch as we have sworn both of us in the name of the Lord, saying, The Lord be be tween me and thee, and between my seed and thy seed for ever. "And he arose and departed and Jonathan went into the city." Yet another service and another reminder are made in the wilderness of Ziph: CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. 231 "And Jonathan, Saul s son, arose and went to David in the wilder ness, and strengthened his hand in God. "And he said unto him, Fear not: for the hand of Saul my father shall not find thee; and thou shalt be king over Israel, and I shall be next unto thee: and that also Saul my father knoweth. "And they two made a covenant before the Lord; and David abode in the wood, and Jonathan went to his house." It was a merciful lessening of the prophetic inspira tion of Jonathan when, always sad but ever hoping, he fondly dreamed of becoming second to the loved of his soul in the coming kingdom. Beautiful was the song of the royal poet over the bodies of father and son at Gilboa; but there is .no noticeable dif ference in the sorrow he felt for both in the praises he bestowed: From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan turned not back, and the sword of Saul returned not empty. " Saul and Jonathan were lovely in their lives, and in death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions. " Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel. u How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle. O Jona than! thou wast slain in thine high places. " I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of woman. " How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished! 1 A beautiful song. Amid high-sounding strains of lament for the fall of the powerful is interlude d one, tender and brief, for the friend, not so much for the sake of the survivor s love as of that of the dead, which was passing the love of woman, it 232 CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. is the most interesting in all the annals of friend ship, and, like most others, whether among the pow erful or the lowly, the wise or the simple, its incip- iency and its preponderance of fondness were with the one whose capacities were the least for every purpose except that of ever-abiding affection and unalterable faithfulness to its behests. In other historic though less noted friendships, as that between Sts. Cuthbert and Herbert, and that between Xystus II. and St. Lawrence, may be seen also the greater devotion of the lesser friend. The humble monk of Derwentwater besought the great bishop of Lindisfarne to obtain for him the felicity of dying at the same hour with him, and the request was kindly granted. So the poor deacon, following behind the great pontiff as he was led to execution, put forth a similar request; and his lamentation was subdued when assured that after three days more, to be spent in distributing among the poor the treasures of the church, he should get also his crown of martyrdom and rejoin his beloved in a better world. Other thoughts come to the mind while reflecting upon these and the common friendships of the world. There is among mankind a respect for friendship that may be named almost unique. There is no term that indicates pitifulness like "friendless," For rare as may be the friendships CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. 233 that are reasonably cemented, and that continue long faithful and fond, yet how few so poor as not to have one or more whom they may justly call friends. To no condition of human life do not friendships of some sort seem to have a necessity peculiar to them selves, differing from and independent of that per taining to other conditions. The possession of wives and children, the possession or pursuit of rich es, power, and honor, seldom if ever are satisfactory without the added possession of friends. The di visions that friendships allow in felicities, the solace they impart in miseries, are unlike those in any other relation. Perhaps causes of this are their calmness, their comparative freedom from eagerness things that render communion among those who feel them, whether often or seldom together, whether dwelling near or remote, so practicable and even. The husband, to be content, must live with his wife, and a parent among or near his children. But the dearest friends may dwell far apart, and the pressure of life that has separated them alters not the sweet ness of communions that are only silent. When death comes to one, if tears flow not as at the departure of those bound by a more passionate feeling, the minds of survivors are often more true to the memory of this bond than to some of those which in life were stronger. As to the origin of friendships it is useless to s;>ec- 234 CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. ulate; so as to the occasions of their cementation; sc as to the inherent fitness of particular classes ot persons for their fondest and most faithful manifes tations. If the loves between men and women often seem fitful or dependent upon accidents, what shall we say ot the friendships of this life? In all this earth there is nothing that, if not accidental, seems so incomprehensibly capricious. In loves dissimilarities, whether of person or of mind and disposition, oftener than otherwise are what first united them. The man with dark hue and eyes commonly finds the maid with the blonde and blue. The maid light-hearted and petite is commonly won by the man lofty and saturnine. In loves the things are sought which the seekers do not already possess. It is a law like that of lower nature which delights in oppositions or in compositions, and will not be content with one of its kind though most excellent. We notice often how variant from the leaf of a tree is its flower, and how variant from both the fruit. What thousands of compositions dot every vernal landscape ! But friendships cannot be traced commonly either to unlikenesses or likenesses. The unlike and the like sort in circumstances that often seem as acci dental as the fall of leaves that have been lifted by one wind and deposited softly upon the bosoms of Others that were brought by a contrary. As for CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. 235 the dependence of friendships upon special charac teristics of mind and temper, and the dogma that they cannot exist except among the good, nothing seems more remote from reality. Not only do friendships subsist among the bad, but they subsist between the good and the bad. There is hardly any community, however small, wherein friendships of greater or less intensity are not found that seem most incongruous; wherein the conduct, the senti. ments, the aspirations, of one friend are unexcep tionable, and those of the other, if not degraded, seem to be ever tending downwards. What is yet more curious among such is that the example of one has seldom appeared to have been very salutary, or that of the other pernicious. There jmay be repri mands frequent and earnest, and acceptance of them, whether with or without resentment, but often with, out amendment; yet alliances continue to subsist, if seldom offensive, at least always defensive, and the one with all his virtuous conduct, sentiments, and aspirations will risk all he values most highly in public opinion to defend his comrade and rescue him from punishment that he knows would be just. Much has been said about the defence rendered by members of the Bar to those who have been charged with crimes of various magnitude, and the world outside of courts has its stereotyped words of condemnation for conduct seeming to them incon- 236 CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. sistent with the conservation of tranquillity, honor, and respect for law for which men of this profession ought to be particularly noted. Yet among these brave, ardent, persistent defences one may often see what is only a discharge of what is felt to be a be hest of friendship of more or less affectionateness, whose risks and sacrifices are the greater as the danger is more threatening and public hostility and prosecution more exacerbated. For even the felon when arrested seeks aid, not always from counsel who are most distinguished, but rather from him whom he knows and likes most, on whose recipro cation of his good-will he relies for successful ren dering of the service which he so sorely needs more trustingly than he would rely upon the superior adroitness and eloquence of the greatest advocate. As to the rarity of friendships asserted by the good Laelius, he was referring, of course, to such as that which marked the companionship of himself with the illustrious man whose departure he contemplated with feelings so calm and painless. Friendships may indeed be not only rare but impossible when the highest heights of ambition admit but one among the sealers, if only two in number, to attain. The instance is yet to be found wherein of two friends, equal in every particular and both desirous of renown, one stepped aside and allowed the other to plant his foot upon the acme of public honors. But there CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. 237 is no rarity of devoted friendships among the mul titudes friendships that delight in services which it is even sweeter to bestow than it is to receive. The poets have been prone to lament the evanes cence of friendships. But this is rather from the fact that their spirits are tuned to a sensibility so high that they set an inadequate value on what is possible to the multitudes who are not so finely and tensely strung. Their lamentations are for the absence of those emotions which only spirits like them can feel, ethereal and of some semblance to the divine. But let any man of experience count up, if he will, the number of those which have been wholly dissolved in the period of his observations. How few among them have been found grossly un faithful ! We will not say that the friendships of hu man life have been more enduring in the main than its loves, though we are not quite sure of being wrong if we should. For loves, though more ardent, are more exacting, and they often lose all because dis satisfied and complaining of what seems to them the little received compared with the abundance which they bestow. Loves demand reiterated assurances and proofs which lovers, on the one hand, sometimes grow resentful for the few they receive, and, on the other, grow weary of their repeated rendering. Hence the numbers of the neglects of parents, of the disinheritances of children, and especially of di- 238 CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. vorces of husbands and wives, that would be multi plied ten thousand fold except partly for the scandal to be incarred, partly for the inconveniences resultant to families, but mainly the restraining laws of the church and the state. "A question was started whether the state of marriage was natural to man. JOHNSON Sir, it is so far from being natural lor man to live in a state ot marriage that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together. "* These were the words of one of the most loving and devoted of husbands, who during the whole of his widowed life mourned the departure of the wife of his bosom. On the other hand, friendships receive and be stow with little jealousy, and some of their dearest results follow services in which those who bestow are hardly conscious of the exertion which they cost. It is not often, we believe, that friendships that have once been fond are dissolved, at least to the degree as to become hostilities. Such an end shocks the minds even of the simple and humble. On the contrary, such friendships usually survive even the tomb, and the affection telt by those who have departed are often inherited and treasured by their children. Common life abounds in them, and, though not demonstrative, self-asserting, and exact- *Boswell s " Life of Dr. Johnson." CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. 239 ing like loves, they impart to the multifold misfor tunes of this lower life a solace without which they would be far harder to endure. They help to sup port poverty, exile, imprisonment, loss of kindred, youth, health, honor, name, even loves; and as old wine is the sweeter, so, after the lapse of long time, thoughts of them are more comforting and more fond. We would not be understood as maintaining that friendship is either superior or equal to love: for love is undoubtedly the supreme of all the emotions of the human heart. It is the very exaltation of its supremacy more than all other causes that gives rise to the jealousies by which it is often so sorely beset. To these jealousies friendship itself some times makes the incipient if not controlling occasion. We remember, in Dickens Household Words, a somewhat blase account of the loss of one friend by another after the marriage of the former. "I had an old friend" the bachelor s story about thus ran "and he got married. After sometime I went to see him and his wife. As I entered the room some thing stood up, having on my old friend s clothes, standing in his shoes, speaking in his voice. But it was not my old friend; he was gone." In this instance, as in most others of the dissolu tions of friendship, is to be noticed the manner in which they occur. Sad as they may be to all par- 240 CELEBRATED AND COMMON FRIENDSHIPS. ties, they are seldom accompanied by violence, and more seldom are succeeded by enmities. Such friendships commonly subside beneath the pressure of life, that substitutes other ties in their stead, and, instead of being rudely cast aside, become only ob solete. " Sunt remissione usus eluendce," as the elder Cato used to say, "dissuendce magis quam dis- cindendcz" Whereas loves when dissolved are dis solved for the most part abruptly, if not with anger and violence ; hearts once beating in happy unison are torn and bleeding, and if hate, does not succeed it is mainly because pride or pious submission keeps it away. Loves and friendships happy they who may claim or who may believe they can claim, to have both, genuine and constant. Not all are blessed with the greater; but the less hardly any is so poor as to be wholly without. Studies, iterary and UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA UBRARY